Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department
Jacob Berger earned his B.A. in philosophy at Swarthmore College in 2005 and his Ph.D. in philosophy with a concentration in cognitive science at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2013. During the 2013-2014 academic year, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. Berger taught for five years at Idaho State University before joining the faculty of Lycoming College in 2019.
Berger’s research is primarily in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Broadly speaking, he is interested in how the mind works. In particular, his research investigates how perception represents the world around us. Berger’s work also explores the nature of consciousness and the kinds of mentality that can occur outside of consciousness. Additionally, Berger is fascinated by how insights about the mind can inform inquiry in other domains such as aesthetics and ethics. Berger’s methodology is interdisciplinary, regularly engaging experimental results from psychology, neuroscience, and other fields within cognitive science. As he favors a scientific approach, he often collaborates with researchers in philosophy and other disciplines.
For more information, please visit his personal website here: https://jfberger.wixsite.com/home
Selected recent publications:
Berger, J. (2021), “Quality-Space Functionalism about Color,” The Journal of Philosophy 18(3): 138-164.
Berger, J. & Brown, R. (2021), “Conceptualizing Consciousness,” Philosophical Psychology 34(5): 637-659.
Berger, J. & Mylopoulos, M. (2021), “Default Hypotheses in the Study of Perception: A Reply to Phillips,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 28(3-4): 206-219.
Berger, J. (2020), “Perceptual Consciousness Plays No Epistemic Role,” Philosophical Issues 30(1): 7-23.
Berger, J. (2020), “Implicit Attitudes and Awareness,” Synthese 197(3): 1291-1312 .
Berger, J. & Mylopoulos, M. (2019), “On Scepticism about Unconscious Perception,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 26(11-12): 8-32.
Berger, J., Nanay, B., & Quilty-Dunn, J. (2018), “Unconscious Perceptual Justification,” Inquiry 61(5-6): 569-589.
Berger, J. (2018), “A Defense of Holistic Representationalism,” Mind & Language 33(2): 161-176.
Persuh, M., LaRock, E., and Berger, J. (2018), “Working Memory and Consciousness: The Current State of Play,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 12:78.