Breaking new ground in the debate about the relation of mind and body, David Armstrong's classic text - first published in 1968 - remains the most compelling and comprehensive statement of the view that the mind is material or physical. In the preface to this new edition, the author reflects on the book's impact and considers it in the light of subsequent developments. He also provides a bibliography of all the key writings to have appeared in the materialist debate.

Exploring the relevance of biological discovery to philosophical topics such as perception, freedom, determinism, and ethical values, J.Z. Young's provocative book illuminates the significant links between these philosophical concepts and recent developments in biology and the neurosciences. In clear-cut language, Young describes the brain and its functions, examining questions concerning physical makeup versus "real" self, the awareness of our moral sense, and how human consciousness differs from that of other animals. He approaches perception not as a passive process but as (...) an active search for information, suggesting that human knowledge develops from a special process--essential to all organisms--of gathering information for survival. (shrink)

Since the appearance of a widely influential book, Self-Knowledge and Self-ldentity, Sydney Shoemaker has continued to work on a series of interrelated issues in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. This volume contains a collection of the most important essays he has published since then. The topics that he deals with here include, among others, the nature of personal and other forms of identity, the relation of time to change, the nature of properties and causality and the relation between the (...) two, dualism and immortality, and the nature of mental states. All the essays show the same care and precision in argument as the earlier book, but they also reveal a substantial shift in Professor Shoemaker's position to a form of materialism. In fact, a number of papers together constitute what is probably the most subtle and rigourous defence yet of a sophisticated functionalism in the account of the mind. (shrink)

No mental phenomenon is more central than consciousness to an adequate understanding of the mind. Nor does any mental phenomenon seem more stubbornly to resist theoretical treatment. Consciousness is so basic to the way we think about the mind that it can be tempting to suppose that no mental states exist that are not conscious states. Indeed, it may even seem mysterious what sort of thing a mental state might be if it is not a conscious state. On this way (...) of looking at things, if any mental states do lack consciousness, they are exceptional cases that call for special explanation or qualification. Perhaps dispositional or cognitive states exist that are not conscious, but nonetheless count as mental states. (shrink)

Because there is a fair amount of overlap in the points by Balog and Rey, I will organize this response topically, referring specifically to each commentator as rele- vant. And, because much of the discussion focuses on my higher-order-thought hypothesis independent of questions about metacognition, I will begin by addressing a cluster of issues that have to do with the status, motivation, and exact formulation of that hypothesis.

Perry argues that certain sorts of indexicals are 'essential', in the sense that they cannot be eliminated in favor of descriptions. This paper also introduces the influential idea that certain sorts of indexicals play a special role in thought, and have a special connection to action.

Do we think in natural language? Or is language only for communication? Much recent work in philosophy and cognitive science assumes the latter. In contrast, Peter Carruthers argues that much of human conscious thinking is conducted in the medium of natural language sentences. However, this does not commit him to any sort of Whorfian linguistic relativism, and the view is developed within a framework that is broadly nativist and modularist. His study will be essential reading for all those interested in (...) the nature and significance of natural language, whether they come from philosophy, psychology or linguistics. (shrink)

Philosophers from Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein to the recent realists and antirealists have sought to answer the question, What are concepts? This book provides a detailed, systematic, and accessible introduction to an original philosophical theory of concepts that Christopher Peacocke has developed in recent years to explain facts about the nature of thought, including its systematic character, its relations to truth and reference, and its normative dimension. Particular concepts are also treated within the general framework: perceptual concepts, logical concepts, and (...) the concept of belief are discussed in detail. The general theory is further applied in answering the question of how the ontology of concepts can be of use in classifying mental states, and in discussing the proper relation between philosophical and psychological theories of concepts. Finally, the theory of concepts is used to motivate a nonverificationist theory of the limits of intelligible thought. Peacocke treats content as broad rather than narrow, and his account is nonreductive and non-Quinean. Yet Peacocke also argues for an interactive relationship between philosophical and psychological theories of concepts, and he plots many connections with work in cognitive psychology. (shrink)

This book argues that we are not equipped to understand the workings of conciousness, despite its objective naturalness.

