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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 book develops a novel theory of intentionality. It argues that intentionality is an internal essential relation of constitution between an intentional state and an object, or between such a state and a possible state of affairs as subsisting.The author's main claim is that intentionality is a fundamentally modal property, hence a non (scientifically) natural property in that it does not supervene, either locally or globally, on its nonmodal physical basis. This is the property, primarily for an intentional mental state, to be constituted by the entities it is about. In the case of intentionality of reference, such constituents are objects, in the sense of individuals; in the case of intentionality of content, such constituents are possible states of affairs as subsisting. Constitution is meant in a mereologically literal sense: those constituents are essential parts of the relevant states. As a result, the theory claims not only that intentionality is relational but also that it is an internal, essential relation holding between an intentional state and its object or proposition-like content.Intentionality as Constitution will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and cognitive science.

A philosophical exploration of the concept of interiority, Rethinking Interiority presents readers with its unmined aspects and senses, including ideas of an inner world and life, personal identity, auto-affection, and its social and political dimensions as well as its ethical possibilities. Internationally recognized scholars and philosophers investigate figures in the history of phenomenology as well as recent developments in psychology and the neurosciences to uncover not only the depths of interiority but also how it comes to connect with and structure external reality. Western and Eastern philosophical positions are addressed, creating a fruitful dialogue in which readers are invited to participate.

This book argues that Sellars'theory of intentionality can be understood as an advancement of a transcendental philosophical approach. It shows how Sellars develops his theory of intentionality through his engagement with the theoretical philosophy of Immanuel Kant.The book delivers a provocative reinterpretation of one of the most problematic and controversial concepts of Sellars'philosophy: the picturing-relation. Sellars'theory of intentionality addresses the question of how to reconcile two aspects that seem opposed: the non-relational theory of intellectual and linguistic content and a causal-transcendental theory of representation inspired by the philosophy of the early Wittgenstein. The author explains how both parts cohere in a transcendental account of finite knowledge. He claims that this can only be achieved by reading Sellars as committed to a transcendental methodology inspired by Kant. In a final step, he brings his interpretation to bear on the contemporary metaphilosophical debate on pragmatism and expressivism.Intentionality in Sellars will be of interest to scholars of Sellars and Kant, as well as researchers working in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy.

This volume translates Brentano's intentionality into medieval psychological and ontological discussions through Sadrian theories of sense perception and mental existence. Applying a new methodology, it reframes various parts of Sadrian theory around the problem of intentionality, which results in a refreshed reading of the philosopher Mulla Sadra. The book starts out by defining intentionality problem and discussing the historiography of Brentano's conceptualization. It examines immateriality, content and aboutness, and sense perception. In its conclusion, the book claims that intentionality in Mulla Sadra combines ontological and psychological realities and that as a result of Sadrian monism, the intentionality, intentional object, the agent, and the reality are different versions of same reality.

Brian Loar (1939-2014) was an eminent and highly respected philosopher of mind and language. He was at the forefront of several different field-defining debates between the 1970s and the 2000s—from his earliest work on reducing semantics to psychology, through debates about reference, functionalism, externalism, and the nature of intentionality, to his most enduringly influential work on the explanatory gap between consciousness and neurons. Loar is widely credited with having developed the most comprehensive functionalist account of certain aspects of the mind, and his ‘phenomenal content strategy'is arguably one of the most significant developments on the ancient mind/body problem.This volume of essays honours the entirety of Loar's wide-ranging philosophical career. It features sixteen original essays from influential figures in the fields of philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, including those who worked with and were taught by Loar. The essays are divided into three thematic sections covering Loar's work in philosophy of language, especially the relations between semantics and psychology (1970s-80s), on content in the philosophy of mind (1980s-90s), and on the metaphysics of intentionality and consciousness (1990s and beyond). Taken together, this book is a fitting tribute to one of the leading minds of the latter-20th century, and a timely reflection on Loar's enduring influence on the philosophy of mind and language.

