Daniel Kolak

Last updated

Daniel Kolak (born 1955 in Zagreb, SR Croatia) is a Croatian-American philosopher who works primarily in philosophy of mind, personal identity, cognitive science, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of logic, philosophy of religion, and aesthetics. He is professor of philosophy at the William Paterson University of New Jersey and an Affiliate of the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS). Kolak is the founder of the philosophical therapy known as cognitive dynamics.

Contents

Biography

Kolak is a prolific philosopher, with over thirty-five authored books and nearly two hundred books edited. [1] He is professor of philosophy at the William Paterson University of New Jersey (WPUNJ), where he chaired the Philosophy Department and founded and directed the WPUNJ cognitive science laboratory. He also directs research at the Brain Behavior Center and is an affiliate of Rutgers University's Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS). Kolak's numerous articles, stories, essays, books and other creative works bridge traditional philosophy with all areas of inquiry and expression, from neuroscience to quantum mechanics, from logic and mathematics to art, music and literature. Among his best known recent works are I Am You: The Metaphysical Foundations for Global Ethics, Principles of Cognitive Science, Wittgenstein's Tractatus , Wisdom Without Answers, From the Presocratics to the Present, In Search of God: The Language and Logic of Belief, The Experience of Philosophy, Self, Cosmos, God, Self and Identity, and the novel In Search of Myself: Life, Death and Personal Identity. He is editor, chief programmer and designer of the interactive electronic library The Philosophy Source on CD-ROM, and was Series Editor of the Wadsworth Philosopher Series and Philosophical Topics. As Series Editor at Longman, he is currently bringing out new editions of the complete canon of philosophy from ancient times to the present. Translated into over a dozen languages, collectively his books have sold over a million copies worldwide. [2]

Kolak is the popularizer of the philosophy known as open individualism, which he developed along with his view of metaphysical subjectivism and the nonlocality of consciousness, according to which there exists but one numerically identical individual subject who is everyone. In his groundbreaking I Am You: the Metaphysical Foundations for Global Ethics, he writes: "The central thesis of I Am You - that we are all the same person - is apt to strike many readers as obviously false or even absurd. How could you be me and Hitler and Gandhi and Jesus and Buddha and Greta Garbo and everybody else in the past, present and future? In this book I explain how this is possible. Moreover, I show that this is the best explanation of who we are for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it provides the metaphysical foundations for global ethics." Variations on Kolak's theme have been voiced periodically throughout the ages (the Upanishads, Averroes, Giordano Bruno, Schopenhauer, Josiah Royce); more recently, physicists such as Erwin Schrödinger, Fred Hoyle, and Freeman Dyson have espoused it. [3]

Kolak continues to work on the logical foundations of quantum mechanics and a mathematical model of consciousness (e.g. Stone–Čech compactification) that integrates relativity and quantum mechanics using an "Ultra-Strong (Open World) Nonlocality" variation on a (spinning, with closed timelike paths) Gödel universe, and other such foundational issues in mathematics, physics and logic further refined with Jaakko Hintikka's IF (independence-friendly) and epistemic logics. [4] [5] He has also made original contributions to the philosophy of religion, the history of philosophy, and the teaching of philosophy.

Kolak is the founder of the philosophical therapy known as cognitive dynamics, which has been used to create new paradigms and technologies for expanding human consciousness, increasing intelligence, and improving creativity. It is still under development. More information about this aspect of Kolak's research in cognitive science (cognitive neuroscience; self-representation; information processing; knowledge representation; mental models; the logic and mathematics of mental processes; autism, confabulation, self-deception, MPD; dreaming), philosophy of mind (personal identity, consciousness, and self; philosophical psychology; psychoanalytic theory) can be found at the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS).

