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Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre were the giants of 20th-century “existentialism”, although neither of them was comfortable with that title. Their famous differences aside, they shared a “phenomenological” sensibility and described personal experience in exquisite and excruciating detail and reflected on the meaning of this experience with both sensitivity and insight. That is the focus of this book: Camus and Sartre, their descriptions of personal experience, and their reflections on the meaning of this experience. They also reflected, worriedly, on the nature of reflection. The thematic problem of the book is the relationship between experience and reflection. The book explores this relationship through novels and plays, Camus’ The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall, Sartre’s Nausea and No Exit, and Sartre’s great philosophical tome, Being and Nothingness.

This book advances a novel way to resolve the central philosophical problem about the mind: how it is that consciousness or experience fits into a larger naturalistic picture of the world. The correct response to the problem, it is argued, is not to posit a realm of experience distinct from the physical, nor to deny the reality of phenomenal experience, nor even to rethink our understanding of consciousness and the language we use to talk about it. Instead, we should view the problem itself as having its origin in our ignorance of the relevant physical facts. This change of orientation is shown to be well motivated historically, empirically, and philosophically, and to have none of the side effects it is sometimes thought to have. The result is a philosophical perspective on the mind that has a number of far-reaching consequences: for consciousness studies, for our place in nature, and for the way we think about the relationship between philosophy and science.

This book examines the biological underpinnings of religion. We can only experience, the book argues, what our bodies allow us to experience. As a consequence, religious thought and feeling are heavily influenced by our sensory organs, emotional programs, sexual sensibilities, and the neural structure of our brains. Studying “spirituality in the flesh” opens up new and exciting agendas for understanding the nature and value of human religiosity. This exploration of embodied spirituality establishes middle ground between the explanations of religion typically made by either scientists or humanists. The book takes most scientific interpreters to task for failing to understand the inherently cultural aspects of embodied experience, even as he chides most religion scholars for ignoring new knowledge about the biological substrates of human thought and behavior. Each chapter takes up a different facet of embodied experience and shows the ways it helps us understand just how and why humans reconstruct their worlds in religious ways. Emotional programs such as fear or wonder, altered consciousness, sexuality, pain, and spatial orientation to the environment provide critical categories that are used to interpret selected episodes in American religious history. Topics as diverse as apocalypticism, nature religion, Native American peyotism, and the sexual experimentalism found in 19th‐century communal societies illustrate how the study of spirituality in the flesh enriches our appreciation of religion.

The book is an extended essay on implicit learning, a topic that emerged in recent years as an important but previously overlooked process. Implicit learning is learning that takes place independent of both the process and products of learning. It occurs without the intention to learn and largely without awareness of the nature of what has been learned. The process is “bottom-up”; information is acquired automatically when individuals focus attention on complex displays; and the knowledge base is “tacit” and largely opaque to introspection. Examples abound in everyday life, notably natural language learning and the acquisition of the mores of social behavior. A core assumption is that this implicit acquisitional mechanism is a fundamental “root” process that is based on evolutionarily old neurological structures and lies at the heart of the adaptive behavioral repertoire of every complex organism. Firstly, the book outlines the essential features of implicit learning that have emerged from controlled studies carried out over the past several decades. It also presents alternative perspectives that have been proposed and accommodates these views to the proposed theoretical model. It then structures the literature within the framework of Darwinian evolutionary biology that lies at the core of the theory. Finally, it shows how the evolutionary stance makes a series of predictions about how functions based on implicit mechanisms should differ from those mediated by consciousness.

The problem of evil remains a perennial challenge to theistic belief. However, one aspect of this challenge has been largely unexplored by theists — the problem of non-human animal pain and suffering. This problem has become even more vexing in the last century as theists have come to accept that non-human animals capable of pain and suffering have inhabited the earth for hundreds of millions of years, struggling to survive in the face of disease, deprivation, and predation. Evil of this sort might not be especially problematic if standard theodices offered by theists could be applied here as well. Unfortunately, those explanations seem impotent in this domain. This book explores the special challenge to theism raised by non-human animals pain and suffering and explores four broad-ranging explanations aimed at responding to the challenge.

The voluminous writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein contain some of the most profound reflections of our time on the nature of the human subject and self-understanding — the human condition, philosophically speaking. This book mimes those extensive writings for a conception of the self. And more specifically, the book offers a discussion of Wittgenstein's later writings on language and mind as they hold special significance for the understanding and clarification of the distinctive character of self-descriptive or autobiographical language. The book also undertakes a philosophical investigation of selected autobiographical writings — among the best examples we have of human selves exploring themselves — as they cast new and special light on the critique of mind-body dualism and its undercurrents in particular, and on the nature of autobiographical consciousness more generally. The chapters take up in turn the topics of self-consciousness, what Wittgenstein calls ‘the inner picture’; mental privacy and the picture of metaphysical seclusion; the very idea of our observation of the contents of consciousness; first-person expressive speech; reflexive or self-directed thought and competing pictures of introspection; the nuances of retrospective self-understanding, person-perception, and the corollary issues of self-perception (itself an interestingly dangerous phrase); self-defining memory; and the therapeutic conception of philosophical progress as it applies to all of these issues. The cast of characters interwoven throughout the discussion include, in addition to Wittgenstein centrally, Augustine, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Iris Murdoch, Donald Davidson, and Stanley Cavell, among others.

