Jan De Vos starts where other critiques on psychology end, presenting the argument that psychology is psychologization.This fresh and pioneering approach asks what it means to become the psychologist of one's own life. If something is not working in our education, in our marriage, in our work and in society in general we turn to the psy-sciences. But is the latter's paradigm precisely not relying on feeding psychological theories into the field of research and action?This book traces psychologization from the Enlightenment to Late-Modernity, engaging with seminal thinkers such as La Mettrie, Husserl, Lasch and Agamben, whereby Jan De Vos teases out the possibilities and the limits of using psychoanalytic theory as a critical tool. Offering challenging and thought-provoking insights into how the modern human came to adopt a psychological gaze on itself and the world, this book will appeal to psychologists, sociologists and studies of culture.

Following Nietzsche's call for a "philosopher-physician" and his own use of the bodily language of "health" and "illness" as tools to diagnose the ailments of the body politic, this book offers a reconstruction of the concept of "political physiology" in Nietzsche's thought, bridging gaps between Anglo-American, German and French schools of interpretation.

Will, Imagination, and Reason sets forth a new understanding of reality and knowledge with far-reaching implications for the study of man and society. Employing a systematic approach, Claes Ryn goes to the philosophical depths to rethink and reconstitute the epistemology of the humanities and social sciences. He shows that will and imagination, together, constitute our basic outlook on life and that reason derives its material and general orientation from the interaction between them.

The imaginative master-minds--novelists, poets, composers, painters, and others--powerfully affect the sensibility and direction of society. Sometimes a distorting, self-serving willfulness at the base of their visions draws civilization, including reason, into dangerous illusion. More penetrating and balanced vision and rationality spring from a different quality of will. Ryn explains the kind of interplay between will, imagination, and reason that is conducive to a deepened sense of reality and to intellectual understanding. He argues that human life and self-knowledge are inescapably historical. In developing his dialectical view of intellect, he draws from Irving Babbitt, Benedetto Croce, and other philosophers to refute positivistic, formalistic, and ahistorical theories of knowledge and to develop his alternative.

Advancing a systematic epistemological argument, Ryn throws much new light on the nature of reason but also on central issues of ethics and aesthetics. This trenchant and original work is indispensable to philosophers, social, political and cultural theorists, literary scholars, and historians.

This volume describes and analyzes in a systematic way the great contributions of the philosopher Krister Segerberg to the study of real and doxastic actions. Following an introduction which functions as a roadmap to Segerberg's works on actions, the first part of the book covers relations between actions, intentions and routines, dynamic logic as a theory of action, agency, and deontic logics built upon the logics of actions. The second section explores belief revision and update, iterated and irrevocable beliefs change, dynamic doxastic logic and hypertheories. Segerberg has worked for more than thirty years to analyze the intricacies of real and doxastic actions using formal tools - mostly modal (dynamic) logic and its semantics. He has had such a significant impact on modal logic that "It is hard to roam for long in modal logic without finding Krister Segerberg's traces," as Johan van Benthem notes in his chapter of this book.

This is the most detailed, sophisticated and comprehensive treatment of autonomy currently available. Moreover it argues for a quite different conception of autonomy from that found in the philosophical literature. Professor Berofsky claims that the idea of autonomy as origination in the self is a seductive but ultimately illusory one. The only serious way of approaching the subject is to pay due attention to psychology, and to view autonomy as the liberation from the disabling effects of physiological and psychological afflictions.

This book challenges common debates in philosophy of mind by questioning the framework of placement problems in contemporary metaphysics. The author argues that placement problems arise when exactly one fundamental ontology serves as the base for all entities, and will propose a pluralist alternative that takes the diversity of our conceptual resources and ontologies seriously. This general pluralist account is applied to issues in philosophy of mind to argue that contemporary debates about the mind-body problem are built on this problematic framework of placement problems. The starting point is the plurality of ontologies in scientific practice. Not only can we describe the world in terms of physical, biological, or psychological ontologies, but any serious engagement with scientific ontologies will identify more specific ontologies in each domain. For example, there is not one unified ontology for biology, but rather a diversity of scientific specializations with different ontological needs. Based on this account of scientific practice the author argues that there is no reason to assume that ontological unification must be possible everywhere. Without this ideal, the scope of ontological unification turns out to be an open empirical question and there is no need to present unification failures as philosophically puzzling "placement problems".

