Jan Plate, M.Sc.

Since the fall semester of 2005, I am a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis, working towards my Ph.D. in philosophy. My main interests lie in philosophy of mind and metaphysics, in particular, basic ontology. I am also interested in conceptual questions of philosophical psychology, epistemology, and the philosophy of causation.

I began my studies in 1997 at the Phillipps-Universität Marburg, where I studied psychology (and some analytical philosophy) for one year. In the summer of 1998, I decided to transfer to the cognitive science program at the university of Osnabrück, where my interests shifted toward Artificial Intelligence. It was obligatory for participants in that program to spend at least one semester abroad, and so I studied computer science and some psycholinguistics at the university of Exeter during the academic year 2000/01. After gaining my B.Sc. in Osnabrück, my interests shifted strongly back to the philosophy of mind, although I continued to attend courses on non-monotonic logic and advanced AI. A lot of time was spent on the topics of intentionality and Fodor's representationalism, but in a final turn, I wrote my Master's thesis in 2004/05 on Physicalism and Subjectivity.

My three largest projects so far have been my M.Sc. thesis from 2005 (Physicalism and Subjectivity), the English translation, completed in 2006, of Achim Stephan's Emergence: From Unpredictability to Self-Organization, and, most recently, a software project on ontological diagrams. I hope to update and revise my thesis in the near future; as for the translation, it looks as if it will come out in 2008 at Springer Verlag. The software project consists of a website and Java applet, both available here. A user guide for the applet, and in particular for the interpretation of ontological diagrams, is also available at that website.

In the spring of 2007, I had some opportunity to deal with the issue of relativism, both in the ancient version that is often (though not uncontroversially) ascribed to Aenesidemus and the modern form promoted by John McFarlane. This has given rise to two term papers that might be useful as a kind of snapshot of what I have been working on most recently. (Both papers are as yet completely unrevised and should not by cited.)

• (With Christopher Mole, Corey Kubatzky, Rawdon Waller, Marilee Dobbs, and Marc Nardone) Faces and Brains: The Limitations of Brain Scanning in Cognitive Science. Philosophical Psychology 20(2)

• An analysis of the binding problem. Philosophical Psychology 20(6)

I can be reached via email to: jplate @at@ artsci .dot. wustl .dot. edu.