Pretense is a topic of keen interest to philosophers and psychologists. But what is it, really, to pretend? What features qualify an act as pretense? Surprisingly little has been said on this foundational question. Here I defend an account of what it is to pretend, distinguishing pretense from a variety of related but distinct phenomena, such as (mere) copying and practicing. I show how we can distinguish pretense from sincerity by sole appeal to a person's beliefs, desires, and intentions – (...) and without circular recourse to an ‘intention to pretend’ or to a sui generis mental state of ‘imagining.’. (shrink)

In his well-known Discourse on Metaphysics , Leibniz puts individual substance at the basis of metaphysical building. In so doing, he connects himself to a venerable tradition. His theory of individual concept, however, breaks with another idea of the same tradition, that no account of the individual as such can be given. Contrary to what has been commonly accepted, Leibniz’s intuitions are not the mere result of the transcription of subject-predicate logic, nor of the uncritical persistence of some old metaphysical (...) assumptions. They grow, instead, from an unprejudiced inquiry about our basic ontological framework, where logic of truth, linguistic analysis, and phenomenological experience of the mind’s life are tightly interwoven. Leibniz’s struggle for a concept capable of grasping concrete individuals as such is pursued in an age of great paradigm changes – from the Scholastic background to Hobbes’s nominalism to the Cartesian ‘way of ideas’ or Spinoza’s substance metaphysics – when the relationships among words, ideas and things are intensively discussed and wholly reshaped. This is the context where the genesis and significance of Leibniz’s theory of ‘complete being’ and its concept are reconstrued. The result is a fresh look at some of the most perplexing issues in Leibniz scholarship, like his ideas about individual identity and the thesis that all its properties are essential to an individual. The questions Leibniz faces, and to which his theory of individual substance aims to answer, are yet, to a large extent, those of contemporary metaphysics: how to trace a categorial framework? How to distinguish concrete and abstract items? What is the metaphysical basis of linguistic predication? How is trans-temporal sameness assured? How to make sense of essential attributions? In this ontological framework Leibniz’s further questions about the destiny of human individuals and their history are spelt out. Maybe his answers also have something to tell us. This book is aimed at all who are interested in Leibniz’s philosophy, history of early modern philosophy and metaphysical issues in their historical development. (shrink)

The point of this paper is to reveal a dogma in the ordinary conception of sensory imagination, and to suggest another way forward. The dogma springs from two main sources: a too close comparison of mental imagery to perceptual experience, and a too strong division between mental imagery and the traditional propositional attitudes (such as belief and desire). The result is an unworkable conception of the correctness conditions of sensory imaginings—one lacking any link between the conditions under which an imagining (...) aids human action and inference and the conditions under which it is veridical. The proposed solution is, first, to posit a variety of imaginative attitudes—akin to the traditional propositional attitudes—which have different associated correctness (or satisfaction) conditions. The second part of the solution is to allow for imaginings with “hybrid” contents, in the sense that both mental images and representations with language-like constituent structure contribute to the content of imaginings. (shrink)

A popular view has it that the mental representations underlying human pretense are not beliefs, but are “belief-like” in important ways. This view typically posits a distinctive cognitive attitude (a “DCA”) called “imagination” that is taken toward the propositions entertained during pretense, along with correspondingly distinct elements of cognitive architecture. This paper argues that the characteristics of pretense motivating such views of imagination can be explained without positing a DCA, or other cognitive architectural features beyond those regulating normal belief and (...) desire. On the present “Single Attitude” account of imagination, propositional imagining just is a form of believing. The Single Attitude account is also distinguished from “metarepresentational” accounts of pretense, which hold that both pretending and recognizing pretense in others require one to have concepts of mental states. It is argued, to the contrary, that pretending and recognizing pretense require neither a DCA nor possession of mental state concepts. (shrink)

Dasein contra Mensch: Heidegger und Cassirer in Davos -- Rosenzweig und Heidegger -- Dass die Philosophie nur abendländisch-europäisch sei-- und was nun? Frage an Heidegger und Husserl -- Das Geschick des Abendlandes -- Sein, Geschichte, Ereignis -- Wahrheit in Heideggers Denken -- Der Erste Weltkrieg oder wie der Tod in die Philosophie Einzug hielt.

