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Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Philosophy of mind
Adrian Bardon's A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time is a
short yet thorough introduction to the history, philosophy, and
science of the study of time-from the pre-Socratic philosophers
through Einstein and beyond. Its treatment is roughly
chronological, starting with the ancient Greek philosophers
Heraclitus and Parmenides and proceeding through the history of
Western philosophy and science up to the present. Using
illustrations and keeping technical language to a minimum, A Brief
History of the Philosophy of Time covers subjects such as time and
change, the experience of time, physical and metaphysical
approaches to the nature of time, the direction of time,
time-travel, time and freedom of the will, and scientific and
philosophical approaches to eternity and the beginning of time.
Bardon brings the resources of over 2500 years of philosophy and
science to bear on some of humanity's most fundamental and enduring
questions.
Experimental Philosophy: Volume 2 contains fourteen articles -
thirteen previously published and one new - that reflect the
fast-moving changes in the field over the last five years. The
field of experimental philosophy is one of the most innovative and
exciting parts of the current philosophical landscape; it has also
engendered controversy. Proponents argue that philosophers should
employ empirical research, including the methods of experimental
psychology, to buttress their philosophical claims. Rather than
armchair theorizing, experimental philosophers should go into the
field to research how people actually think and reason. In a sense
this is a return to a view of philosophy as the progenitor of
psychology: inherently concerned with the human condition, with no
limits to its scope or methods. In the course of the last decade,
many experimental philosophers have overturned assumptions about
how people think in the real world. This volume provides an
essential guide to the most influential recent work on this vital
and exciting area of philosophical research.
HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of
best-loved, essential classics. No man can live a happy life, or
even a supportable life, without the study of wisdom Lucius Annaeus
Seneca (4 BC-AD 65) is one of the most famous Roman philosophers.
Instrumental in guiding the Roman Empire under emperor Nero, Seneca
influenced him from a young age with his Stoic principles. Later in
life, he wrote Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, or Letters from a
Stoic, detailing these principles in full. Seneca's letters read
like a diary, or a handbook of philosophical meditations. Often
beginning with observations on daily life, the letters focus on
many traditional themes of Stoic philosophy, such as the contempt
of death, the value of friendship and virtue as the supreme good.
Using Gummere's translation from the early twentieth century, this
selection of Seneca's letters shows his belief in the austere,
ethical ideals of Stoicism - teachings we can still learn from
today.
Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind surveys philosophical
issues raised by the situated movement in cognitive science, that
is, the treatment of cognitive phenomena as the joint products of
brain, body, and environment. The book focuses primarily on the
hypothesis of extended cognition, which asserts that human
cognitive processes literally comprise elements beyond the boundary
of the human organism. Rupert argues that the only plausible way in
which to demarcate cognitions is systems-based: cognitive states or
processes are the states of the integrated set of mechanisms and
capacities that contribute causally and distinctively to the
production of cognitive phenomena--for example, language-use,
memory, decision-making, theory construction, and, more
importantly, the associated forms of behavior. Rupert argues that
this integrated system is most likely to appear within the
boundaries of the human organism. He argues that the systems-based
view explains the existing successes of cognitive psychology and
cognate fields in a way that extended conceptions of cognition do
not, and that once the systems-based view has been adopted, it is
especially clear how extant arguments in support of the extended
view go wrong.
Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind also examines further
aspects of the situated program in cognitive science, including the
embedded and embodied approaches to cognition. Rupert asks to what
extent the plausible incarnations of these situated views depart
from orthodox, computational cognitive science. Here, Rupert
focuses on the notions of representation and computation, arguing
that the embedded and embodied views do not constitute the radical
shifts in perspective they are often claimed to be. Rupert also
argues that, properly understood, the embodied view does not offer
a new role for the body, different in principle from the one
presupposed by orthodox cognitive science.
