Originally published in 1982, The Shaman and the Magician draws on the author's wide experience of occultism, western magic and anthropological knowledge of shamanism, to explore the interesting parallels between traditional shamanism and the more visionary aspects of magic in modern western society. In both cases, as the author shows, the magician encounters profound god-energies of the spirit, and it is up to the individual to interpret these experiences in psychological or mythological terms. The book demonstrates that both shamanism and magic offer techniques of approaching the visionary sources of our culture.

Originally published in 1978, The Occult Sourcebook has been compiled primarily for the many people who are for the first time becoming engrossed by the numerous and often confusing possibilities underlying the occult sciences. It consists of a series of articles on key areas, providing the reader with easy access to basic facts, together with a carefully planned guide to further reading. Critical comments on the recommended books allow the reader to select those which best suit their interests. The authors have also included a 'Who's Who of the occult' to provide short biographies of some of the more amazing figures who have already travelled down the mystic path. The book offers a programmed system of exploration into the realms of the unknown. It will be invaluable to the increasing number of people who are concerned with the exploration of enlarging human consciousness.

The evocation of narrative as a way to understand the content of consciousness, including memory, autobiography, self, and imagination, has sparked truly interdisciplinary work among psychologists, philosophers, and literary critics. Even neuroscientists have taken an interest in the stories people create to understand themselves, their past, and the world around them. The research presented in this volume should appeal to researchers enmeshed in these problems, as well as the general reader with an interest in the philosophical problem of what consciousness is and how it functions in the everyday world.

Dr Saugstad's dominant interest was in the area of thinking. Many psychologists would have been familiar with his published work in this field at the time. To gain a clearer understanding of the thought processes, he carried out extensive studies of perception. First published in 1965, this book originated in an attempt to reconcile a phenomenological and a behavioristic approach to psychology. Basic assumptions in phenomenology, behavioristics and psychophysics are examined. It is shown that in phenomenology theoretical concepts tend to be treated as observations, whereas in behavioristics observations tend to be treated as theoretical concepts. It is pointed out that the relationship between observer and observed event is confused throughout the history of psychology. This confusion, the author insists, is due to the fact that man's cognitive processes are to a large extent unknown. In relating observations to each other, the psychologist will of necessity contaminate his observations unless he follows specific rules. This fundamental point had apparently not been previously realized by psychologists. In order to develop an adequate conception of scientific psychology, the nature of man's cognitive processes must be taken into account. When this is done, one sees that drastic revisions of current conceptions of psychology are necessary. This book presents a conception of psychology which does take into account man's cognitive processes.

This book offers a timely exploration of our patterns of engagement with politics, news, and information in current high-choice information environments It analyzes the issue plaguing our society today - The spread of misinformation and its impact on the public sphere, our politics and our everyday lives The book offers insights into the processes that influence the supply of misinformation and factors influencing how and why people expose themselves to and process information that may support or contradict their beliefs and attitudes A team of authors from across a range of disciplines address the phenomena of knowledge resistance and its causes and consequences at the macro- as well as the micro-level The chapters take a philosophical look at the notion of knowledge resistance, before moving on to discuss issues such as misinformation and fake news, psychological mechanisms such as motivated reasoning in processes of selective exposure and attention, how people respond to evidence and fact-checking, the role of political partisanship, political polarization over factual beliefs, and how knowledge resistance might be counteracted This book will have a broad appeal to scholars and students interested in knowledge resistance, primarily within philosophy, psychology, media and communication, and political science, as well as journalists and policymakers

The book is the first comprehensive ecological (Gibsonian) account of emotions The book will appeal across disciplines, incorporating insights from phenomenology, developmental systems theory, and clinical psychology to come to grips with our affective relationship with the environment (and the individual differences therein) The book furthers recent ecological conceptions of the environment and of information, making it of interest to all ecologically inclined thinkers (even those who do not have a prime interest in affect and emotions)

-The topic of time psychology, although fundamental for an understanding of all other mental faculties, is still under-represented. This book offers an overarching understanding of concepts beyond methodological detail, uniquely offering a developmental psychology perspective. -From Philippe Rochat, outstanding expert in developmental aspects of the self, it considers key topics including our developing awareness of spatial and temporal vanishing, developmental origins of human subjectivity and sense of separation and guilt, and how we are all constrained to knowingly exist in finite time. -For all advanced students and scholars of the psychology of time, human development and self-consciousness from psychological, philosophical and social science backgrounds.

