Jesse Prinz

JESSE PRINZ (B.A. New York University; Ph.D. University of Chicago) is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York, Graduate Center.  He is also director of the Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies there, and he has held appointments at the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program at Washington University in St. Louis, the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science at Stanford, California Institute of Technology, the University of London, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and at the University of North Carolina, where he held a named professorship.  His research focuses on the perceptual, emotional, and cultural foundations of human psychology.  He is author of Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and Their Perception Basis (MIT, 2002), Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (Oxford, 2004), The Emotional Construction of Morals (Oxford), Beyond Human Nature (Penguin/Norton, 2011), and The Conscious Brain (Oxford, 2012), along with two edited volumes.  All of these books bring research in the cognitive sciences to bear on traditional philosophical questions.  Prinz’s work is a contemporary extension of the classical empiricist tradition in philosophy, which emphasises experience, rather than innate knowledge and disembodied, amodal representations in thought.