I completed my masters degree at the Humboldt-University in Berlin in 1996 and received my Ph.D. from McGill University in Montreal in 2003. Before coming to UGA in 2006, I taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Middlebury College in Vermont.

My current research interests lie mainly in the area of the philosophy of mind and, more specifically, the philosophy of perception. In my most recent papers, I investigate the relationship between the phenomenal character of perceptual experiences and their representational contents. I suggest specific ways in which representationalism, the view that phenomenal character supervenes on representational content, can account for both color constancy experiences and spatial perspective.

This research has also raised an interest in the relationship between the character of perceptual experience and so-called monitoring theories of consciousness. I am particularly interested in the question of how these theories can account for consciousness of fined-grained differences between perceptual experiences. I am currently working on a paper assessing the viability of present versions of the monitoring theory of consciousness and I hope to be able to present my own view on this matter in the next paper.

Finally, I also have a long-standing interest in phenomenology, particularly, the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. In this context, I have published on Husserl’s understanding of geometry and its relation to perceptual experience.

Publications:

“Shadow-Experiences and the Phenomenal Complexity of Color,” forthcoming in dialectica, 2010.

“How Representationalism Can Account for the Phenomenal Significance of Illumination,” in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2009: 8 (4), 551-572.

“Disappearing Appearances: On the Enactive Approach to Spatial Perceptual Content,” in The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 2008: 46 (1), 45-67.

Critical Essay of Lisa Shabel’s book Mathematics in Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Reflections on Mathematical Practice, in Philosophia Mathematica, 2007: 15 (3), 366-386 (invited).

“Edmund Husserl on the Applicability of Formal Geometry,” in Intuition and the Axiomatic Method, eds. Emily Carson and Renate Huber (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), pp. 67-85.

“Carnap, Husserl, Euclid, and the Idea of a Material Geometry,” in Husserl and Stein, eds. Richard Feist and William Sweet (Washington, DC: CRVP Press, 2003), 57-87.

“Husserl, Carnap et l'idée de la géométrie matériale,” in Aux origines de la phénoménologie. Husserl et le contexte des recherches logiques, eds. Denise Fissette and Sandra Lapointe (Paris: Vrin; Laval: Les Presses de l'Université Laval, 2003), pp. 41-59. [abridged version of “Carnap, Husserl, Euclid, and the Idea of a Material Geometry"]