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Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Philosophy of mind
Understanding emotions is becoming ever more valuable in design, both in terms of what people prefer as well as in relation to how they behave in relation to it. Approaches to conceptualising emotions in technology design, how emotions can be operationalised and how they can be measured are paramount to ascertaining the core principles of design. Emotions in Technology Design: From Experience to Ethics provides a multi-dimensional approach to studying, designing and comprehending emotions in design. It presents emotions as understood through basic human-technology research, applied design practice, culture and aesthetics, ethical approaches to emotional design, and ethics as a cultural framework for emotions in design experience. Core elements running through the book are: cognitive science - cognitive-affective theories of emotions (i.e., Appraisal); culture - the ways in which our minds are trained to recognise, respond to and influence design; and ethics - a deep cultural framework of interpretations of good versus evil. This ethical understanding brings culture and cognition together to form genuine emotional experience. This book is essential reading for designers, technology developers, HCI and cognitive science scholars, educators and students (at both undergraduate and graduate levels) in terms of emotional design methods and tools, systematic measurement of emotion in design experience, cultural theory underpinning how emotions operate in the production and interaction of design, and how ethics influence basic (primal) and higher level emotional reactions. The broader scope equips design practitioners, developers and scholars with that 'something more' in terms of understanding how emotional experience of technology can be positioned in relation to cultural discourse and ethics.
This book is an attempt to make sense of the tension in Nietzsche's work between the unashamedly egocentric and the apparently mystical. While scholars have tended to downplay one or other of these aspects, it is the author's contention that the two are not only compatible but mutually illuminating. This book demonstrates Nietzsche's sustained interest in mysticism from the time of The Birth of Tragedy right through to the end of his productive life. This book argues against situating Nietzsche's religious thought in the context of Buddhist or Christian mystical traditions, demonstrating the inadequacy of attempts to mediate between Nietzsche and Meister Eckhart and the Bodhisattva ideal of Mahayana Buddhism. Rather, it is argued that Nietzsche's egoism and mysticism are best understood in the intellectual context which he himself avowed, according to which his "ancestors" were Heraclitus, Empedocles, Spinoza, and Goethe.
The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism, and the Socially Shaped Body investigates the concept of body shame and explores its significance when considering philosophical accounts of embodied subjectivity. Body shame only finds its full articulation in the presence (actual or imagined) of others within a rule and norm governed milieu. As such, it bridges our personal, individual and embodied experience with the social, cultural and political world that contains us. Luna Dolezal argues that understanding body shame can shed light on how the social is embodied, that is, how the body-experienced in its phenomenological primacy by the subject-becomes a social and cultural artifact, shaped by external forces and demands. The Body and Shame introduces leading twentieth-century phenomenological and sociological accounts of embodied subjectivity through the work of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias. Dolezal examines the embodied, social and political features of body shame. contending that body shame is both a necessary and constitutive part of embodied subjectivity while simultaneously a potential site of oppression and marginalization. Exploring the cultural politics of shame, the final chapters of this work explore the phenomenology of self-presentation and a feminist analysis of shame and gender, with a critical focus on the practice of cosmetic surgery, a site where the body is literally shaped by shame. The Body and Shame will be of great interest to scholars and students in a wide variety of fields, including philosophy, phenomenology, feminist theory, women's studies, social theory, cultural studies, psychology, sociology, and medical humanities.
This book defends the much-disputed view that emotions are what Hume referred to as 'original existences': feeling states that have no intentional or representational properties of their own. In doing so, the book serves as a valuable counterbalance to the now mainstream view that emotions are representational mental states. Beginning with a defence of a feeling theory of emotion, Whiting opens up a whole new way of thinking about the role and centrality of emotion in our lives, showing how emotion is key to a proper understanding of human motivation and the self. Whiting establishes that emotions as types of bodily feelings serve as the categorical bases for our behavioural dispositions, including those associated with moral thought, virtue, and vice. The book concludes by advancing the idea that emotions make up our intrinsic nature - the characterisation of what we are like in and of ourselves, when considered apart from how we are disposed to behave. The conclusion additionally draws out the implications of the claims made throughout the book in relation to our understanding of mental illness and the treatment of emotional disorders.
From Homer to Aristotle, understanding anger and harnessing its power was at the core of Hellenic civilization. Homer created the framework for philosophical inquiries into anger, one that persisted until it was overturned by Stoicism and Christianity. Plato saw anger as the guardian of justice and Aristotle conceived of it as bound to friendship. Yet both showed that anger can become a guardian of injustice and a defender of our psychological abnormalities. Plato claimed that reason is a tertiary factor in controlling anger and Aristotle argued that non-cognitive powers can issue commands for anger's arousal - findings that shed light as to why cognitive therapeutic approaches often prove to be ineffective. Both proposed nurturing the "thumos," the receptacle of anger and the seat of self-esteem. Aristotle's view of public anger as an early warning sign of social dissolution continues to be relevant to this day. In this carefully argued study, Kostas Kalimtzis examines the theories of anger in the context of the ancient world with an eye to their implications for the modern predicament.
