Tomasz Szubart is a research and teaching assistant at the Institute of Philosophy and Cognitive Science, University of Szczecin. He received his PhD in Philosophy from Jagiellonian University in 2023 with a dissertation on musical meaning in the light of cognitive aesthetics of music. His research lies at the intersection of philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of music, evolutionary psychology, and teleosemantics.
He investigates how musical meaning can be understood within naturalistic frameworks, especially in relation to emotion, representation and signaling. He is the author of the book “Music and Mind: The Problem of Musical Meaning in the Light of Cognitive Aesthetics of Music” (in Polish) and has published on musical representation, cognitive neuroscience approaches to musical meaning, evolutionary accounts of music, and embodied theories of musical understanding.
In 2025 he held the Bednarowski Trust Fellowship at the University of Aberdeen for the project “Music - Signaling or Representing? Natural Information and Lessons from Other Species”. His current project develops a teleosemantic account of musical meaning across biological, cognitive, and cultural levels.