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Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Philosophy of mind
First published in 1977, Emotion, Thought and Therapy is a study of Hume and Spinoza and the relationship of philosophical theories of the emotions to psychological theories of therapy. Jerome Neu argues that the Spinozists are closer to the truth; that is, that thoughts are of greater importance than feelings in the classification and discrimination of emotional states. He then contends that if the Spinozists are closer to the truth, we have the beginning of an argument to show that Freudian or analytic therapies make philosophic sense. Throughout the book, careful attention is paid to modern discussions in philosophy of mind and psychology, and materials from anthropology and other relevant disciplines are considered. At the centre of the discussion is the notion of 'thought-dependence'. Therapies for psychological disorders are placed along a spectrum in accordance with the role they assign to thoughts. The Spinozist view of the emotions can be seen as at the extreme thought end of a corresponding spectrum of theories of the emotions. The book suggests that this stream may help explain the spectrum of therapeutic theories and the possibilities that exist for psychological development and change. This book will be of interest to students of philosophy, psychology and counselling.
The Injustice of Punishment emphasizes that we can never make sense of moral responsibility while also acknowledging that punishment is sometimes unavoidable. Recognizing both the injustice and the necessity of punishment is painful but also beneficial. It motivates us to find effective means of minimizing both the use and severity of punishment, and encourages deeper inquiry into the causes of destructive behavior and how to change those causes in order to reduce the need for punishment. There is an emerging alternative to the comfortable but destructive system of moral responsibility and just deserts. That alternative is not the creation of philosophers but of sociologists, criminologists, psychologists, and workplace engineers; it was developed, tested, and employed in factories, prisons, hospitals, and other settings; and it is writ large in the practices of cultures that minimize belief in individual moral responsibility. The alternative marks a promising path to less punishment, less coercive control, deeper common commitment, and more genuine freedom.
Psychologists, philosophers, theologians and educationalists have all lately explored various conceptual, moral, psychological and pedagogical dimensions of gratitude in a rapidly expanding academic and popular literature. However, while the distinguished contributors to this work hail from these distinct disciplines, they have been brought together in this volume precisely in recognition of the need for a more interdisciplinary perspective on the topic. While further developing such more familiar debates in the field as whether it is appropriate to feel grateful in circumstances in which there is no obvious benefactor, whether it is proper to feel grateful to those who have benefited one only from a sense of duty and whether it makes sense to be grateful if so doing colludes with injustice, the essays in this collection explore a wide variety of fresh conceptual, psychological and moral issues. For example, in addition to identifying some new moral paradoxes about gratitude and seeking a generally more morally discriminating approach to gratitude education, relations are explored between gratitude and humility, forgiveness and appreciation and the religious and spiritual dimensions of the concept are also given much overdue attention. By drawing together serious academic engagement with the study of gratitude and a serious attempt to undertake this within an interdisciplinary perspective, Perspectives on Gratitude will be of value to academics and graduate students in the fields of philosophy, psychology and theology, as well as other research-based disciplines.
The capacity to represent things to ourselves as possible plays a crucial role both in everyday thinking and in philosophical reasoning; this volume offers much-needed philosophical illumination of conceivability, possibility, and the relations between them.
The concept of the imaginary is pervasive within contemporary thought, yet can be a baffling and often controversial term. In Imagination and the Imaginary, Kathleen Lennon explores the links between imagination - regarded as the faculty of creating images or forms - and the imaginary, which links such imagery with affect or emotion and captures the significance which the world carries for us. Beginning with an examination of contrasting theories of imagination proposed by Hume and Kant, Lennon argues that the imaginary is not something in opposition to the real, but the very faculty through which the world is made real to us. She then turns to the vexed relationship between perception and imagination and, drawing on Kant, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, explores some fundamental questions, such as whether there is a distinction between the perceived and the imagined; the relationship between imagination and creativity; and the role of the body in perception and imagination. Invoking also Spinoza and Coleridge, Lennon argues that, far from being a realm of illusion, the imaginary world is our most direct mode of perception. She then explores the role the imaginary plays in the formation of the self and the social world. A unique feature of the volume is that it compares and contrasts a philosophical tradition of thinking about the imagination - running from Kant and Hume to Strawson and John McDowell - with the work of phenomenological, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist and feminist thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Lacan, Castoriadis, Irigaray, Gatens and Lloyd. This makes Imagination and the Imaginary essential reading for students and scholars working in phenomenology, philosophy of perception, social theory, cultural studies and aesthetics. Cover Image: Bronze Bowl with Lace, Ursula Von Rydingsvard, 2014. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Lelong and Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Photo Jonty Wilde.
