A pioneer in early studies of the human mind and founder of that peculiarly American philosophy called Pragmatism, William James remains America's most widely read philosopher. Generations of students have been drawn to his lucid presentations of philosophical problems. His works, now being made available for the first time in a definitive edition, have a permanent place in American letters and a continuing influence in philosophy and psychology. The essays gathered in the posthumously published Essays in Radical Empiricism formulate ideas (...) that had brewed in James's mind for thirty years as he sought a way out of the philosophical dilemmas generated by the new psychology of the late nineteenth century. They constitute the explanatory core of his doctrine of radical empiricism, a doctrine that charts his course between the absolute idealism he could not accept and, at the other extreme, the law of associationism, which reduces knowledge to sheer contiguity of ideas. In his introduction John J. McDermott describes the historical background and the genesis of James's theory and considers the objections raised by its opponents. (shrink)

A collection of works, many of them classics, on the orthodox view of visual perception.

Challenging and rewarding in equal measure, _Phenomenology of Perception_ is Merleau-Ponty's most famous work. Impressive in both scope and imagination, it uses the example of perception to return the body to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato. Drawing on case studies such as brain-damaged patients from the First World War, Merleau-Ponty brilliantly shows how the body plays a crucial role not only in perception but in speech, sexuality and our relation to others.

In this volume Rorty offers a Deweyan account of objectivity as intersubjectivity, one that drops claims about universal validity and instead focuses on utility for the purposes of a community. The sense in which the natural sciences are exemplary for inquiry is explicated in terms of the moral virtues of scientific communities rather than in terms of a special scientific method. The volume concludes with reflections on the relation of social democratic politics to philosophy.

Challenging and rewarding in equal measure, _Phenomenology of Perception_ is Merleau-Ponty's most famous work. Impressive in both scope and imagination, it uses the example of perception to return the _body_ to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato. Drawing on case studies such as brain-damaged patients from the First World War, Merleau-Ponty brilliantly shows how the body plays a crucial role not only in perception but in speech, sexuality and our relation to others. Perhaps above all, Merleau-Ponty's (...) insights about the embodied mind are a bold and refreshing challenge to the new era of virtual reality and artificial intelligence, as scientists and psychologists discover the centrality of the body to mind and intelligence. (shrink)

What makes this work so important is that it returned the body to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato.

One of the most important Anglo-American philosophers of our time here joins the current philosophical debate about the nature of truth. William P. Alston formulates and defends a realist conception of truth, which he calls alethic realism. This idea holds that the truth value of a statement depends on whether what the statement is about is as the statement says it is. Michael Dummett and Hilary Putnam are two of the prominent and widely influential contemporary philosophers whose anti-realist ideas Alston (...) attacks. (shrink)

Recent work by philosophers of mind and psychology on nonconceptual content.

There is a traditional scepticism about whether the world "out there" really is as we perceive it. A new breed of hyper-sceptics now challenges whether we even have the perceptual experience we think we have. According to these writers, perceptual consciousness is a kind of false consciousness. This view grows out of the discovery of such phenomena as change blindness and inattentional blindness, which show that we can all be quite blind to changes taking place before our very eyes. Such (...) radical scepticism has acute and widespread implications for the study of perception and consciousness. The writings collected in this volume explore these implications. The contributors are scientists and philosophers at the forefront of this research, and include well-known authors such as psychologists Susan Blackmore and Arien Mack, and philosophers Andy Clark and Daniel Dennett. They have an gift for bringing these paradoxical issues to life and sharing their excitement with the non-specialist. (shrink)

Recasting important questions about truth and objectivity in new and helpful terms, his book will become a focus in the contemporary debates over realism, and ...

I discuss Bermudez' minimalist approach to self-consciousness approvingly, connecting it with other positions in philosophy and trying to separate it from ideas about non-conceptual content.

Alston begins his exposition of the realist conception of truth in chapter 1 with a roughly Aristotelian formulation: “A statement is true if and only if what the statement says to be the case actually is the case”. This condition has the drawback that it defines truth via illocutionary acts; yet, as Alston argues, propositions are the most basic truth-bearers. Alston therefore turns to the universalized T-schema for a condition that characterizes the truth of propositions without mentioning illocutionary acts: “ (...) The proposition that p is true iff p”, where “” is a substitutional rather than objectual quantifier over propositions. Later Alston avers that this account of truth is equivalent to another that is overtly realist in characterizing truth in terms of facts, a minimalist correspondence theory: “ The proposition that p is true iff it is a fact that p”. (shrink)

This volume consists of the first of the John Dewey Lectures delivered under the auspices of Columbia University's Philosophy Department as well as other essays by the author. Intended to clarify the meaning of the philosophical doctrines propounded by Professor Quine in 'Word and Objects', the essays included herein both support and expand those doctrines.

Establishment holds that thc psychological mechanism of inference is the ment psychological thcorizing. Moreover, given this conciliatory reading, transformation of mental representations, it follows that perception is in.

