Thoroughly revised and updated, including three new chapters on race, sex and human nature Second edition is split into thirteen more manageable chapters (instead of eight long ones in the first edition), matching course syllabi more effectively and making it easier for students and teachers to use the book Covers the essential topics, such as selection, adaptation, modularity, genes and the environment, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and free will and determinism Additional textbook features include: chapter summaries, annotated further reading and glossary.

Explains and assesses philosophy of emotions via five, clear questions and places the emotions in their wider philosophical context, by looking at epistemology, the value of the emotions and the emotions and science Lots of examples of particular emotions, such as compassion, disgust, pride and anxiety Includes useful additional features such as chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary

Explains and assesses philosophy of emotions via five, clear questions and places the emotions in their wider philosophical context, by looking at epistemology, the value of the emotions and the emotions and science Lots of examples of particular emotions, such as compassion, disgust, pride and anxiety Includes useful additional features such as chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary

This volume establishes the conceptual foundation for sustained investigation into tool development in neuroscience. Neuroscience relies on diverse and sophisticated experimental tools, and its ultimate explanatory target-our brains and hence the organ driving our behaviors-catapults the investigation of these research tools into a philosophical spotlight. The chapters in this volume integrate the currently scattered work on tool development in neuroscience into the broader philosophy of science community. They also present an accessible compendium for neuroscientists interested in the broader theoretical dimensions of their experimental practices. The chapters are divided into five thematic sections. Section 1 discusses the development of revolutionary research tools across neuroscience's history and argues to various conclusions concerning the relationship between new research tools and theory progress in neuroscience. Section 2 shows how a focus on research tools and their development in neuroscience transforms some traditional epistemological issues and questions about knowledge production in philosophy of science. Section 3 speaks to the most general questions about the way we characterize the nature of the portion of the world that this science addresses. Section 4 discusses hybrid research tools that integrate laboratory and computational methods in exciting new ways. Finally, Section 5 extends research on tool development to the related science of genetics. The Tools of Neuroscience Experiment will be of interest to philosophers and philosophically minded scientists working at the intersection of philosophy and neuroscience.

Holding Wrongdoers Responsible contests a number of widely accepted claims about blame and forgiveness that are insufficiently examined in the philosophical literature, and their relationship to each other. These claims are: i Anger is the most fitting kind of blame for those who are guilty of wrongdoing. ii Culpable wrongdoers should be blamed for what they have done. iii Forgiving consists of renouncing blame and blame feelings, especially angry ones. iv Forgiving is a kind and compassionate act for which a wrongdoer should be grateful. Against (i), the book argues that there are a number of reasons why we should be skeptical about the singular importance given to anger in this connection; against (ii), that blame is just one possible response to wrongdoing and, like other responses, has to be evaluated in relation to its purposes and the available alternatives; against (iii), that the continuation of blame after forgiveness is neither conceptually nor morally ruled out; and against (iv), that the image of forgiveness as benevolent and gift-like belies its dark side. By contesting these claims, the book reveals some of the moral and psychological complexities of these phenomena.

This book promotes a Lacanian approach to silence, arguing that Lacanian psychoanalysis is distinctive for putting a high value on both silence and language. Unlike other disciplines and discourses the authors do not treat silence as a mystical-impossible beyond, at the cost of demoting the value of language and thought. Rather than treating silence with awe and wonder, this book puts silence to work, and it does so in order to deal with the inevitable alienation that comes with becoming speaking-beings. This illuminating book will be of great interest to scholars of Lacan and the psychosocial, as well as more broadly to philosophers and linguists alike.