Perception is our key to the world. It plays at least three different roles in our lives. It justifies beliefs and provides us with knowledge of our environment. It brings about conscious mental states. It converts informational input, such as light and sound waves, into representations of invariant features in our environment. Corresponding to these three roles, there are at least three fundamental questions that have motivated the study of perception. How does perception justify beliefs and yield knowledge of our environment? How does perception bring about conscious mental states? How does a perceptual system accomplish the feat of converting varying informational input into mental representations of invariant features in our environment? This book presents a unified account of the phenomenological and epistemological role of perception that is informed by empirical research. So it develops an account of perception that provides an answer to the first two questions, while being sensitive to scientific accounts that address the third question. The key idea is that perception is constituted by employing perceptual capacities - for example the capacity to discriminate instances of red from instances of blue. Perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence are each analyzed in terms of this basic property of perception. Employing perceptual capacities constitutes phenomenal character as well as perceptual content. The primacy of employing perceptual capacities in perception over their derivative employment in hallucination and illusion grounds the epistemic force of perceptual experience. In this way, the book provides a unified account of perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence.

Detection Theory: A User's Guide is an introduction to one of the most important tools for the analysis of data where choices must be made and performance is not perfect. In these cases, detection theory can transform judgments about subjective experiences, such as perceptions and memories, into quantitative data ready for analysis and modeling. For beginners, the first three chapters introduce measuring detection and discrimination, evaluating decision criteria, and the utility of receiver operating characteristics. Later chapters cover more advanced research paradigms, including: complete tools for application, including flowcharts, tables, and software; student-friendly language; complete coverage of content area, including both one-dimensional and multidimensional models; integrated treatment of threshold and nonparametric approaches; an organized, tutorial level introduction to multidimensional detection theory; and popular discrimination paradigms presented as applications of multidimensional detection theory. This modern summary of signal detection theory is both a self-contained reference work for users and a readable text for graduate students and researchers learning the material either in courses or on their own.

Originally published in 1989, much was known about blindness, but the field was divided into specialties. Experts in the different areas were widely dispersed among university departments, rehabilitation agencies, and school systems, with the result that people in one specialty area often knew little about developments in other areas. It was hoped that this work would be useful in reducing that isolation, by presenting, within a single volume, basic information derived from different approaches to the subject of blindness. Individuals already familiar with material in some of the chapters could gain added perspective on the field as a whole by reading about other aspects of blindness outside their specialty area.

This book is about the interweaving between cognitive penetrability and the epistemic role of the two stages of perception, namely early and late vision, in justifying perceptual beliefs. It examines the impact of the epistemic role of perception in defining cognitive penetrability and the relation between the epistemic role of perceptual stages and the kinds (direct or indirect) of cognitive effects on perceptual processing. The book presents the argument that early vision is cognitively impenetrable because neither is it affected directly by cognition, nor does cognition affect its epistemic role. It also argues that late vision, even though it is cognitively penetrated and, thus, affected by concepts, is still a perceptual state that does not involve any discursive inferences and does not belong to the space of reasons. Finally, an account is given as to how cognitive states with symbolic content could affect perceptual states with iconic, analog content, during late vision.

Ethical Humans questions how philosophy and social theory can help us to engage the everyday moral realities of living, working, loving, learning and dying in new capitalism. It introduces sociology as an art of living and as a formative tradition of embodied radical eco post-humanism. Seeking to embody traditions of philosophy and social theory in everyday ethics, this book validates emotions and feelings as sources of knowledge and shows how the denigration of women has gone hand in hand with the denigration of nature. It queries post-structuralist traditions of anti-humanism that, for all their insights into the fragmentation of identities, often sustain a distinction between nature and culture. The author argues that in a crisis of global warming, we have to learn to listen to our bodies as part of nature and draws on Wittgenstein to shape embodied forms of philosophy and social theory that questions theologies that tacitly continue to shape philosophical traditions. In acknowledging our own vulnerabilities, we question the vision of the autonomous and independent rational self that often remains within the terms of dominant white masculinities. This book offers different modes of self-work, drawing on psychoanalysis and embodied post-analytic psychotherapies as part of a decolonising practice questioning Eurocentric colonising modernity. In doing so it challenges, with Simone Weil, Roman notions of power and greatness that have shaped visions of white supremacy and European colonial power and empire. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental ethics, environmental philosophy, social theory and sociology, ethics and philosophy, cultural studies, future studies, gender studies, post-colonial studies, Marxism, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy and philosophy and sociology as arts of living.

