This book argues that there is a common cognitive mechanism underlying all indexical thoughts, in spite of their seeming diversity. Indexical thoughts are mental representations, such as beliefs and desires. They represent items from a thinker's point of view or her cognitive perspective. We typically express them by means of sentences containing linguistic expressions such as 'this (F)' or 'that (F)', adverbs like 'here', 'now', and 'today', and the personal pronoun 'I'. While generally agreeing that representing the world from a thinker's cognitive perspective is a key feature of indexical thoughts, philosophers disagree as to whether a thinker's cognitive perspective can be captured and rationalized by semantic content and, if so, what kind of content this is. This book surveys competing views and then advances its own positive account. Ultimately, it argues that a thinker's cognitive perspective - or her indexical point of view - is to be explained in terms of the content that is believed and asserted as the only kind of content that there is which thereby serves as the bearer of cognitive significance. The Indexical Point of View will be of interest to philosophers of mind and language, linguists, and cognitive scientists.

The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Philosophy of Science is a comprehensive resource for feminist thinking about and in the sciences. Its 33 chapters were written exclusively for this Handbook by a group of leading international philosophers as well as scholars in gender studies, women's studies, psychology, economics, and political science. The chapters of the Handbook are organized into four main parts: I. Hidden Figures and Historical Critique II. Theoretical Frameworks III. Key Concepts and Issues IV. Feminist Philosophy of Science in Practice. The chapters in this extensive, fourth part examine the relevance of feminist philosophical thought for a range of scientific and professional disciplines, including biology and biomedical sciences; psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience; the social sciences; physics; and public policy. The Handbook gives a snapshot of the current state of feminist philosophy of science, allowing students and other newcomers to get up to speed quickly in the subfield and providing a handy reference for many different kinds of researchers.

The diverse essays in this volume speak to the relevance of phenomenological and psychological questioning regarding perceptions of the human. This designation, human, can be used beyond the mere identification of a species to underwrite exclusion, denigration, dehumanization and demonization, and to set up a pervasive opposition in Othering all deemed inhuman, nonhuman, or posthuman. As alerted to by Merleau-Ponty, one crucial key for a deeper understanding of these issues is consideration of the nature and scope of perception. Perception defines the world of the perceiver, and perceptual capacities are constituted in engagement with the world - there is co-determination. Moreover, the distinct phenomenology of perception in the spectatorial mode in contrast to the reciprocal mode, deepens the intersubjective and ethical dimensions of such investigations. Questions motivating the essays include: Can objectification and an inhuman gaze serve positive ends? If so, under what constraints and conditions? How is an inhuman gaze achieved and at what cost? How might the emerging insights of the role of perception into our interdependencies and essential sociality from various domains challenge not only theoretical frameworks, but also the practices and institutions of science, medicine, psychiatry and justice? What can we learn from atypical social cognition, psychopathology and animal cognition? Could distortions within the gazer's emotional responsiveness and habituated aspects of social interaction play a role in the emergence of an inhuman gaze? Perception and the Inhuman Gaze will interest scholars and advanced students working in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, psychology, psychiatry, sociology and social cognition.

This book is concerned with the conditions under which epistemic reasons provide justification for beliefs. The author draws on metaethical theories of reasons and normativity and then applies his theory to various contemporary debates in epistemology. In the first part of the book, the author outlines what he calls the dispositional architecture of epistemic reasons. The author offers and defends a dispositional account of how propositional and doxastic justification are related to one another. He then argues that the dispositional view has the resources to provide an acceptable account of the notion of the basing relation. In the second part of the book, the author examines how his theory of epistemic reasons bears on the issues involving perceptual reasons. He defends dogmatism about perceptual justification against conservatism and shows how his dispositional framework illuminates certain claims of dogmatism and its adherence to justification internalism. Finally, the author applies his dispositional framework to epistemological topics including the structure of defeat, self-knowledge, reasoning, emotions and motivational internalism. The Dispositional Architecture of Epistemic Reasons demonstrates the value of employing metaethical considerations for the justification of beliefs and propositions. It will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in epistemology and metaethics.

