Philosophical

A Cursing Brain?

We have all seen some people make movements that seem to be non-voluntary, awkward or impolite. The difference between those and the full blown disease,…

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A Delicate Balance

You won’t find a more soothing book about terrorism than Trudy Govier’s A Delicate Balance. Although over the past 14 months we’ve…

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A Farewell to Alms

Gregory Clark, an economics professor at the University of California, Davis, has written a work of economic theory that has shaken the very foundations…

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A Manifesto for Mental Health

Skepticism about the current state of affairs in psychiatry is not new, as evidenced by a burgeoning literature that is likely to be familiar to the readers of this site. This book is an updated and extended version of the author’s A Prescription for Psyc

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A Parliament of Minds

Over the last decade a few voices have been raised in complaint against the direction in which academic institutions have taken philosophy since the Midd…

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A Philosopher Goes to the Doctor

Ho's overall purpose (p. ix) is to examine some relationships among reality, appearance, and value, in order to determine whether and which values can, do, or should motivate science and influence medicine. Accordingly, he identifies, describes, and judge

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A Philosophical Disease

One of the aims of philosophy and ethics, as normally conceived, is to be neutral and unbiased. Philosophers especially hope to achieve general truths. It i…

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A Philosophy of Boredom

It might sound odd, but to a philosopher boredom is not boring at all.  Indeed, to the reflective reader the subject of boredom reveals itself as being s…

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A Philosophy of Culture

What Kind of Philosophy is Philosophy Enough? Writing in the early 50's, Morton White had observed that "although there were many m…

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A Physicalist Manifesto

Materialism is the hypothesis that nothing exists except matter and that nothing happens except the motion of that matter. (Of course, materialists can a…

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A Research Agenda for DSM-V

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (known to its friends and enemies as the DSM) is a classification of mental disorders pu…

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A Tear is an Intellectual Thing

In the introductory essay of A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing, professor of philosophy and author Jerome Neu accurately tells the reader that the "…

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A Theory of Freedom

Philip Pettit's A Theory of Freedom: From the Psychology to the Politics of Agency is remarkable in a number of respects. Its principle achievemen…

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About Face

"What is a face? Why do we have faces? What is it to `face' another person? Or, literally, to lose face, to be faceless, or de-faced? As a physician and neurologist, Jonathan Cole considers every aspect of the human face--its evolution; its exquisite deli

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Action and Interaction

Overall, Action and Interaction is an engaging and empirically sophisticated book. Gallagher makes use of a wide array of literature on human social development, and so those who are interested in human action from developmental, psychological, and philos

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Action and Responsibility

Studies in the philosophy of action have predominantly aimed to provide theories of how the action is explained or produced. In this clear and methodical…

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Action, Emotion and Will

Anthony Kenny's classic work of analytic philosophy, Action, Emotion and Will has recently been republished with a new preface by the author. An…

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Adaptive Dynamics

This is an important book which should be of interest to many researchers and advanced students in learning theory, cognitive science and cognitive philo…

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Adult Life

In other words, the book is one that non-philosophers will benefit from reading – it requires no special philosophical training to understand the journey – much like life itself. The book is informed by Merleau-Ponty, Henri Bergson, and Martin Heidegger,

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Advances in Identity Theory and Research

Surely few concepts in the ethical and social sciences are more important than the concept of identity.  In fact, there is a cluster of closely related c…

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Agency and Action

The philosophy of action, as the editors point out in their Preface, is experiencing a resurgence that is "one of the most exciting developments in…

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Agency and Responsibility

Jeanette Kennett has written a nicely balanced, informative and well-argued book on contemporary thought about agency and responsibility. She begins by s…

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Alasdair MacIntyre

This is another in the useful, 'Contemporary Philosophy in Focus' series from Cambridge, that offers exposition and critical analysis of major modern thi…

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Altered Egos

Together with consciousness, the nature of Self is about one of the last surviving mysteries of our times. The question "What is the self?" has a long histo…

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An Interpretation of Desire

Early on in An Interpretation of Desire: Essays in the Study of Sexuality, Gagnon tells us that "research on sexual conduct…is itself a…

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An Introduction to Philosophy of Education

It is likely that there are just as many definitions or explanations of the nature of philosophy as there are philosophers. As a philosophy of educat…

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An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind

Despite its title, David Cockburn’s new book is less an introduction to contemporary issues in the philosophy of mind, and more a book about personhood or self-identity. The book revolves around three approaches to the question “What is a person…

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An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind

Despite its title, David Cockburn’s new book is less an introduction to contemporary issues in the philosophy of mind, and more a book about personh…

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Analytic Freud

I recently decided to sell many of my books on psychoanalysis. I'm still keeping my Freud collection, but I am running low on shelf space, and I haven't…

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Ancient Anger

This book is a fascinating excursion into the ancient mind.  It is concerned with the experience of anger, and theories about the nature of anger, in the…

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Anger

This is the latest offering in a handy series of short books on our favorite faults. Although he provides some treatment of Seneca and Aristotle on anger…

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Anti-Individualism and Knowledge

Hilary Putnam's Twin Earth thought experiment has inspired and troubled epistemologists and philosophers of mind for almost thirty years.  Here it is: Im…

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Antigone€™s Claim

Continental philosophy sees itself, in contrast to the Anglo-American analytic tradition, as offering an alternative to supposedly dull, tedious ruminations concerning formal logic and inconsequential hair splitting over petty linguistic details. Apart fr…

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Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship

Whoever we are, we want friends.  So Aristotle argues in the chapters on friendship in his Nicomachean Ethics, although 'friendship' for him broad…

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Art & Morality

This collection of essays is written in honor of Michael Tanner, a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Many of the authors are former students o…

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Asylum to Action

This book is well written and well researched.  The author, Helen Spandler, is a research fellow in the Department of Social Work at the University of Ce…

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Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism

There are at least two autonomy debates. There is a debate in social philosophy, about the conditions under which an agent's preferences are authenticall…

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Badiou

Why, thus far, has the sizable corpus of a major contemporary philosophical figure in France (someone now installed in the prestigious École Normale Sup…

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Becoming a Subject

Delving more into psychoanalysis than philosophy, Marcia Cavell explores certain issues on memory, anxiety, emotion, thought, judgment, self, self-knowle…

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Being Human

This book is a programmatic plea for a new approach in sociology (the discipline of the author). Being Human is, as Archer points out, the third part…

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Being Yourself

     Professor Meyers provides a collection of self authored essays which centre on the topic of agency. More precisely, they ask how we define agency; i…

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Belief's Own Ethics

Jonathan Adler has written an ambitious book. He has set himself the task of rehabilitating the epistemological view called ‘evidentialism,’ by…

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Bending Over Backwards

Readers who are unfamiliar with the concepts associated with modernism and postmodernism will find Davis' arguments around the idea of dismodernism diffi…

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Berlin Childhood around 1900

Berlin Childhood is not only an autobiographical text by the literary critic, historian and philosopher Walter Benjamin. Describing Berlin around…

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Bertrand Russell

On 23 October, 1916, aged 44, Russell wrote to Lady Constance Malleson, with whom he had just started an affair. She was a young married actress with the s…

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Better than Both

According to the cliché, the difference between pessimism and optimism is that pessimists see the proverbial glass as half empty while optimists j…

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Better Than Well

In Better Than Well, philosopher and bioethicist Carl Elliott examines the meanings of enhancement technologies for American life. His central exa…

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Beyond Health

Beyond Health: Essays on Control, Resistance and Renewal is Nick Fox's latest book in a long-running project to bring the ideas, insights, and method…

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Beyond Hegel and Nietzsche

Nearly two decades ago I attended a series of lectures on Hegel by Stanley Rosen--still in my estimation one of the leading authorities on GWF--and he procl…

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Beyond Kuhn

In his brief but illuminating Foreword to Hung's difficult book, Professor Peter Lipton asserts that "Thomas Kuhn could fairly be called the most in…

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Beyond the DSM Story

The focus of Eriksen and Kress's book is the ethical challenges presented to mental health professionals by the use of the American Psychiatric Associati…

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Biological Complexity and Integrative Pluralism

This book shows that there are at least two ways in which the philosophy of biology contributes to the philosophy of science. One is the philosophical re…

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Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Education

The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy of Education is a very welcome addition to the philosophical literature examining the foundations of educati…

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Blush

There are five chapters to Elspeth Probyn's Blush. In the first chapter, "Doing Shame", the reader is introduced to the subject o…

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Body Image And Body Schema

This volume consists of a wide range of interdisciplinary studies of the body under various interpretations, drawing upon philosophy (with a strong empha…

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Body Images

Despite the short title, Body Images is a book that likely falls under a number of different headings: philosophy, feminist theory, gender studies…

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Body Language

The title, though clever, is quite misleading.  From 'Body Language' one would expect a treatment of how people unintentio…

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Body Work

Debra Gimlin writes in her conclusion to Body Work—"The body is a site of oppression, not only because physically stronger individuals can ove…

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Boundaries of the Mind

Boundaries of the Mind is the first of three volumes in a series by Robert A. Wilson exploring the role of the individual in the cognitive, biolog…

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Brain Fiction

Philosophers who are engaged in the project of attempting to understand the human mind increasingly turn to the neurosciences for inspiration and informa…

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Brain-Mind

The manuscript itself is very accessible. The overview of cognitive science in the first chapter can be read as a separate piece, for example, as one of the introductory readings for a lower-year undergraduate course. Each chapter provides references for

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Brain-Wise

Owen Flannagan is quoted on the back cover of this book as saying that it is "A wonderful treat for the novice and the expert!" and I should s…

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Brainchildren

One of the movers and shakers in the rapidly converging fields of cognitive science, philosophy of the mind, and cognitive ethology, Daniel C. Dennett is…

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Breakdown of Will

Time and again we fail to act in our own best interest. At New Year we resolve to exercise, but when the time comes to go jogging we prefer to watch TV.…

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Brute Rationality

Is there a meaning in the question: 'why should one want to be rational?'. The same question has been raised several times about 'why should one want to…

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy

Just before I received my copy of this book I heard a talking head on a cable news network scoffing at the idea that colleges are taking the Buffy series…

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Camus and Sartre

Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre first met in 1943 at the premier of Sartre's play The Flies. Camus was the young debonair, French-Algerian from…

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Cartographies of the Mind

This is a collection of new papers, organized not so much by a shared theme as a shared orientation. The contributors, almost all philosophers, all work…

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Case Studies in Biomedical Research Ethics

The ethics of scientific research is certainly a topic of common interest for ethicists and philosophers of science alike, even if many among them still…

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Cato's Tears

A fascinating book on emotions, and the way emotion influences the political traditions of the Anglo-American culture comes from Julie Ellison, Professor…

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Causation and Counterfactuals

As you scroll through this review, you moveyour hand; this causes the mouse to move; in turn this causes, via a series of intermediary events, changes on…

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Changing Conceptions of the Child from the Renaissance to Post-Modernity

David Kennedy opens his philosophical study of evolving notions of childhood in the West with the somewhat counterintuitive claim that "preoccupatio…

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Children

David Archard's Children: Rights and Childhood is an exhaustive and meticulously comprehensive examination of children's rights from both a moral and a legal perspective. Much has been written on the subject of children and how they are and ought to be tr…

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Children

David Archard's Children: Rights and Childhood is an exhaustive and meticulously comprehensive examination of children's rights from both a moral…

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Children, Families, and Health Care Decision Making

We can think of political philosophy as a set of principles that circumscribe the legitimate power of the state. A basis of democratic liberalism is that…

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Choices and Conflict

The provocative essays and cases presented in Choices and Conflicts: Explorations in Health Care Ethics offer a range of topics relevant for both…

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City and Soul in Plato's Republic

According to Plato, the just man is like the just city. That much is clear. The point of this city/soul analogy is, however, rather less obvious.…

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Classifying Madness

This book argues that the needs of medical insurance and the pharmaceutical industry are diverting the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the Ame…

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Clean Hands

The work of two distinguished contributors to the philosophical literature on volitional disorders such as addictions, obsessions and compulsions, Clean Hands? is a clear and thought-provoking discussion of one of the most puzzling corners of psychopathol

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Clear and Queer Thinking

Goldstein's book is interesting and, quite probably, a good introduction to Wittgenstein for those who care less about philosophers' biography than about wh…

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Clinical Ethics

The ambiguous term 'clinical ethics' can refer either to the ethical analysis of clinical decisions or to the inclusion of ethical considerations in the…

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Clinical Psychiatry in Imperial Germany

Scientific medicine in the nineteenth century peaked in Germany. Any young American physician who wanted to make a name for himself, such as the young Wi…

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Cognition and the Brain

In recent years, the movement dedicated to applying neuroscience to traditional philosophical problems has been gaining momentum and has become very infl…

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Cognitive Theories of Mental Illness

No doubt at least some mental illnesses can be understood in psychological terms. When I say that some mental illnesses can be understood in psychologica…

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Coherence in Thought and Action

If there was ever an attempt to construct a grand unified theory of human consciousness with its multifarious manifestations, Coherence in Thought and Ac…

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Communicative Action and Rational Choice

Communicative Action and Rational Choice is an ambitious, highly technical interdisciplinary text centered on a rigorous reading of Jürgen Ha…

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Competence, Condemnation, and Commitment

In its Report of  the Surgeon General, the Center for Mental Health Services of th…

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Concealment And Exposure

Thomas Nagel's book, Concealment & Exposure and Other Essays, adds little new to his body of work, but it does display his talents to maximum…

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Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society

Steven Shaviro's book is primarily a discussion about cyberculture or the network society.  Cyberculture is the collection of ideas, customary beliefs, v…

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Conquest of Abundance

Paul Feyerabend's Conquest of Abundance was written after his death at the request of his wife Grazia Borrini-Feyerabend and the editorial skills of…

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Conscience and Convenience

This is a reprint, with one new chapter, of the 1971 classic by a highly respected historian, and the merits of the original material have been well-docu…

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Consciousness

It is uncommon for empirical scientists to take up philosophical issues, applying their findings and hypotheses to the puzzles that so interest philosophers.  But the philosophy of mind is one area that lends itself to joint efforts, and Jeffery Gray's Co…

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Consciousness

Consciousness collects Carruthers' essays on the topic from the last ten years. Some of the essays haven been revised, so the book may set out Carruthers' current position on consciousness, presenting his dispositionalist higher order theory of consciousn…

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Consciousness and Its Place in Nature

When I learnt philosophy in the late '60s, I think it is fair to say that most philosophers were very much still under-labourers, in Locke's phra…

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Consciousness and Language

"How can we reconcile our common-sense conception of ourselves as conscious, mindful, speech act performing, rational agents in a worlds that we bel…

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Consciousness and Mind

Most philosophers have typically used the term 'experience' to refer to the phenomenon of phenomenal consciousness; 'phenomenal consciousness' and 'exper…

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Consciousness and the Novel

The Science, and Art, of Consciousness The title of this collection is something of a misnomer.  Six of the eleven essays have little…

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Consciousness Emerging

Consciousness Emerging is in three parts, exploring consciousness from different angles. The philosophical point of view, the first angle, shows w…

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Consciousness Evolving

Consciousness Evolving is a collection of essays purportedly on the evolution of consciousness. The introduction to this volume begins with the se…

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Consciousness Explained

Consciousness is notoriously difficult to explain. On one hand, there are facts about conscious experience--the way clarinets sound, the way lemonade tas…

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Consciousness in Action

In Consciousness in Action, Susan L. Hurley attacks a popular picture of thought in contemporary philosophy of mind. According to this picture, fo…

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Consciousness, Color, and Content

The apparent existence of ‘qualia’ seems to make it impossible to describe and explain all psychological phenomena using the standard me…

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Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory

The latest text in the series on Contemporary Debates in Philosophy provides contrasting views on eight central arguments in normative and metaeth…

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Contested Knowledge: Social Theory Today

Who needs social theory nowadays? Except for few scholars, probably none of us think that social theory is a necessary ingredient of our daily lives. Thr…

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Crazy for You

The book explores the theme that women’s subordinate position in society and (in part consequently) their gendered life experiences lead to women…

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Creating Mental Illness

Imagine that, for whatever reasons and by whatever means, you could keep your mind/body alive long enough to experience life in, say, the twenty-third ce…

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Creatures Like Us?

