Here is a draft of my entry for the SAGE Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences.
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Hayek in Mind: Editorial Introduction
Here is an uncorrected proof (do not cite) of my introduction to Hayek in Mind: Hayek’s Philosophical Psychology.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.
Extended Minds Meet Queer Theory
Just when you thought the extended mind literature couldn’t be put to more unusual use, here is a forthcoming talk by Michele Merritt who just happens to have been supervised by none other than Shaun Gallagher and Rebecca Kukla. Also on her committee was Andy Clark. Check out Michel’s recent paper for Philosophical Psychology ”The Cure for the Cure: Networking the Extended Mind,” the published version to be found in Volume 24, Number 4, 1 August 2011 , pp. 463-485.
Trailing Hayek in Mind
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
James Wible
HAYEK’S POST-POSITIVIST EMPIRICISM: EXPERIENCE BEYOND SENSATION
Jan Willem Lindemans
A NOTE ON THE INFLUENCE OF MACH’S PSYCHOLOGY IN HAYEK’S PSYCHOLOGY
Giandomenica Becchio
PART III: MIND AND SOCIALITY
THE EMERGENCE OF THE MIND: HAYEK’S ACCOUNT OF MENTAL PHENOMENA AS A PRODUCT OF SPONTANEOUS PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL ORDERS
Gloria Zúñiga y Postigo
HAYEK’S SELF-ORGANIZING MENTAL ORDER AND FOLK-PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES OF THE MIND
Chiara Chelini
BEYOND COMPLEXITY: CAN THE SENSORY ORDER DEFEND THE LIBERAL SELF?
Chor-yung Cheung
COGNITIVE OPENING AND CLOSING: TOWARDS AN EXPLORATION OF THE MENTAL WORLD OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Thierry Aimar
GETTING TO THE HAYEKIAN NETWORK
Troy Camplin
The Embodied Mind: 20 years on
Commemorating a landmark book
The Future of the Embodied Mind
The summer school focuses on cognition in artificial and biological systems from a theoretical perspective that considers embodiment, situatedness, and action-relatedness as key elements in understanding and implementing cognitive systems.
The school will be held in San Sebastián, Spain 5th – 9th September 2011
The school will expose young researchers to theoretical ideas and modeling techniques, thereby facilitating a wider understanding of the broader enactive approach to cognition. It will take place against the background of the celebration of 20 years of the publication of the book “The Embodied Mind” by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. This book is a symbolic landmark demarcating the beginnings of the consolidation of the embodied turn into a theoretically-loaded gathering of insights, discoveries and ideas within the sciences of the mind. The summer school will gather several of the different disciplines affected by this turn (robotics, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, AI) and some of the main protagonists in these fields. The objective will simultaneously be a taking stock of progress in embodied approaches over the last two decades and the elucidation of current challenges and directions. The school will have a duration of 5 days, each day featuring 2 or 3 talks in the morning by invited speakers, smaller discussion groups and workshops in the afternoon, and a general discussion session in the evening.
Autopoiesis and Cognition
Maturana and Varela’s classic Autopoiesis and Cognition is freely available here (H/T to Paul Loader).
What makes a living system a living system? What kind of biological phenomenon is the phenomenon of cognition? These two questions have been frequently considered, but, in this volume, the authors consider them as concrete biological questions. Their analysis is bold and provocative, for the authors have constructed a systematic theoretical biology which attempts to define living systems not as objects of observation and description, nor even as interacting systems, but as self-contained unities whose only reference is to themselves. The consequence of their investigations and of their living systems as self-making, self-referring autonomous unities, is that they discovered that the two questions have a common answer: living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. The result of their investigations is a completely new perspective of biological (human) phenomena. During the investigations, it was found that a complete linguistic description pertaining to the ‘organization of the living’ was lacking and, in fact, was hampering the reporting of results. Hence, the authors have coined the word ‘autopoiesis’ to replace the expression ‘circular organization’. Autopoiesis conveys, by itself, the central feature of the organization of the living, which is autonomy.
Extending the Extended Mind to the Philosophy of Mathematics
Here’s a paper I chanced upon. The full title: “The Four-Color Theorem Solved, Again: Extending the Extended Mind to the Philosophy of Mathematics” (I’ve just noticed that Ken Aizawa has already beat me to the punch!).
Enaction: An Interview with Ezequiel Di Paolo
Here is an interview posted on the eclectic APPS bog. Ezequiel is one of the main current players in enactivist theory and has a recently published (edited) book out that I’ve been reading. Enactivism is a position I’m quite sympathetic to though I’m sceptical of “new paradigm” talk.
Chalmers’ TED talk on The Extended Mind
The Extended Mind - I think that this is the first time Dave has expanded the idea to social extension or networks. I recall that FB post he mentions.
And Dave is trailing on his website his forthcoming book Constructing the World (OUP). BIG NEWS!!
Madary reviews Rowlands
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
