Robert Gordon (Ph.D., Columbia) works primarily in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and moral psychology. For his Master's degree, he specialized in medieval and Renaissance philosophy with a thesis on Nicholas of Cusa. His doctoral dissertation was in ethics and metaethics on universalizability and analogy in moral arguments.

While teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Gordon shifted to the topic of emotions, a part of the philosophy of mind. He was one of the earliest philosophers to develop a theory that emphasized the cognitive content of emotions, particularly the types of beliefs and other mental states that cause various emotions. His work on the topic was published in the Philosophical Review, American Philosophical Quarterly, Analysis, the Journal of Philosophy, and others. These culminated to his book, The Structure of Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1987).

Gordon's current focus is on developing the simulation theory, which he introduced in 1986 and developed further in numerous articles since then. The theory holds that we understand other human beings by mentally simulating them; that is, by generating the same sorts of brain processes that guide our own behavior. Of course, we're not all in the same situation, and we're not all psychologically alike. That's where the sorts of processes that underlie pretending and imagining have to come into play so that we can "put ourselves in another's shoes."