This essay pursues the question of vegetal respiration in Presocratics’ doctrines in contrast to Aristotle’s categorical circumscription of this vital process to the blooded animals. It finds that epithelial respiration in DK31 B100 is central to Empedocles’ conception of plants’ breathing, linked to their fructification, deciduousness, and overall life preservation. It also discusses plants’ respiration in relation to their body temperature in Menestor, then, concludes by analyzing Democritus’ psychological doctrine, arguing that the intake of fiery atoms pertained to all living (...) beings, plants included. (shrink)

With a novel approach to Aristotle's zoology, this study looks at animals as creatures of nature and reveals a scientific discourse that, in response to his predecessors, exiles logos as reason and pursues the logos intrinsic to animals' bodies empowering them to sense the world and live. The volume explores Aristotle's conception of animals through a discussion of his ad hoc methodology to study them, including the pertinence of the soul to such a study, and the rise of zoology as (...) a branch of natural philosophy. For Aristotle, animal life stems from the body in the space of existence and revolves around sensation, which is entwined with pleasure, pain, and desire. Lack of human reason is irrelevant to an understanding of the richness of animal life and cognition. In sum, the reader will acquire knowledge of the animal as such, which lay at the core of Aristotle's agenda and required a study of its own, separate from plants and the elements. This book is intended for students of history of science, ancient biology and philosophy and all those who, from different fields, are interested in animal studies and the human/animal relation. (shrink)

SUPERANNO A unique collection of photographs by WRA photographer Hikaru Iwasaki focuses on resettlement using photos of Japanese Americans following their release from WRA camps from 1943 to 1945. Author Lane Hirabayashi explores the use of photography in the WRA mission to encourage “loyal” Japanese Americans to return to society at large, and convince Euro-Americans this was safe. Hirabayashi also assesses the success of the WRA project, and the multiple uses of the photographs over time.

Among Plato's works, the Statesman is usually seen as transitional between the Republic and the Laws. This book argues that the dialogue deserves a special place of its own. Whereas Plato is usually thought of as defending unchanging knowledge, Dr Lane demonstrates how, by placing change at the heart of political affairs, Plato reconceives the link between knowledge and authority. The statesman is shown to master the timing of affairs of state, and to use this expertise in managing the (...) conflict of opposed civic factions. To this political argument corresponds a methodological approach which is seen to rely not only on the familiar method of 'division', but equally on the unfamiliar centrality of the use of 'example'. The demonstration that method and politics are interrelated transforms our understanding of the Statesman and its fellow dialogues. (shrink)

This essay considers episodes in which phenomena like war and civil strife affected, changed, and revealed the identity of the polis. Even if framed by an understanding of the Peloponnesian War and the imperialistic logic and destiny of Athens, Thucydides' History still provides us with narratives that illuminate the particular history of “minor” poleis, each with its specific events, turning points, and dynamics. Through analysis of Thucydides' historical material, this essay focuses on Plataea, Corcyra, and Mytilene and discusses the notion (...) of the polis in relation to space and in the context of time, thereby testing Aristotle's question—too soon dismissed—about the separation of a community from the space of its city. (shrink)

What did the early Greek philosophers think about animals and their lives? How did they view plants? And, ultimately, what type of relationship did they envisage between all sorts of living beings? On these topics there is evidence of a prolonged investigation by several Presocratics. However, scholarship has paid little attention to these issues and to the surprisingly "modern" development they received in Presocratics' doctrines. This book fills this lacuna through a detailed (and largely unprecedented) analysis of the extant evidence. (...) The volume includes also the first extensive collection of the ancient sources pertaining to living beings and life in early Greek philosophy, organized chronologically and thematically. (shrink)

This book offers a new interpretation of the metaphysics of Charles Peirce, the founder of pragmatism and one of America's greatest philosophers. Robert Lane begins by examining Peirce's basic realism, his belief in a world that is independent of how anyone believes it to be. Lane argues that this realism is the basis for Peirce's account of truth, according to which a true belief is one that would be settled by investigation and that also represents the real world. (...) He then explores Peirce's application of his Pragmatic Maxim to clarify the idea of reality, his two forms of idealism, and his realism about generality and vagueness. This rich study will provide readers with a clear understanding of Peirce's thoughts on reality and truth and how they intersect, and of his views on the relation between the mind and the external world. (shrink)

Attachment theory ( Bowlby, 1969/1982 ) posits the existence of internal working models as a foundational feature of human bonds. Radical embodied approaches instead suggest that cognition requires no computation or representation, favoring a cognition situated in a body in an environmental context with affordances for action ( Chemero, 2009 ; Barrett, 2011 ; Wilson and Golonka, 2013 ; Casasanto and Lupyan, 2015 ). We explore whether embodied approaches to social soothing, interpersonal warmth, separation distress, and support seeking could replace (...) representational constructs such as internal working models with a view of relationship cognition anchored in the resources afforded to the individual by their brain, body, and environment in interaction. We review the neurobiological bases for social attachments and relationships and attempt to delineate how these systems overlap or don’t with more basic physiological systems in ways that support or contradict a radical embodied explanation. We suggest that many effects might be the result of the fact that relationship cognition depends on and emerges out of the action of neural systems that regulate several clearly physically grounded systems. For example, the neuropeptide oxytocin appears to be central to attachment and pair-bond behavior ( Carter and Keverne, 2002 ) and is implicated in social thermoregulation more broadly, being necessary for maintaining a warm body temperature (for a review, see IJzerman et al., 2015b ). Finally, we discuss the most challenging issues around taking a radically embodied perspective on social relationships. We find the most crucial challenge in individual differences in support seeking and responses to social contact, which have long been thought to be a function of representational structures in the mind (e.g., Baldwin, 1995 ). Together we entertain the thought to explain such individual differences without mediating representations or computations, but in the end propose a hybrid model of radical embodiment and internal representations. (shrink)

For many years, Charles Peirce maintained that all senses of the modal terms "possible" and "necessary" can be defined in terms of "states of information." But in 1896, he was motivated by his work in set theory to criticize that account of modality, and in 1905 he characterized that criticism as a return "to the Aristotelian doctrine of a real possibility ... the great step that was needed to render pragmaticism an intelligible doctrine." But since Peirce was a realist about (...) modality before 1896, and since he continued defining "possibility" in terms of "states of information" after that date, it is not clear exactly what he changed his mind about. In this essay I explain what it was that Peirce changed his mind about and why, in retrospect, he viewed that change as a decisive step in the development of pragmaticism. (shrink)

This note discusses the lacuna at Nemean 9.17, considers the supplements suggested to date and proposes a new one.

In this essay, I seek to demonstrate the interplay of philosophical voices – particularly, that of a platonist voice and a community-agreement-view voice – that drives Wittgenstein’s rule-following dialectic forward; and I argue that each voice succumbs to a particular form of dialectical oscillation that renders its response to the problem of rule-following philosophically inadequate. Finally, I suggest that, by seeing and taking stock of the dilemma in which these responses to the skeptical problem are caught, we can come to (...) appreciate Wittgenstein’s own view of what might constitute a proper a response to the so-called problem of rule-following. This view can be preliminarily characterized by saying that Wittgenstein’s aim is to dissolve the temptation to philosophically rebut the skeptical challenge posed by the rule-following dialectic, an aim he achieves by revealing the semantic emptiness of the apparent sentences that raise the skeptical problem. (shrink)

Computational models of learning provide an alternative technique for identifying the number and type of chunks used by a subject in a specific task. Results from applying CHREST to chess expertise support the theoretical framework of Cowan and a limit in visual short-term memory capacity of 3–4 looms. An application to learning from diagrams illustrates different identifiable forms of chunk.

The article considers structuralism as a philosophy of mathematics, as based on the commonly accepted explicit mathematical concept of a structure. Such a structure consists of a set with specified functions and relations satisfying specified axioms, which describe the type of the structure. Examples of such structures such as groups and spaces, are described. The viewpoint is now dominant in organizing much of mathematics, but does not cover all mathematics, in particular most applications. It does not explain why certain structures (...) are dominant, not why the same mathematical structure can have so many different and protean realizations. ‘structure’ is just one part of the full situation, which must somehow connect the ideal structures with their varied examples. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Testament of the Other: Abraham and Torok’s Failed Expiation of GhostsChristopher Lane (bio)Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel. Vol. 1. Ed., trans., and intro. Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.Nicholas Rand and Maria Torok. Questions à Freud: Du Devenir de la Psychanalyse. Paris: Belles Lettres-Archimbaud, 1995.Nicholas Rand and Maria Torok. “Questions to Freudian Psychoanalysis: Dream Interpretation, Reality, Fantasy.” Trans. Rand. (...) Critical Inquiry 19.3 (1993): 567–94. [“QFP”]Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable and immortal elements of life, which, having once been, can never die, though they blend and change and change again for ever.—H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s MinesWhat haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.—Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel1. PrologueNicolas Abraham and Maria Torok may be best known for advancing a theory of transgenerational haunting. According to this theory, repressed secrets are passed from one generation to the next if they are “encrypted” as unprocessed and traumatic information. Before Abraham’s death in 1975, he and Torok saw their analytic role as reparative: Encouraging their analysands to mourn repressed secrets, they hoped to transform their analysands’ perspectives on family history.Abraham and Torok quickly became known for expanding Freud’s emphasis on the subject’s conflicting desires and identifications. From 1968 on, when Abraham published “L’écorce et le noyau” (“The Shell and the Kernel”) as an extended review of Laplanche and Pontalis’s The Language of Psychoanalysis, he and Torok published their claims in cheerful defiance of Freudian orthodoxy, acquiring a reputation in France—and, later, in England and the United States—for shattering such “doctrinaire” elements of psychoanalysis [End Page 3] as the Oedipus complex and death drive, penis envy, and the primal scene, as well as for criticizing Lacan’s alleged stranglehold on psychoanalysis in France and much of Europe. 1 After publishing L’écorce et le noyau (1987), a collection of their essays (many coauthored), and a radically new interpretation of Freud’s patient “the Wolf Man,” Cryptonymie: Le verbier de l’homme aux loups (1976; trans. The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy), Abraham and Torok were championed in Europe and the United States by theorists delighted to see a “poststructuralist” critique of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Ironically, Abraham and Torok’s work received almost comparable support from analytical philosophers eager to denounce Freud’s “unscientific” precepts.Now that the first volume of Abraham and Torok’s essays has appeared in translation, non-Francophone readers have an opportunity to assess what Abraham and Torok contributed to psychoanalysis and to revisit the debates they staged with Freud and Lacan in the 1970s and—posthumously for Abraham—in the ‘80s. Reviewing this collection is not a simple task, however, because its conceptual interests are so diverse and because Torok’s coauthored work with Abraham differs radically from the essays and book she published recently with Nicholas Rand, editor and translator of The Shell and the Kernel. Rand’s interventions confirm Torok’s latest arguments but they also, occasionally, misleadingly frame the older work in terms of the new. Readers may therefore see Rand’s editorial notes and introduction as guides to how he and Torok now view Torok’s collaboration with Abraham. We can only speculate whether Abraham would have interpreted the collaboration the same way. 2How does Abraham and Torok’s account of psychic “encryptment” differ from Freud’s model of repression? Assessing their revision of Freud’s metapsychological project, Abraham and Torok declare, “It would be presumptuous indeed to allege that we have reached our goal. Yet it would be false modesty to deny our suspicion that we are finally entering an open road” [140]. 3 Echoing Freud’s conviction that in dreams he had discovered “the royal road to the unconscious,” Abraham and Torok encourage a comparative reading of their psychoanalytic “road” and Freud’s. The following essay undertakes this reading, but it also speculates on what Freud’s and Lacan’s emphasis on [End Page 4] psychic... (shrink)

Can ordinary citizens in a democracy evaluate the claims of scientific experts? While a definitive answer must be case by case, some scholars have offered sharply opposed general answers: a skeptical versus an optimistic. The article addresses this basic conflict, arguing that a satisfactory answer requires a first-order engagement in judging the claims of experts which both skeptics and optimists rule out in taking the issue to be one of second-order assessments only. Having argued that such first-order judgments are necessary, (...) it then considers how they are possible, outlining a range of practices and virtues that can inform their success and likelihood, and drawing throughout on ancient Greek insights as well as contemporary social psychology and sociology of knowledge. In conclusion the ethics of democratic judgment so developed is applied to the dramatic conviction of the members of an Italian scientific risk commission in L'Aquila. (shrink)

Fictionalist theories of metaphor hold that metaphorical utterances aim at fictionality. Fictionalism successfully explains speaker judgments about the truth and aptness of metaphorical utterances, and it also accurately predicts the data around metaphor and autistic individuals (who have deficits in both imaginative play and metaphor comprehension). But fictionalism is not a viable theory of metaphor, despite these merits, because of (what I call) the problem of semantic entailment: semantic entailments that are normally valid fail under metaphorical interpretation, but fictionalism predicts (...) otherwise. I argue this to ultimately show that theorists of metaphor should reject the linguistic side of the fictionalist story; but this leaves open the possibility of accepting psychological fictionalism, i.e., the hypothesis that fiction/make-believe is central to the cognitive processing of metaphor. Coupling psychological fictionalism with a different theory of metaphorical meaning and content (such as contextualism) promises to keep the explanatory upsides of traditional fictionalism while avoiding the problem of semantic entailment. (shrink)

Mental ownership concerns who experiences a mental state. According to David Rosenthal (2005: 342), the proper way to characterize mental ownership is: ‘being conscious of a state as present is being conscious of it as belonging to somebody. And being conscious of a state as belonging to somebody other than oneself would plainly not make it a conscious state’. In other words, if a mental state is consciously present to a subject in virtue of a higher-order thought (HOT), then the (...) HOT necessarily representsthe subject as the owner of the state. But, we contend, one of the lessons to be learned from pathological states like somatoparaphrenia is that conscious awareness of a mental state does not guarantee first-person ownership. That is to say, conscious presence does not imply mental ownership. (shrink)

In this commentary, we attempt to broaden thinking and dialogue about how our ancestral past might have affected attachment and reproductive strategies. We highlight the theoretical benefits of formulating specific predictions of how different sources of stress might impact attachment and reproductive strategies differently, and we integrate some of these ideas with another recent evolutionary model of human mating.

