Despite their apparently divergent accounts of higher cognition, cognitive theories based on neural computation and those employing symbolic computation can in fact strengthen one another. To substan
In this pioneering collection of essays, leading theorists examine theself-representational theory of consciousness, which holds that consciousness always involves someform of self-awareness. The self
The "hard problem" of today's consciousness studies is subjective experience: understanding why some brain processing is accompanied by an experienced inner life. Recent scientific advances
Finalist in the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards.In Tower of Babel, philosopher Robert Pennock compares the views of the new creationists with those of the old and reveals the insubstantiali
In the contentious debate among contemporary epistemologists and philosophers regarding justification, there is one consensus: justification is distinct from knowledge; there are justified beliefs th
Bound to become a classic and to stimulate debate and research, The Evolution of Communication looks at species in their natural environments as a way to begin to understand what the real units of an
This text introduces statistical language processing techniques—word tagging, parsing with probabilistic context free grammars, grammar induction, syntactic disambiguation, semantic word classe
Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, LorraineDaston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-centurysciences--and show how the conc
The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece traces the odyssey of "truth," Aletheia, from mythoreligious to philosophical thought in archaic Greece. Marcel Detienne's starting point is a simple observatio
The sharing of a sexual partner between relatives has always been taboo. In this stunning work, anthropologist Francoise Heritier charts the incest prohibition throughout history, from the strict dec
A great deal of interest and excitement surround the interface between the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of psychology, yet the area is neither well defined nor well represented in mainstre
Artificial neural networks are nonlinear mapping systems whose structure is looselybased on principles observed in the nervous systems of humans and animals. The basic idea is thatmassive systems of s
Throughout the history of ideas, various branches of philosophy have spun off intothe natural sciences, including physics, biology, and perhaps most recently, cognitive psychology. Acentral theme of t
What is language? How does it relate to the world? How does it relate to the mind? Should our view of language influence our view of the world? These are among the central issues covered in this spiri
Already translated into six languages, Francois Jullien's In Praise of Blandness has become a classic. Appearing for the first time in English, this groundbreaking work of philosophy, anthropology, a
In this first full-length study of a largely forgotten optical device from the eighteenth century, Arnaud Maillet reconfigures our historical understanding of visual experience and meaning in relatio
The four studies in this book center on the Western obsession with the nature of personal identity. Focusing on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but with an eye toward antiquity and the present,
Death and the Idea of Mexico is the first social, cultural, and political history ofdeath in a nation that has made death its tutelary sign. Examining the history of death and of thedeath sign from si
A radically interdisciplinary—anthropological, theological, philosophical, aesthetic—inquiry into the origins of human consciousness, community, and potential.