When agency or intentional causation has occurred, the theory presented here identifies an object ascribable to the agent - his action - which, through its properties, reveals its intentional cause. Such a unified view of agency and action leads to unitary views of intention and the intentional end of all explanatory objects ascribable to agents. While at odds in these matters with the prevailing theories of action, the semantics of this explanatory theory is shown to better satisfy widely accepted criteria for a viable theory of action. The revelatory character of action and its essential reference to agency shows that action theory needs agency theory. To this end, a logic of practical rational agency is developed which is intended to be neutral between competing theories of mind. A sketch of the computer program, PRAGMA, is given which, on the basis of this model of agency and action, analyzes cases of agency in natural discourse. PRAGMA and its manual are available separately. This work should be of interest to theorists concerned with the fundamental practical rational structure of persons, their actions and the discourse appropriate to them: to philosophers and to political, legal, AI and economic theorists.

Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig examine the foundations and applications of Davidson's influential program of truth-theoretic semantics for natural languages. The program uses an axiomatic truth theory for a language, which meets certain constraints, to serve the goals of a compositional meaning theory. Lepore and Ludwig explain and clarify the motivations for the approach, and then consider how to apply the framework to a range of important natural language constructions, including quantifiers, proper names, indexicals, simple and complex demonstratives, quotation, adjectives and adverbs, the simple and perfect tenses, temporal adverbials and temporal quantifiers, tense in sentential complement clauses, attitude and indirect discourse reports, and the problem of interrogative and imperative sentences. They not only discuss Davidson's own contributions to these subjects but consider criticisms, developments, and alternatives as well. They conclude with a discussion of logical form in natural language in light of the approach, the role of the concept of truth in the program, and Davidson's view of it. Anyone working on meaning will find this book invaluable.

This book features 20 essays that explore how Latin medieval philosophers and theologians from Anselm to Buridan conceived of habitus, as well as detailed studies of the use of the concept by Augustine and of the reception of the medieval doctrines of habitus in Suarez and Descartes. Habitus are defined as stable dispositions to act or think in a certain way. This definition was passed down to the medieval thinkers from Aristotle and, to a lesser extent, Augustine, and played a key role in many of the philosophical and theological developments of the time. Written by leading experts in medieval and modern philosophy, the book offers a historical overview that examines the topic in light of recent advances in medieval cognitive psychology and medieval moral theory. Coverage includes such topics as the metaphysics of the soul, the definition of virtue and vice, and the epistemology of self-knowledge. The book also contains an introduction that is the first attempt at a comprehensive survey of the nature and function of habitus in medieval thought. The material will appeal to a wide audience of historians of philosophy and contemporary philosophers. It is relevant as much to the historian of ancient philosophy who wants to track the historical reception of Aristotelian ideas as it is to historians of modern philosophy who would like to study the progressive disappearance of the term "habitus" in the early modern period and the concepts that were substituted for it. In addition, the volume will also be of interest to contemporary philosophers open to historical perspectives in order to renew current trends in cognitive psychology, virtue epistemology, and virtue ethics.

Human language is not arbitrary. But how is its use constrained? Are there rules or general human dispositions that govern it? "Rules and Dispositions in Language Use" explains how correct language use is indeed governed by both rules and general human dispositions. It does so by bringing together themes from Ludwig Wittgenstein and Noam Chomsky, which for many years have been thought to be incompatible.
Opening with a fresh discussion of Saul Kripke's work on rule-following and meaning, the question of what objectively correct language use could amount to is raised and answered. In its conclusion, the importance of human biological endowment for language use is discussed and compared with Wittgensteinian views on how rules govern language use.

Borders enclose and separate us. We assign to them tremendous significance. Along them we draw supposedly uncrossable boundaries within which we believe our individual identities begin and end, erecting the metaphysical dividing walls that enclose each one of us into numerically identical, numerically distinct, entities: persons. Do the borders between us - physical, psychological, neurological, causal, spatial, temporal, etc. - merit the metaphysical significance ordinarily accorded them? The central thesis of I Am You is that our borders do not signify boundaries between persons. We are all the same person. Variations on this heretical theme have been voiced periodically throughout the ages (the Upanishads, Averroes, Giordano Bruno, Josiah Royce, Schrodinger, Fred Hoyle, Freeman Dyson). In presenting his arguments, the author relies on detailed analyses of recent formal work on personal identity, especially that of Derek Parfit, Sydney Shoemaker, Robert Nozick, David Wiggins, Daniel C. Dennett and Thomas Nagel, while incorporating the views of Descartes, Leibniz, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Kant, Husserl and Brouwer. His development of the implied moral theory is inspired by, and draws on, Rawls, Sidgwick, Kant and again Parfit. The traditional, commonsense view that we are each a separate person numerically identical to ourselves over time, i.e., that personal identity is closed under known individuating and identifying borders - what the author calls Closed Individualism - is shown to be incoherent. The demonstration that personal identity is not closed but open points collectively in one of two new directions: either there are no continuously existing, self-identical persons over time in the sense ordinarily understood - the sort of view developed by philosophers as diverse as Buddha, Hume and most recently Derek Parfit, what the author calls Empty Individualism - or else you are everyone, i.e., personal identity is not closed under known individuating and identifying borders, what the author calls Open Individualism. In making his case, the author:

