Donovan Wishon

Associate Professor of Philosophy

Email:
dwishon@olemiss.edu
Office Location:
103 Bryant Hall
Phone:
662-915-7020
Website:
Personal Website

Donovan Wishon is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and a faculty member for the neuroscience minor. He regularly teaches Introduction to Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Personal Identity and the Self, Philosophy of Language, and Nineteenth Century Philosophy.

Research Interests

Wishon's central research interests are in philosophy of mind, history of analytic philosophy, philosophy of language, and history and philosophy of psychology.

Biography

Donovan Wishon, Associate Professor of Philosophy and faculty member for the neuroscience minor, earned his Ph.D. at Stanford University. Professor Wishon’s current research focuses on Bertrand Russell’s changing theories about the place of mind in the natural world. Among other things, his recent work sheds new light on Russell’s ideas about sensation and perception, the scope and limits of introspective knowledge, the role of conscious awareness in our thought and talk, and the relationship between the mind and the brain. Wishon is also recognized as a leading expert on "neutral monism”—the view that the universe consists entirely of transitory space-time events which are, in themselves, neither mental nor material, but which compose “minds” and “matter” when organized into complex psychological and/or physical causal systems. Wishon’s co-edited volume Acquaintance, Knowledge, and Logic was awarded the 2016 Bertrand Russell Society Book Prize. He has organized several academic conferences at UM on Conscious Thought and Thought about Consciousness, The Semantics and Ethics of Racial Language, Shakespeare and Philosophy, and the centenary of Bertrand Russell’s popular book The Problems of Philosophy. In Spring of 2022, he was a Visiting Professor of Bertrand Russell and the History of Analytic Philosophy at McMaster University and a visiting researcher at The Bertrand Russell Research Centre.