Forthcoming, Journal of Philosophy [pdf manuscript].

The problem of imaginative resistance holds interest for aestheticians, literary theorists, ethicists, philosophers of mind, and epistemologists. We present a somewhat opinionated overview of the philosophical discussion to date. We begin by introducing the phenomenon of imaginative resistance. We then review existing responses to the problem, giving special attention to recent research directions. Finally, we consider the philosophical significance that imaginative resistance has—or, at least, is alleged to have—for issues in moral psychology, theories of cognitive architecture, and modal epistemology.

Over the last three decades, studies in microbiology have exposed a world of diverse and dynamic interactions. Through metagenomic sequencing, complex bacterial communities became visible and proved important for many biological phenomena. As a result of discovering the connection between microorganisms and organisms’ survival, the notion of the holobiont has become prominent and has been suggested as a biological individual. The view of the holobiont as an individual, commonly known as the Hologenome Theory, focuses on the interactions and relations between (...) the host and its symbionts in the host’s development and evolution. Today, the holobiont is at the heart of the debate on the nature of the biological individual, a debate which is connected to the same question about the nature of the individual organism. (shrink)

Issues of pretense and imagination are of central interest to philosophers, psychologists, and researchers in allied fields. In this entry, we provide a roadmap of some of the central themes around which discussion has been focused. We begin with an overview of pretense, imagination, and the relationship between them. We then shift our attention to the four specific topics where the disciplines' research programs have intersected or where additional interactions could prove mutually beneficial: the psychological underpinnings of performing pretense and (...) of recognizing pretense, the cognitive capacities involved in imaginative engagement with fictions, and the real-world impact of make-believe. In the final section, we discuss more briefly a number of other mental activities that arguably involve imagining, including counterfactual reasoning, delusions, and dreaming. (shrink)

The rapid expansion of Big Tech companies into various societal domains (e.g., health, education, and agriculture) over the past decade has led to increasing concerns among governments, regulators, scholars, and civil society. While existing theoretical frameworks—often revolving around privacy and data protection, or market and platform power—have shed light on important aspects of Big Tech expansionism, there are other risks that these frameworks cannot fully capture. In response, this editorial proposes an alternative theoretical framework based on the notion of sphere (...) transgressions, which draws on political philosopher Michael Walzer's theory of justice. The editorial not only introduces the sphere transgressions framework, but it also highlights its potential to generate novel research questions. Furthermore, this editorial introduces eight articles and one commentary from a group of interdisciplinary scholars that critically examine Big Tech expansionism by reflecting on this expansionism from the perspective of different societal spheres or by engaging with the sphere transgressions framework itself. (shrink)

In this position paper, we have used Alan Cooper’s persona technique to illustrate the utility of audio- and video-based AAL technologies. Therefore, two primary examples of potential audio- and video-based AAL users, Anna and Irakli, serve as reference points for describing salient ethical, legal and social challenges related to use of AAL. These challenges are presented on three levels: individual, societal, and regulatory. For each challenge, a set of policy recommendations is suggested.

In the flash-lag effect a non-moving object is quickly flashed directly underneath a moving object, which leads us to perceive the non-moving object as “lagging” the moving object, even though the two objects actually occupy the same horizontal position at the time of the flash. In the example above, for instance, a red square moves across a screen. At the midpoint of the red square’s journey from one side to the other, a green square is quickly presented (flashed) (...) just below. Despite the fact that the two stimuli are presented at the same coordinates along the x axis, the stationary square is perceived as behind the moving square. The perceived lag of the flashed stationary object becomes greater when the speed of the moving object is increased and vice versa (Nijhawan 1994). (shrink)

The GRW dynamics propose a novel, relevantly “observer”-independent replacement for orthodox “measurement”-induced collapse. Yet the tails problem shows that this dynamical innovation is not enough: a principled alternative to the orthodox account demands some corresponding ontological advancement as well. In fact, there are three rival fundamental ontologies on offer for the GRW dynamics. Debate about the relative merits of these candidates is a microcosm of broader disagreement about the role of ontology in our physical theorizing. According to imprimitivists, the GRW (...) dynamics directly describe (only) some (element’s) undulation in an unfamiliar high-dimensional physical field. Primitivists resist this GRW0 proposal on the grounds that it fails to secure comprehensible contact with our data about macroscopic objects in ordinary lowdimensional space-time. They expect an adequate fundamental ontology to include at least some spatiotemporally localized entities—intuitively, concrete constituents of our familiar macroscopic landscape. The most compelling case goes by way of distributional basing: minimally, primitivists expect a theory’s predictions immediately about spatiotemporal distributions of fundamental entities to provide a supervenience base for data about configurations of macroscopic objects. But while the background intuition is familiar, the distributional model is surprisingly subtle. Lack of clarity about its details generates serious confusion for both sides of our debate. (shrink)

John Bell proposed an ontology for the GRW modification of quantum mechanics in terms of flashes occurring at space- time points. This article spells out the motivation for this ontology, inquires into the status of the wave function in it, critically examines the claim of its being Lorentz invariant, and considers whether it is a parsimonious but nevertheless physically adequate ontology.

