Here is an article in the WSJ on Deirdre McCloskey. I had the honour and pleasure to meet Deirdre some 18 months ago at a conference on behavioral economics in San Diego. She was absolutely delightful. Everything you wanted to know about Deirdre but were afraid to ask . . . can be found here.
Nature, nurture and liberal values
Roger Scruton weighs in on the nature/nurture debate via a threefold review. (Image another Steve Pyke portrait).
Andy Clark – “Do Thrifty Brains Make Better Minds?”
I’ve just come across this article by Andy with a follow-up here.
Some recent work in computational and cognitive neuroscience suggests that it is indeed the frugal use of our native neural capacity (the inventive use of restricted “neural bandwidth,” if you will) that explains how brains like ours so elegantly make sense of noisy and ambiguous sensory input.
The neuroscience of happiness
Here’s an interview with Shimon Edelman whose The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life has just been published.
Patricia Churchland
Having missed Pat Churchland’s talk at NEI this past October, it was great that she was in town for a full week of speaking engagements not to mention interviews and other demands being made on her time (and she is supposedly retired!). It was a pleasure to meet her (finally!) having followed her work over the years, most notably her Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain. I recall the outright hostility to this book when I very naively talked about it in a philosophy department. I asked her if she recalled this hostility – and she did – but soldiered on regardless. The book obviously made an impression on me and hence its title appears as the tag line to this website.
Here is a collection of my Churchland related posts. The Science Network has a superb collection of podcasts featuring not only Pat, but the rest of the Churchland “dynasty” including of course her husband Paul and their children Anne and Mark.
Enaction and Dance
Here is a recent paper freely available. And in the video below is my favourite (the greatest) dancer – she talks about her craft. Here are some previous dance-related/cognition postings.
Mishima
One of my favourite philosophically orientated novelists is Mishima. I can’t attest to the reliability of this bio-sketch but it’s a start. There is not much scholarly literature on Mishima but here is an appreciation in, of all places, the British Journal of Psychiatry.
Paul Schrader made a superb attempt at expressing Mishima’s thinking (insofar as one can) in a cinematic mode, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, here review by Roger Ebert. According to Schrader, the weak link in the film was the lead actor who was way too matcho. This said, Ken Ogata does a great job and Schrader (aside from Herzog) has pushed the bounds of what philosophically can be articulated on film – namely, Mishima’s thoughts on aesthetics. Bravo to Coppola and Lucas for producing this tricky subject matter and letting it be directed by someone who tends to rub Hollywood (and others) up the wrong way. Amazing that Mishima is still a taboo topic in Japan.
Here is an interview with Mishima:
Here is a full version of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters:
Ignorance is Bliss
Here’s an article in The Economist that my colleague, Roger Koppl, who has done terrific work in the field of forensic evidence, alerted me to. The article mentions Itiel Dror who I’ve been in correspondence with though Roger. I know Itiel’s work through his co-edited Cognition Distributed. Here is his co-authored “extended mind” chapter.
Freedom of Speech
Given that issues of freedom of speech are in the news here is a philosophical take on the notion of Freedom of Speech.
Kitcher reviews Parfit
Philip Kitcher reviews Derek Parfit’s massive two-volume tome On What Matters.
