In August we were pleased to welcome a new postdoctoral fellow to the Institute, Vicente Raja. His research interests are distributed among philosophy, experimental psychology, and plant science. He will be working on the Neural Reuse, Embodied Cognition, and Dynamic-Systems Approaches to the Brain research project (new project page coming soon!) with Michael Anderson. Please join us in extending a warm welcome to Vicente!
Other news for this past month is listed below in alphabetical order:
Michael Anderson has a number of recent publications:
Anderson, M.L. (2018). What phantom limbs are. Consciousness and Cognition
Anderson, M.L. & Chemero, A. (2018). The world well gained: on the epistemic implications of ecological information. Colombo, Matteo, Irvine, Elizabeth and Stapleton, Mog, eds. Andy Clark and his critics. Oxford University Press
Bolt, T., Anderson, M. L., & Uddin, L. Q. (2018). Beyond the evoked/intrinsic neural process dichotomy. Network Neuroscience, 2:1, 1-22.
Michael Anderson was the keynote speaker at the Reconceiving Cognition Conference, held at the University of Antwerp from June 27 – 29. His talk was titled, “Neural reuse, dynamics, and constraints: Getting beyond componential mechanistic explanation of neural function”.
Michael Anderson was the keynote speaker at this year’s PhilMiLCog conference, giving a talk titled “Synergy and Constraint in the Functional Organization of Complex Systems” .
Rotman alumnus Yann Benétreau-Dupin recently wrote a guest post on Daily Nous, titled “A Philosopher’s Experiment Teaching Math and the Arts“.
Yann Benétreau-Dupin secured a book contract with Routledge (for 2021) for a book on the philosophy of risk, with Isabelle Peschard and Chris Wessels.
Rotman alumnus Reuven Brandt has a new publication in Bioethics, titled “Mandatory sex selection and mitochondrial transfer”.
Rotman alumnus Andrew Chater has been awarded the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Arctic Studies at the University of Washington in 2019.
Erlantz Etxeberria, Yousuf Hasan, and Aubrie Schettler ran the spacetime demonstration for the CPSX Summer Space Explorers Camp–this is the second year the members of the Institute have taken part in this fantastic outreach activity for students aged 10 – 14, organized by the Western University Department of Physics and Astronomy.
An article in Nautilus by Rotman alumnus MacKenzie Graham, titled “The Ethics of Consciousness Hunting: How fMRI has become an ethical obligation.“, examined the ethical implications of the use of fMRI to assess patients in a seemingly vegetative state.
Robert Moir and Rotman alumnus Nic Fillion co-authored an article, titled “Explanation and abstraction from a backward-error analytic perspective.“, to be published in the European Journal for Philosophy of Science, October 2018, Vol. 8, Issue 3, pp. 735–759.
Anthony Skelton was quoted in a recent article in the UC Observer, titled “Do we face a future without Down syndrome? Advances in prenatal testing mean parents can detect the chromosomal difference earlier. What does this mean for the future of Down Syndrome?”
Valerie Therrien will be a Logic Year Student at the Institute of Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam for the 2018-19 academic year.
Pictured above: Vicente Raja, new Rotman postdoctoral fellow; Rotman alumnus Andrew Chater, recipient of a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Arctic Studies; Aubrie Schettler, Yousuf Hasan, and Erlantz Etxeberria conduct demonstrations at the CPSX Summer Space Explorers Camp.