This title was first published in 2002: At the end of the 20th century, the emotions ceased to be a neglected topic for philosophical consideration. The editor suggests that this may, in part, be due to a change in the way the subject is approached. The emotions were characteristically thought of by philosophers as states which give rise to perturbation in what might roughly be called "right-thinking". The basic idea was that practical reasoning, like theoretical reasoning, ought to be, and can be, dispassionate. This means that either the emotions interfere with "right-reasoning" in a way which is a proper object of study for the biological sciences but not for the science of the mind, or that the emotions become reducible to, and analyzable as, collections of propositional attitudes which are themselves assessable in terms of "right-reasoning". The move away from this idea is taken as an improvement in our philosophical approach to the emotions by the authors. Following this, all of the papers in the volume contribute to this philosophical approach, each approaching the subject from a different angle.
The book presents the various viewpoints that poetics, literary history and Western rhetoric have adopted throughout Western history. The aim of poetics is to render the specificity of the literary discourse by either highlighting the extra literary generative forces or by focusing on the intrinsic study of literary works. Rhetoric chiefly places emphasis on the verbal effects of discourses whereas literary history predominantly examines the temporal succession of the literary systems or of the literary institution. The author focuses on the three sections: poetics, rhetoric, and literary history and provides an introductory study on the subject of reference.
Originally published in 1959, with some corrections in 1962, the author examines the common view at the time that dreams are mental activities or mental occurrences taking place during sleep. He starts off by offering a proof that the sentence 'I am asleep' is a senseless form of words and cannot express a judgment. After commenting on various features of the concept of sleep, the author expands his argument to prove that the notion of making any judgment at all while asleep is without sense. He takes the further step of showing that this same conclusion holds for all other mental acts and mental occurrences, with the exception of dreams.
Two of the most commonly alleged features of Japanese society are its homogeneity and its encouragement of conformity, as represented by the saying that the nail that sticks up gets pounded. This volume's primary goal is to challenge these and a number of other long-standing assumptions regarding Tokugawa (1600-1868) society, and thereby to open a dialogue regarding the relationship between the Japan of two centuries ago and the present. The volume's central chapters concentrate on six aspects of Tokugawa society: the construction of individual identity, aggressive pursuit of self-interest, defiant practice of forbidden religious traditions, interest in self-cultivation and personal betterment, understandings of happiness and well-being, and embrace of "neglected" counter-ideological values. The author argues that when taken together, these point to far higher degrees of individuality in early modern Japan than has heretofore been acknowledged, and in an Afterword the author briefly examines how these indicators of individuality in early modern Japan are faring in contemporary Japan at the time of writing.
Sensation of Movement explores the role of sensation in motor control, bodily self-recognition and sense of agency. The sensation of movement is dependent on a range of information received by the brain, from signalling in the peripheral sensory organs to the establishment of higher order goals. Through the integration of neuroscientific knowledge with psychological and philosophical perspectives, this book questions whether one type of information is more relevant for the ability to sense and control movement. Addressing conscious sensations of movement, experimental designs and measures, and the possible functions of proprioceptive and kinaesthetic information in motor control and bodily cognition, the book advocates the integration of neuroscientific knowledge and philosophical perspectives. With an awareness of the diverse ideas and theories from these distinct fields, the book brings together leading researchers to bridge these divides and lay the groundwork for future research. Of interest to both students and researchers of consciousness, Sensation of Movement will be essential reading for those researching motor control, multimodal perception, bodily self-recognition, and sense of agency. It aims to encourage the integration of multiple perspectives in order to arrive at new insights into how sensation of movement can be studied scientifically.