From Descartes and Cartesian mind-body dualism in the 17th century though to 21st-century concerns about artificial intelligence programming, The Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Consciousness presents a compelling history and up-to-date overview of this burgeoning subject area. Acknowledging that many of the original concepts of consciousness studies are found in writings of past thinkers, it begins with introductory overviews to the thought of Descartes through to Kant, covering Brentano's restoration of empiricism to philosophical psychology and the major figures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Russell, Wittgenstein, Ryle and James. These opening chapters on the forces in the history of consciousness lay the groundwork needed to understand how influential contemporary thinkers in the philosophy of mind interpret the concept of consciousness. Featuring leading figures in the field, Part II discusses current issues in a range of topics progressing from the so-called hard problem of understanding the nature of consciousness, to the methodology of invoking the possibility of philosophical zombies and the prospects of reductivism in philosophy of mind. Part III is dedicated to new research directions in the philosophy of consciousness, including chapters on experiment objections to functionalism and the scope and limits of artificial intelligence. Equipped with practical research resources including an annotated bibliography, a research guide and a glossary, The Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Consciousness is an authoritative guide for studying the past, present and future of consciousness.

Originally published in 1984, this work is organised in three parts. Each part consists of several related chapters. Each chapter explores the assumptions and implications of a closely related group of concepts in depth. Part 1 explores what a structure is. It considers such notions as content, context, constraint, unity, integrity, and the hierarchical and nucleate forms of organization. Part 2 critically explores the dynamic (energic) conceptualization of psychological and social phenomena. Thus, this part considers such notions as energy, entropy, activity, confirmation, discrepancy, and resistance, as they apply to and affect the stability, activity, and changes observed in psychological and social structures. The relationship among the biological (metabolic), psychological, and social levels of analysis are explored from a rather simplified thermodynamic point of view. In Part 3 brings all these earlier considerations to bear upon the processes by which these structures grow and develop. It explores the concept of development itself, and such related issues as the levels-by-stages model of development, the distinction between intrastructural and intergenerational development, the orthogenic principles, the process of primordial differentiation and integration, development as a dialectical process, and the relationship between growth and development. The Epilogue indicates briefly some of the implications of the present thesis for future empirical and theoretical investigations.

The search for happiness has been an enduring quest for us all. The greatest minds from history--Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Rousseau, Kant, Mill, Gandhi, Einstein and many others-all confirm that happiness is the one thing we all crave after. The Wild Longing of the Human Heart is divided into two parts. Part one examines the brief history of happiness which has not always meant exactly the same thing to all cultures and individuals, and then moves on to summarize the latest information from the areas of brain science as well as the field of positive psychology. Part two proposes that it is not happiness (in the psycho-physiological sense of something like tranquility) which is the true goal of human living. Rather, the true goal of the "wild longing" is a meaningful life, guided by the search for truth, beauty and goodness.

What if philosophy could solve the psychological puzzle of trauma? Embodied Trauma and Healing argues just that, suggesting that one might be needed in order to understand the other. The book demonstrates how the body-mind problem that haunted Descartes was addressed by phenomenologists, whilst also proposing that the human experience is lived subjectively as embodied consciousness. Throughout this book, the author suggests that the phenomenological tools that are used to explore the body can also be an effective way to discuss the physical and mental aspects of embodied trauma. Drawing on the work of Paul Ricoeur, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas, the book outlines a phenomenological approach to the embodied and relational subject. It offers a reading of embodied trauma that can connect it to wider conversations in psychological underpinnings of trauma through Peter Levine's somatic research and Bessel van der Kolk's embodied remembering. Connecting to the analytic tradition, the book suggests that phenomenology can unify both language-based and body-based therapeutic practice. It also presents a compelling discussion that ties the embodied experience of relation in trauma to the wider causal factors of social suffering and relational rupture, intergenerational trauma and the trauma of land, as informed by phenomenology. Embodied Trauma and Healing is essential reading for researchers within the fields of philosophy, psychology and medical humanities for it actively engages with contemporary configurations of trauma theory and recent research developments in healing and mental disorder diagnosis.