Auditory Sound Transmission provides an integrated, state-of-the-art description and quantitative analysis of sound transmission from the outer ear to the sensory cells in the cochlea of the inner ear. It describes in detail the structures and mechanisms involved and gives their input and transmission characteristics. It shows how sound transmission in one part of the ear depends on the input characteristics of the next part and how sound is analyzed in the inner ear before it reaches the nervous system. The book is divided into seven chapters. The first gives the general overview of the path of sound in the ear. The second concerns the acoustics of the outer ear which is important not only for sound transmission in the ear but also for the design and calibration of earphones, as well as for clinical and research measurements of sound pressure in the ear canal. The third chapter analyzes the middle ear function which is crucial for adapting the conditions of sound propagation in the air to those in the inner ear fluids. The middle ear is prone to various malfunctions, and it is shown how they change the acoustic conditions measured in the ear canal and can be diagnosed on this basis. The next three chapters are dedicated to the most intricate mechanical part of the auditory system, the cochlea. Because of its complexity, its function is explained in three steps: first, with the help of simplifications produced by death; second, on the basis of the measured characteristics of the live organ; third, with the help of quantitative analysis. The last chapter describes cochlear mechanisms underlying pitch and loudness perception.

Originally published in 1979, the world's leading researchers contributed chapters describing their work on the orienting reflex in humans. The contributions, at the time current and comprehensive, in a sense that each facet of contemporary research was represented, address the orienting reflex, now recognized as a fundamental component of human learning and cognitive function. The authors contributing to this volume emphasize both theoretical and methodological issues, as well as present more empirical research. Here is a volume that spans all current work on the orienting reflex in humans, both basic and applied, from the laboratory as well as clinical data, and which would be of immense interest to psychologists, psychophysiologists, psychiatrists, physiologists, and all others interested in this fascinating topic.

The Deja vu Experience, Second Edition covers the latest scientific discoveries regarding the strange sense of familiarity most of us have felt at one time or another when doing something for the first time. The book sheds light on this mysterious phenomenon, considering the latest neurophysiological investigations and research on possible reasons why deja vu is often associated with a sense of predicting the future or knowing what happens next. In addition to summarizing the major historical and contemporary theoretical approaches to the deja vu experience, this book aspires to stimulate additional research on this curious subjective phenomenon. Drawing on research from a range of fields including psychology, philosophy, and religion, it aims to demystify some of the more unsettling, spooky-seeming aspects of the deja vu experience, elucidating possible mechanisms and underlying reasons for its occurrence. This edition has been thoroughly updated throughout to include over 200 new professional articles and book chapters related to deja vu that have been published in the 18 years since the original book. By placing the scientific study of deja vu within its historical context and covering a broad range of perspectives on the subject, this title will be invaluable to upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers of Cognitive Psychology, specifically those focusing on Memory Phenomena.

The Deja vu Experience, Second Edition covers the latest scientific discoveries regarding the strange sense of familiarity most of us have felt at one time or another when doing something for the first time. The book sheds light on this mysterious phenomenon, considering the latest neurophysiological investigations and research on possible reasons why deja vu is often associated with a sense of predicting the future or knowing what happens next. In addition to summarizing the major historical and contemporary theoretical approaches to the deja vu experience, this book aspires to stimulate additional research on this curious subjective phenomenon. Drawing on research from a range of fields including psychology, philosophy, and religion, it aims to demystify some of the more unsettling, spooky-seeming aspects of the deja vu experience, elucidating possible mechanisms and underlying reasons for its occurrence. This edition has been thoroughly updated throughout to include over 200 new professional articles and book chapters related to deja vu that have been published in the 18 years since the original book. By placing the scientific study of deja vu within its historical context and covering a broad range of perspectives on the subject, this title will be invaluable to upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers of Cognitive Psychology, specifically those focusing on Memory Phenomena.

