Bøker i Philosophy of Mind Series-serien

What place does consciousness have in the natural world? If we reject materialism, could there even be a credible alternative? In A Place for Consciousness, Rosenberg addresses the casual role of consciousness in the world from an anti-physicalist perspective. Introducing a new paradigm called Liberal Naturalism, he offers a profound framework that proposes a deep link between consciousness and causation. Using this framework, he undercuts the logic of the historical debate and deflates the question of causality that physicalists have long been posing to anti-physicalists.

A core philosophical project is the attempt to uncover the fundamental nature of reality, the limited set of facts upon which all other facts depend. Perhaps the most popular theory of fundamental reality in contemporary analytic philosophy is physicalism, the view that the world is fundamentally physical in nature. The first half of this book argues that physicalist views cannot account for the evident reality of conscious experience, and hence that physicalism cannot be true. Unusually for an opponent of physicalism, Goff argues that there are big problems with the most well-known arguments against physicalismChalmers' zombie conceivability argument and Jackson's knowledge argumentand proposes significant modifications. The second half of the book explores and defends a recently rediscovered theory of fundamental realityor perhaps rather a grouping of such theoriesknown as 'Russellian monism.' Russellian monists draw inspiration from a couple of theses defended by Bertrand Russell in The Analysis of Matter in 1927. Russell argued that physics, for all its virtues, gives us a radically incomplete picture of the world. It tells us only about the extrinsic, mathematical features of material entities, and leaves us in the dark about their intrinsic nature, about how they are in and of themselves. Following Russell, Russellian monists suppose that it is this 'hidden' intrinsic nature of matter that explains human and animal consciousness. Some Russellian monists adopt panpsychism, the view that the intrinsic natures of basic material entities involve consciousness; others hold that basic material entities are proto-conscious rather than conscious. Throughout the second half of the book various forms of Russellian monism are surveyed, and the key challenges facing it are discussed. The penultimate chapter defends a cosmopsychist form of Russellian monism, according to which all facts are grounded in facts about the conscious universe.

Some psychological phenomena can be explained by identifying and describing the processes that constitute them. Others cannot be explained in that way. In Attention Is Cognitive Unison Christopher Mole gives a precise account of the metaphysical difference that divides these two categories and shows that, when current psychologists attempt to explain attention, they assign it to the wrong one.

Consciousness has long been regarded as the biggest stumbling block for the view that the mind is physical. This volume collects thirteen new papers on this problem by leading philosophers including Ned Block, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, Frank Jackson, Joseph Levine, Laurence Nemirow, David Papineau, John Hawthorne, and five others.

Robert Rupert argues against the view that human cognitive processes comprise elements beyond the boundary of the organism, developing a systems-based conception in place of this extended view. He also argues for a conciliatory understanding of the relation between the computational approach to cognition and the embedded and embodied views

Thinking Without Words provides a challenging new theory of the nature of non-linguistic thought. Jose Luis Bermudez offers a conceptual framework for treating human infants and non-human animals as genuine thinkers. The book is written with an interdisciplinary readership in mind and will appeal to philosophers, psychologists, and students of animal behavior.

What do we see? We are visually conscious of colors and shapes, but are we also visually conscious of complex properties such as being John Malkovich? In this book, Susanna Siegel develops a framework for understanding the contents of visual experience, and argues that these contents involve all sorts of complex properties.

Until recently, questions in epistemology and the philosophy of mind were pursued largely in isolation from one another. This volume aims to integrate these two lines of research by bringing together fourteen new essays and one reprinted essay on the relationship between introspection, self-knowledge, and consciousness.

In this book, Derk Pereboom explores how physicalism might best be formulated and defended against the best anti-physicalist arguments.

Synthesizing decades of research, The Conscious Brain advances a new theory of the psychological and neurophysiological correlates of conscious experience.

This volume of new essays brings together philosophers representing many different perspectives to address central questions in the philosophy of perception.

