Faculty & Staff - [ Faculty - Dr. John Bickle ]
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John Bickle, Ph.D.
Professor and Head, Department of Philosophy and Religion
Adjunct Professor, Department of Psychology
Fellow, Institute for Imaging and Analytical Technologies (I*2AT)
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)
Etheredge Hall, room 228
(662) 325-7516
Email: jbickle@philrel.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. Most recently, in October 2010 he gave three invited keynote lectures at the European Graduate School in Philosophy of Mind, Reduction, and Neuroscience, at the University of Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland. In March 2011 he gave the invited keynote lecture at the Mid-South Philosophy Conference, at the University of Memphis. He gave the annual Dunbar Lecture at Millsaps College (Jackson, MS) in February 2012. He was an invited speaker at the Interdisciplinary Symposium on Literature, Memory and Neuroscience at the Banbury Center at Cold Spring Harbor National Laboratories, Long Island, NY, in April 2012. And he gave the first annual Donald Gustafson Memorial Lecture at the University of Cincinnati in May 2012.
Recently Bickle finished the manuscript of 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 Silva's former post-doc at the UCLA College of Medicine). Forthcoming from Oxford University Press Brain and Behavior series in 2012, 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
Recent Representative Publications:
- “Finding the Mechanisms of Affect.” In P. Zacher and R. Ellis (eds.), Categorical and Dimensional Models of Affect: Panksepp and Russell. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, in press, forthcoming 2012, 175-187
- “A Brief History of Neurosciences’s Actual Influences on Mind-Brain Reductionism.” In S. Gozzano and C. Hill (eds.), New Perspectives on Type Identity Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 88-109.
- “Has the Last Decade of Multiple Realization Criticisms Aided Psychoneural Reductionists?” Synthese 177 (December 2010): 247-260.
- “Storytelling 2.0: When New Narratives Meet Old Brains.” (co-authored with Sean Keating). New Scientist 2786, 13 November 2010: 53-56.
- “Memory and Neurophilosophy.” In S. Nalbantian, P. Matthews, and J.L. McClelland (eds.), The Memory Process: Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010: 195-216.
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.
