2015 is shaping up to be big year in the Brown household. Perhaps the biggest news is that my wife and I welcomed our son, Ryland, in March and I have been on Parental Leave. Sadly it is is over now and I am back on the clock! Since I am coming back right in the midst of the the Spring semester (which ends in the first week of June for LaGuardia) I will return to Administrative Assignment rather than teaching. I have been teaching nine courses a year since 2006 so it is a bit strange not being in the classroom, but I still have plenty to do!

Back in February I gave a talk ‘Introspective Consciousness and Higher-Order Thoughts’ at the CUNY Cognitive Science Speaker Series and there was a lot of very helpful discussion. In that talk I tried to extend some of the things I have said about higher-order theories and phenomenal consciousness to introspection. These ideas were all in the early stages and I plan to blog a bit about the discussion and eventually finish writing up a paper on this topic. For now, if anyone is interested, here are the Keynote slides that I used. I am also working on my paper/presentation ‘Two Concepts of Phenomenal Consciousness’ for a conference in Taiwan coming up in August in honor of David Rosenthal. And something else I am very excited about is that I have been asked to write an article for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness. This isn’t due until early in 2016 but I would like to get a rough draft up before the summer in the hope of getting some feedback.

Teaching-wise I also have a lot of interesting projects to work on. I plan to finally record a set of videos for my Hybrid/Online Logic and Philosophy course. I am teaching this course in the summer and I hope to have most of the videos completed by then (course begins in mid-June). I have made a couple of videos in the past for this course but I have never been happy with them. They were (hastily) made to supplement the lecture in class while I was away at a a conference in the Spring of 2013 (the APA maybe? I forget). I want to make a complete series of them and plan to use the Hurley textbook I usually use (and which I had in my first logic course). Doing these videos will be challenging since I haven’t found a way to make them that works well. A lot of the videos I have seen online either resort to recording in class lectures, or to showing a close up of the hand of the person while they write on paper. Those who know me know that my handwriting is terrible and it would really be a terrible idea for me to engage in handwriting on camera! Keynote has the logical notation but doing truth tables and Venn diagrams will be difficult. I am still thinking about what the best thing to do here is so any ideas would be welcome.

Also during the summer I am scheduled to teach Introduction to Neuroscience at LaGuardia. We use Brain and Behavior by Kolb and I am very excited to jump into it.

Looking past the spring/summer I also have some exciting projects and announcements coming up in the fall semester but first things first!