Philosophy

While much has been written on Descartes' theory of mind and ideas, no systematic study of his theory of sensory representation and misrepresentation is currently available in the literature. This book is an ambitious attempt to fill this gap. It argues against the established view that Cartesian sensations are mere qualia by defending the view that they are representational; it offers a descriptivist-causal account of their representationality that is critical of, and differs from, all other extant accounts (such as, for example, causal, teleofunctional and purely internalist accounts); and it has the advantage of providing an adequate solution to the problem of sensory misrepresentation within Descartes' internalist theory of ideas. In sum, the book offers a novel account of the representationality of Cartesian sensations; provides a panoramic overview, and critical assessment, of the scholarly literature on this issue; and places Descartes' theory of sensation in the central position it deserves among the philosophical and scientific investigations of the workings of the human mind.

The voluminous writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein contain some of the most profound reflections of our time on the nature of the human subject and self-understanding — the human condition, philosophically speaking. This book mimes those extensive writings for a conception of the self. And more specifically, the book offers a discussion of Wittgenstein's later writings on language and mind as they hold special significance for the understanding and clarification of the distinctive character of self-descriptive or autobiographical language. The book also undertakes a philosophical investigation of selected autobiographical writings — among the best examples we have of human selves exploring themselves — as they cast new and special light on the critique of mind-body dualism and its undercurrents in particular, and on the nature of autobiographical consciousness more generally. The chapters take up in turn the topics of self-consciousness, what Wittgenstein calls ‘the inner picture’; mental privacy and the picture of metaphysical seclusion; the very idea of our observation of the contents of consciousness; first-person expressive speech; reflexive or self-directed thought and competing pictures of introspection; the nuances of retrospective self-understanding, person-perception, and the corollary issues of self-perception (itself an interestingly dangerous phrase); self-defining memory; and the therapeutic conception of philosophical progress as it applies to all of these issues. The cast of characters interwoven throughout the discussion include, in addition to Wittgenstein centrally, Augustine, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Iris Murdoch, Donald Davidson, and Stanley Cavell, among others.

If humans are purely physical, and the brain does the work formerly assigned to the mind or soul, then how can it fail to be the case that our thoughts and actions are determined by the laws of neurobiology, and that free will, moral responsibility, and reason itself are in jeopardy? Bringing together insights from both philosophy and neuroscience, this book defends a non-reductive version of physicalism whereby humans are (sometimes) the authors of their own thoughts and actions. One resource is an account of mind as embodied and constituted by action-feedback-evaluation-action loops in the environment, ‘scaffolded’ by culture. Another is a non-mysterious account of downward (mental) causation explained in terms of a complex, higher-order system exercising constraints on lower-level processes. These resources are utilized to take on two problems in philosophy of mind: the meaningfulness of language, and the causal efficacy of the mental. Solutions to these problems are a prerequisite to addressing the central problem of the book: how can biological organisms be free and morally responsible? The book argues that the real problem is not neurobiological determinism, but neurobiological reductionism. The relevant question is whether humans, as whole persons, exert downward causation over some of their own parts and processes. If all organisms do this to some extent, what needs to be added to this animalian flexibility to constitute free and responsible action? The keys are sophisticated language and hierarchically ordered cognitive processes allowing (mature) humans to evaluate their own actions, motives, goals, and moral principles.

Disjunctivism has attracted considerable philosophical attention in recent years: it has been the source of a lively and extended debate spanning the philosophy of perception, epistemology, and the philosophy of action. The seventeen chapters in this book examine the different forms of disjunctivism and explore the connections between them.

Over recent years, the psychology of concepts has been rejuvenated by new work on prototypes, inventive ideas on causal cognition, the development of neo-empiricist theories of concepts, and the inputs of the budding neuropsychology of concepts. But our empirical knowledge about concepts has yet to be organized in a coherent framework. This book argues that the dominant psychological theories of concepts fail to provide such a framework and that drastic conceptual changes are required to make sense of the research on concepts in psychology and neuropsychology. The book shows that the class of concepts divides into several distinct kinds that have little in common with one another and that for this very reason, it is a mistake to attempt to encompass all known phenomena within a single theory of concepts. In brief, concepts are not a natural kind. The book concludes that the theoretical notion of concept should be eliminated from the theoretical apparatus of contemporary psychology and should be replaced with theoretical notions that are more appropriate for fulfilling psychologists' goals. The notion of concept has encouraged psychologists to believe that a single theory of concepts could be developed, leading to useless theoretical controversies between the dominant paradigms of concepts. Keeping this notion would slow down, and maybe prevent, the development of a more adequate classification and would overshadow the theoretical and empirical issues that are raised by this more adequate classification.

