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Robert Van Gulick

Robert Van Gulick

Robert Van Gulick

Professor

CONTACT

Philosophy
536 Hall of Languages
Email: rnvangul@syr.edu

CV

Research and Teaching Interests

Robert Van Gulick works in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology. His recent work focuses on problems of consciousness, but his resarch also addresses a variety of related topics from a general teleo-pragmatic view of mind: including reduction, emergence, content, externalism, and mental causation.

He is the Director of the University's Cognitive Science Program and has been the President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. He has twice received NEH Fellowships and has seved as the William P. Tolley Distingusihed Professor of Teaching in the Humanities.

Selected Publications

  • "Consciousness" - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2004, revised 1/2014)Consciousness
  • "Scientific Reduction" (co-authored with Raphael van Riel) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2014) Scientific Reduction

Understanding Consciousness

  • "Understanding the Phenomenal Mind: Are we all just Armadillos?" In, M. Davies and G. Humphreys, Consciousness. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 137-54, (1993). 
  • "Maps, Gaps and Traps". In Q. Smith and A. Jokic (eds.) Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives. Oxford: Clarendon, Oxford Univ. Press, 323-52 (2003).

HOGS - Higher-Order Global State theory of consciousness.

  • "Higher-Order Global States (Hogs): An Alternative Higher-Order Model of Consciousness.’" in Rocco J. Gennaro (ed.),Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness: An Anthology. John Benjamins (2004).
  • "Mirror, Mirror -- Is That All?" in Uriah Kriegel & Kenneth Williford (eds.), Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness. (MIT Press, 2006).

"Mary" and the Knowledge Argument

  • "So Many Ways of Saying 'No' to Mary". in Peter Ludlow, Yujin Nagasawa & Daniel Stoljar (eds.), There's Something About Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson's Knowledge Argument. (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press 2004).
  • "Jackson’s change of mind: representationalism, a priorism & the knowledge argument". In I. Ravenscroft(ed.) Minds, Worlds and Conditionals: Themes from the Philosophy of Frank Jackson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 189-218 (2008).

Non-Reductive Physicalism

  • "Non-reductive physicalism and the teleo-pragmatic theory of mind". Philosophia Naturalis 47/48:1-2, 103-23 (2011).
  • "Nonreductive physicalism: still the best buy at the mind/body bazaar". Published in German only as "Nichtreduktiver Materialismus - noch immer das beste Angebot auf dem Leib-Seele Basar". In Michael Pauen (ed.) Phaenomenales Bewustsein: Entstehung und Erklarg. Berlin: Mentis Verlag, 297-327 (2002).

Mental Causation

  • "Who's in charge here and who's doing all the work?" In J. Heil and A. Mele (eds.) Essays on Mental Causation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 233-56, (1993).

Externalism

  • "Outing the mind".  In R. Schantz (ed.) The Externalist Challenge: New Studies on Cognition and Intentionality. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 255-84 (2004).