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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Philosophy of mind
What do you do when you're not asleep and when you're not eating? You're most likely waiting-to finish work, to get home, or maybe even to be seen by your doctor. Hold On is less about how to manage all that "staying where one is until a particular time or event" (OED) than it is about describing how we experience waiting. Waiting can embrace things like hesitation and curiosity, dithering and procrastination, hunting and being hunted, fearing and being feared, dread and illness, courting and parenting, anticipation and excitement, curiosity, listening to and even performing music, being religious, being happy or unhappy, being bored and being boring. They're all explored here. Waiting is also characterized by brain chemicals such as serotonin and dopamine. They can radically alter the way we register the passing of time. Waiting is also the experience that may characterize most interpersonal relations-mismanage it at your own risk. Hold On contains advice on how to cope with waiting-how to live better-but its main aim is to show how important the experience of waiting is, in popular and highbrow culture, and, sometimes, in history. Detouring into psychology, neurology, ethology, philosophy, film, literature, and especially art, Peter Toohey's illuminates in unexpected ways one of the most common of human experiences. After reading his book, you'll never wait the same way again.
This book proposes a novel and rigorous explanation of consciousness. It argues that the study of an aspect of our self-consciousness known as the 'feeling of embodiment' teaches us that there are two distinct phenomena to be targeted by an explanation of consciousness. First is an explanation of the phenomenal qualities - 'what it is like' - of the experience; and second is the subject's awareness of those qualities. Glenn Carruthers explores the phenomenal qualities of the feeling of embodiment using the tools of quality spaces, as well as the subject's awareness of those qualities as a functionally emergent property of various kinds of processing of these spaces. Where much recent work on consciousness focuses on visual experience, this book rather draws evidence from the study of self-consciousness. Carruthers argues that in light of recent methodological discoveries, awareness must be explained in terms of the organization of multiple cognitive processes. The book offers an explanation of anomalous body representations and, from that, poses a more general theory of consciousness. Ultimately this book creates a hybrid account of consciousness that explains phenomenology and awareness using different tools. It will be of great interest to all scholars of psychology and philosophy as well as anyone interested in exploring the intricacies of how we experience our bodies, what we are and how we fit into the world.
Noam Chomsky's claim that ordinary speakers possess complex structures of linguistic knowledge was a trigger for the cognitive revolution in the mid-20th century. This and an associated claim, that linguistics is essentially in the business of rendering such knowledge explicit, have been the target of an evolving series of sceptical objections ever since.
The relationship between mind and matter, mental states and physical states, has occupied the attention of philosophers for thousands of years. Richard Fumerton's primary concern is the knowledge argument for dualism - an argument that proceeds from the idea that we can know truths about our existence and our mental states without knowing any truths about the physical world. This view has come under relentless criticism, but here Fumerton makes a powerful case for its rehabilitation, demonstrating clearly the importance of its interconnections with a wide range of other controversies within philosophy. Fumerton analyzes philosophical views about the nature of thought and the relation of those views to arguments for dualism, and investigates the connection between a traditional form of foundationalism about knowledge, and a foundationalist view about thought that underlies traditional arguments for dualism. His book will be of great interest to those studying epistemology and the philosophy of mind.
What is awareness? How is dreaming different from ordinary awareness? What does mathematics have to do with awareness? Are different kinds of awareness related? "Awareness" is commonly spoken of as "mind, soul, spirit, consciousness, the unconscious, psyche, imagination, self, and other." The Phenomena of Awareness is a study of awareness as it is directly experienced. From the start, Cecile T. Tougas engages the reader in reflective notice of awareness as it appears from moment to moment in a variety of ways. The book draws us in and asks us to focus on the flow of phenomena in living experience, not as a theoretical construct, nor an image, nor a biochemical product, but instead as phases, moments, or parts that cannot exist without one another. Tougas shows how these parts exist in mutual dependence as a continuum of awareness, as the flow of lived time, and how noticing time deepens psychological self-understanding and understanding of another. The Phenomena of Awareness is divided into four parts: * Seeking and Noticing Awareness * Observing and Understanding the Flow of Phenomena * Distinguishing Intentional Acts * Work in Progress Drawing on the work of E. Husserl, G. Cantor and C.G. Jung, this book is an original synthesis of phenomenology, mathematics and psychology that explores awareness and the concept of 'transfinite number'. This book will be of interest to analytical psychologists, philosophers, mathematicians, feminist scholars, humanities teachers and students. Cecile T. Tougas teaches Latin at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, Durham. She taught philosophy at the University of Southern Maine and the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Stephen Schiffer presents a groundbreaking account of meaning and
belief, and shows how it can illuminate a range of crucial problems
regarding language, mind, knowledge, and ontology. He introduces
the new doctrine of 'pleonastic propositions' to explain what the
things we mean and believe
In recent years there has been much psychological and neurological work purporting to show that consciousness and self-awareness play no role in causing actions, and indeed to demonstrate that free will is an illusion. The essays in this volume subject the assumptions that motivate such claims to sustained interdisciplinary scrutiny. The book will be compulsory reading for psychologists and philosophers working on action explanation, and for anyone interested in the relation between the brain sciences and consciousness.
