Empiricism And The Philosophy Of Mind

Download or read book Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind written by Wilfrid Sellars and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1997-03-25 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most important work by one of America's greatest twentieth-century philosophers, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind is both the epitome of Wilfrid Sellars' entire philosophical system and a key document in the history of philosophy. First published in essay form in 1956, it helped bring about a sea change in analytic philosophy. It broke the link, which had bound Russell and Ayer to Locke and Hume--the doctrine of "knowledge by acquaintance." Sellars' attack on the Myth of the Given in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind was a decisive move in turning analytic philosophy away from the foundationalist motives of the logical empiricists and raised doubts about the very idea of "epistemology." With an introduction by Richard Rorty to situate the work within the history of recent philosophy, and with a study guide by Robert Brandom, this publication of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind makes a difficult but indisputably significant figure in the development of analytic philosophy clear and comprehensible to anyone who would understand that philosophy or its history.

Download or read book The Minds of the Moderns written by Janice Thomas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-05 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a comprehensive examination of the ideas of the early modern philosophers on the nature of mind. Taking Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume in turn, Janice Thomas presents an authoritative and critical assessment of each of these canonical thinkers' views of the notion of mind. The book examines each philosopher's position on five key topics: the metaphysical character of minds and mental states; the nature and scope of introspection and self-knowledge; the nature of consciousness; the problem of mental causation and the nature of representation and intentionality. The exposition and examination of their positions is informed by present-day debates in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of psychology so that students get a clear sense of the importance of these philosophers' ideas, many of which continue to define our current notions of the mental.Again and again, philosophers and students alike come back to the great early modern rationalist and empiricist philosophers for instruction and inspiration. Their views on the philosophy of mind are no exception and as Janice Thomas shows they have much to offer contemporary debates. The book is suitable for undergraduate courses in the philosophy of mind and the many new courses in philosophy of psychology.

Download or read book Peirce's Empiricism written by Aaron Bruce Wilson and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-10-19 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely praised as a founder of modern semiotics and of the pragmatist tradition in philosophy, Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) spent over forty years developing a philosophical system that addresses the fundamental problems of Western metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory. Although never formally completed, what emerges from Peirce’s writings is a distinctive system, through an innovative semiotic or theory of signs and cognition, that combines with a robustly realist metaphysics that emphasizes the mind-independence of laws and other universals. Peirce’s Empiricism: Its Roots and Its Originality explains this marriage of empiricism with realism by tracing the roots of Peirce’s thought in the history of Western philosophy, with particular attention paid to his predecessors in the empiricist and the common sense traditions. By purging modern empiricism of its nominalistic metaphysics and its Cartesian assumptions about mind and knowledge, and by combining it with insights from sources as diverse as Duns Scotus and Charles Darwin, Peirce reinvents the idea that all our knowledge depends on sense perception while reaffirming the place of philosophy as a foundational field of inquiry. In Peirce’s Empiricism, Aaron Bruce Wilson defends an interpretation of Peirce’s philosophical work as forming a systematic whole, and develops the connections between Peirce, Reid, and the British empiricists. Wilson provides focused analyses of Peirce’s accounts of experience, habit, perception, semeiosis, truth, and ultimate ends. This book will be of great value to students and scholars with interests in Peirce, American philosophy more broadly, modern philosophy, and semiotics.

Download or read book Furnishing the Mind written by Jesse J. Prinz and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004-08-20 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Western philosophy has long been divided between empiricists, who argue that human understanding has its basis in experience, and rationalists, who argue that reason is the source of knowledge. A central issue in the debate is the nature of concepts, the internal representations we use to think about the world. The traditional empiricist thesis that concepts are built up from sensory input has fallen out of favor. Mainstream cognitive science tends to echo the rationalist tradition, with its emphasis on innateness. In Furnishing the Mind, Jesse Prinz attempts to swing the pendulum back toward empiricism. Prinz provides a critical survey of leading theories of concepts, including imagism, definitionism, prototype theory, exemplar theory, the theory theory, and informational atomism. He sets forth a new defense of concept empiricism that draws on philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology and introduces a new version of concept empiricism called proxytype theory. He also provides accounts of abstract concepts, intentionality, narrow content, and concept combination. In an extended discussion of innateness, he covers Noam Chomsky's arguments for the innateness of grammar, developmental psychologists' arguments for innate cognitive domains, and Jerry Fodor's argument for radical concept nativism.

Download or read book From Empiricism to Expressivism written by Robert Brandom and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-06 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wilfrid Sellars ranks as one of the leading critics of empiricism—a philosophical approach to knowledge that seeks to ground it in human sense experience. Robert Brandom clarifies what Sellars had in mind when he talked about moving analytic philosophy from its Humean to its Kantian phase and why such a move might be of crucial importance today.

Download or read book In the Space of Reasons written by Wilfrid Sellars and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sellars (1912-1989) was, in the opinion of many, the most important American philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. This collection, coedited by Sellars's chief interpreter and intellectual heir, should do much to elucidate and clearly establish the significance of this difficult thinker's vision for contemporary philosophy.

Download or read book Wilfrid Sellars written by James O'Shea and published by Polity. This book was released on 2007-04-23 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The work of the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars continues to have a significant impact on the contemporary philosophical scene. His writings have influenced major thinkers such as Rorty, McDowell, Brandom, and Dennett, and many of Sellars basic conceptions, such as the logical space of reasons, the myth of the given, and the manifest and scientific images, have become standard philosophical terms. Often, however, recent uses of these terms do not reflect the richness or the true sense of Sellars original ideas. This book gets to the heart of Sellars philosophy and provides students with a comprehensive critical introduction to his lifes work. The book is structured around what Sellars himself regarded as the philosophers overarching task: to achieve a coherent vision of reality that will finally overcome the continuing clashes between the world as common sense takes it to be and the world as science reveals it to be. It provides a clear analysis of Sellars groundbreaking philosophy of mind, his novel theory of consciousness, his defense of scientific realism, and his thoroughgoing naturalism with a normative turn. Providing a lively examination of Sellars work through the central problem of what it means to be a human being in a scientific world, this book will be a valuable resource for all students of philosophy.