Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language
232Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language
232Hardcover
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Their impassioned debate encompasses a wide range of central themes: the nature of consciousness, the bearer and location of psychological attributes, the intelligibility of so-called brain maps and representations, the notion of qualia, the coherence of the notion of an intentional stance, and the relationships between mind, brain, and body. Clearly argued and thoroughly engaging, the authors present fundamentally different conceptions of philosophical method, cognitive-neuroscientific explanation, and human nature, and their exchange will appeal to anyone interested in the relation of mind to brain, of psychology to neuroscience, of causal to rational explanation, and of consciousness to self-consciousness.
In his conclusion Daniel Robinson (member of the philosophy faculty at Oxford University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University) explains why this confrontation is so crucial to the understanding of neuroscientific research. The project of cognitive neuroscience, he asserts, depends on the incorporation of human nature into the framework of science itself. In Robinson's estimation, Dennett and Searle fail to support this undertaking; Bennett and Hacker suggest that the project itself might be based on a conceptual mistake. Exciting and challenging, Neuroscience and Philosophy is an exceptional introduction to the philosophical problems raised by cognitive neuroscience.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780231140447 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Columbia University Press |
Publication date: | 04/10/2007 |
Pages: | 232 |
Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Introduction, by Daniel RobinsonThe Argument
Selections from Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience
Neuroscience and Philosophy, by Maxwell R. Bennett
The Rebuttals
Philosophy as Naive Anthropology: Comment on Bennett and Hacker, by Daniel Dennett
Putting Consciousness Back in the Brain: Reply to Bennett and Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, by John Searle
Reply to the Rebuttals
The Conceptual Presuppositions of Cognitive Neuroscience: A Reply to Critics, by Maxwell R. Bennett and Peter M. S. Hacker
Epilogue, by Maxwell R. Bennett
Still Looking: Science and Philosophy in Pursuit of Prince Reason, by Daniel Robinson
Notes
What People are Saying About This
If you can get two sworn and unrestrained philosophical enemies such as Daniel Dennett and John Searle to join forces against you, you must at the very least be described as the controversialists of our time.
Akeel Bilgrami, Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy and director, Heyman Centre for the Humanities, Columbia University
Neurophysiology has made astonishing progress in recent decades and has learnt many hitherto unknown facts about the brain and its functioning. But what do these discoveries tell us about the mind? Peter Hacker and Maswell Bennett adopt an avowedly Aristotelian stance. Many cognitive scientists, they maintain, covertly endorse the dualism of Plato and Descartes, merely substituting brain-body dualism for mind-body dualism. If Daniel Dennett and John Searle are right, philosophical psychology is about to be superannuated by a scientific breakthrough in the study of the mind. If Bennett and Hacker are right, then much of cognitive neuroscience is not sound science but muddled philosophy. The resulting four-cornered discussion must rank as one of the great philosophical debates of our generation.
The points at issue between these four sophisticated and articulate thinkers concern not only neurophysiology and philosophy of mind but the whole nature of philosophy itself and its relationship to science. The debates here give the reader an unparalleled chance to reach a personal decision on issues of fundamental intellectual importance.
Anthony Kenny, Fellow Emeritus, St. John's College, Oxford University