This book deals with the nature of perceptual consciousness and the relationship of sense-data to the ordinary `macroscopic objects' of daily life.

This volume presents seventeen essays by one of the world's leading scholars on Kant. Henry E. Allison explores the nature of transcendental idealism, freedom of the will, and the concept of the purposiveness of nature. He places Kant's views in their historical context and explores their contemporary relevance to present day philosophers.

This paper examines attention as a scientific concept, and argues that it has a patchwork structure. On this view, the concept of attention takes on different meanings, depending on the scientific context. I argue that these different meanings vary systematically along four dimensions, as a result of the epistemic goals of the scientific programme in question and the constraints imposed by the scientific context. Based on this, I argue that attention is a general reasoning strategy concept: it provides general, non-specific (...) guidance that aids scientific work. As well as shedding light on attention as a scientific concept, this theory has two wider consequences. First, it demonstrates that the patchwork approach is a fruitful way to think about psychological concepts. Second, it provides novel resources to resist eliminativism about attention. (shrink)

Although a good deal has been written about Kant's conception of free will in recent years, there has been no serious attempt to examine in detail the development of his views on the topic. This book endeavours to remedy the situation by tracing Kant's thoughts on free will from his earliest discussions of it in the 1750s through to his last accounts in the 1790s. This developmental approach is of interest for at least two reasons. First, it shows that the (...) path that led Kant to view freedom as a transcendental power that is both radically distinct from and compatible with the causality of nature was a winding one. Second, it indicates that, despite the variety of views of free will that Kant held at various times, the concept occupied a central place in his thought, because it was the point of union between his theoretical and practical philosophy. (shrink)

Orthodox quantum mechanics is built upon psychophysical collapse events that are the close analogs, within contemporary physical theory, of the the Whiteheadian actual occasions, with their mental and physical poles. This article describes the way in which these events enter into quantum theory, and mediate the emergence of actuality from potentiality.

An attempt is made to give a coherent account of the logical essence of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory. The central point is that quantum theory is fundamentally pragmatic, but nonetheless complete. The principal difficulty in understanding quantum theory lies in the fact that its completeness is incompatible with external existence of the space—time continuum of classical physics.

Paget introduces the general reader to Afro-Caribbean philosophy in this ground-breaking work. Since Afro-Caribbean thought is inherently hybrid in nature, he traces the roots of this discourse in traditional African thought and in the Christian and Enlightenment traditions of Western Europe.

The Witness of the Brothers. By Yaacov Oved, 342 pp.

How did molecules become signs? First, according to Deacon, there had to be an interpreter, a physical process capable of making use of some property of a molecule that offered a “semiotic affordance.” He proposes the model of an “autogenic virus,” the most primitive conceivable recursively self-maintaining kind of molecular system that could broach the boundary between physico-chemical process and “interpretive competence.” In this comment I work up to the question of how Deacon introduces concepts such as “representation” and “record” (...) into his account, to argue that the autogen can pass on its lineage without a genetic template. (shrink)

This paper is the forerunner of an extensive logical analysis of the relativity idea, in which an axiomatic structure based upon the principles of topology is developed. It is meant to expose the manner in which relativity stretches from the pole of pure conception to that of factual observation, from the a priori to the a posteriori. We take pains to show, in connection with special relativity, precisely which elements are postulational and which are verifiable empirically. Our attempt can be (...) somewhat naively characterized as an effort to show how misguided it is to "derive" relativity from such experimental facts as the Michelson-Morley experiment--as so many textbooks profess to do. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The philosophy of quantum mechanics has often been conceived by physicists as a collection of dogmas concerning what can be measured, observed and known. To this branch of dialectics the present paper does not attempt to contribute, chiefly because it is written from the conviction that no part of science, nor any philosophy, can safely predict what may be feasible or knowable. Rather, this brief essay endeavors to expose the epistemology of quantum physics in a way which allows it to (...) be recognized as an extension of the ordinary processes of cognition, as the continuation of a line which starts in sensory perception, leads straight through the methods of classical physics into quantum mechanics and shows no signs of terminating even there. (shrink)

We argue that folk psychology and folk morality both develop from the same core conception of persons, namely a concept of a responsive intentional agent. Key features of this conception are evident in infancy and develop universally in the preschool years across cultures and languages. Even these early understandings develop, shaped and specified via processes of cognitive construction intertwined with cultural constructs of persons provided within interactive culturally constituted, communicative experiences of childhood. The result is culturally variable endpoints of social (...) cognitive development, that is, culturally variable folk psychologies and folk moralities. We underwrite this argument with data from studies of theory of mind understandings, moral judgments, person description and explanation, and autobiographical memory, research that spans from infancy to adulthood and includes a variety of cultural communities. (shrink)