This book offers a new and externalist perspective in ignorance studies. Agnotology, the epistemology of ignorance, and, more generally, ignorance studies have grown to cover and explore different phenomena and subjects of research, from known events in history and sociology of science to the investigation of ordinary reasoning and cognitive processing. Nonetheless, although interested scholars have discussed ignorance phenomena and their impact on cognition, most of them have only adopted an internalist perspective to approach this theme. Meanwhile, even though externalist perspectives on cognition flourished in recent literature, authors have paid little attention to the emerging field of ignorance studies. Ignorance has been generally left out from the inquiries on the extension of cognitive states, cognitive processes, and predictive reasoning. Thus, in this volume, we seek to merge the two growing areas of research and to fill this research gap fruitfully. By addressing the uncomfortable themes that pertain to ignorance and related phenomena through an externalist perspective, this book aims to provide much food for thoughts to cognitive scientists and philosophers alike, enriching the current range and reach of both ignorance studies and externalist approaches to cognition.

First published in 1958 with a second edition in 1969, The Concept of Motivation looks philosophically and psychologically at the idea of motivation in order to explain human behaviour. Chapters cover types of explanation in psychological theories, motives and motivations, a look at Freud's theory, drive theories, and regression to hedonism. Despite its original publication date, the book explores topics which are still of great interest to us today. 'This is indeed an outstanding book; perhaps the best study in philosophical psychology to appear since Ryle and a work which [...] will remain a classic for many years' Philosophy

First published in 1923, this book collects together sixteen essays written between 1912 and 1922 that reflect how the author's views on education became increasingly interwoven with their views on "things in general" - with half dealing with each subject. Reflecting this interweave, they are arranged chronologically rather than by subject due to their "unity of conviction and purpose". The author argues that the question "Is man free to direct the process of his own growth?" naturally follows from the question "Is man a free agent?" Thus if freedom is inextricably linked to growth it becomes of paramount interest to the teacher and is explored here under a broad range of topics.

In How to Explain Behavior: A Critical Review and New Approach, Sam S. Rakover proposes a critical review of explanation models (procedures); presents explanation as an essential part of research methodology; depicts understanding as based on explanation models and other procedures; provides a list of basic ideas common to most explanation models; supplies an approach that unifies mechanistic explanations as used by the sciences with mentalistic explanations that are based on one's inner world; and provides a general procedure for explaining individual behavior.

This book describes how, in the era of megamedia culture, aggression in communication constitutes a threat to the communication community. Based on the theoretical incorporation of transcendental pragmatics, the book explores how conceptualizing the phenomena of megamedia aggression from this perspective and diagnosing their destructive force are essential for: postulating the need for constructing a theory of media communication closely related to the model of discursive rationality, giving this theory a critical and normative character, and embedding it in the perspective of the project of social co-responsibility and in the plan for an ethics of co-responsibility. Combining key elements of media theory, the philosophy of communication, the concept of normative ethics and the fields of social psychology and social anthropology, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students in the areas of communication studies, philosophy, anthropology, psychology and psychoanalysis.

This book is an introduction to critical existential-analytic psychotherapy. It has been written as a response to what is considered to be a crisis point in what is currently taken as psychotherapeutic knowledge. A focus point is the relentless move in psychotherapy and psychotherapy trainings towards evidence-based practice. It is suggested that such developments can be usefully challenged if we are to consider: Can starting with theory be a form of violence? Should a primacy be given to practice? Does reliance on empirical research mean we start from the wrong place? From a critical existential-analytic psychotherapeutic perspective, the answer to all three of these questions is 'yes'. This perspective, therefore, is fundamentally different from what psychological therapists are increasingly purporting to do, and further challenges other current notions from diagnosis and treatment to dominant discourses in psychology. The aim of this book is to consider some ways in which the psychological therapies might be able to move away from the crisis mainly caused by what is currently wrongly being understood in terms of 'evidence-based practice' as the nature of psychotherapeutic knowledge. Instead, it is proposed that primacy be given to: practice, considering theories having implications rather than applications, and privileging thoughtfulness with notions of research being seen more as cultural practices. This book is based on a special issue of the European Journal of Psychotherapy& Counselling.

This Handbook brings together philosophical work on how language shapes, and is shaped by, social and political factors. Its 24 chapters were written exclusively for this volume by an international team of leading researchers, and together they provide a broad expert introduction to the major issues currently under discussion in this area. The volume is divided into four parts: Part I: Methodological and Foundational Issues Part II: Non-ideal Semantics and Pragmatics Part III: Linguistic Harms Part IV: Applications The parts, and chapters in each part, are introduced in the volume's General Introduction. A list of Works Cited concludes each chapter, pointing readers to further areas of study. The Handbook is the first major, multi-authored reference work in this growing area and essential reading for anyone interested in the nature of language and its relationship to social and political reality.

