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“Empiricalizing” Heidegger
Tony Chemero has kindly sent me these links to a paper he, Dobromir Dotov and Lin Nie have just had published. The first link is to the full paper entitled “A Demonstration of the Transition from Ready-to-Hand to Unready-to-Hand.” The second link is to a popularized version of the aforementioned paper entitled “Your Computer Really Is a Part of You.” Also look out for Tony’s recently published book Radical Embodied Cognitive Science which will soon be reviewed in The Journal of Mind and Behavior by Rick Dale. I for one thoroughly enjoyed the book having read the proofs.
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Momento’s Revenge
I’ve read just about everything by Andy Clark – as I’ve said several times before he is a superb stylist and is philosophy at its most lively. Some years back I read his paper Memento’s Revenge: Objections and Replies to the Extended Mind. I don’t recall having seen the film that Andy references in his paper; I might have seen clips. Anyway, what’s interesting is that in the discussion after my recent presentation entitled Extended Cognitive Systems to a bunch of economists who didn’t know of the famous Clark-Chalmers Inga/Otto thought experiment (that I freely adapted in my talk) – they got the point so quickly and asked if I’d seen this film. So thanks to the two German scholars who brought it up (sorry I don’t recall your names) I’m now motivated to check out what I anticipate will be an intelligent film.
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The Metaphysics of Mind
This past weekend I attended the Timothy Sprigge Memorial Conference (see link to obituary by Jane O’Grady who was in attendence). I met Sprigge in 1997 at the Bradley conference at Harris-Manchester College Oxford, a time when I was very interested in the idealists. Funny how philosophical changes come and go – Sprigge, ever the outsider, is now of interest to current philosophy of mind. Anyway, this conference brought together a very diverse group of theorists in the most congenial of environments and I was able to meet a few of my intellectual heroes.
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Leemon McHenry (California State University, Northridge)
Sprigge’s Ontology of Consciousness
Pierfrancesco Basile (University of Bern)
It must be true—but how can it be? Some Remarks on Panpsychism and Mental Composition
Alastair Hannay (University of Oslo)
The Space We Share: Phenomenology and Metaphysics
Jason Brown (New York University Medical Center)
What is a Mental State?
Galen Strawson (University of Reading)
Fundamental Singleness: How to Turn the 2nd Paralogism into a Valid Argument
Jaegwon Kim (Brown University)
Explaining Consciousness: From Emergentism to A Priori Physicalism
William Seager (University of Toronto)
Concessionary Dualism and Physicalism
Brian P. McLaughlin (Rutgers University)
Consciousness, Identity, and Explanation
Fred Adams (University of Delaware)
Consciousness: Why and Where?
Geoffrey Madell (University of Edinburgh)
Substance Dualism: You Know it Makes Sense
Ken Aizawa (Centenary College of Louisiana)
How Consciousness Can Safely Emerge
David Cockburn (University of East Anglia)
Doubts About “Consciousness”
Andy Clark (University of Edinburgh)
Locating the Conscious Mind
Howard Robinson (Central European University, Budapest)
Quality, Thought and Consciousness
Stephen Clark (University of Liverpool)
How to Become Unconscious
Eduard Marbach (University of Bern)
Is there a Metaphysics of Consciousness without a Phenomenology of Consciousness? Some thoughts derived from Husserl’s Philosophical Phenomenology
Brenda Almond (University of Hull)
Religious Consciousness: Revisiting the God of the Philosophers
Julian Kiverstein (University of Edinburgh)
The Metaphysics of Time Consciousness
James Giles (University of Guam)
The Metaphysics of Awareness in Taoist philosophy
Tim Crane (University College London)
Consciousness as Predicated of Human Beings
Barry Dainton (University of Liverpool)
Phenomenal Holism
Peter Simons (Trinity College Dublin)
Consciousness for Four-Dimensionalists
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The Bounds of Cognition
Once again I want to bring your attention to the superb Critical Notice by Justin Fisher in the latest issue of The Journal of Mind and Behavior on Adams’ and Aizawa’s The Bounds of Cognition.
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Mind and Behavior: Autumn 2008
The latest issue of The Journal of Mind and Behavior is now available. I especially want to bring your attention to the Critical Notice on Fred Adams’ and Ken Aizawa’s The Bounds of Cognition, a review essay superbly executed by Justin Fisher. Requests for reprints should be sent to:
Professor Justin C. Fisher, Department of Philosophy, Hyer Hall 207, Southern Methodist University, P.O. Box 750142, Dallas, Texas 75275
Intro:
Fred Adams and Kenneth Aizawa have long been the loyal opposition in the debate about extended cognition. Contemporary humans regularly use external devices to process information. Many of us store telephone numbers in our cell phones rather than our brains. Alzheimer’s patients use trusted notebooks to store all kinds of information (Clark and Chalmers, 1998). Expert Scrabble players continually reorganize their letters to more quickly see possible words they might play (Kirsh, 1995). Fans of extended cognition have held that the information processing performed partly within such external devices is enough like traditional cases of cognitive processing that it also deserves to be called “cognitive processing.” Adams and Aizawa have been two key figures to stand against this tide, arguing that we should instead view these as mere cases of external tool use, and that, at least for the time being, we should reserve the term “cognitive processing” for processes that occur inside creatures’ heads. The Bounds of Cognition compiles and updates Adams and Aizawa’s attempts to defend against this tide, and it gives the authors the opportunity to go on the offensive themselves, and give careful arguments for why we should stick to their more conservative construal of “cognitive processing.” This book does very well to give the reader a thorough overview of the state of play in the debate over extended cognition. As a consequence, the present paper is as much a critical commentary on the whole debate as it is a review of the book itself.
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