Neurophilosophy

As Neurophilosophy the discussion of the relationships between brain processes and mental phenomena is called. The term is taken from English, where he was best known for the 1986 book published Neurophilosophy by Patricia Churchland. For more Representatives who, in the broader sense philosophy of mind, are Daniel Dennett, John Searle, David Chalmers, approximated in the German speaking Ansgar Beckermann, Hans Lenk, Thomas Metzinger, Albert Newen, Markus Werning, inter alia, from neuroscience to philosophy to have the medical Henrik Walter and Kai Vogeley and Georg Northoff, who has qualified as single both in medicine and in philosophy. Thus, philosophically committed brain researcher Gerhard Roth and Wolf Singer and artists like Torsten de Winkel attributable to that direction, while the Australian neuroscientist Max Bennett occurs in its written with the philosopher Peter Hacker book Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience as a rather critical participants in the neuro- philosophical discussion. However, most of the mentioned philosophers use the term Neurophilosophy in their works rarely or never.

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While the philosophy of mind alone by their topic - What is the mind? - Is determined with the use of the term neuro- philosophy often is also a substantive position in the foreground with: Neuroscience is the heart of an explanation of the mind, not the rest of cognitive science and certainly not a dualistic metaphysics.

The fact that neurophilosophy is less characterized by a new topic than by a substantive position, leading many philosophers to a rejection of the concept. They argue that the concept of a buzzword in the wake of neuroscience was more than that he would complement the philosophy of mind and philosophy of science in neuroscience to new.

A central theme of neuroscience philosophy is the relationship between neural processes and conscious experience (in the form of so-called qualia ), which thus constitutes one aspect of the classic mind-body problem. The peculiarity of the approach of neuro- philosophy lies in the wide acceptance of the condition of the brain as the basis of mental phenomena. Goal is to create a bridge discipline, by means of the scientific exploration of mental phenomena, including formal cognition and subjective and phenomenal perceptions, theoretically representable is.

Basic work were about Consciousness explained by Daniel Dennett and at astonishing hypothesis ( German: What the soul really is ) of Nobel laureate Francis Crick. Especially Crick is an increased interest in all subjective mental processes within the neurosciences owe. Together with the American neurobiologist Christof Koch, he proclaimed the elaboration of neural correlates of consciousness ( "neuronal Correlates of consciousness" NCC) as a heuristic goal.

Reception

The application of neuroscientific results on philosophical problems repeatedly triggers conflicts that go beyond the academic debate. In German-speaking countries such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published a series of papers which were devoted to the relationship between neuroscience and free will. Some philosophers and neuroscientists such as Gerhard Roth explained that the findings on neurophysiological bases of decision-making processes necessitated a waiver of the concept of free will and a reinterpretation of the idea of responsibility. Against this thesis has been argued by philosophers such as Peter Bieri, Jürgen Habermas and Ernst Tugendhat that the concepts of free will and responsibility presuppose not the independence of causal determination. Other authors dispute the causal determination of the will and toss critics of the theory of self-contradiction of free will before. The denial of free will is incoherent, as well as in the actions and reasoning of the critics freedom of the will must be provided already.