Meet the New Faculty:

Janice Dowell

One of these is alleged to be Janice Dowell

Like my colleague Dan Jacobson, I'm a faculty brat and grew up in Princeton, N.J. My father and stepfather were both professors at the local university, the former an aerospace and mechanical engineer, the latter a professor of cosmology. (Since my sister is a physicist married to a physicist and I'm a philosopher married to a philosopher, I think I'm forced to conclude that the women in my family are eggheads with a weakness for eggheads.)

After growing up in Princeton, I really wanted to attend a university in a city and ended up at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. There I spent four contented years studying philosophy and immersed in various volunteer activities and forms of activism.

From the beginning of high school until the end of college, I'd assumed that I would become some sort of public interest lawyer. What I didn't anticipate how much I would enjoy studying philosophy and how unpleasant I would find the prospect of giving it up. So I decided to apply both to graduate programs in philosophy and to law schools and when I realized that someone was actually willing to pay me to study philosophy, I couldn't resist and I've never looked back. I feel incredibly lucky both to have found something I love to do and to be paid for the privilege of doing it.

I began my graduate career at the University of Michigan where I met my current colleague, Dan Jacobson, as well as my husband and colleague, Dave Sobel. After receiving my MA, I transferred to the University of Pittsburgh where I received my Ph.D. Last year I spent nine months at the Australian National University and I believe that I've benefited from working in all three of these departments with their very different philosophical inclinations.

My research areas are the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind, though I sometimes fear that I'm a closet metaphysician. My dissertation project was on the metaphysics of content. Currently, I'm working on a couple of papers on the debate in the philosophy of mind between physicalists and dualists. One of these papers addresses the question of what's required to vindicate physicalism against the dualist, while the other addresses the question of how best to formulate the thesis of physicalism. Swimming against the tide, I want to defend the view that physicalism is better understood in the first instance as a quasi-empirical thesis than a metaphysical one. Some of these papers are available on my webpage.

I also have a developing interest in the debates about two-dimensional semantics, in particular, in the question of whether representational content is best construed as a-intensions in Frank Jackson's sense and hope to continue work on this topic in the coming months.