Simple chemical agents with lifelike properties can be termed a protocell, meaning the earliest form of a natural living cell. These agents are not necessarily alive but are examples of living technology, namely technology that possesses lifelike qualities. Given that the protocell can respond to environmental cues with directional and controlled movement it can be thought of as being able to make decisions whilst navigating through a complex environment. In this way a mobile protocell agent can be considered to exhibit (...) a form of computation. The development of smart protocell agents can be used as experimental model systems for the investigation of abstracted living processes that can subsequently be physically and chemically manipulated to produce architectural design outcomes. (shrink)

A new design principle is discussed for making a sufficiently complex cell for the creation of the first wet artificial life in the laboratory. The current approach is to attempt a minimal cell, which consists of a liposome that contains a minimal metabolic cycle for self-maintenance and self-replication. Given the lack of success with the minimal cell to date, the authors suggest it is possible to take an alternative approach to building the first wet artificial life form that they have (...) called the first cell. In this article, the concept of the first cell versus the minimal cell is discussed. The new design principle is supported by the following observations that are examined and developed from an Origins of Life perspective: That human development shows a U-shaped curve where the skills and developmental patterns of human infants are proficient at the first phase then decline and subsequently recover to a qualitatively better level. A review of spatial temporal dynamics using cellular automata studies shows that complexity generated at both the initial states and the time evolution dynamics can synthesize rich evolutionary processes. A chemical experiment exhibiting self-organizing dynamics results in the emergence of a self-propelling oil droplet that demonstrates the self-sustaining properties of a non-equilibrium state. Finally, the important design question Is life a contingent or deterministic phenomenon? is examined which asks whether a life form is a dynamic product of its surroundings or whether it is the inevitable outcome of prior events, and is discussed making reference to the characteristics of an art installation The Way Things Go. This contemporary masterpiece, which exhibits a long-lasting chain of unrelated causal events, serves as a theoretical model for discussion of evolutionary processes, suggesting that when it comes to designing wet artificial life forms in the laboratory, both contingent and deterministic processes should be taken into account. (shrink)

Aworkshop was held August 26–28, 2015, by the Earth- Life Science Institute (ELSI) Origins Network (EON, see Appendix I) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. This meeting gathered a diverse group of around 40 scholars researching the origins of life (OoL) from various perspectives with the intent to find common ground, identify key questions and investigations for progress, and guide EON by suggesting a roadmap of activities. Specific challenges that the attendees were encouraged to address included the following: What key (...) questions, ideas, and investigations should the OoL research community address in the near and long term? How can this community better organize itself and prioritize its efforts? What roles can particular subfields play, and what can ELSI and EON do to facilitate research progress? (See also Appendix II.) The present document is a product of that workshop; a white paper that serves as a record of the discussion that took place and a guide and stimulus to the solution of the most urgent and important issues in the study of the OoL. This paper is not intended to be comprehensive or a balanced representation of the opinions of the entire OoL research community. It is intended to present a number of important position statements that contain many aspirational goals and suggestions as to how progress can be made in understanding the OoL. The key role played in the field by current societies and recurring meetings over the past many decades is fully acknowledged, including the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL) and its official journal Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres, as well as the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL). (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Investigating Extended Embodiment Using a Computational Model and Human Experimentation” by Yuki Sato, Hiroyuki Iizuka & Takashi Ikegami. Upshot: First, we comment on a potential weakness highlighted by the use of self-reporting in the human-coupled windmill experiment as described in the target article. Second, we suggest that the authors treat their windmill models as soft-assembled dynamical systems. This would allow them to investigate extended body schemes by looking for 1/f noise in the interface (...) between the agent and the windmills. (shrink)

