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This book investigates in unprecedented detail what David Papineau has called'the intuition of distinctness'--its seeming to us, when we attend introspectively to a phenomenal property of a current sensation, that this property couldn't literally be an electro-chemical property of neural activity in a certain tiny region of our brain. This book argues that the intuition of distinctness is no mere curiosity, since it plausibly underlies much of the widespread feeling both inside and outside philosophy that phenomenal properties (or qualia) constitute an insuperable obstacle to physicalism (or materialism) about the mind. It goes on to argue against the natural suggestion that this feeling is warranted because the intuition of distinctness somehow gives us genuine reason to reject physicalism about phenomenal properties and to adopt property dualism instead; it argues that there is no plausible way in which it could. The volume develops a positive view of what phenomenal properties are, defending an unorthodox version of representationalism, and sketching accounts of what makes our introspective knowledge of phenomenal properties special, how introspection could tell us that an introspected property is physical, and what the subjectivity of phenomenal properties could be. The volume critically surveys previous attempts to explain consistently with physicalism how the intuition of distinctness arises in us. Finally, it elaborates an explanation of the intuition of distinctness.

Dans les tomes précédents, vous avez exploré les limites de la connaissance, enrichissant ainsi vos esprits et vous éloignant de l'ignorance. Cependant, le savoir revêt de multiples formes : relatif, absolu, spirituel… En ouvrant cet ouvrage, vous amorcez peut-être votre dernier voyage mais il sera exceptionnel. Passez au-delà du voile de l'incertitude qui sépare vos intelligences de la connaissance ultime et découvrez un monde invisible mais fascinant. À PROPOS DE L'AUTEUR Jérémy Cohan est auteur de plusieurs livres dont Origines : le grand début d'un tout petit rien. Fort de ses perceptions, de son expérience et de ses sources d'inspiration, il signe avec ce troisième tome une œuvre pleine d'enseignements et de questionnements.

Perceptual Content is the first book to discuss and compare the representational characters of all the traditional'five senses'. It has three main topics or concerns. (1) The diversity of the senses: though Lycan maintains as a working assumption that all perception represents, the similarity between sense modalities ends there. The senses'respective representational modes, styles and structures -- not just their mechanisms -- differ very strongly from each other. (2) The Layering thesis: Lycan argues that a single sensory representation usually has more than one content, the contents systematically related to each other by a priority or dependence relation. More specifically, a perceptual state may represent one object or property by representing a more primitive or less ambitious one; he calls this the'layering'of content. For example, by hearing a sound sequence involving such-and-such volumes and timbres, you hear a voice speaking, and by hearing the voice, you hear words in a language. In some modalities layering works unexpectedly: nearly all tactile representation derives from representation of conditions of or in the subject's own skin, meaning that touch represents, e.g., the texture of a physical object by, and only by, representing stress within the skin; and even among the skin conditions, some are represented only by representing more primitive ones. (3) Aspect perception: despite Wittgenstein's famous discussion of'seeing as'in a late section of Philosophical Investigations, little has been written on perceiving-as. Besides its intrinsic interest -- even popular appeal, what with joke ambiguous figures such as the duck-rabbit and the old/young woman -- it remains especially mysterious. Nearly all work on it has concerned vision only. But it is crucial for understanding auditory representation, which is one thing that distinguishes hearing from the other senses. Further, the auditory case severely damages what Lycan and others had thought was the best approach to understanding aspect perception, in terms of attention.

What is sensory imagining and what role does it play in our lives? How does visualizing a castle, running through a tune in one's head, or imagining the taste of fish ice cream relate to perceiving such things, or to remembering them? What are the connections between imagining and agency, and how does it relate to emotion and other affect? The Profile of Imagining offers a theory that answers these and many other questions. It argues that sensory imagining involves the redeployment of resources central to perception, though in a radically different context and to very different effect. The result is a view that explains central features of imagining's phenomenology and functional role, including its capacity to capture what it would be like to perceive its objects, while acknowledging the many and striking differences between imagining and sensing. Hopkins shows how the view can be extended to imagining in other forms, especially the imagining of affect; and uses it to argue for some surprising conclusions: that imagining something is not a way to engage with its aesthetic character; and that imagining provokes real feeling much less often than is usually assumed.

'Promenade dans la jungle des idées ou réflexions d'un honnête marcheur'se présente sous la forme d'une série d'articles organisés alphabétiquement. Pourquoi ce choix d'organisation scolaire puisque toute promenade suppose détours et arrêts, rêveries et redites? Parce que l'ordre alphabétique a l'avantage de limiter toute tentative de systématisation. L'objectif principal de cet ouvrage est d'approfondir certaines notions, qu'elles soient anciennes – conscience, être, savoir… – ou plus récentes – écologie, technologie, théorie du complot…À PROPOS DE L'AUTEUR Renaud Pontier, né en 1954, ancien élève de l'École du Pétrole et des Moteurs, a travaillé en tant qu'ingénieur de recherche à l'Institut Français du Pétrole (IFP) de 1982 à 2000. Par la suite, il s'est spécialisé dans le domaine des brevets, occupant le poste de responsable de la propriété intellectuelle jusqu'à sa retraite en janvier 2018. Pendant sa retraite, il a consacré son temps à organiser ses réflexions accumulées au fil des ans, touchant à divers domaines tels que la philosophie, la musique, la littérature et la technologie.

La question de l'identité sous-entend une autre question : celle de la connaissance de soi. Qui suis-je? Pas seulement ceci ou cela, mais surtout ce que je fais, jour après jour, de tout ce que j'ai reçu. C'est dans ce va et vient entre ce qui me différencie de l'autre et ce qui m'en rapproche que se définit mon identité du moment, comme une signature faite de ma main à partir de mon nom, qui prouve que je suis unique tout en étant dans la filiation de quelque chose qui me précède. Exercice difficile, qui génère parfois bien des souffrances, au point de vouloir changer de vie, de ville, de religion, de corps, etc., pour se créer une identité sur mesure. Mais quelle est la part du fantasme et de l'imagination dans la construction de son identité? N'y a-t-il pas ce qu'on est, et puis ce que l'on croit être? À PROPOS DE L'AUTEURSam Touzani est un véritable homme-orchestre : comédien, auteur, danseur-chorégraphe, metteur en scène ; un artiste polymorphe, un électron libre. Depuis 25 ans, ses spectacles abordent sans tabou les questions de l'identité, la sexualité, la religion, l'intégration. Il passe au scalpel notre société, il se joue des paradoxes et il nous raconte des histoires qui donnent à repenser notre pensée. Mohamed Sifaoui est écrivain et journaliste, spécialisé dans les questions portant sur l'islam et le terrorisme. Chargé de cours à la Sorbonne, il n'hésite pas à exprimer son opinion à travers des ouvrages tels Taqiyya. Comment les Frères musulmans veulent infiltrer la France (Editions de l'Observatoire) ou Une seule voie : l'Insoumission (Plon). Il est également directeur de publication sur la plateforme digitale www.islamoscope.tv.

