The new field of experimental philosophy has emerged as the methods of psychological science have been brought to bear on traditional philosophical issues. Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy will be the place to go to see outstanding new work in the field. It will feature papers by philosophers, papers by psychologists, and papers co-authored by people in both disciplines. The series heralds the emergence of a truly interdisciplinary field in which people from different disciplines are working together to address a shared set of questions.
The inaugural volume is roughly structured into four sections. The first three papers focus on recent developments in moral psychology, a topic that has seen lively debate and a great deal of progress over the last decade. The second section highlights three contributions that bring new methods to moral psychology: formal modeling and special populations. The third section brings together four papers that adopt an experimental philosophy approach to novel topics, including intuitive dualism, generics, joint action, and happiness. And the last two papers provide critical and historical context to the development of experimental philosophy.

Metasemantics comprises new work on the philosophical foundations of linguistic semantics, by a diverse group of established and emerging experts in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and the theory of content. The science of semantics aspires to systematically specify the meanings of linguistic expressions in context. The paradigmatic metasemantic question is accordingly: what more basic or fundamental features of the world metaphysically determine these semantic facts? Efforts to answer this question inevitably raise others. Where are the boundaries of semantics? What is the essence of the meaning relation? Which framework should we use for semantic theorizing? What are the intrinsic natures of semantic values? Are the semantic facts metaphysically determinate? What is semantic competence? Metasemantic inquiry has long been recognized as a central part of the philosophy of language, but recent developments in metaphysics and semantics itself now allow us to approach these classic questions with an unprecedented degree of precision. The essays collected here provide promising new perspectives on old problems, pose questions that suggest novel research projects, and taken together, greatly sharpen our understanding of linguistic representation.

'The recent publication of a new edition of the American Diagnostic and Statistical manual (DSM-5) highlighted the two contrary viewpoints that exist within the field of mental health. There are those who value such classification systems, seeing each revision of the DSM as a fine-tuning exercise, and there are those who are strongly opposed, seeing such exercises as fundamentally flawed. 'Madness Cracked' provides a fascinating introduction to the history of psychiatry and clinical psychology, looking at how these areas have attempted to classify the various problems and disorders that their practitioners have faced in everyday use. Within the book, Power argues that - like in other areas of science - progress can only be made if the classification systems that are used have a sound theoretical basis. In addition, he outlines a model derived from work on cognition and emotion showing how, with appropriate modifications, it could provide a theoretical basis for classification and diagnosis. Using extraordinary examples from the history of psychiatry and clinical psychology, along with fascinating case material, he shows how our current knowledge in psychology can be developed to provide the theoretical basis that the field needs. For anyone in the field of mental health, Madness Cracked is a thought-provoking and controversial new book.'

Richard Cross provides the first complete and detailed account of Duns Scotus's theory of cognition, tracing the processes involved in cognition from sensation, through intuition and abstraction, to conceptual thought. He provides an analysis of the ontological status of the various mental items (acts and dispositions) involved in cognition, and a new account of Scotus on nature of conceptual content. Cross goes on to offer a novel, reductionist, interpretation of Scotus's view of the ontological status of representational content, as well as new accounts of Scotus's opinions on intuitive cognition, intelligible species, and the varieties of consciousness. Scotus was a perceptive but highly critical reader of his intellectual forebears, and this volume places his thought clearly within the context of thirteenth-century reflections on cognitive psychology, influenced as they were by Aristotle, Augustine, and Avicenna. As far as possible, Duns Scotus's Theory of Cognition traces developments in Scotus's thought during the ten or so highly productive years that formed the bulk of his intellectual life.

This book outlines the evolution of our political nature over two million years and explores many of the rituals, plays, films, and other performances that gave voice and legitimacy to various political regimes in our species' history. Our genetic and cultural evolution during the Pleistocene Epoch bestowed a wide range of predispositions on our species that continue to shape the politics we support and the performances we enjoy. The book's case studies range from an initiation ritual in the Mbendjela tribe in the Congo to a 1947 drama by Bertolt Brecht and include a popular puppet play in Tokugawa Japan. A final section examines the gradual disintegration of social cohesion underlying the rise of polarized politics in the USA after 1965, as such films as The Godfather, Independence Day, The Dark Knight Rises, and Joker accelerated the nation's slide toward authoritarian Trumpism.

