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Book Consciousness and Intentionality

Download or read book Consciousness and Intentionality written by Grant R. Gillett and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2001-02-13 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is there an internal relationship between consciousness and intentionality? Can mental content be described in such a way so as to avoid dualism? What is the influence of social context upon consciousness, conceptions of self and mental content? This book considers questions such as these and argues for a conception of consciousness, mental content and intentionality that is anti-Cartesian in its major tenets. Focusing upon the rule governed nature of concepts and the grounding of the rules for concept use in the practical world, intentional consciousness emerges as a phenomena that depends upon social context. Given that dependence, the authors consider and set aside attempts to reduce human consciousness and intentionality to phenomena explicable at biological or neuroscientific levels. (Series A)

Book Introduction to Phenomenology

Download or read book Introduction to Phenomenology written by Robert Sokolowski and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introductory volume, presenting the major philosophical doctrines of phenomenology.

Book Intentionality

    Book Details:
  • Author : Gábor Forrai
  • Publisher : Rodopi
  • Release : 2005
  • ISBN : 9042018178
  • Pages : 207 pages

Download or read book Intentionality written by Gábor Forrai and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2005 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains eleven original papers about intentionality. Some explore current problems such as the status of intentional content, the intentionality of perception and emotion, the connections between intentionality and normativity, the relationship between intentionality and consciousness, the characteristics of the intentional idiom. Others discuss the work of historical figures like Locke, Brentano, Husserl and Frege.

Book Consciousness and Intentionality  Models and Modalities of Attribution

Download or read book Consciousness and Intentionality Models and Modalities of Attribution written by D. Fisette and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophy of mind has been one of the most active fields in philosophy for the past three decades. One of the most significant factors in the development of this discipline has been the emergence of cognitive science and the interest philosophers have taken in the empirical study of mind. Another equally important factor has been the "naturalistic tum" brought about by W. V. Quine. His proposal that normative epistemology be replaced by empirical psychology marked a radical departure from the Fregean "anti psychologism" and "apriorism" that had characterized much of the analytic tradition in philosophy. But while Quine's program of naturalization called the attention of philosophers to empirical psychology, his conception of psychology was inspired by an austere behaviorism which shunned the mentalism of intentional psychology in the Brentanian and phenomenological tradition. Thus, while agreeing with Brentano that the "intentional idiom" could not be reduced to that of the natural sciences, Quine argued that it is of a piece with the indeterminacy of translation. Most contributors of this col lection share the cognitivist stance and believe that the mind needs to be explained rather than eliminated. Three main questions are actually confronting current philosophers of mind, each addressed by one or another of the contributors to the present collection.

Book The Phenomenal Basis of Intentionality

Download or read book The Phenomenal Basis of Intentionality written by Angela A. Mendelovici and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intentionality is the mind's ability to be "of," "about," or "directed" at things, or to "say" something. For example, a thought might "say" that grass is green or that Santa Claus is jolly, and a visual experience might be "of" a blue cup. While the existence of the phenomenon of intentionality is manifestly obvious, how exactly the mind gets to be "directed" at things, which may not even exist, is deeply mysterious and controversial. It has been long assumed that the best way to explain intentionality is in terms of tracking relations, information, functional roles, and similar notions. This book breaks from this tradition, arguing that the only empirically adequate and in principle viable theory of intentionality is one in terms of phenomenal consciousness, the felt, subjective, or qualitative feature of mental life. According to the theory advanced by Mendelovici, the phenomenal intentionality theory, there is a central kind of intentionality, phenomenal intentionality, that arises from phenomenal consciousness alone, and any other kind of intentionality derives from it. The phenomenal intentionality theory faces important challenges in accounting for the rich and sophisticated contents of thoughts, broad and object-involving contents, and nonconscious states. Mendelovici proposes a novel and particularly strong version of the theory that can meet these challenges. The end result is a radically internalistic picture of the mind, on which all phenomenally represented contents are literally in our heads, and any non-phenomenal contents we in some sense represent are expressly singled out by us.

Book Phenomenal Intentionality

Download or read book Phenomenal Intentionality written by Uriah Kriegel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-09 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the late 1970's, the main research program for understanding intentionality -- the mind's ability to direct itself onto the world -- has been based on the attempt naturalize intentionality, in the sense of making it intelligible how intentionality can occur in a perfectly natural, indeed entirely physical, world. Some philosophers, however, have remained skeptical of this entire approach. In particular, some have argued that phenomenal consciousness - - the subjective feel of conscious experience -- has an essential role to play in the theory of intentionality, a role missing in the naturalization program. Thus a number of authors have recently brought to the fore the notion of phenomenal intentionality, as well as a cluster of nearby notions. There is a vague sense that their work is interrelated, complementary, and mutually reinforcing, in a way that suggests a germinal research program. With twelve new essays by philosophers at the forefront of the field, this volume is designed to launch this research program in a more self-conscious way, by exploring some of the fundamental claims and themes of relevance to this program.