Ouvrez les livres de la plupart des physiologistes et médecins de notre époque, vous retrouverez sans cesse ces expressions qui ont fait fortune : la pensée est un « épiphénomène, » la pensée est un « fait surajouté, » un « surcroît, » un « luxe, » un « accessoire. » Les découvertes sur l'hypnotisme semblent, à première vue, confirmer cette hypothèse, et semblent nous réduire, sous le rapport mental, à des automates inertes… Cependant, à y regarder de plus près, ne découvrirait-on pas que les états de conscience sont toujours les vrais ressorts qui meuvent l'automate, les vraies conditions internes des mouvements mêmes? Sans doute une idée introduite dans une tête humaine développe nécessairement ses conséquences et tend à se réaliser en actes ; nous ne possédons pas une liberté d'indifférence qui s'exercerait en dehors et au-dessus de nos motifs et de nos mobiles. Mais, précisément parce qu'il y a ainsi lutte pour la vie entre les idées, l'essentiel est de faire prédominer dans les consciences humaines les idées les plus hautes et les meilleures. La force des idées est donc en même temps notre vraie force, à nous, êtres pensants... Dans la condition normale et dans les conditions anormales du cerveau, mouvements et idées apparaîtront de plus en plus, croyons-nous, comme les manifestations diverses d'une même activité dont le fond est l'appétit, ou, pour parler comme Schopenhauer, le « vouloir-vivre. » Les expériences sur l'hypnotisme, comme le reconnaît M. Pierre Janet, sont une confirmation frappante de la doctrine des idées-forces, et, si ces expériences semblent d'abord nous rabaisser au rôle des machines, elles nous apprennent cependant que, par le moyen des idées, nous pouvons diriger notre mécanisme même et faire de lui le serviteur de la vie morale.À PROPOS DE L'AUTEUR Alfred Fouillée, né le 18 octobre 1838 à La Pouëze (Maine-et-Loire) et mort le 16 juillet 19121 à Lyon, est un philosophe français.Il est l'auteur d'un adage de droit civil : « Qui dit contractuel, dit juste » et est à l'origine de la notion métaphysique d'« idée-force ».

'Soif d'existence, flâneries et digressions'explore un concept novateur, la sphère d'existence, à travers un ton original et des réflexions basées sur des expériences personnelles. Après une introduction sur le fonctionnement de l'être humain, chaque aspect de la sphère d'existence est exploré à la lumière de la philosophie et des neurosciences, incluant l'élan vital, le respect, l'harmonie, la fraternité, la liberté et l'imaginaire.À PROPOS DE L'AUTEURChristophe Henry, diplômé en neurosciences et psychologie clinique, explore les complexités des mécanismes psychologiques humains à travers ses écrits.

A central figure in Anglo-American philosophy for over four decades, Paul F. Snowdon made seminal contributions to the fields of metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and the history of twentieth-century philosophy. Snowdon's work on perception and perceptual experience--much of which is collected in this volume for the first time--was particularly influential and firmly established'disjunctivism'as a view with which any theorist working in the field must reckon. In the essays collected in the first part of this volume, Snowdon traces the contours of the concept of perception, refining his formulation of the disjunctivist position, determining the degree of involvement of the concept of causation, and engaging critically with arguments which aim to support sense-data theories. The second part contains critical examinations of the views propounded by several influential philosophers, amounting to a partial sketch of the history of twentieth-century philosophy of perception. Among the figures whose work Snowdon engages are J. L. Austin, A. J. Ayer, Michael Ayers, Michael Hinton, John McDowell, G. E. Moore, H. H. Price, Wilfrid Sellars, P. F. Strawson, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The volume opens with a robust and intellectually generous introduction in which Snowdon describes the theoretical challenges, approaches, and themes that animate the set of interrelated problems addressed across all sixteen essays. Sprinkled throughout are an array of candid reflections that serve to illuminate both the substantive connections between the essays as well as the historical and circumstantial contexts that occasioned their writing.

This volume brings together two philosophical research areas that have been subject to increased attention: work regarding the unique character of having an experience and studies on the nature and powers of imagination.The importance of imagination seems to stand in tension with the assumed unique and irreplaceable role of experience in our lives. However, new arguments in various philosophical debates suggest that there is a need to examine how both areas of research interrelate and can enrich one another. The chapters in this volume examine whether the traditional accounts of experience and imagination need to be challenged. They are divided into thematic sections that discuss epistemological, ontological, normative, phenomenological, and intersubjective questions related to experience and imagination.Imagination and Experience is an essential resource for scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of mind, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of psychology.Chapters 6, 8, 13, 14, 15, and 19 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 licenses.

It is natural to think that self-knowledge is gained through introspection, whereby we somehow peer inward and detect our mental states. However, so-called transparency theories emphasize our capacity to peer outward at the world, hence beyond our minds, in the pursuit of self-knowledge. For all their popularity in recent decades, transparency theories have also met with myriad challenges. This volume presents new perspectives on transparency-theoretic approaches to self-knowledge. It addresses many under-explored dimensions of transparency theories and considers their wider implications for epistemology, philosophy of mind, and psychology. Some chapters in this volume aim to deepen our understanding of key themes at the heart of transparency theories, such as the ways in which transparent self-knowledge is properly'first-personal'or'non-alienated'. Other chapters offer arguments for extending transparency accounts of self-knowledge to different kinds of mental states and phenomena, such as memory, actions, social groups, and credences. Finally, there are chapters in the volume which discuss interesting relationships between transparency theories, projection, second-order sincerity, and Moore's Paradox.This book will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and psychology.

