Zdravko Radman - Knowing Without Thinking. Mind, Action, Cognition and the Phenomenon of the Background [2012][A]

Book Description
Publication Date: March 13, 2012
Modern study of the mind is marked by the hegemony of thought, dominance of consciousness, and dictate of deliberation that result in an overwhelming intellectualism. However, it ignores the fundamental fact that by far most of our mental activity is not manifested in explicit reasoning, and is mostly not conscious. What then enables our successful participation in the natural, social, and cultural surroundings without recourse to the 'higher' cognitive processes? The background. It is the implicit and efficacious guide in human coping with the world without the monitoring reason.
Yet how rules turn into routines? How conscious efforts convert into unreflective skills? How does the body of knowledge become the knowing body? How can most complex reactions of the human mind turn into 'just doing'?
The lesson from the background teaches us that we are capacitated to do more than we explicitly know; the sort of knowledge is skilled and automated competence which is there before the conscious 'self' can report of its emergence.

About the Author
ZDRAVKO RADMAN is Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy, Zagreb, Croatia. He has been visiting scholar at University of Konstanz, UC Berkeley, ANU, and UC London. He publishes mainly in philosophy of mind, and aesthetics. He authored Metaphors: Figures of the Mind (1997), and is editor of From a Metaphorical Point of View (1995); and Horizons of Humanity (1997).