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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Philosophy of mind
Duncan Pritchard offers an original defence of epistemological
disjunctivism. This is an account of perceptual knowledge which
contends that such knowledge is paradigmatically constituted by a
true belief that enjoys rational support which is both factive and
reflectively accessible to the agent. In particular, in a case of
paradigmatic perceptual knowledge that p, the subject's rational
support for believing that p is that she sees that p, where this
rational support is both reflectively accessible and factive (i.e.,
it entails p). Such an account of perceptual knowledge poses a
radical challenge to contemporary epistemology, since by the lights
of standard views in epistemology this proposal is simply
incoherent. Pritchard's aim in Epistemological Disjunctivism is to
show that this proposal is theoretically viable (i.e., that it does
not succumb to the problems that it appears to face), and also to
demonstrate that this is an account of perceptual knowledge which
we would want to endorse if it were available on account of its
tremendous theoretical potential. In particular, he argues that
epistemological disjunctivism offers a way through the impasse
between epistemic externalism and internalism, and also provides
the foundation for a distinctive response to the problem of radical
scepticism.
This volume offers a much needed shift of focus in the study of
emotion in the history of philosophy. Discussion has tended to
focus on the moral relevance of emotions, and (except in ancient
philosophy) the role of emotions in cognitive life has received
little attention. Thirteen new essays investigate the continuities
between medieval and early modern thinking about the emotions, and
open up a contemporary debate on the relationship between emotions,
cognition, and reason, and the way emotions figure in our own
cognitive lives. A team of leading philosophers of the medieval,
renaissance, and early modern periods explore these ideas from the
point of view of four key themes: the situation of emotions within
the human mind; the intentionality of emotions and their role in
cognition; emotions and action; the role of emotion in
self-understanding and the social situation of individuals.
This book collects nine seminal essays by Mark Richard published
between 1980 and 2014, alongside four new essays and an
introduction that puts the essays in context. Each essay is an
attempt, in one way or another, to understand the idea of a
proposition. Part I discusses whether the objects of thought and
assertion can change truth value over time. Part II develops and
defends a relativist view of the objects of assertion and thought;
it includes discussions of the nature of disagreement, moral
relativism, and responds to important objections to relativism. It
also explores the idea that thoughts and assertions may be neither
true nor false. Part III discusses issues having to do with
relations between sentential and propositional structure. Among the
topics discussed in Part III are the semantics of quotation, 'mixed
quotation', opacity, philosophical analysis and propositional
structure, and the semantics of demonstratives and clausal
complements.
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It is widely agreed that there is such a thing as sensory
phenomenology and imagistic phenomenology. The central concern of
the cognitive phenomenology debate is whether there is a
distinctive "cognitive phenomenology"--that is, a kind of
phenomenology that has cognitive or conceptual character in some
sense that needs to be precisely determined. This volume presents
new work by leading philosophers in the field, and addresses the
question of whether conscious thought has cognitive phenomenology.
It also includes a number of essays which consider whether
cognitive phenomenology is part of conscious perception and
conscious emotion.
Three broad themes run through the volume. First, some authors
focus on the question of how the notion of cognitive phenomenology
ought to be understood. How should the notion of cognitive
phenomenology be defined? Are there different kinds of cognitive
phenomenology? A second theme concerns the existence of cognitive
phenomenology. Some contributors defend the existence of a
distinctive cognitive phenomenology, whereas others deny it. The
arguments for and against the existence of cognitive phenomenology
raise questions concerning the nature of first-person knowledge of
thought, the relationship between consciousness and intentionality,
and the scope of the explanatory gap. A third theme concerns the
implications of the cognitive phenomenology debate. What are the
implications of the debate for accounts of our introspective access
to conscious thought and for accounts of the very nature of
conscious thought? Cognitive Phenomenology brings the debate to the
forefront of philosophy, and provides a state-of-the-art account of
the issues at stake.
This book outlines the evolution of our political nature over two
million years and explores many of the rituals, plays, films, and
other performances that gave voice and legitimacy to various
political regimes in our species' history. Our genetic and cultural
evolution during the Pleistocene Epoch bestowed a wide range of
predispositions on our species that continue to shape the politics
we support and the performances we enjoy. The book's case studies
range from an initiation ritual in the Mbendjela tribe in the Congo
to a 1947 drama by Bertolt Brecht and include a popular puppet play
in Tokugawa Japan. A final section examines the gradual
disintegration of social cohesion underlying the rise of polarized
politics in the USA after 1965, as such films as The Godfather,
Independence Day, The Dark Knight Rises, and Joker accelerated the
nation's slide toward authoritarian Trumpism.