The mind is directed upon the world. There are worldly things that we have beliefs about and things in the world we desire to have happen. We find some things fearsome and others likable. The puzzle of intentionality -- how it is that our minds make contact with the world -- is one of the oldest and most vexed issues facing philosophers. Many contemporary philosophers and cognitive scientists have been attracted to the idea that our minds represent the world. This book explores an important assumption about representation, namely, that when we represent things in the world, we represent them as having properties, and in this way our representations have'propositional'structure. The contributors examine what the commitment to propositionalism amounts to; illuminate why one might find the thesis attractive (or unattractive); and consider ways in which one might depart from propositionalism. The hope is that this will lead towards a more complete understanding of how the mind and world are connected.

Intentionality is the mind's ability to be'of,''about,'or'directed'at things, or to'say'something. For example, a thought might'say'that grass is green or that Santa Claus is jolly, and a visual experience might be'of'a blue cup. While the existence of the phenomenon of intentionality is manifestly obvious, how exactly the mind gets to be'directed'at things, which may not even exist, is deeply mysterious and controversial. It has been long assumed that the best way to explain intentionality is in terms of tracking relations, information, functional roles, and similar notions. This book breaks from this tradition, arguing that the only empirically adequate and in principle viable theory of intentionality is one in terms of phenomenal consciousness, the felt, subjective, or qualitative feature of mental life. According to the theory advanced by Mendelovici, the phenomenal intentionality theory, there is a central kind of intentionality, phenomenal intentionality, that arises from phenomenal consciousness alone, and any other kind of intentionality derives from it. The phenomenal intentionality theory faces important challenges in accounting for the rich and sophisticated contents of thoughts, broad and object-involving contents, and nonconscious states. Mendelovici proposes a novel and particularly strong version of the theory that can meet these challenges. The end result is a radically internalistic picture of the mind, on which all phenomenally represented contents are literally in our heads, and any non-phenomenal contents we in some sense represent are expressly singled out by us.

Daniel C. Dennett began publishing innovative philosophical research in the late 1960s, and he has continued to do so for the past 45 years. He has addressed questions about the nature of mind and consciousness, the possibility of freedom, and the significance of evolution to addressing questions across the cognitive, biological, and social sciences. The Philosophy of Daniel Dennett explores the intellectual significance of this research project, bringing together the insights of eleven researchers who are currently working on themes that are relevant to Dennett's philosophical worldview. Some of the contributions address interpretive issues within Dennett's corpus, and aim to bring increased clarity to Dennett's project. Others report novel empirical data, at least in part, in the service of fleshing out Dennett's claims. Some of them provide a fresh take on a Dennettian theme, and others extend his views in novel directions. Like Dennett's own work, these papers draw on a wide range of different methodologies, from appeals to intuition pumps and scientific data, to turning the knobs on a theory to see what it can do. But each of them aims to be readable, and approachable. And as a whole, the volume provides a critical and constructive overview of Dennett's stance-based methodology, as well as explorations of his claims about metal representation, consciousness, cultural evolution, and religion.

An extended argument that cognitive phenomena—perceiving, imagining, remembering—can be best explained in terms of an interface between contentless and content-involving forms of cognition.Evolving Enactivism argues that cognitive phenomena—perceiving, imagining, remembering—can be best explained in terms of an interface between contentless and content-involving forms of cognition. Building on their earlier book Radicalizing Enactivism, which proposes that there can be forms of cognition without content, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin demonstrate the unique explanatory advantages of recognizing that only some forms of cognition have content while others—the most elementary ones—do not. They offer an account of the mind in duplex terms, proposing a complex vision of mentality in which these basic contentless forms of cognition interact with content-involving ones. Hutto and Myin argue that the most basic forms of cognition do not, contrary to a currently popular account of cognition, involve picking up and processing information that is then used, reused, stored, and represented in the brain. Rather, basic cognition is contentless—fundamentally interactive, dynamic, and relational. In advancing the case for a radically enactive account of cognition, Hutto and Myin propose crucial adjustments to our concept of cognition and offer theoretical support for their revolutionary rethinking, emphasizing its capacity to explain basic minds in naturalistic terms. They demonstrate the explanatory power of the duplex vision of cognition, showing how it offers powerful means for understanding quintessential cognitive phenomena without introducing scientifically intractable mysteries into the mix.

