I’m Daniel Bracker, a lecturer in philosophy at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
 
I grew up close to a coal-fired thermal power station somewhere near Frankfurt am Main, with no idea what philosophy was. When I went to Berlin to study law and attended the philosophy of law courses, I was hooked! Though my first academic job was at the Université du Luxembourg—as a lawyer, but philosophy kept pulling back.
 
Now I research epistemic autonomy: roughly the ability to make good judgments about when to rely on your own thinking and when to defer to others – or to AI. This question has become urgent. In my PhD thesis, I explore what epistemic autonomy is, whether it has value, and how our understanding of it changes in the age of AI. For instance, we can now rely on  large language models to do the writing for us. What does this mean for our epistemic autonomy?
 
I’m a member of the Theoretical Philosophy Group at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and enjoy writing philosophy for a broader audience through Philosophie Magazin.
 
I studied philosophy in Berlin (Humboldt-Universität) and Amsterdam, where I completed my Research Master in Philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit. I studied law in Berlin (Freie Universität), Paris (Université Paris-Est Créteil), and Luxembourg, where I earned my LL.M in International Law and European Economics at the Université du Luxembourg.
 
I live in Amsterdam with my wife Karina and our kids Leonard and Emeline.