Region Western philosophy Education University of Oxford | Role Philosopher Name Michael Tye | |
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Era Contemporary philosophy Main interests Philosophy of mind, Consciousness, Metaphysics Areas of interest Philosophy of mind, Consciousness, Metaphysics Influenced by Fred Dretske, Frank Cameron Jackson, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell Books Ten Problems of Consci, Consciousness Revisited: Materialis, Consciousness - Color - and Content, Consciousness and persons, The Imagery Debate Similar People Fred Dretske, Frank Cameron Jackson, Mark Sainsbury, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell | ||
Schools of thought Analytic philosophy | ||
Michael Tye (born 1950) is a British philosopher who is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He has made significant contributions to the philosophy of mind.
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Education and career
Tye was educated at Oxford University in England, studying first physics and then physics and philosophy. Before moving to Texas, Tye taught at Haverford College in suburban Philadelphia and Temple University in Philadelphia proper. He was also a visiting professor at King's College, London for some ten consecutive years while at Temple and briefly took up a chair at the University of St. Andrews. Besides philosophy of mind, Tye has interests in cognitive science, metaphysics, and philosophical logic, especially problems relating to vagueness.
Tye's third book, Ten Problems of Consciousness (1995), was an alternate selection of the Library of Science Book Club.
Philosophical work
Along with Fred Dretske and William Lycan, Tye defends the representationalist view of consciousness, more precisely what has been called the "strong" representationalist view, according to which "representation of a certain kind suffices for a sensory quality, where the kind can be specified in functionalist or other familiar materialist terms, without recourse to properties of any ontologically 'new' sort."