Naturalismo e neuroscienze. Sulla genesi storica di un legame teorico

Abstract

The first part of the paper offers an historical reconstruction of the relationship between philosophy and neuroscience. The goal of this part is to show that (1) such relationship has been generated on the basis of a theoretical common ground; (2) that this common story was essentially tied to the American philosophical naturalism; (3) that naturalism entails a metaphilosophical constraint, such that between philosophy and the natural sciences subsists a strong cognitive asymmetry. In the second part of the paper, it has been taken into consideration the proposal of a “naturalized epistemology” (Quine 1969). On the one hand, it has been examined the historical and theoretical consequences of it (often reductionist or eliminativist). But on the other hand, it is possible to show that in the very same quinean text there are conceptual resources that exceed the cages of reductionisms by restoring a broader and less hierarchical idea of philosophy. The fundamental claim of the work is that only assuming an idea of philosophy not already-naturalized it is possible to match the challenge for a new semantics of concepts brought forward by neurosciences.