James A. Diefenbeck, Wayward Reflections on the History ofPhilosophyThomas R. Flynn Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason. Volume 1:Toward an Existential Theory of HistoryMark Golden and Peter Toohey Inventing Ancient Culture:Historicism, Periodization and the Ancient WorldZenonas Norkus Istorika: Istorinis IvadasEverett Zimmerman The Boundaries of Fiction: History and theEighteenth‐Century British Novel.

The relationship between brain activity and conscious visual experience is central to our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying perception. Binocular rivalry, where monocular stimuli compete for perceptual dominance, has been previously used to dissociate the constant stimulus from the varying percept. We report here fMRI results from humans experiencing binocular rivalry under a dichoptic stimulation paradigm that consisted of two drifting random dot patterns with different motion coherence. Each pattern had also a different color, which both enhanced rivalry (...) and was used for reporting which of the two patterns was visible at each time. As the perception of the subjects alternated between coherent motion and motion noise, we examined the effect that these alternations had on the strength of the MR signal throughout the brain. Our results demonstrate that motion perception is able to modulate the activity of several of the visual areas which are known to be involved in motion processing. More specifically, in addition to area V5 which showed the strongest modulation, a higher activity during the perception of motion than during the perception of noise was also clearly observed in areas V3A and LOC, and less so in area V3. In previous studies, these areas had been selectively activated by motion stimuli but whether their activity reflects motion perception or not remained unclear; here we show that they are involved in motion perception as well. The present findings therefore suggest a lack of a clear distinction between ?processing? versus ?perceptual? areas in the brain, but rather that the areas involved in the processing of a specific visual attribute are also part of the neuronal network that is collectively responsible for its perceptual representation. (shrink)

Why read Leibniz today? Can we still learn from him and not just about him? This book argues that Leibniz offers a powerful, productive model for transdisciplinary thinking that can push back against the narrowness of the humanities today. Richard Halpern recasts Leibniz as a great writer as well as a great philosopher, demonstrating that his philosophical project cannot be fully understood without taking its literary elements into account. He shows Leibniz to be a prescient thinker about art and beauty (...) whose insights into the relationship between aesthetic experience and thought remain invaluable. Leibnizing asks readers to follow the dynamic movement of Leibniz’s writing instead of attempting to grasp a static philosophical system and to pay careful attention to the rhetorical and stylistic registers of Leibniz’s work as well as its conceptual and logical dimensions. For philosophers, this book offers a novel approach to reading and interpreting Leibniz. For literary and other theorists, it showcases the relevance of Leibniz’s thought to areas from aesthetics to politics and from metaphysics to computer science. Written in a lucid and even witty style, Leibnizing provides readers with an accessible entryway into Leibniz’s sometimes forbidding but ultimately rewarding philosophical vision. (shrink)

In this analysis of one of the most difficult and neglected topics in Hegelian studies, Songsuk Susan Hahn tackles the status of contradiction in Hegel's ...

This article – which includes a complete translation of Mūlamadhyamakakārikā chapter 2 together with Candrakīrti’s commentary thereon – argues that notwithstanding the many different and often arcane interpretations that have been offered of Nāgārjuna’s arguments against motion, there is really just one straightforward kind of argument on offer in this vexed chapter. It is further argued that this basic argument can be understood as a philosophically interesting one if it is kept in mind that the argument essentially has to (...) do with whether a personal level of description will admit of an exhaustively impersonal explanation. (shrink)

This volume explores the themes of vanishing matter, matter and the laws of nature, the qualities of matter, and the diversity of the debates about matter in the early modern period. Chapters are unified by a number of interlocking themes which together enable some of the broader contours of the philosophy of matter to be charted in new ways. Part I concerns Cartesian Matter; Part II covers Matter, Mechanism and Medicine; Part III covers Matter and the Laws of Motion; (...) and Part IV covers Leibniz and Hume. Bringing together some of the world’s leading scholars of early modern philosophy, as well as some exciting new researchers, _Vanishing Matter and the Laws of Motion _stakes out new territory that all serious scholars of early modern philosophy and science will want to traverse. (shrink)

In this reassessment of Descartes' debt to his mentor Isaac Beeckman, I argue that they share the same basic conception of motion: the force of a body's motion—understood as the force of persisting in that motion, shorn of any connotations of internal cause—is conserved through God's direct action, is proportional to the speed and magnitude of the body, and is gained or lost only through collisions. I contend that this constitutes a fully coherent ontology of motion, (...) original with Beeckman and consistent with his atomism, which, notwithstanding Descartes' own profoundly original contributions to the theory of motion, is basic to all Descartes' further work in natural philosophy. (shrink)

We present a novel, sophisticated intention‐based control system for a mobile robot built from an extremely inexpensive webcam and radio‐controlled toy vehicle. The system visually observes humans participating in various playground games and infers their goals and intentions through analyzing their spatiotemporal activity in relation to itself and each other, and then builds a coherent narrative out of the succession of these intentional states. Starting from zero information about the room, the rules of the games, or even which vehicle it (...) controls, it learns rich relationships between players, their goals and intentions, probing uncertain situations with its own behavior. The robot is able to watch people playing various playground games, learn the roles and rules that apply to specific games, and participate in the play. The narratives it constructs capture essential information about the observed social roles and types of activity. After watching play for a short while, the system is able to participate appropriately in the games. We demonstrate how the system acts appropriately in scenarios such as chasing, follow‐the‐leader, and variants of tag. (shrink)

How do we understand the roots of modern identities and subjectivities (citizen, labour migrant, artist, member of a global faith community) and the cosmopolitan imaginaries and practices embraced and generated in the Asia Pacific region? Writing from a range of disciplines, and diverse sites, the authors explore the ways in which identities are recognized and contested, subjectivities dislodged and reconstituted in the contemporary world, and the role of dialogic scholarly practices in engaging, stimulating and promoting emergent subjectivities and identities.

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

I. In some celebrated passages, the Physics conveys to us that.