Springer, the fourth best academic publisher according to Scholarly Publishers Indicators, has published a book— entitled Biology and Subjectivity: Philosophical Contributions to Non-reductive Neuroscience— whose chapters come from a 2011 symposium organized at the University of Navarra by the Institute for Culture and Society’s Mind-Brain Group.

The volume argues for the contributions that philosophy can bring to non-reductive forms of neuroscientific research, which favors the explanatory progress of science by remaining faithful to the complexity of the mind and human life.

Miguel García-Valdecasas, José Ignacio Murillo and Nathaniel F. Barrett, all of whom are ICS researchers, edited the volume. García-Valdecasas explained that this publication seeks to reclaim the importance of philosophy for the progress of neuroscience from its detractors.

According to the researcher, "Some believe that the language and concepts of philosophy will be replaced by those of neuroscience," however, as he added, "neuroscience will only progress by respecting the complexity of the mind and human life."

The volume has 10 chapters in addition to the introduction and brings together researchers from the United States, Germany, England and Spain. As García-Valdecasas mentioned, "The book is the result of interdisciplinary work," which he believes will be of interest to philosophers, biologists and neuroscientists.

Chapters and authors

 

• Biology and Subjectivity: Philosophical Contributions to a Non-reductive Neuroscience, Murillo, José Ignacio (et al.)

• Self-Consciousness, Personal Identity, and the Challenge of Neuroscience, Sturma, Dieter.

• Mind vs. Body and Other False Dilemmas of Post-Cartesian Philosophy of Mind, Klima, Gyula

• Hylomorphism: Emergent Properties without Emergentism, Jaworski, William

• Remarks on the Ontology of Living Beings and the Causality of Their Behavior, Buchheim, Thomas

• Does the Principle of Causal Closure Account for Natural Teleology?, García-Valdecasas, Miguel

• Body, Time and Subject, Murillo, José Ignacio

• The Enactive Philosophy of Embodiment: From Biological Foundations of Agency to the Phenomenology of Subjectivity, Stapleton, Mog (et al.).

• Radicalizing the Phenomenology of Basic Minds with Levinas and Merleau-Ponty, Bower, Matt

• Mind and Value, Barrett, Nathaniel F.

• Ethics and Normativity, Cottingham, John