Skip to content

Eric Schwitzgebel

Professor of Philosophy, University of California at Riverside

Eric Schwitzgebel is Professor of Philosophy at University of California at Riverside.  He received his B.A. in Philosophy from Stanford in 1990 and his PhD in Philosophy from U.C. Berkeley in 1997, under the supervision of Elisabeth A. Lloyd, Alison Gopnik, and John Searle.

He has published two books and over twenty articles on the issue of how well we know our own stream of conscious experience.  Exploring a wide range of phenomena including imagery, dreaming, auditory and visual experience, emotional experience, and inner speech, he argues that most of us actually have very poor knowledge even of our own currently ongoing stream of consciousness.

Schwitzgebel has also written extensively on the relationship between philosophical moral reflection and real-world moral behavior, especially the moral behavior of professional ethicists.  He finds that professional ethicists behave no morally differently, on average, than do other professors.

Other topics of research are the nature of belief and other attitudes; the epistemology of philosophy; ancient Chinese philosophy; philosophical issues in moral, developmental, and perceptual psychology; the metaphysics of consciousness; and the relationship between philosophy and science fiction.

He blogs at The Splintered Mind.
 



Topic Series


Books

Perplexities of Consciousness (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology)

Buy the Book

Describing Inner Experience?: Proponent Meets Skeptic (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology)

Buy the Book