Beyond Conceptual Dualism

Beyond Conceptual Dualism PDF Author: Giuseppe Vicari
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042024666
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
This book is a systematic analysis of John R. Searle's philosophy of mind. Searle's view of mind, as a set of subjective and biologically embodied processes, can account for our being part of nature qua mindful beings. This model finds support in neuroscience and offers reliable solutions to the problems of consciousness, mental causation, and the self.

Beyond Conceptual Dualism

Beyond Conceptual Dualism PDF Author: Giuseppe Vicari
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042024666
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
This book is a systematic analysis of John R. Searle's philosophy of mind. Searle's view of mind, as a set of subjective and biologically embodied processes, can account for our being part of nature qua mindful beings. This model finds support in neuroscience and offers reliable solutions to the problems of consciousness, mental causation, and the self.

Matter, Affect, AntiNormativity

Matter, Affect, AntiNormativity PDF Author: Caroline Braunmühl
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839461669
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
Dualistic thinking has been questioned by some writers associated with the material, ontological, and affective turns. Yet, these and other writers linked to the ›turns‹ have themselves reproduced dualistic theorizing. Caroline Braunmühl also shows that there are dualistic patterns in significant contributions to queer theory as well as Foucauldian diagnoses of the present. From a perspective sympathetic to the critical efforts made by poststructuralist and related theorists, she analyzes works by Sara Ahmed, Karen Barad, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Michel Foucault, and others. The book suggests specific alternatives to dualistic as well as identitarian ways of framing conceptual pairs such as matter/mind, affect/discourse and negativity/affirmation.

Beyond Reduction

Beyond Reduction PDF Author: Steven Horst
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198043157
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Contemporary philosophers of mind tend to assume that the world of nature can be reduced to basic physics. Yet there are features of the mind consciousness, intentionality, normativity that do not seem to be reducible to physics or neuroscience. This explanatory gap between mind and brain has thus been a major cause of concern in recent philosophy of mind. Reductionists hold that, despite all appearances, the mind can be reduced to the brain. Eliminativists hold that it cannot, and that this implies that there is something illegitimate about the mentalistic vocabulary. Dualists hold that the mental is irreducible, and that this implies either a substance or a property dualism. Mysterian non-reductive physicalists hold that the mind is uniquely irreducible, perhaps due to some limitation of our self-understanding. In this book, Steven Horst argues that this whole conversation is based on assumptions left over from an outdated philosophy of science. While reductionism was part of the philosophical orthodoxy fifty years ago, it has been decisively rejected by philosophers of science over the past thirty years, and for good reason. True reductions are in fact exceedingly rare in the sciences, and the conviction that they were there to be found was an artifact of armchair assumptions of 17th century Rationalists and 20th century Logical Empiricists. The explanatory gaps between mind and brain are far from unique. In fact, in the sciences it is gaps all the way down.And if reductions are rare in even the physical sciences, there is little reason to expect them in the case of psychology. Horst argues that this calls for a complete re-thinking of the contemporary problematic in philosophy of mind. Reductionism, dualism, eliminativism and non-reductive materialism are each severely compromised by post-reductionist philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind is in need of a new paradigm. Horst suggests that such a paradigm might be found in Cognitive Pluralism: the view that human cognitive architecture constrains us to understand the world through a plurality of partial, idealized, and pragmatically-constrained models, each employing a particular representational system optimized for its own problem domain. Such an architecture can explain the disunities of knowledge, and is plausible on evolutionary grounds.

Beyond Cartesian Dualism

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

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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.

Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond

Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond PDF Author: Philipp Schorch
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787357481
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond provides a new look at the old anthropological concern with materiality and connectivity. It understands materiality not as defined property of some-thing, nor does it take connectivity as merely a relation between discrete entities. Somewhat akin to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, it sees materiality and connectivity as two interrelated modes in which an entity is, or more precisely – is becoming, in the world. The question, thus, is how these two modes of becoming relate and fold into each other. Throughout the four-year research process that led to this book, the authors approached this question not just from a theoretical perspective; taking the suggestion of 'thinking through things' literally and methodologically seriously, the first two workshops were dedicated to practical, hands-on exercises working with things. From these workshops a series of installations emerged, straddling the boundaries of art and academia. These installations served as artistic-academic interventions during the final symposium and are featured alongside the other academic contributions to this volume. Throughout this process, two main themes emerged and structure Part II, Movement and Growth, and Part III, Dissolution and Traces, of the present volume, respectively. Part I, Conceptual Grounds, consists of two chapters offering conceptual takes on things and ties – one from anthropology and one from archaeology. As interrelated modes of becoming, materiality and connectivity make it necessary to coalesce things and ties into thing~ties – an insight toward which the chapters and interventions came from different sides, and one in which the initial proposition of the editors still shines through. Throughout the pages of this volume, we invite the reader to travel beyond imaginaries of a universe of separate planets united by connections, and to venture with us instead into the thicket of thing~ties in which we live.

Beyond Transcendence in Law and Philosophy

Beyond Transcendence in Law and Philosophy PDF Author: Louis E. Wolcher
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9781859419854
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
What is the law of the law? What produces our craven subservience to linguistic norms, and our shocking indifference to the phenomenon of universal suffering? In a path-breaking new work of philosophy, Louis Wolcher seeks to answer these questions from the standpoint of Zen Buddhism. Bringing an Eastern sensibility into contact with three of the most important themes in Western philosophy, Beyond Transcendence in Law and Philosophy meticulously investigates three of the twentieth century's most important philosophers: Martin Heidegger - on being, Emmanuel Levinas - on ethics, and Ludwig Wittgenstein - on language. In the context of the larger Western obsession with transcending the ordinary, Louis Wolcher argues that the yearning for transcendence is born of the illusion that there is a fundamental difference between the ordinary and the profound. Employing Zen koans and stories to advance a 'deflationary' view of language and knowledge, he goes on to argue that the norms of transcendence to which we cling are not eternal truths but artefacts of desperate minds adrift on a sea of impermanence. What used to seem so majestically True, Right and Just thus shows itself to be utterly mundane: as merely true, right and just. What is left, however, is not nihilism - for clinging to a view of 'nothingness' is just as deluded as clinging to a view of 'somethingness' - but rather a new beginning of compassionate concern for the suffering of others. Beyond Transcendence in Law and Philosophy is a strikingly original synthesis of Eastern and Western thought. It will enlighten philosophers and legal theorists, as well as those who are interested in or open to the insights of Zen Buddhism.

Contemporary Dualism

Contemporary Dualism PDF Author: Andrea Lavazza
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136682473
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Ontological materialism, in its various forms, has become the orthodox view in contemporary philosophy of mind. This book provides a variety of defenses of mind-body dualism, and shows (explicitly or implicitly) that a thoroughgoing ontological materialism cannot be sustained. The contributions are intended to show that, at the very least, ontological dualism (as contrasted with a dualism that is merely linguistic or epistemic) constitutes a philosophically respectable alternative to the monistic views that currently dominate thought about the mind-body (or, perhaps more appropriately, person-body) relation.

