This essay deals with a particularly recalcitrant problem in the history of ideas, that of irrationalism. It emerged to full consciousness in mid-eighteenth century thought. Irrationalism was a logical consequence of individualism which in turn was a direct outcome of the Cartesian self-reflective subject. In time these tendencies produced the "critical" Zeitgeist and the "epoch of taste" during which Kant began thinking about such matters. Like Alfred Bäumler, I argue that irrationalism could not have arisen in ancient or medieval philosophical (...) discourse, as they both lacked a certain type of rationalism required as its conceptual antipode. Only after the Lisbon earthquake (1755), and the ensuing reason vs. passion debate acknowledging for the first time both human powers as equal contenders, did the specter of irrationalism arise and become a focus. Kant's revolution in thought produced "transcendental psychology" reconciling "pure" sensibility and "pure" reason and provided, I argue, the conceptual wherewithal to grant aesthetic feeling and irrationalism a philosophical niche. (shrink)

The most valuable finding of my first sightseeing trip was that medieval Europe was the seat of Christendom and that Christianity defines the West. I was amazed to see that Europe reveals so much of its past. I had not had such an experience in the United States, where I had lived as a student and then as a professor of economics.As I glimpsed the West, I found myself rediscovering Confucian civilization and how much I am still Confucian, although I (...) was born into a Presbyterian family in Korea. But then, Korea is the most Confucian country. Curious about the West since my first trip, whenever I can I have toured Europe in search of the meaning of the West.While travelling in Europe, my mind often jumps back to my early life in Korea and Japan. I am struck by the vivid contrast in appearance between medieval European towns and Asian towns, which were grey and as flat as pancakes. Medieval towns are stony and solid. Nothing is flimsy. Shaped by spires, domes, and towers, a European town's silhouette rises and falls like a stock market graph. Europeans obviously loved the vertical emphasis. A traveller can see either a soaring church tower or a castle keep miles away on the horizon. Churches predominate, as if to emphasize that the main business of the town is the worship and glorification of God. (shrink)

Das neue Buch des bereits mit zahlreichen Arbeiten besonders zum Vierten Kreuzzug hervorgetretenen Autors setzt sich aus drei unterschiedlichen, wenn auch eng miteinander verwobenen Teilen zusammen: einer Untersuchung zur Familie und zur Biographie des Dogen Enrico Dandolo, einer Darstellung von Politik und Verfassungsgeschichte Venedigs im 12. Jahrhundert und einer Geschichte des Vierten Kreuzzugs. Die Erzähl- und Argumentationsstränge der drei Teile sind vielfach miteinander verschränkt und verfolgen gemeinsam ein viertes Ziel: anschaulich zu machen, daß die politischen und verfassungsrechtlichen Entwicklungen des 12. (...) Jahrhunderts, besonders aber die mit der Person des Enrico Dandolo eng verbundenen Geschehnisse des Vierten Kreuzzugs die Stadt Venedig fundamental veränderten und sie von einer Kaufmannsrepublik (merchant republic) zu einer Seemacht (maritime empire) werden ließen. (shrink)

Recent findings necessitate revision of the traditional view of G protein‐coupled receptor (GPCR) signaling and expand the diversity of mechanisms by which receptor signaling influences cell behavior in general. GPCRs elicit signals at the plasma membrane and are then rapidly removed from the cell surface by endocytosis. Internalization of GPCRs has long been thought to serve as a mechanism to terminate the production of second messengers such as cAMP. However, recent studies show that internalized GPCRs can continue to either stimulate (...) or inhibit cAMP production in a sustained manner. They do so by remaining associated with their cognate G protein subunit and adenylyl cyclase at endosomal compartments. Once internalized, the GPCRs produce cellular responses distinct from those elicited at the cell surface. (shrink)

Die Rede ist von einer merkwürdigen Variante deutscher Italiensehnsucht: Dem Wunsch, in Rom begraben zu werden, der im Fall Wilhelm von Humboldts mit einem konkreten Glücksgefühl korreliert. Das ist schon deshalb bemerkenswert, weil Humboldts römischer Aufenthalt vom Sterben dreier seiner Kinder und seines Freundes Schiller überschattet wurde. Die Frage nach dem Niederschlag, den die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Tod in Humboldts Texten fand, rekonstruiert die vorliegende Untersuchung als Form einer Werkpolitik, die es unternimmt, den eigenen Nachruhm in verschiedenen Diskursen zu steuern. (...) Humboldts Terminologie, die den christlich besetzten Begriff,Unsterblichkeit? durch den Begriff,Unendlichkeit? ersetzt, wird in sechs privilegierten Lektüren nachgegangen. (shrink)

