1980 in philosophy

Last updated
List of years in philosophy

1980 in philosophy

Contents

Events

Publications

Births

Deaths

Related Research Articles

The Chinese room argument holds that a digital computer executing a program cannot have a "mind," "understanding" or "consciousness," regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave. The argument was presented by philosopher John Searle in his paper, "Minds, Brains, and Programs", published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 1980. Similar arguments were presented by Gottfried Leibniz (1714), Anatoly Dneprov (1961), Lawrence Davis (1974) and Ned Block (1978). Searle's version has been widely discussed in the years since. The centerpiece of Searle's argument is a thought experiment known as the Chinese room.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jacques Derrida</span> Algerian-French philosopher (1930–2004)

Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher. He developed a philosophical approach that came to be known as deconstruction, which he utilized in numerous texts, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hilary Putnam</span> American mathematician and philosopher (1926–2016)

Hilary Whitehall Putnam was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, and a major figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He made significant contributions to philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science. Outside philosophy, Putnam contributed to mathematics and computer science. Together with Martin Davis he developed the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem and he helped demonstrate the unsolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louis Althusser</span> French Marxist philosopher (1918–1990)

Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Searle</span> American philosopher

John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. He began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959, and was Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley until 2019.

In philosophy of mind, functionalism is the thesis that mental states are constituted solely by their functional role, which means, their causal relations with other mental states, sensory inputs and behavioral outputs. Functionalism developed largely as an alternative to the identity theory of mind and behaviorism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Chalmers</span> Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist (born 1966)

David John Chalmers is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is a Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science at New York University, as well as co-director of NYU's Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness. In 2006, he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

A philosophical zombie or p-zombie argument is a thought experiment in philosophy of mind that imagines a hypothetical being that is physically identical to and indistinguishable from a normal person but does not have conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object it would not inwardly feel any pain, yet it would outwardly behave exactly as if it did feel pain, including verbally expressing pain. Relatedly, a zombie world is a hypothetical world indistinguishable from our world but in which all beings lack conscious experience.

Synthetic intelligence (SI) is an alternative/opposite term for artificial intelligence emphasizing that the intelligence of machines need not be an imitation or in any way artificial; it can be a genuine form of intelligence. John Haugeland proposes an analogy with simulated diamonds and synthetic diamonds—only the synthetic diamond is truly a diamond. Synthetic means that which is produced by synthesis, combining parts to form a whole; colloquially, a human-made version of that which has arisen naturally. A "synthetic intelligence" would therefore be or appear human-made, but not a simulation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Perry (philosopher)</span> American philosopher

John Richard Perry is Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Stanford University and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of California, Riverside. He has made significant contributions to philosophy in the fields of philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. He is known primarily for his work on situation semantics, reflexivity, indexicality, personal identity, and self-knowledge.

The philosophy of artificial intelligence is a branch of the philosophy of technology that explores artificial intelligence and its implications for knowledge and understanding of intelligence, ethics, consciousness, epistemology, and free will. Furthermore, the technology is concerned with the creation of artificial animals or artificial people so the discipline is of considerable interest to philosophers. These factors contributed to the emergence of the philosophy of artificial intelligence. Some scholars argue that the AI community's dismissal of philosophy is detrimental.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">China brain</span> Philosophical experiment

In the philosophy of mind, the China brain thought experiment considers what would happen if each member of the Chinese nation were asked to simulate the action of one neuron in the brain, using telephones or walkie-talkies to simulate the axons and dendrites that connect neurons. Would this arrangement have a mind or consciousness in the same way that brains do?

An intuition pump is a thought experiment structured to allow the thinker to use their intuition to develop an answer to a problem.

In philosophy of mind, the computational theory of mind (CTM), also known as computationalism, is a family of views that hold that the human mind is an information processing system and that cognition and consciousness together are a form of computation. Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts (1943) were the first to suggest that neural activity is computational. They argued that neural computations explain cognition. The theory was proposed in its modern form by Hilary Putnam in 1967, and developed by his PhD student, philosopher, and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Despite being vigorously disputed in analytic philosophy in the 1990s due to work by Putnam himself, John Searle, and others, the view is common in modern cognitive psychology and is presumed by many theorists of evolutionary psychology. In the 2000s and 2010s the view has resurfaced in analytic philosophy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Biological naturalism</span>

Biological naturalism is a theory about, among other things, the relationship between consciousness and body, and hence an approach to the mind–body problem. It was first proposed by the philosopher John Searle in 1980 and is defined by two main theses: 1) all mental phenomena from pains, tickles, and itches to the most abstruse thoughts are caused by lower-level neurobiological processes in the brain; and 2) mental phenomena are higher-level features of the brain.

<i>Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism</i> 2005 book by William S. Lewis

Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism is a 2005 book about the French philosopher Louis Althusser by William S. Lewis. The book received positive reviews. Lewis was complimented for his inclusion of translated documents of the French Communist Party.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gualtiero Piccinini</span> Italian–American philosopher (born 1970)

Gualtiero Piccinini is an Italian–American philosopher known for his work on the nature of mind and computation as well as on how to integrate psychology and neuroscience. He is Curators' Distinguished Professor in the Philosophy Department and Associate Director of the Center for Neurodynamics at the University of Missouri, St. Louis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Young Marx</span>

The correct place of Karl Marx's early writings within his system as a whole has been a matter of great controversy. Some believe there is a break in Marx's development that divides his thought into two periods: the "Young Marx" is said to be a thinker who deals with the problem of alienation, while the "Mature Marx" is said to aspire to a scientific socialism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Western Marxism</span> Current of Marxist theory

Western Marxism is a current of Marxist theory that arose from Western and Central Europe in the aftermath of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the ascent of Leninism. The term denotes a loose collection of theorists who advanced an interpretation of Marxism distinct from both classical and Orthodox Marxism and the Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union.

Hélène Rytmann was a French revolutionary and sociologist. She was active as a Communist militant in the French resistance to Nazism. A member of the French Communist Party, she was expelled after accusations of Trotskyism and having participated in summary executions of former Nazi collaborators.

References

  1. "Louis Althusser". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 23 January 2013.
  2. Searle, John (1980). "Minds, Brains, and Programs" (PDF). Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 3 (3): 417–424. doi:10.1017/s0140525x00005756. S2CID   55303721.