What Makes Us Think?: A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain

Changeux, Jean-Pierre; Ricoeur, Paul

ISBN 10: 0691092850 / ISBN 13: 9780691092850

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2002

The book is complete and readable, with all pages and cover intact. Dust jacket, shrink wrap, or boxed set case may be missing. Pages may have light notes, highlighting, or minor water exposure, but nothing that affects readability. May be an ex-library copy and could include library markings or stickers. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers BSM.ZMZM

Inhaltsangabe:

Will understanding our brains help us to know our minds? Or is there an unbridgeable distance between the work of neuroscience and the workings of human consciousness? In a remarkable exchange between neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux and philosopher Paul Ricoeur, this book explores the vexed territory between these divergent approaches--and comes to a deeper, more complex perspective on human nature.

Ranging across diverse traditions, from phrenology to PET scans and from Spinoza to Charles Taylor, What Makes Us Think? revolves around a central issue: the relation between the facts (or "what is") of science and the prescriptions (or "what ought to be") of ethics. Changeux and Ricoeur ask: Will neuroscientific knowledge influence our moral conduct? Is a naturally based ethics possible? Pursuing these questions, they attack key topics at the intersection of philosophy and neuroscience: What are the relations between brain states and psychological experience? Between language and truth? Memory and culture? Behavior and action? What is a mental representation? How does a sign relate to what it signifies? How might subjective experience be constructed rather than discovered? And can biological or cultural evolution be considered progressive? Throughout, Changeux and Ricoeur provide unprecedented insight into what neuroscience can--and cannot--tell us about the nature of human experience.

Changeux and Ricoeur bring an unusual depth of engagement and breadth of knowledge to each other's subject. In doing so, they make two often hostile disciplines speak to one another in surprising and instructive ways--and speak with all the subtlety and passion of conversation at its very best.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor: Jean-Pierre Changeux, Professor of Neurobiology at the College de France, is the author of Neuronal Man and, with Alain Connes, Conversations on Mind, Matter, and Mathematics (both Princeton). Paul Ricoeur is a hermeneutic philosopher and the author of many books, including Time and Narrative.

Bibliografische Details

Titel: What Makes Us Think?: A Neuroscientist and a...
Verlag: Princeton University Press
Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
Einband: Softcover
Zustand: acceptable