The contemporary literature on self-deception was born out of Jean-Paul Sartre's work on bad faith-lying to oneself. As time has progressed, the conception of self-deception has moved further and further away from Sartre's conception of bad faith. In Self-Deception's Puzzles and Processes: A Return to a Sartrean View, Jason Kido Lopez argues that this departure is a mistake and that we should return to thinking about self-deception in a Sartrean fashion, in which we are self-deceived when we intentionally use the strategies and methods of interpersonal deception on ourselves. Since literally tricking ourselves cannot work-we will always see through our own self-deception, after all-self-deception merely consists of the attempt to trick ourselves in this way. Other scholars have rejected this notion of self-deception historically, dismissing it as paradoxical. Lopez argues first that it isn't paradoxical, and he further suggests that moving away from this notion of self-deception has caused the contemporary literature on the topic to be littered with disparate and conflicting theories. Indeed, there are a great many ways to avoid the allegedly paradoxical Sartrean notion of self-deception, and the resulting plethora of accounts lead to a fragmented picture of self-deception. If, however, the Sartrean view isn't paradoxical, then there was no need for the host of contradictory theories and most researchers on self-deception have missed what was originally so intriguing about self-deception: that it, like bad faith, is the process of literally trying to trick oneself into believing what is false or unwarranted. Self-Deception's Puzzles and Processes will be of great interest to students and scholars of epistemology, philosophy of mind, psychology, and continental philosophy, and to anyone else interested in the problems of self-deception.

This volume advances discussion between critics and defenders of the force-content distinction and opens up new ways of thinking about force and speech acts in relation to the unity problem. The force-content dichotomy has shaped the philosophy of language and mind since the time of Frege and Russell. Isn't it obvious that, for example, the clauses of a conditional are not asserted and must therefore be propositions and propositions the forceless contents of forceful acts? But, others have recently asked in response, how can a proposition be a truth value bearer if it is not unified through the forceful act of a subject that takes a position regarding how things are? Can we not instead think of propositions as being inherently forceful, but of force as being cancelled in certain contexts? And what do assertoric, but also directive and interrogative force indicators mean? Force, Content and the Unity of the Proposition will be of interest to researchers working in philosophy of language, philosophical logic, philosophy of mind and linguistics.

Narrative Naturalism: An Alternative Framework for Philosophy of Mind provides an original framework for a non-reductive approach to mind and philosophical psychology. Jessica Wahman challenges the reductive (i.e., mechanistic and physicalist) assumptions that render the mind-body problem intractable, and claims that George Santayana's naturalism provides a more beneficial epistemological method and ontological framework for thinking about the place of consciousness in the natural world. She uses Santayana's thought as the primary inspiration for her own specific viewpoint, one that draws on a variety of sources, from analytic philosophy of mind to existentialism and psychoanalysis. This outlook, narrative naturalism, depicts sense-making as a kind of storytelling where different narratives serve different purposes, and Wahman offer a unique worldview to accommodate a variety of true expressions about the world, including truths about subjective existence. Motivated by a desire to challenge the reductionist approaches that explain human motivation and experience in terms of neuroscience and by the increasingly pharmacological interpretations of and solutions to psychological problems, Wahman's overarching purpose is to reconstruct the issue so that neuroscience can be embraced as an indispensable story among others in our understanding of the human condition. When placed in this context, neurobiological discoveries better serve the values and practices associated with human self-knowledge and well-being. Narrative Naturalism will appeal to those interested in American philosophy, Santayana scholarship, pragmatist epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and metaphysics.

Hellenistic philosophy concerns the thought of the Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics, the most influential philosophical groups in the era between the death of Alexander the Great (323 BCE) and the defeat of the last Greek stronghold in the ancient world (31 BCE). The Routledge Handbook of Hellenistic Philosophy provides accessible yet rigorous introductions to the theories of knowledge, ethics, and physics belonging to each of the three schools, explores the fascinating ways in which interschool rivalries shaped the philosophies of the era, and offers unique insight into the relevance of Hellenistic views to issues today, such as environmental ethics, consumerism, and bioethics. Eleven countries are represented among the Handbook's 35 authors, whose chapters were written specifically for this volume and are organized thematically into six sections: The people, history, and methods of Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism. Earlier philosophical influences on Hellenistic thought, such as Aristotle, Socrates, and Presocratics. The soul, perception, and knowledge. God, fate, and the primary principles of nature and the universe. Ethics, political theory, society, and community. Hellenistic philosophy's relevance to contemporary life. Spanning from the ancient past to the present, this Handbook aims to show that Hellenistic philosophy has much to offer all thinking people of the twenty-first century.

