Repensar a Popper

Del 10 al 14 de septiembre de este año, se llevará a cabo en Praga, el Congreso Rethinking Popper. En dicho evento está confirmada la presencia de varios destacados especialistas, entre los que se encuentra, mi amigo David Miller (Univ. de Warwick, Reino Unido).

Como algunos sabrán, las ideas de Popper y la Fundación Bases tienen una relación estrecha, pues durante 2004, Bases inauguró sus acividades con un congreso internacional de tres días titulado "Karl Popper: vigencia y transformación de su pensamiento" (realizado en la Facultad de Humanidades y Artes de Rosario, UNR). Por tanto, aprovecho para comentar que una vez que estén finalizados los cambios que estamos implementando en nuestro web site, todas las ponencias y conferencias dictadas estarán disponibles on-line.

Por mi parte, y volviendo a Rethinking Popper, estoy muy satisfecho pues han aceptado mi propuesta de ponencia los organizadores del Evento... Llegar efectivamente a la República Checa es otro tema...

Abajo reproduzco el abstract:

POPPER, CHURCHLAND AND ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM
Within Karl Popper’s work, his philosophy of mind is probably the most severely criticised aspect. Although it is not our intention to defend the popperian dualism and its solution to the body-mind problem, we believe that Popper’s critique of eliminative materialism continue to be accurate. As we all know, Popper in The self and its brain said that eliminativism was a “promissory materialism”-more related to prophecy than science.

We believe that this prophetic feature of eliminative materialism represents the core of its main proponent’s philosophy: the canadian-american Paul Churchland. The emptyness of eliminativism can be filled by Churchland only by abusing of the promise of a completed neuroscience golden age (in the future), wich will produce eventually a new man and a new culture.

To the “fundamentally defective” folk psychology, Churchland merely opposes a romantic enthusiasm completed with a messianic logic. The statements that Churchland offers are hardly convincing: the so-called failures of common sense psychology; inductive lessons from history; an “a priori” advantage of eliminative materialism over its adversaries: dualism, functionalism, identity theory (in fact, all positive arguments that Churchland can find make the identity theory more plausible).

Since The self and its brain was first published we believe that the problems of eliminative materialism (particularly its prophetic tendency) have done nothing but grow. Therefore, we consider that Popper’s critical remarks on eliminativism –although cruel- are still precise and useful in evaluating Churchland’s philosophy of mind.