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Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Philosophy of mind
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Understanding the human mind and how it relates to the world that we experience has challenged philosophers for centuries. How then do we even begin to think about 'minds' that are not human? Science now has plenty to say about the properties of mind. In recent decades, the mind - both human and otherwise - has been explored by scientists in fields ranging from zoology to astrobiology, computer science to neuroscience. Taking a uniquely broad view of minds and where they might be found - including in plants, aliens, and God - Philip Ball pulls these multidisciplinary pieces together to explore what sorts of minds we might expect to find in the universe. In so doing, he offers for the first time a unified way of thinking about what minds are and what they can do, arguing that in order to understand our own minds and imagine those of others, we need to move on from considering the human mind as a standard against which all others should be measured, and to think about the 'space of possible minds'. By identifying and mapping out properties of mind without prioritizing the human, Ball sheds new light on a host of fascinating questions. What moral rights should we afford animals, and can we understand their thoughts? Should we worry that AI is going to take over society? If there are intelligent aliens out there, how could we communicate with them? Should we? Understanding the space of possible minds also reveals ways of making advances in understanding some of the most challenging questions in contemporary science: What is thought? What is consciousness? And what (if anything) is free will? The more we learn about the minds of other creatures, from octopuses to chimpanzees, and to imagine the potential minds of computers and alien intelligences, the greater the perspective we have on if and how our own is different. Ball's thrillingly ambitious The Book of Minds about the nature and existence of minds is more mind-expanding than we could imagine. In this fascinating panorama of other minds, we come to better know our own.
Montesquieu and the Spirit of Rome argues that the eighteenth-century French author Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brede et de Montesquieu (1689-1755) developed a novel, comprehensive account of Roman history that framed his new political science and grounded his political teachings. Rome's legacy in early-modern thought turns on the work of Montesquieu, and through Rome Montesquieu articulated the strengths and weaknesses of the modern state-the moderation that can distinguish it and sources of extremism that must haunt it. This book is the first to unify Montesquieu's Roman thoughts; it is the first to reconstruct the Rome that was one of his most powerful legacies in the 18th and 19th centuries. Montesquieu and the Spirit of Rome restores Rome to its proper place at the peak of Montesquieu's thought and Montesquieu's thought to its proper place in the history of classical study. It treats Montesquieu as what he claimed to be-a jurist, a poet, a historian, and a political writer of the first rank, and it revives his hard-nosed defence of moderation. |
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