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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