Humans coordinate their focus of attention with others, either by gaze following or prior agreement. Though the effects of joint attention on perceptual and cognitive processing tend to be examined in purely visual environments, they should also show in multisensory settings. According to a prevalent hypothesis, joint attention enhances visual information encoding and processing, over and above individual attention. If two individuals jointly attend to the visual components of an audiovisual event, this should affect the weighing of visual information during (...) multisensory integration. We tested this prediction in this preregistered study, using the well-documented sound-induced flash illusions, where the integration of an incongruent number of visual flashes and auditory beeps results in a single flash being seen as two (fission illusion) and two flashes as one (fusion illusion). Participants were asked to count flashes either alone or together, and expected to be less prone to both fission and fusion illusions when they jointly attended to the visual targets. However, illusions were as frequent when people attended to the flashes alone or with someone else, even though they responded faster during joint attention. Our results reveal the limitations of the theory that joint attention enhances visual processing as it does not affect temporal audiovisual integration. (shrink)

Contribution to a symposium on Gendler's Intuition, Imagination, and Philosophical Methodology.

We investigate the causal uncertainty surrounding the flash crash in the U.S. Treasury bond market on October 15, 2014, and the unresolved concern that no clear link has been identified between the start of the flash crash at 9:33 and the opening of the U.S. equity market at 9:30. We consider the contributory effect of mini flash crashes in equity markets, and find that the number of equity mini flash crashes in the three-minute window between market (...) open and the Treasury Flash Crash was 2.6 times larger than the number experienced in any other three-minute window in the prior ten weekdays. We argue that (a) this statistically significant finding suggests that mini flash crashes in equity markets both predicted and contributed to the October 2014 U.S. Treasury Bond Flash Crash, and (b) mini-flash crashes are important phenomena with negative externalities that deserve much greater scholarly attention. (shrink)

Review of Tamar Schapiro, 'Feeling Like It'.

Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good—especially the first essay, “The Idea of Perfection”—is often associated with a critique of a certain picture of agency and its proper place in ethical thought. There is implicit in this critique, however, an alternative, much richer one. I propose a reading of Murdochian agency in terms of the continuous activity of cultivating and refining a distinctive practical standpoint, and I apply this reading to her account of moral progress. For Murdoch moral progress depends on (...) transcending egoism and achieving clear perception of a normatively-saturated reality, but it would be a mistake to think of egoism in terms of selfishness, or clarity in terms of altruism. Rather, I argue, Murdochian moral progress requires overcoming socially-conditioned and often ideological forms of alienation, and making the social conditions that inform our practical standpoints self-conscious. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that Kant’s moral psychology draws from the dualist tradition of Plato and Aristotle, which takes there to be distinct rational and non-rational parts of the soul. My aim is to challenge the air of obviousness that psychological dualism enjoys in neo-Kantian moral psychology, specifically in regard to Tamar Schapiro’s account of the nature of inclination. I argue that Kant’s own account of inclination instead provides evidence of his commitment to psychological monism, the idea that the (...) mentality of an adult human being is rational through and through. I first consider Schapiro’s “intuitions” in favour of dualism: inclination must have a non-rational source, she contends, because they assail us unbidden and are not immediately responsive to volition, and because we are not responsible simply for having inclinations (only for acting on them). I explain how a monistic account of the nature of inclination can accommodate the first two points, and explain why the third neither is a point a Kantian can accept, nor is its denial the affront to common sense that Schapiro supposes. Then I turn to Schapiro’s aim to conceive of reflection as non-rational and thus independent of justificatory thought, and yet such as to induce rational reflection. I argue that it remains mysterious how inclination, on her account, could be resourced to play this role; and with that criticism in mind, I conclude by making a positive case for Kant’s conceiving of inclination in monistic terms, as an expression of rational mindedness. (shrink)

abstract Postdiction effects are phenomena in which a stimulus influences the appearance of events taking place before it. In metacontrast masking, for instance, a masking stimulus can ren- der a target stimulus shown before the mask invisible. This and other postdiction effects have been considered incompatible with a simple explanation according to which (i) our perceptual experiences are delayed for only the time it takes for a distal stimulus to reach our sensory receptors and for our neural mechanisms to process (...) it, and (ii) the order in which the processing of stimuli is completed corresponds with the apparent temporal order of stimuli. As a result, the theories that account for more than a single postdiction effect reject at least one of these theses. This paper presents a new framework for the tim- ing of experiences—the non-linear latency difference view—in which the three most dis- cussed postdiction effects—apparent motion, the flash-lag effect, and metacontrast masking—can be accounted for while simultaneously holding theses (i) and (ii). This view is grounded in the local reentrant processes, which are known to have a crucial role in perception. Accordingly, the non-linear latency difference view is both more parsimonious and more empirically plausible than the competing theories, all of which remain largely silent about the neural implementation of the mechanisms they postulate. (shrink)

