Download or read book Supervenience and Mind written by Jaegwon Kim and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-11-26 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays presents the core of the work of influential philosopher Jaegwon Kim.
Download or read book Mind in a Physical World written by Jaegwon Kim and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, based on Jaegwon Kim's 1996 Townsend Lectures, presents the philosopher's current views on a variety of issues in the metaphysics of the mind--in particular, the mind-body problem, mental causation, and reductionism. This book, based on Jaegwon Kim's 1996 Townsend Lectures, presents the philosopher's current views on a variety of issues in the metaphysics of the mind--in particular, the mind-body problem, mental causation, and reductionism. Kim construes the mind-body problem as that of finding a place for the mind in a world that is fundamentally physical. Among other points, he redefines the roles of supervenience and emergence in the discussion of the mind-body problem. Arguing that various contemporary accounts of mental causation are inadequate, he offers his own partially reductionist solution on the basis of a novel model of reduction. Retaining the informal tone of the lecture format, the book is clear yet sophisticated.
Download or read book Physicalism Or Something Near Enough written by Chae-gwŏn Kim and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind have largely been shaped by physicalism, the doctrine that all phenomena are ultimately physical. Here, Jaegwon Kim presents the most comprehensive and systematic presentation yet of his influential ideas on the mind-body problem. He seeks to determine, after half a century of debate: What kind of (or "how much") physicalism can we lay claim to? He begins by laying out mental causation and consciousness as the two principal challenges to contemporary physicalism. How can minds exercise their causal powers in a physical world? Is a physicalist account of consciousness possible? The book's starting point is the "supervenience" argument (sometimes called the "exclusion" argument), which Kim reformulates in an extended defense. This argument shows that the contemporary physicalist faces a stark choice between reductionism (the idea that mental phenomena are physically reducible) and epiphenomenalism (the view that mental phenomena are causally impotent). Along the way, Kim presents a novel argument showing that Cartesian substance dualism offers no help with mental causation. Mind-body reduction, therefore, is required to save mental causation. But are minds physically reducible? Kim argues that all but one type of mental phenomena are reducible, including intentional mental phenomena, such as beliefs and desires. The apparent exceptions are the intrinsic, felt qualities of conscious experiences ("qualia"). Kim argues, however, that certain relational properties of qualia, in particular their similarities and differences, are behaviorally manifest and hence in principle reducible, and that it is these relational properties of qualia that are central to their cognitive roles. The causal efficacy of qualia, therefore, is not entirely lost. According to Kim, then, while physicalism is not the whole truth, it is the truth near enough.
Download or read book Physicalism Deconstructed written by Kevin Morris and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a philosophical and historical critique of contemporary conceptions of physicalism, especially non-reductive, levels-based approaches to physicalist metaphysics. Challenging assumptions about the mind-body problem, this accessible book will interest scholars working in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science.
Download or read book The Nature of Consciousness written by Mark Rowlands and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-10-11 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Nature of Consciousness, Mark Rowlands develops an innovative account of the nature of phenomenal consciousness, one that has significant consequences for attempts to find a place for it in the natural order. The most significant feature of consciousness is its dual nature: consciousness can be both the directing of awareness and that upon which awareness is directed. Rowlands offers a clear and philosophically insightful discussion of the main positions in this fast-moving debate, and argues that the phenomenal aspects of conscious experience are aspects that exist only in the directing of experience towards non-phenomenal objects, a theory that undermines reductive attempts to explain consciousness in terms of what is not conscious. His book will be of interest to a wide range of readers in the philosophy of mind and language, psychology and cognitive science.
Download or read book Supervenience written by Elias E. Savellos and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-07-28 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Supervenience is one of the 'hot discoveries' of analytic philosophy, and this collection of essays on the topic represents an examination of it and its application to major areas of philosophy. The interest in supervenience has much to do with the flexibility of the concept. To say that x supervenes on y indicates a degree of dependence without committing one to the view that x can be reduced to y. Thus supervenience is a relationship that has the potential of replacing the traditional notion of dependence, while performing at least part of the function reductive relationships were supposed to fulfil. Moreover, since it is a topic-neutral concept, supervenience has a wide range of applicability.
Download or read book Reality and Humean Supervenience written by Gerhard Preyer and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2002-07-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If asked what Humeanism could mean today, there is no other philosopher to turn to whose work covers such a wide range of topics from a unified Humean perspective as that of David Lewis. The core of Lewis's many contributions to philosophy, including his work in philosophical ontology, intensional logic and semantics, probability and decision theory, topics within philosophy of science as well as a distinguished philosophy of mind, can be understood as the development of philosophical position that is centered around his conception of Humean supervenience. If we accept the thesis that it is physical science and not philosophical reasoning that will eventually arrive at the basic constituents of all matter pertaining to our world, then Humean supervenience is the assumption that all truths about our world will supervene on the class of physical truths in the following sense: There are no truths in any compartment of our world that cannot be accounted for in terms of differences and similarities among those properties and external space-time relations that are fundamental to our world according to physical science.
