A scholarly examination of the centrality of the mind-body problem within and across the science of cognition--from philosophy to psychology to artificial intelligence to neural science. Conceptions of the mind-body problem range from the heritage of Cartesianism to the identification of the circumscribed brain structures responsible for domain specific cognitive mechanisms. Neither narrowly technical nor philosophically vague, this is a structured and detailed account of advancing intellectual developments in theory, research, and knowledge illumined by the conceptual vicissitudes of the mind-body problem. This unique treatment will be of special interest to creative scholars in the disciplines of he sciences of cognition.

The philosophical significance of Maurice Blanchot's writings has rarely been in doubt. Specifying the nature and implications of his thinking has proved much less easy, particularly in reference to the key figure of G. W. F. Hegel. Examination reveals that Blanchot's thinking is persistently oriented towards a questioning of the terms of Hegel's thought, while nevertheless remaining within its themes, whichshows how rigorously he studied Hegel's works but also how radical his critique of them became. Equally, it allows for a crucial discussion of the differences between Blanchot's responses to Hegel and those of Jacques Derrida, with the implicit suggestion that in some ways Blanchot's critique of Hegel is more far-reaching than that developed by Derrida. William S. Allen demonstrates those aspects of Hegelian thought that permeate Blanchot's writings and, in turn, develops a detailed three-way analysis of Derrida, Hegel, and Blanchot. The key question around which this analysis develops is that of the relation between thought and language concerning the issue of the infinite and its legibility. Illegibility introduces a new and substantially philosophical account of Blanchot's importance, and also showshow his writings laid the ground for Derrida's workswhile developing their own uniquely challenging response to the problems of post-Hegelian thought.

Peter Hacker is one of the most notable interpreters of Wittgenstein's work, a powerful and sophisticated exponent of Wittgensteinian ideas, and a distinguished historian of the analytic tradition. Thirteen leading philosophers and Wittgenstein scholars offer specially written essays in honour of Hacker. Their contributions deal with a variety of themes associated with Wittgenstein. Some deal with issues of Wittgenstein scholarship and interpretation, including areas that have attracted an increasing amount of attention, such as ethics and religion. Others deal with central topics from the history of analytic philosophy. Finally there are essays that explore and assess Wittgensteinian ideas, in some cases as developed by Hacker, in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind, or in related areas such as the philosophy of action and the philosophy of neuroscience.

What do philosophy and computer science have in common? It turns out, quite a lot! In providing an introduction to computer science (using Python), Daniel Lim presents in this book key philosophical issues, ranging from external world skepticism to the existence of God to the problem of induction. These issues, and others, are introduced through the use of critical computational concepts, ranging from image manipulation to recursive programming to elementary machine learning techniques. In illuminating some of the overlapping conceptual spaces of computer science and philosophy, Lim teaches the reader fundamental programming skills and also allows her to develop the critical thinking skills essential for examining some of the enduring questions of philosophy. Key Features Teaches readers actual computer programming, not merely ideas about computers Includes fun programming projects (like digital image manipulation and Game of Life simulation), allowing the reader to develop the ability to write larger computer programs that require decomposition, abstraction, and algorithmic thinking Uses computational concepts to introduce, clarify, and develop a variety of philosophical issues Covers various aspects of machine learning and relates them to philosophical issues involving science and induction as well as to ethical issues Provides a framework to critically analyze arguments in classic and contemporary philosophical debates

No matter how long I may look at an image, I shall never find anything in it but what I put there. It is in this fact that we find the distinction between an image and a perception.' - Jean-Paul Sartre"

L Imagination" was published in 1936 when Jean-Paul Sartre was thirty years old. Long out of print, this is the first English translation in many years. "The Imagination" is Sartre s first full philosophical work, presenting some of the basic arguments concerning phenomenology, consciousness and intentionality that were to later appear in his master works and be so influential in the course of twentieth-century philosophy.

Sartre begins by criticising philosophical theories of the imagination, particularly those of Descartes, Leibniz and Hume, before establishing his central thesis. Imagination does not involve the perception of mental images in any literal sense, Sartre argues, yet reveals some of the fundamental capacities of consciousness. He then reviews psychological theories of the imagination, including a fascinating discussion of the work of Henri Bergson. Sartre argues that the classical conception is fundamentally flawed because it begins by conceiving of the imagination as being like perception and then seeks, in vain, to re-establish the difference between the two. Sartre concludes with an important chapter on Husserl s theory of the imagination which, despite sharing the flaws of earlier approaches, signals a new phenomenological way forward in understanding the imagination.

