Nicolas J. Bullot

Biography

Dr Nicolas Bullot’s areas of specialisation comprise Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Science, and Philosophy of Art, Culture, and Aesthetics. His areas of competence include Ethics (involving Bioethics), Philosophy of Social Science, Epistemology, Logic, Metaphysics, and the History of Philosophy and Psychology. Dr Bullot’s research investigates questions in relation to cognition and emotions, identity and social identification, cultural learning, and the arts. One of his core research aims has been to develop philosophical models of the abilities and social tools that humans use to identify, refer to, and interact with individual things such as persons and works of art. This project has led him to examine the contributions of attention to identification and reference (e.g., Bullot 2009, 2011), the role of identification and historical cognition in our response to works of art (e.g., Bullot 2009, 2014, Bullot & Reber 2013), and the cognitive and social mechanisms for identifying persons (e.g., Bullot & Rysiew 2007, Bullot 2014, 2015). Dr Bullot’s philosophical method aims to develop an alternative to individualistic models of human cognition and contextualist theories of culture that reject the methods of cognitive sciences. The alternative he proposes is a new psychohistorical theory of identification and control, developed in the context of his writings about social cognition and the arts. The qualifier “psychohistorical” (or “psychocultural”) denotes research that aims 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 social sciences. Dr Bullot’s psychohistorical theory of art (Bullot 2009, 2014, Bullot & Reber 2013, Bullot, Seeley, Davies 2017) has contributed to integrating the cognitive science of art appreciation with contextualist research in the ontology and history of the arts. Dr Bullot’s current research also includes a philosophical examination of the application of science and technology to the identification, classification, surveillance, and control of human individuals. Dr Bullot enjoys sharing his passion for normative and theoretical philosophy, social cognitive sciences, and the arts at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. He has taught a wide range of philosophical topics, including courses focused on Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics, Ethics and Social Philosophy, and Decision Theory. Dr Bullot welcomes postgraduate students interested in his supervision and co-supervision of Master’s and PhD degrees. He has experience in supervising both students whose research engages with philosophical topics and students working on transdisciplinary and creative arts projects. Along with his research, Dr Bullot is a field recordist and develops sound-art projects for exploring environmental and philosophical issues.

Research Interest

Philosophy of Science, Interdisciplinary Research and Methodology, Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, Philosophy of Perception.