Starting things off is a piece by the epistemologist and philosopher of mind James Pryor. He's contributed a lively essay that will be of particular interest to those coming to philosophy for the first time. In What's So Bad About Living in The Matrix?" he explores and criticizes two tempting but problematic philosophical positions: the view that there can't be facts which it's impossible for us to know about (sometimes called verificationism), and the view that everyone's motive for acting is always to have nicer experiences. Employing examples from both the film and imaginary thought-experiments, Pryor tries to show that these positions, which can often initially seem irresistible to students, are not as straightforward or as satisfying as they might first appear. He then goes on to argue (in sympathy with Vasiliou’s essay) that the worst thing about living in the Matrix would not be the metaphysical or epistemological limitations such a scenario would impose, it would instead be the political constraints: those trapped in the Matrix have constraints on their action that most of us deeply value not having.
David Chalmers is a philosopher from the University of Arizona and author of numerous books and articles on the philosophy of mind, including the influential volume The Conscious Mind. In his essay The Matrix as Metaphysics," he suggests that while we cannot rule out the possibility that we are in a system like the Matrix, this possibility is not as bad as we might have thought. He argues against the intuitive view that if we are in a matrix, we are deluded about the external world. Instead, he suggests that if we are in a matrix, we should regard this as telling us about the nature of the external world: the physical world is ultimately made of bits, and was created by beings who ensured that our minds interact with this physical world. Chalmers's surprising conclusion is that even if we are living in a Matrix-like simulation, most of our beliefs about the world are still true.
Julia Driver, a moral philosopher from Dartmouth College and author of Uneasy Virtue, explores some of the distinctively ethical issues that arise in The Matrix in her essay Artificial Ethics." Driver begins by using the film to consider the moral status of artificially created beings: she argues that, given certain assumptions regarding the nature of consciousness, rationality, and personhood, we ought to regard artificial intelligences such as Agent Smith as creatures that deserve genuine moral consideration. In the second part of her essay Driver tackles the thorny philosophical question of whether one can behave immorally when in “non-veridical” (illusory) circumstances. Noting the implausibility of attributing wrongdoing to those who perform seemingly immoral acts in a dream, she argues that, to the extent that the Matrix offers a similarly illusory world free of actual unpleasant effects on others, it also seems odd to attribute wrongdoing to agents acting in such a world. However, drawing on insights from the first part of her essay, Driver concludes that we have good reasons to think that actions in the Matrix would have genuine effects on both humans and some artificial creatures, and thus the world of the Matrix, like our world, has its own moral norms — its own ethics — that ought to be both acknowledged and respected.
Michael McKenna, a philosopher at Ithaca College who specializes in the philosophical problems of freedom and moral responsibility, offers up a comprehensive yet light-hearted exploration of the free will problem in his essay Neo's Freedom ... Whoa!". Ingeniously utilizing aspects of The Matrix to describe and explore the traditional positions taken in debates over free will, McKenna manages to cover a lot of ground: determinism, fatalism, compatibilism, and incompatibilism are all canvassed and compared through the unique perspective afforded us by the film. He then goes on to explore the attractiveness of the radical freedom that Neo appears to have achieved by the end of The Matrix. Does such absolute freedom indeed “rock” the way we naturally think it would? McKenna convincingly argues that total freedom of this sort offers too much of a good thing: part of the joy we take in exercising our freedom is in pushing boundaries and testing limits — if all boundaries and limitations are removed, the possibility for such joy will disappear as well.
Finally, we have an essay from John Partridge, a professor of philosophy at Wheaton College whose work focuses on the philosophy of the ancient Greeks. In "Plato's Cave & The Matrix," Partridge considers the striking similarities between The Matrix and the "cave" scenario described in Plato’s Republic. In addition to pointing out the numerous surface parallels between the cave-dwellers Plato describes and the humans trapped in the Matrix, Partridge explores a deeper continuity between the film and Plato’s text: both narratives privilege the self- knowledge that follows from the right kind of self-examination. As Plato might put it, both Neo and the cave-dwellers must undertake a difficult journey from darkness to light if genuine knowledge (and consequently true "care of the soul") is to be attained.
Starting things off is a piece by the epistemologist and philosopher of mind James Pryor. He's contributed a lively essay that will be of particular interest to those coming to philosophy for the first time. In 
