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Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Philosophy of mind
Neuroscience has made considerable progress in figuring out how the
brain works. We know much about the molecular-genetic and
biochemical underpinnings of sensory and motor functions, and
recent neuroimaging work has opened the door to investigating the
neural underpinnings of higher-order cognitive functions, such as
memory, attention, and even free will. In these types of
investigations, researchers apply specific stimuli to induce neural
activity in the brain and look for the function in question.
However, there may be more to the brain and its neuronal states
than the changes in activity we induce by applying particular
external stimuli.
In Volume 1 of Unlocking the Brain, Georg Northoff presents his
argument for how the brain must code the relationship between its
resting state activity and stimulus-induced activity in order to
enable and predispose mental states and consciousness. By
presupposing such a basic sense of neural code, the author ventures
into different territories and fields of current neuroscience,
including a comprehensive exploration of the features of resting
state activity as distinguishable from and stimulus-induced
activity; sparse coding and predictive coding; and spatial and
temporal features of the resting state itself. This yields a unique
and novel picture of the brain, and will have a major and lasting
impact on neuroscientists working in neuroscience, psychiatry, and
related fields.
Reasonable people agree that, other things being equal, it is
immoral to fail to fulfill deathbed promises, to maliciously defame
the dead, and to mistreat corpses. But philosophical controversy
swirls over why such acts are morally wrong. Are these acts wrong
only because they violate moral norms against breaking promises,
lying, and abusing others? Are these acts morally deficient because
they wrong the dead? Are these acts morally wrong because they harm
or injure the dead? Or are these acts blameworthy because they
wrong, harm, or injure those who survive the deaths? Who are the
genuine victims, if any, of these morally wrong acts? When first
confronting such questions seriously, we discover paradoxes. On one
hand, we are inclined to think that the dead person is in some
sense wronged, harmed, or injured by posthumous treachery. After
all, when a promise is broken, when someone is maliciously defamed,
and when someone's request concerning the disposition of his
remains is dismissed, we are inclined to think of the victims as
the promisee, the defamed person, and the ignored person,
respectively. On the other hand, in the case of the dead there are
no "people" who might be identified as victims. Assuming that death
marks finality, once we are dead we are no more. So perhaps the
typical moral paradigms dissolve in such cases. Posthumous Harm:
Why the Dead are Still Vulnerable addresses these issues and the
host of questions surrounding them.
What does place mean for human beings? What does it mean to exist
in space? How do we place ourselves not only in physical space, but
within the interior landscape of consciousness? Place Meant is an
interdisciplinary exploration of these and related questions,
through the lenses of psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology,
geography, folklore, memoir, and the history of ideas. It will be
of interest to anyone who has traveled the earth and pondered their
relationship to home, away, and the world at large.
There is a growing literature in neuroethics dealing with cognitive
neuro-enhancement for healthy adults. However, discussions on this
topic tend to focus on abstract theoretical positions while
concrete policy proposals and detailed models are scarce.
Furthermore, discussions appear to rely solely on data from the US
or UK, while international perspectives are mostly non-existent.
This volume fills this gap and addresses issues on cognitive
enhancement comprehensively in three important ways: 1) it examines
the conceptual implications stemming from competing points of view
about the nature and goals of enhancement; 2) it addresses the
ethical, social, and legal implications of neuroenhancement from an
international and global perspective including contributions from
scholars in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and
South America; and 3) it discusses and analyzes concrete legal
issues and policy options tailored to specific contexts.
Experimental philosophy has blossomed into a variety of
philosophical fields including ethics, epistemology, metaphysics
and philosophy of language. But there has been very little
experimental philosophical research in the domain of philosophy of
religion. Advances in Religion, Cognitive Science, and Experimental
Philosophy demonstrates how cognitive science of religion has the
methodological and conceptual resources to become a form of
experimental philosophy of religion. Addressing a wide variety of
empirical claims that are of interest to philosophers and
psychologists of religion, a team of psychologists and philosophers
apply data from the psychology of religion to important problems in
the philosophy of religion including the psychology of religious
diversity; the psychology of substance dualism; the problem of evil
and the relation between religious belief and empathy; and the
cognitive science explaining the formation of intuitions that
unwittingly guide philosophers of religion when formulating
arguments. Bringing together authors and researchers who have made
important contributions to interdisciplinary research on religion
in the last decade, Advances in Religion, Cognitive Science, and
Experimental Philosophy provides new ways of approaching core
philosophical and psychological problems.
Fusing speculative realism, analytical and linguistic philosophy
this book theorises the fundamental impact the experience of
reading has on us. In reading, language provides us with a world
and meaning becomes perceptible. We can connect with another
subjectivity, another place, another time. At its most extreme,
reading changes our understanding of the world around us. Metanoia-
meaning literally a change of mind or a conversion-refers to this
kind of new way of seeing. To see the world in a new light is to
accept that our thinking has been irrevocably transformed. How is
that possible? And is it merely an intellectual process without any
impact on the world outside our brains? Innovatively tackling these
questions, this book mobilizes discussions from linguistics,
literary theory, philosophy of language, and cognitive science. It
re-articulates linguistic consciousness by underlining the poetic,
creative moment of language and sheds light on the ability of
language to transform not only our thinking but the world around us
as well.
