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A defense of liberalism, understood as a perfectionist doctrine that presupposes an ideal but controversial notion of human well-being.
Values are inescapable. They pervade and shape our psychology, our agency, and our lives as reflective and self-knowing subjects. This book explores the crucial ways in which values figure within reflection and thereby shape our theoretical and practical lives, against the backdrop of an expressivist moral psychology that is sensitive to the vicissitudes of valuing. Combining a discussion of the role that values play within reflection with a critique of a range of influential contemporary views in moral psychology and the theory of agency, Dunn shows how such views obscure or distort the nature of that role and that there is a ‘natural fit’ between an expressivist account of values and t...
The Importance of Being Understood is an innovative and thought-provoking exploration of the links between the way we think about each other's mental states and the fundamentally cooperative nature of everyday life. Adam Morton begins with a consideration of 'folk psychology', the tendency to attribute emotions, desires, beliefs and thoughts to human minds. He takes the view that it is precisely this tendency that enables us to understand, predict and explain the actions of others, which in turn helps us to decide on our own course of action. This relection suggests, claims Morton, that certain types of cooperative activity are dependent on everyday psychological understanding conversely, th...
A book that promotes the thesis that basic forms of mentality--intentionally directed cognition and perceptual experience--are best understood as embodied yet contentless. Most of what humans do and experience is best understood in terms of dynamically unfolding interactions with the environment. Many philosophers and cognitive scientists now acknowledge the critical importance of situated, environment-involving embodied engagements as a means of understanding basic minds--including basic forms of human mentality. Yet many of these same theorists hold fast to the view that basic minds are necessarily or essentially contentful--that they represent conditions the world might be in. In this boo...
Getting What You Want? offers a critique of liberal morality and an analysis of its understanding of the individual as a 'wanting thing'.
After years of neurohype and a neuroskeptic backlash, this book provides a systematic analysis of the contributions to self-understanding cognitive neuroscience (CNS) and philosophy can make. The stories of five people in search of self-understanding serve as touchstone throughout the book. Their identities are tied up with what they love. The book provides in-depth analyses of CNS of love and CNS of self-reflection. It critically discusses philosophers who focus on the relation between love, self-understanding and selfhood, such as Harry Frankfurt, Susan Wolf, Charles Taylor and Søren Kierkegaard. It also builds an argument about CNS’ contributions to self-understanding more broadly, and how different these are from philosophy’s contributions. The book develops conceptual review as a philosophical method for improving the validity and comparability of CNS studies. It integrates CNS insights into its philosophical view on love and selfhood where applicable. This book thus argues and exemplifies that philosophy and CNS can work together.
This book shows why we can justify blaming people for their wrong actions even if free will turns out not to exist. Contrary to most contemporary thinking, we do this by focusing on the ordinary, everyday wrongs each of us commits, not on the extra-ordinary, “morally monstrous-like” crimes and weak-willed actions of some.
What difference is there between the visual experience of watching the moon in the sky and the visual experience of seeing a snake slither by your foot? It is easy to believe our interpretation of the world is split into a binary mode, between the bodily self and everything outside it. There is, however, a buffer zone in the immediate surrounding of the body, known as peripersonal space, in which boundaries are blurred. The notion of peripersonal space calls into question not only our entrenched theories of perception, but also has major implications on the way we perceive personal and social awareness. Research has yielded a vast array of exciting discoveries on peripersonal space, across a...
There is an interesting and far-reaching disagreement between Smith and Frederick Stoutland. In his 'The Real Reasons' Stoutland argues that one of the mistakes that turned the belief-desire model of action into the 'received view' is the underlying commitment to the idea that there is an underlying unity to all action explanations. According to Stoutland the unity is no deeper than the superficial fact that actions are responses of agents to the world, and the challenge for the philosophy of action is to make sense of that fact without falling victim to the un fruitful assumption that reasons should be understood as the normative content of determinate representational inner states of agent...
Based on the discovery of an unknown Latin manuscript, Maria Petyt - A Carmelite Mystic in Wartime provides surprising new information about the seventeenth century Flemish mystic Maria Petyt (1623-1677) who wrote many letters to her spiritual director, Michael of St. Augustine. The book contains a transcription of the (unfortunately partly damaged) manuscript, an English translation of it, and several articles opening up new horizons concerning the life and spirituality of Maria Petyt and her historical and religious backgrounds. The authors characterize Maria Petyt as a self-confident spiritual daughter with a strong political mission, a zealous figure fighting side by side with Louis XIV for the catholic victory during the Dutch War, and as one who lived and profoundly understood the spirituality of Teresa of Avila.