112 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
David Hume's comprehensive philosophical system applying Newtonian method to human nature, covering the understanding (belief, causation), the passions, and morals.
Medieval theological concept — one of the seven deadly sins — denoting a spiritual listlessness or torpor that prevents the monk or soul from engaging in necessary spiritual work; analyzed as more than laziness, it is a metaphysical dejection about one's spiritual condition.
British-American philosopher and prolific writer who became the primary interpreter of Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and Vedanta for mid-20th-century Western audiences — dissolving the Eastern/Western philosophical boundary for a generation of countercultural seekers.
John Locke's systematic account of the origins, nature, and limits of human knowledge, arguing that all ideas derive from sensory experience and reflection.
British philosopher who co-developed the extended mind thesis — arguing that cognitive processes can extend beyond the brain into body and environment.
American author and editor — married to Sam Harris — whose Conscious presents the hard problem of consciousness in accessible form, arguing that consciousness may be far more pervasive in nature than conventional scientific assumptions suggest.
Donald Davidson's theory that mental events are identical to physical events (monism) but that mental descriptions cannot be subsumed under physical laws (anomalism) — token identity without type identity.
Ghanaian philosopher who was brought to Europe as a child, earned a doctorate at Halle, and produced original philosophical work on the nature of the human mind and sensation.
Portuguese-American neuroscientist who argued that emotions are not opposed to reason but are biologically necessary for rational decision-making — Descartes' Error was the separation of mind and body.
British philosopher who has developed a comprehensive account of the stream of consciousness and temporal experience — arguing that experience has intrinsic temporal extension.
American philosopher who has contributed to Humean metaphysics, the philosophy of quantum mechanics, and the Mentaculus account of the laws of nature and time's arrow.
The psychological and philosophical movement holding that mental states are either identical with or reducible to dispositions to behavior, and that only publicly observable behavior is a legitimate subject of scientific psychology.
Philosophical analysis of boredom as a mood revealing the structure of temporality, desire, and meaning — treated by Pascal, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Heidegger as philosophically significant.
Ancient Indian philosopher and teacher (Siddhartha Gautama) who founded Buddhism, teaching the Four Noble Truths about suffering and its cessation, the doctrine of no-self (anatta), and the Eightfold Path as the means of liberation.
The question whether perceptual experience is influenced by top-down cognitive processes — beliefs, desires, expectations — or is encapsulated from higher cognition.
Ambitious book by David Chalmers arguing that all truths are a priori scrutable from a minimal base of physical, phenomenal, indexical, and that's-all truths.
Qing dynasty philosopher and philologist who critiqued Neo-Confucian metaphysics — particularly the principle-desire (li-yu) opposition — arguing that principles are discovered through desires and feelings, not opposed to them.
American philosopher who developed the intentional stance — attributing beliefs and desires to systems as a predictive strategy — and argued that consciousness, free will, and the self are useful illusions generated by the brain's narrative processing.
Australian philosopher who has worked on the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and temporal experience.
Australian philosopher best known for formulating the hard problem of consciousness and developing two-dimensional semantics as a tool in philosophy of mind.
American philosopher who developed the formal semantics of indexicals and demonstratives, distinguishing character from content.
American philosopher who defended modal realism — the view that possible worlds are concrete, spatiotemporally isolated universes — and made foundational contributions to semantics, mind, and metaphysics.
British neuroscientist who developed a computational theory of visual perception and proposed the influential three-levels framework — computational, algorithmic, and implementational — for analyzing cognitive systems.
British philosopher who has developed an influential defense of physicalism about mind and a broadly naturalistic philosophy of science.
American philosopher who developed the higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness — a mental state is conscious if and only if the subject has a higher-order thought about it.
American philosopher who has worked on collective intentionality, group belief, and the social dimensions of mind.
American philosopher working on mental content, concepts, and the philosophy of language.
American philosopher who developed anomalous monism — mental events are physical but mental descriptions are irreducible — truth-conditional semantics based on Tarski, and the principle of charity in interpretation.
American cognitive scientist who wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach — the most successful interdisciplinary work on consciousness and self-reference ever written — arguing that consciousness is a strange loop arising from self-referential systems.