This book develops a new approach to naturalizing phenomenology. The author proposes to integrate phenomenology with the mechanistic framework that offers new methodological perspectives for studying complex mental phenomena such as consciousness. While mechanistic explanatory models are widely applied in cognitive science, their approach to describing subjective phenomena is limited. The author argues that phenomenology can fill this gap. He proposes two novel ways of integrating phenomenology and mechanism. First, he presents a new reading of phenomenological analyses as functional analyses. Such functional phenomenology delivers a functional sketch of a target system and provides constraints on the space of possible mechanisms. Second, he develops the neurophenomenological approach in the direction of dynamic modeling of experience. He shows that neurophenomenology can deliver dynamical constraints on mechanistic models and thus inform the search for an underlying mechanism. Mechanisms and Consciousness will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and the cognitive sciences.

This volume responds to the challenges posed by the rapid developments in satellite TV and digital technologies, addressing media ethics from a global perspective to discuss how we can understand journalism practice in its cultural contexts. An international team of contributors draw upon global and non-Western traditions to discuss the philosophical origins of ethics and the tension that exists between media institutions, the media market and political/ideological influencers. The chapters then unveil the discrepancies among international journalists in abiding by the ethics of the profession and the extent to which media ethics are understood and applied in their local context/environment. Arguing that the legitimacy of ethics comes not from the definition per se, but from the extent to which it leads to social good, the book posits this should be the media's raison d'etre to abide by globally accepted ethical norms in order to serve the common good. Taking a truly global approach to the question of media ethics, this volume will be an important resource for scholars and students of journalism, communication studies, media studies, sociology, politics and cultural studies.

Religion was a constant theme throughout Paul Ricoeur's long career, and yet he never wrote a full-length treatment of the topic. In this important new book, Brian Gregor draws on the full scope of Ricoeur's writings to lay out the essential features of his philosophical interpretation of religion, from his earliest to his last work. Ricoeur's central claim is that religion aims at the regeneration of human capability-in his words, "the rebirth of the capable self." This book provides a rich thematic account of Ricoeur's hermeneutics of religion, showing how the theme of capability informs his changing interpretations of religion, from his early work on French reflexive philosophy and the philosophy of the will to his late work on forgiveness, mourning, and living up to death. Gregor exhibits Ricoeur's original contribution to philosophical reflection on such themes as evil, suffering, and violence, as well as imagination, embodiment, and spiritual exercise. He also presents a critical reconsideration of Ricoeur's separation of philosophy from theology, and his philosophical interpretation of Christian theological ideas of revelation, divine transcendence and personhood, atonement, and eschatology. Additionally, Gregor provides an expansive look at Ricoeur's interlocutors, including Marcel, Jaspers, Kant, Hegel, Levinas, and Girard. Theologically-inclined readers will be particularly interested in the book's treatment of Karl Barth and the Protestant theology of the Word, which was a vital influence on Ricoeur. The result is a study of Ricoeur that is both sympathetic and critical, provocative and original, inviting the reader into a deeper engagement with Ricoeur's philosophical interpretation of religion.

This handbook is a thorough and state of the art overview of a central and fast-growing topic in philosophy including up-to-date topics throughout making it the ideal reference source for both students and scholars. This is the only handbook to pull together a thoroughly comprehensive overview of the topic of philosophy of agency. This handbook will help the field of study organise itself: it will be a rallying point for any student and researcher interested in the subject. All chapters are specially commissioned, written by an international team of renowned contributors and not previously published.

