Perceivers generally show a poor ability to detect changes, a condition referred to as “Change Blindness” . They are, in addition, “blind to their own blindness”. A common explanation of this “Change Blindness Blindness” is that it derives from an inadequate, “photographical” folk-theory about perception. This explanation, however, does not account for intra-individual variations of CBB across trials. Our study aims to explore an alternative theory, according to which participants base their self-evaluations on two activity-dependent cues, namely search time and (...) perceived success in prior trials. These cues were found to influence self-evaluation in two orthogonal ways: success-feedback influenced self-evaluation in a global, contextual way, presumably by recalibrating the norm of adequacy for the task. Search time influenced it in a local way, predicting the success of a given trial from its duration. (shrink)

Conceptual primitives and semantic universals are the cornerstones of a semantic theory which Anna Wierzbicka has been developing for many years. Semantics: Primes and Universals is a major synthesis of her work, presenting a full and systematic exposition of that theory in a non-technical and readable way. It delineates a full set of universal concepts, as they have emerged from large-scale investigations across a wide range of languages undertaken by the author and her colleagues. On the basis of empirical (...) cross-linguistic studies it vindicates the old notion of the "psychic unity of mankind", while at the same time offering a framework for the rigorous description of different languages and cultures. (shrink)

According to the PCCP thesis, the probability of a conditional A → C is the conditional probability P. This claim is undermined by Lewis’ triviality results, which purport to show that apart from trivial cases, PCCP is not true. In the present article we show that the only rational, “Dutch Book-resistant” extension of the agent’s beliefs concerning non-conditional sentences A and C to the conditional A → C is by assuming that P = P. In other cases a diachronic Dutch (...) Book against the agent can be constructed. There is a tension between our findings and Lewis’ results, which needs to be explained. Therefore, we present a probability space which corresponds in a natural way to the diachronic Dutch Book—and which allows the conditional A → C to be interpreted as an event in a mathematically sound way. It also allows to formalize the notion of conditionalizing A → C on ¬C which plays a crucial role in Lewis’ proof. Our conclusion is that Lewis’ proof is circular, so it cannot be considered to be a sound argument against PCCP. (shrink)

This important new book by one of the world's leading political theorists boldly questions the moral justification for organizing our world as a territorial states-system and proposes major changes to states' sovereign powers.

Adverse childhood experiences are prevalent in many western populations. Large studies have put the likelihood of having at least one ACE above 50% of the general population. ACEs and the associated experience of chronic stress, moreover, have been consistently linked with a variety of negative physical and psychological health outcomes across the lifespan from behavioral problems and cognitive difficulties early on, to greater chance of suffering from a mental health disorder and engaging in self destructing behaviors. The literature puts forward (...) several protective factors, such as mother-child relations, parental health, and community engagement. In this perspective paper we put forward the potential of regular nature engagement as a possible additional protective factor. Nature’s therapeutic potential has been well documented, for many psychopathologies and mental health difficulties. Yet studies looking at the protective and therapeutic potential of nature with people with ACEs are remarkably limited in numbers. In this perspective piece we conduct a search of the literature to find previous applications of nature as a protective or therapeutic intervention for people with ACEs. We highlight the gap in the current literature, and put forward various mechanisms of action that justify a closer exploration of this area in further research. (shrink)

What is the nature of the underlying representations and mechanisms which allow very young children to acquire the words and structures of their native language? Our research looks especially at children between the ages of 3-5 when language acquisition still proceeds rapidly and uses multiple methodologies, including act-out tasks, truth value judgment tasks, and elicited imitation and production tasks.

