Jesse Prinz

Who is Jesse Prinz?

Jesse J. Prinz is a Distinguished Professor of philosophy and director of the Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. Previous positions include the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Washington University, St. Louis, with visiting positions at University College London, California Institute of Technology, and University of Maryland, College Park. He took his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago under the direction of Murat Aydede, a philosopher of cognitive science now at the University of British Columbia.

Prinz works primarily in the philosophy of psychology and has authored several books and over 100 articles, addressing such topics as emotion, moral psychology, aesthetics and consciousness. Much of his work in these areas has been a defense of empiricism against psychological nativism, and he situates his work as in the naturalistic tradition of philosophy associated with David Hume. Prinz is also an advocate of experimental philosophy.