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Consciousness as Caring: James’s Evolutionary Hypothesis| old_uid | 14153 |
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| title | Consciousness as Caring: James’s Evolutionary Hypothesis |
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| start_date | 2017/06/15 |
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| schedule | 16h-18h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle de séminaire du Centre Cavaillès |
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| details | La notion de conscience. À partir de William James |
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| summary | Between 1872 and 1890, William James developed a neglected form of interactionist dualism. He contended that to be phenomenally conscious is actively to evaluate what is in (or might be in) one’s environment, attending to what one decides is important, and ignoring much else. To be conscious is to care about one’s own actual or potential circumstances, in short ; and James hypothesized that this caring capacity was selected (in the Darwinian sense) because it regulated the behavior of vertebrates with highlyarticulated brains. He did not argue directly for this hypothesis, however. Instead, James recommended the hypothesis as a way to explain the surprising results concerning purposive behavior in decapitated frogs. I reconstruct and evaluate James’s evolutionary hypothesis, showing how it would explain those surprising experiments. |
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| responsibles | Prévost |
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