From Descartes to Hume, philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries developed a dialectic of radically conflicting claims about the nature of the self. In the Paralogisms of The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant comes to terms with this dialectic, and with the character of the experiencing self. Powell seeks to elucidate these difficult texts, in part by applying to the Paralogisms insights drawn from Kant's Transcendental Deduction. His reading shows that the structure of the Paralogisms provides an essential key to understanding both Kant's critique of `rational psychology' and his theory of self-consciousness. As Kant realized, the ways in which we must represent ourselves to ourselves have import not only for epistemology, but for our view of persons and of our own immortality, and for moral philosophy as well. Kant's theory of self-consciousness is also shown to have implications for contemporary discussions of the problem of other minds, functionalism, and the problem of indexical self-reference.

Naturalism and Pragmatism offers reflections on the pragmatic tradition from a fresh perspective: that of a working neuroscientist. Though naturalism and evolution are not the only topics of discussions, they are important themes of the book. Both pragmatism and modern behavioral science grew up in the wake of Darwin's theory of evolution. Indeed it is impossible to imagine either without evolutionary theory and the more general nineteenth-century trend of naturalism from which modern evolutionary theory emerged. And yet, for a variety of reasons, these common origins have not ensured a close affinity between pragmatic philosophy and the behavioral sciences. Among the wide diversity of scientific theories of human cognition and its evolutionary origins, only a few are congenial to pragmatism in its original or classical' form, which embraces the full range of human experience

vii 1 ~OOUCTIONANOOVERVlliW 1 2 SEITING THE STAGE: PERSONAL IDENTITY ANO THE MErAPHYSICS OFMIND 1. Introduction 6 2. The Problem of Personal Identity over Time 7 3. The Psychological Criterion of Personal Identity over Time 12 4. The Neo-Lockean Psychological Criterion of Personal Identity 16 5. The Circularity Objection 19 6. Problems of Logical Form 21 7. The Lack of a Third-Person Criterion for Reidentification 23 8. The Unity of the Mental Bundle 25 9. The Individuation ofPersons 26 10. The Neo-Lockean Criterion and Physicalism: a 'Natural' Alliance 28 11. One 'Solution' to Five Problems 35 3 PARFIT'S REDUcrIO OF A SUBSTRATUM-ORIENTEO CONCEPfION OF PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTINUlTY 43 1. Introduction 2. Relation R 45 51 3. Relation R and the Neo-Lockian Paradigm 4. Psychological Atomism 56 61 5. The Central Place of Q-Memory in the Neo-Lockean Paradigm 64 6. The Trouble with Q-memory 74 7. Contents and Contexts. The Other Four Problems 79 8. Conclusions 4 A CON1ENT-ORIENTEO CONCEPTION OF PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTINUITY 82 1. Introduction 83 2. Two Kinds of Psychological Continuity 91 3. Levels of N-Continuity 93 4. The Unity of N-Continuous Sequences. The Role of the Body 105 5. N-Continuity and Psychological Connectedness 109 6. Summary vi 5 A PSYCHOLOGICAL CRI1ERION OF PERSONAL IDENTITY: THE AVE PROBLEMS REVISITED 1. Introduction 111 2. Circularity, Q-Memory, and N-Continuity 112 119 3. Narrativity and Logical Form 127 4. Third-Person Criteria of Reidentification: The Role of the Body 5.

This volume brings together new essays that consider Wittgenstein's treatment of the phenomenon of aspect perception in relation to the broader idea of conceptual novelty; that is, the acquisition or creation of new concepts, and the application of an acquired understanding in unfamiliar or novel situations. Over the last twenty years, aspect perception has received increasing philosophical attention, largely related to applying Wittgenstein's remarks on the phenomena of seeing-as, found in Part II of Philosophical Investigations (1953), to issues within philosophical aesthetics. Seeing-as, however, has come to occupy a broader conceptual category, particularly in philosophy of mind and philosophical psychology. The essays in this volume examine the exegetical issues arising within Wittgenstein studies, while also considering the broader utility and implications of the phenomenon of seeing-as in the fields of aesthetics, philosophical psychology, and philosophy of mathematics, with a thematic focus on questions of novelty and creativity. The collection constitutes a fruitful interpretative engagement with the later Wittgenstein, as well as a unique contribution to considerations of philosophical methodology.

