Michael R Hicks

Since 2021, I am an associate professor (with tenure) in the philosophy department at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where I began working in 2014.

My work is primarily in the philosophy of language and mind. As the slogan from Sellars above suggests, I am convinced that the most productive approach to the questions I am interested in involves serious engagement with the history of philosophy. Recently Sellars himself has become a primary target of my research interest. But I also work in the history of analytic philosophy more generally.

One of my standing interests concerns what we might call conceptual or cognitive dynamics: I am interested in the ways in which a subject's cognitive repertoire changes over time. Most notably this happens when we learn new things. Too often, however, we think of this latter in terms of learning new facts; the most important kind of learning is better put in terms of cognitive discernment, or--my preferred terminology, borrowed from Gareth Evans--conceptual abilities. Underlying a lot of my work is the goal of conceiving of thinking as the exercise of conceptual abilities. I ask how we can categorize the relevant kinds of abilities, and how we acquire them (for instance). It is my conviction that this is a good way of approaching some central themes in Sellars too, though I have yet to make that point explicit in my work.

On this website I have:

• academic information, including my CV;

• a list of work in progress and publications