L’ouvrage de Beate Collet et Emmanuelle Santelli vient combler un manque qui pendant de longues années a freiné l’avancement des connaissances sur les populations françaises d’ascendance étrangère. Mieux encore, il fait le lien avec l’ensemble du corps social, montrant à la fois sur quels points les réalités de ces populations rejoignent celles de la société globale, et dans quels domaines elles se différencient. Cet ouvrage ambitieux nous livre une sociologie de la famille qui s’attaque à ce..

Against Continuity is the first book to demonstrate that the beating heart of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy is a systematic ontology of irreducible, singular entities. This requires a radical break with decades of Deleuzian orthodoxy, according to which Deleuze's metaphysics revolves around the dissolution of discrete entities into a continuous world of flows and events.With reference to all of Deleuze's work, including published and untranslated seminars, as well as the recently published 'Lettres et autres textes', Arjen Kleinherenbrink critically compares Deleuze's ontology (...) to seven related contemporary thinkers: Levi Bryant, Maurizio Ferraris, Markus Gabriel, Manuel DeLanda, Graham Harman, Tristan Garcia and Bruno Latour. These comparisons establish Deleuze as an important precursor to object-oriented speculative realism and open up exciting new avenues of thought for critics and supporters of Deleuze alike. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 463 Kawika Guillermo Libido Ergo Sum Sitting atop a red beanbag stained with dark splotches, Kelsey watched the tells from the five boys sitting on the carpet in front of her. One by one they gave away their hands, their eyes dodging hers, perhaps afraid of her female intuition. She loved these surreptitious moments, when her boys tried (...) to fool her, believing that they had her in their clutches, as if she couldn’t help but be pulled by their charms. Kelsey went all in, moving her chips into the middle of the carpet. Kaleb’s mouth grinned to the right while Gabriel impatiently tapped on his knee, keeping beat with the remixed 80’s tune coming from the large boom box behind him. Billy’s face was in a gleeful Leave-It-to-Beaver of daffiness, and Michael’s dumbfounded expression—worn to distract her— was put out by a nervous scratch of his neck. After each had pussied out, Kelsey leaned over to distract them further with her cleavage as she picked up the red playing cards, her hair settling onto the boys’ laps as if to imitate fellatio. “Alright, pussy bitches,” she said, collecting the chips and stirring the toothpick in her mouth like a mortar. “Pass’em down,” pointing to the gold dealer’s piece. “Big blind, little blind.” She watched the world as if from a recliner and saw herself dealing the next hand with the finesse of a professional dealer. Her gaze circled the carpet of poker players. Their eyes never met hers. In every house party Kelsey hosted, she always saw a faint bleakness in her guests. She always cleaned them out, her eyes scanning them like food at a supermarket, unveiling their moves with every glance. She watched them all at once: Jackson wiping his mouth, Michael adjusting his glasses, Gabriel 464 Kawika Guillermo chewing on bubblegum in loud smacks, Billy grinning as he mouthed curse words. Finally, Kelsey took only a glimpse at her own cards before doubling the ante. Tommy shrugged and tossed his cards; Michael met her raise and she went all in. She noticed these patterns all between them. She saw their reactions before they even happened: Michael shaking his head and calling her a bitch as he splashed his cards onto her living room carpet. At two in the morning she drank two tequila shots in the kitchen with Paul, one of the many toxic men that she had invited to her party from work. He was a sturdy baseball player/lightweight alcoholic, toxic in his thoughtless remarks on meeting schedules, upcoming due-dates, and portfolios. “Then you put the salt on your thumb, or whatever,” Paul said, shaking up a bottle of Patrón Silver, as if it needed to be shaken. Kelsey stuck out her shot glass for another. A year ago she would have been doing homework, playfully kicking off the dust of the world with a big biology textbook in her hands. Since then, she had discovered that there was a pattern to debauchery that led to some existential fulfillment—a realizing of herself as a living substance—an uber-debauchery. Refusing to dilute her angst into anything but total surrender, she was still a Vegas girl, willing to throw herself into in the Las Vegas rites of passage of drunk driving, diving nude into neighbor’s pools, and waking up in hotel rooms with a hundred dollar bill on the cupboard, weighted in place by Gideon’s Bible. “Another sausage fest,” said a man in a cowboy hat and vintage overalls. Kelsey didn’t know him. He sat on the countertop like the Cheshire Cat and flipped through a book of bumper stickers. He wore one with the words “Libido Ergo Sum” on his forehead. “All right!” another drunken voice shouldered through waves of sound: “Seize the day!” “James’s baby sure looks cute tonight,” said another drunken voice. “’Course no one would try, except this guy.” The man in the cowboy hat smiled up at her. “How come you don’t invite your girlfriends to your parties?” “I don’t have... (shrink)