"Rupert's book is a good read. It is a sustained, systematic,
critical examination of the idea that minds are not simply
ensconced inside heads, but extend into both bodies and the world
beyond the body.... There is much to admire in this book. It is
well-structured and well-written, adopting a self-consciously
naturalistic perspective on how to understand the mind -- through
our best, even if imperfect, empirical sciences in the domain of
cognition. By presenting and critiquing a number of explicit
arguments for and against the specific views that Rupert considers,
Cognitive Systems advances the field."-- Notre Dame Philosophical
Reviews
"Rupert's treatment is a state of the art sustained attack on
various forms of the 'extended mind hypothesis'. It is rigorous and
challenging, and will be of interest to a quite a large audience of
researchers (graduates and above) in philosophy and in cognitive
science. Rupert studiously avoids the 'straw men' that populate
some recent critiques, and raises deep and sympathetic challenges
that go to the core of the program."
--Andy Clark, Department of Philosophy, University of Edinburgh
According to Russellian monism, an alternative to the familiar
theories in the philosophy of mind that combines attractive
components of physicalism and dualism, matter has intrinsic
properties that both constitute consciousness and serve as
categorical bases for the dispositional properties described in
physics. Consciousness in the Physical World collects various works
on Russellian monism, including historical selections, recent
classics, and new pieces. Most chapters are sympathetic with the
view, but some are skeptical. Together, they constitute the first
book-length treatment of the view itself, its relationship to other
theories, its motivations, and its problems.
There are few terms or concepts that have, in the last twenty or so
years, rivaled "collective memory" for attention in the humanities
and social sciences. Indeed, use of the term has extended far
beyond scholarship to the realm of politics and journalism, where
it has appeared in speeches at the centers of power and on the
front pages of the world's leading newspapers. The current
efflorescence of interest in memory, however, is no mere passing
fad: it is a hallmark characteristic of our age and a crucial site
for understanding our present social, political, and cultural
conditions. Scholars and others in numerous fields have thus
employed the concept of collective memory, sociological in origin,
to guide their inquiries into diverse, though allegedly connected,
phenomena. Nevertheless, there remains a great deal of confusion
about the meaning, origin, and implication of the term and the
field of inquiry it underwrites. The Collective Memory Reader
presents, organizes, and evaluates past work and contemporary
contributions on the questions raised under the rubric of
collective memory. Combining seminal texts, hard-to-find classics,
previously untranslated references, and contemporary landmarks, it
will serve as an essential resource for teaching and research in
the field. In addition, in both its selections as well as in its
editorial materials, it suggests a novel life-story for the field,
one that appreciates recent innovations but only against the
background of a long history. In addition to its major editorial
introduction, which outlines a useful past for contemporary memory
studies, The Collective Memory Reader includes five
sections-Precursors and Classics; History, Memory, and Identity;
Power, Politics, and Contestation; Media and Modes of Transmission;
Memory, Justice, and the Contemporary Epoch-comprising ninety-one
texts. In addition to the essay introducing the entire volume, a
brief editorial essay introduces each of the sections, while brief
capsules frame each of the 91 texts.
The context for this interdisciplinary work by a philosopher and a
clinician is the psychiatric care provided to those with severe
mental disorders. Such a setting makes distinctive moral demands on
the very character of the practitioner, it is shown, calling for
special virtues and greater virtue than many other practice
settings. In a practice so attentive to the patient's self
identity, the authors promote a heightened awareness of cultural
and particularly gender issues. By elucidating the nature of the
moral psychology and character of the good psychiatrist, this work
provides a sustained application of virtue theory to clinical
practice. With its roots in Aristotelian writing, The Virtuous
Psychiatrist presents virtue traits as habits, able to be
cultivated and enhanced through training. The book describes these
traits, and how they can be habituated in clinical training. A turn
towards virtue theory within philosophy during the last several
decades has resulted in important research on professional ethics.
By approaching the ethics of psychiatric professionals in these
virtue terms, Radden and Sadler's work provides an original
application of this theorizing to practice. Of interest to both
theorists and practitioners, the book explores the tension between
the model of enduring character implicit in virtue theory and the
segmented personae of role-specific moral responses. Clinical
examples are provided, based upon dramaturgical vignettes
(caseplays) which illustrate both the interactions of the case
participants as well as the inner monologue of the clinician
protagonist.
