This Handbook covers the most urgent, controversial, and important topics in the philosophy of sex. It is both philosophically rigorous and yet accessible to specialists and non-specialists, covering ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of language, and featuring interactions with neighboring disciplines such as psychology, bioethics, sociology, and anthropology. The volume's 40 chapters, written by an international team of both respected senior researchers and essential emerging scholars, are divided into eight parts: I. What is Sex? Is Sex Good? II. Sexual Orientations III. Sexual Autonomy and Consent IV. Regulating Sexual Relationships V. Pathologizing Sex and Sexuality VI. Contested Desires VII. Objectification and Commercialized Sex VIII. Technology and the Future of Sex The broad scope of coverage, depth in insight and research, and accessibility in language make The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality a comprehensive introduction for newcomers to the subject as well as an invaluable reference work for advanced students and researchers in the field.

This volume collects fifteen original essays on E. J. Lowe's work on metaphysics and ontology. The essays connect Lowe's insights with contemporary issues in metaphysics. E. J. Lowe (1950-2014) was one of the most influential analytical philosophers of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Drawing inspiration from Aristotle's thought, E. J. Lowe treated metaphysics as an autonomous discipline concerned with the fundamental structure of reality. The chapters in this volume reflect on his path-breaking work. They deal with a wide range of metaphysical issues including four-category ontology, the causal and non-causal aspects of agency, categorial fundamentality and non-fundamentality, the existence of relations, property dualism, powers and abilities, personal identity, predication, and topological ontology. Taken together, the chapters reflect the liveliness of contemporary debates in metaphysics and the enduring impact of Lowe's thought on them. E. J. Lowe and Ontology will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in metaphysics and philosophy of mind.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE PHYSICS WORLD BOOK OF THE YEAR 2019 'One of the deepest and most original thinkers of his generation of cognitive scientists. His startling argument has implications for philosophy, science, and how we understand the world around us' Steven Pinker 'Is reality virtual? It's a question made even more interesting by this book' Barbara Kiser, Nature Do we see the world as it truly is? In The Case Against Reality, pioneering cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman says no? we see what we need in order to survive. Our visual perceptions are not a window onto reality, Hoffman shows us, but instead are interfaces constructed by natural selection. The objects we see around us are not unlike the file icons on our computer desktops: while shaped like a small folder on our screens, the files themselves are made of a series of ones and zeros - too complex for most of us to understand. In a similar way, Hoffman argues, evolution has shaped our perceptions into simplistic illusions to help us navigate the world around us. Yet now these illusions can be manipulated by advertising and design. Drawing on thirty years of Hoffman's own influential research, as well as evolutionary biology, game theory, neuroscience, and philosophy, The Case Against Reality makes the mind-bending yet utterly convincing case that the world is nothing like what we see through our eyes.

This is a timely and relevant volume, considering the many manipulations and enhancements upon our ideas of reality in the 21st century The book explores how and why we deny, manipulate, convert, or enhance reality The book argues that examining the many ways in which we manipulate, deny, convert or enhance our realities can give us an idea of how to deal with reality, which in turn can provide us with a blueprint for how to live responsibly The book brings together an international team of contributors to discuss contemporary issues such as fake news, propaganda, virtual reality, theatre as real life and reality TV This book draws on examples from vast fields such as film studies, sociology, the social sciences and medicine This volume will appeal to scholars and upper-level students in the areas of communication and media studies, comparative literature, film studies, economics, English, international affairs, journalism, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and theatre

Peter Sloterdijk is an internationally renowned philosopher and thinker whose work is now seen as increasingly relevant to our contemporary world situation and the multiple crises that punctuate it, including those within ethical, political, economic, technological, and ecological realms. This volume focuses upon one of his central ideas, anthropotechnics. Broadly speaking, anthropotechnics refers to the technological constitution of the human as its fundamental mode of existence, which is characterized by the ability to create dwelling places that 'immunize' human beings from exterior threats while at the same time instituting practices and exercises that call on humanity to transcend itself 'ascetically'. The essays included in this volume enter a critical dialogue with Sloterdijk and his many philosophical interlocutors in order to interrogate the many implications of anthropotechnics in relation to some of the most pressing issues of our time, including and especially the question of the future of humanity in relation to globalism and modernization, climate change, the post-secular, neoliberalism, and artificial intelligence. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

William James's Pluralism: An Antidote for Contemporary Extremism and Absolutism explores extremism and the related problem of absolutism in the context of the psychology and philosophy of William James. Extremist and absolutist views were topical in James's day, especially around the time of the Civil War, but they are no less common in these early years of the 21st century. James argued that the love of singularities such as belief in one God, one method, one political system, or one value system contributes to extremist, even violent mentalities. In this book, James's views on singular versus pluralistic perspectives are explored and then applied to contemporary practical issues such as abortion, birth control, and death with dignity legislation. These perspectives are furthermore applied to more theoretical issues, such as causality, values, and methods or ways of investigating the world. Within William James's Pluralism, these theories are investigated in a comprehensive philosophical and psychological examination of the human experience. Written in a nontechnical manner to appeal to the general public-just as William James hoped for his pluralistic philosophy-this book is additionally of considerable interest to academics and students across many fields such as psychology, philosophy, history, and sociology.

