Ornament is a valuable component in any architecture of buildings and cities that aims to connect to human beings. The suppression of ornament, on the other hand, results in alien forms that generate physiological and psychological distress. Early twentieth-century architects proposed major stylistic changes — now universally adopted — without having a full understanding of how the human eye/brain system works.

This paper reviews the algebra of Eddington'sE numbers and identifies those points where Eddington anticipated results of current interest. He discovered the Majorana spinors, and was responsible for the standard γ 5 notation as well as the notion of chirality. Furthermore, Eddington defined Clifford algebras in eight and nine dimensions which are now appearing in grand unified gauge and supersymmetric theories. A point which Eddington cleared up, yet is still misunderstood, is that the Dirac algebra corresponds to afive-dimensional base space.

In this paper, we use the differential forms of three-dimensional Euclidean space to realize a Clifford algebra which is isomorphic to the algebra of the Pauli matrices or the complex quaternions. This is an associative vector-antisymmetric tensor algebra with division: We provide the algebraic inverse of an eight-component spinor field which is the sum of a scalar + vector + pseudovector + pseudoscalar. A surface of singularities is defined naturally by the inverse of an eight-component spinor and corresponds to a (...) generalized Minkowski “double” light cone in the parameter space. A general description of finite spatial rotations, which utilizes the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula, generalizes the usual infinitesimal treatments of the rotation group. We derive an explicit expression for the angle corresponding to two successive finite rotations in any direction. We also discuss Lorentz transformations and duality rotations of the electromagnetic field and exhibit a relationship between the algebraic inverse and a duality rotated field. Using a combined transformation, one can always transform an arbitrary electromagnetic field (E≠0) into a pure electric field, but never into a pure magnetic field. (shrink)

Our political thinking is driven, far more than philosophers recognize, by a concern for social equality and, more specifically, a concern to avoid relations of inferiority. Niko Kolodny argues that, in order to make sense of the most familiar ideas in our political thought and discourse - the justification of the state, democracy, and rule of law, as well as objections to paternalism and corruption - we cannot merely appeal to freedom (as libertarians like Nozick do) or to distributive fairness (...) (as liberals like Rawls do). We must, instead, appeal directly to claims against inferiority, that no one stands above or below. (shrink)

Traditional explanations of multistable visual phenomena (e.g. ambiguous figures, perceptual rivalry) suggest that the basis for spontaneous reversals in perception lies in antagonistic connectivity within the visual system. In this review, we suggest an alternative, albeit speculative, explanation for visual multistability – that spontaneous alternations reflect responses to active, programmed events initiated by brain areas that integrate sensory and non-sensory information to coordinate a diversity of behaviors. Much evidence suggests that perceptual reversals are themselves more closely related to the expression (...) of a behavior than to passive sensory responses: (1) they are initiated spontaneously, often voluntarily, and are influenced by subjective variables such as attention and mood; (2) the alternation process is greatly facilitated with practice and compromised by lesions in non-visual cortical areas; (3) the alternation process has temporal dynamics similar to those of spontaneously initiated behaviors; (4) functional imaging reveals that brain areas associated with a variety of cognitive behaviors are specifically activated when vision becomes unstable. In this scheme, reorganizations of activity throughout the visual cortex, concurrent with perceptual reversals, are initiated by higher, largely non-sensory brain centers. Such direct intervention in the processing of the sensory input by brain structures associated with planning and motor programming might serve an important role in perceptual organization, particularly in aspects related to selective attention. (shrink)

Dans une première partie sont présentés les résultats d'une troisième et dernière campagne de prospection en Crète, consacrée à la partie orientale de l'île : deux ateliers ampho- riques ont été découverts, à Trypitos et à Lagada, et l'on dispose d'éléments suffisants pour localiser d'autres ateliers à Makry Ghialos, Aghios Nikolaos et Hiérapétra. Dans une seconde partie, nous essaierons de tirer quelques enseignements à l'issue de ces prospections qui ont permis de découvrir une vingtaine d'ateliers dans l'ensemble de l'île, avec (...) huit types amphoriques assurément crétois. Ces ateliers domaniaux sont liés à des villas qui exploitent la vigne à des fins d'exportations massives. Situé près d'un lieu d'embarquement qui permette un chargement facile des innombrables amphores destinées au commerce lointain, l'atelier répond aussi aux besoins de la villa en céramique commune et fine ainsi qu'en éléments architectoniques (briques, tuiles, hypocaustes, σφήνες). On en retire l'impression d'une vitalité économique à partir du Ier s. av. n. è., au moment où le vignoble italien semble connaître une certaine stagnation au profit des crus provinciaux. (shrink)

As the Global South is increasingly interpenetrated by neo-liberal and authoritarian regimes the idea of the South as a site of emancipatory resistance and exotic cultural difference has ended. This article offers an alternative route into the cultures of the South. It focuses on the shifting forms of the South in contemporary visual art and outlines the possibilities of non-coercive forms of cultural exchange and the cartographies of a cosmopolitanism from below. This perspective on the South is most evident in (...) the stories of embodied solidarity that stand in contrast to top down visions of socio-economic development and cultural homogenization. (shrink)