We examine dialectical tensions between “dialogue” and “narrative” as these discourses supplant one another as the fundamental discourse of intelligibility, through juxtaposing two interpretations of Genesis 38 rooted in changing interpretative paradigms. Is dialogue properly understood as a narrative genre, or is narrative the content about which people are in dialogue? Is the divine–human relationship a narrative drama or is it a dialogue between a god and human beings? We work within parameters laid out by the philosophical hermeneutics of Gadamer (...) (primarily representing dialogue) and Ricoeur (primarily representing narrative). On the one hand, a feminist approach can develop Tamar as a courageous hero in impossible circumstances, strategizing to overturn Judah’s patriarchal naïveté. On the other hand, Judah seems to be able to be read as a tragic hero, seeking to save Tamar. These readings challenge one another, where either Tamar’s or Judah’s autonomy is undermined. By putting these interpretations into dialogue, our aim is to show that neither dialogue nor narrative succeeds the other with finality, and that we can achieve a fragile integration of the two (dialogue and narrative) despite their propensity toward polarization. (shrink)

When dissimilar images are presented to the two eyes, binocular rivalry (BR) occurs, and perception alternates spontaneously between the images. Although neural correlates of the oscillating perception during BR have been found in multiple sites along the visual pathway, the source of BR dynamics is unclear. Psychophysical and modeling studies suggest that both low- and high-level cortical processes underlie BR dynamics. Previous neuroimaging studies have demonstrated the involvement of high-level regions by showing that frontal and parietal cortices responded time locked (...) to spontaneous perceptual alternation in BR. However, a potential contribution of early visual areas to BR dynamics has been overlooked, because these areas also responded to the physical stimulus alternation mimicking BR. In the present study, instead of focusing on activity during perceptual switches, we highlighted brain activity during suppression periods to investigate a potential link between activity in human early visual areas and BR dynamics. We used a strong interocular suppression paradigm called continuous flash suppression to suppress and fluctuate the visibility of a probe stimulus and measured retinotopic responses to the onset of the invisible probe using functional MRI. There were ∼130-fold differences in the median suppression durations across 12 subjects. The individual differences in suppression durations could be predicted by the amplitudes of the retinotopic activity in extrastriate visual areas (V3 and V4v) evoked by the invisible probe. Weaker responses were associated with longer suppression durations. These results demonstrate that retinotopic representations in early visual areas play a role in the dynamics of perceptual alternations during BR. (shrink)

Tamar Gendler takes on “explaining our comparative difficulty in imagining fictional worlds that we take to be morally deviant” (56), otherwise known as the puzzle of imaginative resistance. Generally speaking, readers have no trouble believing untrue factual claims such as in Alice in Wonderland or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but we resist claims which advocate praise or approval of immoral acts such as murder. Gendler submits that the implied author aims to persuade the reader to change his or (...) her moral beliefs, thereby causing imaginative resistance. This paper will explain that imaginative resistance is fundamentally an interpersonal moral conflict as experienced in the ethical theory of moral subjectivism, and will suggest ways to manage imaginative resistance by looking at the whole work of fiction. (shrink)

Whether causing flash crashes in financial markets, purchasing illegal drugs, or running over pedestrians, AI is increasingly engaging in activity that would be criminal for a natural person, or even an artificial person like a corporation. We argue that criminal law falls short in cases where an AI causes certain types of harm and there are no practically or legally identifiable upstream criminal actors. This Article explores potential solutions to this problem, focusing on holding AI directly criminally liable where (...) it is acting autonomously and irreducibly. Conventional wisdom holds that punishing AI is incongruous with basic criminal law principles such as the capacity for culpability and the requirement of a guilty mind. -/- Drawing on analogies to corporate and strict criminal liability, as well as familiar imputation principles, we show how a coherent theoretical case can be constructed for AI punishment. AI punishment could result in general deterrence and expressive benefits, and it need not run afoul of negative limitations such as punishing in excess of culpability. Ultimately, however, punishing AI is not justified, because it might entail significant costs and it would certainly require radical legal changes. Modest changes to existing criminal laws that target persons, together with potentially expanded civil liability, are a better solution to AI crime. (shrink)

