Ignorance and Imagination : The Epistemic Origin of the Problem of Consciousness


Book Description

Ignorance and Imagination advances a novel way to resolve the central philosophical problem about the mind: how it is that consciousness or experience fits into a larger naturalistic picture of the world. The correct response to the problem, Stoljar argues, is not to posit a realm of experience distinct from the physical, nor to deny the reality of phenomenal experience, nor even to rethink our understanding of consciousness and the language we use to talk about it. Instead, we should view the problem itself as a consequence of our ignorance of the relevant physical facts. Stoljar shows that this change of orientation is well motivated historically, empirically, and philosophically, and that it has none of the side effects it is sometimes thought to have. The result is a philosophical perspective on the mind that has a number of far-reaching consequences: for consciousness studies, for our place in nature, and for the way we think about the relationship between philosophy and science.




Ignorance and Imagination


Book Description

Ignorance and Imagination advances a novel way to resolve the central philosophical problem about the mind: how it is that consciousness or experience fits into a larger naturalistic picture of the world. The correct response to the problem, Stoljar argues, is not to posit a realm of experience distinct from the physical, nor to deny the reality of phenomenal experience, nor even to rethink our understanding of consciousness and the language we use to talk about it. Instead, we should view the problem itself as a consequence of our ignorance of the relevant physical facts, Stoljar shows that this change of orientation is well motivated historically, empirically, and philosophically, and that it has none of the side effects it is sometimes thought to have. The result is a philosophical perspective on the mind that has a number of far-reaching consequences: for consciousness studies, for our place in nature, and for the way we think about the relationship between philosophy and science.




Ignorance and Imagination


Book Description

Presenting a way to resolve the central philosophical problem about the mind: how it is that consciousness or experience fits into a larger naturalistic picture of the world, this book argues that the correct response to the problem is to view it as a consequence of our ignorance of the relevant physical facts.




Philosophical Progress


Book Description

Daniel Stoljar presents a persuasive rejection of the widespread view that philosophy makes no progress. He defends a reasonable optimism about philosophical progress, showing that we have correctly answered philosophical questions in the past and may expect to do so in the future. He offers a credible vision of how philosophy works.




Consciousness and Physicalism


Book Description

Consciousness and Physicalism: A Defense of a Research Program explores the nature of consciousness and its place in the world, offering a revisionist account of what it means to say that consciousness is nothing over and above the physical. By synthesizing work in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of science from the last twenty years and forging a dialogue with contemporary research in the empirical sciences of the mind, Andreas Elpidorou and Guy Dove advance and defend a novel formulation of physicalism. Although physicalism has been traditionally understood to be a metaphysical thesis, Elpidorou and Dove argue that there is an alternative and indeed preferable understanding of physicalism that both renders physicalism a scientifically informed explanatory project and allows us to make important progress in addressing the ontological problem of consciousness. Physicalism, Elpidorou and Dove hold, is best viewed not as a thesis (metaphysical or otherwise) but as an interdisciplinary research program that aims to compositionally explain all natural phenomena that are central to our understanding of our place in nature. Consciousness and Physicalism is replete with philosophical arguments and informed, through and through, by findings in many areas of scientific research. It advances the debate regarding the ontological status of consciousness. It will interest students and scholars in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of cognitive science, and philosophy of science. And it will challenge both foes and friends of physicalism.




Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism


Book Description

The deepest relation between the psychological and the microphysical is constitution, where this relation is not to be explicated by the notion of identity.




Current Controversies in Philosophy of Mind


Book Description

Philosophy of mind is one of the most dynamic fields in philosophy, and one that invites debate around several key questions. There currently exist annotated tomes of primary sources, and a handful of single-authored introductions to the field, but there is no book that captures philosophy of mind’s recent dynamic exchanges for a student audience. By bringing compiling ten newly commissioned pieces in which leading philosophers square off on five central, related debates currently engaging the field, editor Uriah Kriegel has provided such a publication.The five debates include: Mind and Body: The Prospects for Russellian Monism Mind in Body: The Scope and Nature of Embodied Cognition Consciousness: Representationalism and the Phenomenology of Moods Mental Representation: The Project of Naturalization The Nature of Mind: The Importance of Consciousness. Preliminary descriptions of each chapter, annotated bibliographies for each controversy, and a supplemental guide to further controversies in philosophy of mind (with bibliographies) help provide clearer and richer views of active controversies for all readers.




The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness


Book Description

Updated and revised, the highly-anticipated second edition of The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness offers a collection of readings that together represent the most thorough and comprehensive survey of the nature of consciousness available today. Features updates to scientific chapters reflecting the latest research in the field Includes 18 new theoretical, empirical, and methodological chapters covering integrated information theory, renewed interest in panpsychism, and more Covers a wide array of topics that include the origins and extent of consciousness, various consciousness experiences such as meditation and drug-induced states, and the neuroscience of consciousness Presents 54 peer-reviewed chapters written by leading experts in the study of consciousness, from across a variety of academic disciplines




Consciousness


Book Description

CONSCIOUSNESS Consciousness is a thought-provoking collection of classic and contemporary philosophical literature on consciousness, bringing together influential scholarship by seminal thinkers and the work of emerging voices who reflect the diversity of the field. Editors Josh Weisberg and David Rosenthal have selected discussions that animate modern debates and connect consciousness to broader philosophical topics. Providing an expansive view of the philosophical landscape of consciousness studies, this carefully calibrated reader features classic work from the past four decades by seminal thinkers such as Thomas Nagel, David Lewis, Ned Block, Gilbert Harman, and Daniel Dennett, as well as important recent work from David Chalmers, Fiona Macperson, Joseph Levine, Kathleen Akins, and other contemporary philosophers. Divided into five parts, Consciousness explores the nature of consciousness, consciousness and knowledge, qualitative consciousness, and theories of consciousness. A final section on agency and physicalism includes work by Galen Strawson and a previously unpublished article by Myrto Mylopoulos. Philosophically challenging yet accessible to students, Consciousness is an ideal reader for many undergraduate and graduate courses on consciousness or philosophy of mind, as well as a useful supplementary text for general classes in philosophy and a valuable reference text for philosophers of mind, cognitive scientists, and psychologists.




Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity


Book Description

This book is about the idea that some true statements would have been true no matter how the world had turned out, while others could have been false. It develops and defends a version of the idea that we tell the difference between these two types of truths in part by reflecting on the meanings of words. It has often been thought that modal issues—issues about possibility and necessity—are related to issues about meaning. In this book, the author defends the view that the analysis of meaning is not just a preliminary to answering modal questions in philosophy; it is not merely that before we can find out whether something is possible, we need to get clear on what we are talking about. Rather, clarity about meaning often brings with it answers to modal questions. In service of this view, the author analyzes the notion of necessity and develops ideas about linguistic meaning, applying them to several puzzles and problems in philosophy of language. Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophical logic.