Department of Philosophy: People: Core Faculty: Georges Rey

Georges Rey (PhD Harvard University) is Professor of Philosophy. He did his undergraduate work at UC Berkeley, and his graduate work at Harvard, pursuing an initial interest in the views of Quine and the later Wittgenstein. Lectures of Fodor and Chomsky at MIT in the late 70s, however, soon drew him away from those views and into the then just emerging area of cognitive science, and his primary interest since then has been in relating work in that area to traditional problems in the philosophy of mind. He has written numerous articles specifically on (ir)rationality, intentionality and qualitative experience, as well as a book, Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (Blackwell 1997), in which he argues that a computational/ representational theory of mind seems to present a promising way of dealing with the first two issues, and even a weakened version of the third, but that it will never satisfy us completely because of problems inherent in the way we involuntarily think of things that look, sound and move like our conspecifics.

Rey's most recent work has focused on the role of intentionality in early cognitive processing, particularly in vision, sensation and language. He argues (against recent pronouncements of Chomsky) that not only representational content, but "empty" representations of "intentional inexistents," such as of lines, circles, cones, words, phonemes and qualia, are likely to be essential to explanations in these domains, despite the fact that many of these "things" do not exist. He tries to show that this fact is far more innocuous than it might appear, not disturbing in the least a naturalistic metaphysics, explanations in psychology and linguistics, or even our phenomenology. All that needs to be abandoned is the excessively strong "externalism" that he thinks has come to be uncritically presupposed in theories of mental content.

Rey has been a visiting professor at Stanford and MIT, and has been a visiting researcher there, at the University of Split in Zadar (as a Fulbright fellow), at the Australian National University in Canberra, and at CREA in the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, where he was also a visiting lecturer at the Ecole Normale Superieure. He was a co-editor with Barry Loewer of Meaning in Mind: Fodor and His Critics, and was the section editor for the Philosophy of Psychology entries in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

E-mail: georey@earthlink.net

links to:

CPaS Home Page: http://carnap.umd.edu/chps/Faculty/Rey.html

CV: (PDF)

Representative Publications

see CPaS Home Page for links to some of the articles themselves

Contemporary Philosophy of Mind: a Contentiously Classical Approach, Oxford: Blackwell 1997.

(editor w/ Barry Loewer): Meaning in Mind: Jerry Fodor and His Critics, London: Blackwell 1991.

"Mind, Intentionality and Inexistence: an Overview of My Work," in Croatian Journal of Philosophy, vol.5, no. 15 (2005), pp. 389-415.

"Empty Representations in Linguistic Perception," (for the conference on "Early Content: Intentionality in Visual and Linguistic Perception," University of Maryland, April 21-22, 2006.

"Resisting Normativism in Psychology," forthcoming in Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell.

"Conventions, Intuitions and Linguistic Inexistents: a Reply to Devitt," forthcoming in Croatian Journal of Philosophy.

"Phenomenal Content and the Richness and Determinacy of Color Experience," forthcoming in Journal of Consciousness Studies.

"Meta-Atheism: Religious Avowal as Self-Deception," in The Experience of Philosophy, (Martin, R. & Kolak, D, eds.) Oxford, 2005.

"Philosophical Analysis as Cognitive Psychology: the Case of Empty Concepts," in Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science, Cohen, H. & Lefebvre, C., eds., Dordrecht: Elsevier, pp. 71-89 (2005).

"The Rashness of Traditional Rationalism and Empiricism," in New Essays in the Philosophy of Language and Mind, ed. by M. Ezcurdia, R. Stainton, and C. Viger, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 30, pp. 227-58 (2005).

"Representational Content and a Chomskyan Linguistics," in Epistemology of Language, ed. by Alex Barber, Oxford University Press (2003), pp. 140-86.

"Why Wittgenstein Ought to Have Been a Computationalist (and What a Computationalist Can Learn from Wittgenstein)," in Croatian Journal of Philosophy , vol. 3, no. 9 (2003), pp. 231-264.