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Most philosophical explorations of responsibility discuss the topic solely in terms of metaphysics and the “free will” problem. By contrast, the chapters in this book view responsibility from a variety of perspectives: Metaphysics, ethics, action theory, and the philosophy of law. After a broad, framing introduction by the book’s editors, the contributors consider such subjects as responsibility as it relates to the “free will” problem; the relation between responsibility and knowledge or ignorance; the relation between causal and moral responsibility; the difference, if any, between responsibility for actions and responsibility for omissions; the metaphysical requirements for making sense of “collective” responsibility; and the relation between moral and legal responsibility.

Addictive behavior threatens not just the addict’s happiness and health but also the welfare and well-being of others. It represents a loss of self-control and a variety of other cognitive impairments and behavioral deficits. An addict may say, “I couldn’t help myself.” But questions arise: Are we responsible for our addictions? What responsibilities do others have to help us? This book offers a range of perspectives on addiction and responsibility, and how the two are bound together. Contributors—from theorists to clinicians, from neuroscientists and psychologists to philosophers and legal scholars—discuss these questions using a variety of conceptual and investigative tools. Some offer models of addiction-related phenomena, including theories of incentive sensitization, ego-depletion, and pathological affect; others address such traditional philosophical questions as free will and agency, mind–body, and other minds. Two chapters, written by scholars who were themselves addicts, attempt to integrate first-person phenomenological accounts with the third-person perspective of the sciences. Contributors distinguish among moral responsibility, legal responsibility, and the ethical responsibility of clinicians and researchers. Taken together, the chapters offer the argument that we cannot fully understand addiction if we do not also understand responsibility.

This book charts a journey that ranges from poems of chivalry to philosophy, from Yvain to Hegel, from Beatrice to Heidegger. An ancient legend identifies Demon, Chance, Love, and Necessity as the four gods who preside over the birth of every human being. We must all pay tribute to these deities and should not try to elude or dupe them. To accept them, the book suggests, is to live one's life as an adventure—not in the trivial sense of the term, with lightness and disenchantment, but with the understanding that adventure, as a specific way of being, is the most profound experience in our human existence. The four gods of legend are joined at the end by a goddess, the most elusive and mysterious of all: Elpis, Hope. In Greek mythology, Hope remains in Pandora's box, not because it postpones its fulfillment to an invisible beyond but because somehow it has always been already satisfied. Here, the book presents Hope as the ultimate gift of the human adventure on Earth.

This book offers a decoder for some of the new forms of poetry enabled by digital technology. Examining many of the strange technological vectors converging on language, it proposes a poetics appropriate to the digital era while connecting digital poetry to traditional poetry’s concerns with being (a.k.a. ontological implications). Digital poetry, in this context, is not simply a descendent of the book. Digital poems are not necessarily “poems” or written by “poets”; they are found in ads, conceptual art, interactive displays, performative projects, games, or apps. Poetic tools include algorithms, browsers, social media, and data. Code blossoms into poetic objects and poetic proto-organisms. Introducing the terms TAVs (Textual-Audio-Visuals) and TAVITS (Textual-Audio-Visual-Interactives), Aesthetic Animism theorizes a relation between scientific method and literary analysis; considers the temporal implications of animation software; and links software studies to creative writing. Above all it introduces many examples of digital poetry within a playful yet considered flexible taxonomy. In the future imagined here, digital poets program, sculpt, and nourish immense immersive interfaces of semi-autonomous word ecosystems. Poetry, enhanced by code and animated by sensors, reengages themes active at the origin of poetry: animism, agency, consciousness. Digital poetry will be perceived as living, because it is living.

