Wheeler, Dr. Mike

Space

http://www.philosophy.stir.ac.uk/staff/m-wheeler/wheeler-page.php

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=10532&ttype=2

I joined the Department as a Senior Lecturer in 2004. In 2006 I was promoted to Reader. I was here previously (1999 to 2000) as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow. In between I was a Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Dundee. From 1995 to 1999 I was a Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy at Christ Church Oxford. In conjunction with this post, I was a member of the Department of Experimental Psychology and the McDonnell-Pew Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford. My doctoral work was carried out at the University of Sussex.

Research My primary research interests are in philosophy of science (especially cognitive science, psychology, biology, artificial intelligence and artificial life) and philosophy of mind. I also work on Descartes, on Heidegger, and on environmental philosophy. Although my style of argument is firmly analytic, I am keen to explore philosophy at the interface between the analytic and the continental traditions. My doctoral work provided the springboard for a book (Reconstructing the Cognitive World: the Next Step) which was published in 2005 by MIT. In this book I draw on sources as seemingly disparate as Heidegger and AI-oriented robotics, in order to articulate and defend a non-standard philosophical framework for cognitive science. Interpreted within this framework, some recent empirical work in cognitive science is revealed as going beyond the recognisably Cartesian understanding of mind that still dominates the field. Elsewhere, in recently published and forthcoming papers, I have continued a long-term critical engagement with representational explanation in cognitive science, taken a fresh look at John Searle's Chinese Room argument, attempted to clarify the conceptual foundations of evolutionary psychology, responded to Andy Clark's claim that language is a special kind of externally located tool that extends the cognitive capabilities of some biological minds, examined the received biological view of genes as coding for phenotypic traits, and argued that not only has biological science recently rediscovered a supposedly discredited Aristotelian account of organismic development, but that this rediscovery has important implications for the way in which some environmental ethicists appeal to biological facts to support their positions. As an adjunct to my philosophical work, I was, for some time, involved in a project in which artificial life simulation techniques were used to investigate the evolution of honesty in animal communication systems.

In 2005 I was the national co-ordinator for a series of Arts and Humanities Research Council workshops on the topic of The Interactive Mind.