Ian Phillips (philosopher)

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Ian B. Phillips
Born (1980-10-25) 25 October 1980 (age 43)
London, England
NationalityBritish
Spouse Hanna Pickard
Academic background
Education
Institutions Johns Hopkins University
Website https://www.ianbphillips.com/

Ian B. Phillips is a British philosopher and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Psychological and Brain Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University, where he has taught since 2019. He has appointments in the William H. Miller III Department of Philosophy and the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences in the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. [1] He is known for his works on the intersection of philosophy and brain science.

Contents

Early life and education

Ian Phillips was born in London on 25 October 1980 to Amanda and Sir Jonathan Phillips, a retired British civil servant who served as warden of Keble College, Oxford, from 2010 to 2022. He has one brother, a journalist in Latin America. [2] [3]

Phillips studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1999 to 2005, earning BA, MA and BPhil degrees. [4] He held an Examination Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, from 2005 to 2012. He then earned a PhD in philosophy from University College London in 2009. [5] His primary PhD advisor was Michael G. F. Martin. [4]

Career

Phillips was a lecturer in philosophy at University College London from 2010 until 2013. [4] He joined St. Anne's College, Oxford, in 2013 as an Associate Professor and Gabriele Taylor Fellow and was made full professor in 2017, a title of distinction awarded by the University of Oxford. He moved to the University of Birmingham as chair in philosophy of psychology in 2017. From 2017 until 2019, he also held an appointment as a visiting research fellow in cognitive science at Princeton University. [4] In 2019, he joined Johns Hopkins University as a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, with joint appointments in the William H. Miller III Department of Philosophy and the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences in the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. [5] He is a core member of the Foundations of Mind Group at Johns Hopkins University, which connects researchers across the university who are interested in philosophical, theoretical, and methodological questions about the mind-brain. [6]

Research

Phillips is a philosopher interested in the intersections of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. [5] His research focuses on the nature of perception, [7] [8] its relations to memory, [9] imagination, and belief, the scientific study of consciousness, [10] [11] [12] and our experience of time. [13] [14] [15] He has argued that the phenomenon of blindsight does not involve unconscious vision but instead is qualitatively degraded conscious vision. [16] [17]

He has written about the COVID-19 pandemic impacted memory and our experience of time. [18] [19]

He edited The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Temporal Experience (2017). [20] He has served as editor of the academic journal Mind & Language and consulting editor of Timing & Time Perception. He is currently working on a book that studies the relationship between perception and consciousness, focusing on subjects whose perception can be difficult to measure, including infants, animals, and people who have experienced brain damage. [5]

Awards

2021 Lebowitz Prize [21]

2017 Philip Leverhulme Prize [22]

2013 Philosopher's Annual Selection [23] [24]

2011 William James Prize for Contributions to the Study of Consciousness [5]

Personal life

Phillips is married to Hanna Pickard, who is also a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University. [5] The two met when they were both fellows at All Souls College, Oxford. [25]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Consciousness</span>  Awareness of internal and external existence

Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of internal and external existence. However, its nature has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debate by philosophers, theologians, and all of science. Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied or even considered consciousness. In some explanations, it is synonymous with the mind, and at other times, an aspect of mind. In the past, it was one's "inner life", the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination and volition. Today, it often includes any kind of cognition, experience, feeling or perception. It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, or self-awareness either continuously changing or not. The disparate range of research, notions and speculations raises a curiosity about whether the right questions are being asked.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mind</span> Faculties responsible for mental phenomena

The mind is that which thinks, imagines, remembers, wills, and senses, or is the set of faculties responsible for such phenomena. The mind is also associated with experiencing perception, pleasure and pain, belief, desire, intention, and emotion. The mind can include conscious and non-conscious states as well as sensory and non-sensory experiences.

The unconscious mind consists of processes in the mind that occur automatically and are not available to introspection. Although these processes exist beneath the surface of conscious awareness, they are thought to exert an effect on conscious thought processes and behavior. Empirical evidence suggests that unconscious phenomena include repressed feelings and desires, memories, automatic skills, subliminal perceptions, and automatic reactions. The term was coined by the 18th-century German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Searle</span> American philosopher (born 1932)

John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. He began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959, and was Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, until June 2019, when his status as professor emeritus was revoked because he was found to have violated the university's sexual harassment policies.

Blindsight is the ability of people who are cortically blind to respond to visual stimuli that they do not consciously see due to lesions in the primary visual cortex, also known as the striate cortex or Brodmann Area 17. The term was coined by Lawrence Weiskrantz and his colleagues in a paper published in a 1974 issue of Brain. A previous paper studying the discriminatory capacity of a cortically blind patient was published in Nature in 1973. The assumed existence of blindsight is controversial, with some arguing that it is merely degraded conscious vision.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hard problem of consciousness</span> Philosophical concept, first stated by David Chalmers in 1995

In philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness is to explain why and how humans and other organisms have qualia, phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experiences. It is contrasted with the "easy problems" of explaining why and how physical systems give a (healthy) human being the ability to discriminate, to integrate information, and to perform behavioral functions such as watching, listening, speaking, and so forth. The easy problems are amenable to functional explanation: that is, explanations that are mechanistic or behavioral, as each physical system can be explained purely by reference to the "structure and dynamics" that underpin the phenomenon.

