In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The World as I Found It:Possibilities and Peculiarities about Speech and ConversationDavid WemyssIn November 2002, a series of tutorials was advertised within the University of Cambridge. Neville Critchley—a lecturer in philosophy with a reputation for preferring literature—placed advertisements on college notice boards saying he wanted to hear from students not just philosophically or intellectually intrigued by language but literally made unwell by it. Four young people replied, one of (...) whom subsequently provided me with an account of what passed in Room C28 at Emmanuel College. Almost thirteen years afterwards, the account was published under the title "The Weighing of Our Words."1Richard Salisbury, who had prepared the account, died in September 2016. His later piece, "A Report on Experience,"2 was published in October 2018—and that was believed to be the last literary production connected with the 2002 tutorials. However, it transpires that Richard's wife, Carole, who had organized the publication of "A Report on Experience," was also in possession of an intriguing recording from June 2016—just months before Richard's death. Carole discovered an audio recording, on a set of old-fashioned, reel-to-reel tapes, of a meeting in the Bedford Hotel in Bloomsbury, London, between her husband and Neville Critchley—fourteen years after they had last met. The conversation was [End Page 210] clearly intended to be transcribed and published, and I remain grateful to Carole for her help and friendship in arranging this.INeville Critchley and Richard SalisburyBedford Hotel, Southampton Row, LondonJune 2016Neville Critchley:Sitting here in Bloomsbury, I'm remembering the story about T. S. Eliot hiding in the lavatory at Faber and Faber to avoid small talk with colleagues as they left the office together in the evenings.Richard Salisbury:I think quite a lot of people do things like that. But I'm a good bit worse.NC:You have some remarkable illustrations of how much worse.RS:Before moving to Edinburgh (where I met David Wemyss, of course) I had a brief but enjoyable stay in Oxford, doing legal work for the city council there. One day, it was announced that my entire team, from senior executives down to administrative assistants, and one or two hangers-on, had been invited to Westminster for an "exchange of ideas" with civil servants there who were interested in a project I'd set up—to do with parking charges, of all things! Anyway, the plan was to go through to London by luxury coach as a day trip, but I could only think of the fragmented conversation on the journey—especially the conducting of conversations looking over my shoulder or half-standing up, or perhaps getting stuck for too long with one of my less-congenial colleagues. Carole found the answer: if I took the day before the visit as a holiday, and the day after too, I could be in London for the professional appointment but avoid the bus completely. I needed a reason, of course, but London being London I knew I'd easily find a concert that would sound like a convincing explanation for wanting to combine personal and professional objectives. Bruckner 8 did the trick. I needed a couple of nights in a hotel—here at the Bedford actually!—but it was well worth it. I'm never reluctant to have a day or two in Bloomsbury, having stayed here for six months, but the real motivation was the desperation to avoid my colleagues outside the carefully premeditated conversational tramlines I usually had in place. [End Page 211]NC:And that's just one of the many—quite different—ways in which you would characterize why you, like Eliot, would hide in a lavatory to avoid talking to people! But to an everyday, well-adjusted person, that would sound monstrous. Claustrophobically intropunitive—or narcissistic. There's even a case for suppressing the transcript of this interview, or destroying it altogether—but I don't think you'd like that! You assume completely that I'll bring it into existence. It'll be a middlebrow literary accomplishment—a literary coup that marshals the chaos of your experience... (shrink)

