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The Hope And Horror Of Physicalism
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Book Synopsis The Hope and Horror of Physicalism by : Christopher Devlin Brown
Download or read book The Hope and Horror of Physicalism written by Christopher Devlin Brown and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-14 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book assesses the existentially relevant consequences of physicalism. It argues that accepting physicalism is the healthiest stance we can take in the face of an account of the self and world which offers no metaphysical assurances. Why should we care about physicalism? On one hand, the view seems to be inconsistent with things that many people find valuable, such as the existence of free will, God, the immortal soul, ultimate purpose, and natural laws like karma. On the other hand, physicalism seems to have positive existential implications such as supporting the unlimited potential of scientific understanding or the attitude that we need not fear supernatural powers or forces because they don’t exist. This book argues that physicalism has several consequences that are of existential import. It begins by outlining the history of physicalism and explaining two popular ways of understanding it: the via negativa approach and the theory-based approach. The rest of Part 1 explores the existential consequences of these two versions of physicalism. Part 2 draws on Nietzsche to construct an argument about what attitude we ought to adopt toward physicalism. It argues that we ought to avoid nihilism and despair even when being confronted with a picture of the universe which offers no metaphysical assurances. Finally, Part 3 is dedicated to how well physicalism deals with the hard problem of consciousness, mental causation, and multiple realization. The Hope and Horror of Physicalism will appeal to anyone interested in a contemporary approach to existential philosophy, as well as scholars and advanced students working in the fields of philosophy of mind and metaphysics.
Book Synopsis The Autonomous Individual by : Martin Weichold
Download or read book The Autonomous Individual written by Martin Weichold and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-23 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book advances a new theory of what it means to be an autonomous individual with free will and an authentic self. It synthesizes the new “action turn” from 4E cognitive science with the new “practice turn” from the social sciences to develop a new perspective on our self-interpretation as autonomous individuals. Our entire life is built upon one central foundation: the idea that we human beings are autonomous individuals. While this idea is presupposed in some academic fields, such as law and moral philosophy, it is challenged or denied in others. This book aims to move beyond debates about whether free will exists. Instead, it proposes that the idea that human beings are autonomous individuals is a culturally developed self-interpretation that is permanently enacted in social practices. Parts of it describe biological reality correctly, parts are social reality, and parts are mere fictions. This view – which the author calls "praxeological enactivism" – combines work from enactive cognitive science with practice theory from the social sciences. The book concludes by discussing the ethical advantages and dangers of the idea of the autonomous individual. The Autonomous Individual will appeal to philosophers working on free will and autonomy, moral philosophy, and philosophy of social sciences, as well as scholars and advanced students in disciplines such as cognitive science, sociology, cultural theory, and philosophical anthropology.
Book Synopsis Intentionality as Constitution by : Alberto Voltolini
Download or read book Intentionality as Constitution written by Alberto Voltolini and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-28 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops a novel theory of intentionality. It argues that intentionality is an internal essential relation of constitution between an intentional state and an object, or between such a state and a possible state of affairs as subsisting. The author’s main claim is that intentionality is a fundamentally modal property, hence a non (scientifically) natural property in that it does not supervene, either locally or globally, on its nonmodal physical basis. This is the property, primarily for an intentional mental state, to be constituted by the entities it is about. In the case of intentionality of reference, such constituents are objects, in the sense of individuals; in the case of intentionality of content, such constituents are possible states of affairs as subsisting. Constitution is meant in a mereologically literal sense: those constituents are essential parts of the relevant states. As a result, the theory claims not only that intentionality is relational but also that it is an internal, essential relation holding between an intentional state and its object or proposition-like content. Intentionality as Constitution will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and cognitive science.
Book Synopsis Imagination and Experience by : Íngrid Vendrell Ferran
Download or read book Imagination and Experience written by Íngrid Vendrell Ferran and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-16 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together two philosophical research areas that have been subject to increased attention: work regarding the unique character of having an experience and studies on the nature and powers of imagination. The importance of imagination seems to stand in tension with the assumed unique and irreplaceable role of experience in our lives. However, new arguments in various philosophical debates suggest that there is a need to examine how both areas of research interrelate and can enrich one another. The chapters in this volume examine whether the traditional accounts of experience and imagination need to be challenged. They are divided into thematic sections that discuss epistemological, ontological, normative, phenomenological, and intersubjective questions related to experience and imagination. Imagination and Experience is an essential resource for scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of mind, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of psychology.
