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oa De Nieuwe Neurofilosofie
Inleiding tot het ANTW Themanummer
- Amsterdam University Press
- Source: Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte, Volume 111, Issue 3, Oct 2019, p. 299 - 309
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- 01 Oct 2019
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Abstract
The New Neurophilosophy: An Introduction to the ANTW special issue
Contemporary neurophilosophy is more pragmatic than the early neurophilosophy of the 1980’s. It features two implicit ideas: First, commonsense cognitive concepts (CCC’s) like ‘free will’, ‘thoughts’, ‘consciousness’, ‘attention’ and ‘self’, belong to a variety of disciplines and cannot be appropriated by either philosophy or cognitive neuroscience. Second, the description of biological processes in the brain and the description of behavioral processes by CCC’s are so far removed from each other that a simple reduction, or even a relation of implementation between them, is implausible. What is needed instead, is a relation of interpretation: which cognitive concepts should be used to describe specific brain processes is not fixed in advance but the outcome of an ongoing negotiation between common sense practice, philosophy, and cognitive neuroscience. All articles in this special issue shed light on these two key ideas that characterize a new neurophilosophy.