Consciousness in Action - Hardcover

Hurley, S. L.

3.83

6 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674164202 ISBN 13: 9780674164208

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1998

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In this important book, Susan Hurley sheds new light on consciousness by examining its relationships to action from various angles. She assesses the role of agency in the unity of a conscious perspective, and argues that perception and action are more deeply interdependent than we usually assume. A standard view conceives perception as input from world to mind and action as output from mind to world, with the serious business of thought in between. Hurley criticizes this picture, and considers how the interdependence of perceptual experience and agency at the personal level (of mental contents and norms) may emerge from the subpersonal level (of underlying causal processes and complex dynamic feedback systems). Her two-level view has wide implications, for topics that include self-consciousness, the modularity of mind, and the relations of mind to world. The self no longer lurks hidden somewhere between perceptual input and behavioral output, but reappears out in the open, embodied and embedded in its environment.

Hurley traces these themes from Kantian and Wittgensteinian arguments through to intriguing recent work in neuropsychology and in dynamic systems approaches to the mind, providing a bridge from mainstream philosophy to work in other disciplines. Consciousness in Action is unique in the range of philosophical and scientific work it draws on, and in the deep criticism it offers of centuries-old habits of thought.

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About the Author:

S. L. Hurley was Professor at the University of Warwick.

Review:

Consciousness in Actionis an extremely impressive, stimulating contribution to current work on consciousness--a huge step forward from a largely stalemated debate about the existence or otherwise of qualia. At its core is a powerful, and, in my view, compelling case for treating the relation between experience and activity as pivotal to some of the deepest problems consciousness raises. Particularly original is Hurley's exceptionally well-informed use of intriguing psychological phenomena to drive home the rich array of specific philosophical problems she is concerned with about the relation between perception and action. Her solution to these, which involves recognizing a form of deep interdependence between perception, action and the world, draws on a synthesis of an extraordinarily wide range of materials, in philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. Altogether this is a truly remarkable book. (Naomi Eilan, Director of the HRB Project on Consciousness and Self Consciousness, University of Warwick)

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