contact: joshualshep@gmail.com

A bit about me:

In May of 2023 I began as ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Leading up to this, I did a PhD in Philosophy at Florida State University, working with Al Mele on consciousness and action.

I then took a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. While at Oxford, I was subsequently a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College, and a Wellcome Trust Fellow. And I published my first book, Consciousness and Moral Status, with Routledge.

I left Oxford to become Assistant Professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and in 2020 I became Associate Professor at Carleton.

Simultaneously, I began a stint at the University of Barcelona, where from 2018-2023 I was the PI on an ERC funded project, Rethinking Conscious Agency.

During this time I held an Azrieli Global Scholar fellowship from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), and my second book, The Shape of Agency: Control, Action, Skill, Knowledge, was published with Oxford University Press.

My research interests target a number of issues at the intersection of philosophy of mind and action, psychology, neuroscience, and practical ethics. I have always been interested in consciousness and in agency, and in how they relate to each other. Lately, I have become interested in questions about the functions of consciousness, and in questions about how we might test for, and come to know, who is and who is not conscious.

I have also become increasingly interested in the mechanisms and capacities that enable control over aspects of the mind – capacities for cognitive control and metacognition, for example. I am also interested in how we manage to produce behavior that sits on the edge of control, like creativity and improvisational behavior.

Finally, I maintain an interest in the moral significance of consciousness, and in practical implications of consciousness's moral signficance.