Let me begin with a scene you probably know better than you would like. It is 2 a.m., your essay is due at 10 a.m., and you have known about this assignment for 3 weeks. You told yourself, on at least a dozen separate evenings, that tonight would finally be the night you started. Instead you watched the clock slide past midnight, opened the document, stared at the blinking cursor, and closed it again. If this scene makes you wince, you are exactly who this book is for, and I want you to kn...

“[A] lucid and thoughtful book… In a spirit of reconciliation, Crane proposes to paint a more accurate picture of religion for his fellow unbelievers.” —James Ryerson, New York Times Book ReviewContemporary debate about religion seems to be going nowhere. Atheists persist with their arguments, many plausible and some unanswerable, but these make no impact on religious believers. Defenders of religion find atheists equally unwilling to cede ground. The ...

A deep concern with consciousness and intentionality is one of the several things that has lately moved into the centre of the philosophy of mind. The issue of consciousness is often treated as something distinct from intentionality, but – as Tim Crane notes in his incisive new Foreword – there is now something of a sea-change. This classic volume may be at least partly responsible for the shift in how philosophy of mind is starting to be understood. Before its first appearance, discussion...

How can the human mind represent the external world? What is thought, and can it be studied scientifically? Should we think of the mind as a kind of machine? Is the mind a computer? Can a computer think? Tim Crane sets out to answer these questions and more in a lively and straightforward way, presuming no prior knowledge of philosophy or related disciplines.Since its first publication, The Mechanical Mind has introduced thousands of people to some of the most important id...

Aspects of Psychologism is a penetrating look into fundamental philosophical questions of consciousness, perception, and the experience we have of our mental lives. Psychologism, in Tim Crane's formulation, presents the mind as a single subject-matter to be investigated not only empirically and conceptually but also phenomenologically: through the systematic examination of consciousness and thought from the subject's point of view.How should we think about the mind? Analyt...

Dispositions are essential to our understanding of the world. Dispositions: A Debate is an extended dialogue between three distinguished philosophers - D.M. Armstrong, C.B. Martin and U.T. Place - on the many problems associated with dispositions, which reveals their own distinctive accounts of the nature of dispositions. These are then linked to other issues such as the nature of mind, matter, universals, existence, laws of nature and causation.

This book presents the technique of visual logic thinking. The technique consists of separate consecutive parts, which as whole become "skeleton" for information processing with following topics: mnemonic technique of memorization of events and dialogues, visual analysis of events in space and time, visualization of semantic connections and taxonomical groups of abstract essences, estimation of probabilities, essences sorting, rules for work in mixes of disciplines, and also practical meth...

This book provides a comprehensive account of the intentionality of perceptual experience. With special emphasis on vision Searle explains how the raw phenomenology of perception sets the content and the conditions of satisfaction of experience. The central question concerns the relation between the subjective conscious perceptual field and the objective perceptual field. Everything in the objective field is either perceived or can be perceived. Nothing in the subjective field is perceived...

Those aspects of language use that are crucial to an understanding of language as a system, and especially to an understanding of meaning, are the acknowledged concern of linguistic pragmatics. This textbook provides a lucid and integrative analysis of the central topics in pragmatics - deixis, implicature, presupposition, speech acts, and conversational structure. A central concern of the book is the relation between pragmatics and semantics, and Dr Levinson shows clearly how a pragmatic ...

In his long-awaited new edition of Philosophy of Mathematics, James Robert Brown tackles important new as well as enduring questions in the mathematical sciences. Can pictures go beyond being merely suggestive and actually prove anything? Are mathematical results certain? Are experiments of any real value?This clear and engaging book takes a unique approach, encompassing non-standard topics such as the role of visual reasoning, the importance of notation, and the place of ...

If you keep removing single grains of sand from a heap, when is it no longer a heap? From discussions of the heap paradox in classical Greece, to modern formal approaches like fuzzy logic, Timothy Williamson traces the history of the problem of vagueness. He argues that standard logic and formal semantics apply even to vague languages and defends the controversial, realist view that vagueness is a form of ignorance - there really is a grain of sand whose removal turns a heap into a non-hea...

Wittgenstein's Remarks on the Foundations of AI is a valuable contribution to the study of Wittgenstein's theories and his controversial attack on artifical intelligence, which successfully crosses a number of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, logic, artificial intelligence and cognitive science, to provide a stimulating and searching analysis.