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The Chair for Neurophilosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich organizes an international and interdisciplinary meeting on neurophilosophy on March 21 & 22 2013. Colleagues interested in the neurosciences and their implications for other disciplines and society are invited to participate. To advance science and knowledge, to treat debilitating diseases, but also to improve technology and to generate economic revenue, both the European Union and the United States of America […]
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It is already the fifth necessary restructuring of the governing cabinet of Germany within the current legislative period. Annette Schavan, minister for education and science, declared to step down from her function today in order to prevent further damage to her office and the government after the philosophical faculty of the University of Düsseldorf declared her doctoral degree to be invalid on Tuesday February 5. These cases lead to a general credibility crisis of German politics. Hard […]
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Scientists will analyze the genome of the young man who recently killed almost thirty people in a mass shooting in the USA. Biology has been used frequently to understand criminality in the course of history, but with little success. It is unlikely that the genetic analysis will contribute to understanding the terrible crime. By contrast, it carries the risk of stigmatizing people with similar biological features and of overlooking psychological and sociological explanations. While many people […]
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Many sciences use a broad model of causation that allows causal relations to exist on many levels, including social interaction; a reductionist view, by contrast, would even hamper scientific progress instead of supporting it; and agnosticism, after all, is a viable and rational position in a debate if neither side can present convincing arguments. What we discussed so far In the first part of this series we learned something about the controversial view that the person is identical with his...
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The world is more than just an assembly of physical particles. Pragmatical arguments force us to give up the idea that, ultimately, everything must be accounted for by physics. This allows a pluralistic and complementary view for all scientific disciplines and helps us to avoid a philosophical stance that takes the world to be much more simple than we observe and experience it. Simplicity can be a virtue, but with regard to the sheer complexity of our world it can... Read more
