Here’s a soon to be released book written by Mark Rowlands one of the major extended mind/situated cognition players. Let’s hope the proofing is significantly better than what has been coming out of MIT Press of late. This book will be reviewed by Michael Madary in The Journal of Mind and Behavior.
Check out the top illusions of 2010 in the competition organized by the Neuralcorrelate Society.
World Science Festival featuring Bobby McFerrin, best known as the writer and performer of one of my favourite songs Don’t worry be happy.
Is our response to music hard-wired or culturally determined? Is the reaction to rhythm and melody universal or influenced by environment? Join host John Schaefer, Jamshed Barucha, scientist Daniel Levitin, Professor Lawrence Parsons and musical artist Bobby McFerrin for live performances and cross cultural demonstrations to illustrate music’s note-worthy interaction with the brain and our emotions.
Lecture 1: A Scrutable World
Draft MS of Constructing the World
Lecture 2 (12th May): The Cosmoscope Argument
Lecture 3 (19th May): The Case for A Priori Scrutability
Lecture 4 (26th May): Revisability and Conceptual Change: Carnap vs. Quine
Lecture 5 (2nd June): Hard Cases: Mathematics, Normativity, Ontology, Intentionality
Lecture 6 (9th June): Whither the Aufbau?
Once again, this bit of Onion satire was brought to my attention by my chum David Livingtone Smith.
Jesse Norman, a very able philosopher and man of practice, has been elected as the new MP to represent the Hereford and South Herefordshire constituency. Philosophically speaking, Jesse has several strings to his bow. I first came to know him as an Oakeshottian – he edited The Achievement of Michael Oakeshott (Duckworth – unfortunately, no longer in print) – and he provided valuable assistance and good counsel to me in my setting up the Oakeshott Association. Jesse is a bona fide Oakeshottian – unlike others running for public office who have sought to shallowly appropriate the name. I also know Jesse through a shared interest in the Sabre Foundation (donate some $$ now!). Here are Jesse’s academic interests which include his technical work on Pierce. Jesse will bring a touch of class to that most vulgar of all pursuits, politics. I hope that this is the beginning of a distinguished career, that great things lie ahead for him and that his keen intellect and subtlety isn’t corroded or dumbed down. I wish him well.
Here is a chapter from a book by Michael Dawson, Brian Dupuis, and Michael Wilson (all of the Biological Computation Project, University of Alberta) that has just come my way and is entitled From Bricks to Brains: The Embodied Cognitive Science of LEGO Robots. In fact, all the chapters in draft are freely available to be downloaded from the book’s dedicated webpage. This offer will cease on publication of the book – which will be VERY soon. There is also a nicely produced 15 minute mini-documentary on the publisher’s site featuring Dawson and Depuis (click the video tab).
We love stories as much as we need them, but a funny thing has happened to departments of literature. The study of literature as an art form, of its techniques for delighting and instructing, has been replaced by an amalgam of bad epistemology and worse prose that goes by many names but can be summed up as Theory. The situation seems to call for a story, and one written in the style of Jorge Luis Borges, the grand chronicler of the tragicomic struggle between humans and logic.
Check out this piece in The New York Times by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (Mrs. Pinker). She of course has in mind departments that where a lack of philosophical culture licences uncritical and obscure thinking.
Theo alone insisted that Theory was no hoax but was intended as the most imperialist of cognitive campaigns, having designs on all the disciplines. Culture owns knowledge, and departments of literature own Culture. It follows (at least if logic can be said to hold constant in the face of frenetic Culture) that departments of literature can legitimately claim dominion over us all.
Here’s another review of Andy Clark’s Supersizing the Mind (Do also check out Rob Rupert’s critical notice here). It helps that Mirko, the blog author, has as his advisors, Andy Clark and Julian Kiverstein. Mirko is also working as co-translator of Supersizing into Italian. Great stuff – this guy is going places.
