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"What is free will? Can it exist in a determined universe? How can we determine who, if anyone, possesses it? Philosophers have been debating these questions for millennia. In recent decades neuroscientists have joined the fray with questions of their own. Which neural mechanisms could enable conscious control of action? What are intentional actions? Do contemporary developments in neuroscience rule out free will or, instead, illuminate how it works? Over the past few years, neuroscientists and philosophers have increasingly come to understand that both fields can make substantive contributions to the free-will debate, so working together is the best path forward to understanding whether, wh...
Consciousness in Interaction is an interdisciplinary collection with contributions from philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and historians of philosophy. It revolves around the idea that consciousness emerges from, and impacts on, our skilled interactions with the natural and social context. Section one discusses how phenomenal consciousness and subjective selfhood are grounded on natural and social interactions, and what role brain activity plays in these phenomena. Section two analyzes how interactions with external objects and other human beings shape our understanding of ourselves, and how consciousness changes social interaction, self-control and emotions. Section three provides historical depth to the volume, by tracing the roots of the contemporary notion of consciousness in early modern philosophy. The book offers interdisciplinary insight on a variety of key topics in consciousness research: as such, it is of particular interest for researchers from philosophy of mind, phenomenology, cognitive and social sciences, and humanities.
Within the contemporary philosophical debates over the nature of perception, the question of whether perception has content in the first place recently has become a focus of discussion. The most common view is that it does, but a number of philosophers have questioned this claim. The issue immediately raises a number of related questions. What does it mean to say that perception has content? Does perception have more than one kind of content? Does perceptual content derive from the content of beliefs or judgments? Should perceptual content be understood in terms of accuracy conditions? Is naive realism compatible with holding that perception has content? This volume brings together philosophers representing many different perspectives to address these and other central questions in the philosophy of perception.
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.
An examination of the nineteenth-century American novel that argues for a new genealogy of the concept of the will. What if the modern person were defined not by reason or sentiment, as Enlightenment thinkers hoped, but by will? Western modernity rests on the ideal of the autonomous subject, charting a path toward self-determination. Yet novelists have portrayed the will as prone to insufficiency or excess—from indecision to obsession, wild impulse to melancholic inertia. Jennifer Fleissner’s ambitious book shows how the novel’s attention to the will’s maladies enables an ongoing interrogation of modern premises from within. Maladies of the Will reveals the nineteenth-century America...
The essays in this volume ask what if anything survives of our everyday understanding of the responsible agent once we have decomposed the conscious will and sacked the central executive? Book jacket.
Continuing the debate over whether consciousness causes behaviour or plays no functional role in it, leading scholars discuss the question in terms of neuroscience, philosophy, law, and public policy.
According to Russellian monism, an alternative to the familiar theories in the philosophy of mind that combines attractive components of physicalism and dualism, matter has intrinsic properties that both constitute consciousness and serve as categorical bases for the dispositional properties described in physics. Consciousness in the Physical World collects various works on Russellian monism, including historical selections, recent classics, and new pieces. Most chapters are sympathetic with the view, but some are skeptical. Together, they constitute the first book-length treatment of the view itself, its relationship to other theories, its motivations, and its problems.
Mendelovici proposes a novel theory of intentionality in terms of phenomenal consciousness, arguing that the view avoids the problems of its competitors and can accommodate a wide range of cases, including those of thought and nonconscious states.
If I were a better human being, that person's voice wouldn't sound so shrill to me. Many of us may have had such thoughts. They give voice to the worrying intuition that if we were less affected by sexism and racism, or better at keeping our tempers, our fellow humans would look and sound differently to us. In Alien Experience, Maura Tumulty argues that we should take this sense of unease seriously. It is as philosophically significant as our unease over desires or fears that we disown. Making sense of this unease requires us to re-think the relation between experiences and standing commitments; to re-consider what we mean by self-control; and to attend to empirical questions about perceptio...