|
|
Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Philosophy of mind
This book is a systematic analysis of John R. Searle's philosophy
of mind. Searle's view of mind, as a set of subjective and
biologically embodied processes, can account for our being part of
nature qua mindful beings. This model finds support in neuroscience
and offers reliable solutions to the problems of consciousness,
mental causation, and the self.
Reinhold's Elementary Philosophy is the first system of
transcendental philosophy after Kant. The scholarship of the last
years has understood it in different ways: as a model of
Grundsatzphilosophie, as a defense of the concept of freedom, as a
transformation of philosophy into history of philosophy. The
present investigation intends to underline another 'golden thread'
that runs through the writings of Reinhold from 1784 to 1794: that
which sees in the Elementary Philosophy a system of transcendental
psychology.
This book is an edited collection of papers from international
experts in philosophy and psychology concerned with time. The
collection aims to bridge the gap between these disciplines by
focussing on five key themes and providing philosophical and
psychological perspectives on each theme. The first theme is the
concept of time. The discussion ranges from the folk concept of
time to the notion of time in logic, philosophy and psychology. The
second theme concerns the notion of present in the philosophy of
mind, metaphysics, and psychology. The third theme relates to
continuity and flow of time in mind. One of the key questions in
this section is how the apparent temporal continuity of conscious
experience relates to the possibly discrete character of underlying
neural processes. The fourth theme is the timing of experiences,
with a focus on the perception of simultaneity and illusions of
temporal order. Such effects are treated as test cases for
hypotheses about the relationship between the subjective temporal
order of experience and the objective order of neural events. The
fifth and the final theme of the volume is time and
intersubjectivity. This section examines the role of time in
interpersonal coordination and in the development of social skills.
The collection will appeal to both psychologists and philosophers,
but also to researchers from other disciplines who seek an
accessible overview of the research on time in psychology and
philosophy.
Knowledge in an Uncertain World is an exploration of the relation
between knowledge, reasons, and justification. According to the
primary argument of the book, you can rely on what you know in
action and belief, because what you know can be a reason you have
and you can rely on the reasons you have. If knowledge doesn't
allow for a chance of error, then this result is unsurprising. But
if knowledge does allow for a chance of error - as seems required
if we know much of anything at all - this result entails the denial
of a received position in epistemology. Because any chance of
error, if the stakes are high enough, can make a difference to what
can be relied on, two subjects with the same evidence and generally
the same strength of epistemic position for a proposition can
differ with respect to whether they are in a position to know.
In defending these points, Fantl and McGrath investigate the
ramifications for debates about epistemological externalism and
contextualism, the value and importance of knowledge,
Wittgensteinian hinge propositions, Bayesianism, and the nature of
belief. The book is essential reading for epistemologists,
philosophers who work on reasons and rationality, philosophers of
language and mind, and decision theorists.
From an Ontological Point of View is a highly original and accessible exploration of fundamental questions about what there is. John Heil discusses such issues as whether the world includes levels of reality; the nature of objects and properties; the demands of realism; what makes things true; qualities, powers, and the relation these bear to one another. He advances an account of the fundamental constituents of the world around us, and applies this account to problems that have plagued recent work in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics (colour, intentionality, and the nature of consciousness).
Michael Bratman's work has been unusually influential, with
significance in disciplines as diverse as philosophy, computer
science, law, and primatology. This is a collection of critical
essays by some of contemporary philosophy's most distinguished
figures, including Margaret Gilbert, Richard Holton, Christine
Korsgaard, Alfred Mele, Elijah Milgram, Kieran Setiya, Geoffrey
Sayre-McCord, Scott Shapiro, Michael Smith, J. David Velleman, R.
Jay Wallace. It also contains an introduction by the editors,
situating Bratman's work and its broader significance. The essays
in this volume engage with ideas and themes prominent in Bratman's
work. The volume also includes a lengthy reply by Bratman that
breaks new ground and deepens our understanding of the nature of
action, rationality, and social agency.
