Workshop, Interdisciplinarity in Neuroscience: What are the issues?

The study of the brain, because of the immense complexity of this organ, has involved scientific research strategies at very different scales and levels of organization. As a result, neuroscience can be considered as an interdisciplinary nebula rather than as a discipline with well-defined boundaries. The evolution of instruments for measuring, studying, or experimenting on the brain, but also the diverse purposes of neuroscience research (clinical or therapeutic, explanatory or descriptive, theoretical) have also implied collaborations between disciplines that are sometimes very distant. The goal, often stated but rarely achieved, of an integrative approach to these different levels, scales, and purposes presupposes theoretical and institutional conditions for interdisciplinary dialogue that are difficult to implement due to various factors (specialization of scientist’s training, pressure to publish in an identified field, intrinsic epistemic difficulties of interdisciplinary or even inter- level collaborations).

The purpose of this workshop is to initiate a reflection within the Bordeaux Neurocampus on the conditions under which these collaborations and this dialogue between experimental or theoretical approaches at different scales of the brain, with different purposes and different study instruments can be more fruitful. In the background of this reflection, we hope to be able to propose a program of intervention of philosophy in the field as one of the actors of the study of the brain likely to contribute to the interdisciplinary development of new theoretical frameworks and innovative hypotheses to embrace the complexity of the brain in an original way.

CNRS UMR 5536 RMSB, meeting room, University of Bordeaux, Carreire Campus

146 rue Léo Saignat 33076 Bordeaux