John Bickle & Marica Bernstein
One can glean much from these titles and their authors’ backgrounds. First, you don’t find words like those from the MLA titles Hillard highlights—e.g., “goofing,” “radical,” “politics,” or the like. This isn’t due to selection bias on our part. The titles cited here make up about 25 percent of last year’s program, and we invite readers to review this and all archived programs. The academic backgrounds of the presenters are important to the point. The philosophy participants have made a huge time investment in their educations and careers, not only to have (or to soon have) Ph.Ds. in philosophy but, in many cases, especially among our more junior presenters, to have also earned master’s degrees in a brain science. This means that they have not just gotten textbook knowledge but have gained experience in neuroscience research labs. And our neuroscientist presenters have developed a willingness to engage with philosophers, some having done so for many years.
Our participants spend their professional lives exploring how classical philosophical questions about the mind might fruitfully be addressed by neuroscience findings.In short, our participants have training and interest across two fields, one a humanities discipline and the other a STEM. They did not invest this kind of time and energy to talk about “Transcending Embodied Gender Norms” (one of Hillard’s MLA examples). Instead, they spend their professional lives exploring how classical philosophical questions about the mind might fruitfully be addressed by neuroscience findings; they’re thinking hard about the brain sciences’ methodologies and technologies; and they’re exploring how philosophy’s rigor can lead to better neuroscience experiments and analyses. And so are the participating neuroscientists, shoulder to shoulder with the philosophers.