Download or read book Materialism and the Mind body Problem written by David M. Rosenthal and published by Hackett Publishing. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Expanded and updated to include a wide range of classic and contemporary works, this new edition of David Rosenthal's anthology provides a selection of the most important and influential writings on materialism and the mind-body problem.
Download or read book Mind and Cosmos written by Thomas Nagel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-22 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic. In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.
Download or read book Why Materialism Is Baloney written by Bernardo Kastrup and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2014-04-25 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present framing of the cultural debate in terms of materialism versus religion has allowed materialism to go unchallenged as the only rationally-viable metaphysics. This book seeks to change this. It uncovers the absurd implications of materialism and then, uniquely, presents a hard-nosed non-materialist metaphysics substantiated by skepticism, hard empirical evidence, and clear logical argumentation. It lays out a coherent framework upon which one can interpret and make sense of every natural phenomenon and physical law, as well as the modalities of human consciousness, without materialist assumptions. According to this framework, the brain is merely the image of a self-localization process of mind, analogously to how a whirlpool is the image of a self-localization process of water. The brain doesn’t generate mind in the same way that a whirlpool doesn’t generate water. It is the brain that is in mind, not mind in the brain. Physical death is merely a de-clenching of awareness. The book closes with a series of educated speculations regarding the afterlife, psychic phenomena, and other related subjects. ,
Download or read book Chomsky and His Critics written by Louise M. Antony and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this compelling volume, ten distinguished thinkers -- William G. Lycan, Galen Strawson, Jeffrey Poland, Georges Rey, Frances Egan, Paul Horwich, Peter Ludlow, Paul Pietroski, Alison Gopnik, and Ruth Millikan -- address a variety of conceptual issues raised in Noam Chomsky's work. Distinguished list of critics: William G. Lycan, Galen Strawson, Jeffrey Poland, Georges Rey, Frances Egan, Paul Horwich, Peter Ludlow, Paul Pietroski, Alison Gopnik, and Ruth Millikan. Includes Chomsky's substantial new replies and responses to each essay. The best critical introduction to Chomsky's thought as a whole.
Download or read book Real Materialism written by Galen Strawson and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-05-29 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Real Materialism draws together papers written over twenty years by Galen Strawson in philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Strawson focuses on five main areas of enquiry: [1] the nature of the physical, consciousness, the 'mind-body problem', and the prospects for panpsychism; [2] the self, the subject of experience, self-consciousness, and the 'narrative' self; [3] free will and moral responsibility; [4] the nature of thought and intentionality and their connection with consciousness; [5] the problem of causation with particular reference to the philosophy of David Hume.
Download or read book Emergent Materialism written by Selton Luke Peters and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 1995 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selton L. Peters has created a significant book by presenting a complete emergentist view of mind which attempts to answer some of the major objections against traditional materialism. Particular contrast is made between this emergentist view and the Mind-Body Identity Theory. Topics include: the identity of mental and physical events, the question of the existence of irreducibly psychic properties, the function of consciousness, and the problem of personal identity. Peters also gives glimpses into future possibilities which may be realized as mankind continues to evolve. This book is particularly appropriate for graduate seminars or upper division courses in philosophy of mind, and for metaphysics or introductory philosophy courses.
Download or read book A Materialist Theory of the Mind written by D.M. Armstrong and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breaking new ground in the debate about the relation of mind and body, David Armstrong's classic text - first published in 1968 - remains the most compelling and comprehensive statement of the view that the mind is material or physical. In the preface to this new edition, the author reflects on the book's impact and considers it in the light of subsequent developments. He also provides a bibliography of all the key writings to have appeared in the materialist debate.
Download or read book Matter and Consciousness written by Paul M. Churchland and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In "Matter and Consciousness," Paul Churchland clearly presents the advantages and disadvantages of such difficult issues in philosophy of mind as behaviorism, reductive materialism, functionalism, and eliminative materialism. This new edition incorporates the striking developments that have taken place in neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence and notes their expanding relevance to philosophical issues. Churchland organizes and clarifies the new theoretical and experimental results of the natural sciences for a wider philosophical audience, observing that this research bears directly on questions concerning the basic elements of cognitive activity and their implementation in real physical systems. (How is it, he asks, that living creatures perform some cognitive tasks so swiftly and easily, where computers do them only badly or not at all?) Most significant for philosophy, Churchland asserts, is the support these results tend to give to the reductive and the eliminative versions of materialism. "A Bradford Book"
Download or read book Contemporary Dualism written by Andrea Lavazza and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-03 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ontological materialism, in its various forms, has become the orthodox view in contemporary philosophy of mind. This book provides a variety of defenses of mind-body dualism, and shows (explicitly or implicitly) that a thoroughgoing ontological materialism cannot be sustained. The contributions are intended to show that, at the very least, ontological dualism (as contrasted with a dualism that is merely linguistic or epistemic) constitutes a philosophically respectable alternative to the monistic views that currently dominate thought about the mind-body (or, perhaps more appropriately, person-body) relation.
Download or read book The Ethics of Anger written by Court D. Lewis and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-12-03 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ethics of Anger provides the resources needed to understand the prevalence of anger in relation to ethics, religion, social and political behavior, and peace studies. Providing theoretical and practical arguments, both for and against the necessity of anger, The Ethics of Anger assembles a variety of diverse perspectives in order to increase knowledge and bolster further research. Part one examines topics such as the nature and ethics of vengeful anger and the psychology of anger. Part two includes chapters on the necessity of anger as central to our moral lives, an examination of Joseph Butler’s sermons on resentment, and three chapters that explore anger within Confucianism, Buddhism, and other Eastern religions. Part three examines the practical responses to anger, offering several intriguing chapters on topics such as mind viruses, social justice, the virtues of anger, feminism, punishment, and popular culture. This book, edited by Court D. Lewis and Gregory L. Bock, challenges and provides a framework for how moral persons approach, incorporate, and/or exclude anger in their lives.
