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Campbell investigates how consciousness of the world explains our ability to think about the world. He illuminates problems about thought, reference and experience by looking at the psychological mechanisms on which conscious attention depends.
Rich in precursors (Kant and Frege) and stimulated by Castañeda’s study in the logic of self-consciousness and Shoemaker’s seminal paper ‘Self-reference and self-awareness’, the work of the past thirty-five years on self-reference and self-awareness has generated a wealth of deep, sophisticated philosophy. This volume explores the historical anticipations in Kant and Frege, brings four classic contributions together in one place, and offers five new studies. (Series A)
Consciousness is undoubtedly one of the last remaining scientific mysteries and hence one of the greatest contemporary scientific challenges. How does the brain's activity result in the rich phenomenology that characterizes our waking life? Are animals conscious? Why did consciousness evolve? How does science proceed to answer such questions? Can we define what consciousness is? Can we measure it? Can we use experimental results to further our understanding of disorders of consciousness, such as those seen in schizophrenia, delirium, or altered states of consciousness? These questions are at the heart of contemporary research in the domain. Answering them requires a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach that engages not only philosophers, but also neuroscientists and psychologists in a joint effort to develop novel approaches that reflect both the stunning recent advances in imaging methods as well as the continuing refinement of our concepts of consciousness. In this light, the Oxford Companion to Consciousness is the most complete authoritative survey of contemporary research on consciousness. Five years in the making and including over 250 concise entries written by leaders in the field, the volume covers both fundamental knowledge as well as more recent advances in this rapidly changing domain. Structured as an easy-to-use dictionary and extensively cross-referenced, the Companion offers contributions from philosophy of mind to neuroscience, from experimental psychology to clinical findings, so reflecting the profoundly interdisciplinary nature of the domain. Particular care has been taken to ensure that each of the entries is accessible to the general reader and that the overall volume represents a comprehensive snapshot of the contemporary study of consciousness. The result is a unique compendium that will prove indispensable to anyone interested in consciousness, from beginning students wishing to clarify a concept to professional consciousness researchers looking for the best characterization of a particular phenomenon.
"Rosenberg introduces a new paradigm called Liberal Naturalism for thinking about what causation is, about the natural world, and about how to create a detailed model to go along with the new paradigm. Arguing that experience is part of the categorical foundations of causality, he shows that within this new paradigm there is a place for something essentially like consciousness in all its traditional mysterious respects."--BOOK JACKET.
A novel contribution to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism. Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.
In this book, Jos� Luis Berm�dez addesses two fundamental problems in the philosophy and psychology of self-consciousness: (1) Can we provide a noncircular account of fully fledged self-conscious thought and language in terms of more fundamental capacities? (2) Can we explain how fully fledged self-conscious thought and language can arise in the normal course of human development? Berm�dez argues that a paradox (the paradox of self-consciousness) arises from the apparent strict interdependence between self-conscious thought and linguistic self-reference. The paradox renders circular all theories that define self-consciousness in terms of linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun. It seems to follow from the paradox of self-consciousness that no such account or explanation can be given. Drawing on recent work in empirical psychology and philosophy, the author argues that any explanation of fully fledged self-consciousness that answers these two questions requires attention to primitive forms of self-consciousness that are prelinguistic and preconceptual. Such primitive forms of self-consciousness are to be found in somatic proprioception, the structure of exteroceptive perception, and prelinguistic forms of social interaction. The author uses these primitive forms of self-consciousness to dissolve the paradox of self-consciousness and to show how the two questions can be given an affirmative answer.
The first half of this book argues that physicalism cannot account for consciousness, and hence cannot be true. The second half explores and defends Russellian monism, a radical alternative to both physicalism and dualism. The view that emerges combines panpsychism with the view that the universe as a whole is fundamental.
In "Matter and Consciousness," Paul Churchland clearly presents the advantages and disadvantages of such difficult issues in philosophy of mind as behaviorism, reductive materialism, functionalism, and eliminative materialism. This new edition incorporates the striking developments that have taken place in neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence and notes their expanding relevance to philosophical issues. Churchland organizes and clarifies the new theoretical and experimental results of the natural sciences for a wider philosophical audience, observing that this research bears directly on questions concerning the basic elements of cognitive activity and their implementation in real physical systems. (How is it, he asks, that living creatures perform some cognitive tasks so swiftly and easily, where computers do them only badly or not at all?) Most significant for philosophy, Churchland asserts, is the support these results tend to give to the reductive and the eliminative versions of materialism. "A Bradford Book"
A fascinating exploration of the nature of consciousness This engaging and readable book provides an introduction to consciousness that does justice both to the science and to the philosophy of consciousness, that is, the mechanics of the mind and the experience of awareness. The book opens with a general discussion of the brain and of consciousness itself. Then, exploring the areas of brain science most likely to illuminate the basis of awareness, Zeman focuses on the science of sleep and waking and on the science of vision. He describes healthy states and disorders--epilepsy, narcolepsy, blindsight and hallucinations after stroke--that provide insights into the capacity for consciousness and into its contents. And he tracks the evolution of the brain, the human species, and human culture and surveys the main current scientific theories of awareness, pioneering attempts to explain how the brain gives rise to experience. Zeman concludes by examining philosophical arguments about the nature of consciousness. A practicing neurologist, he animates his text with examples from the behavioral and neurological disorders of his patients and from the expanding mental worlds of young children, including his own. His book is an accessible and enlightening explanation of why we are conscious.
conditions of the possibility of Experience ... must mean nothing else than all that which lies immanently in the essence of Experience ... and therefore belongs to it indispensably. The essence of Experience that phenomenological analysis of Experience elucidates is the same as the possibility of Experience, and all that which is determined in the essence, in the possibility of Experience, is eo ipso 1 condition of the possibility of Experience. Through acquaintance with Husserl's work, then, I developed my way of understand ing what, according to their very possibility, lies in conscious activities of mentally representing something, for example, by imagining or remembering it, or by viewing it in a picture, all these understood as forms of modified perception. As Husserl himself made clear, such reflective and descriptive analyses of the mental activities according to their very possibility are carried out regardless of the way they have actually come to be. However, I was also interested in developmen tal questions, especially with regard to the activity of imagining. Hence I turned to cognitive developmental psychology in order to get acquainted with the neces sary empirical material. Moreover, I conducted a pilot-study with young children that I had conceived according to phenomenologically relevant aspects concerning the difference and yet inner connection of the activities of imagining and viewing 2 pictures.