Privacy and surveillance scholars increasingly worry that data collectors can use the information they gather about our behaviors, preferences, interests, incomes, and so on to manipulate us. Yet what it means, exactly, to manipulate someone, and how we might systematically distinguish cases of manipulation from other forms of influence—such as persuasion and coercion—has not been thoroughly enough explored in light of the unprecedented capacities that information technologies and digital media enable. In this paper, we develop a definition of manipulation that (...) addresses these enhanced capacities, investigate how information technologies facilitate manipulative practices, and describe the harms—to individuals and to social institutions—that flow from such practices. -/- We use the term “online manipulation” to highlight the particular class of manipulative practices enabled by a broad range of information technologies. We argue that at its core, manipulation is hidden influence—the covert subversion of another person’s decision-making power. We argue that information technology, for a number of reasons, makes engaging in manipulative practices significantly easier, and it makes the effects of such practices potentially more deeply debilitating. And we argue that by subverting another person’s decision-making power, manipulation undermines his or her autonomy. Given that respect for individual autonomy is a bedrock principle of liberal democracy, the threat of online manipulation is a cause for grave concern. (shrink)

In two often neglected passages of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant submits that the Critique is a 'treatise' or a 'doctrine of method'. These passages are puzzling because the Critique is only cursorily concerned with identifying adequate procedures of argument for philosophy. In this book, Gabriele Gava argues that these passages point out that the Critique is the doctrine of method of metaphysics. Doctrines of method have the task of showing that a given science is indeed a science (...) because it possesses 'architectonic unity' – which happens when it realizes the 'idea' of a science. According to Gava's novel approach, the Critique establishes that metaphysics is capable of this unity, and his reading of the Critique from this perspective not only illuminates the central role of the Transcendental Doctrine of Method within it, but also clarifies the relationship between the different parts of the work. (shrink)

In this paper, I distinguish three general approaches to public trust in science, which I call the individual approach, the semi-social approach, and the social approach, and critically examine their proposed solutions to what I call the problem of harmful distrust. I argue that, despite their differences, the individual and the semi-social approaches see the solution to the problem of harmful distrust as consisting primarily in trying to persuade individual citizens to trust science and that both approaches face two general (...) problems, which I call the problem of overidealizing science and the problem of overburdening citizens. I then argue that in order to avoid these problems we need to embrace a (thoroughly) social approach to public trust in science, which emphasizes the social dimensions of the reception, transmission, and uptake of scientific knowledge in society and the ways in which social forces influence both positively and negatively the trustworthiness of science. (shrink)

Since 2016, when the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal began to emerge, public concern has grown around the threat of “online manipulation”. While these worries are familiar to privacy researchers, this paper aims to make them more salient to policymakers — first, by defining “online manipulation”, thus enabling identification of manipulative practices; and second, by drawing attention to the specific harms online manipulation threatens. We argue that online manipulation is the use of information technology to covertly influence another person’s decision-making, by targeting (...) and exploiting their decision-making vulnerabilities. Engaging in such practices can harm individuals by diminishing their economic interests, but its deeper, more insidious harm is its challenge to individual autonomy. We explore this autonomy harm, emphasising its implications for both individuals and society, and we briefly outline some strategies for combating online manipulation and strengthening autonomy in an increasingly digital world. (shrink)

