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 Gillett 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 is forthcoming 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. It is a challenge to the hypothesis of extended cognition. (I really like the cover art for this one.) Sven Walter has a review of it at Metapsychology and William Fish has another at the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. Justin Fisher has a critical notice at Mind & Brain. Leslie Marsh, at Man Without Qualities, has also read the book and commented upon it. Benoit Harde-Vallee, at Natural Rationality, has also laid hands on it. Look for upcoming reviews in Erkenntnis (by Sven Walter), Philosophical Psychology (by Robert Rupert), and Psyche (by Larry Shapiro).

A few years ago, I wrote some papers and a book on the systematicity arguments for a language of thought. The latter 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."