Department of Philosophy: People: Core Faculty: Peter Carruthers

Peter Carruthers (DPhil, Oxford) is Professor of Philosophy. His primary research interests for most of the last twenty years have been in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and cognitive science. He has worked especially on theories of consciousness and self-knowledge, the role of natural language in human cognition, and modularity of mind. But he has also published on such issues as: the nature and status of our folk psychology; the nature of creativity; nativism (innateness) versus empiricism; theories of intentional content; and defense of a notion of narrow content for psychological explanation. Before coming to College Park he was at the University of Sheffield (UK), where he had a spell as Head of Department and was Director of the Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies. In a previous incarnation he trained as a Wittgensteinian, and published a couple of monographs on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.

Email: pcarruth@umd.edu

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Representative Publications

The Architecture of the Mind: massive modularity and the flexibility of thought (Oxford, 2006).

Consciousness: essays from a higher-order perspective (Oxford, 2005).

Phenomenal Consciousness: a naturalistic theory (Cambridge, 2000).

The Philosophy of Psychology (with George Botterill; Cambridge, 1999).

Language, Thought and Consciousness (Cambridge, 1996).

Human Knowledge and Human Nature (Oxford, 1992).

The Animals Issue: moral theory in practice (Cambridge, 1992).