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Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Philosophy of mind
Using historical and anthropological perspectives to examine
mind-body relationships in western thought, this book interweaves
topics that are usually disconnected to tell a big, important story
in the histories of medicine, science, philosophy, religion, and
political rhetoric. Beginning with early debates during the
Scientific Revolution about representation and reality, Martensen
demonstrates how investigators such as Vesalius and Harvey sought
to transform long-standing notions of the body as dominated by
spirit-like humors into portrayals that emphasized its solid
tissues. Subsequently, Descartes and Willis and their followers
amended this 'new' philosophy to argue for the primacy of the
cerebral hemispheres and cranial nerves as they downplayed the role
of the spirit, passion, and the heart in human thought and
behaviour. None of this occurred in a social vacuum, and the book
places these medical and philosophical innovations in the context
of the religious and political crises of the Reformation and
English Civil War and its aftermath. Patrons and their interests
are part of the story, as are patients and new formulations of
gender. John Locke's psychology and the emergence in England of a
constitutional monarchy figure prominently, as do opponents of the
new doctrines of brain and nerves and the emergent social order.
The book's concluding chapter discusses how debates over
investigative methods and models of body order that first raged
over 300 years ago continue to influence biomedicine and the
broader culture today. No other book on western mind-body
relationships has attempted this.
Joshua Gert presents an original and ambitious theory of the
normative. Expressivism and non-reductive realism represent two
very widely separated poles in contemporary discussions of
normativity. But the domain of the normative is both large and
diverse; it includes, for example, the harmful, the fun, the
beautiful, the wrong, and the rational. It would be extremely
surprising if either expressivism or non-reductive realism managed
to capture all--or even the most important--phenomena associated
with all of these notions. Normative Bedrock defends a
response-dependent account of the normative that accommodates the
kind of variation in response that some non-reductive realists
downplay or ignore, but that also allows for the sort of
straightforward talk of normative properties, normative truth, and
substantive normative disagreement that expressivists have had a
hard time respecting.
One of the distinctive features of Gert's approach is his reliance,
throughout, on an analogy between color properties and normative
properties. He argues that the appropriate response to a given
instance of a normative property may often depend significantly on
the perspective one takes on that instance: for example, whether
one views it as past or future. Another distinctive feature of
Normative Bedrock is its focus on the basic normative property of
practical irrationality, rather than on the notion of a normative
reason or the notion of the good. This simple shift of focus allow
for a more satisfying account of the link between reasons and
motivation, and helps to explain why and how some reasons can
justify far more than they can require, and why we therefore need
two strength values to characterize the normative capacities of
practical reasons.
This book is a sustained analytical exploration of the rich
philosophy of self of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Fernando
Pessoa (1888-1935) has become many things to many people in the
years that have passed since his untimely death. For some he is
simply the greatest Portuguese poet of the 20th century. For others
he has gradually emerged as a forgotten voice in 20th century
modernism. And yet Pessoa was also a philosopher, and it is only
very recently that the philosophical importance of his work has
begun to attract the attention it deserves. Pessoa composed
systematic philosophical essays in his pre-heteronymic period,
defending rationalism in epistemology and sensationism in the
philosophy of mind. His heteronymic work, decisively breaking with
the conventional strictures of systematic philosophical writing, is
a profound and exquisite exploration in the philosophy of self.
Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves pulls together the strands of
this philosophy and rearticulates it in a way that does justice to
its breathtaking originality. It reveals the extraordinary power of
Pessoa's theory by applying it to the analysis of some of the
trickiest and most puzzling problems about the self to have
appeared in the global history of philosophy.
The two sections of this volume present theoretical developments
and practical applicative papers respectively. Theoretical papers
cover topics such as intercultural pragmatics, evolutionism,
argumentation theory, pragmatics and law, the semantics/pragmatics
debate, slurs, and more. The applied papers focus on topics such as
pragmatic disorders, mapping places of origin, stance-taking,
societal pragmatics, and cultural linguistics. This is the second
volume of invited papers that were presented at the inaugural
Pragmasofia conference in Palermo in 2016, and like its predecessor
presents papers by well-known philosophers, linguists, and a
semiotician. The papers present a wide variety of perspectives
independent from any one school of thought.
