Philosophy and Memory Traces defends two theories of autobiographical memory. One is a bewildering historical view of memories as dynamic patterns in fleeting animal spirits, nervous fluids which rummaged through the pores of brain and body. The other is new connectionism, in which memories are 'stored' only superpositionally, and reconstructed rather than reproduced. Both models, argues John Sutton, depart from static archival metaphors by employing distributed representation, which brings interference and confusion between memory traces. Both raise urgent issues about (...) control of the personal past, and about relations between self and body. Sutton demonstrates the role of bizarre body fluids in moral physiology, as philosophers from Descartes and Locke to Coleridge struggled to control their own innards and impose cognitive discipline on 'the phantasmal chaos of association'. Going on to defend connectionism against Fodor and critics of passive mental representations, he shows how problems of the self are implicated in cognitive science. (shrink)

Aristotle’s points about memory are as follows: 1. ‘Memory even of intellectual objects involves an image and the image is an affection of the common senses. Thus memory belongs incidentally to the faculty of thought, and essentially it belongs to the primary faculty of sense-perception.’ (OM., 450a^10-13) 2. The fact that animals have memory proves that it is a function of sense perception and not thought: ‘If memory were a function of the thinking parts, it would not have been an (...) attribute of many of the other animals.’ (OM., 450a^14-17) Memory ‘is a function of the primary faculty of sense-perception, i.e. of that faculty whereby we perceive time.’ (OM., 451a16-17) 3. To have memory, one needs to have the faculty of perceiving time because ‘whenever one actually remembers having seen or heard or learned something, he perceives in addition … that it happened before.’ Thus, not all animals that have sense-perception can have memory. (OM., 450a17-20) 4. Memory and imagination. Memory is a function of those parts of the soul ‘to which imagination also appertains.’ Thus, ‘all objects of which there is imagination are in themselves objects of memory, while those which do not exist without imagination are objects of memory incidentally.’ (OM., 450a21-25) 5. Memory is of what is in soul, not its reference. ‘Granted that there is in us something like an impression or picture, why should the perception of this be memory of something else, and not of this itself? For when one actually remembers, this impression is what he contemplates, and this is what he perceives. How then will he remember what is not present? (OM., 450b11-) 6. Memory ‘is the having of an image, related as likeness to that of which it is an image.’ (OM., 451a15-16) 7. ‘It is only at the instant when the state or affection is implanted in the soul that memory exists, and therefore memory is not itself implanted concurrently with the implantation of the sensory experience.’ (OM., 451a^21-24) 8. ‘Remembering is the existence of a movement capable of stimulating the mind to the desired movement, and this, as has been said, in such a way that the person should be moved from within himself, i.e. in consequence of movements wholly contained within himself.’ (OM., 452a8-12) 9. ‘When the movement corresponding to the object and that corresponding to its time occur, then one actually remembers. … If, however, the movement corresponding to the object takes place without that corresponding to the time, or, if the latter takes place without the former, one does not remember.’ (OM., 452b23-30) . (shrink)

[Edited from Conclusion section:] We have looked at various challenging issues to do with getting connectionism to cope with high-level cognitive activities such a reasoning and natural language understanding. The issues are to do with various facets of generalization that are not commonly noted. We have been concerned in particular with the special forms these issues take in the arena of propositional attitude processing. The main problems we have looked at are: (1) The need to construct explicit representations of (...) generalizations, not just generalize correctly to individual cases; (2) The need to be able to match two or more complex short-term information structures, to enable rapid generalization from recent examples rather than from long-term memories; (3) The need to represent and reason with anomalous combinations of concepts; (4) The need to perform embedded reasoning. This presents special problems for systems using non-concatenative representations (as in mainstream connectionist approaches). We also touched on vague quantification in attitude report complements. Neither this topic nor that of analogies between short-term structures (point 2) has been adequately addressed in the symbolic framework, let alone in connectionism. -/- The opportunities and problems covered are put forward as things worth being optimistic about or pessimistic about, respectively. They are not put forward as decisive arguments for or against connectionism. The hope is that this chapter contributes to a greater understanding of the connectionist/symbolist gap by presenting some unusual issues and by throwing new light on some well known ones. (shrink)

In this paper, we show that there are some strong philosophical and exegetical reasons to argue that according to the view developed in the first chapter of Aristotle’s De Memoria, the objects of memory are non-present, or absent, things and events rather than our past acts of awareness of them. We argue that on Aristotle’s account, the objects of memory can be particulars or universals, perceptibles or intelligibles, and that all these kinds of things are past in the same sense, (...) namely, in the sense of previously having been present to the perceiver or knower. Aristotle’s claim that we remember that we previously learned or saw something is the description of how, rather than what, we remember. Keywords: Aristotle, memory, past, pathos, present. (shrink)

This paper is a commentary on the target article by Dana H. Ballard, “Cortical connections and parallel processing: Structure and function”, in the same issue of the journal, pp. 67–120. -/- I raise some issues about the connectionist or neural-network implementation of information and information processing. Issues include the sharing of information by different parts of a connectionist/neural network, the copying of complex information from one place to another in a network, the possibility of connection weights not being synaptic weights, (...) and the possibility of fast communication within single neurons as complex systems in their own right. (shrink)

Three decades ago, William Ramsey, Steven Stich & Joseph Garon put forward an argument in favor of the following conditional: if connectionist models that implement parallelly distributed processing represent faithfully human cognitive processing, eliminativism about propositional attitudes is true. The corollary of their argument (if it proves to be sound) is that there is no place for folk psychology in contemporary cognitive science. This understanding of connectionism as a hypothesis about cognitive architecture compatible with eliminativism is also endorsed by (...) Paul Churchland, a radical opponent of folk psychology and a prominent supporter of eliminative materialism. I aim to examine whether current connectionist models based on long-short term memory (LSTM) neural networks can back up these arguments in favor of eliminativism. Nonetheless, I will rather put my faith in the eliminativism of the limited domain. This position amounts to the claim that even though connectionist cognitive science has no need whatsoever for folk psychology qua theory, this does not entail the illegitimacy of folk psychology per se in other scientific domains, most notably in humanities, but only on condition that one regards folk psychology as mere heuristics. (shrink)

I argue that a common interpretation of DA 3.4, which sees Aristotle as there rejecting Anaxagoras’s account of mind, is mistaken. Instead, I claim that, in providing his solution to the main puzzles of this chapter, Aristotle takes special care to preserve the essential features that he thinks Anaxagoras ascribes to mind, namely, its ability to know all things, its being unmixed, and its inability to be affected by mixed objects.

This paper is a tentative step towards a historical cognitive science, in the domain of memory and personal identity. I treat theoretical models of memory in history as specimens of the way cultural norms and artifacts can permeate ('proto')scientific views of inner processes. I apply this analysis to the topic of psychological control over one's own body, brain, and mind. Some metaphors and models for memory and mental representation signal the projection inside of external aids. Overtly at least, medieval and (...) Renaissance theorists agreed that such models had to allow for, or even guarantee, some conception of cognitive order and discipline. Individual memory traces had to be independent, not mixed up or interfering with others. The long tradition of improving or bypassing 'natural memory' by deliberately internalizing artefactual models was part of an arduous process of self-fashioning. Moral panic about confusion and mixture features centrally in the imposition of cognitive discipline in local memory traditions. (shrink)

In this Master's dissertation, I try to show that the causal theory of memory, which is the only theory developed so far that at first view seems more plausible and that could be integrated with psychological explanations and investigations of memory, shows some conceptual and ontological problems that go beyond the internal inconsistencies that each version can present. On one hand, the memory phenomenon analyzed is very limited: in general it is reduced to the conscious act of remembering expressed in (...) a propositional format: the idea of an agent who can control his memory reports, in contrast to a passive subject who merely retrieve his encoded memories, is not even considered. Furthermore, the representational function of memory is the only function taken into account; and all the diachronic changes that could entail a dynamic conception of memory are ignored, as is the consideration of context in a broad sense of the term. On the other hand, causal theories make some implicit assumptions that are obviously questionable (e.g., the difference between facts and events) and leave some of their key concepts unexplained, like the nature of the causality, the isomorphism between the memory trace and the memory event, etc. Nonetheless, the principal point that we criticized is the idea of a correspondence between a past event or representation of it, the correspondent memory trace and the memory representation of it. Psychological models of memory, with the exception of the spatial analogy, question some of these assumptions and suggest that memory information is organized in a way other than that implied by the causal theory. But it is distributed connectionism that actually challenges the causal theory of memory, not only through some of its basic postulates, like the superpositional conception of memory traces, their mutual influence and constant state of change, but also because it is compatible with a more situated approach to memory phenomena as well as with the idea that memory in reality accomplishes a variety of functions that go beyond the representational one. The explicit and implicit ideas provided by distributed connectionism, together with the previous criticisms that we made to of causal theory, clearly suggest the possibility of developing another kind of philosophical theory of memory, different from existing theories. This task, nonetheless, implies: (a) A much deeper study of connectionism principles and memory models, as well as of the rival candidate, symbolism, plus the evaluation of these models in the light of psychological and neurophysiological empirical research, which unfortunately I have not dealt with in this work. (b) An analysis of the metaphysical nature of events and facts, in order to see if we should decide in favor of a realist or a non-realist account. It is also clear that this decision can’t be taken without an examination of perception studies (and not exclusively philosophical ones) which would be crucial for determining what is encoded in memory, and studies devoted to language, which, I suspect, plays an important role in the segmentation of reality. (c) A clarification of the notion of causality, because we wouldn’t like to deny any kind entail the complete disappearance of boundaries between memory and imagination. And even if I suspect that my future work will question the existence of absolute boundaries between these two capacities, the notion of causality can’t be completely erase from the theory of memory without erasing the memory phenomenon itself. But this causality, as we’ve already showed, can’t consist in the naïve conception adopted by the causal accounts of memory, nor can it be explained in counterfactual terms. If we think of the reconsolidation concept, of the interdependence between all the memory system, and of the deciding influence of context, it’s almost sure that more than one notion of causality will need to be invoked in order to explain memory. (d) Because I do not want to reduce the study of memory exclusively to cases of remembering, it’s essential to analyze how memory intervenes not only in imagination, but also in perception, reasoning and future projection, for example. In this respect, we could quote the interesting articles of Atance & O’Neill (2001) and Bucker & Carroll (2006), the first concerning the relationship between episodic memory and episodic future thinking, the second concerning the relationship between episodic memory and all kinds of self-projection, such as navigation and theory of mind, relations that would also have to be explored from a philosophical perspective, in particular to overcome the tendency to suppose that representation is the only function of memory. I will also mention the necessity of combining the notion of metamemory with that of memory to some extent; as I have already remarked, it is implausible to suppose that a subject who consciously remembers something is unable to exert any kind of control over his memory reports. (e) Finally, in order to integrate a situated conception of memory into a philosophical account, it will also be indispensable to take into consideration what is known as “everyday memory research” as well as studies in social and collective memory. (shrink)

A case study in historical cognitive science, this paper addresses two claims made by radical proponents of new dynamical approaches. It queries their historical narrative, which sees embodied, situated cognition as correcting an individualist, atemporal framework originating in Descartes. In fact, new Descartes scholarship shows that 17th-century animal spirits neurophysiology realized a recognizably distributed model of memory; explicit representations are patterns of spirit flow, and memory traces are changes left by experience in connections between brain pores. This historical sketch supports (...) the second dynamicist claim, that connectionists' stress on the cognitive importance of pattern-recreation needs supplementing by dynamicists' real-time focus and attention to the active roles of body and environment. Animal spirits theory exhibits just the 'continuous reciprocal causation' between brain, body, and environment which Andy Clark sees as dynamicism's central contribution, and allows for the embedding of brains in culture as well as the physical world. (shrink)

It is proposed that our memory is made up of individual, unconnected Records, to each of which is attached a Heading. Retrieval of a Record can only be accomplished by addressing the attached Heading, the contents of which cannot itself be retrieved. Each Heading is made up of a mixture of content in more or less literal form and context, the latter including specification of environment and of internal states (e.g. drug states and mood). This view of memory allows an (...) easy account of a number of natural memory phenomena as well as a variety of laboratory findings such as the differences between recall and recognition. The theory further proposes that Headed Records can neither be deleted nor modified. Data apparently against such a hypothesis can be accounted for in terms of the retrieval process. (shrink)

1. ‘But occasionally it happens that we get a sudden idea and recollect that we heard or saw something formerly. This happens whenever, from contemplating a mental object in itself, one changes his point of view, and regards it as relative to something else.’ 2. ‘Recollection is not the recovery or acquisition of memory; since at the instant when one at first learns or experiences, he does not thereby recover a memory inasmuch as none has preceded, nor does he acquire (...) one ab initio.’ (OM., 451a19-^22) 3. ‘Even the assertion that recollection is the reinstatement of something which was there before requires qualification- it is right in one way, wrong in another. For the same person may twice learn, or twice discover the same fact. Accordingly, the act of recollecting ought to be distinguished from these acts; i.e. recollecting must imply in those who recollect the presence of some source over and above that from which they originally learn.’ (OM., 451b6-10) 4. ‘Acts of recollection are due to the fact that one movement has by nature another that succeeds it. If this order be necessary, whenever a subject experiences the former of two movements thus connected, it will experience the latter; if, however, the order be not necessary, but customary, only for the most part will the subject experience the latter of the two movements.’ (OM., 451b11-14) 5. ‘Whenever, therefore, we are recollecting, we are experiencing one of the antecedent movements until finally we experience the one after which customarily comes that which we seek. This explains why we hunt up the series, having started in thought from the present or some other, and from something either similar, or contrary, to what we seek, or else from that which is contiguous with it. That is how recollection takes place; for the movements involved in these starting points are in some case identicall, in others, again, simultaneous, while in others they comprise a portion of them, so that the reminent which one experience after that portion is comparatively small.’ (OM., 451b17-22) 6. ‘It is that persons seek to recollect, and thus, too, it is that they recollect even without seeking to do so, viz. when the movement has supervened on some other. For, as a rule, it is when antecedent movements of the classes here described have first been excited, that the particular movement implied in recollection follows.’ (OM., 451b23-^28) 7. ‘When one wishes to recollect, this is what he will do: he will try to obtain a beginning of movement whose sequal shall be the movement which he desires to reawaken.’ (OM., 451^b28-32) 8. ‘In order of succession, the movements are to one another as the objects. Accordingly, things arranged in a fixed order, like the successive demonstration in geometry, are easy to remember, while badly arranged subjects are remembered with difficulty.’ (OM., 451^a1-4) 9. ‘It often happens that, though a person cannot recollect at the moment, yet by seeking he can do so, and discovers what he seeks. This he succeeds in doing by setting up many movements, until finally he excites one of a kind which will have for its sequel the fact he wishes to recollect. For remembering is the existence of a movement capable of stimulating the mind to the desired movement, and this, as has been said, in such a way that the person should be moved from within himself, i.e. in consequence of movements wholly contained within himself.’ (OM., 452a8-12) 10. ‘Persons are supposed to recollect sometimes by starting from ‘places.’ The cause is that they pass swiftly from one point to another …’ (OM., 452a14-15) 11. ‘The middle point among all things is a good starting point. …’ (OM., 452a17-19) . (shrink)

This paper presents Duns Scotus’s theory of mixture in the context of medieval discussions over Aristotle’s theory of mixed bodies. It revisits the accounts of mixture given by Avicenna, Averroes, and Thomas Aquinas, before presenting Scotus’s account as a reaction to Averroes. It argues that Duns Scotus rejected the Aristotelian theory of mixture altogether and that his account went contrary to the entire Latin tradition. Scotus denies that mixts arise out of the four classical elements and he maintains that both (...) the elemental forms and the elemental qualities are lost in the mixture. Consequently, he denies the distinction between the process of mixture and that of substantial change through generation and corruption. The reassessment of Scotus’s account modifies the current historical representation of this discussion, inherited from Anneliese Maier. (shrink)

