The present essay discusses the relationship between moral philosophy, psychology and education based on virtue ethics, contemporary neuroscience, and how neuroscientific methods can contribute to studies of moral virtue and character. First, the present essay considers whether the mechanism of moral motivation and developmental model of virtue and character are well supported by neuroscientifi...

According to intentionalism the phenomenal character (“what it’s like”) of a conscious experience is determined wholly by its representational content. In its strongest forms intentionalism offers the tantalizing prospect of a reduction of phenomenal character to representational content. Arguments based on Twin Earth-like scenarios have shown, however, that if phenomenal character supervenes o...

There are presently, or so it seems to me, three main views about the individuation of the content of intentional mental states. First, there is the no content view: the view that the content (of an intentional mental state) is an ordinary folk pre-scientific concept which can play no role in a respectable mature scientific psychology. Second there is a dualist (or bifurcationist) view of conte...

2 Research plan 3 2.1 Current state of research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2.1.1 The dominant internalist account of rationality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2.1.2 Externalist challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.2 Current state of our research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...

Spencer’s heritage, while almost a forgotten chapter in the history of biology, lives on in psychology and the philosophy of mind. I particularly discuss externalist views of meaning, on which meaning crucially depends on a notion of reference, and ask whether reference should be thought of as cause or effect. Is the meaning of a word explained by what it refers to, or should we say that what w...