Directors: David Chalmers, David Hoy
Visiting Faculty: Ned Block, Robert Brandom, Fred Dretske, Susan Hurley, Frank Jackson, Brian Loar, William Lycan, Colin McGinn, Martine Nida-Rümelin, Chris Peacocke, John Searle, Sydney Shoemaker, Galen Strawson, Michael Tye.
Participants: Torin Alter, Murat Aydede, Kati Balog, Cheryl Chen, Becko Copenhaver, Nick Georgalis, York Gunther, Steve Horst, Sean Kelly, Amy Kind, Michelle Montague, Casey O'Callaghan, David Pitt, Tom Polger, Bill Robinson, Amy Schmitter, Susanna Siegel, Charles Siewert, Cara Spencer, Leopold Stubenberg, Scott Sturgeon, Debbie Tollefsen, Leora Weitzman, Aaron Zimmerman.
Visitors: Kent Bach, Alex Byrne, John Doris, George Downing, Bert Dreyfus, Brie Gertler, Güven Güzeldere, John Hawthorne, Terry Horgan, Janet Levin, Joe Levine, Barry Loewer, Kirk Ludwig, Jerry Neu, Alva Noë, Diana Raffman, Dick Rorty, Eric Schwitzgebel, Dagmar Searle, Stuart Silvers, David Woodruff Smith, Maja Spener, Daniel Stoljar, Julie Tannenbaum, Amie Thomasson.
Staff: Jocelyn Hoy, Peter Murray, Cheryl Ridgway, Brad Thompson.
The Co-Directors
David Chalmers is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. He is the author of The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford University Press, 1996), and of many articles in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, cognitive science, and metaphysics. His anthology Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings will be published in July 2002. His main current projects include (i) articulating the connections between meaning, reason, and possibility, and (ii) understanding the relationship between consciousness and intentionality.
David Hoy is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In addition to over 50 articles he has published books entitled The Critical Circle and Critical Theory as well as an edited book: Foucault: A Critical Reader. His current book projects include Critical Resistance, A History of Consciousness, and The Politics of Temporality. He has co-directed a series of six NEH Summer Institutes.
The Principal Presenters
Ned Block is Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He has written many articles in the philosophy of mind and on the science of consciousness. He also edited the anthologies Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, volumes 1 and 2 (1981), and The Nature of Consciousness (1997). He is a Past President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology.
Robert Brandom is Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. In addition to numerous essays on a wide range of topics that are of central importance in philosophy, he is also the author of several books, including Making It Explicit: Representation, Reason, and Discursive Commitment (1994) and Articulating Reasons (Harvard, 2000).
Fred Dretske is Professor at Duke University and he is the author of Seeing and Knowing (1969), Knowledge and the Flow of Information (1981), Explaining Behavior (1988), and Naturalizing the Mind (1995), and of many articles in the philosophy of mind and epistemology.
Susan Hurley is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, and an Honorary Fellow of All Souls' College, Oxford. She is the author of Natural Reasons (1989) and Consciousness in Action (1998), and of many articles in political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science.
Frank Jackson is Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. He is author of Perception (1978), From Metaphysics to Ethics (1998), and many other books and articles in the philosophy of mind and language, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.
Brian Loar is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He is author of Mind and Meaning (1981), and of numerous articles in the philosophy of mind and language.
William Lycan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina. He is author of many books, including Consciousness (1987) and Consciousness and Experience (1996), and of many articles in the philosophy of mind and language, metaphysics, and epistemology. He is a past president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology.
Colin McGinn is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He is author of many books, including The Subjective View (1983), The Problems of Consciousness (1991), and The Mysterious Flame (2000).
Christopher Peacocke taught for many years at Oxford and is currently Professor of Philosophy at New York University. His books include Sense and Content (1983), Thoughts, (1986), A Study of Concepts (1992), and Being Known (1999).
Martine Nida-Rümelin is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Fribourg. She is author of numerous books and articles (both in German and in English) on the philosophy of consciousness.
John Searle is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of more than ten books, from Speech Acts (1968) to Mind, Language, and Society (1999), and of articles in all areas of philosophy.
Sydney Shoemaker is Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University. He is author of Identity, Cause, and Mind (1984), The First-Person Perspective (1996), and many articles in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. He is a past president of the American Philosophical Association.
Galen Strawson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading. He is author of Freedom and Belief, The Secret Connexion , and Mental Reality, and numerous articles in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the history of philosophy.
Michael Tye is Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. His books include the following: Metaphysics of Mind, The Imagery Debate, Ten Problems of Consciousness, and Consciousness, Color, and Content. He has also written many articles in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language.
