Product Description
Jane Heal argues that central to our ability to arrive at views about others' thoughts is not knowledge of some theory of the mind but rather an ability to imagine alternative worlds and how things appear from another person's point of view.She then applies this view to questions of how we represent others' thoughts, the shape of psychological concepts, the nature of rationality and the possibility of first person authority.This book is of interest to students and professionals in philosophy of mind and language. ... Read more

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Philosophy of Mind: Contemporary Readings is a comprehensive anthology that draws together leading philosophers writing on the major topics within philosophy of mind. Robb and O'Connor have carefully chosen articles under the following headings:
*Substance Dualism and Idealism
*Materialism
*Mind and Representation
*Consciousness
Each section is prefaced by an introductory essay by the editors which guides the student gently into the topic in whichleading philosophers are included.
The book is highly accessible and user-friendly and provides a broad-ranging exploration of the subject. Ideal for any philosophy student, this book will prove essential reading for any philosophy of mind course. The readings are designed to complement John heil's Philosophy of Mind:A Contemporary Introduction, Second edition (Routledge 2003), although the anthology can also be used as a stand-alone volume. ... Read more

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Jon Elster has written a comprehensive, wide-ranging book on the emotions in which he considers the full range of theoretical approaches. Drawing on history, literature, philosophy and psychology Elster presents a complete account of the role of the emotions in human behavior. Combining methodological and theoretical arguments with empirical case studies and written with Elster's customary verve and economy, this book will have a broad appeal to those in philosophy, psychology, economics, political science, as well as literary studies, history, and sociology. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Superlative work about emotions
This superlative work belongs on the shelf of any serious student of art, literature, philosophy and psychology - not to mention those readers who seek self-knowledge. Author Jon Elster explores the complex cognitive antecedents and consequences of emotional experience. Noting that much of what society needs to know about emotions is inaccessible in the psychology laboratory, he makes original, insightful use of literary and philosophical sources. He uses the work of such authors as Francois de La Rochefoucauld, Michel de Montaigne, Jean de La Bruyère and Alexis de Tocqueville to examine how emotional mechanisms function. This approach sheds light on the emotions and on the way you might read literature or listen to music. We highly recommend this book and find it valuable not only for what it says, but for what it inspires. It is capable of changing how you think and feel in ways that are (just as emotions themselves) far from predictable.

Endlessly helpful- making psychology for the social sciences
I cannot praise this book enough. The writing is clear, the thinking is meticulous and infinitely clever, and the usefullness of understanding thedifferent theories of the emotive being in the social scinces cannot beover-emphasized.

This book is Elster's best since "PoliticalPsychology".

If you are not an Elster partisan, what is wrong withyou? ... Read more

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Jaegwon Kim is one of the most preeminent and most influential contributors to the philosophy of mind and metaphysics.This collection of essays presents the core of his work on supervenience and mind with two sets of postscripts especially written for the book. The essays focus on such issues as the nature of causation and events, what dependency relations other than causal relations connect facts and events, the analysis of supervenience, and the mind-body problem.A central problem in the philosophy of mind is the problem of explaining how the mind can causally influence bodily processes.Professor Kim explores this problem in detail, criticizes the nonreductionist solution of it, and offers a modified reductionist solution of his own. Both professional philosophers and their graduate students will find this an invaluable collection. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Absolutely Essential
Jaegwon Kim's "Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays" is an absolute must-read for any philosopher working in the philosophy of mind.Of particular interest, Kim lays out his views in supervenience and its relation to the mind-body problem, discusses and (in my view) deals a death-blow to Donald Davidson's anomalous monism, and begins the development of his views on reductionism that come to fruition in his "Mind in a Physical World" (also a great read).Kim's work is a paradigm of thoroughness, both in material covered and the scope of his application of a few key ideas.Also of particular interest is Kim's work in event theory, which is developed in the first few essays, and which, though neglected for some time, has been the subject of several recent journal articles in application to problems associated with natural kinds.
All-in-all, a great set of essays by, in my view, one of the greatest living philosophers.

