In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Answer to Catherine König-Pralong, Eun-Jeung Lee, and Jyoti MohanSelusi Ambrogio (bio)I want to start my reply by expressing my deep gratitude to the three reviewers who devoted their energy and time to reading and commenting on my book. Their wise comments and criticisms helped in shaping my upcoming research plans, as well as in refining my understanding of this historiographical topic. The eventual readers of this research will (...) certainly benefit from their arguments. I will reply to each review separately, one after the other. Also I could never thank the editors of Philosophy East and West enough for the honor they bestowed on me in hosting this debate.Mapping the ExclusionCatherine König-Pralong provides an extremely knowledgeable and refined review of the book in three sections. The first section is a theoretical evaluation and discussion of the outputs of the monograph through the lens of Reinhard Koselleck's theory of the "temporalization of history" (Verzeitlichung [End Page 230] der Geschichte)1 and her unequalled expertise on the imaginary maps of civilizations. I completely agree with her statement that "from the doxography of the seventeenth century to Brucker's eclecticism, philosophical historiography seemed to be much less attached to historical accuracy than to delimiting regions and identifying peoples and their minds—in a word, to territorializing." The territorialization of philosophy into maps that presented first the lost seeds of divine wisdom (perennialism) and afterwards the exclusive regions of rationality (eclecticism) shows more the Western necessity for a self-definition rather than an effective understanding of the thought of other civilizations. As Metha perfectly expresses it, "Long ago 'Asia' and the 'Orient' became almost existential categories in the European mind."2 It is in this context of 'spatialization of identities' that philosophy became one of the leading characteristics—when not the leading one—of European identity. As the reviewer lucidly remarks, this happened at the expense of philosophy itself. Practical philosophy was put under the superior control of theoretical and logical faculties. It is true that this process was achieved in German pragmatism and Kantian historiography, but this was already evident in Heumann and Brucker's historiographical productions.In her dense analysis, König-Pralong provides bibliographical suggestions that could be integrated within the monograph. I have to admit that, unluckily, I've never come across the two outstanding essays by Wimmer and Rüdiger on Chinese philosophy as a problem of historiography in the eighteenth century, both published in 2017.3 On the contrary, I eagerly read the reviewer's book La colonie philosophique, which was published in March 2019. However, at that time, my monograph was already in the hands of the editor, undergoing the process of double-blind peer review and editing, and hence my argumentation could not benefit from her discussion on temporalization versus historicization and the mapping of civilizations. To quote a sentence from her brilliant book: "L'histoire de la philosophie des Lumières programme en effet une rationalisation de l'histoire et une temporalisation de la philosophie."4 This sentence is a perfect explanation of the "de-territorialization" of India and China from the land of historicity and rationality, namely philosophy. For Brucker, India and China did not possess reliable historical sources, showed childish theoretical capacities, and presented oppressive norms that were not based on moral principles and reasoning.The reviewer agrees with the fact that, at the time of Brucker, we can already find reasons for the exclusion of Asian philosophies, but she contests the thesis that the character of this exclusion was already completely displayed. She suggests that Brucker's Historia critica is mostly a destructive history, showing human mistakes, and that the real targets were Neoplatonism and mystical syncretism, not Asian thought. She writes that "Brucker excluded non-European thoughts from philosophy, but not from the history of philosophy." In my view, Brucker did not insert "barbarian" [End Page 231] and "exotic" civilizations in the history of philosophy, but rather in a critical history—that is, historia critica—of human mistakes. He clearly states that nothing philosophical could be detected in these lands and that his own use of the term "philosophy" about them is... (shrink)

The sense of touch provides us knowledge of two kinds of events. Tactile sensation (T) makes us aware of events on or just below the skin; haptic perception (H) gives us knowledge of things outside the body with which we are in contact. This paper argues that T and H are distinct experiences, and not (as some have argued) different aspects of the same touch-experience. In other words, T ≠ H. Moreover, H does not supervene on T. Secondly: In T, (...) we are aware of immanent, phenomenal qualities; in H, we come to know of transcendent qualities in things that exist independently of ourselves. Finally: T is non-spatial; it is indexed by parts of the body, but not by position in space. H, by contrast, is spatial. This brings to mind Kant’s contention that things are presented as existing objectively when they are represented spatially. (shrink)