This article is the first to bring into scientific discussion and to provide a historico-philosophical analysis of a manuscript “Neoplatonic Philosophy from the archive of Pamfil Danylovych Yurkevych. The reviewed manuscript belongs to P. D. Yurkevych’s handwritten nachlass stored in the funds of the Institute of Manuscript of V. I. Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine in the city of Kyiv. Additional archival materials are involved to answer several research questions. The author of this article provides arguments in favor of proving (...) that the manuscript is to be attributed to P. D. Yurkevych’s own handwriting, to be dated circa 1856, and that the purposing of its content is to be qualified as didactic. As it is established in the article, textual content of the manuscript in question is an original concise description and analysis of neoplatonic philosophy, which belongs to the set of materials created by P. D. Yurkevych in preparation for teaching the course on Ancient Philosophy in Kyiv Theological Academy during Kyivan period of his work. Turning to the inner critique of the manuscript, author of this article emphasizes an analysis that P. D. Yurkevych conducts concerning Plotinus’s ideas of the process of emanation of the world from the One and the role that philosophy has in true cognition. While comparing the manuscript “Neoplatonic Philosophy” with one of P. D. Yurkevych’s substantial philosophical works “Idea”, additional light is shed upon the prosess of genesis and development of Christian-Platonic worldview of the thinker. Furthermore, it is established that the manuscript in question played a major role in P. D. Yurkevych’s own schooling, particulary concerning his view on the philosophy of Plotinus, and his general reception of the Platonic tradition. (shrink)

Since the declaration of financial crisis in 2008, and the imposition of austerity measures in 2011, Greece has become an epicentre—or a “laboratory”—of multiple, successively declared crises, including the humanitarian crisis induced by the devastating effects of neoliberal structural adjustment policies. In this paper, I approach the explosion of crisis discourse as a medium for ideological negotiations of nation-state borders in relation to a continental project of securitisation. I suggest that ‘crisis’ functions as a lexicon through which sovereignty can be (...) reasserted in relation to supranational institutional interference in ostensibly democratic governance. Specifically, I examine how the refugee crisis and the debt crisis converge in nationalised space in Greece; that is, how in state discourse, ‘crises’ serve as a conduit through which the borders of an embattled nation are redrawn and hardened against threats from a political space conceptualised as ‘outside’ the nation. My point of entry is the declaration of the Greek government by the end of the summer of 2015, that it was “experiencing a crisis within a crisis,” dually victimised by migration ‘flows’ and failed European solidarity in a context of ongoing austerity measures required by its institutional lenders. The figure of ‘a crisis within a crisis’ functioned to delineate the boundaries of national space and time and to distinguish the normative victims of what are seen as distinct, if overlapping political phenomena (debt and migration), from those who parasitically share in, or indeed by their very illicit presence cause or contribute to the suffering of the national subject. If the global economic crisis had already been made ‘ours’ by being constructed as a problem inherent in the national economy, the global war on migration became reinvented as 'Europe’s crisis,’ and then ‘Greece’s.’ The nationalisation of ‘crisis’ then, has a triple function: first, to conceal the systemic and structural underpinnings of violent processes of dispossession and displacement; second, to authorise the imposition of regimes of management and securitisation; and third, to reify borders that simultaneously fortify the agencies of state sovereignties while containing those of embodied human beings. The figure of ‘nesting crises’—‘a crisis within a crisis’—emerges through gestures of ownership or territorialisation of crisis: that is, in the conditions under which, affectively and politically a ‘crisis’ becomes ‘ours’ rather than ‘theirs’ and, indeed, constitutes the ‘we’ and the ‘they.’ ‘Nesting crises’ discourse can be read as a vocabulary through which national sovereignty is reasserted and national unity reconstituted. (shrink)

