Sudduth provides a critical exploration of classical empirical arguments for survival arguments that purport to show that data collected from ostensibly paranormal phenomena constitute good evidence for the survival of the self after death. Utilizing the conceptual tools of formal epistemology, he argues that classical arguments are unsuccessful.

Aristotle's Topics is a handbook for dialectic, which can be understood as a philosophical debate between a questioner and a respondent. In book 2, Aristotle mainly develops strategies for making deductions about 'accidents', which are properties that might or might not belong to a subject (for instance, Socrates has five fingers, but might have had six), and about properties that simply belong to a subject without further specification. In the present commentary, here translated into English for the first time, Alexander develops a careful study of Aristotle's text. He preserves objections and replies from other philosophers whose work is now lost, such as the Stoics. He also offers an invaluable picture of the tradition of Aristotelian logic down to his time, including innovative attempts to unify Aristotle's guidance for dialectic with his general theory of deductive argument (the syllogism), found in the Analytics. The work will be of interest not only for its perspective on ancient logic, rhetoric, and debate, but also for its continuing influence on argument in the Middle Ages and later.

Commonsense Consequentialism is a book about morality, rationality, and the interconnections between the two. In it, Douglas W. Portmore defends a version of consequentialism that both comports with our commonsense moral intuitions and shares with other consequentialist theories the same compelling teleological conception of practical reasons.
Broadly construed, consequentialism is the view that an act's deontic status is determined by how its outcome ranks relative to those of the available alternatives on some evaluative ranking. Portmore argues that outcomes should be ranked, not according to their impersonal value, but according to how much reason the relevant agent has to desire that each outcome obtains and that, when outcomes are ranked in this way, we arrive at a version of consequentialism that can better account for our commonsense moral intuitions than even many forms of deontology can. What's more, Portmore argues that we should accept this version of consequentialism, because we should accept both that an agent can be morally required to do only what she has most reason to do and that what she has most reason to do is to perform the act that would produce the outcome that she has most reason to want to obtain.
Although the primary aim of the book is to defend a particular moral theory (viz., commonsense consequentialism), Portmore defends this theory as part of a coherent whole concerning our commonsense views about the nature and substance of both morality and rationality. Thus, it will be of interest not only to those working on consequentialism and other areas of normative ethics, but also to those working in metaethics. Beyond offering an account of morality, Portmore offers accounts of practical reasons, practical rationality, and the objective/subjective obligation distinction.

Properties and objects are everywhere. We cannot take a step without walking into them; we cannot construct a theory in science without referring to them. Given their ubiquitous character, one might think that there would be a standard metaphysical account of properties and objects, but they remain a philosophical mystery. Douglas Ehring presents a defense of tropes--properties and relations understood as particulars--and of trope bundle theory as the best accounts of properties and objects, and advocates a specific brand of trope nominalism, Natural Class Trope Nominalism. This position rejects the existence of universals, and holds that the nature of each individual trope is determined by its membership in various natural classes of tropes (in contrast with the view that a trope's nature is logically prior to those class memberships).
The first part of the book provides a general introduction and defense of tropes and trope bundle theory. Ehring demonstrates that there are tropes and indicates some of the things that tropes can do for us metaphysically, including helping to solve the problems of mental causation, while remaining neutral between different theories of tropes. In the second part he offers a more specific defense of Natural Class Trope Nominalism, and provides a full analysis of what a trope is.

DeLancey shows that our best philosophical and scientific understanding of the emotions provides essential insights on key questions in the philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence. This is the first such book to offer this perspective. Passionate Engines also provides a bold new approach to the study of the mind based on the latest scientific research and along the way, provides an accessible overview of the science of emotion, with minimal jargon and explanation of the technical issues that arise. It is accessible to a wide range of readers, including philosophers, psychologists, computer scientists, and others in disciplines touching on cognitive science.

Leading philosopher Richard Wollheim recruits into service the insights of literature and of psychoanalysis, as well as of philosophy, in this rich and thought-provoking account of the emotions. Starting from the premise that emotions form a distinct psychological category, Wollheim argues that they are-like beliefs and desires-dispositions or underlying forces in the mind that erupt from time to time into the stream of consciousness. However, to assimilate emotions to beliefs or to desires or to some combination of the two is quite wrong. Emotions are attitudes or orientations to the world, says the author, and in this regard they are naturally associated with the imagination. The book considers what emotions are, how they arise in our lives, and how standard and "moral" emotions differ. Wollheim writes within the analytic tradition, yet decisively abandons a number of assumptions associated with that tradition and instead develops what he calls the psychologization, or repsychologization, of the emotions. Addressing repsychologization of the mind and its contents as a major theme, the author offers sustained discussion of the opinions of Sartre, William James, Freud, Melanie Klein, Stendhal, Montaigne, and Bertrand Russell.

