Professor Robert Hanna
University of Colorado - Boulder

About the Speaker: Robert Hanna is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale in 1989, and his honours B.A. in philosophy from the University of Toronto.  He is a Canadian by birth and a naturalized US citizen.  He is passionately committed to philosophy, a few people, and some other things.  His autobiography, when he gets around to completing the life on which it is based, will be ironically entitled My Idea of a Good Time.  His areas of research and specialization include (1)  Kant, (2) the philosophy of mind, and (3) ethics.  In connection with those areas, he is the author of four books -- Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (Clarendon/Oxford/Univ. Press, 2001),  Kant, Science and Human Nature (Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 2006), Rationality and Logic (MIT Press, 2006), and Embodied Minds in Action, co-authored with Michelle Maiese (Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2008) --
and some journal articles.

"Consciousness and Essential Embodiment"
Friday, October 19th, 4:10 p.m. in the Classroom Building, Room 215
Brief Abstract: I claim that conscious minds like ours are "essentially embodied," by which I mean that they are necessarily embodied in all our vital systems, right out to the skin. If correct, this entails that conscious minds like ours are irreducible to our brains, not because they are in any way immaterial properties or facts, but instead because they are necessarily wholly spread out into our dynamic living organismic bodies and belong to their complete neurobiological constitution.

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