Until very recently, no society had seen marriage as anything other than a conjugal partnership: a male-female union. What Is Marriage? identifies and defends the reasons for this historic consensus and shows why redefining civil marriage as something other than the conjugal union of husband and wife is a mistake. Originally published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, this book's core argument quickly became the year's most widely read essay on the most prominent scholarly network in the social sciences. Since then, it has been cited and debated by scholars and activists throughout the world as the most formidable defense of the tradition ever written. Now revamped, expanded, and vastly enhanced, What Is Marriage? stands poised to meet its moment as few books of this generation have. Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George offer a devastating critique of the idea that equality requires redefining marriage. They show why both sides must first answer the question of what marriage really is. They defend the principle that marriage, as a comprehensive union of mind and body ordered to family life, unites a man and a woman as husband and wife, and they document the social value of applying this principle in law. Most compellingly, they show that those who embrace same-sex civil marriage leave no firm ground-none-for not recognizing every relationship describable in polite English, including polyamorous sexual unions, and that enshrining their view would further erode the norms of marriage, and hence the common good. Finally, What Is Marriage? decisively answers common objections: that the historic view is rooted in bigotry, like laws forbidding interracial marriage; that it is callous to people's needs; that it can't show the harm of recognizing same-sex couplings or the point of recognizing infertile ones; and that it treats a mere "social construct" as if it were natural or an unreasoned religious view as if it were rational.

What is a self? What does it mean to have selfhood? What is the relationship between selfhood and identity? These are puzzling questions that philosophers, psychologists, social scientists, and many other researchers often grapple with. Self and Identity is a book that explores and brings together relevant ideas on selfhood and identity, while also helping to clarify some important and long standing scientific and philosophical debates. It will enable readers to understand the difference between selves in humans and other animals, and the different selves that we come to possess from when we are born to when we become old. It also explains how and why the self might break down due to mental illness, thereby providing insight into how we might treat illnesses such as dementia and depression, both of which are conditions that fundamentally affect our selfhood. Taking an important step towards clarifying our understanding of human selfhood and applying it to mental illness, this book will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduate students exploring philosophical questions of selfhood, as well as those examining the connection to clinical disorders.

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.

Stephen Everson presents a comprehensive new study of Aristotle's account of perception and related mental capacities. Recent debate about Aristotle's theory of mind has focused on this account, which is Aristotle's most sustained and detailed attempt to describe and explain the behaviour of living things. Everson places it in the context of Aristotle's natural science as a whole, showing how he applies the explanatory tools developed in other works to the study of perceptual cognition. Everson demonstrates that, contrary to the claims of many recent scholars, Aristotle is indeed concerned to explain perceptual activity as the activity of a living body, in terms of material changes in the organs which possess the various perceptual capacities. By emphasizing the unified nature of the perceptual system, Everson is able to explain how Aristotle accounts for our ability to perceive not only such things as colours and sounds but material objects in our environment. This rich and broad-ranging book will be essential reading not only for students of Aristotle's theory of mind but for all those concerned to understand the explanatory principles of his natural science.

The eminent philosopher Keith Lehrer offers an original and distinctively personal view of central aspects of the human condition, such as reason, knowledge, wisdom, autonomy, love, consensus, and consciousness. He argues that what is uniquely human is our capacity for evaluating our own mental states (such as beliefs and desires), and suggests that we have a system for such evaluation which allows the resolution of personal and interpersonal conflict. The keystone in this system is self-trust, on which reason, knowledge, and wisdom are grounded.

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.

