Anthony I. Jack

Anthony Jack works in philosophy of mind, with a focus on consciousness, moral cognition, and the foundations of cognitive neuroscience. He is Beamer-Schneider Professor of Ethics at Case Western Reserve University, with appointments in Philosophy, Psychology, Neurology, Neuroscience, and Organizational Behavior. His distinctive contribution is empirically grounded: as Principal Investigator of the Brain, Mind & Consciousness Laboratory, he developed the opposing domains hypothesis, which holds that analytic and empathic reasoning are supported by mutually inhibitory brain networks — a finding with implications for debates about dual-process theory, moral psychology, and the structure of human understanding. His recent work returns to consciousness itself, arguing in "The Genuine Problem of Consciousness" that standard formulations of the hard problem mislocate what is genuinely puzzling about subjective experience. He is completing a book for a general audience, The Mind's Essential Tension: How Neuroscience Completes the Enlightenment, which develops the philosophical implications of the two-networks framework for epistemology, ethics, and the post-Enlightenment understanding of reason.