Professor Juhani Yli-Vakkuri uus raamat

Tartu Ülikooli filosoofia osakonna keelefilosoofia professor Juhani Yli-Vakkuri ja University of Southern California filosoofia professor John Hawthorne kirjutasid koos raamatu pealkirjaga “Narrow Content”, mis just avaldati Oxford University Pressi poolt. Kirjastaja iseloomustab raamatut kui "eksternalistliku vaimukäsituse veenvat kaitset".

Jeffrey Speaks (University of Notre Dame), juhtiv vaimufilosoof, kirjutab:

“[Narrow Content] is one of the most convincing philosophy books I have read in a long time. It takes a widely held constellation of views, lays them out with admirable clarity, and patiently reduces them to rubble.”

Veel teinegi näitaja raamatu mõjujõust on see, et David Chalmers (University Professor and Director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University) on andnud oma nõusoleku kirjutada raamatule retsensioon, mis ilmub Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews'is. Narrow Content  saab olema esimene raamat millele Chalmers oma retsensiooni on kirjutanud.

Raamatu lühikirjeldus Oxford University Press'i poolt:

“It is natural to distinguish, for any thinking creature, those events and states that are internal to the creature — its brain states, for example — from those that are not. Narrow mental content, if there is such a thing, is content that is entirely determined by the goings-on inside the head of the thinker. A central question in the philosophy of mind since the mid-1970s has been whether there is a kind of mental content that is narrow in this sense. One important line of thought — by ‘externalists’ — has been that so-called intentional states, such as wishing that they sky were blue and believing that the sky is blue, are, perhaps surprisingly, not internal: there could be twins who are exactly alike on the inside but differ with respect to such intentional states. In the face of this wave of externalism, many philosophers have argued that there must be some good sense in which our intentional states are internal after all, and that such narrow content can play various key explanatory roles relating, inter alia, to epistemology and the explanation of action. This book argues that this is a forlorn hope, and defends a thoroughgoing externalism. The entanglement of our minds with the external world runs so deep that no internal component of mentality can easily be cordoned off.”

Yli-Vakkuri ja Hawthorne töötavad nüüd järgmise raamatu kallal, mille plaanitav pealkiri on “Vagueness and Ignorance”.