Poorly saturated colors are closer to a pure grey than strongly saturated ones and, therefore, appear less “colorful”. Color saturation is effectively manipulated in the visual arts for balancing conflicting sensations and moods and for inducing the perception of relative distance in the pictorial plane. While perceptual science has proven quite clearly that the luminance contrast of any hue acts as a self-sufficient cue to relative depth in visual images, the role of color saturation in such figure-ground (...) class='Hi'>organization has remained unclear. We presented configurations of colored inducers on grey ‘test’ backgrounds to human observers. Luminance and saturation of the inducers was uniform on each trial, but varied across trials. We ran two separate experimental tasks. In the relative background brightness task, perceptual judgments indicated whether the apparent brightness of the grey test background contrasted with, assimilated to, or appeared equal (no effect) to that of a comparison background with the same luminance contrast. Contrast polarity and its interaction with color saturation affected response proportions for contrast, assimilation and no effect. In the figure-ground task, perceptual judgments indicated whether the inducers appeared to lie in front of, behind, or in the same depth with the background. Strongly saturated inducers produced significantly larger proportions of foreground effects indicating that these inducers stand out as figure against the background. Weakly saturated inducers produced significantly larger proportions of background effects, indicating that these inducers are perceived as lying behind the backgrounds. We infer that color saturation modulates figure-ground organization, both directly by determining relative inducer depth, and indirectly, and in interaction with contrast polarity, by affecting apparent background brightness. The results point towards a hitherto undocumented functional role of color saturation in the genesis of form, and in particular figure-ground percepts in the absence of chromatostereopsis. (shrink)

One hundred years after Gestalt views first took hold our understanding of how perceptual processes organize the visual field into objects and their local backgrounds has progressed substantially. We now know that in addition to the image-based properties that the Gestalt psychologists identified as relevant, a myriad of other image-based factors influence figure–ground organization, as do subjective factors such as past experience, attention, and intentions. Moreover, properties of grounds as well as properties of figures play a role. (...) The recent use of indirect measures and brain imaging techniques has revealed that there is much more processing of the regions ultimately perceived as grounds than is supposed in traditional approaches, and that competition and feedback are involved in figure–ground organization. These recent advances offer great promise for uncovering the mechanisms that organize the visual field into figures and grounds. (shrink)

There are few articles in science that remain relevant over a span of 100 years; Max Wertheimer's pioneering experimental studies on apparent motion and figural organization are notable exceptions. Wertheimer's 1912 account of motion perception started a revolution and established the Gestalt school of psychology. It also paved the way for further investigations of apparent motion perception, including subsequent research by Oliver Braddick, Stuart Anstis, Vilaynur Ramachandran, and others. Wertheimer's 1923 article on figural organization helped define grouping as (...) a principle of figure-ground perception. This book provides contemporary readers and researchers with Wertheimer's two pivotal articles, newly translated into English and each accompanied by a synopsis, and two essays on apparent motion and figural organization that describe the long-term impact of Wertheimer's work. The translation of the original German into readable English prose allows English-language readers for the first time to appreciate Wertheimer's visionary ideas. The accompanying essays tie Wertheimer's phenomenological descriptions to the underlying neuronal mechanisms, bridging the years between the articles' first publication and modern research. (shrink)

There is something special about holes that can be analyzed in terms of their existence, their structure, and their visual properties. Interest in holes, therefore, crosses the boundaries of different disciplines. This chapter will discuss holes and how they are processed by the visual system. Visual holes have proved themselves useful in the study of perception and of figure-ground organization in particular.