Lynne Sharpe begins her book by some personal reflections on how she never doubted that the animals in her family were creatures like us, and how it was…

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Critical Resistance

When one hears the word "resistance" in the context of French philosophy, or better, when one hears the word la résistance simply, the…

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Critical Visions

Critical Visions is a collection of essays addressing various aspects and important figures of contemporary social theory. Moving back and…

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Cruel Compassion

This book is a recent installment in Thomas Szasz' crusade against mental health care in its many guises, and in particular, against the use of coercion…

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CTRL [SPACE]

CTRL [SPACE] is an impressive book, made up of roughly 100 chapters, 600 pages and almost a thousand pictures. Each of the essays and projects tha…

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Cultural Psychology of the Self

”Wherever you are you are right now having the experience of being somewhere: here. Sometime: now. Someone: you” (Kolak, 1999). Being located…

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Culture and Subjective Well-Being

Happiness is a modern obsession. Its pursuit was elevated by the American Declaration of Independence to the dignity of one of humanity's most important rig…

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Culture of Death

In his book Culture of Death - The Assault on Medical Ethics in America, Wesley Smith takes issue with what he perceives as the systematic erosion of…

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Curious Emotions

Curious Emotions: Roots of Consciousness and Personality in motivated action is an important contribution to a growing corpus of scholarship which…

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Damaged Identities

Damaged Identities is a fascinating study of the ways that narratives can oppress some groups of people, and how they can resist that oppression t…

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Dangerous Emotions

"When we, in our so pregnant expression, make love with someone of our own species, we also make love with the horse and the dolphin, the kitten…

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Daniel Dennett

While it would be unfair, and difficult, to say that someone was the least systematic of philosophers, it is rather easier to say that Daniel Dennett is not the most systematic we have.  Dennett's style, in his articles and books together, is conversation…

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Daniel Dennett

While it would be unfair, and difficult, to say that someone was the least systematic of philosophers, it is rather easier to say that Daniel Denn…

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Dark Ages

Market prices and crimes rates have a lot common: you never really know when, how and why they are going up or down, but this knowledge would be highly b…

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Darwin and Design

Michael Ruse's Darwin and Design is the third book in his trilogy on evolution, the first being Monad and Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolu…

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Darwin's Dangerous Idea

In Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett insists on the importance of considering consciousness from the evolutionary point of view. Darwin's…

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Darwin's Legacy

The image of science which used to dominate popular and philosophical discussions was very much drawn from physics. Science was a reductive enterprise: i…

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Darwinizing Culture

Do you know why we don't have a Nobel Prize in mathematics? It so happens that Nobel's wife left him for a mathematician, and this is his sweet revenge. Thi…

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Death and Compassion

Toward the end of Death and Compassion: A Virtue-Based Approach to Euthanasia, the author opines, "One of the most significant developments in e…

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Deconstructing Psychotherapy

You can buy this book directly from the publisher, Sage Publications.``Contents````Ian Parker Deconstruction``and Psychotherapy PART ONE: SOURCES AND CONTEXTS FOR THE DECONSTRUCTIVE``TURN John Kaye Toward a Non-Regulative Praxis Glenn``Larner Derrida a

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Deeper than Reason

Everyone at some time in life has had an emotional reaction to a work of art. Whether an expression of fear, anger, or disgust while watching a play or a…

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Defending Science - within Reason

Susan Haack is the current queen of the via media.  Her major epistemological work, Evidence and Inquiry (Blackwells, 1993), prese…

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Defining Psychopathology in the 21st Century

Defining Psychopathology in the 21st Century is a collection of 15 mostly-brief papers on the future of psychiatric classification and diagnosis. …

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Delusions in Context

Bortolotti’s book is aimed, mainly, at philosophers interested in clinical practice, rationality and epistemology. However, I would personally recommend it to psychologists, psychiatrists, nurses and university students because of the broad frame of usefu

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Dennett's Philosophy

Daniel Dennett's contribution to cognitive science and the philosophy of mind is matched by few living philosophers. His introduction of the intentional stance, the multiple-drafts theory of consciousness, and his ardent defense of natural selection have…

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Descartes and the Passionate Mind

In Descartes and the Passionate Mind, Deborah Brown attempts to defend Descartes' theory of self from the classical challenge of inconsiste…

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Descartes' Cogito

Famously, Descartes holds that the occurrence of thought guarantees the existence of a thinker. As illustrated early in the second Meditation, the purpo…

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Descartes's Concept of Mind

In the sixth of his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes famously wrote that "Nature… teaches me, by these sensations of pain, hu…

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Descriptions and Prescriptions

Descriptions and Prescriptions is a sophisticated exploration of the various evaluative decisions that could reasonably influence the development…

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Desembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies

Stanghellini, an Italian psychiatrist, aims to take the reader into the world of schizophrenics and manic-depressives.  His approach is, broadly, phenome…

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Desire and Affect

Contents``````Section I Conatus and Other Basics````Charles Jarrett, "Teleology and Spinoza's Doctrine of Final``Causes"````Konrad Cramer, "Spinoza's Refutation of Interactionism"````Yirmiyahu Yovel, "Transcending Mere Survival: From Conatus``to Conatus I

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Difference and Identity

This collection takes as its starting point the need to raise the healthcare profession's awareness of difference, in all its forms. A special issue…

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Disability, Difference, Discrimination

Despite Marx's taunt, philosophers don't appear to have done much to change the world. But if Anita Silvers is to be believed (pp. 10-11), the Radical Philo…

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Divided Minds and Successive Selves

Judging from the number of books in the Psychology/Self-Help sections of bookstores, the general public has a strong interest in issues to do with mental…

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Do We Still Need Doctors?

John Lantos is a pediatrician, a teacher, and a bioethicist. He is, most of all, a sensitive and literate human being. Person and role are integrated provid…

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Does Consciousness Cause Behavior?

Does consciousness cause behavior?  The flippant answer suggested by the the title is simply, "no".  My awareness (of the world a…

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Don't Believe Everything You Think

Beliefs come in three flavors: true, false, and untested. Obviously we should want to have only true beliefs if we are to function as rational participan…

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Donald Davidson

The death of Donald Davidson last year, shortly after the publication of this book, brought to an end one of the most fruitful and influential philosophi…

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DSM-IV Sourcebook

The DSM-IV Sourcebook, Volume 2 is the second of a projected four volume series aimed at presenting the empirical bases and rationales underlying the recommendations and decisions that informed the development of DSM-IV (The Diagnostic and Statistical Man…

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DSM-IV Sourcebook

The DSM-IV Sourcebook, Volume 2 is the second of a projected four volume series aimed at presenting the empirical bases and rationales underlying…

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DSM-IV-TR Casebook

This DSM-IV-TR Casebook was published two years after the DSM-IV-TR, and eight years after the last extensive revision of the DSM, t…

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Dworkin and His Critics

Ronald Dworkin is one of the most influential moral, political and legal philosophers of the last decades. Therefore, it is perfectly justified that the…

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Dying to Know

Dying to Know is a fascinating and brilliant work that requires several readings to "catch on" to what Levine, an English professor and…

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Dynamics in Action

What is the difference between a wink and a blink? Most of us think we know, but in over two millenia of investigation, neither scientists nor philosophe…

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Emotion and Consciousness

This book is an important contribution to the wealth of work that has been recently published on the topic of emotion and consciousness. Aimed primarily…

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Emotion, Evolution, And Rationality

Emotion, Evolution, And Rationality contains the proceedings of a conference at the King's College London held within a research project "The…

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Emotional Intelligence

What do you do with a new psychological construct?  Mathews et al. present us with the various tests and trials a construct needs to pass before it can become scientifically validated. Emotional Intelligence (EI), they argue, does not make the grade, at l…

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Emotional Intelligence

What do you do with a new psychological construct?  Mathews et al. present us with the various tests and trials a construct needs to pass before it can b…

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Emotional Reason

In Emotional Reason Bennett Helm addresses two major challenges to any philosophical theory of practical reason. The first challenge is that it does not seem clear how the knowledge that we ought to do something motivates us to act on that knowledge -- wh…

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Emotional Reason

In Emotional Reason Bennett Helm addresses two major challenges to any philosophical theory of practical reason. The first challenge is that it do…

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Empathy and Agency

It is one thing to have a mind and another to have a conception of the mind: this much is a truism. Nevertheless almost all readers of this review - in…

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Empathy and Moral Development

In this book, Martin Hoffman attempts to combine an empirical and a philosophical account of moral development, focusing on the concept of empathy. The empi…

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Enchanted Looms

Majid Amini writes``about himself:````I did my undergraduate and postgraduate studies in philosophy``at the University of London. I started teaching philosophy in``1991 and have taught at the Universities of London and Manchester``in Britain. Since 1999,

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Envy

Joseph Epstein's Envy is a short, often humorous, sometimes insightful exploration of, as Epstein puts it, the only vice among the seven deadly si…

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Epistemic Luck

There is no pressing need in at the moment for further theory in psychology. In addition, its bounty of empirical data is enormous with more coming every…

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Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment

Epistemology, Bishop and Trout argue, ought to be practical. It ought to actually guide our reasoning. But standard analytic epistemology (SAE) does not…

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Eros and the Good

Since the publication in the late 1950s of Elizabeth Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy," which offered a critique of dominant academic approa…

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Essays in Social Neuroscience

Modern science was founded on the mechanistic perspective which conceptualizes nature as a kind of machine. The important thing about machines is that th…

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Essays on Nonconceptual Content

York Gunther has edited a useful collection of essays on a hot topic in the philosophy of mind:  the notion of nonconceptual content.  As several of the…

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Essays on Philosophical Counseling

Can Philosophy Help? In David Lodge's 1995 novel,…

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Essential Sources in the Scientific Study of Consciousness

Baars, Banks, and Newman have made a thoughtful contribution to the study of consciousness by presenting to those engaged in research in consciousness an…

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Ethical Issues in Forensic Mental Health Research

This is a slim volume covering a very specific area of research ethics: that of research in forensic mental health settings. The book is the product of a…

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Ethics and the A Priori

As the title suggests, this eagerly anticipated new record of seventeen previously released pieces divides into two parts (of roughly equal length), the…

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Ethics for Everyone:

Humanity is guided by moral principles known as ethics. Although different populations may believe different things, there are general guidelines that help dictate how individuals should behave. Ethics for Everyone, by Larry R. Churchill, helps provide a

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Ethics in Plain English

True to its title, this book transposes into “plain English” the 10 standards of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Ethics Com…

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Ethics in Psychiatric Research

You can buy this book from Barnes and Noble.com:``ETHICS IN PSYCHIATRIC RESEARCH: A RESOURCE MANUAL FOR HUMAN SUBJECTS' PROTECTION

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Ethics of Psychiatry

These days publishers seem to be falling over themselves to put out textbooks on medical ethics. But when it comes to mental health ethics, there is far les…

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Ethics without Ontology

Realism in physics depends upon realism in mathematics. Any complex description of the world will call upon the latter. But mathematics itself is not des…

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European Review of Philosophy. Vol. 5

The fifth volume of the European Review of Philosophy investigates the link between emotion and action, touching on related notions like rational…

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Everyday Irrationality

Absurdly irrational arguments can be hugely entertaining; but in the wrong context they can also be very dangerous, warns Robyn Dawes, and he uses numerous…

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Evolution and the Human Mind

This review first appeared online Sept 1, 2001.

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Evolution's Rainbow

Evolution's Rainbow is the first work for a popular audience by the distinguished Stanford biologist, Joan Roughgarden, and as such, perhaps mark…

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Evolutionary Origins of Morality

Evolutionary Origins of Morality: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives (EOM), edited by Leonard Katz, contains a collection of papers originally pu…

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Existential America

More historical than philosophical, George Cotkin's Existential America engages in a sustained analysis of the reception of European existentialis…

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Existentialism

Steven Earnshaw's recent book, Existentialism: A Guide for the Perplexed, makes an important contribution to filling the absence of student…

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Expertise

What I can say with some confidence is that Watson's new book Expertise: A Philosophical Introduction (Bloomsbury Academic 2020) demonstrates a high level of understanding of and performance in the cross-disciplinary study of expertise, worthy of some deg

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Explaining Consciousness

Tucson, we have a problem. In Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem…

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Exploring the Self

See the publisher's web page for this book.

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Faces of Intention

CONTENTS1.     Introduction: Planning Agents in a Social World````ACCEPTANCE``AND STABILITY````2.     Practical Reasoning and Acceptance in a Context````3.     Planning and Temptation````4.     Toxin, Temptation, and the Stability of Intention````SHARED``

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Fact and Value

Judith Jarvis Thomson's work has always been of the highest standard: clear, crisp, penetrating, lucid. In this timely collection of essays, a distinguished…

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Facts, Values, and Norms

We are all naturalists now! Naturalism has taken on the role previously filled at different times by realism and by empiricism as the mark of s…

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Fads and Fallacies in the Social Sciences

In his latest book, controversial City College sociologist Steven Goldberg continues to challenge the "politically correct" biases that he beli…

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Fearless Speech

Fearless Speech is a presentation of Michel Foucault’s six lectures on the Greek concept of parrhesia, delivered in the fall of 1983,…

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Feelings and Emotions

Feelings and Emotions offers a pleasing snapshot of current scientific thinking and research on emotions. It accurately depicts the contemporary s…

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Feminism and Philosophy of Science

Elizabeth Potter's introductory textbook -- the first of its kind -- is a welcome addition to the literature, if only because much of the work she re…

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Feminist Interpretations of Rene Descartes

This volume, one in the Re-Reading the Canon series, collects together fourteen essays which put forward self-consciously feminist interpretations of the wr…

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Finding Consciousness in the Brain

“Seek and thou shall find” is the motto of both science and philosophy (as well as of a number of religions across the globe). The problem with…

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Flesh in the Age of Reason

In this, his final book in a tragically truncated career, Roy Porter brings together many of the themes and interests he had been exploring for more than…

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Foucault 2.0

 In a new and groundbreaking book titled, interestingly enough, Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge, as if to suggest that we are now moving…

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Foundations of Ethical Practice, Research, and Teaching in Psychology

Karen Strohm Kitchener's Foundations of Ethical Practice, Research, and Teaching in Psychology is intended as an introduction to professional ethi…

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Four Views on Free Will

The 'Great Debates in Philosophy' series of books aims to introduce advanced students to a particular topic by presenting philosophy as it is act…

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Free Will

Free Will is a collection of philosophical articles on the question whether humans have free will.  One of the series of Blackwell Readings in Philosophy, it is aimed at advanced undergraduate courses.  Robert Kane, the editor, provides a helpful introduc…

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Free Will And Moral Responsibility

This, the latest edition of the invitation-only journal Midwest Studies in Philosophy, brings together a dream team of writers on free will and mo…

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Freedom and Determinism

For a topic once immortalized in Milton's oft-quoted words (Paradise Lost, Book 2):Others apart sat on a hill retired, In thoughts mo…

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Freedom And Neurobiology

This new book by John Searle is, strictly speaking, neither new nor a book. To begin with, it consists of just two essays ('Free Will as a Problem in…

