“Stigmergy” has finally made it into a mainstream philosophy reference work. It is mentioned in the chapter entitled “Reasoning and Rationality” written by Collin Allen, Peter M. Todd, and Jonathan M. Weinberg.
Colin, by the way, is co-authoring a paper for a themed issue of Cognitive Systems Research on stigmergy Marge Doyle and I are editing.
Here’s a two-parter with Hubert Dreyfus on embodiment – I haven’t listened to the whole talk but I recall first seeing Dreyfus being interviewed by the very excellent popularizer Bryan Magee some 25 years ago.
Here is an uncorrected proof (do not cite) of my introduction to Hayek in Mind: Hayek’s Philosophical Psychology. Further details will be made available just as soon as the publisher has updated the webpage for this book (according to Amazon the book will be made available on December 13th). A dedicated website to the volume can be found here.
Here’s a recent co-authored book from Christian List. CL is probably the leading theorist in this area and one of the best philosophers around who, not so long ago, was not affiliated with a philosophy department (I see that he now has a joint appointment with the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method). How the F*** does he manage to be so productive and maintain such quality? Professionally he is on the steepest projectory of our generation. Astonishing! RESPECT. And he is still an EPISTEME associate editor!
Here is the table of contents for my forthcoming (in press) edited volume focusing on The Sensory Order – this is the first salvo of shameless promotion.
CONTENTS
“SOCIALIZING” THE MIND AND “COGNITIVIZING” SOCIALITY
Leslie Marsh
“MARGINAL MEN”: WEIMER ON HAYEK
Walter Weimer
PART I: NEUROSCIENCE
HAYEK IN TODAY’S COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE
Joaquín Fuster
THE NON-CARTESIAN VIEW AND THE BRAIN
Erol Başar
PART II: PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
HAYEK’S QUESTION: HOW CAN PARTS OF THE WORLD COME TO MODEL THE REST OF THE WORLD
Joshua Rust
HAYEK’S SPECULATIVE PSYCHOLOGY, THE NEUROSCIENCE OF VALUE ESTIMATION AND THE BASIS OF NORMATIVE INDIVIDUALISM
Don Ross
HAYEK, POPPER AND THE CAUSAL THEORY OF THE MIND
Edward Feser
PEIRCE AND HAYEK ON THE ABSTRACT NATURE OF COGNITION AND SENSATION
A few weeks ago I trailed the release of Georg Theiner’s Res Cogitans Extensa: A Philosophical Defense of the Extended Mind Thesis. Then there was no page devoted to Georg’s book by the publisher. Well now there is so check out the book’s page here. I have the book in hand – scanning it promises a good read. My only gripe is that there is no index. Hopefully, some close-grained reviews will appear over the course of the next year.
Check out this review (scroll down) by Michael Madary of Mark Rowlands’ The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology.
One of the latest labels to emerge for anti-classical (or non-Cartesian, or post-cognitivist) cognitive science is “4E.” The four Es here are the embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended approaches to cognition. Since there are a number of different, and likely incompatible, lines of thought within the 4E group, more work needs to be done to articulate how the Es can and should fit together. Mark Rowlands’ newest book, The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology, addresses this need in a valuable way. He argues, clearly and carefully, for the thesis of the amalgamated mind, which “subsumes both theses of the embodied and the extended mind” (p. 84). The thesis of the embedded mind is rejected as being merely a claim about cognition depending causally on the environment. As such, it is not strong enough to be interesting for Rowlands’ non-Cartesian project. The thesis of the enacted mind, in particular Alva Noë’s sensorimotor version of it, is also rejected as being either implausible or no stronger than the thesis of the embedded mind (pp. 81–82). First I will outline Rowlands’ defense of the thesis of the amalgamated mind; then I will raise some issues for further investigation.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Michael Madary, Ph.D., Johannes Gutenberg — Universität Mainz, FB05 Philosophie und Philologie, Jakob-Welder-Weg 18, 55099 Mainz, Germany. Email: madary@mainz-uni.de