Bøger i Philosophy of Mind Series serien

The author of this text offers a theory of consciousness. He proposes that conscious experience must be understood as an irreducible entity similar to such physical properties as time, mass, and space that exists at a fundamental level and cannot be understood as the sum of its parts.

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.

Mental representations are ubiquitous in cognitive science, and are used to account for many cognitive capacities, from perception to decision making. Yet we lack a clear understanding of what they are. This collection assembles essays by leading philosophers, each trying to provide answers to the puzzles posed by mental representation.

This book provides the first full-length treatment of disjunctivism about visual experiences in the service of defending a naive realist theory of veridical visual perception. It includes detailed theories of hallucination and illusion that show how such states can be indistinguishable from veridical experiences without sharing any common character.

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.

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.

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

Recent work on consciousness has featured a number of debates on the existence and character of controversial types of phenomenal experience.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book explores how groups of interacting minds relate to singular minds. Roelofs argue that we are too used to seeing the mind as an indivisible unity, and that properly understanding our place in nature requires more willingness to see minds as composite systems, both one and many.

This book uses recent evidence from psychology and neuroscience to show that perceptual learning is genuinely perceptual, rather than post-perceptual. It also offers a taxonomy for classifying cases in the philosophical literature.

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.

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.

Recent debates in philosophy of mind have resulted in an impasse, which lead to a renaissance of panpsychism as a viable alternative. Panpsychism is the thesis that mental being is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the universe.

Consciousness in the Physical World collects historical selections, recent classics, and new pieces on Russellian monism, a unique alternative to the physicalist and dualist approaches to the problem of consciousness.

Phenomenal intentionality is supposed to be a kind of directedness of the mind onto the world that is grounded in the conscious feel of mental life. This book of new essays explores a number of issues raised by the notion of phenomenal intentionality.

The Conscious Brain brings neuroscientific evidence to bear on enduring philosophical questions. Major philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness are surveyed, challenged, and extended.

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.

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.