I'm Ben Phillips. I'm an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at Arizona State University. My research focuses on various issues in moral psychology, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. At the moment, I'm mainly working on two topics: the philosophy and psychology of dehumanization; and the relation between consciousness and selfhood. You can contact me at bsphilli@asu.edu.
Dehumanization
Draft manuscript, Diagnosing Disgareement in Dehumanization Research, with Alexander Landry and Katrina Fincher: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/jpkr5_v2
Draft manuscript, The Cognitive Structure of Dehumanization, (available upon request)
2025, Dehumanization. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
2023, Normative Dehumanization and The Ordinary Concept of a True Human. Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, 5, 100155 (for special issue on dehumanization, edited by Alexander Landry & Katrina Fincher)
2022, “They’re Not True Humans”: Beliefs About Moral Character Drive Denials of Humanity. Cognitive Science, 46(2), e13089.
Social Cognition/Moral Psychology
In progress, Empirical paper on causal reasoning and attitudes towards climate action
In progress, Empirical paper on how interacting with AI shapes beliefs about what it means to be human
Draft manuscript, Paper on essentialism and natural-kind categorization, with Angel Pinillos, Eleonore Neufeld, and Bob Rehder (available upon request)
2022, Shared Intentionality and the Representation of Groups; or, How To Build a Socially Adept Robot. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
2022, Entitativity and Implicit Measures of Social Cognition. Mind & Language, 37(5), 1030–1047.
2022, The Roots of Racial Categorization. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 13, 151–175.
2021, Seeing Seeing. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 102(1), 24–43.
2019, The Evolution and Development of Visual Perspective Taking. Mind & Language, 34(2), 183–204.
Philosophy of Perception
2019, The Shifting Border Between Perception and Cognition. Noûs, 53(2), 316–346.
2017, Inscrutability and Visual Objects. Synthese , 194(8), 2949–2971.
2016, Contextualism About Object-Seeing. Philosophical Studies, 173(9), 2377–2396.
Consciousness
2014, Indirect Representation and the Self-Representational Theory of Consciousness. Philosophical Studies, 167(2), 273–290.
Philosophy of Language
2012, Modified Occam’s Razor. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 90(2), 371–382.