Stones, like us, stand at the intersection of countless lines crossing one another and receding to infinity, at the center of a field of forces too unpredictable to be measured…On my desk, next to my laptop, a small piece of lapis lazuli. My eye is captured by the intense blue from its most important component, the mineral lazurite. The stone also contains white calcite specks and some metallic glistering from its pyrite elements. Looking at the play of colors, feeling the (...) weight and the surface of the rocky material, I am reminded of Marguerite Yourcenar's words at the end of her introduction to Caillois's The Writing of Stones when she invokes stones as force fields "at the intersection of countless lines... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Autism and Intersubjectivity:Beyond Cognitivism and the Theory of MindRichard Gipps (bio)The papers that make up this special issue of Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology are obviously united by both topic and approach. They all look at autism through a philosophical lens—both at infantile autism (Gallagher 2004a, 2004b; McGeer 2004; Shanker 2004) and at schizophrenic autism (Stanghellini and Ballerini 2004). Moreover, they are all concerned with the foundations of our (...) understanding of people and their minds, both the minds of others (Gallagher 2004a, 2004b; Shanker 2004; Stanghellini and Ballerini 2004) and that of oneself (McGeer 2004). The developmental disorder of infantile autism provides a conspicuous example of a disruption in the ability to develop such an understanding and enter into the social world, whilst schizophrenic autism provides a conspicuous example of what happens when one falls out of it (Stanghellini and Ballerini 2004).Yet what further affords the opportunity of this introduction is the possibility of discerning a strong common theme that runs through the philosophical treatment the papers provide. For they are united in their rejection of the primarily cognitive approach toward our capacity to relate to one another (or to ourselves) as to minded people taken by many in the mainstream of developmental psycho(patho)logy today.1 Such mainstream approaches ascribe to the developing child a 'theory of mind,' tacit knowledge of which supposedly enables them to negotiate the social world. In place of such an intellectualist, disengaged, cognition-focused psychology, we are offered perspectives that stress the primitive foundational character of our pre-reflective (noncognitive) engagement with one another, our emotion, our expression, and our embodiment.The grounds for this stressing of the affective and praxical dimensions of personal life over the cognitive and representational are twofold. First there is the developmental trajectory itself, and the claim is that the autistic child's interpersonal lacunae manifest themselves considerably before they develop the cognitive capacities for social knowledge (Gallagher 2004a; Shanker 2004). The principle ground, however, is philosophical, and the claim here is that what needs to be rejected in the developmental psycho(patho)logy is an alienated ontology and estranged epistemology that has implicitly become inscribed within it, constraining its explanatory project and limiting its vision of possibilities.2 That at least is how I [End Page 195] would put it and, by way of providing an overarching philosophical presentation of the papers of this issue, what follows shall be its elaboration.The ontology in question has it that the mind is an inner domain, that bodily behavior is an outer domain, that belief and thought epitomize the former, that intentionality is a function of the former and only derivatively manifest in the latter, that the form of our embodiment is contingent, that understanding is manifest primarily in thought and not intrinsically in praxis, that the mind is populated by free-standing inner representations, and that perception and the emotions are extrinsic to the understanding (Gallagher 2004a, 2004b; McGeer 2004; Shanker 2004). And such an ontology carries a host of epistemological implications. The self retreats from the interpersonal interactive domain, taking up residence even behind the subject's own mind, which itself becomes an objectified domain. In our own case, we are left in the predicament of needing to inspect (or intro-spect) our own inner states to find out how things are for us; our self-reports (avowals of what we think and feel) thereby become avowals of judgments of what we take ourselves to think and feel (McGeer 2004). And when we confront others the task becomes one of cognitively figuring out, from merely 'outer' clues, how things stand with them on the inside. The encounter with others is then epistemologically fraught, relying on inference and theory to take us from an outer domain of mere movement to a hidden inner world of intentionality (Gallagher 2004a, 2004b; Shanker 2004).Thus, an alienated ontology of the person and their mind bequeaths its own epistemological problematic, and the estranged epistemology gives to developmental psychology the task of filling in the details of the actual cognitive states and mechanisms which instantiate the theories and inferences which it has discerned a priori to be required. And psychopathology... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 346-353 [Access article in PDF] Stevens after Davidson on Metaphor Clive Stroud-Drinkwater IN "NOTES TOWARD A SUPREME FICTION" 1 Wallace Stevens suggests that the absolute as we imagine that an angel would experience it constitutes the supreme fiction. We conceive the experience of the angel only in a fantasy, but it is our fantasy, and therefore the experience of the angel and its absolute (...) are things that we comprehend in our imagination. Thus, in imagination we can apprehend that which we may at first suppose only angels can apprehend, since "the lapis-haunted air" of the angel's absolute is a creature of our own imagination and nothing more. When Stevens asks, "Is it he or is it I that experience this?," the question is rhetorical, since the angel's "experience" exists only within the poet's imagination. In "Sunday Morning," likewise, Stevens suggests that the concept of paradise is defined only within the limits of human imagination. It is a construct which people can comprehend only in the terms of their essentially finite "passions," "moods," "grievings," "elations," "remembrance" and "desire;" it is a construct which people create in "a chant of paradise, / Out of their blood, returning to the sky." Abstracting from our ordinary feelings will not leave us with a transcendent conception of paradise; on the contrary, it will deprive us of our sense of value. The image of the inhuman god ("Jove in the clouds" with "his inhuman birth") is sterile, remote from all human concern. For Stevens, "The ultimate value is reality." 2 [End Page 346]It is possible to regard this as a sad and resigned affirmation that we have at most this world and its parochial values, since God is "dead" and we cannot really have paradise at all, 3 but it is also possible to regard it as an affirmation of the genuine value of the ordinary and the human. On this interpretation of Stevens, "Sunday Morning" calls us from the shadows of a self-defeating attempt to transcend our own values to a consideration of the place of ordinary values in our conception of paradise: Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else In any balm or beauty of the earth, Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? The question, which is already rhetorical, is answered flatly in another poem, "The Rock"; the imagination can indeed find paradise in reality: In this plenty, the poem makes meanings of the rock, Of such mixed motion and such imagery That its barrenness becomes a thousand things And so exists no more. This is the cure Of leaves and of the ground and of ourselves. In this "cure" we imagine the world as paradise, or the rock as meaningful, or barrenness as a thousand things. There is, however, an unresolved tension between imagining one thing as another and recognizing that the things are, in fact, different. Max Black regards this tension as the greatest weakness in his "interaction" theory of metaphor. 4 In "Notes" Stevens addresses this problem: Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night, How is it I find you in difference, see you there In a moving contour, a change not quite completed? The problem here is the general problem of metaphor: metaphors seem to constitute an "evasion" 5 since they are usually literally false. 6 For example, the "fat girl" is presumably not literally summer or night, and may not even be fat or a girl, metaphors being what they are. To the "fat girl," the poet says, [End Page 347] You remain the more than natural figure. You Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrational Distortion, however fragrant, however dear. His metaphors disguise the object; the object is represented in them as "more than natural"—in other words, not natural, not the thing as it is. "The very thing and nothing else" ("Credences") that Stevens, the poet of the real world, wishes to see thus becomes "obscure," a thing in "an obscure world / Of things that would... (shrink)

Hiller vonGaertringen says of this inscription: ‘Lapis in obscuro loco collocatus est. In ectypis nihil fere dispeximus … Lectio e Koehlero et Velseno componenda est.’ I did not find the stone till my last morning in Athens: it is E.M. 6600; it is extremely illegible, and I had not time to move it to a really good light. But there are a few things to add, and the length of line can, I believe, be determined.

This comes near to satisfying; but even with ipsa the change of subject from tecta to plaustra is awkward, and exsultant is inappropriate to a lumbering plaustrum . I suggest reading cisia instead of ipsa. The cisium was a fast light two-wheeled vehicle which might well jump up on a rough road; and the first three letters cis could have become the -es of the MS exsultantes. Two further points: lapis uiai is not ‘a stone on the road’ , but (...) rather the stone of the road, i.e. the paving; and utrimque is not ‘on one side or the other’ but ‘on both sides’. There remains Ernout's objection that the suppression of the final s of lapis is unlikely. One can only say that no one would have ventured to introduce by conjecture pendentibu' structas or manantibu' stillent, but both are found in Lucretius' text. (shrink)

During the latter half of the thirteenth century there arose around Tuscany a strange and unprecedented poetry, erudite, abstract, and arrogantly intellectual. It sang beyond courtly conventions about the wonders of the rational universe whose complex secrets the new speculative sciences were eagerly systematizing. Appropriating the language of natural philosophy, Aristotelian psychology, and even theology, love poetry developed a new theoretical understanding of its enterprise which allowed it to redefine love as spiritualized search for knowledge. This intellectualization of erotic desire (...) culminates in the Florentine sitlnovisti, a handful of learned poets who turned love poetry into an eclectic philosophical affair. Guido Cavalcanti’s famous canzone “Donna me prega” was universally considered to be not only the technically most perfect canzone ever written but also a rigorous philosophical treatise. As much as in our own day, exegeses of the poem were forced into the arcana of Scholastic Aristotelianism in order to make sense of its abstract, psychologistic definition of love’s essence. While Cavalcanti lyricized an Averroistic logic of the unified intellect, his younger friend Dante was preparing to put all of medieval philosophy, theology, and science into terza rima. It was in this terza rima that medieval Paris found perhaps its most felicitous expression, for the Divine Comedy represents, among other things, a creative transfiguration of the critical discourses Paris was diffusing throughout Europe.What recalls that situation today is the way Paris again marks the center of critical thought, while in Italiy a new generation of poets has emerged that translates the lessons of contemporary philosophy into poetry. In this essay I plan to discuss some of the most radical or, by analogy, “stilnovistic” of these lyricists. For purposes of convenience I will refer to them as the “favorite malice” poets. The phrase comes from the title of an anthology of select contemporary Italian poetry, recently published in a bilingual English edition: The Favorite Malice: Ontology and Reference in Contemporary Italian Poetry.2 The title alludes to a passage of Friedrich Nietzsche: “It is my favorite malice and art that my silence has learned not to betray itself through silence.” These words from Thus Spoke Zarathrustra serves as the anthology’s epigraphs and signal the peculiar poetics that brings the poets together in one volume. They are not brought together as a “school” but as a loose convergence of individual practices. The most illustrious name among the group is that of Andrea Zanzotto , who belongs to an older generation but whom the other poets call their “youngest traveling companion.” The “older” companions include Nanni Cagnone, Luigi Ballerini, Raffaele Perrotta, and Angelo Lumelli. Robert P. Harrison is assistant professor of Italian at Stanford University. He has published a book of poems, The Murano Workshop , and articles on Dante, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and liberal philology. The Body of Beatrice is the title of his work in progress. (shrink)

In its heyday alchemy was a comprehensive theory of transmutation describing not only transformations of base into precious metals but also transformations of the soul up and down the great chain of being. Alchemy was not just a physics but also a metaphysics. Alchemy as metaphysics attracts interest to this day, as in Carl Jung's writings about the soul and personal identity. As he noted, "The alchemists sought for that effect which would heal not only the disharmonies of the physical (...) world but inner psychic conflict as well, the 'affliction of the soul,' and they called this effect the lapis philosophorum [i.e., the philosopher's stone]. In order to obtain it, they had to loosen the age-old attachment of the soul to the body and thus make conscious the conflict between the purely natural and the spiritual man.". (shrink)

There is often said to be something peculiar about the history of modal theory up until the turn of the fourteenth century, when John Duns Scotus decisively reframed the issues. I wish to argue that this impression of dramatic discontinuity is almost entirely a misimpression. Premodern philosophers prescind from the wide-open modal space of all possible worlds because they seek to adapt their modal discourse to the explanatory and linguistic demands of their context.

t. 1.Novoe mirovozzrenie i novai͡a teorii͡a nauki -- t. 2. [without special title].

Коллективный труд "Методология науки и антропология" подготовлен в Центре методологии и этики науки ИФ РАН. Он состоит из двух разделов. В первом разделе "Методология науки и антропологический поворот в философии".

I argue that the dual-process account of human learning rejected by Mitchell et al. in the target article is informative and predictive with respect to human behaviour in a way that the authors' purely propositional account is not. Experiments that reveal different patterns of results under conditions that favour either associative or rule-based performance are the way forward.

-- v. 2. Pami︠a︡ti Vitalii︠a︡ Ivanovicha Svint︠s︡ova.