dr. F.A. (Fred) Keijzer

I am Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Groningen and work mainly on biological approaches to embodied cognition.

 My PhD (1998) is from Leiden University. It discussed the usefulness of representation for explaining basic sensorimotor behavior, later resulting in a book Representation and Behavior (2001, MIT).

 Ever since, my research remained focused on the biological bodily basis of cognition and behavior, and how this basis provides a solid empirical starting point for understanding the very nature of mental phenomena, such as cognition and having a subjective perspective.

 To give an idea of the topics and flavor of my work, here are some of the ideas and claims that were its result. Each is linked to a paper with a year of publication, followed by co-authors.

• Wheeled robots provide an unsuitable idealization of the complexity that is central to the sensorimotor behavior of animals. (1998)

• Making decisions does not suffice for minimal cognition. (2003)

• Bacteria exhibit the basic principles of minimally cognitive behavior. (with Marc van Duijn and Daan Franken, 2006)

• The animal organization of behavior constitutes its own explanandum that can be dissociated conceptually and empirically from ascriptions of intentionality and agency. (2006)

• Dennett’s well-known account of the endless behavioral repetition of the Sphex wasp is anecdotal when its history is taken into account. (2013)

• The Skin Brain Thesis states that the earliest nervous systems were coordination devices for extended muscle sheets rather than sensor-effector connections. (with Marc van Duijn and Pamela Lyon, 2013)

• Simulation studies showed how a bodily extended nerve net with only short and random connections between some nerve cells will improve the bodily coordination of activity across that nerve net. (with Ot de Wiljes and Ronald van Elburg, 2017)

• The very origin of animal muscle-based motility can be interpreted as a form of moving and sensing that does not require inputs and outputs. (2015; with Argyris Arnellos, 2017, 2019)

• Early nervous system evolution and reafference were central to the origin of the self. (with Gáspár Jékely and Peter Godfrey-Smith, 2021)

• Naturalism will remain incomplete when it doesn’t incorporate how our human-style subjective perspective comes into being and allows us to start up the project of science. (2025)