Smell 'sensations' are among the most mysterious of conscious experiences, and have been cited in defense of the thesis that the character of perceptual experience is independent of the physical events that seem to give rise to it. Here we review the scientific literature on olfaction, and we argue that olfaction has a distinctive profile in relation to the other modalities, on four counts: in the physical nature of the stimulus, in the sensorimotor interactions that characterize its use, in the (...) structure of its intramodal distinctions and in the functional role that it plays in people's behaviour. We present two thought experiments in which we detail what would be involved in transforming sounds into smells, and also smells into colours. Through these thought-experiments, we argue that the experiential character of smell derives precisely from the structural features of olfaction, and that an embodied account of olfactory phenomenology is called for. (shrink)

Within the ambit of modernity, "to be" a "person" means "to have" "a body." But what exactly do we mean when we say: ‘I have a body’? Who or what is this ‘I’ that ‘has’ ‘a body’ anyway? And how and why does this ‘having’, this possessing, of ‘a body’ confer legal and psychological personhood on us? Does such bodily possession necessarily define a mode of ‘self ownership’? Is distinguishing between the notions of ‘being an organism’, or even ‘being alive’, (...) and ‘having a body’ just a matter of semantics? Or are there pragmatic, bio-political consequences to the ways we construe our vitality and embodiment? Can thinking about ‘the body’ as a (or even, the) matter of ‘self possession’ tell us something interesting about how ‘personhood’ informs our lives? After all, what is ‘the nature’ of ‘the body’, if it can be possessed in such a manner? And does this proprietary way of thinking exhaust the possibilities for how we can imagine what it means to be an organism, a person, a citizen or a human? (shrink)

ABSTRACT In order to explore what it means to pursue philosophical investigations for theological reasons, this paper argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein continues and corrects Pseudo-Denys’ project in The Divine Names. I first argue that The Divine Names should be interpreted as attempting to render human thought transparent to the divine by relativizing our concepts. The success of this project is compromised because the concept of ‘unity’ is not relativized. I then develop the claim that Wittgenstein does relativize unity in a (...) similar way and for similar religious reasons to Pseudo-Denys. As such, he can be read as continuing and correcting the Pseudo-Dionysian project. I conclude by reflecting on several of this argument’s implications for the relationship between philosophy and Christian systematic theology. (shrink)

What might it mean to read video games as a source for critical theological reflection? This project explores the extent to which FromSoftware’s 2015 classic Bloodborne can be read in just this way for at least two reasons. Firstly, the game makes visible foundational but often taken-for-granted Christian themes, as well as their internal paradoxes. Secondly, Bloodborne’s gameplay is structured through these themes in ways that invite the player to take on a mode of theological reflection which allows them to (...) think creatively beyond the conditions giving rise to these paradoxes. (shrink)

The paper charts both the interpersonal connections between historical anarchist figures and the beat poets as well as the philosophical similarities between them. Almost all the beat poets were anarchists, though their politics was secondary to their attempts to transform consciousness. Among the anarchists, the romantic socialist Gustav Landauer, who was especially popular in post-war American anarchist circles, came closest to the political perspective of the beat poets. Like the beats, Landauer was a poet, a pacifist, an anarchist, a communitarian, (...) a romantic, and a mystic. In northern California, the circle of anarchists surrounding Kenneth Rexroth provided support and inspiration to the early beat movement. In New York, the beats had an affinity with anarchists such as David Thoreau Wieck and the publication "Why?" (later "Resistance"), as well as Dwight Macdonald's "politics" and Holley Cantine's "Retort". (shrink)

From famous figures in the history of philosophy to questions in religious theology to the relationship between knowledge and power, The Handy Western Philosophy Answer Book: Ancient Greek to Its Influence on Philosophy Today takes the sometimes esoteric ideas and the jumble of names and makes them easy to understand, enriching readers' lives and answering the question "What do the ancient Greek philosophers have to teach us about contemporary culture?".

