Branches of Philosophy Podcast

An introduction and summary of "Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness Through the Looking Glass" By Michael Tye · 2021 When Alice stepped through the looking-glass, she encountered a peculiar world where she meets animated chess pieces, characters from nursery rhymes, and talking animals. Everything there is inside out and upside down: so it is with consciousness. Reflecting on th...

An introduction and summary of "The Creative Spark How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional" By Agustín Fuentes · 2017 A bold new synthesis of paleontology, archaeology, genetics, and anthropology that overturns misconceptions about race, war and peace, and human nature itself, answering an age-old question: What made humans so exceptional among all the species on Earth? Creativity. It is...

An introduction and summary of "Mental Time Travel Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal Past" By Kourken Michaelian 2016 Drawing on current research in psychology, a new philosophical account of remembering as imagining the past. In this book, Kourken Michaelian builds on research in the psychology of memory to develop an innovative philosophical account of the nature of rem...

An introduction and summary of "The Philosophy of Metacognition Mental Agency and Self-Awareness" By Joëlle Proust 2013 Does metacognition, i.e. the capacity to form epistemic self-evaluations about one's current cognitive performance, derive from a mindreading capacity, or does it rely, at least in part, on sui generis informational processes? In The Philosophy of Metacognition Joël...

An introduction and summary of "Motor Cognition: What actions tell the self: What actions tell the self" By Marc Jeannerod 2006 Our ability to acknowledge and recognize our own identity — our “self” — is a characteristic doubtless unique to humans. Where does this feeling come from? How does the combination of neurophysiological processes coupled with our interaction with the outside wor...

An introduction and summary of "Consciousness and the World" By Brian O'Shaughnessy 2000 "It is his contention that consciousness consists in a closely knit complex of occurrent mental phenomena and powers with thinking and self-knowledge at the centre - and nothing else. He proceeds to give a philosophical elucidation of its nature, analysing it into its constituent psychologic...

An introduction and summary of "Others in Mind Social Origins of Self-Consciousness" By Philippe Rochat 2009 Why are we so prone to guilt and embarrassment? Why do we care so much about how others see us, about our reputation? What are the origins of such afflictions? Philippe Rochat argues that it is because we are members of a species that evolved the unique propensity to reflect upon...

An introduction and summary of "The Conscious Mind" By David Chalmers 1996 What is consciousness? How do physical processes in the brain give rise to the self-aware mind and to feelings as profoundly varied as love or hate, aesthetic pleasure or spiritual yearning? These questions today are among the most hotly debated issues among scientists and philosophers, and we have seen in recent...

An introduction and summary of "Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind" By Simon Baron-Cohen 1995 In Mindblindness, Simon Baron-Cohen presents a model of the evolution and development of "mindreading." He argues that we mindread all the time, effortlessly, automatically, and mostly unconsciously. It is the natural way in which we interpret, predict, and participat...

An introduction and summary of "I Am: A Philosophical Inquiry into First-Person Being" By Raymond Tallis 2004 I Am focuses on two crucial aspects of the escape from being a mere organism: selfhood and agency. These are seen as originating in what Tallis calls the Existential Intuition - the sense 'That I am this' - within the human body. The nature and origin of the Existential I...

An introduction and summary of "Critique of Pure Reason" By Immanuel Kant 1781 A seminal text of modern philosophy, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781) made history by bringing together two opposing schools of thought: rationalism, which grounds all our knowledge in reason, and empiricism, which traces all our knowledge to experience. Published here in a lucid reworking of...

An introduction and summary of "Thinking about Oneself From Nonconceptual Content to the Concept of a Self" By Kristina Musholt 2015 A novel theory of self-consciousness and its development that integrates philosophical considerations with recent findings in the empirical sciences. In this book, Kristina Musholt offers a novel theory of self-consciousness, understood as the ability to th...