Book Husserl and Intentionality

Download or read book Husserl and Intentionality written by D.W Smith and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book has roots in our respective doctoral dissertations, both completed in 1970 at Stanford under the tutelage of Professors Dagfmn F øllesdal, John D. Goheen, and Jaakko Hintikka. In the fall of 1970 we wrote a joint article that proved to be a prolegomenon to the present work, our 'Intentionality via Intensions', The Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971). Professor Hintikka then suggested we write a joint book, and in the spring of 1971 we began writing the present work. The project was to last ten years as our conception of the project continued to grow at each stage. Our iritellectual debts follow the history of our project. During our dis sertation days at Stanford, we joined with fellow doctoral candidates John Lad and Michael Sukale and Professors Føllesdal, Goheen, and Hintikka in an informal seminar on phenomenology that met weekly from June of 1969 through March of 1970. During the summers of 1973 and 1974 we regrouped in another informal seminar on phenomenology, meeting weekly at Stanford and sometimes Berkeley, the regular participants being ourselves, Hubert Dreyfus, Dagfmn Føllesdal, Jane Lipsky McIntyre, Izchak Miller, and, in 1974, John Haugeland.

Book The Sources of Intentionality

Download or read book The Sources of Intentionality written by Uriah Kriegel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-05 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Book Consciousness and Language

Download or read book Consciousness and Language written by John R. Searle and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-07-15 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description

Book Contemporary Issues in the Philosophy of Mind

Download or read book Contemporary Issues in the Philosophy of Mind written by Anthony O'Hear and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-11-13 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents key issues in the philosophy of mind, examined by leading figures in the field.

Book Aspects of Psychologism

Download or read book Aspects of Psychologism written by Tim Crane and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-02 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aspects of Psychologism is a penetrating look into fundamental philosophical questions of consciousness, perception, and the experience we have of our mental lives. Psychologism, in Tim Crane's formulation, presents the mind as a single subject-matter to be investigated not only empirically and conceptually but also phenomenologically: through the systematic examination of consciousness and thought from the subject's point of view. How should we think about the mind? Analytical philosophy tends to address this question by examining the language we use to talk about our minds, and thus translates our knowledge of mind and consciousness into knowledge of the concepts which this language embodies. Psychologism rejects this approach. The philosophy of mind, Crane believes, has become too narrow in its purely conceptual focus on the logical and linguistic formulas that structure thought. We cannot assume that the categories needed to understand the mind correspond absolutely with such semantic categories. A central claim of Crane's psychologism is that intentionality--the "aboutness" or "directedness" of the mind--is essential to all mental phenomena. In addition, Crane responds to proponents of materialist doctrines about consciousness and defends the claim that perception can represent the world in a non-conceptual, non-propositional way. Philosophers must take more seriously the findings of psychology and phenomenology, Crane contends. An investigation of mental phenomena from this broader viewpoint opens up philosophy to a more realistic and plausible account of the mind's nature.

Book The Significance of Consciousness

Download or read book The Significance of Consciousness written by Charles Siewert and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1998-07-27 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Siewert presents a distinctive approach to consciousness that emphasizes our first-person knowledge of experience and argues that we should grant consciousness, understood in this way, a central place in our conception of mind and intentionality. Written in an engaging manner that makes its recently controversial topic accessible to the thoughtful general reader, this book challenges theories that equate consciousness with a functional role or with the mere availability of sensory information to cognitive capacities. Siewert argues that the notion of phenomenal consciousness, slighted in some recent theories, can be made evident by noting our reliance on first-person knowledge and by considering, from the subject's point of view, the difference between having and lacking certain kinds of experience. This contrast is clarified by careful attention to cases, both actual and hypothetical, indicated by research on brain-damaged patients' ability to discriminate visually without conscious visual experience--what has become known as "blindsight." In addition, Siewert convincingly defends such approaches against objections that they make an illegitimate appeal to "introspection." Experiences that are conscious in Siewert's sense differ from each other in ways that only what is conscious can--in phenomenal character--and having this character gives them intentionality. In Siewert's view, consciousness is involved not only in the intentionality of sense experience and imagery, but in that of nonimagistic ways of thinking as well. Consciousness is pervasively bound up with intelligent perception and conceptual thought: it is not mere sensation or "raw feel." Having thus understood consciousness, we can better recognize how, for many of us, it possesses such deep intrinsic value that life without it would be little or no better than death.