Sensation of Movement explores the role of sensation in motor control, bodily self-recognition and sense of agency. The sensation of movement is dependent on a range of information received by the brain, from signalling in the peripheral sensory organs to the establishment of higher order goals. Through the integration of neuroscientific knowledge with psychological and philosophical perspectives, this book questions whether one type of information is more relevant for the ability to sense and control movement. Addressing conscious sensations of movement, experimental designs and measures, and the possible functions of proprioceptive and kinaesthetic information in motor control and bodily cognition, the book advocates the integration of neuroscientific knowledge and philosophical perspectives. With an awareness of the diverse ideas and theories from these distinct fields, the book brings together leading researchers to bridge these divides and lay the groundwork for future research. Of interest to both students and researchers of consciousness, Sensation of Movement will be essential reading for those researching motor control, multimodal perception, bodily self-recognition, and sense of agency. It aims to encourage the integration of multiple perspectives in order to arrive at new insights into how sensation of movement can be studied scientifically.
To what extent are meaning, on the one hand, and knowledge, on the other, determined by aspects of the 'outside world'? Internalism and Externalism in Semantics and Epistemology presents twelve specially written essays exploring these debates in metaphysics and epistemology and the connections between them. In so doing, it examines how issues connected with the nature of mind and language bear on issues about the nature of knowledge and justification (and vice versa). Topics discussed include the compatibility of semantic externalism and epistemic internalism, the variety of internalist and externalist positions (both semantic and epistemic), semantic externalism's implications for the epistemology of reasoning and reflection, and the possibility of arguments from the theory of mental content to the theory of epistemic justification (and vice versa).
It is a commonly held assumption among cultural, social, and political psychologists that imagining the future of societies we live in has the potential to change how we think and act in the world. However little research has been devoted to whether this effect exists in collective imaginations, of social groups, communities and nations, for instance. This book explores the part that imagination and creativity play in the construction of collective futures, and the diversity of outlets in which these are presented, from fiction and cultural symbols to science and technology. The authors discuss this effect in social phenomena such as in intergroup conflict and social change, and focus on several cases studies to illustrate how the imagination of collective futures can guide social and political action. This book brings together theoretical and empirical contributions from cultural, social, and political psychology to offer insight into our constant (re)imagination of the societies in which we live.
The concept of certainty may be approached contextually through the use of dialogue. In three creative dialogues involving characters that are often seen as representing each other's antipodes -- "a theist" and an "atheist," a "therapist" and "the rapist," and two multi-voiced group personae, 'casual ties' and 'casualties' -- this text negotiates the overlapping aspects of consciousness that each must have in its alter. Coming to know the other in oneself while at the same time othering ourselves is one process of knowing more fully the truth of the human condition. The dialogues are bookended by a meditative and philosophical introduction concerning human finitude and the role of the otherness of death, and a scholarly conclusion about the vicissitudes within the use of human language. Drawing on sources from anthropology, archaeology, socio-linguistics, and critical philosophy, and using both conversation and academic exposition, Three Apodeictic Dialogues offers a unique perspective on some of the disconcerting questions that animate belief, desire, and communication.
This forward-thinking collection presents new work that looks beyond the division between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions-one that has long caused dissension, mutual distrust, and institutional barriers to the development of common concerns and problems. Rather than rehearsing the causes of the divide, contributors draw upon the problems, methods, and results of both traditions to show what post-divide philosophical work looks like in practice. Ranging from metaphysics and philosophy of mind to political philosophy and ethics, the papers gathered here bring into mutual dialogue a wide range of recent and contemporary thinkers, and confront leading problems common to both traditions, including methodology, ontology, meaning, truth, values, and personhood. Collectively, these essays show that it is already possible to foresee a future for philosophical thought and practice no longer determined neither as "analytic" nor as "continental," but, instead, as a pluralistic synthesis of what is best in both traditions. The new work assembled here shows how the problems, projects, and ambitions of twentieth-century philosophy are already being taken up and productively transformed to produce new insights, questions, and methods for philosophy today.
