The MIND Group is an independent, international body of early-stage researchers, which I founded in 2003. It is formed of young philosophers and scientists with a strong interest in questions concerning the mind, consciousness, and cognition. They come from various disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience.
Over the past decade, the MIND Group has cooperated with a number of institutions, such as the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, the Meditationszentrum Beatenberg, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the ICI Kulturlabor Berlin. I first founded the group at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität in Mainz in 2003, but soon had to relocate it to Frankfurt am Main, where we meet twice a year. Meetings typically involve two or three public lectures at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, delivered by highly prominent guests, most of whom are now authors of the target papers in this collection and senior members of the group. In addition, our invited speakers offer extended, closed workshops, where advanced students have the opportunity to give short mock-lectures in English.
This format was inspired by a question which kept confronting me in my teaching: namely why are there so many excellent, smart young philosophers in Germany, who nevertheless are—and often remain—almost completely invisible on the international stage? More than half a century after World War II, only three or four German universities rank among the top 100. The established philosophical community is still largely disconnected from many of the latest and most exciting developments in modern philosophy of mind. One result of my thinking about this problem was that this lack of integration into the global research context was caused, in part, by the language barrier. The biggest psychological obstacles for many young German philosophers seem to be, quite simply, to prepare a talk in English; find the courage to travel to an international conference in another country; and actually present their work there. One of the things we practice at MIND Group meetings is to prepare them for this.
The MIND Group sees itself as part of a larger process of exploring and developing new formats for promoting junior researchers in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. One of the basic ideas behind the formation of the group was to create a platform for people with one systematic focus in philosophy (typically analytic philosophy of mind or ethics) and another in empirical research (typically cognitive science or neuroscience). One of our aims has been to build an evolving network of researchers. By incorporating most recent empirical findings as well as sophisticated conceptual work, we seek to integrate these different approaches in order to foster the development of more advanced theories of the mind. One major purpose of the group is to help bridge the gap between the sciences and the humanities. This not only includes going beyond old-school analytic philosophy or pure armchair phenomenology by cultivating a new, type of interdisciplinarity, which is "dyed-in-the-wool" in a positive sense. It also involves experimenting with new formats for doing research, for example, by participating in silent meditation retreats and trying to combine a systematic, formal practice of investigating the structure of our own minds from the first-person perspective with proper scientific meetings, during which we discuss third-person criteria for ascribing mental states to a given type of system.
In addition to bridging geographical and disciplinary gaps, the MIND Group also aims to bridge conventional gaps produced by institutionalized hierarchies in academia. If you will, this is simply the academic variant of the generation gap: Few things are more intimidating to young researchers than being confronted, at a conference, with criticism from a researcher who has long been one of their intellectual heroes, known only from textbooks, university classes, and research articles. For this reason, the MIND Group meetings have provided a protected space for promoting supportive and collegial interactions between senior and junior group members. In particular, the meetings of the MIND Group have helped establish and cement collaborations both among junior members and between junior and senior members. In some cases this has led to research visits, joint research projects, or long-term mentoring relationships. One motivation for founding the group, after all, was to smooth the path from university studies to being a professional academic for advanced students and young researchers.