Creations of the Mind presents sixteen original essays by theorists from a wide variety of disciplines who have a shared interest in the nature of artifacts and their implications for the human mind. All the papers are written specially for this volume, and they cover a broad range of topics concerned with the metaphysics of artifacts, our concepts of artifacts and the categories that they represent, the emergence of an understanding of artifacts in infants' cognitive development, as well as the evolution of artifacts and the use of tools by non-human animals. This volume will be a fascinating resource for philosophers, cognitive scientists, and psychologists, and the starting point for future research in the study of artifacts and their role in human understanding, development, and behaviour. Contributors: John R. Searle, Richard E. Grandy, Crawford L. Elder, Amie L. Thomasson, Jerrold Levinson, Barbara C. Malt, Steven A. Sloman, Dan Sperber, Hilary Kornblith, Paul Bloom, Bradford Z. Mahon, Alfonso Caramazza, Jean M. Mandler, Deborah Kelemen, Susan Carey, Frank C. Keil, Marissa L. Greif, Rebekkah S. Kerner, James L. Gould, Marc D. Hauser, Laurie R. Santos, Steven Mithen

The purpose of this book is to use neuroscience discoveries concerning religious experiences, the Self and personhood to deepen, enhance and interrogate the theological and philosophical set of ideas known as Personalism. McNamara proposes a new eschatological form of personalism that is consistent with current neuroscience models of relevant brain functions concerning the self and personhood and that can meet the catastrophic challenges of the 21st century. Eschatological Personalism, rooted in the philosophical tradition of "Boston Personalism", takes as its starting point the personalist claim that the significance of a self and personality is not fully revealed until it has reached its endpoint, but theologically that end point can only occur within the eschatological realm. That realm is explored in the book along with implications for personalist theory and ethics. Topics covered include the agent intellect, dreams and the imagination, future-orientation and eschatology, phenomenology of Time, social ethics, Love, the challenge of AI, privacy and solitude and the individual ethic of autarchy. This book is an innovative combination of the neuroscientific and theological insights provided by a Personalist viewpoint. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars of Cognitive Science, Theology, Religious Studies and the philosophy of the mind.

Philosophers have traditionally assumed that the difference between active and passive movement could be explained by the presence or absence of an intention in the mind of the agent. This assumption has led to the neglect of many interesting active behaviors that do not depend on intentions, including the "mindless" actions of humans and the activities of non-human animals. In this book Jones offers a broad account of agency that unifies these cases. The book addresses a range of questions, including: When are movements properly attributed to whole agents, rather than to their parts? What does it mean for an agent to guide its action? What distinguishes agents from other complex systems? What is the relationship between action and adaptive behavior? And why might the study of living systems be the key to understanding agency? This book makes an important contribution to current philosophical debate on the nature and origins of agency. It defines action as a uniquely biological process and recasts human intentional action as a specialized case of a broader and more common phenomenon than has been previously assumed. Uniting findings from philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, biology, computer science, complexity theory and ethology, this book will be of interest to students and scholars working in these areas.

Robert Brandom's rationalist philosophy of language, expounded in his highly influential Making It Explicit, has been the subject of intense scrutiny and debate, establishing him as one of the leading philosophers of his generation. In A Spirit of Trust, Brandom presents the fruits of his thirty-year engagement with Hegel. He submits that the Phenomenology of Spirit holds not only many lessons for today's philosophy of language, but also a moral lesson much needed in today's increasingly polarized societies, in the form of a postmodern ethics of trust. In this outstanding collection, leading philosophers examine and assess A Spirit of Trust. The twelve specially commissioned chapters explore topics including: negation and truth empirical and speculative concepts experience conflict and recognition varieties of idealism premodern ethical life and modern alienation a postmodern ethics of trust. Reading Brandom: On A Spirit of Trust is essential reading for all students and scholars of Brandom's work and those in philosophy of language. It will also be important reading for those studying nineteenth-century philosophy, particularly Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit.