Although symmetry has been discussed in terms of a major law of perceptual organization since the early conceptual efforts of the Gestalt school (Wertheimer, Metzger, Koffka and others), the first quantitative measurements testing for effects of symmetry on processes of Gestalt formation have seen the day only recently. In this study, a psychophysical rating study and a “foreground”-“background” choice response time experiment were run with human observers to test for effects of bilateral symmetry on the perceived strength of (...) class='Hi'>figure-ground in triangular Kanizsa configurations. Displays with and without bilateral symmetry, identical physically-specified-to-total contour ratio, and constant local contrast intensity within and across conditions, but variable local contrast polarity and variable orientation in the plane, were presented in a random order to human observers. Configurations with bilateral symmetry produced significantly stronger figure-ground percepts reflected by greater subjective magnitudes and consistently higher percentages of “foreground” judgments accompanied by significantly shorter response times. These effects of symmetry depend neither on the orientation of the axis of symmetry, nor on the contrast polarity of the physical inducers. It is concluded that bilateral symmetry, irrespective of orientation, significantly contributes to the, largely sign-invariant, visual mechanisms of figure-ground segregation that determine the salience of figure-ground in perceptually ambiguous configurations. (shrink)

Victor Vasarely's (1906–1997) important legacy to the study of human perception is brought to the forefront and discussed. A large part of his impressive work conveys the appearance of striking three-dimensional shapes and structures in a large-scale pictorial plane. Current perception science explains such effects by invoking brain mechanisms for the processing of monocular (2D) depth cues. Here in this study, we illustrate and explain local effects of 2D color and contrast cues on the perceptual organization in terms of (...) figure-ground assignments, i.e. which local surfaces are likely to be seen as “nearer” or “bigger” in the image plane. Paired configurations are embedded in a larger, structurally ambivalent pictorial context inspired by some of Vasarely's creations. The figure-ground effects these configurations produce reveal a significant correlation between perceptual solutions for “nearer” and “bigger” when other geometric depth cues are missing. In consistency with previous findings on similar, albeit simpler visual displays, a specific color may compete with luminance contrast to resolve the planar ambiguity of a complex pattern context at a critical point in the hierarchical resolution of figure-ground uncertainty. The potential role of color temperature in this process is brought forward here. Vasarely intuitively understood and successfully exploited the subtle context effects accounted for in this paper, well before empirical investigation had set out to study and explain them in terms of information processing by the visual brain. (shrink)

Perceptual organization comprises a wide range of processes such as perceptual grouping, figure-ground organization, filling-in, completion, and perceptual switching. The Oxford Handbook of Perceptual Organization provides a broad and extensive review of the current literature, written in an accessible form for scholars and students.

Engagement is important to the success of applications, systems and artefacts as diverse as robotics, pedagogy, games, interactive installations, and virtual reality applications. Yet engagement has proved to be remarkably difficult to define as it can take many forms, so many that it is difficult to isolate what these different instantiations have in common. Instead of pursuing an empirical perspective, the human side of engagement, namely, involvement is considered from a broadly Heideggerian perspective. As Heidegger has a deserved reputation for (...) philosophical obscurity, all of the concepts adopted from his work are mapped onto the more familiar languages and vocabularies of psychology, human–computer interaction and cognitive science. It is argued that technology is engaging and our response to it is to be involved (with it). This resulting involvement–engagement dyad is thus an explicitly holistic account recognising roles for affordance, purpose, identity, affect and embodiment. (shrink)

In lectures and writings in the decades following the publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology [1967], Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology, developed what he called a “misreading” of the phenomenological writings of Aron Gurwitsch, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others. Garfinkel’s “misreading” included a selective and creative treatment of themes that Gurwitsch drew from Gestalt psychology, such as figure-ground, Gestalt contexture, and the phenomenal field. Rather than identifying these themes with visual perception demonstrated with picture-puzzles (for example, of animals hidden (...) in foliage) and line drawings of reversible figures, Garfinkel used them to demonstrate praxeological and interactional phenomena: organizations of embodied activity that constitute fields of collective action. Phenomenal fields, for Garfinkel, are formed through embodied work performed in concert with the actions of others. Although Harvey Sacks, the founder of Conversation Analysis, did not explicitly mention Gurwitsch, phenomenology or Gestalt psychology in his writings and transcribed lectures, some of his writings on the sequential organization of conversation seem informed, if only indirectly through his relationship with Garfinkel, by Gurwitsch’s treatment of visual and auditory phenomena. Both Garfinkel and Sacks devised innovative ways to transpose Gestalt phenomena from perceptual psychology to social formations. (shrink)

