Soren Schlassa

I'm a PhD candidate in the NYU Department of Philosophy and undergrad emeritus at Carleton College. I work on philosophy of cognitive science, metasemantics, and perception. My dissertation is on the question: how and why do intelligent systems like us carve the world up into objects? 

I'm interested in methodological questions in the cognitive sciences, like the nature of computation, representational format, and representation.

Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence

Barnard College, Fall '25

Logic

NYU, Fall '25

Minds and Machines

NYU, Summer '25

Philosophical Applications of Cognitive Science

NYU, Summer '22

Syllabus here.

Global Ethics (TA)

Instructor: Kwame Anthony Appiah, Spring '23

Philosophy of Language (TA)

Instructor: Matt Mandelkern, Fall '22

Philosophy of Mind (TA)

Instructor: Verónica Gómez Sánchez, Spring '22

Philosophical Applications of Cog Sci (TA)

Instructor: Michael Strevens, Fall '21

My philosophy-teaching philosophy: I really like teaching philosophy. My first goal is to get students thinking like philosophers. To me that means framing hypotheses, clarifying them, applying them to cases, revising them, and rooting out misunderstanding. I think studying philosophy is a particularly good way to practice these things. I put a lot of effort into making my classes welcoming and collaborative.

My committee is Michael Strevens, Ned Block, and Dave Chalmers.

Papers in various stages of progress:

"How to See Things"

Defends an account of what it is to visually represent objects, drawing heavily on empirical work. 

Haiku abstract:

To see things as such

Is just to organize what

One sees discretely

"The Mirroring Account of Analog Format"

Extends recent discussions of the iconic/analog/symbolic to apply to mental representations.

Technically, I have an Erdös number of 4 (Erdös - M. Kac - T. Jacobson - B. Allen - me), if you count these papers with nearly a thousand authors each. Maybe a better metric would be to weight each link by the log of the number of authors on the paper. Alas, on that definition my number goes up to 15.