The psychological reality of an inner awareness built into conscious experience has traditionally been a central element of philosophy of consciousness, from Aristotle, to Descartes, Brentano, the phenomenological tradition, and early and contemporary analytic philosophy. Its existence, however, has recently been called into question, especially by defenders of so-called transparency of experience and first-order representationalists about phenomenal consciousness. In this paper, I put forward a defense of inner awareness based on an argument from memory. Roughly, the idea is that since (...) we can only recall something if we were aware of it at the time of its occurrence, and since we can recall our own experiences, we must be aware of our own experiences at the time of their occurrence. The argument is far from new: it goes back to the Buddhist tradition and has been revived more recently in Buddhist Scholarship but also in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind, in particular by Uriah Kriegel. However, I believe that, since it is the best extant argument for inner awareness, it deserves more extensive treatment. My goal is to strengthen the memory argument by making some conceptual distinctions as to the exact thesis about inner awareness that the argument is supposed to support, considering different ways the argument may be reconstructed depending on the exact thesis to be supported, and defending the argument from a new objection, raised very recently by Daniel Stoljar. (shrink)

This paper examines a parallel between Aristotle’s account of phantasia and contemporary psychological models of working memory, a capacity that enables the temporary maintenance and manipulation of information used in many behaviors. These two capacities, though developed within two distinct scientific paradigms, share a common strategy of psychological explanation, Aristotelian Faculty Psychology. This strategy individuates psychological components by their target-domains and functional roles. Working memory and phantasia result from an attempt to individuate the psychological components responsible for flexible thought and (...) are thus implicated in most of our robust cognitive processes, from reading comprehension to problem solving. We then present two novel objections which suggest that these capacities cannot explain our ability to engage in flexible thought. To escape the resultant impasse, we survey alternatives and argue that most promising strategies depend on identifying the behaviors attributed to intelligent thought and action. (shrink)

This collection of essays is the product of a conference on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (Apo) held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009. The essays address three main questions: (1) “How does the APo model of scientific knowledge, focused as it is on the construction of syllogisms, relate to the scientific accounts Aristotle presents elsewhere, especially in the biological treatises?’ (2) ‘How do the arguments and views presented in the APo relate to other aspects of Aristotle’s (...) philosophy?’ and (3) ‘How do the remarks in the concluding chapter of the APo concerning perception, memory, experience, and the grasp of the universal add up to an explanation of how we come to know first principles?’ The papers by J.G. Lennox, M. Leunissen and R. McKirahan address the first two questions, while those by M. Tuominen and G. Salmieri discuss the well-known passage in Apo II 19. (shrink)

Natural philosophers make mistakes. Descartes got the laws of inertia wrong, Kant misunderstood the primacy of Euclidian geometry, and almost everyone (except perhaps Aristarchus of Samos) prior to the discovery of the telescope mistakenly thought that the solar system was geocentric. That we find Aristotle mistaken on questions in the life sciences — questions which required advances such as the microscope to even articulate — should come as little surprise. There seems nothing remarkable in the fact that Aristotle mistakenly thought (...) that the constitutive elements of the world were four (earth, wind, air, fire) or that the “organ” of thought was not the brain, but the heart. But the matter is otherwise when scholars examine Aristotle’s remarks about the female in his biological writings. When Aristotle claims that the leader of a hive is the king bee (HA 8 [9].40.623b9-10), that woman have smaller brains than men (PA 2.7.653a28-9), and that the female of the species have fewer teeth than the male (HA 2.3.501b19-21), Aristotle’s critics have suspected something more nefarious than simply poor observation at work. When Aristotle goes on to claim that “the female is, as it were, a mutilated male” (GA 2.3.737a27-8) or that “the female is more dispirited and more despondent than the male, more shameless and more lying, readier to deceive and possessing a better memory for grudges” (HA 8 [9].1.608b10-12), critics have accused Aristotle of trying to pass off misogyny as science. (shrink)

We review the history of the philosophy of fondue since Aristotle so as to arrive at the formulation of the paradox of Swiss fondue. Either the wine and the cheese cease to exist (Buridan), but then the fondue is not really a mixture of wine and cheese. Or the wine and the cheese continue to exist. If they do, then either they continue to exist in different places (the chemists), but then a fondue can never be perfectly homogenous (it is (...) a French fondue). Or the wine and the cheese continue to exist in the same place (the Stoïcs), but then wine and cheese have to be, oddly, penetrable and spatially expansible. Aristote attempted to solve this paradox by arguing that the cheese and wine continue to exist, but only potentially in the fondue. We sketch an alternative answer. The wine and the cheese continue to exist, but only non-spatially in the fondue. Wine and cheese, once mixed, become non-spatial constituents of the fondue, a bit like character traits are non-spatial constituents of persons. The wine and the cheese are in the fondue, but only the fondue is there in the fondue pot. (shrink)

Mental simulation refers to the imagination of alternative, counterfactual realities. This chapter provides an overview of research on simulations of the past— retrospective simulation—and simulations of the future— prospective simulation. Two major themes run throughout. The first is that both retrospective and prospective thinking are inextricably linked, relying on a mixture of episodic and semantic memories that share common neural substrates. The second is that retrospective and prospective simulation present trade-offs for the individual. On the one hand, they are functional, (...) identifying causal inferences and potential obstacles that prepare us to try harder and perform better in the future. On the other hand, they sometimes produce bias—retrospective thinking can enhance hindsight bias, whereas prospective thinking can evoke biased predictions about the likelihood of certain events as well as how one is going to feel about those events in the future. Fortunately, however, these biases can be diminished with debiasing techniques. (shrink)

This chapter aims to illuminate ways in which hope was significant in the philosophy of classical Greece. Although ancient Greek philosophies contain few dedicated and systematic expositions on the nature of hope, they nevertheless include important remarks relating hope to the good life, to reason and deliberation, and to psychological phenomena such as memory, imagination, fear, motivation, and pleasure. After an introductory discussion of Hesiod and Heraclitus, the chapter focuses on Plato and Aristotle. Consideration is given both to Plato’s direct (...) comments on hope and to the narrative contexts of his dialogues, with analysis of Plato’s positive and negative representations of hope, hope’s relationship to reason, and Plato’s more psychological approach in the Philebus, where hope finds a place among memory, recollection, pleasure, and pain. The chapter then reviews Aristotle’s discussions of confidence, hope, and courage, observing that although Aristotle does not mention hope as a virtue, he does note its importance to human agency and deliberation and as a foundation for the further development of virtue. The chapter concludes that discussions surrounding hope in ancient Greek philosophy are rich and challenging and can serve as a lively stimulus to further exploration of the concept of hope. (shrink)

In the article, I discuss the significance of the Aristotle’s approach to education. Four aspects of his approach are of special importance: 1. the integrity of knowledge, 2. wonder as the beginning of knowledge, 3. oral communication as a specific way of accessing knowledge and operating with it, 4. knowledge as a necessary element of way of life. While nowadays the individuality is the primary value, and the accessibility of information is becoming almost absolute, these points of the Aristotle’s way (...) of teaching are becoming crucial. Taking the Aristotelian approach to teaching as a model we observe the following significant changes: information is becoming structured only if it is well organized, the ability to wonder develops the ability to ask questions correctly and to have answers which are valued and well memorized, oral communication trains memory and involves pupils into the dialogue with teacher, and knowledge itself is taken as a necessary element of the ethical way of life rather than just as additional bit of information. (shrink)

An Italian abstract of my thesis, which contains an interpretation of the most important issues of Anaxagoras' philosophy and the early history of his reception (among his disciples, the Academy and, prominently, Aristotle).

Aristotle introduced in the history of the reception of Anaxagoras the term “homoiomerous.” This word refers to substances whose parts are similar to each other and to the whole. Although Aristotle’s explanations can be puzzling, the term “homoiomerous” may explain an authentic aspect of Anaxagoras’ doctrine reflected in the fragments of his work. Perhaps one should find a specific meaning for the term “homoiomerous” in Anaxagoras, somewhat different from the one present in Aristotle. This requires a review of the sense (...) of the two terms involved in it: “homoios” and “moira.” In other words, the following questions should be answered: what realities are named parts and to what whole do they belong? On the other hand, which similarity do they have to each another and to the whole? The author concludes that the parts are “all things,” which resemble each other and the universe as a whole because, according to Anaxagoras, they are all composed of all things. (shrink)

Medieval accounts of diachronically unified consciousness have been overlooked by contemporary readers, because medieval thinkers have a unique and unexpected way of setting up the problem. This paper examines the approach to diachronically unified consciousness that is found in Augustine’s and Aquinas’s treatments of memory. For Augustine, although the mind is “distended” by time, it remains resilient, stretching across disparate moments to unify past, present, and future in a single personal present. Despite deceptively different phrasing, Aquinas develops a remarkably similar (...) view when, in order to accommodate Aristotle’s view of memory to Augustine’s, he insists that an implicit self-awareness “time-stamps” all intellectual acts. According to their shared approach, diachronic unified consciousness is the result of the curious way in which the mind is both drawn into and transcends the temporal succession of its own acts. (shrink)

Many philosophers and psychologists have attempted to elucidate the nature of mental representation by appealing to notions like isomorphism or abstract structural resemblance. The ‘structural representations’ that these theorists champion are said to count as representations by virtue of functioning as internal models of distal systems. In his 2007 book, Representation Reconsidered, William Ramsey endorses the structural conception of mental representation, but uses it to develop a novel argument against representationalism, the widespread view that cognition essentially involves the manipulation of (...) mental representations. Ramsey argues that although theories within the ‘classical’ tradition of cognitive science once posited structural representations, these theories are being superseded by newer theories, within the tradition of connectionism and cognitive neuroscience, which rarely if ever appeal to structural representations. Instead, these theories seem to be explaining cognition by invoking so-called ‘receptor representations’, which, Ramsey claims, aren’t genuine representations at all—despite being called representations, these mechanisms function more as triggers or causal relays than as genuine stand-ins for distal systems. I argue that when the notions of structural and receptor representation are properly explicated, there turns out to be no distinction between them. There only appears to be a distinction between receptor and structural representations because the latter are tacitly conflated with the ‘mental models’ ostensibly involved in offline cognitive processes such as episodic memory and mental imagery. While structural representations might count as genuine representations, they aren’t distinctively mental representations, for they can be found in all sorts of non-intentional systems such as plants. Thus to explain the kinds of offline cognitive capacities that have motivated talk of mental models, we must develop richer conceptions of mental representation than those provided by the notions of structural and receptor representation. (shrink)

Aristotle introduced in the history of the reception of Anaxagoras the term ‘homoiomerous’. This word refers to substances whose parts are similar to each other and to the whole. Although Aristotle’s explanations can be puzzling, the term ‘homoiomerous’ may explain an authentic aspect of Anaxagoras’ doctrine reflected in the fragments of his work. Perhaps one should find a specific meaning for the term ‘homoiomerous’ in Anaxagoras, somewhat different from the one present in Aristotle. This requires a review of the sense (...) of the two terms involved in it: ‘homoios’ and ‘moira’. In other words, the following questions should be answered: what realities are named parts and to what whole they belong? On the other hand, which similarity do they have to each another and to the whole? The author concludes that the parts are “all things,” which resemble each other and the universe as a whole because, according to Anaxagoras, they are all composed of all things. (shrink)

The notion of habit used in neuroscience is an inheritance from a particular theoretical origin, whose main source is William James. Thus, habits have been characterized as rigid, automatic, unconscious, and opposed to goal-directed actions. This analysis leaves unexplained several aspects of human behavior and cognition where habits are of great importance. We intend to demonstrate the utility that another philosophical conception of habit, the Aristotelian, may have for neuroscientific research. We first summarize the current notion of habit in neuroscience, (...) its philosophical inspiration and the problems that arise from it, mostly centered on the sharp distinction between goal-directed actions and habitual behavior. We then introduce the Aristotelian view and we compare it with that of William James. For Aristotle, a habit is an acquired disposition to perform certain types of action. If this disposition involves an enhanced cognitive control of actions, it can be considered a “habit-as-learning”. The current view of habit in neuroscience, which lacks cognitive control and we term “habit-as-routine”, is also covered by the Aristotelian conception. He classifies habits into three categories: (1) theoretical, or the retention of learning understood as “knowing that x is so”; (2) behavioral, through which the agent achieves a rational control of emotion-permeated behavior (“knowing how to behave”); and (3) technical or learned skills (“knowing how to make or to do”). Finally, we propose new areas of research where this “novel” conception of habit could serve as a framework concept, from the cognitive enrichment of actions to the role of habits in pathological conditions. In all, this contribution may shed light on the understanding of habits as an important feature of human action. Habits, viewed as a cognitive enrichment of behavior, are a crucial resource for understanding human learning and behavioral plasticity. (shrink)

In his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, Nicole Oresme raises a question that he is apparently the first to ask in these terms, in such a context: do all beings have the desire to persevere into being? Before him, this question is not found in any of the medieval commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics. But after him it became canonical until at least the 16th century, since it can be found in Pietro Pomponazzi’s works for example. The novelty here consists in questioning (...) the validity of Averroes’ thesis, in his own commentary on the Physics, according to which all beings have the desire to persist into being, using the Augustinian analysis of voluntary death and suicide. How can we explain that one can freely put an end to his days if he is naturally inclined by a desire for life and even for eternity? Oresme’s solution consists in justifying not only the possibility, but also the moral obligation to accept death under certain conditions. In most cases, we do not really want to die. The desperate man wishes to cancel his misfortune and the heroic man who sacrifices himself for his country wishes to immortalize himself in the memory of other men. From a moral point of view, Nicole Oresme justifies only one case of voluntary death: that of individual sacrifice for the common good. The aim of this paper is to analyze precisely this important turning point in the long history of the notion of conatus in the West by comparing this quaestio from the commentary on the Physics with the glosses that accompany the French translation of the Nicomachean Ethics realised by Oresme at the court of Charles V. (shrink)