Kolak is an expert on dreams, particularly about how the brain synthesizes experience and creates the virtual world we call reality. His unique work on lucid dreams has recently been featured in a documentary, produced by NBC/Universal, which aired in November 2006. [6]

As a composer and musician he has performed in concert on numerous occasions, both solo and with leading musicians such as Charlie Byrd, Dizzy Gillespie and Frank Zappa. As a theatrical director and composer he has won the coveted Helen Hayes Creativity Award for productions such as Sartre's No Exit at the Source Theater in Washington, D.C. Among his film work is the teleplay Id-Entity, about multiple personality disorder as seen through the eyes of four patients, for which Kolak wrote, directed, and produced, and the score and soundtrack. Forsaken Cries: the Case of Rwanda which he produced for PBS, by Amnesty International and narrated by Danny Glover. Most recently Kolak served as special advisor to Martin Scorsese in the making of the Academy Award-winning film The Departed .

In the United States, Kolak successfully lobbied the U.S. government on behalf of the children and retirees of the United Nations and its sister institutions the IMF and World Bank. As president and co-founder of the G-4 Coalition in Washington, D.C., Kolak helped write a bill, sponsored by US Senator Ted Kennedy, allowing the children and retirees of the IMF and World Bank to become permanent U.S. residents. He testified before Congress and worked together with former World Bank President Robert S. McNamara to lobby successfully for the bill's passage. For his efforts on behalf of the international community living in the United States, he received a personal commendation from the Secretary General of the United Nations.

Selected books

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Metaphysics</span> Branch of philosophy dealing with reality

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality. This includes the first principles of: being or existence, identity, change, space and time, cause and effect, necessity, actuality, and possibility.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hilary Putnam</span> American mathematician and philosopher (1926–2016)

Hilary Whitehall Putnam was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, and a major figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He made significant contributions to philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science. Outside philosophy, Putnam contributed to mathematics and computer science. Together with Martin Davis he developed the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem and he helped demonstrate the unsolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Analytic philosophy</span> 20th-century tradition of Western philosophy

Analytic philosophy is a branch and tradition of philosophy using analysis, popular in the Western world and particularly the Anglosphere, which began around the turn of the 20th century in the contemporary era in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia, and continues today. Analytic philosophy is often contrasted with continental philosophy, coined as a catch-all term for other methods, prominent in Europe.

Moore's paradox concerns the apparent absurdity involved in asserting a first-person present-tense sentence such as "It is raining, but I do not believe that it is raining" or "It is raining, but I believe that it is not raining." The first author to note this apparent absurdity was G. E. Moore. These 'Moorean' sentences, as they have become known, are paradoxical in that while they appear absurd, they nevertheless

  1. Can be true;
  2. Are (logically) consistent; and
  3. Are not (obviously) contradictions.

Galen John Strawson is a British analytic philosopher and literary critic who works primarily on philosophy of mind, metaphysics, John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche. He has been a consultant editor at The Times Literary Supplement for many years, and a regular book reviewer for The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Independent, the Financial Times and The Guardian. He is the son of philosopher P. F. Strawson. He holds a chair in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin, and taught for many years before that at the University of Reading, City University of New York, and Oxford University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jaakko Hintikka</span> Finnish philosopher and logician

Kaarlo Jaakko Juhani Hintikka was a Finnish philosopher and logician.

Randall E. Auxier is a professor of philosophy and communication studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, a musician, environmental activist, union advocate, and candidate (2018) for the United States House of Representatives, nominated by the Green Party in the 12th Congressional District of Illinois. He is a radio host for WDBX Carbondale since 2001, a widely read author of popular philosophy, and also a co-founder and co-director of the AIPCT.

William Hirstein is an American philosopher primarily interested in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, metaphysics, cognitive science, and analytic philosophy. He is a professor of philosophy at Elmhurst University.

The KK thesis or KK principle is a principle of epistemic logic which states that "If you know that P is the case then you know that you know that P is the case." This means that one cannot know that P is, if one does not know whether one's knowledge of P is correct. Its application in science can be expressed in the way that it must not only justify its knowledge claims but it must also justify its method of justifying. The principle is also described as knowledge-reflexivity contention.

