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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.

Linked here.

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 US chocolates) and buy French!

Books and food. Is that all I think about? Well, yes.