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Spinoza and Contemporary Biology : Lectures on the Philosophy of Biology and Cognitivism / edited by Henri Atlan, Robert Boncardo, and Inja Stracenski.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Atlan, Henri, Author.
- Series:
- Spinoza studies.
- Spinoza Studies
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Biology--Philosophy.
- Biology.
- Cognition--Philosophy.
- Cognition.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (570 pages)
- Edition:
- First edition.
- Place of Publication:
- Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press Ltd, [2018]
- Summary:
- A neo-Spinozian conception of life and the mind.
- Contents:
- Cover
- Half Title
- Series Page
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Translator's Note
- Acknowledgement
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Why Spinoza?
- Part I: The Intelligible and the Sensible: The Actualities of Spinoza's Doctrine
- Chapter I The Order of Philosophising: Nature
- Where to begin?
- The essence of a thing
- God or Nature
- 'Were the eyes made for seeing?' The ingrained prejudice of final causes
- Self-organising Nature
- The two cultures
- The order of philosophising
- Cause of itself
- Nature naturing and Nature natured
- Intelligo, I comprehend, I understand…
- The nature of things and its intelligibility
- Chapter II From a Biophysics of the Individual to the Nature of the Human Mind
- Some premises on the nature of bodies
- The first misunderstanding: 'Spinoza's physical theory'
- The theory of the individual: a small biophysics
- The ratio of motion and rest
- Homeostasis and theory of the organism
- The essence of an individual
- The mnesic trace
- Other misunderstandings: Hans Jonas's vitalist interpretation
- Omnia animata: the animist misunderstanding
- Mens, animus, anima
- Animus versus mens in the theory of affects
- Understanding and the power of the mind: the mens or the mental
- Passion of the soul (pathema, or passio, animi)
- The Cartesian anima
- The illusions of free will
- Anima and the affects of animals: between stones and humans
- Back to 'all are animate'
- The stone's mind
- Degrees of composition and complexity
- Chapter III Matter and Thought: Identity and Differences
- Two reductionisms
- The heart of the doctrine
- Foundational propositions
- Asymmetries within 'the one and the same thing'
- 'Without relation to…': an interpretative key
- Temptations of parallelism.
- Of one attribute over the other: no anteriority or superiority
- neither materialism nor idealism
- Critiques of parallelism: equality of powers, synthetic identity
- Equality of powers: the affects, privileged locus of observation
- Synthetic identity
- New misunderstandings
- Axioms and the principle of causality
- Inversion of proposition II, 7 in the fifth part of the Ethics
- Reasons and causes
- The laws of nature and mathematical physics
- On the abstraction of mathematical laws
- Between cause and effect: neither all nor nothing in common (Wittgenstein and Spinoza)
- Generation
- Magical thought and temporality
- Matter and the physical sciences: physics and biology - a crossover
- The 'dematerialisation' of physics
- Reductionism and the materialisation of biology
- Levels of organisation and academic disciplines
- Abstractions in the small physics?
- Abstractions in physics and the corpora simplissima
- Physical abstractions in the imagination and real objects in the intellect
- The Bodies: objects of ideas in the intellect
- Chapter IV The Unfinished
- 'For up till now I have not been able to set out anything concerning [these matters] in an orderly way'
- The infinite modes and the absence of a theory of physics
- The infinite immediate and mediate modes
- The 'face of the whole universe': matter and thought
- The matter-thought of microphysics
- The infinite intellect and the ideas of nonexisting things
- Two ways of existing
- To comprehend and to contain
- The example: the power of a point relative to a circle
- The eternal essences
- Essences and existences in the nature of things
- Symmetry restored in eternity
- Part II Psychophysical Causalities
- Chapter V Ideas and Things
- The context.
- 'The Mind cannot determine the Body to motion, to rest or to anything else (if there is anything else)': what the body can do (Ethics III, 2 second movement and scholium)
- Conscious decisions are not the cause of voluntary action
- Intentional actions performed after a delay
- Intention
- Incursion into some contemporary views: John Searle, Elizabeth Anscombe
- A model of intentional self-organisation
- A temporal inversion?
- Towards a temporal unity of the self
- Neural networks
- Limits
- Elements of Spinozist psychophysiology
- Some textual convergences
- Chapter VI The Body Cannot Determine the Mind to Think (Ethics III, 2, First Movement)
- The new methodological reductionism
- Multiform consciousness: preliminary questions - the words we need
- Consciousness as object of experimentation
- William James and the invention of psychophysics
- The theory of emotions in William James
- William James, philosopher: an evolution
- Neutral monism: does consciousness exist?
