Books in the Philosophy of Mind Series series

In this challenging book, David Hodgson takes a fresh approach to the question of free will, contending that close consideration of human rationality and human consciousness shows that together they give us free will, in a robust and indeterministic sense, and in a way that is consistent with what science tells us about the world.

The present volume is the first to instead focus on the epistemology of non-visual perception-hearing, touch, taste, and cross-sensory experiences. Drawing on recent empirical studies of emotion, perception, and decision-making, it breaks new ground on discussions of whether or not perceptual experience can yield justified beliefs or knowledge and how to characterize those beliefs.

Gut reactions is an interdisciplinary defense of the claim that emotions are perceptions of changes in the body. The basic idea behind embodied appraisals is captured in the familiar notion of a "gut reaction". Drawing a parallel between emotion consciousness and visual consciousness, this title shows that emotion is a form of perception.

Desires lead to actions, influence feelings, and determine what counts as reward. Recent empirical evidence shows that these three aspects of desire stem from a common biological origin. Informed by contemporary science as much as by the philosophical tradition. Three Faces of Desire reveals this common foundation and builds a striking new philosophical theory of desire that puts desire's neglected face -- reward -- at its core. Schroeder dives into the way that actions and feelings are produced in the brain, arguing that a distinctive system is responsible for promoting action, on the one hand and causing feelings of pleasure and displeasure, on the other. This system, the brain's reward system is the causal origin of both action and feeling, and is the key to understanding the nature of desire.

Discussions of personal identity frequently ignore the basic metaphysical nature of human people. What Are We? is the first general study of this important question. It explains the question's meaning, considers in detail the main possible answers to it, and suggests how the problem might be solved.

Consciousness has long been regarded as the biggest stumbling block for the view that the mind is physical. This volume collects thirteen new papers on this problem by leading philosophers including Ned Block, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, Frabk Jackson, Joseph Levine, Laurence Nemirow, David Papineau, John Hawthorne, and five others.

What place does consciousness have in the natural world? If we reject materialism, could there even be a credible alternative? In A Place for Consciousness, Rosenberg addresses the casual role of consciousness in the world from an anti-physicalist perspective. Introducing a new paradigm called Liberal Naturalism, he offers a profound framework that proposes a deep link between consciousness and causation. Using this framework, he undercuts the logic of the historical debate and deflates the question of causality that physicalists have long been posing to anti-physicalists.

In this wide-ranging study, Levine explores both sides of the mind-body dilemma, presenting the first book-length treatment of his highly influential ideas on how one explains the physical nature of an experience. This puzzle, the 'explanatory gap' between mind and body, is the focus of this work by an influential scholar in the field.

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.

The senses, or sensory modalities, constitute the different ways we have of perceiving the world, such as seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. But how many senses are there? How many could there be? What makes the senses different? What interaction takes place between the senses? This book is a guide to thinking about these questions. Together with an extensive introduction to the topic, the book contains the key classic papers on this subject togetherwith nine newly commissioned essays.One reason that these questions are important is that we are receiving a huge influx of new information from the sciences that challenges some traditional philosophical views about the senses. This information needs to be incorporated into our view of the senses and perception. Can we do this whilst retaining our pre-existing concepts of the senses and of perception or do we need to revise our concepts? If they need to be revised, then in what way should that be done? Research in diverse areas,such as the nature of human perception, varieties of non-human animal perception, the interaction between different sensory modalities, perceptual disorders, and possible treatments for them, calls into question the platitude that there are five senses, as well as the pre-supposition that we knowwhat we are counting when we count them as five (or more).This book will serve as an inspiring introduction to the topic and as a basis from which further new research will grow.

This volume of new essays brings together philosophers representing many different perspectives to address central questions in the philosophy of perception.