Georgia State University

Faculty Member, Philosophy

Associate Professor (effective Summer 2012)

Arts and Sciences

Thesis Title: A Defense of Conceptual Pluralism

About

I was born in Cleveland, Ohio (home of Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys) and raised in Rockford, Illinois (home of Cheap Trick).

I received my BA from the University of California at Berkeley in 1996 and my MA from Brown University in 1999, both in philosophy. In 2003, I received my Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis in Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology. From 2003-2009 I was an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of South Florida. From Fall 2009 to Spring 2012 I was an assistant professor in the Georgia State philosophy department; in Spring 2012 I was promoted to associate professor and tenured. I am also an associate faculty member in the Neuroscience Institute.

My research focuses on several related topics: (1) Concepts, particularly their structure, content, and acquisition, as well as the relations among concepts, perception, action, and language; (2) Cognitive modeling and psychological explanation, cognitive architecture, and embodied/extended cognition; (3) Compositionality, context, and lexical semantics; (4) Multiple realizability, mechanistic explanation, and the metaphysics of kinds. I also have interests in folk psychology and the self. Papers on these topics may be downloaded from my web page.

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