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BOOK REVIEWS TL· Purposive Brain. By Ragnar Granit. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1977. Pp. 244. $11.95. This book is by one of the leading neurobiologists of our time. At the end of a long and very productive life of research it is attractive to adopt a philosophical attitude and to scan a wide field of biological science. It emerges that it has to be considered in a framework different from that of the physical sciences. This is particularly so when one considers the essential feature ofa biological organism, namely, purposive behavior. The title of the book, TL· Purposive Brain, is both a challenge and a paradox. The brain is a material structure with a basis of operation that by the neurosciences is being more and more reduced to physical terms—the immensely complicated anatomical arrangement of neurones with their action potentials, synaptic potentials, electrochemical gradients, etc. How can such a structure perform in a way that we are justified in referring to as purposive? T
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BOOK REVIEWS TL· Purposive Brain. By Ragnar Granit. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1977. Pp. 244. $11.95. This book is by one of the leading neurobiologists of our time. At the end of a long and very productive life of research it is attractive to adopt a philosophical attitude and to scan a wide field of biological science. It emerges that it has to be considered in a framework different from that of the physical sciences. This is particularly so when one considers the essential feature ofa biological organism, namely, purposive behavior. The title of the book, TL· Purposive Brain, is both a challenge and a paradox. The brain is a material structure with a basis of operation that by the neurosciences is being more and more reduced to physical terms—the immensely complicated anatomical arrangement of neurones with their action potentials, synaptic potentials, electrochemical gradients, etc. How can such a structure perform in a way that we are justified in referring to as purposive? T
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