Douglas Hofstadter is an American cognitive scientist and author whose 'Gödel, Escher, Bach' (1979) explored self-referential systems, strange loops, and the emergence of consciousness through a dialogue between formal logic, visual art, and music.
American neuroscientist at Northeastern University whose theory of constructed emotion — arguing that emotions are not universal hardwired responses but are constructed by the brain through prediction — represents one of the most significant challenges to the classical view of emotion in psychology.
British metaphysician who developed a four-category ontology — individual substances, kinds (universal substances), attributes (universal properties), and modes (individual properties) — and argued for the coherence of non-Cartesian substance dualism.
American philosopher who has worked on the epistemology and phenomenology of intuition — arguing that intuitions have a distinctive phenomenal character that provides a priori justification.
The collected philosophical treatises of Plotinus, edited and arranged by his student Porphyry into six groups of nine (enneads), constituting the foundational text of Neoplatonism.
American philosopher who collaborated with Jerry Fodor on critiques of meaning holism and with Donald Davidson on semantic theory.
The foundational teaching of Buddhism: (1) dukkha (suffering/unsatisfactoriness is pervasive); (2) its origin is craving (tanha); (3) cessation (nirodha) is possible; (4) the Eightfold Path is the way to cessation.
Australian analytic philosopher who devised the knowledge argument against physicalism and co-developed conceptual analysis as a philosophical method.
German-Austrian philosopher who revived the scholastic concept of intentionality — the directedness of mental states toward objects — as the defining mark of the mental, founding phenomenology.
American philosopher who developed an information-theoretic account of knowledge and a naturalistic account of mental content — mental states have the content they have because of their informational relations to the world.
British philosopher who, before dying at 34, produced one of the most important works in the philosophy of language and mind — The Varieties of Reference — developing a neo-Fregean account of singular thought.
Finnish philosopher who founded modern deontic logic (the logic of obligation and permission), developed an action-theoretic approach to causation and explanation, and served as Wittgenstein's literary executor.
British philosopher and psychologist who contributed to early analytic philosophy of mind and developed an early version of trope theory.
Köhler's systematic defense of Gestalt psychology — addressing physicists and philosophers as well as psychologists, arguing for isomorphism between brain processes and psychological experience.
British philosopher who demolished the Cartesian ghost in the machine — mind-body dualism — by showing it rests on a category mistake, and introduced the distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that.
Italian-American philosopher who has developed a mechanistic account of computation — computation is a specific kind of physical process, not a merely formal or functional property — and applied it to the mind-body problem.
German-British philosopher who has written on Wittgenstein and contributed to the historiography of analytic philosophy.
American philosopher who transformed philosophy of language with semantic externalism and the twin earth thought experiment, and later evolved from scientific realism to pragmatism.
Chilean biologist who co-developed autopoiesis with Varela — the defining characteristic of living systems — and developed the biology of cognition, arguing that perception is not representation but a process of structural coupling.
The thesis that sufficiently capable agents with almost any terminal goal will converge on certain instrumental sub-goals — self-preservation, resource acquisition, goal preservation — making powerful AI potentially dangerous regardless of its specific objective.
Edward Kelly et al.'s 2007 800-page scholarly work arguing that the standard neuroscientific model of mind (consciousness as produced by the brain) is falsified by the evidence — including near-death experiences, psychical research, and exceptional human experiences — and that William James's 'transmission model' is better supported.
Canadian philosopher who has worked on the relationship between perception and cognition and the philosophy of numerical cognition.
American cognitive psychologist who was a founding figure of cognitive science and developed influential theories of perception, learning, and narrative.
American philosopher who defended the language of thought hypothesis — thought occurs in an innate mentalese — and the modularity thesis, arguing that the mind is organized into informationally encapsulated domain-specific modules.
American philosopher who was the most influential philosopher of mind of the late 20th century — developing the language of thought hypothesis, the modularity of mind thesis, and a vigorous defense of intentional realism against eliminativism.
British philosopher who founded classical liberalism through natural rights theory and the social contract, and pioneered empiricist epistemology with the tabula rasa doctrine.
