Hello, World

David Bourget

Philosophy RSSS, Coombs Building, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 2601
+61 2 6125 2345 /

UNSW students: The website for PHIL2207 (Philosophy of Psychology) is here.

What I do

I'm currently working toward a PhD in philosophy at the Australian National University, under the supervision of David Chalmers. My dissertation is about the relation between consciousness and other mental states like beliefs and desires. To be more precise, I argue that consciousness is one and the same as underived intentionality, a hypothesis which I think has many interesting implications. When I'm not racking my brain on this topic, I work on computer projects like MindPapers. I'm currently developping PhilPapers, a site which will aggregate all online philosophy articles on the planet (at the moment, there are over 100,000 articles in PhilPapers' still expanding database).

Papers I've written

Published / forthcoming

Consciousness is underived intentionality, forthcoming in Noûs.
This paper is a defence of the core thesis of my dissertation. I argue for two claims which together entail that consciousness is one and the same as underived intentionality: 1) all possible experiences are underived intentional states; 2) all possible underived intentional states are experiences. My arguments presuppose representationalism, a view I (among many others) defend elsewhere.
Representationalism about consciousness, in Max Velmans and Susan Schneider (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. Blackwell. 2007.
Co-authored with William Seager, this paper is an introduction to representationalism.
Quantum leaps in philosophy of mind, Journal of Consciousness Studies 11(12): 17-42. 2004.
This paper criticizes Henry Stapp's quantum mechanical theory of consciousness and free will on a number of fronts, technical and philosophical. Stap has a reply in the same issue of JCS.

In progress

An argument from hallucination for representationalism.
In this paper I offer a direct argument from the existence of hallucinations to representationalism (something which, surprinsingly, no one has come close to achieving yet, as far as I know). I also compare various ways of formulating representationalism.
Representationalism and perceptual distortion.
In this paper I respond to objections to representationalism based on "perceptual distortion"--perspective, blur, double vision and the like.