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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Philosophy of mind
Enactivist Interventions is an interdisciplinary work that explores how theories of embodied cognition illuminate many aspects of the mind, including intentionality, representation, the affect, perception, action and free will, higher-order cognition, and intersubjectivity. Gallagher argues for a rethinking of the concept of mind, drawing on pragmatism, phenomenology and cognitive science. Enactivism is presented as a philosophy of nature that has significant methodological and theoretical implications for the scientific investigation of the mind. Gallagher argues that, like the basic phenomena of perception and action, sophisticated cognitive phenomena like reflection, imagining, and mathematical reasoning are best explained in terms of an affordance-based skilled coping. He offers an account of the continuity that runs between basic action, affectivity, and a rationality that in every case remains embodied. Gallagher's analysis also addresses recent predictive models of brain function and outlines an alternative, enactivist interpretation that emphasizes the close coupling of brain, body and environment rather than a strong boundary that isolates the brain in its internal processes. The extensive relational dynamics that integrates the brain with the extra-neural body opens into an environment that is physical, social and cultural and that recycles back into the enactive process. Cognitive processes are in-the-world rather than in-the-head; they are situated in affordance spaces defined across evolutionary, developmental and individual histories, and are constrained by affective processes and normative dimensions of social and cultural practices.
Our digital existence is hurried and fast. We are tied to the present, or perhaps we are not present enough: immersed in digital social media and processes by artificial intelligence, we are hardly present to ourselves and to others, and feel alienated from nature. We are also made to fear climate change and the end of humanity. How can we live a good life and give meaning to our lives under these conditions? How can and should we co-exist today? Using process philosophy, narrative theory, and the concept of technoperformances, this book analyzes how digital technologies shape our relation to time and our existence, and discusses what this means in the light of climate change and new technologies such as AI. In dialogue with contemporary philosophy of technology and media theory and asking original questions about finding common times in what it calls the "Anthropochrone", it proposes a conceptual framework that helps us to understand how we (should) exist and relate to time today.
This highly readable translation of the major works of the 18th- century philosopher Etienne Bonnot, Abbe de Condillac, a disciple of Locke and a contemporary of Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot, shows his influence on psychiatric diagnosis as well as on the education of the deaf, the retarded, and the preschool child. Published two hundred years after Condillac's death, this translation contains treatises which were, until now, virtually unavailable in English: A Treatise on Systems, A Treatise of the Sensations, Logic.
This volume in the Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science series concerns metarepresentation: the construction and use of representations that represent other representations. Metarepresentations are ubiquitous among human beings, whenever we think or talk about mental states or linguistic acts, or theorize about the mind or language. This volume collects previously unpublished studies on the subject by an interdisciplinary group of contributors, including Daniel Dennett, Alvin Goldman, Keith Lehrer, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.
The Phenomenological Mind, Third Edition introduces fundamental questions about the mind from the perspective of phenomenology. One of the outstanding books in the field, now translated into eight languages, this highly regarded exploration of phenomenology from a topic-driven standpoint examines the following key questions and issues: what is phenomenology? phenomenology and the cognitive sciences consciousness and self-consciousness time and consciousness intentionality and perception the embodied mind action knowledge of other minds situated and extended minds phenomenology and personal identity. This third edition has been revised and updated throughout. The chapter on phenomenological methodologies has been significantly expanded to cover qualitative research, and there are new sections discussing important, recent research on topics such as critical phenomenology, imagination, social cognition, race and gender, collective intentionality, and selfhood. Also included are helpful features, such as chapter summaries, guides to further reading, and boxed explanations of specialized topics, making The Phenomenological Mind, Third Edition an ideal introduction to key concepts in phenomenology, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind.
This is an open access book which explores phenomenology as both an exceptionally diverse movement in philosophy as well as an active research method that crosses disciplinary boundaries. The volume brings together lively overviews of major areas and schools of phenomenology, as well as the most recent applications across a range of fields. The first part reviews the state-of-the-art in various areas of contemporary phenomenology, including several distinct schools of Husserl and Heidegger scholarship, as well as approaches derived from Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, Fanon, and others. An innovative quantitative analysis of citation networks provides rich visualizations of the field as a whole. The second part showcases phenomenology as a living discipline that can advance research in other areas. While some areas of interaction between phenomenology and other disciplines are by now well established (e.g. cognitive science), this volume sheds light on newer areas of application. The goal is to move beyond discussions of philosophical method and highlight scholars who are actually doing phenomenology in a variety of areas, including:  Embodiment and questions of gender, race, and identity, The arts (visual art, literature, architecture), and Archaeology and anthropology.  This volume offers a concise introduction to cutting edge phenomenological research and is suitable for both students and specialists.Â
This book talks about the levels of consciousness and their roles in controlling our life and behaviour. The consciousness has a main role in learning human to behave and to live in all life's situation and ages. This book clarifies these situations in details and the laws that make this system work properly. It provides many solutions and suggestions to control ourselves and our minds and put them in the right way. This book explains many of our behaviours depending on the psychology and the role of the consciousness in the psychiatry, how to treat diseases and mental disorders and how to improve the mental health as well. This subject is not well discussed and detailed in literature so there is a need to give this topic its role in the psychology and in scientific literature too. This book is targeting the consciousness' levels and the role of these levels in our life and behaviours, so it divides the roles among them as appropriate and in the right way and then the humans can recognize which part is more important than the other and on what they should focus.
