Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience

This is a fine and detailed book. Takes a lot of reading, and thinking.

It's a necessary book at this time, and it takes on those people who think that thoughts are "nothing but" electrical and chemical events in the brain.It's a necessary counterbalance to some of the somewhat reductive views of brain function being proposed at present.

A very useful contribution to debate for both philosophers and neuroscientists. Doctors engaged in mental health work will find it interesting as well.

did philosophy end in 1953? (14/16 people found this helpful)

Wittgenstein's book, Philosophical Investigations, is one of the high points of philosophy. I'd recommend it to anyone. If you think that Philosophical Investigations is still the most -almost the only - important book ever published, you will enjoy reading Bennett and Hacker's analysis, and will be inclined to give the work 5 stars, and can stop reading this review now. If you think that the authors deliberately pick the softest available targets in "conceptually confused neuroscience" for their attacks, and are guilty of preaching a "mantra" of "analyse the sentence to display the conceptual confusion, conceptual confusion, conceptual confusion.." then, like me, you'll award the book maybe 3 stars.

The plus point in this book is the obvious erudition of the authors, in particular displayed via a solid analysis of Aristotle's philosophy. It's also fair enough to criticise the Crickian Anti-philosophy-Philosophy in all it's naïve yet misguided splendour.

The main minus point is the unwillingness to deviate a fraction from a "Wittgenstein was right" worldview, this results in repetitive "we will remove the conceptual confusion" statements followed by the mundane explanations of the meanings of words as we normally use them. Also in the irritating category: the almost jealous-sounding criticism of Dennett, for daring to claim that his work has been influenced by Wittgenstein. Whatever you think about Dan Dennett, surely he's allowed to evaluate the influence of others on his own work, even if he doesn't belong to the "Church of Wittgenstein"?

Another significant minus point is the lack of commentary on neuroscience which does not fit the "picture-theory" or "cartesian-mistake" targets, and we can be sure there is such neuroscience. See for example some of the work on neural network representation, or on the vectorial theories of colour space, or even on modern phenomenology. (cf Petitot, Varela, Evan Thompson, Sejnowski & the Churchlands, Noë, O'Regan).

Bennett and Hacker's book isn't rubbish, and is readable. But hopefully readers will be more open-minded to the possibility that some neuroscience isn't just a sub-task for Wittgensteinian analysis, neither is it being carried out solely by naïve scientists with "delusions of philosophical adequacy".

Superb attack on importing Idealism into science (24/27 people found this helpful)

What are you, a ghost in a machine or a living human being? In this excellent book, the authors, a neuroscientist and a philosopher, answer the question.

They say that Rene Descartes' ideas still cause many muddles. He thought that we were all ghosts in machines, two things in one. This was because he believed that there were two basic kinds of thing, mind and matter (a theory called dualism), and that what we are depends on what our minds do (idealism).

The authors show that commonsense clears up the muddles. We are all living human beings. "The person ... is a psychophysical entity, not a duality of two conjoined substances, a mind and a body."

The authors show that dualism - the ghost in the machine - can never explain how our minds relate to our bodies. Our minds are not things, so they cannot cause changes by acting on our brains.

Often neuroscientists wrongly ascribe to our brains the activities that Descartes and his followers like John Locke ascribed to our minds. But human beings - not our brains or minds - think, see, decide and feel. "The brain and its activities make it possible for us - not for it - to perceive and think, to feel emotions, and to form and pursue projects."
Too many neuroscientists trap themselves in idealism. For example, Francis Crick wrote, "What we see appears to be located outside our body. ... What you see is not what is really there. ... In fact we have no direct knowledge of the objects in the world."

But the authors reply, "What we see does not appear to be located outside us. What we see is necessarily located outside our body, unless we are looking at ourselves in a mirror, or at our limbs or thorax." We see what is really there, the real world, and we directly know objects in the world, which exist whether we see them or not.

This is materialism, which "In its simplest and warranted form amounts to a denial that there are mental or spiritual substances." Materialism does not mean that our minds are our brains. It does not mean that we explain things, even material things, by studying the matter of which they are made. Materialism does not reduce everything to physics, or reduce our minds to our nervous systems.

Colin Blakemore was wrong to write, "We are machines", Crick wrong to write, "You ... are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." Our goals, motives and reasons - not our cells or molecules - explain our behaviour.

The authors show that scientists and philosophers do two different, useful jobs. Scientists analyse what's true and what's false. They create theories to explain and hypotheses to predict.

Philosophers analyse concepts and the rules for the use of words. They clarify what makes sense and what does not. And these authors have done this job superbly.

Brilliant, yet question-begging (6/10 people found this helpful)

Although this is an extremely well put together critique, I can't help the feeling that there is something not quite right about it. The assumption from the outset is that we are mistaken in our direct ascription to the brain language that describes, or refers to, experiential states more properly attributed to the related concept of the 'person'. This is the 'mereological fallacy', and the authors take it as read that Aristotle had the right idea in using psychological predicates to refer to the 'form' of the individual as a whole, rather than internal events which may or may not be reducable to statements couched in neurological terms. However, for many people, this way of organising language which refers to experience is mistaken. Rather than seeing the language of experience as part of a conceptual apparatus which, logically speaking, can only properly be applied to the concept of the 'person' (which, it is argued, bears no direct relation with neurological events since WE as PEOPLE have the experiences that the BRAIN merely provides the material support for), perhaps we should consider that this entire conceptual apparatus is a tool which the social brain constructs and uses in order to gain a degree of control over a certain number of its own (particularly cortical) activities. This would mean considering the (rather odd sounding) possibility that 'we' don't use 'our' brain to achieve 'our' ends, but 'our' brain uses 'us' to achieve its ends.

Contemporary critique of cognitive neuroscience (24/26 people found this helpful)

This is an excellent and important read. The authors (a philosopher and a neuroscientist) discuss cognitive neuroscience. The authors commence with a genealogy of our concepts before moving onto conceptual problems in various areas of the neuroscientific study of psychology. Such areas include emotion, consciousness and volition. The work is commendable as it engages both with contemporary neuroscience (LeDoux, Damasio and many others)as well as contemporary philosophers (Dennett, Searle).

This is essential reading for any experimental cognitive neuroscientists as it helps both study design and what research may achieve but also how we should interpret any data thus obtained into a wider psychology. In addition, the book is of interest to clinicians such as neurologists and psychiatrists who perhaps are vulnerable to incorporating the findings of neuroscience uncritically into their own disciplines. Lastly, there is a tendency of scientism in analytic philosophy and an unfortunate conflation of cognitive neuroscience with philosophy of psychology to which this book is a remedy.

M. R. Bennett, P. M. S. Hacker

Reader Reviews:

Excellent deconstruction of "nothing butery" (4/5 people found this helpful)

did philosophy end in 1953? (14/16 people found this helpful)

Superb attack on importing Idealism into science (24/27 people found this helpful)

Brilliant, yet question-begging (6/10 people found this helpful)

Contemporary critique of cognitive neuroscience (24/26 people found this helpful)

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