Summary and scope

pp. 3-11

in: Norman Sieroka, Leibniz, Husserl and the brain, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015

Abstract

The initial motivation for the present study, which in turn led me to the work of Leibniz and Husserl, is the simultaneous appreciation of neurophysiology and philosophy — that is, the acknowledgment that philosophy and neurophysiology are important and sensible enterprises which help with understanding the world around us and how we act in it. They both describe different, but not necessarily incompatible, aspects of the world. For example, while the neurophysiologist maps sounds to activations of inner ear hair cells, neural firing rates and the like, the phenomenologist maps them to pitch, timbre, and so on. The fact that these mappings are not identical will be the root for a certain skepticism about reductions to the physical or the mental or, as I will rather call it, the perceptual. To use a naive but illustrative example, a table can be both round and white, and it does not seem that any attempt to reduce the table as a whole to its color or geometrical shape — even if it were possible to do so — would be very revealing. On the other hand, perceptual states and physical states are not simply completely divergent in their respective structural features. To me, this seems to be something that is worthwhile to consider and examine in more detail.