"Epistemic Reasoning and the Mental" integrates the epistemology of reasoning and philosophy of mind. The book contains introductions to basic concepts in the epistemology of inference and to important aspects of the philosophy of mind. By examining the fundamental competencies involved in reasoning, Gerken argues that reasoning's epistemic force depends on the external environment in ways that are both surprising and epistemologically important.
For example, Gerken argues that purportedly deductive reasoning that exhibits the fallacy of equivocation may nevertheless transmit epistemic warrant from its premise-beliefs to its conclusion-belief. This view is contrary to orthodoxy according to which such reasoning must be valid. But Gerken shows how this novel and unorthodox view is integrated in a psychologically plausible account of our reasoning competencies and a general epistemological framework.
What emerges is an approach to the philosophy of reasoning that is informed and constrained by both epistemology and philosophy of mind.

Of all the wide-ranging interests Coleridge showed in his career, religion was the deepest and most long-lasting; and Beer demonstrates in this book that none of his work can be fully understood without taking this into account. Beer reveals how Coleridge was preoccupied by the life of the mind, and how closely this subject was intertwined with religion in his thinking. The insights that emerge in this collection are of absorbing interest, showing the efforts of a pioneer to reconcile traditional wisdom, both inside and outside orthodox Christianity, with the questions that were becoming evident to a sensitive enquirer.

This impressive volume of essays that includes contributions from Herbert Dreyfus, Sean Kelly, Mike Wheeler, Dan Zahavi, and Shaun Gallagher reflects an emerging trend in cognitive science, and explores this new approach to cognitive science informed by Heidegger's thoughts on human existence.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

The Interactions Between Instinct and Intellect and its Impact on Human Behavior
Length: 324 Pages
The oldest musical instrument found is a flute made of bone that is estimated to be over 50,000 years old. Aristotle wrote the first book on arts, poetics. Since then it has been debated what art is at the highest levels. However, the world of philosophy admits that we still have not been able to articulate a definition for this seemingly simple word of art that would be acceptable to all. This shows that we do not understand it well enough to properly define it. This confusion stems from an inadequate philosophical understanding of it and, thus, we have been relishing that, which we do not comprehend. One of the reasons for this lasting confusion stems from the fact that we try to understand arts by studying art objects in the physical world. However, without being able to identify what in the mind longs for art in its metaphysical realm and why, we will never grasp it. This is why we have been mixing novel, painting, music, acting, perfume, architecture, Persian rugs and poetry and so on and try to devise a definition to define them all. Although they all are art, they have nothing in common. This shows but a small fraction of our profound misconception of the world of art.
Based on what mental force longs for which group of arts coupled with the structure of the art forms, they divide into three distinct and logical categories of 1- Rhythmic Arts, 2- Imitative Arts, and 3- Abstract Arts. Each of these categories connects with a particular mental faculty. Then, through this understanding we also get to see that there exists an inequity in the sensitivity and excitability of these corresponding mental faculties and we experience different intensities of pleasure from different arts. For example, some arts, like live music performed even by average artists will invoke emotions in many who may scream, cry and even faint at concerts, but they never react that way by observing the works of true masters of arts such as Michelangelo, Picasso or others in museums. This results form the imparity in the sensitivities of the corresponding mental faculties mentioned above. This view carries us deep into arts as a phenomenon and helps artists to further refine their arts and the art lovers to appreciate it even more.
In the realm of sports, we learn that all sports have three things in common, aiming, speed and power or endurance. Yet these are the skills required for successful hunting. Hunting and warring is one of the male instincts as they acted these responsibilities through out the human evolution. Because instincts do not disappear in time, they have survived and find expression in different sports, and thus aiming, speed and power find their way into all sports. Females not being pressed by this instinct did not hunt or fight wars. It is for these organic reasons that males so readily become sport fanatics at the dismay of the women in their lives.

What are beliefs and what roles do they play in our behavioral and cognitive economies? Those questions are central issues not only for epistemology, but also for philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and philosophy of religion, to mention only a few fields. The authors in this volume of specially commissioned essays address them from a variety of perspectives, drawing on important classical and contemporary work on mental content, the nature of intentionality, the psychology of delusions, the role of character traits, the moral status of doxastic attitudes, and a range of other topics.

This volume contains a set of state-of-the-art essays by younger philosophers on various topics in the philosophy of action. Some of the essays are about the metaphysics of action and agency; some consider the nature of autonomy and free agency; some explore conceptual and normative issues, some draw on data from psychology and psychopathology. But what all of them have in common is that they address some problem related to our existence as human agents. The range of topics covered is this collection is broad. This is intentional. Rather than focus on one narrow topic in the philosophy of action, this volume brings together papers that, taken together, introduce readers to some key debates in contemporary philosophy of action. Readers new to the field should come away from the volume with a good sense of the state-of-the-art with respect to current thinking about human action and agency. For their part, established researchers in the field will find the essays to be original contributions that substantially advance many debates about action and agency.

