Scientific Explanation, Causality, and Agency: A Free Energy Account, Routledge, 2024 (link)

Cognitive Structural Realism,  Springer, 2019 (link) 

Review by Max Jones for Philosophical Psychology (link)

Structuring the Self, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019 (link)

Here are a few nice things that people kindly said about this book: 

“Structural realism is now a well-established position in the philosophy of science. Majid Beni’s rich and engaging work extends it from the physical sciences to neuroscience and from there to social relations and even our moral judgments. This is a bold and provocative move but Beni draws extensively on both recent and classic literature in philosophy and cognitive science to construct a compelling series of arguments. Structuralism has a long history spanning diverse fields of thought but here Beni breaks new ground and opens up further avenues of intellectual exploration that should be of interest to philosophers and scientists alike.” 

—Steven French, Professor of Philosophy of Science, University of Leeds, UK

“I have never read a book like this before: it offers a relentless and compelling tide of carefully constructed philosophical arguments about the very nature of ‘self ’. It bravely places philosophical arguments—well-honed over centuries—head-to-head with contemporary formulations of self-organisation in theoretical neurobiology and artificial (or perhaps artefactual) intelligence. The result is a convincing argument for a Structuralist Realist Theory of Selfhood—that neatly sidesteps the issues that attend eliminativism and substantivalism. This theory prescribes the right kind of ontological commitments to gracefully accommodate current formulations of consciousness in terms of information theory, neurobiology and the physics of sentient systems. As a physicist, I often find myself using phrases like ‘self-organisation’, ‘self-assembly’, ‘self-information’ and, latterly, ‘self-evidencing’. After reading this book, I will never use the word ‘self ’ in quite the same way.” 

—Karl J. Friston, Scientific Director: Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, Institute of Neurology, UCL, UK

“This is an impressive book about the self that fills a deep void in our conceptulations of ourselves. Bringing together, philosophy, neuroscience, and computational modelling, Beni develops a structural realist account of self that seems highly natural and plausible in metaphysical, conceptual, and empirical terms. A wonderful book that will set new directions and standards on the eternal debate of self.”

—Georg Northoff, EJLB-CIHR Michael Smith Chair in Neurosciences and Mental Health, University of Ottowa Institute of Mental health Research, Canada