Notable ideas Explanatory gap | Role Philosopher Name Joseph Levine Region Western philosophy | |
Born 17 January 1952 (age 72) ( 1952-01-17 ) Main interests Philosophy of mindConsciousnessPhilosophy of LanguageMetaphysics Books Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness | ||
Schools of thought Analytic philosophy | ||
Joseph Levine (born January 17, 1952) is an American philosopher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who received his PhD from Harvard University in 1981.
He works on philosophy of mind and is best known for inventing the explanatory gap argument (cited over 1000 times on Google Scholar) and author of popular and academic philosophy books. The idea is that an unbridgeable gap exists when trying to comprehend consciousness from the perspective of natural science as a scientific explanation of mental states would require a reduction from a physical process to phenomenal experience. The property of mental states to be experienced from a subjective point of view (see Qualia) might not be reducible from the objective, i.e. outside perspective of science. In this sense there would be a gap between the outside perspective of science and the internal perspective of phenomenal experience.