Reviews for Consciousness

The average rating for Consciousness based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-09-16 00:00:00 Doris A Daugherty I have not read Consciousness: Separation and Integration and I don't know if I will. It's been years since I read philosophy and while I'm still interested in metaphysics and in particular the study of consciousness, I tend to read more poetry and less philosophy than I did in my school days. I picked this book up second-hand out of interest in the author. Neil Rossman was a professor of philosophy at La Guardia Community College when I was a student there from 1981 to 1983. It would make a great college story to say he single-handedly inspired my love of philosophy, but the truth is, I arrived in his classroom already pregnant with a love of philosophy. Professor Rossman was just the midwife. But a better midwife one could not hope to have. I don't recall whether, in my first semester of college, I specifically asked to take Introduction to Philosophy or if it was merely a coincidence that Introduction to Philosophy was part of my liberal arts cluster. Either way, I was happy to be there. Professor Rossman taught me about the great philosophers and their thought. He gave names to ideas that had occurred to me spontaneously, for these ideas, I learned, were perennial. What occurred in my mind had previously occurred in the minds of generations of thinkers. Wonderers I should say. For I wondered a lot in my childhood. Some people are wanderers and some people are wonderers. Wonderers are the ones who wander within. I wondered many things about the cosmos and consciousness long before I knew the words cosmos and consciousness. An early memory has me sitting in the back seat of the car next to my little sister. Mom and Dad up front. I thought about the universe expanding. The stars and planets and empty black space. Everything getting further and further away from everything else. Would it keep expanding forever? Or would it reach a limit, like a rubber band, where it could expand no more, where it could only snap back to its original point? And if it did contract to this point, would expansion begin anew? Would the Big Bang happen again, the result of the pressure of that implosion? And would everything unfold the same as before, or would it be different the next time? Would I be here, sitting in the back seat of the car next to my little sister? It wasn't the science that fascinated me. It was the implications for the conscious beings that lived in the cosmos that fascinated me. I wandered within a lot. Many years later, Professor Rossman would introduce me to the tools of language and logic that would allow me to articulate my thoughts and my questions ~ my wonderings.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-09-02 00:00:00 Jay Brewer Absolutely classic Jerry Fodor, through and through. It's argumentative, funny, and clear. Fodor's not as angry as the title makes him out to be but he has a few axes to grind (to name a few: inferential role semantics, theory-theory, and definitional theories of concepts i.e. true believers in the analytic-synthetic distinction). What's particularly remarkable is Fodor's breadth. Not only is he coming to the issues as a first-rate philosopher, but he's in touch with the experimental and theoretical work in the cognitive sciences (here, particularly psychology and linguistics) too. He takes care to point out where they're going wrong. It's striking that he does so, often, using their own methods (he responds to lexical semanticists like Jackendoff and Pinker by dealing with the linguistics at hand, for example). You get, despite how opinionated he is, a clear sense of the tensions between the various positions that Fodor holds. He's quick to point out where people are likely to stop having truck with him and where his arguments work better as a piece and where they start to pull apart. It's this sort of care (sometimes a little between the lines, given his compulsive light-heartedness) that makes this philosophy at its very best. Say what you want about the positions in the book - some are, I'll admit, totally off the rails (which is, as I say, classic Jerry Fodor - at least he isn't saying 'doorknob' is an innate idea anymore) - Fodor's work is brilliant in every sense of the word. Even when it's wrong. Maybe especially then.