In recent decades the analysis of the connection of truth, meaning, and the mental has been a major philosophical question, and Donald Davidson has brought together these subjects in a unified theory of thought, meaning, action, and evaluation. This volume features specially written essays from the most important philosophers working on the subject, and the collection reappraises Davidson’s philosophy with an engaging and illuminating discussion of various problems in the philosophy of truth, meaning, and the mental. In particular, Lepore and Ludwig’s interpretation of Davidson’s philosophy presents a new look and systematization of his philosophy of language, meaning, and thought. Davidson has been a considerable presence in the philosophical landscape since the 1970s, but from the contemporary point of view we have yet to come to a decision about his final place in the annals of philosophy.

Self-consciousness and personal identity are fundamental features of human subjectivity. Even present-day discussions of these issues in philosophy of mind are strongly influenced by the conceptual frameworks given to them in early modern thought. This book discusses the understanding of self-consciousness and personal identity as well as related issues, such as individuation, consciousness, reflection, self-concern, accountability, and conceptions of the soul and the afterlife, as it developed in early modern philosophy; that is, in seventeenth- and eighteenth century thinkers, such as Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, and Hume as well as their early critics, followers and other philosophical contemporaries. The book critically evaluates these contributions and explains the arguments in their historical context. It covers more than a hundred years of philosophical debate in France, Britain and Germany without neglecting to discuss either the details of the arguments or alternative interpretations.

There have long been controversies about how it is that minds can fit into a physical universe. Emergence in Mind presents new essays by a group of philosophers investigating whether mental properties can be said to ‘emerge’ from the physical processes in the universe. Such emergence requires mental properties to be different from physical properties, and much of the discussion relates to what the consequences of such a difference might be in areas such as freedom of the will, and the possibility of scientific explanations of non-physical (for example, social) phenomena. The volume also extends the debate about emergence by considering the independence of chemical properties from physical properties, and investigating what would need to be the case for there to be groups that could be said to exercise rationality.

This volume has three aims. First, historians of philosophy have typically focused on the discussions of the moral relevance of emotions, and with the exception of scholars of ancient philosophy, neglected the place of emotions in cognitive life. This collection of articles refocuses the discussion of emotion in the medieval and early modern periods to their role in cognition. Second, though many have aimed to clarify relationship between the later thinkers and their predecessors with regard to issues in metaphysics and epistemology, there has been very little effort at tracing similar lines of thought about emotion. As a whole, the contributions to this volume serve to begin a discussion about the continuities between medieval and early modern thinking about the emotions. In this regard, there is also a discussion of the emotions of cognitive life of the Renaissance. Though we get only a snapshot of a period of philosophical work often passed over, even this snapshot invites questions about how to weave an intellectual history about accounts of our emotions in our cognitive lives. Finally, attention to the concerns that engage philosophers of the medieval, renaissance and early modern periods can inform the contemporary debate regarding the relationship between emotions, cognition, and reason. The thirteen contributions explore this from the point of view of four key themes: the situation of emotions within the human mind; the intentionality of emotions and their role in cognition; emotions and action; the role of emotion in self-understanding and the social situation of individuals.

This book argues that recent work in philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology supports two radical hypotheses about the nature of morality: moral values are based on emotional responses, and these emotional responses are inculcated by culture, not hard-wired through natural selection. In the first half of the book, the hypothesis that morality has an emotional foundation is defended. Evidence from brain imaging, social psychology, and psychopathology suggest that, when we judge something to be right or wrong, we are merely expressing our emotions. The book claims that these emotions do not track objective features of reality; rather, the rightness and wrongness of an act consists in the fact that people are disposed to have certain emotions towards it. In the second half of the book, it turns to a defence of moral relativism. Moral facts depend on emotional responses, and emotional responses vary from culture to culture. The book surveys the anthropological record to establish moral variation, and draws on cultural history to show how attitudes toward practices such as cannibalism and marriage change over time. It also criticizes evidence from animal behaviour and child development that has been taken to support the claim that moral attitudes are hard-wired by natural selection. The book concludes that there is no single true morality, but also argues that some moral values are better than others; moral progress is possible.