Willem II van Haecht?s panel of the Cabinet of Cornelis van der Geest (1628), introduces the viewer to the theme of the Five Senses by including five prominently displayed paintings, each corresponding to one of the senses, in the foreground. The paper offers a new reading of the panel, suggesting that this image may be read as an allegory of the Five Senses, proposing this theme as a key to the rhetorical performance the collector, (...) van der Geest, is shown undertaking, and connecting the senses to the picture?s punning motto: Vive l?Esprit. (shrink)

The Five Senses of Haiti discusses a series of medical mission trips by physicians and medical students to the Central Plateau of Haiti delivering care in the outpatient setting. Practitioners describe their experiences through the use of their five senses to draw contrast between modern health care and medical practice in the developing world. Physicians in a resource poor setting are left without the usual diagnostic armamentarium and the safeguards and distractions of the modern hospital setting. (...) This deficit creates an opportunity to devote time and focus to individual patients. Practicing medicine in this context clinicians use a heightened sense of awareness and increase their reliance on physical exam findings. Global medicine creates an opportunity for medical students to learn and physicians out of training to practice overlooked physical exam skills in the modern era. Physical exam findings and patient care yield diagnoses and fosters the bonds of the doctor-patient relationship. (shrink)

Veils -- Boxes -- Tables -- Visit -- Joy.

In this paper I am going to argue that two commonly held views about perceptual experience are incompatible and that one must be given up. The first is the view that the five senses are to be distinguished by appeal to the kind of experiences involved in perception; the second is the view – called Representationalism – that the subjective character of perceptual experience is solely determined by what the experience represents. We could take their incompatibility as a (...) reason for rejecting Representationalism; but I will suggest that it’s open to the Representationalist to claim that the experiences of a single sense need have no common character. (shrink)

In this paper I am going to argue that two commonly held views about perceptual experience are incompatible and that one must be given up. The first is the view that the five senses are to be distinguished by appeal to the kind of experiences involved in perception; the second is the view.

The idea that there are five senses dates back to Aristotle, who was one of the first philosophers to examine them systematically. Though it has become conventional wisdom, many scientists and philosophers would argue that this idea is outdated and inaccurate. Indeed, they have given many different answers to this question, ranging from just three (the number of different kinds of physical energy we can detect) to 33 or more senses. Perhaps surprisingly, the issue remains controversial, partly (...) because it is not clear exactly what should count as a ‘sense’. Should proprioception, balance and kinaesthesis, amongst others, be considered additional senses? And if so, how do we figure out how many senses we really have? -/- (Published in Turkish under the title ‘Çok Duyumlu Algi’). (shrink)

Our senses are constantly stimulated in our daily lives but we have only a limited understanding of how they affect our cognitive processes and, especially, our autobiographical memory. Capitalizing on a public science event, we conducted the first empirical study that aimed to compare the relative influence of the five senses on the access, temporal distribution, and phenomenological characteristics of autobiographical memories in a sample of about 400 participants. We found that the access and the phenomenological features (...) of memories varied as a function of the type of sensory cues, but not their temporal distribution. With regard to their influence on autobiographical memory, an overlap between some senses was found, with on one hand, olfaction and taste and, on the other, vision, audition, and touch. We discuss these findings in the light of theories of perception, memory, and the self, and consider methodological implications of the sensory cuing technique in memory research, as well as clinical implications for research in psychopathological and neuropsychological populations. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the phenomenon of a felt sense of the concrete other. Although the importance of this phenomenon is recognised in the contemporary discussion on intercorporeality, it has not been subjected to systematic phenomenological analysis. I argue that the felt sense of the other is an aspect of intercorporeal body memory in so far as it is a habituation to something like the concrete other’s expressive style. Because it is inherently a sensory phenomenon, I speak of an (...) embodied sensorium of the other. I illustrate the phenomenon through contrasting case-vignettes taken from research in early parental bereavement. Based on this, I identify five modalities that outline the fundamental contours of a sensorium and specify that in their intermodal and synesthetic concretion they account for the felt sense of the other. Finally, I argue that the existential importance of the phenomenon is rooted in the distributed nature of my sense of self and self-familiarity. To illustrate this, I draw parallels between the felt sense of the concrete other and the felt sense of home and suggest that though there are also distinct differences between the two phenomena, they are rooted in the same underlying existential need for feeling-at-home in the world. (shrink)

