Toward a Science of Consciousness

Apr 9-14, 2012

PLENARY

          Ned Block

Ned Block (Ph.D., Harvard), Silver Professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Neural Science, came to NYU in 1996 from MIT where he was Chair of the Philosophy Program. He works in philosophy of mind and foundations of neuroscience and cognitive science and is currently writing a book on attention. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 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 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institutes and two Summer Seminars, the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Science Foundation; and a recipient of the Robert A. Muh Alumni Award in Humanities and Social Science from MIT. He is a past president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, a past Chair of the MIT Press Cognitive Science Board, and past President of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. The Philosophers' Annual selected his papers as one of the "ten best" in 1983, 1990, 1995, 2002 and 2010. He is co-editor of The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (MIT Press, 1997). The first of two volumes of his collected papers, Functionalism, Consciousness and Representation, MIT Press came out in 2007. In 2008-2009, he was Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Hong Kong; Townsend Visitor, University of California at Berkeley; and Smart Lecturer at Australian National University. In 2009-2010, he gave the Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Lecture, was the Lansdowne Lecturer at the University of Victoria and gave the Josiah Royce Lectures at Brown University. In 2010-2011, he gave the Thalheimer Lectures at Johns Hopkins. In 2011-12, he will give the Rudolf Carnap Lectures (with Susan Carey) at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and the William James Lectures at Harvard University. He was elected Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society starting in 2012.