While many commentators have pointed to the lack of compassion and empathy in medicine, their critiques, for the most part, have not considered seriously the deeper philosophical, psychological, and ontological reasons why clinicians and medical students might choose to conceive of medicine as an endeavor concerned solely with the biological workings of the body. Thus, this book examines why it is that existential suffering tends to be overlooked in medical practice and education, as well as the ways in which contemporary medical epistemology and pedagogy not only perpetuate but are indeed shaped by the human tendency to flee from the reality of death and vulnerability. It also explores how students and doctors perceive medicine, including what it means to be a doctor and what responsibilities doctors have toward addressing existential suffering. Contending that the being of the physician is constituted by the other who calls out to her in his suffering, this book argues that the doctor is, in fact, called to attend to suffering that extends beyond the biological. It also discusses how future physicians might be “brought back to themselves” and oriented toward a deeper sense of care through a pedagogy that encourages intentional reflection and values the cultivation of the self, openness to vulnerability, and a fuller conception of what it means to be a healer.

Against facts argues that we have no good reason to accept facts in our catalog of the world, at least as they are described by the two major metaphysical theories of facts. Neither of these theories is tenable—neither the theory according to which facts are special structured building blocks of reality nor the theory according to which facts are whatever is named by certain expressions of the form “the fact that such and such.” There is reality, and there are entities in reality that we are able to name, but among these entities there are no facts. Drawing on metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and linguistics, Against facts examines the main arguments in favor of and against facts of the two major sorts, distinguished as compositional and propositional, giving special attention to methodological presuppositions. Compositional facts (facts as special structured building blocks of reality) and the central argument for them, Armstrong’s truthmaker argument are criticized in part I. Propositional facts (facts as whatever is named in “the fact that” statements) and what Against facts calls the argument from nominal reference, which draws on a Quine-like criterion of ontological commitment, are criticized in part II. Against facts argues that metaphysicians should stop worrying about facts, and philosophers in general should stop arguing for or against entities on the basis of how we use language.

This book launches a spirited attack on a system that is profoundly entrenched in our society and its institutions, deeply rooted in our emotions, and vigorously defended by philosophers from ancient times to the present. The book argues that, despite the creative defenses of it by contemporary thinkers, moral responsibility cannot survive in our naturalistic-scientific system. The scientific understanding of human behavior and the causes that shape human character, it contends, leaves no room for moral responsibility. The book argues that moral responsibility in all its forms—including criminal justice, distributive justice, and all claims of just deserts—is fundamentally unfair and harmful and that its abolition will be liberating and beneficial. What we really want—natural human free will, moral judgments, meaningful human relationships, creative abilities—would survive and flourish without moral responsibility. In the course of this argument, the book examines the origins of the basic belief in moral responsibility, proposes a naturalistic understanding of free will, offers a detailed argument against moral responsibility and critiques arguments in favor of it, gives a general account of what a world without moral responsibility would look like, and examines the social and psychological aspects of abolishing moral responsibility. It not only mounts a vigorous attack on the moral responsibility system, but also celebrates the benefits that would result from its total abolition.

In 1988, Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn challenged connectionist theorists to explain the systematicity of cognition. In a highly influential critical analysis of connectionism, they argued that connectionist explanations, at best, can only inform us about details of the neural substrate; explanations at the cognitive level must be classical insofar as adult human cognition is essentially systematic. More than twenty-five years later, however, conflicting explanations of cognition do not divide along classicist-connectionist lines, but oppose cognitivism (both classicist and connectionist) with a range of other methodologies, including distributed and embodied cognition, ecological psychology, enactivism, adaptive behavior, and biologically based neural network theory. This volume reassesses Fodor and Pylyshyn's “systematicity challenge” for a post-connectionist era. The contributors consider such questions as how post-connectionist approaches meet Fodor and Pylyshyn's conceptual challenges; whether there is empirical evidence for or against the systematicity of thought; and how the systematicity of human thought relates to behavior. The chapters offer a representative sample and an overview of the most important recent developments in the systematicity debate.

