Visiting Fellows

Luke Kersten is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in NeuroMind at the Department of Philosophy at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) under the lead of Prof. Dr. Albert Newen. He completed his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in 2020. His research primarily focuses on conceptual and methodological questions in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. His current research investigates the relationship between predictive processing and radical views of cognition, such as extended and embodied cognition. Other research interests include theories of computation, levels of explanation, mechanistic explanation, and music cognition.

Carrie Figdor currently works as Professor at the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences of the University of Iowa. Additionally she is a member of the Iowa Neuroscience Institute. Before, she worked as Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa from 2007-2013 and Associate Professor from 2013-2018, and as Visiting Assistant Professor at Duke University (2012) and Claremont McKenna College (2005-2007). In 2005, she obtained her PhD at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She is currently an Anderson Fellow at the University of Sydney and will be taking up the American Philosophical Association’s Edinburgh Fellowship in Edinburgh in spring 2020.

Felipe Carvalho is a PhD candidate from the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris, working under the supervision of François Recanati. His main interests lie in the psychology of object perception and the epistemology of perceptual demonstrative reference, and how empirical findings in the former domain guide and constrain philosophical explanations in the latter. He is the recipient of a CIERA scholarship (Centre Interdisciplinaire d'études e de recherches sur l'Allemagne) for a 6-month visiting period at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, under the supervision of Prof. Albert Newen.

Alexandre Billon works in the faculty of Philosophy and Psychology at the Université Lille 3 since 2007. He had a PhD position and a postdoc from 2001 to 2006 at CRÉA (he received his PhD in 2005) and was a postdoc at the Institut Jean Nicod from 2006 to 2007. His work focuses on the articulation between our subjective, first-person point of view and the objective conception of the world. He has been drawing on philosophical psychopathology, and in particular on the study of schizophrenia, depersonalization and Cotard’s syndrome, to cast a new light on this old question. His main research areas are (self-)consciousness, the self, subjectivity, depersonalization, delusion and happiness.

Michael D. Kirchhoff received his PhD at the Macquarie University in Australia. Now he works at the university of Wollongong His research is located in one of the most exciting and fast moving areas of research in contemporary philosophy.His recent research focuses primarily on exploring to possibility of diachronic inter-level relations of dependence in cognitive systems and in dynamical systems more generally. He’s currently working on a proposal for a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award with the Australian Research Council. He intend to explore issues such as micro-temporality, the free energy principle and the self, and work on second-wave arguments for the hypothesis of extended cognition.

István Aranyosi received his PhD in 2005 at the Central European University. He is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bilkent University. He specializes in the philosophy of mind and of cognitive science and in metaphysics, and has further teaching competence in philosophy of language philosophy of religion, Ancient and Modern social and political philosophy. His publications include two books – The Peripheral Mind (Oxford University Press, 2013) and God, Mind, and Logical Space (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) – as well as a number of articles on various topics within his fields of research, such as “A New Argument for Mind-Brain Identity,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 62 (3): 489–517, 2011 (Honorable Mention at the American Philosophical Association 2012 Article Prize), "The Solo Numero Paradox," American Philosophical Quarterly 48 (4): 347–360 , 2011, and "Should We Fear Quantum Torment?," Ratio 25 (3): 249–259, 2012.

She received her Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from the University of Western Ontario in Canada in 1988. She then took up a two-year post-doc from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, during which time she spent six months as a Research Fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at the University of Bielefeld. She was appointed as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers (New Jersey) in 1990. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 1996 and Full Professor in 2008. She also has an appointment as an Associate Member of the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science

Research Focus: Her research is focused on issues in the philosophy of mind and psychology. She is particularly interested in the nature of psychological explanation, both scientific and commonsense, and the relation between the two.

Awards and Fellowships:Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis Research Fellowship, 2012-2013.Research Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University, Jerusalem (2011)Research Fellow, ZIF, University of Bielefeld, Germany (Spring 1990) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Post-Doctoral Fellowship (1989-1991)

References: Egan, F. “How to Think about Mental Content,” Philosophical Studies 170 (2014), 115-135. Egan, F. “Representationalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science, E. Margolis, R. Samuels, and S. Stich, eds., Oxford University Press, 2012, 250-72. Egan, F. “Doing Cognitive Neuroscience: A Third Way,” Synthese 153 (2006), 377-91 (co-authored with Robert Matthews).

BS, MS, PhD Cornell. His current research is focused primarily in the philosophy of mind, specifically on propositional attitudes. To this end, he has been concerned to develop a measurement-theoretic account of the semantics of propositional attitude predicates (Measure of Mind, Oxford 2007) as well as a dispositionalist account of the attitudes themselves. He continues to be interested in issues in the foundations of cognitive science, especially as they have to do with linguistic competence.

Robert D. Rupert is a Professor for Philosophy since 2013. He works at the University of Colorado, Boulder since 2005. Before that he was at the Texas Tech University, at the University of Washington, Seattle and at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where he received his PhD in Philosophy in 1996. Robert Rupert is a Fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Science and a Member of the Committee on History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Since 2013 he is also a Professorial Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. His areas of specialisation include Philosophy of Mind, Philosophical Foundation of Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Psychology, Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science with competences in Philosophy of Language, Epistemology and Logic. His research focuses on naturalistic theories of mental content, mental representation, concept acquisition, mental causation, situated cognition, group cognition, natural laws and properties. A representative book: Robert D. Rupert: Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Piera Filippi obtained her PhD in philosophy of language and mind from the University of Palermo (Italy) in April 2012. The main focus of her doctoral project was on the role of pattern perception, prosody and social cognition in the emergence of propositional language. Dr. Filippi is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna, where she conducts experimental research on the role of prosodic enhancement in the acquisition of spoken language. Dr. Filippi has broad research interests in the philosophy of mind and cognitive ethology. She integrates her theoretical background in philosophy with empirical studies in the field of cognitive biology, experimental psychology, and linguistics.