This book applies the formal discipline of logic to everyday
discourse. It offers a new analysis of the notion of individual,
suggesting that this notion is linguistic, not ontological, and
that anything denoted by a proper name in a well-functioning
language game is an individual. It further posits that everyday
discourse is non-compositional, i.e., its complex expressions are
not just the result of putting simpler ones together but react on
the latter, modifying their meaning through feedback. The book
theorizes that in everyday discourse, there is no algebra of truth
values, but the latter can be both input and output of something
which has no truth value at all. It suggests that an elementary
proposition of everyday discourse (defined as having exactly one
predicate) can, in principle, be indefinitely expanded by adding
new components, belonging neither to subject nor to predicate, but
remain elementary. This book is of interest to logicians and
philosophers of language.
Yoga is many things to many people. However, the basics of yoga are
worth understanding given its popularity and the benefits of the
practice. This includes understanding yoga's roots, its origins,
its development within and outside India as well as the research
involving yoga as an integrative therapeutic modality. The author
introduces the topic of yoga to healthcare officials,
practitioners, skeptics, and a range of curious people in between.
For yoga practitioners and those interested in the practice, The
Politics and Promise of Yoga: Contemporary Relevance of an Ancient
Practice outlines a condensed view of traditional yoga practices
and provides a glimpse into the origin of yoga within Indian
history and philosophy. The author hopes that policymakers will be
interested in this evidence-based scientific practice so that it
can be systematically incorporated into mainstream biomedical
systems around the globe. This book also serves to confirm existing
knowledge and historical nuances about yoga and also addresses
contemporary debates and politics which revolve around the
practice.
This book is about the so called "4S" challenge - how does or can
or should someone say something to someone about something? This
challenge is getting more intense day by day in our contemporary
globalized world, increasingly connected by science and technology
through telecommunication and all sorts of social media, where
people are acutely aware of the diverse views on culture, politics,
economics, religion, ethics, education, physical health and mental
wellbeing, which are very often in conflicts with each other. This
book arises from the reading of the dialogue between two
internationally renowned and respected French scholars, Jean-Pierre
Changeux and Paul Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist
and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain,
which explores where science and philosophy meet, and whether there
is a place for religion in the 21st century. This book develops on
the ideas Ricoeur raised in the dialogue about the need for
"digging deeper" and a "third discourse" as a way forward to
improve dialogues between competing worldviews and ideologies. It
attempts to formulate a "third discourse" (as distinct from
ordinary language as "first discourse" and various scientific or
professional/specialist languages as "second discourse") to address
the burning issue of fragmentation of the person through overcoming
the alienations between established discourses of philosophy,
science and theology, without doing injustice to the unique and
indispensable contributions of each of these discourses. It argues
that such a "third discourse" has to go beyond dualism and
reductionism. To achieve that, this new way of talking about the
lived experience of the person is going to take the form of a
non-reductive correlative multilayered discourse that has the
capacity to, as expressed in the language of the hermeneutics of
Ricoeur, "explain more in order to understand better."
A Wittgensteinian Way with Paradoxes examines how some of the
classic philosophical paradoxes that have so puzzled philosophers
over the centuries can be dissolved. Read argues that paradoxes
such as the Sorites, Russell's Paradox and the paradoxes of time
travel do not, in fact, need to be solved. Rather, using a resolute
Wittgensteinian 'therapeutic' method, the book explores how
virtually all apparent philosophical paradoxes can be diagnosed and
dissolved through examining their conditions of arising; to loosen
their grip and therapeutically liberate those philosophers
suffering from them (including oneself). The book contrasts such
paradoxes with real, 'lived paradoxes': paradoxes that are
genuinely experienced outside of the philosopher's study, in
everyday life. Thus Read explores instances of lived paradox (such
as paradoxes of self-hatred and of denial of other humans'
humanity) and the harm they can cause, psychically, morally or
politically. These lived paradoxes, he argues, sometimes cannot be
dissolved using a Wittgensteinian treatment. Moreover, in some
cases they do not need to be: for some, such as the paradoxical
practices of Zen Buddhism (and indeed of Wittgenstein himself), can
in fact be beneficial. The book shows how, once philosophers'
paradoxes have been exorcized, real lived paradoxes can be given
their due.
What does it mean to be sad? What difference does it make whether,
how, and why we experience our own, and other people's, sadness? Is
sadness always appropriate and can it be a way of seeing more
clearly into ourselves and others? In this volume, a
multi-disciplinary team of scholars - from fields including
philosophy, women's and gender studies, bioethics and public
health, and neuroscience - addresses these and other questions
related to this nearly-universal emotion that all of us experience,
and that some of us dread. Somewhat surprisingly, sadness has been
largely ignored by philosophers and others within the humanities,
or else under-theorized as a subject worthy of serious and careful
attention. This volume reverses this trend, presenting sadness as
not merely a feeling or affect, but an emotion of great moral
significance that in important ways underwrites how we understand
ourselves and each other.
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