Recently, psychologists and neurobiologists have conducted experiments taken to show that human beings do not have free will. Many, including a number of philosophers, assume that, even if science has not decided the free will question yet, it is just a matter of time. In The Experimental Approach to Free Will, Katherin A. Rogers accomplishes several tasks. First, canvasing the literature critical of these recent experiments (or of conclusions drawn from them) and adding new criticisms of her own, she shows why these experiments should not undermine belief in human freedom - even robust, libertarian freedom. Indeed, many of the experiments do not even connect with any philosophical understanding of free will. Through this discussion, she generates a long list of problems - ethical as well as practical - facing the attempt to study free will experimentally. With these problems highlighted, she shows that even in the distant future, supposing the brain sciences to have advanced far beyond where they are today, it will likely be impossible to settle the question of free will experimentally. She concludes that, since philosophy has not, and science cannot, settle the question of free will, it is more reasonable to suppose that humans do indeed have freedom. Brings together, and adds to, criticisms of recent experiments (or conclusions drawn from them) which supposedly show that human beings do not have free will Analyzes recent experiments supposedly related to human freedom through the lens of a philosophically informed portrait of a robust, libertarian free choice Develops a long list of problems - both practical and ethical - facing the experimental study of human freedom Proposes a thought experiment set in a distant future of advanced brain science to show that it is likely impossible for science ever to settle the question of free will.

Modernity has radically challenged the assumptions that guide our ordinary lives as persons, in ways we are not normally aware. We live our concrete lives taking for granted that personal decisions, desires, relationships, actions, aspirations, values, and knowledge are central to our existence. But in modernity, we think of these matters as private, idiosyncratic, and subjective, even irrational. This modern conception of ourselves and the associated way of reflection known as modern critical thinking came to dominate our thinking is culminates in the dualistic philosophy of Rene Descartes. This dualism has spawned a reductionist view of persons and tainted "the personal" with connotations of bias, partiality, and privacy, leaving us with the presumption that if we seek to be objective and intellectually respectable, we must expunge the personal. William H. Poteat's work in philosophical anthropology has confronted this concern head on. He undertakes a radical critique of the various forms of mind-body dualism and materialist monism that have dominated Western intellectual concepts of the person. In a unique style that Poteat calls post-critical, he uncovers the staggering incoherencies of these dualisms and shows how they have resulted in a loss of the personal in the modern age. He also formulates a way out of this modern cultural insanity. This constructive dimension of his thought is centered on his signature concept of the mindbody, the pre-reflective ground of personal existence. The twelve contributors in this collection explore outgrowths and implications of Poteat's thought. Recovering the Personal will be of interest to a broad range of intellectual readers with interests in philosophy, psychology, theology, and the humanities.

A big, controversial and unresolved question that cuts across several disciplines - despite journal articles and special issues this is the first book to examine the topic head-on Explains how brain-level explanations of mental disorders can have important, negative consequences for psychological and social theories of mental disorder Plenty of examples such as dementia and Parkinsons which are helpfully contrasted with depression and schizophrenia

In this volume, internationally acclaimed psychoanalysts, philosophers, and scholars of humanities examine the mind-body problem and provide differing analyses on the nature of mind, unconscious structure, mental properties, qualia, and the contours of consciousness. Given that disciplines from the humanities and the social sciences to neuroscience cannot agree upon the nature of consciousness-from what constitutes psychic reality to mental properties, psychoanalysis has a unique perspective that is largely ignored by mainstream paradigms. This book provides a comprehensive exploration of the mind-body problem in various psychoanalytic schools of thought, including philosophical and metapsychological points of view. Psychoanalysis and the Mind-Body Problem will be of interest to psychoanalysts, philosophers, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, academics, and those generally interested in the humanities, cognitive science, and the philosophy of mind.

