Having an open mind means never losing sight of the bigger picture and being continuously aware that scientific research, including research on the mind, is embedded in a wider context. In what follows, we will very briefly draw attention to three examples of what we mean by the “bigger picture” and the “wider context”: ethical, anthropological, and sociocultural issues; globalization and transcultural philosophy; and what we provisionally call “the sapiential dimension”—getting philosophy back into philosophy.[10] Let us begin with the ethical ramifications of the type of work presented in this collection.
New theories lead to new technologies and new potentials for action. Gradually, they also change the image of humankind, a fact that may in turn have major social and cultural consequences. Having an open mind means being sensitive to normative issues and ethical aspects of research in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. It also means acknowledging the fact that the human mind is a culturally embedded phenomenon and that what we come to believe about it will eventually change not only sociocultural practice, but our own minds as well. Such “soft issues” are not empirically tractable, at least not in any direct manner (Metzinger 2000, pp. 6–10; Metzinger 2009). Here, perhaps even more so than elsewhere, the challenge is to formulate the right kinds of questions in a rigorous, precise, and fully intelligible manner. These questions are certainly difficult, but they are also clearly relevant.
Theoretical innovation leads to technological innovation, necessitating careful and reflected risk assessment. For example, modern virtual reality technology not only enables the concrete realization of a large number of new experimental paradigms, but has also provided us with many novel and philosophically relevant insights into the multimodal bodily foundations of selfhood and subjectivity (Blanke 2012; Blanke & Metzinger 2009; Metzinger 2014). In combination with constantly improving brain-computer interfaces, virtual reality technology also possesses the potential for military applications, for example via virtual or robotic re-embodiment. New ways of causally coupling the human-self-model with avatars and surrogate bodies in virtual reality will have clinical benefits in the medical treatment of patients and, perhaps, in rehabilitation programs for prisoners. But it also opens the door to new forms of consumer manipulation and potentially unexpected psychological side-effects (e.g., Blascovich & Bailenson 2011).
A second example of the social and political dimension of new action potentials, in terms of how they might intervene in the brain, is provided by new developments in pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement (Merkel et al. 2007; Metzinger & Hildt 2011). Cognitive enhancement is a molecular-level technology, which aims to optimize a specific class of information-processing functions: cognitive functions, physically realized by the human brain. The human brain, however, is also embodied as well as embedded in a dense network of environmental interactions, many of which are of a distinctly cultural and social nature. And it not only possesses a long evolutionary history, but also changes over an individual’s lifespan. Here, the central philosophical problem is that normative elements are already built into the concept itself. In bioethics, the term “enhancement” is “usually used […] to characterize interventions designed to improve human form or functioning beyond what is necessary to sustain or restore good health” (Juengst 1998, p. 29). As opposed to medical treatments or therapies, enhancements modify physical or mental characteristics in healthy individuals, just like cosmetic surgery. In psychopharmacological enhancement, psychoactive drugs originally devised as therapy for specified diseases are typically used off-label or illicitly by normal, healthy individuals in order to modify brain functioning. In the future, how exactly can we benefit from scientific progress, for example by influencing and constructively interacting with the ever-developing neuronal architecture of our brains on a molecular level, while not leaving the social context out of consideration?
Who counts as a “healthy individual”? A trivial but important point is that concepts like “normal mental functioning” or, say, “normal age-related cognitive decline” possess a statistical and a normative reading. The semantics of both types of concepts change over time. For example, the statistical and descriptive features of “normal mental functioning” or “normal age-related cognitive decline” change as science progresses, as the predictive success of our theories improves, and as textbook definitions are adapted. Our concepts become richer in content and more differentiated. But if a specific society suddenly has new tools and new potentials for action—say, to alter certain cognitive functions in the elderly—then the statistical distribution of even those objective properties underlying a purely statistical notion of what is “normal” may also change. Cognitive enhancement is a neurotechnology, and technologies change the objective world. However, objective changes are also subjectively perceived and may lead to correlated shifts in value judgments. Concepts such as “healthy individual”, “normal mental functioning”, or “normal age-related cognitive decline” always have a descriptive as well as a normative reading, because they appear in statements about what human beings should be like. Is it really necessary to succumb to memory loss or a decreasing attention span after the age of 55? If other options are actually on the table, does this turn passively capitulating to age-related cognitive decline or certain individual limitations in the ability to engage in high-level, abstract thought into a cognitive form of unkemptness and dishevelment?
