Tim Crane is Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy in the University of Cambridge and a Professorial Fellow of Peterhouse.
Tim Crane was educated at the Universities of Durham, York and Cambridge, from where he received his PhD in 1989. Before coming to Cambridge, he was Professor of Philosophy at University College London, where he taught from 1990 to 2009. He founded the Institute of Philosophy in the University of London in 2005 and was its Director until 2008. He has been an academic visitor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Australian National University, the University of Sydney, Macquarie University, the University of Copenhagen and the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study. In 2008 he was Seybert Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania.
Research
Tim Crane has worked mostly in the philosophy of mind. He has been concerned with the most general and abstract questions about the mind and its place in the natural world. He has argued for the integrity and autonomy of the category of the mental, against two kinds of critics: those who think that the category has no real unity; and those who think that the only way to give an account of the mental is to show how it is explicable in purely physical terms.
Abstract:
We often think about things that don't exist, and we seem to make judgements about the sameness and difference of such non-existent objects (Hermes is the same god as Mercury). But what does it mean to say that one non-existent object is the same as another? This question was posed by PT Geach many years ago under the label 'intentional identity'. In this talk I argue that there is no such thing as intentional identity, but nonetheless it is true that non-existent intentional objects can be the same as, or different from, other non-existent objects.