Some mental events are conscious, some are unconscious. What is the difference between the two? This book offers an answer. It attempts to develop a comprehensive theory of the feature that all and only conscious mental events have. According to the theory, conscious mental events differ from unconscious ones in that, whatever else they may represent, they always also represent themselves, and do so in a very specific way. The book fleshed out this idea and argues for it.

One of the features of consciousness that has been largely overlooked in recent treatments of the topic is its unity. What is the unity of consciousness? To what degree might consciousness be unified? And what implications might the unity of consciousness have for our conception of consciousness and the self? Drawing on philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, this book presents answers to these questions. The first part of the book develops a conception of the unity of consciousness according to which a subject has a unified conscious if and only if it has a single conscious state that subsumes each and every one of its conscious states. This conception of the unity of consciousness gives rise to the unity thesis—the claim that consciousness in human beings is necessarily unified. The second part of the volume examines the plausibility of the unity thesis. The book develops a model for evaluating the unity thesis and then goes on to apply this model to a wide range of syndromes—such as anosognosia, the hidden observer in hypnosis, and the split‐brain syndrome—in which the unity of consciousness is often said to breakdown. In each case the evidence in favour of disunity models is found wanting. The final third of the volume examines points of contact between the unity of consciousness on the one hand and theories of theories of consciousness, the sense of embodiment, and accounts of the self on the other.

The topic of introspection stands at the interface between questions in epistemology about the nature of self-knowledge and questions in the philosophy of mind about the nature of consciousness. What is the nature of introspection such that it provides us with a distinctive way of knowing about our own conscious mental states? And what is the nature of consciousness such that we can know about our own conscious mental states by introspection? How should we understand the relationship between consciousness and introspective self-knowledge? Should we explain consciousness in terms of introspective self-knowledge or vice versa? Until recently, questions in epistemology and the philosophy of mind were pursued largely in isolation from one another. This book aims to integrate these two lines of research by bringing together fourteen new chapters and one reprinted piece on the relationship between introspection, self-knowledge, and consciousness.

The book links the analysis of the brain mechanisms of emotion and motivation to the wider context of what emotions are, what their functions are, how emotions evolved, and the larger issue of why emotional and motivational feelings and consciousness might arise in a system organized like the brain. The topics in motivation covered are hunger, thirst, sexual behaviour, brain-stimulation reward, and addiction. The book proposes a theory of what emotions are, and an evolutionary, Darwinian, theory of the adaptive value of emotion, and then describes the brain mechanisms of emotion. The book examines how cognitive states can influence emotions, and in turn, how emotions can influence cognitive states. The book also examines emotion and decision-making, with links to the burgeoning field of neuroeconomics. The book describes the brain mechanisms that underlie both emotion and motivation in a scientific form that can be used by both students and scientists in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, biology, physiology, psychiatry, and medicine.

In recent years, philosophical discussions of free will have focused largely on whether or not free will is compatible with determinism. In this challenging book, David Hodgson takes a fresh approach to the question of free will, contending that close consideration of human rationality and human consciousness shows that together they give us free will, in a robust and indeterministic sense. In particular, they give us the capacity to respond appositely to feature-rich gestalts of conscious experiences, in ways that are not wholly determined by laws of nature or computational rules. The author contends that this approach is consistent with what science tells us about the world; and he considers its implications for our responsibility for our own conduct, for the role of retribution in criminal punishment, and for the place of human beings in the wider scheme of things.

This book focuses on the construction of forms of historical consciousness in narratives, or schools of narrative. The study seeks to underscore what goes behind the writing of ‘true’ and ‘authentic’ histories by treating historical fiction as the literary dimension of nationalist ideology. It traces nationalism from its abstract underpinnings to its concrete manifestation in historical fiction which underwrites the Indian freedom struggle. The construction of identity through mythicized conceptions of India is examined in detail through Raja Rao's first novel, Kanthapura. The key concept governing the subject is that of representation. Since the ‘fictional reality’ of the nation is a much-debated issue, the study examines how history slides into fiction. The book shows how orientalists, nationalists, Marxists, subalternists, and poststructuralists, have all, in their own celebratory ways, used the disenfranchised sub-proletariat in their works. What is found useful in poststructuralist practices, however, is that subaltern identities are imbued with heterogeneity, thus splitting open an authoritarian and reactionary nationalism, and a continuing neo-colonialism.