Download or read book The Meaning of Thought written by Markus Gabriel and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-12-03 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From populist propaganda attacking knowledge as ‘fake news’ to the latest advances in artificial intelligence, human thought is under unprecedented attack today. If computers can do what humans can do and they can do it much faster, what’s so special about human thought? In this new book, bestselling philosopher Markus Gabriel steps back from the polemics to re-examine the very nature of human thought. He conceives of human thinking as a ‘sixth sense’, a kind of sense organ that is closely tied our biological reality as human beings. Our thinking is not a form of data processing but rather the linking together of images and imaginary ideas which we process in different sensory modalities. Our time frame expands far beyond the present moment, as our ideas and beliefs stretch far beyond the here and now. We are living beings and the whole of evolution is built into our life story. In contrast to some of the exaggerated claims made by proponents of AI, Gabriel argues that our thinking is a complex structure and organic process that is not easily replicated and very far from being superseded by computers. With his usual wit and intellectual verve, Gabriel combines philosophical insight with pop culture to set out a bold defence of the human and a plea for an enlightened humanism for the 21st century. This timely book will be of great value to anyone interested in the nature of human thought and the relations between human beings and machines in an age of rapid technological change.
Download or read book A User s Guide to Thought and Meaning written by Ray Jackendoff and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-02-23 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning presents a profound and arresting integration of the faculties of the mind - of how we think, speak, and see the world. Ray Jackendoff starts out by looking at languages and what the meanings of words and sentences actually do. He shows that meanings are more adaptive and complicated than they're commonly given credit for, and he is led to some basic questions: How do we perceive and act in the world? How do we talk about it? And how can the collection of neurons in the brain give rise to conscious experience? As it turns out, the organization of language, thought, and perception does not look much like the way we experience things, and only a small part of what the brain does is conscious. Jackendoff concludes that thought and meaning must be almost completely unconscious. What we experience as rational conscious thought - which we prize as setting us apart from the animals - in fact rides on a foundation of unconscious intuition. Rationality amounts to intuition enhanced by language. Written with an informality that belies both the originality of its insights and the radical nature of its conclusions, A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning is the author's most important book since the groundbreaking Foundations of Language in 2002.
Download or read book Meaning Expression and Thought written by Wayne A. Davis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 14 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents
Download or read book The Meaning of Mind written by Thomas Szasz and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2002-08-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is Szasz's most ambitious work to date. In his best-selling book, The Myth of Mental Illness, he took psychiatry to task for misconstruing human conflict and coping as mental illness. In Our Right to Drugs, he exposed the irrationality and political opportunism that fuels the Drug War. In The Meaning of Mind, he warns that we misconstrue the dialogue within as a problem of consciousness and neuroscience, and do so at our own peril.
Download or read book The Meaning of It All written by Richard P. Feynman and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-04-29 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many appreciate Richard P. Feynman's contributions to twentieth-century physics, but few realize how engaged he was with the world around him -- how deeply and thoughtfully he considered the religious, political, and social issues of his day. Now, a wonderful book -- based on a previously unpublished, three-part public lecture he gave at the University of Washington in 1963 -- shows us this other side of Feynman, as he expounds on the inherent conflict between science and religion, people's distrust of politicians, and our universal fascination with flying saucers, faith healing, and mental telepathy. Here we see Feynman in top form: nearly bursting into a Navajo war chant, then pressing for an overhaul of the English language (if you want to know why Johnny can't read, just look at the spelling of "friend"); and, finally, ruminating on the death of his first wife from tuberculosis. This is quintessential Feynman -- reflective, amusing, and ever enlightening.
