HOW CAN NEUROSCIENTISTS BENEFIT FROM A COLLABORATION WITH PHILOSOPHERS FOR CHALLENGING INTERDISCIPLINARY COOPERATIONS?

During the last decades methodical and conceptual advances in neuroscience facilitated a marked shift in the type of research questions that have been addressed by neuroscientists. These changes resulted in novel conceptual challenges and the need to collaborate with scientists from other fields of neuroscience who belong to different research traditions. Neuroscientists may benefit from an involvement of scholars with complementary expertise who are able to compensate disciplinary constrains. Neuroscience and philosophy share many questions linked to brain and mind although they typically address them from different perspectives. Thus, differences between neuroscientists and philosophers concerning methodology and expertise can provide benefits due to a complementarity of approaches, which can mutually compensate for constraints. We provide evidence that (1) historically, neuroscience has always been an interdisciplinary endeavor because different research traditions have contributed to the development of neuroscience in its current state, (2) similar challenges are also present in contemporary neuroscience as demonstrated by case studies of collaborations between biologically-oriented neuroscientists, computational neuroscientist, or medically-oriented neuroscientists, and (3) involving philosophers in interdisciplinary exchange among neuroscientists from different fields has the potential to foster conceptual advancements and clarify underlying misunderstandings because of the special expertise of philosophers in domains in which neuroscientists are typically not trained. For that purpose, we present examples how different research traditions address diverging questions, differ in underlying assumptions, and may come to different conclusions due to diverging interpretative horizons. Finally, we present how philosophical approaches can help disentangling these differences.