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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Philosophy of mind
This book interrogates the concept of the subject in the poem, against the broader background of literary-theoretical issues related to the lyric subject. Specifically, what kind of subject is the subject in the poem? What relation does it have to other forms of subjectivation that human beings experience in their life practices? What is its singularity? "The Lyric Subject is a most impressive achievement: a shrewd evaluation of a wide range of writings (philosophical, linguistic, literary) bearing on the question of the lyric subject. With myriad poetic examples, Varja Balz alorsky Antic develops a rich, multileveled mapping of the various forms of subjectivity and agency in the lyric." Jonathan Culler, Professor Emeritus at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
Examining the Psychological Foundations of Science and Morality is a progressive text that explores the relationship between psychology, science and morality, to address fundamental questions about the foundations of psychological research and its relevance for the development of these disciplines. Supported by original empirical evidence, the book analyses the relationship of folk psychology to rational knowledge, outlining an original theory that connects psychology and natural sciences through the mind which creates a psychological foundation for scientific knowledge and morality. It argues that science and religion have a common psychological core of subjective experience, which diversifies into knowledge, beliefs and morality. The book considers how subjective space and time are converted into physical space and time, and how subjective 'sense of causation' is shaped into physical causality and human communication. Further, it explores the mind as a complex system of contrasting realities, with the main function being existence attribution (EXON). The chapters delve into a range of topics including theoretical analysis of consciousness, the internal self, unexplainable phenomena, analysis of empirical research into causality, morality and the mind. The book will be of great interest to postgraduate and upper-level undergraduate students studying foundations of psychology, consciousness, philosophy of science, morality, as well as professionals who deal with influence on mass consciousness or are interested in the link between human psychology, scientific knowledge and morality.
This book presents a collection of essays honoring Professor Harry Heft, a leading figure in the field of ecological psychology, engaging critically with his work, thought and influence. Containing 12 chapters written by leading experts from philosophy and psychology, this text critically examines, questions, and expands on crucial ideas from Heft concerning the nature of cognition, its relationship to the body and the environment (including the social and cultural environment), and the main philosophical assumptions underlying the scientific study of psychological functions. It elaborates on the notion of affordance, and its connection to social, cultural and developmental psychology, as well as on the application of Roger Barker's eco-behavioral program for current psychology and cognitive science. The book includes an extensive interview with Heft, where he reflects about the history, challenges and future of ecological psychology. Finally, it presents a chapter written by Heft, that offers a systematic response to the critical feedback. Given the increasing popularity of ecological psychology and the highly influential work of Harry Heft in related areas such as developmental, social and cultural psychology, and philosophy, this book will appeal to all those interested in the cognitive sciences from a scientific and philosophical perspective. It is also a must read for students of psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science departments.
This reconstruction of the work of 'dialectical memory' in Hegel raises the fundamental question of the principle that presides on the articulation of history and indicates in Hegel's philosophy two alternative models of conceiving history: one that grounds history on 'ethical memory,' the other that sees justice as the moving principle of 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.
* Provides a new integrated theory of the study of philosophy that highlights the importance of understanding biological, psychological and neuroscientific principles * Highlights interdisciplinary research and theory in evolution, consciousness and DNA research and neurolinguistics * Written by an expert in neuroscience and neurolinguistics
This book is an introduction to Patanjali's Yoga as a system of theory and practice of psychology. It explains and interprets the concepts and procedures in the language and idiom of the currently prevailing Euro-American approaches to psychology. The book describes the context of inquiry focusing on the currently popular image of Yoga as a form of calisthenics and a system of concepts and practices of psychology. It provides a worldview of Yoga originated in ancient Vedas and Upanishads and explains the Vedic 'myth' of the genesis of the world showing how it differs from the Christian and Dravidian views. The book explains the concepts of the Samkhya system used by Patanjali as their basic framework. Interpreted in the light of modern psychology, it highlights the significance of the Yogic thesis about excess of suffering over happiness in life. The book also explains two important aspects of Yoga i.e., afflictions (klesas) and Kriya Yoga and provides a detailed account of the transformation of consciousness. This book will be of interest to students, teachers, researchers and practitioners of psychology, psychiatry, and Yoga Psychology. It will also be of great interest to psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, mental health professionals, clinical psychologists, and yoga enthusiasts.
