In this highly original and thought-provoking book John Leslie unfolds his view of the nature of the universe. This view is unusual, but rich in philosophical inspiration and suggestion. Over the last three decades Leslie has been developing his theory in a series of path-breaking publications; now at last he gives it its definitive exposition. It may be hard to believe that the universe is as he says it is --but it is hard also to resist his compelling ideas and arguments.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's On Certainty explores a myriad of new and important ideas regarding our notions of belief, knowledge, skepticism, and certainty. During the course of his exploration, Wittgenstein makes a fascinating new discovery about certitude, namely, that it is categorically distinct from knowledge. As his investigation advances, he recognizes that certainty must be non-propositional and non-ratiocinated; borne out not in the things we say, but in our actions, our deeds. Many philosophers working outside of epistemology recognized Wittgenstein's insights and determined that his work's abrupt end might serve as an excellent launching point for still further philosophical expeditions. In Exploring Certainty: Wittgenstein and Wide Fields of Thought, Robert Greenleaf Brice surveys some of this rich topography. Wittgenstein's writings serve as a point of departure for Brice's own ideas about certainty. He shows how Wittgenstein's rough and unpolished notion of certitude might be smoothed out and refined in a way to benefit studies of morality, aesthetics, cognitive science, philosophy of mathematics. Brice's work opens new avenues of thought for scholars and students of the Wittgensteinian tradition, while introducing original philosophies concerning issues central to human knowledge and cognition.

A team of leading experts investigate a range of philosophical issues to do with the self and self-knowledge. Self and Self-Knowledge focuses on two main problems: how to account for I-thoughts and the consequences that doing so would have for our notion of the self; and how to explain subjects' ability to know the kind of psychological states they enjoy, which characteristically issues in psychological self-ascriptions. The first section of the volume consists of essays that, by appealing to different considerations which range from the normative to the phenomenological, offer an assessment of the animalist conception of the self. The second section presents an examination as well as a defence of the new epistemic paradigm, largely associated with recent work by Christopher Peacocke, according to which knowledge of our own mental states and actions should be based on an awareness of them and of our attempts to bring them about. The last section explores a range of different perspectives-from neo-expressivism to constitutivism-in order to assess the view that self-knowledge is more robust than any other form of knowledge. While the contributors differ in their specific philosophical positions, they all share the view that careful philosophical analysis is needed before scientific research can be fruitfully brought to bear on the issues at hand. These thought-provoking essays provide such an analysis and greatly deepen our understanding of these central aspects of our mentality.

It is widely acknowledged that Freud was one of the most influential and groundbreaking theorists of the twentieth century. His theories permeate almost every aspect of modern-day life: literature, philosophy, science, politics, art, religion and culture. Yet his thought and writings are notoriously difficult for students to grasp."Freud: A Guide for the Perplexed" is a clear and thorough account of Freud's thought, providing an ideal guide to the important and complex ideas of this key thinker. The book introduces some of the key Freudian concepts and themes and examines the ways in which they intersect with issues in philosophy and literary theory. Geared towards the specific requirements of students who need to reach a sound understanding of Freud's thought, the guide also provides a cogent and reliable way into some of the most important debates surrounding certain psychoanalytic concepts and their application outside the clinical domain. It discusses, for example, Freud's ideas on the comic in relation to his views on religion. This is the ideal companion to the study of this most influential and challenging of theorists.

Depressive Realism argues that people with mild-to-moderate depression have a more accurate perception of reality than non-depressives. Depressive realism is a worldview of human existence that is essentially negative, and which challenges assumptions about the value of life and the institutions claiming to answer life's problems. Drawing from central observations from various disciplines, this book argues that a radical honesty about human suffering might initiate wholly new ways of thinking, in everyday life and in clinical practice for mental health, as well as in academia. Divided into sections that reflect depressive realism as a worldview spanning all academic disciplines, chapters provide examples from psychology, psychotherapy, philosophy and more to suggest ways in which depressive realism can critique each discipline and academia overall. This book challenges the tacit hegemony of contemporary positive thinking, as well as the standard assumption in cognitive behavioural therapy that depressed individuals must have cognitive distortions. It also appeals to the utility of depressive realism for its insights, its pursuit of truth, as well its emphasis on the importance of learning from negativity and failure. Arguments against depressive realism are also explored. This book makes an important contribution to our understanding of depressive realism within an interdisciplinary context. It will be of key interest to academics, researchers and postgraduates in the fields of psychology, mental health, psychotherapy, history and philosophy. It will also be of great interest to psychologists, psychotherapists and counsellors.

