The often impassioned nature of environmental conflicts can be attributed to the fact that they are bound up with our sense of personal and social identity. Environmental identity--how we orient ourselves to the natural world--leads us to personalize abstract global issues and take action (or not) according to our sense of who we are. We may know about the greenhouse effect--but can we give up …
"A Bradford book."In Natural Minds Thomas Polger advocates, and defends, the philosophical theory that mind equals brain--that sensations are brain processes--and in doing so brings the mind-brain identity theory back into the philosophical debate about consciousness. The version of identity theory that Polger advocates holds that conscious processes, events, states, or properties are type- ide…
The concepts of time and identity seem at once unproblematic and frustratingly difficult. Time is an intricate part of our experience—it would seem that the passage of time is a prerequisite for having any experience at all—and yet recalcitrant questions about time remain. Is time real? Does time flow? Do past and future moments exist? Philosophers face similarly stubborn questions about id…
Five chapters in the book's first part, "Some Elementary Neuroscience," sketch the history of the science of nervous systems and provide a general introduction to neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, and neuropsychology. In the second part, "Recent Developments in the Philosophy of Science," chapters place the mind-body problem within the wider context of the philosophy of science. Drawing on recent …
An argument that individuals and collectives form memories by analogous processes and a case study of collective retrograde amnesia.We form individual memories by a process known as consolidation: the conversion of immediate and fleeting bits of information into a stable and accessible representation of facts and events. These memories provide a version of the past that helps us navigate the pr…
"A Bradford book."The first systematic examination of Hilary Putnam's arguments against computational functionalism challenges each of Putnam's main arguments.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
Influential accounts of persistence?p0b4show ordinary objects persist through time?p0b4sexamine the perdurantist, exdurantist, and endurantist approaches and provide an overview of the topic.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
The biological and philosophical implications of the emergence of new collective individuals from associations of living beings.Our intuitive assumption that only organisms are the real individuals in the natural world is at odds with developments in cell biology, ecology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and other fields. Although organisms have served for centuries as nature's paradigmatic ind…