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Philosophical Science

Catherine Malabou & The Continental Philosophy of Brains

Dale DeBakcsy urges rigor in applying science allegorically to philosophical problems.

Continental philosophy has a reputation amongst analytic philosophers as the flighty sibling of Western thought. In the Twentieth Century, whilst the British and Americans slowly and methodically went about the task of Getting Things in Order, the Germans and French had a tendency to leap steps ahead, generating vast new speculative systems with gleeful abandon, grounded in little more than their inexhaustible personal fancy built upon the collective fancy of those who went before. The more Icarian of Continental thinkers have also been reluctant to chain themselves to the sober discoveries of modern science. Whether out of some genuine allegiance to Adorno and Heidegger, or out of fear that, once let in the door, science will take over the whole of philosophy, Continental philosophy has long had an instinctive revulsion against engaging with the leading edge of science research, and above all to the perceived deterministic rigidity of neuroscience.

But philosophers can ignore a field that’s generating substantive answers to millennia-old questions about perception and identity only for so long, and when neuroscientific advances in imaging techniques and molecular scrutiny uncovered new answers to precisely those questions, a few philosophers rose to the challenge.

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