Freud's Philosophy of the Unconscious is the only comprehensive, systematic study of Sigmund Freud's philosophy of mind. Freud emerges as a sophisticated philosopher who addresses many of the central questions that concern contemporary philosophers and cognitive scientists while anticipating many of their views. While still a student in Vienna, Freud was initiated into philosophy by Franz Brentano. The book charts Freud's intellectual development as he deals with the mind-body problem, the nature of consciousness, folk psychology versus scientific psychology, the relationship between language and thought, realism and antirealism in psychology, and the nature of unconscious mental events. The book also critically examines writings on Freud by Wittgenstein, Davidson, and Searle, demonstrating their weakness as interpretations and criticisms of Freud's position. Readership: Philosophers, cognitive scientists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and psychiatrists.

This book examines and explores Jacques Lacan's controversial topologisation of psychoanalysis, and seeks to persuade the reader that this enterprise was necessary and important. In providing both an introduction to a fundamental component of Lacan's theories, as well as readings of texts that have been largely ignored, it provides a thorough critical interpretation of his work. Will Greenshields argues that Lacan achieved his most pedagogically clear and successful presentations of his most essential and notoriously complex concepts - such as structure, the subject and the real - through the deployment of topology. The book will help readers to better understand Lacan, and also those concepts that have become prevalent in various intellectual discourses such as contemporary continental philosophy, politics and the study of ideology, and literary or cultural criticism.

We all seem to think that we do the acts we do because we consciously choose to do them. This commonsense view is thrown into dispute by Benjamin Libet's eyebrow-raising experiments, which seem to suggest that conscious will occurs not before but after the start of brain activity that produces physical action.
Libet's striking results are often claimed to undermine traditional views of free will and moral responsibility and to have practical implications for criminal justice. His work has also stimulated a flurry of further fascinating scientific research--including findings in psychology by Dan Wegner and in neuroscience by John-Dylan Haynes--that raises novel questions about whether conscious will plays any causal role in action. Critics respond that both commonsense views of action and traditional theories of moral and legal responsibility, as well as free will, can survive the scientific onslaught of Libet and his progeny. To further this lively debate, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Lynn Nadel have brought together prominent experts in neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and law to discuss whether our conscious choices really cause our actions, and what the answers to that question mean for how we view ourselves and how we should treat each other.

People act for reasons. That is how we understand ourselves. But what is it to act for a reason? This is what Fred Schueler investigates. He rejects the dominant view that the beliefs and desires that constitute our reasons for acting simply cause us to act as we do, and argues instead for a view centred on practical deliberation, our ability to evaluate the reasons we accept. Schueler's account of 'reasons explanations' emphasizes the relation between reasons and purposes, and the fact that the reasons for an action are not always good reasons.

In three volumes, a distinguished group of scholars from a variety of disciplines in the natural and social sciences, the humanities and the arts contribute essays in honor of Robert S. Cohen, on the occasion of his 70th birthday. The range of the essays, as well as their originality, and their critical and historical depth, pay tribute to the extraordinary scope of Professor Cohen's intellectual interests, as a scientist-philosopher and a humanist, and also to his engagement in the world of social and political practice. Science, Mind and Art, Volume III of Essays in honor of Robert S. Cohen focuses on issues in contemporary epistemology, aesthetics, and philosophy of mind as well as on the relations of science and human values in ethical and religious thought. It also has important new work in contemporary metaphysics, as well as in the history of philosophy, and on questions of multiculturalism in science education. Contributors include Paul Feyerabend, Adolf GrA1/4nbaum, Joseph Margolis, JoAlle Proust, Erazim Kohak, Elie Wiesel, Miriam Bienenstock, and John Silber, among others.

