Marcia Cavell draws on philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the sciences of the mind in a fascinating and original investigation of human subjectivity. A 'subject' is a creature, we may say, who recognizes herself as an 'I', taking in the world from her own subjective perspective; who is an agent, doing things for reasons, sometimes self-reflective, and able to assume responsibility for herself and some of her actions. The idea of a 'subject' points, then, toward an ideal. It asks for the conditions under which a human infant becomes a subject, and for the sorts of things, like self-deception and massive anxiety, that get in the way. What sorts of questions are these? Certainly philosophical. They burrow into central issues in moral philosophy: freedom of the will, the 'self', self-knowledge, the relations between reason and passion, between autonomy and self-knowledge, issues that form roughly the second half of the book. They lead also into metaphysics and epistemology: Is subjectivity incompatible with objectivity? Are subjects not also objects in the real world? As such, how are they to be treated? Would it be possible, in theory, for a creature to become a subject in the absence of relationships with other subjects? But the questions are also practical. In particular they are at the heart of psychoanalysis both as a theory of the mind, and as a therapy which aims at maximizing the ideals of autonomy and self-knowledge implicit in the very idea of a 'subject'. One of the guiding premises of Becoming a Subject is that philosophical investigation into the specifically human way of being in the world cannot separate itself from investigations of a more empirical sort. Cavell brings together for the first time reflections in philosophy, findings in neuroscience, studies in infant development, psychoanalytic theory, and clinical vignettes from her own psychoanalytic practice.

Philosophers typically suppose that the contents of our beliefs and other cognitive attitudes are propositions-things that might be true or false, and their truth values do not vary from time to time, place to place, or person to person. Neil Feit argues that this view breaks down in the face of beliefs about the self. These are beliefs that we express by means of a first-person pronoun. Feit maintains-following David Lewis, Roderick Chisholm, and others-that in general, the contents of our beliefs are properties. Unlike propositions, properties lack absolute truth values that do not vary with time, place, or person.
Belief about the Self offers a sustained defense of the Property Theory of Content, according to which the content of every cognitive attitude is a property rather than a proposition. The theory is supported with an array of new arguments, defended from various objections, and applied to some important problems and puzzles in the philosophy of mind.

This book mainly focuses on the widely distributed nature of computational tools, models, and methods, ultimately related to the current importance of computational machines as mediators of cognition. An entirely new eco-cognitive approach to computation is offered, to underline the question of the overwhelming cognitive domestication of ignorant entities, which is persistently at work in our current societies. Eco-cognitive computationalism does not aim at furnishing an ultimate and static definition of the concepts of information, cognition, and computation, instead, it intends, by respecting their historical and dynamical character, to propose an intellectual framework that depicts how we can understand their forms of "emergence" and the modification of their meanings, also dealing with impressive unconventional non-digital cases. The new proposed perspective also leads to a clear description of the divergence between weak and strong levels of creative "abductive" hypothetical cognition: weak accomplishments are related to "locked abductive strategies", typical of computational machines, and deep creativity is instead related to "unlocked abductive strategies", which characterize human cognizers, who benefit from the so-called "eco-cognitive openness".

This book explores how the continental philosophical tradition in the 20th century attempted to understand madness as madness. It traces the paradoxical endeavour of reason attempting to understand madness without dissolving the inherent strangeness and otherness of madness. It provides a comprehensive overview of the contributions of phenomenology, critical theory, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism and anti-psychiatry to continental philosophy and psychiatry. The book outlines an intellectual tradition of psychiatry that is both fascinated by and withdraws from madness. Madness is a lure for philosophy in two senses; as both trap and provocation. It is a trap because this philosophical tradition constructs an otherness of madness so profound, that it condemns madness to silence. However, the idea of madness as another world is also a fertile provocation because it respects the non-identity of madness to reason. The book concludes with some critical reflections on the role of madness in contemporary philosophical thought.

This book explores how philosophical realisms relate to psychoanalytical conceptions of the Real, and in turn how the Lacanian framework challenges basic philosophical notions of object and reality. The author examines how contemporary psychoanalysis might respond to the question of ontology by taking advantage of the recent revitalization of realism in its speculative form. While the philosophical side of the debate makes a plea for an independent ontological consistency of the Real, this book proposes a Lacanian reassessment of the definition of the Real as 'what is foreign to subjectivity itself'. In doing so, it reframes the question of the Real in terms of what is already there beneath the supposedly linguistic constitution of subjectivity. The book then goes on to engage the problem of cognition in the realm of Nature qua materiality, focusing on the centrality of the body as a linguistic-material hybrid. It argues that it is possible to re-establish the theoretical dignity of Ricoeur's notion of 'suspicion', by building a dialogue between Lacanian psychoanalysis and three main domains of inquiry: desire, objects and bodily enjoyment. Borrowing from Piera Aulagnier's theory of the Other as a word-bearer, it considers the genesis of desire and sense of reality both explainable through a hybrid framework which comprises psychoanalytical insights and material dynamics in a comprehensive account. This created theoretical space is an opportunity for both philosophers and psychoanalysts to rethink key Lacanian insights in light of the problem of the Real.

