An introduction to the major questions of philosophy by one of America's greatest and best-known philosophers. A practical guide to philosophical theory and how it applies to your life.

Daniel C. Dennett is a brilliant polemicist, famous for challenging unexamined orthodoxies. Over the last thirty years, he has played a major role in expanding our understanding of consciousness, developmental psychology, and evolutionary theory. And with such groundbreaking, critically acclaimed books as Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist), he has reached a huge general and professional audience. In this new book, Dennett shows that evolution is the key to resolving the ancient problems (...) of moral and political freedom. Like the planet's atmosphere on which life depends, the conditions on which our freedom depends had to evolve, and like the atmosphere, they continue to evolve-and could be extinguished. According to Dennett, biology provides the perspective from which we can distinguish the varieties of freedom that matter. Throughout the history of life on this planet, an interacting web and internal and external conditions have provided the frameworks for the design of agents that are more free than their parts-from the unwitting gropings of the simplest life forms to the more informed activities of animals to the moral dilemmas that confront human beings living in societies. As in his previous books, Dennett weaves a richly detailed narrative enlivened by analogies as entertaining as they are challenging. Here is the story of how we came to be different from all other creatures, how our early ancestors mindlessly created human culture, and then, how culture gave us our minds, our visions, our moral problems-in a nutshell, our freedom. (shrink)

Commentary on John Searle's Article John Searle presents a philosopher's view of how conscious experience and free action relate to brain function. That view demands an examination by a neuroscientist who has experimentally investigated this issue.

This is a new release of the original 1949 edition.

" In Being No One, Metzinger, a German philosopher, draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis of...

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

[opening paragraph] -- Clark: The `astonishing hypothesis' which you put forward in your book, and which you obviously feel is very controversial, is that `You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are, in fact, no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it: `You're nothing but a pack of neurons'.' But it seems to me that this is not so (...) astonishing a statement for a scientist to make. Isn't this what reductionist science has always believed? (shrink)

[opening paragraph] -- Clark: The `astonishing hypothesis' which you put forward in your book, and which you obviously feel is very controversial, is that `You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are, in fact, no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it: `You're nothing but a pack of neurons'.' But it seems to me that this is not so (...) astonishing a statement for a scientist to make. Isn't this what reductionist science has always believed? (shrink)

Der Kausalbegriff gehört zu den, gerade in der Gegenwart, am häufigsten in Anspruch genommenen philosophischen Begriffen. In Erkenntnistheorie, Wissenschaftstheorie, der Philosophie des Geistes, in der Handlungstheorie und der Sprachphilosophie taucht er immer wieder in zentraler Funktion auf. Für die Philosophie ist die Deutung des Kausalbegriffs daher von größter Bedeutung. Das vorliegende Buch ist ein Leitfaden zum Kausalbegriff. In seinem ersten Teil wird eine detaillierte Explikation dieses Begriffs geboten, die auf eine neuartige Fassung der nomologischen Regularitätstheorie und die Formulierung einer Logik (...) der Kausalität hinausläuft. Im zweiten Teil wird diese Explikation in einer umfassenden kritischen Auseinandersetzung mit der Literatur zu den verschiedenen Themen, die sich mit dem Kausalbegriff verbinden, weiter begründet und verteidigt. Dabei ergibt sich ein umfassendes Panorama des gegenwärtigen Standes der kausalitätstheoretischen philosophischen Diskussion - mit teilweise weit zurückreichenden Perspektiven in die Vergangenheit. Zur Sprache kommen u. a. die folgenden Themen: probabilistische und Sine-qua-non-Kausalität, kausale Überdeterminierung und Präemption, die Probleme der kausalen Notwendigkeit und des kausalen Vorrangs, Physikalisierung der Kausalität, Retrokausalität, die Deutungen des Ereignisbegriffs und Agens- versus Ereigniskausalität. (shrink)

This book contains a representationalist theory of self-consciousness and of the phenomenal first-person perspective. It draws on empirical data from the cognitive and neurosciences.