We suggest a teleological approach to subjective experiencing or phenomenal consciousness. Like living, subjective experiencing is a teleology-constituting mode of being, which is made up of coupled, functional processes. We explicate our notion of a 'teleological mode of being' and distinguish between three different modes: a living (non-sentient) mode of being, a sentient mode of being, and a rational-symbolic (human) mode of being, which correspond to the three levels of (...) soul suggested by Aristotle. These evolved teleological modes of being are characterized by the possession of distinct, hierarchically nested goals and value systems. We argue that the functions of parts and processes within living systems have to be situated within the appropriate teleological frame of reference. Our evolutionary and comparative approach to the mode of being of subjectively experiencing animals clarifies why functions are best attributed to the parts that constitute sentience. Our proposal resolves the problem of attributing functions to phenomenal consciousness, resonates with basic teleological intuitions and distinctions, and corresponds to the modern broad understanding of selection and evolution. (shrink)

In this first of two articles on chanting and enchantment we introduce the problem of mass synchronisation via collective communicative action that works to eliminate or lessen independent and critical assessment. Chanting forges a singular ‘collective’ identity with little to no structure that would allow for logical tests such as falsifiability. We argue that this problem can be a fundamental threat to democratic polity, and we offer the Neo-Kantian theory of dimensional accrual and dissociation as an explanation. In Part 2, (...) we will continue with examples and a discussion of the confluence of philosophical examination and social scientific explanations. (shrink)

It is through ritual that religions often express their deepest truths, and historians and anthropologists of religion have long recognized the impor-tance of its symbolic dimension. Yet it remains to be explained how religious rituals perform this function. That is, in what ways do ritual gestures symbolize or refer – reserving these two general terms to cover all ways of bearing semantic-like relations to objects, events, and states of affairs? In this essay I will take some first steps toward (...) answering this question by constructing a taxonomy of symbolic gestures in the rituals of Judaism, drawing for this purpose on various categories of reference, first distinguished by Nelson Goodman in his study of symbol systems, including the arts, and more recently elaborated by Israel Scheffler. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Symbolic Classification and The Emergence of a Metaphysics of CausalityOwen Goldinwhat is distinctive about metaphysics as a mode of thought that emerged in the fifth century before the Common Era? How did it emerge out of early ways of conceptualizing the world as a whole, and why? Many answers have been proposed. One common view is that earlier modes of thought personify natural agencies; once this is (...) abandoned, the way is open for discerning more complex regularities among natural events.1 Another view is that the process of "rationalization" introduced by the Greeks involves an implicit appeal to the individual's natural intelligence, in contrast to a dependence on an "inherited stock of wisdom."2 A third view is that the first Greek philosophers introduced inference as a way of navigating conceptual relationships, independent of the sorts of personal interactions among divinities related in mythical narrative.3 According to a fourth account, the mode of rationality that allowed for the development of ancient Greek metaphysics was a social [End Page 3] practice with the aim of persuasion, brought on by more democratic involvement in societal deliberations concerning law and policy.4To these I add a fifth way of answering the question. Crucial to the emergence of Greek metaphysics is explicit distinction of ontological/causal priority and posteriority. Ancient Greek scientific explanations developed out of older, archaic modes of conceptualization, which I maintain have deep parallels with modes of conceptualization shared by many nonliterate cultures. Such modes of thought rest on an implicit worldview which can be called a metaphysics, in a loose sense, and are still worthy of philosophical consideration.I begin with a red flag that will be raised for many as soon as we start talking about the metaphysical traditions of nonliterate cultures. What counts as a metaphysical tradition? I make some distinctions. In the loosest sense, an account or tradition is metaphysical if it reflects a coherent worldview concerning the kinds of beings that there are and how they are related to one another. According to a stricter sense of the term, a tradition is metaphysical if it involves working through this worldview in an explicit and systematic matter. In an even stricter sense, a tradition is metaphysical if, in addition to being explicit and systematic, it merits being classified as "philosophical," itself not an unproblematic term. I here stipulate that an account is philosophical if it does not rest on premises that are specific to certain cultural traditions and employs inferential arguments that are in principle subject to refutation.Generally speaking, there are two ways in which a tradition that is metaphysical in the strictest sense can listen to one that is metaphysical in a looser sense. First, a metaphysician might examine the latter tradition in order to explore how, historically, it served as the root for the former. An example is Aristotle's interest in Hesiod as expressing metaphysical intuitions that later philosophers unpacked.5 By studying [End Page 4] the ontological presuppositions of the sort of account from which our own metaphysics is derived, one learns more about our own ontological presuppositions and what we gain from them.6 This sort of dialogue carries with it the danger that the later thinker presupposes that—in the spirit of "you have to start somewhere"—the earlier thinkers were simply doing a bad job working through their own theories; Aristotle has often been accused of precisely this.7Another sort of dialogue is possible as well. An alternative metaphysical tradition can reveal the possibility of a radically different way of conceptualizing the causal and ontological structure of the world, one with its own advantages. In such a case there is shared set of problems at issue, shared points of reference within the philosophical literature, and a shared understanding of what philosophical argument is. But philosophical insight might also emerge from the kind of dialogue in which a developed metaphysics that conforms to certain standards of inferential argument confronts a way of thinking that is metaphysical in a looser sense. A substance-based ontologist can be led to reflect on whether the world has to be cut up as she does by studying Aztec... (shrink)

The aim of the article is to answer the question if accession can be maintained as a separate and independent mode of acquisition and loss of ownership in the Lithuanian civil law. Although this mode takes its beginning in the Roman law and is well-known in other European jurisdictions, the situation in Lithuania is less clear because the accession is almost totally absent from the legal texts of the Lithuanian positive civil law, court decisions and legal doctrine as (...) well. Thus, a legal analysis confined to the linguistic analysis of law would come to the conclusion that Lithuanian law functions without the accession. Nevertheless, a deeper analysis of the Lithuanian Civil Code and case law reveals a different view. To respond to the posed question, the article analyses the functions and the concept of accession as one of the aspects of a broader property law principle, namely, of unity. The essence of the latter is that one thing presupposes one right of ownership and it is inconceivable to hold several full ownerships into the same thing. In this respect, accession plays an important role protecting the legal interests of the third parties. Also, the application of accession in other continental European countries and the solutions proposed by the Draft Common Frame of Reference is analysed. Further, the analysis turns to the Lithuanian positive law and case law. In spite of the lack of express reference to the accession rule, careful analysis shows that, in fact, the accession rule is established in the Lithuanian Civil Code, albeit it could be found in various forms and in several different units of the Civil Code. Also, Lithuanian courts routinely apply the rules on accession in practice. Even more, the analysis shows that the Lithuanian Civil Code is not devoid of the rules of accession, but, on the opposite, this legal institute is over-regulated and, in part, incoherent. This quality can be explained as a consequence of an imprecise legal drafting. The final conclusion is drawn that accession is a separate and fully working legal institute of Lithuanian civil law, although to reach its coherent application a certain interpretative position should be adopted. (shrink)

How do we talk meaningfully about the sacred in contexts where conventional religious expression has so often lost its power? Inspired by the influential work of David Jasper, this important volume builds on his thinking to identify sacrality in a world where the old religious and secular debates have exhausted themselves and theology struggles for a new language in their wake. Distinguished writers explore here the idea of the sacred as one that exists, paradoxically, in a space that is (...) both possible and impossible: profoundly theological on the one hand, but also deeply this-worldly and irreligious on the other. This is a sacredness that is simultaneously 'present' and 'absent': one which encompasses – as Jasper himself characterises it – 'the impossible possibility of an absolute vision'. The book teaches us that the sacred assumes a renewed potency when fully engaged with the creativity that happens across religion, literature, philosophy and the arts. (shrink)

This dissertation investigates how art, truth, and politics are tightly integrated in Raphael's historical narratives in the Stanza d'Eliodoro. ;The first chapter argues for the importance of paying careful attention to pictorial structure--that close analysis of painting can make a strong contribution to the social history of art. The second chapter begins this interpretive path. It first describes the room's decorative ensemble as a whole and how the histories are located within its complex figurative scheme. Then, drawing upon Martin Heidegger's (...) analysis of postmedieval processes of Vorstellung, it defines the pictorial narratives themselves as representations and concludes that as pictorial representations these narratives appear unable to ground the truth of sacred history. ;Chapter 3 focuses on the Expulsion of Heliodorus, a mural replete with self-referential models of both its own mode of authorship and mode of reception. These self-referential cues help define what it means for the Heliodorus to be not only a pictorial representation but more extensively a work of art. It is Raphael's art of representation that shows forth and validates the metaphysical truth of papal history. ;The latter part of Chapter 3 and all of Chapter 4 offer readings of the Heliodorus as well as the three other histories--the Liberation of St. Peter, Mass at Bolsena, and Repulse of Attila--construing them as theologico-political narratives of the divinity of papal power. All four histories express at the level of narrative form the dilemma of the papacy's contemporary political trajectory only for this predicament to find imaginative "resolution" through the movement of the narrative action. This chapter expounds upon the configurations of historical time in the decorative scheme and how this projects the political unconscious of papal desire. Yet the fifth and final chapter concludes that the Eliodoro narratives are not simply collective wishfulfillments but more properly public symbols that rhetorically address a beholder so to persuade him to accept as true the papacy's desired self-image of its own historical mission. Raphael's art of representation was essential towards this end. (shrink)

