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430Georges Canguilhem, A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem, edited by François Delaporte and translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Zone Books, 1994. Pp. 481. ISBN 0-942299-72-8. £24.25, $36.25 (review)British Journal for the History of Science 30 (1): 101-121. 1997.Georges Canguilhem, A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem, edited by François Delaporte and translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Zone Books, 1994. Pp. 481. ISBN 0-942299-72-8. £24.25, $36.25.
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5036Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to ConnectionismCambridge University Press. 1998.Philosophy and Memory Traces defends two theories of autobiographical memory. One is a bewildering historical view of memories as dynamic patterns in fleeting animal spirits, nervous fluids which rummaged through the pores of brain and body. The other is new connectionism, in which memories are 'stored' only superpositionally, and reconstructed rather than reproduced. Both models, argues John Sutton, depart from static archival metaphors by employing distributed representation, which brings inte…Read more
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8Spirits and Clocks: Machine and Organism in Descartes (review)British Journal for the History of Science 36 (2): 233-235. 2003.
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1742Remembering as Public Practice: Wittgenstein, memory, and distributed cognitive ecologiesIn V. A. Munz, D. Moyal-Sharrock & A. Coliva (eds.), Mind, Language, and Action: proceedings of the 36th Wittgenstein symposium, . pp. 409-444. 2014.A woman is listening to Sinatra before work. As she later describes it, ‘suddenly from nowhere I could hear my mother singing along to it … I was there again home again, hearing my mother … God knows why I should choose to remember that … then, to actually hear her and I had this image in my head … of being at home … with her singing away … like being transported back you know I got one of those … like shivery feelings really suddenly’ (Anderson 2004, 9-10). An older couple, discussing their hon…Read more
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241Descartes was born in La Haye (now Descartes) in Touraine and educated at the Jesuit college of La Fleche` in Anjou. Descartes’modern reputation as a rationalistic armchair philosopher, whose mind–body dualism is the source of damaging divisions between psychology and the life sciences, is almost entirely undeserved. Some 90% of his surviving correspondence is on mathematics and scientific matters, from acoustics and hydrostatics to chemistry and the practical problems of constructing scientific i…Read more
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203Review of Lorraine Daston & Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (review)Times Literary Supplement 5001. 1999.Curious about the nature of light, Robert Boyle spent a series of late nights taking detailed observations of shining veal shanks, stinking fish, pieces of rotten wood which glowed in the dark, and a ‘noctiluca’ distilled from human urine. Once, report Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, with "only a foot-boy" to assist him, Boyle put a luminous diamond to the nocturnal test, "plunging it into oil and acid, spitting on it, and ‘taking it into bed with me, and holding it a good while upon a warm …Read more
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106Batting, habit, and memory: The embodied mind and the nature of skillSport in Society 10 (5): 763-786. 2007.in Jeremy McKenna (ed), At the Boundaries of Cricket, to be published in 2007 as a special issue of the journal Sport in Society and as a book in the series Sport in the Global Society (Taylor and Francis).
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324Language, memory, and concepts of memory: Semantic diversity and scientific psychologyIn Mengistu Amberber (ed.), The Language of Memory in a Crosslinguistic Perspective, John Benjamins. pp. 41-65. 2007.There are many different ways to think about what has happened before. I think about my own recent actions, and about what happened to me a long time ago; I can think about times before I lived, and about what will happen after my death. I know many things about the past, and about what has happened because people did things before now, or because some good or bad things happened to me
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396Materialists are not merchants of vanishingEarly Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar 9. 2012.Early modern critics of materialism (and of associated doctrines like determinism and mechanism) sometimes employed a transcendental argument form. If materialism were true, then some valuable feature of reality could not exist; but that feature does exist; therefore materialism is false. Depending on current context and concerns, the valuable 'X' in question might be God, the soul, hell, objective morality, free will, conscience, truth, knowledge, social order, or justice and the law: all, in t…Read more
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406Motor experience interacts with effector information during action predictionProceedings of the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society 2082-2087. 2013.Recent theory suggests that action prediction relies of a motor emulation mechanism that works by mapping observed actions onto the observer action system so that predictions can be generated using that same predictive mechanisms that underlie action control. This suggests that action prediction may be more accurate when there is a more direct mapping between the stimulus and the observer. We tested this hypothesis by comparing prediction accuracy for two stimulus types. A mannequin stimulus wh…Read more