The Participants
Torin Alter (Ph.D. UCLA 1995) is associate professor of philosophy at The University Of Alabama. He specializes in philosophy of mind and language. He has written about the knowledge argument and related topics. He will be on sabbatical during the 2002-03 academic year, working on a manuscript tentatively entitled Consciousness, Materialism, and Intentionality. E-mail: [email protected]
Murat Aydede (Ph.D Maryland 1993) is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Florida. He works primarily in philosophy of psychology/cognitive science (computational/representational theories of mind, connectionism, language of thought hypothesis), and Philosophy of Mind (ontological issues, consciousness, qualia, introspection, emotions, pain/pleasure). He studied philosophy at Bosphorus University in Istanbul and at the University of Maryland. He has been a visiting scholar at CSLI (1993-94) and an assistant professor at the University of Chicago (1994-2001). He is currently working on a book manuscript on consciousness. E-mail: [email protected].
Katalin Balog (Ph.D. Rutgers 1998) works primarily in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. In philosophy of mind, she is especially interested in and have been working on the nature of consciousness and on the theory of concepts. In metaphysics, she has been working on metaphysical necessity, its relations to conceptual necessity and on the proper formulation and evaluation of physicalism. For representative work, see her paper "Conceivability, Possibility, and the Mind-Body Problem" (Philosophical Review 2000, reprinted in The Philosophers' Annual). E-mail: [email protected].
Cheryl Chen (Ph.D. Berkeley 2002) will be a post-doctoral fellow at Bryn Mawr College this fall. She works mostly on issues in epistemology and the philosophy of mind, though she is also interested in the history of modern philosophy, the history of analytic philosophy, and applied ethics. Her dissertation is about the role perception plays in making it possible for us to have thoughts about the empirical world. E-mail: [email protected].
Rebecca Copenhaver (Ph.D. Cornell 2001) is an assistant professor of philosophy at Lewis and Clark College. Her interests include the history of modern philosophy of mind, in particular Reid, Kant and direct realism, and contemporary philosophy of mind, in particular, cognitive and non-cognitive content and externalism. E-mail: [email protected].
Paula Droege (Ph.D. Connecticut 2001) teaches philosophy at Bard College. She is author of the forthcoming Caging the Beast: A Theory of Sensory Consciousness. She is also interested in developing connections between feminist theory and philosophy of mind, particularly in regard to theories of knowledge and of the self. E-mail: [email protected].
Nicholas Georgalis (Ph.D Chicago 1974) has primary interests in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and ontology. His book manuscript, The Primacy of the Subjective: A Unified Theory of Mind, introduces a unique kind of non-phenomenal narrow content, previously unnoticed in the literature, one that implicates consciousness in intentional states as assuredly as it is in phenomenal states. It is based upon and develops some earlier ideas published in Mind (1990), Erkenntnis (1994, 1996, 2002), Synthese (1999) and in a paper in the anthology, The Caldron of Consciousness (2000). E-mail: [email protected].
York Gunther (Ph.D. Columbia 1999) is assistant professor of philosophy at California State University at Northridge. After studying piano and theory at the Royal Conservatory of Music, he studied philosophy at Toronto and Columbia. Before teaching at Northridge, he was a lecturer and fellow in the humanities at Stanford University. He has published papers in the philosophies of mind and language and is the editor of a forthcoming anthology on nonconceptual content (MIT Press). At moments when his passion for wisdom fades, he devotes himself to distance running, wine tasting, and playing and writing music. E-mail: [email protected].
Steven Horst (Ph.D. Notre Dame 1990) is associate professor of philosophy at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He writes in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, metaphysics and moral psychology. He is author of Symbols, Computation and Intentionality(1996) and Mind and the World of Nature (forthcoming). E-mail: [email protected].
Sean Kelly (Ph.D. Berkeley 1998) is assistant professor of philosophy at Princeton University. He works at the intersection of phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. He is especially interested in issues concerning perception and perceptual content, and has published recently on such topics as visuomotor activity, nonconceptual content, and Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. E-mail: [email protected].
Amy Kind (Ph.D UCLA 1997) is assistant professor of philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. Her research interests lie primarily in philosophy of mind. Some of her works concerns issues relating to the imagination (e.g. the role that mental imagery plays in imagination, the relationship between imagination and possibility). Most recently, she has been working on issues relating to consciousness, and in particular, to qualia. E-mail: [email protected].
Michelle Montague (Ph.D. Colorado 2002) will be an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, beginning in the fall 2002. Her philosophical interests include philosophy of mind, language, and metaphysics. In particular her research has focused on providing an adequate metaphysics for a theory of intentionality. E-mail: [email protected].
Casey O'Callaghan (Ph.D. Princeton 2002) will be a visiting assistant professor of philosophy at UC Santa Cruz beginning fall 2002. His work is in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, and metaphysics. Currently he is completing a series of papers on the nature of sounds and auditory experience. E-mail: [email protected].
