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Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Philosophy of mind
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.
This book offers both a naturalistic and critical theory of signs,
minds, and meaning-in-the-world. It provides a reconstructive
rather than deconstructive theory of the individual, one which both
analytically separates and theoretically synthesizes a range of
faculties that are often confused and conflated: agency (understood
as a causal capacity), subjectivity (understood as a
representational capacity), selfhood (understood as a reflexive
capacity), and personhood (understood as a sociopolitical capacity
attendant on being an agent, subject, or self). It argues that
these facilities are best understood from a semiotic stance that
supersedes the usual intentional stance. And, in so doing, it
offers a pragmatism-grounded approach to meaning and mediation that
is general enough to account for processes that are as embodied and
embedded as they are articulated and enminded. In particular, while
this theory is focused on human-specific modes of meaning, it also
offers a general theory of meaning, such that the agents, subjects
and selves in question need not always, or even usually, map onto
persons. And while this theory foregrounds agents, persons,
subjects and selves, it does this by theorizing processes that
often remain in the background of such (often erroneously)
individuated figures: ontologies (akin to culture, but generalized
across agentive collectivities), interaction (not only between
people, but also between people and things, and anything outside or
in-between), and infrastructure (akin to context, but generalized
to include mediation at any degree of remove).
Why care about intellectual humility? What is an intellectual
virtue? How do we know who is intellectually humble? The nature of
intellectual virtues is a topic of ancient interest. But
contemporary philosophy has experienced unparalleled energy and
concern for one particular virtue over the past 30 years:
intellectual humility. Intellectual Humility: An Introduction to
the Philosophy and Science draws on leading research to provide an
engaging and up-to-date guide to understanding what it is and why
it's important. By using ten big questions to introduce the
concept, this introduction presents a vibrant account of the ideas
behind intellectual humility. Covering themes from philosophy,
psychology, education, social science, and divinity, it addresses
issues such as: What human cognition tells us about intellectual
virtues The extent to which traits and dispositions are stable from
birth or learned habits How emotions affect our ability to be
intellectually humble The best way to handle disagreement The
impact intellectual humility has on religion or theological
commitments Written for students taking the University of
Edinburgh's online course, this textbook is for anyone interested
in finding out more about intellectual humility, how it can be
developed and where it can be applied.
Context and the Attitudes collects thirteen seminal essays by Mark
Richard on semantics and propositional attitudes. These essays
develop a nuanced account of the semantics and pragmatics of our
talk about such attitudes, an account on which in saying what
someone thinks, we offer our words as a 'translation' or
representation of the way the target of our talk represents the
world. A broad range of topics in philosophical semantics and the
philosophy of mind are discussed in detail, including: contextual
sensitivity; pretense and semantics; negative existentials;
fictional discourse; the nature of quantification; the role of
Fregean sense in semantics; 'direct reference' semantics; de re
belief and the contingent a priori; belief de se; intensional
transitives; the cognitive role of tense; and the prospects for
giving a semantics for the attitudes without recourse to properties
or possible worlds. Richard's extensive, newly written introduction
gives an overview of the essays. The introduction also discusses
attitudes realized by dispositions and other non-linguistic
cognitive structures, as well as the debate between those who think
that mental and linguistic content is structured like the sentences
that express it, and those who see content as essentially
unstructured.
This volume aims to inspire a return to the energetics of
Nietzsche's prose and the critical intensity of his approach to
nihilism and to give back to the future its rightful futurity. The
book states that for too long contemporary thought has been
dominated by a depressed what is to be done?. All is regarded to be
in vain, nothing is deemed real, there is nothing new seen under
the sun. Such a postmodern lament is easily confounded with an
apathetic reluctance to think engagedly. Hence the contributors
draw on the variety of topical issues - the future of life, the
nature of life forms, the techno sciences, the body, religion - as
a way of tackling the question of nihilism's pertinence to us now.
The problem of free will arises from ordinary, commonsense
reflection. Shaun Nichols examines these ordinary attitudes from a
naturalistic perspective. He offers a psychological account of the
origins of the problem of free will. According to his account the
problem arises because of two naturally emerging ways of thinking
about ourselves and the world, one of which makes determinism
plausible while the other makes determinism implausible. Although
contemporary cognitive science does not settle whether choices are
determined, Nichols argues that our belief in indeterminist choice
is grounded in faulty inference and should be regarded as
unjustified. However, even if our belief in indeterminist choice is
false, it's a further substantive question whether that means that
free will doesn't exist. Nichols argues that, because of the
flexibility of reference, there is no single answer to whether free
will exists. In some contexts, it will be true to say 'free will
exists'; in other contexts, it will be false to say that. With this
substantive background in place, Bound promotes a pragmatic
approach to prescriptive issues. In some contexts, the prevailing
practical considerations suggest that we should deny the existence
of free will and moral responsibility; in other contexts the
practical considerations suggest that we should affirm free will
and moral responsibility. This allows for the possibility that in
some contexts, it is morally apt to exact retributive punishment;
in other contexts, it can be apt to take up the exonerating
attitude of hard incompatibilism.
This book presents an analysis of the social aspects of Carl Gustav
Jung's thought and its followers, the interpretation of the
phenomena of contemporary social life (social imagery) from the
perspective of the main categories of this thought (archetype,
unconscious, collectivity, mass society, mass man). It also
contains an attempt of their application for understanding
contemporary social and political phenomena (e.g. Brazilian
sebastianism, Balkan conflicts, virtual-imagery sphere of
communication, figures of imagery in popular culture, and others).
The authors examine the relationship between Jung's and Jungians'
(E. Neumann, J. Hillman, J. L. Henderson) conceptions and many
accompanying them (e.g. Frankfurt school, Bachelard's philosophy,
American cultural psychoanalysis) and the background of
contemporary social psychology, sociology, and cultural
anthropology.
Duncan Pritchard offers an original defence of epistemological
disjunctivism. This is an account of perceptual knowledge which
contends that such knowledge is paradigmatically constituted by a
true belief that enjoys rational support which is both factive and
reflectively accessible to the agent. In particular, in a case of
paradigmatic perceptual knowledge that p, the subject's rational
support for believing that p is that she sees that p, where this
rational support is both reflectively accessible and factive (i.e.,
it entails p). Such an account of perceptual knowledge poses a
radical challenge to contemporary epistemology, since by the lights
of standard views in epistemology this proposal is simply
incoherent. Pritchard's aim in Epistemological Disjunctivism is to
show that this proposal is theoretically viable (i.e., that it does
not succumb to the problems that it appears to face), and also to
demonstrate that this is an account of perceptual knowledge which
we would want to endorse if it were available on account of its
tremendous theoretical potential. In particular, he argues that
epistemological disjunctivism offers a way through the impasse
between epistemic externalism and internalism, and also provides
the foundation for a distinctive response to the problem of radical
scepticism.
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