Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language by Maxwell Bennett (PDF)

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In Neuroscience and Philosophy three prominent philosophers and a leading neuroscientist clash over the conceptual presuppositions of cognitive neuroscience. The book begins with an excerpt from Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker’s Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Blackwell, 2003), which questions the conceptual commitments of cognitive neuroscientists. Their position is then criticized by Daniel Dennett and John Searle, two philosophers who have written extensively on the subject, and Bennett and Hacker in turn respond.Their impassioned debate encompasses a wide range of central themes: the nature of consciousness, the bearer and location of psychological attributes, the intelligibility of so-called brain maps and representations, the notion of qualia, the coherence of the notion of an intentional stance, and the relationships between mind, brain, and body. Clearly argued and thoroughly engaging, the authors present fundamentally different conceptions of philosophical method, cognitive-neuroscientific explanation, and human nature, and their exchange will appeal to anyone interested in the relation of mind to brain, of psychology to neuroscience, of causal to rational explanation, and of consciousness to self-consciousness.In his conclusion Daniel Robinson (member of the philosophy faculty at Oxford University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University) explains why this confrontation is so crucial to the understanding of neuroscientific research. The project of cognitive neuroscience, he asserts, depends on the incorporation of human nature into the framework of science itself. In Robinson’s estimation, Dennett and Searle fail to support this undertaking; Bennett and Hacker suggest that the project itself might be based on a conceptual mistake. Exciting and challenging, Neuroscience and Philosophy is an exceptional introduction to the philosophical problems raised by cognitive neuroscience.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review If you can get two sworn and unrestrained philosophical enemies such as Daniel Dennett and John Searle to join forces against you, you must at the very least be described as the controversialists of our time. — Akeel Bilgrami, Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy and director, Heyman Centre for the Humanities, Columbia UniversityNeurophysiology has made astonishing progress in recent decades and has learnt many hitherto unknown facts about the brain and its functioning. But what do these discoveries tell us about the mind? Peter Hacker and Maswell Bennett adopt an avowedly Aristotelian stance. Many cognitive scientists, they maintain, covertly endorse the dualism of Plato and Descartes, merely substituting brain-body dualism for mind-body dualism. If Daniel Dennett and John Searle are right, philosophical psychology is about to be superannuated by a scientific breakthrough in the study of the mind. If Bennett and Hacker are right, then much of cognitive neuroscience is not sound science but muddled philosophy. The resulting four-cornered discussion must rank as one of the great philosophical debates of our generation.The points at issue between these four sophisticated and articulate thinkers concern not only neurophysiology and philosophy of mind but the whole nature of philosophy itself and its relationship to science. The debates here give the reader an unparalleled chance to reach a personal decision on issues of fundamental intellectual importance. — Anthony Kenny, Fellow Emeritus, St. John’s College, Oxford UniversityA useful introduction. — Barry Dainton ― ScienceReadable and accessible. — James Sage ― MetapsychologyA good introduction to this dynamic subfield. ― Library Journal[A] rare opportunity to appreciate an encapsulated philosophical debate… Recommended. ― CHOICE About the Author Maxwell Bennett is professor of neuroscience and university chair at the University of Sydney and scientific director of the Brain and Mind Research Institute. His most recent books are History of the Synapse, The Idea of Consciousness, and Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, which he coauthored with Peter Hacker.Daniel Dennett is Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of numerous books including Freedom Evolves, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life.Peter Hacker is a fellow of St. John’s College, Oxford. The leading authority on the philosophy of Wittgenstein, his seventeen books include, most recently, Human Nature: The Categorical Framework, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, which he coauthored with Maxwell Bennett, and Wittgenstein: Connections and Controversies.John Searle is Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of sixteen books, including Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, and Mind: A Brief Introduction. His works have been translated into twenty-one languages, and in 2004 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐That philosophy should unravel conceptual confusions in neuroscience or other sciences is a principal theme of the authors of

⭐, which book is in the presently reviewed one discussed by those authors, Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker, and defended by them in response to criticisms by Daniel Dennett and John Searle.However, major conceptual confusion characterizes the arguments of authors Bennett and Hacker themselves.Let me begin by noting that all of these authors appear to subscribe to physicalism, describable as holding that all reality is reducible to physical phenomena. Consequently it is understandable that they will aim to fit their arguments into that straightjacket. A well-known expression of this attitude is the intense opposition to Cartesian dualism, the view by Descartes that mind and body, or mind and matter, are two distinct substances.How derided this view is by the authors can be seen from the manner in which they speak of it: “crippling Cartesianism” (p.75, Dennett), “find themselves in bed with Descartes” (p.100, Searle), “the long, dark shadow of Descartes” (p.159, Bennett and Hacker). Only the commentator in the book, Daniel Robinson, expresses (pp.192-3) reservations about “how many kinds of different sorts of ‘stuff’ might be constitutive of all reality”, but he considers such questions “best to leave unanswered”.They need not be left unanswered in philosophy, which with the aid of logic is here to try to resolve them. I may immodestly note that I deal with such questions in my

