Does twentieth-century phenomenology show that the Greek tradition was wrong about the intentionality of the emotions, their place in the mind, and their relevance for ethics? Reason, Emotion, and Will argues that, contrary to some contemporary accounts of mind and consciousness, the views of Levinas, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and others, are not in conflict with the main lines of Greek and medieval thought in this regard. In addition, the book defends a traditional faculty-based account of the mind in comparison with a recent model based on the direct analysis of consciousness and conscious operations in the writings of Bernard Lonergan. The heart of the study consists of an account of the place of affectivity, including the passions and the higher emotions known as desires of reason or affections of the will, in the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Augustine, and especially Thomas Aquinas.

There are few more unsettling philosophical questions than this: What happens in attempts to reduce some properties to some other more fundamental properties? Reflection on this question inevitably touches on very deep issues about ourselves, our own interactions with the world and each other, and our very understanding of what there is and what goes on around us. If we cannot command a clear view of these deep issues, then very many other debates in contemporary philosophy seem to lose traction - think of causation, laws of nature, explanation, consciousness, personal identity, intentionality, normativity, freedom, responsibility, justice, and so on. Reduction can easily seem to unravel our world.
Here, an eminent group of philosophers helps us answer this question. Their novel contributions comfortably span a number of current debates in philosophy and cognitive science: what is the nature of reduction, of reductive explanation, of mental causation? The contributions range from approaches in theoretical metaphysics, over philosophy of the special sciences and physics, to interdisciplinary studies in psychiatry and neurobiology. The authors connect strands in contemporary philosophy that are often treated separately and in combination the chapters allow the reader to see how issues of reduction, explanation and causation mutually constrain each other. The anthology therefore moves the debate further both at the level of contributions to specific debates and at the level of integrating insights from a number of debates.

This book explores the thought of Alexius Meinong, a philosopher known for his unconventional theory of reference and predication. The chapters cover a natural progression of topics, beginning with the origins of Gegenstandstheorie, Meinong's theory of objects, and his discovery of assumptions as a fourth category of mental states to supplement his teacher Franz Brentano's references to presentations, feelings, and judgments. The chapters explore further the meaning and metaphysics of fictional and other nonexistent intended objects, fine points in Meinongian object theory are considered and new and previously unanticipated problems are addressed. The author traces being and non-being and aspects of beingless objects including objects in fiction, ideal objects in scientific theory, objects ostensibly referred to in false science and false history and intentional imaginative projection of future states of affairs. The chapters focus on an essential choice of conceptual, logical, semantic, ontic and more generally metaphysical problems and an argument is progressively developed from the first to the final chapter, as key ideas are introduced and refined. Meinong studies have come a long way from Bertrand Russell's off-target criticisms and recent times have seen a rise of interest in a Meinongian approach to logic and the theory of meaning. New thinkers see Meinong as a bridge figure between analytic and continental thought, thanks to the need for an adequate semantics of meaning in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, making this book a particularly timely publication.

Three particular themes are basic to this study. First, that the human race and its environment are involved in a slowly progressive process of revelation and understanding of its inherent features. And that we are all participating in this ongoing evolutionary cycle. Second, and closely related to the first tenet, man is not separable from his environment. We all share in this cyclic development. Third, that our egoic structures, with the data and experiences they involve, can play a key role in our personal understanding of this ongoing developmental process. The role of the ego is paradoxical. It can be a relatively stable reference used to enhance personal insight concerning its own dynamic structure and similar aspects of its environment. Or it can be maintained with a rigidity that hinders progressive learning. That is, the ego unit has the dual possibilities of affording a focus aiding progressive insight, or becoming a barrier that temporarily diminishes it. The aim of this study is therefore to reduce possible restrictive rigidity as we investigate the role of the egoic unit in seeking greater understanding of its own dynamic structures and their similarly dynamic environment. To pursue this aim we refer to insights from medical practice, philosophy and science. The underlying awareness of an evolving consciousness means that the insights and ideas presented are shared in the expectation that they too will be modified in due course. But if they help provoke interest and insight concerning the paradoxical nature o f our personal processes, they will have served their purpose.

Who are we in simulated worlds? Will experiencing worlds that are not 'actual' change our ways of structuring thought? Can virtual worlds open up new possibilities to philosophize? Virtual Worlds as Philosophical Tools tries to answer these questions from a perspective that combines philosophy of technology with videogame design.