Originally published in 1979, Perceiving Others is an excellent, short introduction to the area of social psychology known as 'person perception', 'social perception' or 'impression formation' - how people interpret each others' moods, predict each others' behaviour and sum up each others' characters. The way people see each other determines the way they behave towards each other making the study of 'person perception' essential to the understanding of social behaviour. Mark Cook poses three questions about how people form opinions of others: what are the processes involved, what information is used and how, and how accurate are they? He provides an answer to these questions in the three main sections of the book, giving a comprehensive survey of the theory and research arising from the issues involved. The topics covered include the meaning of trait descriptions, intuition, social skill and non-verbal communication, the impression formation paradigm, stereotypes, implicit personality theories, attribution theory, Cronbach's components and psychiatric diagnosis. By drawing many of his illustrations from everyday encounters, the author effectively bridges the gap between theory and reality to create a thoroughly readable and comprehensible study.

Smell and taste are our most misunderstood senses. Given a choice between losing our sense of smell and taste, or our senses of sight and hearing, most people nominate the former, rather than the latter. Yet our sense of smell and taste has the power to stir up memories, alter our mood and even influence our behaviour. In The Neuropsychology of Smell and Taste, Neil Martin provides a comprehensive, critical analysis of the role of the brain in gustation and olfaction. In his accessible and characteristic style he shows why our sense of smell and taste do not simply perform basic and intermittent functions, but lie at the very centre of our perception of the world around us. Through an exploration of the physiology, anatomy and neuropsychology of the senses; the neurophysiological causes of smell and taste disorders, and their function in physical and mental illness, Neil Martin provides an accessible and up-to-date overview of the processes of gustation and olfaction. The Neuropsychology of Smell and Taste provides a state-of-the-art overview of current research in olfactory and gustatory perception. With sections describing the effect of odour and taste on our behaviour, and evaluating the contribution current neuroimaging technology has made to our understanding of the senses, the book will be of interest to researchers and students of neuropsychology and neuroscience, and anybody with an interest in olfaction and gustation.

This collection of essays brings together research on sense modalities in general and spatial perception in particular in a systematic and interdisciplinary way. It updates a long-standing philosophical fascination with this topic by incorporating theoretical and empirical research from cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology. The book is divided thematically to cover a wide range of established and emerging issues. Part I covers notions of objectivity and subjectivity in spatial perception and thinking. Part II focuses on the canonical distal senses, such as vision and audition. Part III concerns the chemical senses, including olfaction and gustation. Part IV discusses bodily awareness, peripersonal space, and touch. Finally, the volume concludes with Part V on multimodality. Spatial Senses is an important contribution to the scholarly literature on the philosophy of perception that takes into account important advances in the sciences.

A man with schizophrenia believes that God is instructing him through the public address system in a bus station. A nun falls into a decades-long depression because she believes that God refuses to answer her prayers. A neighborhood parishioner is bedeviled with anxiety because he believes that a certain religious ritual must be repeated, repeated, and repeated lest God punish him. To what extent are such manifestations of religious thinking analogous to mental disorder? Does mental dysfunction bring an individual closer to religious experience or thought? Hearing Voices and Other Unusual Experiences explores these questions using the tools of the cognitive science of religion and the philosophy of psychopathology. Robert McCauley and George Graham emphasize underlying cognitive continuities between familiar features of religiosity, of mental disorders, and of everyday thinking and action. They contend that much religious thought and behavior can be explained as the cultural activation of our natural cognitive systems, which address matters that are essential to human survival: hazard precautions, agency detection, language processing, and theory of mind. Those systems produce responses to cultural stimuli that may mimic features of cognition and conduct associated with mental disorders, but which are sometimes coded as "religious" depending on the context. The authors examine hallucinations of the voice of God and of other supernatural agents, spiritual depression often described as a "dark night of the soul," religious scrupulosity and compulsiveness, and challenges to theistic cognition that Autistic Spectrum Disorder poses. Their approach promises to shed light on both mental abnormalities and religiosity.

Detection Theory: A User's Guide is an introduction to one of the most important tools for the analysis of data where choices must be made and performance is not perfect. In these cases, detection theory can transform judgments about subjective experiences, such as perceptions and memories, into quantitative data ready for analysis and modeling. For beginners, the first three chapters introduce measuring detection and discrimination, evaluating decision criteria, and the utility of receiver operating characteristics. Later chapters cover more advanced research paradigms, including: complete tools for application, including flowcharts, tables, and software; student-friendly language; complete coverage of content area, including both one-dimensional and multidimensional models; integrated treatment of threshold and nonparametric approaches; an organized, tutorial level introduction to multidimensional detection theory; and popular discrimination paradigms presented as applications of multidimensional detection theory. This modern summary of signal detection theory is both a self-contained reference work for users and a readable text for graduate students and researchers learning the material either in courses or on their own.

