Owen Flanagan

Duke University | DU · Department of Philosophy

Neuroexistentialism involves anxiety aggravated by burgeoning neuroscientific evidence that we are animals, nothing more. The anxiety is a response to felt conflict between manifest and scientific images: we might know, say, that heartbreak is the autonomic nervous system in turmoil, but describing or explaining it thus deprives it of meaning we cr...

First, I offer an analytic summary of the 10 main theses in Stephen Asma and Rami Gabriel’s (2019) The Emotional Mind. Second, I raise an objection about Asma and Gabriel’s assumption that the emotions have phenomenal sameness in individual psychology, across species and cultures. Third, I focus and develop a critique of Asma and Gabriel’s objectio...

A number of East Asian thinkers, as well as some in the West, argue that in various ways the self is inextricably intertwined with, part of, or in some sense identical with the rest of the world. In recent interdisciplinary work, this general idea has been described in terms of a family of views collectively identified by the name the “oneness hypo...

The idea that the self is inextricably intertwined with the rest of the world—the “oneness hypothesis”—can be found in many of the world’s philosophical and religious traditions. Oneness provides ways to imagine and achieve a more expansive conception of the self as fundamentally connected with other people, creatures, and things. Such views presen...

Existentialism is a concern about the foundation of meaning, morals, and purpose. Existentialisms arise when some foundation for these elements of being is under assault. In the past, first-wave existentialism concerned the increasingly apparent inability of religion and religious tradition to provide such a foundation, as typified in the writings...

This is a dialogue between a philosopher and a scientist about the scientific explanation of consciousness. What is consciousness? Does it admit of scientific explanation? If so, what must a scientific theory of consciousness be like in order to provide us with a satisfying explanation of its explanandum? And what types of entities might such a the...

What is consciousness? What role, if any, does consciousness play in the explanation of cognition? Can consciousness be studied empirically? These are the questions. Here are the answers

There is a debate about the nature of addiction, whether it is a result of brain damage, brain dysfunction, or normal brain changes that result from habit acquisition, and about whether it is a disease. I argue that the debate about whether addiction is a disease is much ado about nothing, since all parties agree it is “unquestionably destructive.”...

Recent advances in brain imaging methods as well as increased sophistication in neuroscientific modeling of the brain’s reward systems have facilitated the study of neural mechanisms associated with addiction such as processes associated with motivation, decision-making, pleasure seeking, and inhibitory control. These scientific activities have inc...

We criticize a worrisome trend in contemporary psychiatry that pathologizes normalcy on dubious epistemic grounds, on the naïve premise that mental health has some sort of clear, precise, and firm link to true belief and conversely that mental disease or disorder has some clear, precise and firm link to false or misbegotten belief. We deny this pre...

Existentialism is a concern about the foundation of meaning, morals, and purpose. Existentialisms arise when some foundation for these elements of being is under assault. In the past, first-wave existentialism concerned the increasingly apparent inability of religion, and religious tradition, to provide such a foundation, as typified in the writing...

In the first part, we present a taxonomy of a dozen self-variations that appear in the contemporary studies of cross-cultural anthropology, psychology and philosophy. The taxonomy is designed to serve as a general template to analyse cultural variation in views of self, which ranges from the metaphysical self (or no-self) to ideal emotional self. I...

In this chapter, we provide (1) an argument for why ethics should be naturalized, (2) an analysis of why it is not yet naturalized, (3) a defense of ethical naturalism against two fallacies – Hume's and Moore's – that ethical naturalism allegedly commits, and (4) a proposal that normative ethics is best conceived as part of human ecology committed...

There is a distinctive form of existential anxiety, neuroexistential anxiety, which derives from the way in which contemporary neuroscience provides copious amounts of evidence to underscore the Darwinian message—we are animals, nothing more. One response to this 21st century existentialism is to promote Eudaimonics, a version of ethical naturalism...

Rigorously argued and meticulously researched, an investigation of current topics in philosophy that is informed by the Chinese philosophical tradition. For too long, analytic philosophy discounted insights from the Chinese philosophical tradition. In the last decade or so, however, philosophers have begun to bring the insights of Chinese thought t...

Psychologist, philosopher, teacher, writer–William James stood closer than any other thinker to the center of the confluence of intellectual and artistic forces that defined the culture of modernism. The outstanding feature of this volume lies in its intent to investigate James’s influence on both American and International Modernism. It provides,...

