Ion Dur is an authentic scholar. His working methods, his interest and freshness of his discourse are placing him among the active contemporary Romanian philosophers and critics. Among the constant coordinates of his work are the attempt to guide readers "towards the North point of value". Ion Dur distinguishes himself by depth of his analysis on culture, criticism and journalism. The aim of this study is to offer, to young researchers and others as well, an Ariadne‘s Thread to the hermeneut‘s (...) work. In preparation of this article, extensive documentation was made and most diverse sources have been used in order to illustrate the author's ideas and to highlight the warm reception of his writings. Among others, in 1995, the essayist has re-established Sæculum, a journal founded by Lucian Blaga, in 1943, coordinated by Ion Dur for 20 years. We are writing this article in honorem to a scholar and an university Professor who this year climbed onto the seventieth step of his life. (shrink)

We can discern two opposing viewpoints regarding synesthesia. According to the first, it is an oddity, an outlier, or a disordered condition. According to the second, synesthesia is pervasive, driving creativity, metaphor, or language itself. Which is it? Ultimately, I favor the first perspective, according to which cross-sensory synesthesia is an outlying condition. But the second perspective is not wholly misguided. My discussion has three lessons. First, synesthesia is just one of a variety of effects in which one sense modality (...) causally impacts and reshapes experience associated with another. These effects are utterly common. However, due to their unfamiliarity, and to their conflict with a widespread conception of the role of the senses in perception and perceptual experience, until recently they have been surprising. Second, synesthesia nevertheless must be distinguished from other inter-modal effects that lead to misperception, such as crossmodal illusions. Third, synesthesia also may be distinguished from the potentially much broader class of synesthetic effects, which could be common across the population and within individuals. (shrink)

Studies have shown that both serotonin and glutamate receptor systems play a crucial role in the mechanisms underlying drug-induced synesthesia. The specific nature of these mechanisms, however, continues to remain elusive. Here we propose two distinct hypotheses for how synesthesia triggered by hallucinogens in the serotonin-agonist family may occur. One hypothesis is that the drug-induced destabilization of thalamic projections via GABAergic neuronal circuits from sensory areas leads to a disruption of low-level, spontaneous integration of multisensory stimuli. This sort of integration (...) regularly occurs when spatial and temporal attributes match. Destabilization of feedback loops, however, can result in incongruent experiences or binding of random thalamus activation with sensory input in a particular sensory modality. The second hypothesis builds on embodied cognition, cases in which visual images of external stimuli activate task-related neural regions. On this proposal, binding processes that do not normally generate awareness become accessible to consciousness as a result of decreased attentional discrimination among incoming stimuli. (shrink)