Jérôme Dokic

ACADEMIC BIOGRAPHY

I am Professor ("directeur d'études") of Cognitive Philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (part of PSL Research University), a member of Institut Jean-Nicod in Paris, and a member of Academia Europaea. I have written many articles on perception, memory, imagination, and metacognition. My books include La philosophie du son with Roberto Casati (Philosophy of sound, Editions Chambon, 1994), L’esprit en mouvement. Essai sur la dynamique cognitive (Mind in motion. Essay on cognitive dynamics, CSLI, Stanford, 2001), Qu’est-ce que la perception? (What is perception?, Editions Vrin, 2nd edition 2009) and Ramsey. Truth and Success with Pascal Engel (Routledge, 2002).

RESEARCH

One strand of my current research concerns the affective phenomenology accompanying our ordinary experience of the world, which involves feelings of presence, familiarity and confidence and their opposites, such as feelings of absence, or Freud’s feeling of uncanniness. I study these affective phenomena in ordinary perception, but also in pathological cases (derealisation, Parkinson’s disease, Capgras’s and Fregoli’s syndromes) and with respect to modified, displaced or extended perception (virtual reality, sensory substitution and augmentation).

A second strand is about the relationship between mental states and the self. In particular, I am interested in the perspectival dimension of perception, imagination and memory, i.e., the nature and role of the “point of view” involved in our mental states (for instance, the perspectival differences between field and observer memories).

I am currently involved in a 3-year ANR research project on cognitive aesthetics (“SublimAE”), which deals with transformations of self-representations, at various cognitive levels, in intense aesthetic experiences (such as experiences of the sublime).