In the "Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis," Sigmund Freud famously suggested that humanity would suffer three great blows at the hand of science:
"The first was when they learnt that our earth was not the center of the universe but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness. This is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, though something similar had already been asserted by Alexandrian science. The second blow fell when biological research destroyed man’s supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature. This revaluation has been accomplished in our own days by Darwin, Wallace and their predecessors, though not without the most violent contemporary opposition. But human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in the mind."
Today, many would disagree that psychoanalysis delivered that last blow, but research on evolutionary biology and the mind sciences threatens to provide it with force. This is the subject of this conference which brought together academics from law, economics, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and economics. We explored the question by focusing on 5 particular issues: Responsibility, Punishment, Addiction, Cooperation, and Racism. |