Sensory experience seems to be the basis of our knowledge and conception of mind-independent things. The puzzle is to understand how that can be: even if the things we experience (apples, tables, trees etc), are mind-independent how does our sensory experience of them enable us to conceive of them as mind-independent? George Berkeley thought that sensory experience can only provide us with the conception of mind-dependent things, things which cannot exist when they aren't being perceived. It's easy to dismiss Berkeley's conclusion but harder to see how to avoid it. In this book, John Campbell and Quassim Cassam propose very different solutions to Berkeley's Puzzle. For Campbell, sensory experience can be the basis of our knowledge of mind-independent things because it is a relation, more primitive than thought, between the perceiver and high-level objects and properties in the mind-independent world. Cassam opposes this 'relationalist' solution to the Puzzle and defends a 'representationalist' solution: sensory experience can give us the conception of mind-independent things because it represents its objects as mind-independent, but does so without presupposing concepts of mind-independent things. This book is written in the form of a debate between two rival approaches to understanding the relationship between concepts and sensory experience. Although Berkeley's Puzzle frames the debate, the questions addressed by Campbell and Cassam aren't just of historical interest. They are among the most fundamental questions in philosophy.

This edited book offers a broad selection of interdisciplinary studies within cognitive science. The book illustrates and documents how cognitive science offers a unifying framework for the interaction of fields of study focusing on the human mind from linguistics and philosophy to psychology and the history of science. A selection of renowned contributors provides authoritative historical, theoretical and empirical perspectives on more than six decades of research with a special focus on the progress of cognitive science in Central Europe. Readers encounter a bird's eye view of geographical and linguistic diversity brought about by the cognitive revolution, as it is reflected in the writings of leading authors, many of whom are former students and collaborators of Csaba Pleh, a key figure of the cognitive turn in Central Europe, to whom this book is dedicated. The book appeals to students and researchers looking for the ways various approaches to the mind and the brain intersect.

This book examines the concepts of subjectivity and selfhood developed in the oeuvre of Jean-Paul Sartre. Although Sartre is a prominent philosopher, the reception of his work is shrouded in misguided ideas concerning his alleged subjectivism. This book accurately positions Sartre in debates concerning the two themes which form a guiding thread throughout his work and remain immensely relevant in the philosophical landscape of today. Gusman expertly tracks and uncovers the nuances of the evolving notions of subjectivity and selfhood, paying particular attention to his claim that the Self is a 'thing among things' and to his views on narrative identity. Using as a framework the critical reception from thinkers in Sartre's own tradition, the book also draws from the recent popularity of his thought in analytic philosophy of mind. Illuminating and impactful, this book provides an invaluable resource to scholars looking for a contemporary and up-to-date critical study of Sartre's work.

Panpsychism is the view that consciousness - the most puzzling and strangest phenomenon in the entire universe - is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the world, though in a form very remote from human consciousness. At a very basic level, the world is awake. Panpsychism seems implausible to most, and yet it has experienced a remarkable renaissance of interest over the last quarter century. The reason is the stubbornly intractable problem of consciousness. Despite immense progress in understanding the brain and its relation to states of consciousness, we still really have no idea how consciousness emerges from physical processes which are presumed to be entirely non-conscious. The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism provides a high-level comprehensive examination and assessment of the subject - its history and contemporary development. It offers 28 chapters, appearing in print here for the first time, from the world's leading researchers on panpsychism. The chapters are divided into four sections that integrate panpsychism's relevance with important issues in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, metaphysics, and even ethics: Historical Reflections Forms of Panpsychism Comparative Alternatives How Does Panpsychism Work? The volume will be useful to students and scholars as both an introduction and as cutting-edge philosophical engagement with the subject. For anyone interested in a philosophical approach to panpsychism, the Handbook will supply fascinating and enlightening reading. The topics covered are highly diverse, representing a spectrum of views on the nature of mind and world from various standpoints which take panpsychism seriously.