Download or read book What Does That Mean written by Eldon Taylor and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-09 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enlightenment is not something that can just be handed to you. The closest thing to it that you can receive are thoughts and questions that can lead you inward in the search for meaning. What Does That Mean? is full of thoughts and questions that do just that. Some insights you may have thought of and then forgotten, and others you may have experienced but simply havent appreciated. An old saying asserts that the value of a book is not in what it says but rather in what it does. What Does That Mean? is one of those books that will have a lifetime impact on all who read it. The book squarely faces the many inconsistencies held in our systems of belief, from the sciences to psychic phenomena. Eldon Taylor is willing to speak out without reservation, and without avoiding any so-called sanctities. The result is absolutely thought-provoking at every level, as this work addresses the meaning of life and the ultimate humanness of the human being. If you have ever questioned the nature of life, the power of the mind, unexplained events, and other mysteries, you will find this book totally riveting. Throughout these pages, Eldon shares life experiences that will lead you to revelations about your own life. Perhaps this books greatest value is that it assists you in remembering who you really are and thereby places you firmly back on the path to personal enlightenment. English writer and poet Joseph Addison, said, Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. If that is the case, then this book is the perfect workout to enrich your thinking. You may not always like what you read, but you will always find the depth of thought wholly provocative.
Download or read book Louder Than Words written by Benjamin K. Bergen and published by . This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cognition expert describes how meaning is conveyed and processed in the mind and answers questions about how we can understand information about things we've never seen in person and why we move our hands and arms when we speak.
Download or read book The Meaning of Meaning written by Charles Kay Ogden and published by . This book was released on 1959 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Prisoners of Our Thoughts written by Alex Pattakos and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2004 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely book expands on Viktor Frankl's seminal Man's Search for Meaning, examining the book's concepts in depth and widening the market for them by introducing an entirely new way to look at work and the workplace. Alex Pattakos, a former colleague of Frankl's, brings the search for meaning at work within the grasp of every reader using simple, straightforward language. The author distills Frankl's ideas into seven core principles: Exercise the freedom to choose your attitude; Realize your will to meaning; Detect the meaning of life's moments; Don't work against yourself; Look at yourself from a distance; Shift your focus of attention; and Extend beyond yourself. By demonstrating how Dr. Frankl's key principles can be applied to all kinds of work situations, Prisoners of Our Thoughts opens up new opportunities for finding personal meaning and living an authentic work life.
Download or read book The Life of the Mind written by Hannah Arendt and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1981 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author's final work, presented in a one-volume edition, is a rich, challenging analysis of man's mental activity, considered in terms of thinking, willing, and judging. Edited by Mary McCarthy; Indices.
Download or read book The Meaning of the Body written by Mark Johnson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-06-29 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Meaning of the Body, Mark Johnson continues his pioneering work on the exciting connections between cognitive science, language, and meaning first begun in the classic Metaphors We Live By. Johnson uses recent research into infant psychology to show how the body generates meaning even before self-consciousness has fully developed. From there he turns to cognitive neuroscience to further explore the bodily origins of meaning, thought, and language and examines the many dimensions of meaning—including images, qualities, emotions, and metaphors—that are all rooted in the body’s physical encounters with the world. Drawing on the psychology of art and pragmatist philosophy, Johnson argues that all of these aspects of meaning-making are fundamentally aesthetic. He concludes that the arts are the culmination of human attempts to find meaning and that studying the aesthetic dimensions of our experience is crucial to unlocking meaning's bodily sources. Throughout, Johnson puts forth a bold new conception of the mind rooted in the understanding that philosophy will matter to nonphilosophers only if it is built on a visceral connection to the world. “Mark Johnson demonstrates that the aesthetic and emotional aspects of meaning are fundamental—central to conceptual meaning and reason, and that the arts show meaning-making in its fullest realization. If you were raised with the idea that art and emotion were external to ideas and reason, you must read this book. It grounds philosophy in our most visceral experience.”—George Lakoff, author of Moral Politics
Download or read book The Experience of Meaning written by Jan Zwicky and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-05-30 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this book is a recovery of interest in the experience of meaning. Jan Zwicky defends the claim that we experience meaning in the apprehension of wholes and their internal structural relations, providing examples of such insight in mathematics and physics, literature, music, and Plato's ancient theory of forms. Taken together, these essays constitute a powerful indictment of the aggressive reductionism and the reliance on calculative modes of thought that dominate our present conception of understanding. The Experience of Meaning proposes a more just epistemology, arguing for a new grammar of thought, a new way of understanding the relationship of human intelligence to the world. Engaging with philosophy, psychology, literature, fine arts, music, and environmental studies in a profound way, The Experience of Meaning will interest any reader who ponders the question of meaning and its relation to true human expression.