This book introduces generative grammar as an area of study and
asks what it tells us about the human mind. Wolfram Hinzen lays the
foundation for the unification of modern generative linguistics
with the philosophies of mind and language. He introduces Chomsky's
program of a "minimalist"
syntax as a novel explanatory vision of the human mind. He explains
how the Minimalist Program originated in work in cognitive science,
biology, linguistics, and philosophy, and examines its implications
for work in these fields. He considers the way the human mind is
designed when seen as an
arrangement of structural patterns in nature, and argues that its
design is the product not so much of adaptive evolutionary history
as of principles and processes that are ahistorical and internalist
in character. Linguistic meaning, he suggests, arises in the mind
as a consequence of structures
emerging on formal rather than functional grounds. From this he
substantiates an unexpected and deeply unfashionable notion of
human nature.
Clearly written in nontechnical language and assuming a limited
knowledge of the fields it examines and links, Minimal Mind Design
will appeal to a wide range of scholars in linguistics, philosophy,
and cognitive science. It also provides an exceptionally clear
insight into the nature and aims of
Chomsky's Minimalist Program.
Some philosophers hold that trust grows fragile when people become
too rational. They advocate a retreat from reason and a return to
local, traditional values. Others hold that truly rational people
are both trusting and trustworthy. Everything hinges on what we
mean by 'reason' and 'rational'. If these are understood in an
egocentric, instrumental fashion, then they are indeed incompatible
with trust. With the help of game theory, Martin Hollis argues
against that narrow definition and in favour of a richer, deeper
notion of reason founded on reciprocity and the pursuit of the
common good. Within that framework he reconstructs the
Enlightenment idea of citizens of the world, rationally
encountering, and at the same time finding their identity in, their
multiple commitments to communities both local and universal.
All normal human beings alive in the last fifty thousand years
appear to have possessed, in Mark Turner's phrase, "irrepressibly
artful minds." Cognitively modern minds produced a staggering list
of behavioral singularities--science, religion, mathematics,
language, advanced tool use, decorative dress, dance, culture,
art--that seems to indicate a mysterious and unexplained
discontinuity between us and all other living things. This brute
fact gives rise to some tantalizing questions: How did the artful
mind emerge? What are the basic mental operations that make art
possible for us now, and how do they operate? These are the
questions that occupy the distinguished contributors to this
volume, which emerged from a year-long Getty-funded research
project hosted by the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral
Sciences at Stanford. These scholars bring to bear a range of
disciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives on the
relationship between art (broadly conceived), the mind, and the
brain. Together they hope to provide directions for a new field of
research that can play a significant role in answering the great
riddle of human singularity.
Since the late 1970's, the main research program for understanding
intentionality - the mind's ability to direct itself onto the world
- has been based on the attempt naturalize intentionality, in the
sense of making it intelligible how intentionality can occur in a
perfectly natural, indeed entirely physical, world. Some
philosophers, however, have remained skeptical of this entire
approach. In particular, some have argued that phenomenal
consciousness - the subjective feel of conscious experience - has
an essential role to play in the theory of intentionality, a role
missing in the naturalization program. Thus a number of authors
have recently brought to the fore the notion of phenomenal
intentionality, as well as a cluster of nearby notions. There is a
vague sense that their work is interrelated, complementary, and
mutually reinforcing, in a way that suggests a germinal research
program. With twelve new essays by philosophers at the forefront of
the field, this volume is designed to launch this research program
in a more self-conscious way, by exploring some of the fundamental
claims and themes of relevance to this program.
In recent years, philosophical discussions of free will have
focused largely on whether or not free will is compatible with
determinism. In this challenging book, David Hodgson takes a fresh
approach to the question of free will, contending that close
consideration of human rationality and human consciousness shows
that together they give us free will, in a robust and
indeterministic sense. In particular, they give us the capacity to
respond appositely to feature-rich gestalts of conscious
experiences, in ways that are not wholly determined by laws of
nature or computational rules. The author contends that this
approach is consistent with what science tells us about the world;
and he considers its implications for our responsibility for our
own conduct, for the role of retribution in criminal punishment,
and for the place of human beings in the wider scheme of things.