On pourrait dire que parler, c'est d'abord produire des sons conventionnels pour faire comprendre à quelqu'un ce qu'on voudrait lui faire comprendre. Même si l'on constate que la parole est souvent utilisée non seulement pour faire comprendre, mais aussi pour promettre, ou commander, ou avertir, etc., il n'en demeure pas moins que l'on promet, par exemple, en parlant, et que promettre, c'est promettre, alors que parler, c'est autre chose. Par contre, il nous arrive aussi de dire qu'un magnétophone parle, qu'un (...) rêveur ou un perroquet parlent, qu'une peinture ou un paysage naturel « nous parlent », etc. On estime cependant que plusieurs de ces « paroles » sont seulement métaphoriques: elles ne seraient pas des paroles au sens « fort », mais plutôt par extension, par analogie, ou entendues dans un sens restreint. Et l'on voudrait préciser ce sens fort, « prégnant », c'est-à-dire celui qui correspondrait au parler véritable, à l'essence de la parole. (shrink)

This is one of the most significant and serious treatments of the modern roots of the New Age in print.

Most academics agree that emotions and moods are related but distinct phenomena. The present study assessed emotion-mood distinctions among a non-academic population and compared these views with distinctions proposed in the literature. Content analysis of responses from 106 participants identified 16 themes, with cause (65% of respondents), duration (40%), control (25%), experience (15%), and consequences (14%) the most frequently cited distinctions. Among 65 contributions to the academic literature, eight themes were proposed, with duration (62% of authors), intentionality (41%), cause (31percnt;), (...) consequences (31%), and function (18%) the most frequently cited. When the eight themes cited by both academics and non-academics were rank ordered, approximately 60% overlap in opinion was evident. A data-derived summary of emotion-mood distinctions is provided. These data should prove useful to investigators interested in developing a clearer scientific distinction between emotion and mood than is currently available. (shrink)

Previous research has suggested that bodily signals from internal organs are associated with diverse cortical and subcortical processes involved in sensory-motor functions, beyond homeostatic reflexes. For instance, a recent study demonstrated that the preparation and execution of voluntary actions, as well as its underlying neural activity, are coupled with the breathing cycle. In the current study, we investigated whether such breathing-action coupling is limited to voluntary motor action or whether it is also present for mental actions not involving any overt (...) bodily movement. To answer this question, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), and respiratory signals while participants were conducting a voluntary action paradigm including self-initiated motor execution (ME), motor imagery (MI), and visual imagery (VI) tasks. We observed that the voluntary initiation of ME, MI, and VI are similarly coupled with the respiration phase. In addition, EEG analysis revealed the existence of readiness potential (RP) waveforms in all three tasks (i.e., ME, MI, VI), as well as a coupling between the RP amplitude and the respiratory phase. Our findings show that the voluntary initiation of both imagined and overt action is coupled with respiration, and further suggest that the breathing system is involved in preparatory processes of voluntary action by contributing to the temporal decision of when to initiate the action plan, regardless of whether this culminates in overt movements. -/- . (shrink)

Issues of methodology are central to the philosophy of moral progress. However, the idea that effective moral methodology, as well as being instrumental to progress, might also constitute progress has not been adequately explored. This paper will critically assess the merits of this idea – what I call ‘pure proceduralism about moral progress’ – taking Philip Kitcher's recent theory of ‘democratic contractualism’ (2021) as a test case. An epistemology of pure procedural moral progress will be sketched: namely, a naturalised epistemology (...) of paradigmatic instances of moral progress. Assuming an ideal procedure exists and has been at least approximately instantiated (an empirical claim), we learn about its form by studying paradigms of historical moral progress. From this epistemological method will be derived theoretical constraints on what can count as a theory of moral progress per se: it must capture the core semantic constraints on the term ‘moral progress,’ those features without which we would not recognise a change as moral progress. While this poses a tougher challenge for pure proceduralism than for more traditional approaches to moral methodology, it will be concluded that the potential of pure proceduralism as a viable metaethics of moral progress remains an exciting open question. (shrink)