The central aim of this article is to specify the ontological nature of constitutive mechanistic phenomena. After identifying three criteria of adequacy that any plausible approach to constitutive mechanistic phenomena must satisfy, we present four different suggestions, found in the mechanistic literature, of what mechanistic phenomena might be. We argue that none of these suggestions meets the criteria of adequacy. According to our analysis, constitutive mechanistic phenomena are best understood as what we will call ‘object-involving occurrents’. Furthermore, on the basis (...) of this notion, we will clarify what distinguishes constitutive mechanistic explanations from etiological ones. 1 Introduction 2 Criteria of Adequacy 2.1 Descriptive adequacy 2.2 Constitutive–etiological distinction 2.3 Constitution 3 The Ontological Nature of Constitutive Mechanistic Phenomena 3.1 Phenomena as input–output relations 3.2 Phenomena as end states 3.3 Phenomena as dispositions 3.4 Phenomena as behaviours 4 Phenomena as Object-Involving Occurrents 4.1 What object-involving occurrents are and why we need them 4.2 The object in the phenomenon 4.3 The adequacy of option 5 Conclusion. (shrink)

This book presents a systematic interpretation of Charles S. Peirce’s work based on a Kantian understanding of his teleological account of thought and inquiry. Departing from readings that contrast Peirce’s treatment of purpose, end, and teleology with his early studies of Kant, Gabriele Gava instead argues that focusing on Peirce’s purposefulness as a necessary regulative condition for inquiry and semiotic processes allows for a transcendental interpretation of Peirce’s philosophical project. The author advances this interpretation through presenting original views on (...) aspects of Peirce’s thought, including: a detailed analysis of Peirce’s ‘methodeutic’ and ‘speculative rhetoric,’ as well as his ‘critical common-sensism’; a comparison between Peirce’s and James’ pragmatisms in view of the account of purposefulness Gava puts forth; and an examination of the logical relationships that order Peirce’s architectonic classification of the sciences. (shrink)

Philosophers have suggested that, in order to understand the particular visual state we are in during picture perception, we should focus on experimental results from vision neuroscience—in particular, on the most rigorous account of the functioning of the visual system that we have from vision neuroscience, namely, the ‘Two Visual Systems Model’. According to the initial version of this model, our visual system can be dissociated, from an anatomo-functional point of view, into two streams: a ventral stream subserving visual recognition, (...) and a dorsal stream subserving the visual guidance of action. Following this model, philosophers have suggested that, since the two streams have different functions, they represent different properties of a picture. However, the original view proposed by the ‘Two Visual Systems Model’ about the presence of a strong anatomo-functional dissociation between the two streams has recently been questioned on both philosophical and experimental grounds. Indeed, the analysis of several new pieces of evidence seems to suggest that many visual representations in our visual system, related to different tasks, are the result of a deep functional interaction between the streams. In the light of the renewed status of the ‘Two Visual Systems Model’, also our best philosophical model of picture perception should be renewed, in order to take into account a view of the process of picture perception informed by the new evidence about such interaction. Despite this, no account fulfilling this role has been offered yet. The aim of the present paper is precisely to offer such an account. It does this by suggesting that the peculiar visual state we are in during picture perception is subserved by interstream interaction. This proposal allows us to rely on a rigorous philosophical account of picture perception that is, however, also based on the most recent results from neuroscience. Unless the explanation offered in this paper is endorsed, all the recent evidence from vision neuroscience will remain unexplained under our best empirically informed philosophical theory of picture perception. (shrink)

In this chapter, I investigate a problem for Kant’s claim that metaphysics can reach the status of science. The problem arises when one considers Kant’s account of the “architectonic unity” of metaphysics in the Architectonic of Pure Reason. Attaining architectonic unity is a condition for becoming a science for any body of cognitions that purports to be such. This is achieved when the cognitions belonging to a science are systematically organized according to the “idea of reason” which lies at the (...) basis of that science. However, Kant suggests that nobody can ever legitimately claim to have matched the idea of the philosopher, where this appears to imply that nobody can justifiably claim that she has fully grasped the idea of metaphysics. This generates a problem. I suggest that when Kant claims that the idea of the philosopher must remain an ideal or an archetype, he has a particular conception of philosophy in mind, that is, philosophy as a doctrine of wisdom. According to this understanding, philosophy must provide an example of how one can become virtuous. However, this is only a partial solution to our problem, for reasons that will be illustrated. (shrink)

