Oron Shagrir is a professor of philosophy and cognitive and brain sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in addition to serving as the university’s Vice President for International Affairs.
Shagrir's main areas of research are the philosophy of computing and the conceptual foundations of computational sciences, including computer science and the cognitive and brain sciences. In his latest book, The Nature of Physical Computation (Oxford University Press), Shagrir asks why systems such as laptops, smartphones, and nervous systems are deemed to compute, while it seldom occurs to us to describe stomachs, hurricanes, rocks or chairs as computing systems. His answer is that computation is essentially semantic, namely, that it always involves representations.
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