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This collection brings together 14 essays by international specialists in medieval and Renaissance culture and provides a general and a period-specific introduction to distributed cognition and the cognitive humanities. The essays revitalise our reading of medieval and Renaissance works in the fields of literature, philosophy, art, music, law, science, medicine and material culture, by bringing to bear recent insights in cognitive science and philosophy of mind on the ways in which cognition is distributed across brain, body and world. This volume explores how medieval and Renaissance practices and ideas make evident earlier expressions of distributed cognition. As many of the texts and practices have influenced later Western European societies and cultures, this book reveals vital stages in the historical development of our attempts to comprehend and optimise the distributed nature of cognition.

This book brings together 11 essays by international specialists in Victorian culture and modernism. The volume opens with a general introduction to distributed cognition that also sets out its relevance to the humanities, followed by a period-specific introduction. The essays revitalise our reading of Victorian and modernist works in the fields of literature, art, philosophy, material culture and the history of science and technology by bringing to bear recent insights in cognitive science and philosophy of mind on the ways in which cognition is distributed across brain, body and world.

This book provides an up-to-date version of behaviourism, although not a form of behaviourism that denies the existence of consciousness, free will, rationality, etc., nor aims to reduce these to other sorts of things. Properly understood, the idea of being disposed to behave in a certain way is seen as being exactly as rich and interesting as the idea of being in a certain state of mind. The fact that our ways of behaving are sensitive to practical rationality is taken to be an essential aspect of our nature as conscious agents. In describing such a version of practical rationality, the author claims that we are describing the mental state of someone whose behaviour is sensitive to it. His account of behaviourism rests on two central notions: that of a causal disposition to behave; and that of sensitivity to practical rationality. The author explains and develops these notions in some detail, and then uses them to construct powerful and original accounts of belief, intention, knowledge, perception and consciousness.

In this work two key theses are defended: political liberalism is a processual (rather than a static) view and process thinkers should be political liberals. Three major figures are considered (Rawls, Whitehead, Hartshorne) in the effort to show the superiority of political liberalism to its illiberal alternatives on the political right and left. Further, a politically liberal stance regarding nonhuman animals and the environment is articulated. It is typical for debates in political philosophy to be adrift regarding the concept of method, but from start to finish this book relies on the processual method of reflective equilibrium or dialectic at its best. This is the first extended effort to argue for both political liberalism as a process-oriented view and process philosophy/theology as a politically liberal view. It is also a timely defense of political liberalism against illiberal tendencies on both the right and the left.

As calls mount for resistance to recent political events, Simon Morgan Wortham explores the political implications and complexities of a psychoanalytic conception of resistance. Through close readings of a range of authors, both within and outside of the psychoanalytic tradition, the question of the politics of psychoanalysis itself is read back into the task of thinking resistance from a psychoanalytic point of view. Simon Morgan Wortham explores what he sees as the phobic resistance at the centre of the politics of psychoanalysis, one that creates fresh possibilities for contemporary cultural and political analysis.

This work brings contemporary continental thought into conversation with analytic philosophy on the principal topics of philosophy of mind, considering three themes – the world, the flesh and the subject – to resolve the puzzles that beset contemporary philosophy of mind. The authors provide a coherent approach that draws upon phenomenology, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis and poststructuralism, and also relate recent feminist work on the body to traditional concerns with the mind. Other topics discussed include the problem of consciousness, perception and sensation, imagination, desire, emotion, reason, and agency, and the self and others.