On the extended mind hypothesis (EM), many of our cognitive states and processes are hybrids, unevenly distributed across biological and nonbiological realms. In certain circumstances, things - artifacts, media, or technologies - can have a cognitive life, with histories often as idiosyncratic as those of the embodied brains with which they couple. The realm of the mental can spread across the physical, social, and cultural environments as well as bodies and brains. My independent aims in this chapter are: first, (...) to describe two compatible but distinct movements or "waves" within the EM literature, arguing for the priority of the second wave (and gesturing briefly toward a third); and, second, to defend and illustrate the interdisciplinary implications of EM as best understood, specifically for historical disciplines, by sketching two case studies. (shrink)

Where is language? Answers to this have attempted to 'incorporate' language in an 'extended mind', through cognition that is 'embodied', 'distributed', 'situated' or 'ecological'. Behind these concepts is a long history that this book is the first to trace. Extending across linguistics, philosophy, psychology and medicine, as well as literary and religious dimensions of the question of what language is, and where it is located, this book challenges mainstream, mind-based accounts of language. Looking at research from the (...) Middle Ages to the present day, and exploring the work of a range of scholars from Aristotle and Galen to Merleau-Ponty and Chomsky, it assesses raging debates about whether mind and language are centred in heart or brain, brain or nervous-muscular system, and whether they are innate or learned, individual or social. This book will appeal to scholars and advanced students in historical linguistics, cognitive linguistics, language evolution and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

THE LIMITS OF NATURALISM Brand Blanshard I The Issue The purpose of this paper is to consider whether science, as currently conceived, is adequate to the ...

This article explores Herodian's History of the Roman Empire alongside Chariton's novel Callirhoe with an eye to how the minds of collective entities are represented and function in the two narratives. It argues that Chariton, unlike Herodian, elaborates on the diversity of emotions that characterizes a specific collective experience and has groups use direct speech throughout. These choices add vividness to the narrative and intensify the fictional sensationalism and dramatic character of the novel. It also shows that, whereas collectives (...) in Chariton's narrative are primarily designed to highlight a specific characteristic of a hero, dramatize an event and enhance suspense, in Herodian's historiography they are an integral part of the plot and central to his historical analysis of contemporary political and social world. This article offers a new analytical tool geared towards the development of a poetics of the collective in ancient narrative as well as a poetics of fictional and factual narration in antiquity, and advances our understanding of the complex relationship between ancient historiography and novelistic writing. (shrink)

Romanian born E.M. Cioran, who lived in Paris until his death in 1995, writes of politics, of history, and of the utopian dream. "Cioran has a claim to be regarded as among the handful of original minds... writing today".--NEW YORK TIMES.

In this book, Cioran writes of politics, of history, and of the utopian dream. "A small masterwork... a stringent examination of some persistent and murky notions in human history.... It is best to read Cioran while sitting. The impact upon the intellect can be temporarily stunning, and motor systems may give way under the assault."—Joseph Patrick Kennedy, _Houston Chronicle_ "Cioran has a claim to be regarded as among the handful of original minds... writing today."—_New York Times_ "A sort (...) of final philosopher of the Western world. [Cioran's] statements have the compression of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning."—_Washington Post_ E. M. Cioran was born and educated in Romania and lived in Paris from 1937 until his death. He is the author of numerous works, including _On the Heights of Despair_, also available from the University of Chicago Press. (shrink)

Philosophy, History, and Myth is a collection of essays that were originally delivered as academic lectures. The essays are relatively informal explorations of topics in the history of philosophy, logic and its philosophical relevance, materialism in the philosophy of mind, the Hegelian end of history, the role of humanism in the contemporary world, and relations between philosophy and myth, broadly and also more specifically with reference to themes in early Greek literature.

Introduction : what and why is world history? -- A world history skeleton -- Habits of mind in world history -- Managing time : choosing and evaluating world history periods -- Managing space : world history regions and civilizations -- Contacts and the structure of world history -- Topics in world history -- Disputes in world history -- World history in the contemporary era.

Hilary Putnam deals in this book with some of the most fundamental persistent problems in philosophy: the nature of truth, knowledge and rationality. His aim is to break down the fixed categories of thought which have always appeared to define and constrain the permissible solutions to these problems.