This book is a sustained analytical exploration of the rich
philosophy of self of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Fernando
Pessoa (1888-1935) has become many things to many people in the
years that have passed since his untimely death. For some he is
simply the greatest Portuguese poet of the 20th century. For others
he has gradually emerged as a forgotten voice in 20th century
modernism. And yet Pessoa was also a philosopher, and it is only
very recently that the philosophical importance of his work has
begun to attract the attention it deserves. Pessoa composed
systematic philosophical essays in his pre-heteronymic period,
defending rationalism in epistemology and sensationism in the
philosophy of mind. His heteronymic work, decisively breaking with
the conventional strictures of systematic philosophical writing, is
a profound and exquisite exploration in the philosophy of self.
Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves pulls together the strands of
this philosophy and rearticulates it in a way that does justice to
its breathtaking originality. It reveals the extraordinary power of
Pessoa's theory by applying it to the analysis of some of the
trickiest and most puzzling problems about the self to have
appeared in the global history of philosophy.
Using historical and anthropological perspectives to examine
mind-body relationships in western thought, this book interweaves
topics that are usually disconnected to tell a big, important story
in the histories of medicine, science, philosophy, religion, and
political rhetoric. Beginning with early debates during the
Scientific Revolution about representation and reality, Martensen
demonstrates how investigators such as Vesalius and Harvey sought
to transform long-standing notions of the body as dominated by
spirit-like humors into portrayals that emphasized its solid
tissues. Subsequently, Descartes and Willis and their followers
amended this 'new' philosophy to argue for the primacy of the
cerebral hemispheres and cranial nerves as they downplayed the role
of the spirit, passion, and the heart in human thought and
behaviour. None of this occurred in a social vacuum, and the book
places these medical and philosophical innovations in the context
of the religious and political crises of the Reformation and
English Civil War and its aftermath. Patrons and their interests
are part of the story, as are patients and new formulations of
gender. John Locke's psychology and the emergence in England of a
constitutional monarchy figure prominently, as do opponents of the
new doctrines of brain and nerves and the emergent social order.
The book's concluding chapter discusses how debates over
investigative methods and models of body order that first raged
over 300 years ago continue to influence biomedicine and the
broader culture today. No other book on western mind-body
relationships has attempted this.
Joshua Gert presents an original and ambitious theory of the
normative. Expressivism and non-reductive realism represent two
very widely separated poles in contemporary discussions of
normativity. But the domain of the normative is both large and
diverse; it includes, for example, the harmful, the fun, the
beautiful, the wrong, and the rational. It would be extremely
surprising if either expressivism or non-reductive realism managed
to capture all--or even the most important--phenomena associated
with all of these notions. Normative Bedrock defends a
response-dependent account of the normative that accommodates the
kind of variation in response that some non-reductive realists
downplay or ignore, but that also allows for the sort of
straightforward talk of normative properties, normative truth, and
substantive normative disagreement that expressivists have had a
hard time respecting.
One of the distinctive features of Gert's approach is his reliance,
throughout, on an analogy between color properties and normative
properties. He argues that the appropriate response to a given
instance of a normative property may often depend significantly on
the perspective one takes on that instance: for example, whether
one views it as past or future. Another distinctive feature of
Normative Bedrock is its focus on the basic normative property of
practical irrationality, rather than on the notion of a normative
reason or the notion of the good. This simple shift of focus allow
for a more satisfying account of the link between reasons and
motivation, and helps to explain why and how some reasons can
justify far more than they can require, and why we therefore need
two strength values to characterize the normative capacities of
practical reasons.
The Realm of Reason develops a new, general theory of what it is
for a thinker to be entitled to form a given belief. The theory
locates entitlement in the nexus of relations between truth,
content, and understanding. Peacocke formulates three principles of
rationalism that articulate this conception. The principles imply
that all entitlement has a component that is justificationally
independent of experience. The resulting position is thus a form of
rationalism, generalized to all kinds of content.
To show how these principles are realized in specific domains,
Peacocke applies the theory in detail to several classical problems
of philosophy, including the nature of perceptual entitlement,
induction, and the status of moral thought. These discussions
involve an elaboration of the structure of entitlement in ways that
have applications in many other areas of philosophy. He also
relates the theory to classical and recent rationalist thought, and
to current issues in the theory of meaning, reference and
explanation. In the course of these discussions, he proposes a
general theory of the a priori.
The focus of the work lies in the intersection of epistemology,
metaphysics, and the theory of meaning, and will be of interest
both to students and researchers in these areas, and to anyone
concerned with the idea of rationality.