This book describes and defends an ontological-cum-semantic position, asserting that the right ontology is minimal or austere, in that it excludes numerous common-sense posits, and that statements employing such posits are nonetheless true, when truth is understood to be semantic correctness under contextually operative semantic standards. The chapters argue that austere realism emerges naturally from consideration of the deep problems within the naive common-sense approach to truth and ontology. They offer an account of truth that confronts these deep internal problems and is independently plausible: contextual semantics, which asserts that truth is semantically correct affirmability. Under contextual semantics, much ordinary and scientific thought and discourse is true because its truth is indirect correspondence to the world. After offering further arguments for austere realism and addressing objections to it, the chapters consider various alternative austere ontologies. They advance a specific version they call “blobjectivism”—the view that the right ontology includes only one concrete particular, the entire cosmos (“the blobject”), which, although it has enormous local spatiotemporal variability, does not have any proper parts.

Contemporary orthodoxy in philosophy and psychology of emotion construes emotions as falling into two distinct groups, one being largely innate, the Basic Emotions and, the other, being largely socially-constructed, the Higher Cognitive Emotions. In addition, current orthodoxy construes emotions as operating primarily in individual psychological economies, that is, as individualistic. In this monograph I argue that both of these construals are mistaken. I argue that Basic Emotions and, subsequently, Higher Cognitive Emotions develop from inborn emotion precursors (affect expressions) concurrently with language and, by implication, symbolic thought and through the same developmental mechanisms. I argue, further, that emotions operate primarily in social economies to enable human social life, firstly through interpersonal regulation and, subsequently, through intrapersonal regulation. In light of these analyses, I also argue that emotional ontogenesis, which includes the ontogenesis of emotional intentionality, is a world-to-brain transcranial achievement, that is, it is radically externalistic. The development of human emotionality, language and thought is dependent upon the deep functional integration of two exquisitely complementary repertoires of constraints, one neonatal and, the other, maternal (or primary caregiver). Drawing on insights primarily from developmental sciences and philosophy, I show how a limited range of shared developmental mechanisms results in the concurrent development of at least some aspects of human emotionality and language. The deep functional integration of neonatal and maternal constraints repertoires results in the progressively synchronised, mutual modulation of relevant causal processes in both partners together with the neurogenesis and close, linguistically-mediated social relationship prerequisite to such development.

Psychopathy has been the subject of investigations in both philosophy and psychiatry and yet the conceptual issues remain largely unresolved. This volume approaches psychopathy by considering the question of what psychopaths lack. The contributors investigate specific moral dysfunctions or deficits, shedding light on the capacities people need to be moral by examining cases of real people who seem to lack those capacities. The volume proceeds from the basic assumption that psychopathy is not characterized by a single deficit–for example, the lack of empathy, as some philosophers have proposed – but by a range of them. Thus contributors address specific deficits that include impairments in rationality, language, fellow-feeling, volition, evaluation, and sympathy. They also consider such issues in moral psychology as moral motivation, moral emotions, and moral character; and they examine social aspects of psychopathic behavior, including ascriptions of moral responsibility, justification of moral blame, and social and legal responses to people perceived to be dangerous.

How can we be aware of ourselves both as physical objects and as thinking, experiencing subjects? What role does the experience of the body play in generating our sense of self? What is the role of action and agency in the construction of the bodily self? These questions have been a rich subject of interdisciplinary debate among philosophers, neuroscientists, experimental psychologists, and cognitive scientists for several decades. José Luis Bermúdez been a significant contributor to these debates since the 1990’s, when he authored The Paradox of Self-Consciousness (MIT Press, 1998) and co-edited The Body and the Self (MIT Press, 1995) with Anthony Marcel and Naomi Eilan. The Bodily Self is a selection of essays all focused on different aspects of the role of the body in self-consciousness, prefaced by a substantial introduction outlining common themes across the essays. The essays have been published in a wide range of journals and edited volumes. Putting them together brings out a wide-ranging, thematically consistent perspective on a set of topics and problems that remain firmly of interest across the cognitive and behavioral sciences.

