This chapter contains sections titled: Female Porngasm is More Interesting to Study than Male Porngasm Most Porn is Designed to Activate and Appeal to Men's Short‐Term Sexual Strategies Most Female Porngasms are Fake Our Study Results But Female Porn Stars Do Love the Sex! Correspondence Bias Error Management Theory Conclusions Notes.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Erotic Art and Pornographic PicturesJerrold LevinsonOnly in primitive art, with its urgent need to evoke the sources of fertility, are the phallus and the vulva emphasized, as it were innocently. By ancient Greek and Roman times there already existed the special category of the pornographic—graphic art or writing supposed, like a harlot, or porne, to sexually stimulate.1IAS REGARDS PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS of the opposition between the erotic and (...) the pornographic, there are a number of reasonable goals one might have: to preserve as many considered intuitions about the opposition as possible; to present the opposition in a clearer light than it enjoys when casually invoked; to modestly "sharpen" the standard opposition that either accounts for our experience in this domain more fully, or allows us to organize our thinking about the domain more perspicuously. I hope in this paper to make progress toward some of those goals. Though the scope of the erotic/pornographic opposition goes beyond the visual, my focus here will be the opposition as it exists in the visual sphere, and even more narrowly, in the sphere of images. In addition to preserving and clarifying a distinction between erotic art and pornography, I hope also to make an intelligible place for erotica, as something intermediate between the other two.Here, then, are some intuitions on the erotic and the pornographic: [End Page 228]1. the erotic and the pornographic are both concerned with sexual stimulation or arousal.2. while the term "erotic" is neutral or even approving, the term "pornographic" is pejorative or disapproving.3. while "erotic art" is a familiar, if somewhat problematic, notion, "pornographic art" seems an almost oxymoronic one.4. whereas pornography has a paramount aim, namely, the sexual satisfaction of the viewer, erotic art, even if it also aims at sexual satisfaction on some level, includes other aims of significance.5. whereas we appreciate (or relish) erotic art, we consume (or use) pornography. In other words, our interactions with erotic art and pornography are fundamentally different in character, as reflected in the verbs most appropriate to the respective engagements.In what follows I try to accommodate all of those intuitions. As I will need a distinction invoked in the first of them (between sexual stimulation and sexual arousal) let me spell that out before proceeding. By sexual stimulation I will mean the inducing of sexual thoughts, feelings, imaginings, or desires that would generally be regarded as pleasant in themselves. By sexual arousal I mean the physiological state that is prelude and prerequisite to sexual release, involving in the male, at least, some degree of erection. And by sexual release I mean something that I take it needs no spelling out.How to differentiate erotic art from pornography, and from erotica as well, is of course not the only important philosophical question about erotic art. Here are two others: 1) How is the erotic aspect of erotic art compatible with the disinterested or distanced frame of mind that seems required for aesthetic engagement with or appreciation of a work of visual art? 2) How is the degree of eroticness of a work of erotic art related to its artistic value? I will briefly address those two questions toward the end of the paper, but most of my effort will be devoted to the prior question, that of the differentiation of erotic art, erotica, and pornography.IIHow, then, to effect that differentiation in the domain of visual images to which I have restricted my inquiry? One possibility would [End Page 229] concern the specific kind of response aimed at. Thus, erotic art might be said to involve images intended to sexually stimulate, but also to reward artistic interest; erotica to involve images intended to sexually stimulate but not to reward artistic interest; pornography to involve images intended to sexually arouse in the interests of sexual release. Another possibility would be by the character of the sexual representation involved, so that pornography would involve sexually explicit images, erotic art would involve sexually inexplicit images, and erotica images would be intermediate in their explicitness, irrespective of the ends for which the images were fashioned. A third possibility would be by... (shrink)