Excellent papers
This anthology of Kim's papers is really fundamental to anyone willing to study the metaphysics of mind. There are also papers on causality, events and epistemology. However, the core of the book is the seminal work laid by Kim on supervenience and its relation to the mind-body problem.

I really cannot believe how can Kim manage to be at the same precise, technical and transparently clear. Some of the papers contained in here are already classics in the field. I have learned A LOT from Kim. I hope you benefit from his work as I have. ... Read more

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There have long been controversies about how it is that minds can fit into a physical universe. Emergence in Mind presents new essays by a distinguished group of philosophers investigating whether mental properties can be said to 'emerge' from the physical processes in the universe. Such emergence requires mental properties to be different from physical properties, and much of the discussion relates to what the consequences of such a difference might be in areas such as freedom of the will, and the possibility of scientific explanations of non-physical (for example, social) phenomena. The volume also extends the debate about emergence by considering the independence of chemical properties from physical properties, and investigating what would need to be the case for there to be groups that could be said to exercise rationality. ... Read more

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This book discusses two of the oldest and hardest problems in both science and philosophy: What is matter?, and What is mind? A reason for tackling both problems in a single book is that two of the most influential views in modern philosophy are that the universe is mental (idealism), and that the everything real is material (materialism). Most of the thinkers who espouse a materialist view of mind have obsolete ideas about matter, whereas those who claim that science supports idealism have not explained how the universe could have existed before humans emerged. Besides, both groups tend to ignore the other levels of existence—chemical, biological, social, and technological.If such levels and the concomitant emergence processes are ignored, the physicalism/spiritualism dilemma remains unsolved, whereas if they are included, the alleged mysteries are shown to be problems that science is treating successfully. ... Read more

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In the first accessible introduction to the science of linguistics, a world-renowned linguist shows how the ability to learn language lies at the very heart of human nature. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Compelling discussion of the language instinct
PItM is a very interesting read -- a survey of linguistic, or perhaps more properly neuro-linguistic, thinking a decade or so ago.Since then, considerable advances have been made in the neurosciences, yet we are no closer to answering the fundamental questions Jackendorf poses about how and where, precisely, the brain 'does' language.PItM is, thus, no less compelling today for the passage of years since its publication.For anyone seeking a brief and easygoing introduction to the field, this is as fine a place as any to start.

Basic concepts of language
This is a fairly well organized book for basic concepts of language.Andsome extrapolation of the conclusions on language is ventured for someother aspects of human nature.The Argument for Mental Grammar leadsthrough the basic evidence leading to the conclusion that much of humanlanguage is innate.Any analysis of sentences leaves questions where rulesunderlying structure could arise.I would say it seems very introductoryand add some negative remarks on the author's style.

He adds thesesilly pencil drawings a few times to help us "picture" hisarguments.A bit childish.I wish the author would move a lot fasterthrough the arguments.I get up to page 44 for instance, and here he iscomparing the human brain operation to a videotape.What!When you'redone though, you are left with a decent perspective on the languagefaculty.Keep writing reviews on these things people.

Worth a read, but not really about "patterns in the mind"
I picked this up after reading William Calvin's "How Brains Think," which I thought was pretty exciting stuff.While Jackendoff does present some interesting thoughts on how our brains are probablypre-wired for certain abilities (he discusses innate patterns in language,vision, and, less convincingly, in my opinion, cultural adaptation) I washoping for a more in-depth discussion of how we humans function as patternrecognizing machines, so to speak, and what that means about our brains andhow we experience reality.This is really more about linguistics thanabout "patterns in the mind."Still, in all, an interestingread, and I learned a few cool things about the brain and how it works.