Following the pioneering studies of the receptive field (RF), the concept gained further significance for visual perception by the discovery of input effects from beyond the classical RF. These studies demonstrated that neuronal responses could be modulated by stimuli outside their RFs, consistent with the perception of induced brightness, color, orientation, and motion. Lesion scotomata are similarly modulated perceptually from the surround by RFs that have migrated from the interior to the outer edge of the scotoma and in this way (...) provide filling-in of the void. Large RFs are advantageous to this task. In higher visual areas, such as the middle temporal and inferotemporal lobe, RFs increase in size and lose most of their retinotopic organization while encoding increasingly complex features. Whereas lowerlevel RFs mediate perceptual filling-in, contour integration, and figure–ground segregation, RFs at higher levels serve the perception of grouping by common fate, biological motion, and other biologically relevant stimuli, such as faces. Studies in alert monkeys while freely viewing natural scenes showed that classical and nonclassical RFs cooperate in forming representations of the visual world. Today, our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the RF is undergoing a quantum leap. What had started out as a hierarchical feedforward concept for simple stimuli, such as spots, lines, and bars, now refers to mechanisms involving ascending, descending, and lateral signal flow. By extension of the bottom-up paradigm, RFs are nowadays understood as adaptive processors, enabling the predictive coding of complex scenes. Top-down effects guiding attention and tuned to task-relevant information complement the bottom-up analysis. (shrink)

The author clarifies the existential philosophy that is implicit in Kurt Goldstein's philosophy of organism (Goldstein, 1963; 1995). Situated in response to the growing trend that psychological phenomena are reducible to the nervous system, the author argues for the reverse: that the significance of nervous system activity can only be understood by viewing it as background to foreground performances. Like the organization of perception into meaningful figure-- ground Gestalts, the existential modes of embodiment, sociality, temporality, spatiality, and (...) attunement are organized together to accomplish foreground performances. It is only within this context that the activity of the nervous system may be understood as significant or insignificant. Speech is given as an example. The article concludes with a commentary on how the trend of reducing psychological phenomena to neurological phenomena has impaired our understanding of brain disorders and psychological disorders. (shrink)

This article investigates the concept of the ground truth as both an epistemic and technical figure of knowledge that is central to discussions of machine vision and media techniques of visuality. While ground truth refers to a set of remote sensing practices, it has a longer history in operational photography, such as aerial reconnaissance. Building on a discussion of this history, this article argues that ground truth has shifted from a reference to the physical, geographical (...) class='Hi'>ground to the surface of the images echoing earlier points raised by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy that there is a ground of the image that is central to the task of analysis beyond representational practices. Furthermore, building on the practices of pattern recognition, composite imaging, and different interpretational techniques, we discuss contemporary practices of machine learning that mobilizes geographical earth observation datasets for experimental purposes, including tests such as “fake geography” as well as artistic practices, to show how ground truth is operationalized in such contexts of AI and visual arts. (shrink)

In psychophysical experiments, the use of a psychophysical procedure of brightness/darkness cancellation shed light on interactions between spatial arrangement and figure–ground contrast in the perceptual filling in of achromatic and colored surfaces.Achromatic and chromatic Kanizsa squares with varying contrast, contrast polarity, and inducer spacingwere used to test how these factors interact in the perceptual filling in of surface brightness or darkness. The results suggest that the neuronal processing of surfaces with apparent contrast, leading to figure–ground segregation (...) (i.e., perceptual organization), is governed by mechanisms that integrate both luminance contrast and spatial information carried by the inducing stimuli, while discarding information on contrast polarity or color. The findings are discussed in relation to earlier observations on brightness assimilation and contrast. They support theories of nonantagonistic neural mechanisms suppressing local contrast or color signs in brightnessbased figure–ground percepts. Such mechanismsmight be necessary to cancel potentially conflicting polarities in geometricallycomplex visual stimuli so that perceptual filling in resulting in the most plausible representation of figure and ground can be achieved. (shrink)