This Handbook offers students and more advanced readers a valuable resource for understanding linguistic reference; the relation between an expression (word, phrase, sentence) and what that expression is about. The volume's forty-one original chapters, written by many of today's leading philosophers of language, are organized into ten parts: I Early Descriptive Theories II Causal Theories of Reference III Causal Theories and Cognitive Significance IV Alternate Theories V Two-Dimensional Semantics VI Natural Kind Terms and Rigidity VII The Empty Case VIII Singular (De Re) Thoughts IX Indexicals X Epistemology of Reference Contributions consider what kinds of expressions actually refer (names, general terms, indexicals, empty terms, sentences), what referring expressions refer to, what makes an expression refer to whatever it does, connections between meaning and reference, and how we know facts about reference. Many contributions also develop connections between linguistic reference and issues in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science.

Common sense philosophy holds that widely and deeply held beliefs are justified in the absence of defeaters. While this tradition has always had its philosophical detractors who have defended various forms of skepticism or have sought to develop rival epistemological views, recent advances in several scientific disciplines claim to have debunked the reliability of the faculties that produce our common sense beliefs. At the same time, however, it seems reasonable that we cannot do without common sense beliefs entirely. Arguably, science and the scientific method are built on, and continue to depend on, common sense. This collection of essays debates the tenability of common sense in the face of recent challenges from the empirical sciences. It explores to what extent scientific considerations-rather than philosophical considerations-put pressure on common sense philosophy. The book is structured in a way that promotes dialogue between philosophers and scientists. Noah Lemos, one of the most influential contemporary advocates of the common sense tradition, begins with an overview of the nature and scope of common sense beliefs, and examines philosophical objections to common sense and its relationship to scientific beliefs. Then, the volume features essays by scientists and philosophers of science who discuss various proposed conflicts between commonsensical and scientific beliefs: the reality of space and time, about the nature of human beings, about free will and identity, about rationality, about morality, and about religious belief. Notable philosophers who embrace the common sense tradition respond to these essays to explore the connection between common sense philosophy and contemporary debates in evolutionary biology, neuroscience, physics, and psychology.

Virtue, Narrative, and Self connects two philosophical areas of study that have long been treated as distinct: virtue theory and narrative accounts of personal identity. Chapters address several important issues and neglected themes at the intersection of these research areas. Specific examples include the role of narrative in the identification, differentiation, and cultivation of virtue, the nature of practical reasoning and moral competence, and the influence of life's narrative structure on our conceptions of what it means to live and act well. This volume demonstrates how recent work from the philosophy of mind and action concerning narrativity and our understanding of the self can shed new light on questions about the nature of virtue, practical wisdom, and human flourishing. This book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in virtue theory, moral philosophy, philosophy of mind and action, and moral education.

This collection of 19 chapters, all appearing in print here for the first time and written by an international team of established and emerging scholars, explores the place of intellectual virtues and vices in a social world. Relevant virtues include open-mindedness, curiosity, intellectual courage, diligence in inquiry, and the like. Relevant vices include dogmatism, need for immediate certainty, and gullibility and the like. The chapters are divided into four key sections: Foundational Issues; Individual Virtues; Collective Virtues; and Methods and Measurements. And the chapters explore the most salient questions in this areas of research, including: How are individual intellectual virtues and vices affected by their social contexts? Does being in touch with other open-minded people make us more open-minded? Conversely, does connection to other dogmatic people make us more dogmatic? Can groups possess virtues and vices distinct from those of their members? For instance, could a group of dogmatic individuals operate in an open-minded way despite the vices of its members? Each chapter receives commentary from two other authors in the volume, and each original author then replies to these commentaries. Together, the authors form part of a collective conversation about how we can know about what we know. In so doing, they not only theorize but enact social virtue epistemology.

