SPAN has been awarded a generous grant from the Dana Foundation to execute a collaborative research program along with an interdisciplinary mentorship program. Each program focuses on interdisciplinary ties between philosophers of neuroscience and neuroscientists with a particular focus on early career researchers. 

To learn more about each program visit the ITRC page and the Mentorship page. 

Project Background:

While the study of the mind and brain unites philosophers and neuroscientists, the lack of a common language and differing conventions about presenting work publicly pose significant challenges to progress. These challenges were on display at the inaugural meeting of the Society for Philosophy & Neuroscience (SPAN) in May 2025, where many found it difficult to cross disciplinary boundaries. Because neuroscientists and philosophers receive different training and deploy distinct methodologies, communication proves challenging in the absence of cross-training between disciplines. This leads to difficulties or collaborative research and generates barriers for presenting work in an interdisciplinary setting. There is a strong desire in both fields to collaborate and learn from one another, but such opportunities are typically reserved for special summer schools that have limited space and are costly to attend.

Public dissemination of neuroscience research and its implications faces its own formidable challenges. Academic articles rely on specialized language embedded in a larger research program, making it difficult for the non-specialist to make sense of how the research relates to their every day life. Because neuroscience research has direct affects on societal issues such as health, ethics, technology, eduction, and more, it is important that the public understands the role that neuroscience plays in shaping everyday life. Bridging neuroscience with society requires translating specialized language into terminology that can be received by the public while also clearly stating the relevance of the research to real world scenarios.

A goal of SPAN is to provide researchers with the tools to foster interdisciplinary intelligibility such that collaborations can be effective for practitioners of both fields. When brought together, neuroscientists and philosophers can then engage in fruitful discussions without facing significant barriers to communicate with each other and with the public. We believe that research collaborations and subsequent joint public discourse will help to develop and illuminate the integral relationship between neuroscience and philosophy, fostering future efforts to overcome the barriers that hinder communication and research.

i. Philosophers and neuroscientists have distinct departments on university campuses and cross attendance between departmental events is rare. Even if there is interest in cross attendance, conventions differ significantly, stifling engagement and slowing interdisciplinary progress (Knapp et al., 2015). SPAN is in the unique position to reach philosophers and neuroscientists that are interested in cross-disciplinary collaboration. Using our platform, we will be able to facilitate collaborative projects that provide us with qualitative and quantitative data that we can use to devise and implement strategies for improved collaborations, increasing our impact on uniting neuroscience and philosophy toward a common goal. We are also in a position to partner with publicfacing academic platforms to bring interdisciplinary research to the public, an opportunity to train researchers on translating their results into a narrative that can be shared with non-specialists.

ii. Summer programs that bring philosophers and neuroscientists together include the Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy at Duke and The School of Ideas in Warsaw, Poland. These dedicated spaces provide some guidance to neuroscientists and philosophers on how to do interdisciplinary work and sometimes culminate with a group project. The success of these programs shows that there is a significant desire for supported collaborative projects. However, the opportunities are scarce, summer schools are expensive to attend, and support beyond the summer school is lacking. Using our resources, we will be able support sustained collaborations while focusing on researchers at the earliest career stages. We will also be able to leverage what we learn from these projects to implement strategies that our members can use for future collaborations and that we can use to develop more effective opportunities, including unique sessions at our annual conference.

iii. The current media environment challenges the communication of research from the sciences and the humanities and so threatens any application to real world issues. Because research articles are highly specialized, uptake by the general public is difficult and the implications of research are often obscured by a lack of intelligibility. A component of the Collaborative Interdisciplinary Projects will be to train researchers on how to translate the results of the collaboration into a public-facing article, focusing on how those results are relevant to real-world issues.