The Home Page of
Gary Hatfield

Adam Seybert Professor in Moral and Intellectual Philosophy
Sector "A" Advisor, Visual Studies
Department of Philosophy
University of Pennsylvania
Logan Hall, Rm. 433
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304
Phone #: 215-898-6346
Fax #: 215-898-5576 (cover sheet required)
E-address: hatfield (at) phil.upenn.edu

a picture appears here Gary Hatfield received the PhD from the
University of Wisconsin--Madison in 1979,
then taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkins before coming to Penn in 1987.
He works in the history of modern philosophy, the philosophy of psychology, theories of vision, and the philosophy of science. In 1990 he published The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from Kant to Helmholtz; his book on Descartes and the Meditations appeared in 2003; Perception and Cognition: Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology was published by the Clarendon Press in 2009. The revised edition of his translation of Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics appeared in 2004. He is a member of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, the Penn Perception group, and the History and Sociology of Science Graduate Group. He has directed dissertations in history of philosophy, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy and history of science. He has long been fascinated by visual perception and the mind–body problem. For further information, consult Curriculum Vitae (selected [html] or full [pdf]) and research statement.

Event Nov 12, 2011: Modern Mind: Philosophical Conversations

Program.

Office Hours (Cohen 425): Spring 2012, T/R 3-4pm, and by apptmt.
Fall 2011
Phil 423, Philosophy and Visual Perception.
Interactions between philosophy and theories of vision, drawing on classical works and contemporary readings.
Phil 600, Proseminar.
For first year doctoral students in philosophy.

Spring 2012
VLST 101, Eye, Mind & Image (TR 10:30) (with Prof. Leja)
Satisfies GenEd IV (Humanities and Social Sciences) and VII (Natural Science and Mathematics). About VLST 101.
Phil 330, Perception: Problem of the External World
Problem of the external world, drawing on classical sources and contemporary readings.

