Edited by Robert A. Segal (NHC Fellow, 1997–98) At least three major questions can be asked of myth: what is its subject matter? what is its origin? and what is its function? Theories of myth may differ on the answers they give to any of these questions, but more basically they may also differ on … Continued
By P. S. Greenspan (NHC Fellow, 1990–91) P.S. Greenspan uses the treatment of moral dilemmas as the basis for an alternative view of the structure of ethics and its relation to human psychology. Greenspan argues that dilemmas may be regarded as possible consequences of a set of social rules designed to be simple enough to … Continued
By Mark Turner (NHC Fellow, 1989–90) The great adventure of modern cognitive science, the discovery of the human mind, will fundamentally revise our concept of what it means to be human. Drawing together the classical conception of the language arts, the Renaissance sense of scientific discovery, and the modern study of the mind, Mark Turner … Continued
By W. V. Harris (NHC Fellow, 1998–99) The angry emotions, and the problems they presented, were an ancient Greek preoccupation from Homer to late antiquity. From the first lines of the Iliad to the church fathers of the fourth century A.D., the control or elimination of rage was an obsessive concern. From the Greek world it passed … Continued
By Andrews Reath (NHC Fellow, 1991–92) Andrews Reath presents a selection of his best essays on various features of Kant's moral psychology and moral theory, with particular emphasis on his conception of rational agency and his conception of autonomy. Together the essays articulate Reath's original approach to Kant's views about human autonomy, which explains Kant's … Continued
By Elizabeth Schechter (NHC Fellow, 2014–15) Could a single human being ever have multiple conscious minds? Some human beings do. The corpus callosum is a large pathway connecting the two hemispheres of the brain. In the second half of the twentieth century a number of people had this pathway cut through as a treatment for … Continued
By Richard Moran (NHC Fellow, 1994–95) Since Socrates, and through Descartes to the present day, the problems of self-knowledge have been central to philosophy’s understanding of itself. Today the idea of ”first-person authority” — the claim of a distinctive relation each person has toward his or her own mental life — has been challenged from a number of directions, … Continued
By Mitchell S. Green (NHC Fellow, 2001–02) Mitchell S. Green presents a systematic philosophical study of self-expression – a pervasive phenomenon of the everyday life of humans and other species, which has received scant attention in its own right. He explores the ways in which self-expression reveals our states of thought, feeling, and experience, and … Continued
By John A. Hodgson (NHC Fellow, 1981–82) The English Romantic writers and poets valued a genuine coherence of image and idea. Striving for organic form, they were faced with the challenge of using figuration – metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche – to represent the essentially unrepresentable: God, ultimate power, the human mind and psyche, what Shelley called … Continued
By Christopher S. Hill (NHC Fellow, 1987–88) This is a book about sensory states and their apparent characteristics. It confronts a whole series of metaphysical and epistemological questions and presents an argument for type materialism: the view that sensory states are identical with the neural states with which they are correlated. According to type materialism, … Continued