Nick gives us an interesting collection of recent web material, including some book reviews. Perhaps understandably, my attention was first caught by the following entry:
Human Errors and My Errata. Anne Jaap Jacobson has written four posts over at The Brains Blog. The overall project: “My intention in planning these four posts was to close on a kind of contribution very developed in feminist thought. The contribution has concerned how we account for human cognitive successes when we are actually rather error-prone creatures. The very general approach is to give up a kind of Cartesian picture of the mind. What is instead emphasized is the extent to which our knowledge depends on our social interactions”.
Other topics in the four posts include radically different senses of mental representation, both in contemporary and historical work, the neuroscience of action and its implications for standard philosophers’ understanding of belief-desire explanations (not good). Accompanying the different senses of ‘representation’ are different models of the mind’s cognitive relation to its environment. OCD, affordances and dopamine are discussed, along with the implications of the abundance of fakes in our environment. Woven in among this are some reference to red pandas, including Rusty, the red panda who went for a walk about from the National Zoo in DC. I think iconoclastic members of other species should usually be treasured, and I understand that Rusty is something of a hero at the Smithsonian, which runs the zoo.
There’s a great deal of material in the Carnival; it would be possible to spend most of a day following the rewarding links.
Feminist Philosophers 