Consciousness has many elements, from sensory experiences such as vision, audition, and bodily sensation, to nonsensory aspects such as volition, emotion, memory, and thought. The apparent unity of these elements is striking; all are presented to us as experiences of a single subject, and all seem to be contained within a unified field of experience. But this apparent unity raises many questions. How do diverse systems in the brain co-operate to produce a unified experience? Are there conditions under which this unity breaks down? Is conscious experience really unified at all? In recent years, these questions have been addressed by researchers in many fields, including, neurophysiologists and computational modellers, neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, and philosophy. With chapters from some of the leading thinkers on consciousness, this is a thought-provoking book that attempts to answer some of the big questions. Contributors include - Chris Frith, David Chalmers, Guilio Tononi, Anne Treisman, Andrew Young, Sydney Shoemaker, Glyn Humphreys, Rodney Cotterill, Zoltan Dienes, Susan Hurley, Randall O'Reilly, Andreas Engel, Pierre Perruchet, Catherine Tallon-Baudry, and Francisco Varela.
Simon Blackburn presents a selection of his philosophical essays from 1995 to 2010. He offers engaging and illuminating discussions of various problems which arise when such familiar notions as representation, truth, reason, and assertion are applied in the sphere of practical thought. It is puzzling how our thinking gets to grip with such things as values and norms. Blackburn explores how we can try to understand what we say in terms of what we are doing when we say it. He investigates how propositions interact with linguistic expressions whose primary function is identified in terms of actions performed in expressing commitments with them, when those commitments are thought of in practical rather than descriptive terms. He broadens his investigation from semantic questions to wider issues of pluralism, pragmatism, philosophy of mind, and the nature of practical reasoning.
This book describes and proposes an unusual integrative approach to human perception that qualifies as both an ecological and a phenomenological approach at the same time. Thomas Natsoulas shows us how our consciousness - in three of six senses of the word that the book identifies - is involved in our activity of perceiving the one and only world that exists, which includes oneself as a proper part of it, and that all of us share together with the rest of life on earth. He makes the case that our stream of consciousness - in the original Jamesian sense minus his mental/physical dualism - provides us with firsthand contact with the world, as opposed to our having such contact instead with theorist-posited items such as inner mental representations, internal pictures, or sense-image models, pure figments and virtual objects, none of which can have effects on our sensory receptors.
In the last few years, there has been an enormous amount of activity in the study of analogy and metaphor. This is partly because of an interest of artificial intelligence researchers in simulating learning processes using analogy. It also arises from critical examinations of standard theories in the philosophy of language, with their inbuilt literal/meta phoric distinction. This volume consists of recent previously unpub lished work in this area, with a particular emphasis upon the role of analogies in reasoning and, more generally, their role in thought and language. The papers are contributed by philosophers, computer scientists, cognitive scientists and literary critics. Researchers in these fields whose focus is the study of analogy and metaphor will find much of interest in this volume. These essays can also serve as an introduction to some of the major approaches taken in the investigation of analogy. As noted, this volume brings together the work of researchers in several different disciplines. The various approaches taken with respect to the understanding of analogy tend to be rather different, however, the articles suggest a common conclusion. Analogy and metaphor pervade thought and language; their close investigation thus constitutes a valuable contribution to our understanding of persons. DAVID H. HELMAN Case Western Reserve University vii PART I CONCEPTUAL AND CATEGORICAL THEORIES OF ANALOGICAL UNDERSTANDING MARK TURNER CATEGORIES AND ANALOGIES I want to pursue the following claims: The way we categorize helps explain the way we recognize a statement as an analogy."