Women's exclusion from political enfranchisement in Kant's political writings has frequently been noted in the literature, and yet has not been closely scrutinized. More often than not, commentators suggest that this reflects little more than Kant's sharing in the prejudices of his era. This paper argues that, for Kant, women's civil incapacities stem from defects relating to their capacities as moral agents, and more specifically, to his teleological account of the conditions within which we, as imperfect beings, develop our moral (...) capacities. Women are not incidentally or tangentially excluded from the boundaries of political and moral agency, but rather must adopt an explicitly nonmoral character if we are to understand humanity as moving toward its naturally given, moral ends. I argue (1) that Kant's teleological view of human development requires women to develop an explicitly nonmoral character; (2) that this teleology is inextricable from his view of the moral agency that human—and not merely rational—beings are capable of; and (3) that taken together, these suggest that women's subordinate status is internally connected to Kant's view of moral personhood. (shrink)

This study addresses the complex and often fractious relationship between liberal political theory and difference by examining how distinctive liberalisms respond to human diversity. Drawing on published and unpublished writings, private correspondence and lecture notes, the study offers comprehensive reconstructions of Immanuel Kant's and John Stuart Mill's treatment of racial, cultural, gender-based and class-based difference to understand how two leading figures reacted to pluralism, and what contemporary readers might draw from them. The book mounts a qualified defence of Millian liberalism (...) against Kantianism's predominance in contemporary liberal political philosophy, and resists liberalism's implicit association with imperialist domination by showing different divergent responses to diversity. Here are two distinctive liberal visions of moral and political life. (shrink)

The specialization of visual function within biological function is reason for introducing “homology thinking” into explanations of the visual system. It is argued that such specialization arises when organisms evolve by differentiation from their predecessors. Thus, it is essentially historical, and visual function should be regarded as a lineage property. The colour vision of birds and mammals do not function the same way as one another, on this account, because each is an adaptation to special needs of the visual functions (...) of predecessors—very different kinds of predecessors in each case. Thus, history underlies function. We also see how homology thinking figures in the hierarchical classification of visual systems, and how it supports the explanation of visual function by functional role analysis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Omissions and Chronological ComplexitiesJyoti Mohan (bio)The stated purpose of Chinese and Indian Ways of Thinking in Early Modern European Philosophy: The Reception and the Exclusion by Selusi Ambrogio is "to examine the European understanding of China and India within the histories of philosophy from 1600 to 1744."1 Specifically, Ambrogio sets out to investigate the antecedents of the "othering" of non-Western philosophies. How far back did the notion go, (...) that non-Western philosophies were inferior? While Ambrogio often extends his argument to non-Western philosophies in general, in this monograph he examines only what he defines as "orientalist" philosophies—the philosophies of India and China. Since Ambrogio is investigating the histories of philosophy written in Europe, this choice makes sense: India and China were the two philosophical giants that most European philosophers needed to include in their works in order to claim to be universalist. No philosopher who wrote about world philosophies—and by extension no historian of philosophy—could ignore India and China, whether it was to dismiss the philosophies emanating from these geographic regions as inferior, or to extol them as proof that Europe was not the birthplace of "original thought."Ambrogio has chosen a time span from 1600 to 1744 c.e. to represent "the year 1600 … [,] the publication of Barbaricae philosophae antiquitatum by Otto van Heurn[,] and 1744[,] the year of the publication of the last book of the Historia critica by Jakob Brucker."2 Within the limits of this time [End Page 220] span, Ambrogio examines the work of several scholars who included Indian and Chinese philosophies in their "world histories of philosophies" and delineates three major historiographical trends. His rationale for ending his study with Brucker's work is that after this eighteenth-century opus, "Asians were usually excluded from the histories of philosophy."3 This time span seems puzzling to me. I know that most, if not all, of the authors Ambrogio cites had successors in their individual traditions well into the nineteenth century, if not the twentieth. While many histories of philosophy focused solely on the Western and classical traditions (as they did during the period under review by Ambrogio as well), the work of historians and scholars on Orientalist philosophies continued to multiply. To the extent that Ambrogio diligently studies his sources and constructs his argument, his work is commendable, but as a historian my questions for Ambrogio have to do with the underlying rationale for the time span he has chosen, and, by that extension, by the choices of his sources. Below I collect evidence that Asians continue to be included in the histories of philosophy past 1744, and in so doing suggest that this fact has an impact on his historiographical model.For instance, I would like to understand why, in his choice of sources, he has omitted all colonial works, especially since he engages with the argument that descriptions and understandings of Indian and Chinese philosophies were meditated through lenses of proselytization and of conquest. Granted, he is beginning with historians of philosophy, but as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries progressed, historians also diversified their writings—as Ambrogio acknowledges—into histories of religion for instance. The connections between, and descriptions of, non-Western religions and philosophies were so muddled that it is impossible to separate them, save by attending to the titles of individual authors' works as being about religion or philosophy, respectively.The contents of such works are so closely related, at least in the Indian context, that contemporary historians, especially of the colonial period and of Indology, do not quibble over whether these works are about religion or philosophy. For instance, Paul Masson-Oursel wrote in 1923 that the development of Indian philosophy was integral to and proceeded alongside the development of religion.4 Systems of philosophical thought in India operated within larger systems of religious practice. Based on this model, Masson-Oursel describes the development of Indian philosophy as proceeding from the needs of religion. So, for example, he theorized that the mix of an Indo-Iranian religion and a pastoral, fire-worshipping people with an older indigenous Dravidian culture of agriculture, Goddess worship, and belief in amulets, spells, talismans, and other... (shrink)