The Realm of Reason develops a new, general theory of what it is
for a thinker to be entitled to form a given belief. The theory
locates entitlement in the nexus of relations between truth,
content, and understanding. Peacocke formulates three principles of
rationalism that articulate this conception. The principles imply
that all entitlement has a component that is justificationally
independent of experience. The resulting position is thus a form of
rationalism, generalized to all kinds of content.
To show how these principles are realized in specific domains,
Peacocke applies the theory in detail to several classical problems
of philosophy, including the nature of perceptual entitlement,
induction, and the status of moral thought. These discussions
involve an elaboration of the structure of entitlement in ways that
have applications in many other areas of philosophy. He also
relates the theory to classical and recent rationalist thought, and
to current issues in the theory of meaning, reference and
explanation. In the course of these discussions, he proposes a
general theory of the a priori.
The focus of the work lies in the intersection of epistemology,
metaphysics, and the theory of meaning, and will be of interest
both to students and researchers in these areas, and to anyone
concerned with the idea of rationality.
Our visual system can process information at both conscious and
unconscious levels. Understanding the factors that control whether
a stimulus reaches our awareness, and the fate of those stimuli
that remain at an unconscious level, are the major challenges of
brain science in the new millennium. Since its publication in 1984,
Visual Masking has established itself as a classic text in the
field of cognitive psychology. In the years since, there have been
considerable advances in the cognitive neurosciences, and a growth
of interest in the topic of consciousness, and the time is ripe for
a new edition of this text. Where most current approaches to the
study of visual consciousness adopt a 'steady-state' view, the
approach presented in this book explores its dynamic properties.
This new edition uses the technique of visual masking to explore
temporal aspects of conscious and unconscious processes down to a
resolution in the millisecond range. The 'time slices' through
conscious and unconscious vision revealed by the visual masking
technique can shed light on both normal and abnormal operations in
the brain. The main focus of this book is on the microgenesis of
visual form and pattern perception - microgenesis referring to the
processes occurring in the visual system from the time of stimulus
presentation on the retinae to the time, a few hundred milliseconds
later, of its registration at conscious or unconscious perceptual
and behavioural levels. The book takes a highly integrative
approach by presenting microgenesis within a broad context
encompassing visuo-temporal phenomena, attention, and
consciousness.
In Certainty in Action, Daniele Moyal-Sharrock describes how her
encounter with Wittgenstein overturned her previous assumptions
that the mind is a product of brain activity and that thought,
consciousness, the will, feelings, memories, knowledge and language
are stored and processed in the brain, by the brain. She shows how
Wittgenstein enables us to veer away from this brain-centred view
of intelligence and behaviour to a person-centred view focusing on
ways of acting that are both diversely embedded across forms of
human life and universally embedded in a single human form of life.
The book traces the radical importance of action as the cohesive
thread weaving through Wittgenstein's philosophy, and shows how
certainty intertwines with it to produce new ways of engaging in
epistemology, the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of
language. This selection of Moyal-Sharrock's essays vividly
illustrates some of the ways in which Wittgenstein's pioneering
enactivism has impacted - and can further impact - not only
philosophy, but also neighbouring disciplines such as linguistics,
psychology, primatology, evolutionary psychology and anthropology.
Certainty in Action is essential reading for students and
researchers of these disciplines, and for anyone interested in
getting a grasp of Wittgenstein's lasting genius and influence.
This book offers a philosophical analysis of what it is to be a
human being in all her aspects. It analyses what is meant by the
self and the I and how this feeling of a self or an I is connected
to the brain. It studies specific cases of brain disorders, based
on the idea that in order to understand the common, one has to
study the specific. The book shows how the self is thought of as a
three-fold emergent self, comprising a relationship between an
objective neural segment, a subjective neural segment and a
subjective transcendent segment. It explains that the self in the
world tackles philosophical problems such as the problem of free
will, the problem of evil, the problem of human uniqueness and
empathy. It demonstrates how the problem of time also has its place
here. For many people, the world includes ultimate reality; hence
the book provides an analysis and evaluation of different
relationships between human beings and Ultimate Reality (God). The
book presents an answer to the philosophical problem of how one
could understand divine action in the world.
Dana Kay Nelkin presents a simple and natural account of freedom
and moral responsibility which responds to the great variety of
challenges to the idea that we are free and responsible, before
ultimately reaffirming our conception of ourselves as agents.
Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility begins with a defense of
the rational abilities view, according to which one is responsible
for an action if and only if one acts with the ability to recognize
and act for good reasons. The view is compatibilist - that is, on
the view defended, responsibility is compatible with determinism -
and one of its striking features is a certain asymmetry: it
requires the ability to do otherwise for responsibility when
actions are praiseworthy, but not when they are blameworthy. In
defending and elaborating the view, Nelkin questions long-held
assumptions such as those concerning the relation between fairness
and blame and the nature of so-called reactive attitudes such as
resentment and forgiveness. Her argument not only fits with a
metaphysical picture of causation - agent-causation - often assumed
to be available only to incompatibilist accounts, but receives
positive support from the intuitively appealing Ought Implies Can
Principle, and establishes a new interpretation of freedom and
moral responsibility that dovetails with a compelling account of
our inescapable commitments as rational agents.
This is the first volume to present individual chapters on the full
range of developmental and acquired pragmatic disorders in children
and adults. In chapters that are accessible to students and
researchers as well as clinicians, this volume introduces the
reader to the different types of pragmatic disorders found in
clinical populations as diverse as autism spectrum disorder,
traumatic brain injury and right hemisphere language disorder. The
volume also moves beyond these well-established populations to
include conditions such as congenital visual impairment and
non-Alzheimer dementias, in which there are also pragmatic
impairments. Through the use of conversational and linguistic data,
the reader can see how pragmatic disorders impact on the
communication skills of the clients who have them. The assessment
and treatment of pragmatic disorders are examined, and chapters
also address recent developments in the neuroanatomical and
cognitive bases of these disorders.
Marx, the Body, and Human Nature shows that the body and the
broader material world played a far more significant role in Marx's
theory than previously recognised. It provides a fresh 'take' on
Marx's theory, revealing a much more open, dynamic and unstable
conception of the body, the self, and human nature.
This book is an edited collection of papers from international
experts in philosophy and psychology concerned with time. The
collection aims to bridge the gap between these disciplines by
focussing on five key themes and providing philosophical and
psychological perspectives on each theme. The first theme is the
concept of time. The discussion ranges from the folk concept of
time to the notion of time in logic, philosophy and psychology. The
second theme concerns the notion of present in the philosophy of
mind, metaphysics, and psychology. The third theme relates to
continuity and flow of time in mind. One of the key questions in
this section is how the apparent temporal continuity of conscious
experience relates to the possibly discrete character of underlying
neural processes. The fourth theme is the timing of experiences,
with a focus on the perception of simultaneity and illusions of
temporal order. Such effects are treated as test cases for
hypotheses about the relationship between the subjective temporal
order of experience and the objective order of neural events. The
fifth and the final theme of the volume is time and
intersubjectivity. This section examines the role of time in
interpersonal coordination and in the development of social skills.
The collection will appeal to both psychologists and philosophers,
but also to researchers from other disciplines who seek an
accessible overview of the research on time in psychology and
philosophy.
The scientific study of the human mind and brain has come of age
with the advent of technologically advanced methods for imaging
brain structure and activity in health and disease, plus
computational theories of cognition. These advances are leading to
sophisticated new accounts for how mental processes are implemented
in the human brain, but they also raise new challenges.
Mental Processes in the Human Brain provides an integrative
overview of the rapid advances and future challenges in
understanding the neurobiological basis of mental processes that
are characteristically (and in some cases, perhaps uniquely) human,
including: language; thought; understanding of others; attention;
planning and decision-making; emotion; memory; prediction; and
awareness itself. It also presents the latest insights into how
these various processes can break down after brain injury. With
chapters from some of leading figures in the brain sciences, this
book will be essential for all those in the cognitive and brain
sciences.
Aristotle's De Anima has a claim to be the first systematic
treatment of issues in the philosophy of mind, and also to be one
of the greatest works on the subject. This volume provides an
accurate translation of Books II and III, together with some
sections of Book I; particular attention has been given to the
translation of difficult terms, to help the student of philosophy
who does not know Greek. A brief Introduction discusses Aristotle's
approach to his subject, while the Notes provide a continuous
philosophical commentary on the text. Since the original
publication of this volume, Aristotle's philosophy of mind has been
the focus of lively scholarly debate; for this revised edition,
Christopher Shields has added a substantial review of this recent
work, together with a new bibliography.
