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Philosophy as Glial Cell (guest post) - Daily Nous

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Glial cell? “Commonly described as the ‘glue’ that holds the nervous system together, they’re better thought of as infrastructure, the ductwork and insulation that give heft to comparatively sparse neurons. But even this metaphor turns out to be incomplete…” In the following guest post, Regina Rini, Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Moral and Social Cognition at York University, shares a new and surprisingly useful metaphor for philosophy and its place among the disciplines. This is the seventh in a series of weekly guest posts by different authors at Daily Nous this summer. [Posts in the summer guest series will remain pinned to the top of the page for the week in which they’re published.] Philosophy as Glial Cell by Regina Rini Spending time outside your home country is a powerful inducement to think hard about patriotism. The same, it seems, for pride in one’s academic home. Lately I’ve been involved in several big interdisciplinary projects that have pushed me to think hard about the place of philosophy in shared intellectual life. And I’ve settled on a helpful metaphor. Philosophy provides the glial cells in humanity’s central nervous system. Don’t worry, I’ll explain. The thing is, if you look only at the pronouncements of made-for-TV scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Richard Dawkins, you’d think scientists routinely disparage philosophy. But—if my experiences talking to real world experimentalists are anything to go by—that’s not right at all. Most scientists don’t seem to have much of any view regarding philosophy, at least not at first. But talk to them for twenty minutes and they are often delighted to face philosophical queries. That’s because philosophers ask the sort of big picture, fully zoomed-out, questions that lab bench science rarely gets to engage. The reality of scientific practice is that the day-to-day work is hyper-focused: the lab is known for defending a very specific theory, or fine-tuning a long established methodology, or sometimes care and feeding of some extremely expensive equipment. Big questions about conceptual boundaries or the fundamental epistemic credentials of familiar methods just aren’t a good use of time when you’re constantly grinding for grant money. But a collab with a philosopher is an opportunity to step back and see how the local cogs..

Glial cell? “Commonly described as the ‘glue’ that holds the nervous system together, they’re better thought of as infrastructure, the ductwork and insulation that give heft to comparatively sparse neurons. But even this metaphor turns out to be incomplete…” In the following guest post, Regina Rini , Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Moral and Social Cognition at York University, shares a new and surprisingly useful metaphor for philosophy and its place among the disciplines. This is the seventh in a series of weekly guest posts by different authors at Daily

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