Little, Brown, 1992 Review by Glenn Branch on Jul 5th 1999 Volume: 3, Number: 27.

Daniel Dennett is arguably one of the most influential yet radical philosophers in America today. In this volume, Dennett is confronted by colleagues and critics, from philosophy, biology and psychology. His reply constitutes an extensive essay which clarifies, and develops further, central themes in his philosophy. The debate ranges over Dennett's whole corpus, but special attention is given to his major work on consciousness, Consciousness Explained. The volume includes a critical assessement of Dennett's views on behaviouralism and the subjectivity of (...) consciousness, the nature of perception and mental representation, intentional laws and computational psychology, the rationality of thought, culture as a virus, the architecture of mind, and the role of artifacts in thinking. Also included is an introduction to Dennett's philosophy and a full bibliography of his publications. (shrink)

What makes a living system a living system? What kind of biological phenomenon is the phenomenon of cognition? These two questions have been frequently considered, but, in this volume, the authors consider them as concrete biological questions. Their analysis is bold and provocative, for the authors have constructed a systematic theoretical biology which attempts to define living systems not as objects of observation and description, nor even as interacting systems, but as self-contained unities whose only reference is to themselves. The (...) consequence of their investigations and of their living systems as self-making, self-referring autonomous unities, is that they discovered that the two questions have a common answer: living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. The result of their investigations is a completely new perspective of biological (human) phenomena. During the investigations, it was found that a complete linguistic description pertaining to the ‘organization of the living’ was lacking and, in fact, was hampering the reporting of results. Hence, the authors have coined the word ‘autopoiesis’ to replace the expression ‘circular organization’. Autopoiesis conveys, by itself, the central feature of the organization of the living, which is autonomy. (shrink)

Die Cartesianischen Meditationen sind aus Vorträgen hervorgegangen, die Edmund Husserl Mitte Februar 1929 an der Sorbonne gehalten hat. Bei der Grundfragestellung Descartes’ einsetzend, entfaltet Husserl die transzendentale Phänomenologie als »Umbildung und Neu­bildung« des Cartesischen Programms der prima philosophia im Sinne einer Reform der Philosophie zu einer absoluten Wissenschaft aus absoluter Begründung. Eine französische Ausgabe, in der Übersetzung von Emmanuel Levinas und Gabrielle Pfeiffer, erschien 1931 bei A. Colin in Paris. Husserls Arbeiten an dem Manuskript für die deutsche Ausgabe, die gegenüber (...) der französischen erheblich erweitert werden sollte, blieben, nicht zuletzt wegen der 1933 veränderten politischen Situation, unvollendet. So erschien die erste deutschsprachige Ausgabe der Cartesianischen Meditationen erst postum in dem von Stephan Strasser herausgegebenen Band 1 der Husserliana , Den Haag 1950.Die Studienausgabe basiert auf dem Text der zweiten Auflage des Bandes in den Husserliana von 1963, hg. von Rudolf Boehm. (shrink)

Computing Methodologies -- Artificial Intelligence.