(personal website: https://www.sebastianwatzl.com/)
About me
I am a philosopher. My work focuses on the philosophy of mind, and my specialties are philosophical issues about attention.
My research engages central philosophical topics about the nature of the mind, perception, consciousness, freedom and action, individual and society, rationality and ethics (see here for a topical overview of my work). My approach involves philosophical reflection in close dialogue with other disciplines including biology, neuroscience, psychology, economics and other social sciences, and literary studies. Currently, the main focus of my work is connecting questions of how attention works with questions of what deserves our attention, and what good and bad forms of attention are. I lead the ERC Consolidator Grant funded project called ‘GOODATTENTION’, and also manage the project Salient Solutions. Responding ethically to the attention crisis funded by the Norwegian Research Council. In the past, I co-lead an interdisciplinary Convergence Environment at UiO:Life Science on Consciousness, and I'm involved in research on Artificial Intelligence (e.g. I did some work on the ethics of AI in the military and currently participate in work on Attention in Epistemic Planning)
After an MA in biology at Humboldt University Berlin (focusing on honey bee navigation and computational neuroscience), I received an MA in philosophy from New York University and a PhD in philosophy from Columbia University. I came to Oslo after a postdoc at the interdisciplinary Mind-Brain-Behavior program at Harvard University. I have been visiting professor at LMU Munich, and Umeå University. I have received a Young Talented Researchers Grant from the Norwegian Research Council, won the Sister Dals Resesarch Prize, and I was a core-group member of the Norwegian Centre of Excellence CSMN. Before starting the work on my current grants, I was co-founder and head of the Center for Philosophy and the Sciences (CPS).
Pronouns: He/Him
CV
[Open PDF]
What is attention? How does attention shape consciousness? In an approach that engages with foundational topics in the philosophy of mind, the theory of action, psychology, and the neurosciences this book provides a unified and comprehensive answer to both questions. Sebastian Watzl shows that attention is a central structural feature of the mind. The first half of the book provides an account of the nature of attention. Attention is prioritizing, it consists in regulating priority structures. Attention is not another element of the mind, but constituted by structures that organize, integrate, and coordinate the parts of our mind. Attention thus integrates the perceptual and intellectual, the cognitive and motivational, and the epistemic and practical. The second half of the book concerns the relationship between attention and consciousness. Watzl argues that attentional structure shapes consciousness into what is central and what is peripheral. The center-periphery structure of consciousness cannot be reduced to the structure of how the world appears to the subject. What it is like for us thus goes beyond the way the world appears to us. On this basis, a new view of consciousness is offered. In each conscious experience we actively take a stance on the world we appear to encounter. It is in this sense that our conscious experience is our subjective perspective.
What does it mean to possess knowledge about something? What kinds of things exist and can be known? How should we live? What matters and what has value? In this book, we seek to answer these questions by examining contributions from the history of philosophy, science and ethics. The book has 20 chapters divided into three parts. Part 1, Knowing, asks questions about knowledge. Part 2, Being, starts by asking about what is real. Part 3, Doing, is devoted to ethics. Every chapter has an introduction and one or in some cases two original texts written either by contemporary thinkers or by important figures from the history of philosophy and science. Each chapter is accompanied by study questions and learning goals. The aim of this book is twofold: to teach you to become a critical reader, who can identify positions, arguments, and structures in a scientific text; and to introduce you to some important positions and ideas in order to enable you to discuss the big questions raised in the book.