How can we better understand and treat those suffering from schizophrenia and manic-depressive illnesses? This important new book takes us into the world of those suffering from such disorders. Using self-descriptions, its emphasis is not on how mental health professional's view sufferers, but on how the patients themselves experience their disorder. Central to the book is the idea that schizophrenic persons live like disembodies spirits or deanimated bodies. As disembodies spirits, they feel like abstract entities that contemplate their own existence and the world from outside. As deanimated bodies, schizophrenic people feel deprived of the possibility of living personal experiences - perceptions, thoughts, emotions - as their own. A new volume in the International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry series, this book will be of great interest to all those working with sufferers from such disorders - helping them to better understand their mental lives and providing important insights into how best to treat them.
As philosophy departments attempt to define their unique value amid program closures in the humanities and the rise of interdisciplinary research, metaphilosophy has become an increasingly important area of inquiry. Richard Fumerton here lays out a cogent answer to the question asked in the book's title, What is Philosophy?. Against those who argue that philosophy is not sharply distinguishable from the sciences, Fumerton makes a case for philosophy as an autonomous discipline with its own distinct methodology. Over the course of nine engaging and accessible chapters, he shows that answering fundamental philosophical questions requires one to take a radical first-person perspective that divorces the truth conditions of philosophical claims from the kind of contingent truths investigated by the empirical sciences. Along the way, Fumerton briefly discusses the historical controversies that have surrounded the nature of philosophy, situating his own argument within the larger conversation. Key Features Illuminates the unique role of thought experiments and especially the "paradox of analysis" in understanding the purpose and value of philosophy. Shows that philosophy asks fundamental questions, unanswerable by the sciences, that are critical to thinking clearly and rationally about the world. Highlights the distinct character of philosophical questions in specific subject areas: philosophy of language, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. Concludes by making a unique case for philosophy's contribution to cross-disciplinary work in ethics, politics, mathematics, and the empirical sciences. Written in a way to be engaging and accessible for advanced undergraduate readers.
Language development is one of the major battle grounds within the
humanities and sciences. This is the first time that the three
major theories in language development research have been fully
described and compared within the covers of a single book. The
three approaches: (1) The rationalism of Chomsky and the syntactic
nativism that it entails; (2)The empiricism instinct in
connectionist modelling of syntactic development; (3) The
pragmatism of those who see the child as actively constructing a
grammatical inventory piece-by-piece through recruiting general
learning abilities and socio-cognitive knowledge.
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 study emphasizes that Nietzsche was not finished as a thinker when he collapsed in early January 1889. It is unlikely that he would have returned to and continued Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but he considered publishing the fourth part (which had not yet been published) as a bridge between Zarathustra and the unfinished Revaluation of All Values. More importantly, during his last years he worked hard on revaluing values, often in line with what he had written in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This present study performs detailed analyses of Nietzsche's texts and late notes to examine the direction of that unfinished work; it will function as a stimulus to further research on the direction, interpretation and consequences of Nietzsche's late thought.
The field of moral development and moral education has witnessed a relatively huge and differentiated growth in the recent decades both in the area of empirical research and theory and in the area of school practice. In this context, key questions about the importance of "the other" and "interpersonal relationship" in regard to the development of abilities to realise one's life in a truly human way arise. In this book, an international team of researchers examines if and what kind of a relationship with the other is necessary for morality development and vice versa, what kind of relationality is required by specific models of morality. These and other relevant questions are not related only to a strictly philosophical framework, but there is a significant pedagogical overlapping.
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.