Long-standing neglect of the chemical senses in the philosophy of perception is due, mostly, to their being regarded as ‘lower’ senses. Smell, taste, and chemically irritated touch are thought to produce mere bodily sensations. However, empirically informed theories of perception can show how these senses lead to perception of objective properties, and why they cannot be treated as special cases of perception modelled on vision. The senses of taste, touch, and smell also combine to create unified (...) perceptions of flavour. The nature of these multimodal experiences and the character of our awareness of them puts pressure on the traditional idea that each episode of perception goes one or other of the five senses. Thus, the chemical senses, far from being peripheral to the concerns of the philosophy of perception, may hold important clues to the multisensory nature of perception in general. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:An Encounter with the Art and Science of MedicineAnonymous Five“Let Nothing Upset YouLet Nothing Frighten YouEverything is ChangingOnly God is Changeless”—St. Theresa of AvilaSt. Teresa’s prayer is on the front cover of each of four binders dedicated to storing insurance authorizations, studies, references, and reports about our daughter’s brain tumor treatment. They represent our experience, what we learned, the information we were given, and the information we sought (...) out. I kept them in case our daughter ever wanted to understand how my husband and I arrived at a decision for her treatment that was in direct opposition to the strong recommendation of her primary treatment team of physicians.On December 10, 2003, I received an urgent call from our daughter’s neurologist requesting that we meet with the doctor late that afternoon. For six months prior to that appointment, our daughter had been telling us about odd sensations with breathing, nausea, and balance. Sometimes she would seem extremely distressed for a short period of time or report that her friends told her about doing or saying things that didn’t make sense and that she didn’t remember. We consulted a series of physicians as her symptoms became steadily more intense and more prevalent. Our family practice physician referred us to an allergy specialist and a pulmonologist. There were a number of tests for allergies and lung problems. As the tests and treatments did not help, our daughter became increasingly unwilling to go to doctor’s appointments. My husband and I were confused and deeply concerned about the lack of progress. The next series of referrals included a gastroenterologist and a neurologist. The gastroenterologist suggested our daughter had partial–complex epilepsy, concurred with our plan to see a neurologist, and mentioned she should have an MRI.I remember the neurologist putting the MRI scans up, pointing to the large dark spot which he called a “large mass” (5 cm), that could be either a cluster of blood vessels or a neoplasm. He said his office had arranged for us to meet a neurosurgeon the following day. We all remember the same thing about that visit—the image of the large dark mass on the scan—and the neurologists flat, brisk tone. We met with the neuro-surgeon the next day. Her team was kind and sympathetic—she was positive, up beat and direct. She did not think this mass was blood vessels. She thought it was a large tumor that needed to be removed right away. Our daughters surgery was scheduled for the following Friday—December 19, 2003. She had turned 15 on November 5.Four and a half hours after our daughter was wheeled into the operating room, her surgeon told us they had removed 98% of the tumor. She said there was no cure, but there was a good prognosis based on the surgical outcome. Several days later, she called us and said she had more data, and it looked like the resection was closer to 90%. The first pathology report, a “first impression” directly after surgery, described our daughter’s tumor as an astrocytoma, probably high grade. Three weeks after surgery, we met with a panel of doctors—two oncologists and radiologist—who explained that based on the final pathology report, our daughter’s tumor was classified as an ependymoma, grade 2. We were dismayed. First, there had been the change in the estimated success of the resection and now a complete shift in both grade and tumor type.The team recommended radiation to follow her surgery, which they said was standard treatment. We began to try to inform ourselves about her tumor. Her father, an agronomist, did an extensive search in PubMed to evaluate and sort through the literature on low–grade gliomas and radiation. What he could find was inconclusive and grim. Most reports in the literature suggested at best delayed mortality at five years after radiation. [End Page E7] Meanwhile, our daughter went through a spinal MRI and the preparatory “fitting” of the mask to immobilize her head during radiation.E7I consulted with a friend who had worked as an EKG tech. She urged... (shrink)

‘The Five Ways’ has been used as a translation of the phrase quinque viae which is used by Aquinas in Summa Theologiae I, 2, 3. I have put it in inverted commas because I think that it is a poor translation of the Latin. Aquinas’s use of the word via is sufficiently rich to confront us with a choice of English equivalents. There is no reason why in this context we should opt for ‘way’. Since we are not being (...) invited in ST I, 2, 3 on any journey in space, the initial presumption must be that ‘way’ should be used only if we fail to turn up anything more fitting. However, there is no difficulty in providing a more suitable English equivalent. Via is used by Aquinas in the sense of ‘a method of arguing’ or, more specifically, as designating particular arguments. When he considers the two viae by which Aristotle arrived at a certain conclusion, Aquinas clearly distinguishes an argument based on Physics VII from that based on Physics VIII. And in the same context Aquinas uses rationes as an equivalent of viae. Ratio is frequently used by Aquinas in the sense of the English word ‘argument’, as, for instance, in ST I, 30, 2 or ST III, 55, 5. Hence it seems to me that quinque viae should be translated as ‘five arguments’. (shrink)

In the opening lines of Aristophanes' Acharnians, Dicaeopolis counts first among his greatest joys ‘the five talents Cleon coughed up’, and he professes his love of the Knights for this service ‘worthy of Hellas’. The ancient scholiast gave what he thought an obvious explanation from Theopompus : he tells us that Cleon was accused of taking bribes to lighten the tribute of the islanders, and he was then fined ‘because of the outrage against the Knights’. Evidently Theopompus connected the (...) charges against Cleon with some earlier proceedings instigated by Cleon against the Cavalry. There is, as often, some difficulty in determining what Theopompus said and what the scholiast inferred, and, aside from that editorial problem, the scholiast's all-too-simple solution faces at least three major objections regarding the legal and political implications of such a trial. On the strength of such objections it was long ago supposed that Dicaeopolis rejoices not at a recent political defeat for the demagogue, but in recalling a theatrical expose in Babylonians of the previous year. This theory of a stage trial, however, encounters obstacles of its own in any reconstruction of the lost play. In recent work there have been many comments but no altogether satisfactory solution on this problem. It is the view of many that Cleon indeed suffered some political defeat in the year preceding Ach.; but, by this approach, ingenious solutions are required to make sense of the scholia. The assumption of a stage-trial, involving the Knights and Cleon in Babylonians, is still found persuasive by others, but if we are to discount the fragment of Theopompus, which has supporting testimony elsewhere in the scholiastic tradition, we would like to have something more than mere inference that Cleon was tried and convicted in Babylonians. The purpose of this paper is to find a more cogent explanation for these lines in Ach. and the equally puzzling scenario in Theopompus. It will be helpful to begin with the broad outlines of the problem , and then proceed to re-examine the prevailing views, the stage-trial theory and historical theories based upon the scholia. (shrink)

I will here analyse the five factors of action given in the Bhagavad Gtā, paying specific attention to the implications of this account for the Gtā's moral and soteriological psychologies. I argue that the Gtā's account of action constitutes a decentring of agency which paves the way for liberation. Further, while the ethics and moral psychology of the Gtā are often seen as similar to Kant's, I will argue that the decentring of agency in the Gtā places the liberated (...) person beyond autonomy, and so also beyond virtue in Kant's sense. (shrink)