"Personality Capture and Emulation" is the gateway to an amazing future that actually may be achieved, enabling the preservation and simulation of human personalities at progressively higher levels of fidelity. This challenge is no longer the province merely of uninhibited visionaries, but has become a solid field of research, drawing upon a wide range of information technologies in human-centered computing and cyber-human systems. Even at modest levels of accomplishment, research in this emerging area requires convergence of cognitive, social, and cultural sciences, in cooperation with information engineering and artificial intelligence, thus stimulating new multidisciplinary perspectives. Therefore this book will inspire many specific research and development projects that will produce their own valuable outcomes, even as the totality of the work moves us closer to a major revolution in human life. Will it ever really be possible to transfer a human personality at death to a technology that permits continued life?Or will people come to see themselves as elements in a larger socio-cultural system, for which a societal information system can provide collective immortality even after the demise of individuals? A large number and variety of pilot studies and programming projects are offered as prototypes for research that innovators in many fields may exploit for the achievement of their own goals. Together, they provide an empirical basis to strengthen the intellectual quality of several current debates at the frontiers of the human and information sciences."
In Context and Content Robert Stalnaker develops a philosophical picture of the nature of speech and thought and the relations between them. Two themes in particular run through these collected essays: the role that the context in which speech takes place plays in accounting for the way language is used to express thought, and the role of the external environment in determining the contents of our thoughts. Stalnaker argues against the widespread assumption of the priority of linguistic over mental representation, which he suggests has had a distorting influence on our understanding. The first part of the book develops a framework for representing contexts and the way they interact with the interpretation of what is said in them. This framework is used to help to explain a range of linguistic phenomena concerning presupposition and assertion, conditional statements, the attribution of beliefs, and the use of names, descriptions, and pronouns to refer. Stalnaker then draws out the conception of thought and its content that is implicit in this framework. He defends externalism about thought-the assumption that our thoughts have the contents they have in virtue of the way we are situated in the world-and explores the role of linguistic action and linguistic structure in determining the contents of our thoughts. Context and Content offers philosophers and cognitive scientists a summation of Stalnaker's important and influential work in this area. His new introduction to the volume gives an overview of this work and offers a convenient way in for those who are new to it. The Oxford Cognitive Science series is a new forum for the best contemporary work in this flourishing field, where various disciplines-cognitive psychology, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and computational theory-join forces in the investigation of thought, awareness, understanding, and associated workings of the mind. Each book constitutes an original contribution to its subject, but will be accessible beyond the ranks of specialists, so as to reach a broad interdisciplinary readership. The series will be carefully shaped and steered with the aim of representing the most important developments in the field and bringing together its constituent disciplines.
This text develops a philosophical theory of imagination that draws upon the latest work in psychology. This theory illuminates the use of imagination in coming to terms with art, its role in enabling us to live as social beings, and the psychological consequences of disordered imagination. Currie and Ravenscroft offer a lucid exploration of the subject for readers in philosophy, psychology and aesthetics.
The first full, philosophical introduction to Descartes for many years – competitors are either out of date or considerably higher in level Descartes is the most important Western philosopher after Plato and studied by virtually all philosophy students at some point Explains and assesses Descartes’ most important ideas, arguments and texts, particularly his Meditations Concerning First Philosophy Ideal for anyone coming to Descartes for the first time Additional features include a chronology, a glossary and annotated further reading
Key Updates to the Second Edition Includes a new opening section on human nature, borrowing material from elsewhere in the book Adds a new chapter on evolutionary and developmental arguments for the innateness of morality Expands coverage of the challenges to psychological research, including the replication crisis and the WEIRDness challenge Provides a new section on implicit bias and moral responsibility Offers enhanced clarity and accessibility throughout Includes up-to-date Further Reading sections and Bibliography
Key Updates to the Second Edition Includes a new opening section on human nature, borrowing material from elsewhere in the book Adds a new chapter on evolutionary and developmental arguments for the innateness of morality Expands coverage of the challenges to psychological research, including the replication crisis and the WEIRDness challenge Provides a new section on implicit bias and moral responsibility Offers enhanced clarity and accessibility throughout Includes up-to-date Further Reading sections and Bibliography
This volume demonstrates that phonology is a subsystem of the mind/brain and explores the theoretical and practical (including medical) consequences of this insight. Written by American and European specialists at the cutting-edge of research in areas ranging from phonetics to neurology, the book addresses central questions relating to the cognitive status of phonological representation and phonetic implementation and the links between mental and physical representation of sound systems.