Could robots be genuinely intelligent? Could they be conscious? Could there be zombies? Prompted by these questions Robert Kirk introduces the main problems of consciousness and sets out a new approach to solving them. He starts by discussing behaviourism, Turing's test of intelligence and Searle's famous Chinese Room argument, and goes on to examine dualism - the idea that consciousness requires something beyond the physical - together with its opposite, physicalism. Probing the idea of zombies, he concludes they are logically impossible. Having presented the central problems, he sketches his solution: a version of functionalism, according to which consciousness consists in the performance of functions. While there is wide agreement among philosophers about what the main problems of consciousness are, there is little agreement on how to go about solving them. With this powerful case for his version of functionalism, Kirk offers an engaging introduction to both the problems and a possible solution.
Talbot Brewer presents an invigorating new approach to ethical
theory, in the context of human selfhood and agency. The first main
theme of the book is that contemporary ethical theorists have
focused too narrowly on actions and the discrete episodes of
deliberation through which we choose them, and that the subject
matter of the field looks quite different if one looks instead at
unfolding activities and the continuous forms of evaluative
awareness that carry them forward and that constitute an essential
element of those activities. The second is that ethical reflection
is itself a centrally important life activity, and that
philosophical ethics is an extension of this practical activity
rather than a merely theoretical reflection upon it.
This edited book focuses on concepts and their applications using the theory of conceptual spaces, one of today's most central tracks of cognitive science discourse. It features 15 papers based on topics presented at the Conceptual Spaces @ Work 2016 conference. The contributors interweave both theory and applications in their papers. Among the first mentioned are studies on metatheories, logical and systemic implications of the theory, as well as relations between concepts and language. Examples of the latter include explanatory models of paradigm shifts and evolution in science as well as dilemmas and issues of health, ethics, and education. The theory of conceptual spaces overcomes many translational issues between academic theoretization and practical applications. The paradigm is mainly associated with structural explanations, such as categorization and meronomy. However, the community has also been relating it to relations, functions, and systems. The book presents work that provides a geometric model for the representation of human conceptual knowledge that bridges the symbolic and the sub-conceptual levels of representation. The model has already proven to have a broad range of applicability beyond cognitive science and even across a number of disciplines related to concepts and representation.
Recent research across the disciplines of cognitive science has exerted a profound influence on how many philosophers approach problems about the nature of mind. These philosophers, while attentive to traditional philosophical concerns, are increasingly drawing both theory and evidence from empirical disciplines - both the framing of the questions and how to resolve them. However, this familiarity with the results of cognitive science has led to the raising of an entirely new set of questions about the mind and how we study it, questions which not so long ago philosophers did not even pose, let alone address. This volume offers an overview of this burgeoning field that balances breadth and depth, with chapters covering every aspect of the psychology and cognitive anthropology. Each chapter provides a critical and balanced discussion of a core topic while also conveying distinctive viewpoints and arguments. Several of the chapters are co-authored collaborations between philosophers and scientists.
Can you be a self on your own or only together with others? Is selfhood a built-in feature of experience or rather socially constructed? How do we at all come to understand others? Does empathy amount to and allow for a distinct experiential acquaintance with others, and if so, what does that tell us about the nature of selfhood and social cognition? Does a strong emphasis on the first-personal character of consciousness prohibit a satisfactory account of intersubjectivity or is the former rather a necessary requirement for the latter? Engaging with debates and findings in classical phenomenology, in philosophy of mind and in various empirical disciplines, Dan Zahavi's new book Self and Other offers answers to these questions. Discussing such diverse topics as self-consciousness, phenomenal externalism, mindless coping, mirror self-recognition, autism, theory of mind, embodied simulation, joint attention, shame, time-consciousness, embodiment, narrativity, self-disorders, expressivity and Buddhist no-self accounts, Zahavi argues that any theory of consciousness that wishes to take the subjective dimension of our experiential life serious must endorse a minimalist notion of self. At the same time, however, he also contends that an adequate account of the self has to recognize its multifaceted character, and that various complementary accounts must be integrated, if we are to do justice to its complexity. Thus, while arguing that the most fundamental level of selfhood is not socially constructed and not constitutively dependent upon others, Zahavi also acknowledges that there are dimensions of the self and types of self-experience that are other-mediated. The final part of the book exemplifies this claim through a close analysis of shame.
