Antonia Peacocke
· Website External Profile antoniapeacocke.com Research Areas Aesthetics Epistemology Metaphysics Philosophy of Action Philosophy of Mind Antonia Peacocke joined the Philosophy Department at Stanford as an Assistant Professor in 2019. In 2018-19, she completed a Bersoff Faculty Fellowship in the Philosophy Department at New York University. She received her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in 2018, and her A.B. from Harvard College in 2012.Stanford University · Philosophy of Education
Active 2016–2026
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About
Antonia Peacocke is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University whose research focuses on mind, action, epistemology, and aesthetics. She explores the nature of mental actions and how different types of content-attitudes can be related within thought processes. Her work addresses how a single thought can simultaneously belong to distinct content-attitude types, such as a judgment also functioning as a decision, without requiring implausible identity claims at the type level. This framework allows her to analyze intentional judgment, creative conception in art, the deeper content tagging of mental images in imagination, the performance of certain inferences, and the unification of inquiry as a process. Peacocke has recently completed a book titled Mental Means, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, which elaborates on these ideas and their implications for understanding mental actions and thought content. Her latest paper, "Inquiry and the Problem of Answering," is forthcoming in Noûs, and she actively engages in public philosophy through talks and presentations on related topics.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Philosophy
- Epistemology
- Psychology
- Law
- Sociology
- Aesthetics
- Computer Science
Selected publications
Philosophy Compass · 2021 · 32 citations
1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This paper summarizes the historical and contemporary importance of mental action in philosophy. Not every piece of mental activity is a mental action. A mental action is something you do mentally, and something for which you as a whole person are responsible. It can be something you do as a means to doing something else, in the case of complex (i.e. non‐basic) mental actions. The fact that you can perform complex mental actions implies that some thoughts have several contents under the…
Let’s be Liberal: An Alternative to Aesthetic Hedonism
The British Journal of Aesthetics · 2020 · 14 citations
1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Aesthetic value empiricism claims that the aesthetic value of an object is grounded in the value of a certain kind of experience of it. The most popular version of value empiricism, and a dominant view in contemporary philosophical aesthetics more generally, is aesthetic hedonism. Hedonism restricts the grounds of aesthetic value to the pleasure enjoyed in the right kind of experience. But hedonism does not enjoy any clear advantage over a more permissive alternative version of value em…
How literature expands your imagination
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research · 2020 · 13 citations
1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Many great authors claim that reading literature can expand your phenomenal imagination and allow you to imagine experiences you have never had. How is this possible? Your phenomenal imagination is constrained by your phenomenal concepts, which are in turn constrained by the phenomenology of your own actual past experiences. Literature could expand your phenomenal imagination, then, by giving you new phenomenal concepts. This paper explains how this can happen. Literature can direct you…
The Problem of Creative Intention
2025-05-02 · 4 citations
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorrespondingAbstract It’s plausible that conception of new ideas for aesthetic works involves intentional action: we ask how and why artists conceive their works, and we give them great praise for conceiving them. But such creative conception can’t just involve acting on an intention to conceive the new idea in all its particularity, since having that intention already requires you to have conceived that idea. Then what is the content of a creative intention that can guide the process of creative conception…
Phenomenal experience and the aesthetics of agency
Journal of the Philosophy of Sport · 2021-08-09 · 4 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingIn his fascinating new book Games: Agency as Art, C. Thi Nguyen claims that games construct and frame forms of human agency in a way that gives rise to a genuine aesthetics of agency.This is no con...
Awards & honors
- Bersoff Faculty Fellowship in the Philosophy Department at N…
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