Books in the Philosophy of Mind series

The author of this text offers a theory of consciousness. He proposes that conscious experience must be understood as an irreducible entity similar to such physical properties as time, mass, and space that exists at a fundamental level and cannot be understood as the sum of its parts.

In this book David Chalmers follows up and extends his thoughts and arguments on the nature of consciousness that he first set forth in his groundbreaking 1996 book, The Conscious Mind.

This title argues that our conception of consciousness is based upon fundamental errors. It discusses three important philosophical puzzles, each of which presents the same problem. In highlighting this, the errors in our conception of consciousness and cognition are also revealed.

Reconsidering the nativist position toward the mind, this text demonstrates that nativism is an unstable amalgam of two different theses about the mind. It examines recent empirical evidence from developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, computer science, and linguistics.

A collection of the author's essays on such topics as the scientific explanation of consciousness, the moral socialization of children, and the nature and issues of psychological phenomena such as multiple personality disorder and false memory syndrome.

Most philosophers writing about personal identity claim that what it takes for us to persist through time is a matter of psychology. This text argues that such approaches face daunting problems, and defends in their place a radically non-psychological account of personal identity.

This book discusses the lives of major 20th-century philosophers, topics in the philosophy of mind, and ethics. It is accessible to the general reader who wants to know what has happened in philosophy in the last two decades.

In this book, Stich unravels - or deconstructs - the doctrine called "eliminativism". Eliminativism claims that beliefs, desires, and many other mental states we use to describe the mind do not exist, but are fiction posits of a badly mistaken theory of "folk psychology". Stich makes a u-turn in his book, opening up new and controversial positions.

In this text, the author provides both an accessible survey of the latest research on sleep and dreams and a theory about the nature and function of dreaming. Flanagan argues that while sleep has a clear biological function and adaptive value, dreams are merely side effects.

Robert Rupert argues against the view that human cognitive processes comprise elements beyond the boundary of the organism, developing a systems-based conception in place of this extended view. He also argues for a conciliatory understanding of the relation between the computational approach to cognition and the embedded and embodied views

Why does the world look to us as it does? As Nico Orlandi argues, it is simply because of how the world is. This answer emerges from understanding vision as situated in a structured environment, and it contrasts with the view that visual perception involves an inference.

In this book, Derk Pereboom explores how physicalism might best be formulated and defended against the best anti-physicalist arguments.