Department of Philosophy
Staff
Academic Staff
Michael Wheeler
 |
Michael Wheeler, BA, DPhil (Sussex) |
|
|---|---|---|
 |
University of Stirling Stirling FK9
4LA UK |
|
 |
Tel: + 44 (0) 1786 466243 | |
 |
Fax: + 44 (0) 1786 466233 | |
 |
Email: Michael Wheeler | |
 |
Web: www.philosophy.stir.ac.uk |
About |
| I joined the Department as a Senior Lecturer in 2004. In 2006 I was promoted to Reader. I was here previously (1999 to 2000) as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow. In between I was a Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Dundee. From 1995 to 1999 I was a Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy at Christ Church Oxford. In conjunction with this post, I was a member of the Department of Experimental Psychology and the McDonnell-Pew Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford. My doctoral work was carried out at the University of Sussex. |
Research |
My primary research interests are in philosophy of science (especially cognitive science, psychology, biology, artificial intelligence and artificial life) and philosophy of mind. I also work on Descartes, on Heidegger, and on environmental philosophy. Although my style of argument is firmly analytic, I am keen to explore philosophy at the interface between the analytic and the continental traditions. My doctoral work provided the springboard for a book (Reconstructing the Cognitive World: the Next Step) which was published in 2005 by MIT. In this book I draw on sources as seemingly disparate as Heidegger and AI-oriented robotics, in order to articulate and defend a non-standard philosophical framework for cognitive science. Interpreted within this framework, some recent empirical work in cognitive science is revealed as going beyond the recognisably Cartesian understanding of mind that still dominates the field. Elsewhere, in recently published and forthcoming papers, I have continued a long-term critical engagement with representational explanation in cognitive science, taken a fresh look at John Searle's Chinese Room argument, attempted to clarify the conceptual foundations of evolutionary psychology, responded to Andy Clark's claim that language is a special kind of externally located tool that extends the cognitive capabilities of some biological minds, examined the received biological view of genes as coding for phenotypic traits, and argued that not only has biological science recently rediscovered a supposedly discredited Aristotelian account of organismic development, but that this rediscovery has important implications for the way in which some environmental ethicists appeal to biological facts to support their positions. As an adjunct to my philosophical work, I was, for some time, involved in a project in which artificial life simulation techniques were used to investigate the evolution of honesty in animal communication systems. Some draft chapters from my next book, called Extended X: Recarving the Biological and Cognitive Joints of Nature, are available here. Please do not quote from or cite the text without permission. In 2005 I was the national co-ordinator for a series of Arts and Humanities Research Council workshops on the topic of The Interactive Mind. For more details on this project, follow this link: In 2005 I also co-organised a workshop on the philosophy of biology. Details available here |
Teaching |
Autumn 2009 PHI9CA Rationalism and Empiricism Spring 2010 PHI9MC Philosophy of Biology |
Selected Publications |
| Click here for a full list of my publications |
| Some of my Professional Activities |
If you want to know what kept me off the streets before I became a philosopher, take a look here ...for the 'new' album, click here and follow the links to 'Releases' and then 'Triarchy'.
|
