Aaron Allen Schiller, Ph.D.

I'm an Adjunct Lecturer in the Philosophy department at Santa Clara University and a co-founder and the Vice President of the Wilfrid Sellars Society. I'm interested in the philosophies of mind, perception, and knowledge. Recent published or presented work has been on the enactive account of perception and the development of what I call "fact perception."I'm currently teaching Critical Thinking & Writing II and The Philosophy of Mind.

news

4/18/13
Keynote Lecture Slides: The slides for my Philosophy of Mind lectures are up on YouTube for anyone that's interested. Links to specific lectures can be found in my Twitter feed (to the right), but here is the link to my YouTube channel which houses them all (plus a few other videos that some may find entertaining).

4/7/13
Consciousness @ Cafe Socrates: In the wake of the unveiling of President Obama's BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative, I will be leading a discussion on the nature of consciousness on 4/11 at SCU Philosophy's Cafe Socrates. Should we have hope that mapping the brain's 80-90 billion neurons, and the 100 trillion connections between them, will answer any of the philosophical questions about consciousness? What is consciousness? How does it arise in the brain (if it does at all)? Are non-human animals conscious? Is it possible that consciousness is an illusion? Feed your brain. Be there!

4/5/13
Tweeting the Philosophy of Mind: This term I'll be tweeting items of interest for students in my Philosophy of Mind (Philosophy 144) course under the hashtag #scuphil144.

c.v.

(Download the pdf.)

AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION
- Philosophy of Mind
- Perception
- Epistemology

AREAS OF COMPETENCE
- Practical Ethics (esp. Business Ethics)
- Philosophy of Language
- Philosophy of Science
- 20th-Century American Philosophy
- Early Modern Philosophy (esp. Rationalism)
- Ancient Greek Philosophy (esp. Plato)
- Personal Identity
- Popular Culture
- Philosophy of Film

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: I argue that experiential content is conceptual insofar as its intentional objects are conceptually-laden social facts.

PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES
- "The Primacy of Fact Perception," Philosophical Psychology 25 (4), pp. 575-93, 2012
- "An Enactive Account of the Perception of Facts," Behavior and Philosophy 39, pp. 45-67, 2011
- "Psychological Nominalism and the Plausibility of Sellars' Myth of Jones," The Southern Journal of Philosophy 45 (3), pp. 435-54, 2007

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

BOOK CHAPTERS
- "Word Play, Language-Games, and Unfair Labels in Beverly Cleary's 'Ramona the Pest'" with Denise Schiller, in Philosophy in Children's Literature, ed. Peter Costello (Lexington Books, 2012)
- "Colorblindness and Black Friends in Stephen Colbert's America." In Stephen Colbert and Philosophy, Ed. Aaron Schiller (Open Court Publishing, 2009)

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS
- "After Kant's Piercing of the Veil of Ideas, What Comes Into View for a Sellarsian?," Pacific Division Meeting of the APA, Wilfrid Sellars Society Group Meeting, March 28, 2013.
- "Claims in Experience: On the Sellarsian Intersection of the Metaphysics of Epistemology and Perception," at the inaugural meeting of the WSS, Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in Atlanta, Georgia, Dec. 28th, 2012.
- "Austin Meets Adelson: Where Ordinary Language Intersects With Experimental Phenomenology," Pacific Division Meeting of the APA, April, 2011. Commentator, David Shier
- "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

PUBLIC TALKS, MEDIA APPEARANCES, and GUEST LECTURES
- "Fact Perception," Santa Clara University, Philosophy
Department, April 27, 2012
- Featured in a UW-Milwaukee College of Letters and Science recruitment video titled "The Tweeting Philosopher," November 2011
- Featured in a UW-Milwaukee public relations piece on technology in the classroom, October 2011
- "Fact Perception," Texas Christian University, Philosophy Department, February 22, 2011
- "Colorblindness and Black Friends in Stephen Colbert's America," Guest lecture for Michael Blahy's English 101, "Introduction to College Writing," class, UW Milwaukee, September 29, 2009
- Appeared on WUWM-FM 89.7 public radio show "Lake Effect" to discuss satire and politics.
- "Stephen Colbert 101" (with William Keith, UWM Communication) at Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee, WI, July 29, 2009.
- "Nietzsche on Socrates: Theoretical Man and The Birth of Tragedy," Guest lecture for Georgios Anagnostopoulos's upper-division course on Plato's ethics, UC San Diego, February 1, 2007

IN-HOUSE TALKS, GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCES, and COMMENTING
- "Object Transcendence and the Threat of Explosion for Sensorimotor Accounts of Perception," 2013 Philosophy Mini-Conference, Santa Clara University, Philosophy Department, January 19, 2013
- Commented on Kenneth Hobson's "In Defense of Relational Direct Realism" at the 2008 Meeting of Central States Philosophical Association, September 26, 2008
- "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
- 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

PAPERS ONLINE

personal

I'm a California native; I grew up in Ridgecrest, California, a small naval-town-in-the-desert about four hours north of San Diego. I have a lovely family, with one preschooler and two cats. I like to play the guitar and the ukulele.