In recent years there has been much psychological and neurological work purporting to show that consciousness and self-awareness play no role in causing actions, and indeed to demonstrate that free will is an illusion. The essays in this volume subject the assumptions that motivate such claims to sustained interdisciplinary scrutiny. The book will be compulsory reading for psychologists and philosophers working on action explanation, and for anyone interested in the relation between the brain sciences and consciousness.

Consciousness has many elements, from sensory experiences such as vision, audition, and bodily sensation, to nonsensory aspects such as volition, emotion, memory, and thought. The apparent unity of these elements is striking; all are presented to us as experiences of a single subject, and all seem to be contained within a unified field of experience. But this apparent unity raises many questions. How do diverse systems in the brain co-operate to produce a unified experience? Are there conditions under which this unity breaks down? Is conscious experience really unified at all?

In recent years, these questions have been addressed by researchers in many fields, including, neurophysiologists and computational modellers, neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, and philosophy. With chapters from some of the leading thinkers on consciousness, this is a thought-provoking book that attempts to answer some of the big questions.

Contributors include - Chris Frith, David Chalmers, Guilio Tononi, Anne Treisman, Andrew Young, Sydney Shoemaker, Glyn Humphreys, Rodney Cotterill, Zoltan Dienes, Susan Hurley, Randall O'Reilly, Andreas Engel, Pierre Perruchet, Catherine Tallon-Baudry, and Francisco Varela.

We all know what a voluntary action is - we all think we know when an action is voluntary, and when it is not. First, there has to be some wish or goal, then an action designed to fulfil that wish or attain that goal. This standard view of voluntary action is prominent in both folk psychology and the professional sphere (e.g. the juridical) and guides a great deal of psychological and philosophical reasoning. But is it that simple though? For example, research from the neurosciences has shown us that the brain activation required to perform the action can actually precede the brain activation representing our conscious desire to perform that action. Only in retrospect do we come to attribute the action we performed to some desire or wish to perform the action.

This presents us with a problem - if our conscious awareness of an action follows its execution, then is it really a voluntary action?

The question guiding this book is: What is the explanatory role of voluntary action, and are there ways that we can reconcile our common-sense intuitions about voluntary actions with the findings from the sciences? This is a debate that crosses the boundaries of philosophy, neuroscience, psychology and social science. This book brings together some of the leading thinkers from these disciplines to consider this deep and often puzzling topic. The result is a fascinating and stimulating debate that will challenge our fundamental assumptions about our sense of free-will.

We all know what a voluntary action is - we all think we know when an action is voluntary, and when it is not. First, there has to be some wish or goal, then an action designed to fulfil that wish or attain that goal. This standard view of voluntary action is prominent in both folk psychology and the professional sphere (e.g. the juridical) and guides a great deal of psychological and philosophical reasoning. But is it that simple though? For example, research from the neurosciences has shown us that the brain activation required to perform the action can actually precede the brain activation representing our conscious desire to perform that action. Only in retrospect do we come to attribute the action we performed to some desire or wish to perform the action.

This presents us with a problem - if our conscious awareness of an action follows its execution, then is it really a voluntary action?

The question guiding this book: What is the explanatory role of voluntary action, and are there ways that we can reconcile our common-sense intuitions about voluntary actions with the findings from the sciences? This is a debate that crosses the boundaries of philosophy, neuroscience, psychology and social science. This book brings together some of the leading thinkers from these disciplines to consider this deep and often puzzling topic. The result is a fascinating and stimulating debate that will challenge our fundamental assumptions about our sense of free-will.

This book proposes a novel and rigorous explanation of consciousness. It argues that the study of an aspect of our self-consciousness known as the 'feeling of embodiment' teaches us that there are two distinct phenomena to be targeted by an explanation of consciousness. First is an explanation of the phenomenal qualities - 'what it is like' - of the experience; and second is the subject's awareness of those qualities. Glenn Carruthers explores the phenomenal qualities of the feeling of embodiment using the tools of quality spaces, as well as the subject's awareness of those qualities as a functionally emergent property of various kinds of processing of these spaces. Where much recent work on consciousness focuses on visual experience, this book rather draws evidence from the study of self-consciousness. Carruthers argues that in light of recent methodological discoveries, awareness must be explained in terms of the organization of multiple cognitive processes. The book offers an explanation of anomalous body representations and, from that, poses a more general theory of consciousness. Ultimately this book creates a hybrid account of consciousness that explains phenomenology and awareness using different tools. It will be of great interest to all scholars of psychology and philosophy as well as anyone interested in exploring the intricacies of how we experience our bodies, what we are and how we fit into the world.

