VideoLectures

Video Lectures on Philosophy and Neuroscience

A Beginner's Guide to Neural Mechanisms

We are excited to share A Beginner’s Guide To Neural Mechanisms, a free video-course entirely devoted to philosophy of neuroscience and neurophilosophy.

Funding for this Beginner’s Guide was provided by the Templeton World Charity Foundation via the Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy (SSNAP) program at Duke University. Some of the Neural Mechanisms Online team partnered with some of the Brains blog team to propose and execute the project. Seminole Productions at Florida State University handled animation and post production video teams at Dartmouth University, Duke University, University of Iowa, and Edinburgh University handled most of the recording.

Project Directors
Nick Byrd
Fabrizio Calzavarini
Zina Ward

Lecturers
Felipe de Brigard
Mazvita Chirimuuta
Carrie Figdor
Russ Poldrack
Adina Roskies
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

Additional Contributors
Nick Carlisle
Sarah Cloud
Mich Donovan
Geoff Fortescue
Jim Garbarino
Raphael Gerraty
Julia Hoffman
J. Brandon Johnson
Gabrielle Litterio
Isabelle May
Al Mele
Andrew Rothschild
Shadab Tabatabaeian
Nicholas Tomlonovic
Drew Watson
Zane Zwiernik
Edinburgh IS Media Hopper Studio

The Project in Brief...

There is a growing library of presentations, videos, and other resources about philosophy of neuroscience and neuroscience of philosophy available online, including Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy (ssnap.net), Neural Mechanisms Online (neuralmechanisms.org), and The Brains Blog (philosophyofbrains.com). Despite being freely accessible to a massive online audience, however most of these resources do not have an introductory nature. Synchronous web-events organized by Neural Mechanisms Online, for instance, are entirely dedicated to advanced topics at the frontiers of the research in philosophy of neuroscience and Neurophilosophy. There is little content for the uninitiated such as high school students and undergraduate majors in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, or for interested scholars with no specific training in philosophy of neuroscience. To fill this gap, our project will aim to deliver free, online, introductory video content for teachers and students of philosophy, neuroscience, and their intersections. This content will constitute the first introductory mini-course entirely devoted to philosophy of neuroscience and neurophilosophy. The course will cover six major topics. Each topic will include one main video lecture from a leading figure in philosophy and/or neuroscience introducing and discussing the research landscape. To enhance outreach, we will also produce a short series of animated videos that direct viewers to the course. The course will allow high school and college students to freely access neuroscience and philosophy earlier than they otherwise would find it and provide instructors with free, off-the-shelf material to create or update their own philosophy and neuroscience curricula. By providing a crash course for undergraduates and other scholars in the field, the project will expand the audience for online resources in the field. Lastly, by fixing an interdisciplinary consensus on lexicon, concepts, and problems, the project seeks to establish a common ground for the interactions between philosophers and neuroscientists.