Daniel Dennett's multiple drafts model of consciousness is a physicalist theory of consciousness based upon cognitivism, which views the mind in terms of information processing. The theory is described in depth in his book, Consciousness Explained, published in 1991. As the title states, the book proposes a high-level explanation of consciousness which is consistent with support for the possibility of strong AI.

The consciousness and binding problem is the problem of how objects, background and abstract or emotional features are combined into a single experience.

A mental state, or a mental property, is a state of mind of a person. Mental states comprise a diverse class, including perception, pain/pleasure experience, belief, desire, intention, emotion, and memory. There is controversy concerning the exact definition of the term. According to epistemic approaches, the essential mark of mental states is that their subject has privileged epistemic access while others can only infer their existence from outward signs. Consciousness-based approaches hold that all mental states are either conscious themselves or stand in the right relation to conscious states. Intentionality-based approaches, on the other hand, see the power of minds to refer to objects and represent the world as the mark of the mental. According to functionalist approaches, mental states are defined in terms of their role in the causal network independent of their intrinsic properties. Some philosophers deny all the aforementioned approaches by holding that the term "mental" refers to a cluster of loosely related ideas without an underlying unifying feature shared by all. Various overlapping classifications of mental states have been proposed. Important distinctions group mental phenomena together according to whether they are sensory, propositional, intentional, conscious or occurrent. Sensory states involve sense impressions like visual perceptions or bodily pains. Propositional attitudes, like beliefs and desires, are relations a subject has to a proposition. The characteristic of intentional states is that they refer to or are about objects or states of affairs. Conscious states are part of the phenomenal experience while occurrent states are causally efficacious within the owner's mind, with or without consciousness. An influential classification of mental states is due to Franz Brentano, who argues that there are only three basic kinds: presentations, judgments, and phenomena of love and hate.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Hacker</span> British philosopher (born 1939)

Peter Michael Stephan Hacker is a British philosopher. His principal expertise is in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophical anthropology. He is known for his detailed exegesis and interpretation of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, his critique of cognitive neuroscience, and for his comprehensive studies of human nature.

Jeffrey Alan Gray was a British psychologist who is notable for his contributions to the theory of consciousness.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philosophy of mind</span> Branch of philosophy

Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are addressed, such as the hard problem of consciousness and the nature of particular mental states. Aspects of the mind that are studied include mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and its neural correlates, the ontology of the mind, the nature of cognition and of thought, and the relationship of the mind to the body.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mind–body problem</span> Open question in philosophy of how abstract minds interact with physical bodies

The mind–body problem is a philosophical problem concerning the relationship between thought and consciousness in the human mind, and the body.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Animal consciousness</span> Quality or state of self-awareness within an animal

Animal consciousness, or animal awareness, is the quality or state of self-awareness within an animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself. In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.

Externalism is a group of positions in the philosophy of mind which argues that the conscious mind is not only the result of what is going on inside the nervous system, but also what occurs or exists outside the subject. It is contrasted with internalism which holds that the mind emerges from neural activity alone. Externalism is a belief that the mind is not just the brain or functions of the brain.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Berit Brogaard</span> Danish–American philosopher (born 1970)

Berit Oskar Brogaard is a Danish–American philosopher specializing in the areas of cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. Her recent work concerns synesthesia, savant syndrome, blindsight and perceptual reports. She is professor of philosophy and runs a perception lab at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. She was also co-editor of the Philosophical Gourmet Report until 2021.

Anthony Marcel is a British psychologist who contributed to the early debate on the nature of unconscious perceptual processes in the 1970s and 1980s. Marcel argued in favour of an unconscious mind that "…automatically re-describe(s) sensory data into every representational form and to the highest levels of description available to the organism.” Marcel sparked controversy with his claim to have demonstrated unconscious priming. As of 2013 Marcel was working at the University of Hertfordshire and Cambridge University where his research focused on consciousness and phenomenological experience.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philosophy of psychedelics</span>

Philosophy of psychedelics is the philosophical investigation of the psychedelic experience. While psychedelic, entheogenic or hallucinogenic substances have been used by many traditional cultures throughout history mostly for religious purposes, recorded philosophical speculation and analysis of these substances, their phenomenological effects and the relevance of these altered states of consciousness to philosophical questions is a relatively late phenomenon in the history of philosophy. Traditional cultures who use psychedelic substances such as the Amazonian and Indigenous Mexican peoples hold that ingesting medicinal plants such as Ayahuasca and Peyote allows one to commune with the beings of the spirit world.

