This study discusses the mind-body problem, arguing that the human person is best understood as an animal who is also spirit. Braine suggests that human beings should be described holistically, in the tradition of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. His final chapter explores a doctrine of immortality.

First published in 1982. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Basing his argument for the existence of God on the continuous nature of the temporal world, Braine here posits that the philosophy of religion cannot be continued as a separate discipline: the solution of its problems will be the fruit of the correct telesis of the problems of general philosophy in their complex interrelationships.

David Braine; III*—The Nature of Knowledge, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 72, Issue 1, 1 June 1972, Pages 41–64, https://doi.org/10.1093/arist.

David Braine; III*—The Nature of Knowledge, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 72, Issue 1, 1 June 1972, Pages 41–64, https://doi.org/10.1093/arist.

Already hailed as a masterpiece, Foundations of Language offers a brilliant overhaul of the last thirty-five years of research in generative linguistics and related fields. "Few books really deserve the cliché 'this should be read by every researcher in the field'," writes Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct, "but Ray Jackendoff's Foundations of Language does." Foundations of Language offers a radically new understanding of how language, the brain, and perception intermesh. The book renews the promise of early generative (...) linguistics: that language can be a valuable entrée into understanding the human mind and brain. The approach is remarkably interdisciplinary. Behind its innovations is Jackendoff's fundamental proposal that the creativity of language derives from multiple parallel generative systems linked by interface components. This shift in basic architecture makes possible a radical reconception of mental grammar and how it is learned. As a consequence, Jackendoff is able to reintegrate linguistics with philosophy of mind, cognitive and developmental psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and computational linguistics. Among the major topics treated are language processing, the relation of language to perception, the innateness of language, and the evolution of the language capacity, as well as more standard issues in linguistic theory such as the roles of syntax and the lexicon. In addition, Jackendoff offers a sophisticated theory of semantics that incorporates insights from philosophy of language, logic and formal semantics, lexical semantics of various stripes, cognitive grammar, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic approaches, and the author's own conceptual semantics. (shrink)

The paper has sought to show two things. One is that the apparent variety of Stalnaker and Lewis's counterexamples is misleading. Several of their examples are quite unsatisfactory because they depend on unguarded language behavior. There is in fact only one type of counterexample that is worth serious discussion, and that has the form of Barense's.For Barense's example, I try to show that it fails as a counterexample to transitivity because one of the premisses is false within the context of (...) the example. However, Barense's example is problematic for the Stalnaker-Lewis analysis, since their device for avoiding transitivity (rejecting the rule of conditional proof) does not in fact eliminate anomalous conclusions that can be drawn when both the premisses are taken as true.In sum, there appears to be no good reason to doubt thatif is transitive, that the antecedent of a conditional can be strengthened, and that the contrapositive can be inferred. And the rule of conditional proof does seem to capture a commonly accepted form of argument in support ofif-then statements. (shrink)

Plato held that the Agathon (Being itself in its font) is the source or ‘common cause’ both of being(s) and of our understanding, both of the world (cosmos) and of our intellectual grasp thereof, both of the world beyond us (objectivity) that yet includes us and of the world of our inner thoughts (subjectivity) that yet stretches out to embrace the entire universe. This divine presupposition, found ‘philosophically’ in Plato and ‘religiously’ in Augustine’s doctrine of divine illumination, is that God (...) is the common cause of us and our world, for both are held within the same divine/cosmic embrace, by the same Spirit operating within us and beyond us. This leads us to a ‘hand-in-its-glove’ or ‘mind-in-its-world’ proportionate realism that avoids the epistemological defects of Kant’s transcendental realism and Bhaskar’s critical realism. Finally, we should regard knowing by acquaintance as paradigmatic, as the fundamental form of knowing in terms of which the other types are best approached and understood. There is, I suggest, an important sense in which ‘all knowing is knowing in the biblical sense.’. (shrink)

This is an exciting time for brain science. Recent progress has been such that it now seems realistic to look toward an explanation of mind in terms of the brain's anatomy and physiology. Models based on artificially symmetrical arrays of idealized neurons are now being superseded by ones which properly take into account the brain's actual circuitry. This book presents a comprehensive overview of the current state of brain modeling, containing contributions from many leading researchers in (...) this field. It will be of interest not only to researchers in the fields of brain science and neurobiology, but also to psychologists and those involved in the study of artificial intelligence. (shrink)