Theorists such as Stuart Hall have problematised the idea that identity is something that remains essentially the same across time. Since doctrine has been cast as that which safeguards Christian identity, this provokes the question: what role can doctrine play if this is the case? Critiquing George Lindbeck's The Nature of Doctrine in light of Kathryn Tanner's work on rules suggests that doctrine cannot regulate, constitute or generate the necessary conditions for Christian identity. Doctrine can, however, still play a role (...) in generating Christian meaning without regulating identity by determining how concepts are formed in Christian community. (shrink)

A Study of Perennial Philosophy and Psychedelic Experience, with a Proposal to Revise W. T. Stace’s Core Characteristics of Mystical Experience ©Ed D’Angelo 2018 -/- Abstract -/- According to the prevailing paradigm in psychedelic research today, when used within an appropriate set and setting, psychedelics can reliably produce an authentic mystical experience. According to the prevailing paradigm, an authentic mystical experience is one that possesses the common or universal characteristics of mystical experience as identified by the philosopher W. T. Stace (...) in his 1960 work Mysticism and Philosophy. Stace’s common characteristics of mystical experience are the basis for the Hood Mysticism Questionnaire, which is the most widely used quantitative measure of mystical experience in experimental studies of psychedelic experience. In this paper, I trace the historical roots of Stace’s common characteristics of mystical experience back to Christian Neoplatonism and apophatic theology, and I trace those, in turn, back to Plato’s concept of the Good and to Aristotle’s concept of God as active intellect. I argue that Stace’s common characteristics of mystical experience are not universal or culturally invariant but are the product of a specifically Christian religious and moral tradition that has its roots in ancient Greek metaphysics. My paper concludes with a revised list of common characteristics of psychedelic experience that is a better candidate for a list of invariant structures of psychedelic experience than Stace’s common characteristics of Christian mystical experience. (shrink)

Hortense Spillers asserts the imperative for black writers to reconfigure the languages they inherit. One way of doing so is to craft counter-myths against dominative mythologies. Spillers casts myth as an integration of form and concept which overdetermines the significance of what it is used to talk about. One crucial effect of America’s racialising mythos has been to deny black women the ability to determine that significance. She then describes how this mythos is crafted through a double wounding that creates (...) at least two ‘interstices’—first between home and market, then between blackness and humanity—which are covered up by mythological terms. Finally, Spillers shows how counter-mythologies can be crafted by speaking from within these interstices to reconfigure the conditions of possibility governing meaningful speech, taking the 19th- century African-American preaching tradition as her example. The article concludes by reflecting on what it might mean to practice Christian theology as counter-mythology in light of Spillers’ work through a reading of Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker. (shrink)

It is unknown to what extent medical researchers generalize study findings beyond their samples when their sample size, sample diversity, or knowledge of conditions that support external validity do not warrant it. It is also unknown to what extent medical researchers describe their results with precise quantifications or unquantified generalizations, i.e., generics, that can obscure variations between individuals. We therefore systematically reviewed all prospective studies (n = 533) published in the top four highest ranking medical journals, Lancet, New England Journal (...) of Medicine (NEJM), Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and the British Medical Journal (BMJ), from January 2022 to May 2023. We additionally reviewed all NEJM Journal Watch clinical research summaries (n = 143) published during the same time. Of all research articles reporting prospective studies, 52.5% included generalizations beyond specific national study populations, with the numbers of articles with generics varying significantly between journals (JAMA = 12%; Lancet = 77%) (p < 0.001, V = 0.48). There was no evidence that articles containing broader generalizations or generics were correlated with larger or more nationally diverse samples. Moreover, only 10.2% of articles with generalizations beyond specific national populations reported external validity strengthening factors that could potentially support such extrapolations. There was no evidence that original research articles and NEJM Journal Watch summaries intended for practitioners differed in their use of broad generalizations, including generics. Finally, from the journal with the highest citation impact, articles containing broader conclusions were correlated with more citations. Since there was no evidence that studies with generalizations beyond specific national study populations or with generics were associated with larger, more nationally diverse samples, or with reports of population similarity that may permit extensions of conclusions, our findings suggest that the generalizations in many articles were insufficiently supported. Caution against overly broad generalizations in medical research is warranted. (shrink)

The War on Drugs has been waged primarily for cultural reasons, i.e., to enforce the Protestant Work Ethic. It does not serve a rational utilitarian function.

