In her response to my "Seeing as a Non-Experiental Mental State: The Case from Synesthesia and Visual Imagery" Ophelia Deroy presents an argument for an interesting new account of synesthesia. On this account, synesthesia can be thought of as "a perceptual state (e.g. of a letter)" that is "changed or enriched by the incorporation of a conscious mental image (e.g. a color)." I reply that while this is a plausible account of some types of synesthesia, some forms cannot be (...) accounted for this way. (shrink)

Number-form synesthetes consciously experience numbers in spatially-defined locations. For non-synesthete individuals, a similar association of numbers and space appears in the form of an implicit mental number line as signified by the distance effect–reaction time decreases as the numerical distance between compared numbers increases. In the current experiment, three number-form synesthetes and two different non-synesthete control groups performed a number comparison task. Synesthete participants exhibited a sizeable distance effect only when presented numbers were congruent with their number-form. In contrast, the (...) controls exhibited a distance effect regardless of congruency or presentation type. The findings suggest that: number-form synesthesia impairs the ability to represent numbers in a flexible manner according to task demands; number-form synesthesia is a genuine tangible experience, triggered involuntarily; and the classic mental number line can be more pliable than previously thought and appears to be independent of cultural-lingo direction. (shrink)

“Latin America”, for the ecopolitical approach, could be appropriate as the proper name of the ecological disaster, even as its first person: the environmental catastrophe, by means of “Latin America”, would say “I”. Genealogically, and as part of the so-called “Third World”, it would delimit the frontiers where the disastrous takes place “naturally”. But “Latin America”, from the philosophical perspective, has also been the _locus_ par excellence to think about the vegetal and the indigenous. This article, driven by the current (...) relevance of these two concepts, rereads the work of Rodolfo Kusch, one of the key figures of the so-called _Pensamiento latinoamericano_, and unveils not only one of the most original reflections on “plant metaphysics” and the “indigenous thought” but also the contours of a new or alternative philosophical subject: a thinking “we”. Drawing on Kusch’s indications, this text traces “an-other us” on the discursive level and develops the fundamental Kuschean intuition according to which such “we” has a synesthetic nature. From there, this article points to the conceptual reconfigurations of the vegetal and the indigenous by M. Marder and E. Viveiros de Castro to indicate in them the need to experiment, before and in the face of disaster, an-other “us” by/in thinking. (shrink)

Jones and Coleman are among a handful of otherwise normal as a child and the number 5 was red and 6 was green. This the- people who have synesthesia. They experience the ordinary ory does not answer why only some people retain such vivid world in extraordinary ways and seem to inhabit a mysterious sensory memories, however. You might _think _of cold when you no-man’s-land between fantasy and reality. For them the sens- look at a picture of an ice cube, (...) but you probably do not feel es—touch, taste, hearing, vision and smell—get mixed up in- cold, no matter how many encounters you may have had with stead of remaining separate. ice and snow during your youth. Modern scientists have known about synesthesia since Another prevalent idea is that synesthetes are merely being 1880, when Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, pub- metaphorical when they describe the note C flat as “red” or say lished a paper in _Nature _on the phenomenon. But most have that chicken tastes “pointy”—just as you and I might speak of brushed it aside as fakery, an artifact of drug use (LSD and a “loud” shirt or “sharp” cheddar cheese. Our ordinary lan- mescaline can produce similar effects) or a mere curiosity. guage is replete with such sense-related metaphors, and perhaps About four years ago, however, we and others began to un- synesthetes are just especially gifted in this regard. cover brain processes that could account for synesthesia. Along We began trying to find out whether synesthesia is a gen- the way, we also found new clues to some of the most mysteri- uine sensory experience in 1999. This deceptively simple ques- ous aspects of the human mind, such as the emergence of ab- tion had plagued researchers in this field for decades. One nat- stract thought, metaphor and perhaps even language. ural approach is to start by asking the subjects outright: “Is this A common explanation of synesthesia is that the affected just a memory, or do you actually see the color as if it were right people are simply experiencing childhood memories and asso- in front of you?” When we tried asking this question, we did ciations.. (shrink)

