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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy
Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind surveys philosophical
issues raised by the situated movement in cognitive science, that
is, the treatment of cognitive phenomena as the joint products of
brain, body, and environment. The book focuses primarily on the
hypothesis of extended cognition, which asserts that human
cognitive processes literally comprise elements beyond the boundary
of the human organism. Rupert argues that the only plausible way in
which to demarcate cognitions is systems-based: cognitive states or
processes are the states of the integrated set of mechanisms and
capacities that contribute causally and distinctively to the
production of cognitive phenomena--for example, language-use,
memory, decision-making, theory construction, and, more
importantly, the associated forms of behavior. Rupert argues that
this integrated system is most likely to appear within the
boundaries of the human organism. He argues that the systems-based
view explains the existing successes of cognitive psychology and
cognate fields in a way that extended conceptions of cognition do
not, and that once the systems-based view has been adopted, it is
especially clear how extant arguments in support of the extended
view go wrong.
According to Russellian monism, an alternative to the familiar theories in the philosophy of mind that combines attractive components of physicalism and dualism, matter has intrinsic properties that both constitute consciousness and serve as categorical bases for the dispositional properties described in physics. Consciousness in the Physical World collects various works on Russellian monism, including historical selections, recent classics, and new pieces. Most chapters are sympathetic with the view, but some are skeptical. Together, they constitute the first book-length treatment of the view itself, its relationship to other theories, its motivations, and its problems.
There has recently been a good deal of interest in moral sentimentalism, but most of that interest has been exclusively either in metaethical questions about the meaning of moral terms or in normative issues about benevolence and/or caring and their place in morality. In Moral Sentimentalism Michael Slote attempts to deal with both sorts of issues and to do so, primarily, in terms of the notion or phenomenon of empathy. Hume sought to do something like this over two centuries ago, though he didn't have the term "empathy" and used "sympathy" instead; and in effect Slote is seeking to give moral sentimentalism a "second wind" in and for contemporary circumstances. By relying systematically on empathy in its account of normative morality and in what it has to say about the meaning of moral vocabulary, Moral Sentimentalism offers a unified overall ethical picture that can then be tested against ethical rationalism. Rationalism has recently dominated the scene in ethics, but by showing how sentimentalism can make coherent and intuitive sense of such preferred rationalist notions as autonomy, respect, and justice--and by showing how a sentimentalism based in empathy can deal with ethically significant aspects of the moral life that rationalism tends to ignore or skimp on--Slote hopes a wider and more active debate between rationalism and sentimentalism can be set in motion. There are signs that sentimentalist modes of thought are gaining new footholds on the way ethics is done, and this new book is very hopeful about these possibilities.
There are few terms or concepts that have, in the last twenty or so years, rivaled "collective memory" for attention in the humanities and social sciences. Indeed, use of the term has extended far beyond scholarship to the realm of politics and journalism, where it has appeared in speeches at the centers of power and on the front pages of the world's leading newspapers. The current efflorescence of interest in memory, however, is no mere passing fad: it is a hallmark characteristic of our age and a crucial site for understanding our present social, political, and cultural conditions. Scholars and others in numerous fields have thus employed the concept of collective memory, sociological in origin, to guide their inquiries into diverse, though allegedly connected, phenomena. Nevertheless, there remains a great deal of confusion about the meaning, origin, and implication of the term and the field of inquiry it underwrites. The Collective Memory Reader presents, organizes, and evaluates past work and contemporary contributions on the questions raised under the rubric of collective memory. Combining seminal texts, hard-to-find classics, previously untranslated references, and contemporary landmarks, it will serve as an essential resource for teaching and research in the field. In addition, in both its selections as well as in its editorial materials, it suggests a novel life-story for the field, one that appreciates recent innovations but only against the background of a long history. In addition to its major editorial introduction, which outlines a useful past for contemporary memory studies, The Collective Memory Reader includes five sections-Precursors and Classics; History, Memory, and Identity; Power, Politics, and Contestation; Media and Modes of Transmission; Memory, Justice, and the Contemporary Epoch-comprising ninety-one texts. In addition to the essay introducing the entire volume, a brief editorial essay introduces each of the sections, while brief capsules frame each of the 91 texts.
This volume is a collects papers originally presented at the 7th Conference on Logic and the Foundations of Game and Decision Theory (LOFT), held at the University of Liverpool in July 2006. LOFT is a key venue for presenting research at the intersection of logic, economics, and computer science, and this collection gives a lively and wide-ranging view of an exciting and rapidly growing area.
