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This volume addresses foundational issues concerning the nature of first-personal, or de se thought and how such thoughts are communicated. One of the question addressed is whether there is anything distinctive about de se thought or whether it can be subsumed under broader phenomena. Many have held that de se thought motivates a revision to traditional accounts of content or positing special ways of accessing such contents. Gottlob Frege famously held that first-person thoughts involve a subject being “presented to himself in a particular and primitive way, in which he is presented to no-one else.” However, as Frege also noted, this raises many puzzling questions when we consider how we are able to communicate such thoughts. Is there indeed something special about first-person thought such that it requires a primitive mode of presentation that cannot be grasped by others? If there really is something special about first-person thought, what happens when I communicate this thought to you? Do you come to believe the very thing that I believe? Or is my first-person belief only entertained by me? If it is only entertained by me, how does it relate to what you come to believe? It is these questions that the volume addresses and seeks to answer.

This book pursues some novel and unusual standpoints in the philosophy of action. It rejects, for example, the most widely held view about how to count actions, and argues for what it calls a ‘prolific theory’ of act individuation. It also describes and argues against the two leading theories of the nature of action, the causal theory and the agent causal theory. The causal theory cannot account for skilled activity, nor for mental action. The agent causalist theory unnecessarily reifies causings. The book identifies an assumption that they share, and that most action theorists have assumed to be unproblematic and uncontroversial, that an action is, or entails the existence of, an event. Several different meanings to that claim are disentangled and in the most interesting sense of that claim, the book denies that it is true. The book's own alternative is simple and unpretentious: nothing informative can be said about the nature of action that explicates action in any other terms. The book sketches a theory of causal explanation of action that eschews the requirement for laws or generalizations, and this effectively quashes one argument for the oft-repeated view that no explanations of action can be causal, on the grounds that there are no convincing cases of laws of human action. It addresses a number of questions about the knowledge an agent has of his own actions, looking particularly at examples of pathological cases of action in which, for one reason or another, the agent does not know what he is doing.

What is it to be conscious in the primary ordinary sense? Five leading ideas—qualia, what it’s like to be something, subjectivity, intentionality or aboutness, phenomenality—all fail to give an adequate initial clarification of this consciousness. However, there is much data, some in the ideas, for a figurative initial clarification of all consciousness. Being conscious is something’s being actual. This results in the literal and explicit theory or analysis that is Actualism. Right or wrong, it is unprecedented. As against other theories, it is true to our three-part distinction between consciousness in seeing or hearing and thinking and wanting in generic senses—perceptual, cognitive, and affective consciousness. It rests first on a clarification of objective physicality. Then what is actual with perceptual consciousness is demonstrated to be subjective physical worlds. Your being perceptually conscious now is only the existence of such a world out there, probably a room. Its being actual is its being subjectively physical, which includes taking up space, being causal, being lawfully dependent both on the objective physical world and you neurally. Cognitive and affective consciousness, differently, consists in representations, related to linguistic representations but distinguished by being actual—differently subjectively physical. Actualism uniquely satisfies accumulated criteria for an adequate theory of consciousness, one to do with its reality and thus physicality, another with its difference in kind. Is the question what it is to be conscious in the primary ordinary sense a right question? Yes it is.

The book contains innovative contributions to the history and the philosophy of logic and mathematics in the first half of the twentieth century. It is divided into five main sections: history of logic (from Russell to Tarski); foundational issues (Hilbert’s program, constructivity, Wittgenstein, Gödel); mathematics and phenomenology (Weyl, Becker, Mahnke); nominalism (Quine, Tarski); semantics (Tarski, Carnap, Neurath). The treatment exploits extensively untapped archival sources thereby making available a wealth of new material that deepens in significant ways our understanding of the above-mentioned areas. At the same time, the book is a contribution to recent debates on, among other things, the prospects for a successful nominalist reconstruction of mathematics, the nature of finitist intuition, the viability of alternative definitions of logical consequence, and the extent to which phenomenology can hope to account for the exact sciences.

This collection of original essays from leading researchers across a wide range of disciplines engages with a number of issues concerning ‘the aesthetic mind’. It is the only collection which specifically targets the extent to which the empirical sciences can contribute to our philosophical understanding of the notions of the aesthetic and the artistic. The questions addressed include the following: Why do we engage with things aesthetically and why do we create art? Does art or aesthetic experience have a function or functions? Which characteristics distinguish aesthetic mental states? Which skills or abilities do we put to use when we engage aesthetically with an object and how does that compare with non-aesthetic experiences? What does our ability to create art and engage aesthetically with things tell us about what it is to be a human being?The collection is divided into seven parts: ‘The Aesthetic Mind’, ‘Emotion in Aesthetic Experience’, ‘Beauty and Universality’, Imagination and Make-Believe’, ‘Fiction and Empathy’, ‘Music, Dance and Expressivity’, and ‘Pictorial Representation’.