I assess Tamar Gendler's (2007) account of self-deception according to which its characteristic state is not belief, but imaginative pretense. After giving an overview of the literature and presenting the conceptual puzzles engendered by the notion of self-deception, I introduce Gendler's account, which emerges as a rival to practically all extant accounts of self-deception. I object to it by first arguing that her argument for abandoning belief as the characteristic state of self-deception conflates the state of belief and the (...) process of belief-formation when interpreting David Velleman's (2000) thesis that belief is an essentially truth-directed attitude. I then call attention to the fact that Velleman's argument for the identity of motivational role between belief and imagining, on which Gendler's argument for self-deception as pretense depends, conflates two senses of 'motivational role'-a stronger but implausible sense and a weaker but explanatorily irrelevant sense. Finally, I introduce Neil Van Leeuwen's (2009) argument to the effect that belief is the practical ground of all non-belief cognitive attitudes in circumstances wherein the latter prompt action. I apply this framework to Gendler's account to ultimately show that imaginative pretense fails to explain the existence of voluntary actions which result from self-deception. (shrink)

Anonymous argumentation has recently been the focus of public controversy: flash points include the outing of pseudonymous bloggers by newspapers and the launch of an academic journal that expressly permits pseudonymous authorship. However, the controversy is not just a recent one—similar debates took place in the nineteenth century over the then common practice of anonymous journalism. Amongst the arguments advanced by advocates of anonymous argumentation in either era is the contention that it is essential if the widest range of (...) voices are to be heard; amongst the counterarguments of its critics, that it weakens the credibility of individual arguments and irresponsibly cheapens the standard of public discourse. This paper explores some implications of the controversy for the ethics of argumentation in general and virtue theories of argumentation in particular. (shrink)

A challenge we face in a world that has been shaped by, and continues to be shaped by, racist attitudes and institutions is that the evidence is often stacked in favor of racist beliefs. As a result, we may find ourselves facing the following conflict: what if the evidence we have supports something we morally shouldn’t believe? For example, it is morally wrong to assume, solely on the basis of someone’s skin color, that they’re a staff member. But, what if (...) you’re in a context where, because of historical patterns of discrimination, someone’s skin color is a very good indicator that they’re a staff member? When this sort of normative conflict looms, a conflict between moral considerations on the one hand and what you epistemically ought to believe given the evidence on the other, what should we do? It might be unfair to assume that they’re a staff member, but to ignore the evidence would mean risking inaccurate beliefs. Some, notably Tamar Gendler (2011), have suggested that we simply face a tragic irresolvable dilemma. In this chapter, I consider how these cases of conflict arise and I canvass the viability of suggested resolutions of the conflict. In the end, I argue that there’s actually no conflict here. Moral considerations can change how we epistemically should respond to the evidence. (shrink)

Suppose that you're lying in bed. You just woke up. But you're alert. Your mind is clear and you have no distractions. As you lie there, you think to yourself, ‘2 + 2 = 4.’ The thought just pops into your head. But, wanting to be sure of your mathematical insight, you once again think ‘2 + 2 = 4’, this time really meditating on your thought. Now suppose that you're sitting in an empty movie theatre. The lighting is normal (...) and the screen in front of you is blank. Then at some point an image of a peach is flashed on the screen. The image isn't up there for long. In fact, it's only on the screen for what seems like an instant—just long enough for you to see it. These two scenarios are a bit mundane. But, as I will show, reflection on them can yield significant results concerning the nature of persons and their persistence through time. First I will show that thought and perception have temporal constraints whereby your thinking or perceiving in the above scenarios implies that you exist through a temporally.. (shrink)

Action is not always guided by conscious deliberation; in many circumstances, we act intuitively rather than reflectively. Tamar Gendler (2014) contends that because intuitively guided action can lead us away from our reflective commitments, it limits the power of knowledge to guide action. While I agree that intuition can diverge from reflection, I argue that this divergence does not constitute a restriction on the power of knowledge. After explaining my view of the contrast between intuitive and reflective thinking, this (...) paper argues against the conclusions Gendler draws from empirical work on implicit bias. (shrink)

In this paper, we evaluate some proposals that can be advanced to clarify the ontological consequences of Relational Quantum Mechanics. We first focus on priority monism and ontic structural realism and argue that these views are not suitable for providing an ontological interpretation of the theory. Then, we discuss an alternative interpretation that we regard as more promising, based on so-called ‘metaphysical coherentism’, which we also connect to the idea of an event-based, or ‘flash’, ontology.