American philosopher who developed a comprehensive account of defeasible reasoning and built OSCAR — an AI system that reasons in accordance with philosophical epistemology.
American philosopher who developed speech act theory, the Chinese Room argument against strong AI, and biological naturalism — the view that consciousness is a causally emergent property of brain processes.
Swedish philosopher who has worked on the normativity of meaning, perception, and the relationship between content and rationality.
American philosopher who has critically analyzed the extended mind hypothesis — arguing that Clark and Chalmers's parity principle is insufficient to establish that external processes are genuinely cognitive.
American cognitive psychologist who has worked on the psychology of reasoning, induction, and the development of number concepts.
American philosopher who has worked on the Turing test, strong AI, and the philosophy of computation.
American philosopher who developed the constitution theory of material objects — objects are constituted by matter but not identical to it — and a non-reductionist account of persons.
British philosopher who has worked on the nature of mental content, the semantics of natural language, and epistemic warrant — developing accounts of how content is individuated and how a priori knowledge is possible.
Donald Davidson's foundational paper arguing for anomalous monism — mental events are identical to physical events but mental descriptions cannot be systematically reduced to physical descriptions.
American cognitive scientist who developed the neural reuse theory — brain regions are redeployed for new functions throughout evolution and development, challenging modular views of brain organization.
American philosopher working on mental content, concepts, and the philosophy of cognitive science.
American philosopher working on associationism, mechanistic explanation, and animal cognition.
Buddhist concept of liberation — the cessation of craving, aversion, and ignorance, and the extinction of the conditions that generate suffering and rebirth.
American philosopher and Wittgenstein's closest American disciple who contributed to epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of religion — defending a version of the ontological argument and critiquing the possibility of a private language.
Greek philosophical concept meaning mind, intellect, or reason — used variously by Anaxagoras (as a cosmic ordering principle), Plato (as the highest faculty of the soul), Aristotle (as the active intellect), and Plotinus (as the second hypostasis in the emanation hierarchy).
Aristotle's treatise analyzing dreams as residues of sense-impressions — the movements persisting in sense organs after waking experience continue to produce appearances during sleep.
Aristotle's short treatise analyzing sleep and waking as natural phenomena — sleep is a temporary incapacitation of the sensitive faculty, necessary for the restoration of the sense organs.
Aristotle's systematic account of the soul (psyche) as the first actuality of a natural body that has the potential for life — a hylomorphic theory that makes the soul the functional organization of a living body.
Canadian philosopher who founded neurophilosophy — the application of neuroscience to philosophical problems about mind, self, and morality — and has argued for a naturalistic account of conscience.
Canadian philosopher who developed eliminative materialism — folk psychology (belief, desire, intention) is a radically false theory that will be replaced by mature neuroscience — and contributed to a neuroscientifically informed epistemology.
Australian philosopher of biology at the University of Sydney who studies the evolution of mind and consciousness — most notably in octopuses and other cephalopods — whose Other Minds argues that cephalopod intelligence evolved entirely independently of vertebrate intelligence.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty's masterwork arguing that the body is the subject of perception — not an object controlled by a disembodied mind — and that all perception is grounded in embodied, pre-reflective engagement with the world.
Irish-Australian political philosopher who revived the republican tradition of freedom as non-domination — distinct from both liberal freedom as non-interference and communitarian politics.
Ludwig Wittgenstein's posthumously published masterwork dissolving traditional philosophical problems by attending to the actual use of language in forms of life.
Major anthology edited by David Chalmers collecting foundational and cutting-edge texts in philosophy of mind.
Egyptian-Roman philosopher who founded Neoplatonism — a systematic development of Plato synthesizing Aristotelian and Stoic elements — and whose Enneads describe an emanationist metaphysics culminating in mystical union with the One.
Franz Brentano's foundational work proposing an empirical but non-reductive psychology based on the analysis of mental acts, introducing intentionality as the mark of the mental.
German philosopher working on extended cognition, predictive processing, and the philosophy of mind.
American philosopher who has worked on visual perception and the philosophy of pictures and depiction.
British mathematician and physicist who made foundational contributions to general relativity (Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems) and has argued controversially that consciousness requires non-computational physics.
