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In this sequel to Outgrowing Materialism, Thompson explores five conceptual'Worlds'that preceded the dualist v. materialist divide and shows why recent philosophy--often little-known outside of academic circles--is now giving these old ideas a new relevance. In an approachable way, but without avoiding complexity, Embodying Mind leads the reader through the Worlds of panpsychism, idealism, Aristotelianism, emergence, and information theory, holism, and process theology, examining the ideas of ethics and God, and the difficult questions, accompanying each. Thompson concludes that causal processes harmonize as in a cosmic counterpoint. The world and its beautiful contents form a seamless material whole. It is not as if Mind or God glints obscurely through ever-narrowing chinks in otherwise seamless nature. There are no chinks, but the whole is full of Mind. Overall, imperfectly, things are moving towards their sustaining good: God is becoming God, surpassing God. Embodying Mind can be read independently from Outgrowing Materialism, but together the two volumes of Ten Ways to Weave the Word mount a robust, wide-ranging case that nobody interested in the science v. religion debate, or wishing more widely for an integrated understanding of'Matter, Mind and God,'can afford to ignore.

The idea of an ideological war between science and religion, Thompson argues, is founded on a mistake. But this does not mean that there is nothing at stake. For behind the ill-conceived conflict lie complex issues about the nature of mind, consciousness, experience, subjectivity, quality, value, and the like, all of which need to be disentangled and assessed in their own right. Outgrowing Materialism leads the reader through a sequence of five'Worlds,'each of which offers a distinct way of understanding (or failing to understand) these issues, and where God might belong (or not). Writing accessibly, but with a sharp eye for detail, Thompson sheds new light on the familiar territory of materialism, dualism, and structural realism, and evaluates the growing attraction of the multiverse. He argues that dualism mechanized the material world; then materialism exorcised the mental'ghost'from the machine; and finally, this machine is evaporating into pure mathematics. Outgrowing Materialism is half of Ten Ways to Weave the World: Matter, Mind, and God. The sequel, Embodying Mind, discusses five'Worlds'that precede and follow those discussed here. However, Outgrowing Materialism stands in its own right as a critique of the modern science v. religion dilemma.

This book celebrates the research career of Lynne Rudder Baker by presenting sixteen new and critical essays from admiring students, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends. Baker was a trenchant critic of physicalist conceptions of the universe. She was a staunch defender of a kind of practical realism, what she sometimes called a metaphysics of everyday life. It was this general “common sense” philosophical outlook that underwrote her famous constitution view of reality. Whereas most of her contemporaries were in general given to metaphysical reductionism and eliminativism, Baker was unapologetic and philosophically deft in her defense of ontological pluralism. The essays in this book engage with all aspects of her unique and influential work: practical realism about the mind; the constitution view of human persons; the first-person perspective; and God, Christianity, and naturalism.Common Sense Metaphysics will be of interest to scholars of Baker's work, as well as scholars and advanced students engaged in research on various topics in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of religion.

The book provides an argument why realism is a viable metatheoretical framework for psychological science. By looking at some variations of realism such as scientific realism, critical realism, situational realism and Ferraris'new realism, a realist view of science is outlined that can feature as a metatheory for psychological science. Realism is a necessary correction for the mythical image of science responsible for and maintained by a number of dichotomies and polarities in psychology. Thus, the quantitative-qualitative dichotomy, scientist-practitioner polarity and positivist-constructionist opposition feed off and maintains a mythic image of science on levels of practice, methods and metatheory. Realism makes a clear distinction between ontology and epistemic access to reality, the latter which easily fits with softer versions of constructionism, and the former which grounds science in resistance and possibility, loosely translated as criticism. By taking science as a critical activity an issue such as the quantitative imperative looses its defining force as a hallmark of science - it provides epistemic access to certain parts of reality. In addition, essentially critical activities characteristic of various qualitative approaches may be welcomed as proper science. Academics, professionals and researchers in psychology would find value in situating their scholarly work in a realist metatheory avoiding the pitfalls of traditional methodologies and theories.

Auch heute noch (oder vielmehr: heute wieder) geistert durch die Sprachphilosophie und die Philosophie des Geistes die These, dass es sich bei mentalen Einstellungen wie Glauben und Wissen um Relationen zwischen kognitiven Subjekten und Propositionen bzw. Sachverhalten handle. Mit anderen Worten haben diese These bereits zahlreiche Philosophen von Bolzano bis Frege vertreten, doch deren Lehren wurden vor 100 Jahren von Neopositivsten als metaphysischer Unsinn abgekanzelt. Und als vor 50 Jahren Karl Popper seine Lehre von der Welt 3 mit ausdrücklicher Berufung auf Bolzano und Frege entwickelte, warf man ihm vor, damit die methodologischen Standards seines Kritischen Rationalismus zu missachten. All dies scheint in Vergessenheit geraten zu sein. Dabei könnte man auch heute noch viel aus dieser Vorgeschichte lernen. Dieser Band bemüht sich darum, diese frühen Quellen zum Thema in Erinnerung zu rufen und für eine heutige Diskussion kritisch-systematisch aufzubereiten.