- offers a new explanation both of consciousness and of self-consciousness

- constructs a new theory of Self

- explains psychopathologies (e.g. multiple personality disorder, schizophrenia)

- shows Open Individualism to be the best competing explanation of who we are

- provides the metaphysical foundations for global ethics.

The book is intended for philosophers and the philosophically inclined - physicists, mathematicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, economists, and communication theorists. It is accessible to graduate students and advanced undergraduates."

This book is about structural relations between phenomenological and neurophysiological aspects of consciousness and time. Focusing on auditory perception and making new and updated use of Leibniz and Husserl, it investigates the transition from unconscious to conscious states, especially with regard to the constitution of phenomenal time.

This accessible and easy-to-follow book offers a new approach to consciousness. The author 's eclectic style combines new physics-based insights with those of analytical philosophy, phenomenology, cognitive science and neuroscience. He proposes a view in which the mechanistic framework of classical physics and neuroscience is complemented by a more holistic underlying framework in which conscious experience finds its place more naturally.

During the early modern era (c. 1600-1800), philosophers formulated a number of new questions, methods of investigation, and theories regarding the nature of the mind. The result of their efforts has been described as the original cognitive revolution . Topics in Early Modern Philosophy of Mind provides a comprehensive snapshot of this exciting period in the history of thinking about the mind, presenting studies of a wide array of philosophers and topics. Written by some of today s foremost authorities on early modern philosophy, the ten chapters address issues ranging from those that have long captivated philosophers and psychologists as well as those that have been underexplored. Likewise, the papers engage figures from the history of ideas who are well-known today (Descartes, Hume, Kant) as well as those who have been comparatively neglected by contemporary scholarship (Desgabets, Boyle, Collins).

This volume will become an essential reference work that graduate students and professionals in the fields of philosophy of mind, the history of philosophy, and the history of psychology will want to own."

"There is no greater gift to man than to understand nothing of his fate", declares poet-philosopher Paul Valery. And yet the searching human being seeks ceaselessly to disentangle the networks of experiences, desires, inward promptings, personal ambitions, and elevated strivings which directed his/her life-course within changing circumstances in order to discover his sense of life. Literature seeks in numerous channels of insight the dominant threads of "the sense of life", "the inward quest", "the frames of experience" in reaching the inward sources of what we call 'destiny' inspired by experience and temporality which carry it on. This unusual collection reveals the deeper generative elements which form sense of life stretching between destiny and doom. They escape attention in their metamorphic transformations of the inexorable, irreversibility of time which undergoes different interpretations in the phases examining our life. Our key to life has to be ever discovered anew.

Exploring issues ranging from the metaphysical to the moral and legal, a team of esteemed contributors bring together some of the most important and cutting-edge findings in experimental philosophy of the self to address longstanding philosophical questions about personal identity, such as: What makes us today the same person as our childhood and future selves? Can certain changes transform us into a different person? Do our everyday moral practices presuppose a false account of who we are? Chapters offer a survey of recent empirical work and foster dialogue between experimental and traditional philosophical approaches to identity, covering the moral self, dual character concepts, true self, transformative experience and the identity conditions collective entities. With novel experiments and thought-provoking applications to practical concerns including law, immigration, bioethics and politics, this collection highlights the value and implications of empirical work on personal identity.

Psychology and Philosophy provides a history of the relations between philosophy and the science of psychology from late scholasticism to contemporary discussions. The book covers the development from 16th-century interpretations of Aristotle's De Anima, through Kantianism and the 19th-century revival of Aristotelianism, up to 20th-century phenomenological and analytic studies of consciousness and the mind.

In this volume historically divergent conceptions of psychology as a science receive special emphasis. The volume illuminates the particular nature of studies of the psyche in the contexts of Aristotelian and Cartesian as well as 19th- and 20th-century science and philosophy. The relations between metaphysics, transcendental philosophy, and natural science are studied in the works of Kant, Brentano, Bergson, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, and Davidson. Accounts of less known philosophers, such as Trendelenburg and Maine de Biran, throw new light on the history of the field. Discussions concerning the connections between moral philosophy and philosophical psychology broaden the volume's perspective and show new directions for development.