Synthese is a scholarly periodical specializing in papers in epistemology, methodology, and philosophy of science, and related issues. Its subject area is divided into four specialties, with a focus on the first three: (1) "epistemology, methodology, and philosophy of science, all broadly understood"; (2) "foundations of logic and mathematics, where 'logic', 'mathematics', and 'foundations' are all broadly understood"; (3) "formal methods in philosophy, including methods connecting philosophy to other academic fields"; and (4) "issues in ethics and the history and sociology of logic, mathematics, and science that contribute to the contemporary studies".

Meinong's jungle is the name given by Richard Routley (1980) to the repository of non-existent objects in the ontology of Alexius Meinong.

Barry Loewer is a distinguished professor of philosophy at Rutgers University and director of the Rutgers Center for Philosophy and the Sciences.

Open individualism is the view in the philosophy of self, according to which there exists only one numerically identical subject, who is everyone at all times, in the past, present and future. It is a theoretical solution to the question of personal identity, being contrasted with "Empty individualism", the view that personal identities correspond to a fixed pattern that instantaneously disappears with the passage of time, and with "Closed individualism", the common view that personal identities are particular to subjects and yet survive over time.

Personal identity is the unique numerical identity of a person over time. Discussions regarding personal identity typically aim to determine the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a person at one time and a person at another time can be said to be the same person, persisting through time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Seager (philosopher)</span> Philosopher

William Edward Seager is a Canadian philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. His academic specialties lie in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Logic</span> Study of correct reasoning

Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or logical truths. It studies how conclusions follow from premises independent of their topic and content. Informal logic is associated with informal fallacies, critical thinking, and argumentation theory. It examines arguments expressed in natural language while formal logic uses formal language. When used as a countable noun, the term "a logic" refers to a logical formal system that articulates a proof system. Logic plays a central role in many fields, such as philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">New York University Department of Philosophy</span> Division of New York University

The New York University Department of Philosophy is ranked 1st in the US and 1st in the English-speaking world as of the most recent edition of the Philosophical Gourmet Report from 2021. It is also ranked 1st in the world by the 2023 QS World University Rankings, and is internationally renowned. It has particular strengths in epistemology, history of philosophy, logic, metaphysics, moral and political philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic and philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of mind. The department offers B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in philosophy, as well as a minor in philosophy and a joint major in language and mind with the NYU Departments of Linguistics and Psychology. It is home to the New York Institute of Philosophy, a research center that supports multi-year projects, public lectures, conferences, and workshops in the field, as well as outreach programs to teach New York City high school students interested in philosophy.

Leila Tuulikki Haaparanta is a Finnish philosopher who works in analytic philosophy and the philosophy of logic. She is retired from the University of Tampere as a professor emerita.

References

  1. ↑ "Dr. Daniel Kolak". wpunj.edu. Archived from the original on 2014-07-28. Retrieved 2014-07-23.
  2. ↑ "Famous Croatian American Philosopher Prof. Dr. Daniel Kolak". croatia.org.
  3. ↑ Kolak, Daniel (2004). I Am You: The Metaphysical Foundations for Global Ethics. (Volume 25 of the Synthese Library: Studies in Epistemology, Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science.). Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Synthese Library, Springer. ISBN   1-4020-2999-3.
  4. ↑ Eklund, Matti; Kolak, Daniel (2002-06-01). "Is Hintikka's Logic First-Order?". Synthese. The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers; Springer Netherlands. 131 (3): 371–388. doi:10.1023/A:1016184410627. ISSN   0039-7857. S2CID   11535673.
  5. ↑ Kolak, Daniel; Symons, John (2004). "Forward and Acknowledgements (p. 1-2); The Results are in: The Scope and Import of Hintikka's Philosophy (p. 209-271)". In Kolak, Daniel; Symons, John (eds.). Quantifiers, Questions, and Quantum Physics: Essays on the Philosophy of Jaakko Hintikka. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. ISBN   978-1-4020-3210-3.
  6. ↑ "The Afterlife". SCI FI Investigates [TV Show]. Season 1 (Episode 4). 1 November 2006. Retrieved 23 July 2014.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.