John Maze was a giant among philosophers of psychology. This exciting, new collection of his published work demonstrates that what is seemingly new in psychology is so often not new at all but frequently consists of ill-informed corruptions of earlier, discarded, misguided attempts. Their collection together is timely in the current, innovatory era of cross-disciplinary exploration and integration on the borderlands of psychology and philosophy, where there is a visible danger that the welcome loosening of barriers to mutual communication also generates some 'wild' theorizing, familiar enough in the history of psychology itself. A corpus remarkable for its coherence, intellectual virtuosity and radicalism over 50 years, it speaks meaningfully to the wide range of psychological theory throughout its history up to the present day. Written with elegance and eloquence, the essays entail a thoroughgoing critical analysis of the most detrimental philosophical erroers of academic psychology in the 20th century, the relegation to history by the 20th century academy of some of the conceptually most promising lines of research, the cost that has been borne by the discipline of psychology, and the most promising future direction for the discipline.

Within are the words of a highly gifted individual--the Prophet of Gold, whose wisdom and words come from dimensions not considered by most humans.

The secrets and mysteries of life revealed within can do much to help a spiritual life journey, bringing success and understanding, which we all need in these present changing times.

This book is written as to be easily understood with simplicity of words, to make it easy for the reader who wishes to put the valuable information into productive use and benefit from it.

The gold of the wisdom within from The Prophet of Gold will fill your cup of gold, bringing you peace, love, and a higher understanding of life and nature, as well as a brighter future to come.

This book explores a wide range of topics relating to scientific and religious learning in the work of Bishop Robert Grosseteste (c. 1168-1253) and does so from various perspectives, including those of a twenty-first century scientists, historians, and philosophers as well as several medievalists. In particular, it aims to contribute to our understanding of where to place Grosseteste in the history of science (against the background of the famous claim by A.C. Crombie that Grosseteste introduced what we now might call "experimental science") and to demonstrate that the polymathic world of the medieval scholar, who recognized no dichotomy in the pursuit of scientific and philosophical/theological understanding, has much to teach those of us in the modern world who wrestle with the vexed question of the relationship between science and religion. The book comprises an edited selection of the best papers presented at the 3rd International Robert Grosseteste Conference (2014) on the theme of scientific and religious learning, especially in the work of Grosseteste.

This is a concise, accessible, easy-to-navigate introduction to the key terms, concepts, thinkers and texts in philosophy of mind. "Key Terms in Philosophy of Mind" offers an introduction to a central topic in philosophy. The book offers a comprehensive overview of the key terms, concepts, thinkers and major works in the history of this key area of philosophical thought. Ideal for first-year students coming to the subject for the first time, "Key Terms in Philosophy of Mind" will serve as the ideal companion to the study of this fascinating subject. Pete Mandik provides detailed summaries of all the key concepts in the study of philosophy and the mind. There is an introductory chapter that provides context and background, while the following chapters offer detailed definitions of key terms and concepts, introductions to the work of key thinkers, summaries of key texts and advice on further reading. Designed specifically to meet the needs of students and assuming no prior knowledge of the subject, this is the ideal reference tool for those coming to philosophy of mind for the first time. "The Key Terms" series offers undergraduate students clear, concise and accessible introductions to core topics. Each book includes a comprehensive overview of the key terms, concepts, thinkers and texts in the area covered and ends with a guide to further resources.

BLURB for Self and Spirit What is the basis and purpose of esoteric religion, and what is the self? Self and Spirit answers these questions in depth and in a way true to the spirit of traditional wisdom. This book illuminates from a new angle the Non-Dualistic conceptions that have become influential through the work of many modern traditionalists, including Ren Gunon and Frithjof Schuon, whose influence is evident in Dr. Bolton's treatment of religion and tradition. Here, Gnostic ideas usually taken to support pantheistic religion are shown to be able to provide a foundation for belief in a personal God. Religion is not forced into a preconceived system, because no attempt is made to evaluate all religious doctrines by the standard of one doctrine. Instead, certain profound ideas common to many traditions are invoked, these ideas being of a kind that cannot be identified with any one confessional origin. This in turn sheds new light on the dividing-line between the esoteric and the exoteric, and allows these ideas to combine in ways that are natural and free. The key to this new departure is the true nature of the individual self, a subject largely ignored by Non-Dualist thought. Here it is given its full weight, however, and its impact on all other realities is made clear. The relation of the self to its world is also here connected significantly to the cosmic role of religion, illustrating how a conversion from worldly to spiritual priorities can have consequences far beyond the personal concerns of those involved. Throughout, Bolton's thinking is daring, yet true to traditional spirituality.

