Eric Saidel
Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Office: Phillips 522
Office Hours: On sabbatical Spring 2008
Phone: (202) 994-2009
Email: saidel@gwu.edu

Areas of Interest

Primary Courses Taught at GW

• Logic
• Introduction to Philosophy

Selected Publications

• "Teleosemantics and the Epiphonemality of Content" in Naturalism, Intentionality, and Teleology, Jillian McIntosh (ed), Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplemental Volume, 2002.
• "Animal Minds, Human Minds," in The Cognitive Animal (MIT Press), Marc Bekoff, Colin Allen, and Gordon Burghardt (eds) 2002.
• "Dennett For Scientists" (Review of Daniel Dennett, Brook and Ross (ed)) Endeavour, forthcoming.
• "The Evolution of Reference" (Co-written with Colin Allen) in Evolution of Mind (Oxford University Press), Colin Allen and Denise Cummins (eds) 1998: 183-203.

Presentations, Activities, Work in Progress

• "Animals, Art, and Evolution" to be presented at the Annual meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics, October 2003.
• My main project at the moment is a book on the problem of naturalizing mental content, tentatively titled Learning From Our Mistakes. In it I'll argue that Teleosemantic attempts to naturalize mental content are misguided; the fail because evolution doesn't work the way Teleosemantics requires, and also because they make mental content epiphenomenal (perhaps mental content is epiphenomenal, but a theory of content shouldn't have that result as a subsidiary outcome), and finally because they make mental content inaccessible to the person with that content. I'll argue for a different approach, one which relies more closely on how evolution really works.
• "Giving Up Multiple Realizability" submitted to the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.
• "Bird Wings and Bat Wings; Human Pain and Martian Pain: Against An Evolutionary Argument for Multiple Realizability" in progress. I've been working on this on and off for way too long. I'm hoping to put the finishing touches on it this fall (2003) and finally send it off.