Attention is of fundamental importance in the philosophy of mind, in epistemology, in action theory, and in ethics. This book presents an account in which attention, not self, explains the experiential and normative situatedness of human beings in the world. Attention consists in an organization of awareness and action at the centre of which there is neither a practical will nor a phenomenological witness. Attention performs two roles in experience, a selective role of placing and a focal role of access. Attention improves our epistemic standing, because it is in the nature of attention to settle on what is real and to shun what is not real. When attention is informed by expertise, it is sufficient for knowledge. That gives attention a reach beyond the perceptual: for attention is a determinable whose determinates include the episodic memory from which our narrative identities are made, the empathy for others that situates us in a social world, and the introspection that makes us self-aware. Empathy is other-directed attention, placed on you and focused on your states of mind; it is akin to listening. Empathetic attention is central to a range of experiences that constitutively require a contrast between oneself and others, all of which involve an awareness of oneself as the object of another’s attention. An analysis of attention as mental action gainsays authorial conceptions of self, because it is the nature of intending itself, effortful attention in action, to settle on what to do and to shun what not to do.
Jaegwon Kim has argued (Kim 2006a) that the two key issues for emergentism are to give a positive characterization of the emergence relation and to explain the possibility of downward causation. This paper proposes an account of emergence which provides new answers to these two key issues. It is argued that an appropriate emergence relation is characterized by a notion of 'transformation', and that the real key issue for emergentism is located elsewhere than the places Kim identifies. The paper builds on Victor Caston's important work on ancient philosophy of mind (Caston 1997, 2001), but appeals to sources he has not considered.
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David Lewis modified his original theory of causation in response to the problem of 'late preemption ' (see 1973b; 1986b: 193-212). However, as we will see, there is a crucial difference between genuine and preempted causes that Lewis must appeal to if his solution is to work. We argue that once this difference is recognized, an altogether better solution to the preemption problem presents itself. The preemption problem and Lewis's solutionAccording to Lewis's original theory, for any actual, distinct events c and e, e depends (counterfactually) on c just in case it is true that if c had not occurred, then e would not have occurred; and c causes e if and only if (L) there is a series of (actual) events X,, ..., X , such that: X , depends When (L) is met, let us say c is an ancestor of e or, alternatively, that e is a descendant of c. It is the thesis that c causes e only if c is an ancestor of e that comes under threat from the possibility of late preemptive causation.' Here's one case. Suppose two marksmen, Patel and Singh, are targeting a balloon at a fairground stall; they pull their respective triggers virtually simultaneously; Patel's pellet reaches the balloon a split second before Singh's and bursts it; but, had Patel missed, or simply been a fraction slower, Singh's pellet would have burst the balloon instead. Now, in virtue of what does Patel's action (P), but not Singh's action (S), cause the bursting of the balloon ( B ) ? The fact is, there is no descendant of P upon which B counterfactually depends. B does not even depend on the impact between Patel's pellet and the balloon (K), for example; for if K had not occurred, then Singh's pellet, by hypothesis, would have made impact and caused B instead. So, what gives? Lewis. He embellishes his original account with the notion of quasidependence (1986b: 205-207) and redefines causation as follows: for any on c, X , on X , , ..., and e depends on X,,.Lewis accommodates simpler cases of preemption by appeal to the general asymmetry of counterfactual-dependence (see 1979: 33-34; 1973b: 170-72). But he recognizes that this strategy does not work for cases of late preemption, such as the one we are about to consider.
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