Any research program is rightly evaluated on its unfolding ability to address, to illuminate, and to solve a broad range of problems antecedently recognized by the professional community. The research program at issue in this volume is cognitive neurobiology, a broad-front scientific research program with potential relevance to a considerable variety of intellectual disciplines, including neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, neurochemistry, neuropathology, developmental neurobiology, psychiatry, psychology, artificial intelligence, and … philosophy. It is the antecedently recognized problems of this latter discipline in particular that constitute the explanatory challenges addressed in the present volume. My aim in what follows is to direct the light of computational neuroscience and cognitive neurobiology – or such light as they currently provide – onto a range of familiar philosophical problems, problems independently at the focus of much fevered philosophical attention.

Some of those focal problems go back at least to Plato, as illustrated in Chapter 8, where we confront the issue of how the mind grasps the timeless structure underlying the ephemeral phenomena of the perceivable world. And some go back at least to Aristotle, as illustrated in Chapters 3 and 4, where we confront the issue of how the mind embodies and deploys the moral wisdom that slowly develops during the social maturation of normal humans. Other problems have moved into the spotlight of professional attention only recently, as in Chapter 1, where we address the ground or nature of consciousness. Or as in Chapter 7, where we address the prospects of artificial intelligence.