Several studies (e.g., Becklen & Cervone, 1983; Mack & Rock, 1998; Neisser & Becklen, 1975) have found that observers attending to a particular object or event often fail to report the presence of unexpected items. This has been interpreted as inattentional blindness (IB), a failure to see unattended items (Mack & Rock, 1998). Meanwhile, other studies (e.g., Pashler, 1988; Phillips, 1974; Rensink et al., 1997; Simons, 1996) have found that observers often fail to report the presence of large changes in (...) a display when these changes occur simultaneously with a transient such as an eye movement or flash of the display. This has been interpreted as change blindness (CB), a failure to see unattended changes (Rensink et al., 1997). In both cases there is a striking failure to report an object or event that would be quite visible under other circumstances. And in both cases there is a widespread (although not universal) belief that the underlying cause has to do with the absence of attention. The question then arises as to how these effects might be related. Is CB the same thing as IB? If not, what is the relation between them? And given that these phenomena deal with failures of subjective perception, what can they teach us about the nature of our visual experience? In particular, what can they teach us about the role played by visual attention? (shrink)

This article argues, contra-Derrida, that Foucault does not essentialize or precomprehend the meaning of life or bio- in his writings on biopolitics. Instead, Foucault problematizes life and provokes genealogical questions about the meaning of modernity more broadly. In The Order of Things, the 1974-75 lecture course at the Collège de France, and Herculine Barbin, the monster is an important figure of the uncertain shape of modernity and its entangled problems (life, sex, madness, criminality, etc). Engaging Foucault’s monsters, I show that (...) the problematization of life is far from a “desire for a threshold,” à la Derrida. It is a spur to interrogating and critiquing thresholds, a fraught question mark where we have “something to do.” As Foucault puts it in “The Lives of Infamous Men,” it an ambiguous frontier where beings lived and died and they appear to us “because of an encounter with power which, in striking down a life and turning it to ashes, makes it emerge, like a flash [...]. (shrink)

In the ancient world, the Greeks believed that all great insights came from one of nine muses, divine sisters who brought inspiration to mere mortals. In the modern world, few people still believe in the muses, but we all still love to hear stories of sudden inspiration. Like Newton and the apple, or Archimedes and the bathtub (both another type of myth), we’re eager to hear and to share stories about flashes of insight. But what does it take to be (...) actually creative? How to have such a flash insight? Turns out, there is real science behind "aha moments." We prefer to call it “intuilytics.”. (shrink)

The paper is a contribution to the debate on the epistemological status of thought experiments. I deal with the epistemological uniqueness of experiments in the sense of their irreducibility to other sources of justification. In particular, I criticize an influential argument for the irreducibility of thought experiments to general arguments. First, I introduce the radical empiricist theory of eliminativism, which considers thought experiments to be rhetorically modified arguments, uninteresting from the epistemological point of view. Second, I present objections to the (...) theory, focusing on the critique of eliminativism by Tamar Szabó Gendler based on the reconstruction of famous Galileo's Pisa experiment. I show that her reconstruction is simplistic and that more elaborate reconstruction is needed for an appropriate assessment of the epistemic power of general argument. I propose such a reconstruction and demonstrate that general version of Pisa experiment is epistemically equal to the particular one. Thus, from an epistemological perspective, Galileo's thought experiment is reducible to a straightforward argument without particular premises. (shrink)

Experiences of enlightened unity with Nature or with Deity are reported not only in the mystical literature of the past but also in contemporary accounts of the psychedelic adventurer. In Chapter 13, Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes seeks to fathom such reported states within the framework of the metaphysics of Benedict de Spinoza – a metaphysics encompassing monism, pantheism, panpsychism, and the eternal substance: the timelessness of pure Nature, God itself. God is Nature for Spinoza. To achieve this framework, the tenets of Spinozism (...) are explicated with a culmination in the Intellectual Love of God, amor Dei intellectualis, where the finite mind and infinite intellect of Nature unite. Sjöstedt-Hughes then provides a phenomenological account of the unitive states occasioned by certain psychedelic substances, notably the ever-so potent 5-MeO-DMT, comparing these phenomenological elements to the ontological aspects of Spinozism. This comparative analysis will proffer a Spinozan-Psychedelic symbiosis: that certain psychedelic states can be understood through the Spinozan system, and that the Spinozan system can be intuited through certain psychedelic states – a blinding flash of Spinozism that can change one’s relation to oneself and to Nature itself. (shrink)

This article introduces an experimental paradigm to selectively probe the multiple levels of visual processing that influence the formation of object contours, perceptual boundaries, and illusory contours. The experiments test the assumption that, to integrate contour information across space and contrast sign, a spatially short-range filtering process that is sensitive to contrast polarity inputs to a spatially long-range grouping process that pools signals from opposite contrast polarities. The stimuli consisted of thin subthreshold lines, flashed upon gaps between collinear inducers which (...) potentially enable the formation of illusory contours. The subthreshold lines were composed of one or more segments with opposite contrast polarities. The polarity nearest to the inducers was varied to differentially excite the short-range filtering process. The experimental results are consistent with neurophysiological evidence for cortical mechanisms of contour processing and with the Boundary Contour System model, which identifies the short-range filtering process with cortical simple cells, and the long-range grouping process with cortical bipole cells. (shrink)