Spatial cognitive abilities, including mental rotation and visuo-spatial working memory are correlated with mathematical performance, and several studies have shown that training of these abilities can enhance mathematical performance. Here, we investigated the behavioral and neural correlates of MR and vsWM training combined with number line training. Fifty-seven children, aged 6–7, performed 25 days of NL training combined with either vsWM or MR and participated in an Electroencephalography -session in school to measure resting state activity and steady-state visual evoked potentials (...) during a vsWM task before and after training. Fifty children, aged 6–7, received usual teaching and acted as a control group. Compared to the control group, both training groups improved on a combined measure of mathematics. Cognitive improvement was specific to the training. Significant pre-post changes in resting state-EEG, common to both training groups, were found for power as well as for coherence, with no significant differences in rs-EEG-changes between the vsWM and MR groups. Two of the common rs-EEG changes were correlated with mathematical improvement: an increase in coherence between the central frontal lobe and the right parietal lobe in frequencies ranging from 16 to 25 Hz, and an increase in coherence between the left frontal lobe and the right parietal lobe ranging from 23 to 25 Hz. These results indicate that changes in fronto-parietal coherence are related to an increase in mathematical performance, which thus might be a useful measure in further investigations of mathematical interventions in children. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the categerial expression of the metaphysics of ecstatic naturalism and the theology of deep pantheism. Naturalism, the theory that nature is all that there is, becomes the ecstatic form by stressing the continual fissuring between nature naturing and its potencies and nature natured seen as the innumerable orders of the world. Deep pantheism critiques the dualism of supernatural theism as well as the half-way theology of panentheism. Further, deep pantheism is “deep” because it focuses on the (...) churning abyss of the unconscious of nature and it’s archetypal potencies. (shrink)

This paper discusses the nature and the status of inference to the best explanation. We outline the foundational role given IBE by its defenders and the arguments of critics who deny it any place at all ; argue that, on the two main conceptions of explanation, IBE cannot be a foundational inference rule ; sketch an account of IBE that makes it contextual and dependent on substantive empirical assumptions, much as simplicity seems to be ; show how that account avoids (...) the critics ' complaints and leaves IBE an important role ; and sketch how our account can clarify debates over IBE in arguments for scientific realism. (shrink)

This is the introduction to Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, eds. William Day & Victor J. Krebs (Cambridge UP, 2010), a collection of essays on Ludwig Wittgenstein's remarks on aspect-seeing. Section 1: Why Seeing Aspects Now?; Section 2: The Importance of Seeing Aspects; Section 3: The Essays. (The front matter to Seeing Wittgenstein Anew appears above under "Books.").

"Lest one think that the focus on aspect-seeing in Wittgenstein is only a means to more contemporary philosophical ends, one ought to read Day’s remarkable 'Wanting to Say Something: Aspect-Blindness and Language'. Day considers the issue of aspect-blindness, arguing that universal aspect-blindness is impossible for beings with language. Specifically, he shows that a child’s first attempt at language, at trying “bloh” for “ball,” is neither an indication that the child sees the ball for the first time, nor an indication that (...) the child is giving a first label for an object seen all along. Rather, he shows that this attempt is an indication of the dawning of an aspect. The dawning of aspects, so common during the phase of language acquisition, becomes supplanted by language itself. Universal aspect-blindness is not humanly possible, then. Day argues that the acquisition of language results in a loss of desire for aspects (which it is possible to regain through art). Localized aspect-blindness is familiar because as language-users, we have lost our desire for aspects. Day then turns to questions about the deep purpose behind Wittgenstein’s style. Why are those doubting voices prominent? Why does Wittgenstein demand so often that the reader answer his questions? Day shows that these elements of Wittgenstein’s style arise from a motivation to regain his own desire for aspects, and he wants to re-awaken our own desire for aspects. Day motivates us to consider aspect-seeing in order to see Wittgenstein himself anew." --Chris Weigel, Book Review of Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, Journal of the History of Philosophy 49:2 (April 2011): 263. (shrink)

Seeing Wittgenstein Anew is the first collection to examine Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remarks on the concept of aspect-seeing. These essays show that aspect-seeing was not simply one more topic of investigation in Wittgenstein’s later writings, but, rather, that it was a pervasive and guiding concept in his efforts to turn philosophy’s attention to the actual conditions of our common life in language. Arranged in sections that highlight the pertinence of the aspect-seeing remarks to aesthetic and moral perception, self-knowledge, mind and consciousness, (...) linguistic agreement, philosophical therapy, and “seeing connections,” the sixteen essays, which were specially commissioned for this volume, demonstrate the unity of not only Philosophical Investigations but also Wittgenstein’s later thought as a whole. They open up novel paths across familiar fields of thought: the objectivity of interpretation, the fixity of the past, the acquisition of language, and the nature of human consciousness. Significantly, they exemplify how continuing consideration of the interrelated phenomena and concepts surrounding aspect-seeing might produce a fruitful way of doing philosophy. The volume includes a concordance for the unnumbered remarks in the various editions of Philosophical Investigations, including the latest (4th) edition. (The front matter is posted here. The introduction - "Seeing Aspects in Wittgenstein" - appears below under "Published articles."). (shrink)

This essay presents an approach to understanding improvised music, finding in the work of certain outstanding jazz musicians an emblem of Ralph Waldo Emerson's notion of self-trust and of Stanley Cavell's notion of moral perfectionism. The essay critiques standard efforts to interpret improvised solos as though they were composed, contrasting that approach to one that treats the procedures of improvisation as derived from our everyday actions. It notes several levels of correspondence between our interest in jazz improvisations and the particular (...) demands of Emerson's writing, and ends by considering how exemplary moments of instruction in jazz are expressive of Emersonian self-trust. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein was, famously, not a fan of William Shakespeare. He wrote in 1946 that “Shakespeare's similes are, in the ordinary sense, bad.” But Wittgenstein’s opinion was not only one fueled by aesthetic dislike. This short website article argues that Wittgenstein sees in Shakespeare a fellow explorer of skepticism, but one willing to travel down dark alleys that Wittgenstein himself sought to avoid. (This article is a journalistic version of "To Not Understand, but Not Misunderstand: Wittgenstein on Shakespeare," in Wittgenstein (...) Reading, edited by Sascha Bru, Wolfgang Huemer, and Daniel Steuer [De Gruyter, 2013, 39-53].). (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive study of the sublime in Lucan. Drawing upon renewed literary-critical interest in the tradition of philosophical aesthetics, Henry Day argues that the category of the sublime offers a means of moving beyond readings of Lucan's Bellum Civile in terms of the poem's political commitment or, alternatively, nihilism. Demonstrating in dialogue with theorists from Burke and Kant to Freud, Lyotard and Ankersmit the continuing vitality of Longinus' foundational treatise On the Sublime, Day charts Lucan's complex and (...) instructive exploration of the relationship between sublimity and ethical discourses of freedom and oppression. Through the Bellum Civile's cataclysmic vision of civil war and metapoetic accounts of its own genesis, through its heated linguistic texture and proclaimed effects upon future readers and, most powerfully of all, through its representation of its twin protagonists Caesar and Pompey, Lucan's great epic emerges as a central text in the history of the sublime. (shrink)

Induced by intake of the psychedelic substances LSD, psilocybin, DMT and mescaline, psychedelic experiences have been extensively described by subjects as entailing a most unusual increase in the scope and quality of their consciousness. Accordingly, psychedelic experiences have been widely characterised as an “expansion of consciousness.” This article poses the following question, as yet unaddressed in contemporary philosophy and the tradition of phenomenology: to what exactly does “expansion of consciousness” refer as a general characterisation of psychedelic experiences, and what role (...) might attention play therein? On the basis of Aron Gurwitsch’s phenomenology of attention, the following thesis is presented: (a) “expansion of consciousness” refers to a particular restructuration of consciousness in psychedelic experiences. (b) This occurs by means of certain extreme transformations in direction, scope, mode and degree of attention. In order to explicate this thesis, the characteristic features of psychedelic experiences that pertain to expansion of consciousness and attention are first systematically identified from a survey of subject reports. Second, it is demonstrated that the few previous attempts to understand expansion of consciousness in terms of attention as a filter/reducing-valve, spotlight or zoom-lens each fail to explain how consciousness is structured in psychedelic experiences. Third, it is argued that psychedelic expansion of consciousness is a general restructuration of consciousness by means of extreme attentional transformations. In conclusion, brief consideration is given to the question of whether psychedelic expansion of consciousness can have epistemic and ethical value for life. (shrink)