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Philosophical Devices
This book is designed to explain the technical ideas that are taken for granted in much contemporary philosophical writing. Notions like 'denumerability', 'modal scope distinction', 'Bayesian conditionalization', and 'logical completeness' are usually only elucidated deep within difficult specialist texts. By offering simple explanations that by-pass much irrelevant and boring detail, Philosophical Devices is able to cover a wealth of material that is normally only available to specialists. The book contains four sections, each of three chapters. The first section is about sets and numbers, starting with the membership relation and ending with the generalized continuum hypothesis. The second...
Knowing the Score
'A tour de force that provides fresh insight not only into the nature of sport, but cooperation, the mind, altruism, teamwork, leadership, tribalism and ritualism. It's a book that every sports fan should read, and every sports writer should absorb' Matthew Syed 'David Papineau's book is an important contribution to our thinking about sports, society, psychology, and moral philosophy. But it is also much more than that. Gripping from start to finish, it is a terrific read full of humour and good sense. You don't even have to like sports to enjoy it' Ian Buruma Why do sports competitors choke? How can Roger Federer select which shot to play in 400 milliseconds? Should foreign-born footballers...
Thinking about Consciousness
Thinking About Consciousness is a discussion of recent physicalist ideas about consciousness, written in an accessible style by David Papineau.
Introducing Consciousness
This title is now available in a new format. Refer to Consciousness: A Graphic Guide 9781848311718.
The Roots of Reason
David Papineau presents a controversial view of human reason, portraying it as a normal part of the natural world, and drawing on the empirical sciences to illuminate its workings. In these six interconnected essays he offers a fresh approach to some long-standing problems. Papineau rejects the contemporary orthodoxy that genuine thought hinges on some species of non-natural normativity. He explores the evolutionary histories of theoretical and practical rationality, indicating ways in which capacities underlying human reasoning have been selected for their biological advantages. He then looks at the connection between decision and probability, explaining how good decisions need to be informed by causal as well as probabilistic facts. Finally he defends the radical view that a satisfactory understanding of decision-making is only possible within a specific interpretation of quantum mechanics. By placing the subject in its scientific context, Papineau shows how human rationality plays an explicable role in the functioning of the natural world.
The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience
What are the materials of conscious perceptual experience? What is going on when we are consciously aware of a visual scene, or hear sounds, or otherwise enjoy sensory experience? In this book David Papineau exposes the flaws in contemporary answers to this central philosophical question and defends a new alternative. Contemporary theories of perceptual experience all hold that conscious experiences reach out into the world beyond the mind. According to naïve realism, experiences literally incorporate perceived facts, while representationalism holds that experiences contain ordinary properties of the kind possessed by physical objects. These ideas might seem attractive at first sight, howev...
Introducing Consciousness
'An excellent book' - Ted Honderich, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London (UCL) Introducing Consciousness provides a comprehensive guide to the current state of consciousness studies. It starts with the history of the philosophical relation between mind and matter, and proceeds to scientific attempts to explain consciousness in terms of neural mechanisms, cerebral computation and quantum mechanics. Along the way, readers will be introduced to zombies and Chinese Rooms, ghosts in machines and Erwin Schrodinger's cat.
How Biology Shapes Philosophy
A collection of original essays by major thinkers, addressing how the biological sciences inform and inspire philosophical research.
The Philosophy of Science
The aim of this series is to bring together important recent writings in major areas of philosophical inquiry, selected from a variety of sources, mostly periodicals, which may not be conveniently available to the university student or the general reader. The editor of each volume contributesan introductory essay on the items chosen and on the questions with which they deal. A selective bibliography is appended as a guide to further reading. The contributors ask whether we are justified in believing scientific theories and what attitude we should take to them if we are not. Although few philosophers seriously question the existence of everyday objects like trees and tables, many have real do...