American philosopher who has worked on the nature of social kinds, race, and the philosophy of social science.
Penrose's follow-up to The Emperor's New Mind — responding to critics and developing the Orch-OR (Orchestrated Objective Reduction) theory of quantum consciousness with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff.
American cognitive psychologist who contributed to the debate about the structure of concepts — particularly the challenge to prototype theory from the persistence of classical features in clearly graded concepts.
Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis — the theory and practice based on the unconscious mind, repression, infantile sexuality, and the talking cure.
American philosopher at the University of Maryland who approaches parapsychological phenomena with rigorous philosophical analysis — writing The Gold Leaf Lady and other investigations of macro-psychokinesis, mediumship, and survival of bodily death.
American cognitive scientist who developed the core knowledge theory — infants are born with a set of domain-specific core knowledge systems — and studied how conceptual change occurs in development and science.
American philosopher who argued that perception has rich representational content (including properties like causation and natural kind membership) and that cognitive penetration can undermine the rational standing of perceptual beliefs.
Essay by David Chalmers distinguishing epistemic and subjective components of mental content using two-dimensional framework.
Gilbert Ryle's systematic dismantling of Cartesian dualism, arguing that mental terms do not refer to an immaterial substance but to dispositions and abilities of embodied persons.
Charles Darwin's extension of evolutionary theory to human beings, arguing that humans evolved from earlier primates, and developing the theory of sexual selection as a mechanism distinct from natural selection.
Roger Penrose's argument that human consciousness cannot be simulated by a Turing machine — drawing on Gödel's incompleteness theorems, quantum mechanics, and the physics of spacetime.
Jerry Fodor's argument that mental processes are computations over representations in an innate mental language (mentalese) with syntactic structure and semantic content.
Essay by Chalmers arguing that narrow content — content shared by duplicates — can be defined as the primary intension in two-dimensional semantics.
Susanna Siegel's book arguing that perceptual experiences can be epistemically rational or irrational depending on how they were formed — challenging the traditional view that perception is always epistemically basic.
American philosopher who argued that consciousness involves subjective experience that cannot be explained by objective physical descriptions, and developed accounts of moral luck, political philosophy, and the limits of objective reason.
Australian philosopher who argued that cognitive systems are best understood as dynamical systems rather than computational or connectionist systems.
A formal mathematical theory of intelligence as the ability to achieve goals across a wide range of environments — measured against the universal algorithmic prior.
American neurophysiologist and philosopher who co-developed the first mathematical model of artificial neural networks — showing how logical operations could be implemented in networks of simplified neurons.
American philosopher who made seminal contributions to the critique of the given, the nature of semantic concepts, and the relationship between the scientific and manifest images of the world — widely regarded as one of the most important American philosophers of the 20th century.
American philosopher of science who has developed the mechanistic account of scientific explanation and applied it to cognitive science and biology.
American philosopher who has worked on connectionist models of cognition and the debate about mental representation.
Canadian cognitive scientist who argued for a classical computational architecture of mind — symbol manipulation over syntactically structured representations — and against analog mental imagery.
Philip Goff is a British philosopher at Durham University specializing in philosophy of mind, consciousness, and panpsychism. He is the leading contemporary defender of panpsychism — the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world — and has written several accessible books making the case for it.
Galen Strawson is a British philosopher (son of P.F. Strawson) at the University of Texas at Austin, known for his influential work on panpsychism, the self, free will, and moral responsibility. His 2006 paper 'Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism' helped revive serious academic interest in panpsychism.
Donald Hoffman is a professor of cognitive science at UC Irvine whose Interface Theory of Perception argues that our perceptual experiences do not represent objective reality but rather an evolutionarily useful interface — like a desktop GUI — that conceals the true nature of the world. He extends this to a radical claim that spacetime itself is not fundamental, and that consciousness may be.
Bestselling 2011 book by David Eagleman arguing that the vast majority of brain activity occurs below conscious awareness and that the self is a post-hoc narrator rather than an agent in control. Draws on clinical cases, experiments, and evolutionary reasoning to dismantle the Cartesian homunculus.