Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings

I am a computer science professor by trade, and my area of interest is artificial intelligence. This book served as the primary text for a course on the philosophy of mind that I took while I was in graduate school. This was my first experience with the world of philosophy. This is a first rate text on the subject.From past studies of AI/CS, cognitive science, and psychology I can tell that this is an important volume. This is a collection of studies of the philosophy of mind, it is a very self-contained read. This is an important feature of this book; it assumes little to no prior knowledge about philosophy. This book was edited by David Chalmers, and is comprised of over 60 essays from prominent philosophers spanning hundreds of years.The treatment reads much like any thorough text on psychology would. You are not just reading about the current state of the field. The book starts from the beginning--the very beginning. The first chapters start with Rene Descartes (1600s) and Thomas Huxley (1800s). This book takes you through a number of phases of the philosophy of mind. Those who are familiar with the history of psychology will find some common ground in behaviorism, functionalism, and a number of the important questions that are grappled with over the course of the book. When read sequentially you will see how various theories are established, argued, and later refuted (or at least argued against) in later work. More contemporary works include John Searle's "Can computers think?", an essay that you may have encountered in a modern course on artificial intelligence.This is a good read for those who are interested in AI, psychology, or cognitive science. While I hardly claim to be an expert in the field of philosophy of mind, there are a lot of interesting questions that I have grappled with in the past. There are also a number of question that hadn't occurred to me in the past given that I was trained as a scientist, and not a philosopher.The author has even remarked that there will eventually be a companion piece on the philosophy of science. I am excited about the prospect of this companion, and look forward to studying the two volumes together in the future.

The articles go through the discussion of philosophy of mind fairly chronologically and logically. It's funny to see all of the philosophers in this book reference one another's papers which has happened more in this book than any other book I have read for philosophy. This gives one a comparative look at the philosophy of mind debate: starting from Descartes's conception of the mind and body as two distinct substances to modern Functionalism and Connection-ism that does a good job of bridging the philosophical, psychological, and scientific perspectives on these fundamental questions.Book had plenty of room in the margins to write my notes and mark the text and readings were pleasantly short with an average reading length of about ~10 pages, even if the content is very dense.

Chalmers is one of the smartest dudes around in the "philosophy of mind" field. So how does he make this book?He doesn't write volumes and volumes of his own work. This is meant for the reader to get a grasp of:1) What are the key questions in philosophy of mind? What are thoughts, memories? What can we really know about our mind?2) How influential philosophers have tried to answer these questions. MOST of the time, Chalmers will follow up with a paper by a dissenting author - offering a refutation and alterative.If you're prescribed this for a philosophy class, don't throw it away or sell it. If you want to buy this for your own reading please: do not be daunted! Philosophy is taught by years of reading and understanding & developing argument structures. Keep reading collections like this, they're quite accessible!

I required this book for a college course on this topic. I did not major in philosophy so it was a bit of a challenge to read at times. However, my professor often mentioned how it is a great selection of excerpts. I wished I would have found out earlier that there are summaries on each of the types of philosophical thinking (e.g., physicalism, behaviorism, dualism, etc.) BEFORE each of the corresponding sections. So if you are a student who is not a philosophy major and you need to read this book, I strongly advise you to read those summaries because I think they are very helpful with understanding the texts! :)

The rating I gave the book is for the Amazon reproduction and not for the content. Indeed, I attempted to read two essays and each was so garbled in page order, page omissions , and changes of type script that each was impossible to read even as I put in some effort to sort them out.That Amazon keeps this version available is a disservice to the editor (Chalmers), the included authors, the would-be reader, and even to Amazon itself. Please provide a correct representation or just remove the book altogether as it is unusable in its current state.

My book arrived and I have to thank you for the excellent job.

How can we really know that this is a great book? Is it possible that I imagined the whole thing? Maybe your experience will match my own, but it could be colored by our divergent paths.

Great collection of essay on the topic of philosophy of mind. There's almost too much information in this book; It was a good buy.

I used this book extensively on the Philosophy of Mind module on my philosophy degree. It has a wide range of papers you could spend an age trying to find individually, including many of the classic and often referenced examples from Nagel, Jackson, Putnam, Burge, Lewis, Fodor and Kim - not to forget Chalmers himself. This is not a light read and some of the papers are fairly technical, but not all, and when they are they mostly reward the careful reader with new insights. Chalmers is famous for his own views, but he takes an unbiased view in the selection of papers representing all the main camps in philosophy of mind. Given volume and quality of contents, I think this book is great value. If you are looking for the right papers to support you in studying philosophy of mind then this is a great selection. Combine it with an introductory text such as one of the ones from Kim, Heil or Churchland and you could have all you need for a philosophy of mind at an undergraduate level.Are there any criticisms? A few minor niggles. There is little in the way of introductory text for each section - and it would have been better to have had a few pages of positioning for each section in the book. Secondly, after a few weeks of intense reading my copy is looking pretty battered. It is a large book, which is always problematic in paperback format, but even so the physical quality is a little lower than I might ideally of liked. But these really are niggles.

I first came across this book as part of the requirements for a distance learning course in Philosophy of the Mind from Oxford University. Virtually all our material for study came from it. It is a superb collection of the most important papers written on this subject since Descartes (and of course includes some of his Meditations). It is helpfully divided into the principle philosophical positions that are taken. A concise overview of the these is given at the beginning.Chalmers has shown no real partiality in his choice of papers..preferring to reflect the work of the most influencial philosophers rather than his own views. His main contribution is a very helpful paper outlining most of the philsophical stances about the mind that are current, and he is one of the few who is sufficiently confident and humble to be fairly agnostic about the mind/body problem. If I had any quibble it would be that modern substance dualists,(admittedly a small breed),do not really get an airing; a physicalist world view predominates after Descartes. All in all however it is an excellent book.

differnt perspectives