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The thesis that the mind cannot directly apprehend features of the physical world — what Thomas Reid calls the Way of Ideas — is a staple of Early Modern philosophical tradition. This commitment to the direct awareness of, and only of, mental representations unifies the otherwise divergent philosophical systems of Rationalists and Empiricists. Thomas Reid battles against this thesis on many fronts, in particular over the nature of perception. This book lays the groundwork for Reid's theory of perception by developing Reid's unheralded argument against a representational theory of thought, which this book applies to the discussion of the intentionality of perceptual states and Reid's appeal to ‘signs’. Reid's efforts to preserve common sense epistemic commitments also lead him to adopt unique theories about our concepts of primary and secondary qualities, and about original and acquired perceptions. About the latter pair, the book argues that most perceptual beliefs depend for their justification upon inferences. The Way of Ideas holds that sensations are objects of awareness and that our senses are not robustly unified. This book develops Reid's counter-proposals by examining his discussion of the evolutionary purpose of sensations, and the nature of our awareness of sensations, as well as his intriguing affirmative answer to Molyneux's questions.

This book provides a cognitive scientific perspective to beliefs about supernatural agents. First, human intuitions about agents, agency, and counterintuitive concepts are outlined and explained. Second, various kinds of folk beliefs and theological doctrines about souls and spirits are analyzed in the light of the human cognitive architecture, using descriptions of spirit possession and shamanism as materials. Third, scholastic discussions of God’s cognitive capacities as well as folk-psychological God beliefs are analyzed. This analysis combines with a discussion of Buddhist ideas of soullesness and of buddhahood in textual traditions and in folk beliefs. Beliefs about God and buddhas are shown to rest on the same cognitive capacities of understanding agency and intentionality that underlie spirit beliefs. The Buddhist doctrine of soullessness was originally a denial of the self as a separate spiritual entity, not a denial of personal agency. God and buddhas differ from ordinary agents in that they are believed to have open access to all minds. Therefore, they can serve as means of representing what persons believe others to believe. Such divine minds are also used as an explanation for the fact that the whole of reality is intuitively experienced as if intentionally directed by a personal will. The book ends with a discussion of the future of religion and atheism.

This book presents a complete theory about the nature of normative thought, that is, the sort of thought that is concerned with what ought to be the case, or what we ought to do or think. This theory implies a kind of metanormative realism, according to which normative truths or facts are genuinely part of reality. At the same time, the theory aims to provide a substantive account of the nature of these normative facts, and a substantive explanation of how it is possible for us to know these facts and to refer to them in language or thought. In providing these explanations, the theory relies on a version of the idea (which has been much discussed in recent work in the philosophy of mind) of the normativity of the intentional. This is the idea that there is no way to explain the nature of the various sorts of mental states that have intentionality or representational content (such as beliefs, judgments, desires, decisions, and so on) without stating normative facts. This idea provides the basis for a systematic theory that deals with the following three areas: the semantics of normative statements (which investigates the meaning of statements about what ought to be); the metaphysics of normative facts (about the nature of the facts stated by these statements); and the epistemology of normative belief (about what justifies us in holding beliefs that these statements express).

Some philosophers think physical explanations stand on their own: what happens, happens because things have the properties they do. Others think that any such explanation is incomplete: what happens in the physical world must be partly due to the laws of nature. This book follows the debate between these views from Descartes to Hume. The book argues that the competing models of causation in the period grow out of the scholastic notion of power. On this Aristotelian view, the connection between cause and effect is logically necessary. Causes are “intrinsically directed” at what they produce. But when the Aristotelian view is faced with the challenge of mechanism, the core notion of a power splits into two distinct models, each of which persists throughout the early modern period. It is only when seen in this light that the key arguments of the period can reveal their true virtues and flaws. To make this case, the book explores such central topics as intentionality, the varieties of necessity, and the nature of relations. Arguing for controversial readings of many of the canonical figures, the book also focuses on lesser‐known writers such as Pierre‐Sylvain Régis, Nicolas Malebranche, and Robert Boyle.

Towards Non-Being presents an account of the semantics of intentional verbs such as ‘believes’, ‘fears’, ‘seeks’, and ‘imagines’. It tackles problems concerning intentional states which are often brushed under the carpet, such as their failure to be closed under deducibility. Drawing on the noneist work of the late Richard Routley (Sylvan), the book proceeds in terms of objects that may be existent or non-existent, at worlds that may either be possible or impossible. Since Russell, non-existent objects have had a bad press in Western philosophy. The book mounts a full-scale defence, and in the process, offers an account of both fictional and mathematical objects as non-existent.

Are words and thoughts necessarily about what they are about or are they only contingently so? This book defends the former alternative against the latter by articulating a requisite modal background and then bringing this background to bear on cognitive matters—notably the intentionality of cognitive episodes and states. The modal picture that emerges from the first two chapters is a strongly particularist approach whereby all possibilities reduce to possibilities for particular things, where the latter are determined by the natures of the particular things involved. The ensuing three chapters are devoted to the aboutness of referring terms in language and thought. The approach espoused is, once again, strongly particularist in allotting explanatory priority to cognitive episodes and states regarding particular things. The emerging view is that a given use of a name to refer to a particular thing, or a given thought about the thing, could not be what it is without being about the thing it is actually about.