Charles Travis presents a series of essays in which he has developed his distinctive view of the relation of thought to language. The key idea is "occasion-sensitivity": what it is for words to express a given concept is for them to be apt for contributing to any of many different conditions of correctness (notably truth conditions). Since words mean what they do by expressing a given concept, it follows that meaning does not determine truth conditions. This view ties thoughts less tightly to the linguistic forms which express them than traditional views of the matter, and in two directions: a given linguistic form, meaning fixed, may express an indefinite variety of thoughts; one thought can be expressed in an indefinite number of syntactically and semantically distinct ways. Travis highlights the importance of this view for linguistic theory, and shows how it gives new form to a variety of traditional philosophical problems.

This book re-examines the roles of causation and cognition in early modern philosophy. The standard historical narrative suggests that early modern thinkers abandoned Aristotelian models of formal causation in favor of doctrines that appealed to relations of efficient causation between material objects and cognizers. This narrative has been criticized in recent scholarship from at least two directions. Scholars have emphasized that we should not think of the Aristotelian tradition in such monolithic terms, and that many early modern thinkers did not unequivocally reduce all causation to efficient causation. In line with this general approach, this book features original essays written by leading experts in early modern philosophy. It is organized around five guiding questions: What are the entities involved in causal processes leading to cognition? What type(s) or kind(s) of causality are at stake? Are early modern thinkers confined to efficient causation or do other types of causation play a role? What is God's role in causal processes leading to cognition? How do cognitive causal processes relate to other, non-cognitive causal processes? Is the causal process in the case of human cognition in any way special? How does it relate to processes involved in the case of non-human cognition? The essays explore how fifteen early modern thinkers answered these questions: Francisco Suarez, Rene Descartes, Louis de la Forge, Geraud de Cordemoy, Nicolas Malebranche, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch de Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Ralph Cudworth, Margaret Cavendish, John Locke, John Sergeant, George Berkeley, David Hume, and Thomas Reid. The volume is unique in that it explores both well-known and understudied historical figures, and in that it emphasizes the intimate relationship between causation and cognition to open up new perspectives on early modern philosophy of mind and metaphysics.

Disjunctivism has attracted considerable philosophical attention in recent years: it has been the source of a lively and extended debate spanning the philosophy of perception, epistemology, and the philosophy of action. Adrian Haddock and Fiona Macpherson present seventeen specially written essays, which examine the different forms of disjunctivism and explore the connections between them. This volume will be an essential resource for anyone working in the central areas of philosophy, and the starting point for future research in this fascinating field.

The aim of this book is to address the relevance of Wilfrid Sellars' philosophy to understanding topics in Buddhist philosophy. While contemporary scholars of Buddhism often take Sellars as a touchstone for philosophical analysis, and while many take Sellars' corpus as their entree into current philosophical discourse, fewer contemporary philosophers have crossed the bridge in the other direction, using Sellarsian ideas as a way of entering into Buddhist philosophy. The essays in this volume, written by both philosophers and Buddhist Studies scholars, are divided into two sections organized around two of Sellars' essays that have been particularly influential in Buddhist Studies: "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man" and "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind." The chapters in Part I generally address questions concerning the two truths, while those in Part II concern issues in epistemology and philosophy of mind. The volume will be of interest to Sellars scholars, to scholars interested in the contemporary interaction of Buddhist philosophy and Western philosophy and to scholars of Buddhist Studies.

Although we no longer live in the relative simplicity of the Jurassic age, and even though we are not aware of them, primitive mammalian brain that developed in that era still live on inside our skulls and remain crucial to our daily functions. The challenges we face today in the information age--how to process the vastly greater, more varied and quickly changing inputs we receive--are very different from those that our ancestors faced during the Jurassic age. As we struggle to process overwhelming amounts of information, we may sometimes ask whether our brains can change to help us adapt. In fact, our brains have always changed gradually, so the questions we should ask are really how our brains will change, and whether we will be able to take full advantage of the changes, perhaps even enhance them, to help us keep up with the accelerating evolution of machines. To understand how our brains will change, we need to understand how they evolved in the first place, as well as how the interactions of the resulting brain structures, including the relics of primitive mammalian and even reptilian processes, influence how we think and act.
In Mind from Body, Don Tucker, one of the most original thinkers about organic information processing, provides a fascinating analysis of how our brains have become what they are today and speculates intriguingly about what they could be tomorrow. He presents important research that explains how personal experience creates the emotional and motivational bases of each of our thoughts, even though we are usually not aware that it is happening. Tucker shows that in exploring how these bodily thought processes still determine how we react to the world andmake decisions, we can become more rational in our actions, free ourselves from fruitless or even self-destructive patterns of behavior, become more efficient, and perhaps even wiser. By combining the most up-to-date scientific thought and hands-on experimental results, expressed clearly and compellingly, along with a story of hypothetical decision-making, Tucker explicates what is happening behind our thought processes as our minds struggle to maintain the pace of the information age.

