my mind on books

The Brain and the Meaning of Life by Paul Thagard (Princeton University Press, 2010).

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

Why is life worth living? What makes actions right or wrong? What is reality and how do we know it? The Brain and the Meaning of Life draws on research in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to answer some of the most pressing questions about life’s nature and value. Paul Thagard argues that evidence requires the abandonment of many traditional ideas about the soul, free will, and immortality, and shows how brain science matters for fundamental issues about reality, morality, and the meaning of life. The ongoing Brain Revolution reveals how love, work, and play provide good reasons for living.

Defending the superiority of evidence-based reasoning over religious faith and philosophical thought experiments, Thagard argues that minds are brains and that reality is what science can discover. Brains come to know reality through a combination of perception and reasoning. Just as important, our brains evaluate aspects of reality through emotions that can produce both good and bad decisions. Our cognitive and emotional abilities allow us to understand reality, decide effectively, act morally, and pursue the vital needs of love, work, and play. Wisdom consists of knowing what matters, why it matters, and how to achieve it.

The Brain and the Meaning of Life shows how brain science helps to answer questions about the nature of mind and reality, while alleviating anxiety about the difficulty of life in a vast universe. The book integrates decades of multidisciplinary research, but its clear explanations and humor make it accessible to the general reader.

See also: Website for the book, including a sample chapter and links to cited websites.

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion (Oxford Handbooks in Philosophy) ed. by Peter Goldie (Oxford University Press, 2010)

(link for UK – published Dec 2009)

Product description from the publisher:

This volume contains thirty-one state-of-the-art contributions from leading figures in the study of emotion today. The volume addresses all the central philosophical issues in current emotion research, including: the nature of emotion and of emotional life; the history of emotion from Plato to Sartre; emotion and practical reason; emotion and the self; emotion, value, and morality; and emotion, art and aesthetics.

Anyone interested in the philosophy of emotion, and its wide-ranging implications in other related fields such as morality and aesthetics, will want to consult this book. It will be a vital resource not only for scholars and graduate students but also for undergraduates who are finding their way into this fascinating topic

See also: Table of contents

The Oxford Handbook of Causation (Oxford Handbooks) ed. by Helen Beebee, Christopher Hitchcock and Peter Menzies (Oxford, 2010)

(link for UK – published Nov 2009)

Product description from the publisher:

Causation is a central topic in many areas of philosophy. In metaphysics, philosophers want to know what causation is, and how it is related to laws of nature, probability, action, and freedom of the will. In epistemology, philosophers investigate how causal claims can be inferred from statistical data, and how causation is related to perception, knowledge and explanation. In the philosophy of mind, philosophers want to know whether and how the mind can be said to have causal efficacy, and in ethics, whether there is a moral distinction between acts and omissions and whether the moral value of an act can be judged according to its consequences. And causation is a contested concept in other fields of enquiry, such as biology, physics, and the law.
This book provides an in-depth and comprehensive overview of these and other topics, as well as the history of the causation debate from the ancient Greeks to the logical empiricists. The chapters provide surveys of contemporary debates, while often also advancing novel and controversial claims; and each includes a comprehensive bibliography and suggestions for further reading. The book is thus the most comprehensive source of information about causation currently available, and will be invaluable for upper-level undergraduates through to professional philosophers.

Found via the Book Bench at the New Yorker:

Fall of Sleep by Jean-Luc Nancy, tr. Charlotte Mandell (Fordham University Press, 2009)

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

Philosophers have largely ignored sleep, treating it as a useless negativity, mere repose for the body or at best a source for the production of unconscious signs out of the night of the soul. In an extraordinary theoretical investigation written with lyric intensity, The Fall of Sleep puts an end to this neglect by providing a deft yet rigorous philosophy of sleep. What does it mean to “fall” asleep? Might there exist something like a “reason” of sleep, a reason at work in its own form or modality, a modality of being in oneself, of return to oneself, without the waking “self” that distinguishes “I” from “you” and from the world? What reason might exist in that absence of ego, appearance, and intention, in an abandon thanks to which one is emptied out into a non-place shared by everyone? Sleep attests to something like an equality of all that exists in the rhythm of the world. With sleep, victory is constantly renewed over the fear of night, an a confidence that we will wake with the return of day, in a return to self, to us–though to a self, an us, that is each day different, unforeseen, without any warning given in advance.To seek anew the meaning stirring in the supposed loss of meaning, of consciousness, and of control that occurs in sleep is not to reclaim some meaning already familiar in philosophy, religion, progressivism, or any other -ism. It is instead to open anew a source that is not the source of a meaning but that makes up the nature proper to meaning, its truth: opening, gushing forth, infinity.This beautiful, profound meditation on sleep is a unique work in the history of phenomenology–a lyrical phenomenology of what can have no phenomenology, since sleep shows itself to the waking observer, the subject of phenomenology, only as disappearance and concealment.

