Pragmatist Neurophilosophy: American Philosophy and the Brain


Book Description

Pragmatist Neurophilosophy:American Philosophy and the Brain explains why the broad tradition of pragmatism is needed now more than ever. Bringing pragmatist philosophers together with cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, this volume explores topics of urgent interest across neuroscience and philosophy from the perspective of pragmatism. Discussing how Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Mead benefited from their laboratory-knowledge, contributors treat America's first-generation pragmatists as America's first cognitive scientists. They explain why scientists today should participate in pragmatic judgments, just as the classical pragmatists did, and how current scientists can benefit from their earlier philosophical explorations across the same territory. Looking at recent neuroscientific discoveries in relation to classical pragmatists, they explore emerging pragmatic views supported directly from the behavioral and brain sciences and describe how "neuropragmatism" engages larger cultural questions by adequately dealing with meaningful values and ethical ideals. Pragmatist Neurophilosophy is an important contribution to scholars of both pragmatism and neuroscience and a timely reminder that America's first generation of pragmatists did not stumble onto its principles, but designed them in light of biology's new discoveries.




Neuroscience, Neurophilosophy and Pragmatism


Book Description

Bringing together active neuroscientists, neurophilosophers, and scholars this volume considers the prospects of a neuroscientifically-informed pragmatism and a pragmatically-informed neuroscience on issues ranging from the nature of mental life to the implications of neuroscience for education and ethics.




Pragmatist Neurophilosophy


Book Description




Neuroscience, Psychotherapy and Clinical Pragmatism


Book Description

This volume explores how the principles and values of pragmatic philosophy serve as orienting perspectives for critical thinking in contemporary psychotherapy and clinical practice. Drawing on the contributions of William James and John Dewey, Neuroscience, Psychotherapy, and Clinical Pragmatism introduces a model of clinical pragmatism emphasizing the individuality of the person, open-ended dialogue, experiential learning, and the practical outcomes of ideas and methods. In a second part, chapters show how recent developments in neuroscience and interpersonal neurobiology deepen our understanding of change and growth in accord with the principles of clinical pragmatism. Finally, the volume reviews paradigms of psychotherapy across the psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive, and humanistic traditions. Case studies show how the pluralist orientation of clinical pragmatism enlarges concepts of therapeutic action. This text has been written for psychotherapists as well as scholars, educators, and trainees in the fields of psychiatry, clinical psychology, counseling, and social work.




Habits


Book Description

This pragmatist interpretation of habits provides a unifying concept for 4E cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy, and social theory.




Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy


Book Description

This book builds on the idea that pragmatics and philosophy are strictly interconnected and that advances in one area will generate consequential advantages in the other area. The first part of the book, entitled ‘Theoretical Approaches to Philosophy of Language’, contains contributions by philosophers of language on connectives, intensional contexts, demonstratives, subsententials, and implicit indirect reports. The second part, ‘Pragmatics in Discourse’, presents contributions that are more empirically based or of a more applicative nature and that deal with the pragmatics of discourse, argumentation, pragmatics and law, and context. The book presents perspectives which, generally, make most of the Gricean idea of the centrality of a speaker’s intention in attribution of meaning to utterances, whether one is interested in the level of sentence-like units or larger chunks of discourse.




Pragmatism and Embodied Cognitive Science


Book Description

This book endeavors to fill the conceptual gap in theorizing about embodied cognition. The theories of mind and cognition which one could generally call "situated" or "embodied cognition" have gained much attention in the recent decades. However, it has been mostly phenomenology (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, etc.), which has served as a philosophical background for their research program. The main goal of this book is to bring the philosophy of classical American pragmatism firmly into play. Although pragmatism has been arguably the first intellectual current which systematically built its theories of knowledge, mind and valuation upon the model of a bodily interaction between an organism and its environment, as the editors and authors argue, it has not been given sufficient attention in the debate and, consequently, its conceptual resources for enriching the embodied mind project are far from being exhausted. In this book, the authors propose concrete subject-areas in which the philosophy of pragmatism can be of help when dealing with particular problems the philosophy of the embodied mind nowadays faces - a prominent example being the inevitable tension between bodily situatedness and the potential universality of symbolic meaning.




Pragmatism and the Search for Coherence in Neuroscience


Book Description

We have known for over a thousand years that the brain underlies behavioral expression, but effective scientific study of the brain is only very recent. Two things converge in this book: a great respect for neuroscience and its many variations, and a sense of investigation and inquiry demythologized. Think of it as foraging for coherence.




Artificial Intelligence and Global Security


Book Description

Artificial Intelligence and Global Security: Future Trends, Threats and Considerations brings a much-needed perspective on the impact of the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in military affairs. Experts forecast that AI will shape future military operations in ways that will revolutionize warfare.




Neurophilosophy of Consciousness, Vol. VI


Book Description

Anyone who has ever enjoyed the honor to lecture a graduate school audience will tell you that simplicity in delivery as a goal is a worthwhile pragmatic and theoretical virtue if and only the expected and appropriate cognitive content are aimed at the student and not for self indulgence, independent of the corresponding level of complexity to be communicated. There is a tacit presumption that 'selling/marketing' an idea by a professor implies there must be a 'buyer' student purchase for a pedagogical transaction to be completed. Unless, of course, the professor, consciously knowing (or not) is engaged in a self-serving soliloquy assuming as primitive, 'self-evident' complex propositions and often expressed as either inspired on a radical conceptual theosophy or based on a radical empirical, probable/statistical scientific lab result as characterized by extremist pronouncements. Yet, the very complex and changing nature of the object/event, in its dynamic evolutionary progression in our Minkowsky 4-d space time existential reality, opts to reveal its complexity to human audiences in the form of the simplest possible model-poems solution that are compatible with the student's undeveloped brain dynamics' phenomenology and combinatorial limitations, as amply detailed in our other publications. We now expand further on the justifications for our general poem on the evolution of complexity as discussed under "The Immanent Invariant and the Transcendental Transforming Horizons." We need to harmonize integrative the exotic idealistic speculations and conjectures of conceptual models with the empirical/pragmatic measurements coming out of the lab. See Ch. 12, "Nurophilosophy of Consciousness.", Vol. IV and Vol. V.