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AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION
- Philosophy of Mind
- Epistemology
- Philosophy of Perception

AREAS OF COMPETENCE
- Philosophy of Language
- Metaphysics
- Ancient and Early Modern Philosophy

EDUCATION
- Ph.D., University of California, San Diego (2007)
- B.A., University of California, Berkeley (2000)

DISSERTATION
- Title: Concepts in Experience: An Essay on Conceptualism
- Committee: Rick Grush (Chair), Jonathan Cohen, Seana Coulson, Rafael Núñez, Gila Sher, and Eric Watkins.
- Abstract: Taking up the debate on nonconceptual content, I argue that while metaphysical issues in the philosophy of mind look to support the existence of content which is free from conceptualization, epistemological and phenomenological issues point the other direction. I argue that inasmuch as we are concerned to characterize the contents of experience as the result of a robust interplay between perception, thought, and action, experential content is conceptual insofar as its intentional objects are conceptually-laden empirical facts.

PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES
- "Psychological Nominalism and the Plausibility of Sellars’ Myth of Jones." The Southern Journal of Philosophy (Volume 45, Number 3) Fall, 2007: 435-454

EDITED BOOKS
Stephen Colbert and Philosophy, Open Court Publishing (Forthcoming, Fall 2009)

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS
- "Dreyfus' Phenomenological Foundations, A Reply", Pacific Division Meeting of the APA, April 7, 2007. Commentator: Hubert Dreyfus
- "Sense-Impressions, Things-in-Themselves, and the Totality of Facts," Pacific Division Meeting of the APA, March 25, 2006. Commentator: Kevin Falvey
- "Social Externalism and the Case for Conceptualism," 10th Annual Southern California Philosophy Conference, October 29, 2005
- "That Other Myth: Understanding Sellars' Myth of Jones," Pacific Division Meeting of the APA, March 23, 2005. Commentator: Richard Manning

IN-HOUSE TALKS, GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCES, COMMENTING
- "Colorblindness and Black Friends in Stephen Colbert's America," UCSD Undergraduate Philosophy Club, May 23, 2008
- "Conceptualism and the Problem of the Cognition of Particulars," UCSD Graduate Philosophy Colloquia (GPC), January 14, 2008
- "Applied Epistemology," UCSD Undergraduate Philosophy Club, May 5, 2007
- "Nietzsche on Socrates: Theoretical Man and The Birth of Tragedy," Guest lecture for Georgios Anagnostopoulos's upper-division course on Plato's ethics, February 1, 2007
- Commented on David Hershenov and Rose J. Koch-Hershenov's "Personal Identity and Purgatory" at the 2006 Pacific Region Society of Christian Philosophers Conference, February 17, 2006
- "Symmetrical Accounts of Perception and Action and the Existence of Will-Expressions," UCSD Graduate Philosophy Colloquia, October 10, 2005
- “Sellars’s ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,’” UCSD Undergraduate Philosophy Club, April 13, 2005
- "Enactive Theories of Perception and Social Embeddedness," UCSD Graduate Philosophy Colloquia, April 11, 2005
- "Kantian Considerations On Conceptual Content" (with Kristen Irwin, Melissa Johnson, and Eric Martin), UCSD Philosophy Graduate Roundtable Discussion, speakers Jesse Prinz and Alva Noë, April 17, 2004
- "Davidsonian Rationality, the Space of Reasons, and the Myth of Jones," UCSD Graduate Philosophy Colloquia, February 5, 2004
- "A Conceptualist Response to the Fineness of Grain of Perceptual Experience," Experimental Philosophy Laboratory (EPL), April 30, 2003
- "A Conceptualist Response to the Fineness of Grain of Perceptual Experience," UCSD Philosophy Graduate Conference, keynote speaker and commentator Robert Brandom, April 19, 2003
- Commented on Sara Bernal's "Core Physical Knowledge and the Marks of Thought," UCSD Graduate Philosophy Conference, April 11, 2003
- "Conceptual Frameworks in Post-Sellarsian Philosophy," 2002 Berkeley/Stanford Graduate Student Philosophy Conference, April 27, 2002. Commentator: James Genone

TEACHING EXPERIENCE (INDEPENDENT)
The Rationalists (Winter 2008, Upper Division)
Symbolic Logic I (Spring 2006, Upper Division)
Logic and Decision Making (Spring 2007, Spring 2008)
History of Philosophy: Ancient Philosophy (Fall 2004)
Introduction to Logic (Summer 2004, Summer 2005)
Exit the Cave: Plato’s Dialogues as Drama (Fall 1999, UC Berkeley)

