Ned Block

Philosophy and Psychology

Foundations of consciousness

Go to my homepage in Philosophy.

Ned Block (Ph.D., Harvard), Professor of Philosophy and Psychology, came to NYU in 1996 from MIT where he was Chair of the Philosophy Program. He works in philosophy of mind, metaphysics and foundations of cognitive science and is currently writing a book on consciousness. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of Language and Information, a Sloan Foundation Fellow, a faculty member at two NEH Institutes and two NEH Seminars and the recipient of grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Science Foundation. He is a past president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, a past Chair of the MIT Press Cognitive Science Board of Syndics, and is currently President of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.  The Philosophers' Annual selected his papers in 1983, 1990 and 1996. He is co-editor of The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (MIT Press, 1997). Two volumes of his collected papers are forthcoming from MIT Press. Some of his recent papers are available below.

"Do Causal Powers Drain Away?" forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research with a reply by Jaegwon Kim, "Blocking Causal Drainage and other Chores with Mental Causation"

"Mental Paint" [PDF] (forthcoming in a book of essays on Tyler Burge, with replies by Burge, edited by Martin Hahn and Bjorn Ramberg and published by MIT Press).  Click here to download Acrobat Reader, which is required to view PDF files.

"Tactile Sensation/Spatial Perception," forthcoming in Trends in Cognitive Science, 2003.  This is a reply to Susan Hurley and Alva Noe, "Neural plasticity and consciousness."

“Behaviorism Revisited” This is a comment on J. K. O’Regan. and Alva Noë, "A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual Consciousness" Both are forthcoming in The Behavioral and Brain Sciences

"The Harder Problem of Consciousness", PDF version,  from The Journal of Philosophy XCIX, No. 8, August 2002, 1-35. The version that came out in The Journal of Philosophy was shortened considerably because of space limitations in the journal.  Some of the cuts have been restored in the version here.  Click here to download Acrobat Reader..

“Some Concepts of Consciousness”  In Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings,  David Chalmers (ed.) Oxford University Press, 2002.

"Paradox and Cross Purposes in Recent Work on Consciousness" This is an expanded and revised version of a commentary on all the papers in a special issue of Cognition (April, 2001) on the state of the art in the neuroscience of consciousness. (The special issue has come out separately: Stan Dehaene, ed., The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness, M.I.T. Press, 2001) Two philosophers–Dan Dennett and I–-were asked to comment on all the scientists' papers. (We both made some comments on each others' papers as well). Dennett's paper is available by clicking here.  If you want to see the papers that Dennett and I commented on, look in Cognition, Volume 79, Issues 1-2, Pages 1-237 (April 2001) This volume is on the web and available on the NYU library site by clicking here and then clicking on "Cognition" and then going to 79, 1-2. Other library sites will also have access to this journal. If  you have an NYU web account, but are not logging in from an NYU site, you will need to tell your browser to use an NYU proxy.  Click here for instructions.