This volume brings together new papers advancing contemporary debates in foundational, conceptual, and methodological issues in cognitive neuroscience. The different perspectives presented in each chapter have previously been discussed between the authors, as the volume builds on the experience of Neural Mechanisms (NM) Online - webinar series on the philosophy of neuroscience organized by the editors of this volume. The contributed chapters pertain to five core areas in current philosophy of neuroscience. It surveys the novel forms of explanation (and prediction) developed in cognitive neuroscience, and looks at new concepts, methods and techniques used in the field. The book also highlights the metaphysical challenges raised by recent neuroscience and demonstrates the relation between neuroscience and mechanistic philosophy. Finally, the book dives into the issue of neural computations and representations. Assembling contributions from leading philosophers of neuroscience, this work draws upon the expertise of both established scholars and promising early career researchers.

One of the hardest problems in the history of Western philosophy has been to explain whether and how experience can provide knowledge (or even justification for belief) about the objective world outside the experiencer's mind. A prominent brand of scepticism has precisely denied that experience can provide such knowledge. How, for instance (these sceptics ask) can I know that my experiences are not produced in me by a powerful demon (or, in a modern twist on that traditional Cartesian scenario, by a supercomputer)? This volume, originating from the research project on Basic Knowledge recently concluded at the Northern Institute of Philosophy, presents new essays on scepticism about the senses written by some of the most prominent contemporary epistemologists. They approach the sceptical challenge by discussing such topics as the conditions for perceptual justification, the existence of a non-evidential kind of warrant and the extent of one's evidence, the epistemology of inference, the relations between justification, probability and certainty, the relevance of subjective appearances to the epistemology of perception, the role that broadly pragmatic considerations play in epistemic justification, the contents of perception, and the function of attention. In all these cases, the papers show how philosophical progress on foundational issues can improve our understanding of and possibly afford a solution to a historically prominent problem like scepticism.

Cognitive psychology has matured and flourished in the last half-century, as new theories, research tools, and theoretical frameworks have allowed cognitive psychologists and researchers to explore a broad array of topics. In the same vein, the depth of understanding and the methodological and theoretical sophistication have also grown in wonderful ways. Given the expanse of the field, an up-to-date and inclusive resource such as this handbook is needed for aspiring generalists who wish to read the book cover to cover, and for the many readers who are simply curious to know the current happenings in other cognition laboratories. Guided by this need, this volume's 64 chapters cover all aspects of cognition, spanning perceptual issues, attention, memory, knowledge representation, language, emotional influences, judgment, problem solving, and the study of individual differences in cognition. Additional chapters turn to the control of complex actions and the social, cultural, and developmental context of cognition. The authors include a mix of well-established influential figures and younger colleagues in order to gain an understanding of the field's forward trajectory. The volume also includes a mix of "tutorial" chapters and chapters that powerfully represent a particular research team's point of view.

This book sets out a comprehensive theory of rationality applicable to both practical and theoretical reason. In both domains, Audi explains the role of experience in grounding rationality, delineates the structure of central elements - particuarly belief, desire and action - and attacks the egocentric view of rationality. He defends a rational altruism that supports important moral principles, and concludes with an account of global rationality - the overall rationality of persons.

This book analyzes the relation between the flow time and poetic speech in drama and rhetoric. It begins with the classical understanding of time as flux, and its problems and paradoxes entailing from Aristotle, Augustine, Kant and Husserl. The reader will see how these problems unfold and find resolutions through dramatic speech and rhetoric which has an essential relation to the flow of time. It covers elements in poetic speech such as affect, rhythm, metaphor, and syntax. It uses examples from classical rhetorical theories by Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, dramatic speeches from Shakespeare, as well as other modern dramatic texts by Chekhov, Beckett, Jelinek and Sarah Kane. This book appeals to students and academic researchers working in the philosophical fields of aesthetics and phenomenology as well those working in theater and the performing arts.

