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Notes:

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [136]-149) and index.
• Neil Levy presents an original theory of freedom and responsibility. Cognitive neuroscience and psychology provide a great deal of evidence that our actions are often shaped by information of which we are not conscious some psychologists have concluded that we are actually conscious of very few of the facts we respond to. But most people seem to assume that we need to be conscious of the facts we respond to in order to be responsible for what we do. Some thinkers have argued that this naive assumption is wrong, and we need not be conscious of these facts to be responsible, while others think it is correct and therefore we are never responsible. Levy argues that both views are wrong. He sets out and defends a particular account of consciousness-the global workspace view-and argues this account entails that consciousness plays an especially important role in action. We exercise sufficient control over the moral significance of our acts to be responsible for them only when we are conscious of the facts that give to our actions their moral character. Further, our actions are expressive of who we are as moral agents only when we are conscious of these same facts. There are therefore good reasons to think that the naive assumption, that consciousness is needed for moral responsibility, is in fact true. Levy suggests that this entails that people are responsible less often than we might have thought, but the consciousness condition does not entail that we are never morally responsible. — Back cover.
• Does consciousness matter? — The consciousness thesis — The global workspace — What does consciousness do? — Consciousness and the real self — Consciousness and control.

Subjects:

• Consciousness.
• Responsibility.
• Bewusstsein. (DE-588)4006349-5 gnd
• Verantwortung. (DE-588)4062547-3 gnd
• Consciousness. fast (OCoLC)fst00875441
• Responsibility. fast (OCoLC)fst01095857

Requested by Bloomberg, M.

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Notes:

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 168-200) and index.
• Pragmatic representations — Perception — Action — Pragmatic mental imagery.
• What mediates between sensory input and motor output? This is probably the most basic question one can ask about the mind. There is stimulation on your retina, something happens in your skull, and then your hand reaches out to grab the apple in front of you. What is it that happens in between? What representations make it possible for you to grab this apple? Bence Nanay calls these representations that make it possible for you to grab the apple ‘pragmatic representations’. In Between Perception and Action he argues that pragmatic representations whose function is to mediate between sensory input and motor output play an immensely important role in our mental life. And they help us to explain why the vast majority of what goes on in our mind is very similar to the simple mental processes of animals. If we accept this framework, many classic questions in philosophy of perception and of action will look very different. The aim of this book is to trace the various consequences of this way of thinking about the mind in a number of branches of philosophy as well as in psychology and cognitive science. — Book jacket.

Subjects:

• Philosophy of mind.
• Mind and body.
• Act (Philosophy)
• Perception.

Requested by Bloomberg, M.

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Notes:

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 307-320) and index.

Subjects:

• Ontology.
• Listening.
• Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976.
• Critical theory.
• Self-actualization (Psychology)
• Social change.
• Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976.
• Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976 fast (OCoLC)fst00032385
• Critical theory
• Heidegger, Martin
• Listening
• Ontology
• Self-actualization (Psychology)
• Social change

Requested by Doak, B.

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Part of the series Routledge studies in metaphysics 6;Routledge studies in metaphysics 6.
Notes:

• Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Introduction : understanding the question / Tyron Goldschmidt — Could there be a complete explanation of everything? / Timothy O’Connor — Ultimate naturalistic causal explanations / Graham Oppy — Reasoning without the principle of sufficient reason / Shieva Kleinschmidt — The principle of sufficient reason and the grand inexplicable / Jacob Ross — Contingency, dependence, and the ontology of the many / Christopher Hughes — Conceiving absolute greatness / Earl Conee — A proof of God’s reality / John Leslie — Methodological separatism, modal pluralism, and metaphysical nihilism / David Efird and Tom Stoneham — Contingency / John Heil — Metaphycial nihilism revisited / E. J. Lowe — The subtraction arguments for metaphysical nihilism : compared and defended / Gonzalo Rodriquez-Pereyra — The probabilistic explanation of why there is something rather than nothing / Matthew Kotzen — Are some things naturally necessary? / Marc Lange — Questioning the question / Stephen Maitzen — Ontological pluralism, the gradiation of being, and the question why is there something rather than nothing? / Kris McDaniel.

Subjects:

• Ontology.

Requested by Apolloni, D

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Notes:

• Includes bibliographical references (page [283]-292) and indexes.
• Ontological preliminaries — The indispensability of logical necessity — Modality : fundamental and irreducible — Absolute modality — The source of logical necessities — Metaphysical necessities — Necessary beings : properties and numbers — Higuer-order logics — Contingent beings — Possibilities — Essential knowledge.

Subjects:

• Frege, Gottlob, 1848-1925.
• Modality (Theory of knowledge)
• Ontology.
• Philosophy.

Requested by Kurpiers, R

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Notes:

• Includes index.
• Bibliography: p. 341-350.

Subjects:

• Infinite — History.
• Continuity — History.