This is the first collection of essays exclusively devoted to knowledge from non-knowledge and related issues. It features original contributions from some of the most prominent and up-and-coming scholars working in contemporary epistemology. There is a nascent literature in epistemology about the possibility of inferential knowledge based on premises that are, for one reason or another, not known. The essays in this book explore if and how epistemology can accommodate cases where knowledge is generated from something other than knowledge. Can reasoning from false beliefs generate knowledge? Can reasoning from unjustified beliefs generate knowledge? Can reasoning from gettiered beliefs generate knowledge? Can reasoning from propositions one does not even believe generate knowledge? The contributors to this book tackle these and other questions head-on. Together, they advance the debate about knowledge from non-knowledge in novel and interesting directions. Illuminating Errors will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in epistemology and philosophy of mind.
This book examines linguistic expressions of emotion in intensional contexts and offers a formally elegant account of the relationship between language and emotion. The author presents a compelling case for the view that there exist, contrary to popular belief, logical universals at the intersection of language and emotive content. This book shows that emotive structures in the mind that are widely assumed to be not only subjectively or socio-culturally variable but also irrelevant to a general theory of cognition offer an unusually suitable ground for a formal theory of emotive representations, allowing for surprising logical and cognitive consequences for a theory of cognition. Challenging mainstream assumptions in cognitive science and in linguistics, this book will appeal to linguists, philosophers of the mind, linguistic anthropologists, psychologists and cognitive scientists of all persuasions.
This monograph presents a clear account of when and how attentional processes can shape perceptual experience. This argument is based on the prediction-error minimization model of the mind. The author believes that the topic of attention should take a more central role in the debate about the influence of cognition on perception. Inside, he shows how this can be possible. The hypothesis that cognition may shape perceptual experience has been traditionally labeled as the cognitive penetrability of perceptual experience. Cognitive penetrability is relevant for several debates in philosophy and cognitive science. It tackles the possibility of gathering genuine knowledge on the basis of perceptual information about the world delivered by sensory channels. The problem, the author notes, is that if our previously acquired belief can shape current perceptual experiences, such experiences cannot serve as an adequate source of justification in retaining those beliefs or even forming new ones. He argues that cognitive penetration may sometimes happen through attentional processes, but that its occurrence need not undermine perceptual justification. The book provides an overview of the cognitive penetrability debate. The author discusses evidence that supports the occurrence of this phenomenon. Overall, this investigation offers readers a philosophical discussion of attention based on the biased-competition theory. It argues that attention is a property of mental representations that emerges from a metacognitive competition process.
The mind is not the brain. The locus of our consciousness is in the world. Portalism embraces radical phenomenal externalism and represents a contemporary form of dualism that rejects materialist assumptions of mind/brain identity. As a philosophy of mind, Portalism breaks with traditional thinking in two significant ways: first by holding that consciousness is in fact a fifth fundamental force of nature endowed with behavioural attributes not unlike that of gravity, and second by arguing how consciousness inheres in all living organisms regardless of their biological sophistication. Portalism compels us to reject traditional monist theories about the nature of consciousness and boldly enter into a new way of thinking about our own reality.
Across several intellectual disciplines there exists a tension between an appreciation of the cognitive capacities that all humans share and a recognition of the great variety in their manifestations in different individuals and groups. In this book G. E. R. Lloyd examines how, while avoiding the imposition of prior Western assumptions and concepts, we can reconcile two conflicting intuitions: that all humans share the same basic cognitive capacities and yet their actual manifestations in different individuals and groups differ appreciably. Lloyd investigates the cultural viability of analytic tools we commonly use (such as the contrasts between the literal and the metaphorical, between myth and rational account, and between nature and culture themselves) and the categories that we employ to organize human experience (like mathematics, religion, law, and aesthetics). The end result is a robust defence, within limits, of the possibilities of mutual intelligibility-one which recognizes both the diversity in the manifestations of human intelligence and the need to revise our assumptions in order to achieve that understanding. |
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