Exemplarity and Chosenness is a combined study of the philosophies of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) that explores the question: How may we account for the possibility of philosophy, of universalism in thinking, without denying that all thinking is also idiomatic and particular? The book traces Derrida's interest in this topic, particularly emphasizing his work on "philosophical nationality" and his insight that philosophy is challenged in a special way by its particular "national" instantiations and that, conversely, discourses invoking a nationality comprise a philosophical ambition, a claim to being "exemplary." Taking as its cue Derrida's readings of German-Jewish authors and his ongoing interest in questions of Jewishness, this book pairs his philosophy with that of Franz Rosenzweig, who developed a theory of Judaism for which election is essential and who understood chosenness in an "exemplarist" sense as constitutive of human individuality as well as of the Jews' role in universal human history.

Unconscious Incarnations considers the status of the body in psychoanalytic theory and practice, bringing Freud and Lacan into conversation with continental philosophy to explore the heterogeneity of embodied life. By doing so, the body is no longer merely an object of scientific inquiry but also a lived body, a source of excessive intuition and affectivity, and a raw animality distinct from mere materiality. The contributors to this volume consist of philosophers, psychoanalytic scholars, and practitioners whose interdisciplinary explorations reformulate traditional psychoanalytic concepts such as trauma, healing, desire, subjectivity, and the unconscious. Collectively, they build toward the conclusion that phenomenologies of embodiment move psychoanalytic theory and practice away from representationalist models and toward an incarnational approach to psychic life. Under such a carnal horizon, trauma manifests as wounds and scars, therapy as touch, subjectivity as bodily boundedness, and the unconscious 'real' as an excessive remainder of flesh. Unconscious incarnations signal events where the unsignifiable appears among signifiers, the invisible within the visible, and absence within presence. In sum: where the flesh becomes word and the word retains its flesh. Unconscious Incarnations seeks to evoke this incarnational approach in order to break through tacit taboos toward the body in psychology and psychoanalysis. This interdisciplinary work will appeal greatly to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as philosophy scholars and clinical psychologists.

First handbook on the philosophy of implicit mental states Implicit cognition is at the heart of many unresolved debates about learning, prediction, memory, the relation between mind and language and hot issues in applied areas such as implicit bias Very strong team of international contributors

The capacity to represent things to ourselves as possible plays a crucial role both in everyday thinking and in philosophical reasoning; this volume offers much-needed philosophical illumination of conceivability, possibility, and the relations between them.

In this volume, Geoffrey Madell develops a revised account of the self, making a compelling case for why the "simple" or "anti-criterial" view of personal identity warrants a robust defense. Madell critiques recent discussions of the self for focusing on features which are common to all selves, and which therefore fail to capture the uniqueness of each self. In establishing his own view of personal identity, Madell proposes (a) that there is always a gap between 'A is f and g' and 'I am f and g'; (b), that a complete description of the world offered without recourse to indexicals will fail to account for the contingent truth that I am one of the persons described; and (c), that an account of conscious perspectives on the world must take into account what it means for an apparently arbitrary one of these perspectives to be mine. Engaging with contemporary positions on the first person, embodiment, psychological continuity, and other ongoing arguments, Madell contends that there can be no such thing as a criterion of personal identity through time, that no bodily or psychological continuity approach to the issue can succeed, and that personal identity through time must be absolute, not a matter of degree. Madell's view that the nature of the self is substantively different from that of objects in the world will generate significant discussion and debate among philosophers of mind.

The first comprehensive philosophical introduction and assessment to the problem of self-control, an increasingly popular topic in philosophy Self-control is one of the most fascinating problems in philosophy, studied in core subjects such as free will and ethics, yet there is no book available explaining in clear language what it is Plenty of examples from psychology and philosophy including self-deception in mental disorder, addiction and everyday examples such as loss of willpower and even mind-wandering Includes helpful additional features such as chapter summaries, annotated further reading and glossary Very strong author team led by Neil Levy, well-known for his work on addiction, consciousness and free will.

Theoretical Perspective on Smell is the first collection of scholarly articles to be devoted exclusively to philosophical research on olfaction. The essays, published here for the first time, bring together leading theorists working on smell in a format that allows for deep engagement with the emerging field, while also providing those new to the philosophy of smell with a resource to begin their journey. The volume's 14 chapters are organized into four parts: I. The Importance and Beauty of Smell II. Smell in Time and Space III. What We Perceive through Smell IV. Smell and Other Senses The collection solidifies the area as an important emerging branch of perceptual philosophy by presenting the cutting edge research being done by innovative early career researchers, as well as by those more senior and established within the field.

