I have been at Brown since 2002. Prior to coming here I taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Case Western Reserve University, and (for many years) at the University of Arkansas. I mainly teach courses in philosophy of mind, but occasionally I stray into other areas, including epistemology, logic, philosophy of cognitive science, and philosophy of language. I enjoy teaching and take great pleasure in the many achievements of my students, past and present.

I have written two books. Sensations: A Defense of Type Materialism (Cambridge University Press, 1991) argues for a radical physicalism concerning qualitative mental states (like pain) – specifically, for the view that qualitative states are type-identical with high level brain states. I no longer hold this version of physicalism, having converted to a form of representationalism several years ago, but I continue to write about it from time to time, seeking ways of improving upon my 1991 exposition. Thought and World: An Austere Portrayal of Truth, Reference, and Semantic Correspondence (Cambridge University Press, 2002) defends a deflationary account of semantic properties and relations. The foundation of my approach is a family of logical operators that are known as substitutional quantifiers . According to the theory, truth and its fellow semantic concepts can be explicitly defined in terms of logical concepts. It follows that the most basic properties of truth, such as the instances of the following schema, are analytic and a priori:

1. Type Materialism

“Remarks on David Papineau's Thinking about Consciousness,” Philosophy and Phenomenlogical Research , LXXI (2005), 147-154.

“The Identity Thesis,” forthcoming in an encyclopedia about consciousness edited by Tim Bayne.

2. Truth, Reference, and Semantic Correspondence

“Précis of Thought and World,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , forthcoming.

“Replies to Marian David, Anil Gupta, and Keith Simmons,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , forthcoming.

3. A Representationalist Theory of Qualia

“Ow! The Paradox of Pain,” in Murat Aydede (ed.), Pain: New Essays on its Nature and the Methodology of its Study (MIT press, 2005), pp. 75-98.

“Ouch! The Paradox of Pain.” This is a typescript of a talk that I've given several times in recent years. It overlaps with “Ow!” but also diverges from it in a number of places.

“Visual Awareness and Visual Qualia,” forthcoming in a collection edited by Marcelo Sabates and David Sosa.

4. Modal Epistemology

“Modality, Modal Epistemology, and the Metaphysics of Consciousness,” in Shaun Nichols (ed.), The Architecture of the Imagination ( Oxford University Press, 2006), 205-235.

5. Self Referential Thought

“Harman on Self Referential Thoughts,” Philosophical Issues 16 (2006), 346-357.

6. Reactions to Recent Books

"Comments on Timothy Schroeder's Three Faces of Desire" (This is my contribution to a symposium on Three Faces of Desire (Oxford, 2004) at the 2006 meeting of the Pacific Division of the APA.) 

"Hawthorne's Lottery Puzzle and the Nature of Belief," co-authored with Joshua Schechter, to appear in Philosophical Issues (This is a discussion of some central themes in Hawthorne's Knowledge and Lotteries and some related work by Timothy Williamson.) 

"Goldman on Introspection" (This is my contribution to a symposium on Alvin Goldman's Simulating Minds (Oxford 2006) at the 2007 meeting of the Pacific Division of the APA.)