Supplementing a previous list of philosophy of mind titles, here are more books on philosophy of mind published in 2009, with a look ahead at some coming in 2010, based on a WorldCat search. Philosophy of mind may not be the main subject in every case, but it was at least one of the headings used in cataloging these books.

2009

Language, Reality and Mind: A Defense of Everyday Thought by Charles Crittenden (Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) (link for UK)

Mental Reality, Second Edition, with a new appendix (Representation and Mind) by Galen Strawson (MIT Press, 2009) [first ed published in 1994] (link for UK)

The Metaphysics of Mind (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy) by Michael Tye (Cambridge Univ Pr, 2009) [now in paperback, originally published in 1989] (link for UK)

The Minds of the Moderns: Rationalism, Empiricism, and Philosophy of Mind by Janice Thomas (Montreal ; Ithaca : McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009) (link for UK)

The Philosophy of Animal Minds by Robert W Lurz (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009) (link for UK)

Physical Realization by Sydney Shoemaker (Oxford Univ Pr 2009) [now in paperback, originally published in 2007](link for UK)

Plural Action: Essays in Philosophy and Social Science (Contributions To Phenomenology) by Hans Bernhard Schmid (Dordrecht; Berlin: Springer, 2009) [on “collective intentionality”] (link for UK)

Predicative Minds: The Social Ontogeny of Propositional Thinking (Bradford Books) by Radu J Bogdan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009) (link for UK)

Topics in Early Modern Philosophy of Mind (Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind) by Jon Miller ([Dordrecht] : Springer, 2009) (link for UK)

coming in 2010

Process Approaches to Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind by Michel Weber (State University of New York Press, 2010) [Jan 2010] (not found at amazon.co.uk)

The Disordered Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Mental Illness by George Graham (Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2009) [Feb 2010] (link for UK)

Physicalism (New Problems of Philosophy) by Daniel Stoljar (London : Routledge, 2009) [Feb 2010] (link for UK)

Philosophy of Mind (Critical Concepts in Philosophy) by Sean Crawford (London : Routledge, 2009) [April 2010] (link for UK)

Key Terms in Philosophy of Mind by Pete Mandik (Continuum, 2010) [May 2010] (link for UK) (some previews at author’s blog)

The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts by Alan Richardson (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) [June 2010] (not found at amazon.co.uk)

Mental Actions, edited by Lucy O’Brien and Matthew Soteriou (Oxford University Press, 2009)

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

This volume investigates the neglected topic of mental action, and shows its importance for the metaphysics, epistemology, and phenomenology of mind. Twelve specially written essays address such questions as the following: Which phenomena should we count as mental actions–imagining, remembering, judging, for instance? How should we explain our knowledge of our mental actions, and what light does that throw on self-knowledge in general? What contributions do mental actions make to our consciousness? What is the relationship between the voluntary and the active, in the mental sphere? What are the similarities and differences between mental and physical action, and what can we learn about each from the other?

Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Introduction, Matthew Soteriou (Warwick University)
Chapter 2 Mental Action: A Case Study, Al Mele (Florida State University)
Chapter 3 Judging and the Scope of Mental Agency, Fabian Dorsch (University of Fribourg, Switzerland)
Chapter 4 Reason in Action, John Gibbons (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Chapter 5 Reason, Voluntariness and Moral Responsibility, Thomas Pink (King’s College London)
Chapter 6 Freedom and Practical Judgement, David Owens (University of Sheffield)
Chapter 7 Two Kinds of Agency, Pamela Hieronymi (University of California, Los Angeles)
Chapter 8 Trying and Acting, Brian O’Shaughnessy (King’s College London)
Chapter 9 Perceptual Activity and the Will, Thomas Crowther (Heythrop College, University of London)
Chapter 10 Mental Action and Self-Awareness (II): Epistemology, Christopher Peacocke (Columbia University)
Chapter 11 Mental Actions and the No-Content Problem, Lucy O’Brien (University College London)
Chapter 12 Mental Agency, Conscious Thinking and Phenomenal Character, Matthew Soteriou (Warwick University)
Chapter 13 Is There a Sense of Agency for Thought? Joelle Proust (Institut Nicod)

See also: Mental Action section of MindPapers – includes a link to the article by Christopher Peacocke