In this book John Campbell shows that the general structural features of human thought can be seen as having their source in the distinctive ways in which we...

Philosophers of mind have long been interested in the relation between two ideas: that causality plays an essential role in our understanding of the mental; and that we can gain an understanding of belief and desire by considering the ascription of attitudes to people on the basis of what they say and do. Many have thought that those ideas are incompatible. William Child argues that there is in fact no tension between them, and that we should accept both. He shows (...) how we can have a causal understanding of the mental without having to see attitudes and experiences as internal, causally interacting entities and he defends this view against influential objections. The book offers detailed discussions of many of Donald Davidson's contributions to the philosophy of mind, and also considers the work of Dennett, Anscombe, McDowell, and Rorty, among others. Issues discussed include: the nature of intentional phenomena; causal explanation; the character of visual experience; psychological explanation; and the causal relevance of mental properties. (shrink)

From: _Language, Mind and Logic_, edited by Jeremy Butter?eld. 123.

“What do you see when you look at your face in the mirror?” asks J. David Velleman in introducing his philosophical theory of action. He takes this simple act of self-scrutiny as a model for the reflective reasoning of rational agents: our efforts to understand our existence and conduct are aided by our efforts to make it intelligible. Reflective reasoning, Velleman argues, constitutes practical reasoning. By applying this conception, _Practical Reflection_ develops philosophical accounts of intention, free will, and the foundation (...) of morals. This new edition of _Practical Reflection_ contains the original 1989 text along with a new introduction and is the latest entry in The David Hume Series of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Reissues, which keeps in print previously published indispensable works in the area of cognitive science. _ _ _ _. (shrink)

Necessarily and trivially, ‘I’ means its occurrent utterer or thinker. But how is self-reference possible? Providing an adequate answer to this very hard question is the task undertaken by John Campbell in Past, Space, and Self. His answer, in a nutshell, is that the fundamental ground of self-reference is self-consciousness; and the bulk of the book is devoted to sketching the architecture of this cognitive capacity. Campbell wants to say that the essence of self-consciousness is given in the set of (...) cognitive abilities making it possible to think of oneself as presented and individuated by means of a causal-spatiotemporal self-narrative. Not only is self-consciousness the ground of self-reference, however, but also “possession of this core set of abilities defines possession of concepts”. While Campbell thinks of his account as making up a seamless whole, I would like to distinguish for the purposes of exposition between the thesis that self-consciousness in his sense explains self-reference and the thesis that Campbellian self-consciousness explains concept-possession. It may be that the case made for one of the theses is stronger and more convincing than the case made for the other; I shall address that issue briefly later. (shrink)