Nondescriptive Meaning and Reference extends Wayne Davis's groundbreaking work on the foundations of semantics. Davis revives the classical doctrine that meaning consists in the expression of ideas, and advances the expression theory by showing how it can account for standard proper names, and the distinctive way their meaning determines their reference. He also shows how the theory can handle interjections, syncategorematic terms, conventional implicatures, and other cases long seen as difficult for both ideational and referential theories. The expression theory is founded on the fact that thoughts are event types with a constituent structure, and that thinking is a fundamental propositional attitude, distinct from belief and desire. Thought parts ('ideas' or 'concepts') are distinguished from both sensory images and conceptions. Word meaning is defined recursively: sentences and other complex expressions mean what they do in virtue of what thought parts their component words express and what thought structure the linguistic structure expresses; and unstructured words mean what they do in living languages in virtue of evolving conventions to use them to express ideas. The difficulties of descriptivism show that the ideas expressed by names are atomic or basic. The reference of a name is the extension of the idea it expresses, which is determined not by causal relations, but by its identity or content together with the nature of objects in the world. Hence a name's reference is dependent on, but not identical to, its meaning. A name is directly and rigidly referential because the extension of the idea it expresses is not determined by the extensions of component ideas. The expression theory thus has the strength of Fregeanism without its descriptivist bias, and of Millianism without its referentialist or causalist shortcomings. The referential properties of ideas can be set out recursively by providing a generative theory of ideas, assigning extensions to atomic ideas, and formulating rules whereby the semantic value of a complex idea is determined by the semantic values of its components. Davis also shows how referential properties can be treated using situation semantics and possible worlds semantics. The key is to drop the assumption that the values of intension functions are the referents of the words whose meaning they represent, and to abandon the necessity of identity for logical modalities. Many other pillars of contemporary philosophical semantics, such as the twin earth arguments, are shown to be unfounded.

The ways in which human action and rationality are guided by norms are well documented in philosophy and neighboring disciplines. But how do norms shape the way we experience the world perceptually? The present volume explores this question and investigates the specific normativity inherent to perception.

Some time around their first birthday, children begin to engage in "triadic" interactions, i.e. interactions with adults that turn specifically on both child and adult jointly attending to an object in their surroundings. Recognized as a developmental milestone amongst psychologists for some time, joint attention has recently also started to attract the attention of philosophers. This volume brings together, for the first time, psychological and philosophical perspectives on the nature and significance of joint attention. Original contributions by leading researchers in both disciplines explore the idea that joint attention has a key foundational role to play in the emergence of communicative abilities, psychological understanding, and, possibly, in the very capacity for objective thought.
Contributors:
Dare Baldwin, Josep Call, John Campbell, Naomi Eilan, Fabio Franco, Juan-Carlos Gomez, Jane Heal, R. Peter Hobson, Christoph Hoerl, Sue Leekam, Teresa McCormack, Christopher Peacocke, Vasudevi Reddy, Johannes Roessler, Mark A. Sabbagh, Michael Tomasello, Amanda L. Woodward.

Sir Geoffrey Lloyd presents a cross-disciplinary study of the problems posed by the unity and diversity of the human mind. On the one hand, as humans we all share broadly the same anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and certain psychological capabilities -- the capacity to learn a language, for instance. On the other, different individuals and groups have very different talents, tastes, and beliefs, for instance about how they see themselves, other humans and the world around them. These issues are highly charged, for any denial of psychic unity savors of racism, while many assertions of psychic diversity raise the specters of arbitrary relativism, the incommensurability of beliefs systems and their mutual unintelligibility.
Lloyd surveys a fascinating range of subjects, examining where different types of arguments, scientific, philosophical, anthropological and historical can take us. He discusses color perception, spatial cognition, animal and plant taxonomy, the emotions, ideas of health and well-being, concepts of the self, agency and causation, varying perceptions of the distinction between nature and culture, and reasoning itself. To avoid the pitfalls of misleading dichotomies (especially between cross-cultural universalism and cultural relativism) he pays due attention to the multidimensionality of the phenomena to be apprehended and to the diversity of manners, or styles, of apprehending them. The weight to be given to different factors, physical, biological, psychological, cultural, ideological, varies as between different subject-areas and sometimes even within a single area. He uses recent work in social anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, neurophysiology, andthe history of ideas to redefine the problems and clarify how our evident psychic diversity can be reconciled with our shared humanity.