In this book, Ilhan Inan questions the classical definition of curiosity as a desire to know. Working in an area where epistemology and philosophy of language overlap, Inan forges a link between our ability to become aware of our ignorance and our linguistic aptitude to construct terms referring to things unknown. The book introduces the notion of inostensible reference (or reference to the unknown). Ilhan connects this notion to related concepts in philosophy of language: knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description; the referential and the attributive uses of definite descriptions; the de re/de dicto distinction; and Kripke's distinction between rigid and accidental designators. Continuing with a discussion of the conditions for curiosity and its satisfaction, Inan argues that the learning process-starting in curiosity and ending in knowledge-is always an effort to transform our inostensible terms into ostensible ones. A contextual account is adopted for the satisfaction of curiosity. It then discusses the conditions of successful reference to the object of curiosity and its presuppositions. The book concludes with a discussion on the limits of curiosity and its satisfaction.
The idea that plants have minds can sound improbable, but some widely respected contemporary scientists and philosophers find it plausible. It turns out to be rather tricky to vindicate the presumption that plants do not have minds, for doing so requires getting clear about what plants can do and what exactly a mind is. By connecting the most compelling empirical work on plant behavior with philosophical reflection on the concept of minds, Plant Minds aims to help non-experts begin to think clearly about whether plants have minds. Relying on current consensus ideas about minds and plants, Chauncey Maher first presents the best case for thinking that plants do not have minds. Along the way, however, he unearths an idea at the root of that case, the idea that having a mind requires the capacity to represent the world. In the last chapter, he defends a relatively new and insightful theory of mind that rejects that assumption, making room for the possibility that plants do have minds, primarily because they are alive.
Golf as Meaningful Play offers a philosophical introduction to golf as a sporting practice and source of personal meaning. It is intended both for scholars interested in the philosophy of sport, and for intellectually curious golfers who seek a better understanding of the game. This book describes the physical, emotional, mental, and ethical aspects of the game and how they influence golf instruction. It looks at golf as play, game, sport, and spectacle, discusses golf's heroes, communities, and traditions, and analyzes the role of the virtues in golf, linking them to self-fulfillment, the ultimate good of golf experience. The book concludes with discussions of classic works of golf literary and film art, including Caddyshack, Missing Links, Tin Cup, and Golf in the Kingdom, which celebrate its follies and glories. The fact that golf can serve as a playful laboratory to test oneself is a deep part of the game's attraction. Golf, if played well, conveys an experience which unites happiness, excellence, and interpersonal flourishing. This book strives to give an account of golf both as it is and as it ought to be-how golfers may improve their games and even themselves, in meaningful play.
In this new kind of entree to contemporary discussions of free will and human agency, Garrett Pendergraft collects and illuminates 50 of the most relevant puzzles, paradoxes, and thought experiments. Assuming no familiarity with the philosophical literature on free will, each chapter describes a case, explains the questions that it raises, briefly summarizes some of the key responses to the case, and provides a list of suggested readings. Every chapter is accessible, succinct, and self-contained. The puzzles are divided into five broad categories: the threat from fatalism, the threat from determinism, practical reason, social dimensions, and moral luck. Entries cover topics such as the grandfather paradox, theological fatalism, the consequence argument, manipulation arguments, luck arguments, weakness of will, action explanation, addiction, blame and punishment, situationism in moral psychology, and Huckleberry Finn. Free Will and Human Agency is an effective and engaging teaching tool as well as a handy resource for anyone interested in exploring the questions that have made human agency a topic of perennial philosophical interest. Key Features: Though concise overall, offers broad coverage of the key areas of free will and human agency. Describes each imaginative case directly and in a memorable way, making the cases accessible and easy to remember. Provides a list of suggested readings for each case.