The volume offers a lively and wide-ranging debate on the major questions of perceptual epistemology, including how perceptual experiences can bestow positive epistemic standing to empirical judgments and beliefs; the relative epistemic import of veridical and non-veridical perceptual experiences; the relation between experience and knowledge; and the nature of experience in view of its epistemic linkages to discursive contents. The volume is centered around five cutting-edge essays by leading authors in these areas—Anil Gupta, Andrea Kern, Christopher Peacocke, Susanna Schellenberg and Crispin Wright—along with no less than thirty contributions scrutinizing and critically discussing the essays, prompting detailed rejoinders from the lead authors. The volume closes with an extensive debate between Annalisa Coliva, Gupta and Wright. Taken as a whole, the volume covers much ground in epistemology of perception and displays a variety of approaches and perspectives through fruitful and accessible exchanges. It will be of interest not only to researchers working in perceptual epistemology but also to students new to the subject.

What is the relationship between the concept of person and the concept of intentionality? Is the phenomenological notion of essence somehow related to that of medieval philosophies? What kind of entity is the person understood in her irreducible singularity? These are some of the questions that the chapters in this book seek to address and develop by focusing on the thought of Aquinas, Scotus and Edith Stein. Indeed, the editors of the book are led by the conviction that a fruitful dialogue between medieval philosophy and 20th century phenomenology may prove useful in addressing questions and problems that are still relevant in contemporary debates. The book is divided into three sections, devoted respectively to medieval philosophy, phenomenology and some of the possible systematic and historical intersections between them. Contributors are Sarah Borden Sharkey, Antonio Calcagno, Therese Cory, Daniele De Santis, Andrew LaZella, Dominik Perler, Giorgio Pini, Francesco Valerio Tommasi, Anna Tropia, and Ingrid Vendrell Ferran.

This is the first volume focused on Markus Gabriel's version of New Realism, which spans the fields of metaphysics/ontology, philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of science, and meta-philosophy. Most of the selected contributions are directly or indirectly concerned with Gabriel's fields of sense-ontology, his version of a thoroughly realistic pluralism. While some take up criticisms from previous debates surrounding Gabriel's philosophy and New Realism in general, others advance completely new and innovative challenges for this highly systematic thinker. Overall, the contributions provide both a substantive commentary on Gabriel's work and a multifaceted, critical assessment of its underlying ideas. The book is not only an essential addition to the debate surrounding New Realism, but also furthers the discussions about naturalism, deflationist ontologies, contextualism and mereological arguments to which Gabriel's work has contributed in recent years.

Les divers courants de pensée qui se sont développés jusqu'à nos jours ont généralement ignoré que la création est formée de plusieurs genres, parmi lesquels le genre spirituel et celui de la matérialité. Une réalité pourtant fondamentale. En tant qu'humains, nous sommes en effet des créatures spirituelles qui ont la possibilité de nous équiper d'un corps de genre matériel en nous incarnant sur Terre. Nous sommes alors des esprits équipés d'un corps et dotés de facultés spirituelles en lien avec notre genre spirituel, et de facultés intellectuelles en lien avec le cerveau de notre corps, et non pas des corps équipés d'un esprit. Savoir cette réalité devient une clé de compréhension, grâce à laquelle nous pouvons saisir le sens de nos séjours terrestres, répondre aux questions que nous nous posons, et trouver la meilleure façon de cheminer dans notre existence. À PROPOS DE L'AUTEUR Passant de l'échelle de la cité à celle de la planète, Gérard Missey, architecte et urbaniste, nous propose de partir à la recherche de notions justes, véritables pierres de fondations, sur lesquelles chaque personne, en se construisant elle-même, participe à l'édification d'un monde devenant juste, dont les habitants pourraient alors vivre et s'épanouir de façon juste.

La formation des idées et la neutralité sont explorées à travers des concepts comme la cohérence et la transformation, accompagnés de réflexions personnelles. L'interdépendance entre la souffrance, la volonté et la conscience est examinée, ainsi que leur impact sur la perception du monde. Chaque section apporte une perspective unique, révélant des connexions inattendues.À PROPOS DE L'AUTEURAnimé par une passion insatiable pour la recherche de réponses, Julien Beutels a entrepris ce projet, valorisant les questions plus que les éclaircissements trouvés. Inspiré par la volonté de transmettre et de contribuer au monde littéraire, il vous invite à plonger dans cet ouvrage pour découvrir des sujets profonds et de nouvelles perspectives enrichissantes.

Most people have wondered whether anything really matters, some have temporarily thought that nothing really matters, and some philosophers have defended the view that nothing really matters. However, if someone thinks that nothing matters--if they are a'nihilist about value'--then it seems that it is irrational for them to care about anything. It seems that nihilism about value mandates total indifference. This is the'problem of nihilism'Allan Hazlett addresses in The Epistemology of Desire and the Problem of Nihilism. Hazlett argues that the problem of nihilism arises because desire--and thus caring--is a species of evaluation that admits of irrationality. This contradicts the influential Humean view that desire does not admit of irrationality, which has a ready solution to the problem of nihilism: since desire does not admit of irrationality, it cannot be irrational to care about something that you believe does not matter. However, following G.E. Anscombe, Hazlett argues that desire has the same relationship to goodness as belief has to truth: just as truth is the accuracy condition for belief, goodness is the accuracy condition for desire. This reveals desire as an appropriate target of epistemological inquiry, in the same way that belief is an appropriate target of epistemological inquiry. Desires can amount to knowledge (in the same way that beliefs can amount to knowledge) and, crucially for the problem of nihilism, desire admits of irrationality (in the same way that belief admits of irrationality). Nevertheless, although it is obviously irrational to believe something that you believe is not true, Hazlett argues that it is not irrational to desire something you believe is not good, despite the fact that goodness is the accuracy condition for desire. This provides a solution to the problem of nihilism, and shows that nihilism about value can coherently be combined with the anti-Humean view that desire is a species of evaluation.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International] licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Herbert Simon held that the fundamental turn in the study of bounded rationality is the turn from substantive to procedural rationality. Theories of substantive rationality begin with normative questions about attitudes: what should we prefer, intend, or believe? By contrast, theories of procedural rationality begin with normative questions about processes of inquiry: how should we determine what to prefer, intend, or believe? If Simon was right, then the central task for theories of bounded rationality is to develop an account of rational inquiry for bounded agents. We need, that is, a theory of inquiry under bounds. Inquiry Under Bounds takes as its starting point a five-point bounded rationality program inspired by recent work in cognitive science. To elaborate on and defend that program, Thorstad argues we need an account of rational inquiry for bounded agents. Inquiry under bounds develops an account of rational inquiry for bounded agents: the reason-responsiveness consequentialist view. I use this account to clarify and defend key insights from the bounded tradition as well as to shed light on recent controversies in the epistemology of inquiry.