It would be very desirable to have an account of the relation between mind and world that sustained the integrity of each. In this paper, we will argue that a theory of cognition which is broadly Thomistic can do just that. Many commentators recognize that cognitio is Aquinas’s basic epistemic concept, and that it designates knowledge in the broadest and most basic sense, as distinguished from scientia, or knowledge in the paradigmatic sense. There are several important consequences of this (...) distinction which are relevant to a proper understanding of the way in which a theory of knowledge which is in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition approaches the issue of the relation between the mind and the world. First and foremost, knowledge cannot be construed as a univocal concept in the A/t context. There are different senses of knowledge and we should not expect there to be a theory which supplies necessary and sufficient conditions for “S knows that p” that satisfies all the different senses of knowledge. It is perplexing that the contemporary discussion seems to miss this point, for the same sort of systematic ambiguity of the term ‘knowledge’ seems to hold in English. Second, the A/t theory of knowledge is not an epistemological theory in the modern sense, if by “epistemological” we mean one which is clearly demarcated from a metaphysical, psychological, or even semantical theory. The A/t theory is a metaphysics of knowledge. Third, a Thomistic theory of knowledge begins with a theory of cognition which provides the grounds of knowledge across the board, including even that of scientia. (shrink)

A Democratic Mind: Psychology and Psychiatry with Fewer Meds and More Soul focuses on how an individual lives her life, and on the extent of harm that an individual can inflict on herself or others. In this book, I.W. Charny provides a new lens for understanding regular people rather than treatments that alleviate symptoms.

The target paper of Schoeller, Perlovsky, and Arseniev is an essential and timely contribution to a current shift of focus in neuroscience aiming to merge neurophysiological, psychological and physical principles in order to build the foundation for the physics of mind. Extending on previous work of Perlovsky et al. and Badre, the authors of the target paper present interesting mathematical models of several basic principles of the physics of mind, such as perception and cognition, concepts and emotions, instincts (...) and learning. Their conceptualization helps to clarify the distinction between conscious and unconscious aspects of mind that is often neglected and further provide a clear description of the mental hierarchy, which extends from physical objects in the physical world to abstract ideas in the mental/subjective realm. While we agree that identification of a few fundamental principles is a first step toward developing the physics of the mind, and we concur with the selection of those principles in the target review paper, we think that the theory of the physics of mind would much benefit from considering also the most basic principles that are common for the physics/matter/brain and the mind/subjectivity/cognition. In this respect, such basic principles as time and space, as well as criticality, self-organization, and emergence seem to be the most interesting. (shrink)

Persons have a curious dual nature. On the one hand, they are subjects, whose actions must be explained in terms of beliefs, desires, plans, and goals. At the same time, however, they also are physical objects, whose actions must be explicable in terms of physical laws. So far no satisfying account of this duality has been offered. Both Cartesian dualism and the modern materialist alternatives (reductionist and antireductionist) have failed to capture the full range of our experience of persons. I (...) argue that an exciting new approach to this difficulty can be found by considering developments in clinical psychology. The clinical debate between those endorsing biological models of mental illness and those endorsing psychodynamic models mirrors broader debates in the philosophy of mind. The possible resolution of this debate through the development of integrated psychobiological models suggests a promising way to reconcile the dual nature of persons in a far more appealing way than any yet proposed. (shrink)

This essay explains the prevalence of porn consumption by modeling it as a form of simulation. According to simulation theory (Gordon 1986, Goldman 2006) people predict and explain other’s behavior by using their own mind to model the mind of a target individual, much like an engineer might use a model aircraft to simulate the behavior of an actual aircraft. However, the cognitive mechanisms required for simulation have application outside of psychological interpretation. For example, it is plausible (...) that while consuming pornography individuals simulate the actual activities as depicted by the pornographic material. On this construal, viewers of pornography think and feel as though they are truly having the depicted experience: from the psychological and phenomenological perceptive of someone watching a pornographic video, they really are being sexually pleasured by others, and in just those specific ways. The goal of this essay is to develop the pornography-as-simulation model and examine both its social and theoretical implications. (shrink)