This paper attempts to put forward an aesthetic theory of nature based on a biosemiotic description of the living, which in turn is derived from an autopoietic theory of organism (p. Varela). An autopoietic system's reaction to material constraints is the unfolding of a dimension of meaning. In the outward Gestalt of autopoietic systems, meaning appears as fonn, and as such it reveals itself in a sensually graspable manner. The mode of being of organisms has an irreducible aesthetic (...) side in which this mode of being becomes visible. Nature thus displays a kind of transparency of its own functioning: in a nondiscursive way organisms show traces of their conditio vitae through their material self-presentation. Living beings hence always show a basic level of expressiveness as a necessary component of their organic mode of being. This is called the ecstatic dimension of nature (G. Böhme, R. Corrington). Autopoiesis in its full consequence then amounts to a view reminding of Paracelsus' idea of the signatura rerum (c. Glacken, H. Böhme): nature is transparent, not because it is organized digitally as a linguistic text or code, but rather because it displays analogically the kind of intentionality engendered by autopoiesis. Nature as a whole, as «living fonn" (S. Langer), is a symbol for organic intentionality. The most fundamental meaning of nature protection thus is to guarantee the «real presence" of our soul. (shrink)

The author presents a varied menu of ideas and experiences in many areas - in research, in diagnosis, and in psychotherapy, each using art media with patients of all ages. She integrates art, phenomenology and gestalt psychology, describing specific techniques and findings. Part I of the book lays out the theoretical foundations and the techniques; Part II addresses the formal components used in art therapy - line, shape and colour in their interrelated dynamics and discusses other aspects and modes of (...) symbolic expression found in clients' work. Part III looks at symbolic expression through the scribble, offering a system of classification, diagnostic possibilities and case studies of work with eating disorders. Part IV focuses on art expression for art therapy diagnostics, including a method for qualitative diagnostics, and a first full diagnostic battery for adolescents. Part V is devoted to Holocaust children's art expressions, highlighting the power of art expression in children under ultimate stress, the intensity of their inner experience, and its visualization in the structure of the pictures. The book is for art therapists and advanced students. It can be used as a textbook on phenomenological art therapy; for therapeutically-oriented art teachers, educators and social workers; and for practicing psychotherapists, to see that art is a source of expression demonstrating how a person is. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to grasp the relevant distinctions between various ways in which models and simulations in Artificial Intelligence (AI) relate to cognitive phenomena. In order to get a systematic picture, a taxonomy is developed that is based on the coordinates of formal versus material analogies and theory-guided versus pre-theoretic models in science. These distinctions have parallels in the computational versus mimetic aspects and in analytic versus exploratory types of computer simulation. The proposed taxonomy cuts across the (...) traditional dichotomies between symbolic and embodied AI, general intelligence and symbol and intelligence and cognitive simulation and human/non-human-like AI. -/- According to the taxonomy proposed here, one can distinguish between four distinct general approaches that figured prominently in early and classical AI, and that have partly developed into distinct research programs: first, phenomenal simulations (e.g., Turing’s “imitation game”); second, simulations that explore general-level formal isomorphisms in pursuit of a general theory of intelligence (e.g., logic-based AI); third, simulations as exploratory material models that serve to develop theoretical accounts of cognitive processes (e.g., Marr’s stages of visual processing and classical connectionism); and fourth, simulations as strictly formal models of a theory of computation that postulates cognitive processes to be isomorphic with computational processes (strong symbolic AI). -/- In continuation of pragmatic views of the modes of modeling and simulating world affairs, this taxonomy of approaches to modeling in AI helps to elucidate how available computational concepts and simulational resources contribute to the modes of representation and theory development in AI research—and what made that research program uniquely dependent on them. (shrink)

My aim here is to approach Hegel's thought as prefiguring Heidegger's attempt to reawaken an interest in the issue of language and to develop a relation to it which is not based on conventional linguistic forms. In this light language should not be construed abstractly as a structure unto itself that confines truth to the univocal meanings cemented in judgment; instead, language must be addressed in terms of its dynamic role in drawing attention to being and to the backdrop (...) against which the entirety of what is can be revealed as opening the way to thought. Heidegger often credits a reawakening to the powers of logos to Hölderlin as the "poet of the poets"; but it is not easy to adopt Hölderlin's insights immediately from the domain of poetry without also considering the specific nuances with which language must be endowed in order to provide the fertile soil for thought. It should not be surprising, then, that Heidegger should seek a philosophical analogue to his own efforts in a figure such as Hegel; for it is well known that Hegel not only appreciated the contributions of Hölderlin, but also saw an important correlation between the philosophical and poetic modes of expression. Thus Hegel, in both the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Logic, examines the process of the determination of thought in such a way that he raises a question as ancient as Parmenides' concern for the interrelation between "being and thinking." More importantly, Hegel's attempt to unearth a perennial problem of this magnitude demands a retreat to a more basic level where language carves a deeper path within traditional ontology. (shrink)

In his late writings Husserl emphasizes how the semiotic properties of writing, and of mathematical formulae and diagrams, are crucial for the historical, cross-generational survivability of meaning and specifically indispensable to the operation of scientific knowledge. However, the demand for objectivity, exactitude, and repeatability insidiously interferes with the meaning that such signs seek to express. This leads to a duality of objectivity encapsulated in the notion “the sedimentation of meaning”. On this view, the transmission of objectivity established in an original (...) sense-constituting act cannot survive unless being deposited in some external form, which at the same time risks the original sense being irrevocably lost in a web of signification that amounts to nothing more than empty and meaningless symbol manipulation. I discuss Husserl’s analysis and propose that it is limited by its one-sided focus on the negative impact of modernity. I compare Husserl’s account with Heidegger’s even more radical critique of modern society as one where a so-called “technological” mode of “revealing” reigns supreme at the expense of eradicating other, and more authentic ways to apprehend the world. I critically reconstruct the respective position of both thinkers and show how they point not only to a criticism of the instrumentalization and formalization of knowledge in modern society, but that they are just as importantly highlighting essential semiotic properties of signs. (shrink)