In the summer and autumn of 2015, I met with activists in Athens and Thessaloniki, with the aim of collaboratively producing a conceptual mapping of LGBTQ social movement discourses. My point of entry was the use and signification of “racism” in LGBTQ discourses (and more generally in common parlance in Greek) as a superordinate or “umbrella” concept that includes “homophobic” and “transphobic” but also “misogynist,” “ageist,” “ableist,” and class- or status-based prejudice, discrimination, and oppression, in addition to that, of course, (...) based on “race” or “ethnicity.” As a political theorist whose work over the past decade has focused on the concept of intersectionality, its origins in US Black feminist thought, and its transnational travel beyond the Anglo-American context in which it originated, I wanted to examine how this use of “racism” relates to the concept of “intersectionality” which is now emergent in the Greek social movement context, in particular in LGBTQ and feminist discourses, yet which has not been engaged by academics, neither in the nascent and struggling field of gender studies, nor in legal theory. How do LGBTQ activists define the referential scope and semantic contents of these concepts, based on what knowledges grounded in lived experiences, and on what kinds of social movement strategies? How do these concepts and their theoretical underpinnings reflect or direct activists’ political resistance to the widespread violence that they identify within and on the borders of Greek society? Do they enable coalition-building with other minoritised groups targeted by institutional and interpersonal “racism”? In approaching these questions, I wanted to trace the ways in which my interlocutors produce theories, through which social conditions of racial and heteropatriarchal power are made visible, are explained, and are contested—conditions that they identify with the institutions—“nation, religion, and family”—that make up what they termed the “triptych” or the “syntax of power.” What emerged in my conversations with activists were vivid accounts of the atmospheric violence facing LGBTQ people in Greece, its institutional and interpersonal manifestations, both banal and extreme. Indeed, many activists defined violence as the quintessence of oppression as such, and as what links various systems or forms of oppression—or, “racisms”—to one another. In what follows, I draw on these conversations not to answer the questions with which I set out, but, primarily, those that my interlocutors generated, which concern, ultimately, the unlivability of queer and trans lives—the violence LGBTQ people face and resist, particularly at the intersections of youth, poverty, disability, rurality, racialisation, criminalisation, and patriarchy. (shrink)

This article explores the activities of the Society of Apothecaries and its members following the foundation of a laboratory for manufacturing chemical medicines in 1672. In response to political pressures, the guild created an institutional framework for production which in time served its members both functionally and financially and established a physical site within which the endorsement of practical knowledge could take place. Demand from state and institutional customers for drugs produced under corporate oversight affirmed and supported the society's trading (...) role, with chemical and pharmaceutical knowledge utilized to fulfil collective and individual goals. The society benefited from the mercantile interests, political connections and practical expertise of its members, with contributions to its trading activities part of a much wider participation in London's medical, scientific and commercial milieu. Yet, as apothecaries became increasingly engaged in the practice of medicine rather than the preparation and sale of drugs, the society struggled to reconcile the changing priorities of those it represented, and tensions emerged between its corporate and commercial activities. (shrink)

Research in social cognition aims to illuminate how agents can understand, communicate, and interact with other agents. When defining socio-cognitive abilities, standard cognitivist approaches tend to require demanding representational information processing. Thereby, they describe rather ideal cases. However, interdisciplinary research indicates multiple forms of how socio-cognitive abilities can be realized. Recent minimal approaches offer notions accommodating different kinds of cognitive processing. Nevertheless, the introduction of minimal cases of cognition raises new questions of how to account for commonalities and differences with (...) respect to the standard concepts. It seems to be a widespread strategy to adapt ideas of a two-system approach in order to distinguish less demanding instances from more demanding cases. This paper critically explores such an interpretation of a two-system approach and argues that a dichotomous understanding fails to capture the actual diversity of cognitive processes. (shrink)

In ‘The autonomy of the affect’ Brian Massumi wrote of the gap between affective and cognitive registering of the traumatic experience. Affect theorists and neuroscientists have long shared the notion of a gap between the somatic response to a traumatic event and the appraisal of the affective situation. This article develops theories on dissociation or nothingness, where nothingness is a measurement of the space between the affective and the cognitive registering of a traumatic event. It explores the concept of two (...) different systems, one a ‘conscious automatic’ system and the other an ‘intensity system’ that exists outside of normal physiological sequencing, beyond narration, and therefore incapable of integrating into memory systems. (shrink)

