Jesse J. Prinz
Distinguished Professor, City University of New York, Graduate Center

Previous affiliation: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (still an adjunct there); Washington University in St. Louis
Previous visiting positions: Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, The University of London, California Institute of Technology, University of Maryland at College Park

Research Statement
I work primarily in the philosophy of psychology, broadly construed. I am interested in how the mind works. I think philosophical accounts of the mental can be fruitfully informed by findings from psychology, the neurosciences, anthropology, and related fields. My theoretical convictions are unabashedly empiricist. I hope to resuscitate core claims of British Empiricism against the backdrop of contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science.

Current Research Topics

Below is a list of some of my research interests.  If you click on the header, you will get a thesis statement.  For further elaboration, see the linked papers.  Warning: thse papers are not intended as the most careful defenses of the theories that I favor.  I chose them because they state those theories concisely.  For more thorough developments, see the books.  For other papers, write me for a vita.

Concepts
Sample papers:
"The Return of Concept Empiricism"
"Regaining Composure: A Defense of Prototype Compositionality"

Emotion
Sample papers:
"Embodied Emotions"
"Which Emotions Are Basic?"

Consciousness
Sample papers:
"A Neurofunctional Theory of Consciousness"
"Mental Pointing: Phenomenal Knowledge Without Concepts"
"Is Consciousness Embodied?"

Moral Psychology
Sample papers:
"The Emotional Basis of Moral Judgment"
"Can Moral Obligations Be Discovered Empirically?"
"The Normativity Challenge: Why Traits Won't Save Virtue Ethics"
"Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?"

Nature/Nurture
Sample papers (on moral natism--more topics soon):
"Against Moral Nativism"
"Is Morality Innate?"
"Resisting the Linguistic Analogy (A Reply to Hauser, Cushman, and Young)"

Aesthetics
Sample papers:
"The Role of Emotion in Aesthetic Judgment"
"Emotion and Aesthetic Value"
"When is Film Art?"

Other Topics
Vagueness: "Vagueness, Language, and Ontology"
Modularity: "Is the Mind Really Modular?"
Perception: "Beyond Appearances: The Content of Sensation and Perception"
More topics coming eventually...

Authored Books

The Conscious Brain. New York: Oxford University Press (In progress).

Beyond Human Nature. London: Penguin  / New York: Norton (in progress).

The Emotional Construction of Morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press (September, 2007).

Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion. New York: Oxford University Press (2004).

Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2002).

Edited Books