From Brain to Cosmos - About the Book

FROM BRAIN TO COSMOS
by Mark F. Sharlow

A contemporary look at a question
with ancient roots...

As of October 2010, From Brain to Cosmos is out of print. You can obtain most of the chapters in the online documents listed below. If you want a printed copy of the book, please check with sellers of used books to find out if they have one available.

An Introduction to Subjective Facts (chaps. 2-3)
Knowledge of How Things Seem to You (chap. 4)
Personal Identity and Subjective Time (chap. 5)
Subjective Facts and Other Minds (chap. 6)
Time and Subjective Facts (chaps. 5, 7-9)
Conscious Subjects in Detail (chaps. 5, 10-12)
Beyond Physicalism and Idealism (chap. 13)
Which Systems Are Conscious? (chap. 14)

The information below pertains to the published edition of the book.

Since the time of Plato and before, philosophers have concerned themselves with how objects and situations seem or appear to conscious observers. In the twentieth century, this concern played crucial roles in movements as different as logical positivism and phenomenology. Today, questions about seeming and appearance help to drive the current lively debate about consciousness.

Philosophical reasoning about how things seem often leads toward a crucial question, not always made explicit:

What can one learn about the world by examining the
logical consequences of facts about how things seem?
From Brain to Cosmos by Mark F. Sharlow is a book that digs deeply into this persistent question. Using the methods of analytic philosophy, Sharlow argues that even a partial answer to this question can shed light on a wide spectrum of philosophical topics. Among these topics are the nature of the conscious subject, the reality of time's flow, the coherence of cultural relativism, and even some issues in the philosophy of religion.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

From Brain to Cosmos

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1. On How Things Seem to You

Chapter 2. Into the Subjective World

Chapter 3. The Happenings Within

Chapter 4. On Knowing What Just Happened

Chapter 5. Conscious Beings and Their Histories

Chapter 6. Knowledge of Other Minds

Chapter 7. The Flow of Time

Chapter 8. The Experience of Time

Chapter 9. Spacetime and Happening

Chapter 10. Conscious Beings and Physical Things

Chapter 11. The Structure of the Self

Chapter 12. Personal Identity: Some Problems

Chapter 13. Mind and Matter

Chapter 14. Which Beings Are Conscious?

Chapter 15. God, Time and Eternity

Chapter 16. Postscript

Notes

Works Cited

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From Brain to Cosmos by Mark F. Sharlow

Universal Publishers ~ ISBN 1-58112-683-2