Title: PHENOMENOLOGY AS ANOTHER TOOLBOX FOR NEUROSCIENTISTS
Abstract:Abstracta S PECIAL I SSUE II, pp. 71 – 85, 2008 PHENOMENOLOGY AS ANOTHER TOOLBOX FOR NEUROSCIENTISTS? Lars Schwabe and Olaf Blanke “[I]t has become next to impossible for a single mind fully to comman...Abstracta S PECIAL I SSUE II, pp. 71 – 85, 2008 PHENOMENOLOGY AS ANOTHER TOOLBOX FOR NEUROSCIENTISTS? Lars Schwabe and Olaf Blanke “[I]t has become next to impossible for a single mind fully to command more than a small specialized portion of it. I can see no other escape from this dilemma […] than that some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them – and at the risk of making fools of ourselves.” Erwin Schrodinger in “What is life?” (1944) 1. Introduction In the preface to his book “What is life?”, Erwin Schrodinger calls for scientific and scholarly “trespassing” despite exposing oneself to criticism with respect to possibly incomplete approaches to the question at hand, in his case of how physics and chemistry may account for the complexity of life (Schrodinger, 1944). His book has become an inspiration for many researchers from a variety of academic backgrounds, including biologist Francis Crick. Understanding self-consciousness and how it relates to the brain is certainly a project of similar complexity and in need of trespassing, due to the multidisciplinarity in cognitive science. The book “The phenomenological mind” by philosophers Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi (2008) is an introduction into the phenomenological philosophy of mind, which is an important and timely topic and believed to have the potential of making significant contributions to the interdisciplinary study of the conscious mind and consciousness. Phenomenology, according to the layman’s understanding, refers to how perception and cognition “feel from the inside” with introspection being the primary method. This focus on subjectivity and the first-person perspective seems at odds with the third-person perspective adopted by the natural sciences. As a consequence, many researchers may not consider such phenomenological approaches and favor apparently well-defined approaches such as quantifying behavior or brain activations during perceptual and cognitive tasks.Read More
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 4
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