Richard Holton provides a unified account of intention, choice, weakness of will, strength of will, temptation, addiction, and freedom of the will. Drawing on recent psychological research, he argues that, rather than being the pinnacle of rationality, the central components of the will are there to compensate for our inability to make or maintain sound judgments. Choice is understood as the capacity to form intentions even in the absence of judgments of what action is best. Weakness of will is understood as the failure to maintain an intention, or more specifically, a resolution, in the face of temptation--where temptation typically involves a shift in judgment as to what is best, or in the case of addiction, a disconnection between what is judged best and what is desired. Strength of will is the corresponding ability to maintain a resolution, an ability that requires the employment of a particular faculty or skill. Finally, the experience of freedom of the will is traced to the experiences of forming intentions, and of maintaining resolutions, both of which require effortful activity from the agent.

This collection is devoted to Gilbert Ryle's philosophy of mind and language. It features essays from prominent scholars on the topics of category mistakes, hypotheticals, dispositions, emotion, thinking, perception, and the task-achievement distinction.

Christopher Norris argues for and constructs a new approach to philosophy of mind that combines naturalistic and rationalist perspectives usually thought to be at odds. "Re-Thinking the Cogito" seeks to combine a strongly naturalistic with a distinctively rationalist perspective on some nowadays much-discussed issues in philosophy of mind. Against the common view that they involve downright incompatible conceptions of mind, knowledge and ethics it seeks to unite a naturalism that draws on recent advances in neurophysiology and cognitive science with an outlook that gives full weight to those normative values at the heart of rationalist thought. True to the book's constructive spirit, Norris offers various detailed proposals for bringing the two approaches into a mutually enhancing - though also mutually provocative - relationship. He finds that claim strikingly prefigured in Spinoza's working-out of a non-reductive yet metaphysically uncompromising mind/body monism. Moreover he suggests how a thoroughly naturalised approach might yet become a locus of productive engagement with the work of an ultra-rationalist thinker such as Alain Badiou. Thus Norris puts the case that physically embodied human thought has cognitive, intellectual and creative powers that cannot and need not be accounted for in terms of conscious (let alone self-conscious) reflection. "Continuum Studies in Philosophy" presents cutting-edge scholarship in all the major areas of research and study. The wholly original arguments, perspectives and research findings in titles in this series make it an important and stimulating resource for students and academics from a range of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences.

Pierre Janet (1859 - 1947) is considered to be one of the founders of psychology, and pioneered in the disciplines of psychology, philosophy and psychotherapy. Janet's most crucial research, particularly in the subjects of 'dissociation' and 'subconscious' - terms coined by him - is explored in this book, first published in 1952. As Janet did not publish much in English, these notes provide guidance on such areas of study as hysteria and hypnosis, obsessive thinking and the psychology of adaption. Elton Mayo's comprehensive collection is an important guide for any student with an interest in the history of psychology, psychopathology and social study, and Janet's revolutionary work in the field.

This book reviews some of the most important scientific and philosophical theories concerning the nature of mind and consciousness. Current theories on the mind-body problem and the neural correlates of consciousness are presented through a series of biographical sketches of the most influential thinkers across the fields of philosophy of mind, psychology and neuroscience. The book is divided into two parts: the first is dedicated to philosophers of mind and the second, to neuroscientists/experimental psychologists. Each part comprises twenty short chapters, with each chapter being dedicated to one author. A brief introduction is given on his or her life and most important works and influences. The most influential theory/ies developed by each author are then carefully explained and examined with the aim of scrutinizing the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches to the nature of consciousness.

This volume examines two main questions: What is linguistics about? And how do the results of linguistic theorizing bear on inquiry in related fields, particularly in psychology? The book develops views that depart from received wisdom in both philosophy and linguistics. With regard to questions concerning the subject matter, methodological goals, and ontological commitments of formal syntactic theorizing, it argues that the cognitive conception adopted by most linguists and philosophers is not the only acceptable view, and that the arguments in its favor collapse under scrutiny. Nevertheless, as the book shows, a detailed examination of the relevant psycholinguistic results and computational models does support the claim that the theoretical constructs of formal linguistics are operative in real-time language comprehension. These constructs fall into two categories: mental phrase markers and mental syntactic principles. Both are indeed psychologically real, but in importantly different ways. The book concludes by drawing attention to the importance of the often-elided distinction between personal and subpersonal psychological states and processes, as well as the logical character of dispositional and occurrent states. By clarifying these concepts, particularly by reference to up-and-running psychological and computational models, the book yields a richer and more satisfying perspective on the psychological reality of language.