Drawing on insights from causal theories of reference, teleosemantics, and state space semantics, a theory of naturalized mental representation.In A Mark of the Mental, Karen Neander considers the representational power of mental states—described by the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn as the “second hardest puzzle” of philosophy of mind (the first being consciousness). The puzzle at the heart of the book is sometimes called “the problem of mental content,” “Brentano's problem,” or “the problem of intentionality.” Its motivating mystery is how neurobiological states can have semantic properties such as meaning or reference. Neander proposes a naturalistic account for sensory-perceptual (nonconceptual) representations. Neander draws on insights from state-space semantics (which appeals to relations of second-order similarity between representing and represented domains), causal theories of reference (which claim the reference relation is a causal one), and teleosemantic theories (which claim that semantic norms, at their simplest, depend on functional norms). She proposes and defends an intuitive, theoretically well-motivated but highly controversial thesis: sensory-perceptual systems have the function to produce inner state changes that are the analogs of as well as caused by their referents. Neander shows that the three main elements—functions, causal-information relations, and relations of second-order similarity—complement rather than conflict with each other. After developing an argument for teleosemantics by examining the nature of explanation in the mind and brain sciences, she develops a theory of mental content and defends it against six main content-determinacy challenges to a naturalized semantics.

L'intentionnalité — cette singulière propriété qu'a l'esprit d'être dirigé vers le monde — est aujourd'hui un des problèmes les plus débattus dans le domaine de la philosophie de l'esprit. Dans Apparaître : Essai de philosophie phénoménologique, Denis Seron entend montrer que l'approche phénoménologique peut contribuer positivement à ce débat. Il propose de voir dans l'intentionnalité une notion fondamentalement phénoménologique et, en conséquence, de la définir en termes d'apparence. Il esquisse ensuite, sur cette base, une théorie de l'apparence, dont il suggère enfin qu'elle fournit un cadre approprié pour d'autres problèmes comme ceux de l'unité de la conscience, de l'inconscient, etc. Intentionality — the mind's directedness towards the world — is currently one of the most debated issues in the area of the philosophy of mind. In Apparaître: Essai de philosophie phénoménologique, Denis Seron aims to show that the phenomenological approach can contribute positively to this debate. He proposes to understand the notion of intentionality as a basic phenomenological notion and thus to define it in terms of appearances. On the basis of this, he then sketches a theory of appearance which he suggests is best suited to address a range of other issues such as the unity of consciousness, the unconscious, etc.

Towards Non-Being presents an account of the semantics of intentional language--verbs such as'believes','fears','seeks','imagines'. Graham Priest tackles problems concerning intentional states which are often brushed under the carpet in discussions of intentionality, such as their failure to be closed under deducibility. Priest's account draws on the work of the late Richard Routley (Sylvan), and proceeds in terms of objects that may be either existent or non-existent, at worlds that may be either possible or impossible. Since Russell, non-existent objects have had a bad press in Western philosophy; Priest mounts a full-scale defence. In the process, he offers an account of both fictional and mathematical objects as non-existent. The book will be of central interest to anyone who is concerned with intentionality in the philosophy of mind or philosophy of language, the metaphysics of existence and identity, the philosophy or fiction, the philosophy of mathematics, or cognitive representation in AI. This updated second edition adds ten new chapters to the original eight. These further develop the ideas of the first edition, reply to critics, and explore new areas of relevance. New topics covered include: conceivability, realism/antirealism concerning non-existent objects, self-deception, and the verb to be.

