Two articles on that old philosophical chestnut – free will: one from Intelligent Life (neurons v. free will) and one from the sister title, the Economist (Free will and politics).
Free will
Longino Reviews “The social epistemology of economic experiments”
Cambridge Companion to Oakeshott
I see that CUP now have a page up for Efraim Podoksik’s forthcoming Companion. One doesn’t have to be an astute reader to see that CUP are being slack in that the graphic has Steven Crowell as the editor (Crowell is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism). Judging by the TOC, Podoksik’s volume will be a good complement to Paul and my Companion. I happen to think that Podksik’s In Defence of Modernity still stands as one of the stronger installments from the Imprint Oakeshott catalogue. Between these two volumes 2012 promises to be an exceptionally good year for Oakeshottiana. Update: CUP have now put Efraim’s name to the volume’s graphic.
Views of Hayek, Hebb, and Heisenberg: Toward an Approach to Brain Functioning
Neuroscientist Erol Basar on Hayek
F. A. Hayek’s The Sensory Order must rate as one of the most creative books written on general philosophy of neuroscience. Although Hayek was a Noble-prize winner in economics and was not educated as a neuroscientist, his book opens up a new window on neuroscience, and this window certainly offers great possibilities to neuroscientists working on unifying aspects of neuroscience. Guided by the fundamental view of Fuster (1995), I have tried to suggestively interpret Hayek’s concepts firstly as a work on memory and brain dynamics (Basar, 2004), and more recently, as a more general work on the brain–body–mind relationship (Basar, 2010). Although a detailed description and interpretation of Hayek’s philosophical psychology is not possible because of space constraints, I try to explain three concepts that are embedded in the work of Hayek:
1. D. O. Hebb’s learning theory (1949),
2. The S-Matrix concept of quantum dynamics developed by W. Heisenberg (1943), and
3. The Feynman diagrams as a consequence of the S-Matrix theory.
Galen Strawson on Qualia, Panpsychism and Physicalism
Patterns
The ever exuberant Jason Silva on patterns in 1:45 seconds.
Colin McGinn on Philosophy of Mind
McGinn, one of my favourite philosophers of mind, notwithstanding Dennett’s view of McGinn’s well-known position:
In the Critics section of this week’s New Statesman, ten pages of which are devoted to a philosophy special, our Critic at Large is Colin McGinn, professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami, who surveys the current state of play in the philosophy of mind and consciousness. Although McGinn concedes, in the spirit Descartes, the irrefutable existence of the self, he cautiously downplays the scope of the intellect: “Human intelligence is a local, contingent, temporal, practical and expendable feature of life on earth – an incremental adaptation based on earlier forms of intelligence that no one would regard as faintly omniscient.” In Socratic vein, McGinn asserts: “There is more ignorance … than knowledge.”
Freud’s Cognitive Revolution
Check out my colleague’s article in Psychology Today.
Paul Franco: The Heidegger Controversy and Nietzsche on Liberal Education
My chum and co-editor for A Companion to Michael Oakeshott here talking about the Heidegger controversy and here on Friedrich Nietzsche on Liberal Education. See Paul’s Amazon listing.
Connectome
Here’s a recent WSJ article summing up the state of play in mapping brain connectivity. Here is Susan Bookheimer who holds the Joaquin Fuster Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience chair at UCLA – Fuster is off course a name many readers will recognise from my postings here and here. The images are from the Human Connectome Project.
“The study of connectivity is as hot as hot can get,” said Susan Bookheimer, a neuropsychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is the new head of the Organization of Human Brain Mapping, a large international professional society of neuroimaging researchers.
manwithoutqualities 