Review of Ecology of the brain, the phenomenology and biology of the embodied mind, Thomas Fuchs

Anya Daly

pp. 627-636

Review of:

Fuchs Thomas, Ecology of the brain: The phenomenology and biology of the embodied mind, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017.

Ecology of the Brain: The Phenomenology and Biology of the Embodied Mind (Fuchs 2018) joins a growing body of writings which presents a serious and compelling challenge to the neuro-centrism and physicalist reductionism that has been predominant in recent philosophy of mind and in the human sciences.1This volume will not only be relevant to researchers interested in the philosophy of mind and the role to be played by the human sciences in this domain, but it will also be a valuable addition to any psychiatric training program. It complements the pioneering work of Karl Jaspers and offers a much needed antidote to the explicit or implicit Cartesianism and physicalist reductionism that still persists in many psychiatric writings, research programs and approaches to clinical practice. As Fuchs alerts, the failure to appreciate the organism’s or individual’s embeddedness in an environment, in a world, has stymied efforts to advance psychiatric theory and practice and we can also say this...