When communal sharing relationships suddenly intensify, people experience an emotion that English speakers may label, depending on context, “moved,” “touched,” “heart-warming,” “nostalgia,” “patriotism,” or “rapture”. We call the emotion kama muta. Kama muta evokes adaptive motives to devote and commit to the CSRs that are fundamental to social life. It occurs in diverse contexts and appears to be pervasive across cultures and throughout history, while people experience it with reference to its cultural and contextual meanings. Cultures have evolved diverse practices, (...) institutions, roles, narratives, arts, and artifacts whose core function is to evoke kama muta. Kama muta mediates much of human sociality. (shrink)

In this article, we propose a new account concerning the interlock between intentions and motor representations (henceforth: MRs), showing that the interface problem is not as deep as previously proposed. Before discussing our view, in the first section we report the ideas developed in the literature by those who have tried to solve this puzzle before us. The article proceeds as follows. In Sections 2 and 3, we address the views by Butterfill and Sinigaglia, and Mylopoulos and Pacherie, respectively, and (...) argue that both solutions entail a translation between representational formats, which both accounts aim to avoid. In Section 4, we present our brand‐new claim, according to which intentions and MRs partially share the same motor format, inasmuch as executable action concepts are naturally represented in the agent's motor system together with the action's outcomes. Indeed, since intentions are constituted by executable action concepts and since there is evidence that action concepts are represented (and, thus, built) in the same motor format as action outcomes, the interlock between intentions and MRs no longer constitutes a problem. Then, in Section 5, we report empirical evidence in support of our claim, and before concluding, in Section 6 we briefly clarify our relations with two very recent accounts that criticized the proposals by Mylopoulos and Pacherie and Butterfill and Sinigaglia: Shepherd's and Burnston's. Finally, in Section 7, we offer some remarks about the philosophical idea defended here. The basic insight is that interface without translation is possible because action concepts are such stuff as MRs are made on. (shrink)

Kant’s account of practical justification for belief has attracted much attention in the literature, especially in recent years. In this context, scholars have generally emphasized the originality of Kant’s thought about belief (Glaube), and Kant indeed offers a definition of belief that is very different from views that were prevalent in eighteenth-century Germany. In this article, however, I argue that it is very likely that Christian August Crusius exerted influence on Kant’s definition of belief and his account of practical justification. (...) In turn, acknowledging this influence has relevant consequences for how we understand the phenomenology of Kantian belief. (shrink)

This paper explores the socio-epistemic practice of shopping for experts. I argue that expert shopping is particularly likely to occur on what Thi Nguyen calls cognitive islands. To support my argument, I focus on macroeconomics. First, I make a prima-facie case for thinking that macroeconomics is a cognitive island. Then, I argue that ordinary people are particularly likely to engage in expert shopping when it comes to macroeconomic matters. In particular, I distinguish between two kinds of expert shopping, which I (...) call cynical and wishful, and introduce the notion of assisted expert shopping, which occurs when people or organizations shop for experts on behalf of other people. I argue that assisted expert shopping can sometime result in what I call a propagandistic use of expertise. Finally, I critically examine some possible reasons for optimism and find them wanting. I conclude by suggesting that that much of what I said about shopping for macroeconomic experts might also apply mutatis mutandis to other policy-relevant domains of expertise. (shrink)

Both in his pre-critical writings and in his critical works, Kant criticizes the Wolffian tradition for its use of the mathematical method in philosophy. The chapter argues that the apparent unambiguousness of this opposition between Kant and Wolff notwithstanding, the problem of ascertaining the relationship between Kant’s and Wolff’s methods in philosophy cannot be dismissed so quickly. Only a close consideration of Kant’s different remarks on Wolff’s approach and a comparison of the methods that Wolff and Kant actually used in (...) philosophy can allow us to determine when Kant’s criticisms are justified and where the differences in their methodological proposals for philosophy actually lie. We see that Kant’s account of philosophical method in fact has some elements in common with the Wolffian paradigm, even though there are also relevant differences. (shrink)

This paper explores the debate between those philosophers who take (fundamental, perfectly natural) properties to be pure powers and those who take them to be powerful qualities. I first consider two challenges for the view that properties are powerful qualities, which I call, respectively, ‘the clarification challenge’ and ‘the explanatory challenge’. I then examine a number of arguments that aim to show that properties cannot be pure powers and find them all wanting. Finally, I sketch what I take to be (...) the most promising argument against pure powers and for powerful qualities. (shrink)