An exponentially growing industry, human robot interaction (HRI) research has drawn predominantly upon psychologists' descriptions of mechanisms of face-to-face dyadic interactions. This book considers how social robotics is beginning unwittingly to confront an impasse that has been a perennial dilemma for psychology, associated with the historical 'science vs. art' debate. Raya Jones examines these paradigmatic tensions, and, in tandem, considers ways in which the technology-centred discourse both reflects and impacts upon understanding our relational nature. Chapters in the book explore not only how the technology-centred discourse constructs machines as us, but also how humans feature in this discourse. Focusing on how the social interaction is conceptualised when the human-robot interaction is discussed, this book addresses issues such as the long-term impact on persons and society, authenticity of relationships, and challenges to notions of personhood. By leaving aside terminological issues, Jones attempts to transcend ritual of pitching theories against each other in order to comprehensively analyse terms such as subjectivity, self and personhood and their fluid interplay in the world that we inhabit. Personhood and Social Robotics will be a key text for postgraduate students, researchers and scholars interested in the connection between technology and human psychology, including psychologists, science and technology studies scholars, media studies scholars and humanists. The book will also be of interest to roboticists and HRI researchers, as well as those studying or working in areas of artificial intelligence and interactive technologies more generally.

In this monograph Nicholas Georgalis further develops his important work on minimal content, recasting and providing novel solutions to several of the fundamental problems faced by philosophers of language. His theory defends and explicates the importance of 'thought-tokens' and minimal content and their many-to-one relation to linguistic meaning, challenging both 'externalist' accounts of thought and the solutions to philosophical problems of language they inspire. The concepts of idiolect, use, and statement made are critically discussed, and a classification of kinds of utterances is developed to facilitate the latter. This is an important text for those interested in current theories and debates on philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and their points of intersection.

This volume identifies and develops how philosophy of mind and phenomenology interact in both conceptual and empirically-informed ways. The objective is to demonstrate that phenomenology, as the first-personal study of the contents and structures of our mentality, can provide us with insights into the understanding of the mind and can complement strictly analytical or empirically informed approaches to the study of the mind. Insofar as phenomenology, as the study or science of phenomena, allows the mind to appear, this collection shows how the mind can reappear through a constructive dialogue between different ways-phenomenological, analytical, and empirical-of understanding mentality.

This edited collection provides an inter- and intra-disciplinary discussion of the critical role context plays in how and when individuals and groups remember the past. International contributors integrate key research from a range of disciplines, including social and cognitive psychology, discursive psychology, philosophy/philosophical psychology and cognitive linguistics, to increase awareness of the central role that cultural, social and technological contexts play in determining individual and collective recollections at multiple, yet interconnected, levels of human experience. Divided into three parts, cognitive and psychological perspectives, social and cultural perspectives, and cognitive linguistics and philosophical perspectives, Stone and Bietti present a breadth of research on memory in context. Topics covered include: the construction of self-identity in memory flashbulb memories scaffolding memory the cultural psychology of remembering social aspects of memory the mnemonic consequences of silence emotion and memory eyewitness identification multimodal communication and collective remembering. Contextualizing Human Memory allows researchers to understand the variety of work undertaken in related fields, and to appreciate the importance of context in understanding when, how and what is remembered at any given recollection. The book will appeal to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of cognitive and social psychology, as well as those in related disciplines interested in learning more about the advancing field of memory studies.

Knowledge and Self-Knowledge in Plato's Theaetetus advances a new explanation for the apparent failure of the Theaetetus to come to a satisfactory conclusion about the definition of knowledge. Tschemplik argues that understanding this aporetic dialogue in light of the fact that it was conducted with two noted mathematicians shows that for Plato, mathematics was not the paradigm for philosophy. She points out that, although mathematics is clearly an important part of the philosopher's training, as the educational outline of the Republic makes clear, the point on which the mathematician falls short is the central role that self-knowledge plays in philosophical investigation. Theaetetus betrays this deficiency and is led by Socrates to an understanding of the benefits of self-knowledge understood as the knowledge of ignorance. Tschemplik concludes that it is the absence of self-knowledge in the Theaetetus which leads to its closing impasse regarding knowledge. This book will be of interest to scholars and graduate students in the history of philosophy with a special interest in ancient philosophy, and will also be accessible to upper-level undergraduates in ancient philosophy.

