Philosophy of mind Books

Book SynopsisIn the summer of 2000, David Hlavsa and his wife Lisa Holtby embarked on a pilgrimage. After trying for three years to conceive a child and suffering through the monthly cycle of hope and disappointment, they decided to walk the Camino de Santiago, a joint enterprise - and an act of faith - they hoped would strengthen their marriage and prepare them for parenthood.Though walking more than 400 miles across the north of Spain turned out to be more difficult than they had anticipated, after a series of misadventures, including a brief stay in a Spanish hospital, they arrived in Santiago. Shortly after their return to Seattle, Lisa became pregnant, and the hardships of the Camino were no comparison to what followed: the stillbirth of their first son and Lisa’s harrowing second pregnancy.Walking Distance is a moving and disarmingly funny book, a good story with a happy ending - the safe arrival of David and Lisa’s second son, Benjamin. David and Lisa get more than they bargained for, but they also get exactly what they wanted: a child, a solid marriage, and a richer life.

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Book SynopsisNovel Bodies examines how disability shapes the British literary history of sexuality. Jason Farr shows that various eighteenth-century novelists represent disability and sexuality in flexible ways to reconfigure the political and social landscapes of eighteenth-century Britain. In imagining the lived experience of disability as analogous to—and as informed by—queer genders and sexualities, the authors featured in Novel Bodies expose emerging ideas of able-bodiedness and heterosexuality as interconnected systems that sustain dominant models of courtship, reproduction, and degeneracy. Further, Farr argues that they use intersections of disability and queerness to stage an array of contemporaneous debates covering topics as wide-ranging as education, feminism, domesticity, medicine, and plantation life. In his close attention to the fiction of Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Scott, Maria Edgeworth, and Frances Burney, Farr demonstrates that disabled and queer characters inhabit strict social orders in unconventional ways, and thus opened up new avenues of expression for readers from the eighteenth century forward. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.Trade Review“In this extremely lucid, well-researched, and well argued book, Farr uncovers a vast representational landscape of queer disability in which the heteronormative narratives of eighteenth-century fiction are profoundly imbricated and to which they are indebted.” -- Helen Deutsch * UCLA *“Jason Farr’s Novel Bodies is a rigorously argued and elegantly written account of how eighteenth-century fiction represented the interrelations of sexuality and disability. As Farr persuasively demonstrates, within the pages of both canonical and noncanonical works, queer disability emerges as a narrative force that troubles our understanding of what it means to be ‘normal’ and ‘able-bodied.’ Novel Bodies is an important contribution to disability studies, queer studies, and, more generally, the history of the novel.” -- Paul Kelleher * Emory University *" Novel Bodies makes a thrilling foray into a number of critical conversations. Its readability reflects Farr's careful articulation of the relation of each chapter to the others and to his primary argument. Scholars of British literature will benefit from Novel Bodies' new perspective on several canonical authors, while scholars of American literature might turn to it to consider how the representations of, and responses to, disability and queerness on which it focuses might have crossed the Atlantic, where many of these works were being read and discussed." * Eighteenth Century Studies *"Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature inhabits the fascinating messiness of Georgian-era literary imaginings of corporeal and sexual difference in order to better historicize disability’s formative role in the development of the modern self and its queer relationship to able-bodiedness." * Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies *"Novel Bodies raises an important intersection that clearly needs more careful attention from our scholarly community: race, sexuality, and disability....Novel Bodies succeeds in the story it wants to tell....By attending to representations of corporealities and sexualities that seem liberating, oppressive, recuperative, and resistant, Farr renders the genealogy of sex and disability in a way that challenges those consequences of the Enlightenment that we are still wrestling with today." * Eighteenth-Century Fiction *"Farr’s framework, which further upholds form, content, and eighteenth-century social justice assuredly feels like one trajectory forward. In short, for those looking for a model in how to do intersectional work well in the eighteenth century, Novel Bodies fits the bill." * Studies in the Novel *"This is an important first book that will establish Farr as a major voice in queer and disability studies. Across the manuscript, each chapter is firmly connected to those that precede and follow it. In Novel Bodies, Farr illustrates the centrality of queerness, disease, illness, and impairment to the history of the British novel, the gothic novel, and the long eighteenth century more generally; beyond that, he advances queer studies in significant and compelling ways by advocating inclusive, intersectional analysis." * Aphra Behn Online *"Farr shows such sanctified realms to be under constant disturbance by figures who do not, will not, cannot conform, and whose resistance signals alternate realities to the ones novels try to sustain." * Digital Defoe *"While eighteenth-century scholars are familiar with most of these works, Farr reorients our understanding of how disability and sexuality are inextricably linked and how these intersecting categories shape the novel’s form and content....[B]y expanding the definition of disability beyond impairment, Farr deftly makes concrete and comprehensible the degree to which the early novel engages with variably-embodied subjectivity and non-normative desire in inextricable ways that anticipate its own futurity into the present time." * Eighteenth-Century Fiction (2021 issue) *"This sensitive studies convincingly demonstrates just how ubiquitous is the eighteenth-century novel's engagement with the queer implications of disability, showing how disabled characters mark out alternative possibilities." * Eighteenth-Century Fiction *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Introduction: Disability and the Literary History of Sexuality 1 Deaf Education and Queerness in the Duncan Campbell Compendium (1720-1732) 2 The Reforming Bodies of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Sarah Scott’s Fiction (1754-66) 3 Chronic Illness, Medicine, and the Healthy Marriages of Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) 4 Gendered Disfigurement and Queer Ocular Relations in Frances Burney’s Camilla (1796) and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) Coda: Hypochondria and the Implausibility of Heterosexual Romance in Jane Austen’s Sanditon (1817) Acknowledgments Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisA study of how reason can be influenced by wishful thinking and how it shapes a person's outlook on life as well as their behaviour.Trade Review"It is invevitable that a book of this scope and ambition will be controversial...What ought not to be controversial, however, is that David Pears has given us an outstandingly lucid and intelligent account of mtters of the highest importance. It is the first comprehensive and unified treatment of the paradoxes of irrational thought and irrational action." - Jon Elster, 'Times Literary Supplement'Table of Contentspreface, footnotes, index

