The visual system is known to extract summary representations of visually similar objects which bias the perception of individual objects toward the ensemble average. Although vision plays a large role in guiding action, less is known about whether ensemble representation is informative for action. Motor behavior is tuned to the veridical dimensions of objects and generally considered resistant to perceptual biases. However, when the relevant grasp dimension is not available or is unconstrained, ensemble perception may be informative to behavior by (...) providing gist information about surrounding objects. In the present study, we examined if summary representations of a surrounding ensemble display influenced grip aperture and orientation when participants reached-to-grasp a central circular target which had an explicit size but importantly no explicit orientation that the visuomotor system could selectively attend to. Maximum grip aperture and grip orientation were not biased by ensemble statistics during grasping, although participants were able to perceive and provide manual estimations of the average size and orientation of the ensemble display. Support vector machine classification of ensemble statistics achieved above-chance classification accuracy when trained on kinematic and electromyography data of the perceptual but not grasping conditions, supporting our univariate findings. These results suggest that even along unconstrained grasping dimensions, visually-guided behaviors toward real-world objects are not biased by ensemble processing. (shrink)

Greg Frost-Arnold’s book is a highly elegant edition and commentary of Carnap’s notes, claiming just as much as he is warranted on the basis of the manuscript and other relevant texts, and formulating his scholarly assumptions very carefully. Along the way he tries to unify the three historiographical strategies: narrative, argumentative and micro-historical.

Abstract:This essay explores ways that looming climate change will affect how we think about future winters in New England. By all accounts, by the end of the twenty-first century the depth of the region's winter snow and cold will be much reduced from their historical averages. Drawing upon personal reflection, scientific data, and close readings of iconic New England authors, the essay examines potential future conceptions of the region's winters. I am particularly interested in how the expected warmer winters will (...) demand rereading literary works by iconic figures such as Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, and Robert Frost. The essay begins with an examination of the role nostalgia has played in popular images of New England winters and argues for a critically informed version of nostalgia that will enable readers to mourn for what they might lose in the future. The concluding section examines the folklore behind the January Thaw. Climate change, I argue, will usher in a period of an ongoing New England thaw to which our poetry and natural history writing will have to adapt. (shrink)

This paper develops and defends a new account of therapeutic trust, its nature and its constitutive norms. Central to the view advanced is a distinction between two kinds of therapeutic trust – default therapeutic trust and overriding therapeutic trust – each which derives from a distinct kind of trusting competence. The new view is shown to have advantages over extant accounts of therapeutic trust, and its relation to standard (non-therapeutic) trust, as defended by Hieronymi, Frost-Arnold, and Jones.

Unlike many countries across the world, in Chile after 1968 a radical socialist government came to power with the electoral victory of Salvador Allende and Popular Unity underpinned by a whole range of movements toward a socialism “from below”. Using fragments gathered from workers’ newspapers produced during the 1930s, 1950s and 1970s, the aim of this article is to identify the changing content of radical socialist politics that coalesced by the time of this electoral victory in and through the “everyday” (...) experience of workers in the textile industry. Workers in this sector were at the forefront of the profound changes underway during the prior period of import-substitution industrialisation from the 1930s and the “pre-revolutionary” moment of 1970-1973, where major textile firms were amongst the first to be occupied and nationalised under the Allende government. By tracing the evolution of socialist ideas in these publications —published by trade unions, political parties and, in the 1970s, by workers in the occupied factories themselves— I unravel the development of a radical socialist politics through these decades that then coalesced with the electoral victory of the UP in 1970. Methodologically, I draw on the work of Chilean sociologist Tomás Moulian (1993) and his concept of ideas “en uso” to examine how radical socialist ideas developed and changed in their interaction with workplace conflicts of the time. Consequently, I identify four areas in which these ideas developed: expression of the changing workplace; interpretation of discontent through legalist and radical discourse; the complexities of Chilean socialist and anti-imperialist ideas; and the construction of historical memory. I demonstrate how the interplay of these four features of Chilean socialist ideas were represented in an “everyday socialism” that informed the factory occupations and nascent social transformations after 1970. (shrink)

This book explores how Modernist movements all across the Mediterranean basin differed from those of other regions. The chapters show how the political and economic turmoil of a period marked by world war, revolution, decolonization, nationalism, and the rapid advance of new technologies compelled artists, writers, and other intellectuals to create a new hybrid Mediterranean Modernist aesthetic which sought to balance the tensions between local and foreign, tradition and innovation, and colonial and postcolonial.

Adam Smith publico el presente ensayo en 1759, preocupado por las cuestiones eticas y morales que tarde o temprano repercuten en la vida economica de los individuos transformando su total existencia.

How can cradling, handling, or rubbing a text be said, ethically, to have made something happen? What, as readers or interpreters, may come off in our hands in as we maculate or mark the books we read? For Adam Zachary Newton, reading is anembodied practice wherein "ethics" becomes a matter of tact in the doubled sense of touch and regard. With the image of the book lying in the hands of its readers as insistent refrain, To Make the Hands (...) Impure cuts a provocative cross-disciplinary swath through classical Jewish texts, modern Jewish philosophy, film and performance, literature, translation, and the material text. Newton explores the ethics of reading through a range of texts, from the Talmud and Midrash to Conrad's Nostromo and Pascal's Le Mémorial, from works by Henry Darger and Martin Scorsese to the National September 11 Memorial and a synagogue in Havana, Cuba. In separate chapters, he conducts masterly treatments of Emmanuel Levinas, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Stanley Cavell by emphasizing their performances as readers a trebled orientation to Talmud, novel, and theater/film. To Make the Hands Impure stages the encounter of literary experience and scriptural traditions he difficult and the holy through an ambitious, singular, and innovative approach marked in equal measure by erudition and imaginative daring. (shrink)

Despite the historical implausibility of contemporary commitments to a sovereign state-centric geopolitical imaginary, these commitments are indeed in force. Unfortunately, though, contemporary political theory and political philosophy are unable to account for the momentum of the sovereign state-centric geopolitical imaginary.The author claims that much of International Relations theory is a symptom of, rather than a serious analytical engagement with, this imaginary. He then provides an account of sovereignty as conceptually contradictory, exposing sovereignty as caught in a transcendental deadlock wherein its (...) conditions of possibility are at once its conditions of impossibility.Sovereignty is discussed as necessarily incoherent, leveraging the claim that sovereignty must be understood through the ill-fated attempts to instantiate it historically – attempts which, due to their conditions of possibility, are incessantly incomplete and thus ever repeated through domestic and foreign policy making. (shrink)

Le souci esthetique d'Adam Smith permet de resituer son oeuvre la plus connue (La richesse des nations), comme element d'un systeme qui prend en compte le fonctionnement particulier des lois de l'esprit dans chaque domaine: morale, esthetique, politique, jurisprudence. L'art fournit ainsi la voie d'acces la plus plaisante a la comprehension de l'economie de l'esprit et aux lois de l'imagination. Les textes de Smith font se croiser la notion d'imitation, heritee de l'esthetique de son temps, et celle de systeme (...) qui lui est propre. La musique instrumentale est par exemple denuee de fonction imitative, mais se donne comme un systeme complet et regulier. Des oeuvres nous faisons retour vers l'esprit, en meme temps que l'experience du plaisir leve la distinction entre l'esthetique et la theorie. L'edition proposee demontre encore la variete des preoccupations de Smith; la Lettre a l'Edimburgh Review consacree a la culture francaise de son temps nous revele le lecteur de l'Encyclopedie autant que celui de Rousseau. (shrink)

From philosophy to theology -- Structure -- Mystery -- Power.

For anyone even passingly familiar with Maurice Blanchot, it might initially seem surprising to encounter a collection dedicated to exploring sonic encounters with and resonances of or from his wor...

John Maraldo’s Crossing Paths with Nishida assembles the life’s work of one of the leading voices in Nishida scholarship. Spanning over three decades, this brilliant collection of essays charts the path not just of Nishida’s philosophy, but also the path of deep inquiry of one of his most incisive commentators. In thirteen insightful essays, each reprinted with a new introduction by the author, Maraldo delves into the most critical issues in Nishida scholarship while rendering his philosophy germane to a host (...) of contemporary issues, such as environmentalism, nationalism, cognitive science, and phenomenology. A variety of systematic topics are explored, ranging from Nishida’s notions of “absolute nothingness” and “enactive intuition” to questions of religion, politics, and Nishida’s relation to Heidegger. This volume is essential reading for the specialist and for any reader with an interest in the most important thinker of the Kyoto School of Japanese philosophy. (shrink)

S’il n’existe qu’une planète terre, le concept de mondialisation en revanche n’est pas monolithique et évolue en fonction de changements sociaux, culturels, et économiques. La mondialisation du XXI e siècle diffère du tout au tout de celle du XX e. Bien que l’interdépendance globale économique et numérique soit plus forte que dans le passé, de nouvelles fractures politiques et populistes s’opèrent au niveau national. Cet article mobilise le récent concept d’i-zation de la société, en tant que nouveau facteur de la (...) McDonaldization de la société, pour analyser les récents avancements et impacts du capitalisme numérique sur la mondialisation. Grâce aux smartphones et autres technologies de pointe, nous entrons dans un nouveau processus de compréhension de la mondialisation qui s’accélère de plus en plus sous l’effet des mesures non pharmacologiques mises en place pour lutter contre le Covid-19. (shrink)

language="EN"> The eighth annual meeting of the ASSC took place between June 25th and 28th in Antwerp, an extremely beautiful Belgian city, a major European port and the home of the Peter Paul Rubens, 'the prince of painters and painter of princes'. The meeting was held in a University building at the edge of the old town. This part of the city is remarkable both for the elegance of its architecture and for its innumerable short, interlocking, streets with oddly indistinguishable (...) names. The demands on spatial memory were high and some delegates may still be hunting for the conference dinner which took place, magnificently but improbably, in a hotel - the Elzenveld - inside a hospital. (shrink)

Like most realistically oriented philosophers, I accept that the growth of explanatory power of cognitive system is a sign of the cognitive progress. In other words, I assumecertain version of the principle of „inference to the best explanation”. In the paper I propose a unified and more sophisticated criterion for the „betterness” of explanation, which is formulated in van Fraassen's terminology.

W systemie filozoficznym Jana Szkota Eriugeny wszystko, co istnieje, to natura złożona z bytów i niebytów. Poznawalne dla ludzkiego intelektu części natury to byty, natomiast niepoznawalne części natury to niebyty. Bytem jest zmysłowa część natury ludzkiej oraz rzeczywistość materialnych form. Dla ludzkiego intelektu Niebytem jest Bóg oraz ustanowione przez Niego prymordialne przyczyny i materia. Bóg stworzył wszystko z niczego w ludzkiej naturze. Nierozumny wybór człowieka doprowadził do upadku ludzkiej natury i stworzenia, które z doskonałości przeszło do istnienia w świecie doczesnym. (...) Syn Boży – Bóg-Logos stał się człowiekiem, który dokonał odkupienia ludzkości. W ostatecznych czasach rzeczywistość materialna zostanie zniesiona i stworzenie w ludzkiej naturze dostąpi powszechnego powrotu do pierwotnej doskonałości. Ludzkie intelekty dokonają własnego – ostatecznego sądu i wybrani skierują się ku Stwórcy. Następnie dojdzie do przebóstwienia wybranych – zjednoczenia stworzenia ze Stwórcą bez zmieszania natur, bez zniesienia fundamentalnych różnic ontologicznych oraz bez panteizmu, który w tej koncepcji jest wykluczony. Przebóstwieni będą kontemplować Boga, co oznacza, że będą wiecznie poznawać Niepoznawalnego. Wydaje się, że nawet dla ludzi zgłębiających załomy filozoficznej wiedzy o Bogu w XXI wieku ta szczęśliwa wizja przebóstwienia, które będzie nieustannym procesem poznawania Niepoznawalnego, może być atrakcyjna. (shrink)