Petra Vetter is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology at University of Glasgow (Scotland). Before that, she received a PhD at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. She is interested in how the visual system integrates contextual information and how this information influences our visual perception. In particular, she focuses on the processes in early visual cortex and how they are affected by multisensory, emotional and higher cognitive factors. In her experimental work, she employs fMRI (including retinotopic mapping and brain reading approaches), TMS and psychophysics in humans. She has an active interest in Philosophy of Mind and has been organising an interdisciplinary seminar series with the Philosophy department at the University of Glasgow.

Dr. Hsiang-Yun Chen received her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin in 2012 under the supervision of Josh Dever, Nichoals Asher, and Hans Kamp. She is currently a CFD postdoctoral fellow and visiting assistant professor at Centenary College of Louisiana. Before that she was a postdoctoral research fellow at Academia Sincia in Taiwan. Her main research areas are philosophy of language and philosophical linguistics; she also has active interests in areas of philosophy of mind, epistemology, and action theory that overlap with her enthusiasm for language. She has been working on foundational issues in theory of reference, particularly anaphora and definite descriptions, and how a broad range of linguistic data determines the right shape of semantic analysis. Her most recent projects concern attitude reports, intentional identity, dynamic semantics, and the semantics-pragmatics distinction.

Prof. Dr. Bence Nanay has received a Senior Fellowship from the Center for Mind, Brain and Cognitive Evolution for April 2014 where he will work on his current research topics. He obtained his PhD in philosophy in 2006 under the supervision of John Searle at the University of California, Berkeley and is currently Professor of Philosophy, BOF Research Professor and Co-director of the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp as well as Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, Peterhouse. His areas of specialization include the Philosophy of Mind, the Philosophy of Biology and Aesthetics, with competences in the Philosophy of Psychology and Cognitive Science. His publications comprise writings on perception, action and attention such as the forthcoming book “Between Perception and Action” (2014), Oxford University Press; “A Modal Theory of Function” (2010), Journal of Philosophy, 107, 412-431; and “Attention and Perceptual Content” (2010), Analysis, 70, 263-270.

Matt Bower earned a BA in philosophy from Beloit College (2007) and an MA and PhD in philosophy from the University of Memphis (2013). His dissertation, titled "The Birth of the World: An Exploration in Husserl's Genetic Phenomenology," presents an interpretation of Edmund Husserl's theory of the dynamics of intentionality, especially in perceptual and affective experience, utilizing recently published and yet untranslated manuscripts written in Husserl's later years. The account emphasizes the importance of bodily affects for motivating behaviors crucial in the process of cognitive ontogeny. Matt's current research focuses on developing an enactive account of perception highlighting its dependence on affective experience,elaborating possible contributions of classical phenomenology to the problem of perceptual content, and understanding low-level social cognition in embodied and enactive terms on phenomenological grounds.

Dr. Nivedita Gangopadhyay has received a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship (Spring 2012-2014) for continuing her research in social cognition at the Center for Mind, Brain and Cognitive Evolution. She obtained her PhD in Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science in 2007 under the supervision of Dr. Roberto Casati at the Institut Jean Nicod (CNRS/EHESS/ENS), Paris, France. Her PhD dissertation is titled "The Sensorimotor Theories of Visual Consciousness". As part of the Marie Curie Fellowship, her research project proposes to address the issue of how one knows other minds by developing an original theoretical framework which focuses on some basic forms of understanding other minds by understanding the others' embodied intentionality or skilful bodily engagement with the world. The project combines philosophical analyses with discussions of empirical studies primarily in psychology and neuroscience. Among her other publications she is also the first editor of the volume Perception, Action and Consciousness: Sensorimotor Dynamics and Two Visual Systems (2010), Oxford University Press.

Julia Langkau is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She was a member of the Arché Philosophical Research Centre and received her PhD from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, in 2012. Her thesis is titled “Appealing to Intuitions” and is concerned with thought experiments, knowledge, and intuitions. Her current research project is on the knowledge we can gain from fiction and on questions concerning the role of emotions in fiction. Her main research interests are in epistemology, the methodology of philosophy, and the nature of intuitions and emotions.

Kenneth Aizawa is the Charles T. Beaird Professor of Philosophy at Centenary College of Louisiana. He is the author of The Systematicity Arguments (2003) and (with Frederick Adams) The Bounds of Cognition. He has published papers on connectionism, extended cognition, and the history of cognitive science.

Homepage

Thor Grünbaum is currently an assistant professor, Section for Philosophy, University of Copenhagen. Before that, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge and at Danish National Research Foundation's Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen. His main research interests are in philosophy of action, mind, and psychology. In addition to articles in these areas, he has published a number of articles on aesthetics and the theory of narratives. For more information on his research and a list of publications, visit his homepage.

Professor Coltheart is one of Australia’s most renowned and distinguished cognitive scientists. He was born in Frankston, near Melbourne. In 1957, he enrolled at the University of Sydney where he completed BA, MA and PhD degrees. Over the last 40 years, he has had a highly successful academic career – mainly in the areas of cognitive neuropsychology and cognitive neuropsychiatry – with an unparalleled range and volume of publications, achievements and honours. Macquarie University

IKW

Universitaet Osnabrueck