All contributions are based on novel research in their respective fields. The collection provides materials for researchers and graduate students in the fields of philosophy of mind, history of philosophy, and psychology.

Jung's Four and Some Philosophers provides a context in which to understand the widely differing claims of philosophers. The "four" in the title refers to the four faculties that Jung sees in every psyche. These faculties occur in pairs: thinking and feeling, sensation and intuition. One of these faculties will dominate and determine one's psychological type -- among philosophers it characterizes what they find self-evident. If thinking dominates, its opposite (feeling) is repressed to the unconscious, and vice versa. If intuition dominates, sensation is repressed, and vice versa. To achieve wholeness, the individual must seek the repressed faculty in the mysterious unconscious and then integrate it with the other three conscious faculties.

Jung's Four and Some Philosophers is a valuable source for all students and teachers of philosophy, Jungian analysts, counselors, and spiritual directors, and those seeking a common wisdom in the great philosophers.

The thesis advanced in this book is that feeling and cognition actualize through a process that originates in older brain formations and develops outward through limbic and cortical fields through the self-concept and private space into (as) the world. An iteration of this transition deposits acts, objects, feelings and utterances. Value is a mode of conceptual feeling that depends on the dominant phase in this transition: from desire through interest to object worth. Among the topics covered are subjective time and change, the epochal nature of objects and their temporal extensibility and the evolution of value from inorganic matter into organic form. The theory of microgenesis informs this work. According to this theory, acts and objects evolve in milliseconds through phases that replicate patterns in forebrain evolution. The progression in the actualization of the mind/brain state is from archaic to recent in brain formation, from unity to diversity, from past to present and from mind to world. An account is given of the diversity of felt experience avoiding the reductionist moves characteristic of biological materialism and the inherent dualism of psychoanalytic and related theories. This book is intended for any reader interested in the psychology of the inner life and philosophy of mind, including philosophers, psychologists, psychiatrists and others with an interest in problems of value and moral feeling.

This work introduces the concept of the Voice of the Other and the intersubjective world it creates for humans. The unconscious processes of speech and language are deeply identified with the ego. In the movement from nature to civilization, the newborn is mastered by language and becomes part of the social world of his parents. The child's thought is now structured by parental language and speech as well as by memories stored in the unconscious. What is real for the individual is composed only of the images and words that define them. Even family and school relationships are structured in language and the social formations that language created in the past. The imaginary and symbolic functions of the mind form ideologies that bind people together and help them to make sense of their world. In schools this leads to submissive students and constant teacher-student conflict.

The author uses the works of Freud, Lacan, and Marx to situate schooling in capitalist society. He employs psychoanalytic, linguistic, and anthropological perspectives in an attempt to discover how we think and communicate with one another using unconscious processes.

Since the pioneering work of Donald Davidson on action, many philosophers have taken critical stances on his causal account. This book criticizes Davidson's event-causal view of action, and offers instead an agent causal view both to describe what an action is and to set a framework for how actions are explained.

'Forming the Mind' deals with the internal senses, the mind/body problem and other problems associated with the concept of mind as it developed from Avicenna to the medical Enlightenment. The book collects essays from some of the foremost scholars in a relatively new and very promising field of research. It stresses how important and fruitful it is to see the time period between 1100 and 1700 as one continuous tradition, and brings together scholars working on the same issues in the Arabic, Jewish and Western philosophical traditions. In this respect, this collection opens up several new and interesting perspectives on the history of the philosophy of mind.

The Interactions Between Instinct and Intellect and its Impact on Human Behavior
Length: 286 Pages
I argue that human affairs divide into the two categories of serious affairs and fun affairs. The pleasure seeking aspect of humanity mostly revolves around fun, compassion, amazement and amusement, and sexuality that together constitute humans' Playful Mind, covered in this book. As Shakespeare says, "to be human is to play." Different instincts constantly precipitate varying human interests and energize all human emotions and compel them to interact. For example, the artists through their endless beautiful arts and athletes through their amazing athletic abilities purge life of boredom and render life endlessly joyous and pleasing. There are those who says, heaven belongs to mothers, but I say while that is true, it also belongs to great artists and athletes. However, without understanding what inner forces make these phenomena compellingly captivating for humans we will continue to enjoy them without properly understanding what it is that we so enjoy.
In that, humans have enjoyed arts and sports for millennia without being able to articulate exactly what in these seemingly frivolous activities so engrosses these superbly intelligent and purposeful beings, humans. Hence, we have been relishing that which we do not understand at all. To use another example in the realm of human sexuality, over 90% of both genders have sexual fantasies that create a unique brand of human psychology of its own. Yet the origin of this fascinating and universally prevalent human mental phenomenon is yet to be explained in a meaningful way. This study, The Interactions Between Instinct and Intellect and its Impact on Human Behavior, for the first time unveils all these and more of human mysteries and renders humans naked, so to speak.

