Welcome to my website, my name is Craig French. I'm an AHRC funded Ph.D Student in the Philosophy Department at UCL. I am also the Teaching Assistant for Greek Philosophy. From September 2010 I will join UCL's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience for a year to do cross-disciplinary research.

In my Ph.D thesis I aim to give an account of the nature of Perceptual Knowledge. I work mainly on the metaphysics and epistemology of perception, and practical (e.g., moral) philosophy. I also have a strong interest in various areas of the history of philosophy. The perspective I take is that the epistemology of perception should concentrate on a special class of reasons. Doing the epistemology of perception in this way enables us to formulate questions about what is required at the level of the metaphysics of perception. My supervisor this summer is Professor Christopher Peacocke.

My MPhil.Stud Thesis is `Seeing Objects and Spatial Perception'. My supervisor was Professor Paul Snowdon. You can read the submitted version here - any comments will of course be greatly appreciated!

Below you can download some of my work if you wish, perhaps more interesting are the links to friends' websites on the right. For more information about my academic exploits my CV is here.

• The Phenomenal Presence of Spatiality
  • Phenomenal Presence, June 2010, University of Fribourg
• Comments on James Stazicker's: ``If 'attention alters appearance', Do We Know What The World Is Really Like?''
  • London-Berkeley Conference, May 2010, Institute of Philosophy, University of London
• Visual Differentiation and Spatial Perception
  • MindGrad, December 2009, Warwick University
• Visual Differentiation and Spatial Perception
  • Graduate Conference, December 2009, Institute of Philosophy, University of London
• Peacocke on Awareness and Knowledge of Mental Action
  • Mental Actions Research Seminar, November 2009, UCL
• Reddy on Experiencing Attention
  • Philosophy of Psychology Research Seminar, November 2009, Heythrop College
• Is Simplicity of a Theory of Meaning an Alethic Virtue?
  • Graduate Conference on Meaning and Truth, October 2009, University of Amsterdam
• Simplicity and the Metaphysics of Meaning
  • CMM Graduate Conference on Metaphysics, September 2009, University of Leeds
• Incomplete Definite Descriptions and Indeterminacy
  • OpenMinds, July 2009, University of Manchester
• Testimony and Memory as Generative Sources of Knowledge
  • OpenMinds, June 2008, University of Manchester
• Testimony as a Generative Source of Knowledge
  • London-Berkeley Conference, May 2008, Institute of Philosophy, University of London

My research interests are in Metaphysics & Epistemology, Philosophy of Mind & Psychology, and the History of Philosophy, but I am interested in all areas of philosophy. I am working on various things at the moment, including the following papers (more drafts soon)

• The Phenomenal Presence of Spatiality (06/06/2010)
• Simplicity and the Metaphysics of Meaning (Update 03/09/2009)
• Testimony as a Generative Source of Knowledge (pdf) (Update 22/04/2009)
• Gail Fine on Inquiry in the Meno

Comments of course are very welcome. You can read some of my book reviews here (the first two are published in the Heythrop Journal (Vol. 50, no. 2, 2009), the third is forthcoming, and the fourth was published in BJUP.)

• Review of Kant's Aesthetic Epistemology, by Fiona Hughes
• Review of Kant and Skepticism, by Michael N. Forster
• Review of the Cambridge Companion to Quine, edited by Roger F. Gibson Jnr.
• Review of Creation, Evolution and Meaning, by Robin Attfield

I am the TA for second year undergraduate Greek philosophy at UCL. I am also an undergraduate tutorial assistant for undergraduates at UCL and Heythrop college. In tutorials I teach various things including: Descartes' Meditations, Hume on Causation, Plato's Meno, Plato on Deomcracy in the Republic, Parfit on Personal Identity. At Heythrop I tutor in Epistemology and History of Modern Philosophy. I'm also an online tutor for the Oxford University Dept. of Continuing Education.