Abstract This paper examines the paradoxical decline in engagement with philosophy of science among engineers precisely when machine learning (ML) systems are increasingly performing complex epistemological functions in engineering practice. We identify how philosophical naivety , characterized by the uncritical adoption of reductive frameworks regarding consciousness, intelligence, and ethics, creates tangible organizational and technical liabilities. We then demonstrate how conceptual limitations in engineers’ philosophical foundations lead to three primary flaws: 1) ontological misclassification of system capabilities, 2) ethical blind spots in ML system design and application, and 3) inadequate epistemological approaches and hidden philosophical commitments for interpreting model outputs. Thus, we argue that renewed engagement with the philosophy of science is not merely academic but necessary for engineers to maintain epistemic authority and responsibility in an era where engineering judgment is increasingly delegated to or mediated by ML systems. In response, we propose a technical-philosophical framework integrating perspectives from philosophy of mind, ethics, epistemology, and engineering to address these shortcomings systematically.

ABSTRACT This paper offers a theoretical review of the literature with the aim of exploring the role that imagination plays in the genesis, maintenance, and manifestation of perfectionism within the context of music education. It is based on the hypothesis that imaginative processes – such as anticipatory visualization, the simulation of future scenarios, or the idealization of the self – not only accompany perfectionism but may also constitute one of its main psychological forces. In this regard, contributions from recent empirical research, cognitive psychology, and the philosophy of mind are analyzed in order to establish conceptual and functional links between different types of imagination and the dimensions of perfectionism. The relevance of this review lies in the need to understand perfectionism not only as a maladaptive or adaptive personality trait, but also as a construct informed by imaginative projections that shape expectations, emotions and behaviors. This integrative approach opens new avenues for research and enhances preventive intervention strategies targeting individuals affected by perfectionistic patterns, particularly when these impact their psychological well-being, motivation, or performance.

Abstract This is a plea for viewing the phenomenon of self-talk in a broader perspective of the relation between the speaker’s thought and its externalisation through speech. I -centered versus you -centered self-talk are argued to provide end points of a spectrum rather than constitute a binary categorial distinction. It is argued that Wiltschko’s ‘structure on top’ can be reconceptualised to accommodate this gradation when it is viewed as conceptual structure that is sufficiently flexible. The argument is strengthened by associating properties of self-talk with properties of indexical thought, especially broadly understood de se thought, pointing out bidirectional explanatory benefits for theory of meaning on the one hand, and philosophy of mind, notably theories of self-ascription of beliefs, on the other.

A fundamental issue in the philosophy of mind, particularly within dualist theories, is the distinction between the mind and body as separate ‘substances.’ The challenge lies in elucidating how an immaterial or unphysical mind can causally interact with a physical body or its brain states, considering that they seemingly belong to fundamentally different ontological categories. Questions regarding mental causation often operate under assumptions rooted in a macroscopic worldview based on our everyday intuitions and classical physics, which we believe have clear and defined meanings. However, upon closer inspection within an extended quantum field-theoretical context, these concepts lose significance. When viewed through the lens of modern physics, the conceptual categories defining this debate acquire more complex nuances than we might initially assume. In light of these clarifications, a new understanding of mental causation is presented that reconciles the dualist perspective with the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics.

This paper examines how William James (1842–1910) and Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) developed fundamentally different philosophical frameworks for understanding consciousness, nature, and religious experience. Through close textual analysis of primary sources and engagement with recent historiographical debates, this study demonstrates that James’s evolution from “supernaturalist” phenomenology to religious naturalism grounded in radical empiricism differs fundamentally from Jung’s psycho-epistemological framework emphasizing archetypal structures. The analysis reveals how their divergent ontological commitments—James’s neutral monism versus Jung’s careful distinction between psychological and metaphysical reality—led to distinct methodological approaches to religious phenomena. James evaluated religious experiences pragmatically for their transformative “fruits,” while Jung interpreted them as symbolic expressions of individuation processes. These findings contribute to understanding how early psychology navigated between scientific materialism and religious phenomena, offering insights relevant to contemporary consciousness studies. Rather than imposing anachronistic categories, this historically grounded analysis clarifies both thinkers’ actual positions while exploring their enduring significance for psychology and philosophy of mind.

