Shaun Gallagher is an American philosopher. He holds the Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis. He has secondary appointments as Research Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the University of Hertfordshire in England, Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, and as affiliated research faculty member at the Institute of Simulation and Training at the University of Central Florida. He co-edits the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. He’s the author of several books, including How the Body Shapes the Mind, Hermeneutics and Education, The Inordinance of Time, and most recently Brainstorming (2008), and (with Dan Zahavi), The Phenomenological Mind (2008). He is editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Self (2011). In 2011 he received the Humboldt Foundation Anneliese Maier Research Award [Anneliese Maier-Forschungspreis], a five-year award to promote the internationalisation of the humanities and social sciences in Germany. Other awards include a Marie Curie Initial Training Network grant, "Towards an embodied science of intersubjectivity (TESIS)" issued by the European Commission, and a Templeton Foundation award, "Space, Science and Spirituality" (to study experiences had by astronauts during space travel).
His research focuses on phenomenology, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and hermeneutics. He received his Ph.D in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College. He also studied philosophy at Villanova University and Leuven, and economics at the State University of New York - Buffalo. He has held visiting positions at the Centre de Recherche en Epistémelogie Appliquée in Paris; the Ecole Normale Supériure, Lyon; the University of Copenhagen; and the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge. His previous positions include Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Central Florida.
In How the Body Shapes the Mind, Gallagher, drawing from phenomenology and empirical cognitive sciences, provides a detailed account of embodied cognition. His work on embodiment builds on a distinction between body image and body schema, exploring philosophical implications concerning themes of perception, social cognition, agency, and free will. More recent work focuses on questions about agency and social cognition. He develops a critique of dominant theories of social cognition and develops an approach that defends embodied interaction.