Tim Crane

Tim Crane is Pro-Rector for Foresight and Analysis and Professor of Philosophy at CEU. Before coming to CEU he was Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Peterhouse from 2009. Before that he taught at UCL for 19 years, and founded the Institute of Philosophy in the University of London as its first Director in 2005. He was educated at the Universities of Durham, York and Cambridge, where he obtained his PhD in 1989.

Crane is the author of many articles in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics, and of the following books: The Mechanical Mind (1995, 3rd edition 2016), Elements of Mind (2001), The Objects of Thought (2013), Aspects of Psychologism (2014) and The Meaning of Belief: Religion from an Atheist's Point of View (2017). He was the editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and the philosophy consultant editor for the TLS.

His work has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish and Swedish.

Crane has defended a conception of the mind which rejects both scientistic reductionism and the idea that philosophy of mind should be insulated from science, and he has argued that intentionality — the mind's direction on its objects, or its representational power — is the essential feature of the mind. He is currently working on the nature of the unconscious, and on the nature of belief.