Biological and Neuroscientific Foundations of Philosophy: Towards a New Paradigm. A Comprehensive Critical Review. Franco Fabbro (Author). Routledge · 2023

Abstract

Franco Fabbro, a distinguished neuroscientist with decades of experience in clinical psychology and neuropsychiatry, presents an ambitious and sweeping work in Biological and Neuroscientific Foundations of Philosophy. The book’s central thesis is a call for a paradigm shift: philosophy, which has for centuries been heavily (and often exclusively) grounded in the abstract, timeless, and deterministic frameworks of mathematics and physics, must reorient itself towards the more concrete, complex, and temporally-bound realities of biology and neuroscience. This is not a dismissal of the physical sciences but an argument for their proper place within a larger, more foundational biological context. The book is structured to systematically build this case. Following a critical examination of the "physico-mathematical paradigm"—from its Platonic and Galilean roots to its modern quandaries in quantum mechanics and relativity—Fabbro proposes an alternative grounded in the properties of living organisms. He masterfully synthesizes a vast range of scientific domains, traversing the origin of life and the evolution of the nervous system (Chapter 3), the paleoanthropological story of hominids and the emergence of Homo sapiens (Chapter 4), the profound socio-political transformations from hunter-gatherer bands to modern empires (Chapter 5), and the nature of information and communication (Chapter 6).