A project manager’s emotional intelligence (EI) is essential to project success. However, the mechanism in this cause and effect remains a black box in extant literature. China is now the world’s largest construction market, and figuring out the mechanism of construction project manager’s (CPM’s) EI on project success is meaningful for developing the global construction market. This study conducted an in-depth interview with 24 CPMs with more than 5-year experience in construction project management. The grounded theory was employed to profile (...) the application of CPM’s EI and to build the multilevel mechanism that explains the influence of CPM’s EI on project success. The mechanism framework conforms to the existed input–process–output (IPO) theory. It consists of a team-level mechanism (including the positive team atmosphere, shared vision, and team cohesion) and an individual-level mechanism (i.e., organizational citizenship behavior directed at the organization, perceived supervisor support, trust in leader, and subordinate’s psychological and emotional health). This study further proposed that the effect of this mechanism does not work immediately but develops with time passing. Implications for further research and project management practice are discussed in the end. (shrink)

Figure-Ground Duality in Humour: A Multi-Modal Perspective Creativity with words or pictures is not simply a matter of communicating a message, but of communicating it well, in a way that is effective, original and which defies convention. Effectiveness here pertains to the pragmatic goals of the communicator, and the extent to which these are achieved, while originality pertains to the manner in which the message is framed. Language, for instance, provides a wealth of conventions for framing a message; (...) indeed, the vast part of language is a solidified body of culturally received conventions, which fix the meaning of words and phrases and determine the contextual appropriateness of specific terms, topics and conversational strategies. To frame a message in a novel manner that stretches or even subverts these conventions, a communicator must imbue the elements of communication—whether words, gestures or pictorial elements—with additional meanings. This duality of meaning is not arbitrary, however, or communication cannot succeed. Rather, a creative communicator must draw out secondary meanings that are already implicit in the stock elements of communication, in a way that the audience can understand, appreciate and replicate. Duality thus lies at the heart of creative communication, allowing a communicator to say one thing and simultaneously convey another, secondary message that may augment or subvert the overt content of the communication. This mechanism, which draws out and gives prominence to that which is normally unseen or implicit, is Figure-Ground Reversal. (shrink)

Because the visual system cannot process all of the objects, colors, and features present in a visual scene, visual attention allows some visual stimuli to be selected and processed over others. Most research on visual attention has focused on spatial or location-based attention, in which the locations occupied by stimuli are selected for further processing. Recent research, however, has demonstrated the importance of objects in organizing (or segregating) visual scenes and guiding attentional selection. Because of the long history of spatial (...) attention research, theories of spatial attention are more mature than theories of other visual processes, such as object segregation and object attention. In the present paper, I outline a biased competition account of object segregation and attention, following similar accounts that have been developed for spatial attention (Desimone and Duncan, 1995). In my biased competition account, I seek to understand how some objects can be segregated and selected over other objects in a complex visual scene. Under this account, there are two sources of visual information that allow an object to be processed over other objects: bottom-up information carried by the physical stimulus and top-down information based on an observer's goals. I use the biased competition account to combine many diverse findings from the object segregation and attention literatures into a common framework. (shrink)

The laws which predict how the perceptual quality of figure-ground can be extracted from the most elementary visual signals were discovered by the Gestaltists, and form an essential part of their movement (see especially Metzger, 1930, and Wertheimer, 1923 translated and re-edited by Lothar Spillmann, 2009 and 2012, respectively). Distinguishing figure from ground is a prerequisite for perception of both form and space (the relative positions, trajectories, and distances of objects in the visual field. The human (...) brain has an astonishing capacity for selecting and combining a few critical visual signals to accurately represent both form and space. (shrink)

Summary Based on Clausius’ phrasing of a “transformational content” and the resulting 2nd law of thermodynamics, I demonstrated that Gilbert Simondon’s On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects is historically situated at the threshold of understanding open systems thermodynamics and the related concepts of balance. Furthermore, I showed that Gestalt theory, as represented by Wolfgang Köhler, at least reproduced, if not partially anticipated or even prepared this development of 20th century thinking. Finally, I gave some short examples of how (...) Simondon applied the figure/ground distinction to human perception, memory, and a general theory of becoming and I introduced his proposal to analyse “the grounds” just as thoroughly as the laws of figuration. (shrink)