Difference, Dialogue, and Development is an in-depth exploration of the collected works of Mikhail Bakhtin to find relevance of key concepts of dialogism for understanding various aspects of human development. Taking the reality of differences in the world as a given, Bandlamudi argues that such a reality necessitates dialogue, and actively responding to that necessity leads to development. The varied works of Bakhtin that span several decades passing through the most tumultuous period in Russian history, are brought under one banner of three D's - Difference, Dialogue and Development - and the composite features of the three D's emerge as leitmotifs in every chapter.
conditions of the possibility of Experience ... must mean nothing else than all that which lies immanently in the essence of Experience ... and therefore belongs to it indispensably. The essence of Experience that phenomenological analysis of Experience elucidates is the same as the possibility of Experience, and all that which is determined in the essence, in the possibility of Experience, is eo ipso 1 condition of the possibility of Experience. Through acquaintance with Husserl's work, then, I developed my way of understand ing what, according to their very possibility, lies in conscious activities of mentally representing something, for example, by imagining or remembering it, or by viewing it in a picture, all these understood as forms of modified perception. As Husserl himself made clear, such reflective and descriptive analyses of the mental activities according to their very possibility are carried out regardless of the way they have actually come to be. However, I was also interested in developmen tal questions, especially with regard to the activity of imagining. Hence I turned to cognitive developmental psychology in order to get acquainted with the neces sary empirical material. Moreover, I conducted a pilot-study with young children that I had conceived according to phenomenologically relevant aspects concerning the difference and yet inner connection of the activities of imagining and viewing 2 pictures."
Ludwig Wittgenstein's On Certainty explores a myriad of new and important ideas regarding our notions of belief, knowledge, skepticism, and certainty. During the course of his exploration, Wittgenstein makes a fascinating new discovery about certitude, namely, that it is categorically distinct from knowledge. As his investigation advances, he recognizes that certainty must be non-propositional and non-ratiocinated; borne out not in the things we say, but in our actions, our deeds. Many philosophers working outside of epistemology recognized Wittgenstein's insights and determined that his work's abrupt end might serve as an excellent launching point for still further philosophical expeditions. In Exploring Certainty: Wittgenstein and Wide Fields of Thought, Robert Greenleaf Brice surveys some of this rich topography. Wittgenstein's writings serve as a point of departure for Brice's own ideas about certainty. He shows how Wittgenstein's rough and unpolished notion of certitude might be smoothed out and refined in a way to benefit studies of morality, aesthetics, cognitive science, philosophy of mathematics. Brice's work opens new avenues of thought for scholars and students of the Wittgensteinian tradition, while introducing original philosophies concerning issues central to human knowledge and cognition.
Thomas Reid (1710-96) was a contemporary of both David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and a central figure in the Scottish School of Common Sense. Until recently, his work has been largely neglected, and often misunderstood. Like Kant, Reid cited Hume's Treatise as the main spur to his own philosophical work. In Reid's case, this led him to challenge 'the theory of ideas', which he saw as the cornerstone of Hume's (and many other philosophers') theories. For those familiar with Reid's work, it is clear that its significance extends well beyond his challenging the theory of ideas. The variety of topics which this book covers attests to the richness and variety of Reid's philosophical contributions, and the persisting relevance of his work to contemporary philosophical debates. The work included in this book, by leading figures in Reid scholarship, deals with aspects of Reid's views on topics ranging from perception, to epistemology, to ethics and meta-ethics, through to language, mind, and metaphysics. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.
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.
First published in 2000. This is Volume 10, No 1 of the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion. One of the most important concepts in the history of psychology is intelligence. Traditionally, intelligence has been thought of as a more or less unitary mental capacity, connoting a general problem-solving ability and skill at abstract reasoning. More recently, a major counter-argument to the idea that intelligence is unitary was published by Howard Gardner (1993) In his view, intelligence is not a unitary construct but instead is multidimensional, comprised of linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal facets. Since then, a dialogue has continued about what does and does not constitute an intelligence. This journal is a collection of essays that discuss this question. |
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