Melinda Hogan

BA (UC Berkeley), MA (UWisconsin-Madison), PhD (UWisconsin-Madison)
Melinda Hogan
Phone: 604.599.2189
Surrey Office: Fir 309
Richmond Office: R2674

Dr. Melinda Hogan received her Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of California, Berkeley. She has completed her MA and PhD at the University Wisconsin-Madison.

 

Courses taught

  • PHIL 1100 Introduction to Philosophy
  • PHIL 1150 Introduction to Formal Logic
  • PHIL 2106 Ancient Greek Philosophy
  • PHIL 2215 Metaphysics
  • PHIL 3101 20th Century Analytic Philosophy
  • PHIL 3220 Empiricism
  • PHIL 3425 Language and Meaning
  • PHIL 3430 Philosophy of Mind: Consciousness
  • PHIL 3900 Honours Research and Thesis I
  • PHIL 4215 Topics in Metaphysics
  • PHIL 4430 Topics in Philosophy of Mind

Areas of Interest

I work primarily on issues at the intersection of philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. I also have an interest in the development of early analytic philosophy, philosophy of biology, Plato, Kant, and the philosophy of social science. My research focus is the problem of intentionality. This is the problem of explaining how our thoughts can point to things outside themselves, representing the world (or helping us to represent the world) accurately or (all too often) inaccurately. The background assumption of my work is that meaning must be, in one way or another, fully part of the natural world, not a supernatural world. This means that natural phenomena such as information, causation and biological functions are in the toolbox as factors in the production of mental representations. Other areas of interest include comparing models for the second-order knowledge we have of our own mental states, and discovering what light these models shed on the nature of conscious awareness. Finally, since about 2012, I have been working on a topic that takes me into value theory a bit. I am exploring different conceptions of what privacy is, and the ways in which privacy is related to autonomy, intimacy, communication, social relations and so on.

 

Scholarly Work

  • Melinda Hogan (2006). Dan Lloyd, Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness. Philosophy in Review 25 (1): 49-53.
  • Melinda Hogan (2005) H. P. Grice. Dictionary of Twentieth Century British Philosophers. Thoemmes Press.
  • Melinda Hogan (2003). Brute Error Without Sinn: Identity Claims in the Phaedo and in Frege. In Naomi Reshotko (ed.), Desire, Identity, and Existence: Essays in Honor of T.M. Penner.
  • Melinda Hogan (2002) On Woods et al., Argument: Logic, Critical Thinking and the Fallacies. Philosophical Books 43, 2002, pp. 43-46.
  • Melinda Hogan & R. Martin (2001). Introspective Misidentification: An I for an I. In Andrew Brook & R. DeVidi (eds.), Self-Reference and Self-Awareness. John Benjamins Press.
  • Melinda Hogan (1997). Dretske on Naturalizing the Mind. Review of Metaphysics 51 (2): 414-416.
  • Melinda Hogan (1996). Kant and the Mind. Review of Metaphysics 49 (4): 915-916.
  • Melinda Hogan (1994). What is Wrong with an Atomistic Account of Mental Representation. Synthese 100 (2): 307-27.
  • Melinda Hogan (1992). Natural Kinds and Ecological Niches -- Response to Johnson's Paper. Biology and Philosophy 7 (2): 203-208.