The present study investigated whether lexical access is affected by a regular phonological variation in connected speech: voice assimilation in French. Two associative priming experiments were conducted to determine whether strongly assimilated, potentially ambiguous word forms activate the conceptual representation of the underlying word. Would the ambiguous word form [sud] (either assimilated soute 'hold' or soude 'soda') facilitate 'bagage' 'luggage', which is semantically related to soute but not to soude? In Experiment 1, words in either canonical or strongly assimilated form (...) were presented as primes. Both forms primed their related target to the same extent. Potential lexical ambiguity did not modulate priming effects. In Experiment 2, the primes such as assimilated soute pronounced [sud] used in Experiment 1 were replaced with primes such as soude canonically pronounced [sud]. No semantic priming effect was obtained with these primes. Therefore, the effect observed for assimilated forms in Experiment 1 cannot be due to overall phonological proximity between canonical and assimilated forms. We propose that listeners must recover the intended words behind the assimilated forms through the exploitation of the remaining traces of the underlying form, however subtle these traces may be. (shrink)

The scope of Philosophy in Multiple Voices provides the reader with eight philosophical streams of thought-African-American, Afro-Caribbean, Asian-American, Feminist, Latin-American, Lesbian, Native-American and Queer-that introduce readers to alternative, complex philosophical questions concerning gendered, sexed, racial and ethnic identities, canon formation, and meta-philosophy. The overriding theme of the text is that philosophy is pluralistic in voice, rich in diversity, and ought to valorize democratic intellectual spaces of philosophical engagement.

The description for this book, Men and Nations, will be forthcoming.

This book is based on the premise that the realm of being is meaningful to the extent that we are able to view it comprehensively. Our understanding, in its degree, depends on the breadth of our knowledge; for everything, as we shall see, tends to shed light on everything else. But the knowledge we have today, although far exceeding that of our predecessors, does not serve this purpose of illumination insofar as it remains unassembled, partitioned among the minds of the (...) specialists who respectively represent the fields into which it is divided. ... In one of its aspects, this book is an exercise in perspective. As such, it will have much to say of the very small and the very large, of analysis and synthesis.--Preface. (shrink)

In Queer Social Philosophy, Randall Halle analyzes key texts in the tradition of German critical theory from the perspective of contemporary queer theory, exposing gender and sexuality restrictions that undermine those texts' claims of universal truth. Addressing such figures as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Adorno, and Habermas, Halle offers a unique contribution to contemporary debates about sexuality, civil society, and politics.

Foucault's discussion of the panopticon is the best-known engagement with visual epistemology, the relationship of sight and knowledge. Yet the panopticon is only one form of visual epistemology and all technologies of perspective position and situate their subjects. As a colloquial statement of visual epistemology we might say: you are how you see. This essay focuses on the cinematic episteme or how the technology of cinema configures a way of seeing and way of knowing. Specifically this essay takes up a (...) narrower question of visual alterity. Beginning from Hegel's discussion of consciousness, it asks how within and through film we recognise our self and how can we see the other? To carry out the analysis, the essay attends in particular to two films Baby I will Make You Sweat (1994) and La Moderna Poesia (2000) by experimental and underground artist Birgit Hein. These films combine incongruous and even conflicting representational strategies that particularly enable an exploration of visual alterity. Both films on the one hand narrate a highly subjective experience of self/other relations within the context of a travel narrative: a woman seeking to recapture some sense of life, travels to an unfamiliar destination, enters into new environments and takes up relationships, sometimes intimate, with strangers. On the other hand they both rely on a form of aesthetic abstraction that leaves the film without renaissance perspective, panoptic organizing, shot-reverse shot, continuity editing, i.e. an of the typical representational strategies of alterity found in narrative films. (shrink)

Using cinema to explore the visual aspects of alterity, Randall Halle analyzes how we become cognizant of each other and how we perceive and judge another person in a visual field. Halle draws on insights from philosophy and recent developments in cognitive and neuroscience to argue that there is no pure "natural" sight. We always see in a particular way, from a particular vantage point, and through a specific apparatus, and Halle shows how human beings have used cinema to experiment (...) with the apparatus of seeing for over a century. Visual alterity goes beyond seeing difference to being conscious of how one sees difference. Investigating the process allows us to move from mere perception to apperception, or conscious perception. Innovative and insightful, Visual Alterity merges film theory with philosophy and cutting-edge science to propose new ways of perceiving and knowing. (shrink)