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Book SynopsisIn 1982, the author of this book issued a "promissory note" of just the osrt that analytic philosophers of the twentieth century have led us to expect will come to nothing. This particular "note" occured as a passing remark in the concluding chapter of his 'Introducing Semiotic' to the effect that it would be possible to establish the classical distinction between sense and intellect by means of the analysis of the role of relations in the action of signs. Provoked by this remark of a collcague that, could this promissory note be fulfilled, it would provide "the first essay worth reading on the subject since the days of Locke and Hume," Deely decided to break with the analytic tradition of leaving promissory notes unfulfilled and to develop the alleged possible proof in full. A colloquium convened by Professor Norma Tasca, in the Fall of 1995 in Porto, Portugal, provided Deely with the occasion. His lengthy essay for the occasion, ponderously titled "The Intersemiosis of Perception and Understanding," became the initial draft of this book. Especially in the circles of English-speaking philosophers, where a mere difference of degree between animal intelligence and human understanding has come to be largely taken for granted and philosophy has been reduced to a play of linguistic signs without regard for the dependency of those signs uopn other signs whose play is far from linguistic, the work is bound to stimulate considerable debate.Table of ContentsForword Preamble 1. Requirements in the Discussion 2. Foundations in Nature for the Semiotic Point of View 3. The Semiosis of Sensation 4. From Sensation to Umwelt as Species-Specific Objective World 5. How Is the Distinctiveness of Semiosis in General Possible? 6. A Semiosis beyon Perception 7. The Dependency of Understanding on Perceputal Semiosis 8. Language and Understanding as a Single Semiosis Exapted 9. The Semiotic Animal Appendix: Definition of Umwelt Historically Layered References Index

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisMensen veranderen voortdurend, zowel lichamelijk als geestelijk. Hoe is het desondanks mogelijk dat men er niet aan twijfelt dat men een en dezelfde persoon blijft? Hoe komt de eenheid van onze identiteit tot stand – of is die eenheid slechts illusie? In het klassieke filosofische denken ging men ervan uit dat de ziel borg stond voor onze persoonlijke continuïteit. Maar wat als met de opkomst van het moderne denken het bestaan van die ziel wordt aangevochten? Waar de Britse intellectuele wereld in de achttiende eeuw nog grondig verdeeld raakte over deze kwestie, lijkt men hierover vandaag de dag alvast een consensus te hebben bereikt: bijna iedere hedendaagse filosoof en wetenschapper gaat ervan uit dat er geen ziel bestaat. De vraag naar de oorsprong en grond van onze persoonsidentiteit wordt hiermee prangender dan ooit tevoren. Gregory De Vleeschouwer legt in dit boek de historische achtergrond van het filosofische debat over persoonsidentiteit bloot en laat zien op welke problemen dit debat stuit zolang men de rol van het lichaam negeert. Dankzij zijn lichaam wordt iedere baby meteen gezien als 'een van ons': in het laatste hoofdstuk toont de auteur aan dat dit intersubjectieve aspect onontbeerlijk is voor de totstandkoming van het menselijke zelfbewustzijn. Hierbij werpt hij tevens een nieuw licht op enkele klassieke filosofische gedachtenexperimenten (breintransplantaties, cyborgs, teletransportatie,...) en laat hij zien dat de mens in zijn afhankelijkheid van de ander juist allermenselijkst is.

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