Canada Research Chair (tier 1), Director of the Bertrand Russell Research Centre, and Associate Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University
My research focuses on the history and philosophy of psychology, with a special emphasis on interactions with classic pragmatism and early analytic philosophy. Consciousness, action, and perception, especially in the empirical work of William James and other 19th century sources, have been central. Other interests include Bertrand Russell, neutral monism, and the meta-history (history of history of) philosophy.
A hallmark of my research has been the analysis of experiment and clinical observation, often in physiology and psychology, that have been thought to have philosophical significance. I have a monograph in press with Oxford (Consciousness Is Motor: William James on Mind and Action) that presents James's work on consciousness and action as contributions to a controversy over experiments on living, decapitated vertebrates (typically frogs). Experimentalists like Eduard Pflüger and G. H. Lewes had shown that living, brainless frogs are capable of goal-directed action. They concluded that these brainless creatures must somehow be conscious, and that nervous tissue must operate according to distinctive natural laws--vital laws--that foster intentional action. Critics like T. H. Huxley instead interpreted the experiments as showing that goal-directed action must not be mediated by conscious mental states at all, and he appealed to these results to support epiphenomenalism. At root, the frog controversy turned on the question of the extent to which physiology could be a fully mechanical science, or whether it must sometimes appeal to minds, souls, or other nonphysical factors. The debate stretched back through Marshall Hall, La Mettrie, and Georg Stahl, ultimately to Descartes.
James's intervention involved bringing distinctively Darwinian considerations to bear on the matter. Against Huxley, he contended that there is no biologically plausible explanation for how an inefficacious consciousness could have evolved. And against vitalistic interpretations, he developed a sophisticated, empirically-grounded hypothesis about how consciousness could have evolved even without any special vital laws. In a nutshell, he conceived of consciousness as fundamentally an evaluating agency, and he hypothesized that its evolutionary function is behavior regulation. He also developed detailed models of action initiation and motor control, showing precisely how consciousness could play a regulating role in the physiological economy of higher vertebrates. My current research focus (fall 2023) is to draw philosophical lessons for today's theories of consciousness and of action from the historical research in my monograph.
James's empirical work in psychology, and his empirically-driven reflections on mind more generally, both influenced Bertrand Russell. Although philosophers remember Russell's pointed attacks on pragmatism about truth, he was in fact positively influenced by James's conceptions of acquaintance, introspection, and spatial and temporal perception. After about 1919 , Russell also came under the sway of James's more purely metaphysical account of the mind-body relationship. Russell dubbed this account "neutral monism," and defended his own distinctive version especially in The Analysis of Mind (1921) and The Analysis of Matter (1927). The view is now known as "Russellian Monism," and though it has come in for a revival in recent philosophy of mind, the historical (and indeed psychological) origins of this view remain obscure. In recent work I attempt to elucidate these origins. Other figures in the history of (often scientific) philosophy on whom I have written include Ernst Mach, W. V. Quine, C. S. Peirce, H. Helmholtz, T. H. Green, Kurd Laßwitz, George Berkeley, and Francis Galton.
I am now planning future research on the famous clash over truth between Russell and James, with special reference to the shared psychological background of this dispute. This work will also explore little-known ways this debate was intertwined with political concerns. Russell and James were both scientific philosophers, in their own ways; but they also both had histories of political radicalism, histories that stretched back generations in each respective family. Both were pacifist, cosmopolitan, and anti-nationalistic. But inside their shared “progressive” worldview (as we may call it), each philosopher was a fountainhead of a fundamentally different approach to mind and knowledge, and their differences are on stark display in their dispute over truth. The book project has its seeds in a 2020 public essay I published on Russell in Aeon.
Another interest is in computational tools developed in the digital humanities. I have established the Digital Philosophy Laboratory at McMaster. Our mission is to cultivate new methods for employing computational techniques like topic modeling and sentiment analysis in the study of philosophy, particularly in the history of philosophy. Our connection with the Russell Archives (housed at McMaster) puts us in a special position to apply these digital methods in the study of early analytic philosophy.
Recently, I completed a Fulbright year at the University of Sheffield (2016 - 2017), which is where my book on James's account of consciousness was born. In 2019, I came to McMaster from the Philosophy Department at Cal State Long Beach. In 2008-2009 I was a Mellon Fellow in Philosophy at Cornell, and before that I held a postdoc at the University of Toronto. My PhD comes from the Philosophy Department at Indiana University, Bloomington, where I worked with the philosopher of biology Elisabeth Lloyd. Her primary appointment is in Indiana's History and Philosophy of Science Department, from which I also have an MA.