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Freedom and Responsibilty

As I regularly teach a course called "Freedom and Human Action" in which one of the central concerns is whether freedom and responsibility are compatible…

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Freedom Evolves

In a Crowd of Theorists it is hard to miss Daniel Dennett.  Dennett is tall in philosophical stature, pleasing in paragraph, and famous in wit.  He is an…

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Freedom, Fame, Lying, and Betrayal

This is a lucid book written with clarity and elegance. There are a total of eighteen essays most of which are relevant to living with psychiatric disabi…

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Freud

A hundred and fifty years after Freud's birth, and hundred and six after the publication of the Interpretation of dreams, its official manifesto, psychoanalysis has gone through widespread glory and has now fallen into disrepute. Nowadays psychoanalysis h…

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From Clinic to Classroom

What about events leading to the implementation of a zero-tolerance policy for bringing "weapons" to school? What about events that spark disputes…

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From Morality to Mental Health

Aristotle argues in the Nicomachean Ethics (1985) that we are jointly responsible for our characters and for the things at which we aim. The idea…

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From Passions to Emotions

Thomas Dixon's book aims to provide supplement material to historical development of views of passions and emotions. Hoping that his historical account w…

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From Philosophy to Psychotherapy

In From Philosophy to Psychotherapy, Edwin Hersch undertakes an enormous project.  His task is no less than grounding the theory and practice of p…

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Frontiers of Justice

This book is intended for an academic audience, but remains very accessible to a larger audience. In a truly impressive way, the problems are addressed a…

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Furnishing the Mind

Concepts, it is said, are the vehicles of thought—the basic building blocks of our mental lives. But what exactly are concepts? In Furnishing the…

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Gender and Mental Health

One can only suppose that a muddle over manuscripts resulted in Gender and Mental Health receiving its title. As an introduction to issues surroun…

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Gender Trouble

Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, simply put, traces the multivalent discourses around sex/gender and shows the trouble with them. First publi…

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Genetic Nature/Culture

One would have imagined that the debate between nature and nurture has died, namely, we all should by now have accepted that the human and animal genotyp…

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German Idealism and the Jew

Since the Holocaust€”that Emil Fackenheim rightly named "the rupture that ruptures philosophy" (To Mend the World)€”philosophers of the…

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Getting Hooked

It's amazing, but the truth is that while there has been a huge amount of research into addiction, most of that research is at empirical social studies, rat…

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Gilles Deleuze

This is by far the best introduction I have read to one of the most important and challenging philosophers not of the century that just ended, but of the…

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Goffman's Legacy

I must admit I have always been a Goffmanian. Since reading The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, issued by Penguin Books and Doubleday, Anch…

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Goodness & Advice

Judith Jarvis Thomson is an important philosopher who specializes in ethics.  The book here reviewed contains revised versions of her 1999 Tanner Lecture…

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Grave Matters

Skip the pompous introductory text by Mark C. Taylor to GraveMatters and dip straight into the wonderful black and white photographs byDietrich Christian La…

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Grave Matters

Skip the pompous introductory text by Mark C. Taylor to Grave Matters and dip straight into the wonderful black and white photographs by Dietrich…

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Greed

Greed is one more contribution in the Oxford lecture and book series on The Seven Deadly Sins, a series in which scholars and writers map o…

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Gut Reactions

Are emotions constituted by feelings, thoughts or both? The emotional phenomenon of 'heartbreak' (which is well-documented in Western popular culture) su…

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Habits of Mind

Antonion T. De Nicolas has offered a revolution in the form of a book. The text is Habits of Mind: The Practice of Philosophy as education and the au…

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Handbook of Bioethics

The orientation of this collection is at once encyclopedic, introductory and synthetic. It seeks to be comprehensive with respect to the range of issues,…

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Handbook of Emotions

The Handbook of Emotions is a stimulating and informative resource. As a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the study of emotions, it is in…

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Happiness and Education

Nel Noddings has written an appealing and accessible book that focuses on what might seem a tremendously important question: how can we restructure schoo…

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Happiness Is Overrated

Happiness is Overrated is a straightforward book about the value of happiness that develops a plausible conclusion.  Bellotti explains in his pref…

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Harmful Thoughts

Consisting of nine previously published articles in philosophy journals and law reviews, Meir Dan-Cohen has produced an interesting collection of ideas c…

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Healing Psychiatry

The purpose of Healing Psychiatry: Bridging the Science/Humanism Divide is--as the subtitle indicates--to repair the schism between competing expl…

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Healing the Soul in the Age of the Brain

An increasing number of psychiatric patients with disorders ranging from mild depression or anxiety to full-blown psychosis are being treated with medica…

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Health, Science, and Ordinary Language

Health, Science and Ordinary Language is an examination of theories of health and disease, in general, and in particular, the rift that exists bet…

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Hegel

Ever since Alexandre Kojève’s famous seminars on the Phenomenology of Spirit during the 1930s, Hegel has served as a central reference p…

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Hermeneutics As Politics

The first edition of Stanley Rosen's Hermeneutics as Politics appeared in 1987 from Oxford University Press and, soon after that, established itse…

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Heuristics and Biases

This will be a perfunctory review of a massive (857 page) work, but I lack the technical expertise to do a detailed analysis of its contents, which are t…

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Hidden Resources

Hidden Resources is the book format of a themed issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, the theme being 'to what extent can t…

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Hidden Selves

Liza is an adult survivor of severe childhood abuse. She considers herself to have multiple selves - twelve altogether - ranging from a scared six month-…

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Hiding from Humanity

The arresting title of this clearly written book encapsulates one of its central theses -- that the emotions of disgust and shame are ways in which we h…

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Historical Ontology

1.  The essays in this collection cover various topics -- classification in the human sciences, radical interpretation, 'styles of reasoning', Wittgenste…

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History, Historicity And Science

History, Historicity and Science is another collaboration between Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore, following in the line of The Philosophy…

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How Can I Be Trusted?

In How Can I Be Trusted? A Virtue Theory of Trustworthiness, Nancy Nyquist Potter combines her reflections on the moral dimensions of her life as…

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How Could Conscious Experiences Affect Brains?

How could conscious experience affect brains? That's an excellent question and it is also the title of a slim volume that presents the thinking of Max Ve…

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How Do We Know Who We Are?

The title of Arnold Ludwig's latest book shows that the subject matter is both psychological and philosophical. It also signals the problems it faces. "Th…

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How Emotions Work

When we think of emotions, we generally think of something private, internal, and purely phenomenal. In his book, How Emotions Work, Jack Katz turns this intuitive view on its head. Katz believes that emotions are largely and fundamentally social things.&…

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How Emotions Work

When we think of emotions, we generally think of something private, internal, and purely phenomenal. In his book, How Emotions Work, Jack Katz tur…

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How History Made the Mind

In this interesting book, the author attempts to provide a historically informed account of the development of the human mind. His methodology is interdi…

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How Images Think

Ron Burnett (President of Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design in Vancouver, and Artist/Designer at the New Media Innovation Center), in How Images Th…

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How Scientific Practices Matter

Intellectually, we are not at home in the world.  To tell a likely tale, once upon a time we recognized not only a natural world of sticks and stones, ca…

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How Scientists Explain Disease

Thagard offers a detailed framework for understanding how scientists explain disease and how new explanations gain acceptance. The book’s focus is o…

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How The Body Shapes The Mind

How the Body Shapes the Mind is an exercise in philosophy of mind as a partner of the empirical cognitive sciences. Gallagher tries to contribute…

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How to Be an Epicurean

Wilson characterizes Epicureanism as a form of both theoretical and practical thinking that started with Epicurus in the third century BCE and was developed especially by Lucretius in the first century BCE. She does not focus on the historical exegesis of

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How To Be Trustworthy

How to be Trustworthy is a highly readable and thought-provoking study of trust and trustworthiness that is philosophically and conceptually sophisticated. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the philosophy of trust and social epistemology more gen

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How to Count Animals, More or Less

Interests are interests, regardless whose they are, and like interests deserve equal consideration – this is the basic idea of a common position within animal ethics, related to Peter Singer, Tom Regan and other influential names. It is also a view that S

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How to Solve the Mind-Body Problem

In this short but intriguing book, Nicholas Humphrey presents and defends a novel proposal for solving the mind-body problem. Readers familiar with his e…

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How to Think Like a Roman Emperor

Donald Robertson is a therapist with a strong interest in philosophy and especially Stoicism. This book is about the Stoic techniques of self-calming and controlling emotions. He sets out the life of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, and the various people a

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Human and Animal Minds

Are animals phenomenally conscious? You won't find a categorical 'yes' to this question in Peter Carruthers' new book. You won't find a categorical 'no' either. You will find instead a case in favor of the thesis that there is no fact of the matter concer

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Human Evolution, Reproduction, and Morality

It is not at all unusual - or unwelcome - for scientists to find themselves musing on the ethical presuppositions and implications of their professional…

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Human Identity and Bioethics

This is an ambitious, wide-ranging and welcome book. DeGrazia's aim is to articulate and defend not one but two conceptions of human identity, and then t…

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Human Nature and the Limits of Science

Much of Human Nature and the Limits of Science sets out an argument against evolutionary psychology and the way that the science is used to draw p…

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Human-Built World

Thomas P. Hughes' goal is to help his readers to understand a phenomenon that is "messy and complex" (p.1) and therefore difficult to define: t…

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Humanism

Jim Herrick's Humanism is a very introductory introduction. It is made up roughly of two parts. The first eight chapters deal in general terms wit…

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Humanism, What's That?

This is a truly delightful, little book. Little because it is only seventy seven pages long -- it is, after, all written for children of ten plus years.…

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Humanity

I cannot conceive of a more difficult intellectual task than to "reckon with," as R.G. Collingwood is quoted as saying in the book's epigraph, twentieth cen…

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Hypersanity

Early chapters present a thoughtful review of basic logic, pointing out the limits of pure logic when engaging in social discourse on the many outlets available to us these days. You will even be able to test yourself to become more aware of "self-decepti

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Hystories

Elaine Showalter defines a "hystory" to be the explanation of a strange human condition or belief system as the product of neurotic unconscious mental pr…

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I of the Vortex

This book presents a radically reductive neurobiological view of consciousness and the self: its central thesis is that conscious thought is (nothing mor…

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Identifying the Mind

The central problem of contemporary philosophy of mind is: Is the existence of psychological phenomena (desires, beliefs, emotions, sensations, etc.) con…

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Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds

Plato was able to claim that "the soul is most like the divine, deathless, intelligible, uniform, indissoluble, always the same as itself" (Pha…

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Imagination and Its Pathologies

The equivocal and widespread use of the word 'imagination' throughout the history of modern thought frequently renders any attempt to use it in a precise…

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Imagination and the Meaningful Brain

In this volume, Harvard psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Arnold Modell argues for the systematic integration of first-person experiential accounts and thir…

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Imagining Numbers

Numbers are unusual. Numbers escape ordinary apprehension since we cannot perceive them directly using one or more of our five senses. By numbers, we usu…

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Immortal Remains

Who hasn't wondered about what, if anything, happens after personal death, what the dead do, how they are, and where they are, if not in graveyards? In…

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In Defense of Sentimentality

Among many philosophers, talk about sentimentality, kitsch or erotic love is just not done. Yet in Defense of Sentimentality, Solomon talks specif…

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In Love With Life

Why do we hate to die? John Lachs attempts to provide a succinct answer to the question in his book In Love with Life: Reflections on the Joy of Livi…

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In Praise of Athletic Beauty

Professor of Literature Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is a sports fan. Not only a sports fan; Professor Gumbrecht is a fan of sports fans, so much so that he has…

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In Pursuit of Happiness

Mark Kingwell has written an unusual book about the nature of happiness and the idea of "better living." Ultimately, he defends an Aristotelian view of h…

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In Search of Happiness

As Aristotle noted in the Nicomachean Ethics, we all want to live happy lives, but there is vast disagreement about what happiness consists in.…

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In the Space of Reasons

Wilfrid Sellars was one of the most prominent American philosophers of the 20th century, whose contributions are compared in importance and originality w…

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Individual Differences in Conscious Experience

Consciousness is an ill-understood phenomenon. Not only because of the difficulty of the subject -- it is a conceptual as well an empirical morass -- but al…

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Individuation, Process, and Scientific Practices

Editors and contributors, Otávio Bueno, Ruey-Lin Chen, and Melinda Bonnie Fagan, do a remarkable job of not only articulating why the titular question "What things count as individuals, and how do we individuate them?" is of critical importance to contemp

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Infinity and Perspective

The major premise of Karsten Harrries' ambitious book is the suggestion that much postmodernist rhetoric can be understood as a symptom of Western civilizat…

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Information Arts

Stephen Wilson’s Information Arts, is a monumental encyclopedic collection of the theories and productions that exist at the intersection of…

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Insanity

To buy this book from Barnes & Noble.com at 10% discount, click here: Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences``

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Integrity and the Fragile Self

1.                  Quote from the first page--"One should sure…

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Intention

Buy this book from BN.com: Intention

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Intentions and Intentionality

This book is about human intentionality and the recognition of intentionality in fellow human beings considered as fundamental constituents of social cognition. Social cognition consists of (but is not limited to) such capacities as acting intentionally…

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Intentions and Intentionality

This book is about human intentionality and the recognition of intentionality in fellow human beings considered as fundamental constituents of social co…

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Interpreting Minds

It is accepted wisdom in philosophy as much as in psychology that humans, and quite possibly some other primates, have a seemingly effortless and sponta…

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Introducing Nietzsche

This is one of a series of useful texts on various philosophical topics. These illustrated works are a real joy to read and to look at! The illustrations are a great addition to some, at times, difficult discussions of complex philosophical problems – and

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Introspection Vindicated

In Introspection Vindicated, Gregg Ten Elshof attempts to defend the perceptual model of introspection (PMI), a view which has fallen on hard time…

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Is Academic Feminism Dead?

Is academic feminism dead? How has the university changed since the first women’s studies department was formed in 1970? And if the purpose of women…

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Is Long-Term Therapy Unethical?

In this well-written and thoughtful book, Carol Austad argues that the current mental health care system is unfair. Those in great need, who could benefit…

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Is Oedipus Online?

I should start by being upfront: I think this is an interesting, but profoundly disappointing book. Jerry Aline Flieger's Is Oedipus Online is pub…

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Is Science Neurotic?

Nicholas Maxwell's Is Science Neurotic contains one very big revisionist vision: Science needs to make its aims explicit in an underlying sc…

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Is Science Value Free?

Once upon a time scientists were heroes of the intellect. In a world rife with political struggle and religious bigotry science provided the Only Path to…

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Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion?

I take a look around me.  Computer.  Phone.  Books and papers.  A window with a nice view of nature outside.  There is a world out there.  And in my brai…

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Is There a Duty to Die?