As the crowd stood and applauded for the neurophysiologist Du Bois-Reymond's lecture on August 14, 1872, they did not know that his lecture on the seven riddles of the universe would be long remembered. Scientists at the time believed that science could unlock all of the mysteries of the universe. However, the scientific revolution of the early 20th century fueled by relativity and quantum mechanics would upend the scientific world confirming Du Bois-Reymond's insights. This book explores the brilliance of Du Bois-Reymond's life and work and a vastly expanded scientific understanding of these riddles through the modern disciplines of physics, chemistry, and biology. Despite the progress, underlying metaphysical notions still haunt the riddles. Utilizing notions from Whitehead's Process Philosophy, the author delves into the underlying structure of our universe and outlines the nature of the deity that emerges. Part two of this book examines the riddles consequent demands on theology and religion through the lens of the extraordinary teacher, philosopher, and theologian William DeWitt Hyde. The author clarifies notions about miracles, immortality, and wisdom. This book takes the reader on a vivid, imaginative journey towards unraveling the mysteries of our existence, roles in society, and personal loyalties.

In this collection of essays, most of which are of recent vintage, and seven of which appear here for the first time, Christopher S. Hill addresses a large assortment of philosophical issues. Part I presents a deflationary theory of truth, argues that semantic properties like reference and correspondence with fact can also be characterized in deflationary terms, and offers an account of the value of these 'thin' properties, tracing it to their ability to track more substantial properties that are informational or epistemic in character. Part II defends the view that conscious experiences are type-identical with brain states. It addresses a large array of objections to this identity thesis, including objections based on the alleged multiple realizability of experiences, and objections based on Cartesian intuitions about the modeal separability of mind and matter. In the end, however, it maintains that theories of experience based on type-identity should give way to representationalist accounts. Part III presents a representationalist solution to the mind-body problem. It argues that all awareness, including awareness of qualia, is governed by a Kantian appearance/reality distinction-a distinction between the ways objects and properties are represented as being, and the ways they are in themselves. It also presents theories of pain and visual qualia that kick them out of the mind and assign them to locations in body and the external world. Part IV defends reliabilist theories of epistemic justification, deploys such theories in answering Cartesian skepticism, responds critically to Hawthorne's lottery problem and related proposals about the role of knowledge in conversation and practical reasoning, presents a new account of the sources of modeal knowledge, and proposes an account of logical and mathematical beliefs that represents them as immunune to empirical revision.

William James and the Transatlantic Conversation focuses on the American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910) and his engagements with European thought, together with the multidisciplinary reception of his work on both sides of the Atlantic since his death. James's encounters with European thinkers and ideas ran throughout his early life and across his distinguished international career, in which he participated in a number of transatlantic conversations in science, philosophy, psychology, religion, ethics, and literature. This volume explores and extends these conversations by drawing together twelve scholars from a range of disciplines on both sides of the Atlantic to assess James's work in all its variety, to trace his multidisciplinary reception across the twentieth century, and to evaluate his legacy in the twenty-first century. The first half of the book considers James's many intellectual influences and the second half focuses on A Pluralistic Universe (1909), the published text of his 1908 Hibbert Lectures at Oxford University, as a key text for assessing James's transatlantic conversations. The pluralistic transatlantic currents addressed in the first part of the volume enable a fuller understanding of James's philosophy of pluralism that forms the explicit focus for the second part. Taken as a collection, the volume is unique in scholarship on James in generating transatlantic, interdisciplinary, and cross-generational dialogues, and it repositions James as an important international thinker and arguably the most distinctive American intellectual figure of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Although collective emotions have a long tradition in scientific inquiry, for instance in mass psychology and the sociology of rituals and social movements, their importance for individuals and the social world has never been more obvious than in the past decades. The Arab Spring revolution, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and mass gatherings at music festivals or mega sports events clearly show the impact collective emotions have both in terms of driving conflict and in uniting people. But these examples only show the most obvious and evident forms of collective emotions. Others are more subtle, although less important: shared moods, emotional atmospheres, and intergroup emotions are part and parcel of our social life. Although these phenomena go hand in hand with any formation of sociality, they are little understood. Moreover, there still is a large gap in our understanding of individual emotions on the one hand and collective emotional phenomena on the other hand. This book presents a comprehensive overview of contemporary theories and research on collective emotions. It spans several disciplines and brings together, for the first time, various strands of inquiry and up-to-date research in the study of collective emotions and related phenomena. In focusing on conceptual, theoretical, and methodological issues in collective emotion research, the volume narrows the gap between the wealth of studies on individual emotions and inquiries into collective emotions. The book catches up with a renewed interest into the collective dimensions of emotions and their close relatives, for example emotional climates, atmospheres, communities, and intergroup emotions. This interest is propelled by a more general increase in research on the social and interpersonal aspects of emotion on the one hand, and by trends in philosophy and cognitive science towards refined conceptual analyses of collective entities and the collective properties of cognition on the other hand. The book includes sections on: Conceptual Perspectives; Collective Emotion in Face-to-Face Interactions; The Social-Relational Dimension of Collective Emotion; The Social Consequences of Collective Emotions; Group-Based and Intergroup Emotion; Rituals, Movements, and Social Organization; and Collective Emotions in Online Social Systems. Including contributions from psychologists, philosophers, sociologists, and neuroscience, this volume is a unique and valuable contribution to the affective sciences literature.