First handbook to examine fundamental topics about the body and self-awareness, from its history to current research Includes chapters on fascinating and important topics such as self-consciousness, robotics, phantom limb syndrome, bodily pain and virtual reality Contributions are by a carefully chosen mix of philosophers and psychologists in order to cover the topic comprehensively

The Limits of Thought is a series of penetrating dialogues between the great spiritual leader, J. Krishnamurti and the renowned physicist, David Bohm.
The starting point of their engaging exchange is the question: If truth is something different than reality, then what place has action in daily life in relation to truth and reality? We see Bohm and Krishnamurti explore the nature of consciousness and the condition of humanity. These enlightening dialogues address issues of truth, desire awareness, tradition, and love.
Limits of Thought is an important book by two very respected and important thinkers. Anyone interested to see how Krishnamurti and Bohm probe some of the most essential questions of our very existence will be drawn to this great work.

Memories and Monsters explores the nature of the monstrous or uncanny, and the way psychological trauma relates to memory and narration. This interdisciplinary book works on the borderland between psychology and philosophy, drawing from scholars in both fields who have helped mould the bourgeoning field of relational psychoanalysis and phenomenological and existential psychology. The editors have sought out contributions to this field that speak to the pressing question: how are we to attend to and contend with our monsters? The authors in this volume examine the ways in which we might best relate to our monsters, and how the legacies of ancient traumas and anxieties continue to affect our current stories, memories and everyday practices. Covering such manifestations of the monstrous as racism, crimes against humanity, trauma as portrayed in music and art, and the Holocaust, this book explores the impact the uncanny has on our individual and collective psyches. By focusing on a very specific theme, and one that excites the imagination, Memories and Monsters stokes the flames of an important current movement in relational psychoanalysis. It will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as professionals in psychology and graduate school students and tutors in the fields of both psychology and philosophy.

Sensation of Movement explores the role of sensation in motor control, bodily self-recognition and sense of agency. The sensation of movement is dependent on a range of information received by the brain, from signalling in the peripheral sensory organs to the establishment of higher order goals. Through the integration of neuroscientific knowledge with psychological and philosophical perspectives, this book questions whether one type of information is more relevant for the ability to sense and control movement. Addressing conscious sensations of movement, experimental designs and measures, and the possible functions of proprioceptive and kinaesthetic information in motor control and bodily cognition, the book advocates the integration of neuroscientific knowledge and philosophical perspectives. With an awareness of the diverse ideas and theories from these distinct fields, the book brings together leading researchers to bridge these divides and lay the groundwork for future research. Of interest to both students and researchers of consciousness, Sensation of Movement will be essential reading for those researching motor control, multimodal perception, bodily self-recognition, and sense of agency. It aims to encourage the integration of multiple perspectives in order to arrive at new insights into how sensation of movement can be studied scientifically.

Originally published in 1959, with some corrections in 1962, the author examines the common view at the time that dreams are mental activities or mental occurrences taking place during sleep. He starts off by offering a proof that the sentence 'I am asleep' is a senseless form of words and cannot express a judgment. After commenting on various features of the concept of sleep, the author expands his argument to prove that the notion of making any judgment at all while asleep is without sense. He takes the further step of showing that this same conclusion holds for all other mental acts and mental occurrences, with the exception of dreams.

Psychologists, philosophers, theologians and educationalists have all lately explored various conceptual, moral, psychological and pedagogical dimensions of gratitude in a rapidly expanding academic and popular literature. However, while the distinguished contributors to this work hail from these distinct disciplines, they have been brought together in this volume precisely in recognition of the need for a more interdisciplinary perspective on the topic. While further developing such more familiar debates in the field as whether it is appropriate to feel grateful in circumstances in which there is no obvious benefactor, whether it is proper to feel grateful to those who have benefited one only from a sense of duty and whether it makes sense to be grateful if so doing colludes with injustice, the essays in this collection explore a wide variety of fresh conceptual, psychological and moral issues. For example, in addition to identifying some new moral paradoxes about gratitude and seeking a generally more morally discriminating approach to gratitude education, relations are explored between gratitude and humility, forgiveness and appreciation and the religious and spiritual dimensions of the concept are also given much overdue attention. By drawing together serious academic engagement with the study of gratitude and a serious attempt to undertake this within an interdisciplinary perspective, Perspectives on Gratitude will be of value to academics and graduate students in the fields of philosophy, psychology and theology, as well as other research-based disciplines.