Interdisciplinary in approach, this book combines philosophy, sociology, history and psychology in the analysis of contemporary forms of suffering. With attention to depression, anxiety, chronic pain and addiction, it examines both particular forms of suffering and takes a broad view of their common features, so as to offer a comprehensive and parallel view both of the various forms of suffering and the treatments commonly applied to them. Highlighting the challenges and distortions of the available treatments and identifying these as contributory factors to the overall problem of contemporary suffering, Empty Suffering promises to widen the horizon of therapeutic interventions and social policies. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in mental health and disorder, social theory and social pathologies.

Coming is a lyrical, erudite examination of the French notion of jouissance. How did jouissance evolve from referring to the pleasure of possessing a material thing (property, wealth) to the pleasure of orgasm, from appropriation to dis-appropriation, from consumption to consummation? The philosophers Adele van Reeth and Jean-Luc Nancy engage in a lively dialogue, ranging from consumerism to video games to mysticism and from Spinoza, Hegel, andAugustine to the Marquis de Sade, Marguerite Duras, and Henry Miller. Four additional essays are new to the American edition.

How accurate is the picture of the human mind that has emerged from studies in neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science? Anybody with an interest in how minds work - how we learn about the world and how we remember people and events - may feel dissatisfied with the answers contemporary science has to offer. Sensorimotor Life draws on current theoretical developments in the enactive approach to life and mind. It examines and expands the premises of the sciences of the human mind, while developing an alternative picture closer to people's daily experiences. Enactive ideas are applied and extended, providing a theoretically rich, naturalistic account of meaning and agency. The book includes a dynamical systems description of different types of sensorimotor regularities or sensorimotor contingencies; a dynamical interpretation of Piaget's theory of equilibration to ground the concept of sensorimotor mastery; and a theory of agency as organized networks of sensorimotor schemes, as well as its implicatons for embodied subjectivity. Written for students and researchers of cognitive science, the authors offer a fuller view of the mind, a view better attuned to the experiences of people who live, work, love, struggle, and age, thrown into a world of meaningful relations they help create. Additionally, the book is of interest to neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and philosophers of science.

"A layman will no doubt find it hard to understand how pathological disorders of the body and mind can be eliminated by 'mere' words. He will feel that he is being asked to believe in magic. And he will not be so very wrong for the words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing more than watered down magic." (Freud) This book provides further developments of such ideas, including Freud's uncanny, Jung's synchronicity, Daniels' transpersonal, Clarke's mindfulness and Sollod's anomalous experiences. The paranormal could be seen as being fundamental to the psychological therapies. Occasionally a writer brings this potential to our attention but questions of science, evidence-based practice, etc. continue to dominate. Yet does this continue to lead to 'what's denied running even more wild'? Further, might the lessening of the paranormal be primarily what is lost, the aura, through the increase in internet therapy? The question of the paranormal and the psychological therapies continues to persist, not only for psychoanalysis but the psychological therapies in general. This book attempts to address that. The chapters in this book, apart from a new introduction and a new chapter, were originally published in the European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling.

Originally published in 1982, The Shaman and the Magician draws on the author's wide experience of occultism, western magic and anthropological knowledge of shamanism, to explore the interesting parallels between traditional shamanism and the more visionary aspects of magic in modern western society. In both cases, as the author shows, the magician encounters profound god-energies of the spirit, and it is up to the individual to interpret these experiences in psychological or mythological terms. The book demonstrates that both shamanism and magic offer techniques of approaching the visionary sources of our culture.

Presents a novel framework for conceptualizing issues that have traditionally been considered by separate disciplines including psychology, philosophy, psychiatry, psychotherapy and theology. For the first time existential statuses of objects (absolute, strong, incomplete, weak and super-weak) are distinguished, and applied to describe various phenomena in science, religion and psychology.

Presents a novel framework for conceptualizing issues that have traditionally been considered by separate disciplines including psychology, philosophy, psychiatry, psychotherapy and theology. For the first time existential statuses of objects (absolute, strong, incomplete, weak and super-weak) are distinguished, and applied to describe various phenomena in science, religion and psychology.