There are three perspectives on the nature of persons: Sacred, Secular, and Scientific. One idea is that these perspectives are fundamentally incompatible, inconsistent, incommensurable. Another is that these three perspectives can be reconciled. I explore the tension and explain how the ideas of a good human life, a morally excellent human life ca...

I provide a précis of The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized (), and then respond to three critics, Christian Coseru, Charles Goodman, and Bronwyn Finnigan.

What do the biology and psychology of morality have to do with normative ethics? Our answer is, a great deal. We argue that normative ethics is an ongoing, ever-evolving research program in what is best conceived as human ecology.

Addiction is a person-level phenomenon that involves twin normative failures. A failure of normal rational effective agency or self-control with respect to the substance; and shame at both this failure, and the failure to live up to the standards for a good life that the addict himself acknowledges and aspires to. Feeling shame for addiction is not...

There are two ways a person can experience or, what is different, can think about herself: first, as a subject of experience who feels a certain characteristic way, the-way-it-feels-to-be-oneself; and, second, as the person who is the subject of a particular autobiography, as the actor who is the protagonist in the history of this organism. The fir...

Certain philosophical ideas about identity, what makes one human, and other such dimensions may be associated with conceptions that concern how scientific knowledge about sense of self may be reinforced by processes that occur within the body and the brain. John Locke's cognitivist view asserts that among all other organisms, and although these org...

'I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.' These famous words of David Hume, on his inability to perceive the self, set the stage for JeeLoo Liu and John Perry's collection of essays on self-awareness and self-knowledge. This volume connects recent scientific studies on conscious...

Moderated by Steve Paulson, producer and interviewer for public radio's To the Best of Our Knowledge, philosopher and neurobiologist Owen Flanagan (Duke University), and psychologists Paul Bloom (Yale University) and Roy Baumeister (Florida State University) examine current biological, psychological, and anthropological research on the complex inte...

This chapter presents a reflective, critical position toward the author’s own addiction and toward himself as an addict. It presents the question of whether addressing addiction as a disease is useful; the idea of addiction as a disease seems less useful in describing “what it is like” for the author than to say that his being was physically, psych...

The intertwining of addiction and responsibility in personal, philosophical, legal, research, and clinical contexts. Addictive behavior threatens not just the addict's happiness and health but also the welfare and well-being of others. It represents a loss of self-control and a variety of other cognitive impairments and behavioral deficits. An addi...

Owen Flanagan is unconvinced by Antonio Damasio's argument that 'the self' is needed to explain consciousness.

Flanagan (1991) was the first contemporary philosopher to suggest that a modularity of morals hypothesis (MMH) was worth consideration by cognitive science. There is now a serious empirically informed proposal that moral competence is best explained in terms of moral modules-evolutionarily ancient, fast-acting, automatic reactions to particular soc...

McKay & Dennett (M&D) argue that positive illusions are a plausible candidate for a class of evolutionarily "selected for" misbeliefs. I argue (Flanagan 1991; 2007) that the class of alleged positive illusions is a hodge-podge, and that some of its members are best understood as positive attitudes, hopes, and the like, not as beliefs at all.

Moral notions are foundational questions that have commanded deep reflection since antiquity, reflection that psychological science cannot evade, because the moral formation of children is a central concern of parents, schools, and communities charged with educating the next generation. In this respect there are few domains of study more crucial th...

The naturalist and geologist Charles Darwin (1809–82) ranks as one of the most influential scientific thinkers of all time. In the nineteenth century his ideas about the history and diversity of life - including the evolutionary origin of humankind - contributed to major changes in the sciences, philosophy, social thought and religious belief. The...

Our sense of self is an illusion, but is anyone really fooled by it?

The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World is my attempt to explain whether and how existential meaning is possible in a material world, and how such meaning is best conceived naturalistically. Neuroexistentialism conceives of our predicament in accordance with Darwin plus neuroscience. The prospects for our kind of being-in-the-world are...

Two new books argue that the mind extends beyond the brain into the world around us

Life's meaning is a matter of how we live in this life. Whatever meaning a life has for the creature whose life it is ends when bodily death occurs. When someone dies the meaning of their life is over for them, in first person. But the meaning of a life for others, for those in relation with the dead person, does not end when a person dies. Our liv...