First volume on mental fictionalism, a hot topic in philosophy of mind Great line of up contributors, including a chapter by Daniel Dennett Strong international potential due to contributors from UK, USA and eastern and western Europe

This book is a fascinating collection of various neuroscience terms coined over the last centuries. Each of the 45 chapters in this book dives deep into the etymologies, vernacular subtleties and historical anecdotes relating to these terms. The book illustrates the rich and diverse history of neuroscience, which has borrowed and continues to borrow terms and concepts from across cultures, literature and languages. The ever-increasing number of terms that needed to be coined with the mushrooming of the field required neuroscientists to show astonishing imagination and creativity, leading them to draw inspiration from Graeco-Roman mythology (Elpenor's syndrome), literature (Lasthenie de Ferjol's syndrome), theatre (Ondine's curse), Japanese folklore (Kanashibari), and even the Bible (Matthew effect). This book will of be immense interest to scholars and researchers studying neuroscience, history of science, anatomy, psychology and linguistics. It will also appeal to any reader interested in learning more about neuroscience and its history. All the chapters included in this book were originally published in a column that appeared from 1997 to 2020 in the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences.

Where much contemporary philosophy seeks to stave off the 'threat' of nihilism by safeguarding the experience of meaning - characterized as the defining feature of human existence - from the Enlightenment logic of disenchantment, this book attempts to push nihilism to its ultimate conclusion by forging a link between revisionary naturalism in Anglo-American philosophy and anti-phenomenological realism in recent French philosophy. Contrary to an emerging 'post-analytic' consensus which would bridge the analytic-continental divide by uniting Heidegger and Wittgenstein against the twin perils of scientism and scepticism, this book short-circuits both traditions by plugging eliminative materialism directly into speculative realism.

First handbook on liberal naturalism Superb line up of international contributors, many of whom are leading names in the field Covers hot topics such as history of philosophical naturalism, key figures from Aristotle to Quine and contemporary issues such as ethical, metaphysical and epistemological naturalism

In this book, Hackett introduces the traditional usage of the mapping sentence within quantitative research, reviews its philosophical underpinnings, and proposes the "declarative mapping sentence" as an instrument and approach to qualitative scholarship. With a helpful glossary and a range of illustrative tables, Hackett takes the reader through a straightforward introduction to mapping sentences and their construction, before discussing declarative mapping sentences and possible future research directions. This innovative direction for social research provides a flexible structure for research domain, and it allows qualitative research results to be uniformly sorted. Declarative Mapping Sentences in Qualitative Research will be essential reading for researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of qualitative psychology and psychological methods, as well as philosophical psychology and social science research methods.

Solipsism is one of the philosophical thesis or ideas that has generally been regarded as highly implausible, or even crazy. The view that the world is "my world" in the sense that nothing exists independently of my mind, thought, and/or experience is, understandably, frowned up as a genuine philosophical position. For this reason, solipsism might be regarded as an example of a philosophical position that does not "matter" at all. It does not seem to play any role in our serious attempts to understand the world and ourselves. However, by arguing that solipsism does matter, after all, Why Solipsism Matters more generally demonstrates that philosophy, even when dealing with highly counterintuitive and "crazy" ideas, may matter in surprising, unexpected ways. It will be shown that the challenge of solipsism should make us rethink fundamental assumptions concerning subjectivity, objectivity, realism vs. idealism, relativism, as well as key topics such as ethical responsibility - that is, our ethical relations to other human beings - and death and mortality. Why Solipsism Matters is not only an historical review of the origins and development of the concept of solipsism and a exploration of some of its key philosophers (Kant and Wittgenstein to name but a few) but it develops an entirely new account of the idea. One which takes seriously the global, socially networked world in which we live in which the very real ramifications of solipsism - including narcissism - can be felt.

This book discusses the themes of personhood and personal identity. It argues that while there is a metaphysical answer to the question of personal identity, there is no metaphysical answer to the question of what constitutes a person. The author argues against both body-mind dualism and physicalism and also against the idea that there is some metaphysically real category of persons distinct from the category of human beings or human organisms. Instead, the author presents neutral-monist, autopoietic-enactivist kind of metaphysics of the human being, and a relational, and completely human-dependent notion of a person. The tools used in these arguments include conceptual argumentation and empirical case studies. Using both personal experiences and studies of cultures all over the world, the author examines dualism between mind and body. The author discusses real people who seem to live a Cartesian life, as somehow disembodied minds as well as the concept of the person. The author uses the concluding chapters to present their own views arguing that questions about our identity should be separated from questions of our personhood as well as the concept of personhood. This volume is of interest to scholars of philosophy of mind.

