Oxford Companion to Consciousness

by Bayne, Tim; Cleeremans, Axel; Wilken, Patrick

• ISBN13: 9780198569510
• ISBN10: 0198569513
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-08-03
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Consciousness is undoubtedly one of the last remaining scientific mysteries and hence one of the greatest contemporary scientific challenges. How does the brain's activity result in the rich phenomenology that characterizes our waking life? Are animals conscious? Why did consciousness evolve? How does science proceed to answer such questions? Can we define what consciousness is? Can we measure it? Can we use experimental results to further our understanding of disorders of consciousness, such as those seen in schizophrenia, delirium, or altered states of consciousness? These questions are at the heart of contemporary research in the domain. Answering them requires a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach that engages not only philosophers, but also neuroscientists and psychologists in a joint effort to develop novel approaches that reflect both the stunning recent advances in imaging methods as well as the continuing refinement of our concepts of consciousness. In this light, theOxford Companion to Consciousnessis the most complete authoritative survey of contemporary research on consciousness. Five years in the making and including over 250 concise entries written by leaders in the field, the volume covers both fundamental knowledge as well as more recent advances in this rapidly changing domain. Structured as an easy-to-use dictionary and extensively cross-referenced, theCompanionoffers contributions from philosophy of mind to neuroscience, from experimental psychology to clinical findings, so reflecting the profoundly interdisciplinary nature of the domain. Particular care has been taken to ensure that each of the entries is accessible to the general reader and that the overall volume represents a comprehensive snapshot of the contemporary study of consciousness. The result is a unique compendium that will prove indispensable to anyone interested in consciousness, from beginning students wishing to clarify a concept to professional consciousness researchers looking for the best characterization of a particular phenomenon.

Author Biography

Tim Bayne, Ph.D. (University of Arizona 2003), is University Lecturer in the Philosophy of Mind at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St. Catherine's College. He has published a number of articles on consciousness. Axel Cleeremans, Ph.D. (Carnegie Mellon 1991), is a Research Director with the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (F.R.S.-FNRS) and a professor of Cognitive Psychology at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, where he heads the Consciousness, Cognition and Computation (CO3) Group. His research is essentially dedicated to the differences between information processing with and without consciousness, particularly in the domain of learning and memory. A past president of the Belgian Association of Psychological Science, he is also a member of the executive committee of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness and currently president of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology. Axel Cleeremans has authored and edited several books as well as numerous articles dedicated to consciousness and implicit learning.