TEACHING EXPERIENCE (ASSISTANTSHIPS)
- History of Philosophy: Ancient Philosophy (Fall 2002, Fall 2003, Fall 2006)
- Theory of Knowledge (Spring 2001)
- Philosophy of Mind (Spring 2004, Upper Division, Reader)
- Biomedical Ethics (Winter 2003, Upper Division)
- Introduction to Logic (Fall 2000, Fall 2001, Spring 2003, Fall 2003, Winter 2006, Winter 2007)
- Logic and Decision Making (Winter 2001, Spring 2001, Winter 2002, Spring 2002, Fall 2005)
- Symbolic Logic (Winter 2000, Reader, UC Berkeley)

ACADEMIC AWARDS, HONORS, FELLOWSHIPS, AND GRANTS
- Graduate Student Outstanding Paper Prize, Pacific APA (2007)
- Graduate Student Outstanding Paper Prize, Pacific APA (2005)
- Dissertation Fellowship, UCSD Philosophy (2004-2005)
- Dissertation Fellowship, UCSD Philosophy (2003-2004)
- R.B. Cleaver Scholarship, University of California, San Diego (2000-2001)
- J. Grossmith Scholarship, University of California, Berkeley (1998-1999)

PROFESSIONAL, DEPARTMENTAL, AND UNIVERSITY SERVICE
- Chair for a Colloquium on Cara Spencer's “Indexical Knowledge and Phenomenal Knowledge,” Pacific Division APA Meeting, March 21, 2008
- Referee for the 34th Annual Meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy (2006)
- Served on the search committee for the new Dean of the Division of Arts and Humanities (2004-2005)
- Senior Teaching Assistant (2004-2005)
- UCSD Graduate Philosophy Colloquium Organizer (2004-2005)
- Co-organized (with Nina Davis and PD Magnus) the Second Annual UCSD Philosophy Graduate Conference, April 19, 2003
- Philosophy Department Graduate Student Representative (2002-2003)
- Served on the UCSD Philosophy Department Graduate Program Review Committee (2001-2002)

GRADUATE COURSE WORK
Mind, Language, and Epistemology
- Brandom's Making it Explicit (Rick Grush)
- Strawson (Rick Grush)
- Ayer and Russell (Rick Grush, Independent Study)
- Wittgenstein's On Certainty (Avrum Stroll, Independent Study)
- Sellars and McDowell (Gila Sher)
- Dummett's Frege. Philosophy of Language (Gila Sher, Independent Study)
- Truth (Gila Sher)
- Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Gila Sher, Audited)

History
- Laws in Early Modern Philosophy (Donald Rutherford)
- Kantian Philosophy of Mind (Eric Watkins)
- Kantian Epistemology (Eric Watkins, Audited)
- Plato's Parmenides (Sam Rickless)
- Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Thomas Strum)
- Carnap's The Logical Structure of the World (Thomas Ryckman)

Logic
- Philosophical Logic (Gila Sher)
- Set Theory (Gila Sher)
- Modal Logic (Roberta Ballarin)

Other
- Philosophy of Law (David Brink)
- Free Will & Responsibility (Dana Nelkin)
- Time (Craig Callender)

research

MY RESEARCH IN GENERAL
I've spent the last few years working on the contemporary debate over the notion of nonconceptual content. My dissertation defends the conceptualist position, often characterized as the view that "experience is conceptual through and through." I adopt an intentionalist account of experential content, i.e., one that stresses the need to identify the proper objects of experience. I argue that the proper objects of experience should be states of affairs (or facts) and that inasmuch as such facts are social one cannot characterize the objects of experience without reference to the normative practices of reason giving that define the conceptual. Though future research will one day take me away from the specific question of nonconceptual content, the positions and arguments that I develop in an attempt to criticize nonconceptualism are in critical need of further study. It is the search for a deeper understanding of the contours of my positive proposals that will drive my research agenda over the next five to ten years.

To be more specific: I’ve conceived of my work thus far as concerning the metaphysics of the mind—specifically the metaphysics of experential content. Importantly, I draw a sharp distinction between mental content and linguistic content. Just as it is quite possible to say things that one does not mean, so can one say something which one could not understand. Yet it is precisely the limits of our abilities to understand that determine the limits of our thought. My commitment to a distinction between types of content does much to shape my view of mental content. But it also raises a problem for me, one that I am anxious to better answer: Given that there clearly is a relationship between mental and linguistic content, what is it?

