Gary Hatfield

Gary Hatfield received a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin—Madison in 1979, then taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkins before coming to Penn in 1987. He works in the history of modern philosophy, the philosophy of psychology, theories of vision, and the philosophy of science. In 1990 he published The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from Kant to Helmholtz; his book on Descartes and the Meditations appeared in 2003 (second edition, 2014); Perception and Cognition: Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology was published in 2009. In 2012, an edited volume (co-edited with the psychologist Sarah Allred) arising from an IRCS workshop on the constancies appeared: Visual Experience. The revised edition of his translation of Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics appeared in 2004.

Hatfield is a member of the MindCORE initiative, the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and the Center for Neuroaesthetics. He has directed dissertations in history of philosophy, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy and history of science. He has long been fascinated by visual perception and the mind–body problem.