Blackwell Companion to Consciousness

by Susan Schneider

Book Overview

Updated and revised, the highly-anticipated second edition of The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness offers a collection of readings that together represent the most thorough and comprehensive... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1405160004
• ISBN13: 9781405160001
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
• Length: 744 Pages
• Weight: 2.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.8" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Excellent book

As good as it looks on the cover, especially the chapter written by Giulio Tononi about a unified theory on consciousness, which might be the most potential theory till now!

A Vast Panorama of Consciousness

This book is a typical example of the best type of Blackwell Companion Book. In various incarnations over the years, Blackwell has remained one of the most revered of publishing houses. Their books are written by world experts in their respective fields and something unusual: each chapter or book is heavily peer-reviewed. This is important: so many books appear to be promising, only for us to discover that they are full of mistakes: error of omission or commission, or errors in citations and attributions. I have found very few errors at all in this enormous tome. Blackwell also produce their books on high quality paper using well-drawn and appropriate illustration. This book is a perfect example. After an introduction by the editors - Susan Schneider from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and Max Velmans from Goldsmiths College, University of London, the 700 plus pages are divided into five parts and 55 chapters: Part I: Problems of Consciousness: 1. A Brief History of the Scientific Approach to the Study of Consciousness: Chris Frith (University College London) and Geraint Rees (University College London) 2. Philosophical Problems of Consciousness: Michael Tye (University of Texas, Austin) Part II: The Domain of Consciousness: Origins and Extent of Consciousness: 3. Consciousness in Infants: Colwyn Trevarthen (University of Edinburgh) and Vasuvedi Reddy (University of Portsmouth) 4. Animal Consciousness: Colin Allen (Indiana University) and Mark Bekoff (University of Colorado) 5. Rethinking the Evolution of Consciousness: Thomas Polger (University of Cincinnati) 6. Machine Consciousness: Igor Aleksander (Imperial College, London) Some Varieties of Conscious Experience: 7. Normal and Abnormal States of Consciousness: J. Allan Hobson (Harvard Medical School) 8. Affective Consciousness: Jaak Panksepp (Washington State University) 9. Clinical Pathologies and Unusual Experiences: Richard P. Bentall (University of Manchester) 10. Altered States of Consciousness: Drug Induced States: Edward F. Pace-Schott (Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center) and J. Allan Hobson (Harvard Medical School) 11. Meditation: David Fontana (Liverpool John Moores University) 12. Mystical Experience: David Fontana (Liverpool John Moores University) Breakdowns and the Unity of Consciousness: 13. The Case of Blindsight: Lawrence Weiskrantz (University of Oxford) 14. Split-Brain Cases: Mary K. Colvin (Dartmouth College) and Michael S. Gazzaniga (University of California, Santa Barbara) 15. Philosophical Psychopathology and Self-Consciousness: G. Lynn Stephens (University of Alabama) and George Graham (Wake Forest University) 16. Coming Together: the Unity of Conscious Experience: Barry Dainton (University of Liverpool) Part III: Some Contemporary Theories of Consciousness: 17. The Hard Problem of Consciousness: David Chalmers (Australian National University) 18. The Global Workspace Theory of Consciousness: Bernard J. Baars