David Pitt (Ph.D. CUNY 1994) will be a Chambers Research Fellow in the fall and a visiting assistant professor in the spring at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He is at work on a manuscript (tentatively entitled The Phenomenal Mind) in which he argues (among other things) that intentional content is internally determined and phenomenal, and that phenomenality is the hallmark of the mental. He also has interests in the philosophy of language, philosophy of linguistics and metaphysics. E-mail: [email protected].
Tom Polger (Ph.D. Duke 2000) is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Cincinnati. His work is centered around naturalistic accounts of the metaphysics of mind. In Natural Minds (forthcoming, MIT Press), Polger advocates a type-identity theory of sensations and of mental states generally. His interests also include epistemology of perception, explanation in the mind sciences, and moral psychology. E-mail: [email protected].
Bill Robinson (Ph.D Indiana 1966) is professor of philosophy at Iowa State University. His philosophical interests include phenomenal consciousness and theories of how the mind does or doesn't work, both of which he pursued in Computers, Minds and Robots (Temple, 1992). He is currently at work on Understanding Phenomenal Consciousness. Representative indications of the general direction of this book can be found in his "Intrinsic Qualities of Experience: Surviving Harmans's Critique" (Erkenntnis 1997), "Qualia Realism and Neural Activation Patterns" (Journal of Consciousness Studies 1999), and online in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on epiphenomenalism. E-mail: [email protected].
Amy Schmitter (Ph.D. Pittsburgh 1993) is associate professor of philosophy at the University of New Mexico. She specializes in the history of early modern philosophy and the philosophy of art, and has published on topics in Descartes's works ranging from mathematics to the passions, as well as having several papers in the philosophy of the visual arts. In 2002-03, she will be a visiting fellow at Stanford Humanities Center, trying to complete a book on representation in Descartes. E-mail: [email protected].
Susanna Siegel (Ph.D. Cornell 2000) is assistant professor of philosophy at Harvard University. Some of the topics that interest her concern the nature of introspection, perception, and mental states about particular objects. E-mail: [email protected].
Charles Siewert (Ph.D. Berkeley 1994) is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, where he has taught since 1995. He is the author of The Significance of Consciousness (Princeton 1998), and of articles in the philosophy of mind and ancient philosophy. He also has a strong interest in the phenomenological movement. Current research projects include: accounting for first-person ("introspective") knowledge of conscious thought and experience; reconstruction of Plato's theory of motivation in the Republic; and clarification of Merleau-Ponty's notion of non-representational "motor" intentionality. E-mail: [email protected].
Cara Spencer (Ph.D. MIT 1998) is assistant professor of philosophy at Howard University in Washington, DC. She is currently trying to understand the relation between demonstrative concepts and sensations in the hope that this will help to answer questions about the representational content of indexical and demonstrative belief. She is also interested in the semantics and pragmatics of propositional attitude ascriptions. E-mail: [email protected].
Leopold Stubenberg (Ph.D. Arizona 1992) is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. His work is primarily in the philosophy of mind. He is the author of Consciousness and Qualia (Benjamins, 1998). Currently he is interested in neutral monism. E-mail: [email protected].
Scott Sturgeon (Ph.D. Arizona 1991) teaches philosophy at Birkbeck College. He is interested in epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. He is author of Matters of Mind (Routledge, 2001), and is currently writing Epistemic Norms, to be published by Oxford University Press. E-mail: [email protected].
Deborah Tollefsen (Ph.D. Ohio State 2002) will be an assistant professor at the University of Memphis beginning in the fall of 2002. Her areas of research include philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of social science. Her dissertation is on collective intentionality. Recent publications include "Collective Intentionality and the Social Sciences" (Philosophy of the Social Sciences) and "Organizations as True Believers" (Social Philosophy). E-mail: [email protected].
Leora Weitzman (Ph.D. Stanford 1989) is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota and has also taught at the Universities of Wisconsin-Madison and New Mexico-Albuquerque. Research interests include (1) the invocation of externalist theories of content in anti-skeptical arguments and (2) the grounding of necessary and a priori entailments in something irreducible to logical structure. She has published on these topics in Erkenntnis, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, The Journal of Philosophical Research, and Dialogue. E-mail: [email protected].
Aaron Zimmerman (Ph.D. Cornell 2002) is assistant professor at University of California, Santa Barbara. He did graduate work in philosophy at Tufts University and Cornell University. His doctoral dissertation, "Directly in Mind: An Account of First-Person Access," is an attempt to explain our introspective knowledge of our beliefs and desires. He is currently working on extending this account to explain introspective knowledge of sensations and experiences. E-mail: [email protected].
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