The book is based on assumptions,some preposterous
How can anyone write a book about language without even mentioning the great Ludwig Wittgenstein, who has shown, beyond any doubt, that what is in this book is mere nonsense. Jackendorff tries to look into the brain, butsees nothing. Wittgenstein says:If God himself looked into our brains hewould not know of whom we were talking. That's how language works, throughan unfounded system, that is learned by practice and where the parts don'tmean anything outside this system. This books tries to prove the opposite.I find it worthless like much that comes from American universities. ... Read more

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This book is a further contribution to the series Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Biology.It is an ambitious attempt to explain the relationship between intelligence and environmental complexity, and in so doing to link philosophy of mind to more general issues about the relations between organisms and environments, and to the general pattern of "externalist" explanations. This is a highly original philosophical project that will appeal to a broad swath of philosophers, especially those working in the philosophy of biology, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. ... Read more

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This book's thirty essays explore philosophically the nature and morality of sexual perversion, cybersex, masturbation, homosexuality, contraception, same-sex marriage, promiscuity, pedophilia, date rape, sexual objectification, teacher-student relationships, pornography, and prostitution. Authors include Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Nagel, Alan Goldman, John Finnis, Sallie Tisdale, Robin West, Alan Wertheimer, John Corvino, Cheshire Calhoun, Jerome Neu, and Alan Soble, among others. A valuable resource for sex researchers as well as undergraduate courses in the philosophy of sex. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Not what it looks like
This book presupposes a working knowledge of philosophy. If you have not read and are not fluent in the philosphies of a wide spectrum of writers, this book makes very little sense. It is densely written and should be viewed as an upper level or graduate reading.

thanks
i really appreciate it when people but their books online because it helps me save my parents some money on textbooks.I am a college student who lives at home at drives back and forth everyday to school.so anything i can do to save some money is very appriciated

Sex, Sexual, Love; Only Sex Here
This book has been around for a couple of decades, updated periodically to make it more contemporary. It was a required text in a course I took on "The Philosophy of Sex," and I did not like it then, and I still don't like it. Why?

Because it's obviously a textbook. It's a collection or readings about "sex," and as the word "sex" can be quite elastic, so is this book. And because of that, this book finds its way into academia. Yes, it has readings on all sorts of "sex" issues, from abortion to homosexuality to bestiality (I might be kidding), but sex to me is none of those things (okay, homosexuality is sex). But "sex" here is distinct from "sexual," and that's the rub.

If you want a textbook that examines "sex," but not the "sexual," this book may interest you, but I assure you that you will not be entertained. It's as dry as they come (pun intended). If you're interested in theories about "love" and "sexuality," then mosey over to Robert Solomon. He has several (unfortunately some of his books have different names for the same text; be careful). His wonderful book "Love" is truly extraordinary (but it appears in different incarnations).

If you've been assigned this book as a text, you have my complete and total sympathies.

Finally a book about sexuality that isn't based in fear!
Thank you for finally writing a book about the diversity of humans and their sexuality in a clear and positive light! ... Read more

Product Description

Arguing About the Mind is an accessible, engaging introduction to the core questions in the philosophy of mind. This collection offers a selection of thought-provoking articles that examine a broad range of issues from the mind and body relation to animal and artificial intelligence. Topics addressed include: 

• the problem of consciousness
• the nature of the mind
• the relationship between the mind, body and world
• the notion of selfhood
• pathologies and behavioural problems
• animal, machine and extra-terrestrial intelligence.

The editors provide lucid introductions to each section, give an overview of the debate and outline the arguments of the papers. An original and stimulating reader, Arguing About the Mind is ideal for students new to the philosophy of mind.

Customer Reviews (1)

The Modernist take on the Mind (A clear 5 star effort)
This book is an Anthology of both seminal and topical articles on the philosophy of the mind. It elaborates on a wide range of theories of mind advanced by philosophers as they go about the business of doing what they do best: thinking, reasoning and trying to advance the frontiers of logic and human understanding.

Here we get the philosopher's take on how the mind operates, how it relates to the non-mental world, the relationship between mind and body, and the nature of self (itself). It also includes lessons learned from mental illnesses, from split-brain research, as well as the controversy over the existence of animal consciousness and animal intelligence. It concludes with two of the sexiest topics in philosophy of the mind today: artificial intelligence, and whether there are intelligent beings on other planets. All of the stars of contemporary philosophy are present and at their very best.

Although Bertrand Russell's essay "What is the soul," is thrown in for good measure, in general classicists may be disappointed, as the book in general is pitched towards the present and the future. Although clearly intended for college students of philosophy (and is not the last word in any case), it is nonetheless carefully selected and is accessible to a wider more general audience.