This study focuses on Kant's attempt to find the link between feeling and cognition on a priori grounds in the three Critiques to make philosophical judgment possible. As such it treats the area of aesthetics and its formal principles. This work explores the enigma: How is it that Kant values the talent to judge more than understanding and reason; indeed the lack of it «no school can make good». Yet, even though Kant demonstrates how a priori synthetic judgments and a (...) priori moral judgments are possible as particular pronouncements, he analyzes the power of judgment itself as an independent faculty only in the last Critique. The author argues that the aesthetic factor plays a recalcitrant, yet vital and necessary role in all human judging. Finding an adequate niche for feeling and its a priori principles becomes a key problem not just for Kant but for the entire philosophical enterprise. (shrink)

KANT AND HEGEL FIND THEMSELVES ON SIMILAR PATHS toward their respective goals to give a total account of reality. They share a deep commitment to science, Wissenschaftlichkeit, and raise the question: Where does science begin? Similarly, they answer: It begins with sense knowledge yet it is not founded in the senses. This essay attempts to reflect on, with the aim of cautiously reassessing, the nonsensible, universal features of sense experience from an idealist perspective. A study of the “science of sensibility,” (...) raised to new levels of interest in recent debates of how the mind works, seems to have lost nothing of its fascination, indeed urgency in contemporary discussions, in the Kant-Hegel scholarship, in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science as well as the natural and cognitive sciences in general. (shrink)

Radical and autopoietic enactivists disagree concerning how to understand the concept of sense-making in enactivist discourse and the extent of its distribution within the organic domain. I situate this debate within a broader conflict of commitments to naturalism on the part of radical enactivists, and to phenomenology on the part of autopoietic enactivists. I argue that autopoietic enactivists are in part responsible for the obscurity of the notion of sense-making by attributing it univocally to sentient and non-sentient beings and following (...) Hans Jonas in maintaining a phenomenological dimension to life-mind continuity among all living beings, sentient or non-sentient. I propose following Merleau-Ponty instead, who offers a properly phenomenological notion of sense-making for which sentience is a necessary condition. Against radicalist efforts to replace sense-making with a deflationary, naturalist conception of intentionality, I discuss the role of the phenomenological notion of sense-making for understanding animal behavior and experience. (shrink)

This paper clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between speaking and spoken speech, and the relation between the two, in his Phenomenology of Perception. Against a common interpretation, I argue on exegetical and philosophical grounds that the distinction should not be understood as one between two kinds of speech, but rather between two internally related dimensions present in all speech. This suggests an interdependence between speaking and spoken aspects of speech, and some commentators have critiqued Merleau-Ponty for claiming a priority of speaking over (...) spoken speech. However, there is a sense in which Merleau-Ponty is right to emphasize the priority, namely, in terms of the ontological priority of the speaking subject with respect to language understood as a constituted cultural ideality. The latter only maintains its ontological status insofar as it is taken up by a language community. I favorably contrast Merleau-Ponty’s views on this question to those of the late Heidegger and de Saussure, and suggest potential applications of this clarified position for contemporary discussions in philosophy of language. (shrink)

Approaches to the naturalization of phenomenology usually understand naturalization as a matter of rendering continuous the methods, epistemologies, and ontologies of phenomenological and natural scientific inquiry. Presupposed in this statement of the problematic, however, is that there is an original discontinuity, a rupture between phenomenology and the natural sciences that must be remedied. I propose that this way of thinking about the issue is rooted in a simplistic understanding of the phenomenological reduction that entails certain assumptions about the subject matter (...) of phenomenology and its relationship to the natural sciences. By contrast, Merleau‐Ponty's first work, The Structure of Behavior, presents a radically different approach to the phenomenological reduction, one that traverses the natural sciences and integrates them into phenomenology from the outset. I outline the argument for this position in The Structure of Behavior and then discuss consequences for current methodological issues surrounding the naturalization of phenomenology, focusing on the relationship between empirical sciences of mind, phenomenological psychology, and transcendental phenomenology. This novel exegesis of Merleau‐Ponty's view on the reduction offers new insight into his oft‐quoted remark that the phenomenological reduction is impossible to complete. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the "incompleteness thesis" of Kant's General Metaphysics before completing a full analysis of the power of judgment which only occurred in the Critique of Judgment-Power. Kant scholars have argued that Kant's General Metaphysics was completed with the Critique of Pure Reason and the Third Critique added nothing significant to this quest. One of the issues in this paper is to understand Kant's various "transition problems" and their solution to unify knowledge under a metaphysics, all (...) of which has implications for the natural and cognitive sciences even today. (shrink)