In this example, the not-so-trivial challenge lies in understanding the dynamic interaction between “normality” (in the descriptive sense) and “normalization” (in the normative sense). The theoretical and social dynamics linking both concepts and their interpretation is highly complex. It involves scientific theories (in cognitive neuroscience, molecular neurobiology, and psychopharmacology), applied philosophical ethics, changing cultural contexts, globalization, policy-making, as well as industrial lobbies trying to influence the historical change of our very own concepts and their meaning in order to market new products. Normalization is a complex sociocultural process by which certain new norms become accepted in societal practice. For this reason, the scientific process, say, of optimizing textbook definitions, empirical predictions, and therapeutical success has a political dimension as well. It attempts to firmly ground theoretical entities such as “normal mental functioning” or “normal age-related cognitive decline” in empirical data, but it is also driven by individual career interests, influenced by funding agencies, the pharmaceutical industry, media coverage, and so on.
A third important example of how new ethical issues emerge is presented by the question of animal consciousness and animal suffering. What is the ethics of creating suffering in non-human species, for example in the scientific pursuit of uniquely human epistemic goals? Much recent research shows that many animals are very likely not only conscious, but also self-conscious and able to suffer (Brown 2015; Boly et al. 2013; Edelman & Seth 2009; Seth et al. 2005). They represent a frustration of their own individual preferences on the level of their consciously experienced self-model and thus own their sensory pain. They are also very likely to be unable to distance themselves from negative emotions such as fear, anxiety, or depression. In the light of new and better descriptive theories of consciousness, classical normative issues such as animal ethics reappear in a new guise and with increasing urgency.
Philosophical questions such as “Who or what exactly should count as an object of ethical consideration?” soon may also become relevant for the applied ethics of synthetic phenomenology, that is, for all research programs in artificial intelligence that risk or even directly intend the creation of phenomenal experience, of truly subjective, conscious states in non-biological hardware. “Synthetic phenomenology” (SP) was first introduced by J. Scott Jordan in 1998, explicitly paralleling the idea of “synthetic biology”.[11] The possibility of machine consciousness now is not only part of the bigger picture and the wider context mentioned above, it also illustrates how theoretical innovation may eventually lead to technological innovation and require a careful assessment of possible risks. For example, the Principle of Negative Synthetic Phenomenology (Metzinger 2013b, pp. 2–8) is an ethical norm that demands that, in artificial systems, we should not risk the unexpected emergence of conscious states belonging to the phenomenological category of “suffering” or even aim at the direct creation of states that would increase the overall amount of suffering in the universe. But how exactly are we to unpack the logical details of this normative proposal? How does one approach these new types of questions in a rational and data-driven manner? Machine consciousness, just like VR-technology, pharmaceutical enhancement, and animal suffering is another example of a topic where a lack of imagination might prove dangerous and where an open-minded approach is pertinent.
Perhaps one central aspect of this problem is that in an increasing number of cases we will not only have to ask, “What is a good action?” but also, “What is a good state of consciousness?” Opening, cultivating and further developing one’s own mind clearly is in the spirit of not only Cicero, Plato, and the ancients—systematically increasing our own mental autonomy seems to be a common ideal shared by many of humankind’s philosophical traditions. However, the boundary conditions for this old philosophical project are beginning to change because the tools for manipulating or even systematically cultivating our own minds are constantly becoming better—and precisely as a result of interdisciplinary, empirical work in the Mind Sciences. If we arrive at a comprehensive theory of consciousness, and if we develop ever more sophisticated tools to alter the contents of subjective experience, we will have to think hard about what a good state of consciousness is. This again illustrates the point that as some parts of neurotechnology inevitably lead to consciousness technology, new normative issues arise and classical philosophical questions reappear in new guises (Metzinger 2009).