While relevant to the general discussion of death and dying, a "duty to die" raises different questions from those posed by physician-assisted suicide, term…

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Issues in Philosophical Counseling

Of the relatively few books on philosophical counseling currently available, Peter Raabe has written one of the best: namely, Philosophical Counseling…

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Jean-Paul Sartre

In this book, Leak astutely examines and reveals various dimensions of Sartre's persona, i.e., an artist, a philosopher, a play writer, dramatist, noveli…

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John Searle

Throughout his extensive and diverse body of work Searle has striven to reconcile the so-called ordinary-language philosophy he was brought up with in Ox…

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John Searle's Ideas About Social Reality

X counts as Y in context C, where "X" refers to the simplest case to some physical object or event and "Y" to the result of imposi…

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John Stuart Mill

This biography attempts to synthesize a disparate array of interpretative assessments of various aspects of John Stuart Mill's thought, in order to arriv…

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Jokes

In this elegant little book, Ted Cohen provides some analytic reflections on jokes and their role in human life. Appropriately, he adopts a style that su…

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Jonathan Edwards

Ask anyone who the great figures in the history of American philosophy are and that person probably will offer the following list of people: Franklin, Je…

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Justice in Robes

Ronald Dworkin's Justice in Robes is a thought-provoking collection of essays that aim to answer the following question: "Do moral considerat…

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Justice, Luck, and Knowledge

In her latest book, Justice, Luck, and Knowledge, Susan Hurley has done a great service to ethical and political philosophy by exploring important…

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Kant

The life of Immanuel Kant, I have long thought, would provide excellent material for an entertaining yet thought-provoking film. But who would believe su…

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Kant and the Fate of Autonomy

Karl Ameriks raises the question: What has been the fate of "autonomy" since Kant first problematized it in his Critical Philosophy? This collecti…

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Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness

Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness is a well-researched and well-argued contribution to Kantian studies. In it Guyer redresses a common misunderstan…

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Karl Jaspers

Karl Jaspers: The Shipwreck of Existence "Man is always more than whatever can be known about him." (p. 194) I recently vi…

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Karl Popper

Though controversial, the description of science by Karl R. Popper (1902-2004) stands as one of the most influential achievements of the philosophy of th…

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Kierkegaard

In this fairly short, very clear, wide-ranging and quite lively introduction to the philosophically religious thought of Søren Kierkegaard, Claire…

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Kierkegaard's Concept of Despair

For existential thinkers, particularly Kierkegaard, despair is one of the most significant human emotions that provides the spur to fruitful thought abou…

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Kinds of Minds

In Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett embarks on the audacious task of explaining human consciousness. He sets his sights even higher for…

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Knowledge Monopolies

Along with the rise of other bureaucratic institutions such as the corporation, the modern university helped define twentieth century modernity.  So su…

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Knowledge, Belief, and Character

Epistemology has spawned many schools of thought during the past century with provocative sounding names like epistemic naturalism, compatibilists, coher…

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Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness

John Perry has written a very detailed but small book, Knowledge, Possibility and Consciousness (KP&C). It is based on his Jean Nicod lectures…

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Language

This introduction to the philosophy of language in Continuum's key concepts series aims to provide a concise and accessible overview suitable for und…

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Language, Culture, and Mind

"Language holds a special place in human life. It provides the dominant medium for social interaction helping to enable the distinctive forms of org…

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Language, Vision, and Music

Language, Vision and Music is a collection of 30 articles selected from the Eighth International Workshop on the Cognitive Science of Natural Lang…

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Leaving You

Condemned to exile on a flimsy charge of corrupting the youth and spreading false religion, Socrates, that most revered figure of Western philosophy, too…

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Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy

From 1962 to 1991, John Rawls served as a professor of philosophy at Harvard University.  One of the courses he taught repeatedly over this 30 year per…

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Levels of Analysis in Psychopathology

Since the National Institute of Mental Health declared its independence from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder with the introduction of the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) research programme, psychiatry and its philosophy have been

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Life at the Texas State Lunatic Asylum, 1857-1997

Life at the Texas State Lunatic Asylum 1857-1997, as the title suggests tells the story of a Texan mental hospital, specifically the Austin State Hos…

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Life of the Mind

We all know where the mind is...inside the head, right? The idea that mental life takes place inside the skull --whether in the brain or in the soul --se…

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Life, Death, & Meaning

As Benatar explains in the first paragraph of this book's introduction, "Among the biggest questions are ones about life and whether it has meaning,…

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Life, Sex, and Ideas

Few philosophers in the history of western philosophy have written books targeting a popular audience. Most philosophers have written manuscripts their c…

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Life's Form

In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, a number of ‘liberal Jesuit scholastics’ produced the last great synthesis of Aristotelian psycholog…

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Like a Splinter in Your Mind

The Matrix films spawned a huge amount of philosophical interest and discussion among lay people and philosophers alike, striking a chord i…

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Living and Dying Well

Living and Dying Well is the second installment in the psychologist Lewis Petrinovich's trilogy in bioethics. In the first few chapters, after rev…

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Living with Darwin

Philip Kitcher's Living With Darwin joins a collection of recent high profile books in attacking Christianity through rejecting creationism…

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Living With One's Past

Norman Care is Professor of Philosophy at Oberlin College. He is trained as a philosopher, yet he brings his philosophical skills to a topic with which few other philosophers have grappled, that of how morally to go on with one’s life after having hu…

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Logic and the Art of Memory

Today, systematization is the foremost issue of interest in science, the locus of sophistication in the lively sciences of physics, genetics, and comput…

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Looking for Spinoza

This, the third of Damasio’s influential books, continues his war against a persistent enemy: dualism. Dualists hold that mind and matter, and there…

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Lost Souls

In Lost Souls, David Weissman offers the reader a fascinating journey through the history of philosophic thought that traces and engages a dualism…

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Love

To the still developing literature on love it adds a new approach which is to see love as "our joyful response to a promise of ontological rootedness" (xiii). May devotes a great deal of research to identify the meaning and the sense of love in the existe

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Love, Sex & Tragedy

In this most accessible of Simon Goldhill's books concerning the ancient world and the Greeks, a vast and assorted history comes under the dominion o…

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Love's Confusions

In his 2005 book, Love's Confusions, C.D.C Reeve offers the reader a view into the world of love and its variegated confusions.  Making…

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Ludwig Wittgenstein

The publication of this book is an important event for Wittgenstein scholarship and a wonderful opportunity for anyone who knows a little about either Wi…

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Lust

Simon Blackburn, a prominent Cambridge philosopher, was invited by the New York Public Library and Oxford University Press to tackle the topic of Lust fo…

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Machine Consciousness

Consciousness is a perennial subject of fascination to human inquiry, and whether it can be reproduced in a human artifact − the question of "…

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Mad Travelers

Fugue, the disorder that afflicted the mad travellers of Hacking's title, is best described in the words of Philippe Tissé, the doctor-hero of the…

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Madness And Death In Philosophy

Guven starts with the disingenuous suggestion that this book comes too late; "because it arrives after the event of madness". However, although…

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Madness and Democracy

Madness and Democracy written by Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain, is positioned, from the outset, in dialogue with Michel Foucault's…

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Madness at Home

In this analysis of the role of families in 19th century psychiatry Akahito Suzuki provides a new perspective on a critical period in the history of madn…

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Making Natural Knowledge

This is a second edition, with a new preface, of a book originally published by Cambridge University Press in 1998.  Golinski characterised his original…

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Making Truth

 Praise for this book is well-earned. It deserves to be read, and read carefully, by general readers interested in science, the history of science or of…

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Mandated Reporting of Suspected Child Abuse

In this second edition of what has already become a classic text, Kalichman provides a comprehensive overview of the ethical and practical issues involve…

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Master Passions

Master Passions could be considered a pledge for a relatively new direction in social sciences trying to take emotions for explanatory factors of…

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Matters of the Mind

Over the last two decades, the nature of the mind has enjoyed an ever-increasing share of the philosophical literature. But the enthusiasm has not been conf…

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Me++

The Network breathes with new life everyday and if it rests, we are annoyed. When the biological body (i.e. biomedia) meshes with the networked city, the…

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Meaning and Moral Order

This is a work by a sociologist from Princeton University who has specialized mainly in sociologically based studies of religion, especially of Protestant d…

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Meaning, Basic Self-Knowledge, and Mind

This collection explores Tyler Burge's advocacy of anti-individualism, externalism, and basic self-knowledge.  The papers are drawn mainly from a confere…

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Measuring Psychopathology

In this concise book the authors (A. Farmer and P. McGuffin from the Social Genetic and Developmental Psychiatric Research Centre, Institute of Psychiatr…

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Melancholy And the Care of the Soul

Jacques, in As You Like It, says that he "sucks melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs." Robert Burton, as is well known, com…

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Memory and Narrative

Telling It Like It Wasn't Readers looking for an explicit thesis in James Olney’s book, winner of a Christian Gauss Award for outsta…

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Mental Health

The book published by Kluwer Academic Publishers is Per-Anders Tengland's PhD dissertation.  Therefore, a part of it is highly predictable.  Organized in…

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Metal and Flesh

With Metal and Flesh, Ollivier Dyens wants to explore what he calls "the emergence of a cultural biology."  By this phrase, he means at…

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Metaphors of Memory

A finely illustrated 'history of ideas about the mind' this certainly is, though more a book concerned with the metaphors, than with the essence, of human m…

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Metapolitics

Metapolitics in Badiou's sense is to be distinguished from political theory. It involves thinking of a higher-order sort than the former (hence the me…

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Methods in Mind

It is difficult these days not to be impressed by the range of technologies and research methods available to study the brain. The 'assault' on t…

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Michel Foucault

Clare O'Farrell, a leading Foucault scholar from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia, has provided in this short book a thorough but…

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Mind

Granted, as an introductory text Mind: A Brief Introduction might be said to be particularly brief.  However, if Searle keeps his introduction brief, this is because the present book does much more than introducing the reader to a fascinating philosophic…

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Mind

As part of Continuum's Key Concepts in Philosophy series, Eric Matthew's book Mind aims to provide a non-technical introduction to some of the historical debates in the philosophy of mind while also providing critique of several viewpoints and a p…

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Mind and Mechanism

McDermott has written an excellent essay on the subject of mind. It covers the whole of what nowadays is understood to be the subject matter of philosop…

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Mind in a Physical World

About the reviewers:``Susan Stark and Frank Chessa teach in the Philosophy Department at``Bates College, Lewiston, Maine. They would like to thank David``Beisecker, Todd Jones, Mark Okrent and Ron Wilburn for interesting``discussions on these issues.`` ©

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Mind in Everyday Life and Cognitive Science

This excellent and very readable book shows much of the common sense alluded to in the title. The mind is both one of the most familiar and most mysterious…

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Mind Time

A book by the neuroscientist Benjamin Libet is always worth reading. His experiments on the timing of psychological events are crucial to important debat…

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Mind, Reason and Imagination

This book consists of a number of selected essays in the philosophy of mind and language that have been published by the author over the past fifteen yea…

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Mind's Landscape

Samuel Guttenplan's Mind's Landscape: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (ML) is a detailed philosophical discussion of our everyday or…

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Minding Minds

Interpretation is arguably the most pervasive of all human mental activities. We act as interpreters when we observe what other people do and infer from…

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Minds and Persons

This volume collects papers based on those delivered in London for the Royal Institute of Philosophy's annual lecture series for 2001-2.  As the title in…

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Mindsight

As the title of his book suggests, McGinn presents an account of the human imagination and its role in such phenomena as mental imagery, dreams and the m…

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Models of the Self

This book is a thorough and very scholarly examination of what we mean when we say, "myself." It is not an easy read at times, but the essays pres…

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Modern Social Imaginaries

In the present work, distinguished Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor continues to advance his long‑term project of exploring the self‑under…

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Modern Theories of Justice

The second half of the 20th century has been an exceptionally fertile period for theories of justice. The number of positions, criticisms, and counter-po…

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Modernity and Subjectivity

Majid Amini writes``about himself:````I did my undergraduate and postgraduate studies in philosophy``at the University of London. I started teaching philosophy in``1991 and have taught at the Universities of London and Manchester``in Britain. In 1999, I w

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Modernity and Technology

This volume draws on an international workshop held at the University of Twente in the Netherlands in November 1999. One of its three editors, Thomas J.…

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Moral Literacy

Barbara Herman has already made her mark as an important interpreter of Kant’s moral philosophy and as a moral philosopher in her own right with he…

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Moral Particularism

Particularism, in moral theory, refers to a family of views united only by suspicion of rules and principles. This collection of articles by distinguishe…

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Moral Philosophy and Moral Life

Can philosophy tell us how to live? Should we let it? If not, what is the point of moral philosophy or ethics? Why, and how, should we think about how we live? These are the questions that guide Christensen’s book. Her work brings together ideas and argum

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Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities

It seems obvious that responsibility for an action requires the ability to do otherwise. If I could not have acted otherwise than I did -- say because I…

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Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry

Firmly ensconced in the biopsychiatry age, wherein wonder drugs like Prozac have revolutionized psychiatric care, and the advent of neuroscience has conv…

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Multiple Analogies in Science and Philosophy

Multiple Analogies in Science and Philosophy is volume 11 of the Human Cognitive Processing series.  As part of an interdisciplinary book series t…

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Multiple Identities & False Memories

Spanos's book is an exploration of the recent perplexities that the phenomenon of multiple personalities has generated in the psychological literature (s…

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My Double Unveiled

At the dawn of our present millennium, cognitive neuroscience has come to embrace concepts at least as old as modernity itself. Over the past century, Ra…

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Narrative

There are many academics (such as I) who were reluctant, if not suspicious, in the uses of narratology during the 1970s and 1980s: inspired by the works…

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Narrative and Identity

First, there was a psychology as a science dealing with “something.” We have all, I guess, attended so many courses and read so many books aimi…

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Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences

The questions narrative raises seem to pervade all areas of enquiry. Psychologists ask us if narrative replicates patterns of consciousness; linguists as…

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Natural Ethical Facts

Casebeer sets himself an ambitious agenda. It has two parts. First, he defends a naturalistic ethics, according to which moral values are not merely expl…

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Natural Kinds and Conceptual Change

In this wide-ranging book, LaPorte takes on the orthodoxy in philosophy of science and metaphysics regarding a number of central topics. LaPorte argues t…

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Natural Minds

In Natural Minds, Thomas W. Polger advocates the view that the human mind is the same as its physical substrate, the brain.  His version of identi…

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Natural-Born Cybogs

In the Phaedrus, Plato warns us of the dangers of entrusting our thoughts to mere mechanical contrivances outside our minds. He recounts a myth, a…

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Naturalism and the Human Condition

The subtitle to Professor Olafson’s small and engaging book is a little misleading. He is not really so much against scientism per se, as aga…

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Naturalizing the Mind

In Naturalizing the Mind, Fred Dretske tries to account for the quality of one's mental experience ("how it feels" to be the subject of suc…

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Nature and Narrative

Nature and Narrative is a collection of 17 articles taking a philosophical perspective on psychiatry.  Some of the authors are well known philosop…

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Neither Bad nor Mad

Neither Bad Nor Mad tells the story of Garry David, a convicted Australian murderer who became famous by sending out threats to the public and des…

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Neurophilosophy of Free Will

Can neuroscience shed any light on questions of free-will and agency? Does neuroscience tell us that we can’t act freely? Does it show us how we are…

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Neuropolitics

William Connolly is probably better known to political theorists than psychologists and philosophers, most notably perhaps for his work Identity/diffe…

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Neuroscience and Philosophy

Overview of Neuroscience and PhilosophyNeuroscience and Philosophy is a collection of essays based on a three-hour "Author…

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New Philosophy for a New Media

In his previous work, Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), Mark B. N. Hansen carried o…

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New Versions of Victims

It's a good thing Sharon Lamb isn't the publicist for the anthology she has edited, New Versions of Victims, as she begins her introduction by…

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Nietzsche

Those readers who will expect to come across the “true story” of Nietzsche’s life in this book will be soon disappointed. It is true, Safr…

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Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy

Since R.J. Hollingdale's erudite and stimulating biography of Nietzsche was first published in 1965, interest in this most controversial and influential of…

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Noir Anxiety

Using the grid of Freudian psychoanalysis, Oliver and Trigo examine a wide array of films within the genre of 'film noir.' In particular, the notions of…

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Norms of Nature

While it may be, as Fodor has said, that "it wasn't God that Darwin killed, it was Mother Nature," there continues to be a need to ensure that we…

