Neuroscience
Neuroscience is the scientific study of nervous tissue, activity, organization, systems, and interactions. It is paradigmatically interdisciplinary, currently including biophysics, organic and biochemistry, molecular through evolutionary biology, anatomy and physiology, ethology, neuropsychology, and the cognitive and information sciences. Investigators include basic scientists and clinicians. During the late twentieth century, neuroscience underwent enormous growth. Quantitative information available on the Society for Neuroscience's Web site speaks to this. Beginning in 1970 with 500 members, at last count (summer 2004) the Society boasts more than 34,000 members worldwide. More than 30,000 registrants attended the 2004 annual meeting, where more than 14,000 posters and oral presentations were delivered. There are now more than 300 graduate training programs worldwide in neuroscience. With its increasing academic influence and its obvious connection with philosophy's perennial mind-body problem, it was inevitable that philosophers would begin taking serious interest.
Academic philosophy's systematic interest might be dated to 1986, the year that Patricia Churchland's Neurophilosophy appeared. She boldly proclaimed that "nothing is more obvious than that philosophers of mind could profit from knowing at least something of what there is to know about how the brain works" (p. 4). Her book presented what was then textbook neuroscience, contextualized by developments in postlogical empiricist philosophy of science.
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