This interdisciplinary volume brings together specialists from different backgrounds to deliver expert views on the relationship between morality and emotion, putting a special emphasis on issues related to emotional shocks. One of the distinctive aspects of social existence today is our subjection to traumatic events on a global scale, and our subsequent embodiment of the emotional responses these events provoke. Covering various methodological angles, the contributors ensure careful and heterogeneous reflection on this delicate topic. With eleven original essays, the collection spans a wide variety of fields from philosophy and literary theory, to the visual arts, history, and psychology. The authors cover diverse themes, including philosophical approaches to political polarization; the impact of negative emotions such as anger on inter-relational balance; humour and politics; media and the idea of progress; photography and trauma discourse; democratic morality in modern Indian society; emotional olfactory experiences; phenomenological readings of spatial disorientation, and the significance of moral shocks. This timely volume offers crucial perspectives on contemporary questions relating to ethical behaviours, and the challenges of a globalized society on the verge of political, financial and emotional collapse.

This book examines how Western behavioral science--which has generally focused on negative aspects of human nature--holds up to cross-cultural scrutiny, in particular the Tibetan Buddhist celebration of the human potential for altruism, empathy, and compassion. Resulting from a meeting between the Dalai Lama, leading Western scholars, and a group of Tibetan monks, this volume includes excerpts from these extraordinary dialogues as well as engaging essays exploring points of difference and overlap between the two perspectives.

This volume contains a set of state-of-the-art essays by younger philosophers on various topics in the philosophy of action. Some of the essays are about the metaphysics of action and agency; some consider the nature of autonomy and free agency; some explore conceptual and normative issues, some draw on data from psychology and psychopathology. But what all of them have in common is that they address some problem related to our existence as human agents. The range of topics covered is this collection is broad. This is intentional. Rather than focus on one narrow topic in the philosophy of action, this volume brings together papers that, taken together, introduce readers to some key debates in contemporary philosophy of action. Readers new to the field should come away from the volume with a good sense of the state-of-the-art with respect to current thinking about human action and agency. For their part, established researchers in the field will find the essays to be original contributions that substantially advance many debates about action and agency.

Four-Dimensionalism defends the thesis that the material world is composed of temporal as well as spatial parts. Along the way many topics concerning the metaphysics of time and identity over time are addressed. These include the status of past and future objects, the nature of motion and change, the existence of composite objects, and examples involving two things in the same place at the same time (such as statues and lumps of clay). An original and highly readable study of the metaphysics of time and identity.

The present book intends to approach the problem of mind, meaning and consciousness from a non-naturalist or transcendental point of view. The naturalization of consciousness has reached a dead-end. There can be no proper solution to the problem of mind within the naturalist framework. This work intends to reverse this trend and bring back the long neglected transcendental theory laid down by Kant and Husserl in the West and Vedanta and Buddhism in India. The novelty of this approach lies in how we can make an autonomous space for mind and meaning without denying its connection with the world. The transcendental theory does not disown the embodied nature of consciousness, but goes beyond the body in search of higher meanings and values. The scope of this work extends from mind and consciousness to the world and brings the world into the space of mind and meaning with a hope to enchant the world. The world needs to be retrieved from the stranglehold of scientism and naturalism. This book will dispel the illusion about naturalism which has gripped the minds of our generation. The researchers interested in the philosophy of mind and consciousness can benefit from this work.

This book defends a novel view of mental representation-of how, as thinkers, we represent the world as being. The book serves as a response to two problems in the philosophy of mind. One is the problem of first-personal, or egocentric, belief: how can we have truly first personal beliefs-beliefs in which we think about ourselves as ourselves-given that beliefs are supposed to be attitudes towards propositions and that propositions are supposed to have their truth values independent of a perspective? The other problem is how we can think about nonexistents (e.g., Santa Claus) given the widespread view that thought essentially involves a relation between a thinker and whatever is being thought about. The standard responses to this puzzle are either to deny that thought is essentially relational or to insist that it is possible to stand in relations to nonexistents. This book offers an error theory to the problem. The responses from this book arise from the same commitment: a commitment to treating talk of propositions-as the things towards which our beliefs are attitudes-as talk of entities that actually exist and that play a constitutive and explanatory role in the activity of thought.

What are beliefs and what roles do they play in our behavioral and cognitive economies? Those questions are central issues not only for epistemology, but also for philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and philosophy of religion, to mention only a few fields. The authors in this volume of specially commissioned essays address them from a variety of perspectives, drawing on important classical and contemporary work on mental content, the nature of intentionality, the psychology of delusions, the role of character traits, the moral status of doxastic attitudes, and a range of other topics.

Written in a provocative, witty, and highly accessible style, this is not only a splendid general introduction to the central questions of consciousness and brain science, but also an answer to some of them. The author -- noted Glaswegian chemist A.G. Cairns-Smith -- believes our feelings and sensations are not simply alternative descriptions of neural events but have themselves evolved and have physical effects in the brain as well as physical causes. Secrets of the Mind portrays a vision of the world as it may come to be seen by a future science. Sand, sea water, air, and the atoms from which such materials are made are now well understood by science, but the same can not be said of our personal feelings, our sensations and emotions. Science tells us that these too must be forms of quantum energy if they evolved, yet is only now beginning to explain how.

