Larry Shapiro's Web Page

Welcome to my web page

 

I am a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin -- Madison. My research interests are mainly in philosophy of psychology and philosophy of mind, although I also have interests in philosophy of biology. Currently I am focusing on issues concerning embodied cognition. My teaching reflects these interests. I teach courses in phil psych, phil mind, and phil bio. I also enjoy teaching Introduction to Philosophy.

 

 

This is a book I published with MIT Press in 2004. The book develops some of the ideas I discussed in my 2000 Journal of Philosophy article, "Multiple Realizations." More specifically, I argue that multiple realizability, when conceived as a matter of nomological rather than logical possibility, is probably not as common a phenomenon as many philosophers believe. This is because of constraints that impose themselves on the kinds of functional systems that can realize minds. I also look to the embodied cognition research program to argue that minds cannot be separated from bodies in the way that lots of functionalists imagine.

Brie Gertler and I edited this anthology for Routledge Press. Our goal was to produce an anthology that departed from the standard canon of readings that seems to dominate almost all introductory collections in the philosophy of mind. There's hardly any overlap between the contents of our anthology and the contents of others, and the readings were specially selected to be accessible to intelligent readers with no background in philosophy. We're also proud to have created an anthology that gives equal space to classical philosophical questions about the mind and new questions that have surfaced as a result of recent empirical research in fields like neuroscience, animal cognition, and psychopathology.

 

During my years as Department Chair I had the honor of presenting to my colleagues cutting edge philosophical work at our annual holiday party. I can't find the first of these addresses, but below are those from subsequent years.

2003: Squaring the Cartesian Circle
2004: Anomalous Monism
2005: A Radical Interpretation of Quine

 

ruth

Recently I was asked to deliver a comic paper about Ruth Millikan on the twenty fifth anniversary of her Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (Storrs: October 3-5, 2008). If you thought nothing funny could be said about LTOBC, please read my The Book of Ruth.

 

 

Online Papers

New: Evolution Without Adaptation? This is a review of Robert Richardson's Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007). It appears in Metascience 18: 319-323, 2009. (.pdf).

New: How to Test for Multiple Realization. This is forthcoming soon in Philosophy of Science. Uncorrected proofs are available here.

New: Making Sense of Mirror Neurons. This paper will soon appear in Synthese. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com, or at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-008-9385-8. For a look at the uncorrected proofs, click here.

New: Review of Fred Adams and Ken Aizawa, The Bounds of Cognition (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008). This is a fairly substantive review, and will appear in Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. (HTML version) (.pdf).

New: Understanding the Dimensions of Realization, with Thomas Polger, in The Journal of Philosophy 105: 213-222, 2008. (.pdf)

Functionalism and Mental Boundaries. In L. Marsh and C. Onof (eds.), Perspectives on Social Cognition, a special issue of Cognitive Systems Research 9: 5-14, 2008. (HTML version) (.pdf) or http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cogsys.2007.07.008

Evolutionary Psychology. This is an entry in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (HTML version) (.pdf)

Lessons from Causal Exclusion. I presented this paper at the Central Division Meeting of the APA, Chicago, April, 2006. A slightly different version is forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. (.pdf)

Symbolism, Embodied Cognition, and The Broader Debate, in M. de Vega, A. Glenberg, and A. Graesser (eds.) Symbols and Embodiment: Debates on Meaning and Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 57-74, 2008). (HTML version) (.pdf)

Reductionism, Embodiment, and the Generality of Psychology. This now appears in H. Looren de Jong & M. Schouten (eds.). The Matter of Mind (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006: 101-120). (HTML version) (.pdf)

The Embodied Cognition Research Programme. This now appears in the Philosophy Compass, an online encyclopedia that Brian Weatherson edits. Brie Gertler edited the section in which this will appear. (.pdf)

Epiphenomenalism -- The Dos and the Don'ts. With Elliott Sober, in G. Wolters and P. Machamer (eds.), Thinking about Causes: From Greek Philosophy to Modern Physics (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007). (HTML version) (.pdf)

Can Psychology be a Unified Science? Philosophy of Science 72: 953-963, 2005. (HTML version) (.pdf)

Multiple Realizations. Journal of Philosophy 97: 635-654, 2000. (.pdf)

A Clearer Vision. Philosophy of Science 64: 131-153, 1997. (.pdf) This paper won the Philosophy of Science Young Scholar Prize, 1996.

Junk Representations. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48: 345-361, 1997. (.pdf)

The Nature of Nature: Rethinking Naturalistic Theories of Intentionality. Philosophical Psychology 10: 309-322, 1997. (.pdf)

What is Psychophysics? PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Vol 2: 47-57, 1994. (.pdf)

Content, Kinds, and Individualism in Marr's Theory of Vision. Philosophical Review 102: 489-513, 1993. (.pdf)

Darwin and Disjunction: Foraging Theory and Univocal Assignments of Content. PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Vol 1: 469-480, 1992. (.pdf)