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Academic Staff

Michael Wheeler

		Michael Wheeler, BA, DPhil (Sussex)
		Room A78 Pathfoot Building School of Arts & Humanities Law and Philosophy University of Stirling Stirling FK9 4LA Scotland 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. In 2009 I was promoted to Professor. 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 and Heidegger.

Although I am an analytic philosopher, I am keen to explore ideas and arguments at the interface between the analytic and the contemporary European traditions. This productive interaction between different ways of thinking is at work in my first book, Reconstructing the Cognitive World: the Next Step (MIT Press, 2005). In this book I draw on sources as seemingly disparate as Heidegger and 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 vision of mind that still dominates the field.

My second book, Extended X: Recarving the Biological and Cognitive Joints of Nature will explore a range of arguments in the recent philosophical and scientific literature that challenge our received view of how biological and cognitive nature is organised (e.g. by questioning the idea that cognitive processing takes place entirely within the boundary of the nervous system). Some draft chapters are available here. Please do not quote from or cite the text without permission.

In recent published and forthcoming papers, I have, among other things, defended a functionalist form of the extended mind hypothesis, identified a fundamental tension between extended and enactive views of mind, continued a long-term critical engagement with representational explanation in cognitive science, examined the received biological view of genes as coding for phenotypic traits, explored an apparent conflict between embodied-embedded cognitive science and mainstream evolutionary psychology, and investigated the way in which Descartes’ understanding of what it is to be a machine figures in one of his arguments for substance dualism.

I have produced collaborative research output (e.g. co-authored papers) with researchers in philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, artificial life and linguistics. As a subsidiary to my philosophical work, I was, for some time, involved in a collaborative project in which artificial life simulation techniques were used to investigate the evolution of honesty in animal communication systems.

I am co-editor (with John Protevi) of the Palgrave Macmillan series New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science.

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:

The Interactive Mind

In 2005 I also co-organised a workshop on the philosophy of biology. Details available here

Teaching

Autumn 2012

PHI9CA Rationalism and Empiricism

PHI913 Lectures on Sartre

Spring 2013

PHI9HD Heidegger's Being and Time

Selected Publications

Click here for a full list of my publications

Some of my Professional Activities

Member of the Editorial Board of The Philosophical Quarterly. Referee for various other journals including Mind, Philosophy of Science, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Mind and Language, Cognitive Science, Synthese, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, and Philosophical Psychology.

I am currently External Examiner for the Undergraduate Philosophy programme at the University of Edinburgh, and the MA in Cognitive Science at Queen's University Belfast. I have been External Examiner for the MA in Philosophy of Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex, three Honours Schools at the University of Oxford (Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology; Philosophy and Theology; Philosophy and Modern Languages), and the Undergraduate Philosophy programme at the University of Surrey Roehampton.

External examiner for a number of MPhil and PhD theses at the University of Sussex, the University of London, the University of Edinburgh and the Open University.

If you want to know what kept me off the streets before I became a philosopher, take a look here.