The biological and social sciences often generalize causal
conclusions from one context or location to others that may differ
in some relevant respects, as is illustrated by inferences from
animal models to humans or from a pilot study to a broader
population. Inferences like these are known as extrapolations. The
question of how and when extrapolation can be legitimate is a
fundamental issue for the biological and social sciences that has
not received the attention it deserves. In Across the Boundaries,
Steel argues that previous accounts of extrapolation are inadequate
and proposes a better approach that is able to answer
methodological critiques of extrapolation from animal models to
humans.
One of America's most celebrated poets, Emily Dickinson was virtually unpublished in her lifetime. When a slim volume of her poems emerged on the American scene in 1890, her work created shockwaves that have not subsided yet. Famously precise and sparse, Emily Dickinson's poetry is often described as philosophical, both because her poetry grapples with philosophical topics like death, spirituality, and the darkening operations of the mind, and because she approaches those topics in a characteristically philosophical manner: analyzing and extrapolating from close observation, exploring alternatives, and connecting thoughts into cumulative demonstrations. But unlike Lucretius or Pope, she cannot be accused of producing versified treatises. Many of her poems are unsettling in their lack of conclusion; their disparate insights often stand in conflict; and her logic turns crucially on imagery, juxtaposition, assonance, slant rhyme, and punctuation. The six chapters of this volume collectively argue that Dickinson is an epistemically ambitious poet, who explores fundamental questions by advancing arguments that are designed to convince. Dickinson exemplifies abstract ideas in tangible form and habituates readers into productive trains of thought-she doesn't just make philosophical claims, but demonstrates how poetry can make a distinct contribution to philosophy. All essays in this volume, drawn from both philosophers and literary theorists, serve as a counterpoint to recent critical work, which has emphasized Dickinson's anguished uncertainty, her nonconventional style, and the unsettled status of her manuscripts. On the view that emerges here, knowing is like cleaning, mending, and lacemakingL a form of hard, ongoing work, but one for which poetry is a powerful, perhaps indispensable, tool.
The editors of Ethics at the Cinema invited a diverse group of moral philosophers and philosophers of film to engage with ethical issues raised within, or within the process of viewing, a single film of each contributor's choice. The result is a unique collection of considerable breadth. Discussions focus on both classic and modern films, and topics range from problems of traditional concern to philosophers (e.g. virtue, justice, and ideals) to problems of traditional concern to filmmakers (e.g. sexuality, social belonging, and cultural identity).
Restoring Layered Landscapes brings together historians, geographers, philosophers, and interdisciplinary scholars to explore ecological restoration in landscapes with complex histories shaped by ongoing interactions between humans and nature. For many decades, ecological restoration - particularly in the United States - focused on returning degraded sites to conditions that prevailed prior to human influence. This model has been broadened in recent decades, and restoration now increasingly focuses on the recovery of ecological functions and processes rather than on returning a site to a specific historical state. Nevertheless, neither the theory nor the practice of restoration has fully come to terms with the challenges of restoring layered landscapes, where nature and culture shape one another in deep and ongoing relationships. Former military and industrial sites provide paradigmatic examples of layered landscapes. Many of these sites are not only characterized by natural ecosystems worth preserving and restoring, but also embody significant political, social, and cultural histories. This volume grapples with the challenges of restoring and interpreting such complex sites: What should we aim to restore in such places? How can restoration adequately take the legacies of human use into account? Should traces of the past be left on the landscape, and how can interpretive strategies be creatively employed to make visible the complex legacies of an open pit mine or chemical weapons manufacturing plant? Restoration aims to create new value, but not always without loss. Restoration often disrupts existing ecosystems, infrastructure, and artifacts. The chapters in this volume consider what restoration can tell us more generally about the relationship between continuity and change, and how the past can and should inform our thinking about the future. These insights, in turn, will help foster a more thoughtful approach to human-environment relations in an era of unprecedented anthropogenic global environmental change.
Academic food ethics incorporates work from philosophy but also anthropology, economics, the environmental sciences and other natural sciences, geography, law, and sociology. Scholars from these fields have been producing work for decades on the food system, and on ethical, social, and policy issues connected to the food system. Yet in the last several years, there has been a notable increase in philosophical work on these issues-work that draws on multiple literatures within practical ethics, normative ethics and political philosophy. This handbook provides a sample of that philosophical work across multiple areas of food ethics: conventional agriculture and alternatives to it; animals; consumption; food justice; food politics; food workers; and, food and identity.