The book is divided into nine sections: I.-II. Consciousness (What is the problem? and How should it be studied?); III. Is the mind physical? IV. How is the mind related to the body? V. What is self? VI. What can pathological cases teach us about the mind? VII. How can we know whether - and what - non-human animals think? VIII. Can machine think? IX. Is there intelligent life on other planets?

Each of the nine sections begin with a clear, informative introduction to the questions it covers. They give an overview of the topics, including questions and suggestions for additional reading. Even if the reader picks and chooses he will be more than satisfied. Clearly a five star effort. ... Read more

Product Description
How the Body Shapes the Mind is an interdisciplinary work that addresses philosophical questions by appealing to evidence found in experimental psychology, neuroscience, studies of pathologies, and developmental psychology. There is a growing consensus across these disciplines that the contribution of embodiment to cognition is inescapable. Because this insight has been developed across a variety of disciplines, however, there is still a need to develop a common vocabulary that is capable of integrating discussions of brain mechanisms in neuroscience, behavioral expressions in psychology, design concerns in artificial intelligence and robotics, and debates about embodied experience in the phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Shaun Gallagher's book aims to contribute to the formulation of that common vocabulary and to develop a conceptual framework that will avoid both the overly reductionistic approaches that explain everything in terms of bottom-up neuronal mechanisms, and inflationistic approaches that explain everything in terms of Cartesian, top-down cognitive states.

Gallagher pursues two basic sets of questions. The first set consists of questions about the phenomenal aspects of the structure of experience, and specifically the relatively regular and constant features that we find in the content of our experience. If throughout conscious experience there is a constant reference to one's own body, even if this is a recessive or marginal awareness, then that reference constitutes a structural feature of the phenomenal field of consciousness, part of a framework that is likely to determine or influence all other aspects of experience. The second set of questions concerns aspects of the structure of experience that are more hidden, those that may be more difficult to get at because they happen before we know it. They do not normally enter into the content of experience in an explicit way, and are often inaccessible to reflective consciousness. To what extent, and in what ways, are consciousness and cognitive processes, which include experiences related to perception, memory, imagination, belief, judgment, and so forth, shaped or structured by the fact that they are embodied in this way? ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A sweet and sour blend of technical writing and great prose: not for the uneducated.
To begin, I must state: Buyer Beware. This text is involved and difficult to follow if you lack background in the field, be it even a class in university. I am currently taking a class that overviews subjects presented herein, and it seems if I were not I would only understand the book on a superficial level. With that said, How the Body Shapes the Mind is definitely a must-read for anyone interested in neuroscience, neuropsychology, and any related fields. The author spends a lot of time propping up popular or controversial interdisciplinary concepts from body image to the interconnectivity of the senses to free will itself and deftly taking them apart, rearranging them, and finding wholly new and interesting points of view. The book takes fields as varied as psychology, neurophysiology, and philosophy and weaves a web of facts, studies, and logic to present the author's viewpoint on a number of issues throughout the cognitive sciences and beyond to the philosophy of the mind.

I admit, there are moments in the book where I worried, "why is this book titled `How the Body Shapes the Mind'?" It felt like Gallagher was jumping from topic to disparate topic, with only certain chapters or sections actually pertaining to this overarching theme. However, by the end of each chapter, Gallagher masterfully and with genius execution brings each section into the whole.

The book is set up thematically into two Parts, which are subdivided into Chapters with sub-sections.
First, Gallagher delves into the realm of proprioception and revisits age old topics of body image and body schema. He also presents surprisingly insightful ideas on the nature of language and gestures. In my opinion this part held the most meat (empirical backing), taking two terms with convoluted meanings, and defining them in explicit and logical ways such that he can build and base further information in the book upon it.

To merely define is not enough, according to Gallagher, one must also explain how and why. The author spends a major section of his text describing in absolute detail, often referring back to prior sections in a way that may be defined by some as excessively self-referential (perhaps not to the level of an "infinite regress", but close) , the ontological precepts of body schema and body image. This is an admirable way to present information, which presents it in a clear manner which he juxtaposes against extensive research and academic thought. This skillful presentation gives the author sufficient freedom to present new ideas without being hung up on the complications of necessarily testing all aspects of it.

