Neural Mechanisms: New Challenges in the Philosophy of Neuroscience

This volume brings together new papers advancing contemporary debates in foundational, conceptual, and methodological issues in cognitive neuroscience. The different perspectives presented in each chapter have previously been discussed between the authors, as the volume builds on the experience of Neural Mechanisms (NM) Online - webinar series on the philosophy of neuroscience organized by the editors of this volume.

The contributed chapters pertain to five core areas in current philosophy of neuroscience. It surveys the novel forms of explanation (and prediction) developed in cognitive neuroscience, and looks at new concepts, methods and techniques used in the field. The book also highlights the metaphysical challenges raised by recent neuroscience and demonstrates the relation between neuroscience and mechanistic philosophy. Finally, the book dives into the issue of neural computations and representations. Assembling contributions from leading philosophers of neuroscience, this work draws upon the expertise of both established scholars and promising early career researchers.

Fabrizio Calzavarini is a Post doc Researcher at the University of Bergamo, Italy, and is affiliated with the Center for Logic, Language, and Cognition, Turin, Italy. His research is organized into two interrelated streams. One stream falls at the intersection between the philosophy and neuroscience of semantics, focusing on the neural substrates of lexical competence. The other stream addresses philosophical issues in neuroscience more generally. He is the author of Brain and the Lexicon (Springer, 2020) and the co-organizer of Neural Mechanisms Online, a series of webinars and web-conferences in the philosophy of neuroscience.

Marco Viola is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Turin, Italy. His core interest is the philosophy of neuroscience, especially cognitive ontology and the neuroscience of emotion. Other interests include face perception, philosophy of mind and the social epistemology of science. He is the co-organizer of Neural Mechanisms Online, a series of webinars and web-conferences in the philosophy of neuroscience