Society for Philosophy & Neuroscience

The Society for Philosophy and Neuroscience (SPAN) was created in 2024 to provide researchers with the tools to foster interdisciplinary intelligibility between the fields of neuroscience and philosophy such that collaborations can be effective for practitioners of both fields. While the study of the mind and brain unites philosophers and neuroscientists, the lack of a common language and differing conventions about presenting work publicly pose significant challenges to progress in both fields. Because neuroscientists and philosophers receive different training and deploy distinct methodologies, communication proves challenging in the absence of cross-training between disciplines. There is a strong desire in both fields to collaborate and learn from one another, but such opportunities are typically reserved for special summer schools that have limited space and are costly to attend. This makes it particularly difficult for early career trainees to access opportunities for cross disciplinary collaboration. The current proposal aims to address these challenges through the following goals: (1) fostering interdisciplinary collaboration with a focus on early career researchers; (2) generating data for how to successfully execute future interdisciplinary collaborative efforts;  (3) training researchers on accessible and relatable dissemination of findings that are interpretable by scholars in neuroscience and philosophy.   

This grant supports the Dana NextGen objective to encourage rigorous, collaborative, and cross-disciplinary work between neuroscience and non-science disciplines to solve complex problems that cannot be answered by neuroscience alone.