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? Analytical philosophy tends to address this question by examining the language we use to talk about our minds, and thus translates our knowledge of mind and consciousness into knowledge of the concepts which this language embodies. Psychologism rejects this approach. The philosophy of mind, Crane believes, has become too narrow in its purely conceptual focus on the logical and linguistic formulas that structure thought. We cannot assume that the categories needed to understand the mind correspond absolutely with such semantic categories. A central claim of Crane's psychologism is that intentionality--the'aboutness'or'directedness'of the mind--is essential to all mental phenomena. In addition, Crane responds to proponents of materialist doctrines about consciousness and defends the claim that perception can represent the world in a non-conceptual, non-propositional way.Philosophers must take more seriously the findings of psychology and phenomenology, Crane contends. An investigation of mental phenomena from this broader viewpoint opens up philosophy to a more realistic and plausible account of the mind's nature.

Many of the things we do, we do together with other people. Think of carpooling and playing tennis. In the past two or three decades it has become increasingly popular to analyze such collective actions in terms of collective intentions. This volume brings together ten new philosophical essays that address issues such as how individuals succeed in maintaining coordination throughout the performance of a collective action, whether groups can actually believe propositions or whether they merely accept them, and what kind of evidence, if any, disciplines such as cognitive science and semantics provide in support of irreducibly collective states. The theories of the Big Four of collective intentionality -- Michael Bratman, Raimo Tuomela, John Searle, and Margaret Gilbert -- and the Big Five of Social Ontology -- which in addition to the Big Four includes Philip Pettit -- play a central role in almost all of these essays. Drawing on insights from a wide range of disciplines including dynamical systems theory, economics, and psychology, the contributors develop existing theories, criticize them, or provide alternatives to them. Several essays challenge the idea that there is a straightforward dichotomy between individual and collective level rationality, and explore the interplay between these levels in order to shed new light on the alleged discontinuities between them. These contributions make abundantly clear that it is no longer an option simply to juxtapose analyses of individual and collective level phenomena and maintain that there is a discrepancy. Some go as far as arguing that on closer inspection the alleged discontinuities dissolve

The Objects of Thought addresses the ancient question of how it is possible to think about what does not exist. Tim Crane argues that the representation of the non-existent is a pervasive feature of our thought about the world, and that we will not adequately understand thought's representational power ('intentionality') unless we have understood the representation of the non-existent. Intentionality is conceived by Crane in terms of the direction of the mind upon an object of thought, or an intentional object. Intentional objects are what we think about. Some intentional objects exist and some do not. Non-existence poses a problem because there seem to be truths about non-existent intentional objects, but truths are answerable to reality, and reality contains only what exists. The proposed solution is to accept that there are some genuine truths about non-existent intentional objects, but to hold that they must be reductively explained in terms of truths about what does exist. The Objects of Thought offers both an original account of the nature of intentionality and a solution to the problem of thought about the non-existent.

Since the late 1970's, the main research program for understanding intentionality -- the mind's ability to direct itself onto the world -- has been based on the attempt naturalize intentionality, in the sense of making it intelligible how intentionality can occur in a perfectly natural, indeed entirely physical, world. Some philosophers, however, have remained skeptical of this entire approach. In particular, some have argued that phenomenal consciousness - - the subjective feel of conscious experience -- has an essential role to play in the theory of intentionality, a role missing in the naturalization program. Thus a number of authors have recently brought to the fore the notion of phenomenal intentionality, as well as a cluster of nearby notions. There is a vague sense that their work is interrelated, complementary, and mutually reinforcing, in a way that suggests a germinal research program. With twelve new essays by philosophers at the forefront of the field, this volume is designed to launch this research program in a more self-conscious way, by exploring some of the fundamental claims and themes of relevance to this program.