Professional philosophy is an important part of training and practice for trainee and qualified sport and exercise psychology practitioners (SEPPs) alike. Despite this, there remains limited literature addressing the philosophical premises relevant to the field, and how to navigate them. In this paper, the authors provide an account of how to approach professional philosophy, derived from both their experience teaching philosophy of practice to neophyte SEPPs and their experiences as practitioners. This account is the culmination of a reevaluation of the existing literature in conjunction with the recent changes in the applied field of sport and exercise psychology, and an examination of both the philosophical inheritance of sport and exercise psychology and the broader philosophical literature (e.g., philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, axiology). Given that SEPPs typically receive little, if any, professional philosophical guidance, this paper unpacks and aims to make accessible the components of a professional philosophy, and guides practitioners in interrogating and establishing their professional philosophy using the Philosophy Onion.

The article analyses the approach of Ukrainian and Polish philosopher, psychologist, educator, and doctor Stepan Baley to solving the mind-body problem. Stefan Baley’s contribution to solving the mind-body problem was analysed from the perspective of the philosophical tradition in which he was formed under the direct influence of Kazimierz Twardowski and the indirect impact of Franz Brentano, as well as in light of contemporary discussions surrounding the naturalisation programme in the philosophy of mind. It has been established that Baley solved the mind-body problem by searching for answers to questions about the nature of physical and mental phenomena and their relationship and by defining concepts of consciousness, intentionality, and personality. Baley’s opposition to mental and physical phenomena and the simultaneous denial of the possibility of their identification has been revealed. Attention has been drawn to the philosopher’s consideration of consciousness in connection with the unconscious, and its consistency with classical introspective psychology has been proven. The potential of Baley’s approach to solving the mind-body problem in the context of distinguishing between real and ideal personality has been clarified. It has been found to contribute to overcoming the split between continental and cognitive philosophy, which consists of the former proving that there is no subject inside the brain. The latter asserts that there is no subject outside the brain by establishing a dialogue between philosophy and psychology.

Felipe De Brigard's book “Memory and Remembering”, part of the series "Elements of the Philosophy of Mind", describes the study of memory as a philosophical and cognitive phenomenon. The book examines both the classical ideas of Descartes and Locke, as well as the more modern approaches of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger, which offer different perspectives on the problem of memory.

ABSTRACT In several areas of academic inquiry, including mathematics and moral theory, certain entities these disciplines discuss may well be nonexistent. If they are, this could cause serious practical and conceptual problems. For example, if numbers do not exist, how can mathematics work? One way to address such issues is by treating these states and properties as useful fictions, and some have applied this approach to philosophy of mind. One of the main problems in philosophy of mind has been the difficulty of naturalizing the qualitative character of sensory experiences. Some say this difficulty shows that we cannot naturalize qualitative character; it is nonphysical. Others dispense with this problem by endorsing eliminativism; qualitative experiences do not exist. This paper discusses ways that fictionalism has been employed by qualia-eliminativists such as Dennett and Frankish, and concludes that the value of their fictionalist approach is counterbalanced by conceptual confusions and difficulties communicating with the public. The paper then presents a non-fictional way to solve puzzles about qualitative experiences, through a limited, non-eliminativist form of illusionism. It concludes by comparing the way fictionalism and limited illusionism deal with two challenging conundrums about consciousness: Jackson’s knowledge argument and Levine’s explanatory gap.

ABSTRACT The mind–technology problem refers to issues that lie at the intersection of technology development and the philosophy of mind. In the present paper, I explore one aspect of the mind–technology problem, namely, the role of technologies in supporting the emergence of extended minds. I approach this issue from an engineering perspective, suggesting that the project to build extended minds yields insights into a number of philosophical problems. These include our understanding of the criteria for cognitive extension and the way the borders/boundaries of extended cognitive mechanisms are delineated.

This paper undertook a critical and exploratory inquiry into how causality in the mind-body relationship has been theorised and operationalised in contemporary mental health discourse. Unlike dominant approaches that prioritised brain-based explanations for psychological disorders, this paper interrogated the ontological and epistemic assumptions underpinning neurobiological reductionism, which is the belief that all mental phenomena can be explained purely through physical processes in the brain. Approached through the philosophy of mind, particularly (emergentism, dual-aspect monism and enactivism), the paper reframed mental disorders not as mere neurochemical malfunctions but as complex, causally layered phenomena emerging from interactions between the physical, subjective, social, and environmental domains. Methodologically, the study applied conceptual analysis, drawing from theoretical triangulation across analytic philosophy, phenomenology, and systems theory to reconstruct the mind-body problem in light of clinical realities such as treatment-resistant depression and psychosomatic disorders. The proposed framework challenged linear, one-directional causality and instead, advances a recursive, non-reductive model where mind and body are mutually influential yet ontologically distinct. The discussion engaged historical trajectories from Descartes to contemporary neuroscience, while critically reviewing diagnostic paradigms in psychiatry (e.g., DSM-5) that reflect implicit reductionist biases. The paper concluded by suggesting a shift toward pluralist explanatory models in mental health, advocating for integrative diagnostics and treatment modalities that considers both neural and experiential dimensions.

