Neuroscience and Philosophy

Philosophers and neuroscientists address central issues in both fields, including morality, action, mental illness, consciousness, perception, and memory.
 

Philosophers and neuroscientists grapple with the same profound questions involving consciousness, perception, behavior, and moral judgment, but only recently have the two disciplines begun to work together. This volume offers fourteen original chapters that address these issues, each written by a team that includes at least one philosopher and one neuroscientist who integrate disciplinary perspectives and reflect the latest research in both fields. Topics include morality, empathy, agency, the self, mental illness, neuroprediction, optogenetics, pain, vision, consciousness, memory, concepts, mind wandering, and the neural basis of psychological categories.
 
The chapters first address basic issues about our social and moral lives: how we decide to act and ought to act toward each other, how we understand each other’s mental states and selves, and how we deal with pressing social problems regarding crime and mental or brain health. The following chapters consider basic issues about our mental lives: how we classify and recall what we experience, how we see and feel objects in the world, how we ponder plans and alternatives, and how our brains make us conscious and create specific mental states.
 

Felipe De Brigard is Fuchsberg-Levine Family Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Duke University and the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, is Core Faculty at Duke’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and has a secondary appointment in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics in the Philosophy Department and Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, is Core Faculty at Duke’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and has secondary appointments in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and in the Duke University Law School.
 

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
I Social Neuroscience and Philosophy 
1 The Neuroscience of Moral Judgment: Empirical and Philosophical Developments 17
2 The Nature of Empathy 49
3 I Did That! Biomarkers of Volitional and Free Agency 79
4 Me, My (Moral) Self, and I 111
5 Neuroscience and Mental Illness 139
6 Ethical Implications of Neurobiologically Informed Risk Assessment for Criminal Justice Decisions: A Case for Pragmatism 161
7 Ethical Issues Raised by Recent Developments in Neuroscience: The Case of Optogenetics 195
II Cognitive Neuroscience and Philosophy 
8 Touch and Other Somatosensory Senses 211
9 What Do Models of Visual Perception Tell Us about Visual Phenomenology? 241
10 The Neural Substrates of Conscious Perception without Performance Confounds 285
11 Memory Structure and Cognitive Maps 325
12 Implications from the Philosophy of Concepts for the Neuroscience of Memory Systems 353
13 The Scientific Study of Passive Thinking: Methods of Mind-Wandering Research 389
14 Neuroscience and Cognitive Ontology: A Case for Pluralism 427
Glossary 467
Contributors 477
Index 483