Search results for "Philosophy of Mind"
showing 10 items of 39 documents
Radical disruptions of self-consciousness
2020
This special issue is about something most of us might find very hard to conceive: states of consciousness in which self-consciousness is radically disrupted or altogether missing.
2013
Are dreams subjective experiences during sleep? Is it like something to dream, or is it only like something to remember dreams after awakening? Specifically, can dream reports be trusted to reveal what it is like to dream, and should they count as evidence for saying that dreams are conscious experiences at all? The goal of this article is to investigate the relationship between dreaming, dream reporting and subjective experience during sleep. I discuss different variants of philosophical skepticism about dream reporting and argue that they all fail. Consequently, skeptical doubts about the trustworthiness of dream reports are misguided, and for systematic reasons. I suggest an alternative,…
The Problem of Mind and Other Minds in William James’s Pragmatism
2008
The chapter explicates William James’s pragmatist conception of the human mind and his way of approaching the problem of other minds. James’s pragmatism is usually classified among empiricist and associationist philosophies of mind, but as is shown, it can also be understood according to its Kantian features. In James’s view, the mind is really an active and a purpose-oriented organizing principle which structures our lifeworld. The main difference between James’s pragmatism and Kant’s transcendental philosophy is that James does not make any explicit distinction between psychological and philosophical inquiries into the mind; he based his philosophy of mind on the same introspective method…
Consciousness and Moral Status of Animals
2021
Consciousness is the basis for granting moral status, but it is ephemeral and elusive. Both the ontological and epistemic dimension of consciousness cause hard problems for modern science and the philosophy of mind. On the one hand, consciousness is subjective, and includes conscious states with a phenomenal or qualitative character – “qualia”. It consists of mental states which are accessible to a subject only from the first-person perspective. A being is phenomenally conscious when there is something that is like to be that being. Utilitarianism uses the hedonistic strategy of the moral status, ascribing to that the demand for us to treat sentience as the fundamental property for obtainin…
How coincidence Bears on Persistence
2011
The ‘paradoxes of coincidence’ are generally taken as an important factor for deciding between rival views on persistence through time. In particular, the ability to deal with apparent cases of temporary coincidence is usually regarded as a good reason for favouring perdurantism (or ‘four-dimensionalism’) over endurantism (or ‘three-dimensionalism’). However, the recent work of Gilmore (2007) and McGrath (2007) challenges this standard view. For different reasons, both Gilmore and McGrath conclude that perdurantism does not really obtain support from the puzzles of temporary coincidence. In this paper, I will evaluate their arguments and defend the opposite view: that the paradoxes of coinc…
2013
This metatheoretical paper develops a list of new research targets by exploring particularly promising interdisciplinary contact points between empirical dream research and philosophy of mind. The central example is the MPS-problem. It is constituted by the epistemic goal of conceptually isolating and empirically grounding the phenomenal property of "minimal phenomenal selfhood," which refers to the simplest form of self-consciousness. In order to precisely describe MPS, one must focus on those conditions that are not only causally enabling, but strictly necessary to bring it into existence. This contribution argues that research on bodiless dreams, asomatic out-of-body experiences, and ful…
Beyond Conceptual Dualism
2008
Francesc Forn I ARGIMON: Editorial Foreword: Special Series in Cognitive Science John R. SEARLE: Guest Foreword Preface Introduction One: Problems and Theories: The Mind-Body Problem in Contemporary Philosophical Debate Two: Biological Naturalism: A Naturalistic and Non-Reductive Ontology of Consciousness Three: Functionalistic Models of Consciousness: Dennett, Chalmers, and the Desubstantialization of Mind Four: Holism and Mental Causation in the Theory of Intentionality Five: John Searle and Contemporary Neuroscience. Holism, Mental Causation, and the Roots of Subjectivity Conclusion Works Cited About the Author Index
Why Is Mind-Wandering Interesting for Philosophers?
2018
This chapter explores points of contact between philosophy of mind and scientific approaches to spontaneous thought. While offering a series of conceptual instruments that might prove helpful for researchers on the empirical research frontier, it begins by asking what the explanandum for theories of mind-wandering is, how one can conceptually individuate single occurrences of this specific target phenomenon, and how one might arrive at a more fine-grained taxonomy. The second half of this contribution sketches some positive proposals as to how one might understand mind-wandering on a conceptual level, namely, as a loss of mental autonomy resulting in involuntary mental behavior, as a highly…
Subjectivity as a Non-Textual Standard of Interpretation in the History of Philosophical Psychology
2008
Contemporary caution against anachronism in intellectual history, and the currently mo mentous theoretical emphasis on subjectivity in the philosophy of mind, are two prevailing conditions that set puzzling constraints for studies in the history of philosophical psychol ogy. The former urges against assuming ideas, motives, and concepts that are alien to the historical intellectual setting under study, and combined with the latter suggests caution in relying on our intuitions regarding subjectivity due to the historically contingent charac terizations it has attained in contemporary philosophy of mind. In the face of these condi tions, our paper raises a question of what we call non-textual…
Labor as Action: the Human Condition in the Anthropocene
2020
Abstract The Anthropocene has become an umbrella term for the disastrous transgression of ecological safety boundaries by human societies. The impact of this new reality is yet to be fully registered by political theorists. In an attempt to recalibrate the categories of political thought, this article brings Hannah Arendt’s framework of The Human Condition (labor, work, action) into the gravitational pull of the Anthropocene and current knowledge about the Earth System. It elaborates the historical emergence of our capacity to “act in the mode of laboring” during fossil-fueled capitalist modernity, a form of agency relating to our collectively organized laboring processes reminiscent of the…