Arthur C. Danto is unique among philosophers for the breadth of his philosophical mind, his eloquent writing style, and the generous spirit embodied in all his work. Any collection of essays on his philosophy has to engage him on all these levels, because this is how he has always engaged the world, as a philosopher and person. In this volume, renowned philosophers and art historians revisit Danto's theories of art, action, and history, and the depth of his innovation (...) as a philosopher of culture. Essays explore the importance of Danto's philosophy and criticism for the contemporary art world, along with his theories of perception, action, historical knowledge, and, most importantly for Danto himself, the conceptual connections among these topics. Danto himself continues the conversation by adding his own commentary to each essay, extending the debate with characteristic insight, graciousness, and wit. Contributors include Frank Ankersmit, Hans Belting, Stanley Cavell, Donald Davidson, Lydia Goehr, Gregg Horowitz, Philip Kitcher, Daniel Immerwahr, Daniel Herwitz, and Michael Kelly, testifying to the far-reaching effects of Danto's thought. Danto brought to philosophy the artist's unfettered imagination, and his ideas about postmodern culture are virtual road maps of the present art world. This volume pays tribute to both Danto's brilliant capacity to move between philosophy and contemporary culture and his pathbreaking achievements in philosophy, art history, and art criticism. (shrink)

'One may state Dilthey's significance in most general fashion by characterizing his work as the first thorough-going and sophisticated confrontation of history with positivism and natural science. Dilthey's sweep was universal: he strove to reduce to order the multifarious realms of knowledge, the conflicting traditions of cultural study, that he had embraced. Thus Dilthey laid out a program that no mortal - and certainly no one whose mind had been formed in the third quarter of the nineteenth century (...) - could hope to bring to completion. Yet despite its inconclusiveness, Dilthey's work exerted enormous influence. The distinction he had drawn between natural and cultural science became standard for historians and, to a lesser extent, for social scientists also. After Dilthey historians no longer needed to apologize for the "unscientific" character of their discipline: they understood why its methods could never be quite the same as those of natural science. And the contemporary tradition of intellectual history grew naturally out of Dilthey's teaching.' - H. Stuart Hughes. (shrink)

Critical history is a philosophy of history that highlights the peculiarity and originality of the epistemology and methodology of Bernard Lonergan in the study of history. It is a method of reading the movement of history, through the Lonerganian creative criticism as well as a critical instrument that can help one rise above diverse forms of oversight and bias while working for progress in a human community. It tries to expound on how one can build personal (...) capacities that work for the advantage of the common good. Its precepts can help one achieve self-transcendence and authenticity which are essential in the making of a creative society. It can inspire and create symbols that link one's experience, imagination, rationality, responsibility and affectivity to authentic lived history. It can arouse an intellectual conversion that brings moral revival and can offer insights that help community planners in proposing proper solutions by identifying the actual drivers of progress, decline and re-covery in a society. Critical history creates an intellectual cultivation of mind and character achieved by insight which helps to build an authentic human person and progressive community. Its critical elements can lead to higher viewpoints that rise above prejudices, and these higher viewpoints can move one to integration to higher values. The result will be an authentic subjectivity and emergence of republic of virtues guided by objectivity and sound ethics. (shrink)

Many people think the mind evolved. Some of them think it had to evolve. They think the mind not only has a history, but a history essential to its very existence.

The paper studies Livy's account in Book 45 of the aftermath of Aemilius Paullus' conquest of Macedon employing two interpretative methods, both common in recent studies of historians. The first is “metahistory,” in other words interpreting events within a historical narrative as commenting covertly on the genre of history and on the work as an example of that genre. The second is seeing how internal audiences provide a guide for the reader's interpretation. These, though theoretically independent, are in practice (...) often related, with internal audiences being used as a trigger for wider reflections on the text and the genre. Four linked passages from Livy 45 are discussed in detail. One invites a systematic metahistorical reading without the use of an internal audience, partly to endorse Livy's own manner of “secondary” history, partly to promote a moral reading of the text. The other three employ internal audiences to similar effect: first, Aemilius' meeting with the defeated Perseus, and the lesson which he draws about the mutability of fortune; second, the spectacular games he organizes at Amphipolis; and third, his eventual triumph in Rome, along with the speech that Servilius gives in its support. The understanding of the genre of history that Livy promotes through these passages is, however, astonishingly narrow and didactic, ignoring even central aspects of his own work which do not conform to that understanding. The paper concludes by considering why Livy would wish to present himself and his genre as single-mindedly moralistic when neither he nor it actually was. (shrink)

