By Alison Gopnik, the New York Times An excerpt: Humphrey, an emeritus professor of psychology at the London School of Economics, may not have solved the mind-body problem, and there is something to be said for the awkward geekery of philosophical analysis and experimental data. But he has some really...

By Ulla Schmi from Metapsychology. "Lucy O'Brien's and Matthew Soteriou's Mental Actions accounts for a phenomenon that has been a stepchild to both Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Action: Mental Action. One anthology later, that much is clear: they better had done differently....

By Richard E. Cytowic in Seed Magazine "From my perspective as a neurologist who studies minds and as a creative writer who imagines characters’ inner lives, Virginia Woolf’s mind is a marvel to behold. No two books are alike. “Not this, not that,” she seems to be saying as she rejects convention...

by Ray Tallis from New Scientist "Most neuroscientists, philosophers of the mind and science journalists feel the time is near when we will be able to explain the mystery of human consciousness in terms of the activity of the brain. There is, however, a vocal minority of neurosceptics who contest...

by Greg Boustead in Seed "It all started with Cheerios. Jonah Lehrer was once again standing in a supermarket aisle, crippled by the thought of which variety of whole-oat goodness to buy: honey nut or apple cinnamon. “It was an embarrassing waste of time,” he says, “and yet it happened to me all...

By Judith Glück and Susan Bluck Objectives. This study examined individual differences in laypeople's conceptions of wisdom using a person-oriented approach, as previous studies using a priori group variables may have underestimated the variability. Although there is a tradition of examining people's...

Daniel M. Hausman and Brynn Welch One of the hottest ideas in current policy debates is “libertarian paternalism,” the design of policies that push individuals toward better choices without limiting their liberty. In their recent book, Nudge, Richard Thaler and then Obama advisor (now head of the White...

The focus on complexity as a problem of the financial meltdown of 2008–2009 suggests that crisis is in part epistemological: we now know enough about financial and economic systems to be threatened by their complexity, but not enough to relieve our fears and anxieties about them. What marks the current...

Shannon Spaulding Recently, philosophers and psychologists defending the embodied cognition research program have offered arguments against mindreading as a general model of our social understanding. The embodied cognition arguments are of two kinds: those that challenge the developmental picture of...

Excerpt: " Transhumanism is the view that humans should be permitted to use technology in order to re-make human nature, offered as the next stage in human evolution. It differs from posthumanism in as much as posthumanity is largely concerned with an ideal future where such transitions have already...

Jason A. Clark In the last 10 years, several authors including Griffiths and Matthen have employed classificatory principles from biology to argue for a radical revision in the way that we individuate psychological traits. Arguing that the fundamental basis for classification of traits in biology is...

Philippe N. Tobler Emerging evidence suggests that the long-established distinction between habit-based and goal-directed decision-making mechanisms can also be sustained in humans. Although the habit-based system has been extensively studied in humans, the goal-directed system is less well characterized...