Download or read book The Paradox of Self consciousness written by José Luis Bermúdez and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Jos� Luis Berm�dez addesses two fundamental problems in the philosophy and psychology of self-consciousness: (1) Can we provide a noncircular account of fully fledged self-conscious thought and language in terms of more fundamental capacities? (2) Can we explain how fully fledged self-conscious thought and language can arise in the normal course of human development? Berm�dez argues that a paradox (the paradox of self-consciousness) arises from the apparent strict interdependence between self-conscious thought and linguistic self-reference. The paradox renders circular all theories that define self-consciousness in terms of linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun. It seems to follow from the paradox of self-consciousness that no such account or explanation can be given. Drawing on recent work in empirical psychology and philosophy, the author argues that any explanation of fully fledged self-consciousness that answers these two questions requires attention to primitive forms of self-consciousness that are prelinguistic and preconceptual. Such primitive forms of self-consciousness are to be found in somatic proprioception, the structure of exteroceptive perception, and prelinguistic forms of social interaction. The author uses these primitive forms of self-consciousness to dissolve the paradox of self-consciousness and to show how the two questions can be given an affirmative answer.
Download or read book Self Consciousness and Self Determination written by Ernst Tugendhat and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1989-09-07 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique synthesis of the contemporary, Anglo-American philosophical approach with an abiding concern for classical philosophical problems. This book seeks to clarify the precise structure of self-consciousness and self-determination and elucidates their significance for our philosophical understanding of self-knowledge and human agency.The analysis challenges traditional models of theoretical self-knowledge and practical self-relation and elaborates an account of rationally grounded responsibility that jointly fulfills the demands of autonomy and authenticity.Tugendhat's study is a unique synthesis of the contemporary Anglo-American philosophical approach with an abiding concern for classical philosophical problems. It brings the methods of linguistic analysis to bear on such epistemological, moral, and metaphysical issues as the meaning and interconnections of self-knowledge, ego identity, rational self-understanding, and freedom of the will. In this context, the views of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Mead, and Hegel are searchingly examined. The philosophical testimony of Kierkegaard, Freud, Habermas, and others is also presented and weighed. Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination is based on a series of lectures given at Heidelberg. The book is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.
Download or read book Self and Consciousness written by Frank S. Kessel and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2014-05-22 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains an array of essays that reflect, and reflect upon, the recent revival of scholarly interest in the self and consciousness. Various relevant issues are addressed in conceptually challenging ways, such as how consciousness and different forms of self-relevant experience develop in infancy and childhood and are related to the acquisition of skill; the role of the self in social development; the phenomenology of being conscious and its metapsychological implications; and the cultural foundations of conceptualizations of consciousness. Written by notable scholars in several areas of psychology, philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, and anthropology, the essays are of interest to readers from a variety of disciplines concerned with central, substantive questions in contemporary social science, and the humanities.
Download or read book Consciousness and the Self written by JeeLoo Liu and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New essays connecting recent scientific studies with traditional issues about the self explored by Descartes, Locke and Hume. Leading philosophers offer contrasting perspectives on the relation between consciousness and self-awareness, and the notion of personhood. Essential reading for philosophers, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and psychologists.
Download or read book Self consciousness written by Sebastian Rödl and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rödl's thesis is that self-knowledge is not empirical; it does not spring from sensory affection. Rather, self-knowledge is knowledge from spontaneity; its object and its source are the subject's own activity, in the primary instance its acts of thinking, both theoretical and practical thinking, belief and action.
Download or read book Self Comes to Mind written by Antonio Damasio and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-11-09 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading neuroscientist explores with authority, with imagination, and with unparalleled mastery how the brain constructs the mind and how the brain makes that mind conscious. Antonio Damasio has spent the past thirty years researching and and revealing how the brain works. Here, in his most ambitious and stunning work yet, he rejects the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, and presents compelling new scientific evidence that posits an evolutionary perspective. His view entails a radical change in the way the history of the conscious mind is viewed and told, suggesting that the brain’s development of a human self is a challenge to nature’s indifference. This development helps to open the way for the appearance of culture, perhaps one of our most defining characteristics as thinking and self-aware beings.
Download or read book Our Own Minds written by Radu J. Bogdan and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that in response to sociocultural pressures, human minds develope self-consciousness by activating a complex machinery of self-regulation. In Our Own Minds, Radu Bogdan takes a developmental perspective on consciousness--its functional design in particular--and proposes that children's functional capacity for consciousness is assembled during development out of a variety of ontogenetic adaptations that respond mostly to sociocultural challenges specific to distinct stages of childhood. Young human minds develop self-consciousness--in the broad sense of being conscious of the self's mental and behavioral relatedness to the world--because they face extraordinary and escalating sociocultural pressures that cannot be handled without setting in motion a complex executive machinery of self-regulation under the guidance of an increasingly sophisticated intuitive psychology. Bogdan suggests that self-consciousness develops gradually during childhood. Children move from being oriented toward the outside world in early childhood to becoming (at about age four) oriented also toward their own minds. Bogdan argues that the sociocultural tasks and practices that children must assimilate and engage in competently demand the development of an intuitive psychology (also known as theory of mind or mind reading); the intuitive psychology assembles a suite of executive abilities (intending, controlling, monitoring, and so on) that install self-consciousness and drive its development. Understanding minds, first the minds of others and then our own, drives the development of self-consciousness, world-bound or extrovert at the beginning and later mind-bound or introvert. This asymmetric development of the intuitive psychology drives a commensurate asymmetric development of self-consciousness.
