Mind And Modality

This volume offers a wide-ranging and profound collection of essays on philosophical psychology and conceptions of modality from antiquity to the present day, with some essays on the philosophy of religion as well.

In these twelve essays Stephen Yablo presents a modern-day examination of Cartesian themes in the metaphysics of mind, including mental/physical dualism, the possibility of disembodied existence, conceivability as a guide to possibility, the nature of solipsistic content, and how the mind affects the course of physical events.

Modality is the way a speaker modifies her declaratives and other speech acts to optimally assess the common ground of knowledge and belief of the addressee with the aim to optimally achieve understanding and an assessment of relevant information exchange. In languages such as German (and other Germanic languages outside of English), this may happen in covert terms. Main categories used for this purpose are modal adverbials ("modal particles") and modal verbs. Epistemic uses of modal verbs (like German sollen) cover evidential (reportative) information simultaneously providing the source of the information. Methodologically, description and explanation rest on Karl Bühler's concept of Origo as well as Roman Jakobson's concept of shifter. Typologically, East Asian languages such as Japanese pursue these semasiological fundaments far more closely than the European languages. In particular, Japanese has to mark the source of a statement in the declarative mode such that the reliability may be assessed by the hearer. The contributions in this collection provide insight into these modal techniques.

This book explores a range of traditional and contemporary metaphysical themes that figure in the writings of E. J. Lowe, whose powerful and influential work was still developing at the time of his death in 2015. During his forty-year career, he established himself as one of the world's leading philosophers, publishing eleven single-authored books and well over two hundred essays. His scholarship was strikingly broad, ranging from early modern philosophy to the interpretation of quantum mechanics. His most important and sustained contributions were to philosophy of mind, philosophical logic, and above all metaphysics. E. J. Lowe was committed to a systematic, realist, and scientifically informed neo-Aristotelean approach to philosophy. This volume presents a set of new essays by philosophers who share this commitment, addressing interrelated themes of his work. In particular, these papers focus upon three closely connected topics central not only to Lowe's work, but to contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of mind in general: ontology and categories of being; essence and modality, and the metaphysics of mental causation.

Joseph Levine draws together a series of essays in which he has developed his distinctive approach to philosophy of mind. He defends a materialist view of the mind against various challenges, and offers illuminating studies of consciousness, phenomenal concepts, mental representation, demonstrative thought, and cognitive phenomenology.

We all have beliefs to the effect that if a certain thing were to happen a certain other thing would happen. We also believe that some things simply must be so, with no possibility of having been otherwise. And in acting intentionally we all take certain things to be good reason to believe or do certain things. In this book Barry Stroud argues that some beliefs of each of these kinds are indispensable to our having any conception of a world at all. That means no one could consistently dismiss all beliefs of these kinds as merely ways of thinking that do not describe how things really are in the world as it is independently of us and our responses. But the unacceptability of any such negative "unmasking" view does not support a satisfyingly positive metaphysical "realism." No metaphysical satisfaction is available either way, given the conditions of our holding the beliefs whose metaphysical status we wish to understand. This does not mean we will stop asking the metaphysical question. But we need a better understanding of how it can have whatever sense it has for us. This challenging volume takes up these large, fundamental questions in clear language accessible to a wide philosophical readership.

When philosophers today debate the age-old problem of the relation of mind or soul to matter or body, they tend to get involved quickly in discussing not just what actually is but also what possibly may be or by contrast what necessarily must be. No thesis in this much-disputed area has been the topic of more extended discussion than that of the “supervenience”, as it is called, of the mental on the physical, according to which for any difference in the mental to have been possible, some difference in the physical would have been necessary. In this book a recognized authority on modal logic, the logic of the necessary and the possible, critically examines, from a logician’s distinctive point of view, the supervenience debate in philosophy of mind and philosophical psychology, and ends up questioning not so much the truth as the significance of the supervenience thesis.