Addressing objective and subjective views of the self and the world in philosophy and poetry, this collection brings together a chronology of John Koethe's thoughts on the connections between the two forms and makes a significant contribution to unsettling the oppositions that separate them. The essays traverse the philosophical conception of the self in modern poetry and locate connections between poets including William Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery alongside philosophers including Kant, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein. Koethe pays special attention to romantic poetry and notions of the sublime, which he maps onto subjective individual experience and the objective perspective on the natural world. Koethe further explores this theme in a new essay on romanticism and the sublime in relation to the mind-body problem. Using an associative and impressionistic style to write philosophically about poetry, Koethe defends his own approach that such writing cannot and should not aim for the rigor of philosophical argumentation.

This edited collection presents the latest cutting-edge research in the philosophy and cognitive science of temporal illusions. Illusion and error have long been important points of entry for both philosophical and psychological approaches to understanding the mind. Temporal illusions, specifically, concern a fundamental feature of lived experience, temporality, and its relation to a fundamental feature of the world, time, thus providing invaluable insight into investigations of the mind and its relationship with the world. The existence of temporal illusions crucially challenges the naive assumption that we can simply infer the temporal nature of the world from experience. This anthology gathers eighteen original papers from current leading researchers in this subject, covering four broad and interdisciplinary topics: illusions of temporal passage, illusions and duration, illusions of temporal order and simultaneity, and the relationship between temporal illusions and the cognitive representation of time.

This book offers a unique perspective on one of the deepest questions about the world we live in: is reality multi-leveled, or can everything be reduced to some fundamental 'flat' level? This deep philosophical issue has widespread implications in philosophy, since it is fundamental to how we understand the world and the basic entities in it. Both the notion of 'levels' within science and their ontological implications are issues that are underexplored in the philosophical literature. The volume reconsiders the view that reality contains many levels and opens new ways to understand the ontological status of the special sciences. The book focuses on major open questions that arise at the foundations of cognitive science, cognitive psychology, brain science and other special sciences, in particular with respect to the physical foundations of these sciences. For example: Is the mental computational? Do brains compute? How can the special sciences be autonomous from physics, grounded in, or based on, physics and at the same time irreducible to physics? The book is an important read for scientists and philosophers alike. It is of interest to philosophers of science, philosophers of mind and biology interested in the notion of levels, but also to psychologists, cognitive scientists and neuroscientists investigating such issues as the precise relation of the mental to the underlying neural structures and the appropriate approach to study it.

This book makes Classical Chinese Medicine (CCM) intelligible to those who are not familiar with the tradition, many of whom may choose to dismiss it off-hand or to assess it negatively) . Keekok Lee uses two related strategies: arguing that all science and therefore medicine cannot be understood without excavating its philosophical presuppositions and showing what those presuppositions are in the case of CCM compared with those of biomedicine. Such excavations enable Lee in turn to demonstrate the following theses: (1) the metaphysical/ontological core of a medical system entails its own methodology, how to understand, diagnose and treat an illness/disease; (2) CCM rests on process-ontology, is Wholist, its general mode of thinking is Contextual-dyadic, its implicit logic is multi-valent, its model of causality is non-linear and multi-factorial; (3) Biomedicine (in the main) rests on thing-ontology and dualism, is Reductionist, its logic is classical bi-valent, its model of causality is linear and monofactorial; (4) hence to condemn CCM as "unscientific"/"pseudo-scientific"/plain "mumbo-jumbo" while privileging Biomedicine as the Gold Standard of scientificity is as absurd as to judge a cat to be inferior to a dog, using the criteria of "goodness" embodied in a dog-show.

The purpose of this book is to show the philosophical and anthropological foundation of the dispute about culture, especially in the perspective of the opposition between high and low culture. By analysing the most important achievements of Western philosophical reflection, from the Greeks and Romans through medieval scholasticism to Christian personalism, the author defends the concept of high culture and reveals its metaphysical significance for the human condition. The book also brings out the meaning of the concept of culture, shedding new light upon the long-disputed philosophical questions: who is the creator and subject of culture, what is culture in its essence, and what is its superior purpose?

Aimed at philsophy graduates this book investigates mental content in a systematic way and advances a number of claims about how mental content states are related to the body and the world. Internalism is the thesis that they are; externalism is the theory that they are not. The critical disagreement between these two theses concerns their differing conceptions of the relation between the mind and the world. Is the mind fundamentally autonomous with respect to the world, or does the world enter into the very nature of mind? This study offers an original account of the dilemma and proposes significant advances in the disputes about mind and brain, personality, externalism and internalism, and teleological explanations.

The first collection devoted to salience, a topic very close to key debates in epistemology, philosophy of mind and psychology and ethics Very strong line up of contributors who have been approached specially for this collection Includes chapters on salience in ethics, feminist philosophy and aesthetics, which widens the potential readership.