To explain the khandhas as the Buddhist analysis of man, as has been the tendency of contemporary scholars, may not be incorrect as far as it goes, yet it is to fix upon one facet of the treatment of the khandhas at the expense of others. Thus A. B. Keith could write, “By a division which ... has certainly no merit, logical or psychological, the individual is divided into five aggregates or groups.” However, the five khandhas, as treated (...) in the nikāyas and early abhidhamma, do not exactly take on the character of a formal theory of the nature of man. The concern is not so much the presentation of an analysis of man as object, but rather the understanding of the nature of conditioned existence from the point of view of the experiencing subject. Thus at the most general level rūpa, vedanā, sañña, and are presented as five aspects of an individual being's experience of the world; each khandha is seen as representing a complex class of phenomena that is continuously arising and falling away in response to processes of consciousness based on the six spheres of sense. They thus become the five upādānakkhandhas, encompassing both grasping and all that is grasped. As the upādānakkhandhas these five classes of states acquire a momentum, and continue to manifest and come together at the level of individual being from one existence to the next. For any given individual there are, then, only these five upādānakkhandhas — they define the limits of his world, they are his world. This subjective orientation of the khandhas seems to arise out of the simple fact that, for the nikāyas, this is how the world is experienced; that is to say, it is not seen primarily as having metaphysical significance.Accounts of experience and the phenomena of existence are complex in the early Buddhist texts; the subject is one that is tackled from different angles and perspectives. The treatment of rūpa, vedanā, saññā, and represents one perspective, the treatment of the six spheres of sense is another. As we have seen, in the nikāya formulae the two merge, complementing each other in the task of exposing the complex network of conditions that is, for the nikāyas, existence. In the early abhidhamma texts khandha, āyatana and dhātu equally become complementary methods of analysing, in detail, the nature of conditioned existence.The approach adopted above has been to consider the treatment of the five khandhas in the nikāyas and early abhidhamma texts as a more or less coherent whole. This has incidentally revealed something of the underlying structure and dynamic of early Buddhist teaching — an aspect of the texts that has not, it seems, either been clearly appreciated or properly understood, and one that warrants further consideration. (shrink)

Information from our senses, memories and thoughts is bound together into a unified whole that constitutes our experience of our world, our Umwelt. However, our ability to investigate our Umwelt through standard Western-derived neuroscience is limited, because of the third-person approach that undergirds the field. Achieving greater coherence in our understanding requires the addition of an approach which is fundamentally integrative. The most comprehensive first-person approach to the nervous system can be found in the introspective traditions of Tantric Hinduism. (...) In this review, we explore the hierarchical ordering of the senses in Hinduism (from most gross to the most subtle, the latter being closer to consciousness), and how this may be linked to sensorimotor coupling in the parietal cortex. We demonstrate how this ordering parallels the developmental history of the sensory cortices over the course of vertebrate evolution. The synergy between biosemiotics and neurophenomenology is made clear, as the idea of a “Great Chain of Semiosis” can be very helpful in understanding the reasons behind the emergence of this sensory hierarchy. The structures of the Subtle body described in Hindu Tantra should be seen as semiotic nodes used by the conscious agent in interacting with the world around it. We propose that metaphor ties together the various sensory mappings of the body at the cognitive level. Integrating insights from Hindu Tantra will help modern science better investigate questions of agency, meaning and semiosis in organisms. (shrink)

In verse twelve of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu makes a curious claim about the five flavors; namely that they cause people not to taste or that they jade the palate. The five flavors are: sweet, sour, salt, bitter and spicy or hot as in 'heat'. To the Western mind, the claim, 'The five flavors cause them [persons] to not taste,' is counterintuitive; on the contrary, the presence of the five flavors in a dish or (...) in a meal would expand or enhance the senses and the palate, i.e., taste would be augmented by the five flavors. So what is the plausible meaning of the Taoistic claim? To answer this question, I look very briefly at the history of the doctrine of the five flavors and the history of Chinese cuisine. Lao Tzu probably has Confucian feasts in mind in making such a claim, but other interpretations are discussed. (shrink)

Athenaeus (637a) records these lines from the dithyrambHymenaios, along with a number of other snippets of poetry, in the course of an inconclusive discussion about the characteristics of the instrument (if it is an instrument) called the magadis. Athenaeus had good reasons for being puzzled; the wordfirst appeared in Greek, so far as we know, in the seventh centuryb.c., and its sense was already a matter of some doubt in the fourth. As to this particular fragment, even Telestes' original audience (...) might be forgiven some bafflement in the face of the third line, on which I shall initially focus here. What can be meant by ‘the five-rodded joining of the strings’? (shrink)

Anscombe ends her seminal 1958 essay “Modern Moral Philosophy” with a presentation of five characters, each answering an ancient (and contemporary) question as to “whether one might ever need to commit injustice, or whether it won’t be the best thing to do?” Her fifth character is the execrated consequentialist who “shows a corrupt mind.” But who are the first four characters? Do they “show a mind”? And what precisely is the significance (if any) of her presenting those five (...) just then? In this paper, we interpret Anscombe’s essay with an eye to making sense of her character presentation. We argue that the first four characters can be seen to embody the chief negative and positive doctrines of the essay and to thereby represent and charter a pluralistic school of anti-consequentialist ethics. The upshot is something exegetically interesting yet of broader philosophical importance. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to break down the dimensions of consciousness, attempt to reverse engineer their evolutionary function, and make sense of the origins of consciousness by breaking off those dimensions that are more likely to have arisen later. A Darwinian approach will allow us to revise the philosopher’s concept of consciousness away from a single “thing,” an all-or-nothing quality, and towards a concept of phenomenological complexity that arose out of simple valenced states. Finally, I will offer support (...) for an evaluation-first view of consciousness by drawing on recent work in experimental philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Within the past few years, the topic of human dignity has demonstrated distinct signs of a revitalization of interest both within and beyond academic discourse. Outside the academy, news headlines and Twitter feeds continue to generate discussions about whose lives matter, both in the United States and abroad. This has served to renject into civil discourse, with a renewed sense of urgency, the question: what does it mean for a human life to matter? What does it mean for a human (...) life to have dignity? Within the academy,1 scholars have recently approached this question by focusing on how to renegotiate and... (shrink)

The study of the moral sense was neglected for a long time in psychology until recently when Kohlberg, following the work of Piaget, constructed a scale for studying moral judgments. In this article the more scientific and empirical approach to the moral sense is questioned and an argument is made that a qualitative approach would yield more meaningful results. The work of Coles is cited as one example of a qualitative approach, and this article suggests a phenomenological approach. Five (...) brief descriptions describing learning, resentment, decision-making, and the experience of autonomy were used for both analyses of the moral sense and psychological concomitants. The results indicate that the moral sense is a meaning that refers to an "ought" and that the awakening of the moral sense is frequently associated with negative emotions or feelings. (shrink)

The paper presents the philosophy of the French philosopher Michel Serres, with an accent on his working method and unusual methodology. Starting from the thesis that the empiricist trait of Serres? philosophy remains underexposed if one simply receives his work as that of a structuralist epistemologist, Serres? monograph The Five Senses is then discussed in more detail. Here we see both a radical empiricism all his own and a closeness to phenomenology. Nevertheless, perception and language are not opposed (...) to each other in Serres. Rather, his radical thinking of a world-relatedness of the bodily senses and an equally consistent understanding of a sensuality of language - and also of philosophical prose - are closely intertwined. (shrink)

Standard accounts of the senses attempt to answer the question how and why we count five senses ; none of the standard accounts is satisfactory. Any adequate account of the senses must explain the significance of the senses, that is, why distinguishing different senses matters. I provide such an explanation, and then use it as the basis for providing an account of the senses and answering the counting question.

This article suggests that reading Zhou Dunyi’s 周敦頤 Explanation to the Diagram of Supreme Polarity synchronously instead of diachronically yields a new understanding on the relatedness between infinitude and finitude, or on the One and many. Zhou’s attitude is introduced as a living riddle, in which “Non-Polar and Supreme Polarity” is understood as a new conceptual construct, and one which is issued as a call for action at the end of the text: it is a call to investigate the beginnings (...) and endings of one’s life. In this way, the text demonstrates how a person embodies the cosmological as riddle. The article follows both the diagram and text. It first refers to the riddle, then moves on to its embodiment in the ongoing processes of living as yin-yang 陰陽, the five phases, qian 乾 and kun 坤, and the myriad things, including human beings. According to the approach presented here, it is the sage who is the human embodiment of “Non-Polar and Supreme Polarity.”. (shrink)

The work of Michel Serres has been of significant value, yet remains under-utilized across the social sciences. In this review article the long-awaited translation of his The Five Senses (1985) is explored, with particular interest in its offerings for contemporary theories of the materiality of the human condition. Serres invites the reader into a diverse and rich world of sense, from localized sites of individual bodies to global landscapes of cities and countrysides. Not reducible to individual bodies or (...) language, sense becomes the primary mode of relationality through which experience is produced. Such insights are explored in light of contemporary concerns regarding the constitution of bodies and materiality, which emphasize notions of movement and process. The distinction Serres makes between sense and language is argued to be valuable in terms of theories of virtuality that frame material embodiment as ineffable and beyond language. The article concludes by suggesting that Serres can aid re-attunement to sense, although not in a generalistic fashion, but as part of disciplinary specific engagements. (shrink)

There is now a general consensus that Xunzi's criticism of Zisi and Mengzi for advocating wu Xing 五行 is explained by the excavated text known as Five Conducts, but the five conducts play no significant role in the Mengzi. This article aims to determine more precisely what the Mengzi and Wu xing have in common, while also making sense of the ways in which they diverge. The first part of the article analyzes the distinction between goodness and de (...) 德. The second part examines how the various forms of correct behavior are linked to the internal, pointing out the similarities and differences from Mengzi's approach. (shrink)

Philosophers and scientists have studied sensory perception and, in particular, vision for many years. Increasingly, however, they have become interested in the nonvisual senses in greater detail and the problem of individuating the senses in a more general way. The Aristotelian view is that there are only five external senses—smell, taste, hearing, touch, and vision. This has, by many counts, been extended to include internal senses, such as balance, proprioception, and kinesthesis; pain; and potentially other (...) human and nonhuman senses. This “multisensory turn” has been driven partly by developments in contemporary psychology and neuroscience, which have revealed a host of complex interrelations and interactions between sensory modalities previously thought to be distinct. Contrasts between modalities and other crossmodal phenomena, including multisensory integration, synesthesia, and sensory substitution, have also begun to receive more attention in a burgeoning scientific and philosophical literature on multisensory perception and other crossmodal effects. This article focuses on recent empirically informed contributions to the philosophy of perception, as well as key scientific works that provide important background information and insights into the nature of the senses and sensory perception. Indeed, one of the lessons of the multisensory turn, and of contemporary philosophy of mind more generally, is that philosophers ignore this body of empirical research at their peril because many human and animal senses turn out to be richer and more complex than philosophers and scientists had previously imagined, making this a fruitful area for interdisciplinary interaction and research. (shrink)

In conversation, Atom Egoyan discusses issues relating to the five senses in his cinema. Looking across the range of his films, from Next of Kin to Citadel, he explores questions about the senses, loss and substitution.

This book offers an important study of Aristotle's theory of the sense-organs. It aims to answer two questions central to Aristotle's psychology and biology: why does Aristotle think we have sense-organs, and why does he describe the sense-organs in the way he does? The author looks at all the Aristotelian evidence for the five senses and shows how pervasively Aristotle's accounts of the sense-organs are motivated by his interest in form and function. The book also engages with the (...) celebrated problem of whether perception for Aristotle requires material changes in the perceiver. It argues that, surprisingly to the modern philosopher, nothing in Aristotle's description of the sense-organs requires us to believe in such changes. (shrink)

It might at first seem that the senses (the five traditionally recognized conduits of outer sense) would have very little to contribute to an investigation of Kant's aesthetics. Is not Kant's aesthetic theory based on a relation of the higher cognitive faculties? Much however can be revealed by asking to what degree sight is essential to aesthetic judgment (of beauty and the sublime) as Kant describes it in the 'Critique of Judgment.' Here the sublime receives particular attention.

The senses, or sensory modalities, constitute the different ways we have of perceiving the world, such as seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. But how many senses are there? How many could there be? What makes the senses different? What interaction takes place between the senses? This book is a guide to thinking about these questions. Together with an extensive introduction to the topic, the book contains the key classic papers on this subject together with nine (...) newly commissioned essays.One reason that these questions are important is that we are receiving a huge influx of new information from the sciences that challenges some traditional philosophical views about the senses. This information needs to be incorporated into our view of the senses and perception. Can we do this whilst retaining our pre-existing concepts of the senses and of perception or do we need to revise our concepts? If they need to be revised, then in what way should that be done? Research in diverse areas, such as the nature of human perception, varieties of non-human animal perception, the interaction between different sensory modalities, perceptual disorders, and possible treatments for them, calls into question the platitude that there are five senses, as well as the pre-supposition that we know what we are counting when we count them as five.This book will serve as an inspiring introduction to the topic and as a basis from which further new research will grow. (shrink)

How many senses do humans possess? Five external senses, as most cultures have it—sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste? Should proprioception, kinaesthesia, thirst, and pain be included, under the rubric bodily sense? What about the perception of time and the sense of number? Such questions reduce to two. 1. How do we distinguish a sense from other sorts of information-receiving faculties? 2. By what principle do we distinguish the senses? Aristotle discussed these questions in the De (...) Anima. H. P. Grice revived them in 1967. More recently, they have taken on fresh interest as a result of a collection of essays edited by Fiona Macpherson. This entry reviews some approaches to these questions and advances some new ideas for the reader’s consideration. It proposes that the senses constitute an integrated learning system, membership in which answers question 1. It also proposes that the modalities can be distinguished from one another in two ways, by the means of information pick-up and by the kinds of activity that a perceiver undertakes to make use of them. (shrink)

The distinction we make between five different senses is a universal one.¹ Rather than speaking of generically perceiving something, we talk of perceiving in one of five determinate ways: we see, hear, touch, smell, and taste things. In distinguishing determinate ways of perceiving things what are we distinguishing between? What, in other words, is a sense modality?² An answer to this question must tell us what constitutes a sense modality and so needs to do more than simply (...) describe differences in virtue of which we can distinguish the perceptions of different senses. There are many such differences. (shrink)

My contributions to the early issues of the "Journal of Religious Ethics" display the conviction that moral judgments and religious beliefs arise from complex but comprehensible operations of practical reasoning. As this conviction has continued to ground my explorations of diverse religious traditions as well as my consideration of challenges in the domain of bioethics, I have undertaken to develop a total and coherent logic of moral judgment. Much has changed, of course, in the past quarter century, and we have (...) all had to rethink the moral boundaries of human life. These changes have, however, confirmed rather than altered my sense of the importance of bringing into view the decisional basis of practical judgments--a base that is sometimes obscured by religious traditions as they reify earlier practical decisions and ignore their decisional basis. (shrink)

In the fight against COVID-19 pandemic, the phrase “Flattening the curve” has become a rallying cry, popularized by government leaders and journalist in the news and on the social media. FTC is a succinct way of communicating an important public health message that physical distancing, mask-wearing and other public health measures will decrease the peak number of cases and prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed. However, while the message of FTC is right in the sense that limiting transmission will (...) reduce the peak number of cases, some visualizations used to illustrate its effect are incorrect from an infectious disease modelling point of view. The misconceptions are misinterpretations of flattened curves, the effect of FTC on the duration of the pandemic, the dynamics of the curve to be flattened, and the overestimation of the importance of FTC. (shrink)

Some of the human needs are more important than others in order to be inevitable. One of these needs which cannot be avoided is the need for belonging to any authority. Whatever the name, religion, nation, homeland, flag etc. all these concepts are the reflections of the sense of belonging that comes with human existence. This article will discuss how Kuwaiti novelist Saud Alsanousi reflects the crisis of a child who is born from a secret relationship with a Filipino woman's (...) son who came to Kuwait as a housekeeper in Kuwait. When he returned to Kuwait, where he carried his passport and felt himself unfamiliar in the Philippines because of his physical structure and the Arabs, he was again excluded by his relatives because of his Filipino mother. The novel tries to draw attention to the socio-economic problems of workers coming from South East Asia to the Gulf countries, especially from the character of Jose, who has a nauseous mood due to the uncertainty between Philippine-Kuwait and Christian-Muslim affiliations. The introduction of foreign workers who constitute more than half of the population in the Gulf countries will be reviewed. Afterwards, a short summary of the novel will be given and the main theme of the lack of disability will be analyzed. Summary: In 1973, Syria and Egypt started a air strike against Israel in order to recover their lost territory in the previous wars and their reputation in the international area. Some Western countries -especially the United States- have shown all kinds of military aid to Israel in the face of this attack. Thanks to these aids the Syrian and Egyptian armies have not achieved their intended goals. This attitude of Western countries to Israel has attracted the reaction of other Gulf countries -especially the Saudi administration- which has a large amount of oil reserves. Gulf countries -which have not gotten a strong military option- tried to use the oil in their hands for the first time as a political trump card. These oil-exporting countries have reduced oil production in response. As a result, the economies of Western countries which were industrialized and dependent on oil have been negatively affected by this decision. In contrast, Gulf States have gained a sudden and massive fortune due to oil prices rising three or four times. The Gulf States, which have led this wealth to development in many areas like education, health, urbanism, etc. The need for qualified staff in these fields was supplied by other Arab countries such as Egypt, Syria, and Sudan. However, as the years passed oil prices decreased and so oil revenues decreased. This reduction led the Gulf States -which have only oil-based economies- to look for cheaper labor. While the foreign employment provided from the Arab countries previously later this need has begun to supply from far East Asian countries which are economically very weak. Vast number of employees emigrated to the Gulf countries to work in the labor service sector with very low wages especially from the Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Malaysia. This segment -which has employed with very low wages- has been subjected to injustice and discrimination. The injustices faced by the Far East Asian foreign labor force deprived of social rights have been the subject of many painful stories over time. The modern novel -which aims to reflect the life and the human being with all its details- has reflected the stories of the victims of that employers. Saq al-Bamboo (Bamboo Bar) is one of these novels which has published by Kuwaiti writer Saud Alsanousi in 2012. Within a short time after the publication of the work the novel was interested in the Arab world and in 2013 he was awarded the International Arabic Novelist Prize. The novel is consisting of five chapters and each chapter is divided into three sections 1,2,3... The author conveys the crisis of unetnicity from Jose’s chracter who was born from a Filipino mother and a Kuwaiti father. A translator named Ibrahim Selâm -which is a translation of the souvenirs and diaries belonging to Jose from the Philippine language to Arabic is intended to increase the realism of the work. Josephine -who came to Kuwait to work from the Philippines- was settled in 1985 in one of the country's most reputable families. The old woman who owns the house has a son named Rasheed. Rasheed was interested in Josephine who worked as a servant in their house and he married her with a secret marriage. Because the marriage of a Kuwaiti man and a foreign woman who was working as a housekeeper in Kuwait is accepted as a great shame that will cast a shadow on the dignity and honor of the family the marriage which was concealed by the couple inside and outside of the house, which could only come together with privacy has appeared after months. Rasheed -who was expelled from the house with Josephine- has temporarily found another house. Rasheed and his wife, who thought that his mother's attitude would change as their children were born have disappointed. Rasheed after realizing that his mother would never be satisfied, finally lost his ability to resist this crisis and sent his wife back to. With this development the problem of-identity crisis of Jose’s chracter is dealt with in a multi-faceted way. Jose, who left his age with his mother from Kuwait, had suffered from familial negativities that had passed through Kuwait years later in his twenties, and “familial negativities through his return to Kuwait and depressions caused by the sense of belonging. In an interesting coincidence when he met Gassân, one of the closest friends of Jose’s father in the Philippines, he returned to his dream Paradise ’Kuwait”. The journey from Jesus who has known as “Arabo to “Jesus” started with great hope because he was born from a Kuwaiti father in his own near the Philippines and likened to Arabs alike. But perhaps more of the crisis in the Philippines is waiting for him in Kuwait. Because his father was killed during the years when the Iraqi army occupied Kuwait. Although his father's mother welcomed Jose at first, exclusionary attitude towards foreigners in Kuwait caused her to take a negative attitude towards here grandson. The work is a continuation of the tradition of novels of criticism of the Arab society that has been going on for almost a century. The fact that novel was able to make deep psychological analyzes with his comprehensible language and simple style without being ambiguous and to keep the tension alive by leaving the problems at the end of the episodes and thus to provide immersion in this way reinforced the fictional soundness of the work. The novel also presents fictional material within the Arab society for the researchers in the field of religion psychology and sociology of religion, in order to show how a non-Muslim feels amoung the Muslim society. (shrink)

Discussion of W. Sellars's rediscovery of experiential presence continues with special reference to J. McDowell's and J.F. Rosenberg's recent articles on Sellars's understanding of perception, and a later effort by Sellars to cast light on the intimate relation between sensing and perceptual taking. Five main sections respectively summarize my earlier discussion of Sellars's account of experiential presence, draw on Rosenberg's explication of two Sellarsian modes of responding to sense impressions, consider McDowell's claim that Sellars's perceptual takings are shapings of (...) sensory consciousness, introduce Sellars's Kantian late account of experiential presence, and return critically to McDowell's thesis: Sellars's perceptual takings, notwithstanding their being purely conceptual actualizations, give us awareness of the very pinkness of a pink ice cube. (shrink)

This article surveys five approaches to justice in contemporary Anglo-American legal thought: pure proceduralism, the sources thesis, the semiotic model, the social convention model, and the ‘law and...’ model. Each approach has associated justice with the foundation of the legal structure of rules, principles and the like. The foundation for pure proceduralism has rested in the conditions (such as majority will, freedom of expression, and political equality), external to the pure process. For the sources thesis, the foundation has been (...) the state institutions, such as courts and legislatures and ultimately to the state external to the legal structure. With the semiotic model, the structure of signifying concepts (rules, principles, doctrines and other intelligible objects) takes the foundation as a non-signified concept (such as Hans Kelsen’s Grundnorm) external to the signifying relations inside the structure. For the social convention model, the key has been the observation by a jurist of the regularity of a multiplicity of experienced events and the regularity, in turn, is a concept which abstracts from and unifies the multiplicity into a concept. The final approach, the law and…approach, has assumed that the foundation lies in the external and independent disciplinary discourse, thereby reinforcing the observed legal structure as given. -/- The foundation, in each context, has been considered external to the units and analytical reasoning of the legal structure. The foundation, that is, has been considered neither legal nor illegal. The consequence has been that jurists, working within the structure founded by an externality, cannot access justice. The clue to justice, I suggest, is concealed inside the structure itself: namely in the multiplicity of experienced events which the concepts and signifying relations have enclosed and forgotten. The Paper briefly fleshes out the latter sense of access to justice. (shrink)

Individuals differ greatly in their ability to learn and navigate through environments. One potential source of this variation is “directional sense” or the ability to identify, maintain, and compare allocentric headings. Allocentric headings are facing directions that are fixed to the external environment, such as cardinal directions. Measures of the ability to identify and compare allocentric headings, using photographs of familiar environments, have shown significant individual and strategy differences; however, the neural basis of these differences is unclear. Forty-five college (...) students, who were highly familiar with a campus environment and ranged in self-reported sense-of-direction, underwent fMRI scans while they completed the Relative Heading task, in which they had to indicate the direction of a series of photographs of recognizable campus buildings (i.e., “target headings”) with respect to initial “orienting headings”. Large individual differences were found in accuracy and correct decision latencies, with gender, self-reported sense-of-direction, and familiarity with campus buildings all predicting task performance. Using linear mixed models, the directional relationships between headings and the experiment location also impacted performance. Structural scans revealed that lateral orbitofrontal and superior parietal volume were related to task accuracy and decision latency, respectively. Bilateral hippocampus and right presubiculum volume were related to self-reported sense-of-direction. Meanwhile, functional results revealed clusters within the superior parietal lobule, supramarginal gyrus, superior frontal gyrus, lateral orbitofrontal cortex, and caudate among others in which the intensity of activation matched the linear magnitude of the difference between the orienting and target headings. While the retrosplenial cortex and hippocampus have previously been implicated in the coding of allocentric headings, this work revealed that comparing those headings additionally involved frontal and parietal regions. These results provide insights into the neural bases of the variation within human orientation abilities, and ultimately, human navigation. (shrink)

The efforts to prove God's existence in the history of thought have been one of the fundamental problems of philosophy and theology, and even the most important one. The evidences put furword to prove the existence of God constitute the center of philosophy of religion’s problems not only philosophy of religion, but also the disciplines such as theology-kalam and Islamic philosophy are also seriously concerned. When we look at the history of philosophy, it is clear that almost all philosophers are (...) interested in the evidence in favour of and against the existence of God. Especially in recent times, religious experience has often been regarded as evidence of the existence of God. Studies in the field of religious and mystical experience have put forward many arguments concerning the use of religious experience as evidence. However, this study has been limited to experience of sense and pure consciousness claims rather than examining all of these arguments. In this study firstly, the analogy between experience of sense and religious experience will be deal with, and then claims that conciousness can be emptied by a number of methods which are defended by mystics. In addition, it will be tried to defend the opinion that the mystical experiences which are the common point of the two approaches are valid. The main emphasis of the article will be that these arguments can be used as evidence for the existence of God.Summary: Religious experience - which has not been considered as one of the classical evidences regarding the existence of God before being popular by recent studies – is started to be called one of the arguments. The most important reason for not arguing religious experience among the evidences of God’s existence is that it is a personal experience and therefore contains subjective perspectives. However, many researchers, who refuse to accept the criticism raised against religious experience with restricting to subjectivity, emphasized the importance of religious experience by highlighting the objective aspects of such experiences. This emphasis was not only on its significance, but also on the fact that it had a cognitive feature and thus it could provide evidence for the existence of God. The argument of religious experience is generally defined as an effort for demonstrating to existence of God with reference to several feelings such as spiritual experiences of human in face of creator and sacred Being, encounter with God, uniting, and annihilating selfness in Him. The emergence of such efforts, especially after the XVIIIth century, indicates that the history of the evidence does not go back much earlier. However, even if notas evidence, it is possible to extend the traces of religious and mystical experience to the history of religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. Considering a great amount of the previous literature focused on religious experience in the West, It is easily seen that such research is still new. The main purpose in addressing such a controversial issue is to make the argument on the religious experience more current and to show whether the religious experience would be able to use as evidence for the existence of God.First title of this study comprises many different claims such as Walter T. Stace’s The Argument from Unanimity Richard Swinburne’s The Principle of Credulity, William P. Alston’s Perceiving God, John Hick’s Experience-as. However, instead of briefly giving out very different claims, the study chooses to focus on two arguments which are less discussed and can be given in more detail. The first is the argument based on the analogy between the religious experience and the sense experience. The fundamental point of this argument is sense experience. With reference to the similarities between the sense experience and the religious experience, it can be argued that religious experience is also cognitive and may function as an evidence for the existence of God. In other words, being perceptual and noetic, namely cognitive, of sense experience is addressed as a similar side of religious experience. Whether it is imaginary or real, eventually, it is necessary for an experience to have an object and being experience of something. Therefore, the religious experience includes the perception of a Transcendent Being that is beyond and in excess of the individual who experiences. Perception of the sense experience will definitely be different from the perception of religious experience. Researchers who think that the five sense organs do not run the perception of Sacred Beings, identified broader and various meanings for the perception. Thereby, in this approach, where the semantic field of perception is expanded, it was contended that human beings were able to perceive the transcendent, eternal, and unlimited God, and this can be explained in the epistemological sense. In order to use religious experiences as an evidence for the existence of God, it is necessary to determine whether such experiences are caused by God rather than something else. This raises the issue of the validity of religious experience. The researchers in this area have propounded various criteria to identify whether religious experience is existed or not. Experiences, which do not meet the criteria, are not considered existed even if they claim to be religious experience.The second is the argument that discusses whether it is possible to suggest an evidence for the existence of God by utilizing pure consciousness events. In general, this argument claims that the consciousness gets clear, and thus, mystic or Sufi experiences the Divine One with pure consciousness by discharging consciousness from all sensual contents and removing it from secular desire and wishes. The argument, which claims the experience of Divine One is direct, therefore uninterpretable, and experienced by pure consciousness, believes clearing the consciousness of mystics from sensual qualities such as seeing, hearing, and tasting. It is stated that it is possible for mystics to empty their sensory images and get rid of them, and thus, their desires and wishes could be lost. Especially, the thinkers who are connected with the philosophy of perennialism and defend this approach, thought that people, who have distinct religion, culture, and beliefs in different parts of the world and in various time periods, had the same experience and considered such experiences were universal by suggesting that this similarity could be called as common essence.Even though the claim which offers that the events of pure consciousness are the same everywhere have been criticized in many respects, the advocates of this approach have argued that the experience has the common essence, but the interpretation is different. This relationship, which was tried to be established between experience and commentary, caused a lot of work for both the thinkers who put forward the claims of pure consciousness and the researchers who opposed it. However, examining the relationship between experience and interpretation requires serious studies in socio-psychological, cultural and religious fields. Therefore, in order not to exceed the limits of the article, the relationship between experience and interpretation is briefly mentioned.While discussing two arguments, the main claims of the arguments were addressed, and the criticisms directed to this argument were not discussed as much as possible. However, some fundamental criticisms have been mentioned shortly for a better understanding of the discussion. Since such western-oriented claims mostly were deployed in a western context, the study excluded the comparison of the claims across different cultures. (shrink)

The Inner Touch presents the archaeology of a single sense: the sense of being sentient. Aristotle was perhaps the first to define this faculty when in his treatise On the Soul he identified a sensory power, irreducible to the five senses, by which animals perceive that they are perceiving: the simple "sense," as he wrote, "that we are seeing and hearing." After him, thinkers returned, time and again, to define and redefine this curious sensation. The classical Greek and (...) Roman philosophers as well as the medieval Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin thinkers who followed them all investigated a power they called "the common sense," which one ancient author likened to "a kind of inner touch, by which we are able to grasp ourselves." Their many findings were not lost with the waning of the Middle Ages. From Montaigne and Francis Bacon to Locke, Leibniz, and Rousseau, from nineteenth-century psychiatry and neurology to Proust and Walter Benjamin, the writers and thinkers of the modern period have turned knowingly and unknowing to the terms of older traditions in exploring the perception that every sensitive being possesses of its life.The Inner Touch reconstructs and reconsiders the history of this perception. In twenty-five concise chapters that move freely among ancient, medieval, and modern cultures, Daniel Heller-Roazen investigates a set of exemplary phenomena that have played central roles in philosophical, literary, psychological, and medical accounts of the nature of animal existence. Here sensation and self-sensation, sleeping and waking, aesthetics and anesthetics, perception and apperception, animal nature and human nature, consciousness and unconsciousness, all acquire a new meaning.The Inner Touch proposes an original, elegant, and far-reaching philosophical inquiry into a problem that has never been more pressing: what it means to feel that one is alive.Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies. (shrink)

We invited five Cavell scholars to write on this topic. What follows is a vibrant exchange among Paola Marrati, Andrew Norris, Jörg Volbers, Cary Wolfe and Thomas Dumm addressing the question whether, in the contemporary political context, Cavell’s skepticism and his Emersonian perfectionism amount to a politics at all.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 451-453 [Access article in PDF] Ernst Cassirer. The Logic of the Cultural Sciences: Five Studies. Translated by S. G. Lofts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. xliii + 134. Cloth, $30.00. Paper, $15.00. This is a new translation of Cassirer's Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften: Fünf Studien. It replaces the earlier one by Clarence Smith Howe with the title The (...) Logic of the Humanities (Yale University Press, 1961) that has been out of print for many years. Howe's volume includes a translation of Cassirer's essay "Naturalistic and Humanistic Philosophies of Culture" which does not appear in the new volume.Considered as part of his system of symbolic forms, this volume is the counterpart to Cassirer's conception of mathematical and scientific thought of the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. The pivotal study in Cassirer's five closely related analyses of the cultural sciences is that concerning "Naturbegriffe und Kulturbegriffe." [End Page 451] Cassirer contrasts the way in which concepts function in natural scientific thought with the way in which concepts function in cultural thought. In the natural sciences all of the individual "properties" of a thing can be reduced to numerical determinations. The particular can be subordinated to the universal. Thus gold as a specific metal is gold if and only if it exhibits specific numerically expressed properties, e.g., possesses a specific weight, electrical conductivity, coefficient of expansion, etc.Cultural concepts do not subordinate the particular to the universal in this determinate manner. Rather, they coordinate the particular with the universal. Thus it is possible to arrange the various figures of the Renaissance such as Leonardo da Vinci, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Cesare Borgia under Jakob Burckhardt's conception of "Man of the Renaissance," but each only approximates this standard. Although each is not given a determinate place in relation to the others, they all can be comprehended in a meaningful set of interrelationships.There is a problem of how to render Cassirer's key terms, Naturbegriffe and Kulturbegriffe. Howe expresses them literally as "nature-concepts" and "culture-concepts." Lofts states them as "concepts of nature" and "concepts of culture." Lofts's rendering has the difficulty of suggesting that Cassirer's discussion concerns a comparison or criticism of various concepts of nature and culture rather than a theory of concept-formation showing the type of thinking distinctive to the natural sciences in contrast to the cultural sciences.The last study in the volume concerns "The Tragedy of Culture" in which Cassirer criticizes Georg Simmel's conception of culture as alienation of the human spirit from itself. Against Simmel's negative view, Cassirer advances his view of culture as a positive achievement of the development of spirit (Geist) from life (Leben). Cassirer's position in this study forecasts his view as developed later in An Essay on Man (1944) that human culture as it arises through its various symbolic forms of myth and religion, language, art, history, and science is a process of "progressive self-liberation." Culture for Cassirer is not alienation, but self-knowledge.Central to this last study is Cassirer's discussion of how the "I" does not originally exist in a fixed state of separation between "I" and "world" and between "I" and other human beings. The Ich, Cassirer says, develops itself in relation to the Du in the formation of culture. The difference between the two is not simply given. Lofts follows Howe in translating Ich and Du as "I" and "you" (Howe, 188-90; Lofts, 107-8). Cassirer's use of the second person familiar (Du) is intended to emphasize the "I-thou" relationship, the sense in which the other in this development of the self is originally an alter ego, not an impersonal other (Sie). Cassirer's discussion here echoes his discussion of the "thou" in the chapter on the "Phenomenon of Expression" (Ausdrucksphänomen) in the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. The translation of Du as "you" rather than "thou" which reflects the... (shrink)