As editors of this collection, we do not want to take a specific position on any of these important and highly controversial issues. We merely want to point out that having an open mind also means cultivating a specific kind of sensitivity: a sensitivity for the actual and potential suffering of other sentient beings, for newly emerging ethical issues and for the obvious fact that the kind of research we are developing together does not take place in a political, social, or cultural vacuum. For example, open mindedness also requires a self-critical sense of responsibility to global society as a whole. It is also in this context that new conceptual bridges have to be built between artificial intelligence, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Once more, a first and important step may be to carefully consider the questions themselves, rather than to rush into an answer or attempt to quickly implement mere technocratic solutions. Ultimately, all of these questions have a lot to do with the classical philosophical problem of what a good life actually is.
There is not only an ethics of science, there is also an ethics of globalization. It has to do with fairness and, for example, the willingness of the rich to relinquish some of their sovereignty for the benefits of cooperation. Of course, there are technical issues behind philosophical notions such as “global fairness”. But many would agree that we should distribute resources in a way that helps the worst-off, and that the only way of justifying giving more to those members of humanity who are already well-off is if it demonstrably improves the position of those in the poorest and most dangerous parts of the world as well. The movement of effective altruism uses scientific research to determine the optimal ways of distributing goods to the poorest regions of the world, with the goal of maximizing the benefits and long-term efficiency for instance of donations to charities (for general information, see http://www.effectivealtruism.org/). Such debates apply to the globalization of science and philosophy as well. In this context, it is interesting (and sobering) to note how in academic philosophy, the basic idea of making scholarly work available free of charge and free of usage restrictions online is vastly underdeveloped in comparison to other fields of research. It is also sobering to note that academic philosophy, possibly more than other academic disciplines, continues to be dominated by white, Western (and mostly Anglo-Saxon) males. This is not just reflected in philosophy departments themselves, but also in well-known and widely consulted ranking systems, which almost exclusively focus on Anglo-Saxon departments. We could do much better here, in all of these respects. Of course, many of us have long realized this, and as editors of this collection, we are preaching to the choir. What is needed now are viable ways of changing this situation.
Because of the open access format of the Open MIND collection, which was conceived of, in part, as a donation of intellectual property, we want to focus on one single aspect here. One might argue that the current subscription-based publishing system, which comprises nearly all of the top-ranked journals that young researchers in particular strive to have on their CVs, is inherently conservative, stabilizes the academic status quo, and, given the context of academic globalization plus the urgent need to strengthen deeper and not just intellectual forms of intercultural exchange, potentially leads to a “global closed-mindedness”, to a narrowing of intellectual and scholarly life. Typically, publically funded academics will be involved on different levels and in different stages of the publication process, not only as authors, but also as reviewers, members on editorial boards, editors, and so on. Indeed, these types of participation are awarded and often expected by hiring committees. Yet, despite all of the hours of free labor (from the perspective of the publishing houses), the scientific publications that flow out of this process are often locked behind a paywall, giving authors only limited rights to distribute their own research. More innovative journals give authors the opportunity to publish their papers open access—typically in return for a hefty publication fee that, once more, is most likely to be funded by rich universities in affluent countries. Again, we can, and should, do much better.
Through their work, scientists and philosophers continuously produce knowledge and new intellectual property. However, there exists not only knowledge production, but also knowledge consumption—and the overall process has an economical basis. How should such goods be justly distributed? Who can participate in the process of producing and consuming them? The world continues to be divided into “haves” and “have-nots” when it comes to accessing the fruits of the intellectual labor of humankind. The point is not only that taxpayers should have access to the results of all publicly funded work. A more central point is that, given globalization, we now need a much more transcultural type of philosophy. In order to realize this goal, we urgently need to experiment with different formats of open access publishing, testing out what works best. In this way, we could finally create a unified public sphere for research—a “global workspace” for the science and philosophy of all humankind. Clearly, this in itself is not sufficient, but is a very first, necessary step.[12] Still, the historical transition we are witnessing is one where having an open mind also means publishing open access whenever possible—which in no way excludes additionally using, and paying for, traditional dissemination formats as well. But in creating humanity’s global workspace, as Steven Harnad (2007) puts it, it has now simply become “unethical for the publishing tail to be allowed to continue to wag the research dog.” What is needed is an honest and objective assessment of the most effective methods of scientific publishing—where effective not only means cost-efficient from the perspective of large publishing houses, but also addresses the dual challenges of optimizing the quality of research and peer-review processes while making scientific results available to all interested researchers and scholars.