Part 2 of the book leaves the realm of empirical research almost entirely, and focuses primarily philosophy and pathology. Gallagher successfully represents the text in the title. Every chapter leads further into how the body shapes the mind. By the end, the weight of all text bears down on the reader, suffocating them under the breadth and width of the discussion. The text becomes at times tedious, while at others interesting and refreshing. Most of this is due to writing style. The author is a very thorough writer to such an extent that the reader may be bogged down in the details, searching for the final point of the section.

The final chapters of the book take philosophical concepts such as Theory of the Mind and free will. It then takes these concepts, and argues successfully against all prevailing (presented) viewpoints. The deftness of the writing should be applauded. If there ever were a hole or weak spot in the author's own argument, it is exposed, poked, and prodded in kind with the rest. Having no background in either topic, these sections were of particular interest for their introduction into the concepts, and then subsequent explanation of the body-mind duality and interactions which subsist between them.

As books go, this book is information dense, and definitely food for thought. The sections are ordered in such a manner that one creates a foundation for the next, and information flows bi-directionally, yet smoothly between chapters. The book will change your perspective on how you individually interact with the world, and will make you consider every action, thought, and movement with a new perspective. This book would have been one of those that simply cannot be put down until the end for me, except the flow and ease of reading were interrupted by two things. One, as mentioned earlier, is the distracting level of self-reference to other sections of the book, and the information provided therein. There are one or two studies in that book which were mentioned in sufficient detail to stand alone four or five times. Gallagher's habit of doing this may convince you to skim. Be careful, though, as new points interspersed or at the end of the reiteration may be missed. Second is Gallagher's ubiquitous use of footnotes. Personally, footnotes destroy the flow of a narrative, and make it difficult to keep track of the point throughout a monologue. Worse yet, the footnotes in this text can extend over a couple of pages, and often present lots of information that is integral to the actual book itself, so they cannot be skipped successfully.

Though the book is set up with architectural precision, and a distinctly scientific bend and tone, Gallagher allows himself some artistry. One poetic example from the book: "The body generates a gestural expression. It is, however, another person who moves, motivates, and mediates this process. To say that language moves my body is already to say that other people move me." Read it yourself to find the other gems.

In summary: read this book if the title interests you. The book covers exactly what it says it covers. If you like footnotes, and the character they bring to this book: enjoy. Otherwise I recommend reading them after you've gone through a section. You will find the book much more readable, and thus enlightening. If you don't have $30, hope that they lower the price down to a more reasonable level, it is definitely worth to buy if you can afford it.

The most important book yet written on cogition, embodiment, development, and sociality.
Shaun Gallagher's How the Body Shapes the Mind serves as the gold standard for lucidity and persuasiveness of argument in the cognitive sciences and philosophy of mind.This work focuses on embodiment and its essential role in informing and constraining mind(s).

If you're looking for a book which covers, in depth, all of the essential topics, while providing a rigorous, clear, and often times quite entertaining conceptual framework for thinking about the mind, this is your best bet.

Good technical presentation
This book is aimed mainly at workers in the field and in related aspects of brain functioning. It is solid, important and well worth reading. ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

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Portraying the mind as a two-level structure, this book analyzes the architecture of the human mind. Thus, it demonstrates that the mind consists of a basic mind and a supermind--the former non-conscious and non-linguistic, the latter conscious and language-involving. Claiming that philosophers and psychologists have failed to distinguish these levels, Keith Frankish argues that this failure has stood in the way of the successful explanation of a number of puzzling mental phenomena. His book will be valued by philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (3)

1/3 worth reading
I was really excited when this book came. The genre is of interest of me and I thought the cover was the cherry on top. Overall the book is good. Some chapters are great and some are OK. The major issue or complaint for me is that the majority of the chapters were light on pop culture. The book's selections offers the reader synopses of different theorists, and then occasionally hits on the connections to popular culture.

I see that my paperback copy notes a 2006 and 2010 publication dates. LJ Smith and Stephenie Meyer (if not other YA authors of Vamp genre) should have been referenced in the 2010 edition of the book.