Key Updates to the Second Edition Includes a new opening section on human nature, borrowing material from elsewhere in the book Adds a new chapter on evolutionary and developmental arguments for the innateness of morality Expands coverage of the challenges to psychological research, including the replication crisis and the WEIRDness challenge Provides a new section on implicit bias and moral responsibility Offers enhanced clarity and accessibility throughout Includes up-to-date Further Reading sections and Bibliography

There are three themed parts to this book: values, ethics and emotions in the first part, epistemology, perception and consciousness in the second part and philosophy of mind and philosophy of language in the third part. Papers in this volume provide links between emotions and values and explore dependency between language, meanings and concepts and topics such as the liar s paradox, reference and metaphor are examined.

This book is the second of a two-volume set that originates in papers presented to Professor Kevin Mulligan, covering the subjects that he contributed to during his career. This volume opens with a paper by Moya, who proposes that there is an asymmetrical relation between the possibility of choice and moral responsibility. The first part of this volume ends with a description of foolishness as insensitivity to the values of knowledge, by Engel. Marconi s article makes three negative claims about relative truth and Sundholm notes shortcomings of the English language for epistemology, amongst other papers. This section ends with a discussion of the term subjective character by Nida-Rumelin, who finds it misleading.

The third part of this volume contains papers exploring topics such as the mind-body problem, whether theory of mind is based on simulation or theory and Kunne shows that the most common analyses of the so-called 'Liar' paradox are wanting. At the end of this section, Rizzi introduces syntactic cartography and illustrates its use in scope-discourse semantics.

This second volume contains twenty nine chapters, written by both high profile and upcoming researchers from across Europe, North America and North Africa.

The first volume of this set has two main themes: metaphysics, especially truth-making and the notion of explanation and the second theme is the history of philosophy with an emphasis on Austrian philosophy."

The general aim of this volume is to investigate the nature of the relation between pictorial experience and aesthetic appreciation. In particular, it is concerned with the character and intimacy of this relationship: is there a mere causal connection between pictorial experience and aesthetic appreciation, or are the two relata constitutively associated with one another? The essays in the book's first section investigate important conceptual issues related to the pictorial experience of paintings. In Section II, the essays discuss the notion of styles, techniques, agency, and facture, and also take into account the experience of photographic and cinematic pictures. The Pleasure of Pictures goes substantially beyond current debates in the philosophy of depiction to launch a new area of reflection in philosophical aesthetics.

In exploring whether our neuroscientific discoveries are consistent with the idea we are voluntary agents, "Human Agency and Neural Causes" presents a neuroscientifically-informed emergentist account of human agency.
In contrast with the assumptions that currently shape neuropsychological research on voluntary agency, J.D. Runyan presents a broadly-conceived Aristotelian account of voluntary agency grounded in our everyday thought about our conduct. In the process, some new concerns are raised for compatibilist theories of free will, as well as for reductive neuroscientific theory. This book argues that what contemporary neuroscience reveals is along the lines of what we should expect if we are, in fact, voluntary agents. At the same time, upholding the idea that we are voluntary agents will require profound and controversial changes in the way we interpret our neuroscientific findings.

Written in a provocative, witty, and highly accessible style, this is not only a splendid general introduction to the central questions of consciousness and brain science, but also an answer to some of them. The author -- noted Glaswegian chemist A.G. Cairns-Smith -- believes our feelings and sensations are not simply alternative descriptions of neural events but have themselves evolved and have physical effects in the brain as well as physical causes. Secrets of the Mind portrays a vision of the world as it may come to be seen by a future science. Sand, sea water, air, and the atoms from which such materials are made are now well understood by science, but the same can not be said of our personal feelings, our sensations and emotions. Science tells us that these too must be forms of quantum energy if they evolved, yet is only now beginning to explain how.

Topophobia: A Phenomenology of Anxiety is a vivid second-person inquiry into how anxiety plays a formative part in the constitution of subjectivity. While anxiety has assumed a central role in the history of philosophy - and phenomenology in particular - until now there has been no sustained study of how it shapes our sense of self and being in the world. This book seeks to address that lacuna. Calling upon the author's own experience of being agoraphobic, it asks a series of critical questions: How is our experience of the world affected by our bodily experience of others? What role do moods play in shaping our experience of the world? How can we understand the role of conditions such as agoraphobia in relation to our normative understanding of the body and the environment? What is the relation between anxiety and home? The reader will gain an insight into the strange experience of being unable to cross a bridge, get on a bus, and enter a supermarket without tremendous anxiety. At the same time, they will discover aspects of their own bodily experience that are common to both agoraphobes and non-agoraphobes alike. Integrating phenomenological inquiry with current issues in the philosophy of mind, Trigg arrives at a renewed understanding of identity, which arranges self, other and world as a unified whole. Written with a sense of vividness often lacking in academic discourse, this is living philosophy.

