Mark- your openmindedness is inspiring.

Well, I've started into Jaegwon Kim's book 'Philosophy of Mind' and so far I'm liking his writing style quite a lot. He has a comfortable, conversational tone so far that I like. I was also looking through a book on my shelf that I had forgotten about called 'Mind Designs' by John Haugeland last night. It seemed to be a pretty good collection of cog. sci. essays, including a couple of real classics, although I am a bit worried a lot of the information is too dated. Anyone read through 'Mind Designs' before?

Kim's got a nice essay on the mind/body problem at the turn of the century in a new edited collection called The Future For Philosophy (ed. Brian Leiter). There's also a good piece on consciousness by David Chalmers in the same volume.

I don't know the Haugeland book, but I've heard good things about the recent book by Andy Clark called "Natural Born Cyborgs."

Speaking of Andy Clark- Does 'Mindware' hold up to its good reputation?

I think many people use it in intro to CogSci philosophy courses. I've not read it, but people who know this stuff well seem to like it.

Clark was here at WU for a while. He was part of a strong cogsci/mind program that set up our PNP program that also included Bill Bechtel and Jesse Prinz. Chalmers did a two-year postdoc here, as well, as he was finishing the Conscious Mind. Since then, Clark's been a nomad, going back and forth between the UK and the US.

I'm bored, and have never been much of a smart talker, unless smart-ASS counts. Nevertheless, I've made my way over here. If I know hardly ANYTHING about ANYTHING philosophically, what is a good book that will cover the basics, in simple-like terms. I'd like to start slow and gradually build up to this crazy understanding that you all have. "Cog-sci?!?!"

wow, you guys weren't messing around in mind were you? That is a pretty impressive faculty you had. Did you get to spend much time with any of them? I know it will fade as I spend more time in academia, but I think I would be a little star-struck meeting Bechtel or Chalmers.

quote:

Originally posted by Nickel-Z:
I'm bored, and have never been much of a smart talker, unless smart-ASS counts. Nevertheless, I've made my way over here. If I know hardly ANYTHING about ANYTHING philosophically, what is a good book that will cover the basics, in simple-like terms. I'd like to start slow and gradually build up to this crazy understanding that you all have. "Cog-sci?!?!"

I think two of the best books to start would be Simon Blackburn's "Think" and James Rahcels' "Problems from Philosophy". I've used both in teaching intro classes and both cover the topics well. If you start there, you can move towards the actual sources (ie, reading Aristotle and Hume, etc). There are several nice collections of those.

The Blackburn and Rachels cover the main topics well, in pretty straightforward language.

KLT,

There's a new book by Dennett on mind/consciousness called Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Objections to a Science of Consciousness that looks to explain what Consciousness Explained failed to.

I also found a few books while browsing a used book store that might appeal to you: E.J. Lowe's (whose work on metaphysics and Locke is well-known) An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind, an authored text, and Bill Lycan's Mind and Cognition which is a collection of readings.

I think I'm pretty good at the moment on overview and intro books on phil. of mind, especially after all the great recommendations you gave me a few weeks ago. The Dennett sounds pretty cool though, I don't know why, but I find him to be very interesting even though I usually think he falls just short of whatever he is trying to accomplish. Maybe it is just his writing ability, or the fact that he always seems to be so close to doing something really great.

On another note, I'm struggling my way through a little Quantum Physics book by Rae that was recommended a while back by the philosophy of science teacher at my undergrad. It's making me a bit depressed though, because for all the book's claims of being "a masterpiece of clarity" I'm just getting more confused the farther into it I get.

I used Philosophy of Physics by Sklar and Nancy Cartwright's How the Laws of physics Lie in a grad philsci course. Both were good, although I didn't understand a lot of the stuff at the time. Still don't, actually.

One good recent book by a philosopher of science that I have read is Brian Skyrms' The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure. His previous book, The Evolution of the Social Contract, was also good.

philosopherEric,

I hope you are well.

In an earlier email you asked about my dissertation topic (I started the post on the Sci/Fi Fantasy Top 25).

My dissertation is entitled "Ethics and Mental Health" and approaches the topic from a social psychological/personality perspective. The empirical manuscript attempts to quantify individual differences in ethical beliefs (ranging from a principled to expedient ethic) in order to examine the covariation among ethical beliefs with standard measures of mental health (depression, life satisfaction, etc).

I was hoping you could suggest books by philosophers who have argued that there is a link between an individual's ethical beliefs and his or her mental health (however mental health is defined....well-being, absence of pathology, etc.)

Aristotle's Ethics is my primary source, along with Epictetus and the Stoics, but I would love to read other philosophers' perspectives (particularly if they argue that there is NOT a link between ethics and mental health). I am particularly weak in Eastern philosophy and would not be surpised if Eastern thinkers link ethics and mental health.