This book will have appeal to those interested in the zombie and vamp genre, but the philosophy portion will make the book more likely to be read in academe. And, this is unfortunate. This book could have done more.

Any library seeking to blend modern philosophy with popular fantasy needs this
Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy: New Life for the Undead links popular culture and philosophy with a philosophical discussion of vampires and zombies. The connection lies in how they confront us with moral and metaphysical issues of life and death, and this provides over twenty modern thinkers who reflect on the idea and nature of the undead. Any library seeking to blend modern philosophy with popular fantasy needs this.

Uneven but worthwhile reference work
Incorporating pop culture into academia is quite the trick - you've got to remain true to source material in two very different areas. This collection of essays written by English or philosophy professors at 4-year colleges (or graduate students working on their Ph.D's) gets the philosophy right yet often stumbles on the pop culture details. It's important to get the pop culture details right because it indicates that you're taking the subject seriously and not just using it as a springboard for something else. Any horror fan worth his favorite Halloween mask can tell you that vampires and zombies have been portrayed in multiple ways in books and novels, and one has to be very careful in making generalizations. Given that horror fans tend to be a bit more obsessive than fans of other stripes, you'd better keep them happy!

The best essays in this book are the most focused. Several chapters are devoted to George Romero's "Dead" series, and these chapters (written by Matthew Walker, Simon Clark, and Leah A. Murray) have an appropriately fixed gaze on a small set of films that have been perhaps overanalyzed - and have surprisingly fresh things to say about them. Kudos! Noel Carroll's essay on the holiday of Halloween and Phillip Cole's exploration of Rousseau's philosophy as it relates to vampirism are two of the better essays I've read about the supernatural in a long, long while. I suspect they will be reprinted and quoted from elsewhere. And the cover is undoubtably one of the best photos I've seen on an occult-themed book in the recent past.

As for the worst? I am skeptical when the authors attempt to broaden the definition of "zombie" to Philip K. Dick-style androids or pod people, or when they ignore that many modern movie zombies really aren't undead at all but infected with bizarre viruses, or when they reference brain-eating as typical of all movie zombies even though it's only closely identified with "Return of the Living Dead." Playing too loosely with the facts suggest you haven't studied them that closely in the first place and are compensating by broadening your spectrum. And the "Treehouse of Horror"-type author biographical notes near the end are too jokey for my tastes and make it seem as if the contributors weren't serious about their work appearing in a pop culture book.

Given that the good-to-bad ratio is 50-50 I've given this book 3 stars. I can see it being immensely inspirational to any thoughtful horror or fantasy author looking for fresh approaches to venerable horrors. This would also be very useful for the Boris Karloffs and Robert Englunds of the future in trying to develop character motivation when portraying monsters. For those reasons and to those readers, I recommend it. ... Read more

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Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? In their famous 1998 paper "The Extended Mind," philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers posed this question and answered it provocatively: cognitive processes "ain't all in the head." The environment has an active role in driving cognition; cognition is sometimes made up of neural, bodily, and environmental processes. Their argument excited a vigorous debate among philosophers, both supporters and detractors. This volume brings together for the first time the best responses to Clark and Chalmers's bold proposal. These responses, together with the original paper by Clark and Chalmers, offer a valuable overview of the latest research on the extended mind thesis. The contributors first discuss (and answer) objections raised to Clark and Chalmers's thesis. Andy Clark himself responds to critics in an essay that uses the movie Memento's amnesia-aiding notes and tattoos to illustrate the workings of the extended mind. Contributors then consider the different directions in which the extended mind project might be taken, including the need for an approach that focuses on cognitive activity and practice.

Contributors: Fred Adams, Ken Aizawa, David Chalmers, Andy Clark, Stephen Cowley, Susan Hurley, James Ladyman, Richard Menary, John Preston, Don Ross, Mark Rowlands, Rob Rupert, David Spurrett, John Sutton, Michael Wheeler, Rob Wilson

Life and Mind series: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology

A Bradford Book ... Read more

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Modern Philosophy finds it difficult to give a satisfactory picture of the place of minds in the world. In Mind and World, based on the 1991 John Locke Lectures, one of the most distinguished philosophers writing today offers his diagnosis of this difficulty and points to a cure. In doing so, he delivers the most complete and ambitious statement to date of his own views, a statement that no one concerned with the future of philosophy can afford to ignore.