In this classic work, Leo Strauss examines the problem of natural right and argues that there is a firm foundation in reality for the distinction between right and wrong in ethics and politics. On the centenary of Strauss's birth, and the fiftieth anniversary of the Walgreen Lectures which spawned the work, _Natural Right and History_ remains as controversial and essential as ever. "Strauss... makes a significant contribution towards an understanding of the intellectual crisis in which we find ourselves... [and] brings (...) to his task an admirable scholarship and a brilliant, incisive mind."—John H. Hallowell, _American Political Science Review_ Leo Strauss was the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Political Science at the University of Chicago. (shrink)

The case history in the colonial context was a hybrid form, caught between bureaucratic pressures toward racialization, aggregation, and generalization, on the one hand, and the individualistic bias of the genre, on the other. This tension posed a problem for colonial rulers. In their drive to harvest neat, ideologically reliable knowledge about the minds of colonial subjects, officials and researchers in the 20th-century British Empire read case histories in selective ways, pared them down to simplistic fables, and ultimately bypassed (...) them whenever they could. In other words, although they worked mightily to bend the case history to their purposes, they never fully succeeded. The authority granted to personal testimony and the capaciousness of the detail in case histories always contained a subversive potential. As a result, the politics of the colonial case history were underdetermined, overflowing the categories and resisting the generalizations that colonial rulers sought to impose. (shrink)

No enterprise as laborious and long-drawn out as the writing of history can be pursued without deeply held convictions as to its purpose and significance. With this in mind, Historians on History addresses the nature of historical enquiry by bringing together in one volume the key writings of many of the best known 20th century historians including Braudel, Carr, Elton, Guha, Hobsbawm, Samuel, Scott, and Zeldin. This new edition begins with a substantial survey by John Tosh charting (...) historiographical developments over the past sixty years. Each section of readings that follow includes a brief scene-setting introduction and illuminates the political, social and personal assumptions which have governed and sustained historical practice and theory. The selection of readings has been carefully revised to reflect the latest trends. The anthology strikes a balance between the academic mainstream and recent, more radical voices within the discipline. Students thus have access to a wide range of themes and debates. (shrink)

Truth, Language, and History is the much-anticipated final volume of Donald Davidson's philosophical writings. In four groups of essays, Davidson continues to explore the themes that occupied him for more than fifty years: the relations between language and the world; speaker intention and linguistic meaning; language and mind; mind and body; mind and world; mind and other minds. He asks: what is the role of the concept of truth in these explorations? And, can a scientific (...) world view make room for human thought without reducing it to something material and mechanistic? Including a new introduction by his widow, Marcia Cavell, this volume completes Donald Davidson's colossal intellectual legacy. (shrink)

This is a profound and concise essay on the basic structure of contemporary politics, written throughout in a voice that is sceptical, engaged, and clear.

On the extended mind hypothesis (EM),l many of our cognitive states and processes are hybrids, unevenly distributed across biological and nonbiological realms (Clark 1997; Clark and Chalmers 1998). In certain circumstances, things-artifacts, media, or technologies-can have a cognitive life, with histories often as idiosyncratic as those of the embodied brains with which they couple (Sutton 2002a, 2008). The realm of the mental can spread across the physical, social, and cultural environments as well as bodies and brains. My independent aims (...) in this chapter are: first, to describe two compatible but distinct movements or "waves" within the EM literature, arguing for the priority of the second wave (and gesturing briefly toward a third); and, second, to defend and illustrate the interdisciplinary implications of EM as best understood, specifically for historical disciplines, by sketching two case studies. (shrink)

The attitudes that characterize the contemporary “neuro-turn” were strikingly commonplace as part of the self-fashioning of social identity in the biographies and personal papers of past neurologists and neuroscientists. Indeed, one fundamental connection between nineteenth- and twentieth-century neurology and contemporary neuroscience appears to be the value that workers in both domains attach to the idea of integration, a vision of neural science and medicine that connected reductionist science to broader inquiries about the mind, brain, and human nature and in (...) so doing supposedly resolved once and for all questions germane to the human sciences, humanities, and arts. How those attitudes were produced and reproduced first in neurology and then in neuroscience; in what way they were constructed and disciplined, thereby eventuating in the contested sciences and medicines of the mind, brain, and nervous system; and even how they garnered ever-wider contemporary purchase in cultures and societies are thus fascinating problems for historians of science and medicine. Such problems shed light on ethics, practices, controversies, and the uneasy social relations within those scientific and medical domains. But more to the point of this essay: they also account for the apparent epistemological weight now accorded “the neuro” in our contemporary moment. They thus illuminate in a rather different way why historians have suddenly discovered the value of “the neuro.”. (shrink)