In exploring whether our neuroscientific discoveries are consistent with the idea we are voluntary agents, "Human Agency and Neural Causes" presents a neuroscientifically-informed emergentist account of human agency.
In contrast with the assumptions that currently shape neuropsychological research on voluntary agency, J.D. Runyan presents a broadly-conceived Aristotelian account of voluntary agency grounded in our everyday thought about our conduct. In the process, some new concerns are raised for compatibilist theories of free will, as well as for reductive neuroscientific theory. This book argues that what contemporary neuroscience reveals is along the lines of what we should expect if we are, in fact, voluntary agents. At the same time, upholding the idea that we are voluntary agents will require profound and controversial changes in the way we interpret our neuroscientific findings.

In this innovative work, Moulyn examines some of the most fundamental questions arising from human experience: Why do we feel and behave as if mind and body are separate entities? What is the actual relationship between them? Dissatisfied with the common philosophic view that categorically separates body and mind by placing one in space and the other in time, he proposes an objective and subjective timespace to explain mind-body interaction and create a basis for unity and inner harmony. Choosing a point at which body and mind intersect, the author focuses on the neuromuscular and psychological nature of movement and distinguishes between two kinds of movement: mechanical and purpose-striving. He places mechanical movement in objective timespace while purposeful movement, which is linked to mental activity, he assigns to subjective timespace. This schema is used to explore a range of physical/psychological phenomena, including the reasons for the human tendency to separate mind from body and time and space; the implications of human foreknowledge of death; the evolutionary development of body-mind interaction; mental processes; the concepts of self, ego, and soul; and the question of creativity. Providing a new perspective on a fundamental human dilemma, this work is relevant to studies and classes in neurophysiology, philosophy, humanism, and the philosophy of science.

The general aim of this volume is to investigate the nature of the relation between pictorial experience and aesthetic appreciation. In particular, it is concerned with the character and intimacy of this relationship: is there a mere causal connection between pictorial experience and aesthetic appreciation, or are the two relata constitutively associated with one another? The essays in the book's first section investigate important conceptual issues related to the pictorial experience of paintings. In Section II, the essays discuss the notion of styles, techniques, agency, and facture, and also take into account the experience of photographic and cinematic pictures. The Pleasure of Pictures goes substantially beyond current debates in the philosophy of depiction to launch a new area of reflection in philosophical aesthetics.

In this collection of original papers, leading international authorities turn their attention to one of the most important questions in theoretical philosophy: what is truth? To arrive at an answer, two further questions need to be addressed in this context: 1) Does truth possess any essence, any inner nature? and 2) If so, what does this nature consist of? The present discussion focuses on the antagonism between substantial or robust theories of truth, with correspondence theory taking the lead, and deflationist or minimalist views, which have been commanding an increasing amount of attention in recent years. Whereas substantial theories proceed from the premise that truth has an essence, and that therefore the objective is to discover this essence, the challenge presented by deflationism is to dispense with this very premise.

There are three themed parts to this book: values, ethics and emotions in the first part, epistemology, perception and consciousness in the second part and philosophy of mind and philosophy of language in the third part. Papers in this volume provide links between emotions and values and explore dependency between language, meanings and concepts and topics such as the liar s paradox, reference and metaphor are examined.

This book is the second of a two-volume set that originates in papers presented to Professor Kevin Mulligan, covering the subjects that he contributed to during his career. This volume opens with a paper by Moya, who proposes that there is an asymmetrical relation between the possibility of choice and moral responsibility. The first part of this volume ends with a description of foolishness as insensitivity to the values of knowledge, by Engel. Marconi s article makes three negative claims about relative truth and Sundholm notes shortcomings of the English language for epistemology, amongst other papers. This section ends with a discussion of the term subjective character by Nida-Rumelin, who finds it misleading.

The third part of this volume contains papers exploring topics such as the mind-body problem, whether theory of mind is based on simulation or theory and Kunne shows that the most common analyses of the so-called 'Liar' paradox are wanting. At the end of this section, Rizzi introduces syntactic cartography and illustrates its use in scope-discourse semantics.

This second volume contains twenty nine chapters, written by both high profile and upcoming researchers from across Europe, North America and North Africa.

The first volume of this set has two main themes: metaphysics, especially truth-making and the notion of explanation and the second theme is the history of philosophy with an emphasis on Austrian philosophy."

