CORTEX Student Club - Bertrand Beffara

Science and philosophy have a similar etymology and both refer to knowledge. Historically, they have been jointly practiced and have thus been difficultly severable. Present-day scientists, however, mostly consider science and philosophy as different activities. Here, I take advantage of the opinion from Laplane et al. (2019) to suggest that – conceptually and in practice – dissociating these two activities can impede scientific advances. This suggestion is supported by several examples coming from the literature in neuroscience and in particular from my research topic: the biology of Attention, which I detail here. This talk, in turn, suggests that philosophy is not the subjective part of intellectual activities.