This book offers the first sustained critique of individualism in psychology, a view that has been the subject of debate between philosophers such as Jerry Fodor and Tyler Burge for many years. The author approaches individualism as an issue in the philosophy of science and by discussing issues such as computationalism and the mind's modularity he opens the subject up for non-philosophers in psychology and computer science. Professor Wilson carefully examines the most influential arguments for individualism and (...) identifies the main metaphysical assumptions underlying them. Since the topic is so central to the philosophy of mind, a discipline generating enormous research and debate at present, the book has implications for a very broad range of philosophical issues including the naturalisation of intentionality, psychophysical supervenience, the nature of mental causation, and the viability of folk psychology. (shrink)

Within the past ten years, the discussion of the nature of folk psychology and its role in explaining behavior and thought has become central to the philosophy of mind. However, no comprehensive account of the contemporary debate or collection of the works that make up this debate has yet been available. Intending to fill this gap, this volume begins with the crucial background for the contemporary debate and proceeds with a broad range of responses to and developments of (...) these works -- from those who argue that "folk theory" is a misnomer to those who regard folk theory as legitimately explanatory and necessary for any adequate account of human behavior. Intended for courses in the philosophy of mind, psychology, and science, as well as anthropology and social psychology, this anthology is also of great value in courses focusing on folk models, eliminative materialism, explanation, psychological theory, and -- in particular -- intentional psychology. It is accessible to both graduate students and upper-division undergraduate students of philosophy and psychology as well as researchers. As an aid to students, a thorough discussion of the field and the articles in the anthology is provided in the introduction; as an aid to researchers, a complete bibliography is also provided. (shrink)

This book offers a sustained critique of individualism in psychology, a view that has been the subject of debate between philosophers such as Jerry Fodor and Tyler Burge for many years. The author approaches individualism as an issue in the philosophy of science and by discussing issues such as computationalism and the mind's modularity he opens the subject up for non-philosophers in psychology and computer science. Professor Wilson carefully examines the most influential arguments for individualism and identifies (...) the main metaphysical assumptions underlying them. Since the topic is so central to the philosophy of mind, a discipline generating enormous research and debate, the book has implications for a very broad range of philosophical issues including the naturalisation of intentionality, psychophysical supervenience, the nature of mental causation, and the viability of folk psychology. (shrink)

Second, this collection of cognitive programs evolved in the Pleistocene to solve the adaptive problems regularly faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors-...

People are minded creatures; we have thoughts, feelings and emotions. More intriguingly, we grasp our own mental states, and conduct the business of ascribing them to ourselves and others without instruction in formal psychology. How do we do this? And what are the dimensions of our grasp of the mental realm? In this book, Alvin I. Goldman explores these questions with the tools of philosophy, developmental psychology, social psychology and cognitive neuroscience. He refines an approach called simulation (...) theory, which starts from the familiar idea that we understand others by putting ourselves in their mental shoes. Can this intuitive idea be rendered precise in a philosophically respectable manner, without allowing simulation to collapse into theorizing? Given a suitable definition, do empirical results support the notion that minds literally create surrogates of other peoples mental states in the process of mindreading? Goldman amasses a surprising array of evidence from psychology and neuroscience that supports this hypothesis. (shrink)

This new edition of Mind, Meaning, and Mental Disorder addresses key issues in the philosophy of psychiatry, drawing on both philosophical and scientific theory. The main idea of the book is that causal models of mental disorders have to include meaningful processes as well as any possible lower-level physical causes, and this propsoal is illustrated with detailed discussion of current models of common mental health problems. First published in 1996, this volume played an important role in bridging the gap (...) between philosophy and psychiatry, and introducing those in psychiatry to philosophical ideas somewhat neglected in their field. Completely updated, the new edition of this acclaimed volume draws on the strengths of the first edition, and will be a central text in the burgeoning field of philosophy of psychiatry. (shrink)

