Causality and Mind presents seventeen of Nicholas Jolley's essays on early modern philosophy, which focus on two main themes. One theme is the continuing debate over the nature of causality in the period from Descartes to Hume.
• Which causal patterns are involved in mental processes? • On what mechanisms does the self-organisation of cognitive structure rest? • Can a naturalistic view account for the basic resources of intentionality, while avoiding the objections to reductive materialism? By considering the developmental, phenomenological and biological aspects linking mind and causality, this volume offers a state-of-the art theoretical proposal emphasising the fine-tuning of cognition with the complexity of bodily dynamics.
Causality, Meaningful Complexity and Embodied Cognition
With respect to the possible outlining of new models of the process of knowledge construction, we are really faced, at the moment, with the appearance of a new frontier: a frontier that appears strictly linked to the emergence of a conceptual revolution at the level of the analysis of that peculiar entanglement of complexity, information, causality, meaning, emergence, teleology and intentionality that characterizes the unfolding of the "natural forms" of human cognition.
