Memory of past episodes provides a sense of personal identity — the sense that I am the same person as someone in the past. We present a neurological case study of a patient who has accurate memories of scenes from his past, but for whom the memories lack the sense of mineness. On the basis of this case study, we propose that the sense of identity derives from two components, one delivering the content of the memory and the other generating (...) the sense of mineness. We argue that this new model of the sense of identity has implications for debates about quasi-memory. In addition, articulating the components of the sense of identity promises to bear on the extent to which this sense of identity provides evidence of personal identity. (shrink)

The idea of the élan vital is crucial for an understanding of Bergson’s metaphysical method, underpinning the way in which philosophy stands with other forms of creative activity as an endeavour of “self-overcoming,” the self or subject no longer being at the centre of thought, but understood rather as a product of the process of thinking. In placing a special emphasis on Bergson’s 1907 work, Creative Evolution, the present essay is both an acknowledgement and challenge to the shift from early (...) interpretations of Bergson in which comparisons were made with thinkers such as Schelling and Schopenhauer, to more recent engagements centred on the theories of perception and memory. The aim of this essay is to formulate a response to the marginalized status of Creative Evolution in the “perception-based” strands of Bergson scholarship, by emphasising how Bergson’s theories of memory and consciousness are a means for understanding his definition of evolutionary “creativity.” Bergson suggests that the analysis of consciousness or “will” can provide us with a way of thinking about this creative movement of life, which is not a concept of a “cause” or “origin” in the sense of a “state of nature” (substance, essence, or “being”), but rather the operation of pure tendency. (shrink)

The debate between Einstein and Bergson is a salient episode in the history of modern physics and a telling example of the interaction between science and philosophy. This paper initially discusses five reasons why Bergson criticised Einstein for giving up absolute time. The most important one was Bergson’s commitment to an intuitionist, anti-Kantian metaphysics informed by common sense. Apart from that, he knew that the theory of special relativity permits “duration” in the form of the passage of proper time, to (...) which Bergson referred as “real time”. Neither static eternalism nor dynamic eternalism are acceptable from Bergson’s philosophical perspective, which acknowledges the role of temporal experience and everyday thinking in addition to science and metaphysics. He understood temporal passage as creation of new existence, anticipating what later became known as the growing block theory of time. The pointy relativistic variant of this theory, which divides the universe into blocks of growing past light cones, does justice to large parts of his philosophy, including the distinction between the actual and the virtual. Supporters of Bergson’s account of duration should adopt this theory of time. (shrink)

Those familiar with contemporary continental philosophy know well the defenses Husserlians have offered of Husserl’s theory of inner time-consciousness against post-modernism’s deconstructive criticisms. As post-modernism gives way to Deleuzean post-structuralism, Deleuze’s Le bergsonisme has grown into the movement of Bergsonism. This movement, designed to present an alternative to phenomenology, challenges Husserlian phenomenology by criticizing the most “important… of all phenomenological problems.” Arguing that Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness detailed a linear succession of iterable instants in which the now internal to consciousness (...) receives prejudicial favor, Bergsonism concludes that Husserl derived the past from the present and cannot account for the sense of the past, which differs in kind from the present. Consequently, everything on Husserl’s account remains present and his theory cannot accommodate for time’s passage. In this paper, I renew the Husserlian defense of Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness in response to the recent movement of Deleuzean Bergsonism. Section one presents Bergsonism’s notion of the past in general and its critique of Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness. Section two presents a rejoinder to Bergsonism’s critique of Husserl, questioning (1) its understanding of the living-present as linearly extended, (2) its conflation of the living-present with Husserl’s early schema-apprehension interpretation, and (3) its failure to grasp Husserl’s revised understanding of primary memory as a result of (2). In conclusion, I suggest that Husserl’s theory of retention might articulate a notion of the past more consistent with Bergson than Bergsonism itself. (shrink)

We investigated the interface between biomedia and humans by inviting participants to interact with biometric devices that measured and visualized their body data. At first, they struggled with the alienating and disembodying nature of the devices and the constrained, reductionist representation of data. Through their bodily interactions with these devices, however, participants reframed the data and inserted their bodies into the process of data collection. Drawing on the ideas of Bergson, Grosz, Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard, we argue that by working with (...) their subjectivity in a mediated process of becoming, participants ‘filled in the intervals’ of the visual representations of their bodies to interpret them in ways that marked the duration and meaning of their selves. We conclude that even when presented with artificial representations, individuals convert the representation of the data into narratives inspired by their embodied experience, and the ‘virtual’ pasts of their own lives. (shrink)

In this article, I link the empirical hypothesis that neural representations of sensory stimulation near the body involve a unique motor component to the idea that the perceptual field is structured by skillful bodily activity. The neurophenomenological view that emerges is illuminating in its own right, though it may also have practical consequences. I argue that recent experiments attempting to alter the scope of these near space sensorimotor representations are actually equivocal in what they show. I propose resolving this ambiguity (...) by treating these representations as responsive to the development or degeneration of know-how—which can be isolated as an appropriate object for scientific investigation. (shrink)