Philosophical theories of emotions, and to an extent some theories of scientific psychology, represent attempts to capture the essence of emotions basically as they are conceived in common sense psychology. Although there are problems, the success of explanations of our behavior in terms of believes, desires and emotions creates a presumption that, at some level of abstraction, they reflect important elements in our psychological nature. It is incumbent on a theory of emotions to provide an account of two salient facts about emotions as conceived in common sense psychology. As intentional states, emotions have representational and rational properties: emotions represent states of affairs; and they are rationally related to other mental representations, figure in rational explanations of behavior, and are open to rational assessment. Emotions also have a close relationship to a range of non-intentional phenomena: in typical cases, emotions involve physiological changes, usually associated with the activation of the autonomic nervous system, which are proprioceptively experienced; and they often involve behavioral tendencies, as well.

Eine systematische Neubewertung der transzendentalen Phänomenologie Husserls vor der Folie aktueller Diskussionen in der Philosophie des Geistes steht unerachtet einiger neuerer Annäherungsversuche bislang aus. Die Arbeit lotet die Möglichkeiten, aber auch die methodologischen Grenzen eines solchen Brückenschlages aus. In detaillierten Analysen werden dabei gravierende konzeptuelle und metatheoretische Äquivokationen zwischen der phänomenologischen und den (sprach-)analytischen bzw. kognitivistischen Modellen des Mentalen aufgeklärt. Kritisch fokussiert werden insbesondere repräsentationalistische Projekte der Naturalisierung des phänomenalen und intentionalen Bewusstseins, neuere Selbstbewusstseinstheorien sowie Husserls Sonderstellung gegenüber der semantischen und geisttheoretischen Internalismus/Externalismus- und der Realismus/Anti-Realismus-Debatte. Die Studie zeigt so das deskriptive und explanatorische Potenzial von Husserls Bewusstseinstheorie auf und präsentiert die Phänomenologie als ernstzunehmende Diskussionspartnerin nicht nur der Philosophie des Geistes und der Kognition, sondern auch der analytischen Sprachphilosophie und Erkenntnistheorie.

Since the pioneering work of Donald Davidson on action, many philosophers have taken critical stances on his causal account. This book criticizes Davidson's event-causal view of action, and offers instead an agent causal view both to describe what an action is and to set a framework for how actions are explained.

What do thoughts, hopes, paintings, words, desires, photographs, traffic signs, 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. An approach to this issue prevalent in the philosophy of the past half-century seeks to explain the power of directedness in terms of certain items'ability to reliably track things in their environment. A very different approach, with a venerable history and enjoying a recent resurgence, seeks to explain the power of directedness rather in terms of an intrinsic ability of conscious experience to direct itself. This book attempts a synthesis of both approaches, developing an account of the sources of such directedness that grounds it both in reliable tracking and in conscious experience.

Collective Intentionality is a relatively new label for a basic social fact: the sharing of attitudes such as intentions, beliefs and emotions. This volume contributes to current research on collective intentionality by pursuing three aims. First, some of the main conceptual problems in the received literature are introduced, and a number of new insights into basic questions in the philosophy of collective intentionality are developed (part 1). Second, examples are given for the use of the analysis of collective intentionality in the theory and philosophy of the social sciences (part 2). Third, it is shown that this line of research opens up new perspectives on classical topics in the history of social philosophy and social science, and that, conversely, an inquiry into the history of ideas can lead to further refinement of our conceptual tools in the analysis of collective intentionality (part 3).

This book is a systematic analysis of John R. Searle's philosophy of mind. Searle's view of mind, as a set of subjective and biologically embodied processes, can account for our being part of nature qua mindful beings. This model finds support in neuroscience and offers reliable solutions to the problems of consciousness, mental causation, and the self.

Savas L. Tsohatzidis John Searle is famous for his contributions to two fields with long and dist- guished traditions within analytic philosophy—the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind—, but his interests and achievements extend beyond these fields. From the early 1990s he has added to his research agenda a theme that was not only largely new to his philosophical preoccupations, but also largely absent from the concerns of analytic philosophy as a whole: the syst- atic examination of the mode of being of a particular kind of facts, institutional facts, that appear to be no less objectively knowable than ordinary physical facts, yet seem to be essentially dependent for their existence on the subjectivity of human minds (to recall one of his favourite examples, one can know that something is a piece of paper as objectively as one can know that it is a twenty-dollar bill, but something's being a piece of paper does not depend on anyone's taking it to be a piece of paper, whereas its being a twenty-dollar bill crucially depends on a lot of people taking it to be a twenty-dollar bill). Searle's attempt to give a systematic account of the combination of epistemic objectivity and ontological subjectivity that, in his view, characterizes institutional facts has led to a full-blown theory that he presented in his 1995 book, The Construction of Social Reality, and further developed in his 2001 book, Rationality in Action.

