Rob Wilson Philosophy

My principal focus as a doctoral student and junior faculty member was in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. From early on, partly under the influence of Kim Sterelny (during a Vacation Scholarship at ANU in Canberra while and undergraduate) and Frank Keil (in my first year of graduate work at Cornell), I thought of the philosophy of mind as strongly informed by the philosophy of cognitive science, and that, in turn, by the philosophy of science, something reflected in my early publications. I maintain active research and teaching interests here, despite having worked on a number of other topics since that time. In general terms, my interest in mind and cognitive science have broadened from a focus on traditional issues to include those at the intersection of philosophy of mind and biology, group-level cognition, and the philosophy of psychiatry. My coauthors here include Andy Clark, Frank Keil, Carl Craver, John Sutton, Georg Theiner, and Lucia Foglia, as well as former graduate students Luke Kersten and Bart Lenart.

Chief topics and themes:

• individualism, computationalism, psychological explanation, realization
• group-level cognition, collective intentionality and memory
• embodied cognition & the extended mind: implications & applications

Books

• Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences: Cognition, 2004, Cambridge University Press. 392 pp. Hard & paperback, 2004. Outstanding Title, Choice, December 2004.
• Explanation and Cognition, 2000. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Edited with Frank Keil, Psychology, Yale University. 406 pp, 13 commissioned essays.
• The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, 1999. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. General editor, with Frank Keil, Psychology, Yale University. 8 advisory editors. cxxxii + 964 pp, 471 articles, 6 overview essays.
• “Cognition and Explanation”, special issue of Minds and Machines 8 (Feb. 1998), pp.1-159, co-edited with Frank Keil, Psychology, Yale University.
• Cartesian Psychology and Physical Minds: Individualism and the Sciences of the Mind, Cambridge Studies in Philosophy. Cambridge UP, 1995. xii + 273 pp. Paperback 1997. Outstanding Title, Choice, April 1996. “An a priori argument: the argument from causal powers” reprinted in William G. Lycan (ed.), Mind and Cognition: An Anthology, 2nd ed., Blackwell, 1998, and 3rd edition, 2008.

Journal Articles

• 2016, “The Sound of Music, Externalist Style” (with Luke Kersten), American Philosophical Quarterly 53(2): 139-154. Special issue on externalism in epistemology / mind. Link
• 2014, “Ten Questions Concerning Extended Cognition”, special issue of Philosophical Psychology edited by Thomas Sturm and Anna Estany, 27 (1), pp.19-33. Link
• 2008, “The Drink You Have When You’re Not Having a Drink”, Mind and Language 23 (3), June 2008, pp.273-283. Link
• 2008, “A Conceptual and Empirical Framework for the Social Distribution of Cognition: The Case of Memory” (with Amanda Barnier, John Sutton, and Celia Harris), Cognitive Systems Research, 9 (1-2) March 2008, pp.33-51. Link
• 2005, “What Computers (Still, Still) Can’t Do: Jerry Fodor on Computation and Modularity”, in R. J. Stainton, M. Ezcurdia, and C. D. Viger (eds), New Essays in Philosophy of Language and Mind. Supplementary issue 30 of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, pp.407-425. Link
• 2005, “Collective Memory, Group Minds, and the Extended Mind Thesis”, special issue Cognitive Processing, 6 (December 2005): 227-236. Link
• 2004, “Realization: Metaphysics, Mind, and Science”, Philosophy of Science 71 (December 2004, Proceedings): S985-996. Link
• 2001, “Group-Level Cognition”, Philosophy of Science 68 (2001 supp.), S262-S273. Link
• 2001, “Two Views of Realization”, Philosophical Studies 104 (May 2001), pp.1-30. Link
• 1994, “Wide Computationalism”, Mind 103 (July 1994), pp.351-372. Link
• 1994, “Causal Depth, Theoretical Appropriateness, and Individualism in Psychology”, Philosophy of Science 61 (March 1994), pp.55-75. Link
• 1993, “Against A Priori Arguments for Individualism”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 74 (March 1993), pp.60-79.
• 1992, “Individualism, Causal Powers, and Explanation”, Philosophical Studies 68 (November 1992), pp.103-139. Link
• 1988, “Moving” (with M.S. Candlish), Australasian Journal of Philosophy 66 (June 1988), pp.174-187.