Whether collective agency is a coherent concept depends on the theory of agency that we choose to adopt. We argue that the enactive theory of agency developed by Barandiaran, Di Paolo and Rohde (2009) provides a principled way of grounding agency in biological organisms. However the importance of biological embodiment for the enactive approach might lead one to be skeptical as to whether artificial systems or collectives of individuals could instantiate genuine agency. To explore this issue we contrast the concept (...) of collective agency with multi-agent systems and multi-system agents, and argue that genuinely collective agents instantiate agency at both the collective level and at the level of the component parts. Developing the enactive model, we propose understanding agency – both at the level of the individual and of the collective – as spectra that are constituted by dimensions that vary across time. Finally, we consider whether collectives that are not merely metaphorically ‘agents’ but rather are genuinely agentive also instantiate subjectivity at the collective level. We propose that investigations using the perceptual crossing paradigm suggest that a shared lived perspective can indeed emerge but this should not be conflated with a collective first-person perspective, for which material integration in a living body may be required. (shrink)

This is a greatly expanded version of my article "Anarchism and the Beats," which was published in the book, The Philosophy of the Beats, by the University Press of Kentucky in 2012. It is both an historical and a philosophical analysis of the postwar American counterculture. It charts the historical origins of the postwar American counterculture from the anarchists and romantic poets of the early nineteenth century to a complex network of beat poets and pacifist anarchists in the early decades (...) after World War II. The beat poets understood themselves to be religious prophets of a new form of liberated consciousness. Poetry was both a means to achieve this new form of consciousness and a means to express that consciousness once it was achieved by other means including travel, psychedelic drugs, sex or meditation. The transformation of consciousness sought by the beats was therefore primarily religious in nature, not political or ideological. However, that does not mean that the beats believed that the transformation of consciousness they sought had no political or social implications. On the contrary, the beats were almost all anarchists. It merely means that, for them, political ideology follows consciousness, not the reverse. (shrink)

This is a 2020 revision of my 1988 dissertation "The Choreography of the Soul" with a new Foreword, a new Conclusion, a substantially revised Preface and Introduction, and many improvements to the body of the work. However, the thesis remains the same. A theory of consciousness and trance states--including psychedelic experience--is developed. Consciousness can be analyzed into two distinct but generally interrelated systems, which I call System X and System Y. System X is the emotional-visceral-kinaesthetic body. System X is a (...) harmonic system of "endokinetic" (internal bodily) and "ectokinetic" (emotionally expressive) movement. System Y is a "teleokinetic" (goal directed) system that includes language, cognition, perception, voluntary motor control, manipulation of the environment, etc. Contrary to theories of consciousness prevalent in the Western philosophical traditions that begin with Plato, I argue that System Y is secondary to and dependent upon System X, not the reverse. In building my thesis I draw upon the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, psychoanalysis, Jungian depth psychology, political anthropology, modern neuroscience, Pythagorean music theory, and the mathematical theory of harmonic systems. (shrink)

There is a need to rapidly assess the impact of new technology initiatives on the Counter Improvised Explosive Device battle in Iraq and Afghanistan. The immediate challenge is the need for rapid decisions, and a lack of engineering test data to support the assessment. The rapid assessment methodology exploits available information to build a probabilistic model that provides an explicit executable representation of the initiative’s likely impact. The model is used to provide a consistent, explicit, explanation to decision makers on (...) the likely impact of the initiative. Sensitivity analysis on the model provides analytic information to support development of informative test plans. (shrink)