In a 2005 editorial in the British newspaper The Guardian, Kant was declared "the undefeated heavyweight philosophy champion of the world" because he had the "insight ... to remove psychology from epistemology, arguing that knowledge is inevitably mediated by space, time and forms within our minds." This is an accurate reflection of the consensus view of philosophers and scientists that Kant's accounts of space, time, nature, mathematics, and logic on the Critique of Pure Reason are rationalist, normativist, and nativist. Here, Wayne Waxman argues that this is untrue. Kant neither asserted nor implied that Euclid and Newton are the final word in their respective sciences. Rather than supposing that the psyche derives its fundamental forms from epistemology, he traced the first principles of ordinary, scientific, mathematical, and even logical knowledge to the psyche. Aristotelean logic, in particular, exhausts the sphere of the logical for Kant precisely because he deduced it entirely from psychological principles of the unity of consciousness, resulting in a demarcation of logic from mathematics that would set virtually everything regarded as logic today on the mathematical side of the ledger. Although Kant derived his conception of the unity of consciousness from Descartes, he gave it new life by eliminating its epistemological and metaphysical baggage, reducing it to its logical essence, and grounding what remained on a wholly original conception of the a priori unity of sensibility. Thus, far from departing from the course charted by British Empiricism, Kant's anatomy of the understanding is continuous with, indeed the culmination of, the psychologization of philosophy initiated by Locke, advanced by Berkeley, and developed to its empirical outrance by Hume. "This is a superb and very important book. It is certainly one of the best books written on Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason." -Klaus Steigleder, Professor of Applied Ethics, Ruhr-Universitat Bochum.

A new theory is taking hold in neuroscience. It is the theory that the brain is essentially a hypothesis-testing mechanism, one that attempts to minimise the error of its predictions about the sensory input it receives from the world. It is an attractive theory because powerful theoretical arguments support it, and yet it is at heart stunningly simple. Jakob Hohwy explains and explores this theory from the perspective of cognitive science and philosophy. The key argument throughout The Predictive Mind is that the mechanism explains the rich, deep, and multifaceted character of our conscious perception. It also gives a unified account of how perception is sculpted by attention, and how it depends on action. The mind is revealed as having a fragile and indirect relation to the world. Though we are deeply in tune with the world we are also strangely distanced from it. The first part of the book sets out how the theory enables rich, layered perception. The theory's probabilistic and statistical foundations are explained using examples from empirical research and analogies to different forms of inference. The second part uses the simple mechanism in an explanation of problematic cases of how we manage to represent, and sometimes misrepresent, the world in health as well as in mental illness. The third part looks into the mind, and shows how the theory accounts for attention, conscious unity, introspection, self and the privacy of our mental world.

For much of the past two millennia philosophers have embraced a priori knowledge and have thought that the a priori plays an important role in philosophy itself. Philosophers from Plato to Descartes, Kant to Kripke, all endorse the a priori and engage in a priori reasoning in their philosophical discussions. Recent work in epistemology and experimental philosophy, however, has raised questions about both the existence of a priori knowledge and the centrality of the a priori for philosophy. This collection of essays aims to advance the discussion of the a priori and its role in philosophy by addressing four issues. The first is whether intuitions provide evidence for philosophical propositions, whether that evidence is a priori, and whether the results of experimental philosophy affect the evidential and a priori status of intuitions. The second is whether there are explanations of the a priori and what range of propositions can be justified and known a priori. The third is whether a priori justified beliefs are needed in order to avoid some skeptical worries. The fourth is whether certain recent challenges to the existence or significance of the a priori are successful. The contributors include a mix of young and established philosophers, including some of the most prominent voices in philosophy today.