A fundamental fact about human minds is that they are never truly alone: all minds are steeped in situated interaction. That social interaction matters is recognized by any experimentalist who seeks to exclude its influence by studying individuals in isolation. On this view, interaction complicates cognition. Here, we explore the more radical stance that interaction co-constitutes cognition: that we benefit from looking beyond single minds toward cognition as a process involving interacting minds. All around the cognitive sciences, there are approaches (...) that put interaction center stage. Their diverse and pluralistic origins may obscure the fact that collectively, they harbor insights and methods that can respecify foundational assumptions and fuel novel interdisciplinary work. What might the cognitive sciences gain from stronger interactional foundations? This represents, we believe, one of the key questions for the future. Writing as a transdisciplinary collective assembled from across the classic cognitive science hexagon and beyond, we highlight the opportunity for a figure-ground reversal that puts interaction at the heart of cognition. The interactive stance is a way of seeing that deserves to be a key part of the conceptual toolkit of cognitive scientists. (shrink)

This book is a selection of papers from a conference which took place at the University of Keele in July 1982. The conference was an extraordinarily enjoyable one, and we would like to take this opportunity of thanking all participants for helping to make it so. The conference was intended to allow scholars working on different aspects of symbolic behaviour to compare findings, to look for common ground, and to identify differences between the various areas. We hope that it (...) was successful in these aims: the assiduous reader may judge for himself. Several themes emerged during the course of the conference. Some of these were: 1. There is a distinction to be made between those symbol systems which attempt, more or less directly, to represent a state of affairs in the world (e. g. language, drawing, map and navigational skill) and those in which the representational function is complemented, if not overshadowed, by properties of the symbol system itself, and the systematic inter-relations that symbols can have to one another (e. g. music, mathematics). The distinction is not absolute, for the nature of all symbolic skills is, in part, a function of the structure of the symbolic system employed. Nonetheless, this distinction helps us to understand some common acquisition difficulties, such as that experienced in mathematics, where mental manipulation of symbols can go awry if a child assumes too close a correspondence between mathematical symbols and the world they represent. 2. (shrink)