Thank you for your time.

Aristotle

That's really interesting stuff, Aristotle. I'm afraid I don't really know a lot of literature that is applicable to your topic, unfortunately. Nothing that directly relates to mental health, per se, but I know there are several philosophers of mind/psychology whose work centers on mental health and might help you: George Graham (who I saw give a paper on psychopathology) and Shaun Nichols (same thing). Owen Flanagan (at Duke) has done some work at the intersection of philosophy of mind and ethics, and one of my dissertation committee members, John Doris, has a book out (Lack of Character) that argues ascriptions of character traits made by virtue ethicists are false and that empirical psychology shows that we don't have standing character traits...we are, according to Doris, situationally inclined.

Maybe some of that stuff will help you out. I hope so. PM me if you want to continue this conversation without bothering everyone else with the esoteric stuff.

For those who are interested, I must highly recommend the new edition of the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich. It's pricy ($60 hardbound) but it's hands down the best of the philosophy companions. If you want small and cheap, Blackburn's Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Which I carried in my backpack from undergrad through my Master's) is a good choice, but the second edition of the Companion is great. I was given a freebie, and it might be the best freebie I've ever gotten.

I too have the good old oxford dictionary of philosophy. It came in handy all the time during my undergrad classes.

Picked up Brain-wise by Patricia Churchland. It's probably next on my reading list.

I'm currently halfway through Christine Swanton's Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View. So far, it's the best defense of modern virtue ethics I've read. It's not trying too hard to appeal to rule-based systems (as with Hursthouse's On Virtue Ethics) nor is is overtly naturalistic (as with Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness).

I just finished the chapter in Kim's 'Philosophy of Mind' where he talks about supervenience. I am having a very difficult time understanding the idea of supervenience in general and more specifically, how it is a way around a causal relationship between the physical and the mental. The way I am reading it, I am having trouble differentiating between the statements 'supervenes on' and 'is caused by' as they relate to the relationship between mental states and physical states. If anyone can help clear up my misunderstanding, I'd be greatful.

Hmm. Supervenience is hard to explain. I'll take a shot, although I think your question is a deeper one than I am going to answer.

Supervenience is supposed to expose an asymmetry: that the the possession of a mental property DEPENDS ON the possession of appropriate physical/material properties. A substance could possess ONLY certain physical properties but NO substance could possess exclusively material properties. The mental SUPERVENES ON the material/physical in this sense. I think using "is caused by" here is errant...I'm not sure the claim is that mental states are CAUSED BY physical states, but merely that they require them without making explicit a causal relation...if there's a difference. I could be VERY wrong on that front, though. I think Chalmers explicitly notes that causation and consciousness are two exceptions for the supervenience of physical facts. But all of my books are packed away, so I can't verify that, but from my notes, I think this falls in Chapter 4 of Chalmers' book.

I'm not sure if that helps. There's a very good discussion of this in chapter 2 of Chalmers' The Conscious Mind. Chalmers' "property dualism" is grounded in the concept of supervenience. I read Chalmers' version of dualism as one that thinks it can better understand the compelling theses of materialism while still allowing for qualia to be non-physical. As I recall, Chalmers puts things like this: supervenience formalizes the idea that one set of facts can fully determine another set of facts WITHOUT the relationship being a two-way determination. I think he uses the example of the physical and biological facts: the physical facts of the world set the biological facts (but not vice versa) insomuch as, once the physical facts of the world are fixed, there is not room for variation in the biological facts. The B-properties (high-level props) like biological facts are fixed by (SUPERVENE ON) lower level A-properties, the physical facts in this case.

There are further issues (local vs. global supervenience, whether objects that are the same mentally can be different physically, eg. can TYPES of mental life be represented in multiply different physical forms).

Also, keep in mind that Kim uses supervenience to refer to PROPERTIES: mental PROPERTIES supervene on physical properties. Others aren't as sure about the existence of properties (Davidson, for instance, avoids talking about properties but focuses on descriptions and predicates instead).

I hope that helps some.

Thanks for the explanation. I've got a small army of people working on helping me understand supervenience. Your post (particularly the example of the physics/biology relationship) actually got a little bit of a lightbulb glowing.

I was mainly interested in the idea because a non-reductionist physicalism seems like a really nice path for philosophy of mind. Unfortunately, I still don't buy it. Using supervenience to explain the relation between the mind and the brain stil seems like a poor way to avoid reductionism. I'd be more inclined to agree with some kind of functionalist explanation of mental states than this supervenience explanation, and I'd still put my money on it all boiling down to brain states when all is said and done.