Book Synopsis The Rhetoricity of Philosophy by : Blake D. Scott
Download or read book The Rhetoricity of Philosophy written by Blake D. Scott and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-02 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to recast the way that philosophers understand rhetoric. Rather than follow most philosophers in conceiving rhetoric as a specific way of speaking or writing, it shows that rhetoric is better understood as a dimension of all human discourse and action—what the author calls “rhetoricity”. This book provides the first philosophical treatment of rhetoricity. It is motivated by two ongoing developments. The first is the debate between Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin about philosophy’s relation to rhetoric. Both Badiou and Cassin are critical of rhetoric, albeit for different reasons. Second, there has been a growing resurgence of interest in rhetoric considering the recent rise in authoritarian politics as well as new forms of propaganda driven by “persuasive technologies”. This book identifies the common target of Badiou’s and Cassin’s otherwise incompatible critiques: rhetoric’s conception of audience. It offers a fresh take on the “new rhetoric” project of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, putting their work into conversation with the Badiou-Cassin debate. The book then turns to the hermeneutic philosophy of Paul Ricoeur in search of an expanded conception of audience. It shows that Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy allows us to extend Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s psychological notion of audience to texts themselves and to argue that human beings have a rhetorical capacity to reflect on audiences in search of what is potentially persuasive. The Rhetoricity of Philosophy will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in contemporary European philosophy, rhetoric, argumentation studies, and social theory.
Book Synopsis Philosophy of Plant Cognition by : Gabriele Ferretti
Download or read book Philosophy of Plant Cognition written by Gabriele Ferretti and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-22 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume features new research about the philosophy of plant intelligence and plant cognition, one of the most intriguing and complex current debates at the intersection of biology, cognitive science and philosophy. The debate about plant cognition is marked by deep disagreements. Some theorists are confident that the empirical evidence supports the ascription of cognitive capacities to plants. Others hold that such claims are overblown, and defend more traditional, non-cognitive accounts of plant behavior. Still others seek to formulate intermediate positions. This volume brings together leading researchers from across this theoretical spectrum to tackle the foundational questions that are at issue in the debate about plant cognition. The contributions focus on the philosophical questions raised by recent discoveries and controversies in the empirical sciences, such as: Can plants be said to have genuine cognitive abilities? Can they be characterized as representing or perceiving their environment, as pursuing goals, or even as having some form of conscious experience? Which data could provide evidence for such characterizations? And what are possible implications of these issues for general questions about the nature of cognition, representation, perception, and consciousness? Philosophy of Plant Cognition will be of interest to scholars and students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology, cognitive science, and plant biology.
Book Synopsis The Philosophy of Transformative Experience by : Michael Campbell
Download or read book The Philosophy of Transformative Experience written by Michael Campbell and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-11 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the nature and significance of transformative experiences as they occur across a variety of contexts in human life. By treating these events as social as well as individual phenomena, the essays bring to light the various ways in which cultural and institutional forces influence narratives of personal change. The ease with which we identify transformative experiences shows their importance for our sense of the potentialities inherent in human life, even while their disruptive character threatens confidence in our capability to make rational decisions concerning our future well-being. Yet, narratives of transformation are not just individual artefacts, but are also given support and structure through social forces including shared languages, practices, and institutions. What are the cultural and institutional contexts which enable this form of self-conceptualisation, and what happens when social changes undermine the cogency of these narratives? The chapters in this volume investigate these issues through a blend of philosophical theory and applied cases, working across the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy and social anthropology. Contributors investigate topics including recovery from trauma; the role of narratives in gender transition; climate activism; the ethical ramifications of war; the role of media in framing narratives of ethical change; and the university as a site of transformative experience. The Philosophy of Transformative Experience will be of interest to philosophers working in ethics, political philosophy, and decision theory, as well as scholars and advanced students in anthropology, sociology, and literary studies.
Book Synopsis Descent of the Dialectic by : Michael J. Thompson
Download or read book Descent of the Dialectic written by Michael J. Thompson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reconstructs the concept and practice of dialectics as a means of grounding a critical theory of society. At the center of this project is the thesis of phronetic criticism or a form of reason that is able to synthesize human value with objective rationality. This book argues that defects in modern forms of social reason are the result of the powers of social structure and the norms and purposes they embody. Increasingly, modern societies are driven not by substantive values concerning human good but by the technical imperatives of economic management, leading to a cultural condition of nihilism that has eroded dialectical consciousness. The first half of the book demonstrates the various ways that social power erodes and undermines critical-rational forms of consciousness. The second part of the book constructs an alternative basis for critical reason by showing how it requires seeing human value as essentially ontological: that is, constituted by objective forms of sociality that either promote human freedom or pervert our capacities and drive toward pathological forms of life. The philosophical claim is that a critical theory of ethics must be rooted in these concrete forms of life and that this will serve as a critical vantage point for critical political judgment and transformational praxis. Descent of the Dialectic will be of interest to researchers working in philosophy, political theory, social theory, and critical theory.
Book Synopsis Physicalism Deconstructed by : Kevin Morris
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.