This book develops an original theoretical framework for understanding human-technology relations. The author's approach, which he calls technoanalysis, analyzes artificial intelligence based on Freudian psychoanalysis, biosemiotics, and Latour's actor-network theory. How can we communicate with AI to determine shared values and objectives? And what, ultimately, do we want from machines? These are crucial questions in our world, where the influence of AI-based technologies is rapidly growing. Unconscious dynamics influence AI and digital technology and understanding them is essential to better controlling AI systems. This book's unique methodology- which combines psychoanalysis, biosemiotics, and actor-network theory-reveals a radical reformulation of the problem of the human mind. Technoanalysis views the mind as a hybrid network of humans and nonhuman actants in constant interaction with one another. The author argues that human unconscious dynamics influence and shape technology, just as technology influences and shapes human unconscious dynamics. He proceeds to show how this conception of the relationship between the unconscious and technology can be applied to social robotics and AI. Unconscious Networks will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in philosophy of technology, philosophy of artificial intelligence, psychoanalysis, and science and technology studies.

The unconscious raises relevant problems in the theory of knowledge as regards non-conceptual contents and obscure representations. In the philosophy of mind, it bears on the topic of the unity of consciousness and the notion of the transcendental Self. It is a key-topic of logic with respect to the distinction between determinate-indeterminate judgments and prejudices, and in aesthetics it appears in connection with the problems of reflective judgments and of the genius. Finally, it is a relevant issue also in moral philosophy in defining the irrational aspects of the human being. The purpose of the present volume is to fill a substantial gap in Kant research while offering a comprehensive survey of the topic in different areas of research, such as history of philosophy, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, moral philosophy, and anthropology.

Ambivalence (as in practical conflicts, moral dilemmas, conflicting beliefs, and mixed feelings) is a central phenomenon of human life. Yet ambivalence is incompatible with entrenched philosophical conceptions of personhood, judgement, and action, and is denied or marginalised by thinkers of diverse concerns. This book takes a radical new stance, bringing the study of core philosophical issues together with that of ambivalence. The book proposes new accounts in several areas - including subjectivity, consciousness, rationality, and value - while elucidating a wide range of phenomena expressive of ambivalence, from emotional ambivalence to self-deception. The book rejects the view that ambivalence makes a person divided, showing that our tension-fraught attitudes are profoundly unitary. Ambivalence is not tantamount to confusion or to paralysis: it is always basically rational, and often creative, active, and perceptive as well. The book develops themes from Wittgenstein, Davidson, Sartre, and Freud. It engages with contemporary debates in Analytic Philosophy in addition to work ranging from Aristotle to Cultural Studies and Empirical Psychology, and considers a rich set of examples from daily life and literature.

Why does the brain create music? In Beethoven's Anvil, cognitive scientist and jazz musician William Benzon finds the key to music's function in the very complexity of musical experience. Music demands that our symbol-processing capacities, motor skills, emotional and communicative skills all work in close coordination - not only within our own heads but with the heads (and bodies) of others. Music is at once deeply personal and highly social, highly disciplined and open to emotional nuance and interpretation. It's precisely this coordination of different mental functions, Benzon argues, that underlies our deep need to create and participate in music. Music synchronizes the brain and has had a profound, and little-appreciated, influence on the shape of the mind and human cultures. This is a remarkable book: both daring and scholarly, it offers a sweeping vision of a vital, underappreciated force in our minds and culture.

