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32Realism in the Refutation of IdealismProceedings of the Eighth International Kant Congress 2 313-320. 1995.
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71Knowledge and Mind: A Philosophical IntroductionBradford. 2000.This is the only contemporary text to cover both epistemology and philosophy of mind at an introductory level. It also serves as a general introduction to philosophy: it discusses the nature and methods of philosophy as well as basic logical tools of the trade. The book is divided into three parts. The first focuses on knowledge, in particular, skepticism and knowledge of the external world, and knowledge of language. The second focuses on mind, including the metaphysics of mind and freedom of w…Read more
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31Sense of fairness: Not by itself a moral sense and not a foundation of a lot of moralityBehavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (1). 2013.Baumard et al. make a good case that a sense of fairness evolved and that showing this requires reciprocity games with choice of partner. However, they oversimplify both morality and the evolution of morality. Where fairness is involved in morality, other things are, too, and fairness is often not involved. In the evolution of morality, other things played a role. Plus, the motive for being fair originally was self-interest, not anything moral
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101Jackendoff and consciousnessPragmatics and Cognition 4 (1): 81-92. 1996.In "How language helps us think", Jackendoff explores some of the relationships between language, consciousness, and thought, with a foray into attention and focus. In this paper, we will concentrate on his treatment of consciousness. We will examine three aspects of it: I. the method he uses to arrive at his views; 2. the extent to which he offers us a theory of consciousness adequate to assess his views; and 3. some of the things that we might need to add to what he offers to achieve an adequa…Read more
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491The unity of consciousnessConsciousness and Cognition 9 (2). 2000.Human consciousness usually displays a striking unity. When one experiences a noise and, say, a pain, one is not conscious of the noise and then, separately, of the pain. One is conscious of the noise and pain together, as aspects of a single conscious experience. Since at least the time of Immanuel Kant (1781/7), this phenomenon has been called the unity of consciousness . More generally, it is consciousness not of A and, separately, of B and, separately, of C, but of A-and-B- and-C together, a…Read more
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19Jackendoff on consciousnessPragmatics and Cognition 4 (1): 81-92. 1995.In "How language helps us think", Jackendoff explores some of the relationships between language, consciousness, and thought, with a foray into attention and focus. In this paper, we will concentrate on his treatment of consciousness. We will examine three aspects of it: I. the method he uses to arrive at his views; 2. the extent to which he offers us a theory of consciousness adequate to assess his views; and 3. some of the things that we might need to add to what he offers to achieve an adequa…Read more
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58Though there has been a huge resurgence of interest in consciousness in the past decade, little attention has been paid to what the philosopher Immanuel Kant and others call the unity of consciousness. The unity of consciousness takes different forms, as we will see, but the general idea is that each of us is aware of many things in the world at the same time, and often many of one's own mental states and of oneself as their single common subject, too.
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105Fodor's new theory of content and computationMind and Language 12 (3-4): 459-74. 1997.In his recent book, The Elm and the Expert, Fodor attempts to reconcile the computational model of human cognition with information‐theoretic semantics, the view that semantic, and mental, content consists of nothing more than causal or nomic relationships, between words and the world, or (roughly) brain states and the world. In this paper, we do not challenge the project. Nor do we show that Fodor has failed to carry it out. instead, we urge that his analysis, when made explicit, turns out rath…Read more
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77Phenomenology: Contribution to cognitive scienceAbstracta SPECIAL ISSUE II, Pp. 54 – 70, 2008 (3): 54-70. 2008.My comments will focus on the issue of what, according to Gallagher and Zahavi (2008, hereafter G&Z; all references will be to this book unless otherwise noted), the phenomenological approach can contribute to the cognitive sciences (including cognitive neuroscience), one of their major themes. Toward the end of the paper, I will say something about a second major theme of theirs, the relationship of phenomenology to philosophy of mind. Conventional wisdom within cognitive science has it is that…Read more
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47Judgments and drafts eight years laterIn Don Ross, Andrew Brook & David Thompson (eds.), Dennett’s Philosophy: A Comprehensive Assessment, Mit Press. 2000.Now that some years have passed, how does this picture of consciousness look? On the one hand, Dennett's work has vastly expanded the range of options for thinking about conscious experiences and conscious subjects. On the other hand, I suspect that the implications of his picture have been oversold (perhaps more by others than by Dennett himself). The rhetoric of _CE_ is radical in places but I do not sure that the actual implications for commonsense views of Seemings and Subjects are nearly as…Read more
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254Cognition and the Brain: The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2005.This volume provides an up to date and comprehensive overview of the philosophy and neuroscience movement, which applies the methods of neuroscience to traditional philosophical problems and uses philosophical methods to illuminate issues in neuroscience. At the heart of the movement is the conviction that basic questions about human cognition, many of which have been studied for millennia, can be answered only by a philosophically sophisticated grasp of neuroscience's insights into the processi…Read more
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111Review of 'The Unity of Consciousness', by Tim Bayne (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (3): 599-602. 2012.Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Volume 0, Issue 0, Page 1-4, Ahead of Print
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211Making consciousness safe for neuroscienceIn Andrew Brook & Kathleen Akins (eds.), Cognition and the Brain: The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement, Cambridge University Press. pp. 397. 2005.
