This is a website in progress. Expect irregular improvements.
Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth College.
Part of my work focuses on fairly traditional problems in the philosophy of perception. I began with a keen interest in consciousness, but decided that I could not address that interest without doing some work on the perceptible qualities, perceptual representations, and perceptual content. Follow the Research link to the right for a description of how I have tried to chase down these issues and for some online versions of papers.
The other part of my work focuses on philosophical issues concerning artifacts, especially those that are about something. Pictures, maps, diagrams, and inscriptions are things that we make with the intention of representing or expressing something. How do artifacts do this, and what exactly is it that they do? It turns out that we do not have an adequate understanding of these phenomena. They relate in interesting ways to the phenomena that interest philosophers of mind, but they have an exciting life of their own as well. I work out an approach to representational kinds in my book, On Images (OUP , 2006) (Amazon ) and suggest a similar line of thought for understanding expression in a forthcoming paper "Artifact Expression". The Research link provides some particulars.
Students:
I am not teaching 2007-2008, but I am around this spring term, so feel free to Blitz me if you would like to meet. You just email my last name from campus, or my last name at Dartmouth dot edu from elsewhere. My office is 206 Thornton.
Also, I will be leading the Philosophy Department's Edinburgh FSP in the fall of 2008. I will be in touch with admitted students once the group has been finalized. Until then, if you have questions, get in touch with me or with Off Campus Programs .