My research interests might naturally be classified as philosophy of thought. How should we understand de se thought? Could there be forms of conceptual thought that look more like maps than like language? What sorts of reasoners are we, and what does that tell us about the kinds of thinkers we are?
Persons as Animals
In 2015-16 I worked with Helen Steward on her AHRC-funded Persons as Animals project. The guiding idea of the project was to consider how taking seriously our animal natures will bear on philosophical questions not normally approached through the lens of our animality – specifically, questions about the nature of human perception, agency and cognition. My work on the project gravitated around the third strand; as one species among others, what reasons do we have for thinking that our thought is signficantly unlike that of other animals?
Here's a blog post I wrote about some of the work we did on the project.
First person thought
My doctoral project took as its starting point two prima facie plausible features of first person thought: its pure reflexivity on the one hand, and on the other its apparently ineliminable closeness to a special cluster of forms of self-knowledge in which we are seemingly given to ourselves as ourselves. The thesis proposed a new model of first person thought that brings together these two features by casting our special first personal forms of self-knowledge in a role associated with comprehension rather than one of reference-determination.
Here's a blog post I wrote about one of the papers coming out of that project.
Papers
'The Subjective Perspective in Introspection', Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23 (3-4), pp. 128-145, 2016
'Thinking About You', Mind, 2016
'Crossed Wires About Crossed Wires: somatosensation and immunity to error through misidentification', Dialectica, 71:1, 2017
'Conscious Experience: What's In It For Me?' (coauthored with Alexander Geddes), forthcoming invited contribution to The Sense of Mineness, OUP (please get in touch for a copy)
Book reviews
About Oneself: de se thought and communication, Manuel García-Carpintero and Stephan Torre (eds), OUP: 2016; Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
Persons as Animals
In 2015-16 I worked with Helen Steward on her AHRC-funded Persons as Animals project. The guiding idea of the project was to consider how taking seriously our animal natures will bear on philosophical questions not normally approached through the lens of our animality – specifically, questions about the nature of human perception, agency and cognition. My work on the project gravitated around the third strand; as one species among others, what reasons do we have for thinking that our thought is signficantly unlike that of other animals?
Here's a blog post I wrote about some of the work we did on the project.
First person thought
My doctoral project took as its starting point two prima facie plausible features of first person thought: its pure reflexivity on the one hand, and on the other its apparently ineliminable closeness to a special cluster of forms of self-knowledge in which we are seemingly given to ourselves as ourselves. The thesis proposed a new model of first person thought that brings together these two features by casting our special first personal forms of self-knowledge in a role associated with comprehension rather than one of reference-determination.
Here's a blog post I wrote about one of the papers coming out of that project.
Papers
'The Subjective Perspective in Introspection', Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23 (3-4), pp. 128-145, 2016
'Thinking About You', Mind, 2016
'Crossed Wires About Crossed Wires: somatosensation and immunity to error through misidentification', Dialectica, 71:1, 2017
'Conscious Experience: What's In It For Me?' (coauthored with Alexander Geddes), forthcoming invited contribution to The Sense of Mineness, OUP (please get in touch for a copy)
Book reviews
About Oneself: de se thought and communication, Manuel García-Carpintero and Stephan Torre (eds), OUP: 2016; Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