The potential of information-driven disciplines such as biology and clinical science can be realized only if those involved in the production and analysis of data can successfully build upon each other’s work. The quantity and heterogeneity of the data being produced raises challenges to this goal, and so also does the tendency of different communities to describe their data in different, sometimes ad hoc, ways. If computers are effectively to exploit the results of scientific research and enable interoperability among diverse data repositories, then a strategy is needed to counteract such tendencies to data-silo formation. The use of common, consensus-based, controlled vocabularies to tag or describe data is one such strategy. Applied ontology is the discipline which creates, evaluates, and applies such common vocabularies – called ‘ontologies’ – a discipline which involves contributions from philosophers, logicians, and computer scientists, working with researchers in specific scientific disciplines as well as with users and creators of data in extra-scientific fields. Ontologies provide not merely common terms, but also definitions of these terms expressed in a formal language to allow processing by computers. The book describes the concrete steps involved in building and using ontologies for purposes of tagging data. It documents principles of best practice and provides examples of different sorts of errors to be avoided. It also provides an introduction to a specific top-level ontology, the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), and to the computational resources used in building and applying ontologies, including the Ontology Web Language (OWL).

Contemporary discussions of the success of science often invoke an ancient metaphor from Plato’s Phaedrus: successful theories should “carve nature at its joints,” but is nature really “jointed?” Are there natural kinds of things around which our theories cut? This book offers reflections by a group of philosophers on a series of intertwined issues in the metaphysics and epistemology of classification. The chapters consider such topics as the relevance of natural kinds in inductive inference; the role of natural kinds in natural laws; the nature of fundamental properties; the naturalness of boundaries; the metaphysics and epistemology of biological kinds; and the relevance of biological kinds to certain questions in ethics.

Many philosophers and cognitive scientists dismiss the notion of qualia, sensory experiences that are internal to the brain. Leading opponents of qualia (and of Indirect Realism, the philosophical position that has qualia as a central tenet) include Michael Tye, Daniel Dennett, Paul and Patricia Churchland, and even Frank Jackson, a former supporter. Qualiaphiles apparently face the difficulty of establishing philosophical contact with the real when their access to it is seen by qualiaphobes to be secondhand and, worse, hidden behind a “veil of sensation”—a position that would slide easily into relativism and solipsism, presenting an ethical dilemma. In this book, chapters defending qualia look at the Indirect Realist position and mount detailed counterarguments against opposing views. The book first presents philosophical defenses, with arguments propounding, variously, a new argument from illusion, a sense-datum theory, dualism, “qualia realism,” qualia as the “cement” of the experiential world, and “subjective physicalism.” Three scientific defenses follow, discussing color, heat, and the link between the external object and the internal representation. Finally, specific criticisms of opposing views include discussions of the Churchlands’ “neurophilosophy,” answers to Frank Jackson’s abandonment of qualia (one of which is titled, in a reference to Jackson’s famous thought experiment, “Why Frank Should Not Have Jilted Mary”), and refutations of Transparency Theory.

The causal theory of action (CTA) is widely recognized in the literature of the philosophy of action as the “standard story” of human action and agency—the nearest approximation in the field to a theoretical orthodoxy. This book brings together work on action theory today and discusses issues relating to the CTA and its applications, which range from experimental philosophy to moral psychology. Some of the chapters defend the theory while others criticize it; some draw from historical sources while others focus on recent developments; some rely on the tools of analytic philosophy while others cite the latest empirical research on human action. All agree, however, on the centrality of the CTA in the philosophy of action. The chapters first consider metaphysical issues, then reasons-explanations of action, and, finally, new directions for thinking about the CTA. They discuss such topics as the tenability of some alternatives to the CTA; basic causal deviance; the etiology of action; teleologism and anticausalism; and the compatibility of the CTA with theories of embodied cognition. Two chapters engage in an exchange of views on intentional omissions that stretches over four chapters, and there are direct responses in follow-up chapters.

Philosophers and scientists have long speculated about the nature of color. Atomists such as Democritus thought color to be “conventional,” not real; Galileo and other key figures of the Scientific Revolution thought that it was an erroneous projection of our own sensations onto external objects. More recently, philosophers have enriched the debate about color by aligning the most advanced color science with the most sophisticated methods of analytical philosophy. In this book, scientists and philosophers examine new problems with new analytic tools, considering such topics as the psychophysical measurement of color and its implications, the nature of color experience in both normal color-perceivers and the color blind, and questions that arise from what we now know about the neural processing of color information, color consciousness, and color language. Taken together, these chapters point toward a complete restructuring of current orthodoxy concerning color experience and how it relates to objective reality. Kuehni, Jameson, Mausfeld, and Niederee discuss how the traditional framework of a three-dimensional color space and basic color terms is far too simple to capture the complexities of color experience.

Many philosophical naturalists eschew analysis in favor of discovering metaphysical truths from the a posteriori, contending that analysis does not lead to philosophical insight. A countercurrent to this approach seeks to reconcile a certain account of conceptual analysis with philosophical naturalism; prominent and influential proponents of this methodology include the late David Lewis, Frank Jackson, Michael Smith, Philip Pettit, and David Armstrong. Naturalistic analysis (sometimes known as the “Canberra Plan” because many of its proponents have been associated with the Australian National University in Canberra) is a tool for locating in the scientifically given world objects and properties we quantify over in everyday discourse. This book gathers work from a range of prominent philosophers who are working within this tradition, offering important new work as well as critical evaluations of the methodology. Its centerpiece is an important posthumous work by David Lewis, “Ramseyan Humility.” The chapters first address issues of philosophy of mind, semantics, and the new methodology’s a priori character, then turn to matters of metaphysics, and finally consider problems regarding normativity.

Consciousness is arguably the most important area within contemporary philosophy of mind and perhaps the most puzzling aspect of the world. Despite an explosion of research from philosophers, psychologists, and scientists, attempts to explain consciousness in neurophysiological, or even cognitive, terms are often met with great resistance. This book aims to solve an underlying paradox, namely, how it is possible to hold a number of seemingly inconsistent views, including higher-order thought (HOT) theory, conceptualism, infant and animal consciousness, concept acquisition, and what the book calls the HOT-brain thesis. It defends and further develops a metapsychological reductive representational theory of consciousness and applies it to several importantly related problems. The book proposes a version of the HOT theory of consciousness that the text calls the “wide intrinsicality view” and shows why it is superior to various alternatives, such as self-representationalism and first-order representationalism. HOT theory says that what makes a mental state conscious is that a suitable higher-order thought is directed at that mental state. Thus it argues for an overall philosophical theory of consciousness while applying it to other significant issues not usually addressed in the philosophical literature on consciousness. Most cognitive science and empirical works on such topics as concepts and animal consciousness do not address central philosophical theories of consciousness. The book’s integration of empirical and philosophical concerns will make its argument of interest to both philosophers and nonphilosophers.

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 materialists have formulated what is sometimes called “the phenomenal-concept strategy,” which holds that we possess a range of special concepts for classifying the subjective aspects of our experiences. This book argues that the strategy is mistaken. A rejection of phenomenal concepts leaves the materialist with the task of finding some other strategy for defending materialism. The book points to four major puzzles of consciousness that arise: How is it possible for Mary, in the famous thought experiment, to make a discovery when she leaves her black-and-white room? In what does the explanatory gap consist and how can it be bridged? How can the hard problem of consciousness be solved? How are zombies possible? The book presents solutions to these puzzles—solutions that relieve the pressure on the materialist created by the failure of the phenomenal-concept strategy. In doing so, it discusses and makes new proposals on a wide range of issues, including the nature of perceptual content, the conditions necessary for consciousness of a given object, the proper understanding of change blindness, the nature of phenomenal character and our awareness of it, whether we have privileged access to our own experiences, and, if we do, in what such access consists.