The first systematic collaboration between cognitive scientists and sports psychologists considers the mind–body relationship from the perspective of athletic skill and sports practice. This landmark work is the first systematic collaboration between cognitive scientists and sports psychologists that considers the mind–body relationship from the perspective of athletic skill and sports practice. With twenty-six chapters by leading researchers, the book connects and integrates findings from fields that range from philosophy of mind to sociology of sports. The chapters show not only that (...) sports can tell scientists how the human mind works but also that the scientific study of the human mind can help athletes succeed. Sports psychology research has always focused on the themes, notions, and models of embodied cognition; embodied cognition, in turn, has found striking confirmation of its theoretical claims in the psychological accounts of sports performance and athletic skill. Athletic skill is a legitimate form of intelligence, involving cognitive faculties no less sophisticated and complex than those required by mathematical problem solving. After presenting the key concepts necessary for applying embodied cognition to sports psychology, the book discusses skill disruption ; sensorimotor skill acquisition and how training correlates to the development of cognitive faculties; the intersubjective and social dimension of sports skills, seen in team sports; sports practice in cultural and societal contexts; the notion of “affordance” and its significance for ecological psychology and embodied cognition theory; and the mind's predictive capabilities, which enable anticipation, creativity, improvisation, and imagination in sports performance. Contributors Ana Maria Abreu, Kenneth Aggerholm, Salvatore Maria Aglioti, Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza, Duarte Araújo, Jürgen Beckmann, Kath Bicknell, Geoffrey P. Bingham, Jens E. Birch, Gunnar Breivik, Noel E. Brick, Massimiliano L. Cappuccio, Thomas H. Carr, Alberto Cei, Anthony Chemero, Wayne Christensen, Lincoln J. Colling, Cassie Comley, Keith Davids, Matt Dicks, Caren Diehl, Karl Erickson, Anna Esposito, Pedro Tiago Esteves, Mirko Farina, Giolo Fele, Denis Francesconi, Shaun Gallagher, Gowrishankar Ganesh, Raúl Sánchez-García, Rob Gray, Denise M. Hill, Daniel D. Hutto, Tsuyoshi Ikegami, Geir Jordet, Adam Kiefer, Michael Kirchhoff, Kevin Krein, Kenneth Liberman, Tadhg E. MacIntyre, Nelson Mauro Maldonato, David L. Mann, Richard S. W. Masters, Patrick McGivern, Doris McIlwain, Michele Merritt, Christopher Mesagno, Vegard Fusche Moe, Barbara Gail Montero, Aidan P. Moran, David Moreau, Hiroki Nakamoto, Alberto Oliverio, David Papineau, Gert-Jan Pepping, Miriam Reiner, Ian Renshaw, Michael A. Riley, Zuzanna Rucinska, Lawrence Shapiro, Paula Silva, Shannon Spaulding, John Sutton, Phillip D. Tomporowski, John Toner, Andrew D. Wilson, Audrey Yap, Qin Zhu, Christopher Madan. (shrink)

Originally published in 1988, M.C. Dillon's classic study of Merleau-Ponty is now available in a revised second edition containing a new preface and a new chapter on "Truth in Art." Dillon's thesis is that Merleau-Ponty has developed the first genuine alternative to ontological dualism seen in Western philosophy. From his early work on the philosophical significance of the human body to his later ontology of flesh, Merleau-Ponty shows that the perennial problems growing out of dualistic conceptions of mind and body, (...) subject and object, immanence and transcendence can be resolved within the framework of a new way of thinking based on the exemplar of the worldly embodiment of thought. (shrink)

As much as the differences between perspectives can divide environmental philosophers across the globe, they can also be a source of fruitful exchange; the different approaches can learn from each other and challenge each other’s blind spots. On the one hand, the New World idea of a pristine wilderness devoid of human effects has been deflated when it became apparent that many wilderness areas had been profoundly affected by humans before European conquest and settlement. On the other hand, it is (...) clear by now that preserving the typical Old World cultural-historic landscapes is becoming more and more expensive and difficult. This introduction first sketches the main difference between Old World and New World approaches, and show that both approaches struggle with similar problems. Next, it indicates how New Worlders and Old Worlders respond to these problems. And finally, it gives a brief outline of this volume. (shrink)

Bringing allegory into the light from the neglect into which it fell means focusing on the wondrous heights of the human spirit in its significance for culture. Contemporary philosophies and literary theories, which give pre-eminence to primary linguistics forms (symbol and metaphor), seem to favor just that which makes intelligible communication possible. But they fall short in accounting for the deepest subliminal founts that prompt the mind to exalt in beauty, virtue, transcending aspiration. The present, rich collection shows how allegory, (...) incorporating the soaring of the spirit, offers highlights for culture, with its fluctuations and transformation. This collective effort, rich in ideas and intuitions and covering a vast range of cultural manifestations, is a pioneering work, retrieving the vision of the exalted human spirit, bringing together literature, theatre, music and painting in a variety of revealing perspectives. The authors include: M. Kronegger, Ch. Raffini, J. Smith, J.B. Williamson, H. Ross, M.F. Wagner, F. Divorne, L. Oppenheim, D.K. Heckerl, N. Campi de Castro, P. Saurez Pascual, M. Alfaro Amieiro, H. Fletcher Thompson, R.J. Wilson III, and A. Stensaas. For specialists, students and workers in philosophy, comparative literature, aesthetic phenomenologists and historians of art. (shrink)

Comparison of the opinions working with the children of psychologists of Volgograd region concerning the provision of psychological assistance to children with early childhood autism in the 10-year interval showed the ongoing institutionalization of this social practice, although not intensive enough. However, the COVID-19 pandemic, which began in early 2020, made it virtually impossible to provide psychological support to children with the disorder, due to numerous factual and subjective factors. It was concluded that regional medical and social services needed to (...) be particularly proactive in providing support to vulnerable categories of persons. (shrink)

This paper investigates the attitudes of two Islamic and Christian thinkers, Saint Aquinas and Mulla Sadra Shirazi, about occurrence and eternity hypothesis issue. Aquinas faces two ideas. The first approach is eternity of the world based on Aristotle's theory and his followers another approach is the world temporal occurrence derived from Christian scriptures. Aquinas believes that the reasons presented for proving the world's occurrence are not convincing and therefore criticizes them. Although he accepts the universe occurrence he has a worshiping (...) view to it and finally regards the world's eternity and occurrence as an antinomical problem. In contrast, Mulla Sadra who has accepted the occurrence does not consider a starting point for the issue and in turn tries to prove it by Substantial Motion approach and therefore regardless of worship aspect of the issue and by employing a rational approach he gains a higher status than Aquinas. (shrink)

In her Introduction, Tymieniecka states the core theme of the present book sharply: Is culture an excess of nature's prodigious expansiveness - an excess which might turn out to be dangerous for nature itself if it goes too far - or is culture a 'natural', congenial prolongation of nature-life? If the latter, then culture is assimilated into nature and thus would lose its claim to autonomy: its criteria would be superseded by those of nature alone. Of course, nature and culture (...) may both still be seen as being absorbed by the inner powers of specifically human inwardness, on which view, human being, caught in its own transcendence, becomes separated radically in kind from the rest of existence and may not touch even the shadow of reality except through its own prism. Excess, therefore, or prolongation? And on what terms? The relationship between culture and nature in its technical phase demands a new elucidation. Here this is pursued by excavating the root significance of the 'multiple rationalities' of life. In contrast to Husserl, who differentiated living types according to their degree of participation in the world, the phenomenology of life disentangles living types from within the ontopoietic web of life itself. The human creative act reveals itself as the Great Divide of the Logos of Life - a divide that does not separate but harmonizes, thus dispelling both naturalistic and spiritualistic reductionism. (shrink)

In a recent article1 mention was made of a MS. from which Goetz printed selections in Vol. V. of the . This MS. was not used by Goetz. On fol. 81 appears the following entry: ‘Moechus est adulter alterius t[h]orum furtim polluens; inde a m echo dicitur m[o]echanica ars, ingeniosa atque subtilissima et p ene quomodo facta uel administrata sit inuisibilis in tantum, ut etiam uisum conspicientium quodam modo furetur, dum non facile penetratur eius ingeniositas quali ingenio artis candelabrum illud (...) Theodosianum factum legitur.’. (shrink)

“You Have Seen Their Faces”: Gisèle Freund, Walter Benjamin and Margaret Bourke-White as Headhunters of the Thirties -/- Abstract This paper concentrates on one work by each of three authors: Walter Benjamin’s Deutsche Menschen (Germans), an anthology of twenty-five 18th and 19th century German personal letters; Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell’s You Have Seen Their Faces; and Gisèle Freund’s collection of photographic portraits of writers and artists, compiled between 1936 and 1939. The purpose of this paper is to compare the (...) politics of representation of these three figures and to examine the challenge they addressed to the dominant iconography of the 1930s. At the heart of each one’s work was a desire to bring about a shift in contemporary cultural politics by reimagining the body politic. Benjamin’s and Freund’s aim was to displace the monumentalizing, distancing, ‘heroic’ forms of fascist art and writing. They construct and project an intimate, or ‘domestic’ image of humanism as a form of social practice, past and present. Bourke-White’s aim was to bring to visibility an America concealed beneath the glossy homogenized images of white American advertising. All three authors aligned themselves with a documentary tradition that believed that representation should function as a constructed record of the traces of lived experience. Driven by a need to expose the other side’s deliberate falsifications of experience, they saw their own constructed fictions as ways of ‘documenting,’ and then perhaps transforming, an experiential world of ‘facts,’ bodies, and ‘truths.’ -/- Working Paper 3:15 European Society and Culture Research Group. Center for German and European Studies, University of California at Berkeley. April 1994 37pp. -/- M. Kay Flavell Critical Theory, University of California at Davis . (shrink)

Naturalism about the mind is often taken to be equivalent to some form of physicalism: the existence of mental properties must be shown not to compromise the autonomy of the physical realm. It is argued that this leads to a choice between reductionism, eliminativism, epiphenomenalism or interactionism. The central aim of the paper is to outline an Aristotelian alternative to the physicalist conception of natural bodies. It is argued that the distinction between form and matter, and an ontology which treats (...) individual natural bodies as real, unified things, rather than as complexes, enables us to achieve the non-reductionist, non-epiphenomenalist and non-interactionist position which eludes the post-Cartesian. (shrink)

David Hume was a highly original thinker. Nevertheless, he was a writer of his time and place in the history of philosophy. In this book, M. A. Stewart puts Hume’s writing in context, particularly that of his native Scotland, but also that of British and European philosophy more generally. Through meticulous research Stewart brings to life the circumstances by means of which we can get a deeper understanding of Hume’s writings on the nature and reach of human reason, the foundation (...) of morals, and, especially, on the philosophy of religion. Stewart pays particular attention to Hume’s intellectual development, beginning with his education at the College of Edinburgh, the writing of his Treatise of Human Nature, and his subsequent philosophical responses to criticisms of that book. He argues that Hume’s scepticism set him at odds with the Christian Stoicism of Scottish contemporaries including that of Francis Hutcheson - and shows that this conflict played a major role in his failure to obtain the Edinburgh Moral Philosophy Chair in 1745. Stewart’s detailed study of the physical character of Hume’s surviving manuscripts in Chapters 8 and 9 provides the best available dating of his early ‘Essay on Modern Chivalry’, his ‘Early Fragment on Evil’ and the periods of composition of his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Other chapters compare Hume’s theory of abstraction with that of Locke and Berkeley, provide the 17th and 18th century philosophical context of the central argument of his essay ‘Of miracles’, and consider the 18th and 19th century reception of his writings in England and Ireland. (shrink)

"The availability of a paperback version of Boyle's philosophical writings selected by M. A. Stewart will be a real service to teachers, students, and scholars with seventeenth-century interests. The editor has shown excellent judgment in bringing together many of the most important works and printing them, for the most part, in unabridged form. The texts have been edited responsibly with emphasis on readability.... Of special interest in connection with Locke and with the reception of Descarte's Corpuscularianism, to students of the (...) Scientific Revolution and of the history of mechanical philosophy, and to those interested in the relations among science, philosophy, and religion. In fact, given the imperfections in and unavailability of the eighteenth-century editions of Boyle’s works, this collection will benefit a wide variety of seventeenth-century scholars." --Gary Hatfield, University of Pennsylvania. (shrink)