“Intercultural philosophy” may sound good—but what does it really mean? Philosophy was born at different places and at different times, for example in India, in China, and in Europe. Philosophical thinking evolved in different cultural contexts that were often quite independent of each other and sometimes remained largely isolated for many centuries. Globalization now forces us to face the need to create novel forms of communication between philosophers as well as new forms of cooperation between different traditions and cultures. Yet this development is also an opportunity. The idea of “intercultural philosophy” is certainly not new, and there are many different ways of spelling it out. Here, we want only to point out that in our view, intercultural philosophy should not be a new academic discipline, but that it is, again, an attitude, an increasingly important form of epistemic practice.
At the same time, not all philosophical research contexts originally evolved in isolation, and the globalization of wisdom may be older than we think. To give just one familiar example, it is noteworthy that Pyrrhonian skepticism plausibly has a strong (and entirely mutual) intercultural dimension as well. The practice of using standardized arguments involving opposing statements to cultivate positionlessness, suspension of judgment, and epoché can be found in the Indian tradition as well, for instance in the Madhyamaka tradition and in Nagarjuna’s writings. Textual evidence suggests that not only might Pyrrho himself have been inspired by ideas with which he came into contact in India, but also that later, Sextus’s version of Pyrrhonian skepticism might have shaped Nagarjuna’s Middle Way (Dreyfus & Garfield 2010; Geldsetzer 2010; Kuzminski 2008). Having an open mind, in this sense, involves not only bridging disciplinary cultures, but also integrating different research traditions from different cultures and different periods and looking for their common sources.
Obviously, the open-minded “pooling of intellectual resources” that we mentioned above must increasingly also include philosophers not only from Europe or the Anglo-Saxon world. From a traditional Western perspective, epistemic humility also means acknowledging that other philosophical traditions may long ago have had deep insights into theoretical problems that still puzzle us today, even if their knowledge is not presented in a format and terminology that we are used to or can easily understand. It would be intellectually dishonest to assume that the style of thought developed in Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy is the only way of being intellectually honest. And obviously, if, as we do, one calls for an expansion of the principle of charity into interdisciplinary discourse, then one should also accept that the same principle applies to intercultural collaboration. If there is to be a culture of charity, then it must be a global culture of charity—including open access publishing and global fairness in the distribution of academic goods. Today, even more than in the past, this is another reading of what it means to have an open mind.
Thanks to the internet and major technological advances, modern academic life is unfolding at a greater pace than ever before. It has also become more competitive than it ever was in the past. This development bears the promise of progress; but it also poses a very real risk. As knowledge production becomes a commodity and academia is increasingly reorganized based on economic principles of marketing and business administration, universities are replacing tenure-track lines with adjunct teachers and a constantly growing number of brilliant young academics are now competing for scarce resources in a globalized academic environment. The acceleration of academic life as well as increased social pressure are beginning to have psychological effects on individual researchers as well. A recent surge in the detection of fraud and scientific misconduct may be a sign of underlying counterproductive incentives that have begun to influence scientists world-wide. According to a report in the journal Nature, published retractions in scientific journals have increased by around 1,200% over the past decade, even though the number of published papers grew only 44% in the same period (Van Noorden 2011). A detailed review of all 2,047 biomedical and life-science research articles indexed by PubMed as retracted by the 3rd of May, 2012 revealed that only 21.3% of retractions were attributable to error (Fang et al. 2012). 67.4% of retractions were attributable to misconduct, including fraud or suspected fraud (43.4%), duplicate publication (14.2%), and plagiarism (9.8%). It is also possible, however, that the rising number of retractions has been caused by a growing propensity to retract flawed and fraudulent papers and does not in fact involve a substantial increase in the prevalence of misconduct (Fanelli 2013). These numbers might therefore also suggest an increasing willingness to retract faulty publications. They might also be artefacts of an increased availability of data on such retractions. We do not know what the final interpretation of such data should be. But we do regard them as one potential indicator of overheated competition turned counterproductive.