The trilogy Forms of Representation in the Aristotelian Tradition investigates how Aristotle and his ancient and medieval successors understood the relation between the external world and the human mind. It gives an equal footing to the three most influential linguistic traditions - Greek, Latin, and Arabic - and offers insightful interpretations of historical theories of perception, dreaming, and thinking. This first volume focuses on sense perception and discusses philosophical questions concerning the external senses, their classification, and their functioning, from Aristotle to Brentano.

In Context and Content Robert Stalnaker develops a philosophical picture of the nature of speech and thought and the relations between them. Two themes in particular run through these collected essays: the role that the context in which speech takes place plays in accounting for the way language is used to express thought, and the role of the external environment in determining the contents of our thoughts. Stalnaker argues against the widespread assumption of the priority of linguistic over mental representation, which he suggests has had a distorting influence on our understanding. The first part of the book develops a framework for representing contexts and the way they interact with the interpretation of what is said in them. This framework is used to help to explain a range of linguistic phenomena concerning presupposition and assertion, conditional statements, the attribution of beliefs, and the use of names, descriptions, and pronouns to refer. Stalnaker then draws out the conception of thought and its content that is implicit in this framework. He defends externalism about thought-the assumption that our thoughts have the contents they have in virtue of the way we are situated in the world-and explores the role of linguistic action and linguistic structure in determining the contents of our thoughts. Context and Content offers philosophers and cognitive scientists a summation of Stalnaker's important and influential work in this area. His new introduction to the volume gives an overview of this work and offers a convenient way in for those who are new to it. The Oxford Cognitive Science series is a new forum for the best contemporary work in this flourishing field, where various disciplines-cognitive psychology, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and computational theory-join forces in the investigation of thought, awareness, understanding, and associated workings of the mind. Each book constitutes an original contribution to its subject, but will be accessible beyond the ranks of specialists, so as to reach a broad interdisciplinary readership. The series will be carefully shaped and steered with the aim of representing the most important developments in the field and bringing together its constituent disciplines.

Much of what is said about yoga is misleading. To take two examples, it is neither five thousand years old, as is commonly claimed, nor does it mean union, at least not exclusively. In perhaps the most famous text-The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali-the aim is separation, isolating consciousness from everything else. And the earliest evidence of practice dates back about twenty-five hundred years. Yoga may well be older, but no one can prove it. Scholars have learned a lot more about the history of yoga in recent years, but their research can be hard to track down. Although their work is insightful, it is aimed more at specialists than at general readers. Daniel Simpson's The Truth of Yoga draws on many of their findings, presented in a format designed for practitioners. The aim is to highlight ideas on which readers can draw to keep traditions alive in the twenty-first century. It offers an overview of yoga's evolution from its earliest origins to the present. It can either be read chronologically or be used as a reference guide to history and philosophy. Each short section addresses one element, quoting from traditional texts and putting their teachings into context. The intention is to keep things clear without oversimplifying.

With reference to the treatment of mind-body problems in the novels and non-fictional writings of Johann Karl Wezel, Karl Philipp Moritz, and Jean Paul, this impressive study follows the development of, and demonstrates the continuity in, the history of ideas in Germany between the Late Enlightenment and Romanticism.

This text develops a philosophical theory of imagination that draws upon the latest work in psychology. This theory illuminates the use of imagination in coming to terms with art, its role in enabling us to live as social beings, and the psychological consequences of disordered imagination. Currie and Ravenscroft offer a lucid exploration of the subject for readers in philosophy, psychology and aesthetics.

Offers a combination of a critical approach to education and psychology alongside a focus on professional dialogue, aimed at psychologists, educational professionals and those who work with them. Provides an alternative approach to the current focus in education establishments (which include instrumentalism and performativity) to support and improve relationships and mental health (particularly relating to teachers, parents and young people). This book addresses a fundamental issue for psychologists in the Western world in that it challenges the profession to uphold a moral and ethical practices.

