The usefulness of contextually guided processors is investigated a little further. A more general use for binding V1 cell responses than the one in Phillips & Singer's target article is proposed, which takes into account that strong responses of these cells can mean more than the presence of lines and edges. The possibility of different grouping depending on the activities of neighboring cells is essential to the approach.

Perceptual fluency is the subjective experience of ease with which an incoming stimulus is processed. Although perceptual fluency is assessed by speed of processing, it remains unclear how objective speed is related to subjective experiences of fluency. We present evidence that speed at different stages of the perceptual process contributes to perceptual fluency. In an experiment, figure-ground contrast influenced detection of briefly presented words, but not their identification at longer exposure durations. Conversely, font in which the word was written influenced (...) identification, but not detection. Both contrast and font influenced subjective fluency. These findings suggest that speed of processing at different stages condensed into a unified subjective experience of perceptual fluency. (shrink)

Gray takes an information-processing paradigm as his departure point, invoking a comparator as part of the system. He concludes that consciousness is to be found “in” the comparator but is unable to point to how the comparison takes place. Thus, the comparator turns out not to be an entity arising out of brain research per se, but out of the logic of the paradigm. In this way, Gray both reinvents dualism and remains trapped in the language game of his own (...) model – ending up dealing with the unknowable. (shrink)

Previous reports have demonstrated that the comprehension of sentences describing motion in a particular direction (toward, away, up, or down) is affected by concurrently viewing a stimulus that depicts motion in the same or opposite direction. We report 3 experiments that extend our understanding of the relation between perception and language processing in 2 ways. First, whereas most previous studies of the relation between perception and language processing have focused on visual perception, our data show that sentence processing can be (...) affected by the concurrent processing of auditory stimuli. Second, it is shown that the relation between the processing of auditory stimuli and the processing of sentences depends on whether the sentences are presented in the auditory or visual modality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 487 Although this reviewer would have appreciated a fuller expression of the dialectical interdependency and synthetic elements holding between Fichte and Schelling than Schurr actually developed, his study is nevertheless an orderly and well-documented presentation of their fundamental views. The study can serve as a solid and professional introduction to the postKantian phase of German Idealism, and it most certainly deserves translation into English. LAWRENCES. STEPELEVICH Villanova (...) University Die Konstitution der Jl'sthetik in Wilhelm Diltheys Philosophie. By Michael Heinen. Abhandlungen zur Philosophie, Psychologie und P~dagogik, no. 100. (Bonn: Bouvier, 1974. Pp. 220) Michael Heinen's book draws attention to Dilthey's interest in the original dimension of art experience. That interest has been the traditional stock in the trade of philosophers since the ancient Greeks, and most crucially since the subjectivization of the aesthetic sphere in the speculative thought of Kant and German idealism. But the point is that there is a gap between those philosophers who speculated about perception, aesthetic pleasure, and the enjoyment of the senses, and who tried to justify those speculations through wide-ranging inquiries into the order of the world and its understanding through our ego and its potentialities--betweenthem and Dilthey, who knows that this age-old enthusiasm for metaphysical and epistemological inquiries has become obsolete. The earlier display of erudition may be vast and awe inspiring. But in Dilthey's mind an interest in those inquiries is no longer foremost. Commendable as all of them may be, they approach the world of the work of art and its experience from the outside, in an independent, self-sufficient, and almost autonomous manner, without facing up to the horizon of the world in which an artistic work is rooted. This horizon of the world emerges as the leitmotif of Heinen's book. Heinen reminds the reader that those who create are immersed in this horizon. The conditions under which they work, the tools they have, the methods they use, the materials that are available to them, the ideas they have in mind--all this can be traced back to the world which surrounds them. Moreover, they belong to an historical world. They are oriented toward a past they remember, a future they anticipate; and all they think, or feel, or will, stands in an historical context, long before they are conscious of themselves in this respect. Heinen rightly points out that this creates a problem not only for the analysis of the artistic expression but for the field of hermeneutics, for the method of understanding this expression. It is not so much something that is understood in its meaning by referring to an ego, or a system of cognitive faculties. It emerges from the socio-historical world; and we must place it back in the same horizon from which it emerges. Heinen agrees with Dilthey that we always find ourselves within the whole of life; and when understanding something--a work of art or any other historical object--we have to do it within the full context of life to which we belong. It is an objectification of life that we have to understand from life itself. This may help to explain why a work of art is more than an object created by an artist through his inspiration and the unconscious production of his genius. From his Hegelian perspective Heinen tells us that whenever an artist is involved in the creation of something he is dependent upon the world in which he lives and upon a dialectic between himself and the horizon of life. Heinen expressly defends the probability of this dialectic in a chapter on the presuppositions of Dilthey's aesthetics (pp. 134-162). He studies Dilthey's attempt to discover a methodological basis for the human sciences. He calls attention to the remarkable sequence of sketches in which Dilthey distinguishes between Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften, between human sciences that, in one way or another, deal with historical and other manifestations of 488 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY life and inner experience, and natural sciences that deal with phenomena, with objects of nature. Dilthey is profoundly conscious and frank in announcing that the human sciences also treat phenomena or objects. But... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 448-449 [Access article in PDF] James Van Cleve. Problems from Kant. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xii + 340. Cloth, $45.00. The author acknowledges his debt to the "great Kant books of the 1960s, Jonathan Bennett's Kant's Analytic, and P. F. Strawson's The Bounds of Sense."Their analytical spirit lives on in this book, but the analyses are (...) fresh, take surprising turns, and make unexpected connections to current concerns. In seventeen chapters Van Cleve deals with necessity and the a priori, space and geometry, incongruent counterparts, time, the ideality of matter, experience and objects, substance in the First Analogy, the Second Analogy, noumena, problems of the self, rational theology, and Kant and contemporary irrealism. To sustain the flow of argument, the discussion of certain details, often important, is postponed and taken up in fifteen appendices, and there are nearly seventy pages of careful notes.Chapter 10, "Noumena and Things in Themselves," (134 ff.) criticizes in detail the prevailing "one world" or "double aspect" view of objects, namely that Kant allows just one set of objects, but two ways of "considering" them. Things in themselves are the very same objects as appearances, but considered as they are independent of our experience of them, a view developed in Henry Allison's Kant's Transcendental Idealism. Against this Van Cleve maintains (and I concur) that "appearances are intentionalia, and that intentionalia are constructions out of states of perceivers" (150). The distinction is between two separate universes of discourse, "not between two ways of discoursing [End Page 448] about the same objects" (ibid.). There is no space to report the sharply argued detail that led him to hold the double aspect view to be unfathomable and incoherent. He takes Kant to be a phenomenalist but holding to a version far removed from the reductionist phenomenalism of Russell, Broad, Price, and others. Here the basic elements are not made out to be indubitable givens, but are, rather, sensations. The structures built on them are, according to Van Cleve, "virtual objects" in the sense in which Quine speaks about "virtual classes." To say that something is an element of a class {F:Fx} is only to say that it is F. So, likewise, to say that, e.g., a patch of red exists is short for saying that a certain representation occurs. Carnap's Kantian masterpiece, TheLogical Structure of the World (The Aufbau) could have been consulted as a comprehensive guide to the kind of virtuality here envisaged.It is Van Cleve's stated aim never to discuss Kantian arguments without making their premise and conclusion structure clear (viii). Quite a few of them he finds persuasive; in other cases the arguments are valid, but one or the other premise doubtful. Sometimes he sides with Kant against his critics, sometimes the opposite, and occasionally, as in the case of the Second Analogy, it remains unclear what Kant's argument was. He has shown in this and earlier publications that all reconstructions are flawed, so that either Kant had no good argument, or his argument has not yet been discovered.The title Problems from Kant must be taken seriously. The book rarely deals with textual problems, historical context, or translation difficulties. Rather, the focus is on perennial and still compelling problems. Themes from the First Critique are tracked to and connected with current concerns and sometimes recently ventilated issues are traced back to Kant, as in the last chapter, where the question is raised if Kant was an internal realist in the style of Putnam, or perhaps an anti-realist like Dummett. The contrast with Kant shows that like all complex positions, these are shopping baskets with several goods in them, some in Kant's inventory, others not.Logical notation is used sparingly, and only where it clarifies—no attempt here to shoehorn arguments into unneeded symbolism. Deft examples, Kant's weakness, are a strength of this book. To explain the logic of considering Van Cleve asks, "Consider me apart from my shoes, am I barefoot... (shrink)

Les efforts pour déterminer par des voies non kantiennes les frontières de la raison dépendent de perspectives ouvertes par les idéalistes postkantiens, comme le soutient Rolf-Peter Horstmann, dans un ouvrage d'abord publié en 1991 chez l'éditeur Anton Hain. L'avant-propos présente d'intéressantes idées sur l'«utilité pratique» de l'histoire de la philosophie et sur la question métaphilosophique de la différence entre la matière des problèmes et la manière de les poser. Une nouvelle théorie philosophique pourrait élucider d'anciens problèmes sans en réviser (...) les présupposés, ou reprendre carrément les fondements des tentatives antérieures. Des structures de rationalité auraient une genèse, culmineraient à un moment donné, puis deviendraient désuètes. Rendre justice à la signification et à la dynamique de l'idéalisme allemand exige de comprendre son évolution comme un processus visant l'établissement de normes de rationalité différentes de celles de la tradition des Temps modernes. L'ouvrage analyse ainsi les motifs d'une formulation nouvelle des fondements de ce «courant» de pensée. (shrink)

R. Wintermeyer, Lichtenberg, Wittgenstein et la question du sujet, Paris, PUPS, 2014, 440 p. Voici un livre qu'on lira avec grand plaisir. Vu son titre, on aurait aimé y trouver un peu plus d'informations sur Lichtenberg et son écriture aphoristique, mal connus en France, et un peu moins sur Wittgenstein et sa théorie pragmatique du langage, qui nous sont moins étrangers. Les premiers n'apparaissent qu'en toile de fond d'un travail qui porte principalement sur les seconds. Toutefois l'ensemble est - Recensions.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dekoloniales Philosophieren. Versuch über philosophische Verantwortung und Kritik im Horizont der europäischen Expansion by Rolf ElberfeldAdy Van den Stock (bio)Dekoloniales Philosophieren. Versuch über philosophische Verantwortung und Kritik im Horizont der europäischen Expansion. By Rolf Elberfeld. Hildesheim: Universitätsverlag Hildesheim; Hildesheim, Zürich, New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2021. Pp. 244. Paperback €19.80, isbn 978-3-487-16042-9. Calls for the decolonization of knowledge have come to resound far beyond the walls (...) of institutes of higher education in recent years and are tied up with a much broader quest for social justice in various domains of social life. If to decolonize presupposes taking a stance in relation to the history and ongoing effects of colonialism in different societies across the globe, decolonizing the academic discipline of philosophy would first of all involve dragging it out of the safety of its conventional epistemic and institutional confines in order to face up to past and present realities usually considered to be tangential to its primary concerns and interests. In taking its cue from the historical entwinement of (modern Western) philosophy with colonial practices and experiences of colonization, Rolf Elberfeld's Decolonial Philosophizing: Toward Philosophical Responsibility and Critique in the Horizon of the European Expansion approaches this "negative history" (Negativgeschichte, p. 14) as belying the categorical separation between genesis and validity, which the author sees as being at the heart of the analytical tradition dominating academic philosophy in Germany and beyond (pp. 11, 19–20). For Elberfeld, philosophy in general has tended to "immunize" itself against its own entanglement (Verstrickung) with the historical reality of colonialism. In his view, a prevailing disavowal of the latter's relevance for philosophical practice has made it hard, if not impossible, to come to terms with phenomena of exclusion, discrimination, and marginalization in the history of philosophy and has prevented us from subjecting these "blind spots" to a thoroughly reflexive critique (pp. 11–18). As a result, the kind of justifiable anger expressed by Aimé Césaire in his Discourse on Colonialism (1950) when he writes that colonialism has effectively made European civilization "untenable" (quoted on p. 13) cannot be taken as seriously as it deserves, insofar as it is seen as merely being of "historical" (or worse: "anecdotal") instead of properly "philosophical" relevance. By contrast, in Elberfeld's view, the historical entanglement of philosophy and colonialism is not merely, to paraphrase Adorno, a shameful "splinter in our eye" with the [End Page 1] somewhat limited function of provoking moral outrage or a blanket condemnation of all things "Western" (see pp. 14, 40, 83), but can also serve as a "magnifying glass"1 allowing philosophers to come to a better understanding of the history of their own discipline and thus break new ground. He argues that it is only by taking Césaire's pronouncement seriously, that is to say, by first of all patiently listening to (pp. 12, 219, 221) and thinking through such indictments, that the (European-all-too-European?) project of the Enlightenment can be salvaged and carried further. For Elberfeld, "Enlightenment" (Aufklärung) must now both recognize and arise from within its historically entangled (verstrickungsgeschichtliche) nature. Instead of unilaterally declaring its independence from history, it must now become, as the delightful but quasi-untranslatable German expression goes, verstrickungsgeschichtliche Aufklärung (pp. 9, 17, 209–218). If, then, the project of "decolonial philosophizing" is more than mere virtue-signaling, this is because it allows us to "know better," that is to say, enhances our capacity for assuming "epistemic responsibility."2Despite the complexity and contentious nature of its subject matter, Rolf Elberfeld has succeeded in producing an eminently readable and highly nuanced book which can serve as a good introduction to some of the most important topics and problems relevant to what has been dubbed the "decolonial turn" in philosophy and the humanities more broadly speaking. In twelve relatively brief chapters, the reader is taken on a journey across several continents and cultures through a period roughly spanning the symbolic date of 1492—which the author, following Enrique Dussel, sees as marking the birth of "modernity" (pp. 25–26)—up to the present day. Reflecting the basic... (shrink)

A unifying framework of probabilistic reasoning Content Type Journal Article Category Book Review Pages 1-4 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9573-x Authors Jan Sprenger, Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Tilburg University, P.O. Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

Opposition: Obedience and authority in Exodus 32-34 / George W. Coats -- The theological significance of contradiction within the Book of the Covenant / Paul D. Hanson -- The renewed authority of Old Testament wisdom for contemporary faith / Wayne Sibley Towner -- A stylistic study of the priestly creation story / Bernhard W. Anderson -- "I will not cause it to return" in Amos 1 and 2 / Rolf P. Knierim.

Population counts and longitude and latitude coordinates were estimated for the 50 largest cities in the United States by computational linguistic techniques and by human participants. The mathematical technique Latent Semantic Analysis applied to newspaper texts produced similarity ratings between the 50 cities that allowed for a multidimensional scaling (MDS) of these cities. MDS coordinates correlated with the actual longitude and latitude of these cities, showing that cities that are located together share similar semantic contexts. This finding was replicated using (...) a first‐order co‐occurrence algorithm. The computational estimates of geographical location as well as population were akin to human estimates. These findings show that language encodes geographical information that language users in turn may use in their understanding of language and the world. (shrink)

Perceptual fluency is the subjective experience of ease with which an incoming stimulus is processed. Although perceptual fluency is assessed by speed of processing, it remains unclear how objective speed is related to subjective experiences of fluency. We present evidence that speed at different stages of the perceptual process contributes to perceptual fluency. In an experiment, figure-ground contrast influenced detection of briefly presented words, but not their identification at longer exposure durations. Conversely, font in which the word was written influenced (...) identification, but not detection. Both contrast and font influenced subjective fluency. These findings suggest that speed of processing at different stages condensed into a unified subjective experience of perceptual fluency. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John P. Anton C. P. CAVAFY'S ARS POETICA ' It is generally recognized that Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933) was not born a poet but became one only through persistence and labor, reaching his "first step" sometime after the midpoint of his life. In his effort to assess the quality of his earlier poetic production and sharpen his sensitivity in facing self-criticism, he decided to put in writing his personal (...) thoughts on his work sometime in 1903. The text was written in English in a personal shorthand Cavafy had devised for his own use. It was found among the papers he left to A. Sengopoulos and published for the first time in 1963 by M. Peridis, who also supplied the suitable title Ars Poetica. It falls outside the scope of this essay to discuss the antecedents of this document. Taken as a whole, the text has all the clarity and directness required of a testament designed to serve as a personal guide and handbook. The problems it discusses are limited to the needs of the poet. In this regard, the Ars Poetica has neither the range of topics nor the theoretical scope of, for instance, Aristotle's Poetics. It is quite certain that the ideas that preoccupy Cavafy in the Ars Poetica had been on his mind for a period of years. However, the Ars Poetica is his first prose piece where he gives a systematic treatment to technical and critical issues directly related to the assessment of his work and his role as a poet. In order to project here a clear image of Cavafy's struggle to reach his technical maturity which came after 1910, we need first to discuss the persistent problems he faced during this crucial decade, then to examine the attitudes and values he embodied in certain representative early poems, and finally to relate them to the guiding principles he formulated in his self-addressed poetics of 1903. A number of interrelated problems confronted Cavafy in his late twenties and throughout his thirties. They emerged one by one, to 85 86Philosophy and Literature make more pressing the demand for a consistent solution and a complete recasting of his outlook. Coming to terms with them was extremely difficult. Aside from the emotional and sexual pressures he had to face alone, there was the absence of suitable ideas and conceptual tools to provide him with even the rudiments of an intellectual framework. Whatever he borrowed from Europe and England, or resurrected from his own Hellenic heritage, proved either beyond assimilation or insufficiently digested. The lingering issues fell roughly into four areas. (i) Despite his determination to devote his life to the writing of poetry, the quality of his work was discouraging. He knew this and as a result he often expressed uncertainty about his ability to proceed. Time and again he appeared suffering from a feeling of inadequacy, but nevertheless he sought to engage a reflective mood from which to draw encouragement and hope. (ii) On the theoretical side, he identified with the long tradition which assigned a coveted cultural role to the savant-poet as discloser of truth and spokesman for humanity; this despite the prevailing climate of opinion in his immediate environment which recognized no such high position in his case. Cavafy knew that his standing with the Greek community of Alexandria had gradually dwindled with the loss of family wealth and his lowly employment, and also that his expectations to be respected in his role as a poet and leader in communal affairs were futile. This denial of personal recognition in a society dominated by commerce and finance contributed to his mood of depression. The feeling of being an outcast, despite his associations with the upper social circles of Alexandria, became a constant irritant to his sense of pride. (iii) The course of culture, the destiny of human institutions and the workings of history, became puzzles as he tried to view them through the opaque glass of disillusionment. These were the grand themes actively discussed in the writings of leading European intellectuals, but to the young poet they had a different personal urgency. His vital concern in this connection was not understanding science... (shrink)