In philosophy, there is a high and continuously growing pressure for specialization, and this historical development presents a major problem. One classical model of what philosophy is says that philosophers are “specialists for the general”, who are concerned with integrating the knowledge of their time into an overarching conceptual model. As one German idealist philosopher put it, philosophy “is its own time comprehended in thought”.[13] Today, the realization of this metaphilosophical vision has long become an impossible task for even the greatest scholar. The sheer number of publications in any given, specialized area of research—such as embodied cognition, self-consciousness, or the evolution of culture and complex societies—has become so large that it is now extremely difficult for any ambitious young philosopher to even get an overview of the field. At the research frontier, great progress has been made in the fine-grained differentiation of research questions, while conceptual precision, argumentational density, and the general speed with which technical debates are conducted is continuously rising. This historical shift has become particularly obvious in philosophy of mind. In the age of cognitive neuroscience and Bayesian modeling, “raising one’s own age to the level of thought”, as Hegel put it, has simply become an impossible task. On the other hand, philosophers of mind are not embedded journalists of the neuroscience industry. A philosopher’s task today clearly goes far beyond offering methodological criticism plus a bit of applied ethics. Philosophers should not confine themselves to laying and clarifying some conceptual foundations or just developing a local, domain-specific “conceptual commentary” on the general way in which the empirical Mind Sciences change our perspective on reality and the human mind’s position within it. In the future, philosophers must more actively introduce their own epistemic goals into the overall process as well. Failure to do so is to exercise a counterproductive sort of epistemic humility—and runs the risk of letting academic philosophy slip into irrelevance.
Having an open mind also means that there are no taboo topics. At the outset, philosophy was the “love of wisdom” and, as everybody knows, knowledge and wisdom are not the same thing. Knowledge is something that can be accumulated in an incremental and systematic way, but wisdom has to do with synthesizing very different kinds of knowledge in ways that are practically relevant, for example with respect to knowing what a good life is and, importantly, also with being successful at living a good life (Ryan 2014). This in turn may include actively minimizing the number of unjustified beliefs one has and continuously maximizing the dynamic coherence between one’s beliefs, one’s values, and one’s actions. Perhaps wisdom can also be characterized by a sustained striving for accuracy and for the possession of a wide variety of epistemically justified beliefs on a wide variety of relevant subjects—with one such subject being the deep structure of the human mind itself. In this case, knowledge will automatically be self-knowledge, and the question now becomes on what level the relevant form of self-knowledge is to be found. Tackling this problem may involve a commitment to a deeper form of rationality that includes not only epistemic humility, but heightened sensitivity towards moral issues and one’s limitations in both fields.
It now has become dramatically obvious that something has been lost along the way. Academic life has become distinctly unphilosophical. Professionalization, acceleration, and excessive competition have led us into a form of academic life that can now very rarely be described as a good life. First, it seems safe to say that many of the best and leading researchers are not very successful at living a good life—even if they are philosophers who, at least at the beginning of their careers, may have had a great interest in exactly what a “good” life in the philosophical sense might be. Second, overheated competition increasingly draws people into the field who are predominantly interested in competition and professional success per se, and not so much in the pursuit of knowledge, let alone wisdom. But intellectual superiority and insight are different things, just as knowledge and wisdom are. There is no intrinsic link between striving for intellectual superiority and being intellectually honest, practicing epistemic humility and cultivating an atmosphere of charitable collaboration. In academic philosophy, the sapiential dimension, in which theoretical insight and practical know-how are deeply interwoven, has now been lost almost completely, and one aspect of what it means to have an open mind—as opposed to just being professional, knowledgeable, and smart—is to be aware of this fact and to be ready to face it.
