Michael Brownstein
Michael
Brownstein
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Phone number
917.658.2684
Room number
8.63.19
Education

Please see CV

Bio

Michael Brownstein’s research focuses on feelings, thoughts, and actions that are hard to explain in terms of intentions, deliberations, and one’s conscious sense of self.  Brownstein integrates empirical research with philosophical theorizing, with particular emphasis on understanding “implicit attitudes.”  He has worked on questions having to do with identity and responsibility for unintended actions and has investigated the “ethics of automaticity,” focusing both on how agents can regulate their unwanted attitudes and biases and also whether, and how, one’s “mere” inclinations and habits can ever become reliable guides toward ethical action.

Brownstein has published on these topics, both as sole and co-author, in Noûs, Synthese, Review of Philosophy and Psychology, Mind and Language, Philosophical Studies, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and other journals.  He is author of a mongraph, The Implicit Mind: Cognitive Architecture, the Self, and Ethics, and is co-editor with Jennifer Saul of a two-volume series, Implicit Bias and Philosophy.

Having attended Deep Springs College and Columbia University, Brownstein received his PhD from Penn State in 2009.  He is now Assistant Professor of Philosophy at John Jay College/CUNY.  For the academic year 2014-2015, he is a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, MA, and a Research Fellow at the American Council of Learned Societies

Scholarly Work

Please see CV