In two very influential papers from 2008, Tamar Gendler introduced the concept of “alief” to describe the mental state one is in when acting in ways contrary to their consciously professed beliefs. For example, if asked to eat what they know is fudge, but shaped into the form of dog feces, they will hesitate, and behave in a manner that would be consistent with the belief that the fudge is really poop. They alieve that it is disgusting, while they (...) believe it is not. This paper investigates laughter from self-proclaimed egalitarian, tolerant folk, in response to oppressive jokes that might fit the alief-model. If I merely alieve the content of a joke at which I laugh, will that constitute morally exculpating reasons for such laughter? And what else might it imply? This paper will provide insights at the intersections of humor studies, ethics, epistemology, phenomenology, and the philosophy of mind, all while being moderately and appropriately amusing. (shrink)

Gerard Manley Hopkins is best remembered for his celebratory 'nature sonnets'— 'Pied Beauty', 'God's Grandeur', and 'The Windhover'. Less than a year before his death, however, Hopkins drew on ideas associated with the ancient Greek thinker Heraclitus of Ephesus to express a darker view of nature. In 'That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection’ Hopkins offers a vision of nature and human existence marked by dissolution and destruction. But the poet rejects that apocalyptic vision (...) in favor of the Christian promise of salvation: ‘in a flash, at a trumpet crash/ I am all at once what Christ is…’ In articulating his dark vision of nature Hopkins followed Heraclitus’ fragment B 30: ‘this cosmos…a fire.’ However, Heraclitus’ cosmos ‘always was, is, and will be, an ever-living fire, kindled in measures and extinguished in measures.’ It was not, therefore, the one-way descent to destruction Hopkins described. (shrink)

For Bhartrhari, a fifth-century Indian grammarian-philosopher, all conscious beings—beasts, birds and humans—are capable of what he called pratibha, a flash of indescribable intuitive understanding such that one knows what the present object “means” and what to do with it. Such an understanding, if correct, amounts to a mode of knowing that may best be termed knowing-what, to distinguish it from both knowing-that and knowing-how. This paper attempts to expound Bhartrhari’s conception of pratibha in relation to the notions of meaning, (...) understanding, and knowing. First, I touch briefly on Bhartrhari’s views of consciousness and language, and examine at some length his indescribability thesis concerning the intuitive meaning of a sentence. Then, I delineate the general features of pratibha as intuitive understanding and discuss its probable range in relation to expert intuition and sense perception. Thereafter, I relate pratibha to the notion of knowing-what and show why these two notions are to be differentiated from knowing-that and knowing-how. The paper concludes with some remarks on the contemporary relevance of Bhartrhari’s conception of pratibha. (shrink)

This paper situates Einstein's theory of relativity within broader networks of communication. The speed of light, explained Einstein, was an unsurpassable velocity if , and only if , it was considered in terms of »arbitrary« and »voluntary« signals. Light signals in physics belong within a broader set of signs and symbols that include communication and military signals, understood by reference to Helmholtz, Saussure, media philosophies from WWII to '68 (Lavelle, Ong, McLuhan) and Derrida. Once light signals in physics are considered (...) in relation to semaphore, print, telegraph, radio, computers and tape recorders, Kittler and Habermas provide us with conflicting ways for understanding science and technology, rationality and consensus. We conclude with a study of »flash and bang« in popular accounts of relativity theory to understand the role of theoretical science in the transmission of information and violence. (shrink)

The majority of philosophers of religion, at least since Plantinga’s reply to Mackie’s logical problem of evil, agree that it is logically possible for an omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent God to exist who permits some of the evils we see in the actual world. This is conceivable essentially because of the possible world known as heaven. That is, heaven is an imaginable world in a similar way that logically possible scenarios in any fiction are imaginable. However, like some of the (...) imaginable stories in fiction where we are asked to envision an immoral act as a moral one, we resist. I will employ the works of Tamar Gendler on imaginative resistance and Keith Buhler’s Virtue Ethics approach to moral imaginative resistance and apply them to the conception of heaven and the problem of evil. While we can imagine God as an omnibenevolent parent permitting evil to allow for morally significant freedom and the rewards in heaven or punishments in hell (both possible worlds), we should not. This paper is not intended to be a refutation of particular theodicies; rather it provides a very general groundwork connecting issues of horrendous suffering and imaginative resistance to heaven as a possible world. (shrink)

