Subjectivity and the Social World (PDF)

At a time when the US government is spending enormous amounts of money on a project called BRAIN and the European Union has committed itself to the multi-million Human Brain Project, the chances of revealing the workings of the neuronal components of the brain are as good as they have ever been. Nevertheless, even if brain functions - or the entire brain - could be simulated on a computer one day, as the EU project aims for, the question of the relation between the experiencing subject and the brain is still an open one. The tension between experienced subjectivity and its biological basis is at the core of recent philosophical, psychological, sociological, biological and interdisciplinary debates. The traditional Cartesian inner theatre and the resulting substance dualism cannot be made to fit scientific requirements. Reductive accounts, claiming some identity between mental and physical occurrences, display difficulties when it comes to accounting for the experiential dimension of human life. The central question is: What is a subject and how does a subject interact with others? This book is a collection of papers that provides innovative and insightful answers to this question. It is, therefore, as its name suggests, a discussion of subjectivity and the social world.