Kenneth Aizawa

Charles T. Beaird Professor of Philosophy
A.B., University of Chicago, 1983; M.A., 1988, Ph.D., 1989, University of Pittsburgh.

Like many Centenary faculty, I am out standing in my field.

For the 2009-2010 academic year I will be on leave through a combination of sabbatical and an ATLAS fellowship provided by the Louisiana Board of Regents. At the top of my list of things to do is to complete a book manuscript with Carl Gillet on realization and multiple realization in neuroscience and psychology. We have a book contract with Wiley-Blackwell to deliver a manuscript in September 2010. The book is an outgrowth of a series of three papers on the topic. (More are in the works.) One of these has just appeared in Mind & Language and another in John Bickle's Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Neuroscience. The third is currently under review. Sometime during this year, I hope to write a bit more about the topic of extended cognition.

Back in 2008, my friend and long-time collaborator, Fred Adams, and I published, The Bounds of Cognition. (Now out in paper.) It is a challenge to the hypothesis of extended cognition. (I really like the cover art for this one.)

The reviews are now pouring out (!):

Derek Browne has a review in Analysis.
William Fish has a review at the Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
Justin Fisher has a critical notice at The Journal of Mind & Behavior.
Robert Rupert has a review in Philosophical Psychology.
Larry Shapiro has a review in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.
Max Velmans has a review in the Journal of Consciousness Studies.
Sven Walter has a review of it at Metapsychology.
Sven Walter and Miriam Kyselo have a more extensive critical notice of it at Erkenntnis.
Leslie Marsh, at Man Without Qualities, has also read the book and commented upon it.
Look for an upcoming review in Mind (by Andy Clark).

I have also opened up a blog, The Bounds of Cognition, for philosophy and psychology relating to the hypothesis of extended cognition. Stop by. Comment. Send me topics to post. We'll see how it works out.

A few years ago, I wrote some papers and a book on the systematicity arguments for a language of thought. This was reviewed by Steven Phillips in Minds & Machines.

Finally, it is a longer term goal of mine to write a scientific biography of Warren McCulloch, one of the founders of cybernetics. My colleague here at Centenary, Mark Schlatter, and I have a paper on the Walter Pitts's contribution to "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity." We are also working on a second paper on the shift in Warren McCulloch's research following the publication of "A Logical Calculus."