Interpretations of Kant’s account of the forms of “taking-to-be-true” (Fürwahrhalten) have generally focused on three such forms: opinion (Meinung), belief (Glaube), and knowledge (Wissen). A second distinction that has received comparatively less attention is that between conviction (Überzeugung) and persuasion (Überredung). Kant appears to use the distinction between the subjective and the objective sufficiency of a taking-to-be-true to characterize all of these forms. However, it is impossible to account for the differences between them by relying on this latter distinction alone. (...) In turn, this makes it difficult to fit all of these forms into a single classification of taking-to-be-true. In this chapter, I propose a new approach to conviction and persuasion that dissolves these problems. Conviction and persuasion are not single forms of taking-to-be-true with distinctive characteristics, yet it is not useful to treat them as “classes” of taking-to-be-true either. Rather, they are “operators” that determine whether a taking-to-be-true is apt or inapt, depending on whether it rests on a correct evaluation of the grounds we have. (shrink)

Molyneux’s question famously asks about whether a newly sighted subject might immediately recognize, by sight alone, shapes that were already familiar to her from a tactile point of view. This paper addresses three crucial points concerning this puzzle. First, the presence of two different questions: the classic one concerning visual recognition and another one concerning vision-for-action. Second, the explicit distinction, reported in the literature, between ocular and cortical blindness. Third, the importance of making reference to our best neuroscientific account on (...) vision, ‘the two visual systems model’, in order to better address Molyneux’s problem. Then, by offering a new, deeper analysis of the relation between, and, this paper suggests that the subjects of Molyneux’s two different questions show the same visual impairment as brain-damaged subjects with different lesions of the visual cortex. In particular, the subject of the first question shows the same impairment in visual recognition as a visual agnosic subject, while the subject of the second question shows the same visual impairment in visuomotor processing as an optic ataxic subject. These impairments still hold even if ocular processing is restored. Therefore, I suggest the following. For the first classic question, the required experimental setting cannot be properly reached. By contrast, concerning the second question, based on the interpretation we select, either the answer is negative, or, as with the first question, the experimental setting cannot be properly reached. This proposal constitutes, with the other approaches offered in the literature, a further attempt to tackle the enormous complexity of Molyneux’s puzzle. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Are face-to-face perception and picture perception different perceptual phenomena? The question is controversial. On the one hand, philosophers have offered several solid arguments showing that, despite some resemblances, they are quite different perceptual phenomena and that pictures are special objects of perception. On the other hand, neuroscientists routinely use pictures in experimental settings as substitutes for normal objects, and this practice is successful in explaining how the human visual system works. But this seems to imply that face-to-face perception and picture (...) perception are very similar, if not actually the same. How can we decide between these two opposite intuitions? Here I offer a regimentation of the notion of picture perception that can reconcile these two apparently conflicting ideas about pictures. It follows that philosophers and neuroscientists can maintain their respective stances without any theoretical conflict. (shrink)

Here is a crucial question in the contemporary philosophy of perception: how can we be aware of action properties? According to the perceptual view, we consciously see them: they are present in our visual phenomenology. However, this view faces some problems. First, I review these problems. Then, I propose an alternative view, according to which we are aware of action properties because we imagine them through a special form of imagery, which I call visuomotor imagery. My account is to be (...) preferred as it offers an explanation of our awareness of action properties without generating all the problems that the perceptual view faces. (shrink)

Intellectualists suggest that practical knowledge, or ‘knowing- how’, can be reduced to propositional knowledge, or ‘knowing-that’. Anti-intellectualists, on the contrary, suggest, following the original insights by Ryle, that such a reduction is not possible. Rejection of intellectualism can be proposed either by offering purely philosophical analytical arguments, or by recruiting empirical evidence from cognitive science about the nature of the mental representations involved in these two forms of knowledge. In this paper, I couple these two strategies in order to analyze (...) some crucial reasons for which intellectualism seems not to be the best theory we have to correctly understand and describe practical knowledge. In particular, I will start from a specific philosophical account against intellectualism offered by Dickie :737–745, 2012), and suggest that it can be supported by current experimental results coming from motor neuroscience. The claim of the paper is that there is at least one kind of practical knowledge, which I call motor knowledge, and which is at the basis of the performance of skilled action, which cannot be reduced to propositional knowledge. (shrink)