There is a familiar question of priority here: Which is more basic, thought or language? And I am interested in answering it. But it seems to me that this question cannot be answered by simply putting one before, or below, the other. Much of our thought is clearly driven by language, as those philosophers who, on Dummett’s characterization of analytic philosophy, put the study of language at the center of their work have long recognized. Yet much of our language assumes that speakers and hearers have similar cognitive architectures, and acts of communication often exploit such facts in the conveyance of meaning. Gareth Evans recognized this, and sought to bring to light these structures and articulate the ways in which linguistic content relied on them. Much of the work I do over the next couple of years will be explorations of Evans’s thought here. But since Evans commits himself to the existence of nonconceptual content, as part of his adoption of a “dossier” view of the mind (both of which I take exception to) my positive views on the relationship between linguistic and mental content will be quite different, and will call for substantial, non-interpretative development.

Though my research as of late has been focused on issues rather than figures, one figure that looms large for me is Wilfrid Sellars. This is partly inasmuch as John McDowell, perhaps the most influential critic of nonconceptual content, and Robert Brandom, who has done much to explore a social externalist metaphysics of content, frame so much of their thought in Sellarsian terms. But my interest in Sellars goes deeper than this, down to the question at the heart of Sellarsian philosophy: How can we bring together our understanding of ourselves as persons with our understanding of ourselves as objects of scientific study? Sellars brought to bear upon this question a lifetime of systematic work, much of which has yet to be put into perspective. One of my career goals is to advance philosophy’s understanding of Wlifrid Sellars’s thought as a systematic whole.

I have already started down this path by way of an initial study of Sellars’s attack on the Given in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” As I discuss in my “Psychological Nominalism and the Plausibility of Sellars’s Myth of Jones,” though Sellars’s attack on the Given is increasingly being recognized among epistemologists, few have tried to put this attack into context as just one part of a more general attack on “the entire framework of Givenness.” I seek to show how an expanded understanding of his view along these lines complicates our interpretation of Sellars’s positive proposals about the origins of our own self-understanding as they are contained in his Myth of Jones. Though I believe that this paper has already shed light on an important and overlooked aspect of Sellarsian philosophy, two general projects are announced there that will concern me for some time: (1) understanding the extent to which his attack on the Given is an attack on the entire framework of givenness and (2) explaining the way that self-awareness is constituted if, as Sellars argues, it too is not given to us.

In short, my research over the next 10 or so years, while rooted in the nonconceptual content debate that was the focus of my dissertation, will concern central issues in the metaphysics of mind, language, and epistemology. Such issues include the complicated relationship between mental and linguistic content, the positive semantical proposals of Gareth Evans and their difficulties, the place of persons in a scientific worldview, the range and interconnectedness of Wilfrid Sellars’s thought, and the preconditions of self-awareness.

PAPERS ONLINE
The following papers have either been published or presented at referreed conferences.

Psychological Nominalism and the Plausibility of Sellars's Myth of Jones
Published in The Southern Journal of Philosophy (Volume 45, Number 3) Fall, 2007.
ABSTRACT: Part of Sellars’s general attack on the Myth of the Given is his endorsement of psychological nominalism, a view that implies that awareness of our own mental states is not given but must be earned. Sellars provides an account of how such awareness might have been earned with the Myth of Jones. Such an account is important for Sellars, for without it the Given can look necessary after all. But a problem with such accounts is that they can look extremely implausible. Sellars himself seems unconcerned to make his account plausible, and so others have stepped in here. But, I argue, they have done so in ways that fail to respect his psychological nominalism. This evinces, as well as reinforces, a lack of sensitivity to the scope of Sellars’s attack on the Given, the aim of which is the dismantling of “the entire framework of givenness.” In this essay, I show how one can make Sellars’s Myth of Jones plausible, while still respecting his psychological nominalism, by seeing how Jones’s thought is governed by the norms of rationality as interpretability.

