One life is far too short for one to start learning from a scratch. In honing these stray thoughts, I have leaned heavily on others. Many of my ideas tallied with those of my associates; some wise, some scholarly. They have made such instant impact that I can no longer discern the origin or legacy of the thoughts. Our sentiments are alike, like in hospitals whose walls have heard more cordial prayers than in temples, synagogues, churches, and the mosques. Ours is a lineage where we share our callings. I trail a dynasty of writers particularly medical that have similar passions. Our thoughts, and the themes are alike; because the subject is common. I bask in the reflected glory of my predecessors who stand on the shoulders of their precursors. Our knowledge is concord.

If you ask who dares to cry. This is us, we dare to fly. If you scold who dares to scream. This is us, we dare to dream. This is us, incredibly loud together.

This book provides a formal ontology of senses and the belief-relation that grounds the distinction between de dicto, de re, and de se beliefs as well as the opacity of belief reports. According to this ontology, the relata of the belief-relation are an agent and a special sort of object-dependent sense (a "thought-content"), the latter being an "abstract" property encoding various syntactic and semantic constraints on sentences of a language of thought.

This volume is a collection of fourteen essays by leading philosophers on issues concerning the nature, existence, and our knowledge of animal minds. The nature of animal minds has been a topic of interest to philosophers since the origins of philosophy, and recent years have seen significant philosophical engagement with the subject. However, there is no volume that represents the current state of play in this important and growing field. The purpose of this volume is to highlight the state of the debate. The issues which are covered include whether and to what degree animals think in a language or in iconic structures, possess concepts, are conscious, self-aware, metacognize, attribute states of mind to others, and have emotions, as well as issues pertaining to our knowledge of and the scientific standards for attributing mental states to animals.

This is the second volume of John McDowell's selected papers. These nineteen essays collectively report on McDowell's involvement, over more than twenty years, with questions about the interface between the philosophies of language and mind and with issues in general epistemology. Throughout McDowell focuses on questions to do with content: with the nature of content both linguistic and psychological; with what McDowell regards as misguided views about content; and with the form which a proper semantic theory of content should assume.

Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science VI presents the results of recent research into the foundations of science. The volume contains invited papers presented at the Congress, covering the areas of Logic, Mathematics, Physical Sciences, Biological Sciences and the Humanities.

Charles Travis presents a series of connected essays on current topics in philosophy of perception. The book is informed throughout by a number of central insights of Gottlob Frege's, notably about some intrinsic differences between objects of thought and objects of perception, and about the essential publicity of thought, and hence of its objects. Travis addresses a number of key questions, including how perception can make the world bear for the perceiver on the thing for him to do or think; what it might be for there to be perceptual experiences indistinguishable from ones of perceiving (hence from experiences of one's surroundings); what it might be for things to look a certain way to the experiencer, where this is not for things to look that way; what the upshot of (sub-personal) perceptual processing might be, what sorts of capacities are drawn on in representing something as (being) something. Besides Frege, the essays owe much to J. L. Austin, something to J. M. Hinton, and more than a little to John McDowell and to Thompson Clarke. They engage critically with McDowell and with Clarke, as well as with such philosophers as Christopher Peacocke, Tyler Burge, Jerry Fodor, Elisabeth Anscombe, A. J. Ayer, and H. A. Prichard.

A long tradition, going back to Aristotle, conceives of logic in terms of necessity and possibility: a deductive argument is correct if it is not possible for the conclusion to be false when the premises are true. A relatively unknown feature of the analytic tradition in philosophy is that, at its very inception, this venerable conception of the relation between logic and necessity and possibility - the concepts of modality - was put into question. The founders of analytic philosophy, Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, held that these concepts are empty: there are no genuine distinctions among the necessary, the possible, and the actual. In this book, the first of two volumes, Sanford Shieh investigates the grounds of this position and its consequences for Frege's and Russell's conceptions of logic. The grounds lie in doctrines on truth, thought, and knowledge, as well as on the relation between mind and reality, that are central to the philosophies of Frege and Russell, and are of enduring philosophical interest. The upshot of this opposition to modality is that logic is fundamental, and, to be coherent, modal concepts would have to be reconstructed in logical terms. This rejection of modality in early analytic philosophy remains of contemporary significance, though the coherence of modal concepts is rarely questioned nowadays because it is generally assumed that suspicion of modality derives from logical positivism, which has not survived philosophical scrutiny. The anti-modal arguments of Frege and Russell, however, have nothing to do with positivism and remain a challenge to the contemporary acceptance of modal notions.

This book is a comprehensive development and defense of one of the guiding assumptions of evolutionary psychology: that the human mind is composed of a large number of semi-independent modules. The Architecture of the Mind has three main goals. One is to argue for massive mental modularity. Another is to answer a 'How possibly?' challenge to any such approach. The first part of the book lays out the positive case supporting massive modularity. It also outlines how the thesis should best be developed, and articulates the notion of 'module' that is in question. Then the second part of the book takes up the challenge of explaining how the sorts of flexibility and creativity that are distinctive of the human mind could possibly be grounded in the operations of a massive number of modules. Peter Carruthers's third aim is to show how the various components of the mind are likely to be linked and interact with one another - indeed, this is crucial to demonstrating how the human mind, together with its familiar capacities, can be underpinned by a massively modular set of mechanisms. He outlines and defends the basic framework of a perception / belief / desire / planning / motor-control architecture, as well as detailing the likely components and their modes of connectivity. Many specific claims about the place within this architecture of natural language, of a mind-reading system, and others are explained and motivated. A number of novel proposals are made in the course of these discussions, one of which is that creative human thought depends upon a prior kind of creativity of action. Written with unusual clarity and directness, and surveying an extensive range of research in cognitive science, this book will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in the nature and organization of the mind.