This is an explorative work on teaching. The understanding of teaching that I use in my work is that teaching is action, it happens in the present – here and now. So, while teaching refers to shorter timespans, education in this understanding refers to timespans that are of a longer duration, meaning education is communication between generations. The notion of teaching I explore draw from experiences, for my own part between nature, dog and human. These are experiences of sensing where (...) one flows through and interconnects with others, so that boundaries are difficult to discern, and hence boundaries are not the point, but rather how sensing bodies and ‘movements between’ create experiences that are constitutive of who we become both as dog and human, in/with nature. Here I am not referring this to learning, as is usual in the equation “teaching and learning”. This does not mean learning is irrelevant, but rather that it is such an encompassing concept I cannot deal with it satisfactorily in this article. Also, I go beyond what is commonly understood as learning, in terms of making a change in someone’s cognitive or emotional structures. This article explores the kind of experiences our sensing body furnish us with and how these transfer to memory, in the here and now bodies sense, and how this creates memories. I argue this is especially important to recognize in teaching, but seldom addressed. I suggest we pay more attention to these experiences of sensing and how it becomes part of individual and collective memories. To me this is a vital and integral part in all teaching, in the present. (shrink)

We outline a dual systems approach to temporal cognition, which distinguishes between two cognitive systems for dealing with how things unfold over time – a temporal updating system and a temporal reasoning system – of which the former is both phylogenetically and ontogenetically more primitive than the latter, and which are at work alongside each other in adult human cognition. We describe the main features of each of the two systems, the types of behavior the more primitive temporal updating system (...) can support, and the respects in which it is more limited than the temporal reasoning system. We then use the distinction between the two systems to interpret findings in comparative and developmental psychology, arguing that animals operate only with a temporal updating system and that children start out doing so too, before gradually becoming capable of thinking and reasoning about time. After this, we turn to adult human cognition and suggest that our account can also shed light on a specific feature of our everyday thinking about time that has been the subject of debate in the philosophy of time, which consists in a tendency to think about the nature of time itself in a way that appears ultimately self-contradictory. We conclude by considering the topic of intertemporal choice, and argue that drawing the distinction between temporal updating and temporal reasoning is also useful in the context of characterising two distinct mechanisms for delaying gratification. (shrink)

It is sometimes claimed that non-human animals (and perhaps also young children) live their lives entirely in the present and are cognitively ‘stuck in time’. Adult humans, by contrast, are said to be able to engage in ‘mental time travel’. One possible way of making sense of this distinction is in terms of the idea that animals and young children cannot engage in tensed thought, which might seem a preposterous idea in the light of certain findings in comparative and developmental (...) psychology. I try to make this idea less preposterous by looking into some of the cognitive requirements for tensed thought. In particular, I suggest that tensed thought requires a specific form of causal understanding, which animals and young children may not possess. (shrink)

Since the fall of the former Soviet Union, and following geographical and technological changes in the global economy, theorists in Europe as well as the United States have lamented the confusion and emotional disengagement of many groups formerly identified with the left. This paper addresses the Kantian origins of the idea that 'revolution', however defined (or deferred), is the only plausible image for effective historical engagement capable of motivating spectators to action. Drawing on Foucault's inquiries into conditions for the possibility (...) of 'heroizing' the present, I examine two frameworks for understanding the ontological impact of historical models for 'eventfulness', those offered by Heidegger and Bergson. I then explore their implication for debates between Foucauldian theorists over the technological and bodily bases required to recognize the optimistic moral significance Kant attributed to revolution in practices characterizing the 'new capitalism'. Key Words: Bergson • Foucault • Heidegger • historiography • Kant • revolution. (shrink)

Information processing theories in psychology give rise to executive theories of consciousness. Roughly speaking, these theories maintain that consciousness is a centralized processor that we use when processing novel or complex stimuli. The computational assumptions driving the executive theories are closely tied to the computer metaphor. However, those who take the metaphor serious — as I believe psychologists who advocate the executive theories do — end up accepting too particular a notion of a computing device. In this essay, I examine (...) the arguments from theoretical computational considerations that cognitive psychologists use to support their general approach in order to show that they make unwarranted assumptions about the processing attributes of consciousness. I then go on to examine the assumptions behind executive theories which grow out of the computer metaphor of cognitive psychology and conclude that we may not be the sort of computational machine cognitive psychology assumes and that cognitive psychology''s approach in itself does not buy us anything in developing theories of consciousness. Hence, the state space in which we may locate consciousness is vast, even within an information processing framework. (shrink)

