The Tinkering Mind against Free Will – Commentary on “The Tinkering Mind”

By Ting Huang (See all posts in this series here.) In a prior symposium on the book I posed the following clarifying questions to Vierkant regarding his stance on free will: Does “managerial control” provide basis for moral responsibility? In line with Holton’s conception of choice, what role does consciousness …

Freedom of a Tinker: Comments on Tillmann Vierkant’s The Tinkering Mind

By Paulius Rimkevicius, Chapman University (See all posts in this series here.) Like a tinker, who travels freely from place to place mending metal utensils and sometimes ends up creating quite an extraordinary-looking gadget out of the simple old things that he finds, a philosopher who is well-versed in more …

Tinkering extended minds: Rethinking direct agency.

By Gloria Andrada, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. (See all the posts in this series here.) One of my favorite things about Vierkant’s book is that it provides an original argument for extended cognition, one that begins with the role of intentional action in epistemic  agency. This makes it really interesting …

Vierkant: Precis for The Tinkering Mind

By Tillmann Vierkant, University of Edinburgh (See all posts in this symposium here.) Thanks for giving me the opportunity to say a few words about The Tinkering Mind! I have been bothered by the question of how important intentional action is for epistemic agency for a long time. I have …

This Week: Symposium on Tillmann Vierkant’s The Tinkering Mind!

Hi Everyone! Join us this week for a symposium on Till Vierkant’s exciting new book, The Tinkering Mind! Till will kick us off today with a precis, followed by commentaries from Gloria Andrada, Paulius Rimkevicius, and Ting Huang. Then, on Friday, Till will respond. Join us in the discussion board …

The Individuation of Cognitive Kinds

A central thesis of Cognitive Ontology is that cognitive kinds are unlikely to reduce to neural kinds. I found one of the most exciting threads in the book to be an argument supporting this anti-reductionistic thesis, which Khalidi summarizes in today’s post, and which I’ll call “the Individuation Argument.” According …

Cognitive Ontology – Part 4: Externalism and Cognitive Kinds

As I mentioned in the first blogpost, one aspect of some cognitive kinds that I try to emphasize throughout the book is their externalism, or as I have put it, their “etiological-environmental individuation.” This cumbersome expression is a more accurate way of describing the taxonomic practices that I highlight. It is …

Back to Top