Other Papers and Articles

• 2017, “Collective Intentionality in Non-human Animals”, in Marija Jankovic and Kirk Ludwig (eds), Routledge Handbook on Collective Intentionality. New York : Routledge, pp.420-432. Link
• 2017, “Group-level Cognizing, Collaborative Remembering, and Individuals”, in Michelle Meade, Penny Van Bergen, Celia Harris, John Sutton, and Amanda Barnier (eds.), Collaborative Remembering: Theories, research, and applications. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Link
• 2017, “Externalism and Internalism in the Philosophy of Mind”, Oxford Bibliographies. http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195396577/obo-9780195396577-0352.xml Subscription needed for full access; annotated list of 170 articles. Link
• 2015, “Extended Mind and Identity” (with Bart Lenart), for Handbook of Neuroethics, Jens Clausen and Neil Levy (eds), Springer, pp.423-439. Link
• 2014, “Psychology”, entry for Encyc at eugenicsarchive.ca.
• 2014, “Eugenic Traits”, entry for Encyc at eugenicsarchive.ca.
• 2013, “Group Mind” (with Georg Theiner), in Byron Kaldis (ed.),Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences . Thousand Oaks CA: Sage, pp.401-404.
• 2013, “Embodied Cognition” (with Lucia Foglia), WIRES Cognitive Science 4: 319-325. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1226 Link
• 2011, “Embodied Cognition” (with Lucia Foglia), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/
• 2010, “Extended Vision”, in N. Gangopadhyay, M. Madary, and F. Spicer (eds), Perception, Action and Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press, pp.277-290. Link
• 2010, “Meaning Making and the Mind of the Externalist”, in Richard Menary (ed.), Externalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.167-188. Link
• 2010, Review of Robert Rupert, Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind. New York: Oxford University Press),Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=19128
• 2009, “How to Situate Cognition: Letting Nature Take its Course” (with Andy Clark), in Murat Aydede and Phillip Robbins (eds), Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, pp.55-77. Link
• 2007, “Social Reality and Institutional Facts: Sociality Within and Without Intentionality”, in Savas L. Tsohatzidis (ed.), Intentional Acts and Institutional Facts: Essays on John Searle’s Social Ontology (Dordrecht: Springer), 139-153. Link
• 2007, “Realization” (with Carl Craver), in Paul Thagard (ed.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, Volume 12, Philosophy of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Elsevier, pp.81-104. Link
• 2006, “Critical Notice of Mohan Matthen’s Seeing, Knowing, and Doing: A Philosophical Theory of Sense Perception (Oxford, 2005), Canadian Journal of Philosophy 36 (March 2006): 117-132. Link
• 2005, “Persons, Social Agency, and Constitution”, Social Philosophy and Policy 22 (Summer 2005), pp.49-69. Also published in Ellen Frankl Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul (eds), Personal Identity, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005
• 2005, “Philosophy of Psychology” in Sahotra Sarkar and Jessica Pfeiffer (eds), The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia, 2 volumes. New York: Routledge, pp.613-619.
• 2004, “Recent Work in Individualism in the Social, Behavioural and Biological Sciences”, Biology and Philosophy, 19 (June 2004), pp.397-423. Link
• 2003, “Externalism”, in Lynn Nadel et al. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. London: Macmillan Publishers, pp.92-97.
• 2003, “Individualism”, ch.11 of Stephen Stich and Ted A. Warfield (eds) Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind. New York: Blackwell, pp.256-287. Link
• 2001, “The Cognitive Sciences: A Comment on 6 Reviews of The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences“, Artificial Intelligence, 130 (August 2001):223-229. [Phil Husbands, Catherine Carr, Bonnie Dorr, Donald Peterson, Yoshi Okamoto, George Lakoff.]
• 2000, “The Mind Beyond Itself”, in Dan Sperber (ed.), Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective. Volume 10, Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science. New York: Oxford University Press, pp.31-52.
• 2000, “Explaining Explanation” (with Frank Keil), editors’ introduction to Explanation and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.1-18.
• 2000, “The Shadows and Shallows of Explanation” (with Frank Keil), in F.C. Keil and R.A. Wilson (eds), Explanation and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.87-114. Modified version of 2. below. Link
• 1999, “The Individual in Biology and Psychology”, in Valerie G. Hardcastle (ed.), Where Biology Meets Psychology: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.357-74.
• 1999, “Philosophy: Introduction”, in R.A. Wilson and F.C. Keil (eds), The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.xv-xxxvii. Link
• 1999, “Individualism”, in R.A. Wilson and F.C. Keil (eds), The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.397-99.