Abstrakt Analizy w zakresie starogreckich znaczeń słowa pathos skłaniają do postawienia tezy, że należy mówić o czterech głównych kontekstach, które ukształtowały rozumienie tej kategorii: o kontekście retorycznym, etycznym, tragicznym i emotywnym (passio). Chociaż wszystkie cztery wspomniane obszary pozostawały względem siebie stosunkowo niezależne, modyfikując sens pojęcia pathos w czasem bardzo odległych rejestrach czasowych, to można wskazać pewien wspólny rdzeń, determinujący charakter omawianej kategorii: mianowicie jej inherentną zakłóceniowość, kryzysogenność i afektywność. Pozostaje on w ścisłej relacji z odniesieniem patosu do doświadczeń bolesnych, nagłych, (...) zadziwiających, a także – tak, jak w ślad za Grekami czyni to Waldenfels – do stanów pasywnych, z których podmiot, pod wpływem patycznego ugodzenia, wybudza się jako żywo reagujący, cielesny „respondent”. Celem niniejszego artykułu jest prześledzenie owych starożytnych źródeł patosu i wskazanie ich współczesnych reminiscencji, rozbrzmiewających w Waldenfelsowskiej fenomenologii responsywnej. Struktura tekstu jest następująca: w pierwszej części przyglądamy się historycznym zastosowaniom pojęcia pathos (głównie w ramach tradycji greckiej); w części drugiej analizujemy patos pod kątem zdziwienia, uchodzącego według Platona i Arystotelesa za akt inicjujący myślenie filozoficzne; w części trzeciej, poświęconej fenomenologii Waldenfelsa, prezentujemy afektywny i cielesny wymiar doświadczenia patycznego, zradykalizowanego zarówno względem kartezjańskiego dualizmu, jak i Husserlowskiej teorii autoafekcji; w części czwartej powracamy do wyróżnionych wcześniej historycznych kontekstów patosu, aby pokazać, w jaki sposób Waldenfels na gruncie fenomenologii responsywnej aktualizuje je w ramach swojej polemiki z „klasycznymi” ujęciami doświadczenia i emocji. Słowa kluczowe: Patos, fenomenologia responsywna, Bernhard Waldenfels, retoryka, tragedia, etyka, afekt. (shrink)

The notion of whether people focus on the past, present or future, and how it shapes their behaviour is known as Time Perspective. Fundamental to the work of two of its earliest proponents, Zimbardo and Boyd (2008), was the concept of balanced time perspective and its relationship to wellness. A person with balanced time perspective can be expected to have a flexible temporal focus of mostly positive orientations (past-positive, present-hedonistic, and future) and much less negative orientations (past-negative and present-fatalistic). This (...) study measured deviation from balanced time perspective (DBTP: Zhang, Howell, and Stolarski, 2013) in a sample of 243 mature adults aged 45 to 91 years and explored relationships to Retirement Planning, Depression, Anxiety, Stress, Positive Mood, and Negative Mood. Results indicate that DBTP accounts for unexplained variance in the outcome measures even after controlling for demographic variables. DBTP was negatively related to Retirement Planning and Positive Mood and positively related to Depression, Anxiety, Stress and Negative Mood. Theoretical and practical implications regarding balanced time perspective are discussed. (shrink)