Expression is typically construed as a relation between two ontologically distinct items—namely, a vehicle and a content—but it is better construed non-relationally, since the content is an intrinsic aspect or quality of the expressive vehicle. Upon this basis, The Expressive Self: The First Person in Speech and Thought argues that the distinctive nature of the first-person perspective must be accounted for in expressive, rather than epistemic, terms. For though others can report on what one expresses, one alone is able to non-relationally express oneself; one alone is able to produce vehicles that are episodes of one's self-consciousness. According to Ángel García Rodríguez, the ensuing expressive model of the self provides clarity on some prominent contemporary puzzles, notably Moore's paradox, self-deception, and McKinsey's paradox, given the duality of non-relationally expressive and reporting uses of the underlying first-person claims. Moreover, the phenomena of self-reference and first-person authority, both psychological and bodily, pose no objection to the model. Throughout, the author engages critically with alternative conceptions of the self, delivering a novel account that helps advance the debate about the nature of the self and of the first person.

'Les carnets de Malik'sonde l'énigme du temps, le dépeignant comme une entité insaisissable, indépendante de nos désirs. Qu'il nous soit ami ou ennemi, il file inexorablement à travers nos vies, porté par un étrange cordon d'or. Cette symphonie discordante entre notre perception du temps et sa réalité quantique nous entraîne dans une danse émotionnelle, entre peur, courage et dévotion. L'ouvrage, scrutant chaque instant avec passion, révèle ainsi la fragilité de notre existence dans l'immensité du cosmos.À PROPOS DE L'AUTRICEVirginie Moreau explore un vaste éventail de domaines, allant du développement personnel à la physique quantique, en passant par la philosophie, la poésie et l'ésotérisme. Son parcours de guerrière guérisseuse l'a amenée à surmonter diverses épreuves. En tant que scribe, elle partage ses connaissances pour soutenir et inspirer ceux qui en ont besoin dans leur propre vécu.

Dieser Band versammelt Texte aus dem Nachlass Moritz Schlicks über den Begriff und die Geschichte der Philosophie. Ein großer Teil davon gehört zum Spätwerk Schlicks, und er plante selbst, sie zu publizieren. Diese Edition macht darum erstmals und im Zusammenhang Texte zugänglich, die noch weitgehend unbekannt sind. Schlick zeichnete darin die Philosophiegeschichte als Geschichte eines Irrtums. Dieser Irrtum wurde von den Eleaten zuerst begangen, indem sie Schein und Sein unterschieden, und wird seither in wechselnder Terminologie wiederholt. Durch die moderne Logik kann dieser Irrtum nach Schlicks Ansicht beseitigt werden.

Sprachliche Ausdrücke haben Bedeutungen. Aber was sind diese Sachen, die wir „Bedeutung“ nennen? Warum haben sprachliche Ausdrücke genau die Bedeutungen, die sie haben? Und wie finden wir heraus, welche Bedeutungen sie jeweils haben? Um solche Fragen geht es im vorliegenden Buch. Um sie zu beantworten, muss der Zusammenhang zwischen sprachlichen Ausdrücken und Kommunikation in den Blick genommen werden. Sprachliche Ausdrücke haben Bedeutungen, weil wir damit kommunizieren. Dabei beeinflussen wir unsere Adressaten in einer besonderen Weise und rufen in ihnen bestimmte mentale Zustände hervor. Durch diese mentalen Zustände sind letztlich Bedeutungen unserer Äußerungen zu erklären. Um Bedeutungen zu erkennen, müssen wir aber nicht vorher schon eine Sprache beherrschen. Im Gegenteil: Kommunikation ist grundlegender als Sprache. Wir müssen zuerst kommunizieren, um unsere Muttersprache lernen zu können. Es wird gezeigt, wie Bedeutung durch Kommunikation erklärt werden kann und wie aus Kommunikation Sprache entsteht.

This book aims to reclaim the significance of meaning within the philosophical thinking that has evolved from Descartes and Locke through Kant, Husserl, and Frege, focusing on intentionality—the mind's directedness toward the reality.The author opens with an epistemological account of analyticity and illustrates the central role of intentionality within it. A transcendentalist view on intentionality is then adopted, in contrast with the prevalent naturalist stance. Addressing key themes in the philosophy of language—truth, representation, propositions, predication, reference, and sense— the book presents a framework for a meaning–intentionality theory, which integrates key insights from Frege, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Dummett, and Davidson.The book will appeal to scholars and graduate students of epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, theory of meaning, and theory of intentionality.

How all philosophical explanations of human consciousness and the fundamental structure of the cosmos are bizarre—and why that's a good thingDo we live inside a simulated reality or a pocket universe embedded in a larger structure about which we know virtually nothing? Is consciousness a purely physical matter, or might it require something extra, something nonphysical? According to the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, it's hard to say. In The Weirdness of the World, Schwitzgebel argues that the answers to these fundamental questions lie beyond our powers of comprehension. We can be certain only that the truth—whatever it is—is weird. Philosophy, he proposes, can aim to open—to reveal possibilities we had not previously appreciated—or to close, to narrow down to the one correct theory of the phenomenon in question. Schwitzgebel argues for a philosophy that opens.According to Schwitzgebel's “Universal Bizarreness” thesis, every possible theory of the relation of mind and cosmos defies common sense. According to his complementary “Universal Dubiety” thesis, no general theory of the relationship between mind and cosmos compels rational belief. Might the United States be a conscious organism—a conscious group mind with approximately the intelligence of a rabbit? Might virtually every action we perform cause virtually every possible type of future event, echoing down through the infinite future of an infinite universe? What, if anything, is it like to be a garden snail? Schwitzgebel makes a persuasive case for the thrill of considering the most bizarre philosophical possibilities.

There is a tendency, in contemporary epistemology, to treat'perceptual knowledge'and'self-knowledge'as labels for different and largely unconnected sets of philosophical problems. The project of this volume is to bring out how much is to be gained from treating the two topics as, on the contrary, intimately connected. One set of questions that comes into view when we do concerns the sense in which perceptual knowledge, as understood from the first-person perspective, seem to be'direct'. In a famous passage, Austin contrasted reliance on what we call'evidence'with the way perceptual experience'settles'questions. How should we understand the difference? In what sense is perceptual knowledge'direct', in contradistinction to evidence-based, inferential knowledge? A connected set of issues has to do with the relationship between the epistemic authority of perception and self-consciousness. Is the way perceptual experience'settles'questions inherently manifest to the perceiver? Is a perceiver's awareness of (e.g.) seeing that p to be explained by reference to the very capacities at work in seeing that p? Or does it reflect the operation of some kind of second-order perceptual capacity? Consideration of these matters, in turn, prompts questions about the nature of the first-person perspective.'I can see that p'is a first-person self-ascription. But does it express the distinctively immediate kind of knowledge commonly labelled first-person self-knowledge? How would an affirmative answer to this question bear on a philosophical understanding of the'first-person perspective'? These are rough indications of some of the ways in which reflection on the relationship between perceptual knowledge and self-awareness promises to shed valuable light on both topics.