The surge of philosophical interest in episodic memory has brought to light a number of controversial questions about this form of memory that have only recently begun to be addressed in detail. This book organises discussion around six such questions, offering two new chapters per question, from experts in the field. The questions are: I. What is the relationship between memory and imagination? II. Do memory traces have content? III. What is the nature of mnemonic confabulation? IV. What is the function of episodic memory? V. Do non-human animals have episodic memory? VI. Does episodic memory give us knowledge of the past? The book constitutes a valuable resource for researchers, teachers, and students alike. For researchers, it provides an up-to-date discussion of some of the main theories, arguments, and problems in the area. For teachers, the book can supply the readings for an entire course, or particular sections can provide the readings for specific units within a broader philosophy of memory course. For students, the book offers accessible discussions of some of the most recent topics in the philosophy of memory, which, when taken together, serve as a well-rounded introduction to the area.

This important new monograph presents a non-sceptical outlook on Hume's "Treatise" by analysing the hitherto neglected role of the belief in other minds. The problem of other minds has widely been considered as a special problem within the debate about scepticism. If one cannot be sure that there is a world existing independently of one's mind, how can we be sure that there are minds - minds which we cannot even experience the way we experience material objects? This book shows, through a detailed examination of David Hume's "A Treatise of Human Nature", that these concerns are unfounded. By focusing on Hume's discussion of sympathy - the ability to connect with the mental contents of other persons - Anik Waldow demonstrates that belief in other minds can be justified by the same means as belief in material objects. The book thus not only provides the first large-scale treatment of the function of the belief in other minds within the "Treatise", thereby adding a new dimension to Hume's realism, but also serves as an invaluable guide to the complexity of the problem of other minds and its various responses in contemporary debate.

Ordinary language and scientific discourse are filled with linguistic expressions for dispositional properties such as a oesoluble, a a oeelastic, a a oereliable, a and a oehumorous.a We characterize objects in all domains a " physical objects as well as human persons a " with the help of dispositional expressions. Hence, the concept of a disposition has historically and systematically played a central role in different areas of philosophy ranging from metaphysics to ethics. The contributions of this volume analyze the ancient foundations of the discussion about disposition, examine the problem of disposition within the context of the foundation of modern science, and analyze this dispute up to the 20th century. Furthermore, articles explore the contemporary theories of dispositions.

This book offers a comprehensive study of the nature and significance of offense and offensiveness. It incorporates insights from moral philosophy and moral psychology to rationally reconstruct our ordinary ideas and assumptions about these notions. When someone claims that something is offensive, others are supposed to listen. Why? What is it for something to be offensive? Likewise, it's supposed to matter if someone claims to have been offended. Is this correct? In this book, Andrew Sneddon argues that we should think of offense as a moralized bad feeling. He explains offensiveness in terms of symbolic value. We tend to give claims of both offense and offensiveness more credence than they deserve. While it is in principle possible for there to be genuine moral problems of offense and offensiveness, we should expect such problems to be rare. Offense and Offensiveness: A Philosophical Account will be of interest to scholars and students working in moral philosophy and moral psychology.

1. Provides a comprehensive introduction to the interdisciplinary field of Cognitive Science. 2. Features extended case studies throughout to illustrate key concepts from across different fields. 3. Uniquely adopts a cognitive psychology structure throughout, addressing key issues for each, unlike rival texts which are more thematically based.

Brian Loar (1939-2014) was an eminent and highly respected philosopher of mind and language. He was at the forefront of several different field-defining debates between the 1970s and the 2000s-from his earliest work on reducing semantics to psychology, through debates about reference, functionalism, externalism, and the nature of intentionality, to his most enduringly influential work on the explanatory gap between consciousness and neurons. Loar is widely credited with having developed the most comprehensive functionalist account of certain aspects of the mind, and his 'phenomenal content strategy' is arguably one of the most significant developments on the ancient mind/body problem. This volume of essays honours the entirety of Loar's wide-ranging philosophical career. It features sixteen original essays from influential figures in the fields of philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, including those who worked with and were taught by Loar. The essays are divided into three thematic sections covering Loar's work in philosophy of language, especially the relations between semantics and psychology (1970s-80s), on content in the philosophy of mind (1980s-90s), and on the metaphysics of intentionality and consciousness (1990s and beyond). Taken together, this book is a fitting tribute to one of the leading minds of the latter-20th century, and a timely reflection on Loar's enduring influence on the philosophy of mind and language.