Through much of the twentieth century, philosophical thinking about works of art, design, and other aesthetic products has emphasized intuitive and reflective methods, often tied to the idea that philosophy’s business is primarily to analyse concepts. This ‘philosophy from the armchair’ approach contrasts with methods used by psychologists, sociologists, evolutionary thinkers, and others who study the making and reception of the arts empirically. How far should philosophers be sensitive to the results of these studies? Is their own largely a priori method basically flawed and their views on aesthetic value, interpretation, imagination, and the emotions of art to be rethought in the light of best science? The essays in this volume seek answers to these questions, many through detailed studies of problems traditionally regarded as philosophical but where empirical inquiry seems to be shedding interesting light. No common view is looked for or found in this volume: a number of authors argue that the current enthusiasm for scientific approaches to aesthetics is based on a misunderstanding of the philosophical enterprise and sometimes on misinterpretation of the science; others suggest various ways that philosophy can and should accommodate and sometimes yield to the empirical approach. The authors provide a substantial introduction which sets the scene historically and conceptually before summarizing the claims and arguments of the essays.

Aesthetics is about some special and unusual ways of experiencing the world. Not just artworks, but also nature and ordinary objects. But then if we apply the remarkably elaborate and sophisticated conceptual apparatus of philosophy of perception to questions in aesthetics, we can make real progress. The aim of this book is to bring the discussion of aesthetics and perception together. Many influential debates in aesthetics will look very different and maybe not as difficult to tackle if we clarify the assumptions they make about perception and about experiences in general. The focus of the book is the concept of attention and the ways in which this concept and especially the distinction between distributed and focused attention can help us re-evaluate various key concepts and debates in aesthetics. Some of the key concepts and debates that the book covers are picture perception and depiction, about aesthetic experiences, about formalism, about the importance of uniqueness in aesthetics, about the history of vision debate, and about our identification with fictional characters (among others).

Recent years have seen an explosion of research on the biological, neural, and psychological foundations of artistic and aesthetic phenomena, which had previously been the province of the social sciences and the humanities. Meanwhile, it is a boom time for meta-philosophy, many new methods have been adopted in aesthetics, and philosophers are tackling the relationship between empirical and theoretical approaches to aesthetics. These eleven essays propose a methodology especially suited to aesthetics, where problems in philosophy are addressed principally by examining how aesthetic phenomena are understood in the human sciences. Since the human sciences include much of the humanities as well as the social, behavioural, and brain sciences, the methodology promises to integrate arts research across the academy. The volume opens with four essays outlining the methodology and its potential. Subsequent essays put the methodology to work, shedding light on the perceptual and social-pragmatic capacities that are implicated in responding to works of art, especially images, but also music, literature, and conceptual art.

This volume collects most of the author's publications on human action since the 1970s. The essays collected here are concerned to answer the questions ‘What makes us agents?’ and ‘What makes us responsible to one another for how we live our lives?’ The author develops a unified account of human agency and responsibility in terms of our capacity for critical evaluation, or normative competence. We are agents because we have (and to the extent that we exercise) this capacity, and we are responsible to each other for our lives as reflections of our exercise of this capacity. The account is developed in these essays largely by considering possible sources of normative incapacity, such as compulsion, addiction, manipulation, childhood deprivation, and one's own desires. Many of these essays engage critically with contemporary accounts of free will, action, and moral responsibility.

In evolutionary biology, there is a mode of thinking which is quite common, and philosophically significant. This is ‘agential thinking’. In its paradigm case, agential thinking involves treating an evolved organism as if it were an agent pursuing a goal, such as survival and reproduction, and treating its phenotypic traits, including its behaviours, as strategies for achieving this goal. Less commonly, the entities that are treated as agent-like are genes or groups, rather than individual organisms. Agential thinking is related to the familiar Darwinian point that organisms’ evolved traits are often adaptive, but it goes beyond this. For it involves deliberately transposing a set of concepts—goals, interests, strategies—whose original application is to rational human agents, to the biological world at large. There are two possible attitudes towards agential thinking in biology. The first sees it as mere anthropomorphism, an instance of the psychological bias which leads humans to see intention and purpose in places where they do not exist. The second sees agential thinking as a natural and justifiable way of describing or reasoning about Darwinian evolution and its products. The truth turns out to lie in between these extremes, for agential thinking is not a monolithic whole. Some forms of agential thinking are problematic, but others admit of a solid justification, and when used carefully, can be a source of insight.