Requested by Anonymous

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Notes:

• Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Aquinas’ five ways / Timothy J. Pawl — The contingency cosmological argument / Mark T. Nelson — The Kalam argument for the existence of God / Harry Lesser — The ontological argument / Sara L. Uckelman — Pascal’s wager / Leslie Burkholder — James’ will to believe argument / A.T. Fyfe — The problem of evil / Michael Bruce and Steven Barbone — The free will defense to the problem of evil / Grant Sterling — St. Anselm on free choice and the power to sin / Julia Hermann — Hume’s argument against miracles / Tommaso Piazza — The Euthyphro dilemma / David Baggett — Nietzche’s death of God / Tom Grimwood — Ockham’s razor / Grant Sterling — Parmenides’ refutation of change / Adrian Bardon — McTaggart’s argument against the reality of time / M. Joshua Mozersky — Berkeley’s master argument for idealism / John M. DePoe — Kant’s refutation of idealism / Adrian Bardon — The master argument of Diodorus Cronus / Ludger Jansen — Lewis’ argument for possible worlds / David Vander Laan — A reductionist account of personal identity / Fauve Lybaert — Split-case arguments about personal identity / Ludger Jansen — The ship of Theseus / Ludger Jansen — The problem of temporary intrinsics / Montserrat Bordes — A modern modal argument for the soul / Rafal Urbaniak and Agnieszka Rostalska — Epicurus’ death is nothing to us argument / Steven Luper — Lucretius’ symmetry argument / Nicolas Bommarito — The existence of forms : Plato’s argument from the possibility of knowledge / Jurgis (George) Brakas — Plato, Aristotle, and the third man argument / Jurgis (George) Brakas — Logical monism / Luis Estrada-González — The maximality paradox / Nicola Ciprotti — An argument for free will / Gerald Harrison — Frankfurt’s refutation of the principle of alternative possibilities / Gerald Harrison — Van Inwagen’s consequence argument against compatibilism / Grant Sterling — Fatalism / Fernando Migura and Agustin Arrieta — Sartre’s argument for freedom / Jeffrey Gordon — Descartes’ Cogito / Joyce Lazier — Augustin

Subjects:

• Philosophy — Introductions.

Requested by McLaughlin, ML

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Notes:

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [300]-334) and index.
• Gathering knowledges — Analysing knowledges — Disseminating knowledges — Employing knowledges — Losing knowledges — Dividing knowledges — Geographies of knowledge — Sociologies of knowledge — Chronologies of knowledge.
• The book is divided into 3 parts. The first argues that activities which appear to be timeless – gathering knowledge, analysing, disseminating and employing it – are in fact time-bound and take different forms in different periods and places. The second part tries to counter the tendency to write a triumphalist history of the ‘growth’ of knowledge by discussing losses of knowledge and the price of specialization. The third part offers geographical, sociological and chronological overviews, contrasting the experience of centres and peripheries and arguing that each of the main trends of the period – professionalization, secularization, nationalization, democratization, etc, coexisted and interacted with its opposite. –Publisher.

Subjects:

• Knowledge, Sociology of — History.

Requested by McLaughlin, ML

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Notes:

• Introduction — Antireductionism and the natural order — Consciousness — Cognition — Value — Conclusion.
• The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. Nagel’s skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic. In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.–Publisher description.

Subjects:

• Cosmology.
• Cosmogony.
• Beginning.
• Creation.
• Science — Philosophy.
• Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882.

Requested by Apolloni, D

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Notes:

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 211-214) and index.
• Introduction — A brief history of coping — Language — High and low beliefs — The will to believe — Eden — Babylon — Miletus: the invention of science — Anaximander and anaximenes — Science and philosophy come to Italy — Athens I — Atomism — Athens II: Plato — Athens III: Aristotle — Alexandria — Beliefs about believers — Jerusalem collides with Athens — Cartesianism — Miletus preserved I: Hobbes — Institutions — Miletus preserved II: Spinoza — The strange case of David Hume — Ethics without edification — L’envoi — Conclusion?
• After a Darwinian-type account of what beliefs are and how they arose in animals acting to cope with their environments – low beliefs, virtually all of which are true – Wallace Matson here shows how the invention of language led to imagination and thence to beliefs formed in other ways ( high beliefs ), not true though thought to be, which could be consolidated into mythologies, the first Grand Unified Theories of Everything. Science began when Thales of Miletus produced a Grand Theory based on low ( everyday ) beliefs. Matson traces the course of science and philosophy through seven centuries to their sudden and violent displacement by Christianity with its Grand Theory of the old type.
• Against the widespread opinion that modern philosophy has slowly but completely emancipated itself from bondage to theology, he shows how remnants from the medieval ‘interlude’ still lurk unnoticed in the purportedly neutral notions of logical possibility, possible worlds, and laws as commands, to the detriment of the natural harmony between science and philosophy, including ethics. Accessibly written, this is a book for all who are interested in the foundations of 21st century thought and who wonder where the cracks might be. –pub. desc.

Subjects:

• Knowledge, Theory of.
• Evolutionary psychology.
• Belief and doubt.
• Philosophy — History.
• Science — History.

Requested by Kurpiers, R