Praise for David Hodgson's previous work, The Mind Matters
"magisterial...It is balanced, extraordinarily thorough and
scrupulously fair-minded; and it is written in clear,
straightforward, accessible prose." --Michael Lockwood, Times
Literary Supplement
"an excellent contribution to the literature. It is well written,
authoritative, and wonderfully wide-ranging. ... This account of
quantum theory ... will surely be of great value. ... On the front
cover of the paper edition of this book Paul Davies is quoted as
saying that this is "a truly splendid and provocative book." In
writing this review I have allowed myself to be provoked, but I am
happy to close by giving my endorsement to this verdict in its
entirety " --Euan Squires, Journal of Consciousness Studies
"well argued and extremely important book." --Sheena Meredith, New
Scientist
"His reconstructions and explanations are always concise and
clear." --Jeffrey A Barrett, The Philosophical Review
"In this large-scale and ambitious work Hodgson attacks a modern
orthodoxy. Both its proponents and its opponents will find it
compelling reading." --J. R. Lucas, Merton College, Oxford
This book offers a new argument for the ancient claim that
well-being as the highest prudential good - eudaimonia - consists
of happiness in a virtuous life. The argument takes into account
recent work on happiness, well-being, and virtue, and defends a
neo-Aristotelian conception of virtue as an integrated
intellectual-emotional disposition that is limited in both scope
and stability. This conception of virtue is argued to be
widely-held and compatible with social and cognitive psychology.
The main argument of the book is as follows: (i) the concept of
well-being as the highest prudential good is internally coherent
and widely held; (ii) well-being thus conceived requires an
objectively worthwhile life; (iii) in turn, such a life requires
autonomy and reality-orientation, i.e., a disposition to think for
oneself, seek truth or understanding about important aspects of
one's own life and human life in general, and act on this
understanding when circumstances permit; (iv) to the extent that
someone is successful in achieving understanding and acting on it,
she is realistic, and to the extent that she is realistic, she is
virtuous; (v) hence, well-being as the highest prudential good
requires virtue. But complete virtue is impossible for both
psychological and epistemic reasons, and this is one reason why
complete well-being is impossible.
What do we see? We are visually conscious of colors and shapes, but
are we also visually conscious of complex properties such as being
John Malkovich? In this book, Susanna Siegel develops a framework
for understanding the contents of visual experience, and argues
that these contents involve all sorts of complex properties. Siegel
starts by analyzing the notion of the contents of experience, and
by arguing that theorists of all stripes should accept that
experiences have contents. She then introduces a method for
discovering the contents of experience: the method of phenomenal
contrast. This method relies only minimally on introspection, and
allows rigorous support for claims about experience. She then
applies the method to make the case that we are conscious of many
kinds of properties, of all sorts of causal properties, and of many
other complex properties. She goes on to use the method to help
analyze difficult questions about our consciousness of objects and
their role in the contents of experience, and to reconceptualize
the distinction between perception and sensation. Siegel's results
are important for many areas of philosophy, including the
philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the philosophy of science.
They are also important for the psychology and cognitive
neuroscience of vision.
For centuries, philosophers have been puzzled by the fact that
people often respect moral obligations as a matter of principle,
setting aside considerations of self-interest. In more recent
years, social scientists have been puzzled by the more general
phenomenon of rule-following, the fact that people often abide by
social norms even when doing so produces undesirable consequences.
Experimental game theorists have demonstrated conclusively that the
old-fashioned picture of "economic man," constantly reoptimizing in
order to maximize utility in all circumstances, cannot provide
adequate foundations for a general theory of rational action. The
dominant response, however, has been a slide toward irrationalism.
If people are ignoring the consequences of their actions, it is
claimed, it must be because they are making some sort of a mistake.
In Following the Rules, Joseph Heath attempts to reverse this
trend, by showing how rule-following can be understood as an
essential element of rational action. The first step involves
showing how rational choice theory can be modified to incorporate
deontic constraint as a feature of rational deliberation. The
second involves disarming the suspicion that there is something
mysterious or irrational about the psychological states underlying
rule-following. According to Heath, human rationality is a
by-product of the so-called "language upgrade" that we receive as a
consequence of the development of specific social practices. As a
result, certain constitutive features of our social
environment-such as the rule-governed structure of social
life-migrate inwards, and become constitutive features of our
psychological faculties. This in turn explains why there is an
indissoluble bond between practical rationality and deontic
constraint. In the end, what Heath offers is a naturalistic,
evolutionary argument in favor of the traditional Kantian view that
there is an internal connection between being a rational agent and
feeling the force of one's moral obligations.