"The Imagination" is essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, phenomenology, and the history of twentieth-century philosophy.

This new translation includes a helpful historical and philosophical introduction by Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf. Also included is Maurice Merleau-Ponty s important review of "L Imagination "upon its publication in French in 1936.

Translated by Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf.

"The concept of spontaneity is central to Kant's philosophy, yet Kant himself never dealt with it explicitly. Instead it was presented as an insoluble problem concerning human reason. The ambiguity surrounding his approach to this problem is surprising when one considers that he was a philosopher who based his theoretical programme on the critique of the faculties of knowledge, feeling and desire. However, this ambiguity seems to have avoided up to now any possible critique. This highly original book presents the first full-length study of the problem of spontaneity in Kant. Marco Sgarbi demonstrates that spontaneity is a crucial concept in relation to every aspect of Kant's thought. He begins by reconstructing the history of the concept of spontaneity in the German Enlightenment prior to Kant and goes on to define knowing, thinking, acting and feeling as spontaneous activities of the mind that in turn determine Kant's logic, ethics and aesthetics. Ultimately Sgarbi shows that the notion of spontaneity is key to understanding both Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy."

Featuring contributions from leading figures such as Noam Chomsky, Don Ross, Andrew Brook and Patricia Kitcher, this book traces the philosophical roots behind contemporary understandings of cognition, forming both a convincing case for the centrality of philosophy to the history of neuroscience and cognitive psychology, as well as a revealing insight into the way in which ideas have developed, influenced and ultimately moulded our modern view of the mind

This volume presents fourteen original essays which explore the philosophy of Simon Blackburn, one of the UK's most influential contemporary philosophers. Blackburn is best known to the general public for his attempts to make philosophy accessible to those with little or no formal training, but in professional circles his reputation is based on a lifetime pursuit of his distinctive version of a projectivist and anti-realist research program. As he sees things, we must always try first to understand and explain what we are doing when we think and talk as we do. This research program reaches into nearly all of the main areas of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, and moral psychology. The books and articles he has written provide us with perhaps the most comprehensive statement and defense of projectivism and anti-realism since Hume. The essays collected here document the range and influence of Blackburn's work. They reveal, among other things, the resourcefulness of his distinctive brand of philosophical pragmatism.

Thought, to be thought at all, must be about a world independent of us. But thinking takes capacities for thought, which inevitably shape thought's objects. What would count as something being green is, somehow, fixed by what we, who have being green in mind, are prepared to recognize. So it can seem that what is true, and what is not, is not independent of us. So our thought cannot really be about an independent world. We are confronted with an apparent paradox. Much philosophy, from Locke to Kant to Frege to Wittgenstein, to Hilary Putnam and John McDowell today, is a reaction to this paradox. Charles Travis presents a set of eleven essays, each working in its own way towards dissolving this air of paradox. The key to his account of thought and world is the idea of the parochial: features of our thought which need not belong to all thought.

What is awareness? How is dreaming different from ordinary awareness? What does mathematics have to do with awareness? Are different kinds of awareness related? "Awareness" is commonly spoken of as "mind, soul, spirit, consciousness, the unconscious, psyche, imagination, self, and other." The Phenomena of Awareness is a study of awareness as it is directly experienced. From the start, Cecile T. Tougas engages the reader in reflective notice of awareness as it appears from moment to moment in a variety of ways. The book draws us in and asks us to focus on the flow of phenomena in living experience, not as a theoretical construct, nor an image, nor a biochemical product, but instead as phases, moments, or parts that cannot exist without one another. Tougas shows how these parts exist in mutual dependence as a continuum of awareness, as the flow of lived time, and how noticing time deepens psychological self-understanding and understanding of another. The Phenomena of Awareness is divided into four parts: * Seeking and Noticing Awareness * Observing and Understanding the Flow of Phenomena * Distinguishing Intentional Acts * Work in Progress Drawing on the work of E. Husserl, G. Cantor and C.G. Jung, this book is an original synthesis of phenomenology, mathematics and psychology that explores awareness and the concept of 'transfinite number'. This book will be of interest to analytical psychologists, philosophers, mathematicians, feminist scholars, humanities teachers and students. Cecile T. Tougas teaches Latin at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, Durham. She taught philosophy at the University of Southern Maine and the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

This book contains contributions presented during the international conference on Model-Based Reasoning (MBR012), held on June 21-23 in Sestri Levante, Italy. Interdisciplinary researchers discuss in this volume how scientific cognition and other kinds of cognition make use of models, abduction, and explanatory reasoning in order to produce important or creative changes in theories and concepts. Some of the contributions analyzed the problem of model-based reasoning in technology and stressed the issues of scientific and technological innovation. The book is divided in three main parts: models, mental models, representations; abduction, problem solving and practical reasoning; historical, epistemological and technological issues.