Download or read book Self Consciousness and Objectivity written by Sebastian Rdl and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-08 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sebastian Rödl undermines a foundational dogma of contemporary philosophy: that knowledge, in order to be objective, must be knowledge of something that is as it is, independent of being known to be so. This profound work revives the thought that knowledge, precisely on account of being objective, is self-knowledge: knowledge knowing itself.
Download or read book Consciousness and Self Consciousness written by Rocco J. Gennaro and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1996-03-20 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary work contains the most sustained attempt at developing and defending one of the few genuine theories of consciousness. Following the lead of David Rosenthal, the author argues for the so-called 'higher-order thought theory of consciousness'. This theory holds that what makes a mental state conscious is the presence of a suitable higher-order thought directed at the mental state. In addition, the somewhat controversial claim that “consciousness entails self-consciousness” is vigorously defended. The approach is mostly 'analytic' in style and draws on important recent work in cognitive science, perception, artificial intelligence, neuropsychology and psychopathology. However, the book also makes extensive use of numerous Kantian insights in arguing for its main theses and, in turn, sheds historical light on Kant's theory of mind. A detailed analysis of the relationships between (self-)consciousness, behavior, memory, intentionality, and de se attitudes are examples of the central topics to be found in this work. (Series A)
Download or read book Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Consciousness and the Self written by Sangeetha Menon and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-12-12 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together ancient spiritual wisdom and modern science and philosophy to address age-old questions regarding our existence, free will and the nature of conscious awareness. Stuart Hameroff MD Professor, Anesthesiology and Psychology, and Director, Center for Consciousness Studies The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona This book presents a rich, broad-ranging overview of contemporary research and scholarship into consciousness and the self.... It is ... to their credit that the editors have assembled a highly stimulating set of scholars whose expertise cover all the relevant areas. I strongly recommend the book to anyone with an interest in understanding the directions in which contemporary thinking about the nature of consciousness is headed. B. Les Lancaster Emeritus Professor of Transpersonal Psychology Liverpool John Moores University, UK This volume is a collection of 23 essays that contribute to the emerging discipline of consciousness studies with particular focus on the concept of the self. The essays together argue that to understand consciousness is to understand the self that beholds consciousness. Two broad issues are addressed in the volume: the place of the self in the lives of humans and nonhuman primates; and the interrelations between the self and consciousness, which contribute to the understanding of cognitive functions, awareness, free will, nature of reality, and the complex experiential and behavioural attributes of consciousness. The book presents cutting-edge and original work from well-known authors and scholars of philosophy, psychiatry, behavioural sciences and physics. This is a pioneering attempt to present to the reader multiple ways of conceptualizing and thus understanding the relation between consciousness and self in a nuanced manner.
Download or read book The Structure and Development of Self Consciousness written by Dan Zahavi and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2004-09-23 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Self-consciousness is a topic of considerable importance to a variety of empirical and theoretical disciplines such as developmental and social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy. This volume presents essays on self-consciousness by prominent psychologists, cognitive neurologists, and philosophers. Some of the topics included are the infants’ sense of self and others, theory of mind, phenomenology of embodiment, neural mechanisms of action attribution, and hermeneutics of the self. A number of these essays argue in turn that empirical findings in developmental psychology, phenomenological analyses of embodiment, or studies of pathological self-experiences point to the existence of a type of self-consciousness that does not require any explicit I —thought or self-observation, but is more adequately described as a pre-reflective, embodied form of self-familiarity. The different contributions in the volume amply demonstrate that self-consciousness is a complex multifaceted phenomenon that calls for an integration of different complementary interdisciplinary perspectives. (Series B)
Download or read book Self Consciousness and Split Brains written by Elizabeth Schechter and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Could a single human being ever have multiple conscious minds? Some human beings do. The corpus callosum is a large pathway connecting the two hemispheres of the brain. In the second half of the twentieth century a number of people had this pathway cut through as a treatment for epilepsy. They became colloquially known as split-brain subjects. After the two hemispheres of the brain are cortically separated in this way, they begin to operate unusually independently of each other in the realm of thought, action, and conscious experience, almost as if each hemisphere now had a mind of its own. Philosophical discussion of the split-brain cases has overwhelmingly focused on questions of psychological identity in split-brain subjects, questions like: how many subjects of experience is a split-brain subject? How many intentional agents? How many persons? On the one hand, under experimental conditions, split-brain subjects often act in ways difficult to understand except in terms of each of them having two distinct streams or centers of consciousness. Split-brain subjects thus evoke the duality intuition: that a single split-brain human being is somehow composed of two thinking, experiencing, and acting things. On the other hand, a split-brain subject nonetheless seems like one of us, at the end of the day, rather than like two people sharing one body. In other words, split-brain subjects also evoke the unity intuition: that a split-brain subject is one person. Elizabeth Schechter argues that there are in fact two minds, subjects of experience, and intentional agents inside each split-brain human being: right and left. On the other hand, each split-brain subject is nonetheless one of us. The key to reconciling these two claims is to understand the ways in which each of us is transformed by self-consciousness.
