Neurophilosophy

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The inclusion of neurophysiological research results in philosophical considerations is called neurophilosophy . The term was invented in the early 1970s by neurobiologist Humberto Maturana . In Germany he was best known for the 1986 book Neurophilosophy by Patricia Churchland . Further representatives of the philosophy of the mind in the broader sense are Daniel Dennett , John Searle , David Chalmers , in the German-speaking area Ansgar Beckermann , Hans Lenk , Thomas Metzinger , Albert Newen , Markus Werning and others. The physicians have approached philosophy from neurosciences Henrik Walter and Kai Vogeley as well as Georg Northoff , who is the only one who has completed his habilitation in both medicine and philosophy. Philosophically committed brain researchers such as Gerhard Roth and Wolf Singer and artists such as Torsten de Winkel can also be assigned to this direction, while the Australian brain researcher Max Bennett appears as a rather critical participant in the neurophilosophical discussion in his book Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience , which was written with the philosopher Peter Hacker . Most of the philosophers named here, however, do not or only rarely use the term neurophilosophy in their work.

ask

Whereas the philosophy of the mind by its subject alone - what is the mind? - is certain, when using the term neurophilosophy , a content-related positioning is often in the foreground: The neurosciences are the central element of an explanation of the mind, not the remaining cognitive sciences and certainly not a dualistic metaphysics .

The fact that neurophilosophy is characterized less by a new topic than by a positioning in terms of content leads many philosophers to reject the term. They argue that the term is more of a buzzword in the neuroscience wake than it would add something new to the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science in neuroscience.

A central theme of neurophilosophy is the relationship between neural processes and conscious experience (in the form of so-called qualia ), which is part of the classic mind-body problem . The peculiarity of the approach of neurophilosophy lies in the broad acceptance of the prerequisite of a brain as the basis of mental phenomena. The aim is to create a bridging discipline by means of which the scientific exploration of mental phenomena, including formal cognition and subjective-phenomenal perceptions , can be theoretically represented.

Fundamental work was for example Consciousness explained by Daniel Dennett and An astonishing hypothesis (German: What the soul really is ) by Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick . Above all, Crick owes an increased interest in all subjective mental processes within the neurosciences . Together with the American neurobiologist Christof Koch , he proclaimed the development of neuronal correlates of consciousness (" neuronal correlates of consciousness " NCC) as a heuristic goal.

reception

The application of neuroscientific results to philosophical problems repeatedly triggers conflicts that extend beyond the academic debate. In German-speaking countries, for example, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published a series of articles devoted to the relationship between neuroscience and free will . Some philosophers and neuroscientists such as Gerhard Roth declared that the knowledge about the neurophysiological basis of decision-making processes made it necessary to renounce the concept of free will and to reinterpret the idea of responsibility . Philosophers such as Peter Bieri , Jürgen Habermas and Ernst Tugendhat objected to these theses that the concepts of free will and responsibility in no way presuppose independence from causal determination. Other authors deny the causal determination of the will and accuse critics of the theory of free will to be self-contradictory. The denial of free will is incoherent, since free will must also be assumed in the actions and arguments of the critics.

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christian Geyer (ed.): Hirnforschung und Willensfreiheit , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt, 2004 ISBN 3-518-12387-4
  2. ↑ z. B. Ernst Tugendhat: “ Free will and determinism”, in: Jochen Tröger: How free is our will? , Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007, ISBN 3-8253-5287-0