This second volume in the serial Reviews in Fluorescence is a collection of up to 10 invited reviews on current trends and emerging hot topics in fluorescence. This new annual series compliments the other fluorescence titles published by Springer, while feeding the requirement from the fluorescence community for annual informative updates and developments.

What can the manifestations of schizophrenia and other mental disorders reveal about classical notions of philosophy such as thought, perception, self, and rationality? Philosophers, psychiatrists, and clinical psychologists got together to compare notes at Harvard in October 1989, and presented these 16 papers. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

In the Fall of 2007, ten neuroscientists published a proposal for an interdisciplinary research initiative, the Decade of the Mind, that would focus on four.

Associationism can be broadly defined as a school of thought in philosophy and psychology that holds that mental activity can be accounted for by processes that combine simple elements or ideas. More than a century ago, scientific psychology started taking measurements of word associations, and only a few years later, word associations became a major research tool in psychiatry. With the advent of neurobiology and the discovery of the neuron, the term association came to denote physical connections between cells or (...) parts of the brain. The resulting ambiguity made the concept highly fruitful and at the same time introduced the risk of committing categorical mistakes and of engaging in unfounded speculation, since little was known about the actual functioning of neurons. In modern cognitive neuroscience, computational models provide the critically needed link between the psychological and the biological approaches. The concept of association, with its biological, psychological, and computational connotations, provides the framework needed for further experimental research. Its potential for contributing to our understanding of psychopathology can hardly be overestimated. (shrink)

"The scholarship of Michael Spitzer's new book is impressive and thorough. The writing is impeccable and the coverage extensive. The book treats the history of the use of metaphor in the field of classical music. It also covers a substantial part of the philosophical literature. The book treats the topic of metaphor in a new and extremely convincing manner."-Lydia Goehr, Columbia University The experience of music is an abstract and elusive one, enough so that we're often forced to describe it (...) using analogies to other forms and sensations: we say that music moves or rises like a physical form that it contains the imagery of paintings or the grammar of language. In these and countless other ways, our discussions of music take the form of metaphor, attempting to describe music's abstractions by referencing more concrete and familiar experiences. Michael Spitzer's Metaphor and Musical Thought uses this process to create a unique and insightful history of our relationship with music--the first ever book-length study of musical metaphor in any language. Treating issues of language, aesthetics, semiotics, and cognition, Spitzer offers an evaluation, a comprehensive history, and an original theory of the ways our cultural values have informed the metaphors we use to address music. And as he brings these discussions to bear on specific works of music and follows them through current debates on how music's meaning might be considered, what emerges is a clear and engaging guide to both the philosophy of musical thought and the history of musical analysis, from the seventeenth century to the present day. Spitzer writes engagingly for students of philosophy and aesthetics, as well as for music theorists and historians. (shrink)

Schizophrenia, like other pathological conditions of mental life, has not been systematically included in the general study of consciousness. By focusing on aspects of chronic schizophrenia, we attempt to remedy this omission. Basic components of Husserl’s phenomenology (intentionality, synthesis, constitution, epoche, and unbuilding) are explicated and then employed in an account of chronic schizophrenia. In schizophrenic experience, basic constituents of reality are lost and the subject must try to explicitly re-constitute them. “Automatic mental life” is weakened such that much of (...) the world that is normally taken-for-granted cannot continue to be so. The subject must actively re-lay the ontological foundations of reality. (shrink)