Fifty years after the death of Edmund Husserl, the main founder of the phenomenological current of thought, we present to the public a four book collection showing in an unprecedented way how Husserl's aspiration to inspire the entire universe of knowledge and scholarship has now been realized. These volumes display for the first time the astounding expansion of phenomenological philosophy throughout the world and the enormous wealth and variety of ideas, insights, and approaches it has inspired. The basic commitment to (...) phenomenological concerns found in all this variety makes this collection a most signifi cant historical document. This second volume of the collection bears witness to a deliberate shift of attention from the earlier to the later phase of Husserl's reflections. We see how his issues - intersubjectivity, ethics, human encounter, the societal world, empathy, the sphere of the self, and the surpassing of dichotomies (bodylpsyche, etc.) - are now at the center of attention in the human sciences. Among the authors are H. Tellenbach, A. Rigobello, C. Balzer, C. Bjurvill, V. Molchanov, E. Syristova, O. Balaban, R. Boehm, M. Sancipriano, O. M. Anwar, Y. Okamoto, B. Holyst, T. Sodeika, and M. De Negri. The studies were gathered at the programs held by The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning in the commemorative year 1988/1989, chiefly at the First World Congress of Phenomenology at Santiago de Compos tela, Spain, with the aim of assessing the current state of phenomenology. A-T. T. (shrink)

Climate change threatens the well-being of all life on our planet, human and non-human, individual and systemic, current and future. It disrupts the social-ecological systems in which human communi...

The article aims at challenging the very idea of bioethics. Starting with a thought experiment which puts into perspective relations between law and ethics, a reflexion on founding moments of bioethics as a distinctive discipline will be proposed in order to contest some of its assumptions. Less traditional ways of seeing the field will be subsequently analyzed, yet the conclusion of this exploration will remain critical: we should rather think of an alternative way of seeing moral expertise in the biomedical (...) sphere, founded on plural knowledge of diverse agents who leave their moral presuppositions aside as much as this is possible. (shrink)

A Companion to the Philosophy of Action offers a comprehensive overview of the issues and problems central to the philosophy of action. The first volume to survey the entire field of philosophy of action (the central issues and processes relating to human actions) Brings together specially commissioned chapters from international experts Discusses a range of ideas and doctrines, including rationality, free will and determinism, virtuous action, criminal responsibility, Attribution Theory, and rational agency in evolutionary perspective Individual chapters also cover prominent (...) historic figures from Plato to Ricoeur Can be approached as a complete narrative, but also serves as a work of reference Offers rich insights into an area of philosophical thought that has attracted thinkers since the time of the ancient Greeks. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the philosophical and scientific positions of Ludwik Fleck, author of the first theory of democratic science and, at the end of the day, a scientific realist. This interpretation of his work is somewhat at odds with the more standard approach, wherein Fleck is presented as a pioneer of relativism or of social constructivism in the philosophy of sciences. In the following, I discuss Fleck's philosophical context o er an analysis of a few of his better-known (...) interpretations and offer a final perspective by showing his commitment to the reality of scientific practice, notwithstanding his scepticism towards scientific theories. And while this paper is an attempt to o er an alternative reading of Fleck's positions, it also aims at reaffirming a stance already defended by, among others, Ian Hacking. Scientific realism needs to be understood not in opposition to a historical perspective on dynamically developing sciences, but along with this perspective. (shrink)

Wojciech Dzieduszycki (1848-1909) łączył w sobie filozofa i polityka. Wzorował się na Sokratesie, z którym dzielił nie tylko zachowanie, lecz także poglądy. Dzieduszycki widział w greckim filozofie myśliciela politycznego, oddanego państwu obywatela, a więc odczytywał go w duchu konserwatywnych wartości. W Sokratesie upatrywał też „lekarstwa” na zmieniającą się rzeczywistość.

In this text I analyze the presence of the philosophy of Nietzsche in the literary and intellectual work of the writer Albertina Bertha de Lafayette Stockler (Rio de Janeiro, 1880-1953). The interest and passion of the writer by the German philosopher is demonstrated in references, epigraphs and quotes of the philosopher. Nietzsche’s discussion of Bertha holds a historical interest in the fact that it is rare for a woman to attend philosophical forums on an equal footing with men in Brazil (...) at the time. In addition to the celebrated 1914 conference, which became the chapter in Estudos (1920), Nietzschean notions permeate the writings of Albertina Bertha, both in novels and essays. (shrink)