The basic question cognitivists and most analytic philosophers of mind ask is how consciousness arises in matter. This article outlines basic reasons for thinking the question spurious. It does so by examining 1) definitions of life, 2) unjustified and unjustifiable uses of diacritical markings to distinguish real cognition from metaphoric cognition, 3) evidence showing that corporeal consciousness is a biological imperative, 4) corporeal matters of fact deriving from the evolution of proprioception. Three implications of the examination are briefly noted: (...) 1) the need to re-think the common assumption that unconsciousness historically preceded consciousness; 2) the need to delve as deeply and seriously into natural history as into brains and their computational analogues; 3) the need for a critical stance toward arm-chair judgments about consciousness and a correlative turn toward corporeal matters of fact. (shrink)

Cultural epidemiology is a theoretical framework that enables historical studies to be informed by cognitive science. It incorporates insights from evolutionary psychology (viz. cultural evolution is constrained by universal properties of the human cognitive apparatus that result from biological evolution) and from Darwinian models of cultural evolution (viz. population thinking: cultural phenomena are distributions of resembling items among a community and its habitat). Its research program includes the study of the multiple cognitive mechanisms that cause the distribution, on a cultural (...) scale, of representations and material cultural items. By a detailed analysis of the social cognitive causal chain that occurred in the past, one can find out – and specify – which are the factors of attraction that account for cultural stability as well as historical cultural change. After reviewing recent research and developments in cognitive history, I present the concept of cultural attractor and explain why cultural attractors are historically variable. In doing so, I emphasize the role of historically constituted cognitive mechanisms, which account for much of historical cultural developments. I argue that the framework of cultural epidemiology can better account for these important historical phenomena than either evolutionary psychology accounts of culture or dual inheritance theory. I conclude that describing and explaining the history of cultural attractors is a good research goal for historians. (shrink)

In three comprehensive volumes, Logic of the Future presents a full panorama of Charles S. Peirce’s most important late writings. Among the most influential American thinkers, Peirce took his existential graphs to be a significant contribution to human thought. The manuscripts from 1895–1913, with many of them being published here for the first time, testify to the richness and open-endedness of his theory of logic and its applications. They also invite us to reconsider our ordinary conceptions of reasoning as well (...) as the conventional stories concerning the evolution of modern logic. This first volume of Logic of the Future is on the historical development, theory and application of Peirce’s graphical method and diagrammatic reasoning. It also illustrates the abundant further developments and applications Peirce envisaged existential graphs to have on the analysis of mathematics, language, meaning and mind. (shrink)

1. Kant on the “Conditions of the Possibility” of Experience -- Claude Piché // 2. Plato and Kantian Transcendental Constructivism -- Tom Rockmore // 3. Kant and Fichte on the Notion of (Transcendental) Freedom -- Violetta L. Waibel // 4. Fichte, Transcendental Ontology, and the Ethics of Belief -- Steven Hoeltzel // 5. Transcendental Philosophy as “Therapy of the Mind”: Fichte’s “Facts of Consciousness” Lectures -- Benjamin D. Crowe // 6. From Transcendental Philosophy to Hegel’s Developmental Method -- William (...) F. Bristow // 7. How Transcendental Is Cohen’s Critical Idealism? -- Halla Kim // 8. Heidegger’s Failure to Overcome Transcendental Philosophy -- Eric S. Nelson // 9. Others as the Ground of Our Existence: Levinas, Løgstrup, and Transcendental Arguments in Ethics -- Robert Stern // 10. Raising Validity Claims for Reasons: Transcendental Reflection in Apel’s Argumentative Discourse -- Matthias Kettner // 11. Transcendental Arguments Based on Question-Answer Contradictions -- Yukio Irie // 12. Consequences of the Transcendental-Pragmatic Consensus Theory of Truth -- Michihito Yoshime // 13. On Jürgen Habermas’s Cognitive Theory of Morality -- Yasuyuki Funaba . (shrink)

It is commonplace that whenever a metahistorian attempts to rule out some more or less general approaches to history, or certain methods, procedures as being impossible in history: “it just can’t be done!”—then, invariably, there is another metahistorian who will point to some historians who did just that, which allegedly could not be done. Equally predictable are the objections to such “contrary cases,” viz.: “That isn’t history!” What is it then? It may be religion, metaphysics, Spengler-ism, Toynbeeism,—or (...) worse: social science, sociology, and even: psychology! (shrink)

En la Universidad Médica “Carlos J. Finlay”, se realiza una intervención educativa con el objetivo de valorar la concepción y aplicación de un programa para un curso de preparación de metodólogos en correspondencia con sus funciones en condiciones de universalización de las Ciencias Médicas de Camagüey, en el periodo de septiembre de 2005 a junio de 2007. Se emplean diferentes métodos investigativos: los teóricos, así como la técnica de discusión grupal, permitió diseñar el programa del curso para la preparación de (...) metodólogos en condiciones de universalización y los empíricos, la obtención de algunos datos de interés acerca de los metodólogos que reciben el curso y sus valoraciones en relación con el mismo. Se constata que la preparación pedagógica y experiencia en el desempeño es insuficiente para asumir el rol de metodólogo y valoran de muy importantes los contenidos desarrollados, los métodos y formas organizativas concebidas, por lo que se concluye que el programa del curso cumple con las expectativas del metodólogo al estar diseñado teniendo en cuenta las funciones que estos desempeñan y sus necesidades sentidas A study was carried out about the intervention in education developed to increase teacher's methodological preparation under their new functions due to the fresh conditions of learning within the community applied to medicine training and education in Camagüey. It was carried out in the period of September 2005 to June 2007. Different research methods were used: the theoretical ones and the technique for group discussion help to design the course syllabus and the assessment for those teachers that received the course. It was verified that the methodological preparation and performance experience are insufficient to play their role; but they value as very important the contents, the methods and the organization of the course. The authors conclude that the course meets the expectations of training, because it was designed keeping in mind the teachers' functions and their necessities. (shrink)

Pettit's and Skinner's stimulating books are open to historically-minded objections. Pettit's reading of Hobbes is Rousseauian, but he rejects the Hobbesian/Rousseauian belief that some modern people are driven by amour-propre/“glory”. If Hobbes is right, there is, in Pettit's sense, no “common good”. Skinner's treatment of the neo-Roman “theorists” over-estimates their self-consciousness and their consistency. Leviathan chapter 21 is not a response to neo-Romanism; it treats civil liberty as non-obligation, not as non-interference.

Fiction and myth have been used for centuries in writing history as well as in making it. And this is not surprising; for Clio was not only the muse of history but also that of epic poetry. This personal union of the two functions shows that the Greeks may have felt what we know today, thanks to the additional experience of twenty-five hundred years: that in historiography as well as in its subject matter, history as reality, it (...) is not always possible to draw a neat line of demarcation between historical truth and poetical fiction. History as res scriptae is, and has to be, a product of documentation and imagination. If this imagination is subjected to logical methodology, it will result in “scientific” history, in which the word “science” has to be interpreted in that liberal sense proposed by Collingwood, as “any organized body of knowledge.” If, on the contrary, the imaginative component of historiography is abandoned to poetical fancy, it will result in mythological history. Finally, if the imagination of the historian is guided by the conscious, half-conscious or sub-conscious wish to influence and manipulate the readers’ minds, the result will be ideological history. (shrink)

The historical continuity of spinal catastrophism, traced across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology. Drawing on cryptic intimations in the work of J. G. Ballard, Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Elaine Morgan, and Friedrich Nietzsche, in the late twentieth century Daniel Barker formulated the axioms of spinal catastrophism: If human morphology, upright posture, and the possibility of language are the ramified accidents of natural history, then psychic ailments are ultimately afflictions of the spine, which itself is (...) a scale model of biogenetic trauma, a portable map of the catastrophic events that shaped that atrocity exhibition of evolutionary traumata, the sick orthograde talking mammal. Tracing its provenance through the biological notions of phylogeny and "organic memory" that fueled early psychoanalysis, back into idealism, nature philosophy, and romanticism, and across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology, Thomas Moynihan reveals the historical continuity of spinal catastrophism. From psychoanalysis and myth to geology and neuroanatomy, from bioanalysis to chronopathy, from spinal colonies of proto-minds to the retroparasitism of the CNS, from "railway spine" to Elizabeth Taylor's lost gill-slits, this extravagantly comprehensive philosophical adventure uses the spinal cord as a guiding thread to rediscover forgotten pathways in modern thought. Moynihan demonstrates that, far from being an fanciful notion rendered obsolete by advances in biology, spinal catastrophism dramatizes fundamental philosophical problematics of time, identity, continuity, and the transcendental that remain central to any attempt to reconcile human experience with natural history. (shrink)

This book charts the multidimensional course of what has come to be known as the “Vegetal Turn” in environmental humanities - a wave of theoretical and practical interest in the complexities and peculiarities of plant life and plant-human relations. The Vegetal turn consists of increasingly sophisticated, inter- and trans-disciplinary, inter- and trans-cultural explorations of the multiple systems and networks of communication, intelligence, technical-operational capabilities, and relations articulated by and via plants - as well as the ethical, economic, cultural, and political (...) dimensions of plant-human interactions and practices. The volume includes contributions from philosophy and the humanities more generally that explore and reflect on the history, prospects, and applications of four main themes that the Vegetal Turn has brought to general attention: the mind of plants, and what their peculiar mentality can tell us about mind more generally; plant personhood and/or moral standing, and the justifications and implications of attributions thereof; plant relationships with humans, plant-based human relationships, and the ethics of human practices with or regarding plants - from agriculture to the arts, from forest management to urban design ; as well as the rights and/or political representation of plant life and the other life-forms that depend on it, human as well as non-human, present and future. (shrink)

It is commonly thought that Hume endorses the claim that causal cognition can be fully explained in terms of nothing but custom and habit. Associative learning does, of course, play a major role in the cognitive psychology of the Treatise. But Hume recognizes that associations cannot provide a complete account of causal thought. If human beings lacked the capacity to reflect on rules for judging causes and effects, then we could not (as we do) distinguish between accidental and genuine regularities, (...) and Hume could not (as he does) carry out his science of human nature. One might reply that what appears to be rule-governed behavior might emerge from associative systems that do not literally employ rules. But this response fails: there is a growing consensus in cognitive science that any adequate account of causal learning must invoke active, controlled cognitive processes. (shrink)

In this chapter, the author takes up aspects of Richard Rorty's account of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in the light of such developments. In an autobiographical essay Rorty recounted an early phase of his intellectual life in which he became disillusioned with the Platonist "quest for certainty" that he had harbored up to that time. Rorty's parallel vision of Hegel as providing a philosophical form of this redescriptive path to freedom and thereby as providing a philosophical narrative without a "moral" (...) or any "aspect of eternity" is one that, of course, stands in stark contrast to the usual picture of Hegel's philosophy. Rorty had been obviously attracted to the strongly anti‐Cartesian dimensions of Hegel's account of "Anerkennung" in which mindedness is treated not as a fixed human capacity but as having a history in virtue of being dependent on historically variable forms of social interaction. (shrink)

The central task which defines the intention of my investigation has to do with a statement and further elucidation of some of the central issues arising in an analysis, description, and interpretation of human existence. My argument throughout will be that human existence must be understood from an historical point of view, and I will seek to delineate the peculiar methodology and distinctive categories of interpretation which are demanded by such an approach. The human self is historical and must be (...) understood through its history. Ever since philosophers have taken history seriously there has been an increasing awareness that any philosophy of human existence, if it is to remain true to the immediately given data, must be rooted in man's concrete, historically lived experience. This development of the historical consciousness has added a new dimension to man's attempt to understand himself in his existence. But it has also posed certain unavoidable questions for the philosopher. Chief among these is the question concerning the relation of history and ontology. Is an ontology of historical existence possible? Wilhelm Dilthey, one of the seminal historical thinkers of the modern age, answered the above question in the negative by arguing that existence, as an historical Erlebnis, is never more than a discontinuous succession of subjectively lived experiences. He thus bequeathed to his historically minded successors the difficult problem of reconciling history and ontology. Does the concrete-historical, by virtue of its particularity and subjectivity, render impossible any rational clarification? Or is the concrete-historical in some sense a bearer of universal structures which define the ontological condition for historical existence as such? This is the problem of our investigation. Stated in its broadest formulation, our question has to do with the possibility of an ontology of human historicity. Are there discernible structures of being which underlie and qualify man's concrete historical actualization? The intention of the author is to show that such an ontology is possible. This will be done by clarifying the methodological procedures and developing the categorial analysis which is required by such a program. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity by Suparno BanerjeeBarnita BagchiSuparno Banerjee. Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2020. xiii + 256 pp. E-book, ISBN 9781786836670.Suparno Banerjee’s monograph examines science fiction (henceforth SF) from India, a country that has a rich and fascinating tradition of SF. This is a book that will be of interest and value to scholars and (...) students in higher education of utopia, dystopia, and speculative fiction, and to readers across disciplines interested in SF as a mode. It is quite clear today that Darko Suvin’s canonical definition of SF as cognitive estrangement, an interplay between the familiar and the strange, and its emphasis on the novum that is created in SF, has been enriched with further attention to context, including postcolonial contexts. Whose familiarity in cognition are we speaking about, and what happens when contexts are not necessarily hegemonic Anglo-American or Western ones? Indeed, even in Western contexts, science is not a given, but an element that always has political, historical, and ideological overtones. The novum, too, as with the term utopia, is moored in the contexts of the text.Banerjee’s book is one among several excellent monographs on Indian SF that have been published in the 2020s: Sami Ahmad Khan’s Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction (2021) and Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s Final Frontiers: Science Fiction and Techno-Science in Non-Aligned India (2020) come to mind. Khan adopts a refreshing fan’s guide to Indian SF register in his monograph, discussing mythology, materiality, ideology, and technology, and he coins the abbreviation TransMIT to capture his approach. Mukherjee’s book examines how Indian SF syncs with or questions the technological and scientific paradigms of India under Nehru and the Non-Aligned Movement; arguing that Indian SF needs to be seen as semiperipheral, the book also applies concepts from energy humanities [End Page 586] to Indian SF in an arresting way. Suparno Banerjee’s monograph is a solidly grounded work in its clearly explained choice of corpus, and a methodology that elicits particularly generative insights in a number of areas, including the epistemological status of science in Indian SF, the importance of SF written in bhasha or non-English Indian languages, the interplay between past and future in Indian SF, analysis of how Indian SF imaginatively represents the Other, and attention to Indian women writers of SF.Banerjee offers a lucid and useful chronology of Indian SF in four historical periods: 1835–1905, 1905–47, 1947–95, and 1995–2019. The period from 1835 to 1905 offers the first specimens of Indian SF, primarily in the form of future histories that question colonialism, in the utopian mode, and adventure tales and stories with scientific and technological elements. The establishment of a British education system, starting in the 1820s, gave an impetus to the birth of Indian SF. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream” was published in 1905, a year that heralds the second period lasting until Indian independence. In this period, SF starts appearing not just in the English, Bengali, and Hindi languages, as in the first period, but also in a number of other Indian languages, such as Assamese, Marathi, and Tamil. Children’s and youth magazines develop from the 1920s, spaces where science writing and SF both appear. Nationalist, anticolonial stances emerge, challenging western hegemony, in the 1940s. In the early post-Independence period, the nationalistic elements become even stronger, and SF interacts quite strongly with older forms of fantastic writing such as myths, fairytales, and ghost stories. This third period, Banerjee argues, is the golden age of bhasha SF. From the 1990s English-language SF again becomes very prominent in India and its diaspora, though SF in bhashas continues to flourish.Banerjee examines fiction not just from post-Independence India, but also from colonial British India, and diasporic Indian writing. SF written primarily in Bengali, English, Hindi, and Marathi is examined and, when possible, the book also brings into its ambit of analysis SF written in the languages Assamese, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada. Reflexivity about the corpus of... (shrink)

What motivated British colonialism? What motivated renaissance Florentines to finance their state? Why did Brazilian men find mixed-race women so attractive? What promotes falsity in reports of human affairs? Why did historical-mindedness develop in ancient Greece and China, but not India? When homosexual communities developed, why did gay men pursue sexual strategies so different from those of lesbians? Why does a Heian-period Japanese description of fear of snakes sound so familiar to a Westerner? Why have rebels tended to be youngest (...) rather than eldest siblings? To each of these(and many others) questions, part of the answer lies in specific, identifiable features of human nature. Thus human nature is and should be a substantial concern to anyone trying to understand the past. But human nature is also an object of scientific study. This paper explores a portion of this convergence of humanistic and scientific concerns by outlining and illustrating interrelations between human nature and history. Exploration of the interrelations between history and human nature requires a detailed understanding of what human nature is. And whatever human nature may be, it is a product of human evolution. Accordingly, key concepts in evolutionary psychology are presented to provide theoretical tools for understanding the centerpiece of human nature, the human mind. As much as the study of history may benefit from an understanding of human nature, the study of history and the use of historical materials may also promote the scientific study of human nature. Examples are given and several suggestions are presented to forward this task. Finally, an argument is made for a sort of back engineering in which historical events and conditions are traced to the specific features of human nature that motivated, facilitated, or shaped them. Insofar as this task is achieved, it closes the gap between recorded history and evolutionary history, between the humanities and the sciences. (shrink)

Holograms have been in the public eye for over a half-century, but their influences have deeper cultural roots. No other visual experience is quite like interacting with holograms; no other cultural product melds the technological sublime with magic and optimism in quite the same way. As holograms have evolved, they have left their audiences alternately fascinated, bemused, inspired or indifferent. From expressions of high science to countercultural art to consumersecurity, holograms have represented modernity, magic and materialism. Their most pervasive impact (...) has been to galvanise hopeful technological dreams. Engineers, artists, hippies and hobbyists have played with, and dreamed about, holograms. This book explores how holograms found a place in distinct cultural settings. It is aimed at readers attracted to pop culture, visual studies and cultural history, scholars concerned with media history, fine art and material studies and, most of all, cross-disciplinary audiences intrigued about how this ubiquitous but still-mysterious visual medium grew up in our midst and became entangled in our culture. This book explores the technical attractions and cultural uses of the hologram, how they were shaped by what came before them, and how they have matured to shape our notional futures. Today, holograms are in our pockets (as identity documents) and in our minds (as gaming fantasies and faux hologram performers). Why arent they more often in front of our eyes? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Experience, Embodiment, and History: Remarks on Waldow’s Experience EmbodiedDario Perinetti (bio)Anik Waldow’s Experience Embodied delves into what she calls the “early modern debate on the concept of experience.”1 In her rich and wide-ranging account, she shows how a group of key early modern philosophers dealt with a puzzle regarding the connection between the subjective and objective aspects of experience. The puzzle stems from the fact that experience reveals (...) as much about the experiencing subject as it does about the experienced world. Waldow believes that a one-sided focus on the role of “the way of ideas” in shaping the subjective aspect of experience has distorted our understanding of early modern views on experience.According to the traditional reading, the puzzle presents an intractable challenge to early modern philosophers. For if we experience the world through ideas, and ideas are internal mental states, it becomes difficult to reconcile the explanations required for the psychology of our mental states with those needed for the natural sciences dealing with objective states of affairs. But, so Waldow claims, the challenge can be successfully faced once we understand experience as embodied: “We have to think of experience as embodied to do justice to both explanatory requirements, because it is the body that connects the experiencing mind and its subjectivity with the factual realm of the world.”2Waldow disputes the commonly held view that early modern philosophers saw experience as an interaction between mind and world. She contends, instead, that most early modern philosophers understood experience as embodied. The thesis is presented through a series of “case studies” or “snapshots.” These snapshots focus on the way Descartes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Herder, and Kant accounted for the [End Page 319] embodied dimension of experience. The case studies are noteworthy because they succeed in revealing the significance of embodied experience for the authors in question. Waldow manages to expose the significance of embodied experience by focusing on the connection between the authors’ central philosophical views and their views on topics like education, the psychology of emotions, and history, which are often considered of lesser interest by contemporary philosophers.For example, in chapter 1, Waldow argues that connecting Descartes’s mind-body dualism with his understanding of reason as a tool for human self-determination and agency, makes it possible to see how, contrary to commonly held assumptions, Descartes’s dualism aligns well with an understanding of experience as embodied. This weakens the view that Descartes defended a conception of reason as disembodied, and instead, allows for a reading of Cartesian philosophy as aligned with a more naturalistic picture of human nature. In her chapters on Hume and Herder, Waldow sheds light on the way these philosophers perceived reason and experience as deeply rooted in bodily sensibility, as well as in historically shaped moral attitudes and social norms. This focus on embodied experience is central for highlighting how, in different ways, these philosophers endorsed the naturalistic project of understanding the human place in nature. Building on these results, Waldow approaches the problem of the relationship between naturalism and the methodology proper to philosophy from a different and original angle. Her final chapters on Herder and Kant present two ways of understanding the connection between philosophy and the empirical sciences. In her view, Herder advocates for a naturalistic methodology as a way to provide answers to deep metaphysical questions, as well as to empirical questions related to human nature and its connection to culture, society, and history. Unlike Herder, Kant appears as promoting a form of methodological dualism that distinguishes conceptual questions regarding the structure of experience from empirical questions regarding the experience of concrete, embodied human beings. Waldow succeeds in highlighting this contrast between two methodological approaches, thanks to a journey that takes us through the canonical texts of these two thinkers, as well as through less frequented texts such as Herder’s work on the origins of language and Kant’s writings on anthropology, geography, natural history, and history. As can be seen, Waldow’s book not only provides a valuable insight into the significance of embodied experience in early modern philosophy, but also offers refreshing and unexpected readings of the... (shrink)

Recent theory and research in historical education has focused attention on the structures, processes, and cognitive acts of professional historians. Proponents of historical thinking argue that authentic teaching in history should move beyond the mere memorization of facts and instead engage students directly in the interpretation of primary sources and the construction of original historical accounts. These scholars argue that by "doing history" through open-ended inquiry, students will discover the contingent nature of historical accounts, which is a more (...) accurate reflection of the field. In particular, books like Howard Gardner's The Disciplined Mind and Keith Barton and Linda Levstik's Teaching History for .. (shrink)