In a recent paper, ‘Peripersonal perception in action’ (Synthese, 2018), Frédérique de Vignemont tackles the problem of defining what is peculiar to the visual perception of objects falling within the peripersonal space of the observer, i.e. the space immediately surrounding the body, and which is commonly described as the space in which action takes place. In this paper, I first discuss the proposal offered by de Vignemont about what characterizes peripersonal perception. Then, I suggest an extension of this account that (...) offers a meticulous description of the nature of the Content of Peripersonal Visual Experience - a topic never explicitly considered in the philosophical literature on vision - by discussing some peculiar features of it that, as recognized also by de Vignemont’s account, still need to be explained. In particular, I offer a philosophical examination of the specificity of peripersonal visual experience, in relation to its phenomenological dimension, its optical mechanisms and its neurophysiological underpinnings, in the light of our best theories from vision science, and in comparison to the visual experience of other visual spaces. (shrink)

Everyday life suggests that picture seeing is sometimes infused by an emotional charge. However, nobody has addressed the importance of explaining this emotional charge in picture perception. Even our best model of picture perception, the dorsal/ventral account of picture perception, which integrates the most important empirical results coming from our best model on vision in neuroscience, the two visual systems model, lacks a reference to this emotional charge. The aim of the present paper is to offer an account of picture (...) perception that is able to regain and explain this neglected emotional charge. My claim is that, as for face-to-face perception, during picture perception, we are not only in a visual perceptual state, but also in an emotional state, which is directly connected to our visual perceptual state. I also show that it is possible to offer this integration while remaining in the philosophical/empirical framework of the dorsal/ventral account of picture perception, whose explanatory power is confirmed and improved. (shrink)

Are there any universal entities? Or is the world populated only by particular things? The problem of universals is one of the most fascinating and enduring topics in the history of metaphysics, with roots in ancient and medieval philosophy. This collection of new essays provides an innovative overview of the contemporary debate on universals. Rather than focusing exclusively on the traditional opposition between realism and nominalism, the contributors explore the complexity of the debate and illustrate a broad range of positions (...) within both the realist and the nominalist camps. Realism is viewed through the lens of the distinction between constituent and relational ontologies, while nominalism is reconstructed in light of the controversy over the notion of trope. The result is a fresh picture of contemporary metaphysics, in which traditional strategies of dealing with the problem of universals are both reaffirmed and called into question. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant gilt zu Recht als einer der wichtigsten Philosophen in der Geschichte der westlichen Philosophie. In dieser Einführung werden – neben einem Seitenblick auf seine Biografie und seinen intellektuellen Werdegang – die bedeutendsten Werke seiner kritischen Periode vorgestellt und anhand ihrer Schlüsselbegriffe erklärt. Außerdem wird Kants Neuansatz in der Philosophie aus einer zentralen Idee verständlich gemacht: der Idee, dass nicht nur das menschliche Handeln, sondern alle leitenden menschlichen Weltbezüge «normativ» strukturiert sind.

Does action play any crucial role in our perception of pictures? The standard literature on picture perception has never explicitly tackled this question. This is for a simple reason. After all, objects in a picture seem to be static objects of perception. Thus, it might sound extremely controversial to say that action is crucial in picture perception. Contrary to this general intuitive stance, this paper defends, for the first time, the apparently very controversial claim, never addressed in the literature, that (...) some of the specific and essential relations between vision and action make action (and its motoric basis) crucial in order for us to enter pictorial experience. I first discuss two ways in which vision and action are deeply linked, by describing the famous notions of Vision-for-Action and Sensorimotor Understanding. Then, I describe the special role they play in generating ordinary pictorial experience and suggest that, when we cannot rely on them while in front of a picture, we lose pictorial experience. (shrink)

Everyday visual experience constantly confronts us with things we can interact with in the real world. We literally feel the outside presence of physical objects in our environment via visual perceptual experience. The visual feeling of presence is a crucial feature of vision that is largely unexplored in the philosophy of perception, and poorly debated in vision neuroscience. The aim of this article is to investigate the feeling of presence. I suggest that visual feeling of presence depends on the visual (...) representation of a very particular spatial relation with the object we interact with: the visual representation of absolute egocentric depth, which is due to stereoscopic vision. (shrink)