⭐, but now I wish to point out confusions by the principal reviewed authors, whose object is to prevent confusion.In their arguments they contend (p.208, note 6) that “the idea that the mind is a SUBSTANCE [I capitalized italics] of any kind is not coherent”, i.e. that it makes no “sense” to speak of mind as contrasted with the body. But the authors are confused by words. “Substance” is usually defined by the likes of “essential nature”, and the main issue, regardless of words used, is whether there is an entity customarily termed “mind” which is distinct from the body. The entity in question is obviously, in Descartes’ and other discussions of interaction between mind and body, consciousness–leaving aside particulars like recent propounding of an unconscious. And it certainly makes sense to inquire about the relation between conscious and bodily occurrences.But the most prominent area of confusion by the authors is in their primary contention of a “mereological fallacy” (e.g. p.22), regarding “the logic of part/whole relations”. The authors repeatedly contend such as: “psychological predicates are ascribable to the whole animal, not to its constituent parts”. The underlying dispute is with neuroscientists who ascribe “psychological predicates” to the brain, and the presently discussed authors insist: “Human beings, but not their brains, can be said to be thoughtful or to be thoughtless; animals, but not their brains…, can be said to see, hear, smell and taste things…” And the authors repeat: “psychological predicates apply paradigmatically to the HUMAN BEING (OR ANIMAL) AS A WHOLE, and NOT to the body or its parts”.It should be noted that the shift to the brain by neuroscientists is done from the traditional “mind” or consciousness, since the latter does not lend itself to their physical scrutiny. And the turn by the discussed authors to the “whole” of the animal is evidently born of the like physicalist presupposition that one cannot speak of a mind separate from the body. Ironically, their phrase “psychological predicates” itself relies on the word “psyche” for “soul”, and it is easy to see that their arguments correspondingly confuse the concepts involved.It is not the “whole” of the human or animal that thinks, sees, hears, smells and tastes things. The arm does not take part in thinking, or the leg in seeing. It is indeed a truism that it is the conscious part in us that performs those tasks, enlisting in cases some of the body. Try as they may, thinkers cannot dismiss the role of consciousness in our lives.

⭐Great idea to join an analytic philosopher and a neural scientist to argue their case with other philosophers. Good introduction to Wittgenstein and his philosophical investigations.

⭐So the concept of the book is a good one. Usually you end up with one author’s opinion and he is responsible for summing up and responding to his opponents’ works; having some of that dialogue in the same place seems interesting, and the individuals contributing are worthwhile.Unfortunately the whole thing feels a bit stitched together. I’m left with a puzzle that, despite finished, fails to fit together in a satisfactory manner as well as a distinct impression that everyone was talking past and misunderstanding each other.There are insightful nuggets, of course. But you’d be better off getting them from the authors’ individual works rather than trying to parse through this cluttered compilation.It’s possible some of my disappointment stems from how expensive such a short book was, for full disclosure 🙂

⭐A helpful summary of the views of distinguished authors concerning the importance of a broadly Wittgensteinean perspective on neuroscience.

⭐A lively and current debate about how philosophers and scientists talk about the mind/brain.

⭐The book is about 2/3 Bennett and 1/3 others. I wish Hacker had written more sections, as his arguments made a lot more sense and brought in the more scientific aspects, but he only wrote two short sections. Dennett and Searle only wrote short sections, about 20 pages each. Their higher-profile names have been used to boost this Bennett’s insignificant stinker of a book.Bennet’s arguments are pretty laughable and out-of-touch. He bases his arguments on Wittgensteinian simple language philosophy, but seems to be completely out of touch with the current state of the neuroscientific community. He will argue that sentences like, for example, “The brain remembers the number.” are logically incoherent. He can’t seem to grasp the idea that brains really DO remember things, reason about things, etc. Or he’s just one of these dunce philosophers with no real argument who instead acts incredulous about opposing arguments and hopes that the audience just agrees with him. He also repeats himself and does nothing, as far as I can see, to refute Dennet’s or Searle’s arguments.Don’t waste your time. Buy one of Dennett’s or Searle’s books.