John McDowell amply illustrates a major problem of modern philosophy--the insidious persistence of dualism--in his discussion of empirical thought. Much as we would like to conceive empirical thought as rationally grounded in experience, pitfalls await anyone who tries to articulate this position, and McDowell exposes these traps by exploiting the work of contemporary philosophers from Wilfrid Sellars to Donald Davidson. These difficulties, he contends, reflect an understandable--but surmountable--failure to see how we might integrate what Sellars calls the logical space of reasons" into the natural world. What underlies this impasse is a conception of nature that has certain attractions for the modern age, a conception that McDowell proposes to put aside, thus circumventing these philosophical difficulties. By returning to a pre-modern conception of nature but retaining the intellectual advance of modernity that has mistakenly been viewed as dislodging it, he makes room for a fully satisfying conception of experience as a rational openness to independent reality. This approach also overcomes other obstacles that impede a generally satisfying understanding of how we are placed in the world.

Customer Reviews (4)

terse and elegant prose
John McDowell's insight on how we acquire conceptual knowledge of the external world is brilliant. Basing his argument on the Kantian conception of receptitivity and spontaneity, John McDowell not only eases the philosophical anxiety of acquiring conceptual capacities and the epistemic role experience plays by destroying the need for the anxiety at all. I recommend this for any person interested in philosophy that is constructive and not just a response to someone else's question. McDowell, unlike most philosophers in our age, is not just picking at a niggling point, he is bringing fresh ideas to the philosophical table.

"Evolution of the Stone"
Logical grammar concerns itself with "functors", devices that transform parts of language into other parts. For example, predicates combine with names of objects to form sentences. One of the less-celebrated functor types is the "subnector", which transforms sentences into terms: returning from the complex to the simple. *Mind and World* is a subnector of a book. The philosophical issues it engages with are central ones, but they are developed against a background of baroque analytical machinery. In other words, you really have to know in quite a bit of detail what several difficult figures had to say before McDowell's own concerns are at all clear.

This should not be surprising, given that the book was originally the 1991 John Locke Lectures at Oxford: these lectures are delivered yearly to professional philosophers who have formalized theories and intricate arguments well in hand, but are looking to re-evaluate the "big picture" of the philosophical enterprise. McDowell accordingly polemically bases his presentation on philosophers he was closely linked to in earlier work, Donald Davidson and Gareth Evans. McDowell has elsewhere spent a great deal of energy defending and refining their ideas, but the emphasis here is on his divergence from them concerning the role of concepts in our experience of the world.

Beginning from Wilfrid Sellars' rejection of givenness, McDowell aims to vindicate a view of experience derived from Kant: that experience requires the exercise of conceptual capacities (such as the ability to discriminate facts about the object which might be true of other objects) and an element corresponding to Kantian "intutions", the influence of independent realities. McDowell argues that both elements are essential to including true, meaningful experience as a core element in our rational thought: misconstruing them as inessentially linked at will or heterogeneous and incapable of mixing leads to the reappearance of many traditional problems of epistemology we could otherwise opt out of.

McDowell then goes on to consider how such conceptual capacities could be part of the repertoire of a natural creature such as a human being, without appealing to an extra-natural "soul". His theory is derived from Aristotle's account of moral formation; Aristotle makes this out to be a matter of "second nature", which McDowell generalizes to cover the development of all "normative" conceptualization of the world, including our sense of action, under the heading of *Bildung* (a concept borrowed from the German pedagogical tradition). He ends his lectures by considering, in this light, Marx on the relationship of man to his world and Gadamer on the importance of tradition for rational thought.

This relates to McDowell's stated intention in the preface, that the whole work serve as a prolegomenon to the reading of Hegel's *Phenomenology of Spirit*. (In my opinion, the work fails to serve this purpose: the only Hegel quotation in the lectures is tendentiously interpreted, and Hegel's own treatment of *Bildung* in the *Phenomenology* makes it a critical and anti-traditional moment of the development of Spirit.) Those hoping for insight about Marx's relation to Hegel will be disappointed: in fact, as might be expected given his many favorable references to Gadamer, McDowell's own conclusions are in many ways diametrically opposite to those of the "Hegelian Marxists".