In all groups - from couples to nation-states - people influence
one another. Much of this influence is benign, for example giving
advice to friends or serving as role models for our children and
students. Some forms of influence, however, are clearly morally
suspect, such as threats of violence and blackmail. A great deal of
attention has been paid to one form of morally suspect influence,
namely coercion. Less attention has been paid to what might be a
more pervasive form of influence: manipulation. The essays in this
volume address this relative imbalance by focusing on manipulation,
examining its nature, moral status, and its significance in
personal and social life. They address a number of central
questions: What counts as manipulation? How is it distinguished
from coercion and ordinary rational persuasion? Is it always wrong,
or can it sometimes be justified, and if so, when? Is manipulative
influence more benign than coercion? Can one manipulate
unintentionally? How does being manipulated to act bear on one's
moral responsibly for so acting? Given various answers to these
questions, what should we think of practices such as advertising
and seduction?
HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of
best-loved, essential classics. Our life is what our thoughts make
it The extraordinary writings of Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180), the
only Roman emperor to have also been a stoic philosopher, have for
centuries been praised for their wisdom, insight and guidance by
leaders and great thinkers alike. Never intended for publication,
Meditations are the personal notes born from a man who studied his
unique position of power as emperor while trying to uphold inner
balance in the chaotic world around him. Boldly challenging many of
our biggest questions, Aurelius wrestles with the divided self,
considering the complexities of human nature, rationality and moral
virtue, affirming its place as one of the most timeless,
significant works of philosophy to date.
While the fall of the Berlin Wall is positively commemorated in the
West, the intervening years have shown that the former Soviet Bloc
has a more complicated view of its legacy. In post-communist
Eastern Europe, the way people remember state socialism is closely
intertwined with the manner in which they envision historical
justice. Twenty Years After Communism is concerned with the
explosion of a politics of memory triggered by the fall of state
socialism in Eastern Europe, and it takes a comparative look at the
ways that communism and its demise have been commemorated (or not
commemorated) by major political actors across the region. The book
is built on three premises. The first is that political actors
always strive to come to terms with the history of their
communities in order to generate a sense of order in their personal
and collective lives. Second, new leaders sometimes find it
advantageous to mete out justice on the politicians of abolished
regimes, and whether and how they do so depends heavily on their
interpretation and assessment of the collective past. Finally,
remembering the past, particularly collectively, is always a
political process, thus the politics of memory and commemoration
needs to be studied as an integral part of the establishment of new
collective identities and new principles of political legitimacy.
Each chapter takes a detailed look at the commemorative ceremony of
a different country of the former Soviet Bloc. Collectively the
book looks at patterns of extrication from state socialism,
patterns of ethnic and class conflict, the strategies of communist
successor parties, and the cultural traditions of a given country
that influence the way official collective memory is constructed.
Twenty Years After Communism develops a new analytical and
explanatory framework that helps readers to understand the utility
of historical memory as an important and understudied part of
democratization.