What is perception? What is, if any, its content? What is the contribution of perception to knowledge? Perception and Its Content: Toward the Propositional Attitude View argues that perception has conceptual, propositional, and world-dependent content. After criticizing those theories of experience that conceive it as contentless (the causal-linkage approach and naïve realism), the book examines the nature of perceptual content. Daniel Kalpokas critically scrutinizes different varieties of non-conceptualism and claims that the content of experience is partly conceptual. Perception and Its Content defends the propositional-attitude view, according to which perceptual content is propositional in nature, and explores the world-dependent character of such content. Kalpokas holds that the content of experience is composed of concepts and the presented objects, such as they appear from the subject's point of view and determined environmental conditions. According to this view, perception provides non-inferential knowledge of the truth-makers of our judgments and beliefs. Furthermore, and importantly, that view sheds light on how the mind relates to the world.

'Voir et comprendre'se penche sur la perception humaine, dévoilant comment notre esprit façonne la réalité et influence nos désirs, nos actions et notre rapport à la souffrance. À travers une analyse approfondie, cet ouvrage présente le monde comme un organisme vivant et interconnecté, incitant chaque lecteur à adopter une perspective élargie pour appréhender plus clairement la complexité de l'existence et de soi. Découvrez cette réflexion fascinante qui enrichira votre compréhension de la vie et de vous-même. À PROPOS DE L'AUTEURThomas Carrupt a cultivé une force intérieure qui l'a conduit à écrire pour partager sa vision du monde. S'appuyant sur son parcours académique et ses expériences personnelles, il a opté pour une démarche indépendante, transmettant ainsi ses idées au travers de cet ouvrage.

This book is about the respective roles of intuition and reasoning in ethics. It responds to a number of well-known philosophers and psychologists, and proposes a new perspective – radical in its moderation. It examines in depth the work of the philosopher Joshua Greene and the psychologist Jonathan Haidt. With the so-called empirical turn in ethics, much work has been done to try to isolate the role of reason and intuition in forming our moral judgements, with Haidt and Greene leading the research programmes and attracting much of the professional and public attention, and many others following. The current view – shared by both camps – is that intuition is largely the driver of our moral judgements – a view summed up in Haidt's slogan ‘intuition first, strategic reasoning second'. Haidt believes we have to live with this and accept it. Greene does not: he contends that our intuitions, while suitable for the environments in which we evolved, are worthless in the modern, global, technological age, and to avoid ethical disaster we must learn to adopt reason as the arbiter of moral truth. This book steers a middle course between these two positions and is therefore of great interest to philosophers and psychologists alike. Intuition and reason, and different conceptions of them, lie behind many significant discussions in recent philosophical ethics and moral psychology. One effect of those discussions has been the insertion of a wedge between the two notions. In this engaging and fascinating book, McGee and Foster make a thought-provoking case for removing that wedge. - Professor Roger Crisp, Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Oxford I wanted to cheer all the way through this beautifully written book – one that is both incisive and profoundly humane. So much moral philosophy is ensnared in simple rationalism or simple intuitionism: this book argues that intuition and reason are not just at times compatible, in a sort of uneasy compromise, but that each is always essential to the proper functioning of the other. Its takedown of so much utilitarianism is long overdue. It embraces what can be learnt from neuroscience and at the same time appeals to morality in the practice of life, not just in the seminar room. A book that should be on every intelligent reader's shelves. - Dr Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things What is the role of reason and intuition in ethics? This spirited and thought[1]provoking book makes the case that the relationship between reason and intuition has been fundamentally mischaracterized. And beware—there is a degree of pain in store for those of us who've relied on (and enjoyed) elaborate philosophical thought experiments, such as the famous trolley problem. They're next to useless, the authors contend, in providing us with any genuine moral insight. - David Edmonds, author of Would You Kill the Fat Man?

Embodied, Embedded, and Enactive Psychopathology presents a new way of thinking about mental disorder that is holistic yet critically minded, biologically plausible yet value-inclusive, and scientific yet deeply compassionate. Grounded in an embodied, embedded, and enactive (3e) view of human functioning, this book presents a novel conceptual framework for the study and treatment of mental disorders and explores implications for the tasks of classification, explanation, and treatment. Chapters one to three argue for the central role of conceptualization in the study and treatment of mental disorders. Popular conceptual models are critiqued, including other recent enactive frameworks. Chapters four to seven then present 3e Psychopathology and explore its implications. This includes analysis of both research-based efforts to explain mental disorders, and methods for formulating individual-level explanations in clinical practice. New answers are presented for important questionssuch as: are mental disorders things we do or get? Are mental disorders defined in nature or are they socially constructed? Are mental disorders the same things across different cultures? And, are mental disorders located in our brains, bodies, or environments? This engaging work offers fresh insights that will appeal to clinicians, researchers, and those with an interest in the philosophy of psychiatry.

This book demonstrates how a radical version of physicalism (‘No-Self Physicalism') can offer an internally coherent and comprehensive philosophical worldview. It first argues that a coherent physicalist should explicitly treat a cognitive subject merely as a physical thing and should not vaguely assume an amorphous or even soul-like subject or self. This approach forces the physicalist to re-examine traditional core philosophical notions such as truth, analyticity, modality, apriority because our traditional understandings of them appear to be predicated on a cognitive subject that is not literally just a physical thing.In turn, working on the assumption that a cognitive subject is itself completely physical, namely a neural network-based robot programmed by evolution (hence the term ‘No-Self'), the book proposes physicalistic theories on conceptual representation, truth, analyticity, modality, the nature of mathematics, epistemic justification, knowledge, apriority andintuition, as well as a physicalistic ontology. These are meant to show that this No-Self Physicalism, perhaps the most minimalistic and radical version of physicalism proposed to date, can accommodate many aspects that have traditionally interested philosophers. Given its refreshingly radical approach and painstakingly developed content, the book is of interest to anyone who is seeking a coherent philosophical worldview in this age of science.

