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Forms of thought are involved whenever we name, describe, or identify things, and whenever we distinguish between what is, might be, or must be the case. It appears to be a distinctive feature of human thought that we can have modal thoughts, about what might be possible or necessary, and conditional thoughts, about what would or might be the case if something else were the case. Even the simplest thoughts are structured like sentences, containing referential and predicative elements, and studying these structures is the main task of philosophical logic. This clear and accessible book investigates the forms of thought, drawing out and focusing on the central logical notions of reference, predication, identity, modality and conditionality. It will be useful to students and other interested readers in epistemology and metaphysics, philosophy of mind and language, and philosophical logic.

Locke notoriously included number amongst the primary qualities of bodies and was roundly criticized for doing so by Berkeley. Frege echoed some of Berkeley's criticisms in attacking the idea that ‘Number is a property of external things’, while defending his own view that number is a property of concepts. In the present paper, Locke's view is defended against the objections of Berkeley and Frege, and Frege's alternative view of number is criticized. More precisely, it is argued that numbers are assignable to pluralities of individuals. However, it is also argued that Locke went too far in asserting that ‘Number applies itself to ... everything that either doth exist, or can be imagined’.

From Homer to Hollywood, the western storytelling tradition has canonised a distinctive set of narrative values characterised by tight economy and closure. This book traces the formation of that classical paradigm in the development of ancient storytelling from Homer to Heliodorus. To tell this story, the book sets out to rehabilitate the idea of 'plot', notoriously disconnected from any recognised system of terminology in literary theory. The first part of the book draws on developments in narratology and cognitive science to propose a way of formally describing the way stories are structured and understood. This model is then used to write a history of the emergence of the classical plot type in the four ancient genres that shaped it - Homeric epic, fifth-century tragedy, New Comedy, and the Greek novel - with insights into the fundamental narrative poetics of each.

A perennial issue in the philosophy of mind has been the so-called mind–body problem : the problem of how the mind is related to the body. However, as I indicated in the previous chapter, this way of putting the problem is contentious, since it suggests that ‘the mind’ is some sort of thing which is somehow related to the body or some part of the body, such as the brain. We are invited to consider, thus, whether the mind is identical with the brain, say, or merely causally related to it. Neither proposal seems very attractive – the reason being, I suggest, that there is really no such thing as ‘the mind’. Rather, there are minded beings – subjects of experience – which feel, perceive, think and perform intentional actions. Such beings include human persons, such as ourselves, who have bodies possessing various physical characteristics, such as height, weight and shape. The mind–body problem, properly understood, is the problem of how subjects of experience are related to their physical bodies. Several possibilities suggest themselves. In describing them, I shall restrict myself to the case of human persons , while recognising that the class of subjects of experience may be wider than this (because, for instance, it may include certain non-human animals). One possibility is that a person just is – that is, is identical with – his or her body, or some distinguished part of it, such as its brain.

In this book Jonathan Lowe offers a lucid and wide-ranging introduction to the philosophy of mind. Using a problem-centred approach designed to stimulate as well as instruct, he begins with a general examination of the mind-body problem and moves on to detailed examination of more specific philosophical issues concerning sensation, perception, thought and language, rationality, artificial intelligence, action, personal identity and self-knowledge. His discussion is notably broad in scope, and distinctive in giving equal attention to deep metaphysical questions concerning the mind and to the discoveries and theories of modern scientific psychology. It will be of interest to any reader with a basic grounding in modern philosophy.

So far in this book, we have discussed various different kinds of mental state, including sensations, perceptions (that is, perceptual experiences) and beliefs. We discussed beliefs (and other propositional attitude states) in quite some detail in chapters 3 and 4, before going on to talk about sensations and perceptions in chapters 5 and 6. This order of discussion – although consistent with the overall plan of the book – might strike some readers as being an inversion of the natural one, because it is natural to assume that sensations and perceptions are, in more than one sense, ‘prior’ to beliefs. They seem prior to beliefs, first of all, in the sense that many of our beliefs are based on , or derived from , our sensations and perceptions, whereas the reverse never seems to be the case (except, perhaps, in certain species of delusion). Secondly, sensations and perceptions seem prior to beliefs in the sense that, whereas we might be willing to attribute sensations and perhaps even perceptions to a creature which we deemed incapable of possessing beliefs, I think we would – or, at least, should – be less willing, and perhaps altogether unwilling, to attribute beliefs to a creature which we deemed incapable of possessing sensations and perceptions. Part of what is implied here is that beliefs are mental states of a higher cognitive level than are either sensations or perceptions.

In chapter 1, I described the philosophy of mind as being the philosophical study of minded things just insofar as they are minded. And the general term which I introduced to refer to something with a mind was subject of experience – interpreting ‘experience’ here in a broad sense, to include any kind of sensation, perception or thought. I take it that the term ‘subject of experience’ is more extensive than the term ‘person’ – that is, that although all persons are (at least potentially) subjects of experience, not all subjects of experience are persons. This is because I think that at least some non-human creatures, such as chimpanzees, are certainly subjects of experience and yet that they may not be persons. It is perfectly conceivable that there should be non-human persons, but it is open to question whether any actually exist. What, then, is distinctive of persons as opposed to other subjects of experience? Just this, I suggest: persons are selves – that is to say, they are subjects of experience which have the capacity to recognise themselves as being individual subjects of experience. Selves possess reflexive self-knowledge. By ‘reflexive self-knowledge’ I mean, roughly speaking, knowledge of one's own identity and conscious mental states – knowledge of who one is and of what one is thinking and feeling.

In this innovative study of the relationship between persons and their bodies, E. J. Lowe demonstrates the inadequacy of physicalism, even in its mildest, non-reductionist guises, as a basis for a scientifically and philosophically acceptable account of human beings as subjects of experience, thought and action. He defends a substantival theory of the self as an enduring and irreducible entity - a theory which is unashamedly committed to a distinctly non-Cartesian dualism of self and body. Taking up the physicalist challenge to any robust form of psychophysical interactionism, he shows how an attribution of independent causal powers to the mental states of human subjects is perfectly consistent with a thoroughly naturalistic world view. He concludes his study by examining in detail the role which conscious mental states play in the human subject's exercise of its most central capacities for perception, action, thought and self-knowledge.