Phenomenology, Neuroscience, and the Nature of Experience, Springer's series Studies in Brain and Mind, 2013, pp An Epistemology for Phenomenology? INTRODUCTION There is a tendency to assimilate so called "consciousness studies" to studies of the phenomenology of experience, and it seems to me that this is a shame. It is a shame, I think, because there is no such thing as a legitimate phenomeno...

We discuss Russell’s 1913 essay arguing for the irrelevance of the idea of causation to science and its elimination from metaphysics as a precursor to contemporary philosophical naturalism. We show how Russell’s application raises issues now receiving much attention in debates about the adequacy of such naturalism, in particular, problems related to the relationship between folk and scientific ...

According to agent-causal accounts of free will, agents have the capacity to cause actions, and for a given action, an agent could have done otherwise. This paper uses existing results and presents experimental evidence to argue that young children deploy a notion of agent-causation. If young children do have such a notion, however, it remains quite unclear how they acquire it. Several possible...

reader might have been exposed when first learning about probability. Shafer argues, and the length and depth of the book convinces, that this basic structure is a powerful way of thinking about probability and a way that naturally links probability and causality. He distinguishes the traditional events of probability theory, which he calls Moivrean events and which correspond to sets of leaf n...

[Abstract is now out of date. Needs to be rewritten. The new version of this paper includes a new (partial?) taxonomy of types of function of vision, showing that different forms of representation and different mechanisms are involved.] Clearly we can solve problems by thinking about them. Sometimes we have the impression that in doing so we use words, at other times diagrams or images. Often i...

This paper is an explication and critique of a new theory of causation found in part II of Gregg Rosenberg's A Place for Consciousness. According to Rosenberg's Theory of Causal significance, causation constrains indeterminate possibilities, and according to his Carrier Theory, physical properties are dispositions which have phenomenal properties as their causal bases. This author finds Rosenbe...

Twenty-three second graders and 20 fifth graders were interviewed about how gears move on a gearboard and work in commonplace machines. Questions focused on transmission of motion; direction, plane, and speed of turning; and mechanical advantage. Several children believed that meshed gears turn in the same direction and at the same speed. Many second graders provided very incomplete explanation...

Using quantum entanglement as a simple model of correlations between two systems, one can show that a new causal category must be incorporated into any complete description of physical reality. Such “structural causality” is related to the structural properties of the product space underlying a functional description of a multipart entity. Aristotelian causal categories and the restricted deriv...

A groundswell of recent work in philosophy has sought to revitalize the analysis of causation by appealing to “active principles” such as powers, dispositions, capacities, tendencies, and propensities. These principles are described in a realist and rather Aristotelian fashion, in stark contrast to the deflationary and linguistic accounts of such principles characteristic of Humean thought and ...

The moral neurosciences are an emerging area of research that has the potential to improve our understanding of the biological basis of morality. Thus far, however, research on moral neuroscience and moral judgment development has proceeded independently and with little interconnection. The current article discusses how morality has been defined and assessed in several new and prominent lines o...