Some things in the world-intentional items such as words, thoughts, portraits, and passport photos-are about things, whereas other things in the world-sticks, stones, and fireflies-are not about anything. Necessary Intentionality is a study of aboutness, or intentionality, with a focus on the following question: are intentional items typically about whatever they are about as a matter of necessity, or is their aboutness, rather, a matter of mere contingency? Consider, for example, a particular name referring to a particular person, or a specific belief with respect to some particular thing that it is such and so. Is it possible for the name not to have referred to the person and for the belief not to have been about the thing? Ori Simchen defends a negative answer to such questions. That the name refers to the person is necessary for the name and that the belief is about the thing is necessary for the belief. Simchen articulates his overall position in two main stages. In the first stage he fleshes out a requisite modal metaphysical background. In the second stage he brings the modal metaphysics to bear on cognition, specifically the aboutness of cognitive states and episodes. Simchen presents a productivist approach, which takes aboutness to be determined by the conditions of production of intentional items, rather than an interpretationist approach that takes aboutness to be determined by conditions of consumption of such items.

In Life's Values Alan H. Goldman seeks to explain what is of ultimate value in individual lives. The proposed candidates include pleasure, happiness, meaning, and well-being. Only the latter is the all-inclusive category of personal value, and it consists in the satisfaction of deep rational desires. Since individuals' rational desires differ, the book cannot dictate what will maximize your own well-being and what in particular you ought to pursue. However it can tell you to make your desires rational (that is, informed and coherent) and it can also explain the nature of these states that typically enter into well-being: pleasure, happiness, and meaning being typically partial causes as well as effects of well-being. All are by-products of satisfying rational desires and rarely successfully aimed at directly. Pleasure comes in sensory, intentional, and pure feeling forms, each with an opposite in pain or distress. Happiness in its primary sense is an emotion, not a constant state as some philosophers assume, and in secondary senses a mood (disposition to have an emotion) or temperament (disposition to be in a mood). Meaning in life is a matter of events in one's life fitting into intelligible narratives. Events in narratives are understood teleologically as well as causally, in terms of outcomes aimed at as well antecedent events. So, in the briefest terms, this book distinguishes and relates pleasure, happiness, well-being, and meaning, and relates each to motivation and value.

This book proposes an applied epistemological framework for investigating science, social cognition and religious thinking based on inferential patterns that recur in the different domains. It presents human rationality as a tool that allows us to make sense of our (physical or social) surroundings. It shows that the resulting cognitive activity produces a broad spectrum of outputs, such as scientific models and experimentation, gossip and social networks, but also ancient and contemporary deities. The book consists of three parts, the first of which addresses scientific modeling and experimentation, and their application to the analysis of scientific rationality. Thus, this part continues the tradition of eco-cognitive epistemology and abduction studies. The second part deals with the relationship between social cognition and cognitive niche construction, i.e. the evolutionarily relevant externalization of knowledge onto the environment, while the third part focuses on what is commonly defined as "irrational", thus being in a way dialectically opposed to the first part. Here, the author demonstrates that the "irrational" can be analyzed by applying the same epistemological approach used to study scientific rationality and social cognition; also in this case, we see the emergence of patterns of rationality that regulate the relationships between agents and their environment. All in all, the book offers a coherent and unitary account of human rationality, providing a basis for new conceptual connections and theoretical speculations.

This is the 11th volume in the New Directions in Cognitive Science Series (formerly Vancover Studies in Cognitive Science). It addresses common sense, reasoning, and rationality, currently areas of considerable interdisciplinary interest and importance. While common sense and rationality have often been viewed as two distinct features in a unified cognitive map, this interdisciplinary volume - including essays from an outstanding group of established scholars - engages with this notion and comes up with novel and often paradoxical views of this relationship. It should appeal to philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and computer scientists interested in considering what constitutes human rationality, behaviour, and intelligence. This groundbreaking collection is at the forefront of Cognitive Science research, and promises to be of unprecedented influence across disciplines.