Venue: Centre Broca
Cédric Brun
Associate professor in Philosophy – University Bordeaux Montaigne
Team leader at the Institut des Maladies Neurodégénératives – Team: NeHuS (Neuroscience, Humanities and Society)
Title
The explanatory power of Neurostimulation studies on criminal Behavior
Abstract
The links between brain sciences and the exploration of violent behavior are old and sometimes problematic (think of Franz Joseph Gall’s phrenology or Lumbroso’s criminology in the 19th century).
Over the last twenty years, with the development of neurostimulation studies, the idea that we could intervene in violent or criminal behavior (or even remedy it by using neurostimulation techniques) has become increasingly credible in the field of neuroscience applied to the social domain. In this paper I present a specific argument against the way these interventionist programs are generally presented. Specifically, I show that the explanatory claim made by these neuro-stimulation studies cannot be satisfied due to a lack of causal specificity of the stimulation studies.
Biosketch
Associate professor in the philosophy department of the University of Bordeaux Montaigne, of which I have been the director between 2015 and 2018, member of the host team 4574 Sciences, Philosophy, Humanities headed by Kim-Sang Ong-Van-Cung. I teach general philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science and neuroscience and the history of English-language philosophy at the master’s level as well as philosophy of science, logic, philosophy of mind and the history of English-language philosophy at the undergraduate level.
My research until 2011 focused on the history of classical English-language philosophy and the philosophy of mind. Since 2011 I have oriented my research activity towards the philosophy of neuroscience.
My current research focuses on 1) the question of reductionism and anti-reductionism in general philosophy of science and philosophy of neuroscience, 2) the question of the nature of explanation in neuroscience, and 3) the question of epistemological and metaphysical conditions for the integration of the different levels of exploration of the central nervous system into cognitive and behavioural neuroscience, through the definition of norms of constraints on models (computational and experimental).