Current teaching:
Philosophy of Science: Explanation and Reduction
Philosophy of Language
Some previous teaching:
Perceptual experience
Art, values, and mind
Philosophical Foundations of Cognitive Science
Rationality and change in science
Persons, Minds, and Bodies
Issues in Epistemology: Epistemic norms
Additional information about my teaching can be found here.
Dustin Stokes
Current research:
Perception and cognition
I am interested in the relation between sense perception and cognition, and how psychology and neuroscience can inform our philosophical theories of this relation. I am currently interested in the possibility of cognitive penetrability: the possibility that mental states like belief or desire may influence perceptual experience (how we see things, hear things, etc.), and the relevance of this (possible) phenomenon for epistemology and cognitive science.
The Senses
I am part of an international, interdisciplinary research group,The Network for Sensory Research, see here. I also co-organized, along with two of my Toronto colleagues, a multi-disciplinary research project on the senses, culminating in a volume of new papers entitled Perception and its Modalities. You can check out the project here.
Imagination
Imagination plays an important role in our experiences of art, in the construction of theories, and in everyday reasoning. I am interested in philosophical and psychological accounts of our imaginative capacities, and how these capacities differ from other mental capacities.
Creative thought and behaviour
Despite its importance to art, science, and ordinary problem solving, creativity is a relatively neglected research topic in philosophy and cognitive science. My research employs both traditional philosophical analysis and cognitive scientific methodologies in hopes of reviving research interest in creativity, and hopefully shedding light on a remarkable feature of human thought and behaviour.
I am a philosopher at the University of Toronto. I work primarily in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. My research includes work on perception, imagination, and creative thought and behaviour.