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Oblivion

Marc Augé writes from the standpoint of a philosophical anthropologist with a postmodern interest in absence and lack. This latest translation of his wo…

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On Anger

"The world needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door," says the character Rust Cohle in the American crime-series, True Detectives. I thought of this sentence when I read Agnes Callard's opening essay in the book On Anger (Boston Review Forum

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On Anxiety

This is an interesting and stimulating book. The author is an academic who works as Senior Researcher at the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of L…

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On Being Authentic

Charles Guignon's On Being Authentic is a solid and readable overview of the modern concept of personal authenticity.  Guignon is a specialist on Heidegger and teaches philosophy at the University of South Florida.  Unlike much philosophical writing, On B…

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On Being Authentic

Charles Guignon's On Being Authentic is a solid and readable overview of the modern concept of personal authenticity.  Guignon is a specialist on…

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On Bullshit

It's not very often you'll have the chance to read a book in less than half an hour and finish feeling that you've learned more than might have been gain…

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On Hashish

In September 1940, while fleeing from the Gestapo, Walter Benjamin ended his life with an overdose of morphine. In preceding years, Benjamin had used mor…

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On Personality

Peter Goldie, currently professor of philosophy at the University of Manchester, in the UK, has written a clear, lively, illuminating, urbane and thought…

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On the Emotions

This book is based on Wollheim's 1991 Ernest Cassirer lectures at Yale University. Their unity is Wollheim's recurrent theme that dispositional concepts nee…

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On the Human Condition

The central theme of the book is a critical diagnosis of the present human condition and the contemporary questioning of human identity. The question is…

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On the Internet

Hubert Dreyfus is an American philosopher, best known for his penetrating critique of the pursuit of artificial intelligence. Proponents of so-called str…

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On the Meaning of Life

"Human beings are hungry for significance," writes John Cottingham in his erudite and beautifully written On the Meaning…

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On the Pragmatics of Communication

Jürgen Habermas was recently celebrated by Harvard University as "one of the most important philosophers and social theorists in the world today -…

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On Truth

In this essay, Harry Frankfurt, a professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University, asks why we should think truth is important.  The bulk o…

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On Virtue Ethics

Given its enthusiastic reception, Hursthouse's work is likely to set the agenda for years to come on what virtue ethics is, why we should believe in it,…

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Onflow

Ralph Pred in Onflow: Dynamics of Consciousness and Experience, through his exploration of questions concerning consciousness and experience joins…

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Open Minded

To discuss this book or the following review, join the Metapsychology Discussion E-Mail Group by going to this URL: http://www.onelist.com/subscribe/metapsy-discussion``Reviewer Glenn Branch received his BA in philosophy from Brandeis University and is pr

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Ordinary Unhappiness

Writer, journalist, and the founding editor of The Point, Jon Baskin, has written an admirable book called Ordinary Unhappiness: The Therapeutic Fiction of David Foster Wallace. In this book, he illustrates how Wallace's fiction is an encounter with vario

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Organs without Bodies

Slavoj Zizek's Organs without Bodies (OwB) is monograph on the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.  Why a book on Deleuze?  Deleuze…

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Our Last Great Illusion

Advances in diagnosing and treating the mentally disturbed have been marked in the last several decades.  Although the social system--health care provide…

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Out of Its Mind

Some decades ago, we all knew what psychiatry was: it was ‘medicalized’ psychoanalysis. The discipline of psychiatry had excellent reasons f…

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Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Volume 6

The sixth volume of the Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility draws together a variety of interesting and engaging papers dealing with a broad scope of relevant topics within the current philosophical literature on agency and responsibility. This co

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Oxford Textbook of Philosophy of Psychiatry

At first blush it is an odd idea to have a "proactive textbook" as the editors announce. A textbook is more often seen as a compendium of recei…

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Panpsychism in the West

"The nature of mind has been an enigma since the beginning of recorded history. In many ways it is as much a mystery today as it was to the ancient Gre…

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Passionate Engines

Passionate Engines is not a conventional book, in terms of organization, writing style or publishing ethos; yet its main contribution to emotion theory, while no doubt welcome, is hardly radical. DeLancey appears to launch a fervent assault on cognitivism…

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Passionate Engines

Passionate Engines is not a conventional book, in terms of organization, writing style or publishing ethos; yet its main contribution to emotion t…

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Pathologies of Belief

1.    ``Introduction:``Pathologies of Belief, Martin Davies and``Max Coltheart````2.    ``Wondrous``Strange: The Neuropsychology of Abnormal Beliefs, Andrew W. Young````3.    ``Towards``an Unders

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Perceptual Experience

With the emergence of cognitive science as a discipline fully devoted to studying various aspects of mind and cognition, philosophical analysis has also…

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Persistence

1. The problem of change lies at the heart of a family of metaphysical approaches that may be conveniently subsumed under the label 'persist…

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Persons and Bodies

What is the relationship between me and my body? According to Immaterialism, a person is most fundamentally an immaterial substance (such as a so…

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Phenomenology and Existentialism

Readers abound in philosophy—feminist readers, cognitive science readers, Aristotle readers—name a figure or movement and you will surely find,…

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Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind

Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind collects essays that take up the recent trend of reconsidering and reacquiring the phenomenological movement…

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Philosophical Counseling

Here is a substantial and useful text that seeks to survey and assess the development of philosophical counseling. It is aimed primarily at the professional…

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Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience

What has neuroscience to do with philosophy? Everything and nothing, depending on what the interpreter in question takes the neuroscience to have shown…

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Philosophical History and the Problem of Consciousness

Why has consciousness consistently eluded the explanatory net of analytic philosophers of mind? Paul Livingston's Philosophical History and the Problem o…

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Philosophical Midwifery

Philosophical Midwifery (PM) is, of course, inspired by Plato's Theaetetus.  In that dialogue Socrates compares his art of helping people give b…

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Philosophical Myths of the Fall

Stephen Mulhall's ultimate claim is that the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein shows that it is possible to take rel…

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Philosophical Practice

Philosophical Practice is aimed at philosophers and other professionals interested in the application of philosophy outside of, but supported by,…

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Philosophizing the Everyday

In this short but scholarly written book, John (the author) makes a brilliant effort to revive the philosophical significance of the everyday by looking…

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Philosophy and Life Writing

The anthology consists of ten essays originally published in the journal Life Writing. For those familiar with philosophy, the essays discuss many well-known philosophers, spiritual people, literates, and writers, such as Teresa of Avila, Jean-Jacques Rou

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Philosophy and Living

In the last decade or so philosophy seems to have experienced somewhat of a renaissance in terms of its new-found popularity among an intelligent lay pub…

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Philosophy and Psychotherapy

In this interesting book, Erwin addresses some issues concerning the justification of psychotherapy as a remedy for psychological disorders. In particula…

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Philosophy and the Neurosciences

Philosophy and the Neurosciences is probably best described as an introduction to the philosophy of the neurosciences, for a reader who is already…

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Philosophy and This Actual World

In his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding David Hume says, "The mere philosopher is a character, which is commonly but little acceptab…

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Philosophy As Fiction

At the Arthur Ludlow Memorial Baths, Newport, in 1972, the judges were unable to reach a verdict in the All-England Summarize Proust Competition. The win…

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Philosophy for Counselling and Psychotherapy

Philosophy for Counseling and Psychotherapy: Pythagoras to Postmodernism is a unique blend of philosophy and psychology. As a text, it should be of…

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Philosophy of Body

Collating lectures given at the Ratio conference in 2001, this book presents seven very different perspectives on the body, which has historically been s…

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Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures

Anthologies are often a dipper's delight, and this one is no exception. However, it is also strengthened by an impressive thematic development that allow…

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Philosophy of Mind

This is a lovely little book, perfectly suited for an introductory course in philosophy or for the general reader. In eleven self-contained chapters,…

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Philosophy of Mind and Cognition

The revised edition of David Braddon-Mitchell's and Frank Jackson's Philosophy of Mind and Cognition contains a substantive amount of ne…

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Philosophy of Psychology

The discipline of Psychology is, to put it mildly, broad, and its philosophical study naturally follows suit. To write a text which serves, in the series…

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Philosophy of the Social Sciences

In his book Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Towards Pragmatism, Patrick Baert offers both an introductory text and a pragmatic proposal for red…

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Philosophy Practice

In the relatively young movement known to most as philosophical counseling, there have already been some deep disagreements among its enthusiasts. One of…

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Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow

Stanley Cavell is widely regarded as one of the most innovative and independent contemporary American philosophers writing today. A philosopher originall…

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Physicalism and Its Discontents

Bold metaphysical claims of the form ‘everything there is is X’, where X could be something such as water or mind or matter and such like, are…

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Physicalism and Mental Causation

Among contemporary analytic philosophers of mind, cognitive scientists, and neurophysiologists, physicalism is all the rage.  For the past thirty…

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Physicalism, or Something Near Enough

The philosophical position named  'physicalism' maintains that nothing exists except the kinds of things that are explicitly referred to in the ba…

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Pillar of Salt

I hope that this wonderful book, written with a passionate and sympathetic intelligence, reaches a wide audience. It's not an easy read, for Janice Haake…

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Platonic Ethics, Old and New

In this engaging book, Julia Annas seeks to get the Middle Platonists (a set of writers presumed to have been working between the first century BC and th…

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Porn Studies

The collection of essays, Porn Studies, edited by Linda Williams, represents an intersection of film studies and pedagogy in regards to analyzin…

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Postpsychiatry

Patrick Bracken and Philip Thomas are two U.K. psychiatrists whose important new book expresses a deep concern, and a hopeful optimism, for the future of…

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Power and the Self

Although this collection of nine essays is primarily written by Cultural Anthropologists and for Cultural Anthropologists, there is a little something fo…

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Practical Conflicts

The aim of this collection is to provide a comprehensive basis for understanding the sources, nature and stakes of practical conflicts. As the editors st…

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Practically Profound

Practically Profound is an intelligent, thorough, clearly written book.  The preface is an excellent introduction to some of the major tasks and a…

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Pragmatism, Old And New

Pragmatism has been called the only philosophical school to originate in America. For much of the twentieth century it was also the only English language…

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Preferences and Well-Being

In 2004 a conference took place in Cambridge sponsored by the Royal Institute of Philosophy on preferences and well-being. Drawing on the papers presente…

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Presocratics

"Created especially for students, this series of introductory books on the schools of ancient philosophy offers a clear yet rigorous presentation of…

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Privileged Access

Privileged Access is a collection of fifteen essays which attempt to grapple with the question of how we can know our own feelings or mental state…

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Problems in Mind

See the publisher's description of this book.

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Problems of Living

This intriguing book starts with a quotation of the first two and last stanzas of W. H. Auden's poem The Labyrinth. In the first, Anthopos apteros - literally "wingless man" – meanders happily, lost within the maze of life. By the second stanza, he realiz

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Problems of Rationality

Problems of Rationality is the fourth volume of the collected essays by Donald Davidson. Up to now, minor editing it has been prepared by the late…

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Prozac As a Way of Life

Prozac as a Way of Life is a collection of twelve articles, and a helpful introduction, by contemporary thinkers on the impact of Prozac and other…

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Psychiatric Aspects of Justification, Excuse and Mitigation in Anglo-American Criminal Law

Buchanan’s Psychiatric Aspects of Justification, Excuse and Mitigation is a scholarly work that tackles a broad subject but does so with brev…

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Psychiatric Cultures Compared

Psychiatric Cultures Compared's editors note that the history of psychiatry is usually written by psychiatrists and principally focuses on institu…

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Psychiatric Diagnosis and Classification

This book is based in part on presentations delivered at the 11th World Congress of Psychiatry (Hamburg, Germany, 1999). Consequently, the writing is sch…

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Psychiatric Power

Michel Foucault taught seminars at the College de France from January 1971 until his death in June 1984 under the title "The History of Systems of T…

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Psychiatric Slavery

Thomas Szasz has been the scourge of psychiatry for decades. His criticisms are now well-known: that psychiatry is an unscientific profession which enfor…

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Psychiatry in Society

This book, consisting on eleven chapters each dealing with an aspect of “the interaction between psychiatry and a particular set of social factors&#…

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Psychiatry in the New Millenium

This collection of articles is put together by psychiatrists at the heart of the establishment of American Psychiatry.  Weissman is at Loyola Univer…

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Psychiatry Reborn

Psychiatry Reborn is an important and timely book, tackling a subject that has increasingly preoccupied psychiatry and philosophy of psychiatry over the last two decades. The central problem is identified succinctly in the first line of the introductory c

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Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, And The New Biology Of Mind

Eric Kandel has become a household name in some circles since his sharing of the Nobel Prize in 2000. He is on the second psychiatrist in history to have…

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Psychological Concepts and Biological Psychiatry

Psychological Concepts and Biological Psychiatry argues against the reductionist program of contemporary biomedical psychiatry.  Peter Zachar…

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Psychology and the Question of Agency

Disciplinary psychology has always exhibited signs of strong schizophrenia in its attitude towards the objects of its own research. On the one hand, the…

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Psychotherapy and Confidentiality

This is an important book on an important topic. Recently, courts and legislatures have been carving out new areas of law in regard to confidentiality be…

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Psychotherapy As Praxis

Psychotherapy as Praxis is a proposal for a radical reconceptualization of psychotherapy. The author wants to refute an interpretation of therapy…

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Public Philosophy

Michael Sandel's Public Philosophy is a remarkable collection of essays, the topics of which range from the civic significance of sports to moral…

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Punishment

Ted Honderich's Punishment: The Supposed Justifications Revisited adds to his classic Punishment in addressing itself to an audience of mor…

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Pure Immanence

Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, is a posthumous compilation of three essays by philosopher, logician and former Professor of Philosophy at the U…

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Purple Haze

How can the fine-grained phenomenology of conscious experience arise from neural processes in the brain? The mystery remains unresolved.  The major diffi…

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Questions for Freud

Sigmund Freud was a pioneer who simultaneously blazed a trail into the human mind and into history. In retrospect the trails blazed by pioneers are often recognized as having gone off in the wrong direction. Early trails, like Freud's, were typically roug…

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Questions for Freud

Sigmund Freud was a pioneer who simultaneously blazed a trail into the human mind and into history. In retrospect the trails blazed by pioneers are often re…

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Quine and Davidson on Language, Thought and Reality

Few, if any, analytical philosophers of the past forty or so years have exerted as much influence over their subject as have Willard van Orman Quine and…

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Radical Externalism

Honderich's theory of consciousness, as briefly expounded in this volume, attempts a paradigm shift in favor of a strongly intuitive reading of what it i…

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Rational Choice in an Uncertain World

This book should be prefaced with the following warning: CAUTION:  Using the information contained in this book could result in changes i…

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Rationality and Freedom

Rationality and Freedom is the first of two volumes for a larger project by Amartya Sen dealing with the subjects of rationality, freedom, and jus…

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Rationality in Action

In the book, Searle attempts to provide an analysis of the most pressing philosophical issues concerning human deliberation. How is intentional action ca…

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Re-creating Medicine

This book deal with recent debates within medical ethics. It is concerned with matters such as organ donation, cloning, payment for surrogate mothers, paten…

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Reading Autobiography

The authors of this surprisingly rich and detailed text are both well known in the field of narrative studies. Sidonie Smith is the Martha Guernsey Colby…

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Real Natures and Familiar Objects

Real Natures and Familiar Objects is an important, but very difficult book. While it will doubtless become required reading for professional metap…

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Real Science

Science has changed. The research scientists of today may seem to be doing much the same things in much the same ways as their predecessors of a generat…

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Realism in Action

Realism in Action is of course multiply ambiguous.  I had hoped it would focus on what difference taking metaphysical realisms seriously would mak…