Hanna Pickard is a philosopher who specializes in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychiatry, moral psychology, and medical ethics. She is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University with appointments in the William H. Miller III Department of Philosophy in the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and the Berman Institute of Bioethics.

References

  1. ↑ "Ian Phillips | VPR at JHU" . Retrieved 6 February 2023.
  2. ↑ "Sir Jonathan Phillips Elected New Warden of Keble" (PDF). The Brick: The Newsletter for Keble Alumni. 2009. p. 1. Retrieved 6 January 2023.
  3. ↑ "Sir Jonathan Phillips elected new Warden of Keble — Keble". 14 November 2010. Archived from the original on 14 November 2010. Retrieved 6 February 2023.
  4. 1 2 3 4 "Curriculum Vitae". Ian Phillips. Retrieved 1 December 2022.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 deNobel, Jacob (8 July 2019). "Ian Phillips, who explores the intersection of philosophy and brain science, joins Johns Hopkins as Bloomberg Distinguished Professor". The Hub.
  6. ↑ "Home | Foundations of Mind Group". Foundations of Mind. Retrieved 6 February 2023.
  7. ↑ Phillips, Ian (September 2013). "Afterimages and Sensation". Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 87 (2): 417–453. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2012.00580.x.
  8. ↑ Phillips, Ian (13 December 2018). "Unconscious Perception Reconsidered". Analytic Philosophy. 59 (4): 471–514. doi:10.1111/phib.12135. ISSN   2153-9596. S2CID   148663929.
  9. ↑ Phillips, Ian B. (September 2011). "Perception and Iconic Memory: What Sperling Doesn't Show". Mind & Language. 26 (4): 381–411. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0017.2011.01422.x .
  10. ↑ Peters, Megan A K; Kentridge, Robert W; Phillips, Ian; Block, Ned (6 September 2017). "Does unconscious perception really exist? Continuing the ASSC20 debate". Neuroscience of Consciousness. 2017 (1): nix015. doi:10.1093/nc/nix015. PMC   6007134 . PMID   30042847 . Retrieved 6 February 2023.
  11. ↑ Phillips, Ian (September 2016). "Consciousness and Criterion: On Block's Case for Unconscious Seeing". Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 93 (2): 419–451. doi:10.1111/phpr.12224.
  12. ↑ Phillips, Ian (19 September 2018). "The methodological puzzle of phenomenal consciousness". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 373 (1755): 20170347. doi:10.1098/rstb.2017.0347. ISSN   0962-8436. PMC   6074091 . PMID   30061461.
  13. ↑ Phillips, Ian (2012). "Attention to the Passage of Time". Philosophical Perspectives. 26: 277–308. doi:10.1111/phpe.12007. ISSN   1520-8583. JSTOR   23324610.
  14. ↑ Phillips, Ian (February 2014). "Experience of and in Time: Experience of and in Time". Philosophy Compass. 9 (2): 131–144. doi:10.1111/phc3.12107.
  15. ↑ Phillips, Ian (28 July 2008). "Perceiving Temporal Properties: Perceiving Temporal Properties". European Journal of Philosophy. 18 (2): 176–202. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0378.2008.00299.x.
  16. ↑ Phillips, Ian (April 2021). "Blindsight is qualitatively degraded conscious vision". Psychological Review. 128 (3): 558–584. doi:10.1037/rev0000254. ISSN   1939-1471. PMID   32757572. S2CID   225415947.
  17. ↑ "Sight Unseen". Cal Alumni Association. Retrieved 6 February 2023.
  18. ↑ Phillips, Ian (4 April 2022). "Time, in perspective". The Hub. Retrieved 6 February 2023.
  19. ↑ Rienzi, Greg (4 April 2022). "Unscrambling our memories in the wake of COVID-19". The Hub. Retrieved 6 February 2023.
  20. ↑ "The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Temporal Experience". PhilPapers. Retrieved 1 December 2022.
  21. ↑ keyreporter (22 June 2021). "2021 Lebowitz Prize". The Key Reporter. Retrieved 6 February 2023.
  22. ↑ "Philip Leverhulme Prizes 2017 | The Leverhulme Trust". www.leverhulme.ac.uk. Retrieved 6 February 2023.
  23. ↑ "Philosopher's Annual". www.philosophersannual.org. Retrieved 6 February 2023.
  24. ↑ "Congratulations 2013 Philosopher's Annual Winners!". The Philosopher's Eye. 27 August 2014. Retrieved 6 February 2023.
  25. ↑ Pearce, Katie (9 March 2020). "BDP philosophers agree: They've got their 'dream jobs'". The Hub. Retrieved 6 February 2023.
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