An introduction and summary of "The Mind's Construction: The Ontology of Mind and Mental Action" By Matthew Soteriou 2013 Philosophers working on the ontology of mind have highlighted various distinctions that can be drawn between the ways in which different aspects of our minds fill time. For example, they note that whereas some elements of our mental lives obtain over time, others unfold over time, and some continue to occur throughout intervals of time. Matthew Soteriou explores ways in...

An introduction and summary of "Consciousness, Attention, and Conscious Attention" By Carlos Montemayor, Harry Haroutioun Haladjian 2015 A rigorous analysis of current empirical and theoretical work supporting the argument that consciousness and attention are largely dissociated.In this book, Carlos Montemayor and Harry Haladjian consider the relationship between consciousness and attention. The cognitive mechanism of attention has often been compared to consciousness, because attention and...

An introduction and summary of "Mental Representation and Consciousness: Towards a Phenomenological Theory of Representation and Reference" By Eduard Marbach 1993 Conditions of the possibility of Experience ... must mean nothing else than all that which lies immanently in the essence of Experience ... and therefore belongs to it indispensably. The essence of Experience that phenomenological analysis of Experience elucidates is the same as the possibility of Experience, and all that which is...

An introduction and summary of "Think Again The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know" By Adam Grant 2021 We need to spend as much time rethinking as we do thinking.Why do we refresh our wardrobes every year, renovate our kitchens every decade, but never update our beliefs and our views? Why do we laugh at people using computers that are ten years old, but yet still cling to opinions we formed ten years ago?For too many of us, our ways of thinking become habits that we don't bother to...

An introduction and summary of "On Myself, and Other, Less Important Subjects" By Caspar Hare 2009 Caspar Hare makes an original and compelling case for "egocentric presentism," a view about the nature of first-person experience, about what happens when we see things from our own particular point of view. A natural thought about our first-person experience is that "all and only the things of which I am aware are present to me." Hare, however, goes one step further and claims,...

An introduction and summary of "The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience" By David Papineau 2021 What are the materials of conscious perceptual experience? What is going on when we are consciously aware of a visual scene, or hear sounds, or otherwise enjoy sensory experience? In this book David Papineau exposes the flaws in contemporary answers to this central philosophical question and defends a new alternative.Contemporary theories of perceptual experience all hold that conscious experiences...

An introduction and summary of "How the Body Shapes the Mind"By Shaun Gallagher 2006 How the Body Shapes the Mind is an interdisciplinary work that addresses philosophical questions by appealing to evidence found in experimental psychology, neuroscience, studies of pathologies, and developmental psychology. There is a growing consensus across these disciplines that the contribution of embodiment to cognition is inescapable. Because this insight has been developed across a variety of...

An introduction and summary of "How Religion Evolved And Why It Endures" By Robin Dunbar 2022 A fascinating analysis of the evolution of religion from the internationally renowned evolutionary psychologistWhen did humans develop spiritual thought? What is religion's evolutionary purpose? And in our increasingly secular world, why has it endured?Every society in the history of humanity has lived with religion. In How Religion Evolved, evolutionary psychologist Professor Robin Dunbar tracks...

An introduction and summary of "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" By Nassim Nicholas Taleb 2007 The Black Swan is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, Antifragile, and The Bed of Procrustes.A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal...

An introduction and summary of "Mechanisms and Consciousness Integrating Phenomenology with Cognitive Science" By Marek Pokropski 2021 This book develops a new approach to naturalizing phenomenology. The author proposes to integrate phenomenology with the mechanistic framework that offers new methodological perspectives for studying complex mental phenomena such as consciousness. While mechanistic explanatory models are widely applied in cognitive science, their approach to describing...

An introduction and summary of "Actual Consciousness" By Ted Honderich 2014 What is it for you to be conscious? There is no agreement whatever in philosophy or science: it has remained a hard problem, a mystery. Is this partly or mainly owed to the existing theories not even having the same subject, not answering the same question? In Actual Consciousness, Ted Honderich sets out to supersede dualisms, objective physicalisms, abstract functionalism, general externalisms, and other positions...

An introduction and summary of "Extending the Extended MindFrom Cognition to Consciousness" By Pii Telakivi 2023This book argues that conscious experience is sometimes extended outside the brain and body into certain kinds of environmental interaction and tool use. It shows that if one accepts that cognitive states can extend, one must also accept that consciousness can extend. The proponents of Extended Mind defend the former claim, but usually oppose the latter claim. The most important...

