David Bourget

About me

I'm an associate professor in philosophy and director of the Centre for Digital Philosophy at Western University (previously known as the University of Western Ontario), as well as executive director and tech lead at the PhilPapers Foundation. I obtained my PhD in philosophy at the Australian National University under the supervision of David Chalmers (2010). I also hold a BSc in computer science from l'Université Laval (2002). I was born and raised in Québec City.

Research

My current philosophical research investigates the role of consciousness in grounding meaning, concepts, and non-conscious mental states. Recently I've also been thinking about debunking arguments, the metaphysics of intentionality, and issues in metaphilosophy. I am involved in AI research whose products will hopefully power future iterations of PhilPapers. You can find my papers below.

Computing projects

• PhilPapers: Online Research in Philosophy. David Chalmers and I launched PhilPapers in 2009. It's a search index and structured bibliography of philosophy books and articles with a number of crowd-sourcing features. I continue to maintain PhilPapers. Today, PhilPapers has over 2.5 million index entries, 6,000 bibliographies, 350,000 registered users, and 650 editors.
• PhilPeople, the place to find and follow philosophers.
• PhilArchive, the largest open access archive of philosophical works.
• PhilEvents, a comprehensive calendar of events in philosophy worldwide.
• PhilJobs, the most complete database of jobs in philosophy.
• The APA Journal Survey
• The PhilPapers Philosophical Survey
• PhilSurvey, a large scale follow up to the PhilPapers Philosophical Survey funded by CFI and ORF grants. (Coming soon!)

My PhilPapers categories

Miscellanea

• Interview with Eric Piper of Wiley regarding AI, PhilPapers, etc.
• My partner and frequent co-author, Angela Mendelovici
• My software on CPAN, including tools used as part of xPapers/PhilPapers
• LyX, latex for people that don't like clutter or RSI
• NeoVim, the best text editor

• Representationalism and Sensory Modalities: An Argument for Inter-Modal Representationalism. American Philosophical Quarterly. In press.
  Intermodal representationalists hold that the phenomenal characters of experiences are fully determined by their contents. In contrast, intramodal representationalists hold that the phenomenal characters of experiences are determined by their contents together with their intentional modes or manners of representation, which are non-representational features corresponding roughly to the sensory modalities. This paper discusses a kind of experience that militates for an intermodal representationalist view: intermodal experiences, experiences that unify experiences in different modalities. I argue that such experiences are much easier to explain on the intermodal view. [Contact me for a copy]