This volume of essays examines the problem of mind, looking at how the problem has appeared to neuroscientists from classical antiquity through to contemporary times. Beginning with a look at ventricular neuropsychology in antiquity, this book goes on to look at Spinozan ideas on the links between mind and body, Thomas Willis and the foundation of Neurology, Hooke’s mechanical model of the mind and Joseph Priestley’s approach to the mind-body problem. The volume offers a chapter on the 19th century Ottoman (...) perspective on western thinking. Further chapters trace the work of nineteenth century scholars including George Henry Lewes, Herbert Spencer and Emil du Bois-Reymond. The book covers significant work from the twentieth century, including an examination of Alfred North Whitehead and the history of consciousness, and particular attention is given to the development of quantum consciousness. Chapters on slavery and the self and the development of an understanding of Dualism bring this examination up to date on the latest 21st century work in the field. At the heart of this book is the matter of how we define the problem of consciousness itself: has there been any progress in our understanding of the working of mind and brain? This work at the interface between science and the humanities will appeal to experts from across many fields who wish to develop their understanding of the problem of consciousness, including scholars of Neuroscience, Behavioural Science and the History of Science. (shrink)

The idea of a single scientific method, shared across specialties and teachable to ten-year-olds, is just over a hundred years old. For centuries prior, science had meant a kind of knowledge, made from facts gathered through direct observation or deduced from first principles. But during the nineteenth century, science came to mean something else: a way of thinking. The Scientific Method tells the story of how this approach took hold in laboratories, the field, and eventually classrooms, where science was once (...) taught as a natural process. Henry M. Cowles reveals the intertwined histories of evolution and experiment, from Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection to John Dewey's vision for science education. Darwin portrayed nature as akin to a man of science, experimenting through evolution, while his followers turned his theory onto the mind itself. Psychologists reimagined the scientific method as a problem-solving adaptation, a basic feature of cognition that had helped humans prosper. This was how Dewey and other educators taught science at the turn of the twentieth century-but their organic account was not to last. Soon, the scientific method was reimagined as a means of controlling nature, not a product of it. By shedding its roots in evolutionary theory, the scientific method came to seem far less natural, but far more powerful. This book reveals the origin of a fundamental modern concept. Once seen as a natural adaptation, the method soon became a symbol of science's power over nature, a power that, until recently, has rarely been called into question. (shrink)

Do children have a theory of mind? If they do, at what age is it acquired? What is the content of the theory, and how does it differ from that of adults? The Child's Theory of Mind integrates the diverse strands of this rapidly expanding field of study. It charts children's knowledge about a fundamental topic - the mind - and characterizes that developing knowledge as a coherent commonsense theory, strongly advancing the understanding of everyday theories as well as the (...) commonsense theory of mind. Wellman presents evidence that children as young as age three do possess a commonsense theory of mind - that they grasp the distinction between mental constructs and physical entities and that they have an understanding of the relationship between individuals' mental states and their overt actions. He delves in detail into questions about the nature of adults' commonsense theories of mind and about the nature of commonsense theories. Wellman then examines the content of the three-year-old's theory of mind, the nature of children's notions of mind before age three, the changes in the theory during subsequent development from ages three to six, and the young child's conception of mind in comparison with those of older children and adults. Henry M. Wellman is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Center for Human Growth and Development at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. (shrink)

Young children's early understanding of emotion was investigated by examining their use of emotion terms such as happy, sad, mud, and cry. Five children's emotion language was examined longitudinally from the age of 2 to 5 years, and as a comparison their reference to pains via such terms as burn, sting, and hurt was also examined. In Phase 1 we confirmed and extended prior findings demonstrating that by 2 years of age terms for the basic emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, (...) and fear are commonly used by children as are terms for such related states as crying and hurting. At this early age children produce such terms to refer to self and to others, and to past and future as well as to present states. Over the years from 2 to 5 children's emotion vocabulary expands, their discussion of hypothetical emotions gets underway, and the complexity of their emotion utterances increases. In Phase 2 our analyses go beyond children's production of emotion terms to analyses of their conception of emotion. We focus especially on when children use emotion terms to refer to subjective experiential states of persons. From their earliest uses of these terms in our data children. (shrink)