A hallmark of my research has been the analysis of experiment and clinical observation, often in physiology and psychology, that have been thought to have philosophical significance. I have a monograph in press with Oxford (Consciousness Is Motor: William James on Mind and Action) that presents James's work on consciousness and action as contributions to a controversy over experiments on living, decapitated vertebrates (typically frogs). Experimentalists like Eduard Pflüger and G. H. Lewes had shown that living, brainless frogs are capable of goal-directed action. They concluded that these brainless creatures must somehow be conscious, and that nervous tissue must operate according to distinctive natural laws--vital laws--that foster intentional action. Critics like T. H. Huxley instead interpreted the experiments as showing that goal-directed action must not be mediated by conscious mental states at all, and he appealed to these results to support epiphenomenalism. At root, the frog controversy turned on the question of the extent to which physiology could be a fully mechanical science, or whether it must sometimes appeal to minds, souls, or other nonphysical factors. The debate stretched back through Marshall Hall, La Mettrie, and Georg Stahl, ultimately to Descartes.
James's intervention involved bringing distinctively Darwinian considerations to bear on the matter. Against Huxley, he contended that there is no biologically plausible explanation for how an inefficacious consciousness could have evolved. And against vitalistic interpretations, he developed a sophisticated, empirically-grounded hypothesis about how consciousness could have evolved even without any special vital laws. In a nutshell, he conceived of consciousness as fundamentally an evaluating agency, and he hypothesized that its evolutionary function is behavior regulation. He also developed detailed models of action initiation and motor control, showing precisely how consciousness could play a regulating role in the physiological economy of higher vertebrates. My current research focus (fall 2023) is to draw philosophical lessons for today's theories of consciousness and of action from the historical research in my monograph.
James's empirical work in psychology, and his empirically-driven reflections on mind more generally, both influenced Bertrand Russell. Although philosophers remember Russell's pointed attacks on pragmatism about truth, he was in fact positively influenced by James's conceptions of acquaintance, introspection, and spatial and temporal perception. After about 1919 , Russell also came under the sway of James's more purely metaphysical account of the mind-body relationship. Russell dubbed this account "neutral monism," and defended his own distinctive version especially in The Analysis of Mind (1921) and The Analysis of Matter (1927). The view is now known as "Russellian Monism," and though it has come in for a revival in recent philosophy of mind, the historical (and indeed psychological) origins of this view remain obscure. In recent work I attempt to elucidate these origins. Other figures in the history of (often scientific) philosophy on whom I have written include Ernst Mach, W. V. Quine, C. S. Peirce, H. Helmholtz, T. H. Green, Kurd Laßwitz, George Berkeley, and Francis Galton.
I am now planning future research on the famous clash over truth between Russell and James, with special reference to the shared psychological background of this dispute. This work will also explore little-known ways this debate was intertwined with political concerns. Russell and James were both scientific philosophers, in their own ways; but they also both had histories of political radicalism, histories that stretched back generations in each respective family. Both were pacifist, cosmopolitan, and anti-nationalistic. But inside their shared “progressive” worldview (as we may call it), each philosopher was a fountainhead of a fundamentally different approach to mind and knowledge, and their differences are on stark display in their dispute over truth. The book project has its seeds in a 2020 public essay I published on Russell in Aeon.
Another interest is in computational tools developed in the digital humanities. I have established the Digital Philosophy Laboratory at McMaster. Our mission is to cultivate new methods for employing computational techniques like topic modeling and sentiment analysis in the study of philosophy, particularly in the history of philosophy. Our connection with the Russell Archives (housed at McMaster) puts us in a special position to apply these digital methods in the study of early analytic philosophy.
Recently, I completed a Fulbright year at the University of Sheffield (2016 - 2017), which is where my book on James's account of consciousness was born. In 2019, I came to McMaster from the Philosophy Department at Cal State Long Beach. In 2008-2009 I was a Mellon Fellow in Philosophy at Cornell, and before that I held a postdoc at the University of Toronto. My PhD comes from the Philosophy Department at Indiana University, Bloomington, where I worked with the philosopher of biology Elisabeth Lloyd. Her primary appointment is in Indiana's History and Philosophy of Science Department, from which I also have an MA.
My CV (Sept 2023) is here.
Area of Research Specialization
Philosophy and History of Science (esp Psychology)
Classic Pragmatism (esp James)
Early Analytic Philosophy (esp Russell)
Other Areas of Teaching Competence
Philosophy of Mind (Consciousness, Action, Perception)
History and Philosophy of Biology
General Philosophy of Science
Early Modern Philosophy (esp Descartes, Berkeley, Hume)
Here is a complete set of teaching evaluations from a recent introduction to philosophy class I taught (Phil 100).
And here is a complete set of teaching evaluations from a recent graduate seminar in the history of analytic philosophy (Phil 681).
Area of Research Specialization
Philosophy and History of Science (esp Psychology)
Classic Pragmatism (esp James)
Early Analytic Philosophy (esp Russell)
Other Areas of Teaching Competence
Philosophy of Mind (Consciousness, Action, Perception)
History and Philosophy of Biology
General Philosophy of Science
Early Modern Philosophy (esp Descartes, Berkeley, Hume)
Here is a complete set of teaching evaluations from a recent introduction to philosophy class I taught (Phil 100).
And here is a complete set of teaching evaluations from a recent graduate seminar in the history of analytic philosophy (Phil 681).
The background picture is a diagram of one of G. H. Lewes's physiological frog experiments, from Problems of Life and Mind, Second Series: The Physical Basis of Mind (London: Trübner & Co., 1877) p. 178.
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