New Permanent Department Head hired:
Dr. John Bickle
John Bickle will begin as Professor and Head of the Mississippi State University Philosophy and Religion Department in mid-August 2009. He comes to department from the University of Cincinnati, where he spent nine years as Professor and Head of the Philosophy Department in the College of Arts and Science, professor in the Neuroscience Graduate Program, and for the last year as inaugural Director of the Undergraduate Neuroscience Program. In 2005, he was elected Fellow of the Graduate School, the group of premier faculty researchers across the University.
Bickle received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California, Irvine, in 1989. His area of specialization was philosophy of science and the then-nascent field of neurophilosophy. He spent three years while in graduate school taking seminars and doing lab work at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. His doctoral dissertation, Towards a Scientific Reformulation of the Mind-Body Problem, attempted to combine detailed work on the nature of intertheoretic reduction from the philosophy of science with state-of-the-art neuroscientific work, with an eye toward reformulating and solving the old philosophical conundrum of how mind relates to brain.
Since finishing his Ph.D., Bickle has held faculty positions in Philosophy departments and Neuroscience programs at the University of Mississippi, East Carolina University, and the University of Cincinnati.. He has held visiting appointments at Duke University, Ludwig-Maximilian-Universitaet in Munich, Germany, and the National Institute of Mental Health.
His combination of philosophical and scientific training has enabled him to pursue research projects in numerous fields. His areas of research specialization include the nature and scope of scientific reductionism, and the potential for comprehensively explaining cognitive functions at the level of cellular and molecular mechanisms. He is the author of three books (Psychoneural Reduction: The New Wave, MIT Press, 1998; Philosophy and Neuroscience: A Ruthlessly Reductive Approach, Kluwer (now Springer), 2003; and Understanding Scientific Reasoning, 5 ed. Thomson, 2005, co-authored with Ronald Giere and Robert Mauldin). His fourth book, Engineering the Next Revolution in Neuroscience (co-authored with UCLA neurobiologist Alcino Silva and neurophilosopher Anthony Landreth), is under contract with Oxford University Press, Neuroscience series, and is forthcoming in early 2010. He recently edited the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Neuroscience (forthcoming summer 2009) for Oxford University Press. He is the author of over 60 papers, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries in philosophy, neuroscience, and computer science journals, including Philosophy of Science, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Biology and Philosophy, Journal of Computational Neuroscience, and Journal of Physiology (Paris). Most recently, he has turned his research focus to political philosophy and has begun working on the place of libertarian political policies within contemporary multi-cultural Western democracies.
Bickle is U.S. Director of Budapest Semester in Cognitive Science, a Study Abroad program in English held each fall semester at historic Eötvös University in Budapest, Hungary.
Bickle has been married 10 years to his wife and life partner, Marica Bernstein. He has three step-daughters, Caroline Cooper (26), Katherine Cooper (24), and Margaret Cooper (23). His hobbies include fishing and shooting sports. In addition to his academic work, he's also the author of The Big Food Manual, a growing collection of recipes (now over 6000) from southern, southwestern, and western U.S. regions. He and Marica grow and process much of their own food, and are avid homemade bread, wine, and mead makers.
With Bickle having grown up in Dallas and east Texas, and Bickle and Bernstein having spent much of their adult lives in eastern North Carolina, both are ecstatic about this opportunity to return to the south, and to make MSU, Starkville, and the surrounding region their new home.