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Reasoning About Rational Agents

Midway through this account of the formal representation of reasoning agents acting in a changing environment, Michael Wooldridge writes that "all the…

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Reasoning in Biological Discoveries

Lindley Darden's "Reasoning in Biological Discovery: Essays on Mechanisms, Interfield Relations and Anomaly Resolution" is a collection of pape…

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Reasons without Rationalism

This book concerns the question how one ought to live. And since the author takes it for granted, as he says (1), that what one ought to do is what one h…

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Reclaiming Cognition

This volume is intended to redress an imbalance that the editors find in the study of the mind stemming from the work of Rationalists such as Descartes an…

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Reconstructing Reason and Representation

Chances are that you might have heard or read something lately about evolutionary psychology. This still very young discipline has given rise to a boomin…

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Recreative Minds

At first glance, the topic of the imagination appears somewhat peripheral to the major concerns of philosophy and psychology. Currie and Ravenscroft quic…

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Rediscovering Emotion

David Pugmire's book is a lucid and carefully structured reflection on emotions, primarily intended to serve an audience of students both of philosophy and…

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Rediscovering Empathy

Many philosophers and cognitive scientists are now familiar with a traditional debate between two accounts of folk-psychology (the intuitive framework of…

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Reference and the Rational Mind

Kenneth Taylor's book Reference and the Rational Mind is a collection of essays (published in the last ten years in journals and within conference…

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Regulating Sex

Regulating Sex collects fourteen essays on the subject of how states regulate their citizens' sexual conduct. It brings together academics from va…

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Restraining Rage

Classical studies earns its salt when it we learn something of value from it; not when philological prowess is displayed in esoteric linguistic disputes.…

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Rethinking Causality, Complexity and Evidence for the Unique Patient

This open access, multi-authored volume distills the work of an interdisciplinary research project, CauseHealth, conducted from 2015 to 2019 at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, which attempts to address theoretical and practical challenges to un

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Rethinking Rape

Ann Cahill has written an important and well-balanced book on a subject that is known to fuel passions and not much clear thinking. The book merits the…

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Rethinking the DSM

When psychologists have written about diagnostic classification, they have generally taken a somewhat critical stance to the American Psychiatric Associa…

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Rethinking the Sociology of Mental Health

Julie Mulvany suggests at the start of her contribution to this book “sociologists appear to have abandoned the study of serious mental illness.…

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Return to Reason

Stephen Toulmin, the noted academic probably most well-known for his work in the history and philosophy of science and medical ethics, begins his book by…

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Richard Rorty

'Analytic philosophy' has been many things, but much of it can be -- simplistically -- characterized as an attempt to do the philosopher's work by quite literally analyzing the meaningsof sentences and words into their constituent parts. These constituent…

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Richard Rorty

To begin, here is a list of some apparently obvious and interconnected truisms: There is a world that is independent of whatever we may think of it; it contains objects which have various properties and which bear various relations to each other; those ob…

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Richard Rorty

Volume 4 of Alan Malachowski's Richard Rorty completes the Sage Masters of Modern Thought collection of classic and recent essays on the influential and controversial American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty. As with the other volumes, Volume 4 offer…

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Rights, Democracy, and Fulfillment in the Era of Identity Politics

David Ingram's Rights, Democracy, and Fulfillment arises from a meditation on the United States' recent invasion of Iraq. Ingram names t…

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Rise And Fall of Soul And Self

In The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self Raymond Martina and John Barresi set out to write a history of personal identity. The book is divided up int…

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Risk and Reasoning in Clinical Diagnosis

Dr. Ryle, a practicing primary care physician, has written a book directed at other practicing physicians and the general public. His goal is to explicat…

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Robert Nozick

There are three reasons why this writer is unhappy. 1. Robert Nozick died, 2. I miss him, 3. For the vagaries of the publishing world, the contributions…

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Rousseau

This book seeks to explore the meaning and practice of freedom in Rousseau through the broad scope of both Rousseau's texts and his life seen as a qu…

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Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Derrida on Deconstruction

The book under review is one of the guidebooks from the Routledge Philosophy Guidebook series. This is a valuable series of books which, in the publisher…

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Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland

When Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland first appeared in 1977, it attracted immedi…

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Sartre

This is a book about a failure. True, a most spectacular and exquisite failure, but a failure none the less. It is the failure of the philosopher (projected in the public mind) as a political figure: apostle of the revolution, enlightener of the unlearned…

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Sartre

Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed series of books promises to offer "clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging." Sartre certainly counts as a ch…

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Sartre

Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed series of books promises to offer "clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writer…

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Satisficing and Maximizing

This edited volume discusses the legitimacy of satisficing as a rational model for practical reason and for ethical deliberation. The idea of satisficing…

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Scaffolded Minds

In many respects Scaffolding Minds succinctly synthesizes Somogy Varga's articles over the past decade. It provides pertinent paraphrases for its target audience of philosophical scholars and clinical and cognate practitioners reflecting upon the nature o

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Scandalous Knowledge

Evaluation, interpretation, mimesis, excellence, rationality itself; all of these are under attack these days.  It is a scandal.  In part the g…

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Science and Enlightenment

In clear and well-written prose Maxwell makes the ambitious and far-reaching argument that scientific method, properly conceived, can be applied not just to the acquisition of knowledge but to problems of living. By this method academic inquiry should aim

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Science Rules

Does science have a method, or a collection of methods?  In this book, Achinstein has culled from a variety of scientists and philosophers various "…

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Science, Consciousness and Ultimate Reality

I see this book as "mysticism" applied to self, neuropsychology, and physics/cosmology, the editor's unstated purpose being to "make the w…

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Scientific Evidence

This volume compiles thirteen papers presented in a conference on scientific evidence held at Johns Hopkins in 2003. Seven are authored by former graduat…

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Scientific Irrationalism

The Australian philosopher David Stove (1927-1994) published the first edition of this book in 1982 with the title Popper and After: Four Modern Irra…

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Scientific Perspectivism

In this pleasingly short book, Ronald Giere continues his explorations of naturalistic approaches to understanding science.  The key idea in this vo…

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Scientific Pluralism

This fascinating, if ultimately frustrating, collection of essays addresses "pluralism" in science.  Contributors focus on the foundations…

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Second Philosophy

Analytic philosophy has had a rebellious history for which, prima facie, Penelope Maddy's book occupies an interesting position. Ever since…

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Secrets of the Mind

            Every now and then one comes across a book written by an author who magisterially bestrides the philosophy/psychology divide by combining th…

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Seeing Double

I wanted to review this book because the title sounded interesting. The last one I had reviewed for Metapsychology was about the notion of identit…

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Seeing Red

What does it mean that humans are conscious, in the everyday sort of sense, and can science explain how and why it happens?  Why are we conscious…

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Seeing, Doing, And Knowing

In Seeing, Doing, and Knowing, Mohan Matthen has certainly produced a well constructed theory of perception. Both the (much appreciated) detailed…

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Self and Subjectivity

Kim Atkins, the editor of the book Self and Subjectivity is herself one of the leading figures and a central force in the philosophical discussion…

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Self-Consciousness

This is a book on self-consciousness. It is a noteworthy feature of writings purporting to define or explain the nature of consciousness that their autho…

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Self-Knowledge and Resentment

Since Descartes, many philosophers have shared the intuition that self-knowledge is different from other kinds of knowledge and that it is transparent an…

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Self-Reference and Self-Awareness

A very interesting publication comes to enrich the already voluminous and important series (Advances in Consciousness Research) that John Benjamins Publ…

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Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness

            The theory of consciousness has assume a center stage in recent philosophy of mind. This…

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Sentimental Rules

Recent years have seen more and more philosophers turning to cognitive science and social psychology as a source of data to guide and constrain their the…

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Shades of Loneliness

Richard Stivers' work has always proven groundbreaking, disrupting our comfortable assumptions about modern life and world, and prompting us to question…

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Signs, Mind, And Reality

Signs, Mind, and Reality is the late Sebastian Shaumyan's final version of his u…

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Simple Mindedness

This is a collection of previously written essays. An introduction has been written to state the central unifying theme, and there has been some rewriting a…

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Simulating Minds

"Folk psychology" refers to the ways in which normal people (the "folk") predict and explain each other's mental states. Currentl…

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Singing in the Fire

Reading Singing in the Fire: Stories of Women in Philosophy is like attending a great dinner party, where every guest is smart and fascinating, an…

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Sisyphus's Boulder

There is a convenient device that is repeatedly, and perhaps overly, used to set out some or other position in the humanities. It works in the following…

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Six Questions of Socrates

It cannot have been easy to produce an adequate follow-up to Socrates' Café…

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Skeptical Feminism

There is a fundamental tension in contemporary feminism between 'theory' and 'practice'.  Traditional theorizing has long been interpreted by feminists a…

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Sloth

The reader of this exquisite hardback volume will find her/himself struck by just over a hundred pages of pure, relentless wit.  As Elda R…

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Socializing Metaphysics

The book is dedicated by the editor to the memory of Peter Winch, and in general it pays a fair tribute to both the ingenuity and the high standard of Wi…

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Socrates Cafe

Christopher Phillips gave up a career as a journalist to offer himself as a facilitator for 'Socrates' Café', a forum for free discussion that can be h…

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Socrates in Love

It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of Socrates, as presented by Plato and other sources, upon western thought. He shifted the intellectual discussion from a proto-science of nature to an inquiry into the lives and institutions of human living

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Soren Kierkegaard

 

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Sorting Things Out

This book should be read not only by anybody who has ever thought about classification systems but also by anybody whose life has been touched by such syste…

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Sound Sentiments

Several years ago David Pugmire produced a short and useful book entitled Rediscovering  Emotions. Fine and successful though it was, it bore the…

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Sovereign Virtue

For some time it has been fashionable to deride the supposed flabbiness of liberal man. His political commitments, it is supposed, fall out of convenie…

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Speaking My Mind

I am the world's leading expert on the current contents of my left pocket (a handkerchief, some change). I can also lay claim to being the world's leadin…

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Spinoza

Baruch or Benedict Spinoza — whom we should properly call ‘Bento’, his given name, in the Portuguese-speaking Jewish community of Amsterda…

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Spinoza and Deep Ecology

Eccy de Jonge's book is a strident critique of deep ecology, but it is sometimes difficult to assess the validity of his charges, and given that, despite…

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Spirits and Clocks

Descartes is infamous for his mind/body dualism. It is Descartes' dualism that makes his philosophy memorable to the twentieth first century reader, but dur…

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Stoic Philosophy and Social Theory

Ancient philosophers and schools of Ancient times have always been influential in shaping the modern theories of on psychological and social aspects of society. Lou Marinoff’s groundbreaking book Plato not Prozac! marks a milestone in applying philosophy

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Stories Matter

In Stories Matter, Rita Charon and Martha Montello collect twenty-one articles spread over 226 pages.  The authors are academics, some doctors, tr…

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Surprise, Uncertainty, and Mental Structures

In the Epilogue to this compact book, Jerome Kagan, professor emeritus of psychology at Harvard University, makes a confession: He did not fully understa…

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Surrealist Painters and Poets

This weighty tome might be used as a text for a class on Surrealism but is worth buying and reading in its own right.  It is a collection of memoirs, pro…

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Surrounding Self-Control

This high-quality volume of essays, edited by leading philosopher of action Alfred Mele, provides a thorough overview of a variety of key issues revolving around the philosophy and psychology of self-control. Self-control – to be distinguished in the firs

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Sweet Dreams

Daniel Dennett's Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness is published as part of The Jean Nicod Lectures series.…

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Synesthesia : A Union of the Senses

To say that the phenomenon of synesthesia is interesting is to understate the point and Richard E. Cytowic’s second edition of Synesthesia: A Uni…

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Szasz Under Fire

The work of Thomas Szasz has been important in provoking people to scrutinize and explore the foundations of psychiatry.  While probably the majority of…

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Taking Action

Taking Action is not just another informative, up-to-date, and challenging sample of cognitive neuroscientific research on intentional acts. To be…

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Taking the Red Pill

The title of this collection of essays edited by Glenn Yeffeth, is "Taking the Red Pill, Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix"…

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Teach Yourself Postmodernism

It was with great reservation that I approached this book. I assumed it would be one of the many dummies, idiots, or learn Kant in 60 mi…

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Technology and the Good Life?

When I anticipated receiving the book in the mail, Technology and the Good Life? held great promise. However, as I began reading the book, the promis…

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Teleological Realism

Commonsense psychology explains human behavior in terms of mental states such as beliefs and desires.  Telemachus traveled to Sparta because he wanted to…

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The Act of Thinking

Although The Act of Thinking is a rewrite of a Ph.D. thesis, for Massey University of New Zealand, it is no academic cliché but the work of a mat…

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The Age of Insanity

This thoughtful, provocative volume explores the generalized psychological effects of living in the modern world. The modern world, according to Schumaker,…

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The Anti-Oedipus Papers

It's ridiculous to be a Maoist in Bécon-les-Bruyères, on a Sunday morning, at the train station, in front of a flower shop, selling a l…

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The Anxieties of Affluence

In The Anxieties of Affluence, Daniel Horowitz traces and examines the evolving attitudes of Americans toward the material affluence characterizin…

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The Art of Living

The Art of Living is a fundamentally correct book.  Not only does it accurately lay out Stoic doctrines on the relation of logos and askesis (exercise).  The work furthermore accurately relates Hadot's and Foucault's stance on the Stoics, in proper counte…

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The Art of Living

The Art of Living is a fundamentally correct book.  Not only does it accurately lay out Stoic doctrines on the relation of logos and ask…

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The Asymmetrical Brain

The Asymmetrical Brain is a collection of essays in the field of cognitive neuroscience purporting to report on progress on research on brain func…

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The Bakhtin Circle

 The story of the discovery and perception of Bakhtin in the West after the 60’s offers an interesting collage of the ideas that have been …

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The Beginning of Philosophy

When examining the beginnings of philosophic literature it is tempting to ask whether that historic literature might have the structure of a deductive scien…

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The Big Book of Concepts

Gregory Murphy’s The Big Book of Concepts is large not only in size and scope but also in significance. Murphy provides a much-needed overvie…

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The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Science

There is increasing debate within and between various disciplines of the health sciences about philosophical underpinnings pertinent to both research and…

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The Body/Body Problem

This book lives on the boundary between the philosophies of action, history and mind. It consists of twelve essays, eleven of which have been previously…

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The Bounds of Agency

This is a rewarding book. Touching on fundamental issues in epistemology, action theory, philosophical psychology (and psychopathology), Rovane injects a…

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The Caldron of Consciousness

Metaphors are indicative of what the thinking process is after. The classic image of the mind, at least in the empiricist tradition, was that of a slate or…

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The Cambridge Companion to Adorno

The Cambridge Companion to Adorno consists of sixteen essays covering the thinking of Theodor Adorno in a single book.  Like others in this s…

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The Cambridge Companion to Berkeley

The Cambridge Companion to Berkeley, edited by Kenneth Winkler, is an impressive collection of twelve articles about a philosopher whose work ha…

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The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy

This book is a collection of essays concerning the contribution of feminist thinking to "all of the core subject areas commonly taught in anglophone un…

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The Cambridge Companion to Plato's Republic

The Cambridge Companion to Plato's Republic is a worthy new contribution to the long-running series of Cambridge Companions, and is…

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The Cambridge Companion to Quine

The philosopher Williard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908) died on Christmas day, 2000 at the age of 92.  During six decades he published more than twenty books…

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The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir

Ask anyone outside academic circles and Simone de Beauvoir is best known as the partner of Jean-Paul Sartre, the 'other half' of the existentialis…

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The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics

There aren't many philosophers or philosophical schools that are regularly mentioned in the sports sections of the daily newspapers.  The Stoics, however…

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The Cambridge Medical Ethics Workbook

The Cambridge Medical Ethics Workbook is an introductory text for students new to the field. As a teacher in this field for nearly twenty years, I ha…

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The Case for Humanism

This book is a collection of essays by the two authors the former of whom used to be the editor of the humanist magazine Free Inquiry, the philoso…

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The Case for Pragmatic Psychology

In The Case for Pragmatic Psychology, Daniel Fishman of Rutgers proposes a bold and innovative solution to the dilemma of deciding "what works b…

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The Case of the Female Orgasm

Elizabeth Lloyd's new book has attracted a lot of attention for a technical work of academic philosophy, including profiles in the…

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The Certainty of Uncertainty

The subtitle of Bernhard Poerksen's The Certainty of Uncertainty proposes the task of introducing constructivism, in the form of dialogues with it…

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The Clinical and Forensic Assessment of Psychopathy

This is an excellent collection of essays, remarkably consistent in tone and quality, that presents comprehensive coverage of the latest work on psychopa…

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The Cognitive Basis of Science

In this valuable collection the authors are concerned with the aspects of human psychology that make scientific enquiry possible. Given a broad construal of…

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The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness

This book achieves its aim of demonstrating how recent advances in cognitive neuroscience have contributed to our understanding of conscious experience.&…

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The Concepts of Psychiatry

Nassir Ghaemi's The Concepts of Psychiatry is an important contribution to the literature of philosophy of psychiatry and will be especially usefu…

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The Condition of Madness

See this book listed at the University Press of America website.