An introduction and summary of "Darwin's Dangerous IdeaEvolution and the Meanings of Life" By Daniel C. Dennett 1996In Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life Daniel C. Dennett argues that the theory of evolution can demystify the miracles of life without devaluing our most cherished beliefs.From the moment it first appeared, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection has been controversial: misrepresented, abused, denied and fiercely debated. In this...

An introduction and summary of "Waking Up A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion" By Sam Harris 2015For the millions of Americans who want spirituality without religion, Sam Harris’s latest New York Times bestseller is a guide to meditation as a rational practice informed by neuroscience and psychology.From Sam Harris, neuroscientist and author of numerous New York Times bestselling books, Waking Up is for the twenty percent of Americans who follow no religion but who suspect that important...

An introduction and summary of "War in the Age of Intelligent Machines" By Manuel DeLanda 1991In the aftermath of the methodical destruction of Iraq during the Persian Gulf War, the power and efficiency of new computerized weapons and surveillance technology have become chillingly apparent. For Manuel DeLanda, however, this new weaponry has a significance that goes far beyond military applications; he shows how it represents a profound historical shift in the relation of human beings both to...

An introduction and summary of "Being and Time" By Martin Heidegger 1927 Being and Time (German: Sein und Zeit) is the 1927 magnum opus of German philosopher Martin Heidegger and a key document of existentialism. Being and Time is among the most influential texts of 20th century philosophy. It had a notable impact on subsequent philosophy, literary theory and many other fields. Though controversial, its stature in intellectual history has been compared with works by Kant and Hegel. The book...

An introduction and summary of "The puzzle of experience" By J. J. Valberg 1992 If we reason in a certain way about our experience, we are driven to the conclusion that what is present to us - the object of our experience - is something that exists only in so far as it is present, hence that it is not part of the world. If, on the other hand, we simply open up to our experience, all we find is the world. This book sets out both to explain why we are entangled in this puzzle and to consider...

An introduction and summary of "The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence In History And Its Causes" By Steven Pinker 2011Wasn't the twentieth century the most violent in history? In his extraordinary, epic book Steven Pinker shows us that this is wrong, telling the story of humanity in a completely new and unfamiliar way. From why cities make us safer to how books bring about peace, Pinker weaves together history, philosophy and science to examine why we are less likely to die...

An introduction and summary of "Seeing Things as They are: A Theory of Perception" By John R. Searle 2015This book provides a comprehensive account of the intentionality of perceptual experience. With special emphasis on vision Searle explains how the raw phenomenology of perception sets the content and the conditions of satisfaction of experience. The central question concerns the relation between the subjective conscious perceptual field and the objective perceptual field. Everything in the...

An introduction and summary of "Thought in a hostile world" By Kim Sterelny2003Thought in a Hostile World is an exploration of the evolution of cognition, especially human cognition, by one of today's foremost philosophers of biology and of mind.The central idea of the book is that thought is a response to threat. Competitors and enemies make life hard by their direct physical effects. But they also make life hard by eroding epistemic conditions. They lie. They hide themselves. They seem...

An introduction and summary of "How infants know minds" By Vasudevi Reddy 2008Most psychologists claim that we begin to develop a “theory of mind”—some basic ideas about other people’s minds—at age two or three, by inference, deduction, and logical reasoning.But does this mean that small babies are unaware of minds? That they see other people simply as another (rather dynamic and noisy) kind of object? This is a common view in developmental psychology. Yet, as this book explains, there is...

An introduction and summary of "The Paradox of False Belief UnderstandingThe Role of Cognitive and Situational Factors for the Development of Social Cognition" By Julia Wolf 2021 Our ability to understand others is one of the most central parts of human life, but explaining how this ability develops remains a controversial issue, exercising psychologists and philosophers alike. Within this literature the Paradox of False Belief Understanding remains one of the main open challenges. Based on...

An introduction and summary of "The Phenomenology of Spirit” By Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1807 The Phenomenology of Spirit is the most widely discussed philosophical work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel; its German title can be translated as either The Phenomenology of Spirit or The Phenomenology of Mind. Hegel described the work, published in 1807, as an "exposition of the coming to be of knowledge”. This is explicated through a necessary self-origination and dissolution of "the...

An introduction and summary of "Thinking Without Words" By José Luis Bermúdez 2007Thinking without Words provides a challenging new theory of the nature of non-linguistic thought. Many scientific disciplines treat non-linguistic creatures as thinkers, explaining their behavior in terms of their thoughts about themselves and about the environment. But this theorizing has proceeded without any clear account of the types of thinking available to non-linguistic creatures. One consequence of this...