Home Page of
Timothy Schroeder
(Found here: personal information,
teaching, research, CV, recommendations.)


Hi. I’m an Associate Professor here in the Department of Philosophy at Ohio State University. I arrived here in the
fall of 2006 from the Department of
Philosophy at the University of Manitoba (in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada).
If you guessed that I’m a Canadian, you’re right. Just keep thinking about
snow, hockey, and parliamentary government, and the rest of what I say should
make sense.
Most of my research as a
philosopher is on the philosophy of mind, but some of my work also touches on
issues such as free will and the motivation to do what is morally right. About
half of my work uses information from the neurosciences in order to help answer
philosophical questions; the other half is more traditional, armchair
philosophy. Right now, I’m working on a book on practical rationality. It draws
on the neuroscience of action production and on earlier work on desire.


Teaching
Fall 2006:
Phil
863 (Seminar in Metaphysics, topic: addiction)
Winter 2007:
Phil
101 (Introduction to Philosophy)
Phil
467 (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind)
Spring 2007:
Phil
101h (Honors Introduction to Philosophy)
Research
Right now I’m working on
several topics. They include:
Desire
In Three
Faces of Desire I drew on neuroscience along with the usual
considerations of common sense to propose a new theory of desire. But there is still lots of work to do. I’m especially interested in
the nature of compulsion and addiction, habit, interpersonal comparisons of
desire strength, and the place of desire in a theory of action.
Consciousness
As
a former student of Fred Dretske, I have a lot of sympathy for the representationalist program in work on consciousness. But
standard representationalism goes wrong in two
important ways. First, it holds that phenomenal character is identical to
representational content (of certain privileged representations), whereas it
would be better off holding that phenomenal character is identical to Kaplanian character (of certain privileged
representations). Ben Caplan and I have written one paper on this, and are
preparing another. Second, standard representationalism
holds that there is a radical difference between sensory representations and
cognitive representations, such that the former make a difference to consciousness
but not the latter, though it would be better off holding that all tokened representations make a difference to consciousness
(so long as they are suitably poised within a larger cognitive system). I’m
also preparing a paper on this.
Norms
I’m
in the middle of writing a book, the working title of which is Reasons from Atoms. In it, I attempt to
give a naturalistic account of why it is that we ought to take certain actions (ought in the sense of practical
rationality), given that the facts are
a certain way. This is a continuation of other interests I have in norms in
both the philosophy of mind and in the moral domain. Not surprisingly, I draw
on previous work on desire and on teleosemantics for
help.




Of course, you don’t really
need my advice. But just in case you’re curious, here are a few lists of things
I think are great.
Top five books to read in your
first year of majoring in philosophy that are not themselves philosophy: Shakespeare, Hamlet; Dostoyevsky, Crime
and Punishment; Sacks, The Man Who
Mistook his Wife for a Hat; Gould, The
Panda’s Thumb; Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Top five books I re-read
endlessly: Levi, The Periodic Table;
Levi, The Monkey’s Wrench;
Conan-Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes;
Seth, The Golden Gate; Lodge, Small World.
Top two favourite
cheeses: a nicely aged manchego,
and fresh buffalo mozzarella (eat it with salt!).
Top chocolate: any bar made
by Michel Cluizel (except the New Guinean
single-origin chocolate). Compare it head to head with Hershey’s or Cadbury’s
and prepare to be amazed. Throw out your Ghirardelli, Godiva,
and Scharffen Berger (all
Books and
food. Is that all I think about?
Well, yes.