Interdisciplinarity or interdisciplinary studies involves the combination of multiple academic disciplines into one activity. It draws knowledge from several fields like sociology, anthropology, psychology, economics, etc. It is related to an interdiscipline or an interdisciplinary field, which is an organizational unit that crosses traditional boundaries between academic disciplines or schools of thought, as new needs and professions emerge. Large engineering teams are usually interdisciplinary, as a power station or mobile phone or other project requires the melding of several specialties. However, the term "interdisciplinary" is sometimes confined to academic settings.
In philosophy, physicalism is the view that "everything is physical", that there is "nothing over and above" the physical, or that everything supervenes on the physical. It is opposed to idealism, according to which the world arises from mind. Physicalism is a form of ontological monism—a "one substance" view of the nature of reality, unlike "two-substance" or "many-substance" (pluralism) views. Both the definition of "physical" and the meaning of physicalism have been debated.
David John Chalmers is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of the philosophy of mind, and the 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.
In the philosophy of mind, panpsychism is the view that the mind or a mind-like aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality. It is also described as a theory that "the mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe". It is one of the oldest philosophical theories, and has been ascribed to philosophers including Thales, Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, and Galen Strawson. In the 19th century, panpsychism was the default philosophy of mind in Western thought, but it saw a decline in the mid-20th century with the rise of logical positivism. Recent interest in the hard problem of consciousness, and developments in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and quantum mechanics have revived interest in panpsychism in the 21st century.
Galen John Strawson is a British analytic philosopher and literary critic who works primarily on philosophy of mind, metaphysics, John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche. He has been a consultant editor at The Times Literary Supplement for many years, and a regular book reviewer for The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Independent, the Financial Times and The Guardian. He is the son of philosopher P. F. Strawson. He holds a chair in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin, and taught for many years before that at the University of Reading, City University of New York, and Oxford University.
In the philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness is to explain why and how humans and other organisms have qualia, phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experience. It is contrasted with the "easy problems" of explaining why and how physical systems give a (healthy) human being the ability to discriminate, to integrate information, and to perform behavioral functions such as watching, listening, speaking, and so forth. The easy problems are amenable to functional explanation—that is, explanations that are mechanistic or behavioral—since each physical system can be explained purely by reference to the "structure and dynamics" that underpin the phenomenon.
Neurophenomenology refers to a scientific research program aimed to address the hard problem of consciousness in a pragmatic way. It combines neuroscience with phenomenology in order to study experience, mind, and consciousness with an emphasis on the embodied condition of the human mind. The field is very much linked to fields such as neuropsychology, neuroanthropology and behavioral neuroscience and the study of phenomenology in psychology.
The Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) is an American non-profit organization for professional membership that aims to encourage research on consciousness in cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy, and other relevant disciplines. The association aims to advance research about the nature, function, and underlying mechanisms of consciousness.
The Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) is a commercial citation index product of Clarivate Analytics. It was originally developed by the Institute for Scientific Information from the Science Citation Index. The Social Sciences Citation Index is a multidisciplinary index which indexes over 3,400 journals across 58 social science disciplines – 1985 to present, and it has 122 million cited references – 1900 to present. It also includes a range of 3,500 selected items from some of the world's finest scientific and technical journals. It has a range of useful search functions such as 'cited reference searching', searching by author, subject, or title. Whilst the Social Sciences Citation Index provides extensive support in bibliographic analytics and research, a number of academic scholars have expressed criticisms relating to ideological bias and its English-dominant publishing nature.
The Web of Science is a paid-access platform that provides access to multiple databases that provide reference and citation data from academic journals, conference proceedings, and other documents in various academic disciplines.
An academic discipline or academic field is a subdivision of knowledge that is taught and researched at the college or university level. Disciplines are defined and recognized by the academic journals in which research is published, and the learned societies and academic departments or faculties within colleges and universities to which their practitioners belong. Academic disciplines are conventionally divided into the humanities, the scientific disciplines, the formal sciences like mathematics and computer science; the social sciences are sometimes considered a fourth category.
Cognitive semiotics is the study model of meaning-making, applying methods and theories from semiotics, linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, computational modeling, anthropology, philosophy and other sciences. Contrary to classical cognitive science, cognitive semiotics is explicitly involved with questions of meaning, having recourse, when possible, to semiotic terminology, although developing it when necessary. As against classical semiotics, cognitive semiotics aims to incorporate the results of other sciences, using methods ranging from conceptual and textual analysis as well as experimental and ethnographic investigations.
Diogenes is a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes papers in the field of philosophy and the humanities owned by the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies (CIPSH). It is a platform for scholarly publications with emphasis on transdisciplinary and cross-cultural orientations, and seeks to bring together scholars from different cultures, horizons, and disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The journal's General Editor is Luca Maria Scarantino. It has been in publication since 1953 and is currently published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP) acting for CIPSH.
The Philosophy Documentation Center (PDC) is a non-profit publisher and resource center that provides access to scholarly materials in applied ethics, classics, philosophy, religious studies, and related disciplines. It publishes academic journals, conference proceedings, anthologies, and online research databases, often in cooperation with scholarly and professional associations. It also provides membership management and electronic publishing services, and hosts electronic journals, series, and other publications from several countries.
Filozofia is an academic journal of philosophy published by the Slovak Academy of Sciences. It publishes articles in Slovak, Czech, and English. The journal's scope includes metaphysics, epistemology, history of philosophy, social philosophy, philosophy of mind, ethics, philosophy of religion, and related disciplines. The journal publishes 10 issues a year. The editor-in-chief is Jon Stewart.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the humanities:
The Science of Consciousness is an international academic conference that has been held biannually since 1994. It is organized by the Center for Consciousness Studies of the University of Arizona. Alternate conferences are held in Arizona, and the others in locations worldwide. The conference is devoted exclusively to the investigation of consciousness.
The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies (ACRPS) is an Arab research institute with particular interest in the social sciences, applied social sciences, regional history and geostrategic affairs. To this effect, the ACRPS coordinates and develops research, publications, projects and events on issues and challenges relevant to the Arab world. The ACRPS primarily conducts its work in Arabic but publishes in both Arabic and English.
Keith Frankish is a British philosopher specializing in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of cognitive science. He is an Honorary Reader at the University of Sheffield, UK, Visiting Research Fellow with The Open University, and adjunct Professor with the Brain and Mind Programme at the University of Crete. He is known for his "illusionist" stance in the theory of consciousness. He holds that the conscious mind is a virtual system, a trick of the biological mind. In other words, phenomenality is an introspective illusion. This position is in opposition to dualist theories, reductive realist theories, and panpsychism.
Philip Goff is a British author, idealist philosopher, and professor at Durham University whose research focuses on philosophy of mind and consciousness. Specifically, it focuses on how consciousness can be part of the scientific worldview. Goff holds that materialism is incoherent and that dualism leads to "complexity, discontinuity and mystery". Instead, he advocates a "third way", a version of Russellian idealist monism that attempts to account for reality's intrinsic nature by positing that consciousness is a fundamental, ubiquitous feature of the physical world. "The basic commitment is that the fundamental constituents of reality—perhaps electrons and quarks—have incredibly simple forms of experience."