Argues for a category of “cognitive feelings”, which are representationally significant, but are not part of the content of the states they accompany. The feeling of pastness in episodic memory, of familiarity (missing in Capgras syndrome), and of motivation (that accompanies desire) are examples. The feeling of presence that accompanies normal visual states is due to such a cognitive feeling; the “two visual systems” are partially responsible for this feeling.

Throughout this research, imposing the training of an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to play tic-tac-toe bored game, by training the ANN to play the tic-tac-toe logic using the set of mathematical combination of the sequences that could be played by the system and using both the Gradient Descent Algorithm explicitly and the Elimination theory rules implicitly. And so on the system should be able to produce imunate amalgamations to solve every state within the game course to make better of results (...) of winnings or getting draw. (shrink)

Perceptions "present" objects as red, as round, etc.-- in general as possessing some property. This is the "perceptual content" of the title, And the article attempts to answer the following question: what is a materialistically adequate basis for assigning content to what are, after all, neurophysiological states of biological organisms? The thesis is that a state is a perception that presents its object as "F" if the "biological function" of the state is to detect the presence of objects that are (...) "F". The theory contrasts with causal/informational theories, and with internalist theories, for example those which assign content on the basis of introspected feel. Its advantages are that it permits perceptual error while at the same time allowing content to be expressed in terms of external properties. The argument of the paper is illustrated throughout by examples from biology and computational psychology. (shrink)

Two questions are addressed in this paper. First, what is it to see? I argue that it is veridical experience of things outside the perceiver brought about by looking. Second, what is it to see a material object? I argue that it is experience of an occupant of a spatial region that is a logical subject for other visual features, able to move to another spatial region, to change intrinsically, and to interact with other material objects. I show how this (...) theory is different from the idea that object-seeing is merely the visual segregation of a region of the visual field. Finally, I argue that we do not object-see objects reflected in mirrors, surfaces of back-lit objects, and depictions of objects. (shrink)

Argues that the meaning of perceptual states depends on certain simple "actions" of conditioning and habituation innately associated with them. A game theoretic account of the meaning of perceptual states is offered.

We have argued elsewhere that: (A) Natural selection is not a cause of evolution. (B) A resolution-of-forces (or vector addition) model does not provide us with a proper understanding of how natural selection combines with other evolutionary influences. These propositions have come in for criticism recently, and here we clarify and defend them. We do so within the broad framework of our own “hierarchical realization model” of how evolutionary influences combine.

