Faculty & Staff - [ Faculty - Dr. John Bickle ]
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John Bickle, Ph.D.
Professor and Head, Department of Philosophy and Religion
Interim Head, 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: 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 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.
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 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
Recent Representative Publications:
- "Storytelling 2.0: When New Narratives Meet Old Brains." (co-authored with Sean Keating). New Scientist 2786, 13 November 2010: 53-56.
- "Has the Last Decade of Multiple Realization Criticisms Aided Psychoneural Reductionists?" Synthese 177 (December 2010): 247-260.
- "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.
- "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, 71-126.
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.