Can we empathize with plants? Critics object that supposed empathy with plants entails anthropomorphic or zoomorphic projection. In reply, a phenomenological account of empathy claims to avoid this objection. However, phenomenological accounts of empathy center on one sentient (phenomenally conscious) mind accessing another. If plants are not sentient, then they appear to be inappropriate targets for empathy. I reply by exploring how the organic body is implicated in sentience, even if it is not usually focal. Interoceptive experience gives us indirect (...) access to our own organic body, and thus provides a basis for a problematic, paradoxical empathy with plants. (shrink)

Long ago, when Alexander the Great asked the mathematician Menaechmus for a crash course in geometry, he got the famous reply ``There is no royal road to mathematics.'' Where there was no shortcut for Alexander, there is no shortcut for us. Still, the fact that we have access to computers and mature programming languages means that there are avenues for us that were denied to the kings and emperors of yore. The purpose of this book is to teach logic and (...) mathematical reasoning in practice, and to connect logical reasoning with computer programming in Haskell. Haskell emerged in the 1990s as a standard for lazy functional programming, a programming style where arguments are evaluated only when the value is actually needed. Haskell is a marvelous demonstration tool for logic and maths because its functional character allows implementations to remain very close to the concepts that get implemented, while the laziness permits smooth handling of infinite data structures. This book does not assume the reader to have previous experience with either programming or construction of formal proofs, but acquaintance with mathematical notation, at the level of secondary school mathematics is presumed. Everything one needs to know about mathematical reasoning or programming is explained as we go along. After proper digestion of the material in this book, the reader will be able to write interesting programs, reason about their correctness, and document them in a clear fashion. The reader will also have learned how to set up mathematical proofs in a structured way, and how to read and digest mathematical proofs written by others. This is the updated, expanded, and corrected second edition of a much-acclaimed textbook. Praise for the first edition: 'Doets and van Eijck's ``The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths and Programming'' is an astonishingly extensive and accessible textbook on logic, maths, and Haskell.' Ralf Laemmel, Professor of Computer Science, University of Koblenz-Landau. (shrink)

This note exploits back-and-forth characteristics to construct, using a single method, short proofs for ten classics of first-order and modal logic: interpolation theorems, preservation theorems, and Lindström's theorem.

I argue that once one holds (as Kant does) that the mind is equipped with innate, pre-existing, i.e. a priori structures, one can ask (as materialists or empiricists would), Is there an identifiable source of such structures and what does it imply? Already Schopenhauer, Moses Mendelssohn and others have taken that route of argument, without fully drawing the implications. In this paper I attempt to do so, posing the query: Is Kant's very explicit separation of the transcendent from the transcendental (...) necessary in his critical system? I try to answer from various perspectives. (shrink)

In recent years, social cognition approaches to human evolution and Material Engagement Theory have offered new theoretical resources to advance our understanding of the prehistoric hominin mind. To date, however, these two approaches have developed largely in isolation from one another. I argue that there is a gap between social- and material-centred approaches, and that this is precisely the sociomateriality of the appearance of ancestral hominin bodies, which evolved under selective pressure to develop increasingly complex, cooperative sociality. To get this (...) sociomaterial body in focus, I develop an esthesiological framework, appropriated from Merleau-Ponty (2003), for interpreting the expressive body in an evolutionary and comparative context. The guiding hypothesis of esthesiology is that before being rationality (social or material), “humanity is another corporeity” (Merleau-Ponty, 2003, p. 208). Esthesiology studies the appearance of the body and its sense organs as an intertwining locus of a sensing power (the ability to see, to touch, etc.) and a sensible character (the visible, touchable body). It is this dual-aspect character of the body that facilitates the most basic affective and sensorimotor modes of sociality. Examining these features from a comparative perspective, we find that the human body is distinctively suited to prosocial communication and cooperation: a more cooperative eye, an exposed and communicative skin. I thus propose a cooperative body hypothesis, by analogy with the cooperative eye hypothesis (Tomasello et al., 2007). Esthesiology provides a framework for integrating and interpreting a wide range of otherwise disconnected facts concerning human and nonhuman animal bodies, forms of life, cognition, and evolution, thereby bridging the gap between social cognition and material engagement perspectives. In doing so, however, it not only solves problems and proposes new directions of investigation, but also demands theoretical revisions from each. (shrink)