Valerie G. Hardcastle

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Valerie G. Hardcastle is a professor of Philosophy and Psychology at The University of Cincinnati who grew up in Houston, Texas. [1]

Contents

Education

She was a double major at the University of California, Berkeley, earning bachelor's degrees in Political Science and Philosophy in 1986, and then a master's degree in Philosophy from The University of Houston, and an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Philosophy from the University of California, San Diego. [2] Her coursework has been affiliated with areas such as; Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and has most recently been focusing her time and research on the study of the neuroscience of violence. She is also a Scholar-in-Residence at The Weaver Institute of Law and Psychiatry and is also a Director of The Medical Humanities and Bioethics Certificate. [3] Hardcastle is an internationally known scholar,[ citation needed ] with a total of 5 books that she has authored and a total of 120 total essays that she has written. Those publications only begin the list of achievements she has achieved throughout her lifetime thus far.

Career

Hardcastle specializes in philosophy of neuroscience/biology, philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of psychology, and philosophical implications of psychiatry. She researches bioethics/neuroethics, behavioral neuroscience, neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of mind. She teaches metaphysics, science studies, feminist philosophy of science. [2]

Most recently Hardcastle stepped down as the Dean of McMicken College of Arts and Sciences and had been in this position since 2007. [4]

Prior to her move to U.C., Hardcastle had held multiple positions at Virginia Tech where she earned multiple awards and achievements throughout her time there from 2000-2007.[ citation needed ] Some of these positions which she held include; The Associate Dean of the college of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, Head of the Department of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech / Chair, Center for Science and Technology Studies at Virginia Tech, as well as being the Director of Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies (STS) at Virginia Tech from 2000-2006. [4]

She also held many teaching roles at The University of California, San Diego as well as The University of Houston before heading to Virginia Tech and also was taught at The University of Cincinnati for one year from 1998-1999, prior to her current positions held there at U.C. currently.

Publications

Many of Hardcastle's publications and articles are based on her research in cognitive science. She focuses on how and why the brains function and react to certain aspects. An example of this is when she studies whether the function of brains is to process information in order to produce adaptive behaviors. Hardcastle focuses her studies and works on the nature and structure of interdisciplinary theories in the cognitive sciences. She has worked to develop a philosophical framework for understanding conscious phenomena responsive to neuroscientific, psychiatric, and psychological data. [5]

Personal life

Hardcastle is married and has three children. [6]

Related Research Articles

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Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes with input from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science/artificial intelligence, and anthropology. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. Cognitive scientists study intelligence and behavior, with a focus on how nervous systems represent, process, and transform information. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language, perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mind</span> Faculties responsible for mental phenomena

The mind is the set of faculties responsible for all mental phenomena. Often the term is also identified with the phenomena themselves. These faculties include thought, imagination, memory, will, and sensation. They are responsible for various mental phenomena, like perception, pain experience, belief, desire, intention, and emotion. Various overlapping classifications of mental phenomena have been proposed. Important distinctions group them according to whether they are sensory, propositional, intentional, conscious, or occurrent. Minds were traditionally understood as substances but it is more common in the contemporary perspective to conceive them as properties or capacities possessed by humans and higher animals. Various competing definitions of the exact nature of the mind or mentality have been proposed. Epistemic definitions focus on the privileged epistemic access the subject has to these states. Consciousness-based approaches give primacy to the conscious mind and allow unconscious mental phenomena as part of the mind only to the extent that they stand in the right relation to the conscious mind. According to intentionality-based approaches, the power to refer to objects and to represent the world is the mark of the mental. For behaviorism, whether an entity has a mind only depends on how it behaves in response to external stimuli while functionalism defines mental states in terms of the causal roles they play. Central questions for the study of mind, like whether other entities besides humans have minds or how the relation between body and mind is to be conceived, are strongly influenced by the choice of one's definition.

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Philosophy of psychology is concerned with the philosophical foundations of the study of psychology. It deals with both epistemological and ontological issues and shares interests with other fields, including philosophy of mind and theoretical psychology. Philosophical and theoretical psychology are intimately tied and are therefore sometimes used interchangeably or used together. However, philosophy of psychology relies more on debates general to philosophy and on philosophical methods, whereas theoretical psychology draws on multiple areas.

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References

  1. http://law.uc.edu/news/valerie-hardcastle
  2. 1 2 "Department of Philosophy - Valerie G. Hardcastle". artsci.uc.edu. Retrieved December 19, 2015.
  3. http://www.artsci.uc.edu/departments/philosophy/fac_staff/byDeptMembers.html
  4. 1 2 http://miamioh.edu/documents/about-miami/president/Hardcastle.pdf [ dead link ]
  5. http://www.artsci.uc.edu/departments/philosophy/fac_staff/byDeptMembers.html?eid=hardcave
  6. Cohen, Jordan. "Scholar-in-Residence Hardcastle Brings Strong Background in Philosophy, Neuroscience to the Weaver Institute". The University of Cincinnati. Retrieved 26 July 2013.