This book presents an original approach to the study of psychiatry that is based on a justified epistemological position, which demands that both the natural and the human/social sciences are necessary in developing our understanding. Psychiatry as a medical specialism was constructed in the nineteenth century through the interplay of both the natural sciences and the human/social sciences. This interplay has created a hybrid discipline that spans biological and socio-cultural-historical domains, which has raised challenges for its understanding and research. This book focuses on one of the principal challenges - how can we explore mental symptoms and mental disorders as complexes of neurobiology on the one hand and meaning on the other? The chapters in this book, dedicated to German E Berrios, founder of the Cambridge school of psychopathology, tackles distinctive aspects of psychopathology or related areas. By means of a combination of approaches, chapters seek to unfold another element in our understanding of this field as well as raise new directions for its further study. Rethinking Psychopathology is a valuable resource for clinical psychologists and psychotherapists, psychological researchers, historians of psychology, cultural psychologists, critical psychologists, social scientists, philosophers of psychology, and philosophers of science.

Walmsley offers a succinct introduction to major philosophical issues in artificial intelligence for advanced students of philosophy of mind, cognitive science and psychology. Whilst covering essential topics, it also provides the student with the chance to engage with cutting edge debates.

Things is a collection of twelve metaphysical essays by Stephen Yablo. The essays address a range of first-order topics, including identity, coincidence, essence, existence, causation, and properties. Some first-order debates are not worth pursuing, Yablo maintains; there is nothing at issue in them. Several of the papers explore the metaontology of abstract objects, and more generally of objects that are 'preconceived', their principal features being settled already by their job-descriptions. Yablo rejects standard forms of fictionalism, opting ultimately for a view that puts presupposition in the role normally played by pretense. Almost all of Yablo's published work on these topics is collected here, along with the previously unpublished 'Carving Content at the Joints'.

At least since Locke, philosophers and psychologists have usually held that concepts arise out of sensory perceptions, thoughts are built from concepts, and language enables speakers to convey their thoughts to hearers. Christopher Gauker holds that this tradition is mistaken about both concepts and language. The mind cannot abstract the building blocks of thoughts from perceptual representations. More generally, we have no account of the origin of concepts that grants them the requisite independence from language. Gauker's alternative is to show that much of cognition consists in thinking by means of mental imagery, without the help of concepts, and that language is a tool by which interlocutors coordinate their actions in pursuit of shared goals. Imagistic cognition supports the acquisition and use of this tool, and when the use of this tool is internalized, it becomes the very medium of conceptual thought.

Scientific realism has been advanced as an interpretation of the natural sciences but never as an interpretation of the behavioural sciences. This book introduces a novel version of scientific realism -- Measured Realism -- that characterizes the kind of theoretical progress in the social and psychological sciences that is uneven but indisputable. Measuring the Intentional World proposes a theory of measurement -- Population-Guided Estimation -- that connects natural, psychological, and social scientific inquiry.

The four plays of Shakespeare's Henriad and the slightly later Hamlet brilliantly explore interconnections between political power and interior subjectivity as productions of the newly emerging constellation we call modernity. Hugh Grady argues that for Shakespeare subjectivity was a critical, negative mode of resistance to power - not, as many recent critics have asserted, its abettor.

This volume features essays that explore the insights of the 14th-century Parisian nominalist philosopher, John Buridan. It serves as a companion to the Latin text edition and annotated English translation of his question-commentary on Aristotle's On the Soul. The contributors survey Buridan's work both in its own historical-theoretical context and in relation to contemporary issues. The essays come in three main sections, which correspond to the three books of Buridan's Questions. Coverage first deals with the classification of the science of the soul within the system of Aristotelian sciences, and surveys the main issues within it. The next section examines the metaphysics of the soul. It considers Buridan's peculiar version of Aristotelian hylomorphism in dealing with the problem of what kind of entity the soul (in particular, the human soul) is, and what powers and actions it has, on the basis of which we can approach the question of its essence. The volume concludes with a look at Buridan's doctrine of the nature and functions of the human intellect. Coverage in this section includes the problem of self-knowledge in Buridan's theory, Buridan's answer to the traditional medieval problem concerning the primary object of the intellect, and his unique treatment of logical problems in psychological contexts.

Could a single human being ever have multiple conscious minds? Some human beings do. The corpus callosum is a large pathway connecting the two hemispheres of the brain. In the second half of the twentieth century a number of people had this pathway cut through as a treatment for epilepsy. They became colloquially known as split-brain subjects. After the two hemispheres of the brain are cortically separated in this way, they begin to operate unusually independently of each other in the realm of thought, action, and conscious experience, almost as if each hemisphere now had a mind of its own. Philosophical discussion of the split-brain cases has overwhelmingly focused on questions of psychological identity in split-brain subjects, questions like: how many subjects of experience is a split-brain subject? How many intentional agents? How many persons? On the one hand, under experimental conditions, split-brain subjects often act in ways difficult to understand except in terms of each of them having two distinct streams or centers of consciousness. Split-brain subjects thus evoke the duality intuition: that a single split-brain human being is somehow composed of two thinking, experiencing, and acting things. On the other hand, a split-brain subject nonetheless seems like one of us, at the end of the day, rather than like two people sharing one body. In other words, split-brain subjects also evoke the unity intuition: that a split-brain subject is one person. Elizabeth Schechter argues that there are in fact two minds, subjects of experience, and intentional agents inside each split-brain human being: right and left. On the other hand, each split-brain subject is nonetheless one of us. The key to reconciling these two claims is to understand the ways in which each of us is transformed by self-consciousness.