Simulation models of the Reiterated Prisoner's Dilemma (in the following: RPD-models) are since 30 years considered as one of the standard tools to study the evolution of cooperation (Rangoni 2013; Hoffmann 2000). A considerable number of such simulation models has been produced by scientists. Unfortunately, though, none of these models has empirically been verified and there exists no example of empirical research where any of the RPD-models has successfully been employed to a particular instance of cooperation. Surprisingly, this has not (...) kept scientists from continuing to produce simulation models in the same tradition and from writing their own history as a history of success. In a recent simulation study -- which does not make use of the RPD but otherwise follows the same pattern of research -- Robert Axelrod's (1984) original role model for this kind of simulation studies is praised as ``an extremely effective means for investigating the evolution of cooperation'' and considered as ``widely credited with invigorating that field'' (Rendell et al. 2010). (shrink)

Philosophical accounts of joint action are often prefaced by the observation that there are two different senses in which several agents can intentionally perform an action Φ, such as go for a walk or capture the prey. The agents might intentionally Φ together, as a collective, or they might intentionally Φ in parallel, where Φ is distributively assigned to the agents, considered as a set of individuals. The accounts are supposed to characterise what is distinctive about activities in which several (...) agents intentionally Φ collectively rather than distributively. This dualism between joint and parallel action also crops up outside philosophy. For instance, it has been imported into a debate about whether or not group hunting among chimpanzees is a form of joint cooperative hunting. I offer an account of a form of joint action that falls short of what most philosophers take to be required for genuine joint action, but which is not merely parallel activity. This shows that the dualism between the genuinely joint and the merely parallel is false. I offer my account as an explication of an influential definition of “cooperative behaviour” given by the primatologists Christophe and Hedwig Boesch. (shrink)

MY CHAPTER CONTRIBUTION: "Paul Tillich's Enduring Relevance to Ecophilosophy and Environmental Ethics" *** -/- BOOK DESCRIPTION: Paul Tillich's ideas and methods continue to inspire and guide students, teachers, and professionals in all fields. He crosses boundaries between the academy and the community, religions and spiritualities, cultures and societies, taking leaders deeper and further than they ever imagined. Tillich is a master of conversation. His thought bridges social polarizations, program silos, and educational specialization. His ideas cannot be contained in a closed (...) system. His methodology has the power to engage other philosophies of life, religions and spiritualities, scientific research, culture shifts, and lifestyle diversity critically and appreciatively. Tillich is also a master of confrontation. His thought challenges political structures, racial and gender inequalities, and social injustice. He is an acute observer of social change and struggles courageously with moral quandaries. He inspires action for today and hope for tomorrow. Each essay explores another facet of Tillich's influence in education, religion, popular culture, science, health, social reform, and political action. They are chosen to be "snapshots" of his ongoing influence, accessible to both undergraduate and graduate students, and relevant to corporate and non-profit leaders alike. Reading this book will open your eyes to discern Tillich's hidden presence in academic curricula, contemporary research, political speeches and social policies, entertainment and internet, books and podcasts, and social media. Tillich can be your intellectual companion in whatever endeavor you choose to pursue. -/- . (shrink)

El lenguaje o la actividad cognoscitiva del ser humano que se debate en su lucha contra la circunstancia en la que le ha tocado vivir es hablar, decir y conocer. El hombre habla porque tiene algo que decir, dice porque se define a sí mismo ante la circunstancia en la que vive en cada momento, y esto es posible porque conoce de forma creativa. En este sentido el decir determina el hablar, por arriba, y el conocer por abajo. El conocer (...) humano empieza en una sensación sensible, la aísthesis, la cual es transformada en un universal, extracto o concepto, logos, el cual es el fruto de una serie de operaciones intelectivas realizadas por el propio sujeto en u solo acto, el acto único de hablar, decir y conocer. (shrink)

Heidegger’s ontologische Differenz imposes methodological limits which strictly mark his philosophy for rigor and determinacy. If it is not possible to think Being from the categories of the entity, it is also true that the difference is a tank of possibilities and developments to which Heidegger himself hints at. From the accuracy of the early works to the overturning of the problem in the later works, the ontological difference is a constant of Heideggerian thought. This paper seeks to push Existenz (...) from a mode of being of Dasein to a mode of giving of Seiende. In accordance with his late writings, bringing the question of the Being­-existence bond towards the perspective of the entity – and not only the entity among entities that poses the question –, the development of the problem in Heidegger’s meditation is analysed through the questions of ontological difference – the mode of negation, the between of distinction, the specific situatedness that defines experience, the Being, as a member of ontological difference, in its connection to the Nichts, the Event as a relaxation of the connection between Sein and Seiende. The entity that is exist­ent is the convergence point of the Event where Being and existent, Being and existence, are not in contrast, but protrude (ragen) towards each other revealing the traits of a Seyende des Seyns, of the entity of Being. (shrink)

Attraverso una breve e veloce premessa storico-critica e storico-filosofica il testo proposto fa emergere il tema del rapporto problematico sussistente fra l'attuale ideologia che sorregge il fenomeno economico, sociale e politico della globalizzazione internazionale dei capitali (soprattutto finanziari) ed i riflessi di ordine umano e naturale che ne sono l'effettiva conseguenza. Da un punto di vista psicologico, sociale ed educativo l'impianto ideologico neoliberista viene allora contrastato dalla ripresa di un pensiero critico, radicale e rivoluzionario, che riutilizza il principio dell'infinito creativo (...) e doppiamente dialettico, di lontana matrice presocratica e bruniana. Il testo analizza la progressione di avvicinamento a tale principio preparata dalle riflessioni di H. Marcuse, W. Reich, G. Deleuze, C. Castoriadis e A. Badiou. (shrink)

LandryElaine, * ed. Categories for the Working Philosopher. Oxford University Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-19-874899-1 ; 978-0-19-106582-8. Pp. xiv + 471.

Since Hume, there has been broad consensus that if the notion of the good has any intelligible foundation, it is not “ontological”, in the natures of things. Today however this view is being challenged. After a sketch of the positions of Kant and Hume, and a glance at some of the recent challenges, the paper examines a key element in Thomas Aquinas’s ontol- ogy of the good: the notion of nal causality. For Thomas nal causality presupposes formal and e cient (...) causality. Hume’s denial of the intelligibility of the good, it is su ested, presup- poses his denial of that of these other causes. (shrink)

I sketch a history of the evolving relationship between ethics and economics as discourse, and I venture a few conjectures on interactions between such evolution and the evolving relationship between economic subsystem and moralities qua sub-systems in ancient, early modern and modern societies.

Reseña de „Birnbacher, D. y Koßler, M. (eds.). (2022). Das Hauptwerk 200 Jahre Arthur Schopenhauers Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Königshausen & Neumann“ in: Tópicos, 69, (2024), 497–506.

Come tutti gli ambiti teorici e pratici della civiltà occidentale anche la riflessione pedagogica viene investtita dalla potenza ideologica del neoliberismo, che intende trasformare e rivoluzionare a partire dagli anni '80 del Novecento tutte le forme in senso lato culturali sviluppatesi a partire dagli anni '60 e '70 del medesimo secolo. L'applicazione del principio della post-modernità frantuma e dissolve progressivamente le prospettive di cambiamento precedenti, assegnando alla civiltà capitalistica un'esistenza assoluta ed immodificabile. Tutti gli intenti che hanno di volta in (...) volta dimostrato di voler moderare e limitare (o condizionare) queste pretese non sono riuscite a raggiungere i propri scopi, favorendo al contrario la rincorsa regressiva operata dal sistema ideologico dominante. Solo la ripresa di una concezione di nuovo rivoluzionaria può invece, proprio a partire da una rinnovata pedagogia radicale e democratica, risolvere i problemi di mera sopravvivenza della civiltà umana e del suo contesto naturale, scatenati dalla illimitata volontà di potenza del neoliberismo economico e finanziario. (shrink)

Per la critica della civilizzazione. I processi di civilizzazione visti come processi di emarginazione.

Review of The Routledge Handbook of Scientific Realism by Juha Saatsi (ed.).

This paper aims to analyse the notion of familiarity in Dewey’s pragmatism in order to show its important role as a tool for human beings to interpret the reality, manage it, and act within it. Starting from an examination of Deweyan transactional realism, the discourse focuses on familiarity and its related terms (such as “familiar,”“to familiarize,”but also opposites such as “unknown” or “strange”) in Dewey’s thought, to finally come to highlight its fundamental hermeneutic role. This might be useful to account (...) for a subject of Deweyan thought not so deeply highlighted by scholarship and, at the same time, to show pragmatism’s closeness to hermeneutics regarding the relation between the human being and the real. -/- Questo articolo si prefigge di analizzare la nozione di familiarità nel pragmatismo di John Dewey, per mostrare come essa sia uno strumento importante a disposizione degli esseri umani per interpretare il reale, orientarsi ed agire in esso. Partendo da un esame del realismo transazionale deweyano, il discorso passa a delineare il ruolo della familiarità ed affini (termini come “familiare”, “familiarizzare” ma anche gli opposti “estraneo”, “ignoto” ecc.) nel filosofo americano fino ad evidenziarne il fondamentale ruolo ermeneutico. In tal modo, è fornito un resoconto su un aspetto del pensiero deweyano non adeguatamente messo in luce dalla ricerca e nello stesso tempo si individua un importante punto di contatto tra pragmatismo ed ermeneutica intorno alla questione del rapporto dell’essere umano con il reale. (shrink)

There have been innumerable attempts to characterize personal identity either in terms of psychological continuity or in terms of the linear and self-referential process of reproduction of one's self. I will defend the thesis according to which personal identity emerges mainly as a process of transcendence of one's own "minimal self". It is precisely by means of this critical distancing from his self, I contend, that the individual learns to see himself under a new perspective as far as to experience (...) his self as a surprise. Amazed at his own self, he lives a reawakening which leads him to a transformation of his way of living. This transcendence of the self cannot take place self-referentially but only through the force of an example provided by another person. Such act neither aims at the annihilation of the individual, nor does it contrast with self-love. It is in conlict merely with what Harry Frankfurt calls "selfindulgence". The idea of a transcendence of the self is already to be found in Plato, who fostered the overcoming of and puriication from amathia (in the sense of a "not knowing but pretending to know") and from an excessive love of oneself. Indeed, these latter would be the two grave diseases which render formless the soul of a human being, for they stand in the way of the cura sui. The same theme will reappear in Max Scheler's phenomenological reduction, which endeavours to bracket egocentrism (construed as excessive love of oneself) in order to give a form to the personal identity. (shrink)

Negli ultimi due anni sono stati pubblicati due importanti libri sul progresso morale: 'Moral Progress' di Philp Kitcher e 'A Better Ape' di Victor Kumar e Richmond Campbell. In questa nota critica, recensisco entrambi i libri e problematizzo il modo in cui cercano rispettivamente di legare tra loro il tema del progresso morale con la teoria dell'evoluzione.

The ‘Animal Question’ has occupied Western philosophy for more than a decade now. Whether inspired by the rising urgency of the problem of violence towards and exploitation of nonhuman animals perpetuated by science, technology and culture broadly speaking, or by an enthralment with otherness, an increasing number of theorists engage with the concepts of the animal and human–nonhuman relations. These notions become an incessant impetus for creative and critical inquiry and the exploration of philosophical, political, ethical and artistic thinking. What, (...) however, needs to be asked in the first place is: how can we, as humans, relate to the nonhuman, and more specifically, to nonhuman animals ethically? Is it possible at all? The question of ethics is one of the main driving forces behind The Animal Catalyst: Towards Ahuman Theory, edited by Patricia MacCormack. (shrink)

The article concerns the moderate intuitionism of Robert Audi beteween epistemology and ethics.

