The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology

by Sarah Robins (Editor), John Symons (Editor), Paco Calvo (Editor)

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology, Second Edition is an invaluable guide and major reference source to the key topics, problems, concepts, and debates in philosophy of psychology and is the first companion of its kind. A team of renowned international contributors provide forty-eight chapters, organized into six clear The Companion covers key topics, such as the origins of experimental psychology; folk psychology; behaviorism and functionalism; philosophy, psychology and neuroscience; the language of thought, modularity, nativism, and representational theories of mind; consciousness and the senses; dreams, emotion, and temporality; personal identity; and the philosophy of psychopathology. For the second edition, six new chapters have been added to address the following important belief and representation in nonhuman animals; prediction error minimization; contemporary neuroscience; plant neurobiology; epistemic judgment; and group cognition. Essential reading for all students of philosophy of mind, science, and psychology, The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology will also be of interest to anyone studying psychology and its related disciplines.

Genres: Philosophy

792 pages, Paperback

First published January 8, 2017

Reviews

[Larry]

Pretty weak contributions overall. Two good overviews of classical theories of content by Ryder. But it's all downhill from there. The contributions on LOT and modularity are insignificant--the objection to massive modularity mentioned being: “if modules are nothing but functionally distinct input-output mechanisms, then massive modularity is not interesting anymore”: right, it isn't! It's trivially true! Then there is a paper by Craver on mechanisms (which, ok, are important, and have the benefit of making people not take Kim's causal exclusion argument so seriously anymore) and Bickle writes... what he writes about reductionism. And then there's a farce of a paper by Mike Wheeler on ev-psych, with all the usual stuff from 500 years ago (quotes by Gould, the grain problem, the brain isn't a computer, you name it), and not a single reference to ev-psych literature apart from Cosmides & Tooby's papers from the last century. Very difficult to take seriously.