This book addresses a part of a problem. The problem is to determine the architecture of cognition, that is, the basic structures and mechanisms underlying cognitive processing. This is a multidimensional problem insofar as there appear to be many distinct types of mechanisms that interact in diverse ways during cognitive processing. Thus, we have memory, attention, learning, sensation, perception, and who knows what else, interacting to produce behavior. As a case in point, consider a bit of linguistic behavior. To tell a friend that I think Greg won a stunning victory, I must evidently rely on various bits of information stored in my memory, including who my friends are, who Greg is, what he won, and what natural languages I share with my friend. I must sense and perceive that my friend is within hearing distance, how loud I need to speak, how loud I am speaking, and whether my friend is paying attention. I must avail myself of what I know about the language I share with my friend, along with innumerable principles about human "folk psychology. " This book does not address the full range of contemporary theorizing about cognitive architecture, but only a part. It addresses theories of cognitive architecture that hypothesize that there exist cognitive representations, then begins to explore the possible structure of these representations. One of the leading hypotheses concerning the structure of cognitive representations is that it is akin to that found in symbolic logic.

This monograph presents an interpretation of Descartes's dualism, which differs from the standard reading called 'classical separatist dualism' claiming that the mind can exist without the body. It argues that, contrary to what it is commonly claimed, Descartes's texts suggest an emergent creationist substance dualism, according to which the mind is a nonphysical substance (created and maintained by God), which cannot begin to think without a well-disposed body. According to this interpretation, God's laws of nature endow each human body with the power to be united to an immaterial soul. While the soul does not directly come from the body, the mind can be said to emerge from the body in the sense that it cannot be created by God independently from the body. The divine creation of a human mind requires a well-disposed body, a physical categorical basis. This kind of emergentism is consistent with creationism and does not necessarily entail that the mind cannot survive the body. This early modern view has some connections with Hasker's substance emergent dualism (1999). Indeed, Hasker states that the mind is a substance emerging at one time from neurons and that consciousness has causal powers which effects cannot be explained by physical neurons. An emergent unified self-existing entity emerges from the brain on which it acts upon. For its proponents, Hasker's view explains what Descartes's dualism fails to explain, especially why the mind regularly interacts with one and only one body. After questioning the notion of emergence, the author argues that the theory of emergent creationist substance dualism that she attributes to Descartes is a more appropriate alternative because it faces fewer problems than its rivals. This monograph is valuable for anyone interested in the history of early modern philosophy and contemporary philosophy of mind.

This book contributes to the developing dialogue between cognitive science and social sciences. It focuses on a central issue in both fields, i.e. the nature and the limitations of the rationality of beliefs and action. The development of cognitive science is one of the most important and fascinating intellectual advances of recent decades, and social scientists are paying increasing attention to the findings of this new branch of science that forces us to consider many classical issues related to epistemology and philosophy of action in a new light. Analysis of the concept of rationality is a leitmotiv in the history of the social sciences and has involved endless disputes. Since it is difficult to give a precise definition of this concept, and there is a lack of agreement about its meaning, it is possible to say that there is a 'mystery of rationality'. What is it to be rational? Is rationality merely instrumental or does it also involve the endorsement of values, i.e. the choice of goals? Should we consider rationality to be a normative principle or a descriptive one? Can rationality be only Cartesian or can it also be argumentative? Is rationality a conscious skill or a partly tacit one? This book, which has been written by an outstanding collection of authors, including both philosophers and social scientists, tries to make a useful contribution to the debates on these problems and shed some light on the mystery of rationality. The target audience primarily comprises researchers and experts in the field.

Neuroscience has raised many questions for philosophy and its traditional focus on the mind, but what does the emerging field of neurophilosophy teach us about the relationship between mind and brain? How have the new debates transformed our understanding of consciousness, the self and free will? Georg Northoff is a world-leading expert in this exciting area, and in Minding the Brain he provides a comprehensive introduction to non-reductive neurophilosophy, charting the developments of the discipline and applying its ideas to the debates that have captivated philosophers for centuries. Minding the Brain: * employs extensive pedagogy to help the reader get to grips with complex concepts * takes a transdisciplinary approach unifying science, psychology and philosophy Unearthing new ways to tackle age-old debates, Minding the Brain is a stimulating text for anyone interested in philosophy, psychology, the cognitive sciences and neuroscience.