The study of self-consciousness helps humans understand themselves
and restores their identities. But self-consciousness has been a
mystery since the beginning of history, and this mystery cannot be
resolved by conventional natural science. In Self-Consciousness,
author Masakazu Shoji takes the mystery out of self-consciousness
by proposing the idea that the human brain and body are a
biological machine. A former VLSI microprocessor designer and
semiconductor physicist, Shoji was guided by the ideas of ancient
sages to create a conceptual design of a human machine brain model.
He explains how it works, how it senses itself and the outside
world, and how the machine creates the sense of existence of the
subject SELF to itself, just as a living human brain does. A
follow-up to Shoji's previous book, Neuron Circuits, Electronic
Circuits, and Self-Consciousness, this new volume examines
self-consciousness from three unconventional viewpoints to present
a complex theory of the mind and how self-consciousness develops.
Prolegomena to a Carnal Hermeneutics introduces the importance of
body politics from both Eastern and Western perspectives. Hwa Yol
Jung begins with Giambattista Vico's anti-Cartesianism as the birth
of the discipline. He then explores the homecoming of Greek mousike
(performing arts), which included oral poetry, dance, drama, and
music; Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogical body politics; the making of
body politics in Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Luce
Irigaray; Marshall McLuhan's transversal and embodied philosophy of
communication; and transversal geophilosophy. This tour de force
will be an engaging read for anyone interested in the above
thinkers, as well as for students and scholars of comparative
philosophy, communication theory, environmental philosophy,
political philosophy, or continental philosophy
The Kantian Aesthetic explains the kind of perceptual knowledge
involved in aesthetic judgments. It does so by linking Kant's
aesthetics to a critically upgraded account of his theory of
knowledge. This upgraded theory emphasizes those conceptual and
imaginative structures which Kant terms, respectively, "categories"
and "schemata." By describing examples of aesthetic judgment, it is
shown that these judgments must involve categories and fundamental
schemata (even though Kant himself, and most commentators after
him, have not fully appreciated the fact). It is argued, in turn,
that this shows the aesthetic to be not just one kind of
pleasurable experience amongst others, but one based on factors
necessary to objective knowledge and personal identity, and which,
indeed, itself plays a role in how these capacities develop.
In order to explain how individual aesthetic judgments are
justified, and the aesthetic basis of art, however, the Kantian
position just outlined has to be developed further. This is done by
exploring some of his other ideas concerning how critical
comparisons inform our cultivation of taste, and art's relation to
genius. By linking the points made earlier to a more developed
account of this horizon of critical comparisons, a Kantian approach
can be shown to be both a satisfying and comprehensive explanation
of the cognitive basis of aesthetic experiences. It is shown also
that the approach can even cover some of the kinds of avant-garde
works which were thought previously to limit its relevance.
This volume brings together new papers advancing contemporary
debates in foundational, conceptual, and methodological issues in
cognitive neuroscience. The different perspectives presented in
each chapter have previously been discussed between the authors, as
the volume builds on the experience of Neural Mechanisms (NM)
Online - webinar series on the philosophy of neuroscience organized
by the editors of this volume. The contributed chapters pertain to
five core areas in current philosophy of neuroscience. It surveys
the novel forms of explanation (and prediction) developed in
cognitive neuroscience, and looks at new concepts, methods and
techniques used in the field. The book also highlights the
metaphysical challenges raised by recent neuroscience and
demonstrates the relation between neuroscience and mechanistic
philosophy. Finally, the book dives into the issue of neural
computations and representations. Assembling contributions from
leading philosophers of neuroscience, this work draws upon the
expertise of both established scholars and promising early career
researchers.
This volume investigates the neglected topic of mental action, and
shows its importance for the metaphysics, epistemology, and
phenomenology of mind. Twelve specially written essays address such
questions as the following: Which phenomena should we count as
mental actions--imagining, remembering, judging, for instance? How
should we explain our knowledge of our mental actions, and what
light does that throw on self-knowledge in general? What
contributions do mental actions make to our consciousness? What is
the relationship between the voluntary and the active, in the
mental sphere? What are the similarities and differences between
mental and physical action, and what can we learn about each from
the other?
Internalism in philosophy of mind is the thesis that all conditions
that constitute a person's current thoughts and sensations, with
their characteristic contents, are internal to that person's skin
and contemporaneous. Externalism is the denial of internalism, and
is now broadly popular. Joseph Mendola argues that internalism is
true, and that there are no good arguments that support
externalism.