Around the third millennium B.C. in the Fertile Crescent, a world-system with a single world-economy, covering very vast regions, began to form. Mesopotamia became the center of this world-system. This was possible due to the development of common commercial law and logical competence there. The expansion of the world-economy during the Silk Road period from the 4th century B.C. to the early 5th century A.D. across various countries of Eurasia was accompanied by the spread of logical competence, first formed in Mesopotamia, as a mechanism of legal hermeneutics to draw logical conclusions without fallacies. This competence was simultaneously comprehended in different cultures connected by the Great Silk Road - in ancient Greek logic (4th - 2nd centuries B.C.); ancient Chinese proto-logic (5th - 2nd centuries B.C.); Judaic logical hermeneutics (1st - 2nd centuries A.D.); and in Indian-Buddhist logic (2nd - 6th centuries A.D.). The book analyzes the emergence of logic and its spread and early forms of its reflection. Consequently, logical competence is seen not as an innate ability, but as a social practice first established in Mesopotamia. Logic as a science became possible only after the development of logical competence as an accepted social practice. On the other hand, this view is a non-Marxist assessment of the early form of the world-system, centered on international law and logical competence, which made the world-economy and international trade then possible.

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.

The problem of skepticism about knowledge of the external world has been the centrepiece of epistemology since Descartes. In the last 25 years, there has been a keen focus of interest on the problem, with a number of new insights by the best contemporary epistemologists and philosophers of mind. Anthony Brueckner is recognized as one of the leading contemporary investigators of the problem of skepticism.
Essays on Skepticism collects Brueckner's most important work in this area, providing a connected and comprehensive guide to the complex state of play on this intensively studied area of philosophy. The guiding questions of this volume are: Can we have knowledge of the external world of things outside our minds? Can we have knowledge of the internal world of our own contentful mental states? The work divides into four sections: I. Transcendental Arguments against Skepticism; II. Semantic Answers to Skepticism; III. Self-knowledge; IV. Skepticism and Epistemic Closure.

This book showcases a range of views on topics at the forefront of current controversies in the field of metaphysics. It will give readers a varied and alive introduction to the field, and cover such key issues as: modality, fundamentality, composition, the object/property distinction, and indeterminacy. The contributors include some of the most important philosophers currently writing on these issues. The questions and philosophers are: Are there any individuals at the fundamental level? / (1) Shamik Dasgupta (2) Jason Turner Is there an objective difference between essential and accidental properties? / (1) Meghan Sullivan (2) Kris McDaniel and Steve Steward Are there any worldly states of affairs? / (1) Daniel Nolan (2) Joseph Melia Are there any intermediate states of affairs? / (1) Jessica Wilson (2) Elizabeth Barnes and Ross Cameron Do ordinary objects exist? / (1) Trenton Merricks (2) Helen Beebee Editor Elizabeth Barnes guides readers through these controversies (all published here for the first time), with a synthetic introduction and succinct abstracts of each debate.

This book provides an up-to-date and accessible overview of the hottest and most influential contemporary debates in philosophy of perception, written especially for this volume by many of the most important philosophers of the field. The book addresses the following key questions: Can perception be unconscious? What is the relation between perception and attention? What properties can we perceive? Are perceptual states representations? How is vision different from the other sense modalities (like hearing or smell)? How do these sense modalities interact with one another? Contributors are Ned Block, Berit Brogaard, Alex Byrne, Robert Kentridge, John Kulvicki, Heather Logue, Mohan Matthen, Bence Nanay, Matt Nudds, Casey O'Callaghan, Adam Pautz, Ian Phillips, Susanna Siegel and Wayne Wu.

This book brings together new essays that explore the connection between love and reasons. The observation that considerations of love carry significant weight in the deliberative process opens up new perspectives in the classic discussion about practical reasons, and gives rise to many interesting questions about the nature of love's reasons, about their source and legitimacy, about their relation to moral and epistemic reasons, and about the extent to which love is sensitive to reasons. The contributors to this volume orient questions related to love within the broader context of the contemporary discussion on practical reasons, and move forward the conversation about the normative dimensions of love. Love, Reason and Morality will be of interest to philosophers working on issues of normativity, meta-ethics and moral psychology, and especially those interested in the source of practical reasons and the role of attachments in practical deliberation.

