Nicholas Silins

Professor

218 Goldwin Smith Hall
nico.silins@cornell.edu

Education

Oxford University, D.Phil in Philosophy, 2004

Oxford University, B.Phil in Philosophy, 2001

Princeton University, B.A. in Comparative Literature, magna cum laude, 1999

Departments and programs

Philosophy

Affiliated Colleges

College of Arts and Sciences

Overview

Professor Silins works mainly in epistemology and the philosophy of mind, and has primarily published about the epistemology of perception, self-knowledge, consciousness, and attention. He also has research interests in cognitive science, aesthetics, and classical Asian philosophy. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in all of these areas, and he has supervised graduate students working in many of them.

He joined the Sage School in Fall 2006, after completing a Bersoff Fellowship at New York University. He has also been a Fellow at the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University, and an Associate Professor at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.

You can find his cv and all of his published papers here.

Research Focus

Epistemology, esp. perception
Philosophy of mind, esp. consciousness, attention and self-knowledge
Aesthetics
Classical Asian Philosophy

Publications

Selected

What is consciousness? Must we always be aware of our own conscious states?

2024 “The Conscious Theory of Higher-Orderness”, Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind

forthcoming “Speak, Memory: Dignāga, Consciousness, and Awareness”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy

How well do we know our own minds, and how exactly do we know our own minds when we do?

2020 “The Evil Demon in the Lab: Skepticism, Introspection, and Introspection of Introspection”, Synthese

2018 "The Evil Demon Inside", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

2012 “Judgment as a Guide to Belief”, in (eds.) D. Smithies and D. Stoljar, Introspection and Consciousness (OUP)

How does perception work? When and how does it justify our beliefs about the world?

2016 “Cognitive Penetration and the Epistemology of Perception”, Blackwell Compass

2015 “The Epistemology of Perception”, with Susanna Siegel, in The Oxford Handbook of Perception

2008 "Basic Justification and the Moorean Response to the Skeptic”, Oxford Studies in Epistemology

How can I sneak content about skateboarding into philosophy journals?

See my “Speak, Memory” or “Cognitive Penetration” papers above to find out