An easy-to-digest introduction the science of the experience of consciousness as the German Idealist philosopher GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL (17701831) understood it, this condensed version of Hegels The Phenomenology of Spiritwhich the author created himself for his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciencesexplores Hegels take on: [ what mind is [ the sensibility of the physical soul [ the immediacy of the feeling soul [ consciousness and the intellect [ the theoretical mind [ memory, intuition, and imagination [ the morality of conscience [ moral life, or social ethics [ revealed religion in the absolute mind [ and much more. This 1894 translation of the 18271830 German original, by Scottish philosopher and Oxford University professor WILLIAM WALLACE (18431897), remains a favorite of Hegel students, and is celebrated for its style and eloquence.
A Brief Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind is written to engage the beginning student, offering a balanced, accessible entrZe into a notoriously complex field of inquiry. Crumley introduces four core areas in contemporary philosophy of the mind: the mind/body problem, mental content (intentionality), mental causation, and the nature of consciousness. The book is distinctive in its further coverage of such fascinating topics as the nature of mental images, theories of concepts, and whether or not computers can think, as well as brief accounts of the disciplines with which the philosophy of mind is often associated, among them neuroscience and cognitive psychology.
The Chomskian revolution in linguistics gave rise to a new orthodoxy about mind and language. Michael Devitt throws down a provocative challenge to that orthodoxy. What is linguistics about? What role should linguistic intuitions play in constructing grammars? What is innate about language? Is there a 'language faculty'? These questions are crucial to our developing understanding of ourselves; Michael Devitt offers refreshingly original answers. He argues that linguistics is about linguistic reality and is not part of psychology; that linguistic rules are not represented in the mind; that speakers are largely ignorant of their language; that speakers' intuitions do not reflect information supplied by the language faculty and are not the main evidence for grammars; that the rules of 'Universal Grammar' are largely, if not entirely, innate structure rules of thought; indeed, that there is little or nothing to the language faculty. Devitt's controversial theses will prove highly stimulating to anyone working on language and the mind.
A Brief Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind is written to engage the beginning student, offering a balanced, accessible entree into a notoriously complex field of inquiry. Crumley introduces four core areas in contemporary philosophy of the mind: the mind/body problem, mental content (intentionality), mental causation, and the nature of consciousness. The book is distinctive in its further coverage of such fascinating topics as the nature of mental images, theories of concepts, and whether or not computers can think, as well as brief accounts of the disciplines with which the philosophy of mind is often associated, among them neuroscience and cognitive psychology.
This book, taking its point of departure from Stanley Cavell's claim that philosophy and autobiography are dimensions of each other, aims to explore some of the relations between these forms of reflection, first by seeking to develop an outline of a philosophy of autobiography, and then by exploring the issue from the side of five autobiographical works. Christopher Hamilton argues in the volume that there are good reasons for thinking that philosophical texts can be considered autobiographical, and then turns to discuss the autobiographies of Walter Benjamin, Peter Weiss, Jean-Paul Sartre, George Orwell, Edmund Gosse and Albert Camus. In discussing these works, Hamilton explores how they put into question certain received understandings of what philosophical texts suppose themselves to be doing, and also how they themselves constitute philosophical explorations of certain key issues, e.g. the self, death, religious and ethical consciousness, sensuality, the body. Throughout, there is an exploration of the ways in which autobiographies help us in thinking about self-knowledge and knowledge of others. A final chapter raises some issues concerning the fact that the five autobiographies discussed here are all texts dealing with childhood.
The thesis that the mind cannot directly apprehend features of the physical world - what Reid calls the Way of Ideas - is a staple of Early Modern philosophical tradition. This commitment to the direct awareness of, and only of, mental representations unifies the otherwise divergent philosophical systems of Rationalists and Empiricists. Thomas Reid battles against this thesis on many fronts, in particular over the nature of perception. Ryan Nichols lays the groundwork for Reid's theory of perception by developing Reid's unheralded argument against a representational theory of thought, which Nichols applies to his discussion of the intentionality of perceptual states and Reid's appeal to 'signs'. Reid's efforts to preserve common sense epistemic commitments also lead him to adopt unique theories about our concepts of primary and secondary qualities, and about original and acquired perceptions. About the latter pair, Nichols argues that most perceptual beliefs depend for their justification upon inferences. The Way of Ideas holds that sensations are objects of awareness and that our senses are not robustly unified. Nichols develops Reid's counter-proposals by examining his discussion of the evolutionary purpose of sensations, and the nature of our awareness of sensations, as well as his intriguing affirmative answer to Molyneux's questions. Nichols brings to the writing of this book a consummate knowledge of Reid's texts, published and unpublished, and a keen appreciation for Reid's responses to his predecessors. He frequently reconstructs arguments in premise/conclusion form, thereby clarifying disputes that have frustrated previous Reid scholarship. This clarification, his lively examples, and his plainspoken style make this book especially readable. Reid's theory of perception is by far the most important feature of Reid's philosophical system, and Nichols offers what will be, for a long time to come, the definitive analysis of this theory.