This book provides a framework that encompasses both physics and cognitive science - integrating them into a 'theory of everything' to establish a basis for both our scientific and humanistic endeavours. It explores the implications of brain laterality for understanding the emergence of mind and its relation to the physical world - arguing that the analytic vs. holistic cognitive differences of the left and right human cerebral hemispheres are key to understanding not only human self-consciousness and language, but also sociocultural phenomena ranging from the emergence of the scientific method and axes of political orientation to the direction of development of conceptions of God and the fundamental differences between polarizing philosophical traditions. In a further step, the book draws on the Darwinian principle that our cognitive apparatus is shaped by the environment in which it evolved to argue that human bilaterality mirrors the fundamental hylomorphic relation between formal organization and material components that constitutes physical nature itself. The logical division between holistic and analytic categories thereby offers a principled basis for a metaphilosophy.
What do philosophy and computer science have in common? It turns out, quite a lot! In providing an introduction to computer science (using Python), Daniel Lim presents in this book key philosophical issues, ranging from external world skepticism to the existence of God to the problem of induction. These issues, and others, are introduced through the use of critical computational concepts, ranging from image manipulation to recursive programming to elementary machine learning techniques. In illuminating some of the overlapping conceptual spaces of computer science and philosophy, Lim teaches the reader fundamental programming skills and also allows her to develop the critical thinking skills essential for examining some of the enduring questions of philosophy. Key Features Teaches readers actual computer programming, not merely ideas about computers Includes fun programming projects (like digital image manipulation and Game of Life simulation), allowing the reader to develop the ability to write larger computer programs that require decomposition, abstraction, and algorithmic thinking Uses computational concepts to introduce, clarify, and develop a variety of philosophical issues Covers various aspects of machine learning and relates them to philosophical issues involving science and induction as well as to ethical issues Provides a framework to critically analyze arguments in classic and contemporary philosophical debates
In Admirable Evasions, Theodore Dalrymple explains why human self-understanding has not been bettered by the false promises of the different schools of psychological thought. Most psychological explanations of human behavior are not only ludicrously inadequate oversimplifications, argues Dalrymple, they are socially harmful in that they allow those who believe in them to evade personal responsibility for their actions and to put the blame on a multitude of scapegoats: on their childhood, their genes, their neurochemistry, even on evolutionary pressures. Dalrymple reveals how the fashionable schools of psychoanalysis, behaviorism, modern neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology all prevent the kind of honest self-examination that is necessary to the formation of human character. Instead, they promote self-obsession without self-examination, and the gross overuse of medicines that affect the mind. Admirable Evasions also considers metaphysical objections to the assumptions of psychology, and suggests that literature is a far more illuminating window into the human condition than psychology could ever hope to be.
Donald Olding Hebb, referred to by American Psychologist as one of "the 20th century's most eminent and influential theorists in the realm of brain function and behavior," contributes greatly to the understanding of mind and thought in Essays on Mind. His objective was to learn about thought which he considered "the central problem of psychology -- but also, not less important, to learn how to think clearly about thought, which is philosophy." The volume is written for advanced undergraduates, graduates, professionals, and lay people interested in or studying the mind. Hebb offers an increased understanding of the mind from a biological perspective that affects long-standing philosophical and psychological problems. "Psychology and Philosophy were divorced some time ago but, like other divorced couples, they still have problems in common," writes Hebb. The first three chapters establish the methodological and philosophical basis for his biologically centered theory of behavior, including the evolution of the mind, nature versus nurture, the origination and status of cell-assembly theory, and infant thought and language development. He concludes with a discussion of the workings of scientific thought from a practical rather than theoretical perspective.
In Basic Structures of Reality, Colin McGinn deals with questions of metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind from the vantage point of physics. Combining general philosophy with physics, he covers such topics as the definition of matter, the nature of space, motion, gravity, electromagnetic fields, the character of physical knowledge, and consciousness and meaning. Throughout, McGinn maintains an historical perspective and seeks to determine how much we really know of the world described by physics. He defends a version of "structuralism": the thesis that our knowledge is partial and merely abstract, leaving a large epistemological gap at the center of physics. McGinn then connects this element of mystery to parallel mysteries in relation to the mind. Consciousness emerges as just one more mystery of physics. A theory of matter and space is developed, according to which the impenetrability of matter is explained as the deletion of volumes of space. McGinn proposes a philosophy of science that distinguishes physics from both psychology and biology, explores the ontology of energy, and considers the relevance of physics to seemingly remote fields such as the theory of meaning. In the form of a series of aphorisms, the author presents a metaphysical system that takes laws of nature as fundamental. With its broad scope and deep study of the fundamental questions at the heart of philosophy of physics, this book is not intended primarily for specialists, but for the general philosophical reader interested in how physics and philosophy intersect.
