Dr Thomas Joyce

 

I am a philosopher. I pursue my own private research, and fund it by teaching. I live and work in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

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I completed my Doctorate (also known as a PhD) in Philosophy under the supervision of Jonathan Dancy at the University of Reading, graduating in June 2008. Reading's philosophy department was ranked third in the UK in that year's Research Assessment Exercise.

 

Over the last 20 years I have taught philosophy in schools, colleges, and universities in the UK, and tutored many private students. Between 2004 and 2020 I was a Jacobsen Tutor for the Royal Institute of Philosophy in the UK.

 

Since 2009 I have worked independently on a project that develops my doctoral research.

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My primary research interest is in the nature and structure of rationality, and how this explains our possession of cognitive skills - for example speaking a language, recognising objects, or making logical inferences. In other words, I am interested in the psychological facts that explain our ability to think, speak, perceive, and act. The dominant theoretical tradition in philosophy, often known as intellectualism, explains these abilities by claiming that all thought is linguistic. If so, then we must think in words, to know how to do something is to know a set of facts, and all our skills can be explained by the facts we know. This view is taken for granted by every academic discipline that deals with the human mind. It also motivates the belief that computers and human minds are fundamentally the same sort of thing. I am deeply sceptical of these ideas, and I have been persuaded by objections raised by a long tradition of philosophers. My goal is to develop these objections into a coherent set of arguments that will be widely accepted.

 

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