Contemporary philosophy of mind

Synthese ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Rorty
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy

Review of Spanish Monographs on Nietzsche

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 488-494
Author(s):  
Oscar Quejido Alonso
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy

Abstract This article reviews the most relevant monographs published in Spanish between 2012 and 2018. The latter have a particular focus on the relevance of Nietzsche’s philosophy for contemporary philosophy of mind, but they are also concerned with the reception of some fundamental tenets of Nietzsche’s political thought as well as with the reception of his work in Spain and the reconstruction of his intellectual itinerary.

Borges on Replication and Concept Formation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yemima Ben-Menahem
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Concept Formation ◽  
Jorge Luis Borges ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Broad Sense ◽  
Common Theme ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Complex Picture ◽  
The Common

This chapter examines three stories by Jorge Luis Borges: “Funes: His Memory,” “Averroës's Search,” and “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Each of these highlights the intricate nature of concepts and replication in the broad sense. The common theme running through these three stories is the word–world relation and the problems this relation generates. In each story, Borges explores one aspect of the process of conceptualization, an endeavor that has engaged philosophers ever since ancient Greece and is still at the center of contemporary philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. Together, Borges's stories present a complex picture of concepts and processes of conceptualization.

Missing Elements: What Philosophers of Science Might Discover in Chemistry

2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Woody ◽  
Clark Glymour
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Theory ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Top Quark ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Ideal Gas ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Analysis And Synthesis ◽  
Special Value

In the late middle ages, chemistry was the science and technology closest to philosophy, the material realization of the method of analysis and synthesis. No longer. Contemporary philosophy is concerned with many sciences—physics, psychology, biology, linguistics, economics—but chemistry is not among them. Why not? Every discipline has particular problems with some philosophical coloring. Those in quantum theory are famous; those in psychology seem endless; those in biology and economics seem more sparse and esoteric. If, for whatever reason, one’s concern is the conceptual or theoretical problems of a particular science, there is no substitute for that science, and chemistry is just one among others. Certain sciences naturally touch on substantive areas of traditional philosophical concern: quantum theory on metaphysics, for example, psychology on the philosophy of mind, and economics and statistics on theories of rationality. In these cases, there is a special interest in particular sciences because they may reform prior philosophical theories or recast philosophical issues or, conversely, because philosophy may inform these subjects in fundamental ways. That is not true, in any obvious way, of chemistry. So what good, then, what special value, does chemistry offer contemporary philosophy of science? Typically philosophical problems, even problems in philosophy of science, are not confined to a particular science. For general problems—problems about representation, inference, discovery, explanation, realism, intertheoretic and interdisciplinary relations, and so on—what is needed are scientific illustrations that go to the heart of the matter without requiring specialized technical knowledge of the reader. The science needed for most philosophy is familiar, not esoteric, right in the middle of things, mature and diverse enough to illustrate a variety of fundamental issues. Almost uniquely, chemistry fits the description. In philosophy of science, too often an effort gains in weight and seriousness merely because it requires mastery of an intricate and arcane subject, regardless of the philosophical interest of what it says. Yet, surely, there is something contrived, even phony, in illustrating a philosophical point with a discussion of the top quark if the point could be shown as well with a discussion of the ideal gas law.

Inferentialism and the Transcendental Deduction

2009 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Landy
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Recent Trend ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Conceptual Content ◽  
Contemporary Debate ◽  
Transcendental Deduction ◽  
Founding Fathers

One recent trend in Kant scholarship has been to read Kant as undertaking a project in philosophical semantics, as opposed to, say, epistemology, or transcendental metaphysics. This trend has evolved almost concurrently with a debate in contemporary philosophy of mind about the nature of concepts and their content. Inferentialism is the view that the content of our concepts is essentially inferentially articulated, that is, that the content of a concept consists entirely, or in essential part, in the role that that concept plays in a system of inferences. By contrast, relationalism is the view that this content is fixed by a mental or linguistic item's standing in a certain relation to its object. The historical picture of Kant and the contemporary debate about concepts intersect in so far as contemporary inferentialists about conceptual content often cite Immanuel Kant not only as one of the founding fathers of a tradition that leads more or less straightforwardly to contemporary inferentialism, but also as the philosopher who first saw the fatal flaws in any attempt to articulate the content of our concepts relationally.

scholarly journals The Epistemic Approach to the Problem of Consciousness

2020 ◽  
pp. 481-496
Author(s):  
Daniel Stoljar
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Significant Implication ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
Epistemic Approach ◽  
Minority View ◽  
The Hard Problem ◽  
Epistemic View

According to the epistemic view of the hard problem of consciousness, we are ignorant at least for the time being of something important and relevant when it comes to the hard problem, and this fact has a significant implication for its solution. This chapter outlines one version of the view before considering two objections. The first is that, while we may be ignorant of various features of the world, we are not ignorant of any feature that is relevant to the hard problem. The second is that, even if the epistemic approach is true, properly understood it is not an answer to the hard problem; indeed, it is no contribution to that problem at all. The chapter concludes with some brief reflections on why the epistemic approach, despite its attractiveness, remains a minority view in contemporary philosophy of mind.

scholarly journals Making up symptoms: psychic indeterminacy and the construction of psychotic phenomena

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huw Green
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Mental Content ◽  
Verbal Description ◽  
Psychotic Symptoms ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Change Over Time ◽  
Mental Symptoms ◽  
Clinical Phenomenology ◽  
Over Time

SummaryPsychotic phenomena include a far wider range of experiences than is captured by the brief descriptions offered in contemporary diagnostic guides. Given the richness of historical clinical phenomenology, what can account for the recent ascendancy of relatively impoverished descriptions of psychosis? One possible explanation is provided by Hacking's notion of dynamic nominalism, where human categories change over time in tandem with those who they classify. But although dynamic nominalism makes sense of changes in behaviour, it fails to account for change at the level of subjective experience. In this paper, psychotic symptoms are addressed in the light of the indeterminacy of subjective mental content. A naïve-introspectionist approach to mental symptoms assumes that, notwithstanding practical difficulties, such symptoms are reliably describable in principle. Contemporary philosophy of mind challenges this assumption. Lighting upon a verbal description for ineffable phenomena changes their nature, resolving them into new forms.Declaration of interestNone.

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