Recent critics have declaimed against John Stuart Mill's liberalism, arguing that his conception of civilization is inexorably bound to a hierarchal conception of social progress justifying Europeans' moral right to 'civilize' barbarian peoples. Without exonerating him from his undoubtedly problematic views regarding non-European cultures, I would like to argue that Mill in fact has a much subtler view of historical development and of civilization than such critics attribute to him. Central to these critics' charges is an 'aggregative' view of Mill's (...) conceptualization of historical development--suggesting that Mill understood societies to move through discrete stages of social development, characterized by internally-correlated stages of economic, political, cultural and moral development--which fails to be borne out under close examination. I argue that Mill's view of historical development and his liberalism more generally are in fact significantly more capacious than is often recognized and are not inextricably bound to the project of imperialism. (shrink)

Seeing, Doing, and Knowing is an original and comprehensive philosophical treatment of sense perception as it is currently investigated by cognitive neuroscientists. Its central theme is the task-oriented specialization of sensory systems across the biological domain. Sensory systems are automatic sorting machines; they engage in a process of classification. Human vision sorts and orders external objects in terms of a specialized, proprietary scheme of categories - colours, shapes, speeds and directions of movement, etc. This 'Sensory Classification Thesis' implies that sensation (...) is not a naturally caused image from which an organism must infer the state of the world beyond; it is more like an internal communication, a signal concerning the state of the world issued by a sensory system, in accordance with internal conventions, for the use of an organism's other systems. This is why sensory states are both easily understood and persuasive.Sensory classification schemes are purpose-built to serve the knowledge-gathering and pragmatic needs of particular types of organisms. They are specialized: a bee or a bird does not see exactly what a human does. The Sensory Classification Thesis helps clarify this specialization in perceptual content and supports a new form of realism about the deliverances of sensation: 'Pluralistic Realism' is based on the idea that sensory systems coevolve with an organism's other systems; they are not simply moulded to the external world. The last part of the book deals with reference in vision. Cognitive scientists now believe that vision guides the limbs by means of a subsystem that links up with the objects of physical manipulation in ways that bypass sensory categories. In a novel extension of this theory, Matthen argues that 'motion-guiding vision' is integrated with sensory classification in conscious vision. This accounts for the quasi-demonstrative form of visual states: 'This particular object is red', and so on. He uses this idea to cast new light on the nature of perceptual objects, pictorial representation, and the visual representation of space. (shrink)

How do fitness and natural selection relate to other evolutionary factors like architectural constraint, mode of reproduction, and drift? In one way of thinking, drawn from Newtonian dynamics, fitness is one force driving evolutionary change and added to other factors. In another, drawn from statistical thermodynamics, it is a statistical trend that manifests itself in natural selection histories. It is argued that the first model is incoherent, the second appropriate; a hierarchical realization model is proposed as a basis for a (...) statistical treatment. It emerges that natural selection does not cause evolution; it just is evolution. The theory incorporates relations of statistical correlation, but not the kind of causation found in fundamental physical processes. (shrink)

Higher animals need to identify and track material objects because they depend on interactions with them for nutrition, reproduction, and social interaction. This paper investigates the perception of material objects. It argues, first, that material objects are tagged, in all five external senses, as bearers of the features detected by them. This happens through a perceptual process, here entitled Generalized Completion, which creates the appearance of objects that have properties that transcend the activation of sensory receptors. The paper shows, secondly, (...) that material objects are privileged subjects for perceived motion and interaction. That is, they are perceived as subjects for these properties while their parts seem to be subjects only derivatively. Material objects are the only perceptual subjects that are both multisensory and privileged. (shrink)

What is color? What is color vision? Most philosophers answer by reference to humans: to human color qualia, or to the environmental properties or "quality spaces" perceived by humans. It is argued, with reference to empirical findings concerning comparative color vision and the evolution of color vision, that all such attempts are mistaken. An adequate definition of color vision must eschew reference to its outputs in the human cognition and refer only to inputs: color vision consists in the use of (...) wavelength discrimination in the construction of visual representations. A color quality is one that is generated from such processing. (shrink)

Because culture plays a role in determining the aesthetic merit of a work of art, intrinsically similar works can have different aesthetic merit when assessed in different cultures. This paper argues that a form of aesthetic hedonism is best placed to account for this relativity of aesthetic value. This form of hedonism is based on a functional account of aesthetic pleasure, according to which it motivates and enables mental engagement with artworks, and an account of pleasure-learning, in which it reinforces (...) the appreciation of culture specific ways of engaging with art. (shrink)

