Kategoria BISAC: Philosophy >> Mind & Body

To test his hypothesis,...

Explores the dynamic relationship between bodies and the world around them.

What if we lived across and through our skins as much as we do within them? According to Shannon Sullivan, the notion of bodies in transaction with their social, political, cultural, and physical surroundings is not new. Early in the 20th century, John Dewey elaborated human existence as a set of patterns of behavior or actions shaped by the environment. Underscoring the continued relevance of his thought, Sullivan brings Dewey into conversation with Continental philosophers--Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty--and...

Examining the constitutive role of language and narration in key areas of human experience, Narrative and the Self articulates a view of the self as the implied subject of narrative utterances. Anthony Paul Kerby draws on the diverse insights of recent work in philosophy, literary theory, and psychology to synthesize a coherent and provocative view of narrative identity and selfhood. Invoking the writings of Benveniste, Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Taylor, and other theorists, he argues that language and narration play a central role in key aspects of human experience such as emotion,...

Intended for anyone attempting to find their way through the large and confusingly interwoven philosophical literature on consciousness, this reader brings together most of the principal texts in philosophy (and a small set of related key works in neuropsychology) on consciousness through 1997, and includes some forthcoming articles. Its extensive coverage strikes a balance between seminal works of the past few decades and the leading edge of philosophical research on consciousness.As no other anthology currently does, The Nature of Consciousness provides a substantial introduction to the...

In What Is Thought? Eric Baum proposes a computational explanation of thought. Just as Erwin Schrodinger in his classic 1944 work What Is Life? argued ten years before the discovery of DNA that life must be explainable at a fundamental level by physics and chemistry, Baum contends that the present-day inability of computer science to explain thought and meaning is no reason to doubt there can be such an explanation. Baum argues that the complexity of mind is the outcome of evolution, which has built thought processes that act unlike the standard algorithms of computer...

Minds are complex artifacts, partly biological and partly social; only a unified, multidisciplinary approach will yield a realistic theory of how they came into existence and how they work. One of the foremost workers in this multidisciplinary field is Daniel Dennett. This book brings together his essays on the philosphy of mind, artificial intelligence, and cognitive ethology that appeared in inaccessible journals from 1984 to 1996. Highlights include "Can Machines Think?," "The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies," "Artificial Life as Philosophy," and "Animal Consciousness: What...

Consciousness emerges as the key topic in this second edition of Owen Flanagan's popular introduction to cognitive science and the philosophy of psychology. in a new chapter Flanagan develops a neurophilosophical theory of subjective mental life. He brings recent developments in the theory of neuronal group selection and connectionism to bear on the problems of the evolution of consciousness, qualia, the unique first-personal aspects of consciousness, the causal role of consciousness, and the function and development of the sense of personal identity. He has also substantially revised the...

In Frank Jackson's famous thought experiment, Mary is confined to a black-and-white room and educated through black-and-white books and lectures on a black-and-white television. In this way, she learns everything there is to know about the physical world. If physicalism -- the doctrine that everything is physical -- is true, then Mary seems to know all there is to know. What happens, then, when she emerges from her black-and-white room and sees the color red for the first time? Jackson's knowledge argument says that Mary comes to know a new fact about color, and that, therefore,...

How can we experience real emotions when viewing a movie or reading a novel or watching a play when we know the characters whose actions have this effect on us do not exist? This is a conundrum that has puzzled philosophers for a long time, and in this book Robert Yanal both canvasses previously proposed solutions to it and offers one of his own.

First formulated by Samuel Johnson, the paradox received its most famous answer from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who advised his readers to engage in a "willing suspension of disbelief." More recently, philosophers have argued that we are...

How can we experience real emotions when viewing a movie or reading a novel or watching a play when we know the characters whose actions have this effect on us do not exist? This is a conundrum that has puzzled philosophers for a long time, and in this book Robert Yanal both canvasses previously proposed solutions to it and offers one of his own.

First formulated by Samuel Johnson, the paradox received its most famous answer from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who advised his readers to engage in a "willing suspension of disbelief." More recently, philosophers have argued that we are...

Thomas Reid's Inquiry has long been recognized as a classic philosophical text. Since its first publication in 1764, there have followed no less than forty editions. The proliferation of secondary literature further indicates that Reid's work is flourishing as never before. Yet Reid scholars have been acutely aware of proceeding without the full textual evidence. There exist thousands of unpublished manuscript pages in Reid's hand, many of which relate directly to the composition of Inquiry. Furthermore, no account has been taken of the successive alterations made to the...

This volume is a study of empowered, resilient, and globally responsible moral consciousness in the historical context of a global transition to a new level of sociohistorical organization in society. This work develops further the Freirean concept of critical consciousness, and describes its lifespan ontogeny, integrating moral psychology, critical theory and cultural critique, education, religion, and social ethics theory with cross-cultural empirical research. What evolves is a new level of understanding of human motivation, and individual and collective human spiritual potential at the...

In this book, William Irwin Thompson explores the nature of myth. Acknowledging the persuasive power of myth to create and inform culture, he weaves the human ability to create life with and communicate through symbols with myths based on male and female forms of power.

In recent years the majority of scholarship on Aristotle's philosophy of mind has concentrated on his account of sensation and has generally sought to find in his ancient account insights applicable to contemporary materialistic explanations of mental life. Challenging cognitivist and functionalist interpretations, this volume argues that Aristotle believed the mind to be unmixed, or separate from the body. Through careful textual analysis of De Anima and other key texts, the author shows that the Greek philosopher made a clear distinction between perception-an activity realized in...