In this short monograph, John Horty explores the difficulties
presented for Gottlob Frege's semantic theory, as well as its
modern descendents, by the treatment of defined expressions.
Knowledge how to do things is a pervasive and central element of
everyday life. Yet it raises many difficult questions that must be
answered by philosophers and cognitive scientists aspiring to
understand human cognition and agency. What is the connection
between knowing how and knowing that? Is knowledge how simply a
type of ability or disposition to act? Is there an irreducibly
practical form of knowledge? What is the role of the intellect in
intelligent action? This volume contains fifteen state of the art
essays by leading figures in philosophy and linguistics that
amplify and sharpen the debate between "intellectualists" and
"anti-intellectualists" about mind and action, highlighting the
conceptual, empirical, and linguistic issues that motivate and
sustain the conflict. The essays also explore various ways in which
this debate informs central areas of ethics, philosophy of action,
epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind and
cognitive science.
The context for this interdisciplinary work by a philosopher and a clinician is the psychiatric care provided to those with severe mental disorders. Such a setting makes distinctive moral demands on the very character of the practitioner, it is shown, calling for special virtues and greater virtue than many other practice settings. In a practice so attentive to the patient's self identity, the authors promote a heightened awareness of cultural and particularly gender issues. By elucidating the nature of the moral psychology and character of the good psychiatrist, this work provides a sustained application of virtue theory to clinical practice. With its roots in Aristotelian writing, The Virtuous Psychiatrist presents virtue traits as habits, able to be cultivated and enhanced through training. The book describes these traits, and how they can be habituated in clinical training. A turn towards virtue theory within philosophy during the last several decades has resulted in important research on professional ethics. By approaching the ethics of psychiatric professionals in these virtue terms, Radden and Sadler's work provides an original application of this theorizing to practice. Of interest to both theorists and practitioners, the book explores the tension between the model of enduring character implicit in virtue theory and the segmented personae of role-specific moral responses. Clinical examples are provided, based upon dramaturgical vignettes (caseplays) which illustrate both the interactions of the case participants as well as the inner monologue of the clinician protagonist.
This book introduces generative grammar as an area of study and
asks what it tells us about the human mind. Wolfram Hinzen lays the
foundation for the unification of modern generative linguistics
with the philosophies of mind and language. He introduces Chomsky's
program of a "minimalist"
This is a revised edition of Walker's well-known book in feminist
ethics first published in 1997. Walker's book proposes a view of
morality and an approach to ethical theory which uses the critical
insights of feminism and race theory to rethink the epistemological
and moral position of the ethical theorist, and how moral theory is
inescapably shaped by culture and history. The main gist of her
book is that morality is embodied in "practices of responsibility"
that express our identities, values, and connections to others in
socially patterned ways. Thus ethical theory needs to be
empirically informed and politically critical to avoid reiterating
forms of socially entrenched bias. Responsible ethical theory
should reveal and question the moral significance of social
differences. The book engages with, and challenges, the work of
contemporary analytic philosophers in ethics.
David B. Wong proposes that there can be a plurality of true moralities, moralities that exist across different traditions and cultures, all of which address facets of the same problem: how we are to live well together. Wong examines a wide array of positions and texts within the Western canon as well as in Chinese philosophy, and draws on philosophy, psychology, evolutionary theory, history, and literature, to make a case for the importance of pluralism in moral life, and to establish the virtues of acceptance and accommodation. Wong's point is that there is no single value or principle or ordering of values and principles that offers a uniquely true path for human living, but variations according to different contexts that carry within them a common core of human values. We should thus be modest about our own morality, learn from other approaches, and accommodate different practices in our pluralistic society.
When are borders justified? Who has a right to control them? Where should they be drawn? Today people think of borders as an island's shores. Just as beaches delimit a castaway's realm, so borders define the edges of a territory, occupied by a unified people, to whom the land legitimately belongs. Hence a territory is legitimate only if it belongs to a people unified by a civic identity. Sadly, this Desert Island Model of territorial politics forces us to choose. If we want territories, then we can either have democratic legitimacy, or inclusion of different civic identities-but not both. The resulting politics creates mass xenophobia, migrant-bashing, hoarding of natural resources, and border walls. To escape all this, On Borders presents an alternative model. Drawing on an intellectual tradition concerned with how land and climate shape institutions, it argues that we should not see territories as pieces of property owned by identity groups. Instead, we should see them as watersheds: as interconnected systems where institutions, people, the biota, and the land together create overlapping civic duties and relations, what the book calls place-specific duties. This Watershed Model argues that borders are justified when they allow us to fulfill those duties; that border-control rights spring from internationally-agreed conventions-not from internal legitimacy; that borders should be governed cooperatively by the neighboring states and the states system; and that border redrawing should be done with environmental conservation in mind. The book explores how this model undoes the exclusionary politics of desert islands.