This book offers a systematic look at current challenges in moral epistemology through the lens of research on higher-order evidence. Fueled by recent advances in empirical research, higher-order evidence has generated a wealth of insights about the genealogy of moral beliefs. Higher-Order Evidence and Moral Epistemology explores how these insights have an impact on the epistemic status of moral beliefs. The essays are divided into four thematic sections. Part I addresses higher-order evidence against morality that comes from sources such as disagreement and moral psychology. Part II covers rebuttals of higher-order evidence against morality. The essays in Part III examine the relevance of higher-order evidence for a broader range of phenomena in moral epistemology, for both individuals and groups, including moral testimony and phenomena of practical concern, such as fundamentalist views about moral matters. Finally, Part IV discusses permissible epistemic attitudes regarding a body of moral evidence, including the question of how to determine the permissibility of such attitudes. This volume is the first to explicitly address the implications of higher-order evidence in moral epistemology. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced graduate students working in epistemology and metaethics.

Most of the time our utterances are automatically interpreted as speech acts: as assertions, conjectures and testimonies; as orders, requests and pleas; as threats, offers and promises. Surprisingly, the cognitive correlates of this essential component of human communication have received little attention. This book fills the gap by providing a model of the psychological processes involved in interpreting and understanding speech acts. The theory is framed in naturalistic terms and is supported by data on language development and on autism spectrum disorders. Mikhail Kissine does not presuppose any specific background and addresses a crucial pragmatic phenomenon from an interdisciplinary perspective. This is a valuable resource for academic researchers and graduate and undergraduate students in pragmatics, semantics, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics and philosophy of language.

This book carries forward the discourse on the mind's engagement with the world. It reviews the semantic and metaphysical debates around internalism and externalism, the location of content and the indeterminacy of meaning in language. The volume analyzes the writings of Jackson, Chomsky, Putnam, Quine, Bilgrami and others, to reconcile opposing theories of language and the mind. It ventures into Cartesian ontology and Fregean semantics to understand how mental content becomes world-oriented in our linguistic communication. Further, the author explores the liaison between the mind and the world from the phenomenological perspective, particularly, Husserl's linguistic turn and Heidegger's intersubjective entreaty for Dasein. The book conceives of thought as a biological and socio-linguistic product which engages with the mind-world question through the conceptual and causal apparatuses of language. A major intervention in the field of philosophy of language, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers interested in philosophy, phenomenology, epistemology and metaphysics.

This is the first dedicated text to explain and explore the utility of critical realism for psychologists, offering it as a helpful middle ground between positivism and postmodernism. By introducing its basic concepts, Pilgrim explains critical realism to psychologists and shows how the interface between the natural and social worlds, and the internal and external, can be used to examine human life. This both/and aspect of human life is important in another sense: we are both determined and determining beings, making choices but within the material constraints of both our bodies and the social context of our unique existence. The book offers an exploration of academic and applied psychology with that inward and outward curiosity in mind, beginning with the premise that both inner and outer reality are the legitimate interest of psychologists. In doing so, it shows how critical realism endorses the remaining advantages of positivism and postmodernism, while discarding their philosophical errors. A range of case studies are presented to show how psychologists can use critical realism when working with real life problems, as researchers or practitioners.

Although qualitative approaches to psychological research have a long history in the discipline, they have also been, and remain, marginalized from the canon of mainstream scientific psychology. At the current moment, however, there is growing recognition of the importance of qualitative methods and a movement toward a more inclusive and eclectic stance on psychological research. This volume reflects upon the historical and contemporary place of qualitative methods in psychology and considers future possibilities for further integration of these methods in the discipline. Scholars representing a wide-range of perspectives in qualitative and theoretical psychology reflect on the historical and contemporary positions of qualitative methods in psychology with an eye to the future of research and theory in the discipline. This book encourages a more critical and inclusive stance on research, recognizing both the limits and contributions that different methodological approaches can make to the project of psychological knowledge.

