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Hobbes's extreme political views have commanded so much attention that they have eclipsed his work on language and mind, and on reasoning, personhood, and group formation. But this work is of immense interest in itself, as Philip Pettit shows inMade with Words, and it critically shapes Hobbes's political philosophy. Pettit argues that it was Hobbes, not later thinkers like Rousseau, who invented the invention of language thesis--the idea that language is a cultural innovation that transformed the human mind. The invention, in Hobbes's story, is a double-edged sword. It enables human beings to reason, commit themselves as persons, and incorporate in groups. But it also allows them to agonize about the future and about their standing relative to one another; it takes them out of the Eden of animal silence and into a life of inescapable conflict--the state of nature. Still, if language leads into this wasteland, according to Hobbes, it can also lead out. It can enable people to establish a commonwealth where the words of law and morality have a common, enforceable sense, and where people can invoke the sanctions of an absolute sovereign to give their words to one another in credible commitment and contract. Written by one of today's leading philosophers,Made with Wordsis both an original reinterpretation and a clear and lively introduction to Hobbes's thought.

Contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind have largely been shaped by physicalism, the doctrine that all phenomena are ultimately physical. Here, Jaegwon Kim presents the most comprehensive and systematic presentation yet of his influential ideas on the mind-body problem. He seeks to determine, after half a century of debate: What kind of (or \"how much\") physicalism can we lay claim to? He begins by laying out mental causation and consciousness as the two principal challenges to contemporary physicalism. How can minds exercise their causal powers in a physical world? Is a physicalist account of consciousness possible? The book's starting point is the \"supervenience\" argument (sometimes called the \"exclusion\" argument), which Kim reformulates in an extended defense. This argument shows that the contemporary physicalist faces a stark choice between reductionism (the idea that mental phenomena are physically reducible) and epiphenomenalism (the view that mental phenomena are causally impotent). Along the way, Kim presents a novel argument showing that Cartesian substance dualism offers no help with mental causation. Mind-body reduction, therefore, is required to save mental causation. But are minds physically reducible? Kim argues that all but one type of mental phenomena are reducible, including intentional mental phenomena, such as beliefs and desires. The apparent exceptions are the intrinsic, felt qualities of conscious experiences (\"qualia\"). Kim argues, however, that certain relational properties of qualia, in particular their similarities and differences, are behaviorally manifest and hence in principle reducible, and that it is these relational properties of qualia that are central to their cognitive roles. The causal efficacy of qualia, therefore, is not entirely lost. According to Kim, then, while physicalism is not the whole truth, it is the truth near enough.

Here, for the first time, contemporary Continental thought comes into conversation with analytic philosophy on all the principal topics of philosophy of mind. Rejecting the dominant Anglo-American paradigm, which reduces mental phenomena to their roles in a scientific psychology, the authors present a non-mysterious, naturalistic alternative. Characterising mental life is, they seek to show, capturing the world from the point of view of the subject. But the subject is essentially embodied, so that mental phenomena are modes of our fleshly existence in the world.The book aims to bring together these three themes - the world,the flesh and the subject - to resolve many of the puzzles that beset contemporary philosophy of mind. It thereby provides a coherent new approach which draws upon phenomenology, hermeneutics, psycho-analysis and poststructuralism, and relates recent feminist work on the body to traditional concerns with the mind. The topics discussed include the problem of consciousness, perception and sensation, imagination, desire, emotion, reason and agency, and the self and others.Features * Brings continental thought to bear on contemporary philosophy of mind* Offers a new approach to problems of mind * Brings recent work on the body together with traditional concerns with the mind* Treats philosophy of mind in a topic oriented way.

Introductory texts on the philosophy of mind tend to presume that we are forced into a dichotomy between some version of materialism and substance dualism. Hylomorphism -- the idea that living material substances are not just matter, but compounds of matter and soul -- is typically treated as a historical curiosity or as inherently obscure. In Mind, Matter and Nature, James D. Madden offers an alternative: an introduction to contemporary philosophy of mind on its own terms that concludes that the hylomorphic philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas offers the best approach. This book offers a fair-minded and detailed presentation of the most influential contemporary positions along with the arguments for and against them. Written for students, Mind, Matter and Nature presumes no prior philosophical training on the part of the reader. The book nevertheless holds the arguments discussed to rigorous standards and is conversant with recent literature, thus making it useful as well to more advanced students and professionals interested in a resource on Thomistic hylomorphism in the philosophy of mind.

