Joseph Levine – författare

Neuroprotection in Autism, Schizophrenia and Alzheimer's Disease provides an up-to-date overview on recent clinical studies and the similarities discovered in the most prevalent brain disorders. The book's content will help shed light on basic mechanisms and provide new avenues for early diagnosis toward disease prevention and disease modification. It is written for researchers, clinicians and medical physicians in neuroscience, neurology and psychiatry. Sections discuss the shared pathophysiological mechanisms that underlie autism, schizophrenia/mood disorders and Alzheimer's disease, i.e. neurodevelopmental disorders, neuropsychiatric diseases and neurodegenerative disorders.

Offers an up-to-date overview of basic and clinical studies concerning similarities in the most prevalent brain disorders Helps the reader become familiar with novel neuroprotective mechanisms and experimental treatment modalities in these difficult to treat disorders Written for researchers, clinicians and medical physicians in neuroscience, neurology and psychiatry

Conscious experience presents a deep puzzle. On the one hand, a fairly robust materialism must be true in order to explain how it is that conscious events causally interact with non-conscious, physical events. On the other hand, we cannot explain how physical phenomena give rise to conscious experience.In this wide-ranging study, Joseph Levine explores both sides of the mind-body dilemma, presenting the first book-length treatment of his highly influential ideas on the 'explanatory gap', the fact that we can't explain the nature of phenomenal experience in terms of its physical realization. He presents a careful argument that there is such a gap, and, after providing intriguing analyses of virtually all existing theories of consciousness, shows that recent attempts to close it fall short of the mark. Levine concludes that in the foreseeable future consciousness will remain a mystery.

Joseph Levine draws together a series of essays in which he has developed his distinctive approach to philosophy of mind. He explores such topics as the "phenomenal concept strategy" to defend materialism from anti-materialist intuitions, the doctrine of representationalism about phenomenal character, the modal argument against materialism, the nature of demonstrative thought, and cognitive phenomenology. Levine argues that the phenomenal concept strategy cannot work and that representationalism has certain fatal flaws, at least if it is to be joined to a materialist metaphysics. On the other hand, he defends materialism from the modal argument, contending that it relies on a questionable conflation of semantic and metaphysical issues. Levine also provides a naturalistic theory of demonstrative thought, criticizing certain philosophical arguments involving that notion in the process. All of the essays in some way respond to various materialist attempts to close the "explanatory gap" as well as outline a different conception of conscious experience that would accommodate the gap. Levine connects his work with related themes in contemporary psychology and with such hot philosophical topics as cognitive phenomenology.