Jeremy Pober

Academic Degree:
PhD
Professional Category:
FCT Researcher

Research group: LanCog

I am a FCT Junior Research Fellow and member of the LanCog group. Prior to taking up this position, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University Antwerp. And before that I completed a PhD at the University of California, Riverside, under the supervision of Eric Schwitzgebel.
Here in LanCog, I am Principal Investigator of the FCT-funded project “Neuroscience and the Self: What Can Our Brains Tell Us About Who We Are?” The aim is to create a neuroscientifically informed theory of the self that can allow us to use neuroscience to answer questions like “does addiction change who we are?” The project combines my interests in several areas of contemporary philosophy. One part, in the metaphysics of mind, argues for a reductive or reductive-friendly position. Another part, in the philosophy of psychology, aims at developing neuroscientifically sensitive theories of folk psychological mental states, especially emotion and desire. My plan is to then develop a view of the self, in moral psychology and action theory, in terms of these mental states (as the ‘deep self’ literature does) that can, with my theories of mental states as a guide for relating the self to the brain. Finally, I will turn to neuroscience and the philosophy of psychiatry to look at the neural bases of mental health conditions like addiction and compare them to the systems involved in realizing the mental states that make up who we are.

Selected Publications

“What Emotions Really Are (in the Theory of Constructed Emotion)” Philosophy of Science 85(2018):640-59.
“Addiction is Not a Natural Kind” Frontiers in Psychiatry 4(2013)123.
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