Alexius Meinong (1853–1920) nimmt in der Geschichte der Ontologie eine ausgezeichnete Stellung ein. Er war der erste Philosoph, der in systematischer Weise eine quasi-ontologische Disziplin entwickelte, die im Vergleich zu der Disziplin, die man traditionell Metaphysik oder Ontologie nennt, viel allgemeiner sein sollte. Die Metaphysik untersucht das Seiende als Seiendes, und die seienden Entitäten bilden – so die These Meinongs – nur ein kleines Fragment dessen, was man unter dem Namen'Gegenstandstheorie'untersuchen kann. Die Gegenstände als solche (die'reinen'Gegenstände) sind, wie Meinong sagt,'außerseiend', was bedeutet, dass sie bezüglich ihres Seins bzw. Nicht-Seins neutral sein sollen. In diesem Buch wird die so verstandene Gegenstandstheorie in ihrer historischen Entwicklung im Zusammenhang mit Meinongs Intentionalitätstheorie untersucht, denn der wahre Grund, warum Meinong einen Bereich der außerseienden Gegenstände überhaupt postulierte, ist nicht anders als die philosophischen Rätsel, auf die man in der Intentionalitätstheorie stößt. The thought of Alexius Meinong (1853–1920) has a distinguished position within the conceptual space of ontology. He was the first philosopher who tried systematically to develop a quasi-ontological discipline which was intended to be much more general than the metaphysics in the traditional sense. Metaphysics investigates being qua being; and this constitutes only a small part of the domain of the theory of objects (Gegenstandstheorie) as Meinong conceived of it. For – so reads one of Meinong's most frequently cited theses – the objects considered purely qua objects are neutral concerning their being or non-being. In this book Meinong's theory of objects is presented in its historical development and investigated within the context of his theory of intentionality. This connection is justified because the real motivation behind Meinong's introduction of entities'beyond being and non being'lies in the philosophical puzzles of the theory of intentionality.

In Self-Knowledge and Resentment, Akeel Bilgrami argues that self-knowledge of our intentional states is special among all the knowledges we have because it is not an epistemological notion in the standard sense of that term, but instead is a fallout of the radically normative nature of thought and agency.Four themes or questions are brought together into an integrated philosophical position: What makes self-knowledge different from other forms of knowledge? What makes for freedom and agency in a deterministic universe? What makes intentional states of a subject irreducible to its physical and functional states? And what makes values irreducible to the states of nature as the natural sciences study them? This integration of themes into a single and systematic picture of thought, value, agency, and self-knowledge is essential to the book's aspiration and argument. Once this integrated position is fully in place, the book closes with a postscript on how one might fruitfully view the kind of self-knowledge that is pursued in psychoanalysis.

Understanding consciousness by taking the stream of consciousness seriously; a general characterization of experience and a detailed description of experience from within, drawing on theories of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, John Searle, and Gerald Edelman.In Onflow, Ralph Pred supplies an account of the nature of consciousness that grapples with'the raw unverbalized stream of experience.'Unlike other recent philosophical accounts of consciousness, Pred's analysis deals with the elusive and commonly neglected continuities in the stream of consciousness. Pred offers a general characterization and analysis of experience as well as a highly detailed interpretation of experience from within. Determined to make'conceptual contact'with the immediacy of actual experience, Pred carries forward the radical empiricism pioneered by William James (who coined the term'stream of consciousness') and draws on the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.To help readers apprehend the formation of conscious thoughts, the intertwining of perception and action, and the working of consciousness in onflowing experience, Pred applies methods of analysis developed in John Searle's theory of intentionality to James's views, thereby showing how intentional states are embedded in the stream of consciousness. Then, calling on Whitehead's treatment of lived moments as acts of experience, Pred provides an account of consciousness that at once deals with conscious thoughts as they emerge from and function in embodied, socialized experience and illustrates how language distorts our understanding of experience and subjectivity. Finally, he details striking parallels between this account and Gerald Edelman's biological theory of consciousness, and, in contrasting the two, argues for a revitalized version of the experiental monism originally formulated by James.

