"What if the hokey-pokey IS what it's all about?"

Sample Published Articles (PDF)

1. Malebranche doctrine of Freedom/Consent
2. Malebranches distinction between General and Particular Volitions
3. Does Continuous Creation entail Occasionalism?

Philosophy Songs
The following are songs I've composed and performed in a style of which the best one can say is that it ought to be expunged completely from this earth. You listen at your peril.

1. Not-P
2. The Present King of France is Bald
3. The Category Blues
4. It's Not Lonely At The Top: The Incredible and True story Of My Life as a Dominant Monad
5. Back in the Vat

Feel free to distribute, but please cite me.
All songs © 2006
Andrew Pessin

• Early Modern Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Religion

 "I’ve always found almost everything interesting, including  the fact that almost everything is interesting. But ultimately  I gravitated towards philosophy, because in studying philosophy, one gets to learn  (and think) about pretty much almost everything else.  (There's  Philosophy of Science, of Mind, of Religion, of Literature, etc.)"

Andrew Pessin's original philosophy training and first publications were in the Philosophy of Mind.  He has two published books in this field:  Gray  Matters: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (coauthored)  and  The Twin Earth Chronicles: Twenty Years of Reflection on Hilary  Putnam's "The Meaning of 'Meaning' " (co-edited).

In the past 7 years Pessin has worked mostly in Early Modern Philosophy. He is particularly interested in a 17th-century French Cartesian named Nicolas Malebranche, who was extremely well-respected in his time but who, until recently, has been largely  neglected in English language scholarship. Pessin has written several papers on some of Malebranche's more provocative doctrines, such as "occasionalism" (the  doctrine that no minds or bodies have genuine causal powers) and "Vision  in God" (the  doctrine that perceiving material bodies involves getting into a cognitive  relationship directly with God). 

Work on these papers led him to the study of Descartes, on whom he has published two papers and now has several works in progress. Most recently he has been writing about Descartes's famous (or infamous) doctrine that God freely created the eternal truths, as well as on the (as it turns out) closely related topic of Descartes’s conception of "ideas." Pessin also recently published a paper on Leibniz’s conception of time, looking at Leibniz "through the lens" of the twentieth-century philosopher McTaggart's distinction between the A and B conceptions of time.

Pessin still considers himself a relative newcomer to Early Modern Philosophy though, and looks forward  to expanding his acquaintance with some of the other major figures of  the period.   In particular he’d like to learn more about Berkeley and Kant.

He has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals and has been active as a presenter at professional conferences.

View the philosophy department site.