'if AI is outside your field, or you know something of the subject and would like to know more then Artificial Intelligence: The Basics is a brilliant primer.' - Nick Smith, Engineering and Technology Magazine November 2011 Artificial Intelligence: The Basics is a concise and cutting-edge introduction to the fast moving world of AI. The author Kevin Warwick, a pioneer in the field, examines issues of what it means to be man or machine and looks at advances in robotics which have blurred the boundaries. Topics covered include: how intelligence can be defined whether machines can 'think' sensory input in machine systems the nature of consciousness the controversial culturing of human neurons. Exploring issues at the heart of the subject, this book is suitable for anyone interested in AI, and provides an illuminating and accessible introduction to this fascinating subject.

We have known for over a thousand years that the brain underlies behavioral expression, but effective scientific study of the brain is only very recent. Two things converge in this book: a great respect for neuroscience and its many variations, and a sense of investigation and inquiry demythologized. Think of it as foraging for coherence.

A sweeping reconstruction of human consciousness and its breakdown, from the Stone Age through modern technology Why has humankind developed so differently from other animals? How and why did language, culture, religion, and the arts come into being? In this wide-ranging and ambitious essay, Christoph Turcke offers a new answer to these timeworn questions by scrutinizing the phenomenon of the dream, using it as a psychic fossil connecting us with our Stone Age ancestors. Provocatively, he argues that both civilization and mental processes are the results of a compulsion to repeat early traumas, one to which hallucination, imagination, mind, spirit, and God all developed in response. Until the beginning of the modern era, repetition was synonymous with de-escalation and calming down. Then, automatic machinery gave rise to a new type of repetition, whose effects are permanent alarm and distraction. The new global forces of distraction, Turcke argues, are producing a specific kind of stress that breaks down the barriers between dreams and waking consciousness. Turcke's essay ends with a sobering indictment of this psychic deregulation and the social and economic deregulations that have accompanied it.

This book re-examines the roles of causation and cognition in early modern philosophy. The standard historical narrative suggests that early modern thinkers abandoned Aristotelian models of formal causation in favor of doctrines that appealed to relations of efficient causation between material objects and cognizers. This narrative has been criticized in recent scholarship from at least two directions. Scholars have emphasized that we should not think of the Aristotelian tradition in such monolithic terms, and that many early modern thinkers did not unequivocally reduce all causation to efficient causation. In line with this general approach, this book features original essays written by leading experts in early modern philosophy. It is organized around five guiding questions: What are the entities involved in causal processes leading to cognition? What type(s) or kind(s) of causality are at stake? Are early modern thinkers confined to efficient causation or do other types of causation play a role? What is God's role in causal processes leading to cognition? How do cognitive causal processes relate to other, non-cognitive causal processes? Is the causal process in the case of human cognition in any way special? How does it relate to processes involved in the case of non-human cognition? The essays explore how fifteen early modern thinkers answered these questions: Francisco Suarez, Rene Descartes, Louis de la Forge, Geraud de Cordemoy, Nicolas Malebranche, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch de Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Ralph Cudworth, Margaret Cavendish, John Locke, John Sergeant, George Berkeley, David Hume, and Thomas Reid. The volume is unique in that it explores both well-known and understudied historical figures, and in that it emphasizes the intimate relationship between causation and cognition to open up new perspectives on early modern philosophy of mind and metaphysics.

I met Dr. Frederick P. Lenz III, AKA Zen Master Rama, first when I was a small child and then again in 1984. By our second meeting he was labeled a cult leader. Ironically, for many years the media had identified me as a cult deprogrammer. Never did I think that my life would go the way it did. All the deviations from the normal began with my birth and have yet to stop. As you can guess, when Rama attempted to abduct me I was expecting it. What would I endure under his control? What would I have to witness while he held me? What could I do and what else would I be helpless to prevent? Was it impossible to get free? This book includes some of my teachings to help you understand Light and Dark. There are four volumes in this series. You must read all four volumes and read them in the order they were written. As you begin to read this Volume, know that you may not understand everything immediately but you will by the time you finish.This is my incredible journey with the Zen Master, Wizard and Magician. Welcome to my world.