Consciousness is arguably the most important area within contemporary philosophy of mind and perhaps the most puzzling aspect of the world. Despite an explosion of research from philosophers, psychologists, and scientists, attempts to explain consciousness in neurophysiological, or even cognitive, terms are often met with great resistance. In The Consciousness Paradox, Rocco Gennaro aims to solve an underlying paradox, namely, how it is possible to hold a number of seemingly inconsistent views, including higher-order thought (HOT) theory, conceptualism, infant and (...) animal consciousness, concept acquisition, and what he calls the HOT-brain thesis. He defends and further develops a metapsychological reductive representational theory of consciousness and applies it to several importantly related problems. Gennaro proposes a version of the HOT theory of consciousness that he calls the "wide intrinsicality view" and shows why it is superior to various alternatives, such as self-representationalism and first-order representationalism. HOT theory says that what makes a mental state conscious is that a suitable higher-order thought is directed at that mental state. -/- Thus Gennaro argues for an overall philosophical theory of consciousness while applying it to other significant issues not usually addressed in the philosophical literature on consciousness. Most cognitive science and empirical works on such topics as concepts and animal consciousness do not address central philosophical theories of consciousness. Gennaro’s integration of empirical and philosophical concerns will make his argument of interest to both philosophers and nonphilosophers. (shrink)

Consciousness is arguably the most important interdisciplinary area in contemporary philosophy of mind, with an explosion of research over the past thirty years from philosophers, psychologists, and scientists. It is also perhaps the most puzzling aspect of the world despite the fact that it is familiar to each of us. Consciousness also seems resistant to any straightforward physical explanation. This book introduces readers to the contemporary problem of consciousness, providing a clear introduction to the overall landscape and a fair-minded critical (...) survey of various theories of consciousness. Beginning with essential historical background to the problem of consciousness, Rocco Gennaro explores the following key topics and debates: the metaphysical problem of consciousness, including varieties of dualism and materialism; consciousness and neuroscience, particularly the question of whether consciousness can be reduced to brain activity or attentional mechanisms; representational and cognitive theories of consciousness; consciousness and psychopathology; animals, machines, and consciousness. Extensive use is made of interesting phenomena throughout the book, ranging from blindsight, synaesthesia, and change blindness to phantom limb syndrome, split-brain cases, and dissociative identity disorder. The inclusion of chapter summaries, annotated further reading, and a glossary make this book essential reading for anyone seeking a clear and informative overview of the problem of consciousness, not only in philosophy but related fields such as psychology and cognitive science. (shrink)

I argue that recent developments in animal cognition support the conclusion that HOT theory is consistent with animal consciousness. There seems to be growing evidence that many animals are indeed capable of having I-thoughts, including episodic memory, as well as have the ability to understand the mental states of others.

A más de 300 años de la primera edición del Leviatán, las lecturas acerca de las pasiones allí descritas deben realizarse teniendo en cuenta cambios históricos, políticos y discursivos. Aún así, continúa siendo posible hacer un rastreo conceptual de algunas de las pasiones aquí tratadas, sobre todo de las que en la actualidad participan con efervescencia de la vida pública. ¿Qué valor podemos rescatar de ellas a más de 300 años? Al consistir la presente obra de un tratado de filosofía (...) política sobre los orígenes y desarrollos del pacto social, es posible comprender estas pasiones, en principio, desde sus valores contractuales. Cada una de ellas representa un valor en la relación con los otros, formas de ser y de estar en el mundo de los propios sujetos en contrato. Reflexionamos con especificidad aquí sobre la indignación, sobre su potencial político y jurídico para contornear los bordes del contrato, pero también sobre su potencial hermenéutico, habilitando otros modos de recorrer la lectura a través de la pregunta por las injusticias, los mecanismos de devolución legítimos ante ellas exigidos y el uso de la violencia racionalizada. (shrink)

The note reinterprets an important epigraphic testimony of the Ostrogoth age, published for the first time by Giovanni Battista de Rossi in 1894. It is a polymetric funeral eulogy commissioned among the Amali royal family, perhaps dedicated by Flavia Amala Amalafrida Theodenanda to one or more relatives, unless one wishes to identify her with one of the dedicatees of the eulogy. After a presentation of supportive material and a new edition of the text, the history of the discovery of the (...) inscription is retraced, involving leading figures of the 19th century political and ecclesiastical culture including cardinal Vincenzo Vannutelli and H. Stevenson Jr., a pupil of de Rossi. The contribution dates the artifact between the end of the 5th century and the beginning of the 6th; it studies the hypothesis of identifying Amalafrida with one of the princesses in the family circle of King Theodoric and with the Ostrogothic wife of Flavius Maximus; it illustrates a hypothesis of the intended use of the epigraph for a funeral monument in the cemetery area of the Martyrial Basilica of S. Secondino on the Praenestina. (shrink)

Everything you need to understand both Laruelle's critique of difference and his project of non-philosophyGilles Deleuze described Laruelle's thought as 'one of the most interesting undertakings of contemporary philosophy'. Now, Rocco Gangle - who translated Laruelle's philosophy into English - takes you through Laruelle's trailblazing book Philosophies of Difference, helping you to understand both Laruelle's critique of Difference and his project of non-philosophy, which has become one of the most intriguing avenues in contemporary thought. He explains the context within (...) which Laruelle's thought developed and takes you through the challenging argument and conceptual scaffolding of 'Philosophies of Difference'. (shrink)

This study takes up where the previous volume in this series, on open societies in the ancient and medieval periods, left off. Setting out from that point, it analyzes the difficult, often dramatic and highly conflicted, relationship between theoreticians of the open society and those who have actually pursued Utopian ideals and various other chimeras. The thread uniting the two studies passes through the political institutions of the Roman Republic and English parliamentarianism, the bulwarks of truly free societies (however imperfect, (...) and thus subject to improvement, they may be). it is certainly no accident that all the great figures in this field, such as Vico, Montesquieu, Hume and the like, refer to these two models: the departure points for modern liberalism. Rocco Pezzimenti charts the difficult progress towards the achievement of rights, and reviewing modern political thought and the approach of contemporary analysis, offers a critique of a number of platitudes and demonstrates how even in the most recent centuries the complete negation of the open society has come about, often due to thinkers who have long been considered amongst the most enlightened. This has happened not only explicitly, due to those readily identified as the enemies of freedom, but also surreptitiously, occasioned by various Utopian visionaries. The analysis of those elements called the paradoxes of modernity has, under the cover of apparently innovative ideas, exalted methods and principles which have nothing to do with liberty and its history. The purpose of these pages is to provide an historical profile of the problem and alert each of us as to how delicate the balances of the open society are; societies which must be defended with the greatest possible lucidity and determination, a defence on a par with that of freedom itself. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary work contains the most sustained attempt at developing and defending one of the few genuine theories of consciousness.

A natural heir of the Renaissance and once tightly conjoined to its study, continental philosophy broke from Renaissance studies around the time of World War II. In _The Other Renaissance_, Rocco Rubini achieves what many have attempted to do since: bring them back together. Telling the story of modern Italian philosophy through the lens of Renaissance scholarship, he recovers a strand of philosophic history that sought to reactivate the humanist ideals of the Renaissance, even as philosophy elsewhere progressed toward (...) decidedly antihumanist sentiments. Bookended by Giambattista Vico and Antonio Gramsci, this strand of Renaissance-influenced philosophy rose in reaction to the major revolutions of the time in Italy, such as national unity, fascism, and democracy. Exploring the ways its thinkers critically assimilated the thought of their northern counterparts, Rubini uncovers new possibilities in our intellectual history: that antihumanism could have been forestalled, and that our postmodern condition could have been entirely different. In doing so, he offers an important new way of thinking about the origins of modernity, one that renews a trust in human dignity and the Western legacy as a whole. (shrink)

Many actors mobilize the cognitive, legal and technical tool-box of data protection when they discuss and address controversial issues such as digital mass surveillance. Yet, critical approaches to the digital only barely explore the politics of data protection in relation to data-driven governance. Building on governmentality studies and Actor-Network-Theory, this article analyses the potential and limits of using data protection to critique the ‘digital age’. Using the conceptual tool of dispositifs, it sketches an analytics of data protection and the emergence (...) of its configuration as ‘data protection by design and by default’. This exploration reminds us that governing through data implies, first and foremost, governing digital data. (shrink)

"[READING ECO is a timely indication] of the fruitfulness of perceiving Eco as the same in his metamorphoses. [It also testifies] to a certain price that Eco and his readers must/may pay for the enormous pleasure and intellectual stimulus of being Eco and being with Eco." —The Comparatist Umberto Eco is, quite simply, a genius. He is a renowned medievalist, philosopher, novelist, a popular journalist, and linguist. He is as warm and witty as he is learned—and quite probably the best-known (...) academic and novelist in the world today. The goal of this anthology is to examine his ideas of literary semiotics and interpretation as evidenced both in his scholarly work and in his fiction. (shrink)

In diesem Aufsatz sollen einmal mehr zentrale Begründungsschritte im Ausweis der menschlichen Willensfreiheit in den Sektionen 2 und 3 von GMSIII untersucht werden, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des in Sektion 3 formulierten Zirkels von Freiheit und Sittlichkeit. Das zentrale Ergebnis zur zweiten Sektion besagt, dass Kant dort keinen Beweis der menschlichen Willensfreiheit leistet, er vielmehr den eigentlichen Beweis, der in der dritten Sektion geleistet wird, bloß skizzierend vorwegnimmt. In der dritten Sektion liefert Kant eine geschlossene Argumentation von der notwendig anzunehmenden Vernünftigkeit (...) vernünftiger Wesen zur notwendigen Annahme transzendentaler Freiheit bis zur notwendigen Zuschreibung von Sittlichkeit, wobei der Schluss von der Freiheit der epistemischen Vernunft auf die praktischtranszendentale Freiheit geschieht. Dieser Befund ergibt sich zumindestdann, wenn man den Zirkel als eine eindeutige petitio principii liest, wofür auch sehr viel spricht. Allerdings ergeben sich in dieser Lesart Schwierigkeiten, Kants selbst formulierten Ausweg aus dem Zirkel zu interpretieren, wie er ihn am Ende der dritten Sektion formuliert. (shrink)