Primary and secondary processes are the foundational axes of the Freudian mental apparatus: one horizontally as a tendency to associate, the primary process, and one vertically as the ability for perspective taking, the secondary process. Primary process mentation is not only supposed to be dominant in the unconscious but also, for example, in dreams. The present study tests the hypothesis that the mental activity during REM-sleep has more characteristics of the primary process, while during non-REM-sleep more secondary process operations take (...) place. Because the solving of a rebus requires the ability to non-contexually condensate the literal reading of single stimuli into a new one, rebus solving is a primary process operation by excellence. In a replication of the dream-rebus study of Shevrin and Fisher (1967), a rebus, which consisted of an image of a comb (German: “Kamm”) and an image of a raft (German: “Floß”), resulting in the German rebus word “kampflos” (Engl.: without a struggle), was flashed subliminally (at 1 ms) to 20 participants before going to sleep. Upon consecutive awakenings participants were asked for a dream report, free associations and an image description. Based on objective association norms, there were significantly more conceptual associations referring to Kamm and Floß indexing secondary process mentation when subjects were awakened from non-REM sleep as compared to REM-awakenings. There were not significantly more rebus associations referring to kampflos indexing primary process mentation when awakened from REM-sleep as compared to non-REM awakenings. However, when the associations were scored on the basis of each subject’s individual norms, there was a rebus effect with more idiosyncratic rebus associations in awakenings after REM than after non-REM-sleep. Our results support the general idea that REM-sleep is characterized by primary process thinking, while non-REM-sleep mentation follows the rules of the secondary process. (shrink)

Contribution to a book symposium on Tamar Gendler's Intuition, Imagination, and Philosophical Methodology.

Abstract:- Human civilization has been a witness to several instances of trauma, resulting from war, natural calamities, poverty, and many other heart wrenching episodes of human suffering. Political instability, inter-faith skirmishes, and state sponsored attacks by dictators are a few to mention, that made the society to drive its progress backwards and made the mankind suffer a lot, since ever. Apart from the human lead disasters, nature has also had its say on this, resulting in even extinction of some of (...) the most powerful species of flora and fauna from the universe. Floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, droughts, meteorite strikes, and flash-floods are a few to be blamed for causing a lot of trauma and suffering. It is, however possible for mankind to reconcile the trauma caused by the natural disasters, but a man-made disaster now, in the form of a nuclear war, would prove non-negotiable for human survival, and would be a potential catastrophe. Economic, political, religious, and corporate fronts at the global level could pave way to potential physical, as well as mental trauma, that could spread to every nook and corner of the globe, if not contained beforehand. (shrink)

Amie Thomasson challenges advocates of layered conceptions of reality to explain “how layers are distinguished” and “what holds them together” by “examining the world” (2014). One strategy for answering such questions is mereological, treating inter-layer relations as parthood relations, where layers exist whenever composition does, and the number of layers will be equivalent to the number of answers to Peter Van Inwagen’s Special Composition Question, while answers to his General Composition Question explain what holds the layers together (1987). Various answers (...) have been proffered for these questions, from the physicalist atomism of Richard Feynman (2015), Hilary Putnam (1958), and Kit Fine (1992) to the holism of Jonathan Schaffer (2010), the two-layer emergentism of Van Inwagen himself (1995), Tim Maudlin’s three-layered “flash ontology” (2011), and Rob Koons two-layered “thermal substances” (2019). In this PhD project, I seek to meet Thomasson’s challenge by identifying which of these proposals are compatible with plausible interpretations of quantum physics. Atomist answers may have difficulty with relativity, while holistic and emergentist models have trouble giving an account of experimental conditions. Maudlin and Koons’ views, meanwhile, may make testable predictions about the scope of entanglement. Examining the world can lead us to sharply winnow our theories about how layers are distinguished and what holds them together. (shrink)

This is a defence of the authenticity of Plato’s Epistula vii against the recent onslaught by Frede and Burnyeat (2015). It focusses on what Ep. vii has to say about writing and the embedded philosophical Digression and evaluates this in the context of other mainly late dialogues. In the Cratylus, Socrates ends with resignation regarding the potential of language study as a source of truth. This is also the case in Ep. vii, where the four means of knowledge (names, definitions, (...) images (diagrams) and knowledge/insight/true opinion) do not offer the essence of reality due to the weakness of language, in this case owing to a diagram with contrary properties. Consequently, name and definition are impermanent and conventional. Contra Burnyeat, definition is not impossible but useful in the acquisition of knowledge. Only after dialectical examination comes a flash of insight into reality. So, reality (truth) must, as in the Cratylus, be studied directly. Significantly for Plato (as opposed to Socrates), the epistemology is illustrated by a mathematical case. Hence it is relevant to look at mathematical procedure in middle and late dialogues. Moreover, the possible role of division is considered. Finally, the critique of writing justified by the Digression is placed in the context of the general aversion to the written word. The epistemology of the Digression is shown to be a fair and competent synopsis of the later Plato’s epistemology. Hence, there seems to be no reason thus far to doubt that Ep. vii is a genuine work of Plato. (shrink)

