Michael Tye
Department of Philosophy
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78750
Tel: (512) 471-6789
E-mail: mtye@mail.utexas.edu
photograph © 2009 Colleen Keating
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Michael TyeDepartment of Philosophy |
photograph © 2009 Colleen Keating |
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I’m a philosopher at the University of Texas at Austin. My interest in philosophy was awakened at Oxford while an undergraduate. I went up to Oxford to study physics, but after finding out that a physics degree would require a day a week in the laboratory, I switched to physics and philosophy (which involved no lab work at all). By the time I had finished my undergraduate degree, I had decided to focus upon philosophy alone. Subsequently, I came to the USA, though I’ve been back to the UK as a visiting professor at King’s College, London for some ten consecutive years and briefly as the occupant of a chair at the University of St. Andrews. I work mainly in the philosophy of mind and the foundations of cognitive science, but I also have interests in metaphysics. I’ve published five books, four with MIT Press, Bradford Books and one with Cambridge University Press. The last three were on consciousness, the one before that on the imagery debate in cognitive psychology and the first on the metaphysics of mind. My first book on consciousness (Ten Problems of Consciousness) was an alternate selection of the Library of Science Book Club; it was published in 1995. The follow up (Consciousness, Color, and Content) came out in 2000. Both books defend what has come to be known as the representationalist approach to phenomenal consciousness. There is a web symposium on my views on consciousness (see On-line Papers below). My fifth book, Consciousness and Persons, is on the unity of consciousness and was published by MIT Press, Bradford Books, in November 2003. I have just completed another book, to be published very shortly by MIT Press in mid-December 2008 or early January 2009 (and not in April 2009, as Amazon has been claiming), entitled Consciousness: Materialism without Phenomenal Concepts. Here are the cover design and cover blurbs.
“This marvelously informed, powerfully argued book is Michael Tye’s latest contribution to the task of finding a naturalistic understanding of consciousness. It is an agenda setter.” —Frank Jackson, Department of Philosophy, Princeton University
“In opposing dualism, and defending the view that mind is a form of matter, modern materialists often substitute a dualism of their own—a dualism of concepts rather than properties. Tye has been a leading advocate of this materialist strategy, in his classic Consciousness, Color, and Content and elsewhere. Consciousness Revisited marks a radical intellectual break: Tye offers powerful arguments against his previous position, and a new way to defend materialism, leaning on Bertrand Russell’s notion of knowledge by acquaintance. This book is terrific—the many admirers of the early Tye may be reassured that the later Tye is just as good.” —Alex Byrne, Department of Philosophy, MIT and coeditor of Disjunctivism
In Spring 2009, I’ll be talking outside the USA at the second European Graduate School in philosophy at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland (March 22―29) and at the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness in Berlin, Germany (June 4―8).
On-line Papers
Web symposium on Consciousness, Color, and Content, 2002 “Qualia,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (revised 31 July 2007) “Phenomenal Consciousness: the Explanatory Gap as Cognitive Illusion” Mind 1999 “Inverted Earth, Swampman, and Representationism”, Philosophical Perspectives 1998 “Externalism and Memory,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume, 1998 Some Recent Papers (not on-line) “Fuzzy Realism and the Problem of the Many,” Philosophical Studies, 1996 “Orgasms Again,” Philosophical Issues, Vol. 7, ed. by E. Villenueva, 1996 “The Function of Consciousness,” Noûs, Vol. 30, 1996. “The Problem of Simple Minds: Is There Anything it is Like to be a Honey Bee?” Philosophical Studies 1997 “Externalism, Twin Earth, and Self-Knowledge,” (with B. McLaughlin), in Knowing Our Own Minds: Essays on Self-knowledge, ed. by B. Smith and C. Macdonald, Oxford University Press, 1998 “Oh Yes It Is,” Mind, 2001 “Vagueness and Reality,” Philosophical Topics, 28, 2001 “Blurry Image, Double Vision and Other Oddities: New Problems for Representationalism?” Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Q. Smith and A. Josic, Oxford University Press, 2003. Pictures at Meetings
2002 Tucson consciousness conference 2002 Tucson consciousness conference party 2004 NYU philosophy conference in Florence 2005 SPAWN consciousness conference at Syracuse photos 2005 SPAWN consciousness conference at Syracuse movie (QuickTime)
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Interview for Mind and Consciousness: 5 Questions, ed. Patrick Grim, forthcoming