The Evolution of Consciousness brings together interdisciplinary insights from philosophy, neuroscience, psychology and cognitive science to explain consciousness in terms of the biological function that grounds it in the physical world. Drawing on the novel analogy of a house of cards, Paula Droege pieces together various conceptual questions and shows how they rest on each other to form a coherent, structured argument. She asserts that the mind is composed of unconscious sensory and cognitive representations, which become conscious when they are selected and coordinated into a representation of the present moment. This temporal representation theory deftly bridges the gap between mind and body by highlighting that physical systems are conscious when they can respond flexibly to actions in the present. With examples from evolution, animal cognition, introspection and the free will debate, this is a compelling and animated account of the possible explanations of consciousness, offering answers to the conceptual question of how consciousness can be considered a cognitive process.

Unified Philosophy: Interdisciplinary Metaphysics, Ethics, and Liberal Arts demonstrates how an integrated vision of metaphysics, ethics, and hermeneutics can serve as an underlying philosophy for general education or liberal arts courses and programs. Its unique approach elevates such courses to orientation and reorientation courses and seminars within higher education. The book introduces and reintroduces concepts in philosophy in ethics for students and faculty. It underscores that philosophy is theoretical and applied metaphysics; metaphysics is applied ethics and hermeneutics; and ethics and hermeneutics are applied metaphysics. The opening chapter explores metaphysics: inquiry into reality. It consists of two sections: part and whole; and change and stability. Part and whole involve four positions about reality: part-alone, holistic or limited part, part-whole dualism, or whole-alone. Change and stability also entail four positions about reality: change-alone, holistic or directed change, change-stability dualism, or stability-alone. In turn, each of the eight positions integrates the apparently unrelated languages of game theory, mereology, functions, sets, virtue ethics, phenomenology, cybernetics, and ergonomics/human factors. Chapter One forms the model of which the remaining chapters are applications. The third edition expands Alphonse Chapanis' environment-user interface to four interfaces: environment-environment, environment-person, person-environment, and person-person interfaces. New chapters include Chapter One, Chapter Two, and Chapter Seven. Chapter Two examines positivism through subjectivity spectrum. Chapter Seven examines management reality including authority. Written in recognition of ethics and metaphysics as fundamental components of philosophy and the quest for wisdom, Unified Philosophy is a thought-provoking text for students of theology, ethics, law, medicine, and engineering, education, and city planning/environmental science.

Providing theoretical and applied analyses of Michel Henry’s practical philosophy in light of his guiding idea of Life, this is the first sustained exploration of Henry’s practical thought in anglophone literature, reaffirming his centrality to contemporary continental thought. This book ranges from the tension between his methodological insistence on life as non-intentional and worldly activities to Henry’s engagement with the practical philosophy of intellectuals such as Marx, Freud, and Kandisky to topics of application such as labor, abstract art, education, political liberalism, and spiritual life. An international team of leading Henry scholars examine a vital dimension of Henry's thinking that has remained under-explored for too long.

What does it mean to consider philosophy as a species of not just literature but world literature? The authors in this collection explore philosophy through the lens of the "worlding" of literature--that is, how philosophy is connected and reconnected through global literary networks that cross borders, mix stories, and speak in translation and dialect. Historically, much of the world's most influential philosophy, from Plato's dialogues and Augustine's confessions to Nietzsche's aphorisms and Sartre's plays, was a form of literature--as well as, by extension, a form of world literature. Philosophy as World Literature offers a variety of accounts of how the worlding of literature problematizes the national categorizing of philosophy and brings new meanings and challenges to the discussion of intersections between philosophy and literature.