Rocco Gangle addresses the methodological questions raised by a commitment to immanence in terms of how diagrams may be used both as tools and as objects of philosophical investigation. Gangle integrates insights from Spinoza, Pierce and Deleuze in conjunction with the formal operations of category theory.

This book, written in the form of a dialogue, is an introduction to several ethical theories and to four major contemporary moral issues: euthanasia, abortion, animal rights, and capital punishment.

The Symposium on the Culture of Unbelief was held as part of the First International Symposium on Belief.

As is well known, any preorder R on a set U induces an Alexandrov topology on U. In some interesting cases related to data mining an Alexandrov topology can be transformed into different types of logico-algebraic models. In some cases, (pre)topological operators provided by Pointless Topology may define a topological space on U even if R is not a preorder. If this is the case, then we call R a crypto-preorder. The paper studies the conditions under which a relation R (...) is a crypto-preorder and how to transform a crypto-preorder into a proper preorder. (shrink)

This book examines the relevance of François Laruelle’s innovative notion of non-standard philosophy to critical and constructive discourses in the humanities, bringing together essays from prominent Anglophone scholars of Laruelle’s work and includes a contribution from Laurelle himself.

There has been much discussion about the nature and even existence of so-called “pure conscious events” (PCEs). PCEs are often described as mental events which are non-conceptual and lacking all experiential content (Forman 1990). For a variety of reasons, a number of authors have questioned both the accuracy of such a characterization and even the very existence of PCEs (Katz 1978, Bagger 1999). In this chapter, I take a somewhat different, but also critical, approach to the nature and possibility of (...) PCEs. I focus on several overlapping views found in recent analytic philosophy of mind and examine PCEs in light of them. After introducing terminology and some preliminary matters, I examine whether or not the “higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness” rules out the possibility of PCEs, and conversely, whether or not PCEs show that the HOT theory cannot apply to all conscious states. The HOT theory says that what makes a mental state conscious is that it is accompanied by a higher-order thought to the effect that “I am in mental state M now.” A related theme will be to assess PCEs in light of the recent debate between so-called “conceptualists” and those who believe that there are “non-conceptual contents of experience.” Conceptualism, to which I am very sympathetic, is basically the view that all conscious experience is structured by concepts possessed by the subject. I argue that PCEs are indeed conceptual and so no threat to conceptualism. For example, standard criticisms of conceptualism do not apply to PCEs. Finally, I examine the possibility that PCEs are not conscious at all. In the end, my overall conclusion is that we should hold that PCEs are indeed compatible with both HOT theory and conceptualism or seriously question the idea that PCEs are conscious at all. (shrink)

Diego Velasquez's Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour) is an intriguing work of representational art. It seems to me that there are two central ways to analyse the painting as involving some kind of 'representation of a representation'.

The current study aims to clarify the meaning, the epistemic construction, and the pragmatics of the term _āgama_ occurring in _Pātañjalayogaśāstra_ I.7 and its commentaries. Since _āgama_ is a linguistic construction, this paper is also a contribution to the inquiry into the philosophy of language of the _Pātañjalayogaśāstra_. The inclusion of linguistic-philosophical arguments corroborates the Pātañjalayoga system of philosophy as a _śāstra_ text and its logical and epistemological paradigm. The structure of the present work is as follows: a first part (...) strictly dealing with textual sources, and a second where the content of textual sources is discussed. Relying on the early literature ranging from the _Pātañjalayogaśāstra_ (c. 400 CE) to the _Pātañjalayogasūtravṛtti_ of Nāgeśa Bhaṭṭa (PYV, half of 17th—half of 18th cent. CE), to _āgama_ can be accorded two principal meanings: as a generic verbal testimony, and as authoritative verbal teachings. Grounded on the evaluated textual material, the second part of this essay presents a hypothesis aiming at the understanding of verbal testimony: in the _Pātañjalayogaśāstra_, _āgama_ exhibits an epistemological, linguistic and psychological construction. In fact, as an epistemic theory of verbal testimony _āgama_ functions following three main vectors being: (a) epistemological source and instance of valid cognition, namely a _pramāṇa_, (b) linguistically structured, _āgama_ exhibits a propositional structure (_vākya_); and (c) a mental episode, placing _āgama_ as one among the different mental events (_cittavṛtti_) described in the _Pātañjalayogaśāstra_. (shrink)