Andy Clark is a leading philosopher and cognitive scientist. The fruits of his work have been diverse and lasting. They have had an extraordinary impact throughout philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and robotics. The extended mind hypothesis, the power of parallel distributed processing, the role of language in opening up novel paths for thinking, the flexible interface between biological minds and artificial technologies, the significance of representation in explanations of intelligent behaviour, the promise of the predictive processing framework to unify the cognitive sciences: these are just some of the ideas explored in Clark’s work that have been picked up by many researchers and that have been contributing to intense debate across the sciences of mind and brain. This volume provides the first interdisciplinary, critical engagement with Clark’s work; it includes contributions of authors from several disciplines, offering a fresh perspective on key questions in the sciences of mind and brain.

Animalism is the view that we are animals. After being ignored for a long time in philosophical discussions of our nature, this idea has recently gained considerable support in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. It has also, amongst philosophers, occasioned strong opposition, even though it might be said to be the view assumed by much of the scientific community. Animalism: New Essays on Persons, Animals, and Identity is the first volume to be devoted to this important topic and promises to set the agenda for the next stage in the debate. In addition to a substantial introduction by the editors, contributors to the volume include Lynne Rudder Baker, Stephan Blatti, Tim Campbell, David Hershenov, Jens Johansson, Mark Johnston, Rory Madden, Jeff McMahan, Eric Olson, Derek Parfit, Mark Reid, Denis Robinson, David Shoemaker, Sydney Shoemaker, and Paul Snowdon.

Externalism about mental content is the view that things outside of the skin or in the past are constitutive parts of present mental states. Internalism is the denial of externalism. This book propounds a plausible physicalist internalism, called qualia empiricism. Qualia empiricism is the conjunction of a modal structuralist account of perceptual experience, an account of the content contributed to thought by referring terms that deploys rigidified description clusters, and an account of non-epistemic internal resources that can bridge those first two elements. It also argues that externalism is supported by no reasons that withstand close scrutiny. These include case-based arguments and arguments entwined with externalist accounts of perceptual states and language. The book critically considers externalist arguments rooted in work by Putnam, Kripke, Burge, Millikan, Dretske, Papineau, Prinz, Fodor, Harman, Stampe, Stalnaker, Tye, Kant, Williamson, disjunctivists, Wittgenstein, Wright, Davidson, and Brandom, among others.

What is intentionality? Intentionality is a distinguishing characteristic of states of mind such as beliefs, thoughts, wishes, dreams, and desires, which are about things outside themselves. This book explores various ways in which philosophers have tried to explain intentionality, and then suggests a new way. Part I of the book gives a critical account of the five most comprehensive and prominent current approaches to intentionality. These approaches can be summarized as the instrumentalist approach, derived from Carnap and Quine, and culminating in the work of Daniel Dennett; the linguistic approach, derived from the work of Chomsky and exhibited most fully in the work of Jerry Fodor; the biological approach, developed by Ruth Garrett Millikan, Colin McGinn, and others; the information-processing approach, which has been given a definitive form in the work of Fred Dretske; and the functional role approach of Brian Loar. Part II sets out a multi-level, developmental approach to intentionality. Drawing upon work in neurophysiology and psychology, the book argues that intentionality is to be found, in different forms, at the levels of brain functioning, prelinguistic consciousness, language, and at the holistic level of ‘whole person performance’ which is demarcated by our ordinary everyday talk about beliefs, desires, hopes, intentions, and the other ‘propositional attitudes’.

In 1988, Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn challenged connectionist theorists to explain the systematicity of cognition. In a highly influential critical analysis of connectionism, they argued that connectionist explanations, at best, can only inform us about details of the neural substrate; explanations at the cognitive level must be classical insofar as adult human cognition is essentially systematic. More than twenty-five years later, however, conflicting explanations of cognition do not divide along classicist-connectionist lines, but oppose cognitivism (both classicist and connectionist) with a range of other methodologies, including distributed and embodied cognition, ecological psychology, enactivism, adaptive behavior, and biologically based neural network theory. This volume reassesses Fodor and Pylyshyn's “systematicity challenge” for a post-connectionist era. The contributors consider such questions as how post-connectionist approaches meet Fodor and Pylyshyn's conceptual challenges; whether there is empirical evidence for or against the systematicity of thought; and how the systematicity of human thought relates to behavior. The chapters offer a representative sample and an overview of the most important recent developments in the systematicity debate.

