It has been argued that personal level explanations are independent and autonomous from sub-personal level explanations (McDowell 1994, Hornsby 2000). These claims of autonomy have come under pressure from the recent explosion of results in cognitive neuroscience studying all aspects of human perception, action, and cognition. In this talk, I shall reconsider the relation between personal and sub-personal explanations in the light of advances in cognitive neuroscience and interventionist accounts of causation (Woodward 2003). On the way I will discuss the traditional distinction between constitutive and enabling conditions which has sometimes been used to mark the difference between personal and sub-personal explanations.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 26 Sept 2013
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Hong Yu Wong, Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, University of Tübingen
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson

About the Speaker:

Hong Yu Wong heads the Philosophy of Neuroscience Group at the Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, an excellence cluster at the University of Tübingen. He is also a faculty member of the Philosophisches Seminar and the Max Planck Neural and Behavioural Graduate School at the University of Tübingen. His primary research interests concern the relations between perception and action, and the role of the body in structuring these relations.