Karen Neander, Professor of Philosophy and Philosophy

Please note: Karen has left the "Linguistics" group at Duke University; some info here might not be up to date.

Neander is Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Philosophy at Duke.  She joined the department in 2006, after holding positions in other philosophy departments in Australia and the US, including the University of Sydney, the University of Adelaide and the Australian National University, where she was a Post-Doctorial Fellow and then a Research Fellow in RSSS.  Her (1984) PhD from La Trobe University discussed the concept of mental illness and the application of biological concepts of function and malfunction to disorders of the mind.  Since then her work has primarily been in philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology and the conceptual foundations of cognitive science and neuroscience.  She has published numerous papers on the nature of functions and functional explanation, teleological and selectional explanation, mental representation and mental reference to content (especially teleosemantics), pictorial representation and consciousness.      

Contact Info:

Office Location:	201 West Duke Building, Durham, NC 27708
Office Phone:	(919) 660-3050
Email Address:
Web Page:	http://www.duke.edu/web/linguistics/index.html/~kneander

Office Hours:

To make an appointment, email Neander at kneander@duke.edu.

Specialties:

Philosophy of Mind
Philosophy of Biology
Cognitive Science

Current Ph.D. Students   (Former Students)

• Aryn Conrad  
• Adela Deanova  
• Stephen Martin  
• Whitney Kane  
• Gordon Steenbergen  
• David Barack  
• Kyle L. Motsinger  
• Daniel M Kraemer  

Recent Publications   (More Publications)

1. Neander, K, Functional analysis and the species design, Synthese, vol. 194 no. 4 (April, 2017), pp. 1147-1168, Springer Nature [doi]  [abs]
2. Neander, K, Does biology need teleology?, in The Routledge Handbook of Evolution and Philosophy (January, 2017), pp. 64-76, Routledge, ISBN 9781138789555 [doi]  [abs]
3. Neander, K, A mark of the mental: In defense of informational teleosemantics (January, 2017), pp. 1-327, ISBN 0262339862  [abs]
4. Neander, K, The methodological argument for informational teleosemantics, in How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations for Naturalism (January, 2016), pp. 121-140, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9781107055834 [doi]  [abs]
5. Neander, K, Biological Functions, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (December, 2013)