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Talk at Urania Berlin, January 25 2012, 7:30pm
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Neuroscience as savior? Why we need a critical discourse about the knowledge of the brain
Jan Slaby
Urania Berlin, An der Urania 17, 10787 Berlin
Language: German
Undeniably, the brain is important. But how important are the insights of neuroscience really? If one does believe the respective proponents, then these insights will lead to nothing less than to a fundamental change of human self-understanding. Jan Slaby shows that this assumption is more of an imputation than a philosophically thought-through hypothesis, and that many of the "insights" are far away from being scientifically established knowledge. Hear a plea for a critical and philosophically ambitious to understand the sciences, who try to get a better understanding of human beings.
Link to german webpage: http://www.urania.de/programm/2012/j433/
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Graduate Seminar, February 20-23, 2012
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Current methodological and philosophical issues in neuroscience Free University Berlin organized by Jan Slaby and Philipp Haueis (teaching language: German)
For several neuroscientific disciplines the last two decades have been an unprecedented story of success: with the help of neuroimaging techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the inquiry into the neuronal correlates of cognitive and affective states is in full swing. Proponents of brain research often pronounce groundbreaking results and even already see the coming of a 'new image of humanity'. However, to insiders, the hype is mostly gone already and has been replaced with a wider-reaching reflection of neuroscientific methods:
What can be really measured with an fMRI scanner? How are anatomical localization and functional connectivity reconcilable with one another? Do neuroscientific images have an epistemic status of their own, or are they just a convenient representation of large data sets?
The seminar will focus on recent methodological and philosophical issues surrounding experimental designs, generation and statistical modeling of data, and the interpretation of experimental results in neuroscientific research. Beyond that, the cultural and social contexts of neuroscientific discourse and its effects on institutions and the media will be considered. The agenda of the research initiative Critical Neuroscience will be discussed by looking at particular examples. Advanced graduate and PhD students are requested to enroll via email as early as possible (jan(dot)slaby [AT] fu-berlin(dot)de)
Literature:
Hanson, S. J. & Bunzl, M., Hrsg. (2010). Foundational Issues in Human Brain Mapping. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Selected contributions from the book Critical Neuroscience (edited by Suparna Choudhury & Jan Slaby, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell 2012) will be made accessible online for participants.
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Conference, December 1-3, 2011
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Neuro-Reality Check.
Scrutinizing the ‘neuro-turn’ in the humanities and natural sciences.
Workshop at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. December, 1-3 2011
organized by Suparna Choudhury and Max Stadler
with contributions from Nima Bassiri, Stephen Casper, Roger Cooter, Steven Fuller, Sky Gross, Melissa Littlefield and Jenell Johnson, Daniel Margulies, Paul Martin and Simon Williams, Constantina Papoulias and
Felicity Callard, Martyn Pickersgill, Amir Raz, Mark Robinson, Julia Voss and Niklas Maak, and Allan Young. The full programme can be found here.
Today, few developments in the world of science and technology would seem to draw comparable degrees of attention, commentary and sheer excitement than the neurosciences. Within and beyond academia it has become routine to celebrate or alternatively, to castigate, the purportedly palpable effects and consequences – social, political, cultural and intellectual - of the recent expansions of the neurosciences. Whether we witness art historians finding fault with neuro-enthusiastic colleagues, linguists warning of a ‘new biologism’, ethicists, science policy strategists and anthropologists pondering the future impacts of neuroscience, literary critics and artists dabbling in mirror-neurons, or media-savvy neuroscientists forming a new kind of public intellectual, the neurosciences have, without question, inspired a great deal of scholarly and not-so-scholarly action. Indeed, so familiar have these discourses become, so seemingly self-evident their significance, that the problematisations of the neurosciences rarely appear to move beyond elaborations of the already familiar or, at best, partisan polemics.
More problematic, on closer inspection the majority of these diverse neuro-discourses would seem to operate on a very thin evidential basis. Claims being made about neuroscience’s societal impacts more often than not possess the same kind of impressionistic qualities as the growing alarmism on the part of Geisteswissenschaftler lamenting the neuro-induced loss of cultural capital and contracting research budgets. The conspicuous absence of a solid evidential basis in these matters is the working hypothesis of our upcoming workshop: Neuro-Reality Check.
The workshop brings together scholars from a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds with the aim of stepping back a little - and of probing deeper into the alleged effects and actual causes of the ongoing neurohype. Our aim, in other words, is to encourage a more de-centred kind of analysis than the one typically pursued: Why, for instance, is it that art historians or political theorists choose to eschew ‘theory’ in favour of neuroscientific wisdom? Which ideological sea-changes reside behind the frequently proclaimed ‘crisis’ in the humanities, and how do they resonate with the turn to the ‘neuro’? What are the interests and economic conditions driving the mushrooming of interdisciplinary neuro-X academic subfields in the contemporary academic landscape? Or again, is it really – empirically - the case that we are on the verge on of a ‘neuro-revolution’, our life-worlds, language and habits already being subtly transformed?
Please contact us if you wish to attend (schoudhury [AT] mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de or mstadler [AT] mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de). Participation is open, but spaces are limited.
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