Neurophilosophy, or the philosophy of neuroscience, is the interdisciplinary study of neuroscience and philosophy that explores the relevance of neuroscientific studies to the arguments traditionally categorized as philosophy of mind. Recent scientific discourse elucidates the distinction between "neurophilosophy" and "philosophy of neuroscience".

The term was coined by Patricia Churchland in her book, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind–Brain, which was published in 1986 by the MIT Press. Churchland was driven by the mind-body problem, which asks a highly-debated question of how the mind, which drives intangible, nonphysical mental processes, is related to the brain, a physical organ. This problem extends to the understanding of other relatively unknown phenomena, such as decision making, learning, consciousness, existence of free will, as well as other related topics. Churchland originally theorized that the physical brain was clearly relevant and, more importantly, necessary to discovering the nonphysical mind and its related mental processes since the only thing that exists is the physical brain. These beliefs were initially met with contention from contemporary philosophers, who typically misinterpreted her argument. Instead of understanding her argument as "necessary," many philosophers often implied that Churchland argued that a neural underpinning was both "necessary" and "sufficient." This line of thought is not without historical context as many classical philosophers, such as Plato, Descartes, and Chalmers, argued that mind and brain have no connection. Contemporary philosophers often argue that the many undiscovered problems in neuroscience will never allow a mechanism into solving cognition. Churchland argues that proponents of this belief do not understand that the field of neuroscience is relatively young and is bound by the unknowns of chemistry and physics. The philosophy of neuroscience attempts to clarify neuroscientific methods and results using the conceptual rigor and methods of philosophy of science.

Below is a list of specific issues important to philosophy of neuroscience:

Many of the methods and techniques central to neuroscientific discovery rely on assumptions that can limit the interpretation of the data. Philosophers of neuroscience have discussed such assumptions in the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), dissociation in cognitive neuropsychology, single unit recording, and computational neuroscience. Following are descriptions of many of the current controversies and debates about the methods employed in neuroscience.

Many fMRI studies rely heavily on the assumption of localization of function (same as functional specialization).

Localization of function means that many cognitive functions can be localized to specific brain regions. An example of functional localization comes from studies of the motor cortex. There seem to be different groups of cells in the motor cortex responsible for controlling different groups of muscles.

Many philosophers of neuroscience criticize fMRI for relying too heavily on this assumption. Michael Anderson points out that subtraction-method fMRI misses a lot of brain information that is important to the cognitive processes. Subtraction fMRI only shows the differences between the task activation and the control activation, but many of the brain areas activated in the control are obviously important for the task as well.

Some philosophers entirely reject any notion of localization of function and thus believe fMRI studies to be profoundly misguided. These philosophers maintain that brain processing acts holistically, that large sections of the brain are involved in processing most cognitive tasks (see holism in neurology and the modularity section below). One way to understand their objection to the idea of localization of function is the radio repairman thought experiment. In this thought experiment, a radio repairman opens up a radio and rips out a tube. The radio begins whistling loudly and the radio repairman declares that he must have ripped out the anti-whistling tube. There is no anti-whistling tube in the radio and the radio repairman has confounded function with effect. This criticism was originally targeted at the logic used by neuropsychological brain lesion experiments, but the criticism is still applicable to neuroimaging. These considerations are similar to Van Orden's and Paap's criticism of circularity in neuroimaging logic. According to them, neuroimagers assume that their theory of cognitive component parcellation is correct and that these components divide cleanly into feed-forward modules. These assumptions are necessary to justify their inference of brain localization. The logic is circular if the researcher then uses the appearance of brain region activation as proof of the correctness of their cognitive theories.