This book tells the story of modern ethics, namely the story of a discourse that, after the Renaissance, went through a methodological revolution giving birth to Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s new science of natural law, leaving room for two centuries of explorations of the possible developments and implications of this new paradigm, up to the crisis of the Eighties of the eighteenth century, a crisis that carried a kind of mitosis, the act of birth of both basic paradigms of the two (...) following centuries: Kantian ethics and utilitarianism. The new science of natural law carried a fresh start for ethics, resulting from a mixture of the Old and the New. It was, as suggested by Schneewind, an attempt at rescuing the content of Scholastic and Stoic doctrines on a new methodological basis. The former was the claim of existence of objective and universal moral laws; the latter was the self-aware attempt at justifying a minimal kernel of such laws facing skeptical doubt. What Bentham and Kant did was precisely carrying this strategy further on, even if restructuring it each of them around one out of two alternative basic claims. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics of the Enlightenment attacked both not on their alleged failure in carrying out their own projects, but precisely on having adopted Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s project. What counter-enlightenment has been unable to spell out is which alternative project could be carried out facing the modern condition of pluralism, while on the contrary, if we takes a closer look at developments in twentieth-century ethics or at on-going discussions on practical issues, we might feel inclined to believe that Grotius’s and Pufendorf’s project is as up-to-date as ever. -/- Table of Contents -/- Preface I. Fathers of the Reformation and Schoolmen 1.1. Luther: passive justice and the good deeds; 1.2. Calvin: voluntarism and predestination; 1.3. Baroque Scholasticism; 1.4. Casuistry and Institutiones morales -/- II Neo-Platonists, neo-Stoics, neo-Sceptics 2.1. Aristotelian, neo-Platonic, neo-Epicurean and neo-Cynic Humanists; 2.2. Oeconomica and the art of living; 2.3. Neo-Stoics; 2.4. Neo-Sceptics; 2.5. Moralistic literature -/- III Neo-Augustinians 3.l. The Jansenists on natura lapsa, sufficient grace, pure love; 3.2. Nicole on the impossibility of self-knowledge; 3.3. Nicole on self-love and charity; 3.4. Nicole against civic virtue, for Christian civility; 3.5. Malebranche on general laws and necessary evil; 3.6. Malebranche on Neo-Augustinianism and Platonism. -/- IV Grotius, Pufendorf and the new moral science 4.1. Grotius against Aristotle and the sceptics; 4.2. Mersenne and Gassendi; 4.3. Descartes on ethics as the last branch of philosophy’s tree; 4.4. Hobbes on scepticism and the new moral science; 4.5. Spinoza on the new moral science as a descriptive science;4.6. Locke on voluntarism and probabilism; 4.7. Pufendorf on natural law as an exact science; 4.8. Pufendorf on physical and moral entities; 10. Pufendorf on self-preservation -/- V The empiricist version of the new moral science: from Cumberland to Paley 5.1. Cumberland against Hobbesian voluntarism; 5.2. Cumberland and theological consequentialism; 5.3. Cumberland on universal benevolence and self-love; 5.4. Shaftesbury on the moral sense; 5.5. Hutcheson on natural law and moral faculties; 5.6. Gay, Brown, Paley and theological consequentialism. -/- VI The rationalist version of the new moral science: from Cudworth to Price 6.1. The Cambridge Platonists; 6.2. Shaftesbury on the moral sense; 6.3. Butler and a third way between voluntarism and scepticism; 6.4. Price and the rational character of moral truths; -/- VII Leibniz’s compromise between the new moral science and Aristotelianism 1.Leibniz against voluntarism; 2.Leibniz against the division between the physical and the moral good; 3.Leibniz on la place d’autrui and theological consequentialism; 4.Thomasius, Wolff, Crusius -/- VIII French eighteenth-century philosophers without the new moral science 8.1. The genealogy of our ideas of virtue and vice; 8.2. Maupertuis and moral arithmetic 8.3. The philosophes and the harmony of interests; 8.4. Rousseau on corruption, self-love, and virtue; 8.5. Sade on the merits of vice -/- IX Experimental moral science: Hume and Adam Smith 9.1. Mandeville’s paradox; 9.2. Hutcheson on the law of nature and moral faculties; 9.3. Hume on experimental moral philosophy and the intermediate principles; 9.4. Hume’s Law; 9.5. Hume on the fellow-feeling; 9.6. Hume on natural and artificial virtues and disinterested pleasure for utility; 9.7. Adam Smith’s anti-realist metaethics; 9.8. Adam Smith on self-deception and the paradox of happiness; 9.9. Adam Smith on sympathy and the impartial spectator; 9.10. Adam Smith on the twofold criterion for moral judgement and its paradox; 9.11. Reid on the refutation of scepticism and the self-evidence of duty -/- X Kantian ethics 10.1. Kantian metaethics: moral epistemology; 10.2. Kantian metaethics: moral ontology; 10.3. Kantian metaethics: moral psychology; 10.4. Kantian normative ethics; 10.5. Kant on the impracticability of applied ethics; 10.6. Kantian moral anthropology; 10.7. Civilisation and moralisation; 10.8. Theology on a moral basis and the origins of evil; 10.9. Fichte and the transformation of theoretical philosophy into practical philosophy XI Bentham and utilitarianism 11.1. Bentham’s linguistic theory; 11.2. Bentham’s moral ontology, psychology, and theory of action; 11.3. The principle of greatest happiness; 11.4. The critique of religious ethics; 11.5. The new morality; 11.6. Interest and duty; 11.7. Virtues; 11.8. Private ethics and legislation -/- XII Followers of the Enlightenment: liberal Judaism and Liberal Theology 12.1. Mendelssohn; 12.2. Salomon Maimon; 12.3. Haskalā and liberal Judaism; 12.4. Liberal Theology. -/- XIII Counter-Enlighteners 13.1.Romanticism and the fulfilment of individuality as the Summum Bonum; 13.2. Hegel on history as the making of liberty; 13.3. Hegel on the unhappy consciousness and the beautiful soul; 13.4. Hegel on Morality and Sittlichkeit; 13.5. Marx on ideology, alienation, and praxis; 13.6. Schopenhauer on compassion; 13.7. Kierkegaard on faith beyond ethics. -/- XIV Followers of the Enlightenment: intuitionists and utilitarian 14.1 Whewell‘s criticism of utilitarianism; 14.2 Whewell on morality and the philosophy of morality; 14.3 Whewell on the Supreme Norm; 14.4 Whewell on the conflict between duties; 14.5 Mill and the proof of the principle of utility; 14.6 Mill’s eudemonistic utilitarianism; 14.7 Mill on rules -/- XV Followers of the Enlightenment: neo-Kantians and positivists 15.1. French spiritualism; 15.2. Neo-Kantians: the Marburg school; 15.3. Neo-Kantians: the Marburg school; 15.4. Comte’s positivism and the invention of altruism; 15.5. Social Darwinism; 15.6. Wundt and an ethic of humankind -/- XVI Post-enlighteners: Sidgwick 16.1. Criticism of intuitionism; 16.2. On ethical egoism; 16.3. Criticism of utilitarianism -/- XVII Post-enlighteners: Durkheim 17.1. Sociology as physics of customs; 17.2. Morality as physics of customs and as practical science; 17.3. On Kantian ethics and utilitarianism; 17.4. The variability of moralities;17.5. Social solidarity as end and justification of morality; 17.6. Secular morality as “sociodicy”; XVIII Post-enlighteners: Nietzsche 18.1. On the Dionysian; 18.2. On the deconstruction of the world of values 18.3 On the twofold genealogy of moralities; 18.4. On ascetics and nihilism; 18.5. Normative ethics of self-fulfilment -/- Bibliography / Index of names / Index of concepts -/- . (shrink)

Modern physics has cast doubt on Newton's idea of particles with definite properties. Do we have to go back to Aristotle for a new understanding of the ultimate nature of substance? If we ask, `what is the nature of substance?', we might be told that this substance is salt, that one is copper, or that the atomic nucleus is a mixture of protons and neutrons. But what are all these substances? What do they have in common which makes them substances? (...) We don't seem to think that such things as colours, numbers, or shapes are by themselves `substantial enough' to be substances in their own right. We therefore change our question to `what is it to be a substance?', or to `what is the ultimate nature of the simplest substances?'. (shrink)

The study of animal cognition raises profound questions about the minds of animals and philosophy of mind itself. Aristotle argued that humans are the only animal to laugh, but in recent experiments rats have also been shown to laugh. In other experiments, dogs have been shown to respond appropriately to over two hundred words in human language. In this introduction to the philosophy of animal minds Kristin Andrews introduces and assesses the essential topics, problems and debates as they cut across (...) animal cognition and philosophy of mind. She addresses the following key topics: what is cognition, and what is it to have a mind? What questions should we ask to determine whether behaviour has a cognitive basis? the science of animal minds explained: ethology, behaviourist psychology, and cognitive ethology rationality in animals animal consciousness: what does research into pain and the emotions reveal? What can empirical evidence about animal behaviour tell us about philosophical theories of consciousness? does animal cognition involve belief and concepts; do animals have a ‘Language of Thought’? animal communication other minds: do animals attribute ‘mindedness’ to other creatures? moral reasoning and ethical behaviour in animals animal cognition and memory. Extensive use of empirical examples and case studies is made throughout the book. These include Cheney and Seyfarth’s ververt monkey research, Thorndike’s cat puzzle boxes, Jensen’s research into humans and chimpanzees and the ultimatum game, Pankseep and Burgdorf’s research on rat laughter, and Clayton and Emery’s research on memory in scrub-jays. Additional features such as chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary make this an indispensable introduction to those teaching philosophy of mind, animal cognition. It will also be an excellent resource for those in fields such as ethology, biology and psychology. (shrink)

This paper investigates Péter Pázmány’s theory of mixtures from his exegesis of Meteorologica IV, in the context of sixteenth-century scholarship on Aristotle’s Meteorologica. It aims to contribute to a discussion of Anneliese Maier’s thesis concerning the incompatibility between hylomorphism and the theory of elements in the Aristotelian tradition. It presents two problems: the placement of Meteorologica IV in the Jesuit cursus on physics and the conceptualization of putrefaction as a type of substantial mutation. Through an analysis of these issues, it (...) shows how sixteenth-century exegesis imposes the hylomorphic thesis onto the subject matter of meteorology and how the hylomorphic theory of substantial change can be adapted in order to accommodate the theory of elements. The case being made is that Meteorologica is a privileged place where hylomorphism and the theory of elements meet and that the late Aristotelian theory of mixtures sought to accommodate both theories of material substance. (shrink)

According to Greimas, the semiotic square is far more than a heuristic for semantic and literary analysis. It represents the generative “deep structure” of human culture and cognition which “define the fundamental mode of existence of an individual or of a society, and subsequently the conditions of existence of semiotic objects” (Greimas & Rastier 1968: 48). The potential truth of this hypothesis, much less the conditions and implications of taking it seriously (as a truth claim), have received little attention in (...) the literature. In response, this paper traces the history and development of the logical square of opposition from Aristotle to Greimas and beyond, to propose that the relations modelled in these diagrams are embodied relations rooted in gestalt memories of kinesthesia and proprioception from which we derive basic structural awareness of opposition and contrast such as verticality, bilaterality, transversality, markedness and analogy. To make this argument, the paper draws on findings in the phenomenology of movement (Sheets-Johnstone 2011a, 2011b, 2012, Pelkey 2014), recent developments in the analysis of logical opposition (Beziau & Payette 2008), recent scholarship in (post)Greimasian semiotics (Corso 2014, Broden 2000) and prescient insights from Greimas himself (esp. 1968, 1984). The argument of the paper is further supported through a visual and textual content analysis of a popular music video, both to highlight relationships between the semiotic square and mundane cultural ideologies and to show how these relationships might be traced to the marked symmetries of bodily movement. In addition to illustrating the enduring relevance of Greimasean thought, the paper further illustrates the neglected relevance that embodied chiasmus holds for developments in anthropology, linguistics and the other cognitive sciences. (shrink)

J. N. (Jitendra Nath) Mohanty (1928–2023). -/- Professor J. N. Mohanty has characterized his life and philosophy as being both “inside” and “outside” East and West, i.e., inside and outside traditions of India and those of the West, living in both India and United States: geographically, culturally, and philosophically; while also traveling the world: Melbourne to Moscow. Most of his academic time was spent teaching at the University of Oklahoma, The New School Graduate Faculty, and finally Temple University. Yet his (...) preeminent work in Husserlian phenomenology developed alongside his eminent work in Indian philosophy: describing his interests as “a fusion of disparate horizons.” -/- J. N. Mohanty was born September 26, 1928, in Cuttack (Odisha, East India). After graduating from high school, he went on to study both Indian and Western philosophy in Calcutta, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees. There he read Whitehead and Kant’s First Critique; although he wanted to include mathematics in his curriculum, he was led instead to include Indian philosophy and Sanskrit. On the shelves of his teacher, Ras Vihar Das, he came upon a copy of the English translation (Ideas I, 1931) of Edmund Husserl’s classic Ideen I (1913), which presented Husserl’s ground-breaking conception of phenomenology. In 1952–1954 he left India for the first time, reaching Göttingen to study mathematics and philosophy, which earned him a doctorate in mathematics and “philosophy of mathematical sciences” (in his own words). In Göttingen, Mohanty found the powerful mathematical world that Husserl himself had earlier interacted with, where several Husserl students had formed the Göttingen school of phenomenology. During these years Mohanty studied primarily mathematics, alongside Kant and also Vedic Sanskrit. From his friend Günter Patzig, interpreter of Aristotle and Frege, Mohanty was drawn to Frege in relation to mathematical logic. He attended lectures of Heidegger, intrigued by his ontological thinking. Yet, despite the Husserlian legacy, Mohanty was completely self-taught in his studies of Husserl (as he has reported). With a doctorate in mathematics, and ideas from Kant and Frege in his philosophical background, Mohanty set about crafting his own conception of philosophy grounded in phenomenology, drawing on Husserl’s extensive work, critically sifting through Husserl’s texts and their emerging concepts of intentionality, meaning, subject, intersubjectivity, and world. In between he wrote his first book-length study: on phenomenological insights in Nicolai Hartmann and A. N. Whitehead (1958). -/- Over many decades Mohanty formulated and argued, in analytical detail, for a conception of phenomenology and its place in philosophy, later presented in a clear and concise book titled Transcendental Phenomenology: An Analytic Account (1989). Over these very decades the same scholar explored classical and recent Indian philosophy, thinking through kindred ideas of consciousness, self, and knowledge drawn from the Indian philosophical contexts. While writing on Nyāya theory of truth, he also pondered whether the world and finite individual are illusory or real, and whether Marx, Arendt, Gandhi (whom he heard speak in Calcutta), or Vinoba Bhave (with whom he marched across India for the land-grant movement) could best navigate post-Independent India’s social and svarāj or self-rule reforms. The two Mohantys, thinking through a vision of self and world, turned out to be “non-different” or “non-dual” as they each practiced critical phenomenology from both inside and outside the respective philosophical and cultural traditions. Numerous students, fellows, and colleagues or collaborators have benefited immensely from this infusion and unified approach to diversity in philosophical thought. In the 2000s, moving into retirement, Mohanty wrote two long books devoted to his understanding of Husserl and phenomenology and the calling of philosophy itself. This two-volume study shows Mohanty himself thinking through Husserl, critically, in The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: A Historical Introduction (2008), and Edmund Husserl’s Freiburg Years: 1916–1938. As Mohanty worked on Husserl, he carefully indicated where he agreed and where he rejected or changed ideas, all part of his practice in phenomenology of “description and interpretation.” It was the same pattern he used in addressing the thought of Husserl vis-à-vis Kant or Frege or even Quine. -/- As Mohanty developed his understanding of phenomenology over the years, he wrote books on theory of meaning and the concept of intentionality, developing a model of ideal meaning and its foundation in intentionality, drawing on Husserl’s results. He followed these with the book Husserl and Frege (1982), linking the thought of those foundational figures for the “continental” and “analytic” traditions, respectively, in twentieth-century Western philosophy. Over his long career Mohanty addressed both traditions in his clear and accessible writing style. While developing his views on phenomenology, Mohanty regularly looked to “Husserl and his others,” evaluating views in Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and then Derrida and others in the wake of Husserl. With his background in Kant, Mohanty also looked toward Heidegger and Hegel in relation to Husserl’s later work in the Crisis (1935–38). Similarly, he looked to contemporary analytic philosophers, adjudicating his own, oft-wise Husserlian views in relation to Frege, Nagel, and others. Amid his active scholarly career, Mohanty co-founded the journal Husserl Studies, and was editorial advisor to Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, Philosophy East & West, Journal of Indian Philosophy, Sophia, among others. -/- Yet all this while Mohanty was also thinking and writing about Indian philosophy and its relation to phenomenology. In his own retrospective, Indian philosophy is “the permanent background” of his Husserlian thinking, while Kant is the recurrent Western background of his Husserlian phenomenology. Mohanty’s form of “transcendental phenomenology” evolved, in his own perspective, against the background of his studies of Navya-Nyāya on logic and Vedānta on consciousness, in Indian philosophy, and against the background of Kant’s First Critique on the transcendental, in Western philosophy. Accordingly, Mohanty’s study of logical form and of the intentionality of consciousness seeks a fusion of East and West in the conception of transcendental phenomenology. (Cf. Mohanty’s apt response to critics in The Empirical and the Transcendental (2000).) Even in the context of North American Husserl scholarship, Mohanty has exercised an earnest fusion of East and West. For the so-called East Coast and West Coast interpretations of Husserl’s crucial notion of noema both find a sympathetic spirit in J. N. Mohanty’s careful and nuanced interpretation of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. With Mohanty the two faces of the noema are the logical (Fregean) and the phenomenal (Kantian), and these views of intentional structure join in consciousness—in a way resonant with Indian thought. -/- - David Woodruff Smith (UC Irvine) and Purushottama Bilimoria (SFSU, San Francisco; University of Melbourne) -/- For photo of Prof Mohanty visit APA online memorial_minutes2023 Courtesy of APA Memorial Minutes (& Proceedings) 2023 . (shrink)

Historical Cognitive Science I am lucky to strike three reviewers who extract so clearly my book's spirit as well as its substance. They all both accept and act on my central methodological assumption; that detailed historical research, and consideration of difficult contemporary questions about cognition and culture, can be mutually illuminating. It's gratifying to find many themes which recur in different contexts throughout _Philosophy and Memory_ _Traces_ so well articulated here. The reviews catch my desires to interweave discussion of cognitive (...) theories of memory with moral questions of psychological control and self-mastery, to evoke the virtues and the pleasures of strange, baroque beliefs about fickle 'animal spirits' coursing through the nerves and the brain, to demonstrate that mechanistic explanation (even in its blunt old Cartesian form) can acknowledge complexity, and to develop scientific conceptions of dynamic memory traces and representations which can survive uncharitable philosophical criticism. The book's insistent interdisciplinarity is just an inchoate quest to acknowledge the daunting variety of the phenomena: remembering is both natural and cultural, and is studied by narrative theorists as well as neurobiologists, by physicists as well as psychologists. By fusing the rangy detail of a history of early modern neurophysiology with the committed, even gullible fervor of a defence of 'new connectionist' cognitive science, I wanted to pull out the carpet from all those who are happy to let 'scientific' and 'cultural' approaches to the mind run along independently. Once this general project is given space, as it is by all three reviewers, we can get down to specifics. (shrink)

“Second-order Logic” in Anderson, C.A. and Zeleny, M., Eds. Logic, Meaning, and Computation: Essays in Memory of Alonzo Church. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001. Pp. 61–76. -/- Abstract. This expository article focuses on the fundamental differences between second- order logic and first-order logic. It is written entirely in ordinary English without logical symbols. It employs second-order propositions and second-order reasoning in a natural way to illustrate the fact that second-order logic is actually a familiar part of our traditional intuitive logical framework and (...) that it is not an artificial formalism created by specialists for technical purposes. To illustrate some of the main relationships between second-order logic and first-order logic, this paper introduces basic logic, a kind of zero-order logic, which is more rudimentary than first-order and which is transcended by first-order in the same way that first-order is transcended by second-order. The heuristic effectiveness and the historical importance of second-order logic are reviewed in the context of the contemporary debate over the legitimacy of second-order logic. Rejection of second-order logic is viewed as radical: an incipient paradigm shift involving radical repudiation of a part of our scientific tradition, a tradition that is defended by classical logicians. But it is also viewed as reactionary: as being analogous to the reactionary repudiation of symbolic logic by supporters of “Aristotelian” traditional logic. But even if “genuine” logic comes to be regarded as excluding second-order reasoning, which seems less likely today than fifty years ago, its effectiveness as a heuristic instrument will remain and its importance for understanding the history of logic and mathematics will not be diminished. Second-order logic may someday be gone, but it will never be forgotten. Technical formalisms have been avoided entirely in an effort to reach a wide audience, but every effort has been made to limit the inevitable sacrifice of rigor. People who do not know second-order logic cannot understand the modern debate over its legitimacy and they are cut-off from the heuristic advantages of second-order logic. And, what may be worse, they are cut-off from an understanding of the history of logic and thus are constrained to have distorted views of the nature of the subject. As Aristotle first said, we do not understand a discipline until we have seen its development. It is a truism that a person's conceptions of what a discipline is and of what it can become are predicated on their conception of what it has been. (shrink)

¿Cuál es el origen de todas las cosas? A pesar de su gran diversidad, ¿tienen una raíz común? ¿Tuvo el mundo un comienzo? ¿Cómo surgió la vida en la tierra? Tales preguntas, que aún provocan a los científicos, fueron formuladas por vez primera por los primeros pensadores griegos. Anaxágoras responde a ellas poniendo al inicio del tiempo una confusa mezcla de todas las cosas sobre la cual obró un ser llamado Intelecto, quien dio lugar al orden del mundo que hoy (...) contemplamos. Con ello, este autor presocrático comienza a plantear algunas cuestiones filosóficas que perdurarán hasta nuestros días: la constitución de la materia, la naturaleza del conocimiento sensorial e intelectual, la intervención de Dios en el mundo… Este libro pretende analizar cuidadosamente la filosofía de Anaxágoras prestando atención a los dos aspectos principales de su doctrina: la mezcla e Intelecto. Su comprensión de la realidad física como una mezcla tiene consecuencias filosóficas de gran interés y constituye quizá la más sugestiva entre las primeras concepciones de la materia. Por otro lado, Intelecto es, según Anaxágoras, quien provoca la variedad de los seres a través del movimiento. Así, nuestro filósofo distingue del sustrato material la causa de sus cambios, la cual se hallaría, además, dotada de inteligencia. Tales rasgos de la filosofía de Anaxágoras atrajeron la atención de los grandes filósofos clásicos, particularmente de Aristóteles. El segundo gran objetivo de este libro es, pues, recorrer el camino por el cual discurrieron las enseñanzas de Anaxágoras, desde que fueron expuestas por él en Atenas, justo durante el siglo que definió la preponderancia intelectual de dicha polis durante siglos, hasta que llegaron a oídos de Aristóteles, el testigo más determinante para comprender a Anaxágoras. (shrink)

In late Renaissance medicine, the example of digestion was frequently invoked to prove the elemental composition of the human body. Food was considered as being decomposed in its first elements by the stomach, and digested into a thick juice, which was assimilated by the liver and the body parts. Such a process points to the structure of the human body into four elements that are transformed into different types of humors during several stages of “concoction”. This chapter examines the Galenic (...) interpretation of digestion expounded by the French physician Jean Fernel (1497–1558) in his Physiologia (1567). In this treatise, Fernel states the body composition into elemental portions, while stressing the role of the “innate heat” as the physiological counterpart of the body’s essence or “substantial form”. He applies this view in his account of digestion, where he states that the conversion of food follows the rule of “mixture”. This chapter aims to explore how Fernel applies his interpretation of elements and innate heat to the process of digestion, as well as his sources in Galen’s De facultatibus naturalibus, Avicenna’s Canon and Aristotle’s Meteorologica. It first examines the role of the natural soul and its “nourishing” faculties in nutrition as a physiological function. It then considers the role of elements, humors and innate heat during the “concoction” of food in the stomach, liver and veins. (shrink)

According to one interpretation of Aristotle’s famous thesis, to say that action is the conclusion of practical reasoning is to say that action is itself a judgment about what to do. A central motivation for the thesis is that it suggests a path for understanding the non-observational character of practical knowledge. If actions are judgments, then whatever explains an agent’s knowledge of the relevant judgment can explain her knowledge of the action. I call the approach to action that accepts Aristotle’s (...) thesis so understood Normativism. There are many reasons to doubt Normativism. My aim in this paper is to defend Normativism from a pair of arguments that purport to show that a normative judgment could not constitute an event in material reality and also the knowledge of such a happening. Both highlight a putative mismatch between the natures of, on the one hand, an agent’s knowledge of her normative judgment and, on the other, her knowledge of her own action. According to these objections, knowledge of action includes (a) perceptual knowledge and (b) knowledge of what one has already done. But knowledge of a normative judgment includes neither. Hence knowledge of action cannot simply be knowledge of a normative judgment. (shrink)

Is it not surprising that we look with so much pleasure and emotion at works of art that were made thousands of years ago? Works depicting people we do not know, people whose backgrounds are usually a mystery to us, who lived in a very different society and time and who, moreover, have been ‘frozen’ by the artist in a very deliberate pose. It was the Classical Greek philosopher Aristotle who observed in his Poetics that people could apparently be moved (...) even by the imitation of a person or an act. And although we are usually well aware that it is a simulacrum, not a real situation, it nevertheless sometimes seems as if we ourselves are standing there on the stage or in the painting, so intense and emotional is our response, even though we are just spectators. Aristotle concludes from this that we have intellectual capacities which allow us put ourselves in another’s place and consequently to react to simulated situations as though they are actually happening to us, here and now. In this process, he contends, observation, memory, imagination and emotions are crucial elements. In the past it was not customary to invoke human mental faculties to explain our response to works of art. The Ancient Greeks, after all, knew little about the human body or brain and usually referred to the extended world of the gods in their endeavours to comprehend the ‘inner world’ of human beings. In our time the situation is completely different—such an allusion to the brain no longer surprises us. Whether it is about the mystery of the consciousness, the question of free will or accounts of bizarre psychological aberrations or disorders, we have become accustomed to references to parts of the brain, to images of brain scans, to reports about neural networks and the like. However, because there are so many factors that play a part in our appreciation of works of art we need a complex explanation for it, and it is not enough to look only at certain properties of the brain that are determined by evolution. Those properties are shared by every human being, and so are rather useless in explaining people’s different reactions to the same work of art. Evidently the brains of individuals differ so much that they make it possible for people to respond differently to one and the same artwork. This, of course, raises questions concerning the painted emotions that can be seen in this exhibition. Virtually everyone, after all, is fascinated by such paintings and usually recognizes the emotions they represent. The reactions to these painted emotions are also often similar. This is probably why artworks like this are generally highly valued, then and now, here and elsewhere: from the enigmatically smiling Egyptian Queen Nefertiti and the startled Rembrandt to a seemingly despairing African mask. Aristotle observed that in the theatre players imitate actions that are associated with emotions in a number of ways and that these emotions are shared in a particular fashion by the playwright, the actors and the audience. The audience may even be carried away by these emotions to such an extent that they are in a sense purged of them and can subsequently leave the theatre relieved. Are such emotional reactions perhaps related to the fact that emotions are universal and that brains respond similarly to them? Is this why we can so readily identify painted emotions? May we therefore also assume that the properties of the brain determined by evolution help us to explain these emotions? In answering these questions we shall discuss a number of insights into emotions in psychology and brain science and explore some theories about the possible function of emotions and their expression. (shrink)