Our visual system can process information at both conscious and
unconscious levels. Understanding the factors that control whether
a stimulus reaches our awareness, and the fate of those stimuli
that remain at an unconscious level, are the major challenges of
brain science in the new millennium. Since its publication in 1984,
Visual Masking has established itself as a classic text in the
field of cognitive psychology. In the years since, there have been
considerable advances in the cognitive neurosciences, and a growth
of interest in the topic of consciousness, and the time is ripe for
a new edition of this text. Where most current approaches to the
study of visual consciousness adopt a 'steady-state' view, the
approach presented in this book explores its dynamic properties.
This new edition uses the technique of visual masking to explore
temporal aspects of conscious and unconscious processes down to a
resolution in the millisecond range. The 'time slices' through
conscious and unconscious vision revealed by the visual masking
technique can shed light on both normal and abnormal operations in
the brain. The main focus of this book is on the microgenesis of
visual form and pattern perception - microgenesis referring to the
processes occurring in the visual system from the time of stimulus
presentation on the retinae to the time, a few hundred milliseconds
later, of its registration at conscious or unconscious perceptual
and behavioural levels. The book takes a highly integrative
approach by presenting microgenesis within a broad context
encompassing visuo-temporal phenomena, attention, and
consciousness.
Dana Kay Nelkin presents a simple and natural account of freedom
and moral responsibility which responds to the great variety of
challenges to the idea that we are free and responsible, before
ultimately reaffirming our conception of ourselves as agents.
Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility begins with a defense of
the rational abilities view, according to which one is responsible
for an action if and only if one acts with the ability to recognize
and act for good reasons. The view is compatibilist - that is, on
the view defended, responsibility is compatible with determinism -
and one of its striking features is a certain asymmetry: it
requires the ability to do otherwise for responsibility when
actions are praiseworthy, but not when they are blameworthy. In
defending and elaborating the view, Nelkin questions long-held
assumptions such as those concerning the relation between fairness
and blame and the nature of so-called reactive attitudes such as
resentment and forgiveness. Her argument not only fits with a
metaphysical picture of causation - agent-causation - often assumed
to be available only to incompatibilist accounts, but receives
positive support from the intuitively appealing Ought Implies Can
Principle, and establishes a new interpretation of freedom and
moral responsibility that dovetails with a compelling account of
our inescapable commitments as rational agents.
When Harambe, a now-famous gorilla at the Cincinnati zoo, was shot
for endangering a small child, animal rights activists protested,
calling into question moral reasoning that privileges the
possibility of injury to a human over definite violence to an
animal. Many others, though less vehement in their objection,
voiced the same questions: was the gorilla any worse than the
negligent parents? Doesn't Harambe have rights just like you and
me? How do we decide what animals deserve and how we ought to treat
them? To what extent are our attitudes towards animals embedded in
our subconscious and immune to reason? The foundations of our moral
attitudes to animals are more complex than many may appreciate.
Subhuman takes an interdisciplinary approach to these questions,
drawing from research in philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, law,
history, sociology, economics, and anthropology, to unearth
surprising revelations about human relationships with animals. T.J.
Kasperbauer argues provocatively that behind our positive and
negative attitudes to animals is an enduring concern that animals
pose a threat to our humanness. Namely, our need to ensure animals'
inferiority to human beings affects both our kindness and cruelty
to animals. Kasperbauer develops this idea by looking at research
on the phenomenon of dehumanization, revealing that our attitudes
to other humans are predicted and reflected in our treatment of
other species. In making his case, Kasperbauer provides a critical
survey of leading theories that range over the role of animals in
human evolutionary history, the psychology of meat-eating and
keeping pets, feelings of fear and disgust toward animals, the use
of animal minds to determine their moral status, and the "expanding
moral circle" hypothesis. By exploring the psychological obstacles
humans face in meeting ethical demands, Kasperbauer sets forth new
and fascinating ways of thinking about our moral obligations to
animals, and how we might correct them.
Marx, the Body, and Human Nature shows that the body and the
broader material world played a far more significant role in Marx's
theory than previously recognised. It provides a fresh 'take' on
Marx's theory, revealing a much more open, dynamic and unstable
conception of the body, the self, and human nature.
