This book realistically describes the experiences of people living with schizophrenia and their families, from the detection of the first symptoms until the development of treatments and strategies to cope with this unique human condition. Schizophrenia is a form of psychosis in which subjective aspects, such as hallucinatory and delusional phenomena, tend to distort the understanding of reality. Because psychotic states fluctuate in intensity over time, those affected literally live between reason and illusion. Between Reason and Illusion: Demystifying Schizophrenia is an invitation to understand what it means to develop schizophrenia and to live with it throughout one's life. And this is an invitation to all those who are in some way affected by this condition: those who live with it, family members, friends, health professionals, and everyone who want to have a non-stigmatized view of mental disorders and people who live with them. “Faced with psychosis, the person affected by the disease and the family are lost and go looking for alternative or spiritual help, which usually delays the beginning of treatment. Jorge, Cecília and Rodrigo had the courage to face a difficult theme and the happy idea of writing a book of an educational nature about schizophrenia. The book's originality lies in the fact that it was written taking into account the experience of the person with the disease and his or her family members in the face of this something new that has occurred in their lives”. - Dr. Itiro Shirakawa, Professor Emeritus of the Paulista Medical School of the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP/EPM), Brazil.

Truth, Cicovacki says, presupposes neither a dominance of subject or object, but their dynamic and reciprocal interactive relation. The absence of proper interactions leads to various forms of self-projections or illusions. Truth, by contract, exists in a harmonious interaction between its subjective and objective elements. Cicovacki thus locates the value of truth between traditional absolutist claims and contemporary relativism.

"Fascinating and insightful. . . . I cannot recall a book that has made me think more about the nature of thinking." -- Richard C. Lewontin Harvard University Everyone knows that optical illusions trick us because of the way we see. Now scientists have discovered that cognitive illusions, a set of biases deeply embedded in the human mind, can actually distort the way we think. In Inevitable Illusions, distinguished cognitive researcher Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini takes us on a provocative, challenging, and thoroughly entertaining exploration of the games our minds play. He opens the doors onto the newly charted realm of the cognitive unconscious to reveal the full range of illusions, showing how they inhibit our ability to reason--no matter what our educational background or IQ. Inevitable Illusions is stimulating, eye-opening food for thought.

Identifying quickly illusion with deception, we tend to oppose it to the reality of life. However, investigating in this collection of essays illusion's functions in the Arts, which thrives upon illusion and yet maintains its existential roots and meaningfullness in the real, we might wonder about the nature of reality itself. Does not illusion open the seeming confines of factual reality into horizons of imagination which transform it? Does it not, like art, belong essentially to the makeup of human reality? Papers by: Lanfranco Aceti, John Baldacchino, Maria Avelina Cecilia Lafuente, Jo Ann Circosta, Madalina Diaconu, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Brian Grassom, Marguerite Harris, Andrew E. Hershberger, James Carlton Hughes, Lawrence Kimmel, Jung In Kwon, Ruth Ronen, Scott A. Sherer, Joanne Snow-Smith, Max Statkiewicz, Patricia Trutty-Coohill, Daniel Unger, James Werner.

The amazing scientist, mathematician, philosopher Émilie du Châtelet (1706-49) has widely been hailed as a rare female intellectual in the Enlightenment. At the same time, her own ideas and contributions remain largely unknown and her writings are rarely read. This is unfortunate, since she has interesting contributions to and explanations of physics, metaphysics, religion, translation, the equality of the sexes, and ethics.This book is a selection of du Châtelet's philosophical writings, in new English translations: -Foreword to "Foundations of Physics"-On the Principles of Our Knowledge (From "Foundations of Physics")-On the Existence of God (From "Foundations of Physics")-On Liberty-Translator's Preface to Mandeville's "Fable of the Bees"-On the Resurrection of the Dead (from "Examinations of the Bible")-On Happiness

The notion of aesthetic illusion relates to a number of art forms and media. Defined as a pleasurable mental state that emerges during the reception of texts and artefacts, it amounts to the reader's or viewer's sense of having entered the represented world while at the same time keeping a distance from it. Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and the Arts is an in-depth study of the main questions surrounding this experience of art as reality. Beginning with an introduction providing historical background to modern discussions of illusion, it deals with a wide range of theoretical issues. The collection explores the nature and function of the aesthetic illusion as well as the role of affect and emotion, the implications of aesthetic illusion for the theory of fiction, the variable forms of aesthetic illusion and its relationship to other components of aesthetic response. Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and the Arts brings together a team of scholars from philosophy, literature and art and presents an interdisciplinary examination of a concept lying at the heart of contemporary aesthetics.

A novel contribution to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism. Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.