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 conte...

This book explores a range of issues in the philosophy of mind, with the mind-body problem as the main focus. It serves as a stimulus to the reader to engage with the problems of the mind and try to come to terms with them, and examines Descartes's mind-body dualism.

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 excl...

The International Research library of Philosophy collects in book form a wide range of important and influential essays in philosophy, drawn predominantly from English language journals. Each volume in the library deals with a field of enquiry which has received significant attention in philosophy in the last 25 years and is edited by a philosopher noted in that field.

John R. Searle has made profoundly influential contributions to three areas of philosophy: philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of society. This volume gathers together in accessible form a selection of his essays in these areas. They range widely across social ontology, where Searle presents concise and informative statements of positions developed in more detail elsewhere; artificial intelligence and cognitive science, where Searle assesses the current state of the ...

This book provides a clear and comprehensive introduction to the work of Willard van Orman Quine, the most important and influential American philosopher of the post-war period. An understanding of Quine's work is essential for anyone who wishes to follow contemporary debates in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind and metaphysics.Hookway traces the development of Quine's work from his early criticisms of logical positivism and empiricism to his more recent theories a...

Quine was one of the foremost philosophers of the Twentieth century. In this outstanding overview of Quine's philosophy, Peter Hylton shows why Quine is so important and how his philosophical naturalism has been so influential within analytic philosophy.Beginning with an overview of Quine's philosophical background in logic and mathematics and the role of Rudolf Carnap's influence on Quine's thought, he goes on to discuss Quine's famous analytic-synthetic distinction and his argume...

Twenty-three philosophers examine the doctrine of materialism find it wanting. The case against materialism comprises arguments from conscious experience, from the unity and identity of the person, from intentionality, mental causation, and knowledge. The contributors include leaders in the fields of philosophy of mind, metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology, who respond ably to the most recent versions and defences of materialism. The modal arguments of Kripke and Chalmers, Jackson’s kno...

This is an open access title. It is available to read and download as a free PDF version on Oxford Academic and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. The Red and the Real offers a new approach to longstanding philosophical puzzles about what colors are and how they fit into the natural world. Jonathan Cohen argues for a role-functionalist treatment of color - a view according to which colors are identical to c...

In The Emergent Self, William Hasker joins one of the most heated debates in analytic philosophy, that over the nature of mind. His provocative and clearly written book challenges physicalist views of human mental functioning and advances the concept of mind as an emergent individual.Hasker begins by mounting a compelling critique of the dominant paradigm in philosophy of mind, showing that contemporary forms of materialism are seriously deficient in confronting crucial aspects of ...

Naturalism provides a rigorous analysis and critique of the major varieties of contemporary philosophical naturalism. The authors advocate the thesis that contemporary naturalism should be abandoned, in light of the serious objections raised against it. Contributors draw on a wide range of topics including: epistemology, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind and agency, and natural theology.

Despite recent strides in neuroscience and psychology that have deepened understanding of the brain, consciousness remains one of the greatest philosophical and scientific puzzles. The second edition of Theories of Consciousness: An Introduction and Assessment provides a fresh and up-to-date introduction to a variety of approaches to consciousness, and contributes to the current lively debate about the nature of consciousness and whether a scientific understanding of it is possibl...