Walter Glannon - Brain, Body, and Mind. Neuroethics with a Human Face [2011][A]

Book Description
Publication Date: April 29, 2011
This book is a discussion of the most timely and contentious issues in the two branches of neuroethics: the neuroscience of ethics; and the ethics of neuroscience. Drawing upon recent work in psychiatry, neurology, and neurosurgery, it develops a phenomenologically inspired theory of neuroscience to explain the brain-mind relation. The idea that the mind is shaped not just by the brain but also by the body and how the human subject interacts with the environment has significant implications for free will, moral responsibility, and moral justification of actions. It also provides a better understanding of how different interventions in the brain can benefit or harm us. In addition, the book discusses brain imaging techniques to diagnose altered states of consciousness, deep-brain stimulation to treat neuropsychiatric disorders, and restorative neurosurgery for neurodegenerative diseases. It examines the medical and ethical trade-offs of these interventions in the brain when they produce both positive and negative physical and psychological effects, and how these trade-offs shape decisions by physicians and patients about whether to provide and undergo them.

Reviews
"As neuroscience provides increasingly powerful investigative methods and therapeutic tools, so conceptual and ethical questions about the relationships between brain and mind become ever more pressing. Walter Glannon provides a highly informed and thoughtful account of several key issues, founded on the controversial but arresting and topical premise that 'the mind is not located in the brain': understanding how our brains enable consciousness requires us to lift our eyes above the neural horizon, to pay due attention to the bodies that sustain us, the physical world we inhabit and the cultural world we inherit." - Adam Zeman, Professor of Cognitive and Behavioural Neurology, University of Exeter

"Walter Glannon is one of the most interesting philosophers writing about the ethics of science today. This timely book will make an important contribution to both the ethics of neuroscience and the neuroscience of ethics."- John Harris, Lord Alliance Professor of Bioethics, The University of Manchester

"Walter Glannon's neuroethics work has always been marked by the
unusual combination of erudition, clarity, depth, balance, and common sense. Brain, Body, and Mind is a tour de force of those qualities and required reading for all neuroethicists and anyone interested in the philosophical and social implications of the new neuroscience." - Stephen J. Morse, U. Pennsylvania Law School & Psychiatry Department

"Glannon's new book is a welcome extension of the work initiated in Bioethics and the Brain. There is some overlap in topics but the new work clarifies, deepens, and explores the key topics in neuroethics in ways that no other contemporary publication in this field is able to do. The philosophy is accessible, the scientific and clinical detail informative and the comment and analysis always sharp and to the point. Glannon does the humanities and the sciences a real service in this book and ought to be lauded for the scholarship that has gone into it. What else can I say about this book? Get it, read it, appreciate, enjoy and inwardly digest it and it will do the health of your mind, indeed even your soul, a power of good."- Grant Gillett, Otago Bioethics Centre,University of Otago Medical School

"While neuroscience provides insights into the structure and function of our brains in health and disease at an ever-increasing pace, the careful analysis of personal and societal implications and unintended consequences of these discoveries is lagging. Brain, Body, and Mind: Neuroethics with a Human Face is an essential guide to the most intellectually challenging and ethically significant issues at the interface of neuroscience and society. Physicians and ethicists will welcome Glannon's lucid, provocative, and deeply interesting contribution to this discussion alike." - Thomas E. Schlaepfer, MD, University of Bonn, and The Johns Hopkins University

"The author does an excellent job of distilling current issues in neuroethics in an engaging, relevant, and empirically-supported way. His methodology of distinguishing and addressing separately both meanings of neuroethics (the neuroscience of ethics and the ethics of neuroscience) is helpful and unique. He integrates extensive research into his discussions and comes to sound, although certainly debatable, conclusions." -- Doody's

"Glannon addresses neurophilosophical problems with critical and analytical precision. The book will be extremely valuable to anyone seriously interested in the field of neuroethics. Scholars from other disciplines will appreciate Glannon's clearly written and well-documented scholarship." -- William Winslade, American Journal of Bioethics

About the Author
Walter Glannon, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Calgary and author of BIOETHICS AND THE BRAIN OUP 2006.