Le mégaprojet de centrale au charbon Thar (Thar Coal Mega Power Project) est l’un des plus ambitieux du Pakistan. Il affectera directement les communautés du désert de Thar sur une superficie d’environ neuf mille kilomètres carrés. Plus de deux cent cinquante villages seront évacués pour assurer son succès économique. Le projet a d’ores et déjà provoqué des migrations, des spéculations sur le sol, l’usurpation de pâturages communs et le rejet des communautés. Les conflits dans la région revêtent deux faces. D’abord, (...) on constate des conflits entre les communautés autochtones, l’État et les fonctionnaires de la Sindh Engro Coal Mining Company (SECMC). Ensuite, les problèmes intracommunautaires se sont transformés en conflits religieux entre musulmans et hindous, bien que les causes sous-jacentes soient environnementales. Cet article fournit une description critique des conflits, de l’usurpation de la terre, des processus de spéculation et d’accumulation dans la zone du projet. (shrink)

Abstract: How it is that one's own thoughts can seem to be someone else's? After noting some common missteps of other approaches to this puzzle, I develop a novel cognitive solution, drawing on and critiquing theories that understand inserted thoughts and auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia as stemming from mismatches between predicted and actual sensory feedback. Considerable attention is paid to forging links between the first-person phenomenology of thought insertion and the posits (e.g. efference copy, corollary discharge) of current cognitive (...) theories. I show how deficits in the subconscious mechanisms regulating inner speech may lead to a 'fractured phenomenology' responsible for schizophrenic patients' reports of inserted thoughts and auditory verbal hallucinations. Supporting work on virtual environments is discussed, and lessons concerning the fixity of delusional belief are drawn. (shrink)

If we are free to imagine what we choose, this is likely because our intentions determine what we are imagining. However, in a recent article, Munro and Strohminger (2021) argue that, in some cases of imagistic imagining, our intentions do not determine what we are imagining. They offer examples where, intuitively, a person intends to imagine one thing but, due to the causal source of the image used, imagine another. This paper acknowledges the challenge posed by these cases while arguing (...) on several grounds that, when present, intentions nevertheless always suffice to determine the object of one’s imaginings. I conclude by explaining how intentions could fix the objects of episodic rememberings in much the same way as they do for imaginings, thereby bolstering the case that remembering is a kind of imagining. (shrink)

Research on sleep loss and vigilance both focus on declines in cognitive performance, but theoretical accounts have developed largely in parallel in these two areas. In addition, computational instantiations of theoretical accounts are rare. The current work uses computational modeling to explore whether the same mechanisms can account for the effects of both sleep loss and time on task on performance. A classic task used in the sleep deprivation literature, the Psychomotor Vigilance Test, was extended from the typical 10-min duration (...) to 35 min, to make the task similar in duration to traditional vigilance tasks. A computational cognitive model demonstrated that the effects of time on task in the PVT were equivalent to those observed with sleep loss. Subsequently, the same mechanisms were applied to a more traditional vigilance task—the Mackworth Clock Task—providing a good fit to existing data. This supports the hypothesis that these different types of fatigue may produce functionally equivalent declines in performance. (shrink)

If imagination is subject to the will, in the sense that people choose the content of their own imaginings, how is it that one nevertheless can learn from what one imagines? This chapter argues for a way forward in addressing this perennial puzzle, both with respect to propositional imagination and sensory imagination. Making progress requires looking carefully at the interplay between one’s intentions and various kinds of constraints that may be operative in the generation of imaginings. Lessons are drawn from (...) the existing literature on propositional imagination and from the control theory literature concerning the prediction and comparison mechanisms (or “forward models”) involved in ordinary perception. A more general conclusion is reached that, once we have the tools to understand how some imaginings are both under willful control and helpfully guide action and inference, we will have what we need to understand the cognitive basis of imagination in general. (shrink)