If it seems unquestionable that C. I. Lewis is a Kantian in important respects, it is more difficult to determine what, if anything, is original about his Kantianism. For it might be argued that Lewis’ Kantianism simply reflects an approach to the a priori which was very common in the first half of the twentieth century, namely, the effort to make the a priori relative. In this paper, I will argue that Lewis’ Kantianism does present original features. The latter can (...) be detected by focusing on Lewis’ account of the method of philosophy in the first chapter of Mind and the World Order. In that context, Lewis argues that the method of philosophy should be reflective and critical. It will be my contention that this understanding of philosophy involves a therapeutic perspective, which bears important resemblances to Kant’s account of transcendental reflection in the Amphiboly of the Critique of Pure Reason. I will illustrate how this therapeutic application of reflection works in Lewis’ metaphysics. In this context, reflection can correct errors of reasoning that occur when we are operating within a particular conceptual scheme and use the criteria of reality that are appropriate in another. (shrink)

Philosophers suggested that usual picture perception requires the simultaneous occurrence of the perception of the surface and of the depicted object. However, there are special cases of picture perception, such as trompe l'oeil perception, in which, unlike in usual picture perception, the object looks like a real, present object we can interact with, of the kind we are usually acquainted with in face-to-face perception. While philosophers suggested that usual picture perception and trompe l'oeil perception must differ with respect to the (...) perception of the surface, nobody has ever proposed a final explanatory account for such a difference. Here, I propose such an account. I consider the two possible options as candidates for the explanation of the illusory power of trompe l'oeil perception. The first is that, with trompe l'oeils, we perceive the surface unconsciously. The second is that, with trompe l'oeils, we cannot perceive the surface at all, that is, we cannot perceive it either consciously or unconsciously. I show that the second option is the unique plausible option, as it is in line with vision science, and with our received view about the nature of usual picture perception. (shrink)

What we generally regard as ‘the face’ should be semiotically understood not as something given and monolithic, but rather stratified – it is at least threefold: biological (face), physiognomic (expression), perceivable (visage) – and relational as it has to be put within a narrative in order to make sense. The face lies at the centre of a whole semiotic system, the form of life, revolving around the issue of identity (which the face – the visage, to be precise – embodies (...) and still does not resolve). What we may call ‘the natural face’ is not, as common sense would suggest, the precondition of the ‘culturalized’ one (featured with modifications ranging from make-up and proper masks to surgery), but rather just one of the possible semiotic masks a person may choose to wear. At the same time, the mask does not have to be reduced to a deceptive device only (nor to be meant merely as a material object), being in fact at the centre of a more complex axiology. The classic veridictory square articulating the opposition between Being and Seeming may provide a suitable model for the semiotic square of ‘visageness’, so that we would have: Face, Disguise (the place of the mask proper), Fake, Anonymity. Based on these theoretical premises, the paper finally addresses popular music and outlines a provisional map of the pragmatics of the mask (subtractive vs. additive, ritualistic vs. continuous, material vs. virtual, mask as face vs. face as mask), as a suggestion for further studies. (shrink)

Philosophers and cognitive scientists try to understand, from different perspectives, the nature of the experience of reality. Given this shared, interdisciplinary interest, it would be beneficial to have a coherent story about the experience of reality, in which there is reciprocal contribution from both philosophy and cognitive science. This paper wants to pave the way for this shared enterprise on the investigation of the experience of reality. I first distinguish between two indicators of reality. (1) The experience of availability to (...) motor interaction. (2) The experience of mind-independence. I then show how invoking an analysis of the results from vision science, concerning the visual mechanisms of stereopsis, which is related to the visual impression of a solid, three-dimensional world available to motor interaction, successfully provides a coherent description of the first indicator. Furthermore, I suggest that the analysis of the evidence about the first indicator is very informative in preparing the ground for the investigation of the second indicator. This is shown by discussing experimental evidence directly related to stereopsis, as well as some perceptual phenomena that are usually described by invoking the story from vision science about stereopsis. Thus, the epistemological analysis of the results from vision science on stereopsis, offered in this paper, is beneficial in a twofold manner, for the interdisciplinary enterprise aimed at understanding the experience of reality. It is explicitly beneficial in the description of the first indicator, and implicitly beneficial to understand the second indicator. Finally, it also suggests future research about their relation. (shrink)