In this paper I shall examine Aristotle's treatment of a certain puzzle concerning change. In section I, I shall show that within a certain standard framework for the semantics of subject-predicate sentences a number of things that Aristotle wants to maintain do not make sense. Then, I shall outline a somewhat non-standard account of the semantics for such sentences — arguably Aristotle's — and show how the proposals concerning change fit quite naturally into this framework. The results of this exercise (...) will enable us to say something quite precise about applications of some obscure but characteristically Aristotelian doctrines: that ‘is’ is ‘said in many ways,’ that his predecessors got the Law of Opposites wrong. They also shed some light upon Aristotle's ontology of predicables. (shrink)

The paper intends to objectively review the ecological understanding of Upaniṣhadic ṛṣis. Since ecology is a modern notion, it is required to precisely place it within the Upaniṣhadic thought. For that purpose, a possible ontological structure of Upaniṣhadic philosophy is sorted in which the discussion of ecology becomes meaningful. Upaniṣhadic ṛṣis conceived ecology as a part of their metaphysics, that is, one which is assisted by the devatas. There is a dependent coexistence between Devatas, Humans and the world. This feature (...) of Upaniṣhadic philosophy should not be treated as a declaration for environmental conservation. It is rather seen as a theory of consumption and calibration from both sides. Although ecology is integrated into the Upaniṣhadic metaphysics, it is not one of the subject matters of Upaniṣhads. An understanding of ecology traceable from Upaniṣhads is supplementary to Upaniṣhadic theory of Devatas. Thus, the author concludes that the Upaniṣhadic ecology is metaphysical rather than natural. (shrink)

This paper presents a new account of aesthetic pleasure, according to which it is a distinct psychological structure marked by a characteristic self-reinforcing motivation. Pleasure figures in the appreciation of an object in two ways: In the short run, when we are in contact with particular artefacts on particular occasions, aesthetic pleasure motivates engagement and keeps it running smoothly—it may do this despite the fact that the object we engagement is aversive in some ways. Over longer periods, it plays a (...) critical role in shaping how we engage with objects to get this kind of pleasure from them. This account is yoked to a broadly functional understanding of art: it is not the nature of the object that makes it art, but the nature of the response that it is designed to elicit. The view does not, however, rest on individual psychology alone, as some other functional accounts do. Crucially, it is argued that shared cultural context is a key determinant of the pleasure we derive from aesthetic artefacts. The pleasure of art is always communal and communicative. (shrink)

A hitherto neglected form of explanation is explored, especially its role in population genetics. “Statistically abstractive explanation” (SA explanation) mandates the suppression of factors probabilistically relevant to an explanandum when these factors are extraneous to the theoretical project being pursued. When these factors are suppressed, the explanandum is rendered uncertain. But this uncertainty traces to the theoretically constrained character of SA explanation, not to any real indeterminacy. Random genetic drift is an artifact of such uncertainty, and it is therefore wrong (...) to reify it as a cause of evolution or as a process in its own right. *Received July 2009. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, 170 St. George St., Toronto, ON M5R 2M8, Canada; e‐mail: mohan[email protected]. (shrink)

This article examines how Kant’s conceptualizations of natural history and teleological judgement shape his understanding of human difference and race. I argue that the teleological framework encasing Kant’s racial theory implies constraints on the capacity of non-whites to make moral progress. While commentators tend to approach Kant’s racial theory in relation to his political theory, his late-life cosmopolitanism, and his treatments (or non-treatments) of colonialism, empire and slavery, the problem I focus on here is that race is itself only intelligible (...) in relation to a teleological natural history limiting certain races’ capacities to engage in humanity’s moral vocation. (shrink)

How many senses do humans possess? Five external senses, as most cultures have it—sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste? Should proprioception, kinaesthesia, thirst, and pain be included, under the rubric bodily sense? What about the perception of time and the sense of number? Such questions reduce to two. 1. How do we distinguish a sense from other sorts of information-receiving faculties? 2. By what principle do we distinguish the senses? Aristotle discussed these questions in the De Anima. H. P. Grice (...) revived them in 1967. More recently, they have taken on fresh interest as a result of a collection of essays edited by Fiona Macpherson. This entry reviews some approaches to these questions and advances some new ideas for the reader’s consideration. It proposes that the senses constitute an integrated learning system, membership in which answers question 1. It also proposes that the modalities can be distinguished from one another in two ways, by the means of information pick-up and by the kinds of activity that a perceiver undertakes to make use of them. (shrink)