​Imagination will remain a mystery—we will not be able to explain imagination—until we can break it into parts we already understand. Explaining Imagination is a guidebook for doing just that, where the parts are other ordinary mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, and decisions. In different combinations and contexts, these states constitute cases of imagining. This reductive approach to imagination is at direct odds with the current orthodoxy, according to which imagination is a sui generis mental state or process—one with (...) its own inscrutable principles of operation. Explaining Imagination upends that view, showing how, on closer inspection, the imaginings at work in hypothetical reasoning, pretense, the enjoyment of fiction, and creativity are reducible to other familiar mental states—judgments, beliefs, desires, and decisions among them. Crisscrossing contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and aesthetics, Explaining Imagination argues that a clearer understanding of imagination is already well within reach. (shrink)

On reconnaît aujourd'hui que la pluralité juridique, c'est-à-dire la coexistence dans un même espace de plusieurs ordres ou systèmes juridiques concurrentiels, caractérise un grand nombre de sociétés de par le monde. Les juristes, et tous ceux qui s'intéressent à la diversité des cultures juridiques ainsi qu'à leur interaction, ont de plus en plus besoin de maîtriser les concepts, les techniques et les méthodes propres à l'étude pluraliste du droit. Ce manuel a pour objet de guider le chercheur désireux de mieux (...) connaître les aspects théoriques, méthodologiques et pratiques du pluralisme juridique. Il lui permettra notamment de se familiariser avec les fonctions et les usages de l'approche pluraliste, en plus de l'initier aux exigences de cette méthode sur le plan épistémologique, de même que dans le travail de terrain. Il propose également des contributions qui illustrent et interrogent la pertinence de la théorie pluraliste dans l'étude de certains phénomènes juridiques particuliers. Cet ouvrage est issu des travaux d'un collectif international d'experts francophones provenant d'horizons culturels et professionnels divers, et riches d'une expérience concrète de l'étude et de l'application de la méthode pluraliste. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 93 Heft: 2 Seiten: 460-471.

The aim of this article is to examine Aristotle’s treatment of the relationship between the accentuated mobility and the overwhelming imagination of melancholics. I begin by retracing the main lines of Aristotle’s reflection on the psychological and ethical implications of the propensity of melancholics to be guided by φαντασία. With specific regard, then, to the connection between certain peculiar psycho-somatic conditions – such as, among others, that deriving from an overabundance of μέλαινα χολή – and the capacity of foreseeing the (...) future by oneiric φαντάσματα, I analyse some crucial passages from the De divinatione per somnum and the Eudemian Ethics, as well as some fragments of the dialogues Eudemus and On Philosophy. Finally, I put forward the hypothesis that the focus on psycho-somatic conditions constitutes the fil rouge of the Aristotelian conception of dream divination, and argue – contrary to what is mostly claimed by scholars – its substantial unity. (shrink)

El autor postula que la mundialización ha llegado a ser una “máquina incontrolable y excluyente”, gobernada por mecanismos económicos que se han emancipado de la ética y de las culturas, en un proyecto de exterminación de la diversidad cultural y de las raíces de la existencia autónoma de los humanos. Frente a ello, y siguiendo el principio de Gandhi, postula una economía no-violenta.

Many theorists claim that inner speech is importantly linked to human metacognition (thinking about one's own thinking). However, their proposals all rely upon unworkable conceptions of the content and structure of inner speech episodes. The core problem is that they require inner speech episodes to have both auditory-phonological contents and propositional/semantic content. Difficulties for the views emerge when we look closely at how such contents might be integrated into one or more states or processes. The result is that, if inner (...) speech is especially valuable to metacognition, we do not currently understand why it is. The article concludes with two positive proposals for understanding the content and structure of inner speech episodes, which should serve as constraints on future accounts of the metacognitive value of inner speech. (shrink)

Author replies to commentaries from Christopher Hill, Hannah Kim, Emine Hande Tuna, and Neil Van Leeuwen on Explaining Imagination (OUP, 2020) by Peter Langland-Hassan.