We, the editors, certainly do not claim to know what exactly philosophy really is or what it is to lead a good life, nor do we always agree on these questions—but we are convinced that whatever the answer is, it is deeply connected with a particular kind of attitude that reaches back all the way to the skeptical tradition, East and West. Philosophy at its best is not just purely academic or technical: it is also a practice, a way of life; and its theoretical and practical dimensions should never be completely independent of each other. This is what we mean when we say that academic philosophy would greatly profit from a sapiential dimension. And if we are right to say that philosophy is, among other things, an epistemic practice, a particular style of thinking resulting from the cultivation of an open-minded attitude (and one that is skeptical, we might add, in the most constructive sense), then this may also suggest a new reading of what it means to say that philosophy has an important role to play in the Mind Sciences. Asking for an interaction between cognitive neuroscience and philosophy as academic disciplines is one thing—but asking for the introduction of a particular way of thinking and a particular type of collaborative practice—a more genuinely philosophical attitude—into scientific research is another. We hope that by now it is clear that we think philosophy can contribute to the Mind Sciences in both respects, as an academic discipline and as an epistemic practice. Still, what we have been discussing here under the heading of open mindedness is first and foremost an example of philosophy as an epistemic practice—and as such it can be quite independent of philosophy as an academic discipline. Indeed, this is why we think that an important goal is to put philosophy, in this practical and classical sense, back into philosophy in the academic sense as well.
We openly admit that we have no ready-made answer to the question of how to re-introduce the sapiential dimension into modern academic philosophy, in a way that is rational and intellectually honest. In fact, we think this might well be the biggest challenge for the future. Obviously, what we call the “sapiential dimension” here has nothing to do with any kind of theology or organized religion. And we suspect that the real value of what we called “first-person methods” above may lie not in supporting dubious metaphysical arguments, but lies, in part, in their potential for reintroducing the sapiential dimension into academic philosophy. But we also want to point out that this could simply be empirically false. Sometimes it is enough to remain with the question, to simply see it for what it is and to face the facts. Sometimes things take care of themselves. As we said when sketching the problem of subjectivity, to have an open mind means to acknowledge (and not repress) the fact that there may actually be a set of deeper metatheoretical ambiguities here. Having an open mind can also consist in admitting the existence of a problem—and that is all we want to do here.
Taking empirical constraints into account has become absolutely central in current philosophy of mind. However, there are different models of what good interdisciplinary practice is and how empirical constraints are to be satisfied or integrated. Interdisciplinary philosophy of mind does not simply consist in turning away from old-school armchair philosophy, which sometimes took intuitions as main input for philosophical work. And it would be false to say that “pure” philosophy has no place in the newly unfolding scheme of things—there is clearly relevant and highly valuable work that has only a small empirical component, or perhaps even none at all. One aspect of the Open MIND approach is that young philosophers should increasingly become active as experimenters themselves, for instance by proposing epistemic goals and novel experimental designs to empirical researchers and even by joining their colleagues from different disciplines to work on shared research projects. Another aspect of the approach, as we noted earlier, is that the extended principle of charity applies not only to the relationship between disciplines, but also to that between different generations of researchers.
We are all learning as we go along. Perhaps most centrally and most obviously, to have an open mind means to acknowledge the fact that while there has long been an “interdisciplinary turn” in philosophy of mind, the real task consists in creatively testing out and developing entirely new types of interdisciplinary cooperation. For example, it is important to preserve a critical spirit and an openly inquisitive mindset—interdisciplinarity must never be purely decorative, a fashionable necessity, or reduced to a rhetorical element in edifying Sunday speeches. Along the way, we will also need a new understanding of progress, of acceptable forms of inquiry and methods, as well as new measures of success, for instance concerning novel forms of collaboration and publication formats that are still under the radar of institutionalized impact factors.
