In a lively and original account of psychology's formative years, the late Edward S. Reed describes the attempts of 19th-century thinkers and practitioners to make psychology into a science. Setting psychological developments within the social, religious, and literary contexts of the time, Reed counters the widespread belief that psychology emerged from philosophy.
How should we speak of bodies and souls? In Coming to Mind, Lenn E. Goodman and D. Gregory Caramenico pick their way through the minefields of materialist reductionism to present the soul not as the brain’s rival but as its partner. What acts, they argue, is what is real. The soul is not an ethereal wisp but a lively subject, emergent from the body but inadequately described in its terms. Rooted in some of the richest philosophical and intellectual traditions of Western and Eastern philosophy, psychology, literature, and the arts and the latest findings of cognitive psychology and brain science—Coming to Mind is a subtle manifesto of a new humanism and an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the human person. Drawing on new and classical understandings of perception, consciousness, memory, agency, and creativity, Goodman and Caramenico frame a convincing argument for a dynamic and integrated self capable of language, thought, discovery, caring, and love.
A brilliant and comprehensive history of the creation of the modern Western mind. Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to searching questions about the nature of human inner life. This is the story of how a new concept—the mind—emerged as a potential solution, one that was part soul and part machine, but fully neither. In this groundbreaking work, award-winning historian George Makari shows how writers, philosophers, physicians, and anatomists worked to construct notions of the mind as not an ethereal thing, but a natural one. From the ascent of Oliver Cromwell to the fall of Napoleon, seminal thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Diderot, and Kant worked alongside often-forgotten brain specialists, physiologists, and alienists in the hopes of mapping the inner world. Conducted in a cauldron of political turmoil, these frequently shocking, always embattled efforts would give rise to psychiatry, mind sciences such as phrenology, and radically new visions of the self. Further, they would be crucial to the establishment of secular ethics and political liberalism. Boldly original, wide-ranging, and brilliantly synthetic, Soul Machine gives us a masterful, new account of the making of the modern Western mind.
This interdisciplinary book ties the historical work of Descartes to his successors through current research and critical overviews on the neuroscience of consciousness, the brain, and cognition. This text is the first historical survey to focus on the cohesions and discontinuities between historical and contemporary thinkers working in philosophy, physiology, psychology, and neuroscience. The book introduces and analyzes early discussions of consciousness, such as: metaphysical alternatives to scientific explanations of consciousness and its connection to brain activity; claims about the possibilities and limits of neuroscientific accounts of consciousness and cognition; and the proposition of a “non-reductive naturalism” concerning phenomenal consciousness and rationality. The author assesses the contributions of early philosophers and scientists on brain, consciousness and cognition, among them: Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Newton, Haller, Kant, Fechner, Helmholtz and du Bois-Reymond. The work of these pioneers is related to that of modern researchers in physiology, psychology, neuroscience and philosophy of mind, including: Freud, Hilary Putnam, Herbert Feigl, Gerald Edelman, Jean-Pierre Changeux, Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers, amongst others. This text appeals to researchers and advanced students in the field.
Discover Dr. Sha's Powerful Techniques for Healing Your Soul, Mind, and Body What is the real secret to healing? Internationally acclaimed healer and author Dr. Zhi Gang Sha gives us a simple yet powerful answer to this age-old question: Heal the soul first; then healing of the mind and body will follow. In Soul Mind Body Medicine, Dr. Sha shows that love and forgiveness are the golden keys to soul healing. From that foundation, he presents practical tools to heal and transform soul, mind, and body. The techniques and the underlying theories are easy to learn and practice but profoundly effective. They include: Healing methods for more than 100 ailments, from the common cold to back pain to heart disease to diabetes Step-by-step approaches to weight loss, cancer recovery, emotional balance, and maintenance of good health A revolutionary one-minute healing technique Endorsements “Just as our thoughts can influence water, our souls can bring healing and balance to our selves, our loved ones, and our world today. Dr. Sha is an important teacher and a wonderful healer with a valuable message about the power of the soul to influence and transform all life. His book Soul Mind Body Medicine will deeply touch you.” — Dr. Masaru Emoto, author of The Hidden Messages in Water “All cultures have produced authentic healers from time to time. Dr. Zhi Gang Sha is such a healer — a man of deep wisdom and compassion, and a gift to the human race.” — Larry Dossey, MD, author of The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things
This work summarizes results from neuroscience and recent work with artificial neural networks that together suggest a unified set of answers to questions about how the brain actually works; how it sustains a thinking, feeling, dreaming self; and how it sustains a self-conscious person.
This edited volume presents spiritual and religious perspectives and practices that can be integrated into counseling, written by experts in the field. Included are topics such as transpersonal experiences, prayer, meditation, and non-traditional spiritual approaches.
Approaching the study of literature as a unique form of the philosophy of language and mind--as a study of how we produce nonsense and imagine it as sense--this is a book about our human ways of making and losing meaning. Brett Bourbon asserts that our complex and variable relation with language defines a domain of meaning and being that is misconstrued and missed in philosophy, in literary studies, and in our ordinary understanding of what we are and how things make sense. Accordingly, his book seeks to demonstrate how the study of literature gives us the means to understand this relationship. The book itself is framed by the literary and philosophical challenges presented by Joyce's Finnegan's Wake and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. With reference to these books and the problems of interpretation and meaning that they pose, Bourbon makes a case for the fundamental philosophical character of the study of literature, and for its dependence on theories of meaning disguised as theories of mind. Within this context, he provides original accounts of what sentences, fictions, non-fictions, and poems are; produces a new account of the logical form of fiction and of the limits of interpretation that follow from it; and delineates a new and fruitful domain of inquiry in which literature, philosophy, and science intersect. Table of Contents: Preface Note on Abbreviations Introduction: What Are We When We Are Not? Part I The Surface of Language and the Absence of Meaning 1. From Soul-Making to Person-Making 2. The Logical Form of Fiction 3. The Emptiness of Literary Interpretation 4. To Be But Not To Mean 5. How Do Oracles Mean? Part II Senses and Nonsenses: Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations 6. A Twitterlitter of Nonsense: Askesis at Finnegans Wake 7. The Analogy between Persons and Words 8. "The Human Body Is the Best Picture of the Human Soul" 9. The Senses of Time 10. Being Something and Meaning Something Bibliography Acknowledgments Index This is an adventurous and unusual book. Bourbon moves back and forth between literary and philosophical contexts with ease, showing in multifarious ways how the one can, often in unexpected ways, illuminate the other. Throughout these wide-ranging explorations Bourbon uncovers a good deal about both the nature of literary meaning and our distinctive -- if tellingly irreducible -- relations to literary texts. --Garry L. Hagberg, author of Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory and Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge
From its beginnings in prehistoric religion to its central importance in Western faith traditions, the soul has been a constant source of fascination and speculation. Brain & Belief seeks to understand mankind's obsession with life, death, and the afterlife. Exploring the latest insights from neuroscience, psychopharmacology, and existential psychology, McGraw exhaustively researches the various takes on the human soul and considers the meaning of the soul in a postmodern world. The ambitious scope of the book is balanced by a deeply personal voice whose sympathy for both science and religion is resonant.