Mental action deserves a place among foundational topics in action theory and philosophy of mind. Recent accounts of human agency tend to overlook the role of conscious mental action in our daily lives, while contemporary accounts of the conscious mind often ignore the role of mental action and agency in shaping consciousness. This collection aims to establish the centrality of mental action for discussions of agency and mind. The thirteen original essays provide a wide-ranging vision of the various and nuanced philosophical issues at stake. Among the questions explored by the contributors are: Which aspects of our conscious mental lives are agential? Can mental action be reduced to and explained in terms of non-agential mental states, processes, or events? Must mental action be included among the ontological categories required for understanding and explaining the conscious mind more generally? Does mental action have implications for related topics, such as attention, self-knowledge, self-control, or the mind-body problem? By investigating the nature, scope, and explanation of mental action, the essays presented here aim to demonstrate the significance of conscious mental action for discussions of agency and mind. Mental Action and the Conscious Mind will be of interest to scholars and graduate students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and philosophy of agency, as well as to philosophically inclined cognitive scientists.

Do epistemic requirements vary along with facts about what promotes agents' well-being? Epistemic instrumentalists say 'yes', and thereby earn a lot of contempt. This contempt is a mistake on two counts. First, it is incorrectly based: the reasons typically given for it are misguided. Second, it fails to distinguish between first- and second-order epistemic instrumentalism; and, it happens, only the former is contemptible. In this book, Nathaniel P. Sharadin argues for rejecting epistemic instrumentalism as a first-order view not because it suffers extensional failures, but because it suffers explanatory ones. By contrast, he argues that epistemic instrumentalism offers a natural, straightforward explanation of why being epistemically correct matters. What emerges is a second-order instrumentalist explanation for epistemic authority that is neutral between competing first-order epistemic theories. This neutrality is an advantage. But, drawing on work from cognitive science and psychology, Sharadin argues that instrumentalists can abandon that neutrality in order to adopt a view he calls epistemic ecologism. Epistemic Instrumentalism Explained will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of mind.

Recently, psychologists and neurobiologists have conducted experiments taken to show that human beings do not have free will. Many, including a number of philosophers, assume that, even if science has not decided the free will question yet, it is just a matter of time. In The Experimental Approach to Free Will, Katherin A. Rogers accomplishes several tasks. First, canvasing the literature critical of these recent experiments (or of conclusions drawn from them) and adding new criticisms of her own, she shows why these experiments should not undermine belief in human freedom - even robust, libertarian freedom. Indeed, many of the experiments do not even connect with any philosophical understanding of free will. Through this discussion, she generates a long list of problems - ethical as well as practical - facing the attempt to study free will experimentally. With these problems highlighted, she shows that even in the distant future, supposing the brain sciences to have advanced far beyond where they are today, it will likely be impossible to settle the question of free will experimentally. She concludes that, since philosophy has not, and science cannot, settle the question of free will, it is more reasonable to suppose that humans do indeed have freedom. Brings together, and adds to, criticisms of recent experiments (or conclusions drawn from them) which supposedly show that human beings do not have free will Analyzes recent experiments supposedly related to human freedom through the lens of a philosophically informed portrait of a robust, libertarian free choice Develops a long list of problems - both practical and ethical - facing the experimental study of human freedom Proposes a thought experiment set in a distant future of advanced brain science to show that it is likely impossible for science ever to settle the question of free will.

