Next Tuesday, October 30, at 12:30 in the Salón de Grados of the Facultad de Psicología, Professor Fernando Vidal will give a lecture on his latest book «Being Brains» (Fordham University Press, 2017). It deals with Philosophy and Theory of the mind. Fernando Vidal is ICREA Research Professor and Professor at the Medical Anthropology Research Center of the Rovira i Virgili University.
Born in Buenos Aires and former student of the Colegio Nacional of Buenos Aires, Fernando Vidal has been trained in psychology and history of science at the universities of Harvard, Geneva and Paris and in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Winner of a Guggenheim scholarship, since 2012 he is a research professor at ICREA (Catalan Institute of Research and Advanced Studies), which he joined after more than a decade as a permanent senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He is a specialist in the intellectual and cultural history of the human sciences from the Renaissance to the present. His subjects of study have in common an interest in the articulation of knowledge and values in the formation of ideas about the human being, including the notion of «person» and the theories about the relationship between the soul and the body. Among his published books are Jean Starobinski – Las razones del cuerpo, and (in collaboration) The Moral Authority of Nature (with Lorraine Daston), Neurocultures: Glimpses into an Expanding Universe (with Francisco Ortega) and Endangerment, Biodiversity and Culture (with Nélia Dias). His last two books are The Sciences of the Soul: The Early Modern Origins of Psychology (2011) and Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject (2017, with F. Ortega). In recent years it has evolved towards Medical anthropology and Bioethics. In September 2018, after six years as a professor at the CEHIC (Center for the History of Science, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona), he has become a professor at the MARC (Medical Anthropology Research Center, Universidad Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona), where he will coordinate a international research project on the phenomenology of captivity syndrome.