What is Neurophilosophy and How Did Neurophilosophy Get Started?

Authors

  • Patricia Smith Churchland Professor of Philosophy, University of California San Diego, USA
10.5281/zenodo.6637568

Abstract

As neuroscience has intensely developed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we increasingly see neurobiological results that bear upon age-old philosophical questions about the mind and its relation to the brain. Although neuroscience has not yet completely answered questions about learning and memory, or about attention, social impulses and sleep, for all these topics there are now relevant results. These results suggest that more can and will be understood in the coming years, especially as new techniques and methods are discovered and applied. Arguments from philosophers regarding why consciousness in particular cannot ever be explained neurobiologically are also critically examined. On this contentious topic too, clinical neurologists in particular have sought ways of determining the conscious status of their patients in order better to treat them. Even on this topic there is early but promising neurobiological progress.

Keywords:

neurophilosophy, history, mind, brain, Churchland, David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel, Quine

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Metrics

Metrics Loading ...

Author Biography

Patricia Smith Churchland, Professor of Philosophy, University of California San Diego, USA

Neurophilosophy – the idea that the nature of mental processes such as decision-making, problem-solving and so forth were supported by neurobiological mechanisms – was more or less inevitable, given the progress in neuroscience in the 1970’s. This progress revealed many links between higher functions, including consciousness and self-control, and neural activities. Because I happened to be the first to publish using the word, ‘neurophilosophy’, (the title of my 1986 book bore that name), I am regarded as a neurophilosophy pioneer.

References

Allman J. Evolving Brains. New York: Scientific American Library, 1999.

Arstila V and Lloyd D. Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience of Temporality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.

Baars BJ and Gage NM. Cognition, Brain, and Consciousness. San Diego: Academic Press, 2007.

Bickle J. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Neuroscience. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Brozek B. Rule Following. Krakow: Copernicus Center Press, 2013.

Churchland PM. A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.

Churchland PM. The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996a.

Churchland PM. The rediscovery of light. Journal of Philosophy 1996; 93: 211–228.

Churchland PM. Philosophy at Work. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Churchland PM. Plato’s Camera. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.

Churchland PS. Neurophilosophy: Towards a Unified Understanding of the Mind/Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986.

Churchland PS. and Sejnowski, T. J. The Computational Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.

Churchland PS. Brainwise: Studies in Neurophilosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.

Churchland PS. Touching a Nerve. New York: Norton, 2013.

Churchland PS. Exploring the causal underpinning of determination, resolve, and will. Neuron 2013; 80: 1337–1338.

Danks D. Unifying the Mind: Cognitive Representations as Graphical Models, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.

Dennett DC. The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.

Eliasmith C. How to Build a Brain: A Neural Architecture for Biological Cognition. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Craver C. Explaining The Brain. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Fodor JA. The Language of Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.

Fodor JA. Methodological solipsism considered as a research strategy in cognitive psychology. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1980; 3: 63–109.

Fodor JA. In Critical Condition: Polemical Essays on Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.

Frith C. Making Up The Mind: How The Brain Creates our Mental World. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.

Gazzaniga MS. Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience. New York: Harper Collins, 2015.

Gazzaniga M and LeDoux J. The Integrated Mind. New York: Plenum Press, 1978.

Glimcher P and Fehr E. Neuroeconomics: Decision Making and the Brain. Second edition. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2013.

Glymour C. The Minds Arrows: Bayes Nets and Graphical Causal Models in Psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

Graziano M. Consciousness and the Social Brain. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Grens K. The rainbow connection. The Scientist. URL = www.the- scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/41055/title/The-Rainbow-Connection/ 2014.

Heller M, Brozek B and Kurek L. Between Philosophy and Science. Krakow: Copernicus Center Press, 2013.

Hinton G. Where do features come from? Cognitive Science 2014; 38:1078–1011.

Lieberman P. The Unpredictable Species. Princeton University Press, 2013.

McGinn C. Storm over the brain: Review of Patricia S. Churchland, Touching a Nerve. New York Review of Books. April 24, 2014.

McGinn C. All machine and no ghost. New Statesman, February 2012.

Medawar P. Advice to a Young Scientist. New York: Basic Books, 1979.

Mele A. Surrounding Free Will: Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Moser EI, Roudi Y, Witter MP, Kentros C, Bonhoeffer T and Moser M-B. Grid cells and cortical representation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2014;15: 466–481.

Nagel T. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Pääbo S. Neanderthal Man: In Search of the Lost Genomes. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

Pace-Schott EF and Hobson JA. The neurobiology of sleep: genetics, cellular physiology and subcortical networks. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2002; 591–600.

Parvizi J, Rangarajan V, Shirer WR, Desai N and Greicius MD. The will to persevere induced by electrical stimulation of the human cingulate gyrus. Neuron 2013; 80: 1359–1367.

Petersen SE and Posner MI. The attention system of the human brain: 20 years after. Annual Review of Neuroscience 2012; 35: 73–89.

Schooler J, Nadelhoffer T, Nahmias E and Vohs K. Measuring and manipulating beliefs about free will and related concepts: The good, the bad, and the ugly. In Mele (ed.): 2014; 72–94.

Scruton R. The Soul of the World. Princeton University Press, 2014.

Silva AJ, Landreth A and Bickle J. Engineering the Next Revolution in Neuroscience: The New Science of Experiment. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Smith DL. Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011.

Squire LR, Berg D, Bloom FE, du Lac S, Ghosh A and Spitzer NC. Fundamental Neuroscience. Fourth edition. San Diego: Academic Press, 2012.

Striedter GF, Belgard TG, Chen CC, Davis FP, Finlay BL, Güntürkün O, Hale ME, Harris JA., et al., NSF workshop report: discovering general principles of nervous system organization by comparing brain maps across species. Brain, Behavior and Evolution 2014; 83:1–8.

Quine WV. O. Word and Object. Second edition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960.

Ryvlin R, Cross JH and Rheims S. Epilepsy surgery in children and adults. The Lancet Neurology 2014;13: 1114–1126.

Squire LR, Stark CE and Clark RE. The medial temporal lobe. Annual Review of Neuroscience 2004; 27: 279–306.

Solomon SG and Lennie P. The machinery of colour vision. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2007; 8: 276–286.

Thagard P. Explanatory identities and conceptual change. Science and Education 2014; 23:1531–1548.

Yu S, Gao B, Fang Z, Yu H, Kang J, Wong HS. Stochastic learning in oxide binary synaptic devices for neuromorphic computing. Frontiers in Neuroscience 2013; 7: 1–9.

Downloads

Published

10.04.2022

How to Cite

Smith Churchland, P. . (2022). What is Neurophilosophy and How Did Neurophilosophy Get Started?. Journal of NeuroPhilosophy, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6637568

Issue

Vol. 1 No. 1 (2022)

Section

Review Articles

Categories

License

Copyright (c) 2022 Patricia Smith Churchland

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Authors continue to hold copyright with no restrictions.