How can one think about a thing, think something false about it, and still be thinking about that thing at all? If a concept is applied to something outside its meaning, how are we to say it does not mean that thing as well? The problem of misrepresentation is one of the central issues in contemporary philosophy of mind. Here, Mark Perlman criticizes the way all contemporary theories of mental representation seek to account for misrepresentation, concluding that it cannot be explained naturistically. Specifically, Perlman evaluates and criticizes the theories of mental content proposed by Fodor, Dretske, Millikan, Block, Harman and others, as well as examining verificationist approaches to meaning of Quine, Davidson and Stich. The book goes much further than criticism, however: Perlman formulates a naturalistic theory of representation that reluctantly accepts the unfortunate conclusion that there is no misrepresentation. He adds a pragmatic theory of content, which explains apparent misrepresentation as concept change. Mental representations can be good or bad in specific contexts and for specific purposes, but their correctness is not a matter of truth and falsity. The pragmatic approach to mental content has implications for epistemology, theories of truth, metaphysics, psychology, and AI (specifically connectionist networks). Readership: One of the most thorough examinations of mental representation and meaning holism available, this book should be read by everyone interested in the mind and how ideas can have meaning. It crosses boundaries from philosophy into psychology, linguistics, AI and cognitive science.

Bringing together active neuroscientists, neurophilosophers, and scholars this volume considers the prospects of a neuroscientifically-informed pragmatism and a pragmatically-informed neuroscience on issues ranging from the nature of mental life to the implications of neuroscience for education and ethics.

Theology after Postmodernity is a ground-breaking study that has the capacity to transform the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and Christian theology. Reading the theology of Thomas Aquinas in close engagement with the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, Tina Beattie shows how Thomism exerted a formative influence on Lacan, and she also shows how a Lacanian approach can bring rich new insights to Thomas's theology. A growing number of English-speaking scholars now recognize the extent to which twentieth century French theorists and philosophers were influenced by medieval theology, and there have been several studies of Jacques Lacan's Thomism. However, this is the first study published in English to bring a Lacanian feminist perspective to bear on the theology of Thomas Aquinas. Focusing on the centrality of desire in Thomas's theology and Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, Beattie follows Lacan along an overgrown and often hidden path through the changing configurations of desire, gender, and knowledge from their Aristotelian formation in the medieval universities to their fragmentation in the collapse of modernity's visions and values. Beattie offers a penetrating critique of Thomas's Aristotelianism, but she also excavates the mystical treasures within his theology. This enables her to show how Thomas's God remains an unconscious but potent influence in the shaping of modern western thought, and to ask what transformations might be needed in order to bring about a Thomism for our times. Probing beneath the surface of Thomas's Summa Theologiae and other writings, she brings to light the Other of Thomas's One God - an incarnate, maternal Trinity who emerges when Thomas's Aristotelian ontotheology is suspended and the more neglected aspects of his doctrinal and theological insights are allowed to emerge. Lacan makes possible a renewed Thomism which offers a rich theology of creation, incarnation, and redemption capable of responding to some of the most urgent and far-reaching challenges that questions of gender, nature, and God pose to Christian theological language in its classical and postmodern formations.

The Objects of Thought addresses the ancient question of how it is possible to think about what does not exist. Tim Crane argues that the representation of the non-existent is a pervasive feature of our thought about the world, and that we will not adequately understand thought's representational power ("intentionality") unless we have understood the representation of the non-existent. Intentionality is conceived by Crane in terms of the direction of the mind upon an object of thought, or an intentional object. Intentional objects are what we think about. Some intentional objects exist and some do not. Non-existence poses a problem because there seem to be truths about non-existent intentional objects, but truths are answerable to reality, and reality contains only what exists. The proposed solution is to accept that there are some genuine truths about non-existent intentional objects, but to hold that they must be reductively explained in terms of truths about what does exist. The Objects of Thought offers both an original account of the nature of intentionality and a solution to the problem of thought about the non-existent.