General

In recent years, philosophical discussions of free will have focused largely on whether or not free will is compatible with determinism. In this challenging book, David Hodgson takes a fresh approach to the question of free will, contending that close consideration of human rationality and human consciousness shows that together they give us free will, in a robust and indeterministic sense. In particular, they give us the capacity to respond appositely to feature-rich gestalts of conscious experiences, in ways that are not wholly determined by laws of nature or computational rules. The author contends that this approach is consistent with what science tells us about the world; and he considers its implications for our responsibility for our own conduct, for the role of retribution in criminal punishment, and for the place of human beings in the wider scheme of things.

What do thoughts, hopes, paintings, words, desires, photographs, traffic signs, 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. An approach to this issue prevalent in the philosophy of the past half-century seeks to explain the power of directedness in terms of certain items' ability to reliably track things in their environment. A very different approach, with a venerable history and enjoying a recent resurgence, seeks to explain the power of directedness rather in terms of an intrinsic ability of conscious experience to direct itself. This book attempts a synthesis of both approaches, developing an account of the sources of such directedness that grounds it both in reliable tracking and in conscious experience.

One of the features of consciousness that has been largely overlooked in recent treatments of the topic is its unity. What is the unity of consciousness? To what degree might consciousness be unified? And what implications might the unity of consciousness have for our conception of consciousness and the self? Drawing on philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, this book presents answers to these questions. The first part of the book develops a conception of the unity of consciousness according to which a subject has a unified conscious if and only if it has a single conscious state that subsumes each and every one of its conscious states. This conception of the unity of consciousness gives rise to the unity thesis—the claim that consciousness in human beings is necessarily unified. The second part of the volume examines the plausibility of the unity thesis. The book develops a model for evaluating the unity thesis and then goes on to apply this model to a wide range of syndromes—such as anosognosia, the hidden observer in hypnosis, and the split‐brain syndrome—in which the unity of consciousness is often said to breakdown. In each case the evidence in favour of disunity models is found wanting. The final third of the volume examines points of contact between the unity of consciousness on the one hand and theories of theories of consciousness, the sense of embodiment, and accounts of the self on the other.

This book collects fifteen articles by prominent philosophers on the epistemological writings of Timothy Williamson, along with replies from the author to each of the articles. All the key themes in Williamson's work in epistemology are covered, including such central topics as ‘knowledge-first’ epistemology, knowledge as a state of mind, cognitive homelessness, the knowledge account of evidence, and the knowledge account of assertion.

The status of Wittgenstein’s work in contemporary philosophy of mind is peculiar. While few philosophers of mind would deny that Wittgenstein had at least some helpful things to say concerning philosophical questions about the mind—some clever ways of undermining imagistic conceptions of thought perhaps, or some fruitful questions concerning the conditions of grasping a rule— one could read the most reputable journals in the profession and attend all of the main conferences bearing on the philosophy of mind and come away with the sense that Wittgenstein’s work has quite limited and dubious significance for this area of philosophy. There are some philosophers, however—in fact, some of the most respected in the world—who believe that Wittgenstein’s work constitutes one of the most significant contributions to philosophical questions about the mind in the history of philosophy, and who believe that despite the limited attention, sometimes even disdain, Wittgenstein’s work receives, it is largely of unrealized and untapped significance. This volume brings together some of the most influential figures in contemporary philosophy to discuss the significance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy for understanding the mind.