Cerebro y alma: nuevas formas de mirar a un viejo problema 

Autor: José Manuel Giménez Amaya

Breve CV

José Manuel Giménez Amaya es profesor ordinario de Ciencia, Razón y Fe y director del Grupo de Investigación Ciencia, Razón y Fe de la Universidad de Navarra. Doctor en Medicina y Cirugía por la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, donde también ha sido catedrático de Anatomía y Embriología en su Facultad de Medicina. Doctor en Filosofía por la Universidad de Navarra. Ha sido profesor visitante de Neurociencia en las siguientes instituciones extranjeras: Massachussetts Institute of Technology, Rochester University Medical School y University of California at San Diego, en Estados Unidos; Aarhus Universitet, en Dinamarca; y Heidelberg Universität, en Alemania.

Abstract

The main ideas that I would like to transmit in my chapter are as follows:

1. The neuroscience is a biological discipline, which was aimed in its foundation as an interdisciplinary common research. That is, in my opinion, the main reason for showing a great ability of growing in knowledge integration as we have seen and experienced in the last forty years.

2. However, one of the most remarkable hints in this integrative development could be summarized in the following question: why the humanities studies have recently been of great interest for the neuroscience itself ?

3. To answer this crucial interdisciplinary enquiry, I will try to give you an idea about how difficult has been for this neurobiological discipline to fully develop an explanation of the human being as a whole from the unique perspective of the functioning of the nervous system.

4. In a final approach and in contrast with the above-mentioned in n. 3, I will attempt to illustrate how coherent and consistent are the recent neurobiological discoveries (specially related to the field of the systems neurobiology) and the anthropological view of the aristotelian-thomistic philosophical tradition.