Philosophical logic has been, and continues to be, a driving force behind much progress and development in philosophy more broadly. This collection by up-and-coming philosophical logicians deals with a broad range of topics, including, for example, proof-theory, probability, context-sensitivity, dialetheism and dynamic semantics.

* Draws on work across multiple disciplines, from astrobiology and physics to linguistics and the social sciences, making it appealing to graduates from a wide variety of fields. * The first accessible introduction into the important work of philosopher Howard Pattee. * Aims to equip readers with new approaches to simple and complex systems theory to take into any respective discipline.

The aim of this volume is to critically assess the philosophical importance of phenomenology as a method for studying the normativity of meaning and its transcendental conditions. Using the pioneering work of Steven Crowell as a springboard, phenomenologists from all over the world examine the promise of phenomenology for illuminating long-standing problems in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, action theory, the philosophy of religion, and moral psychology. The essays are unique in that they engage with the phenomenological tradition not as a collection of authorities to whom we must defer, or a set of historical artifacts we must preserve, but rather as a community of interlocutors with views that bear on important issues in contemporary philosophy. The book is divided into three thematic sections, each examining different clusters of issues aimed at moving the phenomenological project forward. The first section explores the connection between normativity and meaning, and asks us to rethink the relation between the factual realm and the categories of validity in terms of which things can show up as what they are. The second section examines the nature of the self that is capable of experiencing meaning. It includes essays on intentionality, agency, consciousness, naturalism, and moral normativity. The third section addresses questions of philosophical methodology, examining if and why phenomenology should have priority in the analysis of meaning. Finally, the book concludes with an afterword written by Steven Crowell. Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology will be a key resource for students and scholars interested in the phenomenological tradition, the transcendental tradition from Kant to Davidson, and existentialism. Additionally, its forward-looking focus yields crucial insights into pressing philosophical problems that will appeal to scholars working across all areas of the discipline.

The concept of a relational self has been prominent in feminism, communitarianism, narrative self theories, and social network theories, and has been important to theorizing about practical dimensions of selfhood. However, it has been largely ignored in traditional philosophical theories of personal identity, which have been dominated by psychological and animal theories of the self. This book offers a systematic treatment of the notion of the self as constituted by social, cultural, political, and biological relations. The author's account incorporates practical concerns and addresses how a relational self has agency, autonomy, responsibility, and continuity through time in the face of change and impairments. This cumulative network model (CNM) of the self incorporates concepts from work in the American pragmatist and naturalist tradition. The ultimate aim of the book is to bridge traditions that are often disconnected from one another-feminism, personal identity theory, and pragmatism-to develop a unified theory of the self.

Imagination in the Western Psyche: From Ancient Greece to Modern Neuroscience offers a comprehensive treatment of the human imagination by integrating the rich discourse on imagination in the humanities with modern neuroscientific research. This book is the first to offer an integrated understanding of imagination from both a humanistic (i.e., historical, philosophical, cultural, depth psychological) and scientific perspective. The book presents neurobiological accounts that align with prominent theories in Jungian and archetypal psychology and offers a window into the many ways imagination can be understood. It elaborates on the discourse on imagination in Western civilization that goes back thousands of years. Chapters analyze how imagination has been considered throughout history and contrasts a modern neuroscientific approach that looks at imagination by studying its component parts without addressing the phenomenon in all its experiential richness and complexity. By bringing these two approaches together an account of the human imagination emerges that is grounded in scientific rigor without diminishing the fullness of human experience. This book will appeal to academics, researchers, and post-graduate students in the fields of analytical psychology, depth psychology, Jungian studies, and psychotherapy

The aim of this book is to address the relevance of Wilfrid Sellars' philosophy to understanding topics in Buddhist philosophy. While contemporary scholars of Buddhism often take Sellars as a touchstone for philosophical analysis, and while many take Sellars' corpus as their entree into current philosophical discourse, fewer contemporary philosophers have crossed the bridge in the other direction, using Sellarsian ideas as a way of entering into Buddhist philosophy. The essays in this volume, written by both philosophers and Buddhist Studies scholars, are divided into two sections organized around two of Sellars' essays that have been particularly influential in Buddhist Studies: "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man" and "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind." The chapters in Part I generally address questions concerning the two truths, while those in Part II concern issues in epistemology and philosophy of mind. The volume will be of interest to Sellars scholars, to scholars interested in the contemporary interaction of Buddhist philosophy and Western philosophy and to scholars of Buddhist Studies.

