Frances Egan | |
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Institutions | Rutgers University |
Main interests | Philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, cognitive science, psychological explanation |
Frances Egan is a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. [1] [2] She has authored a number of articles and book chapters on philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, and perception. [1]
Egan graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1976 with a B.A. in philosophy. [1] She received a Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario in 1988. [1] She has taught at Rutgers University since her appointment as an assistant professor in 1990. [1] Besides her Rutgers appointment, she is also an associate editor of Noûs, a quarterly journal of philosophy. [1]
Egan's principal research interests are in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and foundations of cognitive science. [2] [3] Her work focuses on the nature of psychological explanation, and on the relationship between folk explanation and scientific explanation. [2] She is known for her work on the role of representational content in computer models of mind. [3] [4] She argues that computational models of mind do not require meaning ascriptions, and that meaning ascriptions should be viewed as helping to connect the formal characterization of a computational theory with our intuitive belief that mental processes are intentional. [3] She has also written on vision, including the history of vision. [1]
Egan has received a number of awards including research fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld, Germany. [1] She is the recipient of the 2021 Jean Nicod Prize. [5]
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Jerry Alan Fodor was an American philosopher and the author of many crucial works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. His writings in these fields laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, and he is recognized as having had "an enormous influence on virtually every portion of the philosophy of mind literature since 1960." At the time of his death in 2017, he held the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Rutgers University, and had taught previously at the City University of New York Graduate Center and MIT.
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