Michael D. Kirchhoff

Michael D. Kirchhoff is an Associate Professor in the School of Liberal Arts, University of Wollongong, Australia. His current research focuses on the use of idealization in computational neuroscience and philosophy of cognitive science. Kirchhoff is the author of "The Idealized Mind: From Model-based Science to Cognitive Science" (2025) with the MIT Press. A follow-up book is in the MIT Press publication pipeline entitled "The Idealized Brain: Uniting Philosophy of Science and Computational Neuroscience" coming out in 2026. In 2024, Kirchhoff was named Field Leader in 'Philosophy' and Field Leader in 'Epistemology and Scientific History' in The Australian: Research Magazine. In addition to working of idealized modeling in the computational cognitive sciences, Kirchhoff is well-known for his interdisciplinary work integrating the highly technical and mathematical literature on free energy and active inference with current movements in the field of embodied, enactive and extended cognitive science. In this context, Kirchhoff has a co-authored book "Extended Consciousness and Predictive Processing: A Third-Wave View" published in 2019 by Routledge.