Neuroscience and Critique

Recent years have seen a rapid growth in neuroscientific research, and an expansion beyond basic research to incorporate elements of the arts, humanities and social sciences. It has been suggested that the neurosciences will bring about major transformations in the understanding of ourselves, our culture and our society. In academia one finds debates within psychology, philosophy and literature about the implications of developments within the neurosciences, and the emerging fields of educational neuroscience, neuro-economics, and neuro-aesthetics also bear witness to a 'neurological turn' which is currently taking place. Neuroscience and Critique is a ground-breaking edited collection which reflects on the impact of neuroscience in contemporary social science and the humanities. It is the first book to consider possibilities for a critique of the theories, practices, and implications of contemporary neuroscience. Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 3.0 license.

Jan De Vos is a post-doctoral FWO Research Fellow at the Centre for Critical Philosophy of Ghent University, Belgium. His main research area is that of the neurological turn and its implications for ideology critique. Ed Pluth is professor and chair of the philosophy department at California State University, Chico, USA. He works on issues and figures in contemporary continental philosophy, with special attention to how language and the extra-linguistic are put into relation to each other, and what this relation implies generally about the status of thinking and conscious life.

Introduction: Who Needs Critique? Jan De Vos and Ed Pluth Part One: Which Critique? 1. The Brain: a Nostalgic Dream: Some notes on neuroscience and the problem of modern knowledge, Marc De Kesel 2. What is Critique in the Era of the Neurosciences? Jan De Vos 3. Who Are We, Then, If We Are Indeed Our Brains? Critique, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis, Nima Bassiri 4. Neuroscientific Dystopia: Does Naturalism commit a Category Mistake? Peter Reynaert Part Two: Some Critiques 5. From Global Economic Change to Neuromolecular capitalism, Jessica Pykett 6. What is the feminist critique of neuroscience? A call for dissensus studies, Cynthia Kraus 7. Brain in the Shell. Assessing the stakes and the transformative potential of the Human Brain Project, Philipp Haueis and Jan Slaby 8. Confession of a Weak Reductionist: Responses to Some Recent Criticisms of My Materialism, Adrian Johnston Part Three: Critical Praxes 9. The role of biology in the history of psychology: neuropsychoanalysis and the foundation of a mental level of causality, Ariane Bazan 10. Embodied simulation as second-person perspective on intersubjectivity, Vittorio Gallese 11. Empathy as Developmental Achievement: Beyond Embodied Simulation, Mark Solms Afterword 12. The Fragile Unity of Neuroscience, Joseph Dumit