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The Conscious Mind

According to Chalmers, a theory of consciousness should, at the very least, "...give the conditions under which physical processes give rise to conscious…

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The Conscious Self

The major thesis of The Conscious Self is that the self -- specifically the human self -- actually exists and is reflexively conscious of its own…

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The Consolations of Philosophy

The problems for which this self-help book offers advice are those which most of us have faced at one time or another: unpopularity, not having enough mo…

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The Constitution of Selves

Schechtman thinks that the contemporary literature of personal identity has gone off in the wrong direction and in this slim volume she attempts to reori…

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The Construction of Power and Authority in Psychiatry

Contents: Contents: Preface; Poem for psychiatric conference; The construction of mind and madness: from Leonardo to the Hearing Voices Network; Living within and without psychiatric language games; Part One - Keynote presentations at the Longhirst Hall C

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The Creation of Psychopharmacology

The fundamental claim of The Creation of Psychopharmacology is that psychoactive drugs are a powerful force in history. Agents such as chlorpromaz…

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The Crucible of Experience

Daniel Burston's previous book, The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R.D. Laing (Reviewed in…

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The Culture of Our Discontent

Meredith F. Small examines the western medical model of mental illness from the perspective of an anthropologist.  Her book journeys across various…

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The Delay of the Heart

About the reviewer:````Antonio T. de Nicolas was educated in Spain, India and the United States, and received his Ph.D. in philosophy at Fordham University in New York. He is Professor Emeritus of philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Br

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The Deleuze Connections

Charles T. Wolfe teaches``at the Department of Philosophy, Boston University.

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The Disappearance of Rituals

Byung-Chul Han is a Korean-born professor of philosophy and cultural studies at the University of the Arts in Berlin as well as a popular contemporary social analyst. During the last two decades, he has published numerous book-length essays dissecting con

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The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic

In the early Nineteenth century, Jacksonian Americans believed they could cure, or at least contain, crime, mental illness and even poverty. The means w…

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The Dream Drugstore

This is a fascinating book.  In The Dream Drugstore, Allen Hobson uses his own theory of dreaming to discuss altered states of consciousness,…

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The Emergence of Sexuality

In this book Davidson engages in two main related topics -- a discussion of some of the methodological issues that emerge in the work of Michel Foucault,…

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The Emotional Brain

The study of the emotions has been relatively neglected by neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers, but recently the tide has been turning.…

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The Empirical Stance

In this collection of five lectures, Bas van Fraassen attempts to answer a number of questions regarding the nature of empiricism, scientific inquiry, an…

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The Enigma of Health

Detachment from ourselves and from life is the first thing we shouldavoid. Feeling well or ill should not be confused with incommensurability, and health is…

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The Epistemic Innocence of Irrational Beliefs

Some of your beliefs are irrational. That is not such a terrible thing. In this excellent book, Bortolotti explains the usefulness of irrational beliefs. For example, being delusional is being an irrational state of mind, Bortolotti does not deny that the

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The Ethical Way

Professionals working with managed care are consistently confronted with the ethical dilemmas inherent in managed behavioral healthcare. Moffic, a profes…

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The Ethics of Identity

Individualism is part and parcel of classical liberalism. It is the individual that matters morally, and it is the individual for which liberalists postu…

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The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

First published in 1965, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis is a valuable account of the theory and method of what Thomas Szasz has named "autonomous ps…

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The Ethics of Suffering

Philosophers of law (at least those of a positivist bent) are most often preoccupied with questions concerning the validity conditions for statements tha…

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The Evolution of Agency and Other Essays

Kim Sterelny's The Evolution of Agency and Other Essays is a collection of articles. There are six articles in the philosophy of biology, five in phi…

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The Evolution of Morality

Richard Joyce introduces the two tasks of his book as: (i) to address the question 'is morality innate?' (chapters 1-4) and, assuming that it is,…

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The Existentialists

Emmanuel Levinas once remarked that both everyone and no-one is an existentialist: everyone, because traces of the doctrine can be found in very many thi…

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The Extinction of Desire

The hero is a wanderer through space and time, his quest caught in an allegory which must in the end be fragmentary. – Hermann Hesse…

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The Fate of Knowledge

How is scientific knowledge to be construed? Sociologists stress non-cognitive, social factors. Philosophers of science tend to stress cognitive and logi…

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The Feeling of What Happens

Antonio Damasio is a best-selling author, and it is not hard to see why.  This is a work of pop science, valuable in its own right.  While it is not part…

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The Fountain of Youth

The purpose of this book is to introduce the reader to the scientific and ethical issues concerning prolongevity, i.e. the process of significantly incre…

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The Future for Philosophy

What philosophy professors spend their time on is often out of step with what the public feels philosophy ought to be concerned with. Instead of dealing…

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The Greeks and the Irrational

In The Greek and the Irrational, first published in 1951, E.R. Dodds (1893 - 1979) investigates the question of whether the ancient Greeks…

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The Human Animal

The subtitle of Olson’s book gives the plot away: Olson holds that psychological properties and abilities are not relevant to our continued existenc…

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The Hungry Soul

In The Hungry Soul we find an interesting blend of subjects, methods, and traditions. First and foremost, it is a work of philosophical anthropolo…

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The Hypomanic Edge

In the psychoanalytic era, it was common for almost every paper to come back to one theme: the Oedipus complex (or variations on libido, sexuality, and r…

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The Idea of the Self

Jerrold Seigel is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History at New York University, and the author of several well-regarded books on cultural, intellectu…

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The Illusion of Conscious Will

A book with this title is likely to cause a reaction even before you read it. Some will immediately dismiss it as more of the obviously wrong ide…

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The Importance of Being Understood

The rather bold claim on the jacket that this book will be of interest to anyone working in either ethics or the philosophy of mind really is true…

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The Last Physician

The essays collected in this volume - over half by physicians and several of which were initially presented at a conference at the University of Chicago&…

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The Limits of Autobiography

Leigh Gilmore’s The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony is a fine addition to the body of excellent recent work in trauma st…

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The Limits of Medicine

Andrew Stark's The Limits of Medicine tackles timely issues. As the possibilities for medical intervention expand it is increasingly importa…

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The Logic of Affect

This book sounds like it should be about the rationality of emotion. It isn't. It says nothing about logic or rationality, and not much about affect or emot…

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The Logical Alien

Edited by Sofia Miguens and published in 2020 by Harvard University Press, The Logical Alien: Conant and his Critics is an imposing 1069-pages collection devoted to the problem of the possibility of illogical thought. Could we imagine beings who would rea

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The Madonna of the Future

The subtitle of The Madonna of the Future, the most recent collection of art criticism written by the philosopher Arthur Danto for The Nation,…

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The Making of the Modern Self

Why write a book on the history of our notions of self and identity? After all, hadn't Charles Taylor satisfied sufficiently this need with his masterful…

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The Matrix and Philosophy

Life is hard sometimes, isn't it?  Ok, some of us may have it easier, but for most of us, life is a long road with pleasures scattered with displeasures.…

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The Meaning of Life and the Great Philosophers

MoL is an edited collection which aims to bring together a range of perspectives exploring some of the greatest minds in the history of philosophy on the question of MoL. The topic is seeing some resurgence in philosophical interest and just this year th

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The Meaning of Mind

   As "mind" is the key word of the title, Szasz, typically conversant in classical languages as a European-trained scholar, refers to the Lati…

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The Mechanics of Passion

After The weariness of the self and La société du malaise (The society of discontent), Alain Ehrenberg signs another book on the therapeutic culture so typical of contemporary Western societies, in which a nebulous array of psychological theories, dissemi

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The Metaphor of Mental Illness

Neil Pickering's closely argued and sophisticated return to the very basic methodological underpinnings of claims about whether "mental illness"…

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The Metaphysical Club

The Metaphysical Club is above all the story of a historical context. A wonderfully told story about a terribly complex context of ideas, o…

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The Metaphysics of Capital

To jump straight in: this book is a terrible read, at least it was for me. Admittedly, it was off to an immediately bad start when I read the opening lin…

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The Mind Doesn't Work That Way

The Computational Theory of Mind (CTM) can't explain "much of what's special about our kinds of minds". Or so argues Jerry Fodor, who has defended this very…

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The Mind Incarnate

In this book, Lawrence Shapiro confronts an issue that is commonly acknowledged as one of the most significant metaphysical question in philosophy: the m…

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The Moral Challenge of Alzheimer Disease

There have been many scientific and social changes in the dementia landscape in the five years since the first edition of The Moral Challenge of Alzheime…

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The Most Solitary of Afflictions

Every once in a while you reread a book that profoundly interested you at the time, and you wonder if it will have quite the same impact. Will it still s…

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The Myth of Pain

The Myth of Pain opens with a series forward, in which the editors state that the aim of the series is both interdisciplinary and uncharted: to offer…

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The Nature of Consciousness

The philosophical and scientific study of consciousness is somewhat of a black sheep in contemporary thought. The brain, for instance, is designated leg…

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The Nature of Intelligence

The Novartis Foundation, an international science and education charity located in London, regularly hosts symposia that deal with cutting edge issues in…

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The Nature of the Mind

There is in the modern scientific world a riddle about how to understand what it means to be human. Natural science and its methodology, on the one hand,…

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The New Disability History

Despite many source materials for disability history, labor historiography rarely recognizes the experience and perception of disability in laborers̵…

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The New Idea of a University

There is nothing more interesting to academics than their reflections on their own professional identities.   And their identities are intimately bound u…

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The New Phrenology

This book is an exhaustive review of arguments for the negative answer to one of the most fundamental questions of psychology: Can psychological processe…

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The Other Bishop Berkeley

There is more to Berkeley than meets the eye. Given the fact that he can be read in so many various ways, many of which do not overlap, this shows how hi…

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The Oxford Companion to the Mind

The Oxford Companion to the Mind is an eclectic collection of entries by respected academics on topics in psychology and philosophy of mind.  Edit…

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The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology

The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology has two main audiences: the first one would be the experts who could benefit from a first approach to phenomenology, such as practitioners, teachers, psychologists, and psychiatrists. For them, I wou

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The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Disability

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Disability gives us a cohesive portrayal of current Anglo-American thinking and debate about the central conceptions of disability within the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of Medical Humanities.

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The Paradox of Self Consciousness

This book has many virtues. Despite its somewhat daunting title, it is very readable, largely because for the most part it is beautifully written. It mak…

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The Parallax View

Philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek has been called the Elvis of contemporary intellectuals more than once. After all, not only can he boast a p…

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The Paranormal and the Politics of Truth

Attempting to be aware of my own discursive thought patterns, and thus my orientation towards certain belief structures, I concluded an analysis was poss…

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The Phenomenology Reader

The Phenomenology Reader alongside Dermot Moran's Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2000) provide a much needed pair of te…

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The Philosopher's Autobiography

The book is an introduction to the 'relatively new' genre of 'philosophical autobiography'. The first two chapters outline some characteristics of philos…

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The Philosopher's Secret Fire

Patrick Harpur has attempted something quite extraordinary and difficult. Not only does he want to capture lightning in a bottle, he wants to show how it…

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The Philosophical I

'Still crazy after all these years' would make an apt title for a conference to mark my retirement and to probe the pathways by which people join and rem…

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The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

In The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe's brilliant exposé of the insecurity, egoism, avarice, and hypocrisy of the pioneers of American Modern Art, Andy…

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The Philosophy of Law

Raymond Wacks' very short introduction to Philosophy of Law is just 107 pages of text, plus a short preface, with some photographs of the philosopher…

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The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty

Few comprehensive books exist on the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.  Most English-language books tend to focus upon his phenomenology and…

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The Philosophy of Need

The essays collected in this volume derive from a conference held by the Royal Institute of Philosophy in Britain in September, 2003. It appears that the…

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The Philosophy of Psychiatry

Philosophy of Psychiatry is a new name for something that is, in a sense, very old. The topic of how best to care for and heal a person's mind or soul ha…

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The Philosophy of Psychology

Psychology is the specialized area of inquiry into the mental life and activities of humans and animals. Psychology was part of philosophy until the mid…

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The Philosophy of Science and Technology Studies

While science and technology studies (or STS) and philosophy of science both describe and comment on issues in the natural sciences, the relationship bet…

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The Philosophy of William James

Applying a technique that should be turned into the theme of a website to rival the "Cau…

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The Physics of Consciousness

Contemporary literature on consciousness distinguishes between "easy problems" concerning the cognitive capacities of animals and humans, to which…

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The Postnational Self

The Postnational Self is a collection that comes with a message: The age of the nation is over, whereas the postnational age is beginning to dawn.…

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The Presence of Mind

According to the publishers blurb The Presence of Mind argues that beliefs and desires have a legitimate place in the explanation of action. A philos…

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The Primacy of the Subjective

Externalism is the dominant doctrine in the contemporary philosophy of mind.  There are several variants of this doctrine. According to passive exte…

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The Problem of the Soul

Owen Flanagan’s The Problem of the Soul is an accessible attempt to articulate and defend a thoroughgoing physicalist view of mind (or, as he…

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The Race for Consciousness

John Taylor’s The Race for Consciousness is successful as a guided tour of many important topics in neuroscience and related disciplines. It…

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The Rational Imagination

In The Rational Imagination, Ruth Byrne develops an account of imagination according to which imaginative thought about the way the world could…

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The Reasons of Love

As its title suggests, this is a book about love.  It is based on a series of lectures that Frankfurt delivered in 2000 and 2001, at Princeton University…

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The Relevance of Philosophy to Life

This book is a collections of essays in moral/political philosophy and philosophy of education, written over the years by the American pragmatist philoso…

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The Revolt of the Primitive

Modern feminism has been with us for decades. Are you of the opinion that it has done more harm than good, that society is suffering as a result, or that it…

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The Right to Refuse Mental Health Treatment

I ought to begin by declaring my own interests in this area. As a clinical psychologist in the UK I look to the USA with envy at the amount of research and…

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The Robot's Rebellion

The Robot's Rebellion attempts to reconcile a scientific commitment to Darwinism with the commonsense view that we are freely deliberating agents…