Dreyfus' Phenomenological Foundations, A Reply
Presented at the 2007 Pacific Division Meeting of the APA in San Francisco, California.
ABSTRACT: In his 2005 Presidential Address at the Pacific Division Meeting of the APA, Hubert Dreyfus proposed that philosophers of all stripes should work together to address the following problem: to show "how the ground floor of pure perception and receptive coping supports the conceptual upper stories of the edifice of knowledge." While much of the address focused on what sorts of phenomena pure perception and receptive coping could be, much less time was spend defending the claim that such phenomena are foundational in the way seemingly required by his formulation. In this paper, I consider the meaning of, and arguments for, Dreyfus' phenomenological foundations. I argue that, even if one can agree with Dreyfus that there are some capacities which are minimal or receptive or reactionary, there seems to be no good reason to accept, and several good reasons to reject, that they form any kind of "foundation."

"Sense-Impressions, Things-in-Themselves, and the Totality of Facts"
Presented at the 2006 Pacific Division meeting of the APA in Portland, Oregon.
ABSTRACT: In "Having the World in View" John McDowell criticizes Wilfrid Sellars' views concerning what the latter called "the sense-impression inference." The disagreement between them is that while Sellars finds there to be sufficient grounds for admitting the existence, as well as for determining the nature, of sense-impressions, McDowell does not. While many have considered this debate recently, none have made sufficient headway in discussing what I take to be the sticking point between them. I argue that while there can be little doubt that causal connections between mind and world are necessary for empirical content, how we conceive of those connections makes all the difference. Sellars, in finding necessary a distinction between things-in-themselves and appearances, is thereby committed to bridging that gulf with sense-impressions whereas McDowell, who holds a world of facts view, feels no such compulsion.

"Social Externalism and the Case for Conceptualism"
Presented at the 2005 Southern California Philosophy Conference.
ABSTRACT: Many have argued that were content externalism true, then the existence of nonconceptual content would have to be admitted. Robert Stalnaker and Christopher Peacocke are two who have argued along these lines. In this paper, I want to explore the connection between content externalism and the case for nonconceptual content. As I will argue, while a purely physical content externalism does look to imply the existence of nonconceptual content, forms of social externalism look to push in the other direction.

WORKING PAPERS
The following papers are works in progress only. I post them here to make circulating them easier, and in the hopes of receiving feedback on them. So please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any comments or criticisms.

"Symmetrical Accounts of Perception and Action and the Existence of Will-Expressions"
ABSTRACT: On the face of it, there is something odd in the fact that accounts of perception, on the one hand, and accounts of action, on the other, are not more often thought to be symmetrical. If our topic is the relation between mind and world, then why not think that perception is a world->mind relation that mirrors the mind->world relation in action and vice-versa? There seems to be a great deal which is obvious about such an assertion, yet not many (as far as I can tell) seem to have given it much thought. In this essay, I consider what I'll be calling "symmetrical views" on action and perception - what they might be, what kind of thinkers have held them, why one might find them interesting, etc. All this is in its first half. In the second half, I put to work a symmetrical account of action and perception by considering the notion of sense-impressions, and asking what taking their existence seriously should mean to one committed to offering symmetrical accounts of action and perception.

teaching

Teaching has been a big part of my education in philosophy. As an undergraduate, some friends and I taught a course on Plato's Symposium and I was one of two readers for a large course in predicate logic. As a graduate student, I either TAed or taught for all but four quarters. This is very much as I would have had it; teaching philosophy goes hand-in-hand with doing philosophy. When we attempt to explain difficult philosophical concepts to others, we get clearer about our own thinking.

COURSE MATERIALS
Please visit my Course Page for all of my online course materials, including syllabi for all the courses I've taught.

ABOUT "EXIT THE CAVE"
"Exit the Cave: Plato's Dialogues as Drama" was a course that I co-organized (with Sophia Lehey and Kelley Greene) and lectured for in the Fall of 1999 at UC Berkeley through UCB's DeCal program. "DeCal" stands for "Democratic Education at Cal." The purpose of the program is to give undergraduate students the opportunity to run their own courses with the supervision of a faculty member. (For more information visit the DeCal website.)

The purpose of our course was to see what happens when one reads Plato's dialogues as dramatic pieces and not just philosophical treatises. We focused on Plato's Symposium, doing both close readings of the arguments and analyzing the dramatic elements of the dialogue. We were lucky to have some great guest speakers as well, including Alan Code, Hans Sluga, and Mark Griffith.

The highlight of the course was a dramatic reading of the Symposium performed in the UCB Philosophy department's Howison Library the last week of the semester. It played to a packed house of philosophers and non-philosophers alike. Attendees included Donald Davidson, Richard Wollheim, and most of the rest of the faculty of UCB's philosophy department at the time.

Aaron Allen Schiller

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