The book “Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Cognition as Computation” by Dr. Mohammad Hossein Vafaian, a faculty member of the Faculty of Management, Science and Technology, has been published. This book is a theoretical project to re-examine the development of the concept of “mind” and “cognition” in the Western tradition; from the Platonic horizon to the birth of cognitive sciences in the twentieth century, and then an attempt to open an alternative horizon by relying on Aristotle and phenomenology.
The overall structure of the work is based on four movements. In the first part, the transition from pre-Socratic and Hebrew-Greek perceptions of man and soul to Plato, Aristotle, and then the Christian tradition is followed, which ultimately provide the basis for the emergence of Descartes and the “birth of the subject”; a subject in which the Aristotelian soul gives way to the abstract and self-conscious Cartesian mind and certainty is based on a mathematical foundation and reflective awareness. The second part attempts to show how the new conception of consciousness, in the context of modernity, leads to “calculation” and “counting”. The author places Hobbes and the empiricists to Kant and the logicians and analytic philosophers on a historical line and formulates the emergence of mathematical logic, Babbage’s machine, Turing’s idea and cybernetics as key moments in the transformation of the mind into an abstract machine and ultimately the birth of cognitive science. In this horizon, the connection of psychology and cognitive science plays a fundamental role as an attempt to redefine “human consciousness” in the form of computational and representation-oriented structures.
The third part focuses on the internal crises of this project: the loss of holistic vision, the reduction of action and skill to a priori conceptual knowledge, the inadequacy of abstract cognition for action and the necessity of referring to unconscious levels. The author shows that the abstract and linguistic understanding of representation, when separated from the body, the lived world, and practical contexts, inevitably either reverts to behaviorism or loses its ability to explain human action. In the final section, the book, titled “Return to Aristotle,” opens up another horizon. By rereading Aristotle’s rational virtues (centered on Phronesis), Heidegger’s phenomenology (the relationship between the world and Dasein), and finally Merleau-Ponty’s ideas on the corporeality of perception and the intentionality of movement, the foundations of the effort for “embodied/embedded/extended/enactive” approaches and their relationship to the Cartesian legacy are critically assessed. Finally, new approaches in reducing humans to the brain or to social construction and the connection of cognitive science with Eastern ideas such as Buddhism are addressed. This book also includes a detailed appendix on the relationship between the Freudian unconscious and cognitive science, in which the two currents of Kantian exact science and Goetheian romantic science are contrasted.

Previously, a collection of articles entitled “Critical Essays in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science” was published in three volumes with an introduction by Professor Shawn Gallagher. The first volume, entitled “History and Developmental Contexts,” focuses on the historical dimensions and the process of formation of the initial and influential ideas in the establishment of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. The second volume, entitled “Philosophy, Environment, and the Body,” addresses the philosophical issues and challenges related to artificial intelligence and ends with an introduction to the second cognitive revolution. The third volume, entitled “Computation and Representation,” seeks to delve deeper into the conceptualization of this second concept and the semantic network associated with it, in order to clarify their theoretical possibilities and limitations.