How does the mind lend itself to artistic creation and appreciation? How should we study minds and arts in ways that transform our understanding of both? This book examines the concepts of art and cognition from the complementary perspectives of philosophy, the empirical sciences, and the humanities. Central chapters combine examples of visual art, music, literature, and film with the properties of cognition that they illuminate, including 4E cognition, predictive processing, and theories of affect and emotion. These aspects of cognition (...) are undergoing theoretical shifts that complicate established understandings of the mind and its encounter with the arts. As the book takes stock of recent developments in aesthetics that have incorporated empirical findings (Naturalized Aesthetics), it also envisions a new generation of cognitive science with robust ties to history and literature (the Cognitive Humanities). In this way, Cognition and the Arts can be seen as a model of interdisciplinary scholarship. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Emergence of the Stability‐Diversity—Complexity Debate Mathematization of Ecological Stability The End of the Consensus Contextualization and Classification of Ecological Stability Measures of Ecological Diversity and Complexity Evaluating Stability‐Diversity—Complexity Relationships Acknowledgments References Further Reading.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Originally published in 1961 by Columbia University Press.

The paper presents a series of German-Jewish readings of Lessing's "Nathan the Wise" stretching from the Enlightenment to the early post-1945 period. Already the first Jewish reader, Moses Mendelssohn, did not focus his interpretation of this drama on the so-called "parabel of the rings," where Nathan is commonly said to preach religious tolerance. Rather, Mendelssohn concentrates on act IV, scene 7, which expounds Lessing's concept of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity and Nathan's experience of Christian persecution. With the upsurge (...) of German anti-Semitism in the late 19th and 20th century, this scene served first as a sign of German-Christian empathy for Jewish suffering, and thus of hope, then as a reminder of recent prosecutions. It seemed to foreshadow, and eventually became overshadowed by, the Shoah. (shrink)

Perhaps no concept has been thought more important to ecological theorizing than the niche. Without it, technically sophisticated and well-regarded accounts of character displacement, ecological equivalence, limiting similarity, and others would seemingly never have been developed. The niche is also widely considered the centerpiece of the best candidate for a distinctively ecological law, the competitive exclusion principle. But the incongruous array and imprecise character of proposed definitions of the concept square poorly with its apparent scientific centrality. I argue this definitional (...) diversity and imprecision reflects a problematic conceptual indeterminacy that challenges its putative indispensability in ecology. (shrink)

The waning popularity of logical empiricism and the supposed discovery of insurmountable technical difficulties led most philosophers to abandon the project to formulate a formal criterion of empirical significance. Such a criterion would delineate claims that observation can confirm or disconfirm from those it cannot. Although early criteria were clearly inadequate, criticisms made of later, more sophisticated criteria were often indefensible or easily answered. Most importantly, Carnap’s last criterion was seriously misinterpreted and an amended version of it remains tenable.

Methodological individualism has a long, successful, and controversial track record in the social sciences. Its record in ecology is much shorter but proving as successful and controversial with so-called individual-based models. Distinctions and debates about methodological individualism in social sciences clarify the commitments of this general, individualistic approach to modeling ecological phenomena and show that there is a lot recommending it. In particular, a representational priority on individual organisms yields a cogent albeit deflationary account of ecological emergence and helps reveal (...) how quite disparate models and theories in ecology might be unified. (shrink)

Ecology is indispensable to understanding the biological world and addressing the environmental problems humanity faces. Its philosophy has never been more important. In this book, James Justus introduces readers to the philosophically rich issues ecology poses. Besides its crucial role in biological science generally, climate change, biodiversity loss, and other looming environmental challenges make ecology's role in understanding such threats and identifying solutions to them all the more critical. When ecology is applied and its insights marshalled to address these (...) problems and guide policy formation, interesting philosophical issues emerge. Justus sets them out in detail, and explores the often ethically charged dimensions of applied ecological science, using accessible language and a wealth of scientifically-informed examples. (shrink)

Attempts to discover fundamental traits in the process of experiencing and producing in man. Includes chapters on judgment, query, experience, and meaning.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this essay, Timothy Justus reviews the book Brain and Music (2012) by Stefan Koelsch, first providing a sketch of the book’s contents, including examples of Koelsch’s empirical work from four core areas (1) musical syntax, (2) musical semantics, (3) music and action, and (4) music and emotion. Justus then proceeds to discuss the continuous nature of cognitive domains and the continuous nature of mental activity.

Therefore, the difference between the natural and the non or supernatural would not be an ontological one. The identification of kinds of complexes or ...

Loop analysis is a method of qualitative modeling anticipated by Sewall Wright and systematically developed by Richard Levins. In Levins’ (1966) distinctions between modeling strategies, loop analysis sacrifices precision for generality and realism. Besides criticizing the clarity of these distinctions, Orzack and Sober (1993) argued qualitative modeling is conceptually and methodologically problematic. Loop analysis of the stability of ecological communities shows this criticism is unjustified. It presupposes an overly narrow view of qualitative modeling and underestimates the broad role models play (...) in scientific research, especially in helping scientists represent and understand complex systems. (shrink)

The current work investigated whether differences in phonological overlap between the past- and present-tense forms of regular and irregular verbs can account for the graded neurophysiological effects of verb regularity observed in past-tense priming designs. Event-related potentials were recorded from 16 healthy participants who performed a lexical-decision task in which past-tense primes immediately preceded present-tense targets. To minimize intra-modal phonological priming effects, cross-modal presentation between auditory primes and visual targets was employed, and results were compared to a companion intra-modal auditory (...) study (Justus, T., Larsen, J., de Mornay Davies, P., Swick, D. (2008). Interpreting dissociations between regular and irregular past-tense morphology: evidence from event-related potentials. Cognitive, Affective, Behavioral Neuroscience, 8, 178–194.). For both regular and irregular verbs, faster response times and reduced N400 components were observed for present-tense forms when primed by the corresponding past-tense forms. Although behavioral facilitation was observed with a pseudopast phonological control condition, neither this condition nor an orthographic-phonological control produced significant N400 priming effects. Instead, these two types of priming were associated with a post-lexical anterior negativity (PLAN). Results are discussed with regard to dual- and single-system theories of inflectional morphology, as well as intra- and cross-modal prelexical priming. (shrink)

Robustness concepts are often invoked to manage two obstacles confronting models of ecological systems: complexity and uncertainty. The intuitive idea is that any result derived from many idealized but credible models is thereby made more reliable or is better confirmed. An appropriate basis for this inference has proven elusive. Here, several representations of robustness analysis are vetted, paying particular attention to complex models of ecosystems and the global climate. The claim that robustness is itself confirmatory because robustness analysis employs a (...) Bayesian variety-of-evidence argument is criticized, but recent overwhelming pessimism about robustness may have a silver lining. (shrink)

First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Significance of Terminology for the Idea of a Historical Period – Considerations on Frühe Neuzeit/Early Modern. This article focuses on the relationship between the names given to historical periods and the attributed substance of that period. It argues that the possibility of a neutralisation in terms of substantive meaning depends on the terminology used to delineate a historical period. Considering the example of ‘early modern history’ the article sketches the usage of that term in twentieth century historiography. While it (...) is clear that the concept cannot escape the inherent teleology of modernity succeeding pre‐modern ages, the analysis shows that historians have used ‘early modern’ in surprisingly divers ways trying to overcome the semantic meaning of the term itself. (shrink)