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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Philosophy of mind
In this seminal contribution to Kant studies, originally published in 1982, Karl Ameriks presented the first thorough survey and evaluation of Kant's theory of mind. It is now brought up to date with a substantial new Preface and Postscript, as well as additional notes and references; this expanded edition will enhance the book's continued value for today's Kantians and philosophers of mind. 'splendid ... not only the best commentary we have in English on Kant's philosophy of mind, but one of the most stimulating perspectives on Kant's whole philosophy to appear for some time.'|s Times Literary Supplement
David-Hillel Ruben mounts a defence of some unusual and original positions in the philosophy of action. Written from a point of view out of sympathy with the assumptions of much of contemporary philosophical action theory, his book draws its inspiration from philosophers as diverse as Aristotle, Berkeley, and Marx. Ruben's work is located in the tradition of the metaphysics of action, and will attract much attention from his peers and from students in the field.
The Profound Limitations of Knowledge explores the limitations of
knowledge and argues that neither reasoning nor direct or indirect
observations can be trusted. We cannot even assign probabilities to
claims of what we can know. Furthermore, for any set of data, there
are an infinite number of possible interpretations. Evidence
suggests that we live in a participatory universe-that is, our
observations shape reality.
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.
Eleven distinguished philosophers have contributed specially
written essays on a set of topics much debated in recent years,
including physicalism, qualia, semantic competence, conditionals,
presuppositions, two-dimensional semantics, and the relation
between logic and metaphysics. All these topics are prominent in
the work of Robert Stalnaker, a major presence in contemporary
philosophy, in honour of whom the volume is published. It also
contains a substantial new essay in which Stalnaker replies to his
critics, and sets out his current views on the topics discussed.
Contributors: Richard Heck, Frank Jackson, William Lycan, Vann
McGee, John Perry, Paul Pietroski, Sydney Shoemaker, Scott Soames,
Daniel Stoljar, Timothy Williamson, and Stephen Yablo.
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.
This volume aims to inspire a return to the energetics of
Nietzsche's prose and the critical intensity of his approach to
nihilism and to give back to the future its rightful futurity. The
book states that for too long contemporary thought has been
dominated by a depressed what is to be done?. All is regarded to be
in vain, nothing is deemed real, there is nothing new seen under
the sun. Such a postmodern lament is easily confounded with an
apathetic reluctance to think engagedly. Hence the contributors
draw on the variety of topical issues - the future of life, the
nature of life forms, the techno sciences, the body, religion - as
a way of tackling the question of nihilism's pertinence to us now.
To what extent are meaning, on the one hand, and knowledge, on the
other, determined by aspects of the 'outside world'? Internalism
and Externalism in Semantics and Epistemology presents twelve
specially written essays exploring these debates in metaphysics and
epistemology and the connections between them. In so doing, it
examines how issues connected with the nature of mind and language
bear on issues about the nature of knowledge and justification (and
vice versa). Topics discussed include the compatibility of semantic
externalism and epistemic internalism, the variety of internalist
and externalist positions (both semantic and epistemic), semantic
externalism's implications for the epistemology of reasoning and
reflection, and the possibility of arguments from the theory of
mental content to the theory of epistemic justification (and vice
versa).
Decartes' maxim Cogito, Ergo Sum (from his Meditations) is perhaps
the most famous philosophical expression ever coined. Joseph Almog
is a Descartes analyst whose last book WHAT AM I? focused on the
second half of this expression, Sum--who is the "I" who is
existing-and-thinking and how does this entity somehow incorporate
both body and mind? This volume looks at the first half of the
proposition--cogito. Almog calls this the "thinking man's paradox":
how can there be, in the the natural world and as part and parcel
of it, a creature that... thinks? Descartes' proposition declares
that such a fact obtains and he maintains that it is self-evident;
but as Almog points out, from the point of view of Descartes' own
skepticism, it is far from obvious that there could be a
thinking-man. How can it be that a thinking human be both part of
the natural world and yet somehow distinct and separate from it?
How did "thinking" arise in an otherwise "thoughtless" universe and
what does it mean for beings like us to be thinkers? Almog goes
back to the Meditations, and using Descartes' own aposteriori
cognitive methodology--his naturalistic, scientific, approach to
the study of man--tries to answer the question.
Descartes held that only ideas are immediately perceived, and that
all ideas are really identical to mental states. Yet certain
passages in the Meditations seem to assert that some extramental
individuals -- the sun, for example, or a piece of wax -- can be
immediately perceived (not by the senses, but by the intellect). If
so then Descartes was committed to the seemingly absurd claim that
extramental things can be really identical to mental states. But
the claim is not absurd; as this book shows, it is based on a
coherent doctrine of intentional representation that was taught at
the Jesuit college of La Fleche that Descartes attended as a youth.
On this doctrine, an individual that is outside the mind with one
sort of being can be inside it with another. This book brings a
fresh perspective to the currently deadlocked debate over whether
Descartes was a representationalist or a direct realist, and sheds
new light on his difficult notions of material falsity and the
self-representational character of thought.
