Beyond Cartesian Dualism

Beyond Cartesian Dualism PDF Author: Steve Alsop
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402038089
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Get Book Here

Book Description
There is surprisingly little known about affect in science education. Despite periodic forays into monitoring students’ attitudes-toward-science, the effect of affect is too often overlooked. Beyond Cartesian Dualism gathers together contemporary theorizing in this axiomatic area. In fourteen chapters, senior scholars of international standing use their knowledge of the literature and empirical data to model the relationship between cognition and affect in science education. Their revealing discussions are grounded in a broad range of educational contexts including school classrooms, universities, science centres, travelling exhibits and refugee camps, and explore an array of far reaching questions. What is known about science teachers’ and students’ emotions? How do emotions mediate and moderate instruction? How might science education promote psychological resilience? How might educators engage affect as a way of challenging existing inequalities and practices? This book will be an invaluable resource for anybody interested in science education research and more generally in research on teaching, learning and affect. It offers educators and researchers a challenge, to recognize the mutually constitutive nature of cognition and affect.

Beyond Cartesian Dualism

Beyond Cartesian Dualism PDF Author: Steve Alsop
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402038089
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Get Book Here

Book Description
There is surprisingly little known about affect in science education. Despite periodic forays into monitoring students’ attitudes-toward-science, the effect of affect is too often overlooked. Beyond Cartesian Dualism gathers together contemporary theorizing in this axiomatic area. In fourteen chapters, senior scholars of international standing use their knowledge of the literature and empirical data to model the relationship between cognition and affect in science education. Their revealing discussions are grounded in a broad range of educational contexts including school classrooms, universities, science centres, travelling exhibits and refugee camps, and explore an array of far reaching questions. What is known about science teachers’ and students’ emotions? How do emotions mediate and moderate instruction? How might science education promote psychological resilience? How might educators engage affect as a way of challenging existing inequalities and practices? This book will be an invaluable resource for anybody interested in science education research and more generally in research on teaching, learning and affect. It offers educators and researchers a challenge, to recognize the mutually constitutive nature of cognition and affect.

Mind and Body in Early China

Mind and Body in Early China PDF Author: Edward Slingerland
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190842326
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Get Book Here

Book Description
Mind and Body in Early China critiques Orientalist accounts of early China as the radical, "holistic" other. The idea that the early Chinese held the "strong" holist view, seeing no qualitative difference between mind and body, has long been contradicted by traditional archeological and qualitative textual evidence. New digital humanities methods, along with basic knowledge about human cognition, now make this position untenable. A large body of empirical evidence suggests that "weak" mind-body dualism is a psychological universal, and that human sociality would be fundamentally impossible without it. Edward Slingerland argues that the humanities need to move beyond social constructivist views of culture, and embrace instead a view of human cognition and culture that integrates the sciences and the humanities. Our interpretation of texts and artifacts from the past and from other cultures should be constrained by what we know about the species-specific, embodied commonalities shared by all humans. This book also attempts to broaden the scope of humanistic methodologies by employing team-based qualitative coding and computer-aided "distant reading" of texts, while also drawing upon our current best understanding of human cognition to transform our basic starting point. It has implications for anyone interested in comparative religion, early China, cultural studies, digital humanities, or science-humanities integration.

Locke and Cartesian Philosophy

Locke and Cartesian Philosophy PDF Author: Philippe Hamou
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192546643
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume presents twelve original essays, by an international team of scholars, on the relation of John Locke's thought to Descartes and to Cartesian philosophers such as Malebranche, Clauberg, and the Port-Royal authors. The essays, preceded by a substantial introduction, cover a large variety of topics from natural philosophy to religion, philosophy of mind and body, metaphysics and epistemology. The volume shows that in Locke's complex relationship to Descartes and Cartesianism, stark opposition and subtle 'family resemblances' are tightly intertwined. Since the turn of the twentieth century, the theory of knowledge has been the main comparative focus. According to an influential historiographical conception, Descartes and Locke form together the spearhead in the 'epistemological turn' of early modern philosophy. In bringing together the contributions to this volume, the editors advocate for a shift of emphasis. A full comparison of Locke's and Descartes's positions should cover not only their theories of knowledge, but also their views on natural philosophy, metaphysics, and religion. Their conflicting claims on issues such as cosmic organization, the qualities and nature of bodies, the substance of the soul, and God's government of the world, are of interest not only in their own right, to take the full measure of Locke's complex relation to Descartes, but also as they allow a better understanding of the continuing epistemological debate between the philosophical heirs of these thinkers.