Download or read book Neo Existentialism written by Markus Gabriel and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-11-26 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this highly original book, Markus Gabriel offers an account of the human self that overcomes the deadlocks inherent in the standard positions of contemporary philosophy of mind. His view, Neo-Existentialism, is thoroughly anti-naturalist in that it repudiates any theory according to which the ensemble of our best natural-scientific knowledge is able to account fully for human mindedness. Instead, he shows that human mindedness consists in an open-ended proliferation of mentalistic vocabularies. Their role in the human life form consists in making sense of the fact that the human being does not merely blend in with inanimate nature and the rest of the animal kingdom. Humans rely on a self-portrait that locates them in the broadest conceivable context of the universe. What distinguishes this self-portrait from our knowledge of natural reality is that we change in light of our true and false beliefs about the human being. Gabriel’s argument is challenged in this volume by Charles Taylor, Andrea Kern and Jocelyn Benoist. In defending his argument against these and other objections and in spelling out his theory of self-constitution, Gabriel refutes naturalism’s metaphysical claim to epistemic exclusiveness and opens up new paths for future self-knowledge beyond the contemporary ideology of the scientific worldview.
Download or read book Thought and Things written by James Mark Baldwin and published by . This book was released on 1906 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book John Searle s Philosophy of Language written by Savas L. Tsohatzidis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-18 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a volume of original essays on key aspects of John Searle's philosophy of language. It examines Searle's work in relation to current issues of central significance, including internalism versus externalism about mental and linguistic content, truth-conditional versus non-truth-conditional conceptions of content, the relative priorities of thought and language in the explanation of intentionality, the status of the distinction between force and sense in the theory of meaning, the issue of meaning scepticism in relation to rule-following, and the proper characterization of 'what is said' in relation to the semantics/pragmatics distinction. Written by a distinguished team of contemporary philosophers, and prefaced by an illuminating essay by Searle, the volume aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of Searle's work in philosophy of language, and to suggest innovative approaches to fundamental questions in that area.
Download or read book Seeing Thinking and Knowing written by A. Carsetti and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2004-03-31 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world perceived at the visual level is constituted not by objects or static forms, but by processes appearing imbued with meaning. As G. Kanizsa stated, at the visual level the line per se does not exist: only the line which enters, goes behind, divides, etc., a line evolving according to a precise holistic context, in comparison with which function and meaning are indissolubly interlinked. Just as the meaning of words is connected with a universe of highly-dynamic functions and functional processes which operate syntheses, cancellations, integrations, etc. (a universe which can only be described in terms of symbolic dynamics), in the same way, at the level of vision, we must continuously unravel and construct schemata; we must assimilate and make ourselves available for selection by the co-ordinated information penetrating from external Reality. Lastly, we must interrelate all this with the internal selection mechanisms through a precise "journey" into the regions of intensionality. In accordance with these intuitions, we may directly consider, from the more general point of view of contemporary Self-organisation theory, the network of meaningful programs living at the level of neural systems as a complex one which articulates and develops, functionally, within a "coupled universe" characterised by the existence of a double selection: external and internal, the latter regarding the universe of meaning. This network gradually posits itself as the basis for the emergence of natural and meaningful forms and the simultaneous, if indirect, surfacing of an "I-subject-": as the basic instrument, in other words, for the perception of real and meaningful processes, of "objects" possessing meaning, aims, intentions, etc.: above all, of biological objects possessing an inner plan and linked to the progressive expression of a specific cognitive action.
Download or read book Reasoning Meaning and Mind written by Gilbert Harman and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1999-07-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gilbert Harman presents a selection of fifteen interconnected essays on fundamental issues at the centre of analytic philosophy. The book opens with a group of four essays discussing basic principles of reasoning and rationality. The next three essays argue against the idea that certain claims are true by virtue of meaning and knowable by virtue of meaning. In the third group of essays Harman sets out his own view of meaning, arguing that it depends upon the functioning of concepts in reasoning, perception, and action, by which these concepts are related to the world. He also examines the relation between language and thought. The final three essays investigate the nature of mind, developing further the themes already set out. Reasoning, Meaning, and Mind offers an integrated presentation of this rich and influential body of work.
