Dr. Andrew Michel, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry in the Thomas F. Frist, Jr. College of Medicine at Belmont University, has been named (alongside collaborators Dr. Jeffrey Bishop of Saint Louis University and Dr. M. Therese Lysaught of Loyola University Chicago) as a winner of the 2021 Expanded Reason Award for their co-authored book Biopolitics After Neuroscience: Morality and the Economy of Virtue.
This thesis-driven book rigorously critiques selected neuroscientific journal literature, via a genealogical approach, to expose deeply held philosophical assumptions that animate contemporary neuroscience’s attempt to scientifically ground morality in the brain. The project exposes the social and moral imaginary that shapes neuroscientific questions, especially the expanding neoliberal political economy that constructs the neo-liberalized human subject under a biopolitics of moral behavior.
The book concludes with a call for a humbler and more constrained neuroscience, informed by a more robust human anthropology that embraces the nobility, beauty, frailty and even failure of human beings as opportunities that necessitate social cohesion and the care of the least of these.
The project was funded by a grant awarded through the Science of the Virtues Project through the University of Chicago in collaboration with the Templeton Foundation. Biopolitics After Neuroscience: Morality and the Economy of Virtue will be published by Bloomsbury Academic Press and is expected for release in June 2022.
