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.
I am a philosopher of science concentrating primarily in the philosophy of psychology. I have written a few papers and a book on the systematicity arguments for a language of thought. The latter was recently reviewed by Steven Phillips in Minds & Machines.
I have just published a book, The Bounds of Cognition, with my friend and long-time collaborator, Fred Adams, on the hypothesis of extended cognition. (I really like the cover art for this one.) Leslie Marsh, at Man Without Qualities, has already read it and even likes it! Benoit Harde-Vallee, at Natural Rationality, has also laid hands on it.
In early 2007, Synthese published a paper of mine on the biochemistry of memory consolidation, which seems to me to provide a very nice example of multiple realization of cognitive processing. I am also working with Carl Gillett on a set of three papers connecting his Dimensioned View of realization to recent discussions of multiple realization in psychology and neuroscience. One of these papers is now forthcoming from Mind & Language, and another is forthcoming in John Bickle's Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Neuroscience.
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."
Recently I have joined a group blog for the philosophy of mind, Brains, started by my friend Gualtiero Piccinini.
Sample Publications
Conference presentations and commentaries
Photos
Courses
Society for the Metaphysics of Science
Contact Information
Oh, and here's a link to a site exposing Expelled, the fundamentalist anti-science propaganda film.
Free Open Source Software
I've been experimenting with a variety of free open source software and found a number of things that work well for me.
Firefox has been a great browser. I don't miss Internet Explorer at all. 
OpenOffice.org is a lot like Microsoft Office XP. 
GIMP 2.4 (GNU Image Manipulation Program) has been doing a good job of replacing my Photoshop Elements 3.0. 
Maintained by Ken Aizawa.
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Last modified April 10, 2008.
The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the author and have not been approved by Centenary College of Louisiana.