This volume is devoted to problems within analytic metaphysics. It defends an ontology and theory of categories inspired by Aristotle, but revised in such a way as to be compatible with modern science. The ontology of both natural and social reality is addressed, starting out from the view that universals exist but only in the spatiotemporal world (immanent realism). In attempting to bring Aristotle's ontology up-to-date, the author relies very much on the thinking of Edmund Husserl, conceiving the cement of the universe as Husserlian relations of existential dependence and regarding intentionality as a non-reducible category in the ontology of mind. The work is thoroughly realistic in spirit, but large parts of it should nonetheless be of interest to conceptualists and nominalists, too.

People do things for reasons. But philosophers have disagreed sharply about how'reasons explanations'of actions actually work and hence about their implications for human freedom and autonomy. The dominant view in contemporary philosophy is the (Humean) idea that the beliefs and desires that constitute our reasons for acting simply cause us to act as we do. Fred Schueler seeks to replace such causal views, arguing that they leave out two essential elements of these explanations. Reasons explanations are inherently teleological in the sense that the agent's reasons always explain the purpose for which he acted. They are also inherently normative since it is always possible that an agent's reasons for doing something are not good reasons. Schueler argues that causal accounts of reasons explanations make no sense of either of these features; he argues instead for an account based on practical deliberation, our ability to evaluate the reasons we accept.

Is there an internal relationship between consciousness and intentionality? Can mental content be described in such a way so as to avoid dualism? What is the influence of social context upon consciousness, conceptions of self and mental content?This book considers questions such as these and argues for a conception of consciousness, mental content and intentionality that is anti-Cartesian in its major tenets. Focusing upon the rule governed nature of concepts and the grounding of the rules for concept use in the practical world, intentional consciousness emerges as a phenomena that depends upo.

Combining ideas from philosophy, artificial intelligence, and neurobiology, Daniel Dennett leads the reader on a fascinating journey of inquiry, exploring such intriguing possibilities as: Can any of us really know what is going on in someone else's mind? What distinguishes the human mind from the minds of animals, especially those capable of complex behavior? If such animals, for instance, were magically given the power of language, would their communities evolve an intelligence as subtly discriminating as ours? Will robots, once they have been endowed with sensory systems like those that provide us with experience, ever exhibit the particular traits long thought to distinguish the human mind, including the ability to think about thinking? Dennett addresses these questions from an evolutionary perspective. Beginning with the macromolecules of DNA and RNA, the author shows how, step-by-step, animal life moved from the simple ability to respond to frequently recurring environmental conditions to much more powerful ways of beating the odds, ways of using patterns of past experience to predict the future in never-before-encountered situations. Whether talking about robots whose video-camera'eyes'give us the powerful illusion that'there is somebody in there'or asking us to consider whether spiders are just tiny robots mindlessly spinning their webs of elegant design, Dennett is a master at finding and posing questions sure to stimulate and even disturb.

Some of a person's mental states have the power to represent real and imagined states of affairs: they have semantic properties. What Minds Can Do has two goals: to find a naturalistic or non-semantic basis for the representational powers of a person's mind, and to show that these semantic properties are involved in the causal explanation of the person's behaviour. In the process, this 1997 book addresses issues that are central to much contemporary philosophical debate. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers in philosophy of mind and of language, cognitive science, and psychology.