This edited volume focuses on the hypothesis that performativity is not a property confined to certain specific human skills, or to certain specific acts of language, nor an accidental enrichment due to creative intelligence. Instead, the executive and motor component of cognitive behavior should be considered an intrinsic part of the physiological functioning of the mind, and as endowed with self-generative power. Performativity, in this theoretical context, can be defined as a constituent component of cognitive processes. The material action allowing us to interact with reality is both the means by which the subject knows the surrounding world and one through which he experiments with the possibilities of his body. This proposal is rooted in models now widely accepted in the philosophy of mind and language; in fact, it focuses on a space of awareness that is not in the individual, or outside it, but is determined by the species-specific ways in which the body acts on the world. This theoretical hypothesis will be pursued through the latest interdisciplinary methodology typical of cognitive science, that coincide with the five sections in which the book is organized: Embodied, enactivist, philosophical approaches; Aesthetics approaches; Naturalistic and evolutionary approaches; Neuroscientific approaches; Linguistics approaches. This book is intended for: linguists, philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists, scholars of art and aesthetics, performing artists, researchers in embodied cognition, especially enactivists and students of the extended mind.
This book examines what seems to be the basic challenge in neuroscience today: understanding how experience generated by the human brain is related to the physical world we live in. The 25 short chapters present the argument and evidence that brains address this problem on a wholly trial and error basis. The goal is to encourage neuroscientists, computer scientists, philosophers, and other interested readers to consider this concept of neural function and its implications, not least of which is the conclusion that brains don't "compute."
This book shows how persecution is a condition that binds each in an ethical obligation to the other. Persecution is functionally defined here as an impinging, affective relation that is not mediated by reason. It focuses on the works and personal lives of Emmanuel Levinas-a phenomenological ethicist who understood persecution as an ontological condition for human existence-and Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis who proposed that a demanding superego is a persecuting psychological mechanism that enables one to sadistically enjoy moral injunctions. Scholarship on the work of Freud and Levinas remains critical about their objectivity, but this book uses the phenomenological method to bracket this concern with objective truth and instead reconstruct their historical biographies to evaluate their hyperbolically opposing claims. By doing so, it is suggested that moral actions and relations of persecution in their personal lives illuminate the epistemic limits that they argued contribute to the psychological and ontological necessity of persecuting behaviors. Object relations and intersubjective approaches in psychoanalysis successfully incorporate meaningful elements from both of their theoretical works, which is used to develop an intentionality of search that is sensitive to an unknowable, relational, and existentially vulnerable ethical subjectivity. Details from Freud's and Levinas' works and lives, on the proclivity to use persecution to achieve moral ends, provide significant ethical warnings, and the author uses them as a strategy for developing the reader's intentionality of search, to reflect on when they may use persecuting means for moral ends. The interdisciplinary nature of this research monograph is intended for academics, scholars, and researchers who are interested in psychoanalysis, moral philosophy, and phenomenology. Comparisons between various psychoanalytic frameworks and Levinas' ethic will also interest scholars who work on the relation between psychoanalysis and The Other. Levinas scholars will value the convergences between his ethics and Freud's moral skepticism; likewise, readers will be interested in the extension of Levinas' intentionality of search. The book is useful for undergraduate or graduate courses on literary criticism and critical theories worldwide.
Waymond Rodgers, PhD, CPA, has worked over fifteen years studying how to combine ethical considerations with a decision-making model of perception, information, and judgment that will foster better decision-making processes, resulting in an overall improvement of daily life. He has presented seminars on ethics at numerous international conferences and also provided ethics presentations to corporations, societies, universities, and other organizations such as Opus Dei. The need for ethics in society is such an important factor because many commonly held ethical values are incorporated into laws. Yet, due to the judgmental nature of certain values, many ethical values of a society cannot be incorporated into law. Ethical process thinking involves discerning right from wrong and acting in alignment with such judgments, enabling us to complement several ethical approaches of preferences, rules, and principles with unique decision-making pathways leading to an ethical decision. Ethical decisions can be difficult to make due to a misunderstanding of the decision-making process, incomplete information, changing environments, time pressures, and a lack of expertise. Ethical Beginnings: Preferences, Rules, and Principles influencing decision making explains the major barriers to ethical decision-making, why structuring a problem is necessary, and when to use information for decision-making purposes. |
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