The lectures are followed by four postscripts, which expand upon technical disagreements between McDowell and other analytic philosophers mentioned in passing in the lectures. All of these will be of some interest to those who follow analytic philosophy closely, especially the interpretation of Wittgenstein: but there is less "systematic" content in these and the introduction (added for the paperback edition). They contribute to the relative irrelevancy of this book for the interested layman hoping to get a sense of McDowell's program, who would be better served by reading McDowell's paper "Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space" (included in *Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality*).

Essential Reading
This text with its new Introduction clearly demonstrates McDowell's prominence in American philosophy.McDowell is certainly one of the most important, careful, and creative minds in the field.Mind and World is crucial reading material on perceptual content, judgment, and experience.

Inspired by Sellars's Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, McDowell interrogates the notion of a 'logical space of reasons' as having location in the natural world.At times adopting an obscure and abstract prose style, McDowell nevertheless identifies specific anxieties concerning the realtion between mind and world: tensions between a Kantian sensible intuition (or 'minimal empiricism')--how our thoughts are answerable to and directed at the world--and the idea of receiving an impression (or Kantian humility) as a transaction with the world, placing it in a 'logical space of reasons.'So there is a tension between a normative context, that is, how the world 'impinges' on us, which is within the logical space of reasons, and empirical concepts that are supposed to be within the logical space of nature.But if we take Sellars seriously, identifying something as an impression--an economy of logical space of nature 'giving' or 'impinging' on the mind, then we are responsible to characterize just how an 'impinging world' is different from justifying or placing a verdict on empirical descriptions.McDowell's tension is between a 'minimal empiricism'--thought is answerable to a tribunal of experience--and how experience is indeed a tribunal, which attributes verdicts on thoughts.

Along the way, McDowell critiques the Myth of the Given, Davidson's coherentism, and argues for 'direct realism.'
McDowell has a flair for characterizing and 'exorcising' philosophical anxieties between empiricism and naturalism, and he employs creative metaphors that are extremely helpful, such as the 'seesaw' and a 'sideways on view.'

The first three lectures are most important, wherein he discusses conceptual and non-conceptual content.Here he engages the views of Sellars, Quine, Davidson, Evans, and Peacocke.

Mind and World is a masterful example of careful and thorough-going philosophy--at its best.

For philosophy majors
This is a difficult, but well written text of a series of lectures given by McDowell.Frankly, it required a lot of concentration on my part, but the effort was worth it.McDowell makes good sense of the problems ofempiricism.He is also a good stylist. ... Read more

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Thomas Aquinas' philosophical psychology, or philosophy of mind, was neglected for centuries by secular thinkers because of the dominance of ideas deriving from Descartes. Contemporary scholars, however, have discovered in his writings some of the best philosophical reflections from any period.

Now available in paper, Aquinas on Mind makes accessible those parts of Aquinas' system which have enduring value. The core of the work is a close reading of sections from Summa Theologiae which deal with the nature of human intellect and will and the relationship between body and soul. This study requires no knowledge of Latin or medieval history. It relates Aquinas' system to a tradition of philosophy of mind inaugurated in the Anglo-American academic community by Wittgenstein and Ryle. ... Read more

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Matters of Mind tackles the mind-body problem and how it has spanned and changed from the earlier theories of reducing aboutness to empirical cases for physicalism.The theories of perception, property explanation, content and knowledge, reliabilism and the problem of zombies and ghosts are all carefully assessed in this clearly written book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Honest Take
I like this book because Sturgeon gives readers what few in the high court of academic philosophy would ever dare to: the unadorned truth. In general, philosophers have made a muddle of these mysteries of the mind, but Sturgeon sorts it our nicely, and with style and readability that few in his field can match. The technical aspects will be daunting for lay readers, especially the highly original examination of ideas across different disciplines, and how they relate. But this is a work of the highest order, and it will be remembered and heavily referenced for many, many years to come. ... Read more