Ontology and Closeness in Human-Nature Relationships

Ontology and Closeness in Human-Nature Relationships PDF Author: Neil H. Kessler
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319992740
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
In Ontology and Closeness in Human-Nature Relationships, Neil H. Kessler identifies the preconceptions which can keep the modern human mind in the dark about what is happening relationally between humans and the more-than-human world. He has written an accessible work of environmental philosophy, with a focus on the ontology of human-nature relationships. In it, he contends that large-scale environmental problems are intimate and relational in origin. He also challenges the deeply embedded, modernist assumptions about the relational limitations of more-than-human beings, ones which place erroneous limitations on the possibilities for human/more-than-human closeness. Diverging from the posthumanist literature and its frequent reliance on new materialist ontology, the arguments in the book attempt to sweep away what ecofeminists call “human/nature dualisms. In doing so, conceptual avenues open up that have the power to radically alter how we engage in our daily interactions with the more-than-human world all around us. Given the diversity of fields and disciplines focused on the human-nature relationship, the topics of this book vary quite broadly, but always converge at the nexus of what is possible between humans and more-than-human beings. The discussion interweaves the influence of human/nature dualisms with the limitations of Deleuzian becoming and posthumanism’s new materialism and agential realism. It leverages interhuman interdependence theory, Charles Peirce’s synechism of feeling and various treatments of Theory of Mind while exploring the influence of human/nature dualisms on sustainability, place attachment, common worlds pedagogy, emergence, and critical animal studies. It also explores the implications of plant electrical activity, plant intelligence, and plant “neurobiology” for possibilities of relational capacities in plants while even grappling with theories of animism to challenge the animate/inanimate divide. The result is an engaging, novel treatment of human-nature relational ontology that will encourage the reader to look at the world in a whole new way.

Cognition, Content, and the A Priori

Cognition, Content, and the A Priori PDF Author: Robert Hanna
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191025593
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
In Cognition, Content, and the A Priori, Robert Hanna works out a unified contemporary Kantian theory of rational human cognition and knowledge. Along the way, he provides accounts of (i) intentionality and its contents, including non-conceptual content and conceptual content, (ii) sense perception and perceptual knowledge, including perceptual self-knowledge, (iii) the analytic-synthetic distinction, (iv) the nature of logic, and (v) a priori truth and knowledge in mathematics, logic, and philosophy. This book is specifically intended to reach out to two very different audiences: contemporary analytic philosophers of mind and knowledge on the one hand, and contemporary Kantian philosophers or Kant-scholars on the other. At the same time, it is also riding the crest of a wave of exciting and even revolutionary emerging new trends and new work in the philosophy of mind and epistemology, with a special concentration on the philosophy of perception. What is revolutionary in this new wave are its strong emphases on action, on cognitive phenomenology, on disjunctivist direct realism, on embodiment, and on sense perception as a primitive and proto-rational capacity for cognizing the world. Cognition, Content, and the A Priori makes a fundamental contribution to this philosophical revolution by giving it a specifically contemporary Kantian twist, and by pushing these new lines of investigation radically further.

The Promise of Dualism

The Promise of Dualism PDF Author: Elizabeth Koppelman White
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780957404434
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
"The future is dualist" is the message of this book. It argues that the future progress of humanity depends on the dualist viewpoint being adopted that takes account of both sides of an argument and corrects imbalances created by the application of extreme points of view. Dualist theory concerns dualist or one-to-one interactions and how these can explain many phenomena in nature and in our society that are inadequately accounted for by the sciences. The theory is applicable to every aspect of our existence and is all-embracing in the sense of giving us an additional way of looking at everything around us. It is a new and different way of viewing the phenomena already explicated by the sciences in their various ways. Dualist theory concerns the way that dualist interactions can be used to explain change, complexity and innovation in the universe, including how these interactions give us an insight into ourselves and our society. A dualist interaction is a one-to-one relationship between existents which is harmonious over a period of time and which leads to differences being created. These differences are caused by the respective interactions. Perhaps the most obvious example is a male-female relationship in which offspring are produced. Dualist theory also addresses many of the flaws in human thinking that are currently causing problems throughout the world. It promises a better future if these flaws are overcome in the manner suggested in this book. The point is to show how reason can solve our problems. Our reasoning powers are not to be disparaged just because past ways of thinking are now failing us. We have the brains to solve our most pressing problems in the long term. It is a matter of improving our ways of thinking and this has always been the aim of philosophy, though it has lately been remiss in that regard. We must not allow past and present failures to make us despair of our future and resort to religion as the only way forward. The later Roman Empire took that path and it crippled civilisation by terminating intellectual progress. It took centuries to repair the damage caused, and even yet we are ignorant of much of the history, literature and achievements of the Roman Empire because so much was lost through religious bigotry. As things stand, an extreme religious mentality could easily prevail and make it a crime to be doubtful and uncertain of orthodox beliefs.