my mind on books

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

Why Red Doesn’t Sound Like a Bell: Understanding the Feel of Consciousness by J. Kevin O’Regan (Oxford University Press USA, 2011)

(amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

This book proposes a novel view to explain how we as humans — contrary to current robots — can have the impression of consciously feeling things: for example the red of a sunset, the smell of a rose, the sound of a symphony, or a pain.

The book starts off by looking at visual perception. Our ability to see turns out to be much more mysterious than one might think. The eye contains many defects which should seriously interfere with vision. Yet we have the impression of seeing the world in glorious panavision and technicolor. Explaining how this can be the case leads to a new idea about what seeing really is. Seeing is not passively receiving information in the brain, but rather a way of interacting with the world. The role of the brain is not to create visual sensation, but to enable the necessary interactions with the world.

This new approach to seeing is extended in the second part of the book to encompass the other senses: hearing, touch, taste and smell. Taking sensory experiences to be modes of interacting with the world explains why these experiences are different in the way they are. It also explains why thoughts or automatic functions in the body, and indeed the vast majority brain functions, are not accompanied by any real feeling.

The “sensorimotor” approach is not simply a philosophical argument: It leads to scientifically verifiable predictions and new research directions. Among these are the phenomena of change blindness, sensory substitution, “looked but failed to see”, as well as results on color naming and color perception and the localisation of touch on the body.

The approach is relevant to the question of what animals and babies can feel, and to understanding what will be necessary for robots to become conscious.

See also: Author’s website, PhilPapers