Immanuel Kant: Pioneer neuroscientist

John O (University College London)

*****
Monday 2nd June, 7pm, Royal Institution of Great Britain, Albemarle Street, London

Public lecture

Professor John O'Keefe,
Professor, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Department of Anatomy.  Director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour, University College London.  Recipient of the 2013 Horwitz Prize for “significant advancements to the field of neuroscience” and the 2014 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience.
Immanuel Kant: Pioneer neuroscientist

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argued that our concept of space was not derived from sensations arising from our interaction with the physical world but instead represented the a priori basis for our perception of the world in the first place. Extensive work in modern neuroscience has provided strong evidence in support of this position. We now know that there is an extensive network of brain areas in the temporal lobes dedicated to the construction of an allocentric space framework and that some parts of this network develop relatively independently of the animal’s experience. This map-like spatial representation is constructed from more primitive representations of places, directions and distances and allows the animal to know where it is in an environment and how to navigate to desired locations. In my talk, I will present the evidence for these more primitive representations and discuss how they may interact with each other to produce a Kantian map-like representation of space. In the latter part of my talk I will discuss how our understanding of these brain systems sheds light on some of the postulates of Euclidean geometry, one of the conceptual domains used by Kant to support his view of the synthetic a priori nature of our spatial representations.

The event is part of an annual series of public lectures I organise in collaboration with the Royal Institution of Great Britain for the Leverhulme Kant and the Laws of Nature project.

For info and upcoming events, please see: