Closely related to this are his responses to the so-called Miller-Bode objections, which charged that his philosophy of pure experience could not solve the ...

William James and Wisconsin, by G.C. Sellery.--The distinctive philosophy of William James, by M.C. Otto.--William James, man and philosopher, by D.S. Miller.--William James and psychoanalysis, by Norman Cameron.--The William James centenary dinner: Introductory remarks, by C.A. Dykstra. William James and the world today, by John Dewey, read by Carl Boegholt. William James in the American tradition, by B.H. Bode.--The Sunday service: William James as religious thinker, by J.S. Bixler.

There is a traditional view concerning the relation between mind and matter, knower and known. It posits a bifurcation between the two, maintaining, as Ryle puts it, that mind and matter are two distinct orders of existence. This traditional view comes, in large part, from Descartes. James rejects the traditional view, arguing instead for a close relationship between thought and object. His argument contains two components. The first stresses the close functional relationship between thought and object in our everyday (...) experience. James argues here that true thoughts do or can lead us to their objects, culminating in prosperous interaction with them. The second part of James's argument holds that in pure experience--the original flow of data within which all distinctions are to be made--there is no distinction yet made between mind and matter, knower and known. These distinctions arise only later as conceptual tools for bringing organization to the original presentations. Any given element of pure experience is categorized twice, once as an element of the physical world, and a second time as an element of the perceiver's own mental history. The conclusion, then, is that James: shows that thought and object work together in a close functional relationship in ordinary experience; and argues that they arise from one homogeneous pure experience. ;A number of criticisms were directed against James's view, including: Lovejoy's, arguing that the incompatibilities of thought and object preclude the possibility of their arising from one homogeneous source; Russell's and Perry's, arguing that James's theory is unable to extricate itself from idealism; Miller's and Bode's, arguing that James's view contradicts one of his own important tenets in The Principles of Psychology; and an argument that James is unable to account for the agency by means of which pure experience gets organized. ;James can reply plausibly to all of these criticisms including the difficult issue of the self. On this question a consistent understanding of James's basic assumptions is required. ;Finally, James's viewpoint offers an interesting critical perspective on certain contemporary theories of mind-brain identity. (shrink)

Rudolf Bode’s text Rhythm and its Importance for Education (published by Eugen Diederich, Jena, 1920) has both a theoretical and a practical aim: to clarify the nature of the rhythm phenomenon in order to lay down the foundations of ‘Rhythmic Gymnastics’. Bode engages with the work of his contemporaries, such as Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, Karl Buecher and Ludwig Klages, and comes to identify rhythm with a continuum devoid of rationality. The text is unique in its ability to meaningfully connect (...) such diverse fields as philosophy, gymnastics, anthropology and politics and shows, in this way, the potential of ‘rhythmanalysis’. (shrink)

Romantic love is a phenomenon of immense interest to the general public as well as to scholars in several disciplines. It is known to be present in almost all human societies and has been studied from a number of perspectives. In this integrative review, we bring together what is known about romantic love using Tinbergen’s “four questions” framework originating from evolutionary biology. Under the first question, related to mechanisms, we show that it is caused by social, psychological mate choice, genetic, (...) neural, and endocrine mechanisms. The mechanisms regulating psychopathology, cognitive biases, and animal models provide further insights into the mechanisms that regulate romantic love. Under the second question, related to development, we show that romantic love exists across the human lifespan in both sexes. We summarize what is known about its development and the internal and external factors that influence it. We consider cross-cultural perspectives and raise the issue of evolutionary mismatch. Under the third question, related to function, we discuss the fitness-relevant benefits and costs of romantic love with reference to mate choice, courtship, sex, and pair-bonding. We outline three possible selective pressures and contend that romantic love is a suite of adaptions and by-products. Under the fourth question, related to phylogeny, we summarize theories of romantic love’s evolutionary history and show that romantic love probably evolved in concert with pair-bonds in our recent ancestors. We describe the mammalian antecedents to romantic love and the contribution of genes and culture to the expression of modern romantic love. We advance four potential scenarios for the evolution of romantic love. We conclude by summarizing what Tinbergen’s four questions tell us, highlighting outstanding questions as avenues of potential future research, and suggesting a novel ethologically informed working definition to accommodate the multi-faceted understanding of romantic love advanced in this review. (shrink)

The debate about computational literary studies (CLS) is stuck. Forceful arguments are repeatedly made as to why literary studies must now—or could never—involve quantification, statistics, and algorithms (not least in this journal) with little sense of either side convincing the other of their case. Surveying this debate over the past decade, I propose that what seems a complete divergence of opinion obscures a fundamental agreement: that computation is separate from literary phenomena. For the field’s critics, this distinction makes CLS an (...) oxymoron; for its proponents, both ways of knowing can contribute to literary studies, and there is critical potential in working across the divide. Yet the perception of a divide remains, and it prevents either effective critiques of reductive uses of computation (in literary studies and beyond) or productive engagements with computation’s constitutive effects (including for literary textuality and subjectivity). In charting this divide as it characterizes and limits apparently very different arguments, I connect claims about technology and subjectivity made in critiques and defenses of CLS to the separation of matter and meaning commonly referred to as Cartesian dualism. With both sides maintaining this arrangement, the debate about CLS is sealed off from technocultural inquiries in multiple fields (including literary studies) and from much of what matters in and as contemporary literary phenomena. The performative approaches to scientific and literary materiality I use to elucidate problems with the existing debate also help to characterize, explain the need for, and make legible where it already exists, a different—performative—CLS. Attuned to the coconstitution of computational methods and objects, with each other, and with literary subjectivities and textualities, this CLS builds on and extends existing critical paradigms to enable literary studies in the postprint era. (shrink)

Motion pictures, from their emergence in the late nineteenth century, have been used in ways that have held in tension a number of competing or seemingly contradictory impulses. Movies can document and reveal physical and social realities, extend perception through time and space, and create audio-visual approximations of subjective perspective and mental states; they can mimic or transform reality, or create new verisimilar or fantastical screen worlds that, in part, resemble, or abstract our own. Over the past 120 years, many (...) thinkers have attempted to define the aesthetic nature of the medium in, at times, prescriptive or overly conditional ways that centre on some technologies (notably the camera), techniques, or types of motion picture making while excluding others (notably animation), and that bracket or narrowly circumscribe the question of viewer experience. However, in the past thirty years or so, we have seen an expanded interest in forms previously more marginalized in film studies, such as documentary, docudrama, and animation. This is due in part to the digital turn in both screen media production and distribution, which has led to the proliferation and pervasiveness of both. We have also seen much deeper consideration of how viewers understand, experience, and think with screen media with the rise of phenomenological and cognitive approaches to the screen-viewer relationship. Carl Plantinga has become a key and productive figure during these years, generating persuasive understandings of the emotional, schematic, and moral dimensions of our experience of screen media, and the ways in which films and TV are designed for such purposes. A cognitivist, he is interested in the possibilities of the screen to allow us to better imagine and empathize with the experiences of others, to persuade us of a state of affairs, and to provoke our capacity for moral reasoning. (shrink)

Although Isaiah Berlin's critique of positive liberty has achieved canonical status, its place within his wider political philosophy remains obscure. However, the re-publication of one of his most important philosophical essays, From Hope and Fear Set Free, as part of a new edition of Four Essays on Liberty, simply entitled Liberty, has opened the door to a re-evaluation of Berlin's political project. At the heart of Berlin's argument, which gains its fullest expression in From Hope and Fear Set Free, stands (...) his contention that positive liberty, in its incarnation as self-realisation, conflates liberty with knowledge, which leads to the distortion of our phenomenologically inescapable structure of experience. This transgression against the conceptual framework in terms of which we think, Berlin argues, played its desolate part in linking the ?totalitarian temptation? latent in liberty as self-realisation with the totalitarian politics of the mid-twentieth century. (shrink)

Quiconque a visité la Chambre de la Signature, au Vatican, et s’est attardé devant « L’École d’Athènes » de Raphaël garde en mémoire l’image significative qu’offrent, au centre de la composition, les personnages d’Aristote et de Platon. C’est l’image, en raccourci, d’un dialogue poursuivi vingt années durant par le maître de l’Académie et son disciple de Stagire, l’un des plus féconds sans doute qu’ait jamais comptés l’histoire de la pensée philosophique. La première rencontre entre les deux hommes eut lieu probablement (...) au cours de l’année 366/5 avant notre ère. Ils vécurent ensemble, à Athènes, dans un commerce quasi constant, pour ainsi dire jusqu’à la mort de Platon, au mois de mai 347. Cependant, le maître avait laissé pour toujours son empreinte sur l’esprit du disciple. Au point que le lecteur attentif d’Aristote peut avoir l’impression de souvent trouver dans ses œuvres, comme disait Th. Gomperz, le « Platonicien » et l’« Asclépiade » confrontés l’un à l’autre sur toutes les grandes questions de la philosophie. Le difficile accord, parfois constaté dans le Corpus Aristotelicum, entre les thèses recommandées respectivement par l’héritier de l’Académie et le champion d’une philosophie nouvelle pose incontestablement le problème le plus redoutable que doit affronter l’exégèse. (shrink)

Les etudes reunies dans ce volume sont consacrees a l'interpretation des theses principales que defend Aristote en plaidant pour l'exercice d'une veritable politique par le citoyen juste. Ce sont des theses d'un enjeu redoutable. Elles impliquent le plus souvent les conceptions que se fait Aristote des vertus morales et intellectuelles composant le portrait de l'homme, non seulement heureux, mais susceptible d'apporter le bonheur a la Cite. Elles engagent aussi a considerer l'unite profonde que forment, chez Aristote, l'ethique et la politique. (...) A cote d'etudes recemment publiees par l'auteur, le receuil contient d'importants inedits qui font le point sur des questions disputees. L'ensemble peut introduire aux differents aspects de la pensee ethico-politique d'Aristote qui font, aujourd'hui encore, son actualite. (shrink)