It is fortunate for the community in which she lives that one of the things about which Elinor Dashwood cares a great deal is the social duty of “general civility”—the practice, in Hume’s words, of “gentle usage.” The heroine of Sense and Sensibility is respectful and considerate toward others, whether or not these are dearly loved family members or comparative strangers. According to Karen Stohr, throughout the novel, “Elinor is the exemplar of moderation, propriety and moral rectitude,” and the reader’s (...) assessment is seemingly quite straightforward: we can rest assured that although others may be unscrupulous, self-aggrandizing, and/or self-deceiving, Elinor Dashwood is virtuous from beginning to end.1.. (shrink)

Objective: Mindfulness disposition is associated with various psychological factors and prevent emotional distress in chronic diseases. In the present study, we analyzed the key role of mindfulness dispositions in protecting the individual against psychological distress consequent to COVID-19 social distancing and quarantining. Methods: An online survey was launched on March 13, 2020, with 6,412 responses by April 6, 2020. Socio-demographic information, exposure to the pandemic, and quarantining were assessed together with psychological distress and mindfulness disposition. Multivariate linear regression analysis was (...) performed to study the influence of predictive factors on psychological distress and quality of life in Italian responders during the early days of lockdown. Pearson correlations were calculated to study the relations between mindfulness and psychiatric symptoms. Results: Multivariate linear regression run on socio-demographics, COVID-19-related variables, and mindfulness disposition as moderators of overall psychological distress showed that mindfulness was the best predictor of psychological distress (β = -0.504; p =.000). High negative correlations were found between mindfulness disposition and overall Global Severity Index (r = -.637; p =.000), while moderate to high associations were found between mindfulness and all SCL-90 sub-scales. Discussion: Findings showed that high dispositional mindfulness enhances well-being and helps in dealing with stressful situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Mindfulness-based mental training could represent an effective intervention to stem the post-traumatic psychopathological beginnings and preventing the onset of chronic mental disorders. (shrink)

People are minded creatures; we have thoughts, feelings and emotions. More intriguingly, we grasp our own mental states, and conduct the business of ascribing them to ourselves and others without instruction in formal psychology. How do we do this? And what are the dimensions of our grasp of the mental realm? In this book, Alvin I. Goldman explores these questions with the tools of philosophy, developmental psychology, social psychology and cognitive neuroscience. He refines an approach called simulation (...) theory, which starts from the familiar idea that we understand others by putting ourselves in their mental shoes. Can this intuitive idea be rendered precise in a philosophically respectable manner, without allowing simulation to collapse into theorizing? Given a suitable definition, do empirical results support the notion that minds literally create surrogates of other peoples mental states in the process of mindreading? Goldman amasses a surprising array of evidence from psychology and neuroscience that supports this hypothesis. (shrink)

Originally published in 1950, the name of the late Dr H.G. Baynes was already well-known as a leading exponent of and translator of the writings of Professor C.G. Jung, as author and as psychotherapist. The essay which gives it title to this varied and interesting collection of writings, shows clearly Dr Baynes’s gift for illuminating a familiar subject with fresh insight drawn from his wide knowledge of the unconscious mind. He can make the unconscious real to us, and can (...) convince us that myth and dream are expressions of vital problems of the human soul. The collection includes material to interest many types of reader, from _The British Journal of Medical Psychology_, from _Folk-Lore_, from The Society for Psychical Research. But perhaps most full of interest for the majority of readers are the first three chapters of an unfinished book – _What It Is All About_; here we find an admirable introduction, given with a wealth of illustration, to the main concepts of Professor Jung’s analytical psychology. Dr Baynes made Professor Jung’s thought his own, without loss of his own originality. He can touch with significance any subject on which he writes, whether it be the problem of the individual or the kindred problems of humanity. (shrink)

