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Following up on last week's revival of the "hot topics" threads, let's try for comments on the 'hot topics' in philosophy of mind? Perception, the extended mind, the embodied mind? Comments are open.
I've seen something of a revival of disjunctivism and the like, but mostly I'm seeing a big uptick in neuroscientific approaches to philosophy of mind. There seems to be a lot of argumentation around various approaches to "the hard problem" of consciousness relative to neural theories of consciousness and so on. I've not done a lot of formal work in philosophy of mind. My thesis research is mainly in phil of science and phil of action, but all of this recent sort of neurosciency stuff in philosophy of mind is really interesting. I think neuroscience and philosophy would each be well-served if their respective practitioners were willing to learn something from the other field.
Embodied Cognition. At my undergrad institution, I had three professors in three different fields (philosophy, psychology, and robotics) who were all proponents of the embodied cognition viewpoint. Who would have thought that Merleau-Ponty would have anticipated the correct way to go about some robotics problems?
Cross-Cultural Explorations of Philosophy of Mind. For example, perception and consciousness from a contemporary philosophical, scientific, and classical Indian philosophical perspective.
I think the philosophy of perception is the current center of work in phil mind (and has been for several years). This makes sense given that the 80's were preoccupied with intentionality and the 90's were preoccupied with consciousness. A lot of this work has to do with the nature of perceptual experience (e.g. representational vs. relational accounts), the relationship between perception's phenomenal and intentional features, and the connections between perception and action (embodiment, etc.).
In the philosophy of psychology part of the philosophy of mind: work on emotions and judgment continues to be rich vein of research, and it seems to me good work continues to be done on dual process accounts of mind, implicit biases, stereotype threat, and also work on the methodology of psychology (prompted by recent worries about replicability). Work interpreting and addressing issues in neuroscience also continues to seem a rich and growing field.
An interesting new topic, though perhaps not a "hot" one, is mental fictionalism (a kinder, gentler alternative to eliminativism).
Non-visual forms of perception: touch, audition, proprioception, etc. Also, the mechanisms of executive functioning, such as attention and working memory.
Reconciling naive realism and intentionalism, i.e. perception as both relational and representational.
A number of people have noted that philosophy of perception is "hot". Here are some specific "hot" questions within the philosophy of perception, divided into three groups–the list is by no means exhaustive. Group 1. Does cognition influence perception? Is there any firm or useful divide between cognition and perception? How much does "top-down" processing influence perception? How does learning influence perception? Group 2. What is a sense modality? How should sense modalities be individuated? What sense modalities do we have? What kinds of properties can we sense? How extensively do our sense modalities interact? Do they interact early in processing, late in processing, or both? Can we generalize from one sense modality to perception, e.g., inferring that perceptual experience is transparent from the premise that visual experience is transparent? What can we learn about perception in general by studying non-visual sense modalities? Group 3. Is perception for action, action for perception, or both? Is attention a form of action? What roles do attention play in perception? While some of these questions arise when we reflect on perceptual experiences, others arise only in light of results from various sciences, especially cognitive psychology, psychophysics, and cognitive neuroscience. The "hotness" of philosophy of perception, accordingly, can be seen as part of a broader interest in empirically-informed philosophy of mind.
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