Counterfactual thinking has become an established method to evaluate decisions in a range of disciplines, including history, psychology and literature. Elke Reinhuber argues it also has valuable applications in the fine arts and popular media. A fascination with the path not taken is a logical consequence of a world saturated with choices. Art which provokes and explores these tendencies can help to recognise and contextualise the impulse to avoid or endlessly revisit individual or collective decisions. Reinhuber describes the term in broad strokes through the disciplines to show how counterfactualism finds shape in contemporary art forms, especially in photography, film, and immersive and interactive media art (such as 360 Degrees content, virtual reality and augmented reality). She analyses the different stages of counterfactuals with examples where artists experience counterfactual thoughts in the process of art production, explore these thoughts in their artwork, and where the artwork itself evokes counterfactual thoughts in the audience. A fascinating exploration for scholars and students of art, media and the humanities, and anybody else with an interest in choices, the art of decisionmaking and counterfactualism.

This book presents new research on the crucial role that imagination plays in contemporary philosophy of fiction. It will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and literary studies.

The sciences philosophy, psychology and neuroscience share the basis that all refer to the human being. Therefore, an interdisciplinary collaboration would be desirable. The exchange of criticism is an essential requirement for interdisciplinary collaboration. Criticism must be heard and - if possible - considered. Indeed, criticism can be valid or unwarranted. However, whether criticism is unwarranted can only emerge from discussion and conversation. In the discussion of cognitive neuroscience, some criticism can easily be considered (such as the mereological fallacy that represents that talking about the person is substituted with talking bout the brain). Another issue for an interdisciplinary discussion of cognitive neuroscience is the interpretation of the readiness potential including re-considering Benjamin Libet's classic experiments. Additionally, a critical discussion on cognitive neuroscience must address ethical questions, such as the possibility of the abuse of neuroscientific insight.

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.

People backslide. They freely do things they believe it would be best on the whole not to do - and best from their own point of view, not just the perspective of their peers or their parents. The aim of this book is to explain why that happens. The first main item of business is to clarify the nature of backsliding - of actions that display some weakness of will. To this end, Mele uses traditional philosophical techniques dating back to Plato and Aristotle (whose work on weakness of will or "akrasia" he discusses) and some new studies in the emerging field of experimental philosophy. He then attacks the thesis that backsliding is an illusion because people never freely act contrary to what they judge best. Mele argues that it is extremely plausible that if people ever act freely, they sometimes backslide. The biggest challenge posed by backsliding is to explain why it happens. At the book's heart is the development of a theoretical and empirical framework that sheds light both on backsliding and on exercises of self-control that prevent it. Here, Mele draws on work in social and developmental psychology and in psychiatry to motivate a view of human behavior in which both backsliding and overcoming the temptation to backslide are explicable. He argues that backsliding is no illusion and our theories about the springs of action, the power of evaluative judgments, human agency, human rationality, practical reasoning, and motivation should accommodate backsliding.

Inference has long been a central concern in epistemology, as an essential means by which we extend our knowledge and test our beliefs. Inference is also a key notion in influential psychological accounts of mental capacities, ranging from problem-solving to perception. Consciousness, on the other hand, has arguably been the defining interest of philosophy of mind over recent decades. Comparatively little attention, however, has been devoted to the significance of consciousness for the proper understanding of the nature and role of inference. It is commonly suggested that inference may be either conscious or unconscious. Yet how unified are these various supposed instances of inference? Does either enjoy explanatory priority in relation to the other? In what way, or ways, can an inference be conscious, or fail to be conscious, and how does this matter? This book brings together original essays from established scholars and emerging theorists that showcase how several current debates in epistemology, philosophy of psychology and philosophy of mind can benefit from more reflections on these and related questions about the significance of consciousness for inference.

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.

Several Python programming books feature tools designed for experimental psychologists. What sets this book apart is its focus on eye-tracking. Eye-tracking is a widely used research technique in psychology and neuroscience labs. Research grade eye-trackers are typically faster, more accurate, and of course, more expensive than the ones seen in consumer goods or usability labs. Not surprisingly, a successful eye-tracking study usually requires sophisticated computer programming. Easy syntax and flexibility make Python a perfect choice for this task, especially for psychology researchers with little or no computer programming experience. This book offers detailed coverage of the Pylink library, a Python interface for the gold standard EyeLink (R) eye-trackers, with many step-by-step example scripts. This book is a useful reference for eye-tracking researchers, but you can also use it as a textbook for graduate-level programming courses.

