Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of NeuroscienceExistentialisms arise when the foundations of being, such as meaning, morals, and purpose come under assault. In the first-wave of existentialism, writings typified by Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche concerned the increasingly apparent inability of religion, and religious tradition, to support a foundation of being. Second-wave existentialism, personified philosophically by Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir, developed in response to similar realizations about the overly optimistic Enlightenment vision of reason and the common good.The third-wave of existentialism, a new existentialism, developed in response to advances in the neurosciences that threaten the last vestiges of an immaterial soul or self. Given the increasing explanatory and therapeutic power of neuroscience, the mind no longer stands apart from the world to serve as a foundation of meaning. This produces foundational anxiety.In Neuroexistentialism, a group of contributors that includes some of the world's leading philosophers, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and legal scholars, explores the anxiety caused by third-wave existentialism and possible responses to it. Together, these essays tackle our neuroexistentialist predicament, and explore what the mind sciences can tell us about morality, love, emotion, autonomy, consciousness, selfhood, free will, moral responsibility, law, the nature of criminal punishment, meaning in life, and purpose.“There is little doubt that modern science has thoroughly undermined any hopes for a higher purpose or meaning inherent in the universe itself” (305), writes theoretical physicist Sean Carroll for the edited volume, Neuroexistentialism. Editors Gregg D. Caruso and Owen Flanagan organize eighteen chapters for this excellent collection that invites contributions from a diverse group of scholars, representing rich perspectives on “meaning morals and purpose in the age of neuroscience,” as the volume’s subtitle signals.The term ‘neuroexistentialism ‘captures the anxiety occasioned by neuroscience’s challenge to foundational concepts like morality, free will, and life’s meaning: as Caruso and Flanagan observe, “even as science yields the truth about human nature, it also disenchants” (ix). They sketch the characteristics of neuroexistentialism in the introduction, appearing antecedently to the first major section of the collection. They affirm well-known existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre’s claim that existentialism is a humanism, and they connect this notion to their present work: “What we call neuroexistentialism is a recent expression of existential anxiety over the nature of persons” (1; emphasis in original). Flanagan and Caruso call on those living in the age of the brain sciences to “[make] sense of the nature, meaning, and purpose of our lives given that we are material beings living in a material world” (9). They suggest in the absence of an ultimate meaning-maker, “we can each impose a degree of unity on ourselves,” even if a self-unifying account may not culminate in a well-defined endpoint, insofar as persons are “in process of unification but never achieving it” (15). Hence, existentialism includes an axiological, or goal-directed, insecurity. The axiological effort is a shared feature of many chapters.Neuroexistentialism is partitioned thematically into four sections: “Morality Love and Emotion” (Part I), “Autonomy, Consciousness and the Self” (Part II), “Free Will, Moral Responsibility, Meaning in Life (Part III), and “Neuroscience and the Law” (Part IV). Patricia Churchland’s contribution opens the first section, in which she asks why moral motivation looms large in human decision-making. The answer is revealed in part by the structure of the brain and two evolutionary upgrades: first, an increase in neurons and brain size leading to the development of the neocortex; and second, scheduled learning regulated by an immature, “learning-r