Heidegger and Cognitive Science

Citation

Kiverstein J & Wheeler M (eds.) (2012) Heidegger and Cognitive Science. New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan. http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=297771

Abstract
The cognitive scientists of today are increasingly occupied with investigating the ways in which human cognition depends on the dynamic interaction over multiple time scales of brain, body and world. The old vision of the mind as a logic machine whose workings could be explained in abstraction from the biological body and the cultural environment is looking increasingly untenable and outdated. This collection explores the idea that this development in cognitive science can be productively interpreted through an encounter with Heidegger's existential phenomenology. Not only can Heidegger help us to understand the history of cognitive science but his philosophy also provides a conceptual framework for the cognitive science of today and of the future. Heidegger, however, is standardly interpreted as being resolutely anti-naturalist, as insisting that a scientific understanding of human beings is necessarily limited and partial in what it can tell us about human existence. Can there be a cognitive science of human existence or is such a project doomed to fail for reasons already articulated in Heidegger's philosophy?

People

Professor Michael Wheeler

Professor, Philosophy