I am a philosopher at the Australian National University. Officially I am Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Consciousness. I'm also Visiting Professor of Philosophy at New York University. I work in the philosophy of mind and in related areas of philosophy and cognitive science. I am especially interested in consciousness, but am also interested in philosophical issues about meaning and possibility, in the foundations of cognitive science and of physics, and a bunch of other things.
This site includes quite a bit of my own work (e.g. papers on consciousness and papers on meaning and modality), and it also includes a number of resources I've put together on topics related to consciousness and/or philosophy: e.g., MindPapers (a bibliography), directories of online papers, and some philosophical diversions. There is also a photo gallery. A complete master index to this site's contents is available.
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My undergraduate degree was in mathematics and computer science at the University of Adelaide in Australia. I was a graduate student in mathematics for a while at the University of Oxford, but then I switched to Indiana University, where I obtained a Ph.D. in 1993 in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, working in Doug Hofstadter's Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition. I spent 1993-95 as a McDonnell Fellow in Philosophy, Neuroscience, and Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, and 1995-98 in the Department of Philosophy at UC Santa Cruz. From 1999-2004 I was in the Department of Philosophy and the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. I moved to ANU in August 2004. As of September 2009 I am also part-time at New York University. A photo gallery is here.
Activities
I seem to spend a lot of time organizing things (this is a good work-avoidance strategy). I'm strongly committed to getting an interdisciplinary science of consciousness off the ground. I was one of the founders of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (which has now had ten very successful conferences), and I'm associate editor of PSYCHE, an interdisciplinary e-journal on consciousness. I've helped organize the biannual Tucson conferences on consciousness. I also edit the philosophy of mind series at Oxford University Press, and am philosophy of mind editor for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I am director of the Centre for Consciousness at ANU and of the Consciousness Project at NYU.
Research
When I have time and run out of excuses, I sometimes do some real work. I've written articles on consciousness, metaphysics and meaning, AI and computation, and various other topics in philosophy and cognitive science (see top of page). Consciousness is my first love, and it's what I always come back to, but one of the nice things about being a philosopher is that one is allowed to be interested in all sorts of things. (If you get interested in X, you just say "I'm working on the philosophy of X"). I do a lot of fairly technical philosophy (philosophy of language, metaphysics) as well as being closely involved with work in science (neuroscience, psychology, AI, physics). At the moment, I am working on a book on consciousness (The Character of Consciousness, to be published in April 2010), a book on meaning (The Multiplicity of Meaning, and a book on foundations (Constructing the World).
The
Conscious Mind:
In
Search of a Fundamental Theory
My first book on consciousness was published in April 1996, with Oxford University
Press. Its web page has a few bits and pieces, such as the table
of contents, the introduction,
some reviews,
and other information.
Explaining
Consciousness:
The Hard Problem
This collection (edited by Jonathan Shear) was published
in 1997 by MIT Press. It has a keynote
article by me, 26 responses from all sorts of perspectives, and my
response
to all these in turn. See its web page for contents.
Philosophy
of Mind:
Classical
and Contemporary Readings
This is an anthology of readings in the philosophy of mind, edited by me, and
published by Oxford University Press in August 2002. Its web page has the
table of contents and an ever growing list of typos.