Wittgenstein meets Neuroscience by Axel Kohler

In their book “Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience”, the philosopher Peter Hacker (Oxford University) and the neuroscientist Max Bennett (University of Sydney) join forces to draw attention to some of the most entrenched conceptual confusions in neuroscience and consciousness research. Coming from a Wittgensteinian perspective in analytical philosophy, the two authors defend an anti-reductionist framework for neuroscience, trying to avoid both the inconsistencies of Cartesianism and the vacuity of modern neuroscientific reductionism. On the way, they discuss a whole panoply of data and theories from the cognitive neurosciences as well as the major conundrums in consciousness research. Although the book discusses an impressive range of material and provides detailed conceptual analyses for the major theoretical issues in neuroscience, many neuroscientists will find the arguments unconvincing; Bennett and Hacker render their conclusions immune against empirical results by their exclusively a priori style of reasoning. The book is subdivided into four parts plus an appendix. In the first part, Bennett and Hacker give a historical introduction to one of the central philosophical issues in neuroscience: the mind-body problem. Drawing on different sources in history, from Aristotle and Galen via Descartes to Sherrington, Eccles, and Penfield, they outline the (neo-)Cartesian tradition that has been the underlying framework of neuroscientific research well into the twentieth century. Their criticism of the Cartesian tradition does not primarily revolve around its postulation of two separate substances, res extensa and res cogitans, but focuses on the conception of the mind as an entity that is somehow related to the brain, especially in the neo-Cartesian tradition of 19 and 20 century neuroscientists. According to Bennett and Hacker, the mind has to be conceived as a process and not as an object-like entity. They consider it at least vacuous if not illogical to predicate psychological attributes of the mind. In accordance with our language rules, there is only one proper subject of psychological attributes: the human being (or animal) as a whole. In the same vein, Bennett and Hacker argue against modern neuroscientific reductionism.