What colour does a white wall look in the pinkish light of the late afternoon? Philosophers disagree: they hold variously that it looks pink, white, both, and no colour at all. A new approach is offered. After reviewing the dispute, a reinterpretation of perceptual constancy is offered. In accordance with this reinterpretation, it is argued that perceptual features such as color must always be predicated of perceptual objects. Thus, it might be that in pinkish light, the wall looks white and (...) the light looks pink. The paper concludes by discussing some criteria for object identification in perceptual states. (shrink)

Molyneux's Question (MQ) concerns whether a newly sighted man would recognize/distinguish a sphere and a cube by vision, assuming he could previously do this by touch. We argue that (MQ) splits into questions about (a) shared representations of space in different perceptual systems, and about (b) shared ways of constructing higher dimensional spatiotemporal features from information about lower dimensional ones, most of the technical difficulty centring on (b). So understood, MQ resists any monolithic answer: everything depends on the constraints faced (...) by particular perceptual systems in extracting features of higher dimensionality from those of lower. Each individual question of this type is empirical and must be investigated separately. We present several variations on MQ based on different levels of dimensional integration—some of these are familiar, some novel adaptations of problems known elsewhere, and some completely novel. Organizing these cases in this way is useful because it unifies a set of disparate questions about intermodal transfer that have held philosophical and psychological interest, suggests a new range of questions of the same type, sheds light on similarities and differences between members of the family, and allows us to formulate a much-augmented set of principles and questions concerning the intermodal transfer of spatiotemporal organization. (shrink)

The West has a stereotypical image of businesses, officials, and politicians, etc., in the East (Third World) countries being pervasively corrupt while it views itself as being almost completely uncorrupt. One closer look, however, realities turn out to be quite different. Business corruption is much more universal that Westerners are generally willing to accept. The major differences are that corruption in the East is practiced so blatantly that it makes major news. Western businesses, on the other hand, have, over time, (...) developed sophisticated techniques whereby corruption becomes almost invisible. This paper discusses the myths and realities of Eastern versus Western corruption and discusses several means which have allowed Western companies to exploit others through subtle and, almost invisible means. The overall advantage, however, still goes to the West where petty corruption has been pretty much eliminated. (shrink)

The author investigates greek ontologies that apparently rely on a conflation of "binary" (x is f) and "monadic" (x is) uses of 'is'. He uses Aristotelian and other texts to support his proposal that these ontologies are explained by the Greeks using two alternative semantic analyses for 'x is F'. The first views it as asserting a relation between x and F, the second as asserting that a "predicative complex" exists, where a predicative complex is a complex consisting of x (...) and F. The article concludes by indicating some uses for the novel concept of predicative complex in aristotelian interpretation. (shrink)

The study examines the benefits of imaginative teaching practices in enhancing educational quality by focusing on innovative pedagogical approaches. It aims to evaluate the influence of these performances on key variables, including Student Engagement (SE), Academic Performance (AP), Educational Satisfaction (ES), Creativity Development (CD), and Critical Thinking Skills (CTS). Using SPSS software, various statistical methods, such as x2 tests, ANOVA (Analysis of Variance), T-tests, and descriptive statistics, were employed to analyze data collected from educators. The findings reveal significant improvements across (...) all measured variables, indicating that imaginative teaching practices effectively enhance student engagement, academic performance, critical thinking skills, creativity, and overall satisfaction with the educational experience. These results suggest that incorporating creative methods in teaching can create a more dynamic, engaging, and effective learning environment, ultimately leading to improved educational outcomes. (shrink)

Kant's ethics has long been bedevilled by a peculiar tension. While his practical philosophy describes the moral obligations incumbent on all free, rational beings, Kant also understands moral anthropology as addressing to our moral advancement. How are we to reconcile Kant's Critical account of a transcendentally free human will with his developmental view of anthropology, history and education as assisting in our collective progress towards moral ends? I argue that Kant in fact distinguishes between the objective determination of moral principles (...) and subjective processes of moral acculturation developing human beingsempirical ethics’ as attending to the unsystematizable facets of a properly human moral life. (shrink)

What do we directly hear? In section I, I define direct perception, and outline the logical atomist way of attacking the question. I argue in section II that atomism fails. Then, in sections III-V, I propose that a better alternative to atomism is to revive and modernize another traditional empiricist doctrine: that we directly sense what the senses deliver to automatic (i.e., sub-personal) processes of learning.