Philosophers of mind have long been interested in the relation between two ideas: that causality plays an essential role in our understanding of the mental; and that we can gain an understanding of belief and desire by considering the ascription of attitudes to people on the basis of what they say and do. Many have thought that those ideas are incompatible. William Child argues that there is in fact no tension between them, and that we should accept them both. He shows how we can have a causal understanding of the mental without having to see attitudes and experiences as internal, causally interacting entities; and he defends this view against influential objections. The book offers detailed discussions of many of Donald Davidson's contributions to the philosophy of mind, and also considers the work of Dennett, Anscombe, McDowell, and Rorty, among others. Issues discussed include: the nature of intentional phenomena; causal explanation; the character of visual experience; psychological explanation; and the causal relevance of mental properties.

This volume explores how the principles and values of pragmatic philosophy serve as orienting perspectives for critical thinking in contemporary psychotherapy and clinical practice. Drawing on the contributions of William James and John Dewey, Neuroscience, Psychotherapy, and Clinical Pragmatism introduces a model of clinical pragmatism emphasizing the individuality of the person, open-ended dialogue, experiential learning, and the practical outcomes of ideas and methods. In a second part, chapters show how recent developments in neuroscience and interpersonal neurobiology deepen our understanding of change and growth in accord with the principles of clinical pragmatism. Finally, the volume reviews paradigms of psychotherapy across the psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive, and humanistic traditions. Case studies show how the pluralist orientation of clinical pragmatism enlarges concepts of therapeutic action. This text has been written for psychotherapists as well as scholars, educators, and trainees in the fields of psychiatry, clinical psychology, counseling, and social work.

In this incisive study one of Britain's most eminent philosophers explores the often overlooked tension between voluntariness and involuntariness in human cognition. He seeks to counter the widespread tendency for analytic epistemology to be dominated by the concept of belief. Is scientific knowledge properly conceived as being embodied at its best, in a passive feeling of belief or in an active policy of acceptance? Should a jury's verdict declare what its meembers involuntarily accept? And should statements and assertions be presumed to express what their authors believe or what they accept? Does such a distinction between belief and acceptance help to resolve the paradoxes of self-deception and akrasia? Must people be taken to believe everything entailed by what they believe, or merely to accept everything entailed by what they accept? Through a systematic examination of these problems, the author sheds new light on issues of crucial importance in comtemporary epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. This book is intended for scholars and students in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and cognitive science; also artificial intelligence. Suitable for students at se

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.

Herbert Simon's renowned theory of bounded rationality is principally interested in cognitive constraints and environmental factors and influences which prevent people from thinking or behaving according to formal rationality. Simon's theory has been expanded in numerous directions and taken up by various disciplines with an interest in how humans think and behave. This includes philosophy, psychology, neurocognitive sciences, economics, political science, sociology, management, and organization studies. The Routledge Handbook of Bounded Rationality draws together an international team of leading experts to survey the recent literature and the latest developments in these related fields. The chapters feature entries on key behavioural phenomena, including reasoning, judgement, decision making, uncertainty, risk, heuristics and biases, and fast and frugal heuristics. The text also examines current ideas such as fast and slow thinking, nudge, ecological rationality, evolutionary psychology, embodied cognition, and neurophilosophy. Overall, the volume serves to provide the most complete state-of-the-art collection on bounded rationality available. This book is essential reading for students and scholars of economics, psychology, neurocognitive sciences, political sciences, and philosophy.