In this book, William Lycan reviews the diverse philosophical views on consciousness--including those of Kripke, Block, Campbell, Sellars, and Casteneda--and ..

Carruthers offers a refreshing piece of “substantive philosophy.” Going beyond the limitations of pure analysis, he adopts a methodology which is one part analysis, one part empirical data, and a heavy dose of inference to the best explanation. The overarching goal is to advance the commonsense—yet unfashionable—thesis that natural language is the primary medium of thought, and to defend the related cognitive conception of NL. In particular, Carruthers argues that imaginative phonological representations of “inner speech” are constitutive of conscious thoughts, (...) and that thinking involves operations on such symbols. While there is still a role for mentalese cognition, such thinking is always unconscious, and probably of limited innate conceptual resources. The weak thesis is that, of natural necessity, all conscious propositional thought requires NL. The strong thesis is that, of natural necessity, distinctively human thoughts can only be tokened in natural language—hence even much of our unconscious thinking occurs in English. (shrink)

_Behavioral and Brain Sciences_ , 15, 183-247, 1992. Reprinted in _The Philosopher's Annual_ , Grim, Mar and Williams, eds., vol. XV-1992, 1994, pp. 23-68; Noel Sheehy and Tony Chapman, eds., _Cognitive Science_ , Vol. I, Elgar, 1995, pp.210-274.

Little, Brown, 1992 Review by Glenn Branch on Jul 5th 1999 Volume: 3, Number: 27.

Do we think in natural language? Or is language only for communication? Much recent work in philosophy and cognitive science assumes the latter. In contrast, Peter Carruthers argues that much of human conscious thinking is conducted in the medium of natural language sentences. However, this does not commit him to any sort of Whorfian linguistic relativism, and the view is developed within a framework that is broadly nativist and modularist. His study will be essential reading for all those interested in (...) the nature and significance of natural language, whether they come from philosophy, psychology or linguistics. (shrink)

The idea behind this book is that developing a conception of the physical world and a conception of mind is impossible without the exercise of agency, meaning "the power to alter at will one's perceptual inputs". The thesis is derived from a philosophical account of the role of agency in knowledge - the first time this has been attempted in the context of developmental psychology. The book is divided into three parts. In Part One, Russell argues that purely "representational" theories (...) of mind and of mental development have been overvalued, thereby clearing the ground for the book's central thesis. In Part Two, he proposes that, because objective experience depends upon the experience of agency, the development of the "object concept" in human infants is grounded in the development of executive-attentional capacities. In Part Three, an analysis of the links between agency and self-awareness generates an original theory of the nature of certain stage-like transitions in mental functioning and of the relationship between executive and mentalising deficits in autism. The book will be of particular interest to students and researchers in cognitive-developmental psychology, to philosophers of mind, and to anybody with an interest in cognitive science. (shrink)

First published in 1995, The Visual Brain in Action remains a seminal publication in the cognitive sciences. For this new edition, a very substantial and illustrated epilogue has been added to the book in which Milner and Goodale review the key developments that support or challenge the views that were put forward in the first edition.

The book is an extended study of the problem of consciousness. After setting up the problem, I argue that reductive explanation of consciousness is impossible , and that if one takes consciousness seriously, one has to go beyond a strict materialist framework. In the second half of the book, I move toward a positive theory of consciousness with fundamental laws linking the physical and the experiential in a systematic way. Finally, I use the ideas and arguments developed earlier to defend (...) a form of strong artificial intelligence and to analyze some problems in the foundations of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Tye's book develops a persuasive and, in many respects, original argument for the view that the qualitative side of our mental life is representational in..

A further development of Tye's theory of phenomenal consciousness along with replies to common objections.

within-field task as testing proceeded. (In any case, the two-field task is presumably a more difficult one than the one-field task. ...

Presenting a look at the human mind's capacity while criticizing artificial intelligence, the author makes suggestions about classical and quantum physics and ..

Preface by Daniel C. Dennett Beginning with a general theory of function applied to body organs, behaviors, customs, and both inner and outer representations, ...