Keith Douglas' Web Page
| About me | Find out who I am and what I do. |
| My resumé | A copy of my resumé and other documentation about my education and work experience for employers and the curious. |
| Reviews, theses, articles, presentations | A collection of papers from my work, categorized and annotated. |
| Current research projects | What I am currently working on, including some non-research material. |
| Interesting people | People professionally "connected" to me in some way. |
| Interesting organizations | Organizations I am "connected" to. (Some rather loosely.) |
| Intellectual/professional influences | Influences on my work, including an organization chart. Here you can also buy many good books on philosophy and other subjects via amazon.com. I have included brief reviews of hundreds of books. |
| Professional resources | Research sources, amazon.com associates programs, etc. |
| What is the philosophy of computing? | A brief introduction to my primary professional interest. |
| My intellectual heroes | A partial list of important people. Limited to the dead. |
| My educational philosophy | As a sometime teacher I've developed one. Includes book resources. |
Book Influences - Philosophy of Mind
|
Title |
Author |
Purchase / Enjoy Cover |
Comment |
| Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy | Churchland | Strictly speaking this book covers more topics than just philosophy of mind. However, one can look at it as a book showing how one's philosophy of mind affects metaphysics, epistemology, etc. | |
| Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds | Dennett | A collection of Dennett's papers. | |
| Conscious Mind | Chalmers | This book was very disappointing. It came highly recommended to me, but it just amounts to Leibniz in new (possible world semantics) clothes. On the other hand, there are interesting remarks about philosophy of computing that are worth considering. Maybe Chalmers is in the wrong subfield? | |
| Consciousness Explained | Dennett | My favourite book on the philosophy of mind, which is not to say it is all correct. (How could it be? Nothing created this complex ever is.) Favourite line: (paraphrased) Why is the sky blue? Because ripe berries are red and leaves are green, not the other way around. Dennett's discussion of our "feature detectors" is masterful, as is the demolishing of those inane undead creatures (because they keep coming back!), the philosophical zombies. | |
| Conversations on Mind, Matter and Mathematics | Changeux and Connes | A neuroscientist and a mathematician discuss various philosophical topics. A few errors slip in (about Turing) but otherwise the conversation is the sort of thing I enjoy myself - an engaging talk between friends about something neat-o. | |
| Emperor's New Mind | Penrose | Physics, logic, computability, philosophy of mind? What's not to like? Well, Penrose's mangling of Gödel's theorem and crazy speculation about microtubules - as well as not citing much of anything in AI - his target! | |
| Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid | Hofstadter | I could write for hours about this one. Instead, I will simply say: Read it. (The absence of actually proving the first incompleteness theorem is the only thing wrong with it, but the other aspects are so delightfully powerful I reread it fairly often and they certainly make up for the lack, however important at first sight it might seem.) Last time I reread it I found that Hofstadter thanks my teacher from CMU: Wilfried Sieg, who I suppose he met when they were both at Stanford. | |
| Invitation to Cognitive Science, Volume 3 | Osherson | This volume of the series deals with "thinking" (cognition in the narrow sense) and contains many interesting papers. The editorial quality was such that I want to obtain the other volumes in the ICS series. | |
| Large, The Small and the Human Mind | Penrose (with a few others) | A third in the sequence about philosophy of mind, computability and microtubules. What's not like? Well, Penrose's mangling of Gödel's theorem and crazy speculation about microtubules - as well as not citing much of anything in AI - his target! | |
| Metamagical Themas: questing for the essence of mind and pattern | Hofstadter | A collection of papers by Hofstadter on a wide variety of topics. Especially notable is the paper on Nomic - one example of a self-modifying game, and "Who Pushes Who Around the Careenium", which is a dialogue featuring his characters from Gödel, Escher, Bach. | |
| Mind and World | McDowell | This slim collection of lecture transcripts and further remarks takes up a theme supposedly central to modern philosophy: where reasons fit in a "world of causes". Kant is of course the primary inspiration and source for this problem but McDowell also draws upon Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Hegel, Strawson, Davidson and others. His solution involves socialization, though not in those terms. I have one reservation, however. This sort of piece includes substantive hypotheses about the nature of our mental functioning which may in fact be false. In particular, it seems to assume something like the old perceptual/cognitive split though not in such naive terms. A sophisticated pseudoQuinian (for example, perhaps, the Churchlands) might reject McDowell's solution on these grounds. | |
| Mind Design II | Haugland (ed.) | Collection of papers on AI and cognitive science. | |
| Mind's I | Hofstadter and Dennett (eds.) | Collection of papers on AI, cognitive science and related concerns. Reprints Smullyan's wonderful dialogue, "Is God a Taoist?" | |
| Nature of Mind | Rosenthal | Collection of papers on philosophy of mind up to c.1990. (Hi, Robin!) | |
| Neurophilosophy at Work | Churchland | Paul Churchland's latest collection of papers, which not only address topics in traditional philosophy of mind areas (such as consciousness, qualia, the interface with epistemology) but also with ethics and the study of concepts. I wonder how easy it would be to combine his and R. Millikan's nonclassical semantics. Printed on glossy paper to allow reproduction of wonderful colours. | |
| Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind | Fodor | This is a difficult but influential book on the relations between philosophy of mind and language. In particular, in it Fodor defends folk psychology - or at least one part of it, namely a realism about (the referent of) "belief/desire" psychological explanations, etc. He also has an appendix on why there is a language of thought (and fails to realize that language could be compositional "below the language level itself"). | |
| Shadows of the Mind | Penrose | A second in the sequence about philosophy of mind, computability and microtubules. What's not like? Well, Penrose's mangling of Gödel's theorem and crazy speculation about microtubules - as well as not citing much of anything in AI - his target! | |
| The Intentional Stance | Dennett | I recently purchased this, more than a decade after first reading it as an undergraduate. It struck me that it might be useful to "back port" some of Dennett's ideas to understanding the metaphyics of computers and computation. As for the philosophy of mind present in the book, it is now over 20 years old. It is sobering to reflect on the lack of change in the positions of some of the players, though I notice slight shifting towards a common ground on the part of Dennett and the Churchlands. (Fodor and Searle, on the other hand, are still very far away, Fodor more so than he was, for better or for worse.) I also (as I do in cases like this) played Bunge-inspired advocate, and perhaps his difference lies in the nature of representation, not in the computationalism stuff, really. Time to reread other things then ... Finally: a general warning: this book is for the most part a reprint of papers found elsewhere and it would be difficult for newbies to the field to profitably read this book. | |
| True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us | Solomon | I classify this volume as being one on the philosophy of mind as it defends a mildly cognitive account of emotions. Solomon stresses the "outward directedness" (intentionality) of emotions. Otherwise his views in broad outline are phenomenological and existentialist. Hence my usual criticisms apply: phenomology should not be a replacement for analysis and synthesis of mechanism. Solomon realizes this point but does not perform much of the mechanismic exploration here. Existentialism, at least in its Sartrean version, like here, is very scientifically out of date, though Solomon also brings in some more recent points. Overall not a bad book, simply a very "skimming the surface" one. | |
| Supervenience and Mind | Kim | Together with the work of Davidson, the remarks on events here form the starting point for my MA thesis. | |
| Turing | Hodges | A brief biography of Turing and critical discussion of his work for the Great Philosophers series. (Hodges will also explain to you why Turing counts as a philosopher.) |
Finished with this section? Go back to the list of book subjects here.