Book Synopsis Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism by : Derk Pereboom
Download or read book Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism written by Derk Pereboom and published by Philosophy of Mind. This book was released on 2016-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Derk Pereboom explores how physicalism might best be formulated and defended against the best anti-physicalist arguments. Two responses to the knowledge and conceivability arguments are set out and developed. The first exploits the open possibility that introspective representations fail to represent mental properties as they are in themselves; specifically, that introspection represents phenomenal properties as having certain characteristic qualitative natures, which these properties might actually lack. The second response draws on the proposal that currently unknown fundamental intrinsic properties provide categorical bases for known physical properties and would also yield an account of consciousness. While there are non-physicalist versions of this position, some are amenable to physicalism. The book's third theme is a defense of a nonreductive account of physicalism. The type of nonreductivism endorsed departs from others in that it rejects all token identity claims for psychological and microphysical entities. The deepest relation between the mental and the microphysical is constitution, where this relation is not to be explicated by the notion of identity.
Book Synopsis Physicalism, Or Something Near Enough by : Chae-gwŏn Kim
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.
Book Synopsis Minds, Causes and Mechanisms by : Josep E. Corbí
Download or read book Minds, Causes and Mechanisms written by Josep E. Corbí and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2000-02-21 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Minds, Causes, and Mechanisms questions the internal consistency of causal physicalism, and vindicates a novel approach to mental causation.
Book Synopsis Evolutionary Philosophy by : Ed Gibney
Download or read book Evolutionary Philosophy written by Ed Gibney and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evolutionary Philosophy is the foundation text for a new belief system. We are all products of evolution. Understanding all of the implications of this statement leads to a comprehensive worldview that can answer our universally shared questions: Where did I come from? What am I? What is a good life? How do I know? These questions and many more are answered in this book, before the beliefs of 60 of the top philosophers of history are put to the test in an evaluation of the survival of their fittest ideas. This is an audacious work of research and analysis from author Ed Gibney, who finishes by asking readers to help Evolutionary Philosophy to grow and adapt as mankind's knowledge continues to accumulate. This clear and accessible work promises to help you reevaluate mankind's place in the universe and your place in society.
Download or read book Without God written by Louis Betty and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2016-06-03 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michel Houellebecq is France’s most famous and controversial living novelist. Since his first novel in 1994, Houellebecq’s work has been called pornographic, racist, sexist, Islamophobic, and vulgar. His caricature appeared on the cover of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015, the day that Islamist militants killed twelve people in an attack on their offices and also the day that his most recent novel, Soumission—the story of France in 2022 under a Muslim president—appeared in bookstores. Without God uses religion as a lens to examine how Houellebecq gives voice to the underside of the progressive ethos that has animated French and Western social, political, and religious thought since the 1960s. Focusing on Houellebecq’s complicated relationship with religion, Louis Betty shows that the novelist, who is at best agnostic, “is a deeply and unavoidably religious writer.” In exploring the religious, theological, and philosophical aspects of Houellebecq’s work, Betty situates the author within the broader context of a French and Anglo-American history of ideas—ideas such as utopian socialism, the sociology of secularization, and quantum physics. Materialism, Betty contends, is the true destroyer of human intimacy and spirituality in Houellebecq’s work; the prevailing worldview it conveys is one of nihilism and hedonism in a postmodern, post-Christian Europe. In Betty’s analysis, “materialist horror” emerges as a philosophical and aesthetic concept that describes and amplifies contemporary moral and social decadence in Houellebecq’s fiction.
Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind by : Brian McLaughlin
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind written by Brian McLaughlin and published by Oxford University Press (UK). This book was released on 2009-01-15 with total page 833 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the most authoritative and comprehensive guide ever published to the state of the art in philosophy of mind, a flourishing area of research. An outstanding team of contributors offer 45 new critical surveys of a wide range of topics.
Download or read book Physicalism written by Daniel Stoljar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-04-05 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Physicalism, the thesis that everything is physical, is one of the most important yet divisive problems in philosophy. In this superb introduction to the problem Daniel Stoljar focuses on three fundamental questions: the interpretation, truth and philosophical significance of physicalism.
Book Synopsis A Theology for Christian Education by : James R. Estep
Download or read book A Theology for Christian Education written by James R. Estep and published by B&H Publishing Group. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is “Christian” about Christian education; how is it different from on-Christian education? A Theology for Christian Education examines this question in depth and argues that the doctrines of systematic theology should drive the content, purpose, and methods of the educational program of the c hurch. The book states: “Christian education is distinct from other kinds of education in that its aim is the transformation of the whole person into the likeness of Christ (Col. 1 :28). Christian education is the process of accomplishing this aim.” A Theology for Christian Education dedicates chapters to examining particular doctrines and their implications for Christian education. It is the only serious academic text to offer a systematic presentation of the intersection of theology and Christian education from a conservative evangelical perspective.
