Alexander Mugar Klein - Böcker

William James was an acknowledged master of phenomenal description. He gave us the "stream of consciousness" that "flows," and the newborn's mental life as a "blooming, buzzing confusion." But in Consciousness Is Motor, Alexander Klein shows that James sculpted these phenomenal descriptions around an armature of empirical details. His book reconstructs James's models of consciousness and volition, uncovering results from animal experimentation and clinical observation on which those models were built. What emerges is a more powerful and more empirically-informed account of mind than has been appreciated.James's early work on consciousness engaged the 1870s automatism controversy. The controversy was triggered, Klein argues, by experiments demonstrating that living, decapitated frogs are capable of goal-directed action. One side regarded goal-directedness as evidence of spinal consciousness; the other espoused epiphenomenalism, reasoning that consciousness must play no role in producing even purposive action since the latter is possible for brainless creatures. James intervened, Klein shows, by arguing that consciousness has a likely evolutionary function-behavior regulation-and so cannot be a mere epiphenomenon. It accomplishes this function by affording a capacity for evaluation, on Klein's reading. As evidence, James appealed not just to introspection, but also to experimental facts, such as that hemisphere-less vertebrates have a diminished capacity for evaluating different available means to pursue goals. James's "ideo-motor" model of action demonstrated precisely how an evaluating consciousness could help regulate behavior. Klein excavates key clinical observations James designed the ideo-motor model to accommodate, including observations of patients with impairments like paresis and anaesthesia. The resulting model features an early example of a predictive, error-correction feedback loop for motor control.Klein concludes by showing how James's models of consciousness and action feed into his distinctive philosophical outlook, soon to be known as pragmatism. According to his doctrine, meaning and truth are understood in terms of goal-directed action guidance. Consciousness Is Motor paints a striking new portrait of James as an empirically-informed philosopher and psychologist-one who anticipated some contemporary approaches, even while furnishing neglected alternatives to theoretical problems that continue to vex researchers today.

William James was a giant of turn-of-the-century intellectual life. He helped found the young science of physiological psychology, produced a series of widely debated texts on religious experience and on the ethics of faith, co-founded the pragmatist movement in philosophy, and at the end of his life, developed a distinctive metaphysics concerning the relationship between mind and matter that is still influential today. In philosophy, James is remembered for his pragmatism, an outlook that ties truth and meaning to practical results, and for his will to believe doctrine, which defends a right to believe even without evidence, in some cases. His landmark contributions to psychology include his theory that emotions are feelings of bodily changes following excitement--that "we feel sorry because we cry, are angry because we strike" and not vice versa. His Varieties of Religious Experience offered an intimate look at intense, personal, and often heterodox religious experiences. Featuring twenty-nine new essays by leading scholars like Gary Hatfield, Philip Kitcher, Cheryl Misak, and Jesse Prinz, this Oxford Handbook provides an organized, chapter-by-chapter presentation of key themes in James's thought. These themes include attention, emotion, consciousness, evolution, intentionality, truth, religion, ethics, pragmatism, mathematics, and radical empiricism. James was an extraordinarily dialectical thinker, and his engagement with figures from Hume and Hegel to Peirce and Dewey are covered along with his influence on later phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Each chapter provides those new to James with an accessible route into a topic of interest, while also providing seasoned readers sophisticated interpretations by the best living scholars working on James today.

This book examines Bertrand Russell’s complicated relationships to the women around him, and to feminism more generally. The essays in this volume offer scholarly reassessments of these relationships and their import for the history of feminism and of analytic philosophy.Russell is a founder of analytic philosophy. He has also been called a feminist due to his public, decades-long advocacy for women’s rights and equality of the sexes. But his private behavior towards wives and sexual partners, and his apparently dismissive (occasionally public) responses to some women philosophers, raises the question of what sort of feminist (or chauvinist) Russell actually was.Focusing on women in Russell’s circle of acquaintance, including feminist activists and his philosophical interlocutors, this book casts new light on a timeless thinker’s feminism and the women who played critical roles in the making of analytic philosophy.