Mental Wellbeing and Psychology unpacks the philosophical and psychological need to understand ourselves through an exploration of historical archives and artistic creativity. This focuses on some practical, evidence-based approaches to developing mental wellbeing. The book uses phenomenological psychology to explore the materials developed by the Stiwdio Arts group and offers an understanding of one's experiences of their world, recognising that these are embodied and perceived within a temporal and relational place. It offers examples for developing mental health and wellbeing interventions for charities, private care and the NHS. It provides an evidence base for the use of creativity and historical resources in mental health care. This book will be of great interest for academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the field of mental wellbeing, nursing and mentalhealth nursing, occupational therapy and social work.

Originally published in 1985. This book is about a single famous line of argument, pioneered by Descartes and deployed to full effect by Kant. That argument was meant to refute scepticism once and for all, and make the world safe for science. 'I think, so I exist' is valid reasoning, but circular as proof. In similar vein, Kant argues from our having a science of geometry to Space being our contribution to experience: a different conclusion, arrived at by a similar fallacy. Yet these arguments do show something: that certain sets of opinions, if professed, show an inbuilt inconsistency. It is this second-strike capacity that has kept transcendental arguments going for so long. Attempts to re-build metaphysics by means of such transcendental reasoning have been debated. This book offers an introduction to the field, and ventures its own assessment, in non-technical language, without assuming previous training in logic or philosophy.

Pre-reflective Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind delves into the relationship between the current analytical debates on consciousness and the debates that took place within continental philosophy in the twentieth century and in particular around the time of Sartre and within his seminal works. Examining the return of the problem of subjectivity in philosophy of mind and the idea that phenomenal consciousness could not be reduced to functional or cognitive properties, this volume includes twenty-two unique contributions from leading scholars in the field. Asking questions such as: Why we should think that self-consciousness is non-reflective? Is subjectivity first-personal? Does consciousness necessitate self-awareness? Do we need pre-reflective self-consciousness? Are ego-disorders in psychosis a dysfunction of pre-reflective self-awareness? How does the Cartesian duality between body and mind fit into Sartre's conceptions of consciousness?

This volume examines the relevance of Emmanuel Levinas's work to recent developments in analytic philosophy. Contemporary analytic philosophers working in metaethics, the philosophy of mind, and the metaphysic of personal identity have argued for views similar to those espoused by Levinas. Often disparately pursued, Levinas's account of "ethics as first philosophy" affords a way of connecting these respective enterprises and showing how moral normativity enters into the structure of rationality and personal identity. In metaethics, the volume shows how Levinas's moral phenomenology relates to recent work on the normativity of rationality and intentionality, and how it can illuminate a wide range of moral concepts including accountability, moral intuition, respect, conscience, attention, blame, indignity, shame, hatred, dependence, gratitude and guilt. The volume also tests Levinas's innovative claim that ethical relations provide a way of accounting for the irreducibility of personal identity to psychological identity. The essays here contribute to ongoing discussions about the metaphysical significance and sustainability of a naturalistic but nonreductive account of personhood. Finally, the volume connects Levinas's second-person standpoint with analogous developments in moral philosophy.

This volume brings together new essays that consider Wittgenstein's treatment of the phenomenon of aspect perception in relation to the broader idea of conceptual novelty; that is, the acquisition or creation of new concepts, and the application of an acquired understanding in unfamiliar or novel situations. Over the last twenty years, aspect perception has received increasing philosophical attention, largely related to applying Wittgenstein's remarks on the phenomena of seeing-as, found in Part II of Philosophical Investigations (1953), to issues within philosophical aesthetics. Seeing-as, however, has come to occupy a broader conceptual category, particularly in philosophy of mind and philosophical psychology. The essays in this volume examine the exegetical issues arising within Wittgenstein studies, while also considering the broader utility and implications of the phenomenon of seeing-as in the fields of aesthetics, philosophical psychology, and philosophy of mathematics, with a thematic focus on questions of novelty and creativity. The collection constitutes a fruitful interpretative engagement with the later Wittgenstein, as well as a unique contribution to considerations of philosophical methodology.

