Paper Minds

How do poems and novels create a sense of mind? What does literary criticism say in conversation with other disciplines that addresses problems of consciousness? In Paper Minds, Jonathan Kramnick takes up these vital questions, exploring the relations between mind and environment, the literary forms that uncover such associations, and the various fields of study that work to illuminate them. Opening with a discussion of how literary scholarship’s particular methods can both complement and remain in tension with corresponding methods particular to the sciences, Paper Minds then turns to a series of sharply defined case studies. Ranging from eighteenth-century poetry and haptic theories of vision, to fiction and contemporary problems of consciousness, to landscapes in which all matter is sentient, to cognitive science and the rise of the novel, Kramnick’s essays are united by a central thematic authority. This unified approach of these essays shows us what distinctive knowledge that literary texts and literary criticism can contribute to discussions of perceptual consciousness, created and natural environments, and skilled engagements with the world.

Is analytic metaphysics the kind of metaphysics that contemporary analytic philosophers study? One of the aims of this special issue of the Studia Leibnitiana is to demonstrate that it would be misleading to think so. The reason is simply that some important past metaphysicians also adopted an analytic style and G. W. Leibniz is surely one of them. His analysis on the notion of identity and individuality, on the difference between artifacts and biological entities are pieces of analytic metaphysics. The other aim of the volume is to show that there is a close semantic connection between the concepts of individual, mind and body in Leibniz. The book tried to demonstrate it from both an analytical and a historical point of view. .

Jane Austen's fiction is itself philosophy, a fact to which Stanley Cavell attested when he honored his philosophical teacher, J. L. Austin, through homage to her and her work. Engaging equally in criticism and in philosophy, Jane Austen and Other Minds demonstrates the standing of Austen's fiction as a philosophical investigation, both in its own right and as a resource to ordinary language philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Eric Reid Lindstrom addresses a long-standing shortcoming of Austen scholarship by locating in her fiction a linguistic phenomenology available to the novelistic everyday but not afforded her in intellectual history. He simultaneously advances recognition and understanding of J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell, and of ordinary language philosophy, within Austen scholarship and the broader field of contemporary literary studies. This book argues compellingly for Cavell's choice of Austen as a means to pursue 'passionate exchange,' reimagining her common association with restriction and confinement.

This book is about the many things that life may sometimes bring your way. It may be good or bad and maybe even bring you to tears, but it will help you to gain will and confidence in yourself. This book touches on various topics such as love, relationships, religion, and empowerment. The view of two writers with a love of poetry to teach and tell stories about life and the gifts of others.

Reading Minds is a practical guide to the cognitive science revolution. With fascinating descriptions of studies of the mind, from the brain scans of lovers and liars in London to the eye movements of babies in Budapest, this book takes the reader into the laboratories of the most innovative psychological researchers around the world. Using anecdotes from everyday life and his clinical practice, renowned psychotherapist and academic the author shows how to use the insights of science to better understand and relate to others.

Minds and Bodies is a clear introduction to the mind-body problem. It requires no prior philosophical knowledge and is ideally suited to newcomers to philosophy and philosophy of mind. Robert Wilkinson carefully introduces the fundamental components of the philosophy of mind: Descartes's dualist account of mind and body; monist views including eliminativism; computer science and artificial intelligence. Each chapter is linked to a reading from key thinkers in the field, from Descartes to Paul Churchland.

An illustrious international line-up of contributors present new essays on themes from the philosophy of Frank Jackson, discussing his groundbreaking work on supervenience and conceptual analysis; mind and colour; normative ethics and metaethics; and conditionals. Jackson offers a substantial and illuminating reply to his critics.

There is no question more fundamental to human existence than that posed by the nature-versus-nurture debate. For much of the past century, it was widely believed that there was no essential human nature and that people could be educated or socialized to thrive in almost any imaginable culture. Today, that orthodoxy is being directly and forcefully challenged by a new science of the mind: evolutionary psychology. Like the theory of evolution itself, the implications of evolutionary psychology are provocative and unsettling. Rather than viewing the human mind as a mysterious black box or a blank slate, evolutionary psychologists see it as a physical organ that has evolved to process certain types of information in certain ways that enables us to thrive only in certain types of cultures. In On Our Minds, Eric M. Gander examines all sides of the public debate between evolutionary psychologists and their critics. Paying particularly close attention to the popular science writings of Steven Pinker, Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Jay Gould, Gander traces the history of the controversy, succinctly summarizes the claims and theories of the evolutionary psychologists, dissects the various arguments deployed by each side, and considers in detail the far-reaching ramifications—social, cultural, and political—of this debate. Gander's lucid and highly readable account concludes that evolutionary psychology now holds the potential to answer our oldest and most profound moral and philosophical questions, fundamentally changing our self–perception as a species. -- Boguslaw Pawlowski