CUNY Graduate Center
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2007
Houston, Texas, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind
  •  795
    Being all that we can be: A critical review of Thomas Metzinger's Being No One
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 10 (11): 89-96. 2003.
    Some theorists approach the Gordian knot of consciousness by proclaiming its inherent tangle and mystery. Others draw out the sword of reduction and cut the knot to pieces. Philosopher Thomas Metzinger, in his important new book, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity, instead attempts to disentangle the knot one careful strand at a time. The result is an extensive and complex work containing almost 700 pages of philosophical analysis, phenomenological reflection, and scientific dat…Read more
  •  625
    Type-q materialism
    In Chase Wrenn (ed.), Naturalism, Reference and Ontology: Essays in Honor of Roger F. Gibson, Peter Lang Publishing Group. 2008.
    s Gibson (1982) correctly points out, despite Quine’s brief flirtation with a “mitigated phenomenalism” (Gibson’s phrase) in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, Quine’s ontology of 1953 (“On Mental Entities”) and beyond left no room for non-physical sensory objects or qualities. Anyone familiar with the contemporary neo-dualist qualia-freak-fest might wonder why Quinean lessons were insufficiently transmitted to the current generation.
  •  346
    Ned Block argues that the higher-order (HO) approach to explaining consciousness is ‘defunct’ because a prominent objection (the ‘misrepresentation objection’) exposes the view as ‘incoherent’. What’s more, a response to this objection that I’ve offered elsewhere (Weisberg 2010) fails because it ‘amounts to abusing the notion of what-it’s-like-ness’ (xxx).1 In this response, I wish to plead guilty as charged. Indeed, I will continue herein to abuse Block’s notion of what-it’s-like-ness. After do…Read more
  •  284
    Review of Russell T. Hurlburt’s & Eric Schwitzgebel’s Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic (review)
    PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 15 (2). 2009.
    What happens when a psychologist who’s spent the last 30 years developing a method of introspective sampling and a philosopher whose central research project is casting skeptical doubt on the accuracy of introspection write a book together? The result, Hurlburt & Schwitzgebel’s thought-provoking Describing Inner Experience?, is both encouraging and disheartening. Encouraging, because the book is a fine example of fruitful and open-minded interdisciplinary engagement; disheartening, because it ma…Read more
  •  241
    Misrepresenting consciousness
    Philosophical Studies 154 (3). 2011.
    An important objection to the "higher-order" theory of consciousness turns on the possibility of higher-order misrepresentation. I argue that the objection fails because it illicitly assumes a characterization of consciousness explicitly rejected by HO theory. This in turn raises the question of what justifies an initial characterization of the data a theory of consciousness must explain. I distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic characterizations of consciousness, and I propose several desi…Read more
  •  223
    The same-order representation theory of consciousness holds that conscious mental states represent both the world and themselves. This complex representational structure is posited in part to avoid a powerful objection to the more traditional higher-order representation theory of consciousness. The objection contends that the higher-order theory fails to account for the intimate relationship that holds between conscious states and our awareness of them--the theory 'divides the phenomenal labor' …Read more
  •  222
    Leopold Stubenberg, Consciousness and Qualia (review)
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (4): 154-154. 1999.
  •  166
    The zombie's cogito: Meditations on type-Q materialism
    Philosophical Psychology 24 (5). 2011.
    Most materialist responses to the zombie argument against materialism take either a ?type-A? or ?type-B? approach: they either deny the conceivability of zombies or accept their conceivability while denying their possibility. However, a ?type-Q? materialist approach, inspired by Quinean suspicions about a priority and modal entailment, rejects the sharp line between empirical and conceptual truths needed for the traditional responses. In this paper, I develop a type-Q response to the zombie argu…Read more
  •  158
    Higher-order theories of consciousness
    Scholarpedia 3 (5): 4407. 2008.
