Titel: Critical Neuroscience - Alternatives to Neurocentrism in Philosophy and Psychiatry
Termin:
22.4.2010
Veranstaltungsort:
Biegenstraße 12, ground floor
Referenten: Felicity Callard (London), Suparna Choudhury (Berlin), Thomas Fuchs (Heidelberg), Lutz Fricke (Berlin), Martin Hartmann (Frankfurt/M.), Jan-Christoph Heilinger (Zürich), Philip Hogh (Frankfurt/M.), Anelis Kaiser (Basel), Laurence Kirmayer (Montreal), Julia König (Frankfurt/M.), Daniel Margulies (Berlin), Stephan Schleim (Groningen)
Weitere Informationen:
http://www.critical-neuroscience.org/CNS_schedule.pdf
“neurocultural” disciplines are increasingly amassing resources and attention. In the
academic and popular literature we often find the conviction that quite soon scientific
approaches to the human brain will transform or even supersede cultural,
philosophical, literary or ‘folk’ explanations of human phenomena. The neurosciences
are bringing upon the horizon new technologies that are being mobilized in the name
of educational improvement, treatment, illness prevention and security: new
pharmaceutical drugs, brain-based methods to boost intelligence, attention and
happiness as well as screening devices with wide-ranging medical, civil and military
uses. Programmes designed to screen for “biomarkers” in the areas of mental health,
the law, and education rest on the hope that neuroscience will enable reliable early
detection of “problematic” traits and conditions.
This raises several concerns. Vivid depictions of the new brain sciences in the
media and popular writing, often in the form of a futuristic discourse of promise and
progress, increasingly lead to the incorporation of neuroscientific language into
laypeople’s self-understanding. There seems to be a ‘hunger’ for self-objectification
that is not easy to explain. Often, neuroscientific claims and explanatory patterns are
treated as authoritative, even with regard to important normative questions in the
domains of morality, ethics and social policy. This happens despite the fact that many
of the experimental results and their theoretical articulations are unstable and
provisional at the current stage of development in the field. A related concern is the
increasing push towards premature application of brain-based technologies,
especially when these might affect important aspects of the personality.
Critical Neuroscience is a project that attempts to understand, explain,
contextualize and, where called-for, critique these developments with the aim to
create awareness of and the competencies needed to responsibly deal with these
concerns in neuroscientific practitioners, policy makers and the public at large. Does
neuroscience indeed have wide-ranging effects or are we collectively overestimating
its impacts, at the expense of other important drivers of social and cultural change,
such as, for example, developments in the economy? Via what channels is
neuroscience interacting with contemporary conceptions of selfhood, identity, and
well-being? How is neuroscience institutionally and politically entangled with powerful
agents such as pharmaceutical companies, funding agencies, policy makers?
A further dimension of the agenda is to make the results of these assessments
relevant to the practice of cognitive neuroscience itself. What difference would it
make to scientific practice if neuroscientists themselves where involved, from the
outset, in the analysis of contextual factors, historical trajectories, conceptual
difficulties and potential consequences in connection to their work?
The workshop explores selected problem domains in which neuroscience is
(really or apparently) making an impact. One focus is on psychiatry: Are we
witnessing the advent of “neurocentrism” in the understanding of mental illness? Will
the neurochemical approach take over psychiatric treatment? What are patient’s
responses to the focus on the brain in medical practice and popular imagination?
Another focus is philosophy: What is the appeal of “neurocentrism” as an
anthropological position (“you are your brain”)? What notion of “nature”, including
subjective “inner nature”, do neuroscientists and neurophilosophers adopt? In how
far is nature treated as a domain of normative facticity (M. Hartmann) that allows
drawing conclusions about how humans should live or how society should be
arranged based on alleged facts about human brain functioning?
Related further themes to be explored are controversies over neuroscientific
methods (e.g. “voodoo correlations” in fMRI studies), the new discourse of
neurocapitalism – the claim that increasingly, the brain sciences are in the process of
adopting a neoliberal vision that treats all aspects of a personality as commodities to
be invested in the marketplace (“mental capital”) – and “neurogenderings”, i.e. the
new focus in some parts of neuroscience on sexual differences that are allegedly
based in the brain.
Kontakt:
Jan Slaby
Institut für Philosophie
Philipps-Universität Marburg
Wilhelm-Röpke Str. 6 b
35032 Marburg
Tel.:
+49 - (0)6421 - 2 82 47 13
jslaby@uos.de; slaby@staff.uni-marburg.de
http://www.critical-neuroscience.org/
Veranstalter: Organized by the interdisciplinary Project “Neuroscience in Context”, funded by the, Volkswagen-Foundation, in collaboration with the Institute of Cognitive Science, University of, Osnabrück, and the Institute of Philosophy, Philipps-University Marburg.
Wissenschaftliche Leitung: Jan Slaby (Marburg/Osnabrück), Christoph Demmerling (Marburg), Suparna, Choudhury (Berlin)
Schlagworte: Genetische Tests/Beratung, Genforschung/-technik, Hirnforschung, Humangenetik, Krankheit, Psychiatrie, Psychologie