This short note takes two quotations from Snooks’ recent editorial on neuroeducation and teases out some further details on the philosophy of neuroscience and neurophilosophy along with consideration of the implications of both for philosophy of education.

A rapidly emerging hegemonic neuro-culture and a booming neural subjectivity signal the entry point for an inquiry into the status of the signifier neuro as a universal passe-partout. The wager of this paper is that the various appropriations of the neurosciences in the media and in academia itself point to something essential, if not structural, in connection with both the discipline of the neurosciences and the current socio-cultural and ideological climate. Starting from the case of neuroeducation, the genealogy of the (...) neurological turn is linked to the history of psychology and its inextricable bond with processes of psychologisation. If the neurological turn risks not merely neglecting the dimension of critique, but also obviating its possibility, then revivifying a psy-critique might be necessary in order to understand today’s neural subjectivity and its place within current biopolitics. (shrink)

Como dijo Ramón y Cajal, “mientras el cerebro continúe siendo un misterio, el universo también lo será”. El mejor ejemplo de esto son las emociones involucradas en la toma de decisiones, en donde aún no existe un consenso sobre cómo definirlas desde un punto de vista neurológico y teórico correlacionados. Se sabe que las emociones permiten dar significado a hechos y eventos; que son estados cerebrales desde donde la persona hace planes de acción y toma distintas decisiones, pero no todos (...) los autores están de acuerdo en que puedan ser explicadas únicamente como cambios físicos o marcadores somáticos: tensión muscular, frecuencia cardíaca o temperatura corporal. También ocurren cambios en el cerebro en términos de neurotransmisores, pero aún se desconocen los detalles de algunos de estos procesos emergentes. Por eso se consideró una revisión sistemática de los trabajos de los especialistas y una interpretación desde la neuroética fundamental como disciplina filosófica —como filosofía del cerebro— que hace posible la habilitación de un andamiaje teórico conceptual capaz de explicar y comprender algunos de los correlatos neurales asociados a la toma racional y no racional de las decisiones, y la aspiración de explicaciones teóricas subyacentes. (shrink)

This paper examines extant ways of classifying varieties of psychological externalism and argues that they imply a hitherto unrecognized distinction between shallow and deep externalism. The difference is between starting points: shallowly externalist hypotheses begin with the attribution of psychological states to individuals, just as individualistic hypotheses do, whereas deeply externalistic hypotheses begin with agent-environment interaction as the basis of cognitive processes and attribute psychological states to individuals as necessary for such interaction. The over-arching aim is to show how deep (...) externalism works and what its implications are for psychological and philosophical theorizing. (shrink)

One important way in which neuroscience, particularly neuroanatomy, contributes to cognitive science is by providing a model of the brain's architecture, which, in turn, can be utilized as a guide to the architecture of cognition. This project assumes commitment to a view, now well established, that different mental processes, such as perceiving and remembering, employ different parts of the brain (where part is loosely construed so as not to exclude entities which may themselves be composite). These parts may differ according (...) to their internal organizational structure, information processing capacities, and degree of informational connectivity with other parts. Later I will present an example of research in visual processing where researchers are currently attempting to realize the heuristic potential of the brain's architecture in order to understand cognitive organization. Of prior importance, however, is an understanding of how neuroscientists decipher the architecture of the brain itself. This task of mapping the brain, of carving it up into distinct areas, is not as straightforward as one might think. There are, for example, several different criteria by which one might fix a given boundary between brain regions. Below, I not only highlight some of the more interesting facets of brain mapping research but also elaborate on why such research is of interest to cognitive scientists. (shrink)

Education is a fertile ground for neuroscientific applications. However, at the scholarly level this has predominantly been addressed by cognitive psychology and the emerging field of neuroeducation. Although in its very early stages, there is also now a nascent interest by philosophers of education with respect to the intersections of neuroscience, education, and research. The chapter uses neuroscience to provide phenomena for philosophy of education to think and ask questions about, while remaining philosophical and educational. The chapter begins with a (...) survey of the various ways of critical philosophical engagement with neuroscience’s and neuroeducation’s empirical literature, including suggested improvements on the concepts and ideas that frame the neuroscience-education intersection. This includes neuromyths, commercialization, neuroimaging, scientific reductionism, and technological enhancements. It then surveys the opposite direction, where engagement with neuroscience unsettles familiar philosophical concepts, resulting in new lines of philosophical thinking within the discipline. This includes cultural differences, plasticity, and open dynamic systems. It ends with a call for further philosophical inquiry in this emerging intersection. (shrink)