In this book, Shay Welch expands on the contemporary cognitive thinking-in-movement framework, which has its roots in the work of Maxine Sheets-Johnstone but extends and develops within contemporary embodied cognition theory. Welch believes that dance can be used to ask questions, and this book offers a method of how critical inquiry can be embodied. First, she presents the theoretical underpinnings of what this process is and how it can work; second, she introduces the empirical method as a tool that can be used by movers for the purpose of doing embodied inquiry. Exploring the role of embodied cognition and embodied metaphors in mining the body for questions, Welch demonstrates how to utilize movement to explore embodied practices of knowing. She argues that our creative embodied movements facilitate our ability to bodily engage in critical analysis about the world.
Beatrice Longuenesse presents an original exploration of our understanding of ourselves and the way we talk about ourselves. In the first part of the book she discusses contemporary analyses of our use of 'I' in language and thought, and compares them to Kant's account of self-consciousness, especially the type of self-consciousness expressed in the proposition 'I think.' According to many contemporary philosophers, necessarily, any instance of our use of 'I' is backed by our consciousness of our own body. For Kant, in contrast, 'I think' just expresses our consciousness of being engaged in bringing rational unity into the contents of our mental states. In the second part of the book, Longuenesse analyzes the details of Kant's view and argues that contemporary discussions in philosophy and psychology stand to benefit from Kant's insights into self-consciousness and the unity of consciousness. The third and final part of the book outlines similarities between Kant's view of the structure of mental life grounding our uses of 'I' in 'I think' and in the moral 'I ought to,' on the one hand; and Freud's analysis of the organizations of mental processes he calls 'ego' and 'superego' on the other hand. Longuenesse argues that Freudian metapsychology offers a path to a naturalization of Kant's transcendental view of the mind. It offers a developmental account of the normative capacities that ground our uses of 'I,' which Kant thought could not be accounted for without appealing to a world of pure intelligences, distinct from the empirical, natural world of physical entities.
Robert Brandom's rationalist philosophy of language, expounded in his highly influential Making It Explicit, has been the subject of intense scrutiny and debate, establishing him as one of the leading philosophers of his generation. In A Spirit of Trust, Brandom presents the fruits of his thirty-year engagement with Hegel. He submits that the Phenomenology of Spirit holds not only many lessons for today's philosophy of language, but also a moral lesson much needed in today's increasingly polarized societies, in the form of a postmodern ethics of trust. In this outstanding collection, leading philosophers examine and assess A Spirit of Trust. The twelve specially commissioned chapters explore topics including: negation and truth empirical and speculative concepts experience conflict and recognition varieties of idealism premodern ethical life and modern alienation a postmodern ethics of trust. Reading Brandom: On A Spirit of Trust is essential reading for all students and scholars of Brandom's work and those in philosophy of language. It will also be important reading for those studying nineteenth-century philosophy, particularly Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit.
The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intentionality provides a wide-ranging survey of topics in a rapidly expanding area of interdisciplinary research. It consists of 36 chapters, written exclusively for this volume, by an international team of experts. What is distinctive about the study of collective intentionality within the broader study of social interactions and structures is its focus on the conceptual and psychological features of joint or shared actions and attitudes, and their implications for the nature of social groups and their functioning. This Handbook fully captures this distinctive nature of the field and how it subsumes the study of collective action, responsibility, reasoning, thought, intention, emotion, phenomenology, decision-making, knowledge, trust, rationality, cooperation, competition, and related issues, as well as how these underpin social practices, organizations, conventions, institutions and social ontology. Like the field, the Handbook is interdisciplinary, drawing on research in philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics, legal theory, anthropology, sociology, computer science, psychology, economics, and political science. Finally, the Handbook promotes several specific goals: (1) it provides an important resource for students and researchers interested in collective intentionality; (2) it integrates work across disciplines and areas of research as it helps to define the shape and scope of an emerging area of research; (3) it advances the study of collective intentionality.
Time and Body promotes the application of phenomenological psychopathology and embodied research to a broad spectrum of mental disorders. In a new and practical way, it integrates the latest research on the temporal and intersubjective constitution of the body, self and its mental disorders from phenomenological, embodied and interdisciplinary research perspectives. The authors investigate how temporal processes apply to the contribution of embodiment and selfhood, as well as to their destabilization, such as in eating disorders and borderline personality disorders, schizophrenia, depression, social anxiety or dementia. The chapters demonstrate the applicability of phenomenological psychopathology to a range of illnesses and its relevance to treatment and clinical practice.