The argument from contradictory contents presented here is based directly on observations about the content of experience. It claims that experience content, if conceptual, allows for contradictions within one and the same content. There are at least two examples of this, the waterfall illusion and the visual experiences of some grapheme-color synesthetes. However, due to a Fregean principle of content individuation, no conceptual contents are contradictory. So experience content is nonconceptual. I motivate a particular version of the argument and defend (...) it against two central objections: First, the objection that there is more than one content involved in apparently self-contradictory experiences and second, the claim that conceptual contents are sometimes contradictory, as is true of some desires. In reaction to the second objection, I argue that we need an explanation of why subjects are not irrational if they do not revise their self-contradictory perceptual experiences, and that the conceptualist has no good account of this. For on his view, just as in thought, conceptual abilities are involved in experience and we are dealing with the same Fregean propositional contents. By contrast, nonconceptualism provides such an explanation, for no conceptual abilities are involved in experience itself, and scenario content is not the kind of content that can be revised under rational pressure. (shrink)

Deeply informed by jazz as music and sociality, Fumi Okiji explores black movement of thought as marked by a failure to be adequately disturbed by contradiction. The tarrying with the negative so crucial to European critical theory cannot quite account for the exorbitance characteristic of black thought. This is an orientation that allows for an oversubscription of intention, sense, and logic, against the parsimony prized by the dialectical form. Attending to the black immoderation that registers as nonsense or (...) deafening feedback from the perspective of European thought, Okiji tunes in to moments ranging from the Haitian revolutionary forces' singing of "La Marseillaise" to Cecil Taylor's synesthetic poetics to the aporetic mien of the orisha Esu. She brings our attention to a galaxy of intimacies that flash up with such improvisatory and untimely thought. Extending the encounter between black study, Frankfurt School critical theory, and sound studies developed in Jazz as Critique, and drawing Yoruba aesthetics into this cluster, On Black Exorbitance is both a statement of non-citizenry and a preparation for practices of intoxication. (shrink)

This book presents a critical analysis of sense-making practices through an exploration of acoustic, creative, and artistic spaces. It studies how local cultures of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch are impacted by global discourses and media, such as television, popular music, digital media, and literature. The authors look at sense-making practices and spatial discourses through an interconnected discussion on thought and experience that seeks to present a multidimensional cartography of the global, the local, and the glocal, to closely (...) analyze the phenomenon of globalization. The volume is an investigation of the possibilities of alternate, sustainable modes of being and existing in a world which requires a unified, ethical, biopolitical worldview that challenges the disparity of its fragments while speculating on their synesthetic conditionality. A unique contribution, the book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of English literature, media studies, cultural studies, literary cultures, post-colonial studies, globalization studies, philosophy, critical theory, sociology, and social anthropology. (shrink)

When I was seven years old I discovered that I had been seeing the world differently from other people. My senses were joined. I was a synesthete. Over the years, I learned quite a bit about my synesthesia, but I was surprised in 2013 when I suddenly began to have another kind of vision, hypnagogic images. At first, I thought these new visions were part of my synesthesia, that I was seeing a new form, one I didn’t have a (...) name for. But synesthesia needs a trigger, a trigger that causes us to see what we see. This form did not have a trigger, and that concerned me. In this paper I will explore the visual similarities and differences between my synesthetic photisms and my hypnagogic visions. I will compare the triggers or lack thereof, where I see the images, the ways in which the shapes I see appear, their colors, and their commonalities. I will discuss how the hypnagogic visions have changed, along with the fact that now both synesthetic and hypnagogic visions occur during the same experience, and that I have found other synesthetes who also have both synesthesia and hypnagogia. À l’âge de sept ans j’ai découvert que je voyais le monde différemment des autres. Mes sens étaient reliés. J’étais une synesthète. Avec les années, j’ai beaucoup appris sur ma synesthésie mais j’ai été surprise en 2013 quand soudain j’ai commencé à voir une autre sorte de vision, des images hypnagogiques. Au début j’ai pensé que ces nouvelles visions faisaient partie de ma synesthésie, que j’en voyais une nouvelle forme, dont j’ignorais le nom. J’ai commencé à être préoccupée par cette forme qui n’avait pas de déclencheur. Dans cet article j’explorerai les similarités visuelles et les différences entre mes photismes synesthétiques et mes visions hypnagogiques. Je comparerai les déclencheurs ou leur absence, les espaces où je vois les images et de quelles manières apparaissent les formes que je vois, leurs couleurs et leurs points communs. J’examinerai comment changeaient les visions hypnagogiques et le fait que je vois des visions à la fois synesthésiques et hypnagogiques se produire dans la même expérience, et que j’ai trouvé d’autres synesthètes qui eux aussi ont à la fois la synesthésie et l’hypnagogie. (shrink)

In the modern period, the most original and influential theories about law and politics were developed in connection with a set of far-reaching, interrelated questions about the definition of law, the purpose of law, the relationship between law and morality, and the existence of natural law and natural rights. In this entry I summarize the contributions of Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu; William Blackstone; Jeremy Bentham; and Immanuel Kant as exemplars of the history of modern (...) thought on law and politics. (shrink)

In the last two centuries, our world would have been a safer place if philosophers such as Rousseau, Marx, and Nietzsche had not given intellectual encouragement to the radical ideologies of Jacobins, Stalinists, and fascists. Maybe the world would have been better off, from the standpoint of sound practice, if philosophers had engaged in only modest, decent theory, as did John Stuart Mill. Yet, as Ronald Beiner contends, the point of theory is not to think safe thoughts; the point is (...) to open intellectual horizons. In Philosophy in a Time of Lost Spirit, Beiner reflects on the dualism of theory and practice. The purpose of the theorist is not to offer sensible guidance on the conduct of social life but to test the boundaries of our vision of social order. Whereas the liberal citizen should embody the practical virtues of prudence and moderation, the theorist should be radical, probing, and immoderate. Looking back at the liberal-communitarian debate of the 1980s, Beiner recognizes that the antidote to our spiritless times lies neither in the embrace of community over individualism nor of individualism over community: both individual and community need to be submitted to radical questioning. It is by exposing ourselves to the challenge of fearless thinking encountered at the philosophical extremities that we are most likely to understand our own world at a deeper level. In this collection of essays and reviews, Ronald Beiner helps us to think critically about the thought-worlds of our foremost contemporary thinkers, including Hannah Arendt, Allan Bloom, Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer, J¦rgen Habermas, Will Kymlicka, Christopher Lasch, Richard Rorty, Judith Shklar, Leo Strauss, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer. (shrink)

In this paper, I suggest an outline of a new interpretation of core issues in Spinoza’s metaphysics and philosophy of mind. I argue for three major theses. (1) In the first part of the paper I show that the celebrated Spinozistic doctrine commonly termed “the doctrine of parallelism” is in fact a confusion of two separate and independent doctrines of parallelism. Hence, I argue that our current understanding of Spinoza’s metaphysics and philosophy of mind is fundamentally flawed. (2) The clarification (...) and setting apart of the two doctrines will also put us in a position to present my second major thesis and address one of the more interesting and enduring problems in Spinoza’s metaphysics: how can the attribute of thought be, on the one hand, isomorphic with any other attribute, and yet, on the other hand, be isomorphic with God himself, who has infinitely many attributes? In the second part of the paper, I present Spinoza’s solution to this problem. I argue that the number and order of modes is the same in all attributes. Yet, modes of Thought, unlike modes of any other attribute, have an infinitely-faceted internal structure so that one and the same idea represents infinitely many modes by having infinitely many facets (or aspects). (3) This new understanding of the inner structure of ideas in Spinoza will lead us to my third thesis in which I explain and solve another old riddle in Spinoza’s metaphysics: his insistence on the impossibility of the human mind knowing any of God’s infinite attributes other than Thought and Extension. In the third part, I show some of the major ramifications of my new interpretation and respond to some important objections. In my conclusion I discuss the philosophical importance of my interpretation. I explain why Spinoza could not embrace reductive idealism in spite of the preeminence he grants to the attribute of Thought. I argue that Spinoza is a dualist -- not a mind-body dualist, as he is commonly conceived to be, but rather a dualist of Thought and Being. Finally, I suggest that Spinoza’s position on the mind-body issue breaks with the traditional categories and ways of addressing the subject by suggesting a view which grants clear primacy to Thought without accepting any idealist reduction of bodies to thought. (shrink)

In this book, Sorensen presents the first general theory of the thought experiment. He analyses a wide variety of thought experiments, ranging from aesthetics to zoology, and explores what thought experiments are, how they work, and what their positive and negative aspects are. Sorensen also sets his theory within an evolutionary framework and integrates recent advances in experimental psychology and the history of science.

This paper argues for two interrelated claims. The first is that the most innovative contribution of Timothy Williamson, Herman Cappelen, and Max Deutsch in the debate about the epistemology of thought experiments is not the denial of intuition and the claim of the irrelevance of experimental philosophy but the claim of epistemological continuity and the rejection of philosophical exceptionalism. The second is that a better way of implementing the claim of epistemological continuity is not Deutsch and Cappelen’s argument view (...) or Williamson’s folk psychological view. This is so because while the argument view makes the basis of the relevant classificational judgement evidentially too demanding; the folk psychological view makes it too weak and error-prone to count as an adequate explanation. Drawing from a certain reading of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics that flowers in Miranda Fricker and John McDowell, I argue for the reason-responsiveness view. Like the extant views, the reason-responsiveness view vindicates the claim of epistemological continuity. But unlike the extant views, it does not share those problematic features. Further, I show that the reason-responsiveness view offers a way for champions of the claim of epistemological continuity to resist Avner Baz’s objection to the claim of epistemological continuity and his objection to the philosophical use of thought experiments while taking on board some attractive elements of his view. (shrink)

Written by a highly respected scholar of Thomas Aquinas's writings, this volume offers a comprehensive presentation of Aquinas's metaphysical thought. It is based on a thorough examination of his texts organized according to the philosophical order as he himself describes it rather than according to the theological order. -/- In the introduction and opening chapter, John F. Wippel examines Aquinas's view on the nature of metaphysics as a philosophical science and the relationship of its subject to divine being. Part (...) One is devoted to his metaphysical analysis of finite being. It considers his views on the problem of the One and the Many in the order of being, and includes his debt to Parmenides in formulating this problem and his application of analogy to finite being. Subsequent chapters are devoted to participation in being, the composition of essence and esse in finite beings, and his appeal to a kind of relative nonbeing in resolving the problem of the One and the Many. Part Two concentrates on Aquinas's views on the essential structure of finite being, and treats substance-accident composition and related issues, including, among others, the relationship between the soul and its powers and unicity of substantial form. It then considers his understanding of matter-form composition of corporeal beings and their individuation. Part Three explores Aquinas's philosophical discussion of divine being, his denial that God's existence is self-evident, and his presentation of arguments for the existence of God, first in earlier writings and then in the "Five Ways" of his Summa theologiae. A separate chapter is devoted to his views on quidditative and analogical knowledge of God. The concluding chapter revisits certain issues concerning finite being under the assumption that God's existence has now been established. -/- John F. Wippel, professor of philosophy at The Catholic University of America, was recently awarded the prestigious Aquinas Medal by the American Catholic Philosophical Association. In addition to numerous articles and papers, Wippel has coauthored or edited several other works, including Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas and The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines, both published by CUA Press. (shrink)