Matéria E Consciência - Uma Introdução Contemporânea À Filosofia Da Mente

In Matter and Consciousness , Paul Churchland clearly presents the

advantages and disadvantages of such difficult issues in philosophy of mind as behaviorism,

reductive materialism, functionalism, and eliminative materialism. This new edition incorporates the

striking developments that have taken place in neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial

intelligence and notes their expanding relevance to philosophical

issues.

Churchland organizes and clarifies the new theoretical and experimental

results of the natural sciences for a wider philosophical audience, observing that this research

bears directly on questions concerning the basic elements of cognitive activity and their

implementation in real physical systems. (How is it, he asks, that living creatures perform some

cognitive tasks so swiftly and easily, where computers do them only badly or not at all?) Most

significant for philosophy, Churchland asserts, is the support these results tend to give to the

reductive and the eliminative versions of materialism.

A Bradford

Book