Supervenience and Mind

Supervenience and Mind PDF Author: Jaegwon Kim
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521439961
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
This collection of essays presents the core of the work of influential philosopher Jaegwon Kim.

Supervenience and Mind

Supervenience and Mind PDF Author: Jaegwon Kim
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521439961
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
This collection of essays presents the core of the work of influential philosopher Jaegwon Kim.

Mind in a Physical World

Mind in a Physical World PDF Author: Jaegwon Kim
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262611534
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
This book, based on Jaegwon Kim's 1996 Townsend Lectures, presents the philosopher's current views on a variety of issues in the metaphysics of the mind--in particular, the mind-body problem, mental causation, and reductionism. This book, based on Jaegwon Kim's 1996 Townsend Lectures, presents the philosopher's current views on a variety of issues in the metaphysics of the mind--in particular, the mind-body problem, mental causation, and reductionism. Kim construes the mind-body problem as that of finding a place for the mind in a world that is fundamentally physical. Among other points, he redefines the roles of supervenience and emergence in the discussion of the mind-body problem. Arguing that various contemporary accounts of mental causation are inadequate, he offers his own partially reductionist solution on the basis of a novel model of reduction. Retaining the informal tone of the lecture format, the book is clear yet sophisticated.

Physicalism Deconstructed

Physicalism Deconstructed PDF Author: Kevin Morris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108472168
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Provides a philosophical and historical critique of contemporary conceptions of physicalism, especially non-reductive, levels-based approaches to physicalist metaphysics. Challenging assumptions about the mind-body problem, this accessible book will interest scholars working in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science.

Physicalism, Or Something Near Enough

Physicalism, Or Something Near Enough PDF Author: Chae-gwŏn Kim
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780691113753
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind have largely been shaped by physicalism, the doctrine that all phenomena are ultimately physical. Here, Jaegwon Kim presents the most comprehensive and systematic presentation yet of his influential ideas on the mind-body problem. He seeks to determine, after half a century of debate: What kind of (or "how much") physicalism can we lay claim to? He begins by laying out mental causation and consciousness as the two principal challenges to contemporary physicalism. How can minds exercise their causal powers in a physical world? Is a physicalist account of consciousness possible? The book's starting point is the "supervenience" argument (sometimes called the "exclusion" argument), which Kim reformulates in an extended defense. This argument shows that the contemporary physicalist faces a stark choice between reductionism (the idea that mental phenomena are physically reducible) and epiphenomenalism (the view that mental phenomena are causally impotent). Along the way, Kim presents a novel argument showing that Cartesian substance dualism offers no help with mental causation. Mind-body reduction, therefore, is required to save mental causation. But are minds physically reducible? Kim argues that all but one type of mental phenomena are reducible, including intentional mental phenomena, such as beliefs and desires. The apparent exceptions are the intrinsic, felt qualities of conscious experiences ("qualia"). Kim argues, however, that certain relational properties of qualia, in particular their similarities and differences, are behaviorally manifest and hence in principle reducible, and that it is these relational properties of qualia that are central to their cognitive roles. The causal efficacy of qualia, therefore, is not entirely lost. According to Kim, then, while physicalism is not the whole truth, it is the truth near enough.

Reality and Humean Supervenience

Reality and Humean Supervenience PDF Author: Gerhard Preyer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0585385637
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
If asked what Humeanism could mean today, there is no other philosopher to turn to whose work covers such a wide range of topics from a unified Humean perspective as that of David Lewis. The core of Lewis's many contributions to philosophy, including his work in philosophical ontology, intensional logic and semantics, probability and decision theory, topics within philosophy of science as well as a distinguished philosophy of mind, can be understood as the development of philosophical position that is centered around his conception of Humean supervenience. If we accept the thesis that it is physical science and not philosophical reasoning that will eventually arrive at the basic constituents of all matter pertaining to our world, then Humean supervenience is the assumption that all truths about our world will supervene on the class of physical truths in the following sense: There are no truths in any compartment of our world that cannot be accounted for in terms of differences and similarities among those properties and external space-time relations that are fundamental to our world according to physical science.

Supervenience

Supervenience PDF Author: Elias E. Savellos
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521450020
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Supervenience is one of the 'hot discoveries' of analytic philosophy, and this collection of essays on the topic represents an examination of it and its application to major areas of philosophy. The interest in supervenience has much to do with the flexibility of the concept. To say that x supervenes on y indicates a degree of dependence without committing one to the view that x can be reduced to y. Thus supervenience is a relationship that has the potential of replacing the traditional notion of dependence, while performing at least part of the function reductive relationships were supposed to fulfil. Moreover, since it is a topic-neutral concept, supervenience has a wide range of applicability.

The Nature of Consciousness

The Nature of Consciousness PDF Author: Mark Rowlands
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113943098X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
In The Nature of Consciousness, Mark Rowlands develops an innovative account of the nature of phenomenal consciousness, one that has significant consequences for attempts to find a place for it in the natural order. The most significant feature of consciousness is its dual nature: consciousness can be both the directing of awareness and that upon which awareness is directed. Rowlands offers a clear and philosophically insightful discussion of the main positions in this fast-moving debate, and argues that the phenomenal aspects of conscious experience are aspects that exist only in the directing of experience towards non-phenomenal objects, a theory that undermines reductive attempts to explain consciousness in terms of what is not conscious. His book will be of interest to a wide range of readers in the philosophy of mind and language, psychology and cognitive science.

Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind

Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind PDF Author: Jaegwon Kim
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019162506X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Jaegwon Kim presents a selection of his essays from the last two decades. The volume includes three new essays, on an agent-centered first-person account of action explanation, the concepts of realization and their bearings on the mind-body problem, and the nonexistence of laws in the special sciences. Among other topics covered are emergence and emergentism, the nature of explanation and of theories of explanation, reduction and reductive explanation, mental causation and explanatory exclusion. Kim tackles questions such as: How should we understand the concept of "emergence", and what are the prospects of emergentism as a doctrine about the status of minds? What does an agent-centered, first-person account of explanation of human actions look like? Why aren't there strict laws in the special sciences - sciences like biology, psychology, and sociology? The essays will be accessible to attentive readers without an extensive philosophical background.

Analytic Philosophy

Analytic Philosophy PDF Author: Aloysius Martinich
Publisher: Blackwell Publishing
ISBN: 9780631216476
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 517

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Book Description
This substantial anthology comprises the most comprehensive and authoritative collection of readings in analytic philosophy of the twentieth century. It provides a survey and analysis of the key issues, figures and concepts. The volume is divided into seven sections: philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, free will and personal identity, ethics, and methodology. It includes the most familiar texts of the analytic tradition, as well as several others that are less often anthologized. Several articles are logically related to each other. For example, Moore's Four Forms of Skepticism, appears together with selections from Wittgenstein's On Certainty; Langford's discussion of the paradox of analysis and Moore's reply are both included; and Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism is paired with Grice and Strawson's In Defense of a Dogma. The distinctive selections and internal coherence make this anthology an invaluable guide for anyone interested in twentieth-century and analytic philosophy.

Mental Causation

Mental Causation PDF Author: Thomas Kroedel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108487149
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Presents a comprehensive account of how the mind causes things to happen in the physical world. This book is also available as Open Access.