Download or read book Another Mind Body Problem written by John Harfouch and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mind-body problem in philosophy is typically understood as a discourse concerning the relation of mental states to physical states, and the experience of sensation. On this level it seems to transcend issues of race and racism, but Another Mind-Body Problem demonstrates that racial distinctions have been an integral part of the discourse since the Modern period in philosophy. Reading figures such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant in their historical contexts, John Harfouch uncovers discussions of mind and body that engaged closely with philosophical and scientific notions of race in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, in particular in understanding how the mind unites with the body at birth and is then passed on through sexual reproduction. Kant argued that a person's exterior body and interior psyche are bound together, that non-White people lacked reason, and that this lack of reason was carried on through reproduction such that non-Whites were an example of a union of mind and body without full being. Charting the development of this phenomenon from sixteenth-century medical literature to modern-day race discourse, Harfouch argues for new understandings of Descartes's mind-body problem, Fanon's experience of being 'not-yet human,' and the place of racism in relation to one of philosophy's most enduring and canonical problems.
Download or read book The Soul Fallacy written by Julien Musolino and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2015-01-06 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most Americans believe they possess an immaterial soul that will survive the death of the body. In sharp contrast, the current scientific consensus rejects the traditional soul, although this conclusion is rarely discussed publicly. In this book, a cognitive scientist breaks the taboo and explains why modern science leads to this controversial conclusion. In doing so, the book reveals the truly astonishing scope and power of scientific inquiry, drawing on ideas from biology, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and the physical sciences. Much more than chronicling the demise of the traditional soul, the book explores where soul beliefs come from, why they are so widespread culturally and historically, how cognitive science offers a naturalistic alternative to religious conceptions of mind, and how postulating the existence of a soul amounts to making a scientific claim. Although the new scientific view of personhood departs radically from traditional religious conceptions, the author shows that a coherent, meaningful, and sensitive appreciation of what it means to be human remains intact. He argues that we do not lose anything by letting go of our soul beliefs and that we even have something to gain. Throughout, the book takes a passionate stand for science and reason. It also offers a timely rejoinder to recent claims that science supports the existence of the soul and the afterlife.
Download or read book The Moral Landscape written by Sam Harris and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sam Harris dismantles the most common justification for religious faith--that a moral system cannot be based on science.
Download or read book Leibniz s Mill written by Charles Landesman and published by University of Notre Dame Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Landesman claims that dualism must be preferred to materialism. The self cannot be reduced to the body, even although in some ways dependent on it.
Download or read book Materialism A Historico Philosophical Introduction written by Charles T. Wolfe and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-01-06 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an overview of key features of (philosophical) materialism, in historical perspective. It is, thus, a study in the history and philosophy of materialism, with a particular focus on the early modern and Enlightenment periods, leading into the 19th and 20th centuries. For it was in the 18th century that the word was first used by a philosopher (La Mettrie) to refer to himself. Prior to that, ‘materialism’ was a pejorative term, used for wicked thinkers, as a near-synonym to ‘atheist’, ‘Spinozist’ or the delightful ‘Hobbist’. The book provides the different forms of materialism, particularly distinguished into claims about the material nature of the world and about the material nature of the mind, and then focus on materialist approaches to body and embodiment, selfhood, ethics, laws of nature, reductionism and determinism, and overall, its relationship to science. For materialism is often understood as a kind of philosophical facilitator of the sciences, and the author want to suggest that is not always the case. Materialism takes on different forms and guises in different historical, ideological and scientific contexts as well, and the author wants to do justice to that diversity. Figures discussed include Lucretius, Hobbes, Gassendi, Spinoza, Toland, Collins, La Mettrie, Diderot, d’Holbach and Priestley; Büchner, Bergson, J.J.C. Smart and D.M. Armstrong.
Download or read book The Mind and the Brain written by Jeffrey M. Schwartz and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-07-23 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading researcher in brain dysfunction and a "Wall Street Journal" science writer demonstrate that the human mind is an independent entity that can shape and control the physical brain.
Download or read book The Waning of Materialism written by Robert C. Koons and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-03-25 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-three philosophers examine the doctrine of materialism find it wanting. The case against materialism comprises arguments from conscious experience, from the unity and identity of the person, from intentionality, mental causation, and knowledge. The contributors include leaders in the fields of philosophy of mind, metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology, who respond ably to the most recent versions and defences of materialism. The modal arguments of Kripke and Chalmers,Jackson>'s knowledge argument, Kim>'s exclusion problem, and Burge>'s anti-individualism all play a part in the building of a powerful cumulative case against the materialist research program. Several papers address the implications of contemporary brain and cognitive research (the psychophysics of colorperception, blindsight, and the effects of commissurotomies), adding a posteriori arguments to the classical a priori critique of reductionism. All of the current versions of materialism -- reductive and non-reductive, functionalist, eliminativist, and new wave materialism -- come under sustained and trenchant attack. In addition, a wide variety of alternatives to the materialist conception of the person receive new and illuminating attention, including anti-materialist versions of naturalism,property dualism, Aristotelian and Thomistic hylomorphism, and non-Cartesian accounts of substance dualism.
