Bücher der Reihe Philosophy of Mind Series

The senses, or sensory modalities, constitute the different ways we have of perceiving the world, such as seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. But how many senses are there? How many could there be? What makes the senses different? What interaction takes place between the senses? This book is a guide to thinking about these questions. Together with an extensive introduction to the topic, the book contains the key classic papers on this subject togetherwith nine newly commissioned essays.One reason that these questions are important is that we are receiving a huge influx of new information from the sciences that challenges some traditional philosophical views about the senses. This information needs to be incorporated into our view of the senses and perception. Can we do this whilst retaining our pre-existing concepts of the senses and of perception or do we need to revise our concepts? If they need to be revised, then in what way should that be done? Research in diverse areas,such as the nature of human perception, varieties of non-human animal perception, the interaction between different sensory modalities, perceptual disorders, and possible treatments for them, calls into question the platitude that there are five senses, as well as the pre-supposition that we knowwhat we are counting when we count them as five (or more).This book will serve as an inspiring introduction to the topic and as a basis from which further new research will grow.

Recent work on consciousness has featured a number of debates on the existence and character of controversial types of phenomenal experience.

Some psychological phenomena can be explained by identifying and describing the processes that constitute them. Others cannot be explained in that way. In Attention Is Cognitive Unison Christopher Mole gives a precise account of the metaphysical difference that divides these two categories and shows that, when current psychologists attempt to explain attention, they assign it to the wrong one.

Robert Rupert argues against the view that human cognitive processes comprise elements beyond the boundary of the organism, developing a systems-based conception in place of this extended view. He also argues for a conciliatory understanding of the relation between the computational approach to cognition and the embedded and embodied views

Thinking Without Words provides a challenging new theory of the nature of non-linguistic thought. Jose Luis Bermudez offers a conceptual framework for treating human infants and non-human animals as genuine thinkers. The book is written with an interdisciplinary readership in mind and will appeal to philosophers, psychologists, and students of animal behavior.

What do we see? We are visually conscious of colors and shapes, but are we also visually conscious of complex properties such as being John Malkovich? In this book, Susanna Siegel develops a framework for understanding the contents of visual experience, and argues that these contents involve all sorts of complex properties.

In this book, Derk Pereboom explores how physicalism might best be formulated and defended against the best anti-physicalist arguments.

Synthesizing decades of research, The Conscious Brain advances a new theory of the psychological and neurophysiological correlates of conscious experience.

This book provides the first full-length treatment of disjunctivism about visual experiences in the service of defending a naive realist theory of veridical visual perception. It includes detailed theories of hallucination and illusion that show how such states can be indistinguishable from veridical experiences without sharing any common character.

Reconsidering the nativist position toward the mind, this text demonstrates that nativism is an unstable amalgam of two different theses about the mind. It examines recent empirical evidence from developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, computer science, and linguistics.

Consciousness has long been regarded as the biggest stumbling block for the view that the mind is physical. This volume collects thirteen new papers on this problem by leading philosophers including Ned Block, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, Frabk Jackson, Joseph Levine, Laurence Nemirow, David Papineau, John Hawthorne, and five others.

Gut reactions is an interdisciplinary defense of the claim that emotions are perceptions of changes in the body. The basic idea behind embodied appraisals is captured in the familiar notion of a "gut reaction". Drawing a parallel between emotion consciousness and visual consciousness, this title shows that emotion is a form of perception.

What is embodiment and why does it matter for understanding the mind? Can the machinery of mind extend beyond the head? With a substantial Foreword by David Chalmers, Supersizing the Mind is essential reading for all those interested in embodied cognition, the extended mind, and the likely shape of twenty-first century cognitive scientific explanation.

In this study, Goldman argues that simulation is intensively used in mindreading tasks, from recognizing emotion in faces to assigning conceptual contents to thoughts. Psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy are applied to questions of third- and first- person mindreading, as well as mental concepts, moral psychology and other topics in social cognition.

What do paintings, thoughts, words, desires, photographs, and perceptions have in common? They are all about something, are directed, are contentful - in a way chairs and trees, for example, are not. This book inquires into the source of this power of directedness that some items exhibit while others do not.