The Prison House of Alienation is an exploration of the humanist theme of alienation that Marx theorized in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. It relates this theme of alienation with the themes of haunting in the Manifesto of the Communist Party and accumulation of capital that he outlined in his magnum opus Capital. The volume claims that humanity plagued by ghosts is dwelling in a prison house from which there seems no escape. Yet humanity seeks to escape from this prison house. The essays are a consequent journey in dramaturgy where science and art truly meet to create emancipatory politics that goes well beyond the entire discourse of twentieth-century socialism. The volume begins with Hamlet's lament in Shakespeare's tragedy, who, struck by alienation, is haunted by the ghost of his dead father. It then discusses how instead of creating a radical theory for creating a socialist alternative, 'haunting' gave way to interpretation as an estranged hermeneutical act that displaces revolutionary theory and praxis. This displacement of revolutionary praxis in turn gave way to violence. This volume therefore also analyzes violence from Clausewitz to Mao, revealing that a rigorous line must be drawn between Stalinism and Maoism on one side, and authentic Marxism on the other side. It concludes by questioning the very idea of ideology, suggesting that ideology is not merely a false consciousness, but a terrible psychotic act that would devour the entire emancipatory project of Marxism itself. Placing the human condition at the centre for alternative twenty-first-century politics, The Prison House of Alienation reveals that there can be no science without art and no politics without humanity. It will be of great interest to scholars of philosophy and politics. The essays were originally published in various issues of Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory.

This collection of essays brings together research on sense modalities in general and spatial perception in particular in a systematic and interdisciplinary way. It updates a long-standing philosophical fascination with this topic by incorporating theoretical and empirical research from cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology. The book is divided thematically to cover a wide range of established and emerging issues. Part I covers notions of objectivity and subjectivity in spatial perception and thinking. Part II focuses on the canonical distal senses, such as vision and audition. Part III concerns the chemical senses, including olfaction and gustation. Part IV discusses bodily awareness, peripersonal space, and touch. Finally, the volume concludes with Part V on multimodality. Spatial Senses is an important contribution to the scholarly literature on the philosophy of perception that takes into account important advances in the sciences.

Offering a new template for future exploration, Susan Greenwood examines and develops the notion that the experience of magic is a panhuman orientation of consciousness, a form of knowledge largely marginalized in Western societies. In this volume she aims to form a "bridge of communication" between indigenous magical or shamanic worldviews and rationalized Western cultures. She outlines an alternative mythological framework for the latter to help develop a magical perception, as well as giving practical case studies derived from her own research. The form of magic discussed here is not fantastic or virtual, but ecological and sensory. Magical knowledge infiltrates the body in its deepest levels of the subconscious, and unconscious, as well as conscious awareness; it is felt and understood through the connection with an inspirited world that includes the consciousness of other beings, including those of plant, animal and the physical environment. This is anthropology from the heart rather than the head, and it engages with the messy area of emotions, an embodiment of the senses, and struggles to find a common language of listening to one another across a void of differences. The aim is to provide a non-reductive structure for the creative interplay of both magical and analytical modes of thought. Passion is a motivator for change, and a change in attitude to magic as an integrative force of human understanding is the main thread of this work.

Originally published in 1978. These essays are written by distinguished philosophers from many countries and were published as a homage to Spinoza in the year which marked the three-hundredth anniversary of his death. A special feature of the book is that it includes a recently discovered letter by Spinoza, reproduced for the first time in English and in facsimile, with a commentary. The controversial influence of Spinoza on Freud is discussed, and illustrated by facsimile reproductions of original letters, hitherto unknown to Freudians and Spinozists alike. These letters direct revealing light on some of Freud's attitudes. Important parallels between East and West will also attract the student of Spinoza.

The essays in this collection explore the idea that discursive norms-the norms governing our thought and talk-are profoundly social. Not only do these norms govern and structure our social interactions, but they are sustained by a variety of social and institutional structures. The chapters are divided into three thematic sections. The first offers historical perspectives on discursive norms, including a chapter by Robert Brandom on the way Hegel transformed Kant's normativist approach to representation by adding both a social and a historicist dimension to it. Section II features four chapters that examine the sociality of normativity from within a broadly naturalistic framework. The third and final section focuses on the social dimension of linguistic phenomena such as online speech acts, oppressive speech, and assertions. The Social Institution of Discursive Norms will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy.

