Faculty & Staff - [ Faculty - Dr. John Bickle ]
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John Bickle, Ph.D.
Head of Philosophy and Religion
Advisory Committee, Applied Cognitive Science Ph.D. Program
Fellow, Institute for Neurocognitive Science and Technology (InNST)
Mississippi State University
(Prior to September 2009
Professor and Head, Department of Philosophy
Professor, Neuroscience Graduate Program
Director, Undergraduate Neuroscience Program
Fellow of the Graduate School
University of Cincinnati)
Philosophy and Religion, Room 102
(662) 325-7516
Email: jb1681@msstate.edu
P.O. Box JS
Mississippi State University
Mississippi State, MS 39762
Research and Teaching Interests
Bickle works primarily in the areas of philosophy of neuroscience, philosophy of science (especially the nature and scope of scientific reductionism), and cellular and molecular mechanisms of cognition and consciousness. He has also written on the impact of logical positivism, especially the pragmatism of Rudolph Carnap. Recently he has begun working on the place of the virtues in ethics, the nature of specific virtues (courage and self-reliance), and the foundations of libertarian political thought.
He is the author of three books, the editor of an Oxford Handbook, and has published more than 70 articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries, and book reviews in professional philosophy, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence journals. He has given over 200 professional talks, including invited addresses in Germany, France, England, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Norway, Sweden, Holland, Mexico, Peru, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, and Romania. In August 2008 he was an invited speaker at the ISHPSSB Summer Graduate Training Workshop, "Future Directions in Genetic Studies," at Washington University. In October 2009 he was an invited speaker and discussant, along with Jaegwon Kim, Barry Loewer, and Michael Stevens, at the Rochester-Syracuse Mellon Seminar on Reductionism at the University of Rochester. In October 2010 he'll give three invited lectures as the principal speaker at the European Graduate School on Philosophy of Mind, Reduction, and Neuroscience at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.
At present, Bickle is putting the finishing touches on his fourth book, Engineering the Next Revolution in Neuroscience, co-authored by UCLA neurobiologist Alcino J. Silva and Anthony Landreth (Bickle's former Ph.D. student at the University of Cincinnati and currently Silva's post-doc at the UCLA College of Medicine). Forthcoming from Oxford University Press Neuroscience series in 2010, this book presents a comprehensive analysis of the conditions sufficient for establishing a causal-mechanistic hypothesis scientifically in actual neuroscientific practice, and shows how some new resources from bio-informatics can be mobilized to increase the efficacy of neuroscientific research.
Education
- B.A. University of California, Los Angeles, 1983
- M.A., Ph.D. University of California, Irvine, 1989
- Dissertation Title: Towards a Scientific Reformulation of the Mind-Body Problem
Representative Recent Publications:
- "Science of Research and the Search for the Molecular Mechanisms of Cognitive Functions." (Co-author: Alcino Silva). In J. Bickle (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Neuroscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
- "Cellular and Subcellular Neuroscience." In J. Symons and F. Calvo (eds.), Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology. London: Routledge, 2009, 400-415.
- "Vous avez dit réalisation multiple? Je réponds neurosciences moléculaires". In Pierre Poirier et Luc Faucher (eds), Des neurosciences à la philosophie: Neurophilosophie et philosophie des neurosciences. Paris: Editions Syllepse, 2009, 181-204.
- "Neuroeconomics, Neurophysiology and the Common Currency Hypothesis" (co-author Anthony Landreth). Economics and Philosophy 24 (2008), 419-429.
- "The Molecules of Social Recognition Memory: Implications for Neuroethics and Extended Mind." Consciousness and Cognition 17 (2008): 468-474.
- "Real Reduction in Real Neuroscience: Metascience, Not Philosophy of Science (and Certainly Not Metaphysics!)." In J. Hohwy and J. Kallestrup (eds.), Being Reduced. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008: 34-51.
John Bickle's Books at Barnes and Noble
Psychoneural Reduction
Philosophy And Neuroscience,
A Ruthlessley Reductive Account
Understanding Scientific Reasoning
Oxford Handbook of Philosophy
and Neuroscience
Other Information
Bickle has been 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, since the program's inception six years ago. Click on the link below for more information about the program.
Videos
As part of a graduate student recruitment effort while Bickle was on faculty at the University of Cincinnati, he "starred" in this video about his work and 2003 book, Philosophy and Newuroscience, with his Ph.D. student Tony Landreth. (Tony has since earned his Ph.D. and is currently a Post-Doctoral researcher in Alcino J. Silva's neurobiology lab at the UCLA College of Medicine in Los Angeles, CA.) Click on the link below to take you to the video page on the University of Cincinnati's Philosophy department web site, where you can view the video in both high-and low-bandwidth formats.