Originally published in 1950, the name of the late Dr H.G. Baynes was already well-known as a leading exponent of and translator of the writings of Professor C.G. Jung, as author and as psychotherapist. The essay which gives it title to this varied and interesting collection of writings, shows clearly Dr Baynes’s gift for illuminating a familiar subject with fresh insight drawn from his wide knowledge of the unconscious mind. He can make the unconscious real to us, and can (...) convince us that myth and dream are expressions of vital problems of the human soul. The collection includes material to interest many types of reader, from _The British Journal of Medical Psychology_, from _Folk-Lore_, from The Society for Psychical Research. But perhaps most full of interest for the majority of readers are the first three chapters of an unfinished book – _What It Is All About_; here we find an admirable introduction, given with a wealth of illustration, to the main concepts of Professor Jung’s analytical psychology. Dr Baynes made Professor Jung’s thought his own, without loss of his own originality. He can touch with significance any subject on which he writes, whether it be the problem of the individual or the kindred problems of humanity. (shrink)

The Gestalt psychologists adopted a set of positions on mind-body issues that seem like an odd mix. They sought to combine a version of naturalism and physiological reductionism with an insistence on the reality of the phenomenal and the attribution of meanings to objects as natural characteristics. After reviewing basic positions in contemporary philosophy of mind, we examine the Gestalt position, characterizing it m terms of phenomenal realism and programmatic reductionism. We then distinguish Gestalt philosophy of mind (...) from instrumentalism and computational functionalism, and examine Gestalt attributions of meaning and value to perceived objects. Finally, we consider a metatheoretical moral from Gestalt theory, which commends the search for commensurate description of mental phenomena and their physiological counterparts. (shrink)

Semantic Engines: An Introduction to Mind Design, John C. Haugeland; Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search, Alan Newell and Herbert A. Simon; Complexity and the Study of Artificial and Human Intelligence, Zenon Pylyshyn; A Framework for Representing Knowledge, Marvin Minsky; Artificial Intelligence---A Personal View, David Marr; Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity, Drew McDermott; From Micro-Worlds to Knowledge Representation: AI at an Impasse, Hubert L. Dreyfus; Reductionism and the Nature of Psychology, Hilary Putnam; Intentional Systems, Daniel C. (...) Dennett; The Nature and Plausibility of Cognitivism, John C. Haugeland; Minds, Brains, and Programs, John R. Searle; MethodologicalSolipsism Considered as a Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology, Jerry A. Fodor; The Material Mind, Donald Davidson. (shrink)

This book is an extended discussion of individualism in the philosophy of mind.

This article stresses the main lines of Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy on the nature of the body-soul union. Following Aristotle, Aquinas sees the soul as a ‘principle of life’ which is intimately bound to a body. Together they form a noncontingent composition. In addition, the distinctive feature of the human soul is rationality, which implies that a human needs a mind to be what it is. However, this is not to say, as Descartes proposes, that the reason that I am (...) a human is that I am fully self-conscious. On the contrary, I will show that selfconsciousness is not necessarily a key to defining a human being. To that aim, and based on Aquinas’s views, I draw a distinction between what I will call ‘egos’ and ‘selves’. (shrink)

This book, now in its fifth edition, provides a comprehensive introduction to Buddhist psychology and counselling, exploring key concepts in psychology and practical applications in mindfulness-based counselling techniques. This integrated study uses Buddhist philosophy of mind, psychology, ethics and contemplative methods to focus on the 'emotional rhythm of our lives', opening up new avenues for mental health.De Silva presents a range of management techniques for mental health issues including stress, anger, depression, addictions and grief. He moves (...) beyond the restriction of mental health issues to 'damage control', instead encouraging personal growth and positive emotions of compassion, forgiveness, generosity, equanimity and, ultimately, emotional balance.This book blends Western psychology and philosophy and ancient wisdom and contemporary thought to provide a key contribution to cognitive sciences, emotion studies, moral psychology and psychotherapy counselling. This new edition contains nine new chapters and an additional second part which focuses on counselling and mindfulness-based techniques in therapy. (shrink)

In the carefully argued central chapters of Adapting Minds, Buller scrutinizes several of evolutionary psychology's most highly publicized "...