Anti-Externalism has three parts. Part I examines famous
case-based arguments for externalism due to Kripke, Putnam, and
Burge, and develops a unified internalist response incorporating
rigidified description clusters. It argues that this proposal's
only real difficulties are shared by all viable externalist
treatments of both Frege's Hesperus-Phosphorus problem and
Russell's problem of empty names, so that these difficulties cannot
be decisive. Part II critically examines theoretical motivations
for externalism entwined with causal accounts of perceptual
content, as refined by Dretske, Fodor, Millikan, Papineau, and
others, as well as motivations entwined with disjunctivism and the
view that knowledge is the basic mental state. It argues that such
accounts are false or do not provide proper motivation for
externalism, and develops an internalist but physicalist account of
sensory content involving intentional qualia. Part III critically
examines theoretical motivations for externalism entwined with
externalist accounts of language, including work of Brandom,
Davidson, and Wittgenstein. It dialectically develops an
internalist account of thoughts mediated by language that can
bridge the internally constituted qualia of Part II and the
rigidified description clusters of Part I.
This book offers an inspiring exploration of current findings from
the psychology of meaning in life, analysing cutting-edge research
to propose practical, evidence-based applications. Schnell draws on
psychological, philosophical and cognitive perspectives to explore
basic concepts of meaning and introduce a multidimensional model of
meaning in life. Written in an accessible style, this book covers a
range of topics including the distinction between meaning and
happiness, the impact of meaning on health and longevity, meaning
in the workplace, and meaning-centred interventions. Each chapter
ends with exercises to encourage self-reflection and measurement
tools are presented throughout, including the author's original
Sources of Meaning and Meaning in Life Questionnaire (SoMe), to
inspire the reader to consider the role of meaning in their own
life. The Psychology of Meaning in Life is essential reading for
students and practitioners of psychology, sociology, counselling,
coaching and related disciplines, and for general readers
interested in exploring the role of meaning in life.
Anthony Everett defends the commonsense view that there are no such
things as fictional people, places, and things. More precisely he
develops and defends a pretense theoretic account on which there
are no such things as fictional objects and our talk and thought
that purports to be about them takes place within the scope of a
pretense. Nevertheless we may mistakenly suppose there are
fictional objects because we mistake the fact that certain
utterances count as true within the pretense, and convey veridical
information about the real world, for the genuine truth of those
utterances. In the first half of The Nonexistent an account of this
form is motivated, developed in detail, and defended from
objections. The second half of the book then argues against
fictional realism, the view that we should accept fictional objects
into our ontology. First it is argued that the standard arguments
offered for fictional realism all fail. Then a series of problems
are raised for fictional realism. The upshot of these is that
fictional realism provides an inadequate account of a significant
range of talk and thought that purports to concern fictional
objects. In contrast the pretense theoretic account developed
earlier provides a very straightforward and attractive account of
these cases and of fictional character discourse in general.
Overall, Everett argues that we gain little but lose much by
accepting fictional realism.
This is a comprehensive reference guide to current research in
Philosophy of Mind, assembled by an international team of leading
scholars in the discipline. From new questions concerning qualia,
representation, embodiment and cognition to fresh thinking about
the long-standing problems of physicalism, dualism, personal
identity and mental causation, this book is an authoritative guide
to the latest research in the Philosophy of Mind. Across twelve
entries, experts in the field explore the current thinking in one
of the most active areas of interest in philosophy today. To aid
researchers further, the Companion also includes overviews of
perennial problems and new directions in contemporary philosophy of
mind, an extended glossary of terms for quick reference, a detailed
chronology, a guide to research for ongoing study and a
comprehensive bibliography of key classic and contemporary
publications in the philosophy of mind. "The Continuum Companions"
series is a major series of single volume companions to key
research fields in the humanities aimed at postgraduate students,
scholars and libraries. Each companion offers a comprehensive
reference resource giving an overview of key topics, research
areas, new directions and a manageable guide to beginning or
developing research in the field. A distinctive feature of the
series is that each companion provides practical guidance on
advanced study and research in the field, including research
methods and subject-specific resources.
"Philadelphia A Story Sequence in Verse" is a window on the work of
esoteric schools. It portrays a small, representative group of
loving friends who at first naively and later decisively with the
potent ancient knowledge in which they have been instructed engage
in storytelling's highest purpose: to remind and remind and remind
us again to remember and hold ourselves aware of what our busy
minds are always forgetting - the present, where the divine
resides. John Craig, the author, is a poet and teacher who with his
wife Victoria,a native of Phila-delphia,lives in the Sierra
foothills of northern California. They have two grown sons.
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