Lomonosov began his scientific career with the study of mining, but his active mind quickly led him to the considerations of physics and chemistry which occupied most of his life. Only toward the end of his career did he begin the systematic treatment of geology and metallurgy. The guiding principle of his thought in these fields became and remained a belief in the extreme age of the earth and the constant modification of its surface. He assumed the presence of a (...) central fire produced by the gradual consumption of sulphur, whose combustion produced earthquakes and mountain formation. Rock formed from clay and eroded into sand which could again be compacted to rock. Plants and animals produced alkaline and earthy materials which by combination with vitriolic acid and phlogiston from burning sulphur gave salt and metals. Fossils were petrified organic remains. (shrink)

Offers a physical explanation of the Coriolis force. This book is useful for studying the hydrodynamics of the ocean and atmosphere. It also presents many aspects of classical mechanics/dynamics physics. It explains the complexities of this force, about which many scientists have had lingering uncertainties since it was first described in 1831.

The practice of evidence based medicine has changed the role of the physician from information dispenser to gatherer and analyser. Studies and controlled trials that may contain unknown errors, or uncertainties, are the primary sources for evidence based decisions in medicine. These sources may be corrupted by a number of means, such as inaccurate statistical analysis, statistical manipulation, population bias, or relevance to the patient in question. Regardless of whether any of these inaccuracies are apparent, the uncertainty of their presence (...) in physician information should be disclosed to the patient. These uncertainties are not, however, shared by physicians with patients, and have caused a direct increase in patient responsibilities and mistrust. Only when disclosure of uncertainty becomes commonplace in medical practice will the physician/patient relationship evolve to a level of greater understanding and satisfaction for both the physician and patient. (shrink)

For William Whewell and, later, Charles Peirce, the methods of science merited scientific examination themselves. Looking to history to build an inductive account of the scientific process, both men transformed scientific methods into scientific evidence. What resulted was a peculiar instance of what Ian Hacking calls “the looping effects of human kinds,” in which classifying human behavior changes that behavior. In the cases of Whewell and Peirce, the behavior in question was their own: namely, scientific study. This essay brings Hacking’s (...) formulation to bear on the status of science in nineteenth-century intellectual history, revealing the continued entanglement of science and philosophy even as they were being prized apart. Focusing on how Whewell and Peirce turned themselves into “scientific kinds,” the essay reveals the slippage between “what” and “how” across what Peirce once called “the age of methods.”. (shrink)

It used to be thought that, just as word-initialfl… and fr… behaved likepl…, pr…, tr…, etc., in not producing a long syllable when following a word-final short vowel, just so word-internal …fl… and …fr… allowed both the short and, except for the pre-classical scenic poets, the long scansion. It was implied that these clusters oscillated with the same degree of freedom which is the well-known characteristic of the stop-and-liquid clusters. The difficulty is, of course, that evidence can be no more (...) than minimal since in truly Latin material f occurs only at the beginning of words or after a compounding seam. In fact, the argument, explicit or implicit, has turned on Horace, Sat. 1.2.98: custodes lectica ceniflones parasitae; Horace, Sat. 2.2.131: ilium aut nequities aut uafri inscitia iuris; Ov. Ars 3.332: cuiue pater uafri luditur arte Getae; Martial 6.64.26: stigmata nec uafra delebit Cinnamus arte; 12.66.3: arte sed emptorem uafra corrumpis Amoene; Phaedrus 2.6.14: inducta uafris aquila monitis paruit; Silius 8.566: et quos aut Rufrae quos aut Aesernia quosue, and Martial 4.71.1: quaero diu totam Safroni Rufe per urbem. (shrink)