The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement

The exponentially increasing body of work on the human brain has not only taught us a lot about how the brain does cognition, it has also had a profound influence on other disciplines that study cognition and behaviour. A notable example, interestingly enough, is philosophy. A small movement dedicated to applying neuroscience to traditional philosophical problems and using philosophical methods to illuminate issues in neuroscience began about twenty-five years ago and has been gaining momentum ever since. The central thought behind it is that certain basic questions about human cognition, questions that have been studied in many cases for millennia, will be answered only by a philosophically sophisticated grasp of what contemporary neuroscience is teaching us about how the human brain processes information.