Dominic Murphy
California Inst. of Technology, USA
Fall Term 2004
The Significance of Introspection

Dominic Murphy is an assistant professor of philosophy at the California Institute of Technology, before which he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program at Washington University, St. Louis. His work concentrates on the fallout from collisions between our unscientific understanding of human nature and the various biological, cognitive, and social sciences. He is the author of Psychiatry in the Scientific Image (MIT Press 2005), which bemoans the conceptual underpinnings of contemporary psychiatry and argues for a theory of psychiatric explanation borrowed from the cognitive neurosciences. While at the Center, he began a new project which aims to critique philosophical theories of introspection in the light of theories of introspection which actually have some facts in them. Dominic is married to an Egyptologist, has one small child, and enjoys living in Southern California because he likes being able to look at ugly buildings, sit in traffic jams, and complain about the heat all at the same time.

June 2011
2010. Explanation in Psychiatry. Philosophy Compass, 5 (7): 602-610.
2010. Complex Mental Disorders: Representation, Stability and Explanation. European
Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 6: 28-42.
2010. Philosophy of Psychiatry. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.