John O'Dea |
Intro
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
Most of my work has been on representational approaches to conscious experience. In the course of writing my Ph.D. I became convinced that the idea that minds represent is a key part of understanding the nature of consciousness. But, like the idea that minds are part of the physcial world, it is not an idea that by itself tells us what it is to be consciousness. Minds are very complex physically and also very complex representationally. The philosophical problem of consciousness, namely the problem of how "matter can become imagination"( to borrow a phrase) seems to have a lot to do with the complexity and subtlety of mental representation.
Recently I have 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 want to know the effect of this, if any, on what a general theory of consciousness should explain.
Recent seminar papers
Publications
forthcoming |
Entry on Frank Jackson, in the forthcoming Companion to Philosophy in Australasia, Melbourne: Monash University e-Press. |
"A Proprioceptive Account of the Sense Modalities", in The Senses: Classical and Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Fiona Macpherson (OUP) (forthcoming 2009) |
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2008 |
“Transparency and the Unity of Experience” in E. Wright (ed), The Case for Qualia, MIT Press. [PDF] |
2007 |
“The Value in Equal Opportunity: Reply to Kershnar.” Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 24 (2), pp.177-187. [PDF] |
“A Higher-order, Dispositional Theory of Qualia” in The Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science, 15(2), 29-41. [PDF] |
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“Consciousness”, entry in The Language of Science, Polimetrica: Monza |
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2006 |
“Representationalism, Supervenience, and the Cross-Modal Problem” in Philosophical Studies, 130 (2), 285-295. [PDF] |
2002 |
“The Indexical Nature of Sensory Concepts” Philosophical Papers, 31, 169-181. [PDF] |