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Journal of Consciousness Studies |
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Journal of Consciousness Studies |
COMMENTATORS
Per Aage Brandt has led the Center for Semiotics, University
of Aarhus, since 1992. He trained in Romance Philology (French and Spanish),
and received a doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1987. He is the author of a
dozen of books and hundreds of published papers.
Thomas C. Dalton is Senior Assistant to the Provost and Senior Research Associate with the Office of the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He has conducted research into the history of developmental psychology and the philosophy of the behavioural sciences, and is author of the intellectual biography Becoming John Dewey: Dilemmas of a Phiolosopher and Naturalist (2002).
Daniel C. Dennett is Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor, Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. After reading philosophy at Harvard he went to Oxford to work with Gilbert Ryle, under whose supervision he completed his DPhil in 1965. He taught at UC Irvine from 1965 to 1971, when he moved to Tufts, where he has taught ever since, aside from periods visiting at Harvard, Pittsburgh, Oxford, and the Ecole Normal Superieur in Paris. His many books are widely read, notably Consciousness Explained (1991) and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995).
Don Dulany is professor emeritus in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois, in the Cognitive division. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan. His current research work examines the view that symbolic representations are carried exclusively by conscious states.
Robert Epstein serves as University Research Professor at United States International University in San Diego and is the founder and Director Emeritus of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies in Massachusetts. He received his PhD in psychology in 1981 from Harvard University, where he collaborated with B.F. Skinner, whose writings he has edited. He has published more than 80 scholarly and scientific articles and is Editor- in-Chief of Psychology Today magazine and the host of the magazine’s nationally-syndicated radio programme.
Joseph Goguen is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California at San Diego, where he is also Director of the Meaning and Computation Laboratory. From 1988 to 1996 he was the Professor of Computing Science at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory and a Fellow of St. Anne’s College. In 1999, he was a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Professor Goguen is author or co-author of over 200 publications, and is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Consciousness Studies.
John Kihlstrom is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his PhD in 1975 from the University of Pennsylvania, where he specialized in personality and experimental psychopathology. In 1987, he published a major article in Science magazine on ‘The Cognitive Unconscious’. Here and elsewhere he has argued for a non-Freudian view of unconscious mental life.
Tibor R. Machan is a Hoover Institution research fellow and Freedom Communications Professor of Business Ethics and Free Enterprise in the Leatherby Center for Entrepreneurship & Business Ethics at the Argyros School of Business and Economics, Chapman University, Orange, CA. He received his PhD from the University of California at Santa Barbara. His books include The Pseudo-Science of B. F. Skinner (1974), and many titles such as Human Rights and Human Liberties (1975) and The Virtue of Liberty (1994).
Jeff Masson was Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Toronto when, in 1970, he decided to apply for training as a psychoanalyst. He graduated from the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute as a Freudian analyst in 1978. He has enjoyed success as a writer of books about animals. His best-selling book, When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals, written with Susan McCarthy, has been translated into twenty languages, and sold nearly half a million copies in the United States alone. He is currently writing a book about the emotional lives of farm animals, to appear in November, 2003. Masson is now living on a beach in Auckland, New Zealand, with his wife and family.
Julie S. Vargas is President of the B.F. Skinner Foundation, which was established in 1987 to educate the public about the work of her father, B.F. Skinner, and to publish significant literary and scientific works in the analysis of behavior and to educate both professionals and the public about the science of behavior. She teaches courses at West Virginia University.
Doug Watt is Director of Neuropsychology at Quincy Hospital, Quincy, MA. A leading advocate of the need to take account of feelings in the study of consciousness, he is a founder member of the editorial board of the journal Consciousness and Emotion.
Skinner’s conflict about consciousness was not just a personal idiosyncracy. Behaviourism and its radical rejection of personal experience was a major theme of the twentieth century, and continues even today. Rejection of consciousness became a core belief for academic psychologists and philosophers in the English-speaking world, justifying their claim to standing among the physical sciences. Skinner’s life suggests that radical behaviourism may be associated with psychological conflict and some degree of dissociation. It also raises questions about the cultural climate that celebrated the rejection of consciousness.
Correspondence: Bernard J. Baars, The Neurosciences Institute, 10640 John Jay Hopkins Drive, San Diego, CA 92121, USA. Email: baars@nsi.edu; bbaars8788@aol.com — please use both email addresses in correspondence.