Naturalistic cognitive science, when realistically rendered, rightly maintains that to think is to deploy contentful mental representations. Accordingly, conscious perception, memory, and anticipation are forms of cognition that, despite their introspectively manifest differences, may coincide in content. Sometimes we remember what we saw; other times we predict what we will see. Why, then, does what it is like consciously to perceive, differ so dramatically from what it is like merely to recall or anticipate the same? Why, if thought is just representation, does the phenomenal character of seeing a sunset differ so stunningly from the tepid character of recollecting or predicting the sun's descent? J. Christopher Maloney argues that, unlike other cognitive modes, perception is in fact immediate, direct acquaintance with the object of thought. Although all mental representations carry content, the vehicles of perceptual representation are uniquely composed of the very objects represented. To perceive the setting sun is to use the sun and its properties to cast a peculiar cognitive vehicle of demonstrative representation. This vehicle's embedded referential term is identical with, and demonstrates, the sun itself. And the vehicle's self-attributive demonstrative predicate is itself forged from a property of that same remote star. So, in this sense, the perceiving mind is an extended mind. Perception is unbrokered cognition of what is real, exactly as it really is. Maloney's theory of perception will be of great interest in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science.

This is the first book in English to explore in detail the genesis and consequences of Lacan's concept of the'Real', providing readers with an invaluable key to one of the most influential ideas of modern times.

In Spirits in the Material World: The Challenge of Technology, Gil Germain provocatively argues that humans are fast becoming spirit-like creatures, beings who assume their bodies are incidental to what it means to be human, and the'real world'an accidental quality of the human condition. Technology, it is suggested, authorizes such an understanding and legitimates a manner of action that obscures the centrality of embodiment. Technology properly understood is thus an otherworldly or spiritual force. Spirits in the Material World challenges the assumptions underpinning the technological world view through a reading of leading contemporary theorists who have addressed the interconnection between technology and embodiment. The book both reveals and contests the multifarious ways in which technology's spiritual thrust is manifested in contemporary thought and practice. While respecting technology's hold on modernity and its predisposition toward disembodiment, Germain gives important reasons why this inclination toward spiritization ought to be resisted and what shape this resistance must take if it is to be meaningful. Spirits in the Material World will appeal to a broad spectrum of scholars and students alike, especially those interested in philosophy of technology, postmodernism, political theory, phenomenology, the end of history debate, and deep ecology.

This book pushes nihilism to its ultimate conclusion by linking revisionary naturalism in Anglo-American philosophy with anti-phenomenological realism in French philosophy. Contrary to the'post-analytic'consensus uniting Heidegger and Wittgenstein against scientism and scepticism, this book links eliminative materialism and speculative realism.

In Physical Realization, Sydney Shoemaker considers the question of how physicalism can be true: how can all facts about the world, including mental ones, be constituted by facts about the distribution in the world of physical properties? Physicalism requires that the mental properties of a person are'realized in'the physical properties of that person, and that all instantiations of properties in macroscopic objects are realized in microphysical states of affairs. Shoemaker offers an account of both these sorts of realization, one which allows the realized properties to be causally efficacious. He also explores the implications of this account for a wide range of metaphysical issues, including the nature of persistence through time, the problem of material constitution, the possibility of emergent properties, and the nature of phenomenal consciousness.

In many respects, Brentano conducted pioneering analyses of problems that are currently in the focus of cognitive science and artificial intelligence: from the problem of reference to that of representation, from the problem of categorial classification to ontology and the cognitive analysis of natural language. Brentano, in fact, dealt with and wrote on questions concerning the auditory stream (temporal apprehension), visual perception (continua, point of view, three-dimensional construction of phenomenal objects), intentionality, imagery, and conceptual space, considering these pertaining to a metaphysical enquiry. Moreover, Brentano displayed clear awareness of the complexity of problems and of the interrelations among different areas of inquiry. From this point of view, his theory, however complex, offers elements for the treatment of problems currently under investigation. Brentano's work is an antidote against physicalism and logicism, which dominated the 20thcentury epistemology, and as such appears to be a good philosophy candidate for cognitive science.'A set of knotty questions are implied in the very title of Brentano's work'Psychology from an empirical standpoint'. To solve them, Albertazzi guides us systematically through Brentano's life and works, investigating into the inherent complexity of both his view of mental life and the related methodology. In so doing, she discloses a number of threads into the open texture of modern philosophy of mind.'Lia Formigari, Ordinary professor of Philosophy of Language, La Sapienza, Rome, Italy

In this important book, Drew Khlentzos explains the antirealist argument from a realist perspective. He defends naturalistic realism against the antirealist challenge, and he considers the consequences of his defense for our understanding of realism and truth. Khlentzos argues that the naturalistic realist view that the world exists independently of the mind must take into consideration what he calls the representation problem: if the naturalistic realist view is true, how can mental representation of the world be explained? He examines this major antirealist challenge in detail and shows that many realists have dismissed it because they have not understood its nature. He sees it as a philosophical puzzle: the antirealist challenge, if sound, does not prove that there are no objects that exist independently of the mind, but that there is no rational basis for thinking that there are; we have good reason to believe in the naturalistic view, but (given the antirealist arguments) we have no way of knowing how it could be true. Khlentzos surveys the antirealist arguments of Michael Dummett, Hilary Putnam, and Crispin Wright and suggests a realist answer. He argues for a radically nonepistemic conception of truth, and against pragmatist, intuitionist, verificationist, and pluralist alternatives. He examines and rejects some current versions of physicalism and functionalism, and offers an original version of the correspondence theory of truth.

This is the second volume of John McDowell's selected papers. These nineteen essays collectively report on McDowell's involvement, over more than twenty years, with questions about the interface between the philosophies of language and mind and with issues in general epistemology. Throughout McDowell focuses on questions to do with content: with the nature of content both linguistic and psychological; with what McDowell regards as misguided views about content; and with the form which a proper semantic theory of content should assume.