James J. Gibson's numerous theoretical and empirical contributions to the understanding of how people perceive were innovative, controversial, often radical, and always profound. Many of his ideas revolutionized the science of perception, and his influence continued to grow throughout the world. This book, originally published in 1982, is a collection of the most important of Gibson's essays on the psychology of perception. Drawing from the entire corpus of Gibson's papers, the editors have selected over thirty works dealing with such diverse topics as ecological optics, event perception, pictorial representation, and the conceptual foundations of psychology. The editors' goals in preparing the volume were twofold: first to provide easy access to Gibson's most outstanding papers and talks, including some that were previously unpublished; and second, to provide an intellectual biography of Gibson by including essays from the different periods of his career.

* Draws on work across multiple disciplines, from astrobiology and physics to linguistics and the social sciences, making it appealing to graduates from a wide variety of fields. * The first accessible introduction into the important work of philosopher Howard Pattee. * Aims to equip readers with new approaches to simple and complex systems theory to take into any respective discipline.

This is the first volume dedicated solely to the topic of epistemological disjunctivism. The original essays in this volume, written by leading and up-and-coming scholars on the topic, are divided into three thematic sections. The first set of chapters addresses the historical background of epistemological disjunctivism. It features essays on ancient epistemology, Immanuel Kant, J.L. Austin, Edmund Husserl, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The second section tackles a number contemporary issues related to epistemological disjunctivism, including its relationship with perceptual disjunctivism, radical skepticism, and reasons for belief. Finally, the third group of essays extends the framework of epistemological disjunctivism to other forms of knowledge, such as testimonial knowledge, knowledge of other minds, and self-knowledge. Epistemological Disjunctivism is a timely collection that engages with an increasingly important topic in philosophy. It will appeal to researches and graduate students working in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of perception.

The philosophy of perception investigates the nature of our sensory experiences and their relation to reality. In the second edition of this popular book, William Fish introduces the subject thematically, setting out the major theories of perception together with their motivations and attendant problems. While providing historical background to debates in the field, this comprehensive overview focuses on recent presentations and defenses of the different theories, and looks beyond visual perception to take into account the role of other senses. The second edition organizes the contents into two main parts: the first deals with philosophical theories of perception, and the second covers key topics and issues in perception as they are discussed in philosophy, cognitive science, and psychology. Two completely new chapters have been added - one on color and color vision; and a second on the interaction between sense modalities - and other chapters have been significantly updated to include discussion of topics such as pre-twentieth-century philosophy of perception, phenomenal intentionality, color adverbialism, predictive processing approaches to perception, ecological approaches to perception, and in-depth discussions of the non-visual senses. Additional updates include fuller and easier-to-understand explanations of some important views that were glossed over in the first edition and greater coverage of research from the last 25 years. All chapter summaries, references, and Suggested Reading lists at the end of each chapter have been brought up to date and the volume now includes a more extensive index at the back of the book. Key Features and Benefits: The only single-authored textbook on philosophy of perception currently available Devoted to contemporary theories and topics, but with appropriate historical coverage for fuller understanding of contemporary work Each chapter includes a chapter overview, questions for further consideration, and an annotated list of Suggested Readings Includes coverage of topics like: - the phenomenal principle - perception and hallucination - perception and content - naive realism and disjunctivism - intentionalism and representationalism - the nature of content - qualia theories and phenomenal intentionality - perception and empirical science - color and color science - theories of non-visual perception - Molyneux's problem - cross-modal illusions - multimodality Key Changes to the Second Edition The division of the book into two major parts: Part I on philosophical theories of perception, Part II on key interdisciplinary topics in perception The addition of two new chapters on color and color vision, and interaction between different sense modalities More topics from the last 25 years of philosophy of perception Combined chapters on belief acquisition theories and intentional theories into one larger chapter More material on the growing intersection of the philosophy and psychology of perception Includes coverage of Molyneux's problem and of cross-modal illusions Updated chapter summaries, references, and Suggested Reading lists at the end of each chapter A summary table and a more extensive index