What are the elements from which the human mind is composed? What structures make up our _cognitive architecture?_ One of the most recent and intriguing answers to this question comes from the newly emerging interdisciplinary field of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychologists defend a _massively modular_ conception of mental architecture which views the mind –including those parts responsible for such ‘central processes’ as belief revision and reasoning— as composed largely or perhaps even entirely of innate, special-purpose computational mechanisms (...) or ‘modules’ that have been shaped by natural selection to handle the sorts of recurrent information processing problems that confronted our hunter-gatherer forebears (Cosmides and Tooby,192; Sperber, 1994; Samuels, 1998a). (shrink)

Perhaps the most influential compatibilist response to this question is Fodor's strategy of levels. Fodor argues that although psychological laws range over world-involving propositional attitudes and their contents, these laws are implemented in computational mechanisms that supervene on the individual's intrinsic states.

Psychology and Cognitive Archaeology demonstrates the potential of using cognitive archaeology framing to explore key issues in contemporary psychology and other behavioral sciences. This edited volume features psychologists exploring archaeological data concerning specific themes such as: the use of tools, our child-rearing practices, our expressions of gender and sexuality, our sleep patterns, the nature of warfare, cultural practices, and the origins of religion. Other chapters touch on cognitive archaeological methods, the history of evolutionary approaches in psychology, and (...) relevant philosophical considerations to further illustrate the interdisciplinary potential between archaeology and psychology. As a complementary counterpoint, the book also includes an archaeologist's perspective on these same topical matters, as well as robust introductory and concluding thoughts by the editors. This book will be an illuminating read for students and scholars of psychology, as well as philosophy, archaeology, and anthropology. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that intentional psychology (i.e. the interpretation of human behaviour in terms of intentional states and propositional attitudes) plays an essential role in the sciences of the mind. However, this role is not one of identifying scientifically respectable states of the world. Rather, I argue that intentional psychology acts as a type of phenomenological model, as opposed to a mechanistic one. I demonstrate that, like other phenomenological models in science, intentional psychology is (...) a methodological tool with its own benefits and insights that complements our mechanistic understanding of systems. As a result, intentional psychology's distinctive scientific benefit is its ability to model systems in unique, non-mechanistic, ways. This allows us to generate predictions that we cannot otherwise generate using the mechanistic models of neuroscience and cognitive psychology necessary for various scientific tasks. (shrink)

Was human nature designed by natural selection in the Pleistocene epoch? The dominant view in evolutionary psychology holds that it was -- that our psychological adaptations were designed tens of thousands of years ago to solve problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. In this provocative and lively book, David Buller examines in detail the major claims of evolutionary psychology -- the paradigm popularized by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate and by David Buss in The Evolution of Desire (...) -- and rejects them all. This does not mean that we cannot apply evolutionary theory to human psychology, says Buller, but that the conventional wisdom in evolutionary psychology is misguided.Evolutionary psychology employs a kind of reverse engineering to explain the evolved design of the mind, figuring out the adaptive problems our ancestors faced and then inferring the psychological adaptations that evolved to solve them. In the carefully argued central chapters of Adapting Minds, Buller scrutinizes several of evolutionary psychology's most highly publicized "discoveries," including "discriminative parental solicitude". Drawing on a wide range of empirical research, including his own large-scale study of child abuse, he shows that none is actually supported by the evidence.Buller argues that our minds are not adapted to the Pleistocene, but, like the immune system, are continually adapting, over both evolutionary time and individual lifetimes. We must move beyond the reigning orthodoxy of evolutionary psychology to reach an accurate understanding of how human psychology is influenced by evolution. When we do, Buller claims, we will abandon not only the quest for human nature but the very idea of human nature itself. (shrink)

This book offers a broad, systematic philosophical approach to mental disorder. The authors spend the first half of the book presenting their basic philosophical allegiances, and they go on to apply their philosophical approach to mental disorder. As the authors note, psychiatry has been largely neglected by contemporary philosophy of mind, and this book is a laudable attempt to rectify the situation by producing a sustained and clinically well-informed philosophical treatment of mental disorder.