The volume is based on the papers that were presented at the international

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In recent research, dual-process theories of cognition have been the primary model for explaining moral judgment and reasoning. These theories understand moral thinking in terms of two separate domains: one deliberate and analytic, the other quick and instinctive. This book presents a new theory of the philosophy and cognitive science of moral judgment. Hanno Sauer develops and defends an account of "triple-process" moral psychology, arguing that moral thinking and reasoning are only insufficiently understood when described in terms of a quick but intuitive and a slow but rational type of cognition. This approach severely underestimates the importance and impact of dispositions to initiate and engage in critical thinking - the cognitive resource in charge of counteracting my-side bias, closed-mindedness, dogmatism, and breakdowns of self-control. Moral cognition is based, not on emotion and reason, but on an integrated network of intuitive, algorithmic and reflective thinking. Moral Thinking, Fast and Slow will be of great interest to philosophers and students of ethics, philosophy of psychology and cognitive science.

This book attempts to advance Donald Griffin's vision of the "final, crowning chapter of the Darwinian revolution" by developing a philosophy for the science of animal consciousness. It advocates a Darwinian bottom-up approach that treats consciousness as a complex, evolved, and multi-dimensional phenomenon in nature, rather than a mysterious all-or-nothing property immune to the tools of science and restricted to a single species. The so-called emergence of a science of consciousness in the 1990s has at best been a science of human consciousness. This book aims to advance a true Darwinian science of consciousness in which its evolutionary origin, function, and phylogenetic diversity are moved from the field's periphery to its very centre; thus enabling us to integrate consciousness into an evolutionary view of life. Accordingly, this book has two objectives: (i) to argue for the need and possibility of an evolutionary bottom-up approach that addresses the problem of consciousness in terms of the evolutionary origins of a new ecological lifestyle that made consciousness worth having, and (ii) to articulate a thesis and beginnings of a theory of the place of consciousness as a complex evolved phenomenon in nature that can help us to answer the question of what it is like to be a bat, an octopus, or a crow. A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness will appeal to researchers and advanced students interested in advancing our understanding of animal minds, as well as anyone with a keen interest in how we can develop a science of animal consciousness.

The study of conscious experience has seen remarkable strides in the last ten years, reflecting important technological breakthroughs and the enormous efforts of researchers in disciplines as varied as neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophy. Although still embroiled in debate, scientists are now beginning to find common ground in their understanding of consciousness, which may pave the way for a unified explanation of how and why we experience and understand the world around us. Written by eminent psychologist Bernard J. Baars, Inside the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind brings us to the frontlines of this exciting discipline, offering the general reader a fascinating overview of how top scientists currently understand the processes underlying conscious experience.

Combining psychology with brain science, Baars brilliantly brings his subject to life with a metaphor that has been used to understand consciousness since the time of Aristotle--the mind as theater. Here consciousness is seen as a "stage" on which our sensations, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings play to a vast, silent audience (the immensely complicated inner-workings of the brain's unconscious processes). Behind the scenes, silent context operators shape conscious experience; they include implicit expectations, self systems, and scene setters. Using this framework, Baars presents compelling evidence that human consciousness rides on top of biologically ancient mechanisms. In humans it manifests itself in inner speech, imagery, perception, and voluntary control of thought and action. Topics like hypnosis, absorbed states of mind, adaptation to trauma, and the human propensity to project expectations on uncertainty, all fit into the expanded theater metaphor.

As Baars explores our present understanding of the mind, he takes us to the top laboratories around the world, where we witness some of the field's most exciting breakthroughs and discoveries. (For instance, Baars recounts one extraordinary sequence of experiments, in which state-of-the-art PET scans--reproduced here in full color--capture in fascinating, graphic detail how brain activity changes as people learn how to play the computer game Tetris.) And throughout the book, Baars has sprinkled numerous and often highly amusing on-the-spot demonstrations that illuminate the ideas under discussion.