This Handbook brings together philosophical work on how language shapes, and is shaped by, social and political factors. Its 24 chapters were written exclusively for this volume by an international team of leading researchers, and together they provide a broad expert introduction to the major issues currently under discussion in this area. The volume is divided into four parts: Part I: Methodological and Foundational Issues Part II: Non-ideal Semantics and Pragmatics Part III: Linguistic Harms Part IV: Applications The parts, and chapters in each part, are introduced in the volume's General Introduction. A list of Works Cited concludes each chapter, pointing readers to further areas of study. The Handbook is the first major, multi-authored reference work in this growing area and essential reading for anyone interested in the nature of language and its relationship to social and political reality.

Whilst accounting for the present-day popularity and relevance of Alan Watts' contributions to psychology, religion, arts, and humanities, this interdisciplinary collection grapples with the ongoing criticisms which surround Watts' life and work. Offering rich examination of as yet underexplored aspects of Watts' influence in 1960s counterculture, this volume offers unique application of Watts' thinking to contemporary issues and critically engages with controversies surrounding the commodification of Watts' ideas, his alleged misreading of Biblical texts, and his apparent distortion of Asian religions and spirituality. Featuring a broad range of international contributors and bringing Watts' ideas squarely into the contemporary context, the text provides a comprehensive, yet nuanced exploration of Watts' thinking on psychotherapy, Buddhism, language, music, and sexuality. This text will benefit researchers, doctoral students, and academics in the fields of psychotherapy, phenomenology, and the philosophy of psychology more broadly. Those interested in Jungian psychotherapy, spirituality, and the self and social identity will also enjoy this volume.

This book enables the reader to trace developments in the philosophy and history of psychology. It provides a broad treatment of the main conceptual issues in psychology, explaining what the problems are, outlining the main approaches taken to them, and indicating their relative merits and demerits.

Who has not found themselves scrolling endlessly on screens and wondered: Am I living or distracting myself from living? In Emergency, Break Glass adapts Friedrich Nietzsche's passionate quest for meaning into a world overwhelmed by "content." Written long before the advent of smartphones, Nietzsche's aphoristic philosophy advocated a fierce mastery of attention, a strict information diet, and a powerful connection to the natural world. Drawing on Nietzsche's work, technology journalist Nate Anderson advocates for a life of goal-oriented, creative exertion as more meaningful than the "frictionless" leisure often promised by our devices. He rejects the simplicity of contemporary prescriptions like reducing screen time in favour of looking deeply at what truly matters to us, then finding ways to make our technological tools serve this vision. With a light touch suffused by humour, Anderson uncovers the impact of this "yes-saying" philosophy on his own life-and perhaps on yours.

Notes and Introduction by Mark G. Spencer, Brock University, Ontario John Locke (1632-1704) was perhaps the most influential English writer of his time. His Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Two Treatises of Government (1690) weighed heavily on the history of ideas in the eighteenth century, and Locke's works are often ? rightly ? presented as foundations of the Age of Enlightenment. Both the Essay and the Second Treatise (by far the more influential of the Two Treatises) were widely read by Locke's contemporaries and near contemporaries. His eighteenth-century readers included philosophers, historians and political theorists, but also community and political leaders, engaged laypersons, and others eager to participate in the expanding print culture of the era. His epistemological message that the mind at birth was a blank slate, waiting to be filled, complemented his political message that human beings were free and equal and had the right to create and direct the governments under which they lived. Today, Locke continues to be an accessible author. He provides food for thought to university professors and their students, but has no less to offer the general reader who is eager to enjoy the classics of world literature.

This book is an argument for moving beyond culturally/historically/ethnically/biologically-grounded identity as the necessary foundation of an authentic self. It highlights examples of people who are attempting to inhabit identities they feel are more appropriate to themselves, by deploring the damage done via claims about authentic identity. The sole theme of this book is "becoming beyond identity". We are not fixed human beings but rather perpetually-dynamic human becomings. As intelligence is enabled or recognized beyond the merely human, we should welcome our continuing evolution from homosapiens, sapiens, into many varieties of intelligences on Earth and the cosmos. This book builds from tiny ripples into a tsunami of examples from conventional identity studies, to Confucian human becomings, to apotemnophilia, to DIY biohacking, to cyborgs, to artilects, to hiveminds, to intelligence in animals, plants and fungi from the Holocene through the beginnings of the precarious, climate change-driven Anthropocene Epoch, with hints far beyond and throughout the cosmos. From a lifetime of work in future studies, anticipation science and space studies, the author balances frank tales of his own experiences and beliefs concerning his uncertain and fluid identities with those of others who tell their stories. In addition to material from academic and popular sources, a few poems further illuminate the scene.