How is consciousness possible? What biological purpose does it serve? And why do we value it so highly? In Soul Dust, the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, a leading figure in consciousness research, proposes a startling new theory. Consciousness, he argues, is nothing less than a magical-mystery show that we stage for ourselves inside our own heads. This self-made show lights up the world for us and makes us feel special and transcendent. Thus consciousness paves the way for spirituality, and allows us, as human beings, to reap the rewards, and anxieties, of living in what Humphrey calls the \"soul niche.\"

Why is life worth living? What makes actions right or wrong? What is reality and how do we know it? The Brain and the Meaning of Life draws on research in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to answer some of the most pressing questions about life's nature and value. Paul Thagard argues that evidence requires the abandonment of many traditional ideas about the soul, free will, and immortality, and shows how brain science matters for fundamental issues about reality, morality, and the meaning of life. The ongoing Brain Revolution reveals how love, work, and play provide good reasons for living.

The Symptom and the Subject takes an in-depth look at how the physical body first emerged in the West as both an object of knowledge and a mysterious part of the self. Beginning with Homer, moving through classical-era medical treatises, and closing with studies of early ethical philosophy and Euripidean tragedy, this book rewrites the traditional story of the rise of body-soul dualism in ancient Greece. Brooke Holmes demonstrates that as the body (sma) became a subject of physical inquiry, it decisively changed ancient Greek ideas about the meaning of suffering, the soul, and human nature.

This first extensive study of Spinoza’s philosophy of mind concentrates on two problems crucial to the philosopher’s thoughts on the matter: the requirements for having a thought about a particular object, and the problem of the mind’s relation to the body. Della Rocca contends that Spinoza’s positions are systematically connected with each other and with a principle at the heart of his metaphysical system: his denial of causal or explanatory relations between the mental and the physical. In this way, Della Rocca’s exploration of these two problems provides a new and illuminating perspective on Spinoza’s philosophy as a system.

Physicalism is standardly construed as a form of monism, on which all concrete phenomena fall under one fundamental type. It is natural to think that monism, and therefore physicalism, is committed to a supervenience claim. Monism is true only if all phenomena supervene on a certain fundamental type of phenomena. Physicalism, as a form of monism, specifies that these fundamental phenomena are physical. But some argue that physicalism might be true even if the world is disorderly, i.e., not ordered by supervenience relations in the way commonly supposed (Montero in J Philos 110:92–110, 2013; Leuenberger in Inquiry 57:151–174, 2014; Montero and Brown in Topoi 37(3):523–532, 2018; Zhong in Philos Stud 178(5):1529–1544, 2021). Unless these authors intend to challenge the claim that physicalism is a type of monism—a claim so central to the dialectic in philosophy of mind that rejecting it risks changing the subject—they are committed to challenging a supervenience requirement for monism. We argue that monism entails that there are substantial supervenience relations among concrete phenomena: relations that would not obtain in a disorderly world. Our argument thus has implications for debates about physicalism and supervenience, and sheds light on an under-discussed issue: what is implied by classifying a theory in the philosophy of mind as a form of monism? We also argue that physicalism’s commitment to monism creates problems for via negativa physicalism, on which the physical is characterized negatively.

Many Christians would not be surprised by this, given the typical dualist anthropology (body and soul), and the eschatological theory prevalent throughout much of Christian history, that at death the soul leaves the body and may be conscious during an intermediate state between death and resurrection. Here are a few outstanding characteristics of NDE's: (1) They result in nearly instantaneous moral transformation; (2) memories of them are vivid and correspond to reports made decades earlier; (3) they contain accurate information of events that could not have otherwise been known by the experiencer around the time of (near) death. [...]it is well known that Christians have struggled for centuries against dualist movements claiming that to be human is to have a soul, and that the ideal state is the liberation of the soul from the body. In The New Scbaff-Heryog Pncyclopedia of Veligious Knowledge there is a clear consensus on a dualist conception of scriptural teaching.1 Yet A Dictionary of the Tibie (1902) contains two sharply opposed views.2 One article on \"Soul\" says that throughout most of the Bible, \"soul\" is simply equivalent to the life embodied in living creatures.3 (This, by the way, comes close to my own view as of 31 years later.).