Many modern theories of consciousness seek to be consistent with prevailing scientific theories of the physical. While ontological flexibilities and current uncertainties in physical laws permit many options, it remains valuable to monitor evolving scientific thinking, generating new constraints and ideas for consciousness research. A structured literature review identifies 24 distinct ontological positions regarding theoretical physics. Significant variety exists across them, partially captured along eight axes: Substrate perspective; Property ontology; Property plurality; Dimensional ontology; Dimensional plurality; Allowed interactions; World plurality; and Intuition rejection, e.g. which intuitions of classical mechanics they are willing to drop. We identify three main implications for consciousness theorists: (i) three strategies for maintaining an ‘enlightened agnosticism’ about physical ontologies; (ii) a default weakening of ontologically-grounded arguments, alongside a strategy for bolstering them; (iii) an exploitable parallel between physical ontologies and philosophy of mind concerning intuition prioritization, leading to potential cross-disciplinary collaboration. We close by suggesting ways this work could be extended and made more useful to consciousness researchers.

In a series of papers, Miri Albahari (2019; 2020; 2022; 2024) has articulated and defended perennial idealism (PI), a view she associates with Śakara’s Advaita Vedānta. She argues that PI offers a solution to the hard problem of consciousness (HPC). In this work, I distinguish the HPC, which occupies contemporary analytic philosophy of mind, from the hard problem of the self (HPS), which occupied classical Indian philosophy. I then critically evaluate Albahari’s use of non-dual universal consciousness to solve the HPC. I focus on her response to a set of objections to the view that non-dual universal consciousness is fit for grounding subject‐level phenomenal‐intentional consciousness – the target of the HPC. I argue that because Śakara’s metaphysics of non-dual universal consciousness as the ground of all being is not fit to ground, it cannot solve the HPC.

This book addresses the philosophical problem of expressiveness, defined as the capacity of objects to convey affective states. Common in both everyday language and artistic contexts, expressive attributions pose significant philosophical questions. The book has a dual aim: to clarify the nature of experiencing objects as expressive and to propose a novel theory of "expressive experience." The first aim involves examining existing attempts to understand expressive experience, identifying misunderstandings about the mental states involved, and specifying the role of emotions. The second aim builds on this clarification, presenting an original theory that synthesizes key insights from previous accounts. While the primary focus is the analytic debate of the past fifty years, the book also incorporates perspectives from phenomenology, Gestalt psychology, and ecological psychology. Expressiveness intersects with various philosophical and psychological issues, challenging theories of perception and emotions, and bridging aesthetics with the philosophy of mind, developmental psychology, and cognitive sciences.

The relationship between heaven and humanity is one of the fundamental philosophical foundations of ecological ethics in ancient Chinese Confucian thought. As a master of Confucian philosophy of mind, Wang Yangming integrated the traditional Confucian discourse on the relationship between heaven and humanity into the principles of the philosophy of mind. Building on the traditional doctrine of benevolence centered on moral concern, he further developed an ecological view of ‘benevolence as the unity of heaven and earth’. In his work Inquiry on the Great Learning, Wang Yangming systematically elaborated on this notion, emphasizing the philosophical expression of the relationship between humans and nature within an ethical framework and outlining the new implications of traditional Confucian ecological thought. This paper aims to analyze Wang Yangming’s ecological view of ‘benevolence as the unity of heaven and earth’ by examining the ecological ideas in his Inquiry on the Great Learning. On this basis, it seeks to refine the valuable achievements of traditional Chinese ecological civilization thought and strengthen the theoretical foundation of contemporary ecological ideas with Chinese characteristics.

The nature of self-awareness has been a topic of inquiry for thousands of years, with profound implications for law and ethics, as well as for understanding a host of neurological and psychiatric pathologies. An influential view in philosophy of mind is that the "self" is a construct of consciousness, its basic functions - such as the sense of agency, the capacity by which we attribute sensory events to our own control - cease when they fall out of awareness. An alternative view is that some core processes that constitute the self can operate outside of awareness, and self-awareness arises when these extant processes become contents of consciousness. We aimed to test between these views empirically by investigating whether intentional binding - an implicit marker of sense of agency in which the perceived time of an action is shifted toward its sensory outcome - occurs even when the outcome is masked from conscious awareness. To our surprise, the intentional binding effect was not just abolished when participants were unaware of their actions' sensory outcomes but appeared to be reversed; the perceived time of the action was repelled from the time of its unconsciously perceived consequence. Results demonstrate that the intentional binding effect, and by extension ordinary processing of sensorimotor contingencies, is functionally dependent upon conscious awareness.