Download or read book Consciousness and the Limits of Objectivity written by Robert J. Howell and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-06-13 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert J. Howell offers a new account of the relationship between conscious experience and the physical world, based on a neo-Cartesian notion of the physical and careful consideration of three anti-materialist arguments. His theory of subjective physicalism reconciles the data of consciousness with the advantages of a monistic, physical ontology.
Download or read book Analytic Philosophy written by Aloysius Martinich and published by Blackwell Publishing. This book was released on 2001-12-04 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This substantial anthology comprises the most comprehensive and authoritative collection of readings in analytic philosophy of the twentieth century. It provides a survey and analysis of the key issues, figures and concepts. The volume is divided into seven sections: philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, free will and personal identity, ethics, and methodology. It includes the most familiar texts of the analytic tradition, as well as several others that are less often anthologized. Several articles are logically related to each other. For example, Moore's Four Forms of Skepticism, appears together with selections from Wittgenstein's On Certainty; Langford's discussion of the paradox of analysis and Moore's reply are both included; and Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism is paired with Grice and Strawson's In Defense of a Dogma. The distinctive selections and internal coherence make this anthology an invaluable guide for anyone interested in twentieth-century and analytic philosophy.
Download or read book Structure and the Metaphysics of Mind written by William Jaworski and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Structure and the Metaphysics of Mind is the first book to show how hylomorphism can be used to solve mind-body problems--persistent problems understanding how thought, feeling, perception, and other mental phenomena fit into the physical world described by our best science. Hylomorphism claims that structure is a basic ontological and explanatory principle. Some individuals, paradigmatically living things, consist of materials that are structured or organized in various ways. Those structures are responsible for individuals being the kinds of things they are, and having the kinds of powers or capacities they have. From a hylomorphic perspective, mind-body problems are byproducts of a worldview that rejects structure. Hylomorphic structure carves out distinctive individuals from the otherwise undifferentiated sea of matter and energy described by our best physics, and it confers on those individuals distinctive powers, including the powers to think, feel, and perceive. A worldview that rejects hylomorphic structure lacks a basic principle which distinguishes the parts of the physical universe that can think, feel, and perceive from those that can't, and without such a principle, the existence of those powers in the physical world can start to look inexplicable and mysterious. But if mental phenomena are structural phenomena, as hylomorphism claims, then they are uncontroversially part of the physical world, for on the hylomorphic view, structure is uncontroversially part of the physical world. Hylomorphism thus provides an elegant way of solving mind-body problems.
Download or read book Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind written by Jaegwon Kim and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-10-21 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jaegwon Kim presents a selection of his essays from the last two decades. The volume includes three new essays, on an agent-centered first-person account of action explanation, the concepts of realization and their bearings on the mind-body problem, and the nonexistence of laws in the special sciences. Among other topics covered are emergence and emergentism, the nature of explanation and of theories of explanation, reduction and reductive explanation, mental causation and explanatory exclusion. Kim tackles questions such as: How should we understand the concept of "emergence", and what are the prospects of emergentism as a doctrine about the status of minds? What does an agent-centered, first-person account of explanation of human actions look like? Why aren't there strict laws in the special sciences - sciences like biology, psychology, and sociology? The essays will be accessible to attentive readers without an extensive philosophical background.
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.
Download or read book Physicalism and Mental Causation written by Sven Walter and published by Imprint Academic. This book was released on 2003 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a range of essays on the conceptual foundations of physicalism, mental causation and human agency.
Download or read book Mind Meaning and Reality written by D. H. Mellor and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-30 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mind, Meaning, and Reality presents fifteen philosophical papers in which D. H. Mellor explores some of the most intriguing questions in philosophy. These include: what determines what we think, and what we use language to mean; how that depends on what there is in the world and why there is only one universe; and the nature of time.
Download or read book Mental Causation written by Thomas Kroedel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a comprehensive account of how the mind causes things to happen in the physical world. This book is also available as Open Access.
Download or read book Supervenience written by Jaegwon Kim and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 674 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The International Research library of Philosophy collects in book form a wide range of important and influential essays in philosophy, drawn predominantly from English language journals. Each volume in the library deals with a field of enquiry which has received significant attention in philosophy in the last 25 years and is edited by a philosopher noted in that field.
Download or read book Having Thought written by John Haugeland and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2000-09-15 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The unifying theme of these thirteen essays is understanding. Haugeland addresses mind and intelligence; intelligibility; analog and digital systems and supervenience; presuppositions about the foundational notions of intentionality and representation; and the essential character of understanding in relation to what is understood.