Understanding consciousness is perhaps the most difficult puzzle facing the sciences today. In the Theater of Consciousness offers an invaluable introduction to the field, brilliantly weaving together the various theories that have emerged as scientists continue their quest to uncover the profound mysteries of the mind--and of human nature itself.

Semantic externalism is the view that the meanings of referring terms, and the contents of beliefs that are expressed by those terms, are not fully determined by factors internal to the speaker but are instead bound up with the environment. The debate about semantic externalism is one of the most important but difficult topics in philosophy of mind and language, and has consequences for our understanding of the role of social institutions and the physical environment in constituting language and the mind. In this long-needed book, Jesper Kallestrup provides an invaluable map of the problem. Beginning with a thorough introduction to the theories of descriptivism and referentialism and the work of Frege and Kripke, Kallestrup moves on to analyse Putnam's Twin Earth argument, Burge's arthritis argument and Davidson's Swampman argument. He also discusses how semantic externalism is at the heart of important topics such as indexical thoughts, epistemological skepticism, self-knowledge, and mental causation. Including chapter summaries, a glossary of terms, and an annotated guide to further reading, Semantic Externalism an ideal guide for students studying philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.

Minimal Semantics asks what a theory of literal linguistic meaning is for--if you were to be given a working theory of meaning for a language right now, what would you be able to do with it? Emma Borg sets out to defend a formal approach to semantic theorizing from a relatively new type of opponent--advocates of what she calls "dual pragmatics." According to dual pragmatists, rich pragmatic processes play two distinct roles in linguistic comprehension: as well as operating in a post-semantic capacity to determine the implicatures of an utterance, they also operate prior to the determination of truth-conditional content for a sentence. That is to say, they have an integral role to play within what is usually thought of as the semantic realm.
Borg believes dual pragmatic accounts constitute the strongest contemporary challenge to standard formal approaches to semantics since they challenge the formal theorist to show not merely that there is some role for formal processes on route to determination of semantic content, but that such processes are sufficient for determining content. Minimal Semantics provides a detailed examination of this school of thought, introducing readers who are unfamiliar with the topic to key ideas like relevance theory and contextualism, and looking in detail at where these accounts diverge from the formal approach.
Borg's defense of formal semantics has two main parts: first, she argues that the formal approach is most naturally compatible with an important and well-grounded psychological theory, namely the Fodorian modular picture of the mind. Then she argues that the main arguments adduced by dual pragmatists against formal semantics--concerning apparent contextual intrusions into semantic content--can in fact be countered by a formal theory. The defense holds, however, only if we are sensitive to the proper conditions of success for a semantic theory. Specifically, we should reject a range of onerous constraints on semantic theorizing (e.g., that it answer epistemic or metaphysical questions, or that it explain our communicative skills) and instead adopt a quite minimal picture of semantics.

What is meaning? Paul Horwich presents an original philosophical theory, demonstrates its richness, and defends it against all comers. At the core of his theory is the idea, made famous by Wittgenstein, that the meaning of a word derives from its use; Horwich articulates this idea in a new way that will restore it to the prominence that it deserves. He surveys the diversity of valuable insights into meaning that have been gained in the twentieth century, and seeks to accommodate them within his theory. His aim is not to correct a common-sense view of meaning, but to vindicate it: he seeks to take the mystery out of meaning. Horwich's 1990 book Truth stablished itself both as the definitive exposition and defence of a notable philosophical theory, `minimalism', and as a stimulating, straightforward introduction to philosophical debate about truth. Meaning now gives the broader context in which the theory of truth operates, and is published simultaneously with a revised edition of Truth, in which Horwich refines and develops his treatment of the subject in the light of subsequent discussions, while preserving the distinctive format which made the book so successful. The two books together present a compelling view of the relations between language, thought, and reality. They will be essential reading for all philosophers of language.

In Representational Ideas: From Plato to Patricia Churchland Watson argues that all intelligible theories of representation by ideas are based on likeness between representations and objects. He concludes that 17th century materialist criticisms of having' mental representations in the mind apply to contemporary material representations in the brain, as proposed by neurophilosophers. The argument begins with Plato, with particular stress on Descartes, Malebranche, and Arnauld. He then proceeds with an examination of the picture theory developed by Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Goodman, and concludes with an examination of Patricia Churchland, Ruth Millikan, Robert Cummins, and Mark Rollins. The use of the historical development of representationalism to pose a central problem in contemporary cognitive science is unique. For students, scholars and researchers in neuroscience, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and modern philosophy.