How we come to know the external world has intrigued thinkers throughout the history of philosophy. Medieval philosophers understood that a theory of perception requires an account of the categorization of sensory information: to perceive things as being dangerous or beneficial and even as being individuals that belong to certain kinds (e.g., ‘this is a dog'). A key question is whether this requires the intervention of rational cognitive capacities, cooperating with sensory ones in normal instances of perception. The contributions to this volume investigate how thinkers from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries answer this and other related questions about human perception. Contributors are Fabrizio Amerini, Joël Biard, Véronique Decaix, Christian Kny, Lydia Schumacher, José Filipe Silva, and Jörg Alejandro Tellkamp.

This book is the first volume featuring the work of American women philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century. It provides selected papers authored by Mary Whiton Calkins, Grace Andrus de Laguna, Grace Neal Dolson, Marjorie Glicksman Grene, Marjorie Silliman Harris, Thelma Zemo Lavine, Marie Collins Swabey, Ellen Bliss Talbot, Dorothy Walsh and Margaret Floy Washburn. The book also provides the historical and philosophical background to their work. The papers focus on the nature of philosophy, knowledge, the philosophy of science, the mind-matter nexus, the nature of time, and the question of freedom and the individual. The material is suitable for scholars, researchers and advanced philosophy students interested in (history of) philosophy; theories of knowledge; philosophy of science; mind, and reality.

Different from traditional research on the mind-body problem often discussed from an epistemological viewpoint, which assumes that mental processes are internal to the person, this book demonstrates the crucial role of contextual relevance in the workings of the mind and illustrates how mind emerges from the individual's interactions with her physical, social, and cultural environments. It also develops the interpersonal and social aspects of embodied mind. The body that creates meaning is not only an emotional, kinesthetic, and aesthetically experiencing body; the body that creates meaning is a social body. It suggests that mind-body relations are not only achieved through the interaction between our own mind and body, but by other minds in our intersubjective interactions. It is related to epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, value theory, action theory, and the philosophies of mind, science, logic, and technology. The readership may include graduateand undergraduate students studying philosophy, law, political science, sociology, psychology, etc., educators, researchers, scholars, and anyone who shows an interest in philosophy.

The most important questions in life are questions about what we should do and what we should believe. The first kind of question has received considerable attention by normative ethicists, who search for a complete systematic account of right action. This book is about the second kind of question. Right Belief and True Belief starts by defining a new field of inquiry named'normative epistemology'that mirrors normative ethics in searching for a systematic account of right belief. The book then lays out and defends a deeply truth-centric account of right belief called `truth-loving epistemic consequentialism.'Truth-loving epistemic consequentialists say that what we should believe (and what credences we should have) can be understood in terms of what conduces to us having the most accurate beliefs (credences). The view straight-forwardly vindicates the popular intuition that epistemic norms are about getting true beliefs and avoiding false beliefs, and it coheres well with how scientists, engineers, and statisticians think about what we should believe. Many epistemologists have rejected similar views in response to several persuasive objections, most famously including trade-off and counting-blades-of-grass objections. Right Belief and True Belief shows how a simple truth-based consequentialist account of epistemic norms can avoid these objections and argues that truth-loving epistemic consequentialism can undergird a general truth-centric approach to many questions in epistemology.

Vor dem Hintergrund der Tatsache, dass innovatives Handeln in der Gegenwart eine große Wertschätzung erfährt, unternimmt das Buch eine Untersuchung des Begriffs, des Ursprungs, des Werts und der Spielarten der Kreativität. Kreativität ist immer ein bewusstes Menschenwerk, das überraschende Neuigkeiten hervorbringt; dabei können solche Neuigkeiten durchaus unterschiedlich bewertet werden und auch ihre Schattenseiten haben. Zur Anwendung kommt die Lust auf Neues in allen Bereichen des Lebens – in den Künsten und in den Wissenschaften, im Privatleben und in der Politik, bei Beziehungen zu anderen Personen und bei der Beziehung zu uns selbst. Das Buch geht detailliert auf die multiplen Facetten des Phänomens ein. Ob auch künstliche Intelligenzen zu kreativen Leistungen in der Lage sind, ist heute eine wichtige und stark umstrittene Frage, deren Antwort nicht zuletzt vom Begriff der Kreativität abhängen wird. Als besonders förderlich für die Ausbildung und Ausübung einer Lust auf Neues haben sich das Nichtstun, die Langeweile und Tagträumereien erwiesen.

To understand the nature of religious belief, we must look at how our minds process the world of imagination and make-believe.We often assume that religious beliefs are no different in kind from ordinary factual beliefs—that believing in the existence of God or of supernatural entities that hear our prayers is akin to believing that May comes before June. Neil Van Leeuwen shows that, in fact, these two forms of belief are strikingly different. Our brains do not process religious beliefs like they do beliefs concerning mundane reality; instead, empirical findings show that religious beliefs function like the imaginings that guide make-believe play.Van Leeuwen argues that religious belief—which he terms religious “credence”—is best understood as a form of imagination that people use to define the identity of their group and express the values they hold sacred. When a person pretends, they navigate the world by consulting two maps: the first represents mundane reality, and the second superimposes the features of the imagined world atop the first. Drawing on psychological, linguistic, and anthropological evidence, Van Leeuwen posits that religious communities operate in much the same way, consulting a factual-belief map that represents ordinary objects and events and a religious-credence map that accords these objects and events imagined sacred and supernatural significance.It is hardly controversial to suggest that religion has a social function, but Religion as Make-Believe breaks new ground by theorizing the underlying cognitive mechanisms. Once we recognize that our minds process factual and religious beliefs in fundamentally different ways, we can gain deeper understanding of the complex individual and group psychology of religious faith.

This book proposes a new and systematic interpretation of the mental nature, function and structure, and importance of the imagination in Book 1,'Of the Understanding', of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. The proposed interpretation has deeply revisionary implications for Hume's philosophy of mind and for his naturalism, epistemology, and stance to scepticism. The book remedies a surprising blindspot in Hume scholarship and contributes to the current, lively philosophical debate on imagination. Hume's philosophy, if rightly understood, gives suggestions about how to treat imagination as a mental natural kind, its cognitive complexity and variety of functions notwithstanding. Hume's imagination is a faculty of inference and the source of a distinctive kind of idea, which complements our sensible representations of objects. Our cognitive nature, if restricted to the representation of objects and of their relations, would leave ordinary and philosophical cognition seriously underdetermined and expose us to scepticism. Only the non-representational, inferential faculty of the imagination can put in place and vindicate ideas like causation, body, and self, which support our cognitive practices. The book reconstructs how Hume's naturalist inferentialism about the imagination develops this fundamental insight. Its five parts deal with the dualism of representation and inference; the explanation of generality and modality; the production of causal ideas; the production of spatial and temporal content, and the distinction of an external world of bodies and an internal one of selves; and the replacement of the understanding with imagination in the analysis of cognition and in epistemology.

