David J. Chalmers
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195311105
- eISBN:
- 9780199870851
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195311105.003.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind
Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. All ...
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Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. This chapter first isolates the truly hard part of the problem of consciousness, separating it from more tractable parts and giving an account of why it is so difficult to explain. It critiques some recent work that uses reductive methods to address consciousness and argues that these methods inevitably fail to come to grips with the hardest part of the problem. Once this failure is recognized, the door to further progress is opened. The second half of the chapter argues that, if we move to a new kind of nonreductive explanation, a naturalistic account of consciousness can be given.Less
Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. This chapter first isolates the truly hard part of the problem of consciousness, separating it from more tractable parts and giving an account of why it is so difficult to explain. It critiques some recent work that uses reductive methods to address consciousness and argues that these methods inevitably fail to come to grips with the hardest part of the problem. Once this failure is recognized, the door to further progress is opened. The second half of the chapter argues that, if we move to a new kind of nonreductive explanation, a naturalistic account of consciousness can be given.
Lisa Ann Robertson
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474442282
- eISBN:
- 9781474476904
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474442282.003.0007
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
This chapter examines Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Theory of Life’ (1816/1848) and his theory of knowledge, discussed in Biographia Literaria (1817), through the lens of autopoietic enaction. It ...
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This chapter examines Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Theory of Life’ (1816/1848) and his theory of knowledge, discussed in Biographia Literaria (1817), through the lens of autopoietic enaction. It focuses on parallels between historical and contemporary theories, particularly their philosophical underpinnings, and argues that Coleridge’s theories are an important alternative to Cartesian accounts of the mind. Interrogating these theories in terms of enactive concepts, such as structural coupling, dynamic co-emergence, and mutual co-dependence, exposes the inherent embodied, embedded, and enacted premises on which Coleridge’s theory of cognition relies. The relationship between the subject and the object implicit in dualist and materialist theories reveals the effects assumptions about this relationship have on the way human beings understand themselves in relationship to nature and their own bodies – effects that are frequently inimical. The chapter concludes that Coleridge and the enactive approach offer valuable options for overcoming the schism between consciousness and nature, mind and world.Less
This chapter examines Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Theory of Life’ (1816/1848) and his theory of knowledge, discussed in Biographia Literaria (1817), through the lens of autopoietic enaction. It focuses on parallels between historical and contemporary theories, particularly their philosophical underpinnings, and argues that Coleridge’s theories are an important alternative to Cartesian accounts of the mind. Interrogating these theories in terms of enactive concepts, such as structural coupling, dynamic co-emergence, and mutual co-dependence, exposes the inherent embodied, embedded, and enacted premises on which Coleridge’s theory of cognition relies. The relationship between the subject and the object implicit in dualist and materialist theories reveals the effects assumptions about this relationship have on the way human beings understand themselves in relationship to nature and their own bodies – effects that are frequently inimical. The chapter concludes that Coleridge and the enactive approach offer valuable options for overcoming the schism between consciousness and nature, mind and world.
C. B. Bow (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198783909
- eISBN:
- 9780191826559
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198783909.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
This book explores the philosophical and historical significance of common sense philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment. As one of eighteenth-century Scotland’s most original intellectual products, ...
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This book explores the philosophical and historical significance of common sense philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment. As one of eighteenth-century Scotland’s most original intellectual products, the Scottish ‘school’ of common sense philosophy developed as a viable alternative to modern philosophical scepticism known as the ‘Ideal Theory’ or ‘the way of ideas’. The philosophical writings of Thomas Reid and David Hume factor prominently in the volume as influential authors of competing ideas in the history and philosophy of common sense. In the chapters of this volume, which all embody original and innovative research, the contributors recover anticipations of Reid’s version of common sense in seventeenth-century Scottish scholasticism; re-evaluate Reid’s position in the realism versus sentimentalism dichotomy; shed new light on the nature of the ‘constitution’ in the anatomy of the mind; identify changes in the nature of sense perception throughout Reid’s published and unpublished works; examine Reid on the non-theist implications of Hume’s philosophy; show how ‘polite’ literature shaped James Beattie’s version of common sense; reveal Hume’s response to common sense philosophers; explore English criticisms and construction of the ‘Scotch school’; and illustrate how Dugald Stewart’s refashioning of common sense responded to a new age and the British reception of German Idealism. In recovering the ways in which Scottish common sense philosophy originally developed in response to the Ideal Theory in Britain during the long eighteenth century, this volume takes an important step toward a more complete understanding of ‘the Scottish philosophy’ in the age of Enlightenment.Less
This book explores the philosophical and historical significance of common sense philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment. As one of eighteenth-century Scotland’s most original intellectual products, the Scottish ‘school’ of common sense philosophy developed as a viable alternative to modern philosophical scepticism known as the ‘Ideal Theory’ or ‘the way of ideas’. The philosophical writings of Thomas Reid and David Hume factor prominently in the volume as influential authors of competing ideas in the history and philosophy of common sense. In the chapters of this volume, which all embody original and innovative research, the contributors recover anticipations of Reid’s version of common sense in seventeenth-century Scottish scholasticism; re-evaluate Reid’s position in the realism versus sentimentalism dichotomy; shed new light on the nature of the ‘constitution’ in the anatomy of the mind; identify changes in the nature of sense perception throughout Reid’s published and unpublished works; examine Reid on the non-theist implications of Hume’s philosophy; show how ‘polite’ literature shaped James Beattie’s version of common sense; reveal Hume’s response to common sense philosophers; explore English criticisms and construction of the ‘Scotch school’; and illustrate how Dugald Stewart’s refashioning of common sense responded to a new age and the British reception of German Idealism. In recovering the ways in which Scottish common sense philosophy originally developed in response to the Ideal Theory in Britain during the long eighteenth century, this volume takes an important step toward a more complete understanding of ‘the Scottish philosophy’ in the age of Enlightenment.
