First, we’d like to thank John Schwenkler for giving us the opportunity to talk about The Multiple Realization Book (OUP 2016) on Brains. For about twenty years we’ve each been trying to understand the phenomenon of multiple realization and its importance in philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. In …
Alva Noë writes at NPR: To move forward and understand the human mind, or the minds of nonhuman animals […], we need to look outside the brain at the animal’s behavior, that is, at how animals live, what they do, what problems they face, and what the circumstances are in which they …
The Human Mind Conference is an international, interdisciplinary event bringing together a wide range of experts from across the humanities and the cognitive sciences to discuss key aspects of mental life and experience. The event will provide a major statement of the current state of knowledge in the study of …
Fabian Dorsch, an Associate Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Fribourg, died unexpectedly on February 21 at the impossibly young age of 42. As anyone who knew him could attest, Fabian kept enormously busy as a philosopher, and it was amazing how well he juggled his numerous writing …
Plants have minds because their activities disclose a world of things that have significance for them. Following Evan Thompson, we can call this an enactive approach to plant minds. What is it to disclose a world of things that have significance? Focus on the most familiar case of a thing …
Reading my two previous posts, you might complain that perceiving and remembering require concepts, ideas, or even thoughts, which are basically representations, and plants don’t have those, so they don’t perceive or remember. For the same reason, you might add, they don’t have minds. Do plants have representations? Phototropism can …
Plants don’t have minds. At least, that’s what most people think. A few years ago, that’s also what I thought. Then, reflecting on the work of Ruth Millikan and Fred Dretske, I started wondering why it seemed obvious, and whether it should. This led me to write a short book …