This volume attempts to solve a grave problem about critical self-reflection. The worry is that we critical thinkers are all in "epistemic bad faith" in light of what psychology tells us. After all, the research shows not merely that we are bad at detecting "ego-threatening" thoughts a la Freud. It also indicates that we are ignorant of even our ordinary thoughts-e.g., reasons for our moral judgments of others (Haidt 2001), and even mundane reasons for buying one pair of stockings over another! (Nisbett & Wilson 1977) However, reflection on one's thoughts requires knowing what those thoughts are in the first place. So if ignorance is the norm, why attempt self-reflection? The activity would just display naivety about psychology. Yet while respecting all the data, this book argues that, remarkably, we are sometimes infallible in our self-discerning judgments. Even so, infallibility does not imply indubitability, and there is no Cartesian ambition to provide a "foundation" for empirical knowledge. The point is rather to explain how self-reflection as a rational activity is possible.

From Homer to Aristotle, understanding anger and harnessing its power was at the core of Hellenic civilization. Homer created the framework for philosophical inquiries into anger, one that persisted until it was overturned by Stoicism and Christianity. Plato saw anger as the guardian of justice and Aristotle conceived of it as bound to friendship. Yet both showed that anger can become a guardian of injustice and a defender of our psychological abnormalities. Plato claimed that reason is a tertiary factor in controlling anger and Aristotle argued that non-cognitive powers can issue commands for anger's arousal - findings that shed light as to why cognitive therapeutic approaches often prove to be ineffective. Both proposed nurturing the "thumos," the receptacle of anger and the seat of self-esteem. Aristotle's view of public anger as an early warning sign of social dissolution continues to be relevant to this day. In this carefully argued study, Kostas Kalimtzis examines the theories of anger in the context of the ancient world with an eye to their implications for the modern predicament.

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology, Second Edition is an invaluable guide and major reference source to the key topics, problems, concepts, and debates in philosophy of psychology and is the first companion of its kind. A team of renowned international contributors provide forty-eight chapters, organized into six clear parts: Historical background to philosophy of psychology Psychological explanation Cognition and representation The biological basis of psychology Perceptual experience Personhood. The Companion covers key topics, such as the origins of experimental psychology; folk psychology; behaviorism and functionalism; philosophy, psychology and neuroscience; the language of thought, modularity, nativism, and representational theories of mind; consciousness and the senses; dreams, emotion, and temporality; personal identity; and the philosophy of psychopathology. For the second edition, six new chapters have been added to address the following important topics: belief and representation in nonhuman animals; prediction error minimization; contemporary neuroscience; plant neurobiology; epistemic judgment; and group cognition. Essential reading for all students of philosophy of mind, science, and psychology, The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology will also be of interest to anyone studying psychology and its related disciplines.

Offering a new template for future exploration, Susan Greenwood examines and develops the notion that the experience of magic is a panhuman orientation of consciousness, a form of knowledge largely marginalized in Western societies. In this volume she aims to form a "bridge of communication" between indigenous magical or shamanic worldviews and rationalized Western cultures. She outlines an alternative mythological framework for the latter to help develop a magical perception, as well as giving practical case studies derived from her own research. The form of magic discussed here is not fantastic or virtual, but ecological and sensory. Magical knowledge infiltrates the body in its deepest levels of the subconscious, and unconscious, as well as conscious awareness; it is felt and understood through the connection with an inspirited world that includes the consciousness of other beings, including those of plant, animal and the physical environment. This is anthropology from the heart rather than the head, and it engages with the messy area of emotions, an embodiment of the senses, and struggles to find a common language of listening to one another across a void of differences. The aim is to provide a non-reductive structure for the creative interplay of both magical and analytical modes of thought. Passion is a motivator for change, and a change in attitude to magic as an integrative force of human understanding is the main thread of this work.

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.