To give a second example, the newly emerged discipline of neuroethics is an important and innovative form of interdisciplinary philosophy, but it should never indirectly contribute to moral hypocrisy, as a fig leaf ultimately used by others to cover the failure to directly and open-mindedly address the political issues involved. If interdisciplinarity becomes merely strategic (e.g., in dealing with funding agencies) or is really guided by off-topic motives, then it loses its systematic force and becomes counterproductive and stale. Interdisciplinary philosophy of mind is not simply about being empirically informed, or about introducing strong and fine-grained “bottom-up constraints” in the formation of new theories about mind and consciousness. It may actually be about the emergence of a new type of researcher. We like the idea of “dyed-in-the-wool interdisciplinarity”, where “dyed-in-the-wool” is not used in a pejorative sense but indicates that young philosophers have learned how to think in a way that transgresses boundaries between disciplines, naturally and effortlessly. The classical approaches were intuition-based, and they made analytical philosophy one of the strongest intellectual currents of the 20th century. But we are now slowly moving from a priori methods and thought experiments to real experiments, and from abstract metaphysical questions about the relationship between mind and body to the investigation of specific aspects of cognition (Knobe 2015). And while it is clear that an open-minded philosophy of mind should not be strictly or exclusively data-driven, it is equally true that it should be both empirically informed and informative, guided (but not completely constrained) by empirical data and theoretical-conceptual considerations alike.
In the end, there is also a sociological aspect to the current transition in our understanding of what good philosophy amounts to. Max Planck, the German theoretical physicist who created quantum theory and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918, famously said: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it” (1948). As the editors of a collection promoting, among other things, senior–junior interaction, we think this may be a bit too pessimistic—and once more, we leave it to our readers to decide how successful this interaction was here, in this project. Still, for now, a careful suggestion is that possibly, the old should learn a little more from the young.
One of our experiences with the MIND Group was that there was a difference between what one might call “junior mentoring” and “senior mentoring”. Junior researchers need friends in neighboring disciplines whom they can trust and ask about literature, current trends, and technical issues that are hard to understand. Our experience is that interdisciplinary exchange works best in excellent young people who are not yet on the job market, and in non-competitive situations in which at best no holders of academic resources are present, such as senior researchers who have grants, post-doc positions, etc. to give away. Good and established systems of senior–junior mentoring already exist, but we believe that given the current situation, junior–junior mentoring is an important resource to be developed as well. For this reason, in the Open MIND project, we installed a form of junior–junior mentoring during the anonymous peer-review process for commentaries. And while replies can be seen as a form of senior-junior mentoring, there was also, covertly in the form of target article reviews, a phase of junior–senior mentoring, in which some of our junior members not only wrote their first reviews ever, but now, after the collection’s publication, can also see for themselves how their comments were implemented and whether this maybe even led to an improvement of the target papers. But above all, it is important that young people from the same generation have the opportunity to meet each other and form their own, autonomous networks based on shared interests and mutually shared (or acquired) expertise. And this will require a radical restructuring of research funding and of the university system itself, as well as new subsidizing schemes. The function of older, more mature researchers may rather consist in creating and offering such platforms, giving a better overview of the intellectual landscape and offering insight into what is really relevant in a specific phase of a young researcher’s academic life. Today, the sociological aspect of what it means to have an open mind has an unprecedented global dimension. In trying to promote young blood, mostly in Germany, we found that language and cultural barriers actually are often higher than we wanted to admit. If what we have said about the ethics of globalization and intercultural philosophy here is correct, then we might not only need new formats of interdisciplinary and intragenerational collaboration, but also new types of intercultural mentoring as well.
As we said at the outset, instead of an introduction we wanted to begin a new conversation by offering some first starting points and perhaps even first building blocks for a fresh understanding of what, today, it could mean to have an open mind. Once again, we openly admit that we have no ready-made answers. But we are convinced that it is important to ask these questions. Somehow, we have to get philosophy back into philosophy.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Michael Madary, Nicole Osborne, Marius Jung, and Daniela Hill for editorial support and their helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. And, as always, we are deeply indebted to Stefan Pitz, Anja Krug-Metzinger, and Janice Kaye Windt for their support.