This paper deals with the highly personal way an individual makes sense of the world in a way that avoids the pitfalls of the so‐called private language. For Wittgenstein following a rule can never mean just following another rule, though we do follow rules blindly. His idea of the ‘form of life’ elicits that ‘what we do’ refers to what we have learnt, to the way in which we have learnt it and to how we have grown to find it (...) self‐evident. But the reference to the ‘bedrock’, to what was originally learnt, is the only kind of situation for which it makes sense to ask whether the meaning of a concept is correctly stated. Dialogue, conversation, and exchange of ideas are the right ways to characterize all the other situations. The challenge of Wittgensteinian philosophy is therefore that of a balance of the individual and the community, of language and the world. His insistence on the third person is countered by the importance he gives to each individual's personal stance: persons must speak for themselves and do what they can do. Given the growing interest for the kind of educational research where the ‘personal’ is focused on, I will try to take up the challenge to see how here as elsewhere ‘language’ works. By making clear what it does for us, it will gradually become clear how this kind of research may itself have to be reinterpreted. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.4 (2000) 303-318 [Access article in PDF] The Threshold of the Self Bradford Vivian The subject has a history. Classical Greek sculpture expressed a fascination with the formal beauty of one's self. Ever gazing outward or upward, the marble figures symbolized the Greek preoccupation with a boldness of being, a constant focus on the ideals of the body and mind, which, through their pursuit, might (...) allow one a foretaste of heaven. Centuries later, as the pagan symbols of the ancient world were replaced with those of the growing Byzantine Empire, blocks of the same marble were fashioned into very different expressions. The ideals of form made manifest in the smooth, taught lines and surfaces of classical Greek sculpture were supplanted by Byzantine art's attention to the less perfect details of the individual: distinctive and common faces, beards, clothing, and less glorified bodies. The gazes of the Byzantine statues were cast down, contemplative, reflecting Byzantium's early Christian emphasis upon the modesty of human existence, the pious appraisal of one's time on Earth. Each of these sculptural styles is a material way of thinking and expressing one's being in the world. In this context, each is also symptomatic of the conditions in which such being was possible.The subject must not be conceived as a transcendent entity. Quite to the contrary, there is a historicity to our being and its expression, to our subjectivity and its elaboration. Within a more sweeping perspective, our epochal narratives of the subject--as well as the modes of thought and speech by which we make sense of ourselves--change with each passing age.At the forefront of the current era is a manifold effort to rethink and elaborate anew the concept of the subject. Feminist scholars have initiated political critique and transformation by arguing that the very notion of a subject in Western discourse has functioned as a trope of masculine privilege cloaked in the language of equality and secular humanism. 1 Postmodernists, of course, define contemporary subjectivity as de-centered and fragmented by nature (e.g., Baudrillard 1994; Latour 1993; Lyotard 1984). And [End Page 303] a variety of interdisciplinary studies illuminate the role of modern science and technology in not only sustaining our being, but actually constituting the human; in short, our daily interdependence and union with artificial body parts, synthetic products, life-support machines, test-tube reproduction, computers, and more, characterizes the arrival of what has been called "the posthuman." 2 Like ancient marble from a quarry, however, all of these materials are sculpted in historically specific ways to simultaneously think and express our subjectivity.What role might rhetoric play in this re-imagining of subjectivity? Modern Western thought has defined the subject according to content--that is, by the nature of the essence or being the subject is said to possess. Drawn around this content, the subject comes to appear enclosed, perhaps autonomous, and identical to itself. In this essay, however, I argue that the self may be conceived as a form--a rhetorical form--that exists only in its continual aesthetic creation, in its indefinite becoming. The self is, by this account, isomorphic with the threshold out of which it is composed. Such a formulation makes the self open to difference, to continual movement and transformation, instead of identical to itself.I aim in this essay to explore the abstract rhetorical forms and functions out of which the self is composed. The distinction here amounts to no longer asking, "What is a subject?" but, "What conditions and forces enable the ongoing production of the self?" Commensurate with such a proposal, it will be essential to ask how this movement--this continual becoming--of the self is brought about. The answer to this question ultimately will amplify the role of rhetoric in, not simply expressing, but actually producing conditions of being. In what follows, I begin by reviewing the very general aspects of subjectivity that I wish to call into question. Thereafter, I explore how the subject might be conceived differently. Finally, I discuss the manner in which rhetoric may... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 151 highly conscientious translator, and a sign of this are the Latin-English and English-Latin glossaries that are appended at the end of the work. The glossaries show how he has tried to remain consistent in his choice of terms and how he decided to render difficult terms like ratio and esse, which cause every translator of Aquinas problems. One could complain, however, that these nine pages of (...) glossary are not quite complete enough. A few missing entries, for example, are ' individual ' (which is used to translate concretum, suppositum, individuatum, and particufuris), ' subiectum ' (translated " substance " and " subject "), and' modus'. The briefest of bibliographical notes and an index complete the work. Here one might want to register a more serious complaint. The bibliographical note is much too brief to he especially helpful. The beginner could use some more suggestions about what to read as a follow-up to Martin's hook. All in all, this is a collection of readings from Thomas Aquinas one would like to see stay in print for a long time to come. Many who teach the thought of Aquinas in the round will want to make use of this work. And, by reading this work, philosophy students to whom Aquinas is an unknown will make a good beginning in becoming di· rectly familiar with one of the greatest of minds. ROBERT D. ANDERSON Saint Anselm College Manchester, New Hampshire Being and Order: The Metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas in Historical Perspective. By ANDREW N. WOZNICKI. Catholic Thought from Lublin. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. Pp. 309 + xiv. This first volume bodes well for the new series Catholic Thought from Lublin, because the author of the hook is also the general editor of the series. Father Woznicki has here produced a welcome addition to those worthwhile hooks exploring the philosophical vision of St. Thomas in depth and comparing and contrasting that vision with other philosophical outlooks. Such studies are important not just for Thomists hut for all who are interested in the thought of the Angelic Doctor. On the first page of his Foreword, Woznicki announces that being and order are so inextricably interrelated that it is absolutely impos· sihle to understand one without the other. With thorough scholarship and impressive depth, Woznicki hacks up his claim. The Foreword also includes Etienne Gilson's marvelous statement: "Metaphysics al- 152 BOOK REVIEWS ways buries its undertakers." Not only does Woznicki probe profoundly into St. Thomas's metaphysics but he shows with an enviable clarity what is metaphysically lacking in philosophies as diverse as those of Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Descartes, Kant, and Whitehead. Woznicki's goal in this well documented study is to discover the order present in the very structure of being as being. In examining the concept of being itself, he claims that being can reveal itself in its inner disposition of both essential and existential characteristics only as something in which essence and existence are related to each other reciprocally and mutually. The Lublin Thomist distinguishes the predicamental and the transcendental modes of predication. While in the predicamental mode of predication a predicate is added to a being as its determining principle, in the transcendental mode of predication nothing can be added to a being as an extraneous nature, in the way that an accident is added to a substance or that a difference is added to a genus. (These additions cannot take place because every nature is essentially being.) The distinction between the two modes of predication permit the formulation of two kinds of concepts, namely, the predicamental and the transcendental. The former describe various grades of being which match different modes of being and so reveal.the various genera of being; the latter in depicting being in its universality express more clearly what is contained in the nature of being as such. A predicamental order of being is established through the predicamental concepts' description of being by its essential characteristics ; a transcendental order of being is established through the transcendental concepts' description of being as expressed by the existential characteristics of esse. While in the predicamental order the emphasis on the essential aspects reveals being as it is expressed in... (shrink)

Presently we are experiencing a world where distributed information reshapes human modes of expression and being. The avalanche of images presented to us daily shifts our attention between numerous contexts and systems of meaning. Faced with the intensity of this broadcast, one tends to turn to abbreviations and flattening of the message. Jacques Rancier talks about aesthetics as a form of disconnected experience, which operates as a disinterested gaze. The disconnection serves as a coping mechanism allowing one to (...) function within the informational deluge. On the other hand, this flattening of an image does not represent the whole truth. Behind every image one senses a depth of meanings, which gives rise to a particular manifestation. In this article, I propose that image hides a being, which through that image individuates itself. While the acquisition of specific qualities constitutes this process of individuation, the being is the motion and agency enabling the process. Culture can be seen as technology and prosthesis, which facilitates memory of our mortality and forces us to individuate. Following this logic, image as part of culture is a technology of being. (shrink)

Today the way philosophical work is presented is very narrowly circumscribed and as a result, this excludes people who do not want to, or cannot effectively, present their work in a particular manner. This canonization of the mode of presentation of philosophical work also serves to maintain the status quo of analytic philosophy as an exclusively academic discipline. In this paper I argue that diversity in how philosophical thinking is presented should be allowed, and even, encouraged. I argue that (...) it is in philosophy’s interest to expand the ways that it is presented, because not doing so not only limits who can participate in philosophy, but it also limits who philosophy attracts and so how far-reaching philosophy can be. (shrink)

The most popular interpretation of musical meaning is stated generally as 'music is a tonal analogue of emotive life.' the article demonstrates the failure of the expression theory to provide adequate ground for a metalanguage of music. The theory's chief fault is that it attempts to make a science of musical signification and that this science is primarily psychological and secondarily musical. Musical signification lies in four areas rather than one: semantic, Symbolic, Figural, And behavioral (j.P. Guilford). A (...) proper metalanguage can only be built on methodology which demonstrates these mutually important modes of cognition. (shrink)

Spoken language is an innate ability of the human being and represents the most widespread mode of social communication. The ability to share concepts, intentions and feelings, and also to respond to what others are feeling/saying is crucial during social interactions. A growing body of evidence suggests that language evolved from manual gestures, gradually incorporating motor acts with vocal elements. In this evolutionary context, the human mirror mechanism (MM) would permit the passage from “doing something” to “communicating it (...) to someone else.” In this perspective, the MM would mediate semantic processes being involved in both the execution and in the understanding of messages expressed by words or gestures. Thus, the recognition of action related words would activate somatosensory regions, reflecting the semantic grounding of these symbols in action information. Here, the role of the sensorimotor cortex and in general of the human MM on both language perception and understanding is addressed, focusing on recent studies on the integration between symbolic gestures and speech. We conclude documenting some evidence about MM in coding also the emotional aspects conveyed by manual, facial and body signals during communication, and how they act in concert with language to modulate other’s message comprehension and behavior, in line with an “embodied” and integrated view of social interaction. (shrink)

The aim of this volume is to open up new perspectives and to raise new research questions about a unified approach to truth, modalities, and propositional attitudes. The volume's essays are grouped thematically around different research questions. The first theme concerns the tension between the theoretical role of the truth predicate in semantics and its expressive function in language. The second theme of the volume concerns the interaction of truth with modal and doxastic notions. The third theme covers higher-order solutions (...) to the semantic and modal paradoxes, providing an alternative to first-order solutions embraced in the first two themes. This book will be of interest to researchers working in epistemology, logic, philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and semantics. (shrink)

This paper adopts Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s expressionism and pure semiotics to argue that Spinoza’s Ethics offers an alternative notion of freedom of speech that is based on the potentia of the individual. Its aim is to show how freedom of thought is connected to the problem of individuation that connects our mode of being with our power to speak and think. Rather than treating freedom of speech as an enlightened idea that is in opposition to, for example, (...) religious authority, or the suppression of human rights, this paper argues that freedom of speech should be understood by what Spinoza calls ‘an adequate idea’: an idea that explains the cause of its own production. What is to be considered is: who wants this freedom, in what situation, why, what is at stake? No freedom in itself is ever given. This paper argues for speech as an assembled body that is always in connection with other bodies. It is argued that to understand the power and value of the freedom of speech, we should study the praxis of the utterance as an assembled body, its causal dimensions, and its affective immanent relations with other bodies, and other modes of speaking. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Augustine on the True Presence and the Eucharist as Sacrament of UnityElizabeth KleinAugustine's understanding of the Eucharist has been a thorny topic for theologians (both within the academy and without) since the Reformation.1 Ulrich Zwingli cited Augustine as an authority in favor of his merely symbolic understanding of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist at the colloquy of Marburg, to which Martin Luther reportedly conceded: "You have (...) Augustine and Fulgentius on your side, but we have all the other fathers."2 John Calvin also insistently took Augustine to be in his camp on the question of the Eucharist, citing, for example, Augustine's John commentary in a refutation of the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation—specifically regarding what happens when an unbeliever eats of the Eucharist: "Let those, therefore, who make unbelievers partakers of the flesh and blood of Christ, if they would agree with Augustine, set before us the visible body of Christ, since, according to him, the whole truth is spiritual."3 To this day, some Protestant commentators maintain a narrative about the theology of the Eucharist that follows a trajectory something like this: Augustine had a more spiritual or symbolic understanding of the [End Page 1325] sacrament, but this understanding was slowly effaced in the early to late Middle Ages, and then recovered at the Reformation. Correspondingly, in academia, Augustine's theology of the sacraments is often ignored or underplayed, no doubt in part due to the inheritance of this Protestant memorialist narrative.At the heart of the debate over Augustine's view of the Eucharist is his view of the effect of the sacraments. Are the sacraments, and the Eucharist in particular, a cause of sanctification for Augustine? Or are they merely a kind of symbol or reminder, one means among many for strengthening faith? Phillip Cary, perhaps the most vigorous opponent of seeing any efficacy in Augustine's sacramental theology, argues that Augustine "has no room for such a notion, which I shall label 'efficacious external means of grace.'"4 But, at the same time, the Catechism of the Catholic Church draws liberally from Augustine in its description of the Eucharist and its effects (for example, see §§1372, 1396, and 1398), as does Thomas Aquinas—particularly on the question pertaining to the effect of the sacrament.5How can Augustine's legacy be so hotly contested, claimed by two opposing camps on such an essential theological question? The short answer is that Augustine speaks about Christ's presence in the Eucharist as symbolic and as real in equal measure, and that both modes of expression were entirely natural to him. But that is not a wholly adequate answer. What is Augustine's Eucharistic theology and how does it accommodate this breadth of expression? What does the Eucharist really mean for him? Part of the difficulty of discerning Augustine's Eucharistic theology is his reticence to speak about it directly,6 but let us take as our point of departure two passages from book [End Page 1326] 1 of De doctrina Christiana in which Augustine explicitly mentions the Eucharist and where he sounds, at first blush, very much like a Zwinglian.Those, you see, who practice or venerate some kind of thing which is a significant sign, unaware of what it signifies, are enslaved under signs, while those who either carry out or venerate useful signs established by God, fully understanding their force and significance, are not in fact venerating what can be seen and passes away, but rather that reality to which all such things are to be referred.... In this time, though, after the clearest indication of our freedom has shone upon us in the resurrection of our Lord, we are no longer burdened with the heavy duty of carrying out even those signs [i.e., of the old covenant] whose meaning we now understand. But the Lord himself and the discipline of the apostles has handed down to us just a few signs instead of many, and these so easy to perform, and so awesome to understand, and so pure and chaste to celebrate, such as the sacrament of baptism, and the celebration of the Lord's body and... (shrink)

Four modes of language acquisition and communication are presented translating ancient Indian expressions on human consciousness, mind, their form, structure and function clubbing with the Sabdabrahma theory of language acquisition and communication. The modern scientific understanding of such an insight is discussed. . A flowchart of language processing in humans will be given. A gross model of human language acquisition, comprehension and communication process forming the basis to develop software for relevantmind-machine modeling will be presented. The implications of such a (...) model to artificial intelligence and cognitive sciences will be discussed. The essential nature and necessity of a physics, communication engineering , biophysical and biochemical insight as both complementary and supplementary to using mathematical and computational methods in delineating the theory of language processing in humans is put forward. (shrink)

It is a contested question in contemporary theories of religion whether the concept of religion can be defined in a sound way or not. Many theorists maintain that a universal but delimiting definition is impossible. In this study, by contrast, it is argued that a conceptual analysis of religion that holds universally is perfectly possible because the following thesis can be seen as a necessary and sufficient conceptual condition of what religion is: X is a religion if and only if (...) X is a collection of artifacts which has the proper function of representing a supraphysical world. On this thesis, it is argued that artifacts such as pictorial and verbal representations, rituals, symbols, and various tools constitute religion as a cultural object, which, as a collection of artifacts, has the proper function of representing a conceived world that is not entirely physical, and which, allegedly, is a prerequisite for existential welfare in relation to observance. It is here important to understand what is constitutive for these kinds of conceived worlds. Supraphysical world is defined as follows. Given that the actual world is a physical world, a conception S is a construction of a supraphysical world if and only if both of the following conditions apply to S: Metaphysical component: S is a duplicate of the actual world with the addition of an anti-physical substance. Existential-normative component: S is an alleged prerequisite for existential welfare in relation to observance. The core argument of the study is that holds a priori for the concept of religion and as an a posteriori necessity for every instance of a religion. Apart from discussing the methodological problems of defining religion, the study introduces a new theory of religion in terms of. It addresses issues in the theory of artifacts; in the theory of representations; and in the theory of conceptual analysis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private LifeDavid FredrickKristina Milnor. Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private Life. Oxford Studies in Classical Literature and Gender Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. xii + 360 pp. Cloth, $99.It is the often-difficult task of social history to explain how a given institution (e.g., marriage, education, the army) changed across different types of cultural expression (e.g., (...) legal and moral prescriptions, representation in visual art and literature) and in lived experience. In this fruitful and sometimes brilliant study, Kristina Milnor explores the repositioning of women during the Augustan period with respect to the distinction between public and private life. Over the course of an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue, she develops the argument that the Augustan period "invented" private life or, more precisely, new strategies for representing private life, in order to make the imperial system look like a return to traditional Roman family values. In making this argument, Milnor looks back to the Republic and forward to Nero; she assembles a wide range of literary and material evidence and makes judicious use of theory. Milnor is primarily concerned with textual representation; as she puts it at one point, the volume is "a study of representation rather than reality" (40–41). However, she does include substantial sections on architecture and space, and in the end it is not clear whether Milnor sees architecture in the Augustan period as a mode of representation or as something that by reshaping behavior necessarily transformed private life in lived experience.The introduction uses Vergil's simile of the housewife spinning in Aeneid 8 to set up the much-debated distinction between "public" and "private" in Roman culture. Milnor notes that the original meaning of privatus during the republic is narrowly oppositional, "a man without a political or military position," but broadened during the empire to mean more generally, "anyone... who did not hold the ultimate 'public' role of emperor" (20). Hence privatus and "domestic" do not mean the same thing: "privatus is necessarily a political word," while "the domestic... functions as a kind of moralized privacy, a concept whose strength lies in its allegiance to supposedly transcendent and apolitical ethical truths" (27). Women emerge during the Augustan period as the preferred symbols of this "moralized privacy," and while the physical and social circumstances of Roman women were highly disparate, the representation of female virtues remains consistent: "the domestic ideal was a construct which did not 'truthfully' represent any woman's life, even at the same time as it purported to represent them all" (38).In the first chapter ("Reading and Writing Gender on the Augustan Palatine"), Milnor argues that Augustus' Palatine complex is "engendered" by the prominence of Niobe, Cleopatra, and the Danaids in its decorative program, pointing to the problematic display of female virtue in the princeps' house. Because of Augustus' unprecedented political position, the "private" behavior of the women in his house became a kind of public performance, a tension that persists in Augustus' larger treatment of the city. In Tristia 2, Ovid addresses Augustus as a fellow author whose "text" is the city of Rome, and just as women [End Page 605] have misread Ovid's poetry licentiously, they frequently appropriate Rome's temples and porticoes for sexual liaisons. Milnor observes that this disingenuous argument at least recognizes women as active and resisting readers of texts, noting further that imperial women (Octavia and Livia) are paradoxically empowered as "authors" of significant public spaces precisely because they were seen to be expressing politically disinterested virtues. The chapter concludes with a look back at Cicero's de Domo Sua, which casts Clodius as a feminized abuser of public space in his appropriation of the Portico of Catulus for his shrine of Libertas; the restoration of Cicero's house, meanwhile, represents the restoration of the Roman state. Milnor argues that this anticipates Augustus' use of his own house as a symbol for Rome, and thus as the site for a paradoxically public performance of the traditions of Roman domesticity.The second chapter, "Domesticity and Display in Vitruvius' de Architectura," begins with two significant questions. Why, if... (shrink)

The present investigation aims to elucidate the presence of myth in the work of Eduardo Nicol. This inquiry of course, is something not thought about, since the author in question from the beginning of his philosophy has recognized that the path of thought is beyond myth, that is, it is nuanced by reason and by conceptual rigor. In other words, for him philosophy is about what is phenomenologically accessible and about what is rationally intelligible. Precisely for this reason, one of (...) the names with which Nicol's philosophy is known is under the name of "Metaphysics of expression" by virtue of the fact that what is given is commonly acquired through an expressive or communicative act. However, and despite this conceptual position, the fact is that the presence of myth can be found at the very heart of this philosopher’s philosophy. It should be noted that there is a particular myth that prevails in the clearing of his work, namely the myth of the androgyne. Through this myth it is possible to elucidate the origin of man and the original idea about symbol. (shrink)

The writings in which an author expresses his thought may actually be the product of certain cultural practices of his age. The article considers how such practices are manifested in the writings of Isidore of Seville, particularly with respect to the meaning of the metaphor of taste. Isidore borrows this metaphor from texts that explain the process of understanding Scripture and applies it to the achievement of wisdom. On the one hand, the metaphor stresses the transformative aspect of understanding (rather (...) than the informative, scientia). It focuses on the special experience of the reader who senses the sweetness of the text, and not on the application of the text to one’s life. On the other hand, reading and writing were imagined in terms related to food. The text was food that had to be prepared, to ‘read’ meant to ‘taste’, to ‘meditate’ on it meant to ‘ruminate’. Against this background, the writings of Isidore seem to appeal to the memory of the reader and his ability to meditate upon the text and, finally, to experience the taste of wisdom. Only the outermost level of texts was intended to inform the reader. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"Awe-Inspiring, in Truth, Are the Mysteries of the Church":Eucharistic Mystagogy and Moral Exhortation in the Preaching of St. John ChrysostomDaria SpezzanoWe entrust to You, loving Master, our whole life and hope, and we ask, pray, and entreat: make us worthy to partake of your heavenly and awesome Mysteries from this holy and spiritual Table with a clear conscience; for the remission of sins, forgiveness of transgressions, communion of the (...) Holy Spirit, inheritance of the kingdom of heaven, confidence before You, and not in judgment or condemnation.—Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom"Awe-inspiring, in truth, are the mysteries of the Church; awesome, in truth, her altar."1 St. John Chrysostom was a founding figure in the development of the Byzantine mystagogical tradition, not only because he is associated with the Divine Liturgy,2 but also because of his preaching on [End Page 413] the Eucharistic mysteries, woven throughout the scriptural exegesis of his liturgical homilies.3 The themes he sounded, in particular the continual exhortation to his hearers to be mindful and properly disposed for the terrible and awe-inspiring mysteries, would become part of the fabric of Byzantine liturgical spirituality. But Chrysostom's influence extends to the West as well, for instance to Thomas Aquinas, who, it is said, would rather have Chrysostom's homilies on Matthew than be lord of Paris,4 and who shares with Chrysostom the title of "Doctor of the Eucharist."5 While the promotion of reverence in liturgical celebration and the demands of social justice are sometimes perceived today as being in tension with each other, for Chrysostom they are inseparable. In accord with the Second Vatican Council's teaching in Sacrosanctum Concilium that the Eucharist is "the source and summit of Christian life," the Catechism of the Catholic Church chooses a quote from Chrysostom to instruct that "the Eucharist commits us to the poor."6 It does so with good reason. Chrysostom urgently and vividly preaches to his wealthy congregation that not only must they approach the altar with awe and holy fear, but they must care for the poor in order to receive the Eucharist worthily. Here his characteristic moral exhortations to almsgiving find their deepest source: without care for the poor, one eats and drinks the Eucharist, like Judas at the Last Supper, to one's own condemnation.Chrysostom's Eucharistic MystagogyChrysostom's preaching on the Eucharist is profoundly rooted in Scripture and shaped by his theological and pastoral concerns. Mystagogy, as Jean [End Page 414] Daniélou has pointed out, is an exegesis of the rites: "It consists of reading in the rites the mystery of Christ and contemplating under symbols the invisible reality."7 The mystagogy of the Greek Fathers is shaped by local traditions, as is their scriptural exegesis. While the distinction risks being overdrawn, Alexandrian mystagogy is characterized by anagogy, while Antiochene mystagogy—including Chrysostom's—by a focus on the relation of the liturgy to the historical events of Christ's earthly life.8 Unlike his contemporary Theodore of Mopsuestia, however, Chrysostom is not concerned to assign to each liturgical action a specific mimetic meaning. Chrysostom everywhere "reads in the rites the mystery of Christ," exemplifying Daniélou's observation that this mystery is the one object of the Christian faith, subsisting under different modes:It is prefigured in the Old Testament; it is accomplished historically in Christ's life on earth; it is contained in the mystery of the sacraments; it is lived mystically in souls; it is accomplished socially in the Church; it is fulfilled eschatologically in the heavenly kingdom.9For Chrysostom, the entire liturgy has a "mystery character," because it is "so much an anamnesis of the saving work of Christ and a revelation of heavenly reality that its earthly form is wholly irradiated by these aspects."10 Chrysostom uses the term "mystery" in relation not only to the sacraments, but more fundamentally to the entire economy of redemption, flowing from the Paschal mystery, in which they operate. The mystery is a secret except to faith; it expresses a relation between, on the one hand, a historic event of salvation history or a material element of the... (shrink)

This text aims at a multi-dimensional reflection on Erich Fromm’s conception of the human being. Starting from Marxist-Freudian sources of the philosopher’s thought, the authors show the fundamental ideas underlying his version of psychoanalysis. Next, Fromm’s view of the human being as a social being is discussed, referring to the concepts of unproductive and productive orientations. Another important dimension of Fromm’s thought that is discussed is the reflection on the nature and functions of the symbolic language (...) of the unconscious, which reveals to the human being both the best and the worst aspects of his or her personality. One of the most famous concepts of the American philosopher is also discussed — the distinction between the being mode and the having mode. The authors drawattention to the value Fromm placed on a life oriented towards the being mode. Finally, they remind us, following Fromm, that a human being turns towards himself in his or her dreams, going beyond all the schemes and concepts that bind his mind when he or she is awake. The understanding of oneself that comes from a deep reflection on the content and character of a dream can awaken in a person the recognition of previously unknown dimensions of his or her mind; from now on, he is not merely someone immersed in the reality of everyday life. Crossing the horizon of oneiric imagination, he or she becomes free, in the dream, and she experiences the freedom of being on waking. (shrink)

Theories of linguistic meaning have been a major influence in twentieth century philosophy. This is due, in part, to the assumption that meaning is the crucial and interesting thing about language. To know the meaning of an expression is to understand it, and since understanding is central to philosophy in many different ways, it should be no surprise that the notion of meaning has often taken center stage. The aim of this paper is to briefly explore some influential views (...) concerning linguistic meaning. The final objective will be to demonstrate some alternatives which are open to theory with respect to this notion,for there are those who have wanted to ban talk of meaning from serious scientific discourse. The point is that many of the disadvantages of traditional notions of meaning are avoidable¾in particular, they are avoidable along a path which starts from Frege and moves on via Tarski and Davidson. (shrink)

In “The Brokenness of Being,” Mari Ruti investigates the impact that trauma can have on being. Informed by her own experience of breast cancer, Ruti argues that there are some traumatic experiences that entirely change one’s symbolic coordinates. She calls these types of experiences benchmark traumas. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, Ruti boldly explores how encountering a benchmark trauma forced her to recognize the brokenness of her being. She theorizes that this recognition reveals the split in the (...) subject. Encountering this brokenness, as she calls it, at the heart of being can be completely debilitating. However, Ruti argues, there is a way to engage rather than repress this impossible reality. She theorizes that creativity is the one human expression that can grapple authentically with the split in the subject. To explore this idea, she collaborates with painter Dwight Smith. Smith’s twenty-two paintings respond to the benchmark trauma of the death of his twenty-two-year-old daughter. The twenty-two paintings are positioned throughout the manuscript and are in conversation with Ruti’s theory. Ruti is fascinated by both the paintings and Smith’s process, which is similar to her own. For Ruti and Smith, their creativity is how existential engagement takes shape. (shrink)

Consciousness6 carries the connotation of a state of consciousness . It is an emergent property of a gestalt phenomenon, namely the psychophysiological state of the organism . In this article, I extend my previous discussion of states of consciousness , embedding this within the wider perspective of both Gestalt psychology and psychoanalytic ego psychology. Gestalt notions, such as Prägnanz and microgenesis, are shown to be highly relevant to this theme. Natsoulas’ recent appraisal of my viewpoint has goaded me into reiterating (...) the argument for looking at a qualitative change in thought, characterizing the shift in consciousness6, as being a promising area for further development. This hypothesized change in mode of thinking is of a metaphoric—symbolic nature, what such authors as Hunt and Haskell would term symbolic cognition. I discuss the relationships among perceptual experience, symbolic cognition and state of consciousness, concluding with some comments on Natsoulas’ reservations. (shrink)

Appearing in the “Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam” as an undefined referent for the limits on freedom of expression in Islam, Shariah is still to be chased as an indefinable referent which restricts freedom of the expression in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran’s Press Law as well as Constitution unveil Shariah’s referent to be a person: the Jurist-Ruler around whom a cult of personality is legalized in terms of “Imamate” and around whom all the limits (...) on freedom of expression revolve. Interpretation of Shariah is not a solution but part of the problem in Iran. Such problem can be dealt in terms of three modes of self-expression which were invented by the Iranian Reformists to avoid self-censorship. The notion of master-signifier can be the key to unraveling the problem of self-referentiality in freedom of expression and its Reformist solution in Iran’s legal system. (shrink)

When we speak of language we usually use the concept of a particular language. In this sense the concept denoted with the word language may vary from one language to another. Real language (=the language spoken) on the contrary is the reality lived by speakers thus encompassing complex and multifarious activities. Depending on the language spoken, the modes of thinking, modes of being in the conception of things, and systems of beliefs transmitted by means of particular languages, denote the (...) living reality of language with different grammatical categories. The concept “language” is expressed sometimes with a noun, thus denoting something existing in it; sometimes with a verb, thus denoting an action or an activity; and sometimes with an adverb, thus denoting the mode of an activity. The reality or degree of reality implicit in these grammatical categories involves a particular mode of thinking, prompted with a particular mode of being in the conception of things. Because of this it is necessary to distinguish the concept of language as something different from the reality of language. But first of all it is necessary to determine the reality or degree of reality of both the reality lived by speakers and the thing usually conceived of as language or a language. (shrink)

My aim in this dissertation is threefold. First I explore Cassirer's thesis that all human expression and representation is symbolic. Human life unfolds in the interplay of physical necessity and self-determination. In life we continually integrate and balance material and non-material components. The symbolic function is the vehicle whereby we interweave these two dimensions. To accomplish this task and to show why human expression and representation is symbolic, I trace Cassirer's conception of the symbolic (...) function to Kant's distinction between symbols and schemata. I then develop Cassirer's deviation from Kant, which led to his own formulation of the concept of the symbolic function and his views on objectifying experience. ;The second aim of this work addresses the implications of the symbolic function for objectifying human experience. Though objects may indeed exist independently of us, we cannot express or represent what there is independently of our human modes of expression--our symbolic forms. Objects are never presented directly but are always known indirectly through some form of expression. This constraint stems from our nature as human subjects and is therefore "subjectively necessary" for objectifying human experience. This implies that truth as well as beauty cannot be addressed independently of the modality through which it is expressed and represented. ;Finally, I have one more aim in view. Cassirer was a "cultural activist" who grappled with the source of the creative human potential. Far too often in contemporary times we impose psychic and spiritual binds on ourselves that stifle our creative imagination and reduce us to the level of material objects. Cassirer speaks to the productive activity of the human imagination which can function through any modality to combat the spiritual vacuum of contemporary culture. This source of creative freedom does not hover in an abstract realm oblivious to the irrational tendencies of human beings, but is grounded in the materials of daily life. It enables us to objectify human experience through any form of expression by means of the symbolic function. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Politics and Peace Tobin Siebers University ofMichigan To Perpetual Peace. Whether this satirical inscription on a certain Dutch shopkeeper's sign, on which a graveyard was painted, holds for men in general, or especially for heads ofstate who can never get enough of war, or perhaps only for the philosophers who dream this sweet dream, is not for us to decide. However, the author of this essay does set out (...) one condition.... The practical politician must not claim, in the event of a dispute with a theorist, to detect some danger to the nation in those views that the political theorist expresses openly and without ulterior motive.... By this clausula salvatoria, the author ofthis essay will regard himselfto be expressly protected in the best way possible from all malicious interpretation. (Immanuel Kant, Preface to Perpetual Peace) My goal is to work my way back to Kant's defensive preface to Perpetual Peace, the prophetic essay situated by many at the origin ofmodern conceptions ofpeace and international diplomacy. Suffice it to say for the moment that the following reflections are intended to reveal the epitaph in Kant's epigraph—the eternal repose residing in perpetual peace. Imagining relation One of the master ideas to come down to us from the eighteenth century holds that the imagination is central to all relations between self and other, however one might designate this otherness. The imagination is central to Adam Smith's idea of sympathy, and Kant uses it as a bridge to 86Tobin Siebers unify his critical philosophy. Whether referring to objects or other people, we require a faculty by which to extend understanding to them, and this faculty continues even today to be described as imaginative. Postmodern theorists, for example, conceive of human relations in terms of identity politics, but at the core of identification is the power to imagine, be it the power to sympathize or to conceive of a party different from oneself. In effect, then, relation is itself a function of the imagination. Moreover, no relation, I want to claim, exists for long that cannot be well imagined, for which some symbolic object or idea cannot be found. The four dominant modes of relation are religion, aesthetics, ethics, and politics.1 They deserve to be called modes insofar as they name different others to which the self (or another principal) may relate imaginatively. Religion is about the relation of goodness between subject and god called the sublime. Often nature, fate, or providence as personified forces or overarching systems are also called sublime. Aesthetics is about the relation of goodness between subject and object called beauty. Ethics is about the relation of goodness between subjects called character or virtue. Finally, politics is about the relation ofgoodness between communities called peace. Peace may seem at first glance to be an odd choice to name the relation of goodness in politics. A more obvious candidate might be the idea of utopia. But utopia comes into being as a concept only with Thomas More's treatise in 1516, and this late invention seems to exclude its being considered as the privileged good of politics. Moreover, the traditional opposition between ethics and politics exposes the unfitness ofutopia as a candidate for the political good. Ethics and politics are often at war because ethics does not want to sacrifice even one person to improve the relations among other people. Ethics strives for a wholly inclusive community, but it defines this community as a collection of autonomous individuals having value in themselves only as ends and never as means to an end. If ethics aims at a wholly inclusive community of individuals, then "utopia" may be described by rights as an ethical concept, regardless ofthe fact that Utopian desire seems to stress the wrong perspective on this community, coming as it does from the collective rather than the individual point of view. The ethical dimension of the Utopian is made obvious by the realization that a 1 I will not discuss cognition, although it is surely dominant, because its objects are various, whereas the modes ofrelation of interest to me here tend to represent their objects as being of a certain kind. Politics and Peace87 utopia... (shrink)

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neuro-developmental condition, which requires a multi-disciplinary matrix of treatments, including functional, educational, and emotional interventions. The latter mode of treatment entails particular difficulties, inasmuch as the core deficits of this condition seem to challenge the very premises of traditional psychotherapy. Reciprocity, verbal, and symbolic expression and inter-subjective dynamics are often difficult to attain with clients diagnosed with ASD, and emotional treatment thus often turns out to be a frustrating process, which may (...) well elicit questions as to the efficacy of psychotherapeutic emotional interventions. These core challenges, described in the literature, become particularly acute in view of the increasing number of clients diagnosed on the autistic spectrum in recent years, and the growing need for qualified therapists who have trained for working specifically with this condition. It seems, therefore, that it is high time for systematic research into the lived experience of therapists working with these clients in order to attain a better clinical and theoretical understanding of the condition itself and broaden the range of effective interventions. This study, informed by a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach which guided both the collection of data and its subsequent analysis, aims to address these issues by exploring the particular challenges faced by therapists in this field, the questions that come up in the process, modes of personal and professional coping, and the insights elicited by the therapeutic encounter. The research consisted of in-depth interviews with 28 practicing therapists from a broad range of clinical orientations, including dance/movement, arts, music, and drama therapists, clinical psychologists, and clinical social workers. The essential themes that emerged from the participants’ responses and the analysis of the findings lend support to theoretical and developmental approaches, which focus on the primacy and the foundational role of the concrete body in inter-subjective relationships and in the therapeutic process, and indicate the potential efficacy of somatic and kinetic interventions. The clinical implications of this study are thus highly relevant to the training and support of therapists working with ASD, who should be encouraged to develop greater receptivity to non-verbal modes of interaction in the therapeutic process. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Everyday Poetics: Logic, Love, and Ethics by Brett BourbonKatie PelkeyEveryday Poetics: Logic, Love, and Ethics by Brett Bourbon; 200 pp. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.In Everyday Poetics: Logic, Love, and Ethics, Brett Bourbon probes the nature of poetry and its centrality in our everyday lives, working from the ordinary-language philosophical framework associated with Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, W. V. O. Quine, and Stanley Cavell. Bourbon's ideas contribute new (...) dimensions to the elusive concept of poetry and pivots the reader's attention inward: how can we recognize poetry in our day-to-day and why should we? At sentence level, his claims are clear and compelling to readers across disciplines with varying knowledge of philosophy and poetry. This book is thus addressed to "poets, literary scholars, philosophers, and students of religion, and anyone who cares about the ethics of everyday life, about the surprises that punctuate and give our lives form" (p. ix).Poems themselves are such "events of form," Bourbon emphasizes, which live among us and need not be constituted by words. Wordless poems can be uncovered and embraced through the development of a "poetic vulnerability" to ordinary experiences that are not necessarily wedded to one's aesthetic reaction. Bourbon designates the alphabet as one such example of what he calls a "primal everyday poem"; the alphabet is wordless and consists of a patterned order whose mere form does not encompass its meaning. The ordinary expression "I love you" also falls under this classification; the phrase is a performative poem whose intricate connotation is simplified by common language, yet is not the equivalent of its mere words. Bourbon asserts that, like the phrase "I love you," poems of the everyday cannot be reduced to mere language, conditions, or creative modes.Of the ineffable nature of poetry, Bourbon claims, "Poetry, like death, is that which we can only know by analogy—by examples—but it has a scope beyond all our examples" (p. 108). In terms of examples, he draws from poignant personal experiences to reinforce his arguments and provide insight into his keen sensibility. In chapter 1 ("Poems of the Everyday"), Bourbon recounts his own dismissal as a young boy of poetry's worthiness until one day while watching an old film, he in fact was struck by the phrase "I love you." This ordinary phrase allowed him to reconsider the parameters of what constitutes poetry and acknowledge the dichotomy of the phrase's formal power constituted by trivial symbols.Chapter 4 ("Epithalamion") is also rooted in personal experience. Bourbon opens with the flat assertion, "I have never liked weddings" (p. 43), but he notes a difference between a "marriage of forms" and "marriage of intimacy and stability": his distaste is for the former. He believes that a successful marriage can become a poem of the everyday—an event of power and "linguistic surrogacy"—where the event itself fosters more meaning than the words alone [End Page 475] can carry. Marriage can be a poem of discovery that arises from the action of learning what it means to love. But in the objects of the wedding and all its trite, heart-shaped symbols, Bourbon remarks, no poems are to be found.Bourbon dedicates chapter 5 ("Is a Poem the Same as Its Words?") to his claim that what a poem is cannot be bound by its words entirely or by meaning alone. If one finds each line of a poem intelligible, that does not indicate that the poem's meaning is consequentially understood. Conversely, a reader may not know a poem's meaning with complete certainty; what is said may not illuminate what is meant. In Bourbon's explanation of the sentence as a model for how particular words construct a poem, he says that one must determine how such a sentence-poem would be meaningful through our own reading. He claims that a poem is more than its words and cannot be simplified into sets of sentences or phrases. "A poem, if it is a sentence, is always more than that sentence; otherwise, a poem would not be a poem but a sentence" (p. 67).Bourbon's latest publication challenges traditional, long... (shrink)

What is it for two people to think of an object, natural kind or other entity under the same mode of presentation (MOP)? This has seemed a particularly difficult question for advocates of the Mental Files approach, the Language of Thought, or other ‘atomistic’ theories. In this paper I propose a simple answer. I first argue that, by parallel with the synchronic intrapersonal case, the sharing of a MOP should involve a certain kind of epistemic transparency between the token (...) thoughts of the two thinkers. I then explain how shared words help bring about this transparency. Finally, I show how this account can be extended for thoughts expressed using demonstratives or indexicals. (shrink)

In response to the unsettled state of modern intellectual history, a model is offered for categorizing its subject matter. Two challenges to intellectual history are first examined: the relation of intellectual to social history and the relation of intellectual history to other disciplines which purport to deal with thought. The model proposed breaks down the "ideas" of intellectual historians into two sorts: 1) systems, complex bodies of thought related in a coherent fashion; and 2) embodiments, a way of fixating or (...) condensing a complex of meanings into a single expression. Each entails a distinct mode of communication, the former by processes of education or socialization, the latter by single symbols or slogans. The distinction between systems and embodiments is clarified by comparison to the abstract-concrete and the discursive-mythical thought distinctions. The "ideas" of intellectual history should ideally include both systems and embodiments as their components, as in the case of the Lutheran Reformation and the French Revolution. By showing their relation to other disciplines, these distinctions can be seen to demarcate the space in which intellectual history can operate. (shrink)

Existence as reflected in natural language is not a univocal notion, but divides into different modes of being, such as existence (as, roughly, endurance) and occurrence. One aim of the paper is to distinguish sharply between abstract artifacts and non-existent objects (e.g., plans vs. planned events that fail to occur); another is to argue for validity as a mode of being distinct from existence, as well as for corresponding distinctions among non-being.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 126.3 (2005) 461-463 [Access article in PDF] Graham Zanker. Modes of Viewing in Hellenistic Poetry and Art. Wisconsin Studies in Classics. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. xiv + 223 pp. 34 black-and-white ills. Cloth, $39.95. The underlying contention here is that if a Hellenistic poetic description of a person, an animal, the weather, a scene, or an objet d'art adopts a particular way (...) of viewing, we have independent evidence for the habits of viewing that Hellenistic people would have brought to their contemplation of representational art. (4) So Graham Zanker summarizes the thesis of his new book, the most extensive and detailed account of Hellenistic visuality yet published. This is a carefully worded sentence. Zanker's enumeration of poetic descriptions of "a person, an animal, the weather, a scene or an objet d'art" deliberately exemplifies what he takes to be the scope of ekphrasis and hence reproves those who have taken ekphrasis more narrowly as the description of works of art (cf. 6–10). The target of this disapproval turns out to be especially Simon Goldhill, whom he attacks at 82–83 and in a long endnote (184–85, n. 26). Yet the care to be precise in matters of literary definition goes with such large, even lax, social and cultural generalizations as "Hellenistic people" and "representational art." What Zanker must mean by those whose contemplation of art can be evoked through poetic descriptions is a highly literate and educated social elite—perhaps the court itself—that may have played (Marie-Antoinette-like) at shepherds and fishermen (as in the cup of Theocritus' first Idyll) but surely did so from a much narrower social perspective than the totalizing generalism of "Hellenistic people." The weapon of precision is a dangerous one to use, when it may be turned back on the user.There are, moreover, numerous problems with both the notion of "independent evidence" and that of "habits of viewing." While the literary evidence of ekphrasis (not only in poetry) certainly encompasses viewing, its specially wrought and often spectacular cleverness may signal the exceptional, even the perverse, as much as (or more than) the habitual. Does a revolutionary statue like the Aphrodite of Cnidos (not actually Hellenistic, but nonetheless rightly incorporated at some length in Zanker's book) reflect or elicit the habitual gaze? In what sense? And, if so, when? Was the gaze it enticed at its moment of creation "habitual," or did that gaze only become "habitual" in its numerous—within our surviving material archive of examples, mainly Roman-period—versions and replications? More difficult still is "independent evidence." I am not really sure what that could be in a topic created from critical and interpretative explications of complex images and texts that do not themselves draw explicit or simple conclusions about viewing (or anything) beyond what readers may impute to them. How they may collectively constitute evidence about viewing can only come about as the result of argument. I think a compelling argument based on the critical interpretation of images and texts may be taken as evidence, but is that "independent evidence?" What does this mean? And such a complex argument is a very different kind of evidence from what Zanker seems to mean by any particular viewpoint we may find expressed in an ekphrasis. [End Page 461]Again, I do not think it follows that the evidence for viewing we may entice from a poetic description of a person, an animal, or the weather need necessarily be related to the contemplation of a work of art. Indeed, Zanker's use of the term contemplation (with its Kantian overtones) appears to indicate a specifically aesthetic zone of response. Certainly the Hellenistic period explicitly elevated creativity in the visual arts to a new canonical status with its creation of art-historical narratives and histories devolving on the rise of naturalism and on the genius of particular hallowed artists who are preserved for us by the likes of Quintilian and Pliny. That special aestheticism, marked in the choice of works of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Paradox of Kandinsky's Abstract RepresentationKenneth BerryThere is a paradox in the relationship between Kandinsky's use of the terms, "abstract" and "concrete," which is presented in the expression, "Kandinsky's abstract representation." Thisexpression, while being apparently contradictory, may point to a feature underpinning Kandinsky's art, which is pivotal to a proper experience of his work, just as, in Christopher Middleton's view, a poetic language may be pivotal to (...) the formation of cultures.1 Art and cultural artifacts are vital to aesthetic experience and aesthetic education, and both the language of art and other languages are instrumental to this end. However, how may Kandinsky's mature abstraction, being in essence objectless, have any claim to representation, and consequently the higher cultural goals of aesthetic expression and the aesthetic enrichment of society?According to Thomas M. Messer, the position of centrality that Kandinsky has assumed in our understanding of modern art is largely due to his having brought to bear on his art, an instinctive awareness of what constituted the central aesthetic issues of his era.2 Kandinsky's writings in Concerning the Spiritual in Art elaborate on his aesthetic theories, and, in particular, [End Page 99] present the view that paintings should be looked at as a graphic representation of a mood rather than as a representation of objects. Messer observes that, for Kandinsky, abstraction, defined as a mode of painting extending beyond the depiction of recognizable objects, having gradually stripped itself of mimetic vestiges, thus becomes paramount. Michael Carter has similarly pointed out that with the pure forms of absolute abstraction, the non-objective colors and shapes of Kandinsky's paintings were regarded as distillations of the aesthetic properties of the artistic sign3 — separable from any referential aspect of art.4 This aesthetic aspect of Kandinsky's work, which became known as nonfigurative, nonobjective, or nonrepresentational,goes along with the cultural — and, as sculptor Anish Kapoor has remarked, "in the deepest, deepest depths of human history the cultural has always been a motivator of people," and has the power to transform society through finding visual equivalents for an emotional language.5Much has been written about Kandinsky's use of color, but perhaps the primary innovation that he made, as in the case of Barnett Newman, was in the field of drawing. Kandinsky was influenced by Gauguin's idea that drawing was an abstraction from memory after nature, just as Gauguin had been affected by the simplified contours and flattened forms of Puvis de Chavannes. Drawing did not come so easily to Kandinsky as color — he had to work harder at drawing, but in his early improvisations, forms and their outlines as graphic symbols came welling up from the unconscious, and eidetic motifs only had to be copied — almost as the art of calligraphy. Kandinsky's "organic" drawing developed as an urge to nonnaturalistic impulses, and during the period of Point and Line to Plane became almost a grammar of form, saved from mere pedantry by the living forces or visual tensions that made various kinds of line operate not just as contours but as dynamic or restful elements within themselves. In 1913, Kandinsky wrote in his "Reminiscences" that, "painting is a thundering collision of different worlds, intended to create a new world in, and from, their struggles with one another, a new world which is the work of art."6 It is clear from this that the Modernist work of art was intended to be a "new world" operating according to its own universal aesthetic laws.Kandinsky is not just a painter; he is also a visual poet. Poetry, according to Tony Curtis, involves the expression of the intensification of experience — the elevation of banal facts of life into something beyond the merely prosaic — something unique and perceptively heightened.7 It involves both imagination and poetic license to explore both ambiguity and paradox. As Scottish poet Norman MacCaig observed, poetry renders the ordinary extraordinary, seeing the unfamiliar in the familiar.8 Creative analogical thinking such as evinced in Kandinsky's art, often involves breaking free of a clichéd representation.Malcolm Budd has remarked that, in its most exclusive sense, a work... (shrink)

In this article we explore the semantic category of graduation, specifically force, which builds the symbolic dimension of time in historical discourses. Our aim is to provide a more refined and extensive theoretical framework to analyse the symbolic construction of time in historical discourses – one that allows us to take into consideration how social, political and economic processes and events are represented and valued in historical discourses. We propose that this symbolic ‘scenification’ of time is constructed (...) in the discourse by a combination and accumulation of congruent and metaphorical lexico-grammatical resources. In this manner, meanings of quantification of time as duration and sequencing tend to be expressed in a more congruent way, whereas meanings of intensification of time as accelerating, deepening and expectation tend to be expressed in a more metaphorical manner by means of processes and nominalizations. The chronological dimension of time imbricates the symbolic dimension in a way that allows historians and sociologists to legitimate particular historical memories of the recent Chilean past. (shrink)

Humans and animals communicate in various non-linguistic modes of communication. This multi-channelled form of communication seems to be characteristic of humans, and involves facial expression, calls/gestures, music and dance, as well as symbolic language; and seems likely to depend, in part, on the psychological mechanisms of projection and projective identification. This article attempts to reflect on the relation between these evolved forms of human communication, both linguistic and non-verbal, in terms of the unconscious as discovered by Freud.

Traditional Chinese landscape painting serves as a profound cultural and spiritual expression, reflecting the Chinese people's reverence for nature through symbolic representation, aesthetic philosophy, and artistic craftsmanship. Since its emergence during the Tang Dynasty, landscape painting evolved into a distinct art form characterized by spiritual contemplation and cultural symbolism. Its development through the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties led to the establishment of northern and southern schools, each with its unique techniques and philosophical underpinnings. In modern society, (...) technological advancements and the influence of Western art have posed new challenges and opportunities for landscape painting. This study explores the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of landscape elements in traditional Chinese art while examining innovative techniques that merge classical aesthetics with modern artistic expressions. Through analyzing the works of key landscape painters, the study highlights advancements in thematic representation, stylistic innovation, and symbolic meaning, offering insights into how traditional landscape painting can be revitalized in contemporary art while preserving its cultural and spiritual heritage. (shrink)

Modes-of-being figure centrally in Heidegger's masterwork Being and Time. Testimony to this is Heidegger's characterisation of two of his most celebrated enquiries—the Existential analytic and the Zeug analysis—as investigations into the respective modes-of-being of the entities concerned. Yet despite the importance of this concept, commentators disagree widely about what a mode-of-being is. In this paper, I systematically outline and defend a novel and exegetically grounded interpretation of this concept. Strongly opposed to Kantian readings, such as (...) those advocated by Taylor Carman and Cristina Lafont, I interpret a mode-of-being as a universal that defines a district —that is, a natural class of entities that ought to be conceptualised in a special way. As such, every mode-of-being plays an important metaphysical and epistemic role: serving both to unify a natural class of a high degree of generality and as the interpretandum of an act yielding the basic-concepts pertaining to the entities therein. In explicating and arguing for this interpretation, I attribute a characteristically Aristotelian philosophical position to the early Heidegger, encompassing both metaphysical and epistemological realism and a conceptualist theory of universals. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on picture theory, which is sometimes spoken of as a theory of the proposition. By a proposition, Wittgenstein like Frege means something that determines its sense by means of a correlation between the mode of combination of its constituent symbols and the structure of its sense. It has been an orthodoxy amongst Tractatus interpreters, and continues to be such in the wider philosophical community, that Wittgenstein follows the Russell in offering a correspondence theory of truth. The (...) expression of a Tractarian fact provides that fact's mode of combination, and from here there can be no further question as to the ontological types of its constituents. Tractarian facts, it is however added, are not truth conditions but items whose existence explains the obtaining of truth conditions: a Tractarian atomic fact is not a truth condition but a truthmaker. (shrink)

RésuméLa théorie des expressions incomplétes dans Principia Mathematica, se fonde sur le principe déja appliqué par Russell dans “On Denoting”, selon lequel il est souhaitable dans certains cas, ?on;établir le statut syntaxique des expressions catégorématiques. Grâce à la théorie intensionnelle ramifyée des types, les expressions incomplétes réféientiellement pourront être logiquement caractérisées par un mode de dérivation principalement basé sur la quantification non‐objectuelle. Ľintroduction des classes cependant, n'est en aucune façon reliée à ce mode intensionnel de dérivation; il en (...) résulte qu'elles fonctionnent en réalité dans ce contexte comme des expressions pourvues de dénotation et ce n'est que par une analogie grammaticale que Russell peut les comparer, du point de vue de leur élimination, aux expressions incomplétes de Principia Mathematica.SummaryThe theory of incomplete symbols in Principia Mathematica is founded on the principle already applied by Russell in “On Denoting“ that it is desirable in certain cases, to establish the syntactical status of “categorematic” expressions. Thanks to the intensional ramified theory of types, the referentially incomplete expressions could be logically caracterised by a mode of derivation primarily based on non‐objectual quantification. The introduction of classes, however, is by no way linked to that intensional mode of derivation; as a result, they function, in that context, like denotative expressions and it is only by a “grammatical” analogy that Russell can compare them, as regards their elimination, to the incomplete symbols in Principia Mathematica.ZusammenfassungDie Theorie der unvollstandigen Symbole in den Principia Mathematica gründet auf dem von Russell schon in “On Denoting” angewendeten Prinzip, wonach es in gewissen Fällen wün‐schenswert ist, den syntaktischen Status kategorematischer Ausdrücke festzulegen. Aufgrund der intensionalen verzweigten Typentheorie könnte man die referentiell unvollständigen Ausdrücke logisch durch eine im wesentlichen auf die nicht objektuelle Quantifi‐kation abstellende Ableitungsart charakterisieren. Die Einführung der Klassen dagegen hüngt keineswegs von dieser intensionalen Ableitungsart ab; daraus geht hervor, dass sie in diesem Kontext wie denotative Ausdrücke funktionieren, und es gelingt Russell nur vermittels einer grammatische Analogie, sie hinsichtlich ihrer Elimination mit den unvollständigen Symbolen der Principia Mathematica zu vergleichen. (shrink)

Russell takes his paper ?On denoting? to have achieved the repudiation of the theory of denoting concepts and Frege?s theory of sense, and the invention of the notion of incomplete symbols.This means that Russell attempts to solve the set theoretic and semantic paradoxes without making use of a theory of sense.Instead, his strategy is to revise his logical ontology by arguing that certain symbols should be treated as incomplete.In constructing such arguments Russell, at various points, makes use of epistemological and (...) metaphysical considerations.These arguments do not form themselves into a systemic set of considerations to be used in appraising a logical system.Finally, the vicious circle principle is argued for on the basis of considerations, which are presumed evident, about the nature of propositional functions.The stringency of this principle is a basic problem for the system of Principia mathematica.However, even given the terms of the argument, ?On denoting? does not offer a complete repudiation of the notion of sense.This allows the possibility of retaining some of the insights of Principia mathematica whilst rejecting the stringency of the vicious circle principle.The basis of such a system is the theory of sense. (shrink)