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Disturbed Consciousness

In this post, Rocco J. Gennaro (picture below) presents his forthcoming edited book titled 'Disturbed Consciousness: New Essays on Psychopathologies and Theories of Consciousness'.


My name is Rocco J. Gennaro. I am Professor of Philosophy and Philosophy Department Chair at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville, Indiana, USA. My Ph.D. in philosophy is from Syracuse University in 1991. I moved from Indiana State University in Terre Haute (where I was for fourteen years) to the University of Southern Indiana in 2009.

My main area of specialty is philosophy of mind/cognitive science and consciousness, but I also have strong interests in metaphysics, ethics, and early modern history of philosophy. I have published seven books (as either sole author or editor) and numerous papers in these areas, often defending a version of the higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness. I have also written on animal and infant consciousness, episodic memory, and have defended conceptualism.

My most recent book is The Consciousness Paradox: Consciousness, Concepts, and Higher-Order Thoughts (MIT Press, 2012).  I am currently editing an anthology entitled Disturbed Consciousness: New Essays on Psychopathologies and Theories of Consciousness (MIT Press, forthcoming 2015). I am also the Philosophy of Mind/Cognitive Science Area Editor for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and I am working on another book entitled Consciousness for Routledge Publishers. 

The main reason for this post is my forthcoming anthology Disturbed Consciousness: New Essays on Psychopathologies and Theories of Consciousness (picture below). These are new papers connecting up theories of consciousness with various psychopathologies. The basic idea is for authors to defend, discuss, or critique at least one specific philosophical theory of consciousness with respect to one or more psychopathologies. Each essay brings together at least one theory and one psychopathology in a substantial way.

Authors were asked to keep in mind such questions as: How can a (or your) theory of consciousness account for a specific psychopathological condition? How might one reply to an actual (or potential) criticism of your theory of consciousness based on a psychopathology? How might one theory of consciousness explain a psychopathology better than another theory? What difficulties arise for a specific theory of consciousness given the existence of one or more of these psychopathologies? Some work had already been done along these lines, particularly with respect to the higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness on, for example, visual agnosia and somatoparaphrenia but the time is right for further work with respect to various theories of consciousness.


Other essays consider such topics as the application of a model of unified consciousness to cases of brain bisection and dissociative identity disorder; prefrontal and parietal underconnectivity in autism and other psychopathologies; self-deception and the self-model theory of subjectivity; schizophrenia and the vehicle theory of consciousness; and a shift in emphasis away from an internal (or brainbound) approach to psychopathology to an interactive one. Each essay offers a distinctive perspective from the intersection of philosophy, consciousness research, and psychiatry. Authors include Andy Brook, Philip Gerrans, William Hirstein, Jakob Hohwy, Uriah Kriegel, Tim Lane, Thomas Metzinger, Erik Myin, Kevin O’Regan, Robert Van Gulick, among others.

My updated full CV is linked here.

Some of my earlier papers can also be found linked to PhilPapers.

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