David John Chalmers

University Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness. In The Conscious Mind (1996), Chalmers made a sustained argument against materialism with regard to consciousness and in favor of a non-reductive view in which consciousness is a fundamental property of nature. In other work, he introduced the now-standard distinction between the easy and hard problems of consciousness, developed a non-reductive approach to the science of consciousness, and analyzed the connections between consciousness and intentionality. In the philosophy of cognitive science, he coauthored the original article on The Extended Mind, arguing that the mind extends outside the head, and developed a framework for understanding computation and its role in artificial intelligence and cognitive science. He developed the epistemic two-dimensional framework for understanding the cognitive content of language, the narrow content of thought, and the Fregean content of perception. In Constructing the World (2012), he developed a Carnapian framework on which all truths about the world are deducible from truths in a small basic language.