my mind on books

The Wonder of Consciousness: Understanding the Mind through Philosophical Reflection by Harold Langsam (MIT Press, 2011)

(amazon.co.uk – 30 Sep)

Product description from the publisher:

Consciousness is a wonderful thing. But if we are fully to appreciate the wonder of consciousness, we need to articulate what it is about consciousness that makes it such an interesting and important phenomenon to us. In this book, Harold Langsam argues that consciousness is intelligible–that there are substantive facts about consciousness that can be known a priori–and that it is the intelligibility of consciousness that is the source of its wonder. Langsam first examines the way certain features of some of our conscious states intelligibly relate us to features of the world of which we are conscious. Consciousness is radically different from everything else in the world, and yet it brings us into intimate connection with the things of the world. Langsam then examines the causal powers of some of our conscious states. Some of these causal powers are determined in an intelligible way by the categorical natures of their conscious states: if you know what consciousness is, then you can also know (by the mere exercise of your intelligence) some of what consciousness does. Langsam’s intent is to get the philosophy of mind away from the endless and distracting debates about whether consciousness is physical or not. He shows that there are substantive things that we can discover about consciousness merely through philosophical reflection. The philosopher who takes this approach is not ignoring the empirical facts; he is reflecting on these facts to discover further, nonempirical facts.

Words and Images: An Essay on the Origin of Ideas by Christopher Gauker (Oxford University Press, USA, 2011)

(amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

At least since Locke, philosophers and psychologists have usually held that concepts arise out of sensory perceptions, thoughts are built from concepts, and language enables speakers to convey their thoughts to hearers. Christopher Gauker holds that this tradition is mistaken about both concepts and language. The mind cannot abstract the building blocks of thoughts from perceptual representations. More generally, we have no account of the origin of concepts that grants them the requisite independence from language. Gauker’s alternative is to show that much of cognition consists in thinking by means of mental imagery, without the help of concepts, and that language is a tool by which interlocutors coordinate their actions in pursuit of shared goals. Imagistic cognition supports the acquisition and use of this tool, and when the use of this tool is internalized, it becomes the very medium of conceptual thought.

See also: Author’s website, philosophy.tv – Christopher Gauker and Kathrin Glüer on the contents of perception

The Evident Connexion: Hume on Personal Identity by Galen Strawson (Oxford University Press, USA, 2011)

(amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

The Evident Connexion presents a new reading of Hume’s ‘bundle theory’ of the self or mind, and his later rejection of it. Galen Strawson argues that the bundle theory does not claim that there are no subjects of experience, as many have supposed, or that the mind is just a series of experiences. Hume holds only that the ‘essence of the mind [is] unknown’. His claim is simply that we have no empirically respectable reason to believe in the existence of a persisting subject, or a mind that is more than a series of experiences (each with its own subject).
Why does Hume later reject the bundle theory? Many think he became dissatisfied with his account of how we come to believe in a persisting self, but Strawson suggests that the problem is more serious. The keystone of Hume’s philosophy is that our experiences are governed by a ‘uniting principle’ or ‘bond of union’. But a philosophy that takes a bundle of ontologically distinct experiences to be the only legitimate conception of the mind cannot make explanatory use of those notions in the way Hume does. As Hume says in the Appendix to the Treatise of Human Nature: having ‘loosen’d all our particular perceptions’ in the bundle theory, he is unable to ‘explain the principle of connexion, which binds them together’. This lucid book is the first to be wholly dedicated to Hume’s theory of personal identity, and presents a bold new interpretation which bears directly on current debates among scholars of Hume’s philosophy.

Strawson also has forthcoming in Oct Locke on Personal Identity (Princeton Monographs in Philosophy), (amazon.co.uk)

See also: Author’s website [updated link 7/19/13]

Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust by Daniel Kelly (MIT Press, 2011)

(amazon.co.uk – 22 July)

Product description from the publisher:

People can be disgusted by the concrete and by the abstract–by an object they find physically repellent or by an ideology or value system they find morally abhorrent. Different things will disgust different people, depending on individual sensibilities or cultural backgrounds. In Yuck!, Daniel Kelly investigates the character and evolution of disgust, with an emphasis on understanding the role this emotion has come to play in our social and moral lives. Disgust has recently been riding a swell of scholarly attention, especially from those in the cognitive sciences and those in the humanities in the midst of the “affective turn.” Kelly surveys the empirical literature and experimental results relevant to disgust and proposes a cognitive model that can accommodate what we now know about it. He offers a new account of the evolution of disgust that builds on the model and argues that expressions of disgust are part of a sophisticated but largely automatic signaling system that humans use to transmit information about what to avoid in the local environment. Drawing on gene culture coevolutionary theory, Kelly argues that disgust was co-opted to play certain roles in our moral psychology. He shows that many of the puzzling features of moral repugnance tinged with disgust are by-products of the imperfect fit between a cognitive system that evolved to protect against poisons and parasites and the social and moral issues on which it has been brought to bear. Kelly’s account of this emotion provides a powerful argument against invoking disgust in the service of moral justification.

See also: Author interview on “Life Matters,” ABC Radio National (Australia)

more books on “disgust” at amazon.com

Based on a search of WorldCat, here are books on “philosophy of mind” published or forthcoming in 2011:

Attention Is Cognitive Unison: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology (Philosophy of Mind Series) by Christopher Mole (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). (kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk)

The Contents of Visual Experience (Philosophy of Mind Series) by Susanna Siegel (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). (kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk)

Continuum Companion to Philosophy of Mind ed. by James Garvey (London; New York: Continuum, 2011). (amazon.co.uk)

Embodiment, Emotion, and Cognition by Michelle Maiese (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). (amazon.co.uk)

The Formation of Reason by David Bakhurst (Chichester, West Sussex; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). (amazon.co.uk)

The Language of Thought: A New Philosophical Direction by Susan Schneider (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011). (amazon.co.uk)

Laws, Mind, and Free Will (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology) by Steven W Horst (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011). (amazon.co.uk)

Like-Minded: Externalism and Moral Psychology by Andrew Sneddon (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011). [coming in Aug] (amazon.co.uk – Oct)

Meaning, Mind, and Matter: Philosophical Essays by Ernest LePore; Barry Loewer (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). (amazon.co.uk)

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind ed. by Brian P McLaughlin; Ansgar Beckermann; Sven Walter; (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). (Paperback ed. – originally published in hardcover in 2009) (amazon.co.uk)

Perplexities of Consciousness (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology) by Eric Schwitzgebel (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011). (kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk)

Phenomenal Consciousness: Understanding the Relation Between Experience and Neural Processes in the Brain by Dimitris Platchias (Montreal ; Ithaca [N.Y.]: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011). (amazon.co.uk)

Philosophy of Mind: A Comprehensive Introduction by William Jaworski (Chichester, West Sussex; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). (amazon.co.uk)

Semantic Externalism (New Problems of Philosophy) by Jesper Kallestrup (London: Routledge, 2011). [coming in Nov] (amazon.co.uk – Sep)

What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion (Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction) by Patrick Colm Hogan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). (kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk)

See also: Contemporary Philosophy of Mind: An Annotated Bibliography and “(Most important) books in the philosophy of mind,” both from David Chalmers