Habit has been understood, through the work of Descartes, Kant and Sartre, as a form of mechanism that arrests and inhibits consciousness, thought and freedom. This article addresses the concept of habit through a different tradition that links it instead to an ever-moving world. In a world of constant change, habits are not so much forms of fixity and repetition as they are modes of encounter materiality and life. Habit is the point of transition between living beings and matter, enabling (...) each to be transformed through its engagement with the other. The article focuses on the work of Ravaisson, Bergson and Deleuze, who understand habit as fundamentally creative and addressed to the future rather than consolidating the past. Habit, within this tradition, is the opening of materiality to the forms of engagement required by life, and the modification of life imposed by the requirements of a material universe. It is open-ended plasticity. (shrink)

Working memory is a foundational construct of cognitive psychology, where it is thought to be a capacity that enables us to keep information in mind and to use that information to support goal directed behavior. Philosophers have recently employed working memory to explain central cognitive processes, from consciousness to reasoning. In this paper, I show that working memory cannot meet even a minimal account of natural kindhood, as the functions of maintenance and manipulation of information that tie working memory models (...) and theories together do not have a coherent or univocal realizer in the brain. As such, working memory cannot explain central cognition. Rather, I argue that working memory merely redescribes its target phenomenon, and in doing so it obfuscates relevant distinctions amongst the many ways that brains like ours retain and transform information in the service of cognition. While this project ultimately erodes the explanatory role that working memory has played in our understanding of cognition, it simultaneously prompts us to evaluate the function of natural kinds within cognitive science, and signals the need for a productive pessimism to frame our future study of cognitive categories. (shrink)

Abstract.Stuart Kauffman's proposal in Investigations to ground a “general biology” in the laws of self‐organization governing systems of autonomous agents runs up against the methodological problem of how to integrate formal mathematical with semantic and semiotic approaches to the study of evolutionary development. Gilles Deleuze's concept of the virtual and C. S. Peirce's system of existential graphs provide a theoretical framework and practical art for answering this problem of method by modeling the creative event of collective self‐organization as both represented (...) and practiced in the scientific community. (shrink)

As people age their actions often become entrenched—we might say they are not open to the new; they are less able to adapt; they are stuck in a rut. Indeed, in The Coming of Age (La Vieillesse) Simone de Beauvoir writes that to be old is to be condemned neither to freedom nor to meaning, but rather to boredom (Beauvoir 1996, 461; 486). While in many ways a very pessimistic account of ageing, the text does provide promising moments where her (...) descriptions do capture other possibilities for aged existence. In particular, I turn to Beauvoir’s suggestion that habit can take on a “kind of poetry” since it merges past, present and future in a sense of eternity that the present moment now lacks with its limited futural horizon (468; 492). In this paper, I draw out, delineate, and further explore this phenomenological reconfiguration of the present that she gestures towards through a consideration of the intensification and modification of the present through habit. Drawing as well upon Merleau-Ponty’s insights into the phenomenal body, I argue that poetical habit is an active passivity that allows for the spontaneity of the new out of the sedimentation of corporeal memory, and for the attentive perception of what appears in the present. To disrupt someone’s habitual life is to unanchor that life from the world, from an identity shaped by repetition, by the constancy of a shared reality of things, that is, from the spatial-temporal process of inhabitation, and thus from her ability to engage with others and to disclose the world. (shrink)

Can the brain become mind? If the question seems strange, aberrant even, it is perhaps due to the way the problem brain–mind is commonly presented, where what's repeatedly asked is whether the brain is or isn’t ‘mind’. Yet, if we take Deleuze and Guattari's provocation seriously, in the Conclusion of What is Philosophy?, the problem is radically recast: even if speculatively, that is, properly philosophically or conceptually, the brain, for them, involves its own becoming, both in terms of its ‘becoming-subject’ (...) and ‘becoming-mind’, as ‘Thought-brain’. I will explore references within Deleuze's philosophy in relation to the brain, namely in The Logic of Sense and his work on cinema, as I try to work out what this fantastic story (with necropolitical undertones) may in fact look like, the one where the brain not simply is but becomes, and in becoming, becomes mind…. (shrink)