Hilary Putnam deals in this book with some of the most fundamental persistent problems in philosophy: the nature of truth, knowledge and rationality. His aim is to break down the fixed categories of thought which have always appeared to define and constrain the permissible solutions to these problems.

The phenomenon of action in which the mind moves the body has puzzled philosophers over the centuries. In this new edition of a classic work of analytical philosophy, Brian O'Shaughnessy investigates bodily action and attempts to resolve some of the main problems. His expanded and updated discussion examines the scope of the will and the conditions in which it makes contact with the body, and investigates the epistemology of the body. He sheds light upon the strangely intimate relation of awareness (...) in which we stand to our own bodies, doing so partly through appeal to the concept of the body-image. The result is a new and strengthened emphasis on the vitally important function of the bodily will as a transparently intelligible bridge between mind and body, and the proposal of a dual aspect theory of the will. (shrink)

Many current neurophysiological, psychophysical, and psychological approaches to vision rest on the idea that when we see, the brain produces an internal representation of the world. The activation of this internal representation is assumed to give rise to the experience of seeing. The problem with this kind of approach is that it leaves unexplained how the existence of such a detailed internal representation might produce visual consciousness. An alternative proposal is made here. We propose that seeing is a way of (...) acting. It is a particular way of exploring the environment. Activity in internal representations does not generate the experience of seeing. The out- side world serves as its own, external, representation. The experience of seeing occurs when the organism masters what we call the gov- erning laws of sensorimotor contingency. The advantage of this approach is that it provides a natural and principled way of accounting for visual consciousness, and for the differences in the perceived quality of sensory experience in the different sensory modalities. Sev- eral lines of empirical evidence are brought forward in support of the theory, in particular: evidence from experiments in sensorimotor adaptation, visual “filling in,” visual stability despite eye movements, change blindness, sensory substitution, and color perception. (shrink)

Philosophers have often argued that ascriptions of content are appropriate only to the personal level states of folk psychology. Against this, this paper defends the view that the familiar propositional attitudes and states defined over them are part of a larger set of cognitive proceses that do not make constitutive reference to concept possession. It does this by showing that states with nonconceptual content exist both in perceptual experience and in subpersonal information-processing systems. What makes these states content-involving is their (...) satisfaction of certain basic conditions deriving from a general account of representation-driven behaviour that is neutral on the question of concept possession. It is also argued that creatures can be in states with nonconceptual content even though they possess no conceptual abilities at all. (shrink)

How do rational minds make contact with the world? The empiricist tradition sees a gap between mind and world, and takes sensory experience, fallible as it is, to provide our only bridge across that gap. In its crudest form, for example, the traditional idea is that our minds consult an inner realm of sensory experience, which provides us with evidence about the nature of external reality. Notoriously, however, it turns out to be far from clear that there is any viable (...) conception of experience which allows it to do the job. The original problem is to show that thought is rationally constrained by external reality. If sensory experience is to provide the solution--in particular, if it is to provide the answer to sceptical challenges--it must therefore meet two criteria. First, it must itself be `receptive'--i.e., appropriately constrained by external reality. Second, it must be the kind of thing that can enter into a logical or rational relationship with belief--it must already be `conceptual,' in other words. In arguing against the idea that anything could serve both roles, Wilfred Sellars termed this conception of experience "the Myth of the Given.". (shrink)

Neural correlates exist for a basic component of logical formulae, PREDICATE(x). Vision and audition research in primates and humans shows two independent neural pathways; one locates objects in body-centered space, the other attributes properties, such as colour, to objects. In vision these are the dorsal and ventral pathways. In audition, similarly separable “where” and “what” pathways exist. PREDICATE(x) is a schematic representation of the brain's integration of the two processes of delivery by the senses of the location of an arbitrary (...) referent object, mapped in parietal cortex, and analysis of the properties of the referent by perceptual subsystems. The brain computes actions using a few “deictic” variables pointing to objects. Parallels exist between such nonlinguistic variables and linguistic deictic devices. Indexicality and reference have linguistic and nonlinguistic (e.g., visual) versions, sharing the concept of attention. The individual variables of logical formulae are interpreted as corresponding to these mental variables. In computing action, the deictic variables are linked with “semantic” information about the objects, corresponding to logical predicates. Mental scene descriptions are necessary for practical tasks of primates, and preexist language phylogenetically. The type of scene descriptions used by nonhuman primates would be reused for more complex cognitive, ultimately linguistic, purposes. The provision by the brain's sensory/perceptual systems of about four variables for temporary assignment to objects, and the separate processes of perceptual categorization of the objects so identified, constitute a pre-adaptive platform on which an early system for the linguistic description of scenes developed. Key Words: argument; attention; deictic; dorsal; logic; neural; object; predicate; reference; ventral. (shrink)

Required reading at more than 100 colleges and universities throughout North America.

Examines the theses that the postulation of mental processing is unnecessary to account for our perceptual relationship with the world, see turvey etal. for a criticque.