⭐Granted, Bennett and Hacker were the impetus behind this book’s creation, but I feel they could have allowed more back-and-forth with Dennett and Searle, their two primary interlocutors. Instead, they republish sections of their own original arguments to give some context to Dennett and Searles’ responses, which don’t differ except in tone from their positions at the conference from which the book came. Then the book grants Bennett and Hacker another answer (composed, so far as I could tell, of almost willful misreadings of Searle’s and Dennetts’ criticisms), then a conclusion from a “referee” who, naturally, mostly judges them to have come out ahead in the argument. I expected more interlocution, but instead it seems to be a vehicle for Hacker and Bennett’s position.

⭐An interesting book which is mostly about philosophy, neuroscience and critical theory. This book is of little interest to people tortured by psychotronic “mind control”.

⭐Outstanding analysis of the problems of cognitive neuroscience, put in historical context. Today cognitive neuroscience has a huge impact which is based on misunderstanding of the functions of the brain. The model is borrowed from neurology, in which brain damage, correctly , is related to behavioural sympotms. The brain does not have this role in normal circumstances, in which it pemits, rather than controls behaviour. This point is made with admirable clarity by Bennett and Hacker. In their previous book on the same topic they expanded considerably on psychological issues related to “brain control” and incisively noted that Cartesian mind/body dualism remains essentially intact in today’s cognitive neuroscience, it has merely been replaced by brain/body dualism. It is compelling reading. Recent studies on mice and Drosophlia provide strong support for the idea that the brain allows animals/humans to adapt to what goes on rather than control what they/we do. Defenders of traditional thought within neurophilosophy contributing to this book present arguments which Bennet and Hacker conveniently undermine, and with elegance and often in a funny, yet serious, manner. Strongly recommended!

⭐This is an important topic which is usually a challenge for the lay reader to follow. Or at least, even if you can follow the views expressed by an author it is difficult to critique their argument.The format chosen here of the debate between two groups with different views makes the argument come alive and helps you to think through the strengths and weaknesses of the views.

⭐There is an old saying that “as iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.”What emerges from the debates in this book is profound insight into some critical issues in philosophy of mind and neuroscience. When I first read this book, I was mostly on Searle’s side, but wound up being persuaded by some of Hacker’s arguments, and even more by Dennett’s. I return to this book again and again.

⭐Excellent.

⭐Wer schon immer Zweifel am Erkenntnisgewinn der Sprachphilosophie hatte, wird sich durch dieses Buch bestätigt fühlen. Da stellen doch tatsächlich der Sprachphilosoph Peter Hacker und der die chemophysikalischen Vorgänge zwischen den Synapsen erforschende Maxwell Bennett fest, es sei “sinnlos”, die Wahrnehmungs- und Denkleistungen die das Gehirn erbringt, diesem auch zuzuschreiben. Vielmehr seien dies Leistungen der Person als einheitlicher Entität (Aristoteles). Nun ist sicherlich zuzugestehen, dass das Gehirn als hardware für die software des Bewusstseins keine personellen Eigenschaften hat. Aber zu behaupten: ” The brain is not an organ of conciousness. One sees with one’s eyes and hears with one’s ears, but one is not concious with one’s brain any more than one walks with one’s brain”, S. 135, erscheint grotesk lächerlich. Also denken wir etwa mit dem Bauch? Sebstverständlich sind die Behauptungen nicht falsifizierbar, geschweige denn verifizierbar.Daher ist es erstaunlich, das so gestandene Philosophen wie Daniel Dennett (Conciousness explained, Freedom evolves) und John Searle (das chinesische Zimmer) sich überhaupt mit den Thesen auseinandersetzen.Dennett bezeichnet sie als naive Anthropologie und erklärt sich Bennett’s Unterstützung der Thesen Hackers mit der Tatsache, dass das Forschungsgebiet Bennett’s auf der Synapsenebene tatsächlich nur die Vermutung zulässt, dass es sich bei dem Forschungsobjekt um nichts als organische Materie handelt. Bringt das Gehirn seine wunderbaren Leistungen doch erst durch das synchrone und höchst komplexe Zusammenspiel von Abermilliarden Synapsen zustande, also auf einer wesentlich höheren Organisationsebene.Searle versucht sorgfältig, die sprachphilosophischen Argumente Punkt für Punkt zu widerlegen, vergeblich. Die Behauptung, eine bestimmte Zuschreibung sei nicht falsch sondern sinnos, entzieht sich offenbar zumindest hier der Frage nach Gründen.Das Buch, das ich nicht ohne Vergnügen und innerem Gelächter gelesen habe, ist genau zutreffend beschrieben worden von A. Bilgrami, Columbia University: “If you can get two sworn and unrestrained philosophical enemies such as Daniel Dennett and John Searle (Dennett und Searle sind durchaus nicht immer einer Meinung, z.B. zur AI) to join forces against you, you must at the very least be described as the controversialists of our time”…….

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