Episodic memory has a distinctive phenomenology. One way to capture what is distinctive about it is by using the notion of mental time travel: When we remember some fact episodically, we mentally travel to the moment at which we experienced it in the past. This way of distinguishing episodic memory from semantic memory calls for an explanation of what the experience of mental time travel is. In this paper, I suggest that a certain view about the content of memories can (...) shed some light on the experience of mental time travel. This is the view that, when a subject remembers some fact episodically, their memory represents itself as coming from a perception of that fact. I propose that the experience of mental time travel in memory is the experience of representing one of the elements in this complex content, namely, the past perceptual experience of the remembered fact. In defence of this proposal, I offer two considerations. Firstly, the proposal is consistent with the idea that memories enjoy a temporal phenomenology (specifically, a feeling of pastness). Secondly, the proposal is consistent with the possibility that some of our other cognitive capacities might yield an experience of mental time travel which can be oriented towards the future. I argue that the received conception of mental time travel is in tension with those two ideas. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the relationship between body, image and affect within consumer culture. Body image is generally understood as a mental image of the body as it appears to others. It is often assumed in consumer culture that people attend to their body image in an instrumental manner, as status and social acceptability depend on how a person looks. This view is based on popular physiognomic assumptions that the body, especially the face, is a reflection of the self: (...) that a person’s inner character or personality will shine through the outer appearance. The modification and cosmetic enhancement of the body through a range of regimes and technologies can be used to construct a beautiful appearance and thereby a beautiful self. The article begins by examining body images in consumer culture and their relation to photography and moving images. This is followed by an examination of the consumer culture transformative process through a discussion of cosmetic surgery. The article then questions the over-simplistic logic that assumes that transformative techniques will automatically result in a more positive and acceptable body image. The new body and face may encourage people to look at the transformed person in a new way. But the moving body, the body without image, which communicates through proprioceptive senses and intensities of affect, can override the perception of the transformed appearance. A discussion of the affective body follows, via a closer examination of the body without image, the opening of the body to greater affect and indeterminacy. The affective body image and its potential greater visibility through new media technologies are then discussed through some examples taken from digital video art. The article concludes by examining some of the implications of these shifts within consumer culture and new media technologies. (shrink)

In discussion on consciousness and the hard problem, there is an unquestioned background assumption, namely, our experience is stored in the brain. Yet Bergson argued that this very question, “Is experience stored in the brain?” is the critical issue in the problem of consciousness. His examination of then-current memory research led him, save for motor or procedural memory, to a “no” answer. Others, for example Sheldrake, have continued this negative assessment of the research findings. So, has this assumption actually been (...) proven since Bergson? Do we know how experience is stored? Or that it is stored? Here, a recent review and model of memory is examined to see where this assumption actually stands. Again, the assessment will be that nothing has changed. The core of the problem, it will be argued, lies in two things: Firstly, the search for how/where experience is stored is motivated—rephrasing Bergson—in the classic metaphysic, a framework on space and time whose logic cannot be coherently, logically adhered to in attempting to explain how experience is stored. Secondly, the search generally assumes an inadequate theory of perception that is implicitly based in this classic metaphysic. If framed within Bergson’s model of perception and his temporal metaphysic, conjoined with J. J. Gibson’s model, the storage-search appears misguided from the start. (shrink)

This article discusses the way in which a group of contemporary cultural theorists in whose work we see a “new materialism” (a term coined by Braidotti and DeLanda) at work constitutes a philosophy of difference by traversing the dualisms that form the backbone of modernist thought. Continuing the ideas of Lyotard and Deleuze they have set themselves to a rewriting of all possible forms of emancipation that are to be found. This rewriting exercise involves a movement in thought that, in (...) the words of Bergson, can be termed “pushing dualism to an extreme.” By this movement, Deleuze has stated, “difference is pushed to the limit,” that is, using Colebrook’s words, “difference is shown differing.” The article addresses the ways in which modernity’s dualisms (structured by a negative relation between terms) are traversed, and how a new conceptualization, and ontology, of difference (structured by an affirmative relation) comes to be constituted along the way. New materialism leaves behind all prioritizations (implicitly) involved in modern dualist thinking since a difference structured by affirmation does not work with predetermined relations (e.g., between mind and body) nor does it involve a (counter-)hierarchy between terms. The article makes explicit the methodology of the current-day rise of non-dualist thought, both in terms of its non-classificatory mode of (Deleuzian) thinking and in terms of the theory of the time of thought thus effectuated (Lyotard’s notion of ‘rewriting modernity’ is not a post-modernism). Throughout the article we will engage with an example in order to demonstrate the ontology that is being practiced following this methodology: How does a new (feminist) materialism traverse the sexual dualisms that structure modernist (feminist) thinking? This example also shows how a feminist post-modernism (found in the canonical work of Butler) has remained dualist, and what makes new materialism “new.” Freed from a dualist methodology, the modernist emancipatory project comes to full fruition in new materialism. (shrink)

The more science progresses, the more it is evident that the physical world presents regularities. This raises a metaphysical problem: why is the world so ordered? In the first part of the article, I attempt to clarify this problem and justify its relevance. In the following three parts, I analyze three hypotheses already formulated in philosophy in response to this problem: the hypothesis that the order of the world is explained 1) by laws of nature, 2) by dispositions of the (...) fundamental physical entities, 3) or by a memory immanent to matter (a hypothesis developed by Peirce, Bergson and James). The third hypothesis may seem surprising. However, it can be shown that the three hypotheses have a psychomorphic dimension in the sense that they give to nature properties analogous to those of mind. In addition, this third hypothesis presents several interesting arguments. (shrink)

Physical processes manifest an objective order that science manages to discover. Commonly, it is considered that these processes obey the “laws of nature.” Bergson disputes this idea which ultimately constitutes a kind of Platonism. In contrast, he develops the idea that physical processes are a particular case of automatic behaviors. In this sense, they imply a motor memory immanent to matter, whose actions are triggered by some perceptions. This approach is obviously panpsychist. It gives matter a certain consciousness, even if (...) the latter is different in nature from our consciousness. In some respects, this approach is similar to contemporary panpsychism because it claims that the psychic is a fundamental characteristic of nature, causally active. But it is also original because it does not constitute a theory of the origin of mind in nature. (shrink)

The received view of Bergson's philosophy of life is that it advances some form of vitalism under the heading of an “élan vital.” This paper argues against the vitalistic interpretation of Bergson's élan vital as it appears in Creative Evolution in favor of an interpretation based on his overlooked reflections on entropy and energetics. Within the interpretation developed here, the élan vital is characterized not as a spiritualistic “vital force” but as a tendency of organization opposed to the tendency of (...) entropic degradation. It is then shown how Bergson's view of evolution and living organization resonates with more contemporary scientific approaches belonging to a “thermodynamic paradigm” in theoretical biology in different respects, including the critique of neo-Darwinism and the positing of a driving force behind evolution. Finally, the special interest that Bergson's philosophical biology bears today is considered in terms of the connection between the concepts of élan vital and duration. (shrink)

Misremembering is a systematic and ordinary occurrence in our daily lives. Since it is commonly assumed that the function of memory is to remember the past, misremembering is typically thought to happen because our memory system malfunctions. In this paper I argue that not all cases of misremembering are due to failures in our memory system. In particular, I argue that many ordinary cases of misremembering should not be seen as instances of memory’s malfunction, but rather as the normal result (...) of a larger cognitive system that performs a different function, and for which remembering is just one operation. Building upon extant psychological and neuroscientific evidence, I offer a picture of memory as an integral part of a larger system that supports not only thinking of what was the case and what potentially could be the case, but also what could have been the case. More precisely, I claim that remembering is a particular operation of a cognitive system that permits the flexible recombination of different components of encoded traces into representations of possible past events that might or might not have occurred, in the service of constructing mental simulations of possible future events. So that imagination and memory are but one thing, which for diverse considerations hath diverse names.Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan 1.2. (shrink)

The main purpose of this article is, from a semiotic perspective, arguing for the recognizing of a semantic role of the imagination as a necessary condition to our linguistic experience, regarded as an essential feature of the relations of our thought with the world through signification processes ; processes centered in but not reducible to discourse. The text is divided into three parts. The first part presents the traditional position in philosophy and cognitive sciences that had barred until recent times (...) the possibility to investigate the semantic function performed by imagination, mainly due to the anti-psychologist arguments on which it is based. After that, I situate my perspective inside of the recent research panorama in philosophy and cognitive science. The second part presents the semiotic framework on the relation between thought, language, and world, conceived through the concepts of signification processes and sense-conditions. Within this framework, I introduce the concept of linguistic experience, characterizing semantic imagination as one of its sense-conditions. In the third part, several pieces of evidence for corroborating the semantic function of imagination are discussed. These pieces come from the fields of phenomena denoted as diagrammatic thought and counterfactual thought. Diagrammatic thought, briefly discussed, points out the semantic work of imagination in the semi-discursive sign systems constructed in mathematics, logic, and natural science. After defending a widening of the concept of counterfactual thought, and its intrinsic relation with semantic imagination, the role of semantic imagination is briefly discussed in some types of counterfactual thought found in our conceptions of modal concepts, in thought experiments, in apagogical arguments, and in the creative discursive devices. (shrink)

Several substantial critiques remain a source of fractionalizing debate within transpersonal psychology, including the weakness of its definition, whether it is redundant with Wilber’s integral psychology, whether it is a scientific field, whether it is too metaphysical, whether it neglects the problem of evil, and what contribution can it make to mainstream psychology. This article explicates these and related areas of critique and provides a response that identifies the essential challenges and future prospects of transpersonal psychology. The article also emphasizes (...) the field’s unique role as a potential bridge connecting psychological science with the transpersonal psyche in a way that can more fully recognize the importance of the latter. (shrink)

According to What Is Philosophy?, all disciplines combat opinion, but art fights most effectively because art and opinion both pertain to sensibility. Yet, this common provenance also makes the line dividing art and opinion porous. The stakes of this porosity are perhaps most visible in the relation of art to life. Although art must avoid two forms of death, ‘chaos’ and ‘opinion’, Deleuze and Guattari don't treat chaos and opinion equally. The fundamental distinction between good death and bad death, between (...) death by chaos and death by opinion, has a number of problematic consequences. Perhaps the most consequential: opinion is deadlier than death itself. (shrink)

Using Deleuzian theory for educational research and practice has become an increasingly popular activity. However, there are many theoretical complexities to the straightforward application of Deleuze to the educational context. For example, the ‘new materialism’ that Deleuze refers to in the 1960s takes its inspiration from Spinoza, and is an emancipatory project. Contrariwise, the ‘new materialism’ of the present moment is frequently applied to educational research and practice specifically as a way out of anthropocentric limits and enclosure. This paper explores (...) the combined forces of humanism and naturalism which are at work in Deleuze’s ‘new materialism’, as type of ‘more-than-human’ emancipation method derived from Bergson and Nietzsche; it is a mode of overcoming human limits, which fully takes into account the connections to and with the non-human world and the ecological consequences of human action. This paper will draw out the specific consequences for educational research and practice in schools of the ‘vitalist-nihilism’ we may derive from Bergson and Nietzsche to analyse matter flows as they enter, mingle with, and exit schools. (shrink)

While today there is much discussion about the ethics of artificial intelligence, less work has been done on the philosophical nature of AI. Drawing on Bergson and Ricoeur, this paper proposes to use the concepts of time, process, and narrative to conceptualize AI and its normatively relevant impact on human lives and society. Distinguishing between a number of different ways in which AI and time are related, the paper explores what it means to understand AI as narrative, as process, or (...) as the emergent outcome of processes and narratives. It pays particular attention to what it calls the “narrator” and “time machine” roles of AI and the normative implications of these roles. It argues that AI processes and narratives shape our time and link past, present, and future in particular ways that are ethically and politically significant. (shrink)

A blindfolded clairvoyant walks into a room and immediately knows how it is arranged. You walk in and immediately see how it is arranged. Though both of you represent the room as being arranged in the same way, you have different experiences. Your experience doesn’t just represent that the room is arranged a certain way; it also visually presents the very items in the room that make that representation true. Call the felt aspect of your experience made salient by this (...) contrast its presentational phenomenology. Many philosophers have observed that perceptual experiences have presentational phenomenology. In this paper I explore its nature, scope, and significance. I argue that in addition to perceptual experiences, presentational phenomenology can be found in intuitive, introspective, imaginative, and recollective experiences. I also argue that presentational phenomenology is epistemologically significant: it plays a central role in explaining why the experiences that have it justify beliefs and give us knowledge. (shrink)

Although memory is pivotal to consciousness and without it no perceptual judgment or thinking is possible, Nyāya epistemology does not accept memory as a knowledge source. Prof Matilal elucidates and defends Udayana’s justification for calling into question the knowledgehood or even truth of any recollection. Deepening Matilal’s argument, this paper first shows why, if a remembering reproduces exactly the original experience from which it borrows its truth-claim, then there is a mismatch between the time of experience and the time of (...) recall and the remembering ends up being false. To correct that error, if we change the tense in the content of recollection, the added past-ness goes beyond the original experience and violates the purely reproductive nature of memory. The paper ends by responding to this Nyāya position using arguments from Dvaita Vedānta and Jaina epistemology where remembering can be veridical and memory is accepted as an important knowledge source. The additional element of past-ness cannot be derived from sense perception. It has to be a spontaneous contribution of the inner sense. (shrink)

Irène Némirovsky’s novella Les Mouches d’automne paints an effective portrait of exile, of the longing for the lost home, and the disorientation that one feels when faced with a reality that is neither recognizable nor understandable. In this article, I analyse Némirovsky’s narrative strategies in relation to spatio-temporal phenomena. My analysis is based on the work of philosophers Mikhail Bakhtin and Gilles Deleuze: Bakhtin’s chronotope and Deleuze’s crystal-image illuminate how the novella’s dominant themes, exile and nostalgia for the home, are (...) irreducible to the clichés of a linear narration and to the simplistic dichotomy home/exile, past/present, and here/there. Instead, Némirovsky creates a productive tension of overlapping and coalescing space- and time-frames. The philosophical framework provided by Bakhtin and Deleuze is useful to unlock and make visible how this thematic complexity is reflected in the novella’s narrative structure. Indeed, my analysis of Les Mouches’s chronotopes and crystal images illuminates Némirovsky’s innovative experimentation in the creation of time–space crossings and a/synchronies, and also contributes to extend further our understanding of Némirovsky’s place within the contemporaneous literary panorama. (shrink)

In this article, I rethink the key arguments of my co-authored paper Teaching Pleasure and Danger in Sexuality Education (Author and Co, 2013 Author and Co. (2013). Teaching pleasure and danger in sexuality education. Sex Education, 13(2), 121–132.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]) by bringing the postmodern logic of critical sexuality education theory into conversation with the relational ontology of new materialism. I begin by rejecting the key problem presented in Author and Co’s (2013) paper as (...) a false problem. This false problem is the drawing of an ‘unqualified line’ between positive and negative sexual experience in sexuality education. Instead, I argue that the actual problem is the initial act of drawing a line to separate sexual experience into a binary. My modification of the problem is an ontological move that allows me to consider sexuality education outside the binaries of negative and positive experience. Elaborating on the ontology problem presented in my paper Teaching Pleasure and Danger in Sexuality Education, I explain new materialism and its key task of realizing the interdependence of dualist terms. Drawing on Bergson and Braidotti’s philosophies of difference, I argue that pushing for sex-positive sexuality education strengthens the sex-negativity in sexuality education. I further critique the logic of negation that structures sexuality education by interrogating the contemporary push for pleasure-based sexuality education. Through this process of rethinking my previous scholarship through new materialist logic, I begin the task of reconfiguring the phallogocentric sexual subject as a subject-in-the-process. The conclusion of this article offers a beginning consideration of sexuality as an act of becoming where forces brought into relationship are entangled, creating a new thing. (shrink)

Rhythm is generally taken to refer to a temporal pattern of events. Yet in recent years, across diverse fields in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, it has come to serve as the conceptual marker for a wide range of new approaches to understanding relations and relationality, following most explicitly from the late work of Henri Lefebvre. This article explores the temporal aspect of such relational thinking, in particular asking how time is implicated in relations, and how it can be (...) meaningful in those relations. The sense of time is surveyed from the perspectives of both cognition and metaphysics as well as with reference to music scholarship and social theory, and key threads are drawn, from the writings of Gaston Bachelard and Charles Sanders Peirce in particular, in order to suggest that time can be a sign, and that the signifying properties of rhythm have critical social consequences. (shrink)

Remembering a cat sleeping (specifically, recollecting the way the cat looked), perceiving (specifically, seeing) a cat sleeping, and imagining (specifically, visualizing) a cat sleeping are of course importantly different. Nonetheless, from the first-person perspective they are palpably alike. The paper addresses two questions: Q1. What are these similarities (and differences)? Q2. How does one tell that one is recalling (and so not perceiving or imagining)?

This paper advocates the main ideas of the interactive model of representation of Mark Bickhard and the assimilation/accommodation framework of Jean Piaget, through a rhythm recognition demonstration program. Although completely unsupervised, the program progressively learns to recognize more and more complex rhythms struck on the user's keyboard. It does so without any recording of the input flow, and without any pattern matching in the usual sense. On the contrary, internal processes are dynamically constructed to follow and anticipate the user's actions. (...) We show that these processes are representations of the rhythms in the interactivist sense, and that they emerge from non representational grounds, avoiding the symbol‐grounding problem. They are not copies or transductions of reality, but ideal internal constructions of the agent, avoiding the circularity pointed out by Piaget. In practice, the active nature of this recognition process allows it to work even with noisy and complex input flows. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore how the differences between Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze delineate two different interpretations of the politics of found footage cinema. To do so, the notion of cinematic interval is crucial. While Debord's practice of détournement presupposes a Hegelian-inspired notion of interval that allows for self-awareness to be achieved, Deleuze puts forth a Bergsonian concept of interval that functions as a condition of possibility for creating an ‘image of movement in itself’. To explore (...) these two interpretations, this article uses Guy Debord's 1973 film The Society of the Spectacle as a case study. By focusing on this specific object, the two interpretations of the cinematic interval make it possible to compare two alternative ways of dealing with the representability – or unrepresentability – of capital, and hence to sketch two alternative views on the politics of found footage film practices. (shrink)

What potential can be found in the work of Deleuze and Guattari for critical legal scholarship? The authors argue that their work can be deployed to re-think ‘critique’ by directly addressing the place and role of the ‘critic’. It is argued that the continued commitment to a stance of ‘resistance’ in CLS is underpinned by never-ending dualisms which, if not confronted and replaced, can only make CLS ever more redundant. The authors ask: ‘what is critique beyond the dualism of power (...) and resistance, of state and nomad?’ This question arises from a belief that critique is still capable of being effective, but only if there is the courage to experiment, and to think creatively. In this sense, the ‘exhaustion’ of critique is framed as an opportunity to re-think and re-engage with the politics of law. The paper diagrams, through image and film, a critical thought: the potential of the artisan. Film is utilised not as representation, nor as illustration, but as a thinking mind in its own right, through which questions relating to the state, political action, and creative thinking can be framed. Such a re-framing is essential, it is argued, for an engagement with the emergence of societies of control. (shrink)

Sāṃkhya, or the philosophy of Yoga, is considered to be one of the most influential traditional philosophies in India. A close reading of it can lead to the conclusion that Sāṃkhya's and Deleuze's philosophy share similar ontological assumptions, especially regarding the material field of immanence that manifests itself through every mode of being. Both philosophies assume modes or degrees of material coexistence that extend from the virtual, potential field of immanence, as something conditional and causal, to actual manifestation that is (...) more or less structured, graspable and shaped. Additionally, they both consider the human psyche to be material that, as materiality itself, manifests itself through different modes of conscious existence. On the other hand, they also share the assumption about the transcendental field of impersonal consciousness immersed in the material field of immanence. This paper identifies and explains the causal relationship among these different modes of being from the point of view of a particular understanding of time, and offers insight into how the comprehension of causality could be implied in ethical theory. (shrink)

Habit is an integral concept for body studies, a hybrid concept and one that has provided the bedrock across the humanities for considering the interrelationships between movement and stasis, being and becoming, and process and fixity. Habits are seen to provide relay points between what is taken to be inside and outside, disrupting any clear and distinct boundary between nature and culture, self and other, the psychological and social, and even mind and matter. Habit thus discloses a paradox. It takes (...) up a unique position in affect modulation, which encompasses both regulation (in the form of discipline) and also extends the body’s potential for engaging the new, change and creativity. In order to understand the basis of the ambivalent duality governing understandings of habit it is argued that a genealogical approach to this question is necessary. This will be located within the recent ‘turn to affect’ and histories of conation within the psychological sciences, particularly taking the writings of William McDougall as a focus. (shrink)

This essay offers a critique of the philosophical ‘turn to affect’, a formation represented here by the work of Brian Massumi and Mark Hansen. In such discourses, affect is celebrated as an entity that is inimical to conceptualisation, subjective intention and linguistic transcription. However, insofar as it boasts such qualities, affect cannot, I argue, be celebrated or made the object of a critical ‘turn’. In drawing on Deleuze's work, contemporary scholarly discourses on affect dispense with Deleuze's most profound proposition: of (...) an order of philosophy, perception, reflection and thought that originates outside, or is no longer dependent upon, a human perspective. (shrink)

This article builds upon concepts of simultaneity and coexistence offered by Bergson and Deleuze to explore new approaches to cinematic audibility. Recognised film theory terms such as synchronisation and synchresis approach sonic time from the transcendent distance of audioviewership. This essay moves cinematic experience inward to ask what is audible within the film world itself. Simultaneity and coexistence penetrate cinematic time to express a multiplicity of audible layers, threads or lines that occur in relation to image-events. The essay both advances (...) and critiques Bergson's and Deleuze's conceptions of time, making it relevant to both film studies and metaphysics. (shrink)

In a conference from 1987 on ‘What is the Creative Act?’, Deleuze argues that a fundamental and mysterious affinity subsists between the work of art and the act of resistance. Starting from this statement, Agamben in his echoing text ‘What is the Act of Creation?’ presents an idea of resistance co-essential to power itself. Each power, in other words each possibility for human beings of doing something, is connected to their impotence, not necessarily understood as total absence of power, but (...) as potential to not-do. Therefore, in the very creative act one detects something that resists and opposes the critical possibility of a retreat, of an emptiness that is itself a form of potentiality. The essay picks things up from here. The act of resistance, described in terms of dynamis, as power which is always in contact with its power-not-to, is identified as the core element of modern cinema images, notably in Italian neorealism. (shrink)

My goal is to conceive how the reality would look like for hypothetical creatures that supposedly perceive on time scales much faster or much slower than that of us humans. To attain the goal, I propose modelling in two steps. At step one, we have to single out a unified parameter that sets time scale of perception. Changing substantially the value of the parameter would mean changing scale. I argue that the required parameter is duration of discrete perceptive frames, or (...) snapshots, whose sequencing constitutes perceptive process. I show that different standard durations of perceptive frames is the ground for differences in perceptive time scales of various animals. Abnormally changed duration of perceptive frames is the cause of the effect of distorted subjective time observed by humans under some conditions. Now comes step two of the modelling. By inserting some arbitrary duration of a perceptive frame, we set a hypothetical scale and thus emulate a viewpoint for virtual observation of the reality in a wider or narrower angle of embracing events in time. Like changing lenses of a microscope, viewing reality in different temporal scales makes certain features of reality manifested, others veiled. These are, in particular, features of life. If we observe an object in an inappropriate interval, we may not notice the very essence of a process it is undergoing. (shrink)

If I see, hear, or touch a sparrow, the sparrow seems real to me. Unlike Bigfoot or Santa Claus, it seems to exist; I will therefore judge that it does indeed exist. The “sense of existence” refers to the kind of awareness that typically grounds such ordinary judgments of existence or “reality.” The sense of existence has been invoked by Humeans, Kantians, Ideologists, and the phenomenological tradition to make substantial philosophical claims. However, it is extremely controversial; its very existence has (...) been called into question. This paper aims to clarify the nature and reality of the sense of existence by studying a psychiatric condition in which the sense appears to be disrupted: depersonalization disorder (DPD). (shrink)

Spaces of Geographical Thought examines key ideas like space and place - which inform the geographic imagination. The text: discusses the core conceptual vocabulary of human geography: agency: structure; state: society; culture: economy; space: place; black: white; man: woman; nature: culture; local: global; and time: space; explains the significance of these binaries in the constitution of geographic thought; and shows how many of these binaries have been interrogated and re-imagined in more recent geographical thinking. A consideration of these binaries will (...) define the concepts and situate students in the most current geographical arguments and debates. The text will be required reading for all modules on the philosophy of geography and on geographical theory. (shrink)