Neural Veils and the Will to Historical Critique: Why Historians of Science Need to Take the Neuro-Turn Seriously

Isis 105 (1):145-154 (2014)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Taking the neuro-turn is like becoming the victim of mind parasites. It’s unwilled . You can’t see mind parasites; they make you think things without allowing you to know why you think them. Indeed, they generate the cognitive inability to be other than delighted with the circumstances of your affected cognition. It’s not as if you can take off your thinking cap and shoo the pests away. You can’t see them—or even know that you could want to. You can’t stand on the outside looking in at your cognitive processes. But historically speaking, you are also inside a culture and socioeconomic order that places the legitimacy of the neuro beyond critique. And the neuro-turn does more: it delegitimizes critique itself, at least as we have known it since Marx. This essay briefly explores how we got here, what the “here” is, and what its implications are for historical critique

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Historical Theory and Historical Confirmation.Cynthia Hay - 1980 - History and Theory 19 (1):39-57.
How to Succeed in Science While Really, Really Trying: The Central European Savant of the Mid-Eighteenth Century. [REVIEW]Eric Palmer - 2015 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 5 (1):167-73.
The Spatial Turn: Geographical Approaches in the History of Science.Diarmid A. Finnegan - 2008 - Journal of the History of Biology 41 (2):369-388.
Historians and Their Duties.Jonathan Gorman - 2004 - History and Theory 43 (4):103-117.

Analytics

Added to PP
2015-01-31

Downloads
48 (#293,199)

6 months
3 (#447,120)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

Resisting neurosciences and sustaining history.Roger Smith - 2019 - History of the Human Sciences 32 (1):9-22.
From phrenology to the laboratory.Tom Quick - 2014 - History of the Human Sciences 27 (5):54-73.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references