Department of Philosophy

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John W Bickle

Professor and Department Head | Philosophy of Neuroscience, Philosophy of Science, Cellular and Molecular Mechanisms of Cognition and Consciousness
206B McMicken Hall
513-556-6336

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Professional Summary

John Bickle is Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy, Professor in the Neuroscience Graduate Program, and Director of the new Undergraduate Neuroscience Program at the University of Cincinnati.

Bickle is the U.S. Director of Budapest Semester in Cognitive Science, an annual Fall semester study abroad program for undergraduates held at historic Eotvos University in Budapest, Hungary. For more information, visit the BSCS Web site.

current research project
Bickle spent October-December 2006 in residence at Alcino Silva’s new lab at the National Institute for Mental Health in Bethesda, MD. He pursued experimental research on the molecular mechanisms of social recognition memory and "remote" memory. That leave also laid the foundation for his fourth book project, co-authored with Silva and Anthony Landreth (Bickle's formner Ph.D. student, currently a post-doc in Silva's lab at UCLA). The book's title is Engineering the Next Revolution in Neuroscience and is under contract from Oxford University Press Neuroscience.

On video, PhD candidate Anthony Landreth interviews Prof. John Bickle about his book, Philosophy and Neuroscience: A Ruthlessly Reductive Account (Kluwer 2003).

Research Interests

Bickle works in philosophy of neuroscience, philosophy of science, and cellular mechanisms of cognition and consciousness. He is noted for his "new wave reductionism" presented in his 1998 MIT Press book, Psychoneural Reduction: The New Wave. His second book, Philosophy and Neuroscience: A Ruthlessly Reductive Account, published in June 2003 by Kluwer Academic Publishers, brings recent research from "molecular and cellular cognition" to the attention of cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind and science. He is also co-author of the 5th edition of Understanding Scientific Reasoning (with Ronald N. Giere and Robert Mauldin). Bickle also edits an annual special issue of the journal Synthese on philosophy and neuroscience.