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’.

Consciousness presents a problem. There are excellent reasons for believing that materialism, or physicalism, is the correct metaphysical view of our world, yet it is extremely difficult to see how conscious experiences, or qualia, can be incorporated into the materialist framework. Both aspects of the problem are defended. First, a positive argument for materialism is given, with responses to dualist objections. Second, objections are presented to most materialist attempts to explain consciousness – in particular, higher‐order theories, representationalism, and eliminativism. Finally, it is argued that to make genuine progress on this problem we need to delve deeper into the question of our cognitive access to our own experience. Thus the problems of intentionality and consciousness are not as separable as has often been thought.

Jerry Fodor presents a strikingly original theory of the basic constituents of thought. He suggests that the heart of a cognitive science is its theory of concepts, and that cognitive scientists have gone badly wrong in many areas because their assumptions about concepts have been seriously mistaken. Fodor argues compellingly for an atomistic theory of concepts, and maintains that future work on human cognition should build upon new foundations. He starts by demolishing the rival theories that have prevailed in recent years—that concepts are definitions, that they are prototypes or stereotypes, that they are abstractions from belief systems, etc. He argues that all such theories are radically unsatisfactory for two closely related reasons: they hold that the content of a concept is determined, at least in part, by its inferential role; and they hold that typical concepts are structurally complex. Empirical and philosophical arguments against each of these claims are elaborated. Fodor then develops his alternative account, arguing that conceptual content is determined entirely by informational (mind—world) relations, and that typical concepts are atomic. The implications of this ‘informational atomism’ are considered in respect of issues in psychology, lexical semantics, and metaphysics, with particular attention to the relation between informational atomism and innateness.

A collection about the intentionality of speech acts and propositional attitudes. The chapters in the first section develop a framework for pragmatics—the study of the interaction of speech acts and the contexts in which they are performed. The framework is used to defend and apply a pragmatic conception of presupposition, to account for the role of indicative conditional statements in reasoning, and to solve some puzzles about statements of identity and existence. The chapters in the second section concern the semantics of the attribution of belief and other propositional attitudes. They attempt to reconcile the possible‐worlds analysis of propositional content with the phenomena, including de re belief attribution and the attribution of indexical or self‐locating belief. The chapters in the third section defend an externalist account of the contents of thought. It is argued that there is no reason to think a viable account of narrow content can be developed, and that none is needed to provide an adequate account of the role of intentional content in the explanation of behaviour and experience. The chapters in the fourth section discuss the relation between the content of thoughts and the forms in which content is represented and expressed. It is argued that the temptation to build linguistic structure into the content of thought should be resisted since it does not provide the material for an adequate solution to the problems that plague the possible‐worlds conception of proposition, such as the problem of logical omniscience.

Knowledge and Reality brings together a selection of Colin McGinn's philosophical essays from the mid 1970s to the late 1990s, whose unifying theme is the relation between mind and reality. The essays are divided into three groups (‘Knowledge and Necessity’, ‘Thought and World’, and ‘Reality and Appearance’) and range over several topics of recent interest, including the analysis of knowledge, the a priori, necessity, possible worlds, externalism, essentialism, realism, mental representation, intentionality, and colour. While all but one essay has been previously published elsewhere, McGinn has provided a new postscript to each essay, placing it in its philosophical context by sketching the background against which it was written, explaining its relations to other notable work, and offering his current reflections on the topic. The volume thus traces the development of McGinn's ideas and their role in some central philosophical debates. Seen together McGinn's essays bear out his commitment to ‘not making the world depend upon our means of knowing about it’, offering a many‐sided defence of realism, while emphasizing the epistemological price that realism exacts.

The central aim of the book is to give a deeper and wider understanding of emotion, and of related phenomena, such as consciousness, thought, feeling, imagination, expressive action, mood, and character. A key theme is the idea of a personal perspective or point of view, as contrasted with the impersonal stance of the empirical sciences. It is only from the personal perspective that thoughts, reasons, feelings, and actions—commonsense psychology—come into view. The book endorses the view that the emotions are intentional, but resists the thought that this intentionality can be fully captured without reference to feelings; this is a kind of over‐intellectualizing of the emotions. The notion of feeling towards is introduced to capture the intentionality of emotion. The book argues that the various elements of emotional experience—thought, feeling, bodily change, expression, and action—are tied together as part of a narrative structure.

This book features collection of essays on consciousness. It is intended as a sequel to the author’s 1991 book, The Problem of Consciousness. Although the author has not modified his views in the last decade, he has included his position under the label ‘mysterianism’, in the canon of positions regarding the mind-body problem. Chapters 1-3 focus on the mind-body problem. Chapters 4-6 deal with the concept of matter. Chapter 7 features a dialogue on consciousness and cosmology. Chapter 8 discusses the problem of philosophy. Chapter 9 questions the first person authority theory. Chapter 10 analyses the objects of intentionality.