My recent review of Michael Gazzaniga’s Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain is now available online at the Claremont Review of Books website. And while you’re on the subject of philosophical anthropology, you might also take a look at William Carroll’s recent Public Discourse article “Who Am I? The Building of Bionic Man.”
Like my review of Gazzaniga but from a very different angle, Bill’s piece emphasizes the Aristotelian point that the parts of a human being are intelligible only by reference to the whole. Scientism as applied to human beings -- whether inspired by a misreading of neuroscience, as I describe in my review, or a misreading of robotics, as discussed in Bill’s article -- typically proceeds from the opposite, false assumption. It abstracts parts of human beings from the whole, reifies them, and then tries either to reduce the whole to these freakishly re-described parts or to eliminate it altogether and replace it with the parts.
I have discussed this reifying tendency in an earlier post, here. I’ve commented on some of the erroneous claims about free will, perception, “mindreading,” etc. commonly made in the name of neuroscience here, here, and here. Biological reductionism is addressed in a couple of further earlier posts, hereand here. And I discussed bionics here.
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