John Searle has mistakenly claimed that emergence is the central concept in the account of social ontology defended by Tony Lawson, the central figure in the project now regularly referred to as Cambridge Social Ontology. This is not the case. Rather, if any concept can be considered central for Lawson, it is organisation. In this paper, I explain how Searle could misunderstand Lawson and, in doing so, I bring out the importance of organisation for understanding how phenomena, both social (...) and non-social, are constituted. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Socially Engaged BuddhismBrian KarafinSocially Engaged Buddhism. By Sallie B. King. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. 192 pp.In a chapter on the philosophical and ethical foundations of the socially engaged Buddhist movement, Sallie King retells a story from the Burmese liberation struggle against military dictatorship. The story was originally told by Aung San Suu Kyi (b. 1945), the Burmese Buddhist activist who is one of the several representative (...) figures (heroes and heroines) of King’s synoptic account of the modern tradition of Engaged Buddhism. An activist against the dictatorship, Uncle U Kyi Maung, being interrogated by officers of military intelligence as to why he had joined the National League for Democracy, the organization headed by Aung San Suu Kyi, Uncle Maung replied: “For your sake” (p. 32).This story of Buddhist resistance can stand as a representative anecdote for King’s useful history of Engaged Buddhism. The context is one of political oppression and torture, abuse of human rights and repression of democracy, and the attempt to respond to this historical situation from a perspective rooted in the traditional Buddhist spirituality of Asia in a fashion that makes that spirituality relevant to the crises of modernity. The interrogated activist responds to the threat of torture with courage rooted in a Buddhist spiritual practice, and thus is able to assert a political stance grounded in a compassionate recognition of his interdependence with the so-called enemy who is temporarily holding power over him. This constellation of factors illustrates the phenomenon of Engaged Buddhism: It is a form of Buddhist spirituality, not a departure from tradition but an application of traditional ideas—of compassion, interdependence, impermanence, no-self, karma, and others—to the modern period, and specifically to a modern Buddhist Asia riven by war, political oppression, ecological crisis, and capitalist globalization in economics and culture. [End Page 215] This application of Buddhist spirituality to modern Asian (and global, though King’s focus is on Asia) history represents an alternative form of politics, and specifically of political resistance: nonviolent, nonadversarial, rooted in indigenous Asian cultures rather than imported from the West (as would be the case with the various Marxist and liberal political ideologies also at play in the colonial and postcolonial period that saw the development of engaged Buddhism). This is a political resistance, in King’s presentation, grounded in compassion rather than justice, and thereby offering to global observers a significantly different slant on modern politics than the Western ideologies and movements, secular as well as religious.“Engaged Buddhism” as a term, says King, was coined by Thích Nhất Hạnh (b. 1926) in the context of the war in Vietnam. This was to be a form of Buddhism that drew on the traditional sources (wisdom that knows interdependence/emptiness and compassion that acts on that wisdom) but found skillful means to intervene concretely in the multiple crises related to the war: in the form of social service work including education, but also political activism to address the underlying causes of the war. King demonstrates with this example of Thích Nhất Hạnh and Vietnam the combination of traditional Buddhist ideas with modern contexts of practical application that characterize the movement as a whole. The template of the “four noble truths” is foundational to Thích Nhất Hạnh’s thought—suffering, its causes, the cessation of suffering and the path to that cessation. But in a world of war and political oppression the causes of suffering cannot be only located intra-psychically—yes, the afflictive mental states of greed, hatred, and delusion are the ultimate sources, but the deluded collective hatred that issues in war must be seen as a relatively autonomous factor calling for its own analysis and response. If the orphans of a bombed-out village can be said to suffer from afflictive mental states it is really the minds of those carrying out the bombing who must be transformed, and this obviously requires intervention into the political realm, given that the war makers are not themselves usually willing to sit down and explore the causes of their unskillful behavior. Hence, engaged Buddhism is Buddhism in... (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche was a troublesome genius, a figure outside the mainstream philosophical tradition whose very apartness has made him central to contemporary philosophy. Nietzsche and Political Thought reclaims the political implications of Nietzsche's work: it shows how his philosophy of power addresses key issues in modern political thought especially those having to do with the historical and cultural nature of human agency.In this thought-provoking study, Mark Warren claims entirely new ground. He develops a "postmetaphysical" political philosophy that provides (...) a link between Nietzsche's work and the later philosophies of the Frankfurt School and Michel Foucault.Warren comes to terms with Nietszche's views on power, freedom, domination, equality, ideology - topics that recent interpretations have neglected in favor of a focus on the literary and philosophical aspects of his work, but that in fact make these literary and philosophical concerns relevant to social and political thought. Importantly, Warren draws a distinction between the implications of Nietzsche's theories concerning power and agency for contemporary political thought and Nietzsche's own politics. He demonstrates how Nietzsche's actual political views did not reflect - and in large part falsified - his own philosophical insights which taken by themselves point toward a pluralistic society in which egalitarianism underscores individuality. But his politics, Warren argues, derived too heavily from a deficient understanding of modern social and political organization.Mark Warren is Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. Nietzsche and Political Thought is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy. (shrink)

We propose a new masking technique for masking word stimuli. Drawing on the phenomena of metacontrast and paracontrast, we alternately presented two prime displays of the same word with the background color in one display matching the font color in the other display and vice versa. The sequence of twenty alterations was sandwich-masked by structure masks. Using this masking technique, we conducted evaluative priming experiments with positive and negative target and prime words. Significant priming effects were found – for primes (...) and targets drawn from the same as well as from different word sets. Priming effects were independent of prime discrimination performance in direct tests and they were still significant after the sample was restricted to those participants who showed random responding in the direct test. (shrink)