The Man Who Wasn't There

The Man Who Wasn't There PDF Author: Anil Ananthaswamy
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101984325
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the tradition of Oliver Sacks, science journalist Anil Ananthaswamy skillfully inspects the bewildering connections among brain, body, mind, self, and society by examining a range of neuropsychological ailments from autism and Alzheimer’s to out-of-body experiences and body integrity identity disorder Award-winning science writer Anil Ananthaswamy smartly explores the concept of self by way of several mental conditions that eat away at patients’ identities, showing we learn a lot about being human from people with a fragmented or altered sense of self. Ananthaswamy travelled the world to meet those who suffer from “maladies of the self” interviewing patients, psychiatrists, philosophers and neuroscientists along the way. He charts how the self is affected by Asperger’s, autism, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, schizophrenia, among many other mental conditions, revealing how the brain constructs our sense of self. Each chapter is anchored with stories of people who experience themselves differently from the norm. Readers meet individuals in various stages of Alzheimer’s disease where the loss of memory and cognition results in the loss of some aspects of the self. We meet a woman who recalls the feeling of her first major encounter with schizophrenia which she describes as an outside force controlling her. Ananthaswamy also looks at several less­ familiar conditions, such as Cotard’s syndrome, in which patients believe they are dead, and those with body integrity identity disorder, where the patient seeks to have a body part amputated because it “doesn’t belong to them.” Moving nimbly back and forth from the individual stories to scientific analysis The Man Who Wasn’t There is a wholly original exploration of the human self which raises fascinating questions about the mind-body connection.

Rethinking Descartes’s Substance Dualism

Rethinking Descartes’s Substance Dualism PDF Author: Lynda Gaudemard
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030754146
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Get Book Here

Book Description
This monograph presents an interpretation of Descartes's dualism, which differs from the standard reading called 'classical separatist dualism' claiming that the mind can exist without the body. It argues that, contrary to what it is commonly claimed, Descartes’s texts suggest an emergent creationist substance dualism, according to which the mind is a nonphysical substance (created and maintained by God), which cannot begin to think without a well-disposed body. According to this interpretation, God’s laws of nature endow each human body with the power to be united to an immaterial soul. While the soul does not directly come from the body, the mind can be said to emerge from the body in the sense that it cannot be created by God independently from the body. The divine creation of a human mind requires a well-disposed body, a physical categorical basis. This kind of emergentism is consistent with creationism and does not necessarily entail that the mind cannot survive the body. This early modern view has some connections with Hasker’s substance emergent dualism (1999). Indeed, Hasker states that the mind is a substance emerging at one time from neurons and that consciousness has causal powers which effects cannot be explained by physical neurons. An emergent unified self-existing entity emerges from the brain on which it acts upon. For its proponents, Hasker’s view explains what Descartes’s dualism fails to explain, especially why the mind regularly interacts with one and only one body. After questioning the notion of emergence, the author argues that the theory of emergent creationist substance dualism that she attributes to Descartes is a more appropriate alternative because it faces fewer problems than its rivals. This monograph is valuable for anyone interested in the history of early modern philosophy and contemporary philosophy of mind.

Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind: Beyond Art Theory and the Cartesian Mind-Body Dichotomy

Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind: Beyond Art Theory and the Cartesian Mind-Body Dichotomy PDF Author: Alfonsina Scarinzi
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9401793794
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Get Book Here

Book Description
The project of naturalizing human consciousness/experience has made great technical strides (e.g., in mapping areas of brain activity), but has been hampered in many cases by its uncritical reliance on a dualistic “Cartesian” paradigm (though as some of the authors in the collection point out, assumptions drawn from Plato and from Kant also play a role). The present volume proposes a version of naturalism in aesthetics drawn from American pragmatism (above all from Dewey, but also from James and Peirce)—one primed from the start to see human beings not only as embodied, but as inseparable from the environment they interact with—and provides a forum for authors from diverse disciplines to address specific scientific and philosophical issues within the anti-dualistic framework considering aesthetic experience as a process of embodied meaning-making. Cross-disciplinary contributions come from leading researchers including Mark Johnson, Jim Garrison, Daniel D. Hutto, John T. Haworth, Luca F. Ticini, Beatriz Calvo-Merino. The volume covers pragmatist aesthetics, neuroaesthetics, enactive cognitive science, literary studies, psychology of aesthetics, art and design, sociology.