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16Don Dedrick, Naming the Rainbow: Colour Language, Colour Science, and Culture Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 21 (2): 106-109. 2001.If the so-called 'science wars' are futile shouting-matches between extremists, some of the more bewildering skirmishes have been contested in the realm of colour science and culture. Ethnographers, postmodernists, and Wittgensteinians stress the specificity of local colour naming strategies, or the peculiarity of objects and emotions with which colours are associated, and may confess lingering attraction to Whorf's idea that cultures carve up an intrinsically unstructured colour space into quit…Read more
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181Francis Bacon was the youngest son of Nicholas Bacon, lord keeper of the great seal under Elizabeth I. He left Cambridge in 1575, studied law, and entered Parliament in 1581. Though roughly contemporary with Kepler, Galileo, and Harvey, Bacon’s grand schemes for the advancement of knowledge were not driven by their discoveries: he resisted the Copernican hypothesis, and did not give mathematics a central place in his vision of natural philosophy. His active public life, under both Elizabeth and …Read more
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420The churchlands' neuron doctrine: Both cognitive and reductionistBehavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (5): 850-851. 1999.According to Gold & Stoljar, one cannot consistently be both reductionist about psychoneural relations and invoke concepts developed in the psychological sciences. I deny the utility of their distinction between biological and cognitive neuroscience, suggesting that they construe biological neuroscience too rigidly and cognitive neuroscience too liberally. Then, I reject their characterization of reductionism. Reductions need not go down past neurobiology straight to physics, and cases of partia…Read more
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92Interacting to remember at multiple timescales: Coordination, collaboration, cooperation and culture in joint rememberingInteraction Studies 16 (3): 419-450. 2015.Everyday joint remembering, from family remembering around the dinner table to team remembering in the operating theatre, relies on the successful interweaving of multiple cognitive, bodily, social and material resources, anchored in specific cultural ecosystems. Such systems for joint remembering in social interactions are composed of processes unfolding over multiple but complementary timescales, which we distinguish for analytic purposes so as better to study their interanimation in practice:…Read more
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94Between individual and collective memory: Interaction, coordination, distributionSocial Research: An International Quarterly 75 (1): 23-48. 2008.in special collective memory issue of Social Research: an international quarterly of the social sciences (winter 2007-08, volume 75 number 1).
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6Rossi, Paolo, Logic and the Art of MemoryAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 81 (1): 151-152. 2003.This translation of a classic and original work of intellectual history is beautifully done. Rossi’s book Clavis Universalis was first published in Italian in 1960, but Clucas translates the second, revised edition of 1983. The book is about Renaissance and 17th-century encyclopedism, hieroglyphics and cryptography, the techniques of artificial memory, the history of rhetoric, changes in views about logic and method in the scientific revolution, and new ideas about how language and images mig…Read more
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268Shakespeare, science, and magicMetascience 31-38. 1991.Sutton's review of Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age
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316Psyche and Soma: Physicians and metaphysicians on the mind-body problem from antiquity to enlightenmentAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 81 (1). 2003.Book Information Psyche And Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body Problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment. Psyche And Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body Problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment John P. Wright Paul Potter Oxford Clarendon Press 2000 xii + 298, Hardback £45.00 Edited by John P. Wright; Paul Potter . Clarendon Press. Oxford. Pp. xii + 298,. Hardback:£45.00.
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212Review of Elizabeth A. Wilson, Neural Geographies: feminism and the microstructure of cognition (review)Philosophy in Review/ Comptes Rendus Philosophiques 299-301. 1999.Writing within and against the set critical practices of psychoanalytic-deconstructive-Foucauldian-feminist cultural theory, Elizabeth Wilson demonstrates, in this provocative and original book, the productivity and the pleasure of direct, complicitous engagement with the contemporary cognitive sciences. Wilson forges an eclectic method in reaction to the 'zealous but disavowed moralism' of those high cultural Theorists whose 'disciplining compulsion' concocts a monolithic picture of science in …Read more
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1190Collective memoryIn Kirk Ludwig & Marija Jankovic (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intentionality, Routledge. pp. 140-151. 2018.
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126Material agency, skills, and history: Distributed cognition and the archaeology of memoryIn Carl Knappett & Lambros Malafouris (eds.), Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach, Springer. 2007.for Lambros Malafouris and Carl Knappett (eds), Material Agency: towards a non-anthropocentric approach (Springer, late 2007)
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313Rene DescartesIn W. H. McNeill (ed.), The Berkshire encyclopedia of world history: Vol 2, Berkshire Publishing. pp. 513-514. 2005.Even though the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes has been remembered primarily for his contributions to Western philosophy, he also showed a curiosity about many aspects of the natural world. His mechanistic and rationalistic methods have been criticized as often as they have been praised, but they provided a framework for subsequent scientific inquiry.