In Certainty in Action, Daniele Moyal-Sharrock describes how her
encounter with Wittgenstein overturned her previous assumptions
that the mind is a product of brain activity and that thought,
consciousness, the will, feelings, memories, knowledge and language
are stored and processed in the brain, by the brain. She shows how
Wittgenstein enables us to veer away from this brain-centred view
of intelligence and behaviour to a person-centred view focusing on
ways of acting that are both diversely embedded across forms of
human life and universally embedded in a single human form of life.
The book traces the radical importance of action as the cohesive
thread weaving through Wittgenstein's philosophy, and shows how
certainty intertwines with it to produce new ways of engaging in
epistemology, the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of
language. This selection of Moyal-Sharrock's essays vividly
illustrates some of the ways in which Wittgenstein's pioneering
enactivism has impacted - and can further impact - not only
philosophy, but also neighbouring disciplines such as linguistics,
psychology, primatology, evolutionary psychology and anthropology.
Certainty in Action is essential reading for students and
researchers of these disciplines, and for anyone interested in
getting a grasp of Wittgenstein's lasting genius and influence.
Ruth Millikan is well known for having developed a strikingly
original way for philosophers to seek understanding of mind and
language, which she sees as biological phenomena. She now draws
together a series of groundbreaking essays which set out her
approach to language. Guiding the work of most linguists and
philosophers of language today is the assumption that language is
governed by prescriptive normative rules. Millikan offers a
fundamentally different way of viewing the partial regularities
that language displays, comparing them to biological norms that
emerge from natural selection. This yields novel and quite radical
consequences for our understanding of the nature of public
linguistic meaning, the process of language understanding, how
children learn language, and the semantics/pragmatics distinction.
The two sections of this volume present theoretical developments
and practical applicative papers respectively. Theoretical papers
cover topics such as intercultural pragmatics, evolutionism,
argumentation theory, pragmatics and law, the semantics/pragmatics
debate, slurs, and more. The applied papers focus on topics such as
pragmatic disorders, mapping places of origin, stance-taking,
societal pragmatics, and cultural linguistics. This is the second
volume of invited papers that were presented at the inaugural
Pragmasofia conference in Palermo in 2016, and like its predecessor
presents papers by well-known philosophers, linguists, and a
semiotician. The papers present a wide variety of perspectives
independent from any one school of thought.
A collection of twelve essays by John Perry and two essays he
co-authored, this book deals with various problems related to
"self-locating beliefs": the sorts of beliefs one expresses with
indexicals and demonstratives, like "I" and "this." Postscripts
have been added to a number of the essays discussing criticisms by
authors such as Gareth Evans and Robert Stalnaker. Included with
such well-known essays as "Frege on Demonstratives," "The Problem
of the Essential Indexical," "From Worlds to Situations," and "The
Prince and the Phone Booth" are a number of important essays that
have been less accessible and that discuss important aspects of
Perry's views, referred to as "Critical Referentialism," on the
philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind.
In the last few years there has been an explosion of philosophical
interest in perception; after decades of neglect, it is now one of
the most fertile areas for new work. Perceptual Experience presents
new work by fifteen of the world's leading philosophers. All papers
are written specially for this volume, and they cover a broad range
of topics dealing with sensation and representation, consciousness
and awareness, and the connections between perception and knowledge
and between perception and action. This will be the book on the
philosophy of perception, a fascinating resource for philosophers
and psychologists.
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This book scrutinizes the practice of sailing and its relation to
philosophy of mind. Sailing brings about a peculiar human-artifact
interaction which can lead to unexplored research paths. The idea
behind this collection is that this interaction is better
scrutinized by sailor scientists/philosophers to open up new
possible pathways in research. Fascinating theoretical
breakthroughs have been provided by observing sailing practices
with the most well-known being Hutchins' introduction in cognitive
science of the concept of "distributed cognition." However, in
times past, sailing has both fueled philosophical metaphors, from
Theseus' ship to Plato's image of the intellect as the boatperson
of the soul, and inspired philosophers' views (as happened to
Herder during a stormy sea trip). The ecology of sailing is highly
constrained: sailboats move at the surface between a compressible
fluid and an uncompressible fluid. Wind originates in certain
specific circumstances. Only certain sequences of actions are
possible to take advantage of this ecology. The ontology of sailing
is both of the boat and of the ocean/wind system. It highlights the
fact that sailboats have been for centuries arguably the most
complex technological artifacts in each culture that developed
them, precisely because the environment they are engaging is so
peculiar and demanding - almost the precise dual of Sapiens'
adaptive environment. This volume will appeal to philosophers of
mind, cognitive psychologists, and marine professionals.
A collection of essays by experts in the field, exploring how
nature works at every level to produce more complex and highly
organized objects, systems, and organisms from much simpler
components, and how our increasing understanding of this universal
phenomenon of emergence can lead us to a deeper and richer
appreciation of who we are as human beings and of our relationship
to God. Several chapters introduce the key philosophical ideas
about reductionism and emergence, while others explore the
fascinating world of emergent phenomena in physics, biology, and
the neurosciences. Finally there are contributions probing the
meaning and significance of these findings for our general
description of the world and ourselves in relation to God, from
philosophy and theology. The collection as a whole will extend the
mutual creative interaction among the sciences, philosophy, and
theology.
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