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The Roman Stoics

The Roman Stoics: Self, Responsibility, and Affection by Gretchen Reydams-Schils is an important contribution to the English-language literature…

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The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy

This volume is an excellent introduction to feminist philosophy, since it showcases the breadth and depth of feminist thinking across a wide range of philosophical traditions and topics, while featuring feminist perspectives that challenge and reconsi

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The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology

The Philosophy of Psychology, as a subject area, is not altogether easy to define. I can think of at least three ways that one might define it. First, as a branch of the Philosophy of Science: i.e., something like a second-order inquiry into the methodolo

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The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy

The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy consists of seven sections: (1) Family and Friendship, (2) Romance and Sex, (3) Politics and Society, (4) Animals, Nature, and the Environment, (5) Art, Faith, and Meaning, (6) Rationality and Morality, and (7)

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The RoutledgeFalmer Reader In The Philosophy Of Education

Wilfred Carr's anthology provides us with eighteen papers published in the decade up to 2004 by a predominantly British cohort of professional philosophe…

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The Rules of Insanity

The Rules of Insanity, divided into seven chapters, basically addresses three kinds of mentally ill offender: people who commit crimes as a result…

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The Science of Self-Control

Howard Rachlin’s The Science of Self-Control is a masterwork by a master scientist. Written with elegant simplicity, exquisite precision and…

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The Second-Person Standpoint

We typically assume that moral obligations come with a distinctive authority. If X is morally wrong, then we take this to mean that I have a decisive rea…

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The Secret History of Emotion

On a Genealogy of the Emotions from a Rhetorical Perspective1. We have been witnessing in recent decades…

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The Self Awakened

In The Self Awakened, Roberto Unger seeks to instigate a thoroughgoing revision of pragmatism by offering a radicalized version of it.  His…

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The Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

There is no doubt that the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an excellent resource, with over 2000 long entries and 8680 pages.  Its…

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The Shortest Shadow

   Although Nietzsche's fragmentary and ambiguous writings have not infrequently been subjected to what we can call a 'deconstructive' reading (by…

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The Significance of Consciousness

In The Significance of Consciousness, Charles Siewert argues that "phenomenal consciousness," the subjective feel or character of conscious…

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The Simpsons and Philosophy

I was at a gas station in Yuma, Arizona a few years ago.  While filling my tank, a young man at another pump caught my eye.  "You taught my logic cl…

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The Social Construction of What?

Of the eight chapters here, only the first five will be of much interest to most philosophers and psychologists. The last three are on weapons research,…

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The Social Nature of Mental Illness

In The Social Nature of Mental Illness, Len Bowers presents a defense of psychiatry against antipsychiatry and critical sociological accounts.  Th…

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The Soul Knows No Bars

Before reading Drew Leder's The Soul Knows No Bars, I thought prison to be an apt place to do philosophy--not only because of some notable histori…

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The Stoics On Determinism And Compatibilism

The Stoics espoused two doctrines that, at first glance, do not seem to cohere. The first was a belief in a providential order in which every event was f…

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The Structure of Thinking

In her original and contentious book, The Structure of Thinking, Laura Weed takes to task the "logical and mechanical reductivist program&quo…

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The Subjective Self

This large book is a portrait of the complexity of the subjective self objectively situated. It is an interdisciplinary account that draws upon philosoph…

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The Subtlety of Emotions

Emotions in general and particular, according to Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, constitute prototype rather than binary categories. There are no necessary and su…

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The Tao of Ordinariness

This is a case where confirmation bias didn't work. Both the academic-philosopher and the spiritual-seeker in me expected this to be as intellectually inspiring as it would be personally uplifting. Unfortunately, it was neither. I found the title intrigui

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The Tears of Things

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1). There must be few people who have no interest in object…

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The Toothpaste of Immortality

In theintroduction we learn that "the aim of this book is to study the humanself, and the ways in which people protect, shape, and construct their…

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The Transformation of Psychology

The papers in this collection explore a wide variety of predominantly late 19th Century influences on the emerging discipline of psychology. Together th…

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The Truth About Denial

This book provides its readers with a serious lesson. It is to motivate its readers to be self-aware about how they come to believe what they do, and how they sometimes protect their established beliefs against competing ideas, even ones that are more des

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The Turing Test

There are three sections to this book. The first, 'Precursors', includes antecedents to the Turing Test. As is well known, Descartes held the view that u…

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The Undiscovered Wittgenstein

As the title of his latest book on Wittgenstein suggests, for John W. Cook, over fifty years after Wittgenstein's death, and despite the rivers of ink th…

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The Vehement Passions

In The Vehement Passions Philip Fisher sets out to show that the passions play an imperative role in providing us with certain valuable informati…

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The View from Within

The book consists in ten original texts, followed by many (shorter) pieces dubbed the peer commentaries and responses. It is perhaps worthwhile to introd…

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The Volitional Brain

Go to the publisher's home page for a table of contents and other information.

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The Wages of Sin

I am pretty sure that this book is going to be one of the books which express most fully the spirit of the 21st Century as regards the inter-dependency o…

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The Web of Life

Something deep and challenging is going on in the Western psyche, and there is no lack of books around that attempt to articulate the nature of the perceive…

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The Whole Child

Philosophers have written far too little about parenting, a trifle in fact when compared for example to what they have produced in the present and previo…

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The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster

The perfectibility of Mankind is an idea that has driven some of the most majestic of human enterprises, and some of the most tragic. The line between he…

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The Will to Punish

Fassin presented the 2016 Tanner Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, entitled 'The Will to Punish,' over three consecutive afternoons in April of that year, followed by participant's comments and a short reply by Fassin. The overall thrust

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The Wing of Madness

In the last five years there has been a surprising rush of biographies, memoirs, and recollections of R.D. Laing. I very much enjoyed the personal touch…

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The Works of Agency

Whereas action may seem to involve the realization of its agent's freely formed intentions, this is not so for events such as a stone's falling from a cliff…

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The World in My Mind, My Mind in the World

The World in my Mind is not presented as a philosophical book, but rather a book about the practical issues around consciousness.  As the author e…

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The World of Perception

In just over a hundred pages, this elegant volume presents the reader with the text of seven talks.  These were originally prepared in short lecture for…

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Theoretical Issues in Psychology: An Introduction

This book is about theoretical and philosophical issues in psychology. Psychology is mainly considered as the science of the mind. But this consid…

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Theory and Reality

Whether you are interested in philosophy of science as a scholar or as a supplement to your other professional interests, Peter Godfrey-Smith presents a…

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Therapeutic Action

Jonathan Lear begins Therapeutic Action with a question: "How might a conversation fundamentally change the structure of the human psyche?&qu…

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There's Something About Mary

There's something about Mary is the first book devoted solely to Frank Jackson's knowledge argument (KA). The editors provide a lengthy introducti…

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Thinking About Feeling

Robert C. Solomon, the editor of Thinking About Feeling, is himself a central force in the recent renaissance of philosophical discussion of the e…

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Thinking and Seeing

What advances scientific knowledge? One of the answers to this important question is embedded in Thinking and Seeing: Visual Metacognition in adults…

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This is Madness Too

As many readers will recognise, this is a companion of This is Madness…

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Thomas Kuhn

Fuller, a historian and philosopher of science and now professor of sociology, University of Warwick, has written a book mostly about Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a workthat he characterizes as "probably the best-known acade…

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Thomas Kuhn

Fuller, a historian and philosopher of science and now professor of sociology, University of Warwick, has written a book mostly about Thomas Kuhn's Th…

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Threads of Life

Literary theory is a field renowned for its fads and fashions, and it often gains notoriety for its readiness to deny common-sense truths. So it is a rel…

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Three Faces of Desire

According to Schroeder's introduction 'desire' has received (too) little attention in recent philosophical work.  He suggests that the two widely accepte…

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Tortured Subjects

Common wisdom has it that under torture most people will say whatever is demanded of them. Our image of the torture room is of a place where false confessio…

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Toward a Philosophical Approach to Psychiatry

Until the “collected works of Kenneth Kendler” are published at some point in the future, and I’d wager that the publication of such an epitome is more likely than not, Toward a Philosophical Approach to Psychiatry is likely to remain the most comprehensi

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Towards a Science of Consciousness III

Table of Contents

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Transhumanism as a New Social Movement

In his engaging book, James MacFarlane details the emergence of Technological Human Enhancement Advocacy (THEA) and provides a detailed ethnographic account of this phenomenon. Specifically, he aims to outline how transhumanism, as a specific offshoot of

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Trauma, Truth and Reconciliation

This is a book about a singularly important topic: how do we repair relationships after a wrong, often a wrong so severe that it cannot be simply rectifi…

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True to Life

There are more things in heaven and earth... than are dreamt of in our philosophy.  Hamlet (to Horatio, Act I, v) In the first chapte…

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True to Our Feelings

Robert Solomon died suddenly in Zurich airport on January 2nd 2007. He was one of the most influential philosophers of emotions in the last 30 years, and…

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Trusting the Subject?

Trusting the Subject? Volume 1 (edited by Anthony Jack and Andreas Roepstorff) is an interesting and timely anthology.  Indeed, given that recent…

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Truth & Predication

When Donald Davidson died aged 86 in 2003, he had been a towering figure in philosophy for more than forty years. Ever since the 1960s he has shaped phil…

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Truth and Truthfulness

    Truth and Truthfulness, the final book by the late Bernard Williams, unsurprisingly houses a set of arguments that explicitly and clear-headed…

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Two Regimes of Madness

With a classic philosophical author such as Aristotle, Descartes, or Kant one is often faced with a number of different translations of their key works…

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Ugly Feelings

Ugly Feelings is a thought provoking book in the aesthetics of negative feelings with insightful reflections upon the social and experiential impa…

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Understanding Emotions

There has recently been something of a resurgence of interest in the emotions within analytic philosophy, and Peter Goldie’s collection is a welcom…

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Understanding People

Suppose I make a promise to meet a friend for lunch on Friday. By promising, I incur an obligation to meet my friend for lunch. One explanation of why I…

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Understanding Phenomenal Consciousness

The Epiphenomenalists Return. In recent philosophy of mind, epiphenomenalism--that strain of dualism according to which the mind is caused…

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Universities

As mentioned in a recent review of The New Idea of a University by Duke Maskell and Ian Robinson on this web site, recent years has seen the devel…

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Upheavals of Thought

A friend of mine, studying philosophy at a prestigious British university; was once set an examination paper including the question "What is an emo…

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Values and Psychiatric Diagnosis

In Values and Psychiatric Diagnosis John Sadler analyses the "values structure" of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Di…

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Varieties of Meaning

This is the sixth installment in MIT's series of Jean Nicod Lectures, a series that is based on the lectures delivered annually in Paris by a leading phi…

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Varieties of Practical Reasoning

This is a long (487pp) collection of twenty essays on the general topic of practical reasoning, aimed at giving readers a sense of what the editor refers…

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Violence Against Women

The editors of Violence Against Women teach philosophy respectively at Concordia University in Montreal, Mount St. Mary's College in Los Angeles, and…

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Violence and the Body

The reader can find in this book a very complete panorama (twenty-two contributions) of the numerous faces violence can take: violence turned to the body…

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Vision and Mind

With so many collections on visual perception published in the past decade or so, you may well ask what's new about this one that makes it worth your tim…

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Vision's Invisibles

The intent of Veronique Foti's book is expressed in at least two ways by its title. Most importantly, the title enacts an intertwining between vision and…

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Visual Culture

Short of going through life with our eyes closed, we cannot avoid road signs, advertising, maps, artworks, posters, graffiti, television and computer scr…

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Wandering Significance

Illustrations and reading-guide notwithstanding, Wandering Significance runs to 662 pages. Wilson might justify its length on the grounds that he…

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Welfare and Rational Care

In this book, Stephen Darwall endeavors to set out a new theory of welfare. The main tenets of the book can be sketched as follows. First, Darwal…

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What Is an Emotion: Classic and Contemporary Readings

The first edition of this collection, co-edited by Cheshire Calhoun, has been a staple text for philosophy courses on the emotions since its publication…

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What Is the Good Life?

Luc Ferry is one of those rare philosophers--a university professor--who writes in a non-academic style that immediately draws you in.  And yet this book…

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What is the Self?

It is commonplace and quite acceptable to speak of the self. However this expression is more appropriately understood as a colloquial umbrella term that…

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What Is Thought?

Baum is a well-known computer scientist, highly and deservedly respected for his early work on neural networks and, more recently, genetic algorithms and…

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What Makes Us Think?

In What Makes us Think? Jean-Pierre Changeux, a leading neuroscientist at the College de France, and Paul Ricoeur, a well-known Parisian philosopher…

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What Nietzsche Really Said

In my first semester as a teaching assistant for a large introductory philosophy course, I had to run discussion sessions for small groups of students. To b…

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What We Owe to Each Other

Scanlon’s book aims to offer us a moral theory of right and wrong and of our obligations to one another. The theory is called contractualism and its…

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When Self-Consciousness Breaks

What are we to make of people who claim to "hear" voices in their heads or who swear that their thoughts are manipulated by outside forces? To…

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Where Biology Meets Psychology

The title of this collection of essays (the essays, themselves, are a product of a special session at the 1997 International Society for the History, Ph…

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Where the Action Is

Imagine a desktop on which computational tasks can be accomplished via the movement of physical objects. Imagine identification tags that can communicat…

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Who Rules in Science

Most of us are taught, beginning in grade school, that science is necessarily impartial and objective because it is… well, because science is sci…

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Why Free Will Is Real

In Why Free Will is Real Christian List defends a compatibilist libertarian position in the metaphysical debate over free will. List’s position is compatibilist because it holds that an agent’s free will is compatible with a scientific worldview. It is li

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Why Read Mill Today?

As the title suggests the aim of Why Read Mill Today? is to show that Mill is a philosopher,  who has something to offer a contemporary aud…

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Why the Mind is Not a Computer

       First published as "Psycho-electronics" in 1994, this reprinted (2004) edition presents an updated text in an attempt to reach a wider a…

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Within Reason

Perhaps because I am already a philosopher, it does not strike me as news that reason is a tool we use to get around in our lives. It doesn't motivate b…

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Wittgenstein

The bulk of the papers in this Volume were first presented at the Virginia Tech Philosophy Department's 1999 conference on 'Wittgenstein: Biography and P…

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Wittgenstein and Approaches To Clarity

Newton Garver's latest book brings together a number of different essays, each of them previously published and each, too, revised to a greater or lesse…

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Wittgenstein And Psychology

Wittgenstein and Psychology is a relatively accessible introduction to some very sophisticated material.  Ludwig Wittgenstein's life, background,…

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Wittgenstein Reads Freud

On its surface, the purpose of Jacques Bouveresse’s slim monograph Wittgenstein Reads Freud is simply to expound Wittgenstein’s unsystem…

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Wittgenstein Reads Weininger

The publication of this book is somewhat surprising, albeit welcome.  Otto Weininger (1880-1903) wrote two books that were considered important in his da…

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Women, Body, Illness

One clue about the quality of a book is that moment when you've turned the last page, closed the back cover, and you sense its aftertaste. With this one,…

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Women, Madness and Medicine

A Full Feminist Assault on Biological Psychiatry Denise Russell shows no reluctance to come to strong conclusions in her book Woman, Madn…

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Zizek

One of Slavoj Zizek's favorite recent references is a short 1997 book on Gilles Deleuze by Alain Badiou, Deleuze:  La clameur de l'ètre.  In thi…

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Zombies and Consciousness

The zombie idea haunts the literature dedicated to the philosophy of mind and consciousness.  The philosophical zombie is an exact physical duplicate of…

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