The senses, or sensory modalities, constitute the different ways we have of perceiving the world, such as seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. But how many senses are there? How many could there be? What makes the senses different? What interaction takes place between the senses? This book is a guide to thinking about these questions. Together with an extensive introduction to the topic, the book contains the key classic papers on this subject togetherwith nine newly commissioned essays.One reason that these questions are important is that we are receiving a huge influx of new information from the sciences that challenges some traditional philosophical views about the senses. This information needs to be incorporated into our view of the senses and perception. Can we do this whilst retaining our pre-existing concepts of the senses and of perception or do we need to revise our concepts? If they need to be revised, then in what way should that be done? Research in diverse areas,such as the nature of human perception, varieties of non-human animal perception, the interaction between different sensory modalities, perceptual disorders, and possible treatments for them, calls into question the platitude that there are five senses, as well as the pre-supposition that we knowwhat we are counting when we count them as five (or more).This book will serve as an inspiring introduction to the topic and as a basis from which further new research will grow.

Reconsidering the nativist position toward the mind, this text demonstrates that nativism is an unstable amalgam of two different theses about the mind. It examines recent empirical evidence from developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, computer science, and linguistics.

In this wide-ranging study, Levine explores both sides of the mind-body dilemma, presenting the first book-length treatment of his highly influential ideas on how one explains the physical nature of an experience. This puzzle, the 'explanatory gap' between mind and body, is the focus of this work by an influential scholar in the field.

The present volume is the first to instead focus on the epistemology of non-visual perception-hearing, touch, taste, and cross-sensory experiences. Drawing on recent empirical studies of emotion, perception, and decision-making, it breaks new ground on discussions of whether or not perceptual experience can yield justified beliefs or knowledge and how to characterize those beliefs.

Consciousness has long been regarded as the biggest stumbling block for the view that the mind is physical. This volume collects thirteen new papers on this problem by leading philosophers including Ned Block, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, Frabk Jackson, Joseph Levine, Laurence Nemirow, David Papineau, John Hawthorne, and five others.

Discussions of personal identity frequently ignore the basic metaphysical nature of human people. What Are We? is the first general study of this important question. It explains the question's meaning, considers in detail the main possible answers to it, and suggests how the problem might be solved.

Desires lead to actions, influence feelings, and determine what counts as reward. Recent empirical evidence shows that these three aspects of desire stem from a common biological origin. Informed by contemporary science as much as by the philosophical tradition. Three Faces of Desire reveals this common foundation and builds a striking new philosophical theory of desire that puts desire's neglected face -- reward -- at its core. Schroeder dives into the way that actions and feelings are produced in the brain, arguing that a distinctive system is responsible for promoting action, on the one hand and causing feelings of pleasure and displeasure, on the other. This system, the brain's reward system is the causal origin of both action and feeling, and is the key to understanding the nature of desire.

Gut reactions is an interdisciplinary defense of the claim that emotions are perceptions of changes in the body. The basic idea behind embodied appraisals is captured in the familiar notion of a "gut reaction". Drawing a parallel between emotion consciousness and visual consciousness, this title shows that emotion is a form of perception.

In this challenging book, David Hodgson takes a fresh approach to the question of free will, contending that close consideration of human rationality and human consciousness shows that together they give us free will, in a robust and indeterministic sense, and in a way that is consistent with what science tells us about the world.

What is embodiment and why does it matter for understanding the mind? Can the machinery of mind extend beyond the head? With a substantial Foreword by David Chalmers, Supersizing the Mind is essential reading for all those interested in embodied cognition, the extended mind, and the likely shape of twenty-first century cognitive scientific explanation.

This is the one and only book by the pioneer of the identity theory of mind. The collection focuses on Place's philosophy of mind and his contributions to neighbouring issues in metaphysics and epistemology. It includes an autobiographical essay as well as a recent paper on the function and neural location of consciousness.

The first half of this book argues that physicalism cannot account for consciousness, and hence cannot be true. The second half explores and defends Russellian monism, a radical alternative to both physicalism and dualism. The view that emerges combines panpsychism with the view that the universe as a whole is fundamental.

In this study, Goldman argues that simulation is intensively used in mindreading tasks, from recognizing emotion in faces to assigning conceptual contents to thoughts. Psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy are applied to questions of third- and first- person mindreading, as well as mental concepts, moral psychology and other topics in social cognition.

What do paintings, thoughts, words, desires, photographs, and perceptions have in common? They are all about something, are directed, are contentful - in a way chairs and trees, for example, are not. This book inquires into the source of this power of directedness that some items exhibit while others do not.

In this volume, Declan Smithies argues that consciousness has unique epistemic significance in the sense that only conscious creatures have epistemic justification to know anything about the world. In other words, all epistemic justification depends ultimately on consciousness.