This first volume contains discussions of the brain, methods for analyzing behavior, thought, consciousness, attention, association, time, and memory.

I had a strange dream, or half-waking vision, not long ago. I found myself at the top of a mountain in the mist, feeling very pleased with myself, not just for having climbed the mountain, but for having achieved my life's ambition, to find a way of answering moral questions rationally. But as I was preening myself on this achievement, the mist began to clear, and I saw that I was surrounded on the mountain top by the graves of all (...) those other philosophers, great and small, who had had the same ambition, and thought they had achieved it. And I have come to see, reflecting on my dream, that, ever since, the hard-working philosophical worms have been nibbling away at their systems and showing that the achievement was an illusion. True, their skeletons, indigestible to worms, remained, and were surprisingly similar to one another. But I was led to think again about what one can, and what one cannot, achieve in this direction. (shrink)

An examination of the genre of philosophical autobiography sheds light on the role of personal judgment alongside objective rationality in philosophy. Building on Monk's conception of philosophical biography, philosophical autobiography can be seen as any autobiography that reveals some interplay between life and thought. It is argued that almost all autobiographies by philosophers are philosophical because the recounting of one's own life is almost invariably a form of extended speech act of self-revelation. When a philosopher is the autobiographer, this self-revelation (...) illuminates the interplay between thought, life, and personality. Understanding how this works allows us to address three problems of biography raised by Honderich: how to give an account of something as large and complex as a human life; how a life-story is also a judgment; and how we can justify identifying one part of a causal circumstance as 'the cause'. There is also a new ethical problem raised about the autobiographer's right to make public details of a shared private life. (shrink)

This is a unique, groundbreaking collection of autobiographical essays by leading women in philosophy. It provides a glimpse at the experiences of the generation that witnessed, and helped create, the remarkable advances now evident for women in the field.

Examines philosophical autobiography as a literary genre and an alternative to Freudian psychoanalysis.

Analogously the determinants of the value and meaning of an artwork are fundamentally the same as for an individual life. In both the value and meaning are determined by the parts, in their particularity and in their configuration, as well as, respectively, the subjective contribution of the person whose life it is and whomsoever observes the artwork. However, a person and his life are inextricably linked in a way an observer and an artwork are not. We should learn caution from (...) the fact that to tinker with the parts and configuration of an artwork will likely destroy its value and meaning and apply that to the lives of individuals, and fully respect the particularity and the subjectivity of evaluation involved. We should eschew all but the idea of universal prescriptions for the good-life for individuals, just as we would do so in the case of a good artwork. (shrink)