Patient referral management is an integral part of clinical practice. However, in low-resource settings, referrals are often delayed. The World Health Organization categorizes three types of referral delays; delay in seeking care, in reaching care and in receiving care. Using two case studies of maternal referrals (from a low-resource state in India), this article shows how a culture of downstream blaming permeates referral practice in India. With no referral guidelines to follow, providers in higher-facilities evaluate the clinical decision-making of their (...) peers in lower-facilities based on patient outcome, not on objective measures. The fear of punitive action for an unfavorable maternal outcome is a larger driving factor than patient safety. The article argues for the need to formulate an ecosystem where patient responsibility is shared across the health system. In conclusion, it discusses possible solutions which can bridge communication and information gap between referring facilities. (shrink)

Memory seems intuitively to consist in the preservation of some proposition (in the case of semantic memory) or sensory image (in the case of episodic memory). However, this intuition faces fatal difficulties. Semantic memory has to be updated to reflect the passage of time: it is not just preservation. And episodic memory can occur in a format (the observer perspective) in which the remembered image is different from the original sensory image. These difficulties indicate that memory cannot be preserved content. (...) It is proposed that what is preserved in memory isan underlying "trace", and that in every act of remembering, memorial content is reconstructed from the preserved trace. (shrink)

This article presents an analogical account of the meaning of function attributions in biology. To say that something has a function analogizes it with an artifact, but since the analogy rests on a necessary (but possibly insufficient) basis, function statements can still be assessed as true or false in an objective sense.

John Campbell argues that visual attention to objects is the means by which we can refer to objects, and that this is so because conscious visual attention enables us to retrieve information about a location. It is argued here that while Campbell is right to think that we visually attend to objects, he does not give us sufficient ground for thinking that consciousness is involved, and is wrong to assign an intermediary role to location. Campbell’s view on sortals is also (...) queried, as is his espousal of the so-called Referential View of Experience. (shrink)

In this essay, I’ll argue, first, that an art object's aesthetic value (or merit) depends not just on its intrinsic properties, but on the response it evokes from a consumer who shares the producer's cultural background. My question is: what is the role of culture in relation to this response? I offer a new account of aesthetic pleasure that answers this question. On this account, aesthetic pleasure is not just a “feeling” or “sensation” that results from engaging with a work (...) of art. It is rather a mental state that facilitates engagement with an artwork, and (in the long run) enables a consumer to learn how to maximize this kind of pleasure. This is where culture comes in. If you belong to a culture, you know how to engage pleasurably with an artwork that is produced so you can engage with it in just this way. The aesthetic value of an artwork is that it plays into such a culture-pleasure nexus. -/- . (shrink)

This paper defends two theses about sensory objects. The more general thesis is that directly sensed objects are those delivered by sub-personal processes. It is shown how this thesis runs counter to perceptual atomism, the view that wholes are always sensed indirectly, through their parts. The more specific thesis is that while the direct objects of audition are all composed of sounds, these direct objects are not all sounds—here, a composite auditory object is a temporal sequence of sounds (whereas a (...) composite visual object is a spatial composite). Many composite objects are directly heard in the sense just mentioned. There is a great variety of such composite auditory objects—melodies, harmonies, sequences of phonemes, individual voices, meaning-carrying sounds, and so on. This diversity of auditory objects has an important application to aesthetics. Perceivers do not naturally or easily attend simultaneously to auditory objects that overlap in time. Yet, aesthetic appreciation depends on such an allocation of attention to overlapping objects. (shrink)

Cognitive definitions cannot accommodate fear as it occurs in species incapable of sophisticated cognition. Some think that fear must, therefore, be noncognitive. This paper explores another option, arguably more in line with evolutionary theory: that like other "biological universals" fear admits of variation across and within species. A paradigm case of such universals is species: it is argued that they can be defined by ostension in the manner of Putnam and Kripke without implying that they must have an invariable essence. (...) Emotions can be defined in this way too, in principle, but the theoretical understanding of homology necessary to do so is lacking at present. (shrink)