Critical Neuroscience Choudhury, Suparna; Slaby, Jan
2011, 2011-08-31, 2011-09-07
eBook
Critical Neurosciencebrings together multi-disciplinary scholars from around the world to explore key social, historical and philosophical studies of neuroscience, and to analyze the socio-cultural ...implications of recent advances in the field. Original, interdisciplinary approach explores the creative potential for engaging experimental neuroscience with social studies of neuroscienceFurthers the dialogue between neuroscience and the disciplines of the social sciences and humanitiesTranscends traditional scepticism, introducing novel ideas about ‘how to be critical’ in and about scienceFeatures contributions from eminent scholars including Steven Rose, Joseph Dumit, Laurence Kirmayer, Shaun Gallagher, Fernando Vidal, Allan Young and Joan Chiao
Drawing from the works of Dante, Catherine of Siena, Boccaccio, Aquinas, and Cavalcanti and other literary, philosophic, and scientific texts, Heather Webb studies medieval notions of the heart to ...explore the "lost circulations" of an era when individual lives and bodies were defined by their extensions into the world rather than as self-perpetuating, self-limited entities.
Contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind have largely been shaped by physicalism, the doctrine that all phenomena are ultimately physical. Here, Jaegwon Kim presents the most comprehensive and ...systematic presentation yet of his influential ideas on the mind-body problem. He seeks to determine, after half a century of debate: What kind of (or "how much") physicalism can we lay claim to? He begins by laying out mental causation and consciousness as the two principal challenges to contemporary physicalism. How can minds exercise their causal powers in a physical world? Is a physicalist account of consciousness possible?
The book aims to bring together these three themes - the world, the flesh and the subject - to resolve many of the puzzles that beset contemporary philosophy of mind.
Radicalizing enactivism Hutto, Daniel D; Myin, Erik
2013, 20121214, 2012, 2013-06-26
eBook, Book
A book that promotes the thesis that basic forms of mentality—intentionally directed cognition and perceptual experience—are best understood as embodied yet contentless.
Most of what humans do and ...experience is best understood in terms of dynamically unfolding interactions with the environment. Many philosophers and cognitive scientists now acknowledge the critical importance of situated, environment-involving embodied engagements as a means of understanding basic minds—including basic forms of human mentality. Yet many of these same theorists hold fast to the view that basic minds are necessarily or essentially contentful—that they represent conditions the world might be in. In this book, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin promote the cause of a radically enactive, embodied approach to cognition that holds that some kinds of minds—basic minds—are neither best explained by processes involving the manipulation of contents nor inherently contentful. Hutto and Myin oppose the widely endorsed thesis that cognition always and everywhere involves content. They defend the counter-thesis that there can be intentionality and phenomenal experience without content, and demonstrate the advantages of their approach for thinking about scaffolded minds and consciousness.
Mudpacks and Prozac Halliburton, Murphy
2009, 20160917, 2016-09-17, 2016-06-09
eBook
People seeking psychiatric healing choose from an almost dizzying array of therapies—from the medicated mud packs of Ayurveda, to the pharmacopeia of Western biomedicine, to the spiritual pathways of ...the world's religions. How do we choose, what do the treatments offer, and how do they cure? In Mudpacks and Prozac, Murphy Halliburton investigates the very different ways in which Ayurvedic, Western, and religious (Christian, Muslim, and Hindu) healing systems define psychiatric problems and cures. He describes people's embodied experiences of therapies that range from soothing to frightening, and explores how enduring pleasure or pain affects healing. And through evocative portraits of patients in Kerala, India—a place of incredible cultural diversity that has become a Mecca for alternative medicine—Halliburton shows how sociopolitical changes around the globe may be limiting the ways in which people seek and experience health care, with negative effects on our quality of health and quality of life.
Integral Psychology connects Eastern and Western approaches to psychology and healing. Psychology in the East has focused on our inner being and spiritual foundation of the psyche. Psychology in the ...West has focused on our outer being and the wounding of the body-heart-mind and self. Each requires the other to complete it, and in bringing them together an integral view of psychology comes into view. The classical Indian yogas are used as a way to see psychotherapy: psychotherapy as behavior change or karma yoga; psychotherapy as mindfulness practice or jnana yoga; psychotherapy as opening the heart or bhakti yoga. Finally, an integral approach is suggested that synthesizes traditional Western and Eastern practices for healing, growth, and transformation.
Keen, a professor and practicing psychotherapist, addresses the essential distinction between the truly serious questions involved in human life and the superficial aspects so generally engaging ...people's concern-and often professional treatment-which he terms, triviality. He considers how contemporary practice of psychotherapy often fails to admit to the critical difference, fails to recognize it in practice, and subsequently treats patients for irrelevancies while neglecting core, essential issues.Keen addressed his concern about the prevalent practices among psychological/medical practitioners vis-a-vis the prescriptive drug control of mental problems in earlier publications. In this work, including a therapy case study, Keen's position-an important one warranting wide attention in the medical and helping professions-stresses that pharmacotherapy threatens our access, and openness to ultimate issues. For professionals and scholars in medicine, public health, clinical psychology, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists.
By showing how and why human nature is what it is, evolutionary theory can help us see better what we need to do to improve the human condition. Following evolutionary theory to its logical ...conclusion, Death, Hope and Sex uses life history theory and attachment theory to construct a model of human nature in which critical features are understood in terms of the development of alternative reproductive strategies contingent on environmental risk and uncertainty. James Chisholm examines the implications of this model for perspectives on concerns associated with human reproduction, including teen pregnancy, and young male violence. He thus develops new approaches for thorny issues such as the nature-nurture and mind-body dichotomies. Bridging the gap between the social and biological sciences, this far-reaching volume will be a source of inspiration, debate and discussion for all those interested in the evolution of human nature and the potential for an evolutionary humanism.
