Kategoria BISAC: Philosophy >> Mind & Body

The reality and validity of the moral sense -- which ordinary people take for granted -- took a battering in the last century. Materialist trends in philosophy, decline in religious faith, and a loosening of traditional moral constraints contributed to a shift in public attitudes, with many decent honest folk both aware of a questioning of moral claims and uneasy with a world that has no place for the moral dimension. Haslam shows how important the moral sense is to the human personality and exposes the weakness in much current thinking that suggests otherwise. His goal is to help the...

As a young man Bill Adams travelled the world teaching US citizens abroad on behalf of a large state university on the East Coast. Back home he reflected that if there were answers to the great questions of life, then he'd not found them -- not in India, in Europe, in China, or Japan. In time he came to see that his lifelong interest in how the mind works could be the clue to the meaning of life. Socrates had been right all along: Know thyself. Adams now sets out a new reasoned argument, based on his experience as a cognitive psychologist and as a human being, to show why Socrates was...

Not consciousness, but knowledge of consciousness: that is what this book communicates in a fascinating way. Consciousness is the thread that links the disappearing gorilla with the octopus suffering from a stomach ache, and the person under anaesthetic with a new born baby. How these are different, yet illustrative, of consciousness is revealed in this accessible book by one of the world's leading thinkers and neural computing engineers. Igor Aleksander addresses this enigmatic topic, by making us understand the difference between what happens to us when thinking consciously and when sort...

Shaun Gallagher is a philosopher of mind who has made it his business to study and meet with leading neuroscientists, including Michael Gazzaniga, Marc Jeannerod and Chris Frith. The result is this unique introduction to the study of the mind, with topics ranging over consciousness, emotion, language, movement, free will and moral responsibility. The discussion throughout is illustrated by lengthy extracts from the author's many interviews with his scientist colleagues on the relation between the mind and the brain.

Emotion experience has failed to date to gain a central place in the study of consciousness. This special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies presents the most recent views on the matter, with discussions of several aspects of emotion experience. Contributors from different disciplines address links between feelings, brain, body and world. What happens in the brain and in the body when we have feelings? How do feelings relate to our understanding of the world? The contributors also analyse emotion experience per se -- the character of moods, the role of emotion...

Rupert Sheldrake outraged the scientific establishment in the early 1980s with his hypothesis of morphic resonance: his book A New Science of Life was denounced by the journal Nature as 'the best candidate for burning there has been for many years'. With his academic career torpedoed, Sheldrake has become the champion of 'the people's science'. Books such as Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and The Sense of Being Stared At have won him popular acclaim and academic opprobrium in equal measure. In this special issue of the Journal of...

What is it for you to be conscious? To be conscious now, for instance, of the room you are in? Theories on offer divide into just two categories, labelled by Ted Honderich as devout physicalism and spiritualism. The first reduces consciousness to no more than the physical, while the second takes it out of space and into mystery. But none of the proposed solutions has worked convincingly, and the reason, according to Honderich, lies in the persistent and resilient human belief that consciousness really is different. Hence his new theory of Radical Externalism, set out here and then...

For the conference and the special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies that lie behind this book, pairs of researchers were asked to tackle from different standpoints concepts of consciousness such as realism, representation, intentionality, information, control, memory and the self.

Questions on the nature of concepts in philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science, such as 'What are concepts?' and 'What is it to possess a concept?' are notoriously difficult to answer. For example, are concepts abstract mind-independent objects in some Platonic or Fregean sense, or are they better understood as mental representations, such as constituents of thoughts? A common view in cognitive science is that thought is based on word-like mental representations; some say that possessing a concept C involves demonstrating some kind of ability with respect to C's. But which ability?...

The central concern of this book is us human beings. The authors' basic question is: 'How is it that we can live in mutual care, have ethical concerns, and at the same time deny all that through the rational justification of aggression?' The authors answer this basic question indirectly by providing a look into the fundaments of our biological constitution, concentrating on what they term emotioning, that is the flow of emotions in daily life that guides the flow of the systemic conservation of a manner of living. Maturana and Verden-Zoller claim that the fundamental emotion that gave rise...

Not consciousness, but knowledge of consciousness: that is what this book communicates in a fascinating way. Consciousness is the thread that links the disappearing gorilla with the octopus suffering from a stomach ache, and the person under anaesthetic with a new born baby. How these are different, yet illustrative, of consciousness is revealed in this accessible book by one of the world's leading thinkers and neural computing engineers. Igor Aleksander addresses this enigmatic topic, by making us understand the difference between what happens to us when thinking consciously and when sort...

Falk Wunderlich prasentiert einen grundlegend neuen Ansatz zum Verstandnis der Kant'schen Bewusstseinstheorie.

Im ersten Teil bietet er eine detaillierte Rekonstruktion der bewusstseinstheoretischen Diskussionen des 18. Jahrhunderts. Im Mittelpunkt steht dabei die Rekonstruktion des Geflechts von Diskussionen, in dessen Kontext sich Kants Uberlegungen bewegen. Auf diese zeitgenossischen Debatten werden im zweiten Teil Kants bewusstseinstheoretische Ansatze bezogen. Der Autor vertritt die These, dass Kant die zeitgenossischen Standardansichten uber Bewusstsein, Apperzeption und...