Guest editor special issue ANTW on ‘The new neurophilosophy’

Together with my colleague Marc Slors, I was invited as a guest editor for a special issue of ANTW, the Dutch Journal for Academic Philosophy. We titled the special issue ‘The new neurophilosophy’, and you can read our editorial article (in Dutch) here (and the abstract below).

Articles in this special issue feature topics such as the self, free will, representations, neurolaw, explanations in cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive ontology.

The New Neurophilosophy: An Introduction to the ANTW special issue

Contemporary neurophilosophy is more pragmatic than the early neurophi- losophy of the 1980’s. It features two implicit ideas: First, commonsense cog- nitive 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.