Much of what we know is acquired by taking things on the word of
other people whom we trust and treat as authorities concerning what
to believe. But what exactly is it to take someone's word for
something? What is it to treat another as an authority concerning
what to believe, and what is it to then trust this person for the
truth? In Testimony, Trust, and Authority, Benjamin McMyler argues
that philosophers have failed to appreciate the nature and
significance of our epistemic dependence on the word of others.
What others tell us is the case-their testimony, as philosophers
use the term-provides us with a reason for belief that is
fundamentally unlike the kind of reason for belief provided by
other kinds of impersonal evidence. Unlike a footprint in the snow
or a bloody knife left at the scene of a crime, a speaker's
testimony provides an audience with what McMyler calls a
second-personal reason for belief, a reason for belief that serves
to parcel out epistemic responsibility for the belief
interpersonally between speaker and audience.
Americans have a deeply ambivalent relationship to guns. The United States leads all nations in rates of private gun ownership, yet stories of gun tragedies frequent the news, spurring calls for tighter gun regulations. The debate tends to be acrimonious and is frequently misinformed and illogical. The central question is the extent to which federal or state governments should regulate gun ownership and use in the interest of public safety. In this volume, David DeGrazia and Lester Hunt examine this policy question primarily from the standpoint of ethics: What would morally defensible gun policy in the United States look like? Hunt's contribution argues that the U.S. Constitution is right to frame the right to possess a firearm as a fundamental human right. The right to arms is in this way like the right to free speech. More precisely, it is like the right to own and possess a cell phone or an internet connection. A government that banned such weapons would be violating the right of citizens to protect themselves. This is a function that governments do not perform: warding off attacks is not the same thing as punishing perpetrators after an attack has happened. Self-protection is a function that citizens must carry out themselves, either by taking passive steps (such as better locks on one's doors) or active ones (such as acquiring a gun and learning to use it safely and effectively). DeGrazia's contribution features a discussion of the Supreme Court cases asserting a constitutional right to bear arms, an analysis of moral rights, and a critique of the strongest arguments for a moral right to private gun ownership. He follows with both a consequentialist case and a rights-based case for moderately extensive gun control, before discussing gun politics and advancing policy suggestions. In debating this important topic, the authors elevate the quality of discussion from the levels that usually prevail in the public arena. DeGrazia and Hunt work in the discipline of academic philosophy, which prizes intellectual honesty, respect for opposing views, command of relevant facts, and rigorous reasoning. They bring the advantages of philosophical analysis to this highly-charged issue in the service of illuminating the strongest possible cases for and against (relatively extensive) gun regulations and whatever common ground may exist between these positions.
Some philosophers hold that trust grows fragile when people become too rational. They advocate a retreat from reason and a return to local, traditional values. Others hold that truly rational people are both trusting and trustworthy. Everything hinges on what we mean by 'reason' and 'rational'. If these are understood in an egocentric, instrumental fashion, then they are indeed incompatible with trust. With the help of game theory, Martin Hollis argues against that narrow definition and in favour of a richer, deeper notion of reason founded on reciprocity and the pursuit of the common good. Within that framework he reconstructs the Enlightenment idea of citizens of the world, rationally encountering, and at the same time finding their identity in, their multiple commitments to communities both local and universal.
This volume brings together fourteen major essays on truth, naturalism, expressivism and representationalism, by one of contemporary philosophy's most challenging thinkers. Huw Price weaves together Quinean minimalism about truth, Carnapian deflationism about metaphysics, Wittgensteinian pluralism about the functions of declarative language, and Rortyian skepticism about representation to craft a powerful and sustained critique of contemporary naturalistic metaphysics. In its place, he offers us not nonnaturalistic metaphysics, or philosophical quietism, but a new positive program for philosophy, cast from a pragmatist mold. This collection will be essential reading for anyone interested naturalism, pragmatism, truth, expressivism, pluralism and representationalism, or in deep questions about the direction and foundations of contemporary philosophy. It will be especially important to practitioners of analytic metaphysics, if they wish to confront the presuppositions of their own discipline. Price recommends a modest explanatory naturalism, in the sense of Hume: naturalism about own linguistic behavior, regarded as a behavior of natural creatures in a natural environment. He shows how this viewpoint privileges use and function over truth and reference, and expression over representation, as useful theoretical categories for the core philosophical project; and thereby undermines the semantic presuppositions of contemporary analytic metaphysics. At the same time, it offers an attractive resolution of the so-called "placement problems", that so preoccupy metaphysical naturalists-a global expressivism, with affinities both to the more local expressivism of writers such as Blackburn and Gibbard, and to Brandom's global inferentialism.