Download or read book Hegel on Self Consciousness written by Robert B. Pippin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-06 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the most influential chapter of his most important philosophical work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel makes the central and disarming assertions that "self-consciousness is desire itself" and that it attains its "satisfaction" only in another self-consciousness. Hegel on Self-Consciousness presents a groundbreaking new interpretation of these revolutionary claims, tracing their roots to Kant's philosophy and demonstrating their continued relevance for contemporary thought. As Robert Pippin shows, Hegel argues that we must understand Kant's account of the self-conscious nature of consciousness as a claim in practical philosophy, and that therefore we need radically different views of human sentience, the conditions of our knowledge of the world, and the social nature of subjectivity and normativity. Pippin explains why this chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology should be seen as the basis of much later continental philosophy and the Marxist, neo-Marxist, and critical-theory traditions. He also contrasts his own interpretation of Hegel's assertions with influential interpretations of the chapter put forward by philosophers John McDowell and Robert Brandom.
Download or read book Subjective Consciousness written by Uriah Kriegel and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-08-06 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some mental events are conscious, some are unconscious. What is the difference between the two? Uriah Kriegel offers the following answer: whatever else they may represent, conscious mental states always represent themselves (whereas unconscious ones do not, at least not in the right way). The book develops this 'self-representational' approach to consciousness along several dimensions - including phenomenological, ontological, and scientific - and defends it from common and uncommon criticisms.
Download or read book Self Reference and Self Awareness written by Andrew Brook and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2001-12-12 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rich in precursors (Kant and Frege) and stimulated by Castañeda’s study in the logic of self-consciousness and Shoemaker’s seminal paper ‘Self-reference and self-awareness’, the work of the past thirty-five years on self-reference and self-awareness has generated a wealth of deep, sophisticated philosophy. This volume explores the historical anticipations in Kant and Frege, brings four classic contributions together in one place, and offers five new studies. (Series A)
Download or read book Consciousness and Self Regulation written by Gary Schwartz and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first and foremost concrete fact which every one will affirm to belong to his inner experience is the fact that consciousness of some sort goes on. I -William James, 1893 We are witnessing today a mounting interest among behavioral and biological scientists in problems long recognized as central to our understanding of human nature, yet until recently considered out of the bounds of scientific psychology and physiology. Sometimes thrown into the heading of "altered states of consciousness," this growing research bears directly upon such time-honored questions as the nature of conscious experience, the mind-body relationship, and volition. If one broadly views this research as encompassing the two interrelated areas of consciousness and self-regulation, one can find many relevant contemporary examples of creative and experimentally sophisticated approaches, including research on the regulation of perception and sensory experience, attention, imagery and thinking, emotion and pain; hypnosis and meditation; biofeedback and volun tary control; hemispheric asymmetry and specialization of brain func tion; drug-induced subjective states; and biological rhythms. Because the material is spread over many different kinds of publications and disciplines, it is difficult for anyone person to keep fully abreast of the significant advances. The overall aim of the new Plenum Series in Consciousness and Self-Regulation: Advances in Research is to provide a scholarly forum for discussing integration of these diverse areas by presenting some of the best current research and theory.
Download or read book Being No One written by Thomas Metzinger and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004-08-20 with total page 896 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to Thomas Metzinger, no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience. The phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a "transparent self-model." In Being No One, Metzinger, a German philosopher, draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis of what a consciously experienced first-person perspective actually is. Building a bridge between the humanities and the empirical sciences of the mind, he develops new conceptual toolkits and metaphors; uses case studies of unusual states of mind such as agnosia, neglect, blindsight, and hallucinations; and offers new sets of multilevel constraints for the concept of consciousness. Metzinger's central question is: How exactly does strong, consciously experienced subjectivity emerge out of objective events in the natural world? His epistemic goal is to determine whether conscious experience, in particular the experience of being someone that results from the emergence of a phenomenal self, can be analyzed on subpersonal levels of description. He also asks if and how our Cartesian intuitions that subjective experiences as such can never be reductively explained are themselves ultimately rooted in the deeper representational structure of our conscious minds.
