Representing Representation - Professor José Zalabardo (UCL Philosophy

Inaugural Lecture - Professor José Zalabardo (UCL Philosophy) The representation of the world provided by the natural sciences leaves mental phenomena out of the picture. A comprehensive representation of the world would have to overcome this limitation. This requires, among other things, explaining mental representation — our ability to represent things in consciousness as being a certain way. When this is achieved, our representation of the world will represent itself. The standard approach to this task is to find a place in the natural order for relations between mental items and things in the extra-mental world. This approach is doomed to failure. The only viable approach to explaining mental representation is to describe our cognitive activity involving the conscious episodes in which we see ourselves as representing the world. The consequences of this approach are not well understood. José Zalabardo is Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Philosophy Department. He joined UCL in 2000, from the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Introduction to the Theory of Logic (2000), Scepticism and Reliable Belief (2012) and Representation and Reality in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (forthcoming). He was born in Madrid and educated at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, the University of St Andrews and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.