Consciousness as Complex Event: Towards a New Physicalism provides a new approach to the study of consciousness. The author argues that what makes phenomenal experiences mysterious is that these experiences are extremely complex brain events. The text provides an accessible introduction to descriptive complexity (also known as Kolmogorov Complexity) and then applies this to show that the most influential arguments against physicalism about consciousness are unsound. The text also offers an accessible review of the current debates about consciousness and introduces a rigorous new conception of physicalism. It concludes with a positive program for the future study of phenomenal experience. It is readable and compact and will be of interest to philosophers and cognitive scientists, and of value to advanced students of philosophy. Key Features Provides a new approach to the study of consciousness, using information theory. Offers a valuable discussion of physicalism, of use in other disciplines. Contains an introduction to the main literature and arguments in the debate about consciousness. Includes an accessible overview of how to apply descriptive complexity to philosophical problems.

Two of the dominant traditions in twentieth-century philosophy explicitly excluded Charles Darwin's account of evolution, not because they claimed it was mistaken, but because they saw it as irrelevant. These two traditions - analytic philosophy, founded by G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and phenomenology, fathered by Edmund Husserl - set the stage for great deal of subsequent philosophy. The non-Darwinian framework that they constructed continues to constrain significant portions of the field, in particular, theories of perception and mind. Philosophy and the Darwinian Legacy traces the major reasons for the exclusion of Darwin and evolutionary considerations from philosophy. These reasons include the ambivalence of nineteenth-century philosophy toward the views of Darwin, the numerous disagreements among biologists at the turn of the century about the status of Darwin's views and the determination of the architects of analytic philosophy and phenomenology to protect ethics, logic and sociopolitical values from all taint of historical contingency. Professor Cunningham argues that this exclusion of Darwinian views distorted most subsequent philosophical theories of perception and mind. She criticizes purely cognitivist theories of perception as well as Machine Functionalist theories of mind, and then offers positive proposals on how these theories should be amended to take account of the adaptive role that perception and mind play on behalf of a living organism's struggle for survival and well being.

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of philosophical, social, ethical, and legal challenges arising as a consequences of current advances in neurosciences and neurotechnology. It starts by offering an overview of fundamental concepts such as mental privacy, personal autonomy, mental integrity, and responsibility, among others. In turn, it discusses the influence of possible misuses or uncontrolled uses of neurotechnology on those concepts, and, more in general, on human rights and equality. Then, it makes some original proposals to deal with the main ethical, legal, and social problems associated to the use of neurotechnology, both in medicine and in everyday life, suggesting possible policies to protect privacy, neural data, and intimacy. Crossing the borders between humanities, natural sciences, bio-medicine, and engineering, and taking into account geographical and cultural differences, this book offers a conceptual debate around policy and decision making concerning some of the key neuroethical challenges of our times. It offers a comprehensive guide to the most important issues of neurojustice and neuroprotection, together with a set of new paradigms to face some of the most urgent neuroethical problems of our times.

This book examines the theoretical links between Edward W. Said and Sigmund Freud as well the relationship between psychoanalysis, postcolonialism and decoloniality more broadly. The author begins by offering a comprehensive review of the literature on psychoanalysis and postcolonialism, which is contextualized within the apparatus of racialized capitalism. In the close analysis of the interconnections between the Freud and Said that follows, there is an attempt to decolonize the former and psychoanalyze the latter. He argues that decolonizing Freud does not mean canceling him; rather, he employs Freud's sharpest insights for our time, by extending his critique of modernity to coloniality. It is also advanced that psychoanalyzing Said does not mean psychologizing the man; instead the book's aim is to demonstrate the influence of psychoanalysis on Said's work. It is asserted that Said began with Freud, repressed him, and then Freud returned. Reading Freud and Said side by side allows for the theorization of what the author calls contrapuntal psychoanalysis as liberation praxis, which is discussed in-depth in the final chapters. This book, which builds on the author's previous work, Decolonial Psychoanalysis, will be a valuable text to scholars and students from across the psychology discipline with an interest in Freud, Said and the broader relationship between psychoanalysis and colonialism.