This volume covers many diverse topics related in varying degrees to mathematics in mind including the mathematical and topological structures of thought and communication. It examines mathematics in mind from the perspective of the spiral, cyclic and hyperlinked structures of the human mind in terms of its language, its thoughts and its various modes of communication in science, philosophy, literature and the arts including a chapter devoted to the spiral structure of the thought of Marshall McLuhan. In it, the authors examine the topological structures of hypertext, hyperlinking, and hypermedia made possible by the Internet and the hyperlinked structures that existed before its emergence. It also explores the cognitive origins of mathematical thinking of the human mind and its relation to the emergence of spoken language, and studies the emergence of mathematical notation and its impact on education. Topics addressed include: * The historical context of any topic that involves how mathematical thinking emerged, focusing on archaeological and philological evidence. * Connection between math cognition and symbolism, annotation and other semiotic processes. * Interrelationships between mathematical discovery and cultural processes, including technological systems that guide the thrust of cognitive and social evolution. * Whether mathematics is an innate faculty or forged in cultural-historical context * What, if any, structures are shared between mathematics and language

The world has a causal structure, in the sense that some events make other events happen. Although understanding causal structure is essential for predicting and controlling the environment, causal structure is, at least usually, not obvious from superficial, perceptual cues. How then do our minds infer this structure? In the last few years, questions about causal inference and learning have become an important focus of investigation in many different disciplines - developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, ethology, philosophy, and computer science. As is common in scientific research, there has been relatively little interaction on the topic between these disciplines. However, in spite of the minimal interaction, a general review of the research shows the beginning of a formal way of determining how, in principle, the problem of causal inference and learning can be solved, and a wealth of methods for determining how it is, in fact, solved by children, adults, and animals. This volume brings together this research and provides a more sophisticated understanding of causal inference and learning.

Major reference source on the philosophy of Proust and the first major collection of its kind Organised into seven clear sections, examining the incredible range of Proust's work from a philosophical standpoint The Routledge Philosophical Minds series has established itself as the leading handbook series of its kind, far more comprehensive and wide-ranging than the Cambridge Companions or Oxford Handbooks

A Psychological Perspective on Folk Moral Objectivism is a thoroughly researched interdisciplinary exploration of the critical role metaethical beliefs play in the way morality functions. Whether people are "moral objectivists" or not is something that deserves much more empirical attention than it has thus far received, not only because it bears upon philosophical claims but also because it is a critical piece of the puzzle of human morality. This book aims to facilitate incorporating the study of metaethical beliefs into existing research programs by providing a roadmap through the theoretical and empirical landscape as it currently exists and evaluating the methodological approaches used thus far. In doing so, it summarizes the key findings-both in terms of metaethical beliefs and their correlates, causes, and consequences-that have emerged, and explores the value of this area of study for anyone interested in the development, function, causes, and/or consequences of morality. A Psychological Perspective on Folk Moral Objectivism offers a helpful guide to social scientists interested in joining this thriving new area of research. It is a valuable resource for upper level undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers in moral psychology, theoretical psychology, experimental philosophy, metaethics, and philosophy of the mind.

First published in 1935, The Life and Writings of Giambattista Vico is a succinct biography of the Italian philosopher, Giambattista Vico. Carefully documented, the book comments on Vico's life as well as his oeuvre in a bid to extend his audience to the English-speaking population. From his early childhood to the influence of his writings after his death, the book provides a keen insight into the many facets of his philosophy. This book will be of interest to students of philosophy and history.

This book explores the ways in which poetic inspiration came to be associated with madness in early nineteenth-century Britain. By examining the works of poets such as Barrett, Browning, Clare, Tennyson, Townshend, and the Spasmodics in relation to the burgeoning asylum system and shifting medical discourses of the period, it investigates the ways in which Britain's post-Romantic poets understood their own poetic vocations within a cultural context that insistently linked poetic talent with illness and insanity. Joseph Crawford examines the popularity of mesmerism among the writers of the era, as an alternative system of medicine that provided a more sympathetic account of the nature of poetic genius, and investigates the persistent tension, found throughout the literary and medical writings of the period, between the Romantic ideal of the poet as a transcendent visionary genius and the 'medico-psychological' conception of poets as mere case studies in abnormal neurological development.