William Bechtel

William Bechtel is a professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and the Science Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego. He was a Professor of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis from 1994 until 2002. Bechtel was also the chair of the Philosophy Department from 1999 until 2002 and was heavily involved with the Philosophy-Psychology-Neuroscience program, serving at different times as Assistant Director and Director. Before that, he was at Georgia State. Bechtel earned his PhD from the University of Chicago.

Bechtel is known for his naturalistic approach to Philosophy of Science. He has published many books and articles on cognitive science and has recently worked on philosophy of biology, especially cell biology and mechanism (biology). Bechtel has also written about the nature of scientific discovery. He is the editor of the journal Philosophical Psychology.

Books

 * Connectionism and the mind: Parallel processing, dynamics, and evolution in networks. Basil Blackwell. 2002.
 * Philosophy of science: An overview for cognitive science. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. 1998.
 * Discovering Complexity. Princeton University Press. 1993.
 * W. Bechtel Philosophy of mind: An overview for cognitive science. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. 1988.

Reference

 * William Bechtel Web at University of California, San Diego http://mechanism.ucsd.edu/~bill/


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