Simple Mindedness

In Defense of Naive Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind

Häftad, Engelska, 2001

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How is our conception of what there is affected by our counting ourselves as inhabitants of the natural world? How do our actions fit into a world that is altered through our agency? And how do we accommodate our understanding of one another as fellow subjects of experience--as beings with thoughts and wants and hopes and fears? These questions provide the impetus for the detailed discussions of ontology, human agency, and everyday psychological explanation presented in this book. The answers offer a distinctive view of questions about "the mind's place in nature," and they argue for a particular position in philosophy of mind: naive naturalism.This position opposes the whole drift of the last thirty or forty years' philosophy of mind in the English-speaking world. Jennifer Hornsby sets naive naturalism against dualism, but without advancing the claims of "materialism," "physicalism," or "naturalism" as these have come to be known. She shows how we can, and why we should, abandon the view that thoughts and actions, to be seen as real, must be subject to scientific explanation.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2001-05-15
Mått144 x 227 x 22 mm
Vikt345 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor278
FörlagHarvard University Press
ISBN9780674005631

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Filosofiska discipliner inom Filosofi och religion

Part 1 Ontological questions: introduction - persons and their states and events; Descartes, Rorty and the mind-body fiction postscript - Rorty on anomalous monism; physicalism, events and part-whole relations; which physical events are mental events?; postscript of part one - the nomological character of causality. Part 2 Agency: introduction - action and the mental-physical divide; bodily movements, actions and epistemology - postscript - a disjunctive conception of bodily movements; physicalist thinking and conceptions of behaviour; agency and causal explanation. Part 3 Mind, causation and explanation: introduction - personal and subpersonal levels; Dennett's naturalism; causation in intuitive physics and in commonsense psychology; semantic innocence and psychological understanding - postscript - externalism.

Jennifer Hornsby [has written] a series of careful and insightful papers...over the past twenty years. In Simple Mindedness, she does us the great service of collecting twelve of these papers together in a single volume...Her overall picture of the mind is filled out in a helpful introduction, and in a series of useful postscripts...Hornsby disagrees with both Descartes and materialists...She denies that people are composed of a material and an immaterial substance...[but also] denies that mental properties reduce to physical properties...Materialists who put in the time and effort to [weigh Hornsby's views] will be richly rewarded. There is much an orthodox materialist can learn from the heretical Hornsby.