TY - JOUR A1 - van Buuren, Jasper T1 - critique of neuroscience JF - Continental philosophy review N2 - Bennett and Hacker criticize a number of neuroscientists and philosophers for attributing capacities which belong to the human being as a whole, like perceiving or deciding, to a “part” of the human being, viz. the brain. They call this type of mistake the “mereological fallacy”. Interestingly, the authors say that these capacities cannot be ascribed to the mind either. They reject not only materialistic monism but also Cartesian dualism, arguing that many predicates describing human life do not refer to physical or mental properties, nor to the sum of such properties. I agree with this important principle and with the critique of the mereological fallacy which it underpins, but I have two objections to the authors’ view. Firstly, I think that the brain is not literally a part of the human being, as suggested. Secondly, Bennett and Hacker do not offer an account of body and mind which explains in a systematic way how the domain of phenomena which transcends the mental and the physical relates to the mental and the physical. I first argue that Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology provides the kind of account we need. Then, drawing on Plessner, I present an alternative view of the mereological relationships between brain and human being. My criticism does not undercut Bennett and Hacker’s diagnosis of the mereological fallacy but rather gives it a more solid philosophical–anthropological foundation. KW - Mereological fallacy KW - Neuroscience KW - Philosophical anthropology KW - Body as subject and object KW - Eccentric positionality KW - Personhood KW - Psychophysical neutrality Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-015-9318-4 SN - 1387-2842 SN - 1573-1103 VL - 49 SP - 223 EP - 241 PB - Springer CY - Dordrecht ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Krüger, Hans-Peter T1 - How is the Human Life-Form of Mind Really Possible in Nature? BT - Parallels Between John Dewey and Helmuth Plessner JF - Human studies N2 - J. Dewey and H. Plessner both and independently of one another treated the central question of what new task philosophy must set itself if the assumption is correct that the life-form of mind, i.e., the mental life-form of humans, arose in nature and must also sustain itself in the future within nature. If nature has to reconceived so as to make the irreducible qualities of life and mind truly possible, then it can no longer be restricted to the role of physical material. Conversely humans cannot no longer take on the role of God outside and independent of nature. Instead these philosophers distinguish between three plateaus (Dewey) or stages (Plessner), between physical (inorganic) nature, psycho-physical (living) nature and the nature that is mental life. This distinction is drawn such that a connection between the plateaus is truly possible. The third level, that of the mental form of life, answers mentally within conduct to the break with the first two levels. Hence it depends in the future as well on the continuously renewed difference (between the precarious and the stable for Dewey, between immediacy and mediation for Plessner) in our experience of nature. Within this difference nature as a whole remains an open unknown, which is why we can credit Dewey with a philosophy of diversified and negative holism, Plessner with a differential philosophy of the negativity of the absolute. KW - Evolution of the human KW - Non-reductive naturalism KW - Open holism KW - Life forms KW - Philosophical anthropology KW - Presuppositions of evolution Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-017-9429-5 SN - 0163-8548 SN - 1572-851X VL - 42 IS - 1 SP - 47 EP - 64 PB - Springer CY - Dordrecht ER -