The aim of this paper is to trace in Leibniz’s drafts the sketched outline of a conceptual framework he organized around the key concept of ‘requisite’. We are faced with the project of a semi-formal theory of conditions, whose logical skeleton can have a lot of different interpretations. In particular, it is well suited to capture some crucial relations of ontological dependence. Firstly the area of ‘mediate requisites’ is explored - where causal and temporal relations are dealt with on the (...) basis of a general theory of ‘consequence’.Then the study of ‘immediate requisites’ is taken into account - a true sample of mereological inquiry, where Leibniz strives for a unitary treatment of part-whole relation, conceptual inclusion and inherence. Far from simply conflating these relations one with another and with causality, therefore, Leibniz tried to spell them out, while at the same time understanding them within a single conceptual framework. (shrink)

It is widely held that introspection-based self-ascriptions of mental states are immune to error through misidentification , relative to the first person pronoun. Many have taken such errors to be logically impossible, arguing that the immunity holds as an “absolute” necessity. Here I discuss an actual case of craniopagus twins—twins conjoined at the head and brain—as a means to arguing that such errors are logically possible and, for all we know, nomologically possible. An important feature of the example is that (...) it is one where a person may be said to be introspectively aware of a mental state that occurs outside of her own mind. Implications are discussed for views of the relation between introspection and mental state ownership, and between introspection and epistemic criteria for the “mark of the mental.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 1-13 [Access article in PDF] From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: The Local/Global Context Ihab Hassan I What Was Postmodernism? What was postmodernism, and what is it still? I believe it is a revenant, the return of the irrepressible; every time we are rid of it, its ghost rises back. Like a ghost, it eludes definition. Certainly, I know less about postmodernism today than I (...) did thirty years ago, when I began to write about it. This may be because postmodernism has changed, I have changed, the world has changed.But this is only to confirm Nietzsche's insight, that if an idea has a history, it is already an interpretation, subject to future revision. What escapes interpretation and reinterpretation is a Platonic Idea or an abstract analytical concept, like a circle or a triangle. Romanticism, modernism, postmodernism, however, like humanism or realism, will shift and slide continually with time, particularly in an age of ideological conflict and media hype.All this has not prevented postmodernism from haunting the discourse of architecture, the arts, the humanities, the social and sometimes even the physical sciences; haunting not only academic but also public speech in business, politics, the media, and entertainment industries; haunting the language of private life styles like postmodern cuisine--just add a dash of raspberry vinegar. Yet no consensus obtains on what postmodernism really means.The term, let alone the concept, may thus belong to what philosophers call an essentially contested category. That is, in plainer language, if you put in a room the main discussants of the concept--say Leslie Fiedler, Charles Jencks, Jean-François Lyotard, Bernard Smith, Rosalind Krauss, Fredric Jameson, Marjorie Perloff, Linda Hutcheon and, just to [End Page 1] add to the confusion, myself--locked the room and threw away the key, no consensus would emerge between the discussants after a week. But a thin trickle of blood might appear beneath the sill.Let us not despair: though we may be unable to define or exorcise the ghost of postmodernism, we can approach it, surprising it from various angles, perhaps teasing it into a partial light. In the process, we may discover a family of words congenial to postmodernism. Here are some current uses of the term: 1. Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (Spain), Ashton Raggatt McDougall's Storey Hall in Melbourne (Australia), and Arata Isozaki's Tsukuba Center (Japan) are considered examples of postmodern architecture. They depart from the pure angular geometries of the Bauhaus, the minimal steel and glass boxes of Mies van der Rohe, mixing aesthetic and historical elements, flirting with fragments, fantasy, and even kitsch. 2. In a recent encyclical, titled "Fideset Ratio," Pope John Paul II actually used the word postmodernism to condemn extreme relativism in values and beliefs, acute irony and skepticism toward reason, and the denial of any possibility of truth, human or divine. 3. In cultural studies, a highly politicized field, the term postmodernism is often used in opposition to postcolonialism, the former deemed historically feckless, being unpolitical or, worse, not politically correct. 4. In Pop culture, postmodernism--or PoMo as Yuppies call it insouciantly--refers to a wide range of phenomena, from Andy Warhol to Madonna, from the colossal plaster Mona Lisa I saw advertising a pachinko parlor in Tokyo to the giant, cardboard figure of Michelangelo's David--pink dayglo glasses, canary shorts, a camera slung across bare, brawny shoulders--advertising KonTiki Travel in New Zealand. What do all these have in common? Well, fragments, hybridity, relativism, play, parody, pastiche, an ironic, anti-ideological stance, an ethos bordering on kitsch and camp. So, we have begun to build a family of words applying to postmodernism; we have begun to create a context, if not a definition, for it. More impatient or ambitious readers can consult Hans Bertens' The Idea of the Postmodern, the best and fairest [End Page 2] introduction I know to the topic. But now I must make my second move or feint to approach postmodernism from a different perspective. II Postmodernism/Posmodernity. I make this move by... (shrink)

Visual imagination (or visualization) is peculiar in being both free, in that what we imagine is up to us, and useful to a wide variety of practical reasoning tasks. How can we rely upon our visualizations in practical reasoning if what we imagine is subject to our whims? The key to answering this puzzle, I argue, is to provide an account of what constrains the sequence in which the representations featured in visualization unfold—an account that is consistent with its freedom. (...) Three different proposals are outlined, building on theories that link visualization to sensorimotor predictive mechanisms (e.g., efference copies, forward models ). Each sees visualization as a kind of reasoning, where its freedom consists in our ability to choose the topic of the reasoning. Of the three options, I argue that the approach many will find most attractive—that visualization is a kind of off-line perception, and is therefore in some sense misrepresentational—should be rejected. The two remaining proposals both conceive of visualization as a form of sensorimotor reasoning that is constitutive of one’s commitments concerning the way certain kinds of visuomotor scenarios unfold. According to the first, these commitments impinge on one’s web of belief from without, in the manner of normal perceptual experience; according to the second, these commitments just are one’s (occurrent) beliefs about such generalizations. I conclude that, despite being initially counterintuitive, the view of visualization as a kind of occurrent belief is the most promising. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Postmodernism:A Self-InterviewIhab HassanThe following interview did not take place in Ihab Hassan's study in Milwaukee, with a view of Lake Michigan, rippling turquoise, blue, and mauve under a sky of fluffy paratactical clouds.Interviewer: You are sometimes known as the Father...Hassan: Please! At most, the Godfather of Postmodernism, though I don't know who the Godmother is. Maybe Madam Hype?I: Why hype?H: Because postmodernism began as a genuinely contested (...) idea and is fading as a form of media hype.I: Can you define it, however tentatively?H: I would prefer not to. In fact, I cannot, no more than I can define romanticism or modernism in a sentence or paragraph. Such definitions are best left to some onomastic genius. Once, I offered a table of features contrasting modernism with postmodernism. Once is quite enough.I: Why is that?H: Because it was as widely cited as pounced upon, nearly everyone ignoring my pointed disclaimer: "Yet the dichotomies this table represents remain insecure, equivocal. For differences shift, defer, even collapse; concepts in any one vertical column are not all equivalent; and inversions and exceptions, in both modernism and postmodernism, abound."I: Well, if we can't define postmodernism, how can we talk about it? [End Page 223]H: The way we talk about everything else: say, freedom, justice, love, spirit, happiness.... We talk about postmodernism by using the word in various verbal contexts—Wittgenstein would have said "language games"—and seeing what happens.I: What happens?H: Some discussions engage postmodernism and clarify it in certain perspectives, without actually defining it: for instance, the works of Hans Bertens, Charles Jencks, Andreas Huyssen, even Fredric Jameson....I: Why even Jameson?H: Because Marxism has a tenuous relation to contemporary reality, as everyone knows except some Western academics.I: Some would say that the entire phenomenon of postmodernism is an exercise of Western academics.H: That's a bit of a non sequitur but true enough, true up to a point. Remember, the phenomenon has overflowed its theoretical origins to become a kind of ironic cultural awareness, a mode of historical reflexivity—if you wish, a perpetually anxious exercise in self-definition.I: But Western, always Western, right?H: Japan has contributed vigorously to postmodernism, especially in art and architecture. So, instead of saying "Western," let's say high-tech, mass-media, omni-consuming societies.I: That, in effect, excludes four fifths of the world, wouldn't you say?H: Yes—and no. You see, cultural postmodernism has mutated into geopolitical postmodernity. By the latter, I mean both globalization with its thousand faces (multinational capitalism, cyber technology, cultural imperialism, "Americanization"), and counter-globalization with as many masks (local knowledge, old cultural traditions, postcolonial ideologies, anti-Western resentments). It's the monster phenomenon of our time.As I have written a good deal about this phenomenon, most recently in Angelika, I won't repeat myself here. The point, however, is that postmodernity is a planetary process, postmodernism is not.I: That suggests a political dimension, which some say you have slighted in your work. How would you respond to that criticism?H: Writing in the late sixties and early seventies about postmodernism, I lacked the benefits of hindsight. For instance, I focused on high culture, Beckett and Borges and Nabokov and Barthelme and Barth. I did not foresee then that postmodernism would become a media phenomenon, involving pop and kitsch. And I recognized the emergent process of globalization only in the Seventies, in Paracriticisms (1975).But I "slighted" the political only in the sense that I did not give it [End Page 224] priority, did not make it an "absolute horizon." In fact, I believe that a primary emphasis on politics flattens, impoverishes our lives. The current paradigm in the humanities ignores the inner cost of "politics."I: Forgive me, but that's another example of what some colleagues in the profession perceive as your contrary or cross-grained character. Can you explain why politics impoverishes our lives?H: Conformists—remember Harold Rosenberg's quip about "the herd of independent minds"?—are quick to discover perversity everywhere. But never mind that. The gravamen is that politics... (shrink)

Visual working memory is a construct hypothesized to store a small amount of accurate perceptual information that can be brought to bear on a task. Much research concerns the construct's capacity and the precision of the information stored. Two prominent theories of VWM representation have emerged: slot-based and continuous-resource mechanisms. Prior modeling work suggests that a continuous resource that varies over trials with variable capacity and a potential to make localization errors best accounts for the empirical data. Questions remain regarding (...) the variability in VWM capacity and precision. Using a novel eye-tracking paradigm, we demonstrate that VWM facilitates search and exhibits effects of fixation frequency and recency, particularly for prior targets. Whereas slot-based memory models cannot account for the human data, a novel continuous-resource model does capture the behavioral and eye tracking data, and identifies the relevant resource as item activation. (shrink)

Postmodernism once more—that breach has begun to yawn! I return to it by way of pluralism, which itself has become the irritable condition of postmodern discourse, consuming many pages of both critical and uncritical inquiry. Why? Why pluralism now? This question recalls another that Kant raised two centuries ago—“Was heist Aufklärung?”—meaning, “Who are we now?” The answer was a signal meditation on historical presence, as Michel Foucault saw.1 But to meditate on that topic today—and this is my central claim—is really (...) to inquire ‘Was heist Postmodernismus?”Pluralism in our time finds itself in the social, aesthetic, and intellectual assumptions of postmodernism—finds its ordeal, its rightness, there. I submit, further, that the critical intentions of diverse American pluralists—M. H. Abrams, Wayne Booth, Kenneth Burke, Matei Calinescu, R. S. Crane, Nelson Goodman, Richard McKeon, Stephen Pepper, not to mention countless other artists and thinkers of our moment—engage that overweening query, “What is postmodernism?,” engage and even answer it tacitly. In short, like a latter-day M. Jourdain, they have been speaking postmodernism all their lives without knowing it.But what is postmodernism? I can propose no rigorous definition of it, any more than I could define modernism itself. For the term has become a current signal of tendencies in theater, dance, music, art, and architecture; in literature and criticism; in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and historiography; in cybernetic technologies and even in the sciences. Indeed, postmodernism has now received the bureaucratic accolade of the National Endowment for the Humanities, in the form of a Summer Seminar for College Teachers; beyond that, it has penetrated the abstractions of “late” Marxist critics who, only a decade ago, dismissed postmodernism as another instance of the dreck, fads, and folderol of a consumer society. Clearly, then, the time has come to theorize the term, if not define it, before it fades from awkward neologism to derelict cliché without ever attaining to the dignity of a cultural concept. 1. “Maybe the most certain of all philosophical problems is the problem of the present time, of what we are, in this very moment,” writes Michel Foucault in “The Subject and Power,” reprinted as “Afterword” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow : 777-96. Ihab Hassan is Vilas Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee. He is the author of, among other books, Radical Innocence , The Dismemberment of Orpheus , Paracriticisms , and The Right Promethean Fire . His latest work, Out of Egypt, is forthcoming in 1986. (shrink)

Klasik Türk edebiyatı ile Arap edebiyatı arasında eski ve köklü alakalar mevcuttur. Bunu gösteren hususlardan biri, pek çok Arapça kasîdenin Türkçe şerhlere kaynaklık etmesidir. Ka ‘ b b. Zuheyr'in Bânet Su‘âd kasîdesi, İbnu'n-Nahvî'nin Munferice'si, Bûsîrî'nin Burde'si ile İbnu'l-Fâriz'in Hamriyye, Râ’iyye ve Tâ’iyye kasideleri Türkçe olarak şerh edilen metinlerden birkaç tanesidir. Dinî Arap edebiyatının en önemli temsilcilerinden olan İbnu'l-Fâriz'in Türk edebiyatında şerh geleneğine kaynaklık eden kasidelerinden biri, “Tâ” kafiyesiyle yazıldığı için kaside-i Tâ ʼ iyye diye bilinen kasidesidir. İbnu'l-Fâriz'in manevi miracını, ruhani (...) seyrini tasvir eden ve et-Tâ’iyyetu'l-Kubrâ veya Nazmu's-sulûk olarak da bilinen bu kasidenin Türkçe olarak ilk şerhi XVI. yüzyılda yaşamış olan Trabzonlu Mehmed Ma‘rûf'un Şerh-i Kasîdetu't-Tâ’iyye adlı eseridir. Başlıca iki bölümden müteşekkil olan bu makalenin ilk bölümünde Trabzonlu Mehmed Ma‘rûf'un hayatı ve eserleri hakkında bilgi verilmiş, ikinci bölümde ise bahsi geçen şerh metot, muhteva ve kaynaklar bakımından incelenmiştir. (shrink)

Ce premier symposium en langue française inaugure une nouvelle série de symposiums qui viendront enrichir la section multilingue de l’European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy. Cette série vise à contribuer à la discussion des publications récentes qui traitent du pragmatisme ou proposent des confrontations avec ce courant de pensée. Elle s’insère dans la section multilingue, dont l’ambition est de permettre aux nombreuses voix internationales qui composent la scène pragmatiste c...

During the querelle des infiniment petits Leibniz wrote several texts addressed to Parisian savants to justify the use of the differential calculus, but only three of them were made public. One of the three, the “Sentiment de Monsieur Leibnitz”, was published without authorization in 1706 at the peak of the quarrel, together with the writings of other mathematicians united in the defence of the new calculus ( Joseph Saurin, Jacob Hermann and the Bernoulli brothers). However, Jean-Paul Bignon, director of the (...) Académie Royale des Sciences, confiscated the prints. All copies of this publication were assumed to be lost, but we have recently identified one copy of it in the British Library catalogue. In this article, we analyse the “Sentiment de Monsieur Leibnitz” by contextualizing it not only from an epistemological approach but also from a political perspective. We will examine the institutional issues at stake by relying on recently published correspondence. (shrink)

Moving from pragmatism and drawing on a fascinating and accurate interpretation of Richard Rorty’s work, Rosa Calcaterra’s Contingency and Normativity. The Challenges of Richard Rorty (Brill-Rodopi, 2019) proposes a philosophical investigation of the relationship between normativity and contingency. Calcaterra’s longstanding familiarity with pragmatist philosophy strongly marks her attitude towards these topics and their related issues. The author takes up some of the pragmatists’ constructiv...

Este artículo trata de la actitud de la ley islámica acerca del transporte marítimo de las mujeres y de cómo las autoridades jurídicas musulmanas consideraban su presencia en los barcos. Discute las condiciones bajo las cuales las mujeres eran acomodadas y tratadas en los barcos así como el comportamiento personal y social que se esperaba de ellas. Con el fin de aplicar la ética islámica y las normas marítimas, los juristas informaban a los armadores, tripulaciones y pasajeros de cómo actuar (...) en el caso de comportamiento inmoral por alguna o varias de las partes. El trabajo se centra en el Mediterráneo Islámico, pero trata brevemente el castigo de la conducta social ofensiva en la Malasia islámica del siglo XIII. Por último, considera también la posición legal islámica sobre el transporte de musulmanes en barcos cristianos. (shrink)

Animal models play a crucial role in fundamental and medical research. Progress in the fields of drug discovery, regenerative medicine and cancer research among others are heavily dependent on in vivo models to validate in vitro observations, and develop new therapeutic approaches. However, conventional rodent and large animal experiments face ethical, practical and technical issues that limit their usage. The chick embryo represents an accessible and economical in vivo model, which has long been used in developmental biology, gene expression analysis (...) and loss/gain of function experiments. It is also an established model for tissue/cell transplantation, and because of its lack of immune system in early development, the chick embryo is increasingly recognised as a model of choice for mammalian biology with new applications for stem cell and cancer research. Here, we review novel applications of the chick embryo model, and discuss future developments of this in vivo model for biomedical research. (shrink)

This essay unites current philosophical thinking on imagination with a burgeoning debate in the philosophy of memory over whether episodic remembering is simply a kind of imagining. So far, this debate has been hampered by a lack of clarity in the notion of imagining at issue. Several options are considered and constructive imagining is identified as the relevant kind. Next, a functionalist account of episodic remembering is defended as a means to establishing two key points: first, one need not defend (...) a factive view of remembering in order to hold that causal connections to past experiences are essential to how rememberings are typed; and, second, current theories that equate remembering with imagining are in fact consistent with a functionalist theory that includes causal connections in its account of what it is to remember. This suggests that remembering is not a kind of imagining and clarifies what it would take to establish the contrary. (shrink)

Martin and Deutscher’s causal theory of remembering holds that a memory trace serves as a necessary causal link between any genuine episode of remembering and the event it enables one to recall. In recent years, the causal theory has come under fire from researchers across philosophy and cognitive science, who argue that results from the scientific study of memory are incompatible with the kinds of memory traces that Martin and Deutscher hold essential to remembering. Of special note, these critics observe, (...) is that a single memory trace can be shaped by multiple past experiences. This appears to prevent traces from underwriting Martin and Deutscher’s distinction between remembering an event and merely forming an accurate representation of it. This paper accepts such criticisms of the standard causal theory and, through considering the phenomenon forgetting through repetition, raises several others. A substantially revised causal theory is then developed, compatible with the thesis that individual memory traces are shaped by multiple past experiences. The key strategy is to conceive of episodic remembering not as the simple retrieval and projection of a static memory trace, but as a complex quasi-inferential process that makes use of multiple forms of information and cues—“prop-like” memory traces included—in generating the experience known as episodic remembering. When remembering is understood as a multi-componential process, there are a variety of ways in which a representation of the past may be appropriately causally dependent upon a prior experience of the event remembered. (shrink)

Much of what we say is never said aloud. It occurs only silently, as inner speech. We chastise, congratulate, joke and cajole, all without making a sound. This distinctively human ability to create public language in the privacy of our own minds is no less remarkable for its familiarity. And yet, until recently, inner speech remained at the periphery of philosophical and psychological theorizing. This essay collection, from an interdisciplinary group of leading philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, displays the rapidly growing (...) interest among researchers in the puzzles surrounding the nature and cognitive role of the inner voice. Questions explored include: the aids and obstacles inner speech presents to self-knowledge; the complex relation it bears to overt speech production and perception; the means by which inner speech can be identified and empirically assessed; its role in generating auditory verbal hallucinations; and its relationship to conceptual thought itself. (shrink)