In this new kind of entree to contemporary discussions of free will and human agency, Garrett Pendergraft collects and illuminates 50 of the most relevant puzzles, paradoxes, and thought experiments. Assuming no familiarity with the philosophical literature on free will, each chapter describes a case, explains the questions that it raises, briefly summarizes some of the key responses to the case, and provides a list of suggested readings. Every chapter is accessible, succinct, and self-contained. The puzzles are divided into five broad categories: the threat from fatalism, the threat from determinism, practical reason, social dimensions, and moral luck. Entries cover topics such as the grandfather paradox, theological fatalism, the consequence argument, manipulation arguments, luck arguments, weakness of will, action explanation, addiction, blame and punishment, situationism in moral psychology, and Huckleberry Finn. Free Will and Human Agency is an effective and engaging teaching tool as well as a handy resource for anyone interested in exploring the questions that have made human agency a topic of perennial philosophical interest. Key Features: Though concise overall, offers broad coverage of the key areas of free will and human agency. Describes each imaginative case directly and in a memorable way, making the cases accessible and easy to remember. Provides a list of suggested readings for each case.

The conscious mind defines human existence. Many consider the brain as a computer, and they attempt to explain consciousness as emerging at a critical, but unspecified, threshold level of complex computation among neurons. The brain-as-computer model, however, fails to account for phenomenal experience and portrays consciousness as an impotent, after-the-fact epiphenomenon lacking causal power. And the brain-as-computer concept precludes even the remotest possibility of spirituality. As described throughout the history of humankind, seemingly spiritual mental phenomena including transcendent states, near-death and out-of-body experiences, and past-life memories have in recent years been well documented and treated scientifically. In addition, the brain-as-computer approach has been challenged by advocates of quantum brain biology, who are possibly able to explain, scientifically, nonlocal, seemingly spiritual mental states. Exploring Frontiers of the Mind-Brain Relationship argues against the purely physical analysis of consciousness and for a balanced psychobiological approach. This thought-provoking volume bridges philosophy of mind with science of mind to look empirically at transcendent phenomena, such as mystic states, near-death experiences and past-life memories, that have confounded scientists for decades. Representing disciplines ranging from philosophy and history to neuroimaging and physics, and boasting a panel of expert scientists and physicians, including Andrew Newberg, Peter Fenwick, Stuart Hameroff, Mario Beauregard, Deepak Chopra, and Chris Clarke the book rigorously follows several lines of inquiry into mind-brain controversies, challenging readers to form their own conclusions-or reconsider previous ones. Key coverage includes: Objections to reductionistic materialism from the philosophical and the scientific tradition. Phenomena and the mind-brain problem. The neurobiological correlates of meditation and mindfulness. The quantum soul, a view from physics. Clinical implications of end-of-life experiences. Mediumistic experience and the mind-brain relationship. Exploring Frontiers of the Mind-Brain Relationship is essential reading for researchers and clinicians across many disciplines, including cognitive psychology, personality and social psychology, the neurosciences, neuropsychiatry, palliative care, philosophy, and quantum physics. "This book ... brings together some precious observations about the fundamental mystery of the nature of consciousness ... It raises many questions that serve to invite each of us to be more aware of the uncertainty of our preconceptions about consciousness ... This book on the frontiers of mind-body relationships is a scholarly embodiment of creative and open-minded science." C. Robert Cloninger, MD Wallace Renard Professor of Psychiatry, Genetics, and Psychology, Washington University School of Medicine St. Louis MO

Realism in Action is a selection of essays written by leading representatives in the fields of action theory and philosophy of mind, philosophy of the social sciences and especially the nature of social action, and of epistemology and philosophy of science. Practical reason, reasons and causes in action theory, intending and trying, and folk-psychological explanation are some of the topics discussed by these leading participants. A particular emphasis is laid on trust, commitments and social institutions, on the possibility of grounding social notions in individual social attitudes, on the nature of social groups, institutions and collective intentionality, and on common belief and common knowledge. Applications to the social sciences include, e.g., a look at the Erklaren-Verstehen controversy in economics, and at constructivist and realist views on archeological reconstructions of the past."

The book would make a perfect company with the new