I am a philosopher of mind with a strong background in Continental philosophy in general and phenomenology in particular. So although my research primarily concerns issues current in the contemporary Anglo-American analytic tradition, my treatment of these issues typically reflects Continental perspectives. My dissertation and early research concerned the philosophical foundations of artificial intelligence, particularly the critiques of AI advanced by thinkers such as J. R. Lucas, Joseph Weizenbaum, John Searle and Hubert Dreyfus. The most interesting of these, in my view, is the Heidegger inspired work of Dreyfus and John Haugeland, which I interpreted as calling into question the representational theory of intentionality assumed in AI. In my dissertation and subsequent publications I tried to extend their work in the direction of a non-representational theory of intentionality, drawing not only on Husserl and Heidegger, but on some then new developments in AI, particularly the robotics work of Rodney Brooks and his students.
My current research grew out of this interest in robotics. Ultimately, robots must be able to negotiate the cultural world of artifacts and built environments. This means dealing not only with the natural features of things, but with their functional features; and it requires participation in the socially mediated activities involved in the production and use of material culture. But how do we do this? There is virtually no philosophical literature dealing with any aspect of this question. Function theory in philosophy is tailored to questions about biological function; and action theory has historically focused on questions about the nature of intentions and individual intentional action, with no particular reference to material culture. My current research is aimed at filling in these lacunae in function theory and action theory.