Essays on Descartes

Essays on Descartes PDF Author: Paul Hoffman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199717540
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is a collection of Paul Hoffman's wide-ranging essays on Descartes composed over the past twenty-five years. The essays in Part I include his celebrated "The Unity of Descartes' Man," in which he argues that Descartes accepts the Aristotelian view that soul and body are related as form to matter and that the human being is a substance; a series of subsequent essays elaborating on this interpretation and defending it against objections; and an essay on Descartes' theory of distinction. In the essays in Part II he argues that Descartes retains the Aristotelian theory of causation according to which an agent's action is the same as the passion it brings about, and explains the significance of this doctrine for understanding Descartes' dualism and physics. In the essays in Part III he argues that Descartes accepts the Aristotelian theory of cognition according to which perception is possible because things that exist in the world are also capable of a different way of existing in the soul, and he shows how this theory figures in Descartes' account of misrepresentation and in the controversy over whether Descartes is a direct realist or a representationalist. The essays in Part IV examine Descartes' theory of the passions of the soul: their definition; their effect on our happiness, virtue, and freedom; and methods of controlling them.

The Engines of the Soul

The Engines of the Soul PDF Author: W. D. Hart
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521342902
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
This study is an unusual contribution to the philosophy of mind in that it argues for the sometimes unfashionable view of dualism: that mind and matter are distinct and separate entities as Descartes believed. The author takes as his point of departure the imaginative hypothesis of disembodiment, which establishes the possibility of the mind's being a quite non-material thing. There are clear casual correlations between what is physical and what is mental, and the most serious issue confronting dualism since Descartes has been how such an interaction is possible. Dr Hart sets out to answer this question by showing that the issue is as much about the nature of causation as it is about the natures of mind and matter.

Between Two Worlds

Between Two Worlds PDF Author: John Carriero
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691135614
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 538

Get Book Here

Book Description
Between Two Worlds is an authoritative commentary on--and powerful reinterpretation of--the founding work of modern philosophy, Descartes's Meditations. Philosophers have tended to read Descartes's seminal work in an occasional way, examining its treatment of individual topics while ignoring other parts of the text. In contrast, John Carriero provides a sustained, systematic reading of the whole text, giving a detailed account of the positions against which Descartes was reacting, and revealing anew the unity, meaning, and originality of the Meditations. Carriero finds in the Meditations a nearly continuous argument against Thomistic Aristotelian ways of thinking about cognition, and shows more clearly than ever before how Descartes bridged the old world of scholasticism and the new one of mechanistic naturalism. Rather than casting Descartes's project primarily in terms of skepticism, knowledge, and certainty, Carriero focuses on fundamental disagreements between Descartes and the scholastics over the nature of understanding, the relation between the senses and the intellect, the nature of the human being, and how and to what extent God is cognized by human beings. Against this background, Carriero shows, Descartes developed his own conceptions of mind, body, and the relation between them, creating a coherent, philosophically rich project in the Meditations and setting the agenda for a century of rationalist metaphysics.

Are We Bodies Or Souls?

Are We Bodies Or Souls? PDF Author: Richard Swinburne
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198831498
Category : Human beings
Languages : en
Pages : 195

Get Book Here

Book Description
What are humans? What makes us who we are? Many think that we are just complicated machines, or animals that are different from machines only by being conscious. In Are We Bodies or Souls? Richard Swinburne comes to the defence of the soul and presents new philosophical arguments that are supported by modern neuroscience. When scientific advances enable neuroscientists to transplant a part of brain into a new body, he reasons, no matter how much we can find out about their brain activity or conscious experiences we will never know whether the resulting person is the same as before or somebody entirely new. Swinburne thus argues that we are immaterial souls sustained in existence by our brains. Sensations, thoughts, and intentions are conscious events in our souls that cause events in our brains. While scientists might discover some of the laws of nature that determine conscious events and brain events, each person's soul is an individual thing and this is what ultimately makes us who we are.