Current Ph.D. Students
(Candid Photo: Lyle in a relaxed moment.)
Lyle Crawford received his both a B.A. Honours (Philosophy and German) and an M.A. degree (Philosophy) from the University of Victoria, His undergraduate thesis project was on the perception of music. His M.A. thesis was on visual “filling in” effects and the nature of perceptual consciousness. Lyle is currently in his third year of the Ph.D. programme at Simon Fraser University. During his university career to date, Lyle has received many academic awards including The Anna Bertha and Frank Kluge Scholarship in Honours Philosophy, The David Kaplan Prize in Honours Philosophy, an entrance scholarship for the Ph.D. programme at SFU, and subsequently a SSHRC Doctoral Scholarship.
Lyle’s principal philosophical interests are in the areas of mind and cognitive science, evolution and biology, and metaphysics. His current research is principally on topics relating to colour vision, a monograph with Profs. Akins and Hahn as well as research project on colour-grapheme syneasthesia. Another current project, is a reply to Elliot Sober’s discussion of evolution and the design argument. His general science interests range from invertebrate biology to theoretical physics. Music, particularly Early Music (Medieval/Renaissance /Baroque), is his major non-academic interest.
Presentations and Papers. Lyle has given commentaries on papers in philosophy of biology and philosophy of mind at the Canadian Philosophical Association and Western Canadian Philosophical Association meetings. He has presented papers on philosophy of biology, philosophy of science, and metaphysics in departmental colloquia at SFU and UVic, as well as at local conferences. He recently published a commentary in the American Journal of Bioethics. In addition to teaching his own courses (Phil. 201 & Phil. 300), Lyle is also a popular guest speaker in classes throughout the department.
Simon Pollon received a B.A. Honours (Philosophy) and a B.A. (English) from the University of Regina, and a M.A. (Philosophy) from the University of Waterloo. His master’s thesis was concerned with mental representation and concepts—in particular with the problem of misrepresentation (or the "disjunction problem”) for causal/nomological theories of mental representation. Simon is now in his second year of the Ph.D. program at Simon Fraser University for which he has received a B.C. Graduate Scholarship.
Simon’s main interests are in the philosophy of mind, action theory, and the philosophy of biology. The aim of his dissertation is to work out a “biologically basic” or minimal conception of agency. On the assumption that human beings are not the only organisms that are agents, what physiological features, behavioural and representational capacities are minimally required to be an agent? Part of this project is to understand the evolutionary precursors of agency— that is, to what sorts of more basic (non-agency-conferring) physiological, behavioural (and perhaps representational) properties of organisms might have given rise to a biologically basic agency over the course of evolution. This investigation of “minimal agency” is part of a broader inquiry into the evolution of mind—of what a mind is and which organisms can be said to have them.
Tereza Hadravová, (M.A.Charles University, Prague) is a visiting student in the Philosophy Department at SFU. She is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Aesthetics at Charles University, Prague. She has also been a visiting student at American University (Washington, D.C.) and Glasgow University. Tereza’s chief interests are in cognitive and experimental aesthetics, theories of perception and the emotions, and the aesthetics of cinema. She is currently working on her Ph.D. thesis on the topic of the nature and empirical basis of aesthetic perception,
Tereza has participated at the XIXth Congress of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics in Avignon (2006) and XVIIth International Congress of Aesthetics in Ankara (2007). She has published articles on film and cognitive aesthetics, edited seminar proceedings, and co-translated Goodman's Languages of Arts into Czech. She is an editor of Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics and an organizer of an independent movie festival Film Sokolov.
Selected Publications:
“Approaching Cognitive Aesthetics”. In: Proceedings to XIX Congress of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics. Avignon: 2006.
“Filmosophy: Re-Imagining the Movie Image”. In: Vertigo 3/8, Spring 2008. [a review of Daniel Frampton's Filmosophy]
“Echo Objects”. In: Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics 1/1, 2008
Current M.A. Students
Photos and bios coming soon....
Jason Leardi (B.A. U. Mass)
Zhengzhi (Jane) Chen
Former M.A. Students
Trey Boone is now in the Ph.D Program in The History and Philosophy of Science Department at Pittsburgh.
Trey did his undergraduate degree (BA, Philosophy, 2007) at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR. He began the philosophy MA program at SFU in the fall of 2007, and plans to complete his degree in the Fall term of 2009.
Trey’s primary interests are in the philosophy of science and mind. Trey's “professional paper”, completed as a part of his MA was entitled "The Binding Problem: A Dissolution and Recasting". He was awarded an SFU Graduate Fellowship for the Summer Term (2009) to complete this project.
Nazim Keven is now a Ph.D. student in the PNP program at Washington University
Nazim did his undergraduate work in Philosophy at Bilkent University in Turkey, having switched from an Engineering program at Yildiz Technical University.
Nazim's professional paper for the MA program was entitled "Monkey See, Monkey Do: An Evolutionary Perspective on Neonate 'Imitation' ". This paper re-examined the now-famous research of Andrew Meltzoff on infant imitation. Meltzoff claimed that human neonates, within the first hours of life, are capable of imitating facial expressions, expressions such as sticking out one’s tongue or opening the mouth wide. These results that have been adopted, for the most part, uncritically by philosophers and most psychologists, and used in support of many theories, from ethical theories to explanations of how we understand the minds of other people. At present, Nazim, Lyle Crawford and Kathleen Akins are collaborating on two follow-up papers, one of which presents an alternative explanation of Metlzoff's results, the second one of which points to methodological problems with the original experimentals.
Apart from philosophy, Nazim is an outdoorsy person, who especially enjoys mountaineering, biking, photography, traveling — and now motorcycle riding.
Ryan Ogilvie is now a Ph.D. student in philosophy at the University of Maryland. He completed his B.A. degree in philosophy at Simon Fraser University in 2007. Late in his degree, Ryan became intrigued with ways in which findings from psychology, artificial intelligence and neuroscience could be used to understand philosophical problems about the nature of mind. As a result, he decided to enroll in the M.A. program to broaden his knowledge of the area, prior to applying to Ph.D programmes. He received a Simon Fraser University Graduate Fellowship for the Summer Term of 2009.
Ryan's professional paper was called "Actions, IllusionsThe Limits of Conscious Visual Experience". This paper discussed the philosophical implications that arise from a widely held view in the neuroscience of vision—the view that there is an anatomical and functional distinction between the dorsal and ventral visual processing streams. On this view, the dorsal stream processes action-relevant information while the ventral stream (or processes information about the features of the visual scene, resulting in conscious visual perception. Although recent research has called into question whether these two paths are functionally distinct, Ryan’s project questions the assumption that this functional division also marks distinction between processes that support visual consciousness and those that do not.