In this book, Christine Tappolet offers readers a thorough, wide-ranging, and highly accessible introduction to the philosophy of emotions. It covers recent interdisciplinary debates on the nature of emotions as well as standard theories of emotions, such as feeling theories, motivational theories, and evaluative theories. The book includes discussions of the alleged irrationality of emotions, and looks into the question of whether emotions could not, in some cases, contribute positively to theoretical and practical rationality. In addition, the role of emotions in the theory of virtues and the theory of values receives a detailed treatment. Finally, the book turns to the question of how we can regulate and even educate our emotions by engaging with music and with narrative art. The overall picture of emotions that emerges is one that does justice to the central role that emotions play in our lives, conceiving of emotions as crucial to our grasp of values. As an opinionated introduction, the book doesn't pretend to be neutral but aims to engage readers in contemporary debates. Each chapter closes with questions for further discussion and suggestions for further reading. Key Features: Written for advanced undergraduates, suitable as the main text in a philosophy of emotion course or as a complement to a set of primary readings Includes useful features for student readers like introductions, study questions, and suggestions for further reading in each chapter Considers whether emotions interfere with our reasoning or whether they can, in some cases, help us to be more rational Argues against basic emotion theory and social constructionism that emotions are both shaped by biological forces and social forces Discusses a variety of subjectivist and objectivist approaches, which share the assumption that emotions and values are closely connected.

This is the first collection of essays devoted to the thought of Anselm W. Muller. It brings to the attention of the English-speaking world an influential and highly regarded philosopher who has made important contributions to a wide range of philosophical debates. Arguably, Muller's most important contributions are to the philosophy of action and virtue ethics. The contributors, who include friends, colleagues, and former students, engage with different aspects of Muller's thought in these areas. Subjects include his interpretation of Aristotle and Wittgenstein, the teleology of thought and action, the Aristotelian distinction between poiesis and praxis and its application to ethical upbringing, and the possibility of practical knowledge and practical truth. Teleological Structures in Human Life will be of interest to researches and advanced students working on virtue ethics, philosophy of action, and practical reasoning.

Posttraumatic Joy presents the major themes and ideas of Nietzsche’s corpus from a continental and psychoanalytic perspective with a particular bent toward how they might illuminate ways of coping with and living beyond trauma and suffering. Through a series of transcribed and edited lectures—originally delivered as a part of the "Nietzsche for Clinicians" workshop run through the Center for Psychological Humanities and Ethics at Boston College—this work traces the genesis of such fundamental psychoanalytic concepts as repression, the death drive, and the Oedipus complex to the works of one of philosophy’s most audacious and original thinkers. Reading Nietzsche not as a philosopher in the traditional sense, but as a proto-psychoanalyst, a precursor to Freud and Lacan, this work explores his understanding of the origins of morality, the value of sublimation, the movement from mourning to melancholia—or, in Nietzsche’s terms, from trauma to tragedy—and the possibility of a life lived in affirmation and self-overcoming. This interdisciplinary book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners whose work intersects with continental philosophy and theoretical and philosophical psychology. This includes any psychotherapist, social worker, psychoanalyst, or pastoral counselor with an interest in understanding the deeply psychological philosophy of one of history’s greatest thinkers.

This volume demonstrates that phonology is a subsystem of the mind/brain and explores the theoretical and practical (including medical) consequences of this insight. Written by American and European specialists at the cutting-edge of research in areas ranging from phonetics to neurology, the book addresses central questions relating to the cognitive status of phonological representation and phonetic implementation and the links between mental and physical representation of sound systems.

This book defends an event-causal theory of libertarian free will and argues that the belief in such free will plays an important, if not essential, role in supporting certain important values. In the first part of the book, the author argues that possession of libertarian free will is necessary for deserved praise and blame and reward and punishment. He contends that his version of libertarian free will-the indeterministic weightings view- is coherent and can fit with a scientific, naturalistic understanding of human nature. However, the author also notes that we don't have sufficient evidentiary grounds to believe that human beings have this kind of free will. Despite this, he argues there are sufficiently strong value-based/axiological reasons to believe we have such free will and to live an act as if we have it. In the second part of the book, the author makes the case that the belief in such libertarian, desert-grounding free will is very important to defending human dignity in the context of criminal justice, making sense of justified pride and its value, and adding value to our relationships. Free Will's Value will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, action theory, ethics, and the philosophy of law.

