What’s New and Exciting About Computationalism?

I’m about to start writing a review article on “Computationalism in the Philosophy of Mind,” for Philosophy Compass, due in two months.  It should cover new and interesting stuff that pertains to computationalism.  By “new”, I would say we should consider mostly literature from the last 15 years or so.Of course …

Ramsey Reconsiders Representation

William Ramsey, Representation Reconsidered, CUP, 2007.This is the most up to date and systematic discussion of representation that I know of.  It distinguishes four notions of representation and discusses their pros and cons, carefully and often insightfully.  That’s enough to make it a useful book.Needless to say, there is more to …

“Zombies did not fall from the sky”

The title of this post is my favorite quote from J. Heil, From An Ontological Point of View, OUP, 2003 (from p. 248).Heil’s point is that “The zombie possibility turns on substantive philosophical theses concerning properties, powers, and laws of nature.  I have argued at length, and on independent grounds, against these …

PSA 2008 Draft Program

The preliminary program of the 2008 Philosophy of Science Association Meeting is out.  The meeting will take place on November 6–8, 2008, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  There will be many talks on the sciences of minds and brains, including a symposium I organized, on “Neural Computation” (other participants: Carl Craver, Oron Shagrir, and Jackie …

Computation in Cognitive Science (After the Fact)

Many thanks to Mark Sprevak for organizing the fabulous conference on computation in cognitive science that took place on July 7-8 at King’s College, Cambridge.  Several of us Brains contributors (Aizawa, Gillett, Rusanen, Weiskopf, and me) were there.  I had a great time.  The papers were excellent:  although they are drafts, reading …

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