Book Philosophy  Neuroscience and Consciousness

Download or read book Philosophy Neuroscience and Consciousness written by Rex Welshon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-17 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explaining consciousness is one of the last great unanswered scientific and philosophical problems. Immediately known, familiar and obvious, consciousness is also baffling, opaque and strange. This introduction to the problems posed by consciousness discusses the most important work of cognitive science, neurophysiology and philosophy of mind of the past thirty years and presents an up to date assessment of the issues and debates. The reader is first introduced to the way that consciousness has been thought about in the history of philosophy and psychology. The author then presents an informal and largely non-technical account of the properties of consciousness that are thought to be the most paradigmatic and problematic. Recent scientific work on consciousness, from neurophysiological studies of the brain and evolutionary studies of the development of consciousness to computational theories of the mind are then examined and the philosophical problems that these accounts raise are systematically introduced. The final chapters of the book consider more practical matters by addressing self-deception, neuroses, the unconscious and notions of the self, before concluding with an assessment of the future for psychology and the philosophy of mind.

Book Actual Consciousness

    Book Details:
  • Author : Ted Honderich
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
  • Release : 2014
  • ISBN : 0198714386
  • Pages : 433 pages

Download or read book Actual Consciousness written by Ted Honderich and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is it for you to be conscious? There is no consensus in philosophy or science: it has remained a mystery. Ted Honderich develops a brand new theory of consciousness, according to which perceptual consciousness is external to the perceiver.

Book Radical Enactivism

    Book Details:
  • Author : Richard Menary
  • Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
  • Release : 2006-01-01
  • ISBN : 9027241511
  • Pages : 268 pages

Download or read book Radical Enactivism written by Richard Menary and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This collection is a much-needed remedy to the confusion about which varieties of enactivism are robust yet viable rejections of traditional representationalism approaches to cognitivism – and which are not. Hutto's paper is the pivot around which the expert commentators, enactivists and non-enactivists alike, sketch out the implications of enactivism for a wide variety of issues: perception, emotion, the theory of content, cognition, development, social interaction, and more. The inclusion of thoughtful replies from Hutto gives the volume a further degree of depth and integration often lacking in collections of essays. Anyone interested in assessing the current cutting-edge developments in the embodied and situated sciences of the mind will want to read this book."Ron Chrisley, University of Sussex, UK

Book The Mystery of Consciousness

Download or read book The Mystery of Consciousness written by John R. Searle and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has long been one of the most fundamental problems of philosophy, and it is now, John Searle writes, "the most important problem in the biological sciences": What is consciousness? Is my inner awareness of myself something separate from my body? In what began as a series of essays in The New York Review of Books, John Searle evaluates the positions on consciousness of such well-known scientists and philosophers as Francis Crick, Gerald Edelman, Roger Penrose, Daniel Dennett, David Chalmers, and Israel Rosenfield. He challenges claims that the mind works like a computer, and that brain functions can be reproduced by computer programs. With a sharp eye for confusion and contradiction, he points out which avenues of current research are most likely to come up with a biological examination of how conscious states are caused by the brain. Only when we understand how the brain works will we solve the mystery of consciousness, and only then will we begin to understand issues ranging from artificial intelligence to our very nature as human beings.

Book Brentano s Mind

    Book Details:
  • Author : Mark Textor
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 2017-08-11
  • ISBN : 0192525654
  • Pages : 256 pages

Download or read book Brentano s Mind written by Mark Textor and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-11 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Textor presents a critical study of the work of Franz Brentano, one of the most important thinkers of the nineteenth century. His work has influenced analytic philosophers like Russell as well as phenomenologists like Husserl and Sartre, and continues to shape debates in the philosophy of mind. Brentano made intentionality a central topic in the philosophy of mind by proposing that 'directedness' is the distinctive feature of the mental. The first part of the book investigates Brentano's intentionalism as well as attempts to improve or develop it. Textor argues that there is no plausible version of this doctrine, and rejects it in favour of a mark of the mental proposed by Brentano's student Husserl: mental phenomena have no appearances. The second part of the book develops and defends Brentano's view about the structure of perceptual awareness. Awareness of a mental activity and this mental activity are not distinct mental acts, the first representing the second. They are one and the same activity that has several objects. Textor shows that Brentano held that intentionality is plural - directedness is directedness on some objects - and shows how the plural conception solves thorny problems. The third part of the book is devoted to Brentano's view of pleasure and pain. Textor draws out parallels between enjoying an activity and awareness of it and argues that enjoying an activity and the activity enjoyed are not distinct. The final part of the book extends the plural view to the conscious mental life of a thinker at a time (the unity of synchronic consciousness): it is one mental act with many objects.