Vieles deutet darauf hin, dass das 21. Jahrhundert die Epoche des Gehirns werden könnte - samt einer wissenschaftlichen und kulturellen Revolution. Die anstehenden Veränderungen im Zusammenhang mit Künstlicher Intelligenz und der aufstrebenden Weltanschauung des Transhumanismus werfen die grundsätzliche Frage auf, ob ein System in der Lage ist, sich selbst zu durchschauen. In einer essayistischen Aufschlüsselung dieser Problematik widmet sich Herbert M. Hurka der Selbstthematisierung des Gehirns und zeigt: Mit jeder Äußerung, gleich in welchem Medium, betreibt das Gehirn in einer selbstreferentiellen Schleife immer auch aktiv seine Selbsterforschung - und bleibt dabei als Subjekt der Erkenntnis immer auch ihr Objekt.

Why does the world look to us as it does? Generally speaking, this question has received two types of answers in the cognitive sciences in the past fifty or so years. According to the first, the world looks to us the way it does because we construct it to look as it does. According to the second, the world looks as it does primarily because of how the world is. In The Innocent Eye, Nico Orlandi defends a position that aligns with this second, world-centered tradition, but that also respects some of the insights of constructivism. Orlandi develops an embedded understanding of visual processing according to which, while visual percepts are representational states, the states and structures that precede the production of percepts are not representations. If we study the environmental contingencies in which vision occurs, and we properly distinguish functional states and features of the visual apparatus from representational states and features, we obtain an empirically more plausible, world-centered account. Orlandi shows that this account accords well with models of vision in perceptual psychology -- such as Natural Scene Statistics and Bayesian approaches to perception -- and outlines some of the ways in which it differs from recent'enactive'approaches to vision. The main difference is that, although the embedded account recognizes the importance of movement for perception, it does not appeal to action to uncover the richness of visual stimulation. The upshot is that constructive models of vision ascribe mental representations too liberally, ultimately misunderstanding the notion. Orlandi offers a proposal for what mental representations are that, following insights from Brentano, James and a number of contemporary cognitive scientists, appeals to the notions of de-coupleability and absence to distinguish representations from mere tracking states.

Epistemic agency is a crucial concept in many different areas of philosophy and the cognitive sciences. It is crucial in dual process theories of cognition as well as theories of metacognition and mindreading, self-control, and moral agency. But what is epistemic agency? The Tinkering Mind argues that epistemic agency has two distinct and incompatible definitions. It can be simply understood as intentional mental action, or as a distinct non-voluntary form of evaluative agency. The core argument of the book demonstrates that both definitions lead to surprising and counterintuitive consequences. If epistemic agency is a form of intentional action, then this implies that the radical theory of extended cognition has to be true. If, on the other hand, epistemic agency is not intentional action but evaluative agency, then intentional epistemic actions like deliberation are not truly cognitive but merely catalytic. Once established, the distinction between these two options sheds new light on various and diverse philosophical and psychological debates from dual process theories to debates on choice and self-control.

This book offers a new and externalist perspective in ignorance studies. Agnotology, the epistemology of ignorance, and, more generally, ignorance studies have grown to cover and explore different phenomena and subjects of research, from known events in history and sociology of science to the investigation of ordinary reasoning and cognitive processing. Nonetheless, although interested scholars have discussed ignorance phenomena and their impact on cognition, most of them have only adopted an internalist perspective to approach this theme. Meanwhile, even though externalist perspectives on cognition flourished in recent literature, authors have paid little attention to the emerging field of ignorance studies. Ignorance has been generally left out from the inquiries on the extension of cognitive states, cognitive processes, and predictive reasoning. Thus, in this volume, we seek to merge the two growing areas of research and to fill this research gap fruitfully. By addressing the uncomfortable themes that pertain to ignorance and related phenomena through an externalist perspective, this book aims to provide much food for thoughts to cognitive scientists and philosophers alike, enriching the current range and reach of both ignorance studies and externalist approaches to cognition.

Das Buch vereint fünf bisher unveröffentlichte Aufsätze, in denen Franz von Kutschera zentrale Gedanken seiner Philosophie mit Blick auf das gesamte Spektrum der philosophischen Disziplinen darstellt. Dabei kommt der Philosophie des Geistes eine Schlüsselrolle zu, innerhalb einer Philosophie im engeren Sinn, die sich in den Grenzen unseres normalen, intentionalen Denkens hält. Dass intentionales Erkennen Grenzen hat, lässt sich mit dessen eigenen Mitteln feststellen. Dass Menschen darüber hinauskommen können, zeigen überintentionale Erfahrungen. So richten die hier versammelten Aufsätze ihren Blick auch auf eine Philosophie im weiteren Sinn, die versucht, über die Grenzen des intentionalen Denkens hinaus zu gehen. Dabei geht der Autor auf nicht gegenständlichen Formen des Bewusstseins, auf die Intentionen seiner Arbeit und auf die Gründe für die gegenwärtige Krise christlichen Glaubens ein.

How much does rationality constrain what we should believe on the basis of our evidence? According to this book, not very much. For most people and most bodies of evidence, there is a wide range of beliefs that rationality permits them to have in response to that evidence. The argument, which takes inspiration from William James'ideas in'The Will to Believe', proceeds from two premises. The first is a theory about the basis of epistemic rationality. It's called epistemic utility theory, and it says that what it is epistemically rational for you to believe is what it would be rational for you to choose if you were given the chance to pick your beliefs and, when picking them, you were to care only about their epistemic value. So, to say which beliefs are permitted, we must say how to measure epistemic value, and which decision rule to use when picking your beliefs. The second premise is a claim about attitudes to epistemic risk, and it says that rationality permits many different such attitudes. These attitudes can show up in epistemic utility theory in two ways: in the way you measure epistemic value; and in the decision rule you use to pick beliefs. This book explores the latter. The result is permissivism about epistemic rationality: different attitudes to epistemic risk lead to different choices of prior beliefs; given most bodies of evidence, different priors lead to different posteriors; and even once we fix your attitudes to epistemic risk, if they are at all risk-inclined, there is a range of different priors and therefore different posteriors they permit.