The question of innateness, or nativism, is one of the most heated problems in philosophy, reaching as far back as Plato but generating fierce debates in contemporary philosophy and cognitive science. Which aspects of the human mind are innate and which are the products of experience? Do we have any innate concepts or knowledge or are all the contents of the mind acquired by means of learning? Innateness and Cognition is a much-needed overview of this important problem. Through addressing the following topics M.J. Cain argues for a nativist perspective which, nevertheless, finds an important role for culture and social learning in cognitive development: the nature of innateness the coherence and explanatory value of the concept of innateness the acquisition of concepts and the role of learning in conceptual development domain specific knowledge, including the 'massive modularity' thesis and the theory of core knowledge domains cognitive development relating the theory of mind and mathematics the relationship between biological and cultural evolution and their respective roles in cognitive development language and innateness, particularly Chomsky's linguistic nativism and challenges to this morality, moral judgment, and innateness. Innateness and Cognition is an excellent resource for those researching and studying philosophy of psychology and philosophy of mind, as well as those interested in foundational issues in cognitive science, psychology, linguistics, and anthropology.

This volume brings together philosophical and interdisciplinary perspectives on improvisation. The contributions connect the theoretical dimensions of improvisation with different viewpoints on its practice in the arts and the classroom. The chapters address the phenomenon of improvisation in two related ways. On the one hand, they attend to the lived practices of improvisation both within and without the arts in order to explain the phenomenon. They also extend the scope of improvisational practices to include the role of improvisation in habit and in planned action, at both individual and collective levels. Drawing on recent work done in the philosophy of mind, they address questions such as whether improvisation is a single unified phenomenon or whether it entails different senses that can be discerned theoretically and practically. Finally, they ask after the special kind of improvisational expertise which characterizes musicians, dancers, and other practitioners, an expertise marked by the artist's ability to participate competently in complex situations while deliberately relinquishing control. Philosophy of Improvisation will appeal to anyone with a strong interest in improvisation, to researchers working in philosophy, aesthetics, and pedagogy as well as practitioners involved in different kinds of music, dance, and theater performances.

The body has always had the potential to unsettle us with its strange exigencies and suppurations, its demands and desires, and thus throughout the ages, it has continued to be a subject of interest and obsession. This collection of twelve peer-reviewed essays on Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault interrogates the body in all of its beauty...and with all of its blights and blemishes. Written by a diverse body of scholars-art historians, cultural theorists, English professors, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and sociologists from North America and Europe-these essays bring into conversation two intellectual giants frequently seen as antagonists, and thus rarely seen together. Topics covered include: the intersections of Foucault and Lacan and how they bring to light new thoughts on the senses, the self-destructive body, ableism and disability in Guillermo del Toro's film The Shape of Water, body image and the ego, selfie-culture, and metamorphosis in Ottessa Moshfegh's novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, among others.

I Eat, Therefore I Think breaks new ground by introducing philosophy via an activity central to life: eating. Building on the original meaning of philosophy as love of wisdom, it explains how the search for wisdom can best succeed by addressing not just the mind, but the entire human being. Eating, an activity that integrates physiological, social, religious, cultural, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions, offers an opportunity to re-think fundamental questions. The result: surprising and novel ways to approach art, religion, knowledge, ethics, and even democracy. The book outlines a new philosophy for our time. As such, it will be of interest to people curious about the topic of food, to those interested in learning about philosophy, and to those who seek new ideas as guides for living meaningful lives in an intelligible world.

Theories of Hope: Exploring Affective Dimensions of Human Experience is a collection of essays dedicated to inquiring into the nature of hope in its multiple and varied guises. Looking specifically at the ways in which some experiences of hope emerge within contexts of marginalization, transgression, and inquiry, this volume seeks to explore the experiences of hope through a lens of its more challenging aspects.

This ground-breaking book presents a brief history of behaviorism, along with a critical analysis of radical behaviorism, its philosophy and its applications to social issues. This third edition is much expanded and includes a new chapter on experimental method as well as longer sections on the philosophy of behaviorism. It offers experimental and theoretical examples of a new approach to behavioral science. It provides an alternative philosophical and empirical foundation for a psychology that has rather lost its way. The mission of the book is to help steer experimental psychology away from its current undisciplined indulgence in "mental life" toward the core of science, which is an economical description of nature: parsimony, explain much with little. The elementary philosophical distinction between private and public events, even biology, evolution and animal psychology are all ignored by much contemporary cognitive psychology. The failings of radical behaviorism as well as a philosophically defective cognitive psychology point to the need for a new theoretical behaviorism, which can deal with problems such as "consciousness" that have been either ignored, evaded or muddled by existing approaches. This new behaviorism provides a unified framework for the science of behavior that can be applied both to the laboratory and to broader practical issues such as law and punishment, the health-care system, and teaching.

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.