This book aims to answer two simple questions: what is it to want
and what is it to intend? Because of the breadth of contexts in
which the relevant phenomena are implicated and the wealth of views
that have attempted to account for them, providing the answers is
not quite so simple. Doing so requires an examination not only of
the relevant philosophical theories and our everyday practices, but
also of the rich empirical material that has been provided by work
in social and developmental psychology. The investigation is
carried out in two parts, dedicated to wanting and intending
respectively. Wanting is analysed as optative attitudinising, a
basic form of subjective standard-setting at the core of compound
states such as 'longings', 'desires', 'projects' and 'whims'. The
analysis is developed in the context of a discussion of
Moore-paradoxicality and deepened through the examination of rival
theories, which include functionalist and hedonistic conceptions as
well as the guise-of-the-good view and the pure entailment
approach, two views popular in moral psychology. In the second part
of the study, a disjunctive genetic theory of intending is
developed, according to which intentions are optative attitudes on
which, in one way or another, the mark of deliberation has been
conferred. It is this which explains intention's subjection to the
requirements of practical rationality. Moreover, unlike wanting,
intending turns out to be dependent on normative features of our
life form, in particular on practices of holding responsible. The
book will be of particular interest to philosophers and
psychologists working on motivation, goals, desire, intention,
deliberation, decision and practical rationality.
The scientific study of the human mind and brain has come of age
with the advent of technologically advanced methods for imaging
brain structure and activity in health and disease, plus
computational theories of cognition. These advances are leading to
sophisticated new accounts for how mental processes are implemented
in the human brain, but they also raise new challenges.
Mental Processes in the Human Brain provides an integrative
overview of the rapid advances and future challenges in
understanding the neurobiological basis of mental processes that
are characteristically (and in some cases, perhaps uniquely) human,
including: language; thought; understanding of others; attention;
planning and decision-making; emotion; memory; prediction; and
awareness itself. It also presents the latest insights into how
these various processes can break down after brain injury. With
chapters from some of leading figures in the brain sciences, this
book will be essential for all those in the cognitive and brain
sciences.
This volume comprises nine lively and insightful essays by leading
scholars on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, focusing mainly
on his early work. The essays are written from a range of
perspectives and do not belong to any one exegetical school; they
approach Wittgenstein's work directly, seeking to understand it in
its own terms and by reference to the context in which it was
produced. The contributors cover a wide range of aspects of
Wittgenstein's early philosophy, but three central themes emerge:
the relationship between Wittgenstein's account of representation
and Russell's theories of judgment; the role of objects in the
tractarian system; and Wittgenstein's philosophical method.
Collectively, the essays demonstrate how progress in the
understanding of Wittgenstein's work is not to be made by focusing
on overarching, ideological issues, but by paying close attention
to his engagement with specific philosophical problems.
Aristotle's De Anima has a claim to be the first systematic
treatment of issues in the philosophy of mind, and also to be one
of the greatest works on the subject. This volume provides an
accurate translation of Books II and III, together with some
sections of Book I; particular attention has been given to the
translation of difficult terms, to help the student of philosophy
who does not know Greek. A brief Introduction discusses Aristotle's
approach to his subject, while the Notes provide a continuous
philosophical commentary on the text. Since the original
publication of this volume, Aristotle's philosophy of mind has been
the focus of lively scholarly debate; for this revised edition,
Christopher Shields has added a substantial review of this recent
work, together with a new bibliography.
"An Essay toward the Other" considers the three fundamental
verities of the human experience-the True, the Good, and the
Beautiful-and presents three arguments, one from the domain of each
verity, in support of theism and in opposition to materialism. "The
True" is the way things are. "The Good" is that which contributes
to the happiness of the individual and the group. "The Beautiful"
is an indefinable quality that evokes a pleasing and enjoyable
inner experience. The verities derive from a Divine source and
point toward that Divine source, thus the opening sentence, "From
the One, three; from the three, One." While the verities are part
of the human experience, their source and their vision transcend
our realm. They are of God. The author accepts the classical view
that all human intention, however flawed and misguided, looks to a
final good. That final good we call happiness, and insofar as our
aims and ways are shaped and guided by the True, the Good, and the
Beautiful, we are drawn toward happiness.
|
You may like...
Kant's Thinker
Patricia Kitcher
Hardcover
R3,144
Discovery Miles 31 440
|