By the end of the twentieth century, it had been almost forgotten that the Freudian account of the unconscious was only one of many to have emerged from the intellectual ferment of the second half of the 19th century. The philosophical roots of the concept of the unconscious in Leibniz, Kant, Schelling and Schopenhauer had also been occluded from view by the dominance of Freudianism. From his earliest work of the 1940s, until his final writings of the 1990s, Gilles Deleuze stood at odds with this dominant current, rejecting Freud as sole source for ideas about the unconscious. This most 'contemporary' of French philosophers acted as custodian of all the ideas that had been rejected by the proponents of the psychoanalytic model, carefully preserving them and, when possible, injecting them with new life. In 1950s and 60s Deleuze turned to Henri Bergson's theories of memory and instinct and to Carl Jung's theory of archetypes. In "Difference and Repetition (1968)" he conceived of a 'differential unconscious' based on Leibnizian principles. He was also immersed from the beginning in esoteric and occult ideas about the nature of the mind. "Deleuze and the Unconscious" shows how these tendencies combine in Deleuze's work to engender a wholly new approach to the unconscious, for which active relations to the unconscious are just as important as the better known pathologies of neurosis and psychosis.
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.
Colour has long been a source of fascination to both scientists and philosophers. In one sense, colours are in the mind of the beholder, in another sense they belong to the external world. Colours appear to lie on the boundary where we have divided the world into 'objective' and 'subjective' events. They represent, more than any other attribute of our visual experience, a place where both physical and mental properties are interwoven in an intimate and enigmatic way. The last few decades have brought fascinating changes in the way that we think about 'colour' and the role 'colour' plays in our perceptual architecture. In Colour: Mind and the Physical World, leading scholars from cognitive psychology, philosophy, neurophysiology, and computational vision provide an overview of the contemporary developments in our understanding of colours and of the relationship between the 'mental' and the 'physical'. With each chapter followed by critical commentaries, the volume presents a lively and accessible picture of the intellectual traditions which have shaped research into colour perception. Written in a non-technical style and accessible to an interdisciplinary audience, the book will provide an invaluable resource for researchers in colour perception and the cognitive sciences.
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.
There are no statues. Or rocks. Or chairs. Or stars. But there are microscopic objects arranged statuewise and rockwise and chairwise and starwise. Moreover, there are-in addition to microscopic objects arranged humanwise-composite human beings. Or so Trenton Merricks argues. The ontology of Objects and Persons is motivated, in large part, by causal considerations. One of the central ideas is that physical objects are causally non-redundant: physical objects cause things that are not wholly overdetermined by their proper parts. Merricks 'eliminates' statues and other inanimate composite macrophysical objects on the grounds that they would-if they existed-be at best completely causally redundant. Merricks defends our existence by arguing, from certain facts about mental causation, that we human beings cause things that are not overdetermined by our proper parts. A second strand of argument for Merricks's overall ontology involves a variety of philosophical puzzles, puzzles that are dealt with in illuminating and often novel ways. Many other issues are addressed along the way, including free will, the 'reduction' of a composite object to its parts, and the ways in which identity over time can "for practical purposes" be a matter of convention. Anyone working in metaphysics will enjoy this lucid and provocative book.
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.
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.
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
Simple seeing. Plain talking. Language in use and persons in action. These are among the themes of Virgil Aldrich's writings, from the 1930's onward. Throughout these years, he has been an explorer of conceptual geography: not as a foreign visitor studying an alien land, but close up 'in the language in which we live, move, and have our being'. This is his work. It is clear to those who know him best that he also has fun at it. Yet, in the terms of his oft-cited distinction, it is equally clear that he is to be counted not among the funsters of philosophy, but among its most committed workers. Funsters are those who attempt to do epistemology, metaphysics, or analysis by appealing to examples which are purely imaginary, totally fictional, as unrealistic as you like, 'completely unheard of'. Such imaginative wilfullness takes philosophers away from, not nearer to, 'the rough ground' (Wittgenstein) where our concepts have their origin and working place. In the funsters' imagined, 'barely possible' (but actually impossible) world, simple seeing becomes transformed into the sensing of sense-data; plain talk is rejected as imprecise, vague, and misleading; and per sons in action show up as ensouled physical objects in motion. Then the fly is in the bottle, buzzing out its tedious tunes: the problem of perception of the external world; the problem of meaning and what it is; the mind-body problem. Image-mongering has got the best of image-management." |
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