Introduction

I live in Tokyo and work at the Komaba campus of the University of Tokyo. I am a member of the University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy and teach science writing in the ALESS program, an offshoot of the English Department. I have been with UT since 2006, when I arrived in Japan to take up a JSPS postdoctoral fellowship in Philosophy.

Prior to 2006 I spent 3 years as postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy Program of RSSS, ANU, Canberra. In 2002 I graduated with a Ph.D. in philosophy from Monash University, Melbourne. I spent the 1997-8 American academic year in graduate coursework in the Philosophy Dept of the University Maryland (College Park). Before that I studied philosophy and psychology toward a B.A. (Hons) (1996) from The University of Queensland, Brisbane, where I was born and near where I was raised.

Research

Project 1: Perceptual Constancy

I currently work mainly on the philosophy of perception, and the problem of perceptual constancy in particular.  I have been developing a theory of constancy that, I think, is explanatorily powerful in being a general theory, and seems to solve many historical puzzles to do with perceptual experiences involving constancy.  Slides from a recent  presentation can be downloaded here (PDF). My poster on the topic for the 2011 Kyoto conference of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) can be downloaded here (PDF).    The full paper is in the works.

Project 2: Normativity in Perception

Merleau-Ponty’s observation that objects have subjectively better perceiving conditions was recently defended and radicalised by Sean Kelly, who argues that perceptual experiences necessarily have a normative aspect – in seeing an object we are, necessarily, motivated to see it better. I became interested in this intriguing idea because it arises in connection with the experience of perceptual constancy. However, I now believe the connection is remote, and that the best interpretation of  seeing “better” is “with higher confidence”, which is only indirectly related to constancy – or, for that matter, to motivation.  Slides from recent seminar paper in which I briefly argue for this conclusion can be downloaded here (PDF). Currently I am working on how confidence fits in to the phenomenology of perception.

Project 3: Other Minds and the Problem of Consciousness

I have also been looking at the way in which our social nature impacts on our everyday understanding of consciousness. The traditional view is that the concept of consciousness arises from our reflections on our own experience; our understanding of the consciousness of other people is normally regarded as derived from this. But there is quite a lot of evidence that this is not the case. It is quite likely that our conceptions of ourselves as “seats of awareness” is jump-started by our realisation, as infants, that there are “others” around. I am interested in the effect of this, on what a general theory of consciousness should explain.

Other seminar papers

“Critical Thinking in an English Science Writing Course”

A short paper arguing for the benefits and possibility of including critical thinking as a core component of the science writing course I teach. Text available on request.

Publications