Overview
Professor Silins works mainly in epistemology and the philosophy of mind, and has primarily published about the epistemology of perception, self-knowledge, consciousness, and attention. He also has research interests in cognitive science, aesthetics, and classical Asian philosophy. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in all of these areas, and he has supervised graduate students working in many of them.
He joined the Sage School in Fall 2006, after completing a Bersoff Fellowship at New York University. He has also been a Fellow at the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University, and an Associate Professor at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.
You can find his cv and all of his published papers here.
Research Focus
- Epistemology, esp. perception
- Philosophy of mind, esp. consciousness, attention and self-knowledge
- Aesthetics
- Classical Asian Philosophy
Publications
Selected
What is consciousness? Must we always be aware of our own conscious states?
2024 “The Conscious Theory of Higher-Orderness”, Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind
forthcoming “Speak, Memory: Dignāga, Consciousness, and Awareness”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy
How well do we know our own minds, and how exactly do we know our own minds when we do?
2020 “The Evil Demon in the Lab: Skepticism, Introspection, and Introspection of Introspection”, Synthese
2018 "The Evil Demon Inside", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
2012 “Judgment as a Guide to Belief”, in (eds.) D. Smithies and D. Stoljar, Introspection and Consciousness (OUP)
How does perception work? When and how does it justify our beliefs about the world?
2016 “Cognitive Penetration and the Epistemology of Perception”, Blackwell Compass
2015 “The Epistemology of Perception”, with Susanna Siegel, in The Oxford Handbook of Perception
2008 "Basic Justification and the Moorean Response to the Skeptic”, Oxford Studies in Epistemology
How can I sneak content about skateboarding into philosophy journals?
See my “Speak, Memory” or “Cognitive Penetration” papers above to find out