Faculty Seminars and Working Groups

Working group on the History of the Philosophy of Science

Papers in pdf format

Transparency of Mind: The Contributions of Descartes, Leibniz, and Berkeley to the Genesis of the Modern Subject, in Departure for Modern Europe: A Handbook of Early Modern Philosophy (1400-1700) , ed. by Hubertus Busche (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2011), 361–75. Key words: Modern subject, Cartesian theory of mind, transparency of consciousness, Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley, Putnam, Rorty.
The Reality of Qualia, Erkenntnis 66 (2007), 133–68. Key words: Qualia realism, phenomenal experience, dispositionalism about color, representative realism, sense-data theories, Brentano intentionality.
Did Descartes Have a Jamesian Theory of the Emotions?, Philosophical Psychology 20 (2007), 413–40. Key words: Cognitive theories of emotion, Rene Descartes, embodiment, emotions, evolution, historical methodology, instinct, mechanistic theories of behavior, mind–brain relations, passions, William James.
Kant on the Perception of Space (and Time). In Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy, ed. by Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 61–93. Key words: Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, space, intuition, Wolff, Crusius.
Introspective Evidence in Psychology. In Scientific Evidence: Philosophical Theories & Applications, ed. by Peter Achinstein (Baltimore: Johns Hopkine University Press, 2005), 259–86. Key words: introspection, psychology of perception, Wundt, Gestalt Psychology.
Sense-Data and the Mind-Body Problem. In Perception and Reality: From Descartes to the Present, ed. by Ralph Schumacher (Berlin: Mentis Verlag, 2004), 305–31. Key words: sense-data, qualia, physicalism, philosophy of mind.
Objectivity and Subjectivity Revisited: Color as a Psychobiological Property. In Colour Perception: Mind and the Physical World, ed. by Rainer Mausfeld and Dieter Heyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 187–202. Key words: color constancy, biological function of color vision.
Representation and Constraints: The Inverse Problem and the Structure of Visual Space. Acta Psychologica 114 (2003), 355–378. Key words: visual geometry, phenomenology of vision.
Psychology Old and New. In Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1870–1945, ed. by Thomas Baldwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 93–106. Key words: new psychology, psychology as a discipline, Spencer, Maudsley, Lewes, Brentano, Wundt, James.
Behaviorism and Psychology. In Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1870–1945, ed. by Thomas Baldwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 640–648. Key words: behaviorism, neobehaviorism, Watson, Singer, Holt, Perry, Tolman, Hull, Skinner, American naturalism.
Perception as Unconscious Inference. In Perception and the Physical World: Psychological and Philosophical Issues in Perception, ed. by Dieter Heyer and Rainer Mausfeld (New York: Wiley, 2002), 115–143. Key words: cognitive machinery, sophisticated content, phenomenal experience.
Sense-Data and the Philosophy of Mind: Russell, James, and Mach. Principia 6 (2002), 203–30. Key words: sense-data, qualia, philosophy of mind.
Psychology, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science: Reflections on the History and Philosophy of Experimental Psychology. Mind and Language 17 (2002), 207–232. Key words: logical empiricism, autonomy of psychology.
The Brain's "New" Science: Psychology, Neurophysiology, and Constraint. Philosophy of Science 67 (2000), S388–403. Key words: eliminative materialism, reductionism, mind and brain.
Attention in Early Scientific Psychology. In Visual Attention, ed. by R. D. Wright (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3–25. Key words: attention, early experimental psychology, Aristotle, Lucretius, Augustine, Buridan, Wolff, Hamilton, Jevons, Wundt, James.
The Cognitive Faculties. In Cambridge History of Seventeenth Century Philosophy, ed. by M. Ayers and D. Garber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 953–1002. Key words: Aristotelian theories of cognition; skepticism; new science; Molyneux's problem; optics; Suarez, Coimbrans, Rubio, Sanchez, Charron, Descartes, Hobbes, Gassendi, Cudworth, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley.
The Workings of the Intellect: Mind and Psychology. In Logic and the Workings of the Mind: The Logic of Ideas and Faculty Psychology in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. by Patricia Easton. North American Kant Society Publications 5 (Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview Publishing Co., 1997), 21–45. Key words: cognitive faculties, faculty of intellect, mental vs. psychological, psychologism, early modern epistemololgy.
Wundt and Psychology as Science: Disciplinary Transformations. Perspectives on Science 5 (1997), 349–382. Key words: Wundt, history of psychology, "new" psychology, founding of experimental psychology, psychology as a discipline, idea of a discipline.
Was the Scientific Revolution Really a Revolution in Science? In Tradition, Transmission, Transformation, ed. by Jamil Ragep and Sally Ragep, Collection de travaux de l'Academie internationale d'histoire des sciences (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 489–525. Key words: new science, natural philosophy, physics as a discipline, historiography of the scientific revolution, history of early modern philosophy.
Remaking the Science of Mind: Psychology as a Natural Science. In Inventing Human Science, ed. by Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 184–231. Key words: Wolff, Bonnet, Godart, Krüger, Hartley, Priestley, history of psychology in the 17th and 18th centuries, history of experiment in psychology, psychology as a natural science, idea of a natural science.
Philosophy of Psychology as Philosophy of Science. In PSA 1994, ed. by David Hull, Mickey Forbes, and Richard Burian, 2 vols. (East Lansing, MI: Philosophy of Science Association, 1995), 2:19–23. The introduction to a symposium of same title.
Empirical, Rational, and Transcendental Psychology: Psychology as Science and as Philosophy. In Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. by Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 200–27. Key words: Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, Christian Wolff, Christian Crusius, transcendental psychology, possibility of scientific psychology.
Metaphysics and the New Science. In Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. by David Lindberg and Robert Westman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 93–166. Key words: Scientific Revolution, science and metaphysics, metaphysics as assumption (or presupposition), metaphysics as a practice, mathematization of nature, Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes, Galileo, Cassirer, Whitehead, Burtt, Strong, Koyre.
The Senses and the Fleshless Eye: The Meditations as Cognitive Exercises. In Articles on Descartes' Meditations, ed. by Amelie Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 45–79. Key words: Descartes and Augustine, Descartes and Aristotelian theories of the senses, Descartes on training the will.
The Status of the Minimum Principle in the Theoretical Analysis of Vision. Psychological Bulletin 97 (1985), 155–186, with William Epstein. Key words: perceptual economy, minimum tendency, parallel processing, connectionism.
The Sensory Core and the Medieval Foundations of Early Modern Perceptual Theory. Isis 70 (1979), 363–384, with William Epstein. Key words: theories of vision, theories of perception, perceptual constancy, size, shape, and distance perception, visual pyramid, retinal image, Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), Pecham, Witelo, Descartes, Berkeley.
Perceived Shape at a Slant as a Function of Processing Time and Processing Load. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 3 (1977), 473–483 with William Epstein and Gerard Muise. Key words: shape constancy, slant perception, masking of 3-D stimuli, perceptual processing, allocation of attention.

On-Line Publications

Review of John Bickle (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Neuroscience, Oxford UP, 2009, in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

Papers On Line from IRCS.

The papers are compressed and formatted as postscript input to a printer. After downloading, run the unix command "gunzip" (e.g., gunzip 01-04.ps.gz or gunzip 96-05.ps.Z); "lpr" the resulting file, specifying a printer if needed (e.g., lpr -Pcogsci 01-04.ps).