- Consciousness and knowledge in Spinoza
- Dreaming with open eyes: the dream and modified states of consciousness
- The neurosciences and the dream
- Error and imagination
- Progression and gradualism: humans, animals and others
- The psychophysics of James and Spinoza: the missed encounter
- Chapter VII Detour via the Cognitive Neurosciences
- The conscious unconscious: the cerebral unconscious, access to consciousness, and what comes after
- Access to consciousness
- Medical applications
- Focusing attention
- Self-consciousness
- Self-consciousness (self-awareness) and consciousness of the self
- The biological self
- Self-consciousness, feelings and emotions in the mind-body
- Other medical applications
- Feelings and emotions: a temporal inversion (James revisited)
- Affects of attachment and social organisation: humans and animals.
- Monogamous and polygamous voles
- The theory of affects and the reward system
- Affects of attachment: from invertebrates to Homo sapiens
- Chapter VIII Causes, Correlations, Information, Neural Codes
- What are we talking about?
- Mirror neurons and the 'grandmother-neuron': intracerebral causality
- Information and meaning
- Problems of coding
- The genetic code
- Neural codes
- Coding mental states by cerebral states?
- 'Consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies': a future mathematical language?
- Chapter IX Unconscious Consciousness: From the Inadequate to the Adequate
- The pathological, amplification of the normal
- The challenge and the wager
- Error and adequate knowledge
- Development and evolution of human cognition: continuity within change
- Continuity within difference as pedagogy
- Continuity within difference: the spiritual automaton, or the possible passage from inadequate to adequate knowledge
- The way
- The two corollaries of Ethics II, 16
- In summary
- Return to the wager: taking up the challenge
- The language of technology
- Human and animal affects: the role of different languages
- Chapter X Research Methods and Metaphysical Temptations
- The naturalisation of the mind
- Analogies and metaphors: 'intentionality' in nature
- Barrier of intentionality in adaptive evolution?
- Underlying ontologies
- Eliminative materialism
- When natural human languages are eliminated
- Chapter XI The 'Whole of Nature' Under Each Attribute
- The other attributes: an interpretation
- Back to substances and attributes: the first ten propositions
- The tautology
- The intelligibility of the real, despite the unknown attributes
- Hypotheses, theories, models: under-determinations, synthetic identity.
- Materialism and the naturalisation of the mind: a 'folk' materialism?
- Spinoza, James, Wittgenstein, Putnam: a welcome atypical path
- A double misunderstanding
- Chapter XII Emergence And Supervenience: Anomalous Monism and Synthetic Identity
- Emergence and supervenience in biology
- Emergences: mechanical and metaphysical
- The 'emergent mentalism' of Roger W. Sperry
- Emergence and reduction (Jaegwon Kim)
- Mental causation
- Elisabeth of Bohemia to Descartes
- Physical 'realisation'
- 'Conceptual' causation
- Supervenience of mental states: the rectangle of psychophysical causalities
- Supervenience of software: functionalism
- Artificial intelligence
- what it means to 'understand'
- the Turing test
- New medical observations: idealist temptations
- Return to the second movement of Ethics III, 2 (no determination of the body by the mind)
- Psychosomatics: the extraordinary story of the stomach ulcer
- Placebos, unknowingly and knowingly consenting to treatment
- Neurofeedback and other techniques
- Anomalous monism
- The Davidson case
- Anomalous monism and Kantian moral theory
- Diagonal causalities
- Causa and ratio
- Rectangle without diagonals
- External operational causality in medicine
- Psychophysiological therapies
- The two sides of the same coin
- The internal and the external
- Conclusion
- Appendix The Conatus
- Polysemy
- The teleological misunderstanding
- Power, force of existing, impulse and essence
- The conatus of a stone
- Primitive affects: negative and positive feedback
- Moral judgement
- From alienated desire to the desire of those determined by their affects to think and act under the guidance of reason, and then towards the highest virtue or power
- The effort of understanding
- From alienated desire towards its liberation
- The highest virtue.
- The presence of the cause of itself in each thing.
- Notes:
- Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.
- Description based on print version record.
- Includes bibliographical references.
- ISBN:
- 9781474489027
- 1474489028
- 9781474489034
- 1474489036
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