This paper discusses two novels by contemporary writer Inga Iwasiów (b. 1963), Bambino (2008) and Ku słońcu [Towards the Sun] (2010), in the context of geopolitical, ideological, social and psycho-cultural transformations as they specifically affect different generations of inhabitants of the Polish city of Szczecin (pre-1945 German Stettin) from 1945 until the first decade of the 21st century. Bambino covers the years 1945–1981, but also contains flashbacks to pre-war memory of Stettin and to the suppressed experiences of the new post-war (...) inhabitants, as well as ‘flash-forwards’ to post-1989, post-communist reality; Ku słońcu covers 1981 to the first decade of 2000s. It shows how the novels portray these transformations through the experience primarily of women (but not only) — in Bambino, through the main protagonists: Ula (formerly Ulrike), Anna and Marysia, and through that of the hidden narrator Magda (Marysia’s daughter born in the same year as the author, Iwasiów, 1963); and in Ku słońcu, primarily through the experience of Magda herself, as well as through that of two generations of ‘feminist’ academics: Małgorzata and Sylwia (in which it is hard not to perceive the personal experience of the author, though she is at pains to emphasize elsewhere that her work is a collective biography of the city, not so much of herself). The analysis follows Katarzyna Chmielewska’s supposition that contemporary Polish fiction dealing with the past ‘constantly oscillates between memory and genealogy’, and that it raises raw issues not yet addressed by historians; it also derives inspiration from the new ‘postdependency’ studies proposed by Hanna Gosk and Ryszard Nycz. It also attempts to capture the specific nature of Iwasiów’s use of language, her style of feminism, her method of portraying place, and the connections in her prose between place and memory. (shrink)

This is a defence of the authenticity of Plato’s Epistula vii against the recent onslaught by Frede and Burnyeat (2015). It focusses on what Ep. vii has to say about writing and the embedded philosophical Digression and evaluates this in the context of other mainly late dialogues. In the Cratylus, Socrates ends with resignation regarding the potential of language study as a source of truth. This is also the case in Ep. vii, where the four means of knowledge (names, definitions, (...) images (diagrams) and knowledge/insight/true opinion) do not offer the essence of reality due to the weakness of language, in this case owing to a diagram with contrary properties. Consequently, name and definition are impermanent and conventional. Contra Burnyeat, definition is not impossible but useful in the acquisition of knowledge. Only after dialectical examination comes a flash of insight into reality. So, reality (truth) must, as in the Cratylus, be studied directly. Significantly for Plato (as opposed to Socrates), the epistemology is illustrated by a mathematical case. Hence it is relevant to look at mathematical procedure in middle and late dialogues. Moreover, the possible role of division is considered. Finally, the critique of writing justified by the Digression is placed in the context of the general aversion to the written word. The epistemology of the Digression is shown to be a fair and competent synopsis of the later Plato’s epistemology. Hence, there seems to be no reason thus far to doubt that Ep. vii is a genuine work of Plato. (shrink)

It is no secret that disputes between philosophers working in separate traditions do arise, especially along the analytic-continental fault line. Flashes of disagreement between analytic philosophers and pragmatists have also been witnessed in recent years. Many analytic philosophers allege that pragmatism lacks logical rigor or contains a naïve theory of truth (i.e., what is useful is true). Some pragmatists contend that analytic philosophy fails to address practical issues—what John Dewey called ‘the problems of men’—and endorses a faulty fact-value dichotomy. Many (...) of these disagreements reflect mistaken views on both sides of the analytic-pragmatist divide, views that could easily be corrected through more open dialogue across the two traditions. Since at least the mid-twentieth century, analytic philosophers and pragmatists have reached out to each other in an effort to bridge the divide. When the founders of the analytic tradition, the logical positivists, immigrated from Austria and Germany to the United States during World War II, the stage was set for greater collaboration. Indeed, the logical positivist Otto Neurath invited the American pragmatist John Dewey to contribute to the Encyclopedia of Unified Sciences. This collaborative spirit finds expression in the present collection of essays. According to the editor, ‘(t)his volume aims to clarify the most recent developments in this process (of collaboration), focusing on the key theoretical issues in the revival of salient themes in the classic tradition of American philosophy within the context of analytical thought’ (xi). (shrink)

Imaginative resistance (IR) is rejecting a claim that is true within a fictional world. Accounts that describe IR hold that readers exit a fiction at points of resistance. But if resistance entails exiting a fiction, then learning morality from fiction doesn’t occur. But moral learning from fiction does occur; some such cases are instances of accepting a norm one first denied. I amend current solutions to IR with poetic license. The more poetic license granted a work, the more flexible one (...) is regarding perceived falsehoods. Instead of exiting the fiction, one has the chance to stay engaged and possibly learn norms she previously denied. (shrink)