Terence Horgan

Terence Edward Horgan (born October 13, 1948) is an American philosopher and a professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson. His areas of expertise include philosophy of mind and metaethics.

Horgan obtained his bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1970 from Stanford University. In 1974, he completed his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan under the supervision of Jaegwon Kim, with his dissertation titled "Microreduction and the Mind-Body Problem." After holding professorships in Illinois, Michigan, and Memphis, Horgan has been a professor in Tucson, Arizona since 2002.

Philosophy of mind

The focal point of Horgan's thinking is the philosophy of mind, particularly the question of the possibility of a physicalist interpretation of consciousness. Initially he criticized Frank Cameron Jackson's dualistic thought experiment known as "Mary's Room" as merely exploiting an ambiguity in the notion of physical information, rendering it inconclusive since "physical information" carries different meanings in various premises. Since 2002, Horgan has begun arguing against it using conceivability arguments in the tradition of Saul Kripke and David Chalmers. In another essay from 2002, Horgan describes his ambivalent stance towards physicalism as follows: "I remain deeply attracted to materialism in philosophy of mind; I would like to believe that mental is superdupervenient on the physical. But the hole hard problem looks very hard indeed, and I see no prospects currently in sight for dealing with it satisfactorily. […] Much as I would like to be a materialist, at present I do not know what an adequate materialist theory of mind would be."

Books

• (co-authored with J. Tienson): Connectionism and the Philosophy of Psychology. Bradford Books, 1996.