Sensing Sacred is an edited volume that explores the critical intersection of "religion" and "body" through the religious lens of practical theology, with an emphasis on sensation as the embodied means in which human beings know themselves, others, and the divine in the world. The manuscript argues that all human interaction and practice, including religious praxis, engages "body" through at least one of the human senses (touch, smell, hearing, taste, sight, kinestics/proprioception). Unfortunately, body-and, more specifically and ironically, sensation-is eclipsed in contemporary academic scholarship that is inherently bent toward the realm of theory and ideas. This is unfortunate because it neglects bodies, physical or communal, as the repository and generator of culturally conditioned ideas and theory. It is ironic because all knowledge transmission minimally requires several senses including sight, touch, and hearing. Sensing Sacred is organized into two parts. The first section devotes a chapter to each human sense as an avenue of accessing religious experience; while the second section explores religious practices as they specifically focus on one or more senses. The overarching aim of the volume is to explicitly highlight each sense and utilize the theoretical lenses of practical theology to bring to vivid life the connections between essential sensation and religious thinking and practice.

<I>Critical Discursive Psychology</I> addresses issues in critical discursive research in psychology, and outlines the historical context in the discipline for the emergence of qualitative debates. Key critical theoretical resources are described and assessed and a series of polemics is staged that brings together writers who have helped shape critical work in psychology. It also sets out methodological steps for critical readings of texts and arguments for the role of psychoanalytic theory in qualitative research.

Topophobia: A Phenomenology of Anxiety is a vivid second-person inquiry into how anxiety plays a formative part in the constitution of subjectivity. While anxiety has assumed a central role in the history of philosophy - and phenomenology in particular - until now there has been no sustained study of how it shapes our sense of self and being in the world. This book seeks to address that lacuna. Calling upon the author's own experience of being agoraphobic, it asks a series of critical questions: How is our experience of the world affected by our bodily experience of others? What role do moods play in shaping our experience of the world? How can we understand the role of conditions such as agoraphobia in relation to our normative understanding of the body and the environment? What is the relation between anxiety and home? The reader will gain an insight into the strange experience of being unable to cross a bridge, get on a bus, and enter a supermarket without tremendous anxiety. At the same time, they will discover aspects of their own bodily experience that are common to both agoraphobes and non-agoraphobes alike. Integrating phenomenological inquiry with current issues in the philosophy of mind, Trigg arrives at a renewed understanding of identity, which arranges self, other and world as a unified whole. Written with a sense of vividness often lacking in academic discourse, this is living philosophy.

Rooted in Gricean tradition, this book concentrates on game- and decision-theoretic (GDT) approaches to the foundations of pragmatics. An introduction to GDT, an overview of GDT pragmatics research to date, its relation to semantics and to Gricean pragmatics are followed by contributions offering a high-level survey of current GDT pragmatics and the field of its applications, demonstrating that this approach provides a sound basis for synchronic and diachronic explanations of language use.

A wide-ranging reading of Freud's work, this book focuses on Freud's scientifically discredited ideas about inherited memory in relation both to poststructuralist debates about mourning, and to certain uncanny figurative traits in his writing. "Freud's Memory" argues for an enriched understanding of the strangenesses in Freud rather than any denunciation of psychoanalysis as a bogus explanatory method.

This is the first introductory textbook of its kind devoted to philosophy of psychiatry, offering a thorough and accessible investigation of the conceptual and philosophical problems at the heart of psychiatric practice and research. While it applies some of the long-standing concerns of philosophy to the mental health professions, it also investigates philosophical problems and issues that have arisen more recently from careful examination of psychiatric phenomena. Divided into two parts, Philosophy of Psychiatric Practice and Research and Philosophy and Psychopathology, the book's 12 chapters cover topics like the ontological status of mental illness, philosophical issues in diagnosis, the role of culture in psychiatry and the relationship between mental illness and personal identity, as well as explore foundational problems in studying well-known psychopathologies like schizophrenia, depression and addiction. All chapters include initial overviews and concluding summaries and a list of suggested readings. Key Features Two-part structure - divided between (1) philosophy of psychiatric practice and research, and (2) philosophy and psychopathology - presents a clear, yet distinctive picture of the field Offers a unified style and vision throughout, with easy-to-follow segues from chapter to chapter Pedagogical features include chapter overviews and summaries, discussion questions and sections for further reading

Descartes made a sharp distinction between matter and mind. But he also thought that the two interact with one another. Is such interaction possible, however, without either a materialist reduction of mind to matter or an idealist (phenomenalist) reduction of matter to mind? These questions overshadow the Western tradition in metaphysics from the time of Descartes to present times. The book makes an effort to stay clear of reductivist views of the two Cartesian substances. It defends a dualistic psycho-physical parallel theory which reconciles freedom of action with determinism in nature. Basic problems in perception theory are also discussed, with special emphasis on hearing and sound. Because of the intrinsic interest of the subject and the author's non-technical presentation of it, the book should appeal to all readers with a serious interest in philosophy and psychology.

This book introduces the reader to Whitehead's complex and often misunderstood metaphysics by showing that it deals with questions about the nature of causation originally raised by the philosophy of Leibniz. Whitehead's philosophy is an attempt at rehabilitating Leibniz's theory of monads by recasting it in terms of novel ontological categories.