Brainstorming

Shaun Gallagher

Description

Shaun Gallagher is a philosopher of mind who has made it his business to study and meet with leading neuroscientists, including Michael Gazzaniga, Marc Jeannerod and Chris Frith.The result is this unique introduction to the study of the mind, with topics ranging over consciousness, emotion, language, movement, free will and moral responsibility. The discussion throughout is illustrated by lengthy extracts from the author's many interviews with his scientist colleagues on the relation between the mind and the brain.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy of mind

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 23 octobre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781845407247
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title page
BRAINSTORMING
Views and Interviews on the Mind
Shaun Gallagher
imprint-academic.com



Copyright page
2013 digital version by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © Shaun Gallagher, 2008
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
Originally published in the UK by Imprint Academic
PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK
Originally published in the USA by Imprint Academic
Philosophy Documentation Center
PO Box 7147, Charlottesville, VA 22906-7147, USA



Dedication
In memory of
Jacques Paillard and Francisco Varela



1: Introduction
I did not write this book, I constructed it. And in regard to its content, let me admit at the beginning that in this book I beg, borrow, and steal (well maybe not steal, since I have observed copyrights) as much wisdom as I can from some of the best minds of our time. These are people who think about brains and minds professionally. Although this is a book about the philosophy of mind, it is also interdisciplinary, so I have made use not only of philosophers, but also of psychologists, neuropsychologists and neuroscientists, people who have gained their understanding of how brain and behavior and mental experience go together through experimentation. I’ve borrowed from people in person - in a series of interviews, many of which have been published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. I’ve borrowed by means of e-mail exchanges that I’ve had with numerous people over the past several years. And of course, I’ve borrowed from books.
This book includes interviews, but is not strictly a collection of interviews. I have mixed in explanations and descriptions that are meant to clarify and explicate the issues under discussion. More specifically, this book is intended to be an unorthodox but very accessible introduction to certain themes that cut across the philosophy of mind and psychology. This might rightfully seem a contradiction. An introduction to a certain subject matter is supposed to be orthodox, if nothing else. That is, if one intends to introduce someone to a subject matter, one normally intends to review the established and received views that define the field. So in what sense can this be at the same time an introduction and unorthodox? Well first, the genre of this book is not standard for introductory textbooks since it consists in large parts of interviews rather than straight explanatory discourses. In addition, I can honestly say that there was no preconceived plan to the book, although this does not mean that a plan did not emerge in its construction. The topics and themes that we cover have emerged from the interviews themselves. But this is also why this can be considered an introductory text. The interview style, I believe, makes the various topics and themes very accessible, in the way that conversation tends to be more accessible than formal lecture. And as in a conversation, topics tend to emerge on their own and can be deeply engaging. Furthermore, the fact that these are the topics that emerged in conversations with some of the most important researchers in the field means that we will be exploring views that are close to the cutting edge of contemporary philosophy and science. So what we find expressed here are not so much the received and established views but a set of ongoing questions and discussions that define the field. If these are the issues that the leading researchers are concerned about and find exciting, it seems appropriate to think that these are the most appropriate issues to begin with, and that these are the issues that beginning students, or even experts who are approaching these topics from different fields, might find the most interesting.
As I begin to construct this book I’m sitting at a very large desk in my office. On the desk is my computer, and in my computer I have stored in electronic form hundreds of relevant papers, interviews, e-mails, and some of my own thoughts as I have recorded them. I also have lined up on my desktop (the actual one rather than the virtual one) a large number of books. Books that I consider some of the best written on the topic of the mind. When I say that they are the best, I don’t mean that all of the ideas they contain are true or that all of the theories they propound are correct. In fact, amongst all of these papers and books, on my estimate, there are thousands of contradictions - so they couldn’t all be right. Some of these works are scientifically outdated. Actually that is a rather easy claim to make since the practice in science seems to be to exclude references published more than five years ago. Philosophers have a different practice, going perhaps to the other extreme. In any case, as a philosopher I have no problem keeping Aristotle’s De Anima (350 BCE) on my desk next to Marc Jeannerod’s The Cognitive Neuroscience of Action (1997). Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949) is uncomfortably sandwiched between Descartes’ Meditations (1641) and Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained (1991). Patricia Churchland’s Neurophilosophy (1986) is lying there orthogonal to Edmund Husserl’s Lectures on Internal Time Consciousness (1928), which is piled on top of Davidson’s Essays on Actions and Events (2001). And Gerald Edelman’s Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1993) is leaning lightly against Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945).
Someone familiar with the contents of these various works might complain that I keep a very messy desk - perhaps both physically and metaphysically. They might question the mind that puts one or two materialist Churchlands (Patricia and Paul) next to a transcendental Husserl, for example, or that keeps Descartes so close to Dennett, and mixes empirical science with pure philosophy. But all of these thinkers (and I haven’t mentioned the ones on the bookcases that surround me, or the ones on my list of books still to read) have something important, or at least something interesting, to say about the mind.
I’ve given myself license in this introduction (to be quickly revoked for the rest of the book) to be polemic - for just a minute. I want to point out that there have been many false barriers erected, many silly lines drawn across the last century of philosophy. For example, the so-called analytic-continental divide, which often prevents philosophers who cite Davidson, Dennett or the Churchlands from citing Husserl or Merleau-Ponty. There may be reasoned and productive disagreements between these groups of thinkers, but to discover them and to move beyond them, if that is possible, one must at least consider them together. The discipline called philosophy of mind has traditionally been associated with analytic philosophy in the 20th century. In this book I will not hesitate to redefine the philosophy of mind to include some of the continental phenomenologists - Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and even more contemporary thinkers in this tradition - when it makes sense to do so.
I think there is another, slightly older divide that needs to be closed if we are to move forward in our understanding of the mind. This is the overly simplified division between philosophy and empirical science. Prior to the 20th century, philosophy by its very nature was trans-disciplinary. It was practiced as such by people like Descartes, Newton, and Locke in the 17th century. They were thinkers who were philosophers and scientists at the same time. Even through the 18th and the late 19th centuries the lines were not clearly drawn between philosophy and psychology, philosophy and economics, philosophy and physics. Indeed, scientific experimentation was still called ‘natural philosophy’. Things started to come apart when universities started to make their curricula more cohesively specialized, when the natural and then social-behavioral sciences started to divide into their own departments. The divide that separates philosophy from these sciences is reflected in the 19th century positivist movement, but it has certainly characterized most of the 20th century. There were always some philosophers, however, who stayed close to the psychological sciences. William James was a good example at the end of 19th century; Maurice Merleau-Ponty stayed the course around the mid-20th century; and in regard to cognitive science, and the more recent neurosciences, Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland provide good examples of a growing number of philosophers who carry on that more original 17th-century conception of philosophy. In this book I suggest that we think of philosophy in that very wide and comprehensive sense, going back, even to ancient times, to its original meaning as an all-encompassing term for the pursuit of knowledge.
For those philosophers who are paying attention to the empirical sciences of psychology and cognitive neuroscience, and to the ongoing work on artificial intelligence and robotics, it becomes easier to span the two aforementioned divides with one bridge. Researchers in both the European tradition of phenomenological philosophy and the analytic philosophy of mind are today working together with scientists, and are considering the implications of empirical studies for addressing philosophical issues. In doing so they naturally meet up at the frontier of empirical science. This convergence of science, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind turns out to be a fruitful and refreshing approach that exemplifies in a specific way what Owen Flanagan and others call a method of ‘triangulation’ (e.g., Flanagan 1992). The idea is that to understand something as complicated as the nature of the mind or the brain (where the ‘or’ is still in question), one needs to