If winning elections is a matter of manipulating brains, that must make George Bush and his team experts in neuroscience – but Owen Flanagan isn't convinced

After giving different meanings for naturalism, this article discusses Wittgenstein and Bouwsma; the scope of naturalism; the ontology of imperialistic and non-imperialistic naturalism; naturalized epistemology and the problem of normativity; naturalized ethics; naturalizing normativity; and some thoughts on relativism. The discussion closes with D...

A noted philosopher proposes a naturalistic (rather than supernaturalistic) way to solve the "really hard problem": how to live in a meaningful way—how to live a life that really matters—even as a finite material being living in a material world. If consciousness is "the hard problem" in mind science—explaining how the amazing private world of cons...

The scientific, ethical, and policy issues raised by research involving the engraftment of human neural stem cells into the brains of nonhuman primates are explored by an interdisciplinary working group in this [Policy Forum][1]. The authors consider the possibility that this research might alter the cognitive capacities of recipient great apes and...

The evocation of narrative as a way to understand the content of consciousness, including memory, autobiography, self, and imagination, has sparked truly interdisciplinary work among psychologists, philosophers, and literary critics. Even neuroscientists have taken an interest in the stories people create to understand themselves, their past, and t...

A major task for philosophy is to adjudicate conflicts between our ordinary way of understanding persons and the world - what Wilfrid Sellars called the 'manifest image' - and scientific accounts of persons and the world - the 'scientific image'. Sometimes, of course, it is possible to blend the two images so as to produce a genuinely stereoscopic...

What, if anything do dreams tell us about ourselves? What is the relationship between types of sleep and types of dreams? Does dreaming serve any purpose? Or are dreams simply meaningless mental noise-'unmusical fingers wandering over the piano keys'? With expertise in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, Owen Flanagan is uniquely qualified to...

Review of book, Owen Flanagan (Au.), Dreaming Souls: Sleep, Dreams, and the Evolution of the Conscious Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, 210 pp., $25.00. Reviewed by David Pincus. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Review of book, Owen Flanagan (Au.), Dreaming Souls: Sleep, Dreams, and the Evolution of the Conscious Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, 210 pp., $25.00. Reviewed by David Pincus.

The Turing Test (TT) is claimed by many to be a way to test for the presence, in computers, of such ``deep'' phenomena as thought and consciousness. Unfortunately, attempts to build computational systems able to pass TT (or at least restricted versions ...

The five papers in this issue all deal with the proper evolutionary function of sleep and dreams, these being different. To establish that some trait of character is an adaptation in the strict biological sense requires a story about the fitness enhancing function it served when it evolved and possibly a story of how the maintenance of this functio...

This paper discusses the problem of destructive emotions by comparing Eastern and Western assumptions about emotions. In the case of anger, for example, Eastern thinkers straightforwardly posit that it is entirely possible to cultivate attitudes in which anger is naturally absent. In the West, by contrast, it is generally assumed that anger is a “b...

Strictly speaking, these questions do not ask exactly the same thing. Things serve functions for which they were not designed-a paper bag can serve as an umbrella. And learning how some device works can leave one clueless about its function. Imagine an expert explaining to me the intricacies of his latest invention without ever explaining what it i...

There are many things I like about this prayer. It is short. It assumes and thereby teaches what is true, that we humans can do things to ourselves-”I lay me down to sleep:’ Furthermore, a child is taught the prayer not just so that he or she can express some egoistical desire about himself or herself. The prayer is taught because in learning to sa...

I proposed at the start to delay treatment of the traditional philosophical problems about dreams until my neurophilosophical theory was in place. The plan was to see how these problems looked from the perspective of a theory of dreams informed by contemporary mind science. That theory is now in place, so the time has come to play some good old-fas...

What, if anything, do dreams tell us about ourselves? What is the relationship between types of sleep and types of dreams? Does dreaming serve any purpose? Or are dreams simply meaningless mental noise—”unmusical fingers wandering over the piano keys”? With expertise in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, Owen Flanagan is uniquely qualified t...

A great deal of interest and excitement surround the interface between the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of psychology, yet the area is neither well defined nor well represented in mainstream philosophical publications. This book is perhaps the first to open a dialogue between the two disciplines. Its aim is to broaden the traditional su...