The ever exuberant Jason Silva on patterns in 1:45 seconds.
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.”
Check out my colleague’s article in Psychology Today.
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.
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.
Here is the programme for the soon to be happening CO4 conference, a great initiative started by Richard Brown.
Here’s a very recent paper from the Philosophy of Education. Here is the correct link for Francis Schrag’s reference to Bob Grant’s “On Writing Michael Oakeshott’s Biography.” Speaking of which, Bob Grant has written a fantastic biographical essay “The Pursuit of Intimacy, or Rationalism in Love” for Paul and my Companion.
Check out two forthcoming papers from Rob Rupert, one of the sharpest minds around:
1. Against Group Cognitive States (forthcoming in S. Chant and G. Preyer (eds.), From Individual to Collective Intentionality. No listing on OUP’s website yet).
English users are not fazed by such sentences as “Microsoft intends to develop a new operating system” and “England wants to retain the pound as its unit of currency.” We produce and consume such claims frequently and with ease. One might nevertheless wonder about their literal truth. Does Microsoft — the corporation itself — literally intend to develop a new operating system? Does England — as a single body — genuinely want to retain the pound as its unit of currency. More generally, it is a substantive philosophical and empirical question whether groups of individuals (who themselves instantiate mental states) instantiate mental states properly so called.
2. Keeping HEC in CHEC: On the Priority of Cognitive Systems
A review in The Economist of Stefan Collini’s What Are Universities For? The best articulation of the instrumental/intrinsic debate is still Oakeshott’s The Voice of Liberal Learning. Here is the first essay from VLL online. And Paul Franco is tackling this topic for the Oakeshott Companion.
Mr Collini is moved by Newman’s insistence that a liberal education is not about what students learn or what skills they acquire but “the perspective they have on the place of their knowledge in a wider map of human understanding”. But this is a far cry from the mechanisms government now uses (and Mr Collini’s focus is almost entirely on the British government in Westminster) to set goals for the proper expenditure of public money and to turn university students into demanding “consumers” of higher education.