In the last few years, there has been an enormous amount of activity in the study of analogy and metaphor. This is partly because of an interest of artificial intelligence researchers in simulating learning processes using analogy. It also arises from critical examinations of standard theories in the philosophy of language, with their inbuilt literal/meta phoric distinction. This volume consists of recent previously unpub lished work in this area, with a particular emphasis upon the role of analogies in reasoning and, more generally, their role in thought and language. The papers are contributed by philosophers, computer scientists, cognitive scientists and literary critics. Researchers in these fields whose focus is the study of analogy and metaphor will find much of interest in this volume. These essays can also serve as an introduction to some of the major approaches taken in the investigation of analogy. As noted, this volume brings together the work of researchers in several different disciplines. The various approaches taken with respect to the understanding of analogy tend to be rather different, however, the articles suggest a common conclusion. Analogy and metaphor pervade thought and language; their close investigation thus constitutes a valuable contribution to our understanding of persons. DAVID H. HELMAN Case Western Reserve University vii PART I CONCEPTUAL AND CATEGORICAL THEORIES OF ANALOGICAL UNDERSTANDING MARK TURNER CATEGORIES AND ANALOGIES I want to pursue the following claims: The way we categorize helps explain the way we recognize a statement as an analogy."

The concept of altruism, or disinterested concern for another's welfare, has been discussed by everyone from theologians to psychologists to biologists. In this book, evolutionary, neurological, developmental, psychological, social, cultural, and religious aspects of altruistic behavior are examined. It is a collaborative examination of one of humanity's essential and defining characteristics by renowned researchers from various disciplines. Their integrative dialogue illustrates that altruistic behavior is a significant mode of expression that can be studied by various scholarly methods and understood from a variety of perspectives in both the humanities and the sciences. Altruism and Altruistic Love establishes a framework for scholarship on altruism by presenting definitions, a historical overview, a review of contemporary research, and debates in various disciplines, as well as a discussion of directions for future work.

"Personality Capture and Emulation" is the gateway to an amazing future that actually may be achieved, enabling the preservation and simulation of human personalities at progressively higher levels of fidelity. This challenge is no longer the province merely of uninhibited visionaries, but has become a solid field of research, drawing upon a wide range of information technologies in human-centered computing and cyber-human systems. Even at modest levels of accomplishment, research in this emerging area requires convergence of cognitive, social, and cultural sciences, in cooperation with information engineering and artificial intelligence, thus stimulating new multidisciplinary perspectives. Therefore this book will inspire many specific research and development projects that will produce their own valuable outcomes, even as the totality of the work moves us closer to a major revolution in human life. Will it ever really be possible to transfer a human personality at death to a technology that permits continued life?Or will people come to see themselves as elements in a larger socio-cultural system, for which a societal information system can provide collective immortality even after the demise of individuals? A large number and variety of pilot studies and programming projects are offered as prototypes for research that innovators in many fields may exploit for the achievement of their own goals. Together, they provide an empirical basis to strengthen the intellectual quality of several current debates at the frontiers of the human and information sciences."

This innovative new volume analyses the role of emotions in knowledge acquisition. It focuses on the field of philosophy of emotions at the exciting intersection between epistemology and philosophy of mind and cognitive science to bring us an in-depth analysis of the epistemological value of emotions in reasoning. With twelve chapters by leading and up-and-coming academics, this edited collection shows that emotions do count for our epistemic enterprise. Against scepticism about the possible positive role emotions play in knowledge, the authors highlight the how and the why of this potential, lucidly exploring the key aspects of the functionality of emotions. This is explored in relation to: specific kinds of knowledge such as self-understanding, group-knowledge and wisdom; specific functions played by certain emotions in these cases, such as disorientation in enquiry and contempt in practical reason; the affective experience of the epistemic subjects and communities.

1. Takes the work of Winnicott and at it through a philosophical lens 2. Using this approach, he opens up an furthers Winnicott's theories of play, use of an object and otherness 3. Written in an accessible and engaging style, this book will appeal to both practicing analysts, analysts in training and students reading philosophy or looking into psychoanalytic theories.