Luis H. Favela
University of Central Florida
Fall 2019

Luis H. Favela is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Central Florida. He was a Fellow at Duke University’s Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy and Visiting Researcher in Olaf Sporns’ Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Indiana University Bloomington. He is an Associate Editor for the journal Cognitive Systems Research and Secretary-Treasurer Elect for the Society for Philosophy and Psychology.

Favela takes an interdisciplinary and naturalistic approach to various topics in the sciences and philosophies of mind (e.g., action-perception, comparative cognition, consciousness, embodiment, and neuronal modeling). He was recently awarded the university-wide Undergraduate Research Mentor of the Year. While at the Center, Favela will work on a project he is developing with his collaborator John Beggs (Department of Physics, Indiana University Bloomington). The first part is directed at scientists, and aims to describe and review a nonreductive and nonmechanistic approach to neuroscience research guided by the application of universality classes. The second part is directed at philosophers, and aims to develop an argument for the epistemic justification of applying universality classes in neuroscience.