This book brings together insights from the enactivist approach in philosophy of mind and existing work on autonomous agency from both philosophy of action and feminist philosophy. It then utilizes this proposed account of autonomous agency to make sense of the impairments in agency that commonly occur in cases of dissociative identity disorder, mood disorders, and psychopathy. While much of the existing philosophical work on autonomy focuses on threats that come from outside the agent, this book addresses how inner conflict, instability of character, or motivational issues can disrupt agency. In the first half of the book, the author conceptualizes what it means to be self-governing and to exercise autonomous agency. In the second half, she investigates the extent to which agents with various forms of mental disorder are capable of exercising autonomy. In her view, many forms of mental disorder involve disruptions to self-governance, so that agents lack sufficient control over their intentional behavior or are unable to formulate and execute coherent action plans. However, this does not mean that they are utterly incapable of autonomous agency; rather, their ability to exercise this capacity is compromised in important respects. Understanding these agential impairments can help to deepen our understanding of what it means to exercise autonomy, and also devise more effective treatments that restore subjects' agency. Autonomy, Enactivism, and Mental Disorder will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, philosophy of psychiatry, and feminist philosophy.

Where much contemporary philosophy seeks to stave off the 'threat' of nihilism by safeguarding the experience of meaning - characterized as the defining feature of human existence - from the Enlightenment logic of disenchantment, this book attempts to push nihilism to its ultimate conclusion by forging a link between revisionary naturalism in Anglo-American philosophy and anti-phenomenological realism in recent French philosophy. Contrary to an emerging 'post-analytic' consensus which would bridge the analytic-continental divide by uniting Heidegger and Wittgenstein against the twin perils of scientism and scepticism, this book short-circuits both traditions by plugging eliminative materialism directly into speculative realism.

Solipsism is one of the philosophical thesis or ideas that has generally been regarded as highly implausible, or even crazy. The view that the world is "my world" in the sense that nothing exists independently of my mind, thought, and/or experience is, understandably, frowned up as a genuine philosophical position. For this reason, solipsism might be regarded as an example of a philosophical position that does not "matter" at all. It does not seem to play any role in our serious attempts to understand the world and ourselves. However, by arguing that solipsism does matter, after all, Why Solipsism Matters more generally demonstrates that philosophy, even when dealing with highly counterintuitive and "crazy" ideas, may matter in surprising, unexpected ways. It will be shown that the challenge of solipsism should make us rethink fundamental assumptions concerning subjectivity, objectivity, realism vs. idealism, relativism, as well as key topics such as ethical responsibility - that is, our ethical relations to other human beings - and death and mortality. Why Solipsism Matters is not only an historical review of the origins and development of the concept of solipsism and a exploration of some of its key philosophers (Kant and Wittgenstein to name but a few) but it develops an entirely new account of the idea. One which takes seriously the global, socially networked world in which we live in which the very real ramifications of solipsism - including narcissism - can be felt.

This book discusses the themes of personhood and personal identity. It argues that while there is a metaphysical answer to the question of personal identity, there is no metaphysical answer to the question of what constitutes a person. The author argues against both body-mind dualism and physicalism and also against the idea that there is some metaphysically real category of persons distinct from the category of human beings or human organisms. Instead, the author presents neutral-monist, autopoietic-enactivist kind of metaphysics of the human being, and a relational, and completely human-dependent notion of a person. The tools used in these arguments include conceptual argumentation and empirical case studies. Using both personal experiences and studies of cultures all over the world, the author examines dualism between mind and body. The author discusses real people who seem to live a Cartesian life, as somehow disembodied minds as well as the concept of the person. The author uses the concluding chapters to present their own views arguing that questions about our identity should be separated from questions of our personhood as well as the concept of personhood. This volume is of interest to scholars of philosophy of mind.

In How to Explain Behavior: A Critical Review and New Approach, Sam S. Rakover proposes a critical review of explanation models (procedures); presents explanation as an essential part of research methodology; depicts understanding as based on explanation models and other procedures; provides a list of basic ideas common to most explanation models; supplies an approach that unifies mechanistic explanations as used by the sciences with mentalistic explanations that are based on one's inner world; and provides a general procedure for explaining individual behavior.

Argues for a new theory of the self It's Cartesian defence of the self will attract interest and engagement