Felipe De Brigard
Duke University, Department of Philosophy and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
Felipe De Brigard is the Fuchsberg-Levine Family Associate Professor of Philosophy, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, and faculty member at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University, where he directs the Imagination and Modal Cognition Laboratory. Combining functional neuroimaging, clinical neuropsychology, and analytic philosophy of mind, his research investigates how episodic memory and counterfactual simulation share a common constructive neural architecture.
With Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, De Brigard co-directs the Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy (SSNAP) at Duke and co-edited Neuroscience and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2022) and its sequel Neuroscience and Philosophy II (MIT Press, 2026). The 2026 volume pairs philosophers and neuroscientists across 11 co-authored chapters examining split-brain agency, aphantasia and sensory imagery, the geometry of neural representations, and moral cognition.
De Brigard is placed in the Functionalist cohort because his cognitive neuroscience program treats memory, self-projection, and conscious imagery as functional simulation mechanisms implemented by distributed cortical networks. By showing that remembering the past and simulating possible futures rely on the same constructive relational machinery, his work informs how self-models maintain temporal continuity across changing states.
Known for. Memory and Mental Time Travel (2023), episodic counterfactual thinking, co-director of Duke SSNAP, co-editor of Neuroscience and Philosophy I and II (MIT Press, 2022, 2026)
Coverage on this site
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Felipe De Brigard is listed with the other functionalists and computationalists, who hold that what matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.