Forming the Mind

The mind/body problem that was a concern in the Middle Ages and in early modern times is, however, as indicated not the same problem that occupy contemporary philosophers. Today we want to explain how phenomena like consciousness and intentionality are possible in a material (or physical) world. The problem that faced medieval philosophers and Descartes was rather the opposite, that is, how can matter at all have an effect on the mental (non-material) and how can such a noble thing as a mind be united to a material body.

• One problem is the so-called interaction problem, that is, how can such different things (or substances) as the mind and the body have an efficient causal effect on each other.
• Another problem is the unification problem, that is, how can the mind and the body, which can exist apart from each other, be united into one single thing; a human being.
• A third way of stating the problem has to do with the existence of sensations or sense ideas in the mind, which means that the problem is really how to explain in what way there can be sensations in a mind without a body.
• A fourth mind/body problem, which is quite neglected and which the present book does not deal with at all, but which is very important, is how final and efficient causality can be combined.

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Adorno's Positive Dialectic

Theodor Adorno is one of the most exciting, controversial, difficult, and misrepresented philosophers of the twentieth century.This book consists initially of this introduction which serves to bring Adorno’s life, works, and the reception of his ideas into focus for those to whom this is not well known.

• From the early 1930s until his death in 1969, Adorno wrote dozens of key texts which mirrored several of the projects of other members of the Early Frankfurt School, in particular Horkheimer, Lowenthal, and Marcuse.
• Generally speaking, Adorno’s work belongs within the framework adopted by the Frankfurt School: he was animated by the same motivation – to understand how and why Western civilisation decayed to Nazi barbarism.
• The most important texts of Adorno’s critique of enlightenment span contributions to German philosophy and embrace key works of social criticism, the philosophy of history, epistemology, aesthetics, and, of course, the deployment of Freudian psychoanalysis.

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Political Philosophy: From Plato to Mao

This uniquely accessible introduction to political philosophy explores the history of ideas and ways of thinking about society. Beginning with Plato's "Utopia," Cohen goes on to discuss political philosophies from Niccolo Machiavelli's "Psychology of the State" through to Hobbes' "Wicked World," John Locke, Adam Smith, Rousseau, Marxism, Italian Fascism, Maoism and beyond. Theory is set in a social context, in what amounts to a history of civilization, from Plato and the Enlightenment humanists to Hayek and Fukuyama. Concise summaries of key ideas are likewise set within the useful context of an historical narrative. The book finishes with a final discussion of capitalism and the "Third Way," bringing the narrative fully up to date.
The historicists believe they have unravelled one of the oldest problems of speculative metaphysics, the problem our study started
with, identified by Heraclitus and Parmenides – the problem of change. They believe their advance is due to their living in a
uniquely important period of history – one in which change has accelerated, revealing for the first time the revolutionary truth. But
the reality is that the more everything changes, the more everything remains the same.
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