Through the works of key figures in ethics since modernity this book charts a shift from dominant fixated, objective moral systems and the dependence on moral authorities such as God, nature and state to universal, formal, fallible, individualistic and/or vulnerable moral systems that ensue from the modern subject's exercise of reason and freedom.

In this collection of original papers, leading international authorities turn their attention to one of the most important questions in theoretical philosophy: what is truth? To arrive at an answer, two further questions need to be addressed in this context: 1) Does truth possess any essence, any inner nature? and 2) If so, what does this nature consist of? The present discussion focuses on the antagonism between substantial or robust theories of truth, with correspondence theory taking the lead, and deflationist or minimalist views, which have been commanding an increasing amount of attention in recent years. Whereas substantial theories proceed from the premise that truth has an essence, and that therefore the objective is to discover this essence, the challenge presented by deflationism is to dispense with this very premise.

In this innovative work, Moulyn examines some of the most fundamental questions arising from human experience: Why do we feel and behave as if mind and body are separate entities? What is the actual relationship between them? Dissatisfied with the common philosophic view that categorically separates body and mind by placing one in space and the other in time, he proposes an objective and subjective timespace to explain mind-body interaction and create a basis for unity and inner harmony. Choosing a point at which body and mind intersect, the author focuses on the neuromuscular and psychological nature of movement and distinguishes between two kinds of movement: mechanical and purpose-striving. He places mechanical movement in objective timespace while purposeful movement, which is linked to mental activity, he assigns to subjective timespace. This schema is used to explore a range of physical/psychological phenomena, including the reasons for the human tendency to separate mind from body and time and space; the implications of human foreknowledge of death; the evolutionary development of body-mind interaction; mental processes; the concepts of self, ego, and soul; and the question of creativity. Providing a new perspective on a fundamental human dilemma, this work is relevant to studies and classes in neurophysiology, philosophy, humanism, and the philosophy of science.

A wide-ranging reading of Freud's work, this book focuses on Freud's scientifically discredited ideas about inherited memory in relation both to poststructuralist debates about mourning, and to certain uncanny figurative traits in his writing. "Freud's Memory" argues for an enriched understanding of the strangenesses in Freud rather than any denunciation of psychoanalysis as a bogus explanatory method.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE PHYSICS WORLD BOOK OF THE YEAR 2019 'One of the deepest and most original thinkers of his generation of cognitive scientists. His startling argument has implications for philosophy, science, and how we understand the world around us' Steven Pinker 'Is reality virtual? It's a question made even more interesting by this book' Barbara Kiser, Nature Do we see the world as it truly is? In The Case Against Reality, pioneering cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman says no? we see what we need in order to survive. Our visual perceptions are not a window onto reality, Hoffman shows us, but instead are interfaces constructed by natural selection. The objects we see around us are not unlike the file icons on our computer desktops: while shaped like a small folder on our screens, the files themselves are made of a series of ones and zeros - too complex for most of us to understand. In a similar way, Hoffman argues, evolution has shaped our perceptions into simplistic illusions to help us navigate the world around us. Yet now these illusions can be manipulated by advertising and design. Drawing on thirty years of Hoffman's own influential research, as well as evolutionary biology, game theory, neuroscience, and philosophy, The Case Against Reality makes the mind-bending yet utterly convincing case that the world is nothing like what we see through our eyes.

Jan De Vos starts where other critiques on psychology end, presenting the argument that psychology is psychologization.This fresh and pioneering approach asks what it means to become the psychologist of one's own life. If something is not working in our education, in our marriage, in our work and in society in general we turn to the psy-sciences. But is the latter's paradigm precisely not relying on feeding psychological theories into the field of research and action?This book traces psychologization from the Enlightenment to Late-Modernity, engaging with seminal thinkers such as La Mettrie, Husserl, Lasch and Agamben, whereby Jan De Vos teases out the possibilities and the limits of using psychoanalytic theory as a critical tool. Offering challenging and thought-provoking insights into how the modern human came to adopt a psychological gaze on itself and the world, this book will appeal to psychologists, sociologists and studies of culture.

<I>Critical Discursive Psychology</I> addresses issues in critical discursive research in psychology, and outlines the historical context in the discipline for the emergence of qualitative debates. Key critical theoretical resources are described and assessed and a series of polemics is staged that brings together writers who have helped shape critical work in psychology. It also sets out methodological steps for critical readings of texts and arguments for the role of psychoanalytic theory in qualitative research.

Rooted in Gricean tradition, this book concentrates on game- and decision-theoretic (GDT) approaches to the foundations of pragmatics. An introduction to GDT, an overview of GDT pragmatics research to date, its relation to semantics and to Gricean pragmatics are followed by contributions offering a high-level survey of current GDT pragmatics and the field of its applications, demonstrating that this approach provides a sound basis for synchronic and diachronic explanations of language use.