Research on the concept of affordance generated different interpretations, which are due to different stories aimed at describing how this notion accounts for visually guided motor behaviors. On the one hand, _dispositional accounts of affordances_ explain how affordances emerge from the encounter of the agent’s perceptual-motor skills, with an object offering possible interactions, as _behavioral dispositional properties_. On the other hand, _cognitive neuroscience_ explains what neural mechanisms are required for agents to detect affordances, resulting from an internal _processing_. As the (...) literature recognized, it would be beneficial to connect these two stories. We propose an important step into this connection, showing how a _dispositional notion_ of affordance can be distinguished into two versions, the _Dispositional Account of Nomological Affordance Response_ and the _Dispositional Account of Probable Affordance Response_, and how to complement different aspects of _visuomotor processing_ for affordance extraction, discussed in _neuroscience_, with them. An important benefit of our proposal is that it suggests, for the first time, that we should not prefer one _dispositional_ account at the expense of the other. Indeed, we show that different _dispositional_ accounts can capture distinct aspects of the plethora of complex manifestations, at the neurocognitive level of visuomotor-processing, that affordances can display in humans, both in healthy and pathological subjects. (shrink)

According to power theorists, properties are powers—i.e. they necessarily confer on their bearers certain dispositions. Although the power theory is increasingly gaining popularity, a vast majority of analytic metaphysicians still favors what I call ‘the nomic theory’—i.e. the view according to which what dispositions a property confers on its bearers is contingent on what the laws of nature happen to be. This paper argues that the nomic theory is inconsistent, for, if it were correct, then properties would not confer any (...) dispositions on their bearers—they would only appear to do so (just like how, in cases of mimicking, objects do not really have the relevant dispositions, they merely appear to have them). If my arguments are sound, then the nomic theory is incoherent and ultimately collapses into what I call ‘neo-occasionalism’ and powers turns out to be the only available option for those who believe that properties genuinely confer dispositions on their bearers. (shrink)

Since the early 1990s, increasing attention has been paid to the impact of workplace bullying on employees’ well-being and job attitudes. However, the relationship between workplace bullying and job satisfaction remains unclear. This study aims to shed light on the nature of the bullying-job satisfaction relationship in the Italian context. As expected, the results revealed a U-shape curvilinear relationship between workplace bullying and job satisfaction after controlling for demographic variables. In contrast to the curvilinear model, the results support a negative (...) linear relationship between workplace bullying and psychological well-being, in which higher exposure to negative acts at work is associated with diminished well-being. In addition, gender and job position significantly predicted mental health scores where men and managers reported a better psychological well-being than women, blue-collar, and white-collar employees. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed according to these results. (shrink)

The present paper offers an analysis of _derealization disorder_, a disorder in which the experience of reality is altered. In this respect, usually, real objects are experienced as _mind-independent_ and as _offering motoric interaction_. These two features seem to be responsible for our experience of objects in quality of _real objects_. Then, a crucial question is the following: what aspect of the experience of reality is derealization, in quality of a disorder of reality, about? This paper suggests that, in the (...) case of _derealization_, what is disrupted is the experience of _mind-independence_, but not the experience of _possibility for motor interaction_. By doing so, however, the paper also suggests something important on the relation between these two experiences, namely, that they can be, _contra_ any alleged, very general intuition, disjointed, as the case of derealization shows. (shrink)

It is generally said that dreams are experienced as real. But the notion of reality is often used, in the philosophical literature, along with that of presence. A big problem, in this respect, is that both these terms may assume different meanings. So understanding the nature of presence and reality in dreams depends on the way we conceive these two notions. This paper contributes to the literature on dreaming by describing the experience of presence and reality in dreams in a (...) very specific sense. I consider the experience of presence as related to the experience of possibility of motoric interaction, and the experience of reality as related to the experience of mind-independence. Then, endorsing that dream experiences are different from perception, and similar to imagery, I suggest that the dreamer can experience reality but not presence, with three lines of argument, concerning visual determinacy, stereopsis and peripersonal localization. (shrink)