Dr. Nicholas Georgalis

Dr. Nicholas Georgalis
Distinguished Research
Professor of Philosophy
Office: Brewster A-324
252-328-6106
georgalisn@ecu.edu

Profile
My main research interests are in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language, with special interest in the areas where the two intersect. I have published two books, The Primacy of the Subjective: Foundations for a Unified Theory of Mind and Language, MIT Press, 2006, and Mind, Language, and Subjectivity: Minimal Content and the Theory of Thought, Routledge, 2015. The first introduces a novel and fundamental concept, minimal content, and demonstrates its pivotal role in a number of issues in the philosophy of mind, while the second develops a theory of thought derived from this concept and shows how it serves as a solution to a number of classic problems in the philosophy of language. Thus, it fulfills the promise of the subtitle of my 2006. I also have an abiding interest in various realism/anti-realism issues.

Publications
My published articles have appeared in several journals, including Mind, Synthese, Erkenntnis. See philpapers for list.

Education
My Ph.D. in philosophy is from the University of Chicago, M.A. in philosophy from Lehigh University, and a B.A. in mathematics from the University of Minnesota.

Teaching
My teaching over the years has included courses in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, metaphysics, 20th century analytic philosophy, philosophy of science, history of modern philosophy, and three levels of logic.

Books
Publisher’s Description: In this highly original monograph, Nicholas Georgalis proposes that the concept of minimal content is fundamental both to the philosophy of mind and to the philosophy of language. He argues that to understand mind and language requires minimal content-a narrow, first-person, non-phenomenal concept that represents the subject of an agent’s intentional state as the agent conceives it. Orthodox third-person objective methodology must be supplemented with first-person subjective methodology.

Reviews
Mind: 116 (463) (July 2007): 749-753
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: 2006.06.21

Publisher’s Description: In this monograph Nicholas Georgalis further develops his important work on minimal content, recasting and providing novel solutions to several of the fundamental problems faced by philosophers of language. His theory defends and explicates the importance of ‘thought-tokens’ and minimal content and their many-to-one relation to linguistic meaning, challenging both ‘externalist’ accounts of thought and the solutions to philosophical problems of language they inspire. The concepts of idiolect, use, and statement made are critically discussed,
and a classification of kinds of utterances is developed to facilitate the latter. This is an important text for those interested in current theories and debates on philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and their points of intersection.
Issued as paperback in 2017, hardback edition 2015, both by Routledge.

Review
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: 2015.06.15
Author’s Response to This Review