It is, by now, a well-established thesis that one major path that runs from Kant, through Fichte and Schelling, up to Hegel is defined by the conception of freedom as autonomy. It is less known and has been less frequently the object of study that from Kant to Hegel a new idea of life takes shape as well. Even less taken into account is the fact that these two paths from Kant to Hegel might be systematically intertwined. If the notion (...) of life in German Idealism is discussed at all, it has been discussed mostly in dealing with the philosophies of nature and biology of Kant and his successors. This framing is, of course, not wrong in itself; yet to my mind we can only fully account for the thought of what is living and the new interest that the idealist philosophies of nature actually deserve if we regard life as a practical notion. For the idealists, life is, as Fichte has it, an “analogue of freedom in nature,” and it describes the one form of object we can encounter in nature that possesses a kind of unity and organization that comes close to the unity and the organization of spirit. In various accounts of German Idealism, life is not only regarded as an analogue of a self-grounded order, but figures furthermore as a precondition of the actuality of freedom: It is in being alive that we might become free. How exactly this is so is of course not only a very complicated issue but also a contested one among Kant and his successors. In order to outline at least two basic approaches to relating ‘life’ and ‘autonomy,’ I would like to present a sketch of a reading of Kant, in whose works the analogy of life and autonomy first manifests itself, and of Hegel, who has to my mind most fully developed the potential of this constellation. (shrink)

In this paper, we conceptually explore the role of empathy as a connectedness organising mechanism. We expand ideas underlying positive organisational scholarship and examine leading-edge studies from neuroscience and quantum physics that give support to our claims. The perspective we propose has profound implications regarding how we organise and how we manage. First, we argue that empathy enhances connectedness through the unconscious sharing of neuro-pathways that dissolves the barriers between self and other. This sharing encourages the integration of affective and (...) cognitive consciousness which facilitates the ability to find common ground for solution building. Second, empathy enhances connectedness through altruistic action. In giving to others, feelings of joy and harmony are activated. This in turn allows personal freedom to be enriched and transcendence from the rational ego-self is reduced to develop a more expansive, integrated and enlightened state underlying connectedness. Finally, empathy enhances connectedness which results in sharing the quantum field of coherence where there is little separation between self and other. This means living beyond self-interest in a coherent world based upon interdependent wholeness rather than atomization and separation. Empathy allows us to find that state of coherent connectedness. (shrink)

This paper is a systematic investigation of motion expressions in programmatic music description. To address issues with defining the Source MOTION and the Target MUSIC, we utilize Gestalt models (Figure-Ground and Source-Path-Goal) while also critically examining the ontological complexity of the Target MUSIC. We also investigate music motion descriptions considering the role of the describer’s perspective and communicative goals. As previous research has demonstrated, an attentional Goal-bias is common in physical motion description, yet this has been found also (...) to lessen due to audience accommodation effects. We investigate whether this also occurs in music description. Using cognitive linguistic frameworks, we conducted an analysis of 21 English speakers’ written descriptions of dynamic orchestral excerpts. All participants gave a description of one excerpt reporting their own personal experiences and the other excerpt reporting the events of the excerpt for a fictional future participant. We find that addressee accommodation shapes the choice of the ontological types of Figures used from being more subjective and creative in describing music for oneself versus being more objective in describing music for others. However, our investigation does not find sufficient evidence for a Goal-bias in music like there is in physical motion event descriptions. (shrink)

Despite Michel Serres’s caution with figures of the limit, border, and boundary which philosophy and social theory put into play, his work can fruitfully be read as a proposal to rethink limits for a social and natural contract. By following up on the intimate connection between limits and law in his work, this paper shines a light on Serres’s argument for a parallelism of limits and laws; and particularly highlights the partially underacknowledged role of entropy for this matter. First, attention (...) will be drawn to the role of topological boundaries for Serres’s structural consideration of a natural contract in a number of his works (e.g., The Natural Contract, Atlas, Hominescence), in order to demonstrate the indispensable connection between topological boundaries, a topologically conceived ethics, and a topological approach to law. This grounds the argument for a second step, which will focus on the role of entropy and entropic difference for his understanding of processes of social organization as well as a proposal of a “new natural contract.” Similarly, this will emphasize the linkages between entropic figures of the limit and respective conceptions of a contract. This “new natural contract,” as Serres calls it, not only goes a long way in connecting themes around thermodynamic and informational entropy of the early Hermès series to his later employments of entropy in social theory, but also integrates different criticisms of his earlier natural contract and critiques of a Western-centric form of naturalism. The aim of this paper is to show that Serres’s approach to entropy engenders a reconsideration of a natural contract that not only thoroughly integrates his own non-essentialist and non-dualistic understanding of nature, but that opens up a horizon of resonances with feminist and postcolonial critiques of the Anthropocene. (shrink)