Coordinator:

Colin Jager
Department of English, Rutgers
colin.jager@rutgers.edu

The Mind & Culture working group will exchange research between the cognitive sciences and the humanities on questions of consciousness, subjectivity, and the mind. The topic is richly interdisciplinary, and we will explore approaches based in philosophy, psychology, linguistics and anthropology, as well as in the literary humanities and history.

Under this broad rubric, we hope to establish and explore a set of shared concerns that cut across the defining issues of the disciplines. Among them might be: the role of the emotions in cognition and ethics; the cultural implications of the dynamics between different corporeal areas (brain, viscera, etc.); the problem of consciousness in literary and philosophical discourse; cross-cultural comparison of cognitive and emotional categories; histories of mind and of cognition; the mind/body problem; and artificial intelligence.

Guest discussants for fall 2007 included Paul Bloom (Psychology, Yale), Jerry Fodor (Philosophy, Rutgers), Pascal Boyer (Psychology and Anthropology, Washington), Rebecca Saxe (Cognitive Neuroscience, MIT), and Justine Cassell (Computer Science, Northwestern). Spring 2008 guests include Sean Kelly (Philosophy, Harvard), Stephen Stich (Philosophy, Rutgers), Anne Harrington (History of Science, Harvard), Peter Kramer (Psychiatry and Human Behavior, Brown), Jerome Wakefield (Social Work, NYU), Jesse Prinz (Philosophy, UNC-Chapel Hill), Marc Hauser (Biology, Harvard), Thomas Nagel (Philosophy, NYU), David Chalmers (Philosophy, Australian National University), Joe Henrich (Psychology, British Columbia), and Shaun Gallagher (Philosophy, Central Florida).

Among last year's guests were Blakey Vermuele (English, Stanford), Alan Leslie (Psychology, Rutgers), Alvin Goldman (Philosophy, Rutgers), Jonathan Haidt (Psychology, Virginia), Paul Kockelman (Anthropology, Columbia), and Brian McLaughlin (Philosophy, Rutgers).

The Mind & Culture working group will meet on alternate Wednesdays at 1:10 pm. Please contact the CCA for more information. All are welcome.