Academician V. V. Vinogradov’s correspondence, which was written during his exile in Vyatka (1934–1936), provides a valuable opportunity to explore new aspects of the personality of this distinguished philologist and to reflect on the history of Soviet and Russian scholarship. The aim of the study is to identify the constants of the linguistic personality of a philologist who found himself in a situation of academic isolation during his exile. To achieve their objective, the authors employ the strategy of slow reading of politically censored texts. They utilise a multifaceted approach, encompassing genre, linguistic-cognitive, and linguistic-axiological analysis of dialogical and monological compositional units of messages addressed to N. M. Malysheva, the scholar’s wife, also studying deliberate authorial statements and stylistically marked verbal means. The analysis of Vinogradov’s epistolary practices discloses his normocentric linguistic personality, evident in his adherence to the conventions of the epistolary genre. Additionally, it reveals his mentally determined other-centrism, manifested in a strategically focused attention on the intended recipient. It has been established that the monological compositional blocks of the letters verbalise the personalism of the linguistic personality of the exiled philologist, who possessed a philosophical mind, an extraordinary intellectual aptitude, and the ability to resist official ideological dogmas through speech. The reliance on the precedent fund of Russian linguistic culture, the pervasive figure of identity between life and work, and the use of verbs such as read, think, write, and work in a performative function are indicative of the formation of a personal axiosphere and a corresponding axiological lexicon. The analysis interprets the functional load of nonce words, individual metaphors, irony, and comparisons realised in the texts of letters, which mark the creative component of the scholar’s linguistic personality.

The text aims to formulate the position in the philosophy of consciousness known as physicalism in a way that does not repeat the shortcomings of existing formulations and yet retains the essential features of the physical as the basis of the mental. It explains why the word „materialism“ is outdated and should be replaced by „physicalism“ despite the existence of usages that treat them as interchangeable. The assumption is defended that physicalism is not only a metaphysical position, as is usually claimed, but is a hybrid – metaphysical and at the same time scientific – hypothesis. It is shown where to seek support for physicalism beyond the famous philosophical arguments from causal closure, from prior explanatory successes, and from mind-brain correlations, namely in the realm of the empirical. The best way to connect the mental and the physical is defended as „grounding,“ which shows the mental as a broadly physical fact, based on narrowly physical facts, in contrast to supervenience and realization. The advantages of physicalism as a strategy for studying consciousness are briefly described.

The hypothesis we present in the article is that philosophy of mind was conceived in the same context in which the Vienna Circle emerged, so that it was born and remains marked to this day by an underlying antimetaphysical axiom, namely: it is science that will respond definitively to the problem of mind. No matter how antagonistic the positions adopted over decades of discussion have been – theory of mind-brain identity, theory of the non-existence of the mind, functionalism, interactionism, anomalous monism, biological naturalism, enactivism, eliminativism, naturalistic dualism –, the debate in Philosophy of Mind is conditioned by this axiom. In the first three points of the article, we propose an analysis of how Schlick, Carnap and Feigl solidified the statement that the problem of the mind must be answered strictly by science. Our objective with this analysis is to show that, behind their specific perspectives on the theory of mind-brain identity, there is an intention (to reduce the problem of the mind to science), which is common to them. This is not a supposed intention, by inference or other interpretation strategy, but an intention explicitly stated in the form of a fundamental axiom. In the fourth point, through selected examples, we seek to confirm the formulated hypothesis, showing how the neopositivist axiom has become a kind of indeclinable truth for what we call philosophy of mind.

One of the most vibrant discussions in Christian Analytic Theology today revolves around the Problem of the Soul. On the one hand, it is connected with the issues of Philosophy of Mind, as the soul is typically understood either as conscious experience itself or as some substance that serves as its bearer. On the other hand, our understanding of human nature and what happens to a person between death and resurrection. One side of the controversy is represented by Substance Dualists, who believe that human nature consists of two substances – physical and mental. Substance dualists are challenged by Christian Physicalists who say that human nature consists of only one substance – physical. It might seem that Christian Physicalism is a result of the current dominance of materialism in Anglo-American Analytic Philosophy. However, already at the dawn of Christianity, there were teachings that either directly asserted the corporeality and mortality of the soul or claimed that between death and resurrection, a person would be unable to think or feel but would remain in an unconscious state resembling deep sleep. A millennium later, these ideas were revived in the disputes of Protestant theologians of the 16th and 17th centuries. This article is precisely devoted to its consideration.