Greetings -- I am a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati.  My work sits primarily at the intersection of the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of cognitive science, and experimental psychology.  While my foundation is in philosophy, my research is highly interdisciplinary and at times involves designing and conducting empirical psychological experiments.
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My research explores questions such as:

• What is imagination, and what does it allow us to do?
• What can contemporary AI systems teach us about human thought?
• What is the nature and purpose of "inner speech"?
• How does imagination relate to episodic memory?
• What is the relationship between language and abstract thought? 
• How do we come to know our own minds?

My book, Explaining Imagination, was published by Oxford University Press in September 2020.  It's available free as a PDF download, thanks to a TOME grant from the University of Cincinnati.  It's also available in hardcopy at the usual places.  You can find out more about the book--and reactions to it--on this site's Explaining Imagination page.

I am currently at work on a book provisionally titled The Stepwise Mind: Reasoning, Imagination, and the Lessons of Generative AI.  It explores the implications contemporary AI models have for several traditional debates in the philosophy of cognitive science.  These include the nature and number of mental "formats," the role of language in reasoning, the connectionism versus classicism debate, the relationship of episodic to semantic memory, and how imagination is contrained in its epistemic uses.

Contact: Langland-Hassan at uc dot edu
​Here is how I pronounce my name