This volume comprises nine lively and insightful essays by leading
scholars on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, focusing mainly
on his early work. The essays are written from a range of
perspectives and do not belong to any one exegetical school; they
approach Wittgenstein's work directly, seeking to understand it in
its own terms and by reference to the context in which it was
produced. The contributors cover a wide range of aspects of
Wittgenstein's early philosophy, but three central themes emerge:
the relationship between Wittgenstein's account of representation
and Russell's theories of judgment; the role of objects in the
tractarian system; and Wittgenstein's philosophical method.
Collectively, the essays demonstrate how progress in the
understanding of Wittgenstein's work is not to be made by focusing
on overarching, ideological issues, but by paying close attention
to his engagement with specific philosophical problems.
"An Essay toward the Other" considers the three fundamental
verities of the human experience-the True, the Good, and the
Beautiful-and presents three arguments, one from the domain of each
verity, in support of theism and in opposition to materialism. "The
True" is the way things are. "The Good" is that which contributes
to the happiness of the individual and the group. "The Beautiful"
is an indefinable quality that evokes a pleasing and enjoyable
inner experience. The verities derive from a Divine source and
point toward that Divine source, thus the opening sentence, "From
the One, three; from the three, One." While the verities are part
of the human experience, their source and their vision transcend
our realm. They are of God. The author accepts the classical view
that all human intention, however flawed and misguided, looks to a
final good. That final good we call happiness, and insofar as our
aims and ways are shaped and guided by the True, the Good, and the
Beautiful, we are drawn toward happiness.
Sudduth provides a critical exploration of classical empirical
arguments for survival arguments that purport to show that data
collected from ostensibly paranormal phenomena constitute good
evidence for the survival of the self after death. Utilizing the
conceptual tools of formal epistemology, he argues that classical
arguments are unsuccessful.
This is an expanded edition of Sydney Shoemaker's seminal
collection of his work on interrelated issues in the philosophy of
mind and metaphysics. Reproducing all of the original papers, many
of which are now regarded as classics, and including four papers
published since the first edition appeared in 1984, Identity,
Cause, and Mind's reappearance will be warmly welcomed by
philosophers and students alike.
Commonsense Consequentialism is a book about morality, rationality,
and the interconnections between the two. In it, Douglas W.
Portmore defends a version of consequentialism that both comports
with our commonsense moral intuitions and shares with other
consequentialist theories the same compelling teleological
conception of practical reasons.
Broadly construed, consequentialism is the view that an act's
deontic status is determined by how its outcome ranks relative to
those of the available alternatives on some evaluative ranking.
Portmore argues that outcomes should be ranked, not according to
their impersonal value, but according to how much reason the
relevant agent has to desire that each outcome obtains and that,
when outcomes are ranked in this way, we arrive at a version of
consequentialism that can better account for our commonsense moral
intuitions than even many forms of deontology can. What's more,
Portmore argues that we should accept this version of
consequentialism, because we should accept both that an agent can
be morally required to do only what she has most reason to do and
that what she has most reason to do is to perform the act that
would produce the outcome that she has most reason to want to
obtain.
Although the primary aim of the book is to defend a particular
moral theory (viz., commonsense consequentialism), Portmore defends
this theory as part of a coherent whole concerning our commonsense
views about the nature and substance of both morality and
rationality. Thus, it will be of interest not only to those working
on consequentialism and other areas of normative ethics, but also
to those working in metaethics. Beyond offering an account of
morality, Portmore offers accounts of practical reasons, practical
rationality, and the objective/subjective obligation distinction.
This study examines the history of a fundamental problem in
Aristotelian cognitive psychology, i.e. the nature and function of
the mechanisms that provide the human mind with data concerning
physical reality.
Chapter I traces the Classical and Arabic prehistory of the
Medieval doctrine of intelligible species. Scholastic discussions
on formal mediation in intellective cognition were constrained in
essential ways by Thomas. Chapter II analyzes his views on mental
representation in the context of the reception of Peripatetic
psychology in the West. The following chapters (III-V) examine the
controversies about the necessity of intelligible species, from
Aquinas' death to the 15th century. Another volume is planned,
devoted to Renaissance discussions, developments of later
Scholasticism, and the elimination of the intelligible species in
modern non-Aristotelian philosophy.
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