    in Scholarpedia, forthcoming
  •  132
    The appearance of unity: A higher-order interpretation of the unity of consciousness
    Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Conference of The Cognitive Science Society. 2001.
    subjective appearance of unity, but respects unity can be adequately dealt with by the theory. I the actual and potential disunity of the brain will close by briefly considering some worries about processes that underwrite consciousness. eliminativism that often accompany discussions of unity and consciousness
  •  69
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Volume 92, Issue 2, Page 401-404, June 2014
  •  61
    Explanatory Optimism about the Hard Problem of Consciousness argues that despite the worries of explanatory pessimists, consciousness can be fully explained in “easy” scientific terms. The widespread intuition that consciousness poses a hard problem is plausibly based on how consciousness appears to us in first-person access. The book offers a debunking argument to undercut the justificatory link between the first-person appearances and our hard problem intuitions. The key step in the debunking …Read more
  •  57
    It is widely held that consciousness is partially constituted by a “pre-reflective” self-consciousness. Further, it’s argued that the presence of pre-reflective self-consciousness poses a problem for “higher-order” theories of consciousness. Higher-order theories invoke reflective representation and so do not appear to have the resources to explain pre-reflective self-consciousness. This criticism is rooted in the Heidelberg School’s deep reflection on the nature of self-consciousness, and accor…Read more
  •  47
    Comments on David Miguel Gray’s “HOT: Keeping up Appearances?”
    Southwest Philosophy Review 28 (2): 59-63. 2012.
    David Rosenthal and Josh Weisberg have recently provided a counter argument to Ned Block’s argument that a Higher Order Thought (HOT) theory of consciousness cannot accommodate the existence of hallucinatory conscious states (i.e. a conscious episode consisting of a HOT without the presence of a relevant lower order thought). Their counter argument invokes the idea of mental appearances: a non-existent intentional object which is to aid in an account of subjective conscious awareness. I argue th…Read more
  •  22
    A Problem of Intimacy: Commentary on Rocco Gennaro's The Consciousness Paradox
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 20 (11-12): 69-81. 2013.
    First, I want to start off by saying that The Consciousness Paradox is a wonderful book: well written, strongly argued, and impressively thorough. This is no great surprise, given the quality we've come to expect from Rocco Gennaro over the years, but it is a great thing to have a canonical statement of his view in one place and to have so many of the details of his theory of consciousness filled in. I also want to express my honour at being a part of this symposium.
  •  20
    Qualitative Consciousness: Themes From the Philosophy of David Rosenthal (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2022.
    Qualitative consciousness is conscious experience marked by the presence of sensory qualities, like the experienced painfulness of having a piano dropped on your foot, or the consciousness of seeing the brilliant reds and oranges of a sunset. Over his career, philosopher David Rosenthal has defended an influential theoretical approach to explaining qualitative consciousness. This approach involves the development of two theories – the higher-order thought theory of mental state consciousness and…Read more
  •  16
    Each of us, right now, is having a unique conscious experience. Nothing is more basic to our lives as thinking beings and nothing, it seems, is better known to us. But the ever-expanding reach of natural science suggests that everything in our world is ultimately physical. The challenge of fitting consciousness into our modern scientific worldview, of taking the subjective “feel” of conscious experience and showing that it is just neural activity in the brain, is among the most intriguing explan…Read more
  •  6
    A special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies debating the merits of Russell Hurlburt's technique of Descriptive Experience Sampling as a means of accessing inner experience.
  •  6
    Qualitative Consciousness: Themes From the Philosophy of David Rosenthal (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2022.
    Qualitative consciousness is conscious experience marked by the presence of sensory qualities, like the experienced painfulness of having a piano dropped on your foot, or the consciousness of seeing the brilliant reds and oranges of a sunset. Over his career, philosopher David Rosenthal has defended an influential theoretical approach to explaining qualitative consciousness. This approach involves the development of two theories – the higher-order thought theory of mental state consciousness and…Read more
  •  1
    Introduction
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 18 (1): 7-20. 2011.