Despite recent advances in Locke scholarship, philosophers and political theorists have paid little attention to the relations among his three greatest works: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Two Treatises of Government, and Epistola de Tolerantia. As a result our picture of Locke's thought is a curiously fragmented one. Toleration and Understanding in Locke argues that these works are unified by a concern to promote the cause of religious toleration. Making extensive use of Locke's neglected replies to Proast, Nicholas Jolley shows how Locke draws on his epistemological principles to criticize religious persecution - for Locke, since revelation is an object of belief, not knowledge, coercion by the state in religious matters is not morally justified. In this volume Jolley also seeks to show how the Two Treatises of Government and the letters for toleration adopt the same contractualist approach to political theory; Locke argues for toleration from the function of the state where this is determined by the decisions of rational contracting parties. Throughout, attention is paid to demonstrating the range of Locke's arguments for toleration and to defending them, where possible, against recent criticisms. The book includes an account of the development of Locke's views about religious toleration from the beginning to the end of his career; it also includes discussions of his individualism about knowledge and belief, his critique of religious enthusiasm, his commitment to the minimal creed, and his teachings about natural law. Locke emerges as a rather systematic thinker whose arguments are highly relevant to modern debates about religious toleration.
The concept of affordances is being increasingly used in fields beyond ecological psychology to reveal previously unexplored interdisciplinary relationships. These fields include engineering, robotics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, urban theory, architecture, computer science, and much more. As the concept is adapted for its relational meaning between an agent and the environment, or object, the meaning of the term has changed to fit the customs of the adapting field. This book maps the different shades of the term and brings insights into how it is operationalized by providing short accessible essays regardless of background. Each contribution addresses big questions around this topic such as the application of the concept on ongoing research, how to measure or identify affordances, as well as other reflective questions about the future of affordances in the field. The book is envisioned to be read by non-experts, students, and researchers from several disciplines, and fills the need for summarization across disciplines. As the many adaptations flourished from the same psychological concept, this book also aims to function as a catalyst and motivation for reinterpreting the concepts for new directions. Compared to existing books, this book aims not to span the vertical dimension of field by taking a deep dive into a niche-field-instead, this book aims to have a wide horizontal span highlighting a common concept shared by an increasing number of fields, namely affordances. As such, this book takes a different approach by attempting to summarize the different emerging applications and definitions of the concept, and make them accessible to non-experts, students, and researchers regardless of background and level.
Combining Minds is about the idea of minds built up out of other minds, whether this is possible, and what it would mean if it were. Roelofs surveys many areas of philosophy and psychology, analysing and evaluating denials and affirmations of mental combination that have been made in regard to everything from brain structure, to psychological conflict, to social cooperation. In each case, he carefully distinguishes different senses in which subjectivity might be composite, and different arguments for and against them, concluding that composite subjectivity, in various forms, may be much more common than we think. Combining Minds is also the first book-length defence of constitutive panpsychism against all aspects of the 'combination problem'. Constitutive panpsychism is an increasingly prominent theory, holding that consciousness is naturally inherent in matter, with human consciousness built up out of this basic consciousness the same way human bodies are built up out of physical matter. Such a view requires that many very simple conscious minds can compose a single very complex one, and a major objection made against constitutive panpsychism is that they cannot - that minds simply do not combine. This is the combination problem, which Roelofs scrutinizes, dissects, and refutes. It reflects not only contemporary debates but a long philosophical tradition of contrasting the apparently indivisible unity of the mind with the deep and pervasive divisibility of the material world.Combining Mindsdraws together the threads of this problem and develops a powerful and flexible response to it.
Discussions about the nature of the emotions in Hellenistic philosophy have aroused intense scholarly interest over the last few years. The topics covered by the essays in this volume range from the classical background of Hellenistic theories, through debates on emotion in the major Hellenistic schools, to discussions in later antiquity. Special emphasis is placed on the development of the Stoic views on the nature and value of the emotions. The essays are written with a high level of philosophical and classical scholarship, but contain no exclusive technicalities. Audience: This first comprehensive treatment of the emotions in Hellenistic philosophy can be read with pleasure and profit not only by professionals in ancient philosophy but also all those who are interested in the philosophy of mind and its history.
According to the libertarian position on free will, people
sometimes exercise free will, but this freedom is incompatible with
the truth of causal determinism. Frequently maligned within the
history of philosophy, this view has recently gained increasingly
sympathetic attention among philosophers. But stark questions
remain: How plausible is this view? If our actions are not causally
determined, how can we have control over them? Why should we want
our actions to be breaks in the deterministic causal chain? |
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