Frank Jackson champions the cause of conceptual analysis as central
to philosophical inquiry. In recent years conceptual analysis has
been undervalued and, Jackson suggests, widely misunderstood; he
argues that there is nothing especially mysterious about it and a
whole range of important questions cannot be productively addressed
without it. He anchors his argument in discussion of specific
philosophical issues, starting with the metaphysical doctrine of
physicalism and moving on, via free will, meaning, personal
identity, motion and change, to the philosophy of colour and to
ethics. The significance of different kinds of supervenience
theses, Kripke and Putnam's work in the philosophy of modality and
language, and the role of intuitions about possible cases receive
detailed attention. Jackson concludes with a defence of a version
of analytical descriptivism in ethics. In this way the book not
only offers a methodological programme for philosophy, but also
throws fascinating new light on some much-debated problems and
their interrelations. puffs which may be quoted (please do not edit
without consulting OUP editor): 'This is an outstanding book. It
covers a vast amount of philosophy in a very short space, advances
a number of original and striking positions, and manages to be both
clear and concise in its expositions of other views and forceful in
its criticisms of them. The book offers something new for those
interested in the various individual problems it
discusses-conceptual analysis, the mind-body relation, secondary
qualities, modality, and ethical realism. But unifying these
individual discussions is an ambitious structure which amounts to
an outline of a complete metaphysical system, and an outline of an
epistemology for this metaphysics. It is hard to think of a central
area of analytic philosophy which will not be touched by Jackson's
conclusions.' Tim Crane, Reader in Philosophy, University College
London 'The writing is clear, straightforward, and down to
earth-the usual virtues one expects from Jackson . . . what he has
to say is innovative and valuable . . . the book deals with a large
number of apparently diverse philosophical issues, but it is also
an elegantly unified work. What gives it unity is the
metaphilosophical framework that Jackson works out with great care
and persuasiveness. This is the first serious and sustained work on
the methodology of metaphysics in recent memory. What he says about
the role of conceptual analysis in metaphysics is an important and
timely contribution. . . . It is refreshing and heartening to see a
first-class analytic philosopher doing some serious
metaphilosophical work . . . I think that the book will be greeted
as an important event in philosophical publishing.' Jaegwon Kim,
Professor of Philosophy, Brown University
What is consciousness? How does the subjective character of
consciousness fit into an objective world? How can there be a
science of consciousness? In this sequel to his groundbreaking and
controversial The Conscious Mind, David Chalmers develops a unified
framework that addresses these questions and many others. Starting
with a statement of the "hard problem" of consciousness, Chalmers
builds a positive framework for the science of consciousness and a
nonreductive vision of the metaphysics of consciousness. He replies
to many critics of The Conscious Mind, and then develops a positive
theory in new directions. The book includes original accounts of
how we think and know about consciousness, of the unity of
consciousness, and of how consciousness relates to the external
world. Along the way, Chalmers develops many provocative ideas: the
"consciousness meter", the Garden of Eden as a model of perceptual
experience, and The Matrix as a guide to the deepest philosophical
problems about consciousness and the external world. This book will
be required reading for anyone interested in the problems of mind,
brain, consciousness, and reality.
Contemporary philosophers of mind tend to assume that the world of
nature can be reduced to basic physics. Yet there are features of
the mind consciousness, intentionality, normativity that do not
seem to be reducible to physics or neuroscience. This explanatory
gap between mind and brain has thus been a major cause of concern
in recent philosophy of mind. Reductionists hold that, despite all
appearances, the mind can be reduced to the brain. Eliminativists
hold that it cannot, and that this implies that there is something
illegitimate about the mentalistic vocabulary. Dualists hold that
the mental is irreducible, and that this implies either a substance
or a property dualism. Mysterian non-reductive physicalists hold
that the mind is uniquely irreducible, perhaps due to some
limitation of our self-understanding.
In this book, Steven Horst argues that this whole conversation is
based on assumptions left over from an outdated philosophy of
science. While reductionism was part of the philosophical orthodoxy
fifty years ago, it has been decisively rejected by philosophers of
science over the past thirty years, and for good reason. True
reductions are in fact exceedingly rare in the sciences, and the
conviction that they were there to be found was an artifact of
armchair assumptions of 17th century Rationalists and 20th century
Logical Empiricists. The explanatory gaps between mind and brain
are far from unique. In fact, in the sciences it is gaps all the
way down.And if reductions are rare in even the physical sciences,
there is little reason to expect them in the case of
psychology.
Horst argues that this calls for a complete re-thinking of the
contemporary problematic inphilosophy of mind. Reductionism,
dualism, eliminativism and non-reductive materialism are each
severely compromised by post-reductionist philosophy of science,
and philosophy of mind is in need of a new paradigm.
Horst suggests that such a paradigm might be found in Cognitive
Pluralism: the view that human cognitive architecture constrains us
to understand the world through a plurality of partial, idealized,
and pragmatically-constrained models, each employing a particular
representational system optimized for its own problem domain. Such
an architecture can explain the disunities of knowledge, and is
plausible on evolutionary grounds.
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