Jan Plate

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, meta-ontology. I am also interested in conceptual questions of philosophical psychology and epistemology.

I began my studies in 1997 at the Phillipps-Universität Marburg, where, for one year, I studied psychology and analytical philosophy. 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. As a part of that programme, I spent nearly a year studying computer science (and some psycholinguistics) at the university of Exeter from 2000 to 2001. After gaining my B.Sc. in Osnabrück, my interests shifted back to the philosophy of mind, although I continued to attend courses on advanced logic and AI. A main interest during that time was the representational theory of mind, but in the end, I decided to go even further in the direction of metaphysics, and 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, 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 as soon as time allows; as for the translation, it looks as if it will come out in 2009 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.

My dissertation project is currently in its first stages of development. Tentatively, I plan to work on the concepts of existence and individuation. If all goes well, one upshot of this work will be an argument against the possibility of atomless entities (also known as ‘gunk’).

• Faces and Brains: The Limitations of Brain Scanning in Cognitive Science. Philosophical Psychology 20(2)
  This paper grew out of Chris Mole’s highy enjoyable class on Current Controversies in Cognitive Science at Washington University (Spring 2006), and is co-authored by Chris Mole and the participants of that class.

• An analysis of the binding problem. Philosophical Psychology 20(6)
  ERRATUM: Footnote 22 should (of course) refer rather to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason than to Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit.

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