Wednesday, 6 June 2018

An open invitation to contribute to a new book


Dear Professor,
As editor, I am excited to announce the recently commissioned undertaking by InTech Publishing, London, of a new neuro(bio)ethics text themed to a holistic and human perspective, one that promises to be pragmatically useful for the engineering and medical arts.
Neuroethics, clearly, has assumed considerable significance in light of the great strides made in the neurosciences, now reflected in major continental investments in neuroscience made in Europe (The Human Brain Project), America (The BRAIN Initiative) and Asia. With this increasing knowledge there is a growing capacity for intervention in the nervous system, which is evidenced in the many neurotechnologies that can be applied medically or for neuromodulatory purposes; hence, the need for ethical deliberation. 
Much of the current debate has centered on the possibility of harming or modulating human faculties, like autonomous behavior and personal identity; however, determining their physical correlates, that is, how the brain is affected, has been complicated by its great complexity and an empirical approach that has deemphasized a more integrative philosophy of science understanding of its operation. Accordingly, the physical and integrative dimension of intervention has been inferenced only in passing, with current medical and neurotechnological interventions left to arbitrary judgment on their normative outcomes.
On the other hand, there is a growing awareness that organismal and integral, global properties of the brain and body are central contributors in shaping the neural architecture. Psychiatric and degenerative diseases like schizophrenia and alzheimers dementia, for example, appear to be linked to impairments of these global attributes. For this reason I believe that a new approach to configuring the intellectual discourse on neuroethics is both needed and possible, one that will frame it through a synthesis of philosophy of organismal biology, neuroscience, and the respective medical and neurotechnological disciplines. This is reflected in the book's title: Neurobioethics: Bridging Biological Philosophy, Neurotechnology, and Medical Ethics. This theme offers not only a fresh and novel perspective, but one that can also assist in unifying debate anthropologically, while having pragmatic implications medically and technologically.
The book's theme is developed in topical sections that consider such principal organismal attributes with counterparts in human behavior as identity and cognition, organismal unity, autonomy, awareness and responsivity, and social and communicative dimensions. An additional section considers the brain's dynamic systemic (global) operation, that may be impacted during intervention, as appears to happen in epilepsy.
Invitations are broadly solicited from neuro(bio)ethics, neuroscience and global state interactions, neurology and psychiatric diseases, philosophy of biology and mind, and medical and neurotechnologies, with an emphasis on synthetic considerations of one or more topical themes. Registration can be made online at: 
via proposal submission. Kindly distribute to interested scholars.
Book timelines are intended for scheduling purposes.
Sincerely,

Denis Larrivee, PhD
Academic Editor
Editorial Board, Neurology and Neurological Sciences Online (USA)
Editorial Board, EC Neurology, London
International Association Catholic Bioethicists
International Neuroethics Society
Loyola University Chicago
Mind and Brain Institute, University of Navarra, Spain



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