The book questions two key dichotomies: that of the apparent and real, and that of the internal and external. This leads to revised notions of the structure of experience and the object of knowledge. Our world is experienced as possibilities of action, and to know is to know what to do. A further consequence is that the mind is best considered as a property of organisms' interactions with their environment. The unit of analysis is the loop of action and perception, and the central concept is the notion of habit of action, which provides the embodied basis of cognition as the anticipation of action. This holds for non-linguistic tacit meanings as well as for linguistic meanings. Habit of action is a teleological notion and thus opens a possibility for defining intentionality and normativity in terms of the soft naturalism adopted in the book. The mind is embodied, and this embodiment determines our physical perspective on the world. Our sensory organs and other instruments give us instrumental access to the world, and this access is epistemic in character. The distinction between the physical and conceptual viewpoint allows us to define truth as the correspondence with operational fit. This embodied epistemic truth is however not a sign of antirealism, as the instrumentally accessed theoretical objects are precisely those objects that experimental science deals with.

We act for reasons. But, it is sometimes claimed, the mental states and events that make up reasons, are not sufficient conditions of actions. Reasons never make actions happen. We- as agents (persons, selves, subjects) - make our actions happen. Actions are done by us, not elicited by reasons. The present essay is an attempt to understand this concept of agent causality. Who - or what - is an agent ? And how - in virtue of what - does an agent do things, or refrain from doing them? The first chapter deals with problems in the theory of action that seem to require the assumption that actions are controlled by agents. Chapters two and three then review and discuss theories of agent cau sality. Chapters four and five make up the central parts of the essay in which my own solution is put forth, and chapter six presents some data that seem to support this view. Chapter seven discusses how the theory can be reconciled with neuro-physiological facts. And in the last two chapters the theory is confronted with conflicting viewpoints and phe nomena. Daniel Robinson and Richard Swinburne took time to read parts of the manuscript in draft form. Though they disagree with my main viewpoints on the nature of the self, their conunents were very helpful. I hereby thank them both."

The voluminous writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein contain some of the most profound reflections of recent times on the nature of the human subject and self-understanding - the human condition, philosophically speaking. Describing Ourselves mines those extensive writings for a conception of the self that stands in striking contrast to its predecessors as well as its more recent alternatives. More specifically, the book offers a detailed discussion of Wittgenstein's later writings on language and mind as they hold special significance for the understanding and clarification of the distinctive character of self-descriptive or autobiographical language.
Garry L. Hagberg undertakes a ground-breaking philosophical investigation of selected autobiographical writings - among the best examples we have of human selves exploring themselves - as they cast new and special light on the critique of mind-body dualism and its undercurrents in particular and on the nature of autobiographical consciousness more generally. The chapters take up in turn the topics of self-consciousness, what Wittgenstein calls 'the inner picture', mental privacy and the picture of metaphysical seclusion, the very idea of our observation of the contents of consciousness, first-person expressive speech, reflexive or self-directed thought and competing pictures of introspection, the nuances of retrospective self-understanding, person-perception and the corollary issues of self-perception (itself an interestingly dangerous phrase), self-defining memory, and the therapeutic conception of philosophical progress as it applies to all of these issues.
The cast of characters interwoven throughout this rich discussion include, inaddition to Wittgenstein centrally, Augustine, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Iris Murdoch, Donald Davidson, and Stanley Cavell, among others. Throughout, conceptual clarifications concerning mind and language are put to work in the investigation of issues relating to self-description and in novel philosophical readings of autobiographical texts.

If man has no nature - if our intellect and understanding are products of our own activities - do we possess a key to self-modification? Are we free to re-make mankind? Sartre champions the romantic idea that we can - by sheer determination - begin afresh. Oakeshott is struck by the vandalism of such a project - he seeks to defend political culture from degradation by meddling academics. The Radical and Conservative understanding of social order and the human self are compared in this in-depth analysis of two contrasting philosophies.

Including two new essays, this remarkable volume is an updated edition of Davidson's classic Essays on Actions and Events (1980). A superb work on the nature of human action, it features influential discussions of numerous topics. These include the freedom to act; weakness of the will; the logical form of talk about actions, intentions, and causality; the logic of practical reasoning; Hume's theory of the indirect passions; and the nature and limits of decision theory.