Experiences and feelings are inherently conscious states. There is something it islike to feel pain, to have an itch, to experience bright red. Philosophers call this sort ofconsciousness "phenomenal
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 cent
How does time pass? Does time itself move, or is time's passage merely an illusion? Analytic philosophers belong, for the most part, to one of two camps on this question: the tensed camp, which defend
Hao Wang (1921-1995) was one of the few confidants of the great mathematician and logician Kurt Godel. A Logical Journey is a continuation of Wang's Reflections on Kurt Godel and also elaborates on di
Consciousness is arguably the most important area within contemporary philosophy ofmind and perhaps the most puzzling aspect of the world. Despite an explosion of research fromphilosophers, psychologi
Among the entities that can be mentally or linguistically represented are mental and linguistic representations themselves. That is, we can think and talk about speech and thought. This phenomenon is
A provocative ontological-cum-semantic position asserting that the right ontology isaustere in its exclusion of numerous common-sense and scientific posits and that many statementsemploying such posit
The body may be the object we know the best. It is the only object from which we constantly receive a flow of information through sight and touch; and it is the only object we can experience from the
Hilary Putnam, who may have been the first philosopher to advance the notion that thecomputer is an apt model for the mind, takes a radically new view of his own theory of functionalismin this book. P
One philosophical approach to causation sees counterfactual dependence as the key tothe explanation of causal facts: for example, events c (the cause) and e (the effect) both occur,but had c not occur
We are material beings in a material world, but we are also beings who have experiences and feelings. How can these subjective states be just a matter of matter? To defend materialism, philosophical m
One philosophical approach to causation sees counterfactual dependence as the key to the explanation of causal facts: for example, events c (the cause) and e (the effect) both occur, but had c not oc
In this major new work, John Searle launches a formidable attack on current orthodoxies in the philosophy of mind. More than anything else, he argues, it is the neglect of consciousness that results