A new translation and edition of Aristotle's Protrepticus (with critical comments on the fragments) -/- Welcome -/- The Protrepticus was an early work of Aristotle, written while he was still a member of Plato's Academy, but it soon became one of the most famous works in the whole history of philosophy. Unfortunately it was not directly copied in the middle ages and so did not survive in its own manuscript tradition. But substantial fragments of it have been preserved in several (...) works by Iamblichus of Chalcis, a third century A.D. neo-Pythagorean philosopher and educator. On the basis of a close study of Iamblichus' extensive use and excerption of Aristotle's Protrepticus, it is possible to reconstruct the backbone of the lost work, and then to flesh it out with the other surviving reports about the work from antiquity (for example in Alexander of Aphrodisias and other ancient commentators on Aristotle). It is also possible to identify several papyrus fragments of the work, and many references and literary allusions in later authors, especially Cicero, whose own lost dialogue Hortensius was a defense of philosophy modeleld on Aristotle's. (shrink)

This paper investigates the historical origin and ancestors of typicality, which is now a central concept in Boltzmannian Statistical Mechanics and Bohmian Mechanics. Although Ludwig Boltzmann did not use the word typicality, its main idea, namely, that something happens almost always or is valid for almost all cases, plays a crucial role for his explanation of how thermodynamic systems approach equilibrium. At the beginning of the 20th century, the focus on almost always or almost everywhere was fruitful for developing measure (...) theory and probability theory. It was apparently Hugh Everett III who first mentioned typicality in physics in 1957 while searching for a justification of the Born rule in his interpretation of quantum mechanics. The historically closest concept before these developments is moral certainty, which was invented by the medieval French theologian Jean Gerson, and it became a standard concept at least until the Age of Enlightenment, when Jakob Bernoulli proved the Law of Large numbers. (shrink)

In Nicomachean Ethics 1. 7, Aristotle gives a definition of the human good, and he does so by means of the “ ergon argument.” I clear the way for a new interpretation of this argument by arguing that Aristotle does not think that the ergon of something is always the proper activity of that thing. Though he has a single concept of an ergon, Aristotle identifies the ergon of an X as an activity in some cases but a product in (...) others, depending on the sort of thing the X is—for while the ergon of the eye is seeing, the ergon of a sculptor is a sculpture. This alternative interpretation of Aristotle’s concept of an ergon allows the key explanatory middle term of the ergon argument to be what, I argue, it ought to be: “the best achievement of a human.”. (shrink)

What is the connection between the way we represent time and things in time, on the one hand, and our capacity to remember particular past events, on the other? This is the substantive question that has stood behind the project of putting together this volume. The methodological assumption that has informed this project is that any progress with the difficult and fascinating set of issues that are raised by this question must draw on the resources of various areas both in (...) philos- ophy and in psychology. (shrink)

This presentation includes a complete bibliography of John Corcoran’s publications devoted at least in part to Aristotle’s logic. Sections I–IV list 20 articles, 43 abstracts, 3 books, and 10 reviews. It starts with two watershed articles published in 1972: the Philosophy & Phenomenological Research article that antedates Corcoran’s Aristotle’s studies and the Journal of Symbolic Logic article first reporting his original results; it ends with works published in 2015. A few of the items are annotated with endnotes connecting them with (...) other work. In addition, Section V “Discussions” is a nearly complete secondary bibliography of works describing, interpreting, extending, improving, supporting, and criticizing Corcoran’s work: 8 items published in the 1970s, 22 in the 1980s, 39 in the 1990s, 56 in the 2000s, and 65 in the current decade. The secondary bibliography is annotated with endnotes: some simply quoting from the cited item, but several answering criticisms and identifying errors. As is evident from the Acknowledgements sections, all of Corcoran’s publications benefited from correspondence with other scholars, most notably Timothy Smiley, Michael Scanlan, and Kevin Tracy. All of Corcoran’s Greek translations were done in consultation with two or more classicists. Corcoran never published a sentence without discussing it with his colleagues and students. REQUEST: Please send errors, omissions, and suggestions. I am especially interested in citations made in non-English publications. (shrink)

JUNE 2015 UPDATE: A BIBLIOGRAPHY: JOHN CORCORAN’S PUBLICATIONS ON ARISTOTLE 1972–2015 By John Corcoran -/- This presentation includes a complete bibliography of John Corcoran’s publications relevant to his research on Aristotle’s logic. Sections I, II, III, and IV list 21 articles, 44 abstracts, 3 books, and 11 reviews. It starts with two watershed articles published in 1972: the Philosophy & Phenomenological Research article from Corcoran’s Philadelphia period that antedates his Aristotle studies and the Journal of Symbolic Logic article from his (...) Buffalo period first reporting his original results; it ends with works published in 2015. A few of the items are annotated as listed or with endnotes connecting them with other work and pointing out passages that in-retrospect are seen to be misleading and in a few places erroneous. In addition, Section V, “Discussions”, is a nearly complete secondary bibliography of works describing, interpreting, extending, improving, supporting, and criticizing Corcoran’s work: 8 items published in the 1970s, 23 in the 1980s, 42 in the 1990s, 56 in the 2000s, and 69 in the current decade. The secondary bibliography is also annotated as listed or with endnotes: some simply quoting from the cited item, but several answering criticisms and identifying errors. Section VI, “Alternatives”, lists recent works on Aristotle’s logic oblivious of Corcoran’s research and, more generally, of the Lukasiewicz-initiated tradition. As is evident from Section VII, “Acknowledgements”, Corcoran’s publications benefited from consultation with other scholars, most notably Timothy Smiley, Michael Scanlan, Roberto Torretti, and Kevin Tracy. All of Corcoran’s Greek translations were done in collaboration with two or more classicists. Corcoran never published a sentence without discussing it with his colleagues and students. -/- REQUEST: Please send errors, omissions, and suggestions. I am especially interested in citations made in non-English publications. Also, let me know of passages I should comment on. (shrink)

This paper compares two complementary theories, Simeonov’s Wandering Logic Intelligence and Ehresmann’s & Vanbremeersch’s Memory Evolutive Systems, in view of developing a common framework for the study of multiscale complex systems such as living systems. It begins by a brief summary of WLI and MES, then analyzes their resemblances and differences. Finally, the article provides an outlook for a future research.

A woman is listening to Sinatra before work. As she later describes it, ‘suddenly from nowhere I could hear my mother singing along to it … I was there again home again, hearing my mother … God knows why I should choose to remember that … then, to actually hear her and I had this image in my head … of being at home … with her singing away … like being transported back you know I got one of those (...) … like shivery feelings really suddenly’ (Anderson 2004, 9-10). An older couple, discussing their honeymoon forty years ago, each say that they can’t remember the show they saw, until through iterative, puzzled cross-cuing they finally get there – ‘Desert Song, that’s it’ (Harris et al 2011, 292). An elderly English veteran of a prisoner of war camp in Japan, finishing up morning tea with a young Japanese social scientist interested in reconciliation, suddenly calls out loudly - in Japanese - ‘stand to attention’. He stands to attention in front of her: like many of the men she interviews, he physically re-enacts fragments of that long-past world of the camp, bringing that absent past into this new present context with a visceral shock (Murakami 2001, 2012; Middleton & Brown 2005, 133-136). (shrink)