The literature on theoretical reason has been dominated by epistemological concerns, treatments of practical reason by ethical concerns. This book overcomes the limitations of dealing with each separately. It sets out a comprehensive theory of rationality applicable to both practical and theoretical reason. In both domains, the book explains how experience grounds rationality, delineates the structure of central elements, and attacks the egocentric conception of rationality. It establishes the rationality of altruism and thereby supports major moral principles. The concluding part describes the pluralism and relativity the book's conception of rationality accommodates and, taking the unified account of theoretical and practical rationality in that light, constructs a theory of global rationality — the overall rationality of persons.

This book presents essays in the form of thirteen chapters on the propositional imagination. The propositional imagination — the mental capacity we exploit when we imagine that everyone is colour-blind or that Hamlet is a procrastinator — plays an essential role in philosophical theorizing, engaging with fiction, and in everyday life. These thirteen chapters extend the theoretical picture of the imagination and explore the philosophical implications of cognitive accounts of the imagination. The book also investigates broader philosophical issues surrounding the propositional imagination. The first section addresses the nature of the imagination, its role in emotion production, and its sophistication manifestation in childhood. The chapters in the second section focus on the nature of pretence and how pretence is implicated in adult communication. The third section addresses the problem of ‘imaginative resistance’, the striking fact that when we encounter morally repugnant assertions in fiction, we seem to resist imagining them and accepting them as fictionally true. In the final section, contributors explore the relation between imagining, conceiving, and judgements of possibility and impossibility.

This book is a comprehensive development and defence of one of the guiding assumptions of evolutionary psychology: that the human mind is composed of a large number of semi-independent modules. One goal is to argue for massive cognitive modularity. Another is to show that the approach has the resources to explain the distinctive powers of the human mind. A third goal is to show how the various components of the mind are likely to be linked and interact with one another. The book outlines and defends the basic framework of a perception/belief/desire/planning/motor-control architecture (which is common to all animal cognition), embedded within which is a distinctively human language faculty. The flexibility and creativity of the human mind (together with its characteristic capacities for science and sophisticated forms of planning) are then explained as utilizing mental rehearsal of actions (including inner speech), with the results being globally broadcast to the full range of central modules.

This book presents an examination of Aristotle's accounts of voluntariness in the Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics. It makes the case that these constitute a theory of moral responsibility — albeit one with important differences from modern theories. Highlights of the discussion include a reconstruction of the dialectical argument in the Eudemian Ethics II 6-9, and a demonstration that the definitions of ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ in Nicomachean Ethics III 1 are the culmination of that argument. By identifying the paradigms of voluntariness and involuntariness that Aristotle begins with and the opponents (most notably Plato) he addresses, the book explains notoriously puzzling features of the Nicomachean account — such as Aristotle's requirement that involuntary agents experience pain or regret. Other familiar features of Aristotle' account are cast in a new light. That we are responsible for the characters we develop turns out not to be a necessary condition of responsible agency. That voluntary action has its ‘origin’ in the agent and that our actions are ‘up to us to do and not to do’ — often interpreted as implying a libertarian conception of agency — turn out to be perfectly compatible with causal determinism, a point the book makes by locating these locutions in the context of Aristotle's general understanding of causality. While Aristotle does not himself face or address worries that determinism is incompatible with responsibility, his causal repertoire provides the resources for a powerful response to incompatibilist arguments. On this and other fronts Aristotle's is a view to be taken seriously by theorists of moral responsibility.

This book examines how emotions form a bridge between our experience of art and of life. We often find that a particular poem, painting, or piece of music carries an emotional charge; we may also experience emotions towards, or on behalf of, a particular fictional character. These experiences are philosophically puzzling, for their causes seem quite different from the causes of emotion in the rest of our lives. Using many literary, visual and musical examples, this book shows that what these experiences have in common, and what links them to the expression of emotion in non-artistic cases, is the role played by feeling. It surveys various accounts of the nature of fiction, attacks contemporary cognitivist accounts of expression, and offers an uncompromising defence of a controversial view about musical expression: that music expresses the emotions it causes its listeners to feel. Whilst this book engages with the work of contemporary theorists, it remains accessible to readers without philosophical training.