Dr Dan Cavedon-Taylor

I joined the Open University in 2019, having previously worked at the universities of Southampton, Oxford, St Andrews and Antwerp. 

I received my PhD in 2011 from Birkbeck, University of London. My thesis, on how pictures function as sources of knowledge, was funded by the inaugural British Society of Aesthetics PhD Studentship and a Royal Institute of Philosophy Jacobsen Fellowship. I also spent time at the University of Oxford as a visiting student.

After my PhD, most of my research moved into the philosophies of mind, perception, psychology and psychiatry. I'm writing a book on mental imagery and most of my current research concerns the roles played by imagery in human cognition, including mental health conditions like depression, bipolar disorder and social phobia. Some representative publications in this area include:

• Mental Imagery: Greasing the Mind's Gears - Philosophers' Imprint 2023.
• Aphantasia and Psychological Disorder: Current Connections, Defining the Imagery Deficit and Future Directions – Frontiers in Psychology (Psychopathology) 2022.
• Predictive Processing and Perception: What does Imagining have to do with it? – Consciousness and Cognition 2021.
• Mental Imagery: Pulling the Plug on Perceptualism – Philosophical Studies 2021.
• Untying the Knot: Imagination, Perception and their Neural Substrates – Synthese 2021.

From 2012-2021 I was Treasurer of the British Society of Aesthetics.

I am an Associate Editor for the Australasian Journal of Philosophy.

​I currently supervise PhD students in aesthetics, the philosophy of mind and history of philosophy. I have slim capacity to take on additional doctoral students, but would be happy to hear from potential applicants whose research directly alligns with my own.

Research interests

Philosophy of mind 

Aside from mental imagery, I also work on perception (including non-visual senses) and various mental health conditions. Representative publications:

• Must Depression be Irrational? – Synthese 2024.
• High-Level Perception and Multimodal Perception – In Logue and Richardson (ed.) Purpose and Procedure in Philosophy of Perception. Oxford University Press. 2021.
• Odors, Objects and Olfaction – American Philosophical Quarterly 2018.
• Naive Realism and the Cognitive Penetrability of Perception – Analytic Philosophy 2018.
• Touching Voids – Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2017.
• Perceptual Content and Sensorimotor Expectations – Philosophical Quarterly 2011.

Deepfakes and Photographs

Following on from my PhD, I've written a great deal about photographic pictures and some of that research--particularly on deepfakes--shades into social epistemology. Representative publications:

• Deepfakes: A Survey and Introduction to the Topical Collection – Synthese 2024.
• Designed to Deceive? The Philosophy of Deepfakes – Special issue of Synthese 2023.
• Life Through a Lens: Aesthetic Virtue and Salience vs Kantian Disinterest – In Archer (ed.) Salience: A Philosophical Inquiry. Routledge. 2022.
• Arrangement and Timing: Photography, Causation and Anti-Empiricist Aesthetics – Ergo 2021.
• Photographically Based Knowledge – Episteme 2013.

Other topics

I've also written some things in philosophy of religion and mainstream epistemology. 

Teaching interests

• Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
• Early Modern Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Normative Ethics
• Metaphysics
• Philosophy of Religion
• Philosophy of Mind and Psychology

I have written teaching materials for DD113 Global Challenges: Social Science in Action on global justice and for DA223: Investigating Philosophy on the mind-body problem. I give lectures on consciousness and the emotions for Philosophy MA students and run forum activities on collective knowledge for students of A333: Key Questions in Philosophy. I am currently chairing a rewrite of the latter module where I am also writing teaching material on trusting experts and conspiracy theories.

Impact and engagement

I have featured on the BBC News Channel programme Click where I was interviewed on the malicious use of fabricated, photorealistic images. I have also given public talks at art galleries and written for various blogs.