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34Kant: A unified representational base for all consciousnessIn Uriah Kriegel & Kenneth Williford (eds.), Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness, Mit Press. pp. 89-109. 2006.
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9Jackendoff on consciousnessPragmatics and Cognition 4 (1): 81-92. 1996.In "How language helps us think", Jackendoff explores some of the relationships between language, consciousness, and thought, with a foray into attention and focus. In this paper, we will concentrate on his treatment of consciousness. We will examine three aspects of it: I. the method he uses to arrive at his views; 2. the extent to which he offers us a theory of consciousness adequate to assess his views; and 3. some of the things that we might need to add to what he offers to achieve an adequa…Read more
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39Further routes to psychological constructionismBehavioral and Brain Sciences 35 (3): 153-154. 2012.In this commentary, we do two things. First, we sketch two further routes to psychological constructionism. They are complementary to Lindquist et al.'s meta-analyses and have potential to add new evidence. Second, we look at a challenging kind of case for constructionism, namely, emotional anomalies where there are correlated, and probably relevant, brain anomalies. Psychopaths are our example
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35Fodor's New Theory of Content and ComputationMind and Language 12 (3-4): 459-474. 1997.In his recent book, The Elm and the Expert, Fodor attempts to reconcile the computational model of human cognition with information‐theoretic semantics, the view that semantic, and mental, content consists of nothing more than causal or nomic relationships, between words and the world, or (roughly) brain states and the world. In this paper, we do not challenge the project. Nor do we show that Fodor has failed to carry it out. instead, we urge that his analysis, when made explicit, turns out rath…Read more
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105The Appearance of ThingsIn Andrew Brook & Don Ross (eds.), Daniel Dennett, Cambridge University Press. pp. 41. 2002.
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270Kant, self-awareness, and self-referenceIn Andrew Brook & R. DeVidi (eds.), Self-Reference and Self-Awareness, John Benjamins. pp. 9--30. 2001.
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44Kant's A Priori Methods for Recognizing Necessary TruthsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 22 (sup1): 215-252. 1992.
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4Jerome Neu, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Freud Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 13 (1): 43-45. 1993.
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102Unified consciousness and the selfJournal of Consciousness Studies (5-6): 5-6. 2002.I am in complete sympathy with Galen Strawson's conclusions in ‘The Self’ . He takes a careful, measured approach to a topic that lends itself all too easily to speculation and intellectual extravaganzas. The results are for the most part balanced and plausible. I am even in sympathy with his claim that a memory-produced sense of continuity over time is less central to selfhood than many researchers think, though he may go too far in the opposite direction. Thus my purpose in these comments is n…Read more
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108Neuroscience versus psychology in FreudAnnals of the New York Academy of Sciences 843 (1): 66-79. 1998.In the 1890's, Freud attempted to lay out the foundations of a complete, interdisciplinary neuroscience of the mind. The conference that gave rise to this collection of papers, Neuroscience of the Mind on the Centennial of Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology, celebrated the centrepiece of this work, the famous Project (1895a). Freud never published this work and by 1896 or 1897 he had abandoned the research programme behind it. As he announced in the famous Ch. VII of The Interpretation …Read more
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