Contact Andrew Pessin

"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 was in the philosophy of mind. He published several articles in this field, as well as two books: Gray Matters: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (co-authored)  and  The Twin Earth Chronicles: Twenty Years of Reflection on Hilary  Putnam's "The Meaning of 'Meaning' " (co-edited).

Subsequently Pessin has worked mostly in early modern philosophy. He is particularly interested in a 17th-century French thinker 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 now published several papers and has a book-length manuscript in progress. These address various aspects of Descartes's famous (or infamous) doctrine that God freely created the eternal truths, as well as the (as it turns out) closely related topic of Descartes’s conception of "ideas." Along the way Pessin also 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.

Most recently Pessin has published two philosophical books aimed at the general reader: The God Question: What Famous Thinkers From Plato to Dawkins Have Said About the Divine and The 60-Second Philosopher: Expand Your Mind on a Minute or so a Day!.

Visit Andrew Pessin's personal Web site, www.andrewpessin.com

View the philosophy department site.