This article explores a German philosophy of metaphor, which proposed a close link between the body and the mind as the basis for metaphor, debunked the view that metaphor is just a decorative rhetorical device and questioned the distinction between the literal and the figurative. This philosophy of metaphor developed at the intersection between a reflection on language and thought and a reflection on the nature of beauty in aesthetics. Thinkers such as Giambattista Vico, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean (...) Paul and others laid the foundations for this philosophy and it was successively refined by Gustav Gerber, Alfred Biese and Friedrich Nietzsche. It influenced in its turn in various ways the linguistic study of metaphor and the psychology of metaphor as elaborated, for instance, by a lesser-known American scholar, Gertrude Buck. All these thinkers contributed to a philosophy and psychology of the metaphoric according to which metaphors are not only nice, but necessary for the structure and growth of human thought and language. Obvious parallels between this 19th-century philosophy of metaphor and the 20th-century theory of metaphor developed by Lakoff and his followers are examined throughout. (shrink)

What psychological and philosophical significance should we attach to recent efforts at computer simulations of human cognitive capacities? In answering this question, I find it useful to distinguish what I will call "strong" AI from "weak" or "cautious" AI. According to weak AI, the principal value of the computer in the study of the mind is that it gives us a very powerful tool. For example, it enables us to formulate and test hypotheses in a more rigorous and precise (...) fashion. But according to strong AI, the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind; rather, the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind, in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to. (shrink)

Ancient Greek Psychology and the Modern Mind-Body Debate offers an overview of Platonic-Aristotelian thought on man with a view to considering what its alternative conceptual framework may contribute to the modern debate which is dominated by the scepticism confronting modern reductionism. -/- The mind-body problem is central to the modern philosophical and cultural debate because we cannot understand what man is until we understand what consciousness is and how it interacts with the body. Although many suggestions have (...) been offered, no convincing account has as yet appeared. Perhaps it was all mistaken ideology from the start? A crucial (and fatal?) distinction was made by modern natural science in the 17th century between the subjective/qualitative and the objective/quantitative. -/- The ancient Greeks, notably Plato and Aristotle, focused not on consciousness and experience, but on goal-directed reason/form, and the contrast was not mechanical matter, but the particular. The latter owed its intelligibility and being to reason and form and did not, therefore, constitute a realm of its own. Hence the ancient picture of man did not fall apart either: the soul is conceived of as a dynamic-telic aspect of the human organism. -/- Considering the problems and consequent scepticism that confronts modern reductionism and the recent appearance of holistic ideology in many areas it is suggested that we take a fresh look at the alternative conceptual framework of our ancient Greek ancestors. (shrink)

The debate has continued in these terms to the present day. In Like-Minded, Andrew Sneddon argues that "reason" and "passion" do not satisfactorily capture all the important options for explaining the psychological foundations of morality.

Ancient Greek Psychology and the Modern Mind-Body Debate offers an overview of Platonic-Aristotelian thought on man with a view to considering what its alternative conceptual framework may contribute to the modern debate which is dominated by the scepticism confronting modern reductionism. The mind-body problem is central to the modern philosophical and cultural debate because we cannot understand what man is until we understand what consciousness is and how it interacts with the body. Although many suggestions have been (...) offered, no convincing account has as yet appeared. Perhaps it was all mistaken ideology from the start? A crucial (and fatal?) distinction was made by modern natural science in the 17th century between the subjective/qualitative and the objective/quantitative. The ancient Greeks, notably Plato and Aristotle, focused not on consciousness and experience, but on goal-directed reason/form, and the contrast was not mechanical matter, but the particular. The latter owed its intelligibility and being to reason and form and did not, therefore, constitute a realm of its own. Hence the ancient picture of man did not fall apart either: the soul is conceived of as a dynamic-telic aspect of the human organism. Considering the problems and consequent scepticism that confronts modern reductionism and the recent appearance of holistic ideology in many areas it is suggested that we take a fresh look at the alternative conceptual framework of our ancient Greek ancestors. (shrink)