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Author: Juhani Yli-Vakkuri
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198785968
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Can there be 'narrow' mental content, that is entirely determined by the goings-on inside the head of the thinker? This book argues not, and defends instead a thoroughgoing externalism: the entanglement of our minds with the external world runs so deep that no internal component of mentality can easily be cordoned off.

Author: Gabriel M. A. Segal
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262264563
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
A good understanding of the nature of a property requires knowing whether that property is relational or intrinsic. Gabriel Segal's concern is whether certain psychological properties—specifically, those that make up what might be called the "cognitive content" of psychological states—are relational or intrinsic. He claims that content supervenes on microstructure, that is, if two beings are identical with respect to their microstructural properties, then they must be identical with respect to their cognitive contents. Segal's thesis, a version of internalism, is that being in a state with a specific cognitive content does not essentially involve standing in any real relation to anything external. He uses the fact that content locally supervenes on microstructure to argue for the intrinsicness of content. Cognitive content is fully determined by intrinsic, microstructural properties: duplicate a subject in respect to those properties and you duplicate their cognitive contents. The book, written in a clear, engaging style, contains four chapters. The first two argue against the two leading externalist theories. Chapter 3 rejects popular theories that endorse two kinds of content: "narrow" content, which is locally supervenient, and "broad" content, which is not. Chapter 4 defends a radical alternative version of internalism, arguing that narrow content is a variety of ordinary representation, that is, that narrow content is all there is to content. In defending internalism, Segal does not claim to defend a general philosophical theory of content. At this stage, he suggests, it should suffice to cast reasonable doubt on externalism, to motivate internalism, and to provide reasons to believe that good psychology is, or could be, internalist.

Author: RICHARD J. KOSCIEJEW
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1491850132
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 589

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Book Description
Anyone who has ever tried to present a rather abstract scientific subject in a popular manner knows the great difficulties of such an attempt. Either he succeeds in being intelligible by concealing the core of the problem and by offering to the reader only superficial aspects or vague allusions, thus of deluding the reader by arousing in him the deceptive illusion of comprehension; Or else he gives an expert account of the problem, but as the untrained reader is unable to follow the exposition and becomes discouraged from reading any further. If these two categories are omitted from todays popular scientific literature, surprisingly little remains. But the little left is very valuable indeed. It is very important that the public is given an opportunity to experience-consciously and intelligently-the efforts and results of scientific research. It is not sufficient that each successive progression is taken up, elaborated, and applied by a few specialists in the field. Restricting the body of knowledge to a small group deadens the philosophical spirit of these people and leads to spiritual poverty. THE CORPSES OF TIMES GENERATIONS represents a valuable contribution to popular scientific writing. The main ideas to Theory are extremely well presented. Moreover, the presents state of our knowledge in which the paradigms of science are aptly characterized. Mr. Kosciejew shows how the criterial growth of our factual knowledge, with the striving for a unified conception comprising all empirical data, has led to the present situation which is characterized -despite all successes by an uncertainty concerning the choice of the basic theoretical concept.

Author: Brian McLaughlin
Publisher: Oxford University Press (UK)
ISBN: 0199262616
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 833

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Book Description
This is the most authoritative and comprehensive guide ever published to the state of the art in philosophy of mind, a flourishing area of research. An outstanding team of contributors offer 45 new critical surveys of a wide range of topics.

Author: Richard Schantz
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110915278
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 533

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Book Description
The debate between internalism and externalism has become a focal point of attention both in epistemology and in the philosophy of mind and language. Externalism challenges basic traditional internalist conceptions of the nature of knowledge, justification, thought and language. What is at stake, is the very form that theories in epistemology and the philosophy of mind ought to take. This volume is a collection of original contributions of leading international authors reflecting on the present state of the art concerning the exciting controversies between internalism and externalism.

Author: Richard John Kosciejew
Publisher: Author House
ISBN: 1496936353
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 633

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Book Description
If the universe is a seamlessly interactive system that evolves to an assigning of some levelling plexuity, and that, the lawful regularities of this universe are emergent properties of this system; we can legibly assume that the cosmos, as a legitimate point of singularity, as an undivided totality in the contributions for making of its whole. In that, for evincing to the 'progressive principal order' of complementarity, as placed within the intertwining relations within its given parts. Minded that this collective and undivided whole exists in some sense within all contributions of its parts, then one can declare positively or firmly maintain that it operates in self-reflective fashion and is the evidence for all emergent plexuities. Since human consciousness evinces self-reflective awareness in the human brain and since this brain is equivalently matched to all physical phenomena, as this can be viewed as an emergent property in the possessive nature of totality, such that it can be found within the whole for existing by its reason of certainty. As, can be feasible as plausibly concluded, that locality presupposes the consciousness of the universe, as 'we' are conscious to its existing conventions within this prevalent response to approaching the expeditions into which of the past-present-future dimensions, allow to some marginal glimpse into the unthinkable.

