WELCOME TO THE CABANA
Welcome note and introduction
Dear fellow humans and users of the Internet,
Thank you for visiting my little cabana with view on the coastlines of the Internet. This website presents a sample of my work and collaborations as a researcher, teacher, and multimedia artist.
I spend much of my life meditating the perennial topics of philosophy. In my professional research, I have focused my efforts on topics that are best investigated by integrating philosophical analysis with other disciplines in the natural sciences and the humanities. To take one example, I am developing a highly multidisciplinary and collaborative program of research aimed at investigating our social capacity to learn about and value other persons and significant artefacts like works of art. This program has led me to critically examine the contributions of the cognitive science to the study of identification and reference (e.g., Bullot 2009, 2011), to the explanation of our response to works of art (e.g., Bullot 2009, 2014, Bullot & Reber 2013, Bullot, Seeley, & Davies 2017), and to the explanation of the capacity to identify persons (e.g., Bullot & Rysiew 2007, Bullot 2014, 2015, under review). My other projects include a work on the origins of violence and meta-ethical research on the use of empirical evidence for practical decision making.
The research method that I adopt seeks to develop an alternative to both individualistic models of human cognition and contextualist theories of culture that reject the empirical methods of the social cognitive sciences. The alternative I propose is a new psychohistorical approach to identification and control, which is developed in the context of my writings about social cognition and the arts. I use the qualifier “psychohistorical” to denote research that ambitions to integrate (i) system-based explanations of human cognition common in the psychological and biological sciences with (ii) contextualistic explanations pervasive in historical accounts in philosophy and the humanities.
Along with my philosophical research, I am a field and multimedia recordist. I am developing sound-art projects for exploring and illustrating a number of environmental and philosophical issues. I have begun to publish my fields recordings under my own label Art & Anamnesis Studio. These sound works can be streamed or downloaded from the usual retailers of digital audio (e.g., Apple iTunes, Google Play, Spotify etc.).
Nicolas J. Bullot