In this book, Martin Lenz provides the first reconstruction of intersubjective accounts of the mind in early modern philosophy. Some phenomena are easily recognised as social or interactive: certain dances, forms of work and rituals require interaction to come into being or count as valid. But what about mental states, such as thoughts, volitions, or emotions? Do our minds also depend on other minds? The idea that our minds are intersubjective or social seems to be a recent one, developed mainly in the 19th and 20th centuries against the individualism of early modern philosophers. By contrast, this book argues that well-known early modern philosophers often started from the idea that minds are intersubjective. How then does a mind depend on the minds of others? Early modern philosophers are well known to have developed a number of theories designed to explain how we cognize external objects. What is hardly recognized is that early modern philosophers also addressed the problem of how our cognition is influenced by other minds. This book provides a historical and rational reconstruction of three central, but different, early modern accounts of the influence that minds exert on one another: Spinoza's metaphysical model, Locke's linguistic model, and Hume's medical model. Showing for each model of mental interaction (1) why it was developed, (2) how it construes mind-mind relations, and (3) what view of the mind it suggests, this book aims at uncovering a crucial part of the unwritten history of intersubjectivity in the philosophy of mind.

This book explores the structure and function of memory and imagination, as well as the relation and interaction between the two states. It is the first book to offer an integrative approach to these two emerging areas of philosophical research.The essays in this volume deal with a variety of forms of imagining and remembering. The contributors come from a range of methodological backgrounds: empirically minded philosophers, analytic philosophers engaging mainly in conceptual analysis, and philosophers informed by the phenomenological tradition. Part 1 consists of novel contributions to ontological issues regarding the nature of memory and imagination and their respective structural features. Part 2 focuses on questions of justification and perspective regarding both states. The chapters in Part 3 discuss issues regarding memory and imagination as skills or abilities. Finally, Part 4 focuses on the relation between memory, imagination, and emotion.Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of memory, philosophy of imagination, philosophy of mind, and epistemology.

This book presents an analysis of the social aspects of Carl Gustav Jung's thought and its followers, the interpretation of the phenomena of contemporary social life (social imagery) from the perspective of the main categories of this thought (archetype, unconscious, collectivity, mass society, mass man). It also contains an attempt of their application for understanding contemporary social and political phenomena (e.g. Brazilian sebastianism, Balkan conflicts, virtual-imagery sphere of communication, figures of imagery in popular culture, and others). The authors examine the relationship between Jung's and Jungians'(E. Neumann, J. Hillman, J. L. Henderson) conceptions and many accompanying them (e.g. Frankfurt school, Bachelard's philosophy, American cultural psychoanalysis) and the background of contemporary social psychology, sociology, and cultural anthropology.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Christopher S. Hill argues that perceptual experience constitutively involves representations of worldly items, and that the relevant form of representation can be explained in broadly biological terms. He then maintains that the representational contents of perceptual experiences are perceptual appearances, interpreted as relational, viewpoint-dependent properties of external objects. There is also a complementary explanation of how the objects that possess these properties are represented. Hill maintains that perceptual phenomenology can be explained reductively in terms of the representational contents of experiences, and uses this doctrine to undercut the traditional arguments for dualism. This treatment of perceptual phenomenology is expanded to encompass cognitive phenomenology, the phenomenology of moods and emotions, and the phenomenology of pain. Hill also offers accounts of the various forms of consciousness that perceptual experiences can possess. One aim is to argue that phenomenology is metaphysically independent of these forms of consciousness, and another is to de-mystify the form known as phenomenal consciousness. The book concludes by discussing the relations of various kinds that perceptual experiences bear to higher-level cognitive states, including relations of format, content, and justification or support.

This book explores the methodological strategies for linking philosophy and neuroscience concerning the study of the conscious brain. The author focuses on four distinct methods for relating these two academic disciplines: isolationist, reductionist, neurophenomenological, and non-reductionist. After analyzing the pros and cons of these approaches, Steven S. Gouveia applies them to the concept of Qualia and Information to understand how the metaphilosophical assumptions of each approach influence the definitions of those specific concepts. Gouveia argues for an approach that conceives the interdisciplinarity of both philosophy and neuroscience, in a particular and sound methodology, offering empirical examples of the explanatory power of this methodology over the others. Additionally, he shows how the metaphilosophical assumptions of each methodology—usually taken by researchers implicitly and unconsciously—influence their own approach to the methodological problem.

Best known for his groundbreaking and influential work in Buddhist philosophy, Mark Siderits is the pioneer of “fusion” or “confluence philosophy', a boldly systematic approach to doing philosophy premised on the idea that rational reconstruction of positions in one tradition in light of another can sometimes help address perennial problems and often lead to new and valuable insights. Exemplifying the many virtues of the confluence approach, this collection of essays covers all core areas of Buddhist philosophy, as well as topics and disputes in contemporary Western philosophy relevant to its study. They consider in particular the ways in which questions concerning personal identity figure in debates about agency, cognition, causality, ontological foundations, foundational truths, and moral cultivation. Most of these essays engage Siderits'work directly, building on his pathbreaking ideas and interpretations. Manydeal with issues that have become a common staple in philosophical engagements with traditions outside the West. Their variety and breadth bear testimony to the legacy of Siderits'impact in shaping the contemporary conversation in Buddhist philosophy and its reverberations in mainstream philosophy, giving readers a clear sense of the remarkable scope of his work.

This innovative volume investigates the meaning of ‘something'in different recent philosophical traditions in order to rethink the logic and the unity of ontology, without forgetting to compare these views to earlier significative accounts in the history of philosophy. In fact, the revival of interest in “something” in the 19th and 20th centuries as well as in contemporary philosophy can easily be accounted for: it affords the possibility for asking the question: what is there? without engaging in predefined speculative assumptions The issue about “something” seems to avoid any naive approach to the question about what there is, so that it is treated in two main contemporary philosophical trends: “material ontology”, which aims at taking “inventory” of what there is, of everything that is; and “formal ontology”, which analyses the structural features of all there is, whatever it is. The volume advances cutting-edge debates on what is the first et the most general item in ontology, that is to say “something”, because the relevant features of the conceptual core of something are: non-nothingness, otherness. Something means that one being is different from others. The relationality belongs to something.: Therefore, the volume advances cutting-edge debates in phenomenology, analytic philosophy, formal and material ontology, traditional metaphysics.