Based upon Ajit Maan's groundbreaking theory of Internarrative Identity, this collection focuses upon redefining self, slave narrative, the black Caribbean diaspora, and cyberspace to explore the interconnection between identity and life experience as expressed through personal narrative.

This volume explores 'unknown time' as a cultural phenomenon, approaching past futures, unknown presents, and future pasts through a broad range of different disciplines, media, and contexts. As a phenomenon that is both elusive and fundamentally inaccessible, time is a key object of fascination. Throughout the ages, different cultures have been deeply engaged in various attempts to fill or make time by developing strategies to familiarize unknown time and to materialize and control past, present, or future time. Arguing for the perennial interest in time, especially in the unknown and unattainable dimension of the future, the contributions explore premodern ideas about eschatology and secular future, historical configurations of the perception of time and acceleration in fin-de-siecle Germany and contemporary Lagos, the formation of 'deep time' and 'timelessness' in paleontology and ethnographic museums, and the representation of time-past, present, and future alike-in music, film, and science fiction.

This book reassesses Gadamer's hermeneutics by bringing it into a dialogue with John McDowell's minimal empiricism. It employs the resources of McDowell's minimal empiricism to address the transcendental and ontological presuppositions for objective experience and understanding, while retaining Gadamer's emphasis on the historicity of understanding. By means of the dialogue with McDowell, the book develops a hermeneutical conception of objectivity and perceptual experience, which also entails reinterpretations of Gadamer's notions of tradition, practical wisdom and meaning. The book explores the philosophical space beyond the analytic-Continental divide and demonstrates that hermeneutics is not limited to a reflection on understanding as it is practiced in the human sciences, but can be revived as a distinct and cogent philosophical approach with a transcendental and ontological dimension. Thaning's book is a richly detailed, well-argued and coherent presentation of a defensible, and potentially very important, philosophical position. It demonstrates an impressively deep understanding of the literature both from the phenomenological tradition and from the part of the analytical tradition, inspired by Wilfred Sellars, to which John McDowell belongs. Being a substantial philosophical achievement in its own right, the book raises far-reaching questions that will be of interest to a wide audience. Dr. Steven Crowell, Rice University, Houston (USA) Morten Thaning's book is an important contribution to the discourse of philosophical hermeneutics. Thaning extensively discusses a topic, which recent debates have touched upon, but which up to now has not been the subject matter of concentrated scholarly work: the relation between Gadamer's hermeneutics and McDowell's empiricism. With Thaning's interpretation Gadamer' work can be read anew as concerning the problem of hermeneutical objectivity. Prof. Dr. Gunter Figal, University of Freiburg (Germany)

This book draws on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, psychology, neuroscience and Buddhist philosophy to explicate Merleau-Ponty's unwritten ethics. Daly contends that though Merleau-Ponty never developed an ethics per se, there is significant textual evidence that clearly indicates he had the intention to do so. This book highlights the explicit references to ethics that he offers and proposes that these, allied to his ontological commitments, provide the basis for the development of an ethics. In this work Daly shows how Merleau-Ponty's relational ontology, in which the interdependence of self, other and world is affirmed, offers an entirely new approach to ethics. In contrast to the 'top-down' ethics of norms, obligations and prescriptions, Daly maintains that Merleau-Ponty's ethics is a 'bottom-up' ethics which depends on direct insight into our own intersubjective natures, the 'I' within the 'we' and the 'we' within the 'I'; insight into the real nature of our relation to others and the particularities of the given situation. Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics of Intersubjectivity is an important contribution to the scholarship on the later Merleau-Ponty which will be of interest to graduate students and scholars. Daly offers informed readings of Merleau-Ponty's texts and the overall approach is both scholarly and innovative.

This book is the third in my series of four books dealing with Intelligence, Instincts, and Consciousness. The simple and truthful realization of what we are, and how we got to where we are within nature's world, is the ultimate truth that any philosophy could ever propose to know. It is ultimately the most powerful state that any human mind can ever attain. It is a true kind of nirvana. It is with this knowing state of mind that we can make ever-new beginnings and provide for a future where our chances are best for surviving whatever random hells that nature will with great certainty rise up against us. The fact that we might have to eventually face up to what we are as completely definable creatures in terms of a very complex organization of billions of very simple structures is not in anyway whatsoever a degradation of the truth of our humanity. Understanding what we are has led us to realize both the miraculous and morally good achievements of our kind, and also to an understanding of the basic nature of our more hidden ugly and evil actions.