Author: Daron Acemoglu
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 0735224382
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 594

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Book Description
How does history end? -- The Red Queen -- Will to power -- Economics outside the corridor -- Allegory of good government -- The European scissors -- Mandate of Heaven -- Broken Red Queen -- Devil in the details -- What's the matter with Ferguson? -- The paper leviathan -- Wahhab's children -- Red Queen out of control -- Into the corridor -- Living with the leviathan.

Author: Katalin Farkas
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019161551X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Descartes's philosophy has had a considerable influence on the modern conception of the mind, but many think that this influence has been largely negative. The main project of The Subject's Point of View is to argue that discarding certain elements of the Cartesian conception would be much more difficult than critics seem to allow, since it is tied to our understanding of basic notions, including the criteria for what makes someone a person, or one of us. The crucial feature of the Cartesian view defended here is not dualism - which is not adopted - but internalism. Internalism is opposed to the widely accepted externalist thesis, which states that some mental features constitutively depend on certain features of our physical and social environment. In contrast, this book defends the minority internalist view, which holds that the mind is autonomous, and though it is obviously affected by the environment, this influence is merely contingent and does not delimit what is thinkable in principle. Defenders of the externalist view often present their theory as the most thoroughgoing criticism of the Cartesian conception of the mind; Katalin Farkas offers a defence of an uncompromising internalist Cartesian conception.

Author: Dan Arnold
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231145470
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Premodern Buddhists are sometimes characterized as veritable Òmind scientistsÓ whose insights anticipate modern research on the brain and mind. Aiming to complicate this story, Dan Arnold confronts a significant obstacle to popular attempts at harmonizing classical Buddhist and modern scientific thought: since most Indian Buddhists held that the mental continuum is uninterrupted by death (its continuity is what Buddhists mean by ÒrebirthÓ), they would have no truck with the idea that everything about the mental can be explained in terms of brain events. Nevertheless, a predominant stream of Indian Buddhist thought, associated with the seventh-century thinker Dharmakirti, turns out to be vulnerable to arguments modern philosophers have leveled against physicalism. By characterizing the philosophical problems commonly faced by Dharmakirti and contemporary philosophers such as Jerry Fodor and Daniel Dennett, Arnold seeks to advance an understanding of both first-millennium Indian arguments and contemporary debates on the philosophy of mind. The issues center on what modern philosophers have called intentionalityÑthe fact that the mind can be about (or represent or mean) other things. Tracing an account of intentionality through Kant, Wilfrid Sellars, and John McDowell, Arnold argues that intentionality cannot, in principle, be explained in causal terms. Elaborating some of DharmakirtiÕs central commitments (chiefly his apoha theory of meaning and his account of self-awareness), Arnold shows that despite his concern to refute physicalism, DharmakirtiÕs causal explanations of the mental mean that modern arguments from intentionality cut as much against his project as they do against physicalist philosophies of mind. This is evident in the arguments of some of DharmakirtiÕs contemporaneous Indian critics (proponents of the orthodox Brahmanical Mimasa school as well as fellow Buddhists from the Madhyamaka school of thought), whose critiques exemplify the same logic as modern arguments from intentionality. Elaborating these various strands of thought, Arnold shows that seemingly arcane arguments among first-millennium Indian thinkers can illuminate matters still very much at the heart of contemporary philosophy.

Author: Paul Lisicky
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555979211
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
In The Narrow Door, Paul Lisicky creates a compelling collage of scenes and images drawn from two long-term relationships, one with a woman novelist and the other with his ex-husband, a poet. The contours of these relationships shift constantly. Denise and Paul, stretched by the demands of their writing lives, drift apart, and Paul's romance begins to falter. And the world around them is frail: environmental catastrophes like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, natural disasters like the earthquake in Haiti, and local disturbances make an unsettling backdrop to the pressing concerns of Denise's cancer diagnosis and Paul's impending breakup. Lisicky's compassionate heart and resilience seem all the stronger in the face of such searing losses. His survival--hard-won, unsentimental, authentic--proves that in turning toward loss, we embrace life.