It is my great pleasure to introduce Evan Thompson, who will be our featured scholar on the blog this week. Evan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Previously, he was a professor at the University of Toronto. His works spans the areas of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and phenomenology and – unusually – also draws heavily on Asian philosophy and contemporary Buddhist philosophy. He is particularly interested in exploring points of contact and fostering dialogue between neuroscience, contemporary Western philosophy and Asian philosophy.
Evan has published on embodied cognition, conscious experience, colour vision, and the self, among other themes. Most recently, he published Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2015). In it, he explores how our experience of our self changes from the waking state, to dreaming and meditation. He argues that taking our first-person experience seriously is essential in explaining the nature of consciousness and the self. In doing so, we can learn much from engaging with the Vedic and Buddhist traditions, since these offer fundamental insights into consciousness and cognition which can provide a new perspective to the scientific study of the mind.
We welcome Evan to the blog and are looking forward to his posts!