Research Catalog

Title

Past, space, and self / John Campbell.

Author

Campbell, John, 1956-

Publication

Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, [1994], ©1994.

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Holdings

Details

Description

x, 270 pages; 21 cm.

Summary

• Humans were thought to be unique among the species in having minds, but recent results showing the richness and diversity in animal psychology makes this view untenable. Yet there remains the question of whether we can map the features of a particularly human psychology that are responsible for the mind's overall structure. In this book John Campbell shows that the general structural features of human thought can be seen as having their source in the distinctive ways in which we think about space and time.
• He describes the contrasts between animal representations of space and time and distinctively human ways of thinking about them. In particular, he shows what is special about the human ability to think about the past.
• .
• Campbell looks at how self-consciousness exploits these particular abilities in thinking about space and the past. He discusses at length the relation between self-consciousness and the first person and how fundamental the first person is in ordinary thought. Campbell shows that the structured character of ordinary thinking can be explained by reference to the demands of first-person thinking and the way in which first-person thinking exploits distinctively human representations of space and tim.
• Finally, he considers the metaphysical implications of this approach, in particular, how ordinary self-consciousness relies on a realist view of the past.

Series Statement

Representation and mind

Uniform Title

Representation and mind.

Subjects

• Space and time
• Schemas (Psychology)
• Mental representation
• Egoism

Note

• "A Bradford book."

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [257]-265) and index.

Contents

1. Frames of Reference -- 2. The Past -- 3. The First Person -- 4. Self-Reference and Self-Knowledge -- 5. The Reductionist View of the Self -- 6. Conceptual Structure and Self-Consciousness -- 7. The Realism of Memory.

ISBN

0262032155

LCCN

93014038

OCLC

• 28218178
• ocm28218178

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries