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Groundbreaking essays and commentaries on the ways that recent findings in psychology and neuroscience illuminate virtue and character and related issues in philosophy.

Groundbreaking essays and commentaries on the ways that recent findings in psychology and neuroscience illuminate virtue and character and related issues in philosophy.

Does action always arise out of desire? G.F. Schueler examines this hotly debated topic in philosophy of action and moral philosophy, arguing that once two senses of "desire" are distinguished-roughly, genuine desires and pro attitudes-apparently plausible explanations of action in terms of the agent's desires can be seen to be mistaken.

Josef Stern addresses the question: Given the received conception of the form and goals of semantic theory, does metaphorical interpretation, in whole or part, fall within its scope?

In this rigorous investigation into the logic of truth Anil Gupta and Nuel Belnap explain how the concept of truth works in both ordinary and pathological contexts. The latter include, for instance, contexts that generate Liar Paradox. Their central claim is that truth is a circular concept. In support of this claim they provide a widely applicable theory (the revision theory) of circular concepts. Under the revision theory, when truth is seen as circular both its ordinary features and its pathological features fall into a simple understandable pattern.The Revision Theory of Truth is unique in placing truth in the context of a general theory of definitions. This theory makes sense of arbitrary systems of mutually interdependent concepts, of which circular concepts, such as truth, are but a special case.

Leading philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists address issues of moral responsibility and free will, drawing on new findings from empirical science.

Bayes or Bust? provides the first balanced treatment of the complex set of issues involved in this nagging conundrum in the philosophy of science.

According to Peter Ludlow, there is a very close relation between the structure of natural language and that of reality, and one can gain insights into long-standing metaphysical questions by studying the semantics of natural language. In this book Ludlow uses the metaphysics of time as a case study and focuses on the dispute between A-theorists and B-theorists about the nature of time. According to B-theorists, there is no genuine change, but a permanent sequence of events ordered by an earlier-than/later-than relation. According to the version of the A-theory adopted by Ludlow (a position sometimes called presentism), there are no past or future events or times; what makes something past or future is how the world stands right now.Ludlow argues that each metaphysical picture is tied to a particular semantical theory of tense and that the dispute can be adjudicated on semantical grounds. A presentism-compatible semantics, he claims, is superior to a B-theory semantics in a number of respects, including its abilities to handle the indexical nature of temporal discourse and to account for facts about language acquisition. Along the way, Ludlow develops a conception of E-type temporal anaphora that can account for both temporal anaphora and complex tenses without reference to past and future events. His view has philosophical consequences for theories of logic, self-knowledge, and memory. As for linguistic consequences, Ludlow suggests that the very idea of grammatical tense may have to be dispensed with and replaced with some combination of aspect, modality, and evidentiality.

Vinod Goel argues that the cognitive computational conception of the world requires our thought processes to be precise, rigid, discrete, and unambiguous; yet there are dense, ambiguous, and amorphous symbol systems, like sketching, painting, and poetry, found in the arts and much of everyday discourse that have an important, nontrivial place in cognition.

This text presents a summary of the basic theoretical structures of classical mechanics, electricity and magnetism, quantum mechanics, statistical physics, special relativity and modern field theories.

Rather than surveying theories and data in the manner characteristic of many introductory textbooks in the field, An Invitation to Cognitive Science employs a unique case study approach, presenting a focused research topic in some depth and relying on suggested readings to convey the breadth of views and results.

A collection of works, many of them classics, on the orthodox view of visual perception.

A comprehensive, scientific examination of the popular psychological construct of emotional intelligence.

A wide-ranging collection of writings on emerging political structures in cyberspace.

the authors of these essays explore the interconnections between psychology and moral theory

The authors review major advances in verbal reports over the past decade, including new evidence on how giving verbal reports affects subjects' cognitive processes, and on the validity and completeness of such reports.

In this original and provocative book, Bogdan proposes that the ability to interpret others' mental states should be viewed as an evolutionary adaptation.