About this Collection: Introduction to the Open MIND Project —

" ... This is an edited collection of 39 original papers and as many commentaries and replies. The target papers and replies were written by senior members of the MIND Group, while all commentaries were written by junior group members. All papers and commentaries have undergone a rigorous process of anonymous peer review, during which the junior members of the MIND Group acted as reviewers. The final versions of all the target articles, commentaries and replies have undergone additional editorial review. Besides offering a cross-section of ongoing, cutting-edge research in philosophy and cognitive science, this collection is also intended to be a free electronic resource for teaching. It therefore also contains a selection of online supporting materials, pointers to video and audio files and to additional free material supplied by the 92 authors represented in this volume. We will add more multimedia material, a searchable literature database, and tools to work with the online version in the future. All contributions to this collection are strictly open access. They can be downloaded, printed, and reproduced by anyone ... 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? ...We wanted to create a resource of lasting value that will subsist for years to come, and most importantly something that really is accessible for everybody—not only for people in affluent parts of the world, like ourselves. There seemed no better way to do this than by providing a large, open-access collected edition showcasing the work of our senior and junior members. It quickly became clear that because of the scope of the project, and also because we had specific ideas about how it should be realized, this was going to be an experiment in autonomous open-access publishing. "