Many find it plausible that for a given beneficiary, Y, benefactor, R, and action, ϕ, Y’s being grateful to R for ϕ-ing implies Y’s being grateful that R ϕ-ed. According to some philosophers who hold this view, all instances of gratitude to, or “prepositional gratitude,” are also instances of gratitude that, or “propositional gratitude.” These philosophers believe there is a single unified concept of gratitude, a phenomenon that is essentially gratitude that, and whose manifestations sometimes have additional features that make (...) them instances of gratitude to as well. In this article, I show that view to be mistaken. I base my argument on two hypothetical cases, in each of which a beneficiary, Y, is grateful to a benefactor, R, for ϕ-ing, but not grateful that R ϕ-ed. Generalizing from those cases and other cases of gratitude, I argue that prepositional gratitude is the proper response to benevolence-motivated action and propositional gratitude consists in a beneficiary’s judging a state of affairs to be valuable for himself and welcoming that state of affairs. Because not every instance of a benefactor’s acting benevolently toward a beneficiary is something that beneficiary finds valuable for himself and welcomes, it is possible to be grateful to a benefactor for ϕ-ing but not grateful that she ϕ-ed. Prepositional gratitude and propositional gratitude can each occur without the other and are thus two distinct phenomena. I conclude by explaining the importance of accurately understanding the relationship between prepositional gratitude and propositional gratitude. (shrink)

The nature of the edited scholarly collection has undergone a sea change. Whereas once upon a time edited collections brought together conference papers or previously published landmark studies—whose mark of excellence is scholarly rigor—more recently libraries have been inundated by Guides, Companions, and Handbooks. The Guide/Companion/Handbook model has its uses, perhaps especially for introductory essays or overviews of topics in which clarity, rather than cutting-edge scholarship, is the mark of excellence. Between these two models falls a new and somewhat unprecedented (...) (at least in Aristotle scholarship) genre of collection, what Cambridge University Press is characterizing as a Critical Guide. The volume’s self-description claims that it is a “collection of newly commissioned essays…present[ing] a thorough and close examination of the work” which will “challenge and advance the scholarship on the Ethics</i>, establishing new ways of viewing and appreciating the work for all scholars of Aristotle.” Clearly, one is no longer looking at introductory essays. (shrink)

Book review of Anderson-Gold & Muchnik (eds), Kant's Anatomy of Evil.

I review Sandra Lapointe (ed.) "Themes from Ontology, Mind, and Logic: Present and Past – Essays in Honour of Peter Simons".

A number of researchers today make an appeal to quantum physics when trying to develop a satisfactory account of the mind, an appeal still felt to be controversial by many. Often these "quantum approaches" try to explain some well-known features of conscious experience (or mental processes more generally), thus using quantum physics to enrich the explanatory framework or explanans used in consciousness studies and cognitive science. This paper considers the less studied question of whether quantum physical intuitions could help us (...) to draw attention to new or neglected aspects of the mind in introspection, and in this way change our view about what needs explanation in the first place. Although prima facie implausible, it is suggested that this could happen, for example, if there were analogies between quantum processes and mental processes (e.g., the process of thinking). The naive idea is that such analogies would help us to see mental processes and conscious experience in a new way. It has indeed been proposed long ago that such analogies exist, and this paper first focuses at some length on David Bohm's formulation of them from 1951. It then briefly considers these analogies in relation to Smolensky's more recent analogies between cognitive science and physics, and Pylkko's aconceptual view of the mind. Finally, Bohm's early analogies will be briefly considered in relation to the analogies between quantum processes and the mind he proposed in his later work. -/- [This article is a modified version of an article that was first published in the anthology Being and Brain: At the Boundary between Science, Philosophy, Language and Arts, ed. by G. Globus, K. Pribram and G. Vitiello, Advances in Consciousness Research 58, John Benjamins, Amsterdam 2004, pp. 165-195.]. (shrink)

This is a review of Mind Design II: Philosophy, Psychology, and Artificial Intelligence, edited by John Haugeland and published by The MIT Press in 1997.

The collective monograph "Ontology of Stative Situations - Linguistic Modeling. A Contrastive Bulgarian-Russian Study" includes research carried out within the project of the same name "Ontology of stative situations – linguistic modeling. A contrastive Bulgarian-Russian study", supported by the "Scientific Research" Fund of the Ministry of Education and Science in Bulgaria (№ КП-06-РУСИЯ / 23) and from the Russian Fund for Fundamental Research (No. 20-512-18005).