This book is not aimed at exhuming Kant, but resurrecting him. It is inspired by the Critique of Pure Reason , yet is not about it: perhaps over-ambitiously, it tries to delineate not Kant's metaphysics of experience but the truth of the matter. The author shows rather than says where he agrees and disagrees with the first Critique , in so far as he understood that profound but obscure, over-systematic yet carelessly written, inspiring and infuriating, magnificent but flawed masterpiece. The book attempts a highly systematic presentation, in which the very form of the work reflects the content of the arguments. Kant is often derided for the extent to which he allows his penchant for architectonic structure to distort his insights, but it is argued that he had the right instinct in assuming that there must be some systematic way in which the necessary conditions for experience fit together. The contemporary trend in analytical philosophy seems to be towards ever more specialized, jargon-infested work, and there is a need to draw things together into a wider view that can be more generally appreciated.
Political theory is traditionally concerned with the justification and limits of state power. It asks: Can states legitimately direct and coerce non-consenting subjects? If they can, what limits, if any, constrain sovereign power? Public law is concerned with the justification and limits of judicial power. It asks: On what grounds can judges 'read down' or 'read in' statutory language against the apparent intention of the legislature? What limits, if any, are appropriate to these exercises of judicial power? This book develops an original constitutional theory of political authority that yields novel answers to both sets of questions. Fox-Decent argues that the state is a fiduciary of its people, and that this fiduciary relationship grounds the state's authority to announce and enforce law. The fiduciary state is conceived of as a public agent of necessity charged with guaranteeing a regime of secure and equal freedom. Whereas the social contract tradition struggles to ground authority on consent, the fiduciary theory explains authority with reference to the state's fiduciary obligation to respect legal principles constitutive of the rule of law. This obligation arises from the state's possession of irresistible public powers. The author begins with a discussion of Hobbes's conception of legality and the problem of discretionary power in administrative law. Drawing on Kant, he sketches a theory of fiduciary relations, and develops the argument through three parts. Part I shows that it is possible for the state to stand in a public fiduciary relationship to its people through a discussion of Crown-Native fiduciary relations recognized by Canadian courts. Part II sets out the theoretical underpinnings of the fiduciary theory of the state. Part III explores the implications of the fiduciary theory for administrative law and common law constitutionalism. The final chapter situates the theory within a broader philosophical discussion of the rule of law.
All normal human beings alive in the last fifty thousand years appear to have possessed, in Mark Turner's phrase, "irrepressibly artful minds." Cognitively modern minds produced a staggering list of behavioral singularities--science, religion, mathematics, language, advanced tool use, decorative dress, dance, culture, art--that seems to indicate a mysterious and unexplained discontinuity between us and all other living things. This brute fact gives rise to some tantalizing questions: How did the artful mind emerge? What are the basic mental operations that make art possible for us now, and how do they operate? These are the questions that occupy the distinguished contributors to this volume, which emerged from a year-long Getty-funded research project hosted by the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. These scholars bring to bear a range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives on the relationship between art (broadly conceived), the mind, and the brain. Together they hope to provide directions for a new field of research that can play a significant role in answering the great riddle of human singularity.
Since the late 1970's, the main research program for understanding intentionality - the mind's ability to direct itself onto the world - has been based on the attempt naturalize intentionality, in the sense of making it intelligible how intentionality can occur in a perfectly natural, indeed entirely physical, world. Some philosophers, however, have remained skeptical of this entire approach. In particular, some have argued that phenomenal consciousness - the subjective feel of conscious experience - has an essential role to play in the theory of intentionality, a role missing in the naturalization program. Thus a number of authors have recently brought to the fore the notion of phenomenal intentionality, as well as a cluster of nearby notions. There is a vague sense that their work is interrelated, complementary, and mutually reinforcing, in a way that suggests a germinal research program. With twelve new essays by philosophers at the forefront of the field, this volume is designed to launch this research program in a more self-conscious way, by exploring some of the fundamental claims and themes of relevance to this program. |
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