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1006Consensus collaboration enhances group and individual recall accuracyQuarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 65 (1). 2012.We often remember in groups, yet research on collaborative recall finds “collaborative inhibition”: Recalling with others has costs compared to recalling alone. In related paradigms, remembering with others introduces errors into recall. We compared costs and benefits of two collaboration procedures—turn taking and consensus. First, 135 individuals learned a word list and recalled it alone (Recall 1). Then, 45 participants in three-member groups took turns to recall, 45 participants in three-mem…Read more
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1534From individual memory to collective memory: Theoretical and empirical perspectivesMemory 16 (3): 177-182. 2008.Very often our memories of the past are of experiences or events we shared with others. And ‘‘in many circumstances in society, remembering is a social event’’ (Roediger, Bergman, & Meade, 2000, p. 129): parents and children reminisce about significant family events, friends discuss a movie they just saw together, students study for exams with their roommates, colleagues remind one another of information relevant to an important group decision, and complete strangers discuss a crime they happene…Read more
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484Looking beyond memory studies: comparisons and integrationsMemory Studies 2 (3): 299-302. 2009.Projects in memory studies are best driven by topic not tradition, because the phenomena under investigation are usually interactive, not neatly compartmentalized. This imposes open-endedness not only in tracing diverse activities of remembering across the spread of relevant disciplines, but also in looking beyond memory altogether in order better to understand its diverse manifestations.
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1398Minds in and out of time: memory, embodied skill, anachronism, and performanceTextual Practice 26 (4): 587-607. 2012.Contemporary critical instincts, in early modern studies as elsewhere in literary theory, often dismiss invocations of mind and cognition as inevitably ahistorical, as performing a retrograde version of anachronism. Arguing that our experience of time is inherently anachronistic and polytemporal, we draw on the frameworks of distributed cognition and extended mind to theorize cognition as itself distributed, cultural, and temporal. Intelligent, embodied action is a hybrid process, involving the…Read more
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1127Reflections on Emotions, Imagination, and Moral Reasoning Toward an Integrated, Multidisciplinary Approach to Moral CognitionIn Robyn Langdon & Catriona Mackenzie (eds.), Emotions, Imagination, and Moral Reasoning, Psychology Press. pp. 327-347. 2012.B eginning with the problem of integrating diverse disciplinary perspectives on moral cognition, we argue that the various disciplines have an interest in developing a common conceptual framework for moral cognition research. We discuss issues arising in the other chapters in this volume that might serve as focal points for future investigation and as the basis for the eventual development of such a framework. These include the role of theory in binding together diverse phenomena and the role of…Read more
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907Cognitive Ecology as a Framework for Shakespearean StudiesShakespeare Studies 39 94-103. 2011.‘‘COGNITIVE ECOLOGY’’ is a fruitful model for Shakespearian studies, early modern literary and cultural history, and theatrical history more widely. Cognitive ecologies are the multidimensional contexts in which we remember, feel, think, sense, communicate, imagine, and act, often collaboratively, on the fly, and in rich ongoing interaction with our environments. Along with the anthropologist Edwin Hutchins,1 we use the term ‘‘cognitive ecology’’ to integrate a number of recent approaches to cult…Read more
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409Controlling the passions: passion, memory, and the moral physiology of self in seventeenth-century neurophilosophyIn Stephen Gaukroger (ed.), The Soft Underbelly of Reason: The Passions in the Seventeenth Century, Routledge. pp. 115-146. 1998.Some natural philosophers in the 17th century believed that they could control their own innards, specifically the animal spirits coursing incessantly through brain and nerves, in order to discipline or harness passion, cognition and action under rational guidance. This chapter addresses the mechanisms thought necessary after Eden for controlling the physiology of passion. The tragedy of human embedding in the body, with its cognitive and moral limitations, was paired with a sense of our confine…Read more
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44Stefano Franchi and Güven Güzeldere, eds., Mechanical Bodies, Computational Minds: Artificial Intelligence from Automata to Cyborgs Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 26 (6): 414-416. 2006.review of Stefano Franchi and Güven Güzeldere, eds., Mechanical Bodies, Computational Minds: Artificial Intelligence from Automata to Cyborgs.