On Philosophy and Neuroscience

December 19, 2023 timothywstanley@me.com

Many of the best philosophers of mind, like Andy Clark, are immersed in the world of philosophy and that of neuroscience. There are plenty of philosophers who don’t carve up their way of thinking about the mind into ‘philosophy’ and ‘neuroscience’; we just want a picture of what the mind is like, and any sources of information about that are relevant. There are big questions about where consciousness comes from, how it evolved, what it is, and how we experience the world. There’s a cluster of unresolved issues, and plenty of them still have a philosophical flavour. The neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell just published a book about the nature of free will: Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will. It’s impossible to write intelligently about that as a neuroscientist, I think, without touching on the long philosophical history around that topic. And even if you want to be a hardcore neuroscientist saying, well, philosophy has nothing for me, moral issues don’t go away just by looking at the brain. Or, if they seem to, you end up with a very strange moral philosophy.

Nigel Warburton, “The Best Philosophy Books of 2023 recommended by Nigel Warburton” - https://fivebooks.com/best-books/best-philosophy-books-2023-nigel-warburton/