The Brains Blog

Neurofunctional Prudence & Morality

Marcus Arvan February 18, 2020 February 19, 2020 books

I am excited to report that my new book, Neurofunctional Prudence and Morality: A Philosophical Theory, is now available from Routledge ($70 hardback, $12.50+ ebook). Anyone interested can preview the book’s introduction and part of Chapter 1 here at Google Books. Interested readers can also download a pre-published draft of …

Affordances and Motivation

The study of emotions, the so-called affective turn, allows us to rethink crucial elements in psychology and philosophy of mind. There has been a concurrent surge in creative research and theory in the field of ecological psychology.[1] In our book, we seek to clarify the function of affective sentience in …

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John Schwenkler February 17, 2020 February 25, 2020 books

We are pleased to have Stephen T. Asma and Rami Gabriel blogging this week on The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition (Harvard University Press, 2019). To view all their posts on a single page, please click here.

The Emotional Mind: The affective roots of culture and cognition

Stephen T. Asma and Rami Gabriel February 16, 2020 February 16, 2020 Emotion / evolution / Intentionality / Psychology / Stephen T. Asma and Rami Gabriel: "The Emotional Mind"

In our new book, we argue that emotional systems are central to understanding the evolution of the human mind (as well as those of our primate cousins).

5. The Positive Semantic Argument

Peter Carruthers January 17, 2020 January 17, 2020 animal cognition / Consciousness / Peter Carruthers: Human and Animal Minds

As I emphasized on Wednesday, phenomenal concepts are, in a sense, private. They are acquaintance-based indexicals that aren’t governed by any set of public norms, and which don’t defer to the expertise of others. Nor do they make any commitment to the underlying nature of the states referred to. When …

4. The Negative Semantic Argument

Peter Carruthers January 16, 2020 January 16, 2020 animal cognition / Consciousness / Peter Carruthers: Human and Animal Minds

It is important to realize that first-personal phenomenal consciousness is all-or-nothing. Any given mental state is either phenomenally conscious or it isn’t. It makes no sense to talk of degrees of phenomenal consciousness, or partial phenomenal consciousness. This is another place where some of the distinctions drawn in Monday’s post …

3. Reducing the Phenomenal

Peter Carruthers January 15, 2020 January 15, 2020 Consciousness / Peter Carruthers: The Centered Mind / Phenomenal Concepts

The phenomenal concept strategy has been pursued by many different authors. The basic idea is to explain the problematic thought experiments (zombies, Mary, and the explanatory gap) in terms of the distinctive set of concepts we can use when thinking about our own access-conscious nonconceptual mental states. People differ over …