Niko Kolodny It is often said that there is a special class of norms, ‘rational requirements’, that demand that our attitudes be related one another in certain ways, whatever else may be the case.1 In recent work, a special class of these rational requirements has attracted particular attention: what I will call ‘requirements of formal coherence as such’, which require just that our attitudes be formally coherent.2 For example, we are rationally required, if we believe something, to believe what it (...) entails. And we are rationally required, if we intend an end, to intend what we take to be necessary means to it. The intuitive idea is that formally incoherent attitudes give rise to a certain normative tension, or exert a kind of rational pressure on each another, and this tension, or pressure, is relieved just when one of the attitudes is revised. As John Broome observes, these requirements are, by their nature, ‘wide scope’, which is to say that there is no particular attitude that one must have or lack in order to satisfy them. This is because they require just formal coherence, and there is no particular attitude that one must have or lack in order to be formally coherent. (shrink)

At first glance, love seems to be a psychological state for which there are normative reasons: a state that, if all goes well, is an appropriate or fitting response to something independent of itself. Love for one’s parent, child, or friend is fitting, one wants to say, if anything is. On reflection, however, it is elusive what reasons for love might be. It is natural to assume that they would be nonrelational features of the person one loves, something about her (...) in her own right. According to the “quality theory,” for example, reasons for love are the beloved’s personal attributes, such as her wit and beauty. In J. David Velleman’s provocative and ingeniously argued proposal, the reason for love is the beloved’s bare Kantian personhood, her capacity for rational choice and valuation.1 But no such nonrelational feature works. To appreciate just one difficulty, observe that whatever nonrelational feature one selects as the reason for love will be one that another person could, or actually does, possess. The claim that nonrelational features are reasons for love implies, absurdly, that insofar as one’s love for Jane is responsive to its reasons, it will accept any relevantly similar person as a replacement. (shrink)

Munoz-Dardé (2009) argues that a social contract theory must meet Rousseau's ‘liberty condition’: that, after the social contract, each ‘nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before’. She claims that Rousseau's social contract does not meet this condition, for reasons that suggest that no other social contract theory could. She concludes that political philosophy should turn away from social contract theory's preoccupation with authority and obedience, and focus instead on what she calls the ‘legitimacy’ of social arrangements. I (...) raise questions about each of these claims. (shrink)

In this paper we will try to find resemblances of the operation of human consciousness with systems with the intention to simulate it mathematically. Also we will try to do the same for the non-conscious operations and try to synthesize the human mind in form of system with subsystems.

Correspondence should be addressed to David A. Leopold [email protected] the viewing of certain patterns, widely known as ambiguous or puzzle figures, perception lapses into a sequence of spontaneous alternations, switching every few seconds between two or more visual interpretations of the stimulus. Although their nature and origin remain topics of debate, these stochastic switches are generally thought to be the automatic and inevitable consequence of viewing a pattern without a unique solution. We report here that in humans such perceptual alternations (...) can be slowed, and even brought to a standstill, if the visual stimulus is periodically removed from view. We also show, with a visual illusion, that this stabilizing effect hinges on perceptual disappearance rather than on actual removal of the stimulus. These findings indicate that uninterrupted subjective perception of an ambiguous pattern is required for the initiation of the brain-state changes underlying multistable vision.Visual perception involves coordination between sensory sampling of the world and active interpretation of the sensory data. Human perception of objects and scenes is normally stable and robust, but it falters when one is presented with patterns that are inherently ambiguous or contradictory. Under such conditions, vision lapses into a chain of continually alternating percepts, whereby a viable visual interpretation dominates for a few seconds and is then replaced by a rival interpretation. This multistable vision, or 'multistability', is thought to result from destabilization of fundamental visual mechanisms, and has offered valuable insights into how sensory patterns are actively organized and interpreted in the brain1, 2. Despite a great deal of recent research and interest in multistable perception, however, its neurophysiological underpinnings remain poorly understood. Physiological studies have suggested that disambiguation of ambiguous patterns. (shrink)

Normativity involves two kinds of relation. On the one hand, there is the relation of being a reason for. This is a relation between a fact and an attitude. On the other hand, there are relations specified by requirements of rationality. These are relations among a person's attitudes, viewed in abstraction from the reasons for them. I ask how the normativity of rationality—the sense in which we ‘ought’ to comply with requirements of rationality—is related to the normativity of reasons—the sense (...) in which we ‘ought’ to have the attitudes what we have conclusive reason to have. The normativity of rationality is not straightforwardly that of reasons, I argue; there are no reasons to comply with rational requirements in general. First, this would lead to ‘bootstrapping’, because, contrary to the claims of John Broome, not all rational requirements have ‘wide scope’. Second, it is unclear what such reasons to be rational might be. Finally, we typically do not, and in many cases could not, treat rational requirements as reasons. Instead, I suggest, rationality is only apparently normative, and the normativity that it appears to have is that of reasons. According to this ‘Transparency Account’, rational requirements govern our responses to our beliefs about reasons. The normative ‘pressure’ that we feel, when rational requirements apply to us, derives from these beliefs: from the reasons that, as it seems to us, we have. (shrink)

In this article we revisit two different temporal phases related to the main publication of Serge Moscovici's book La Psychanalyse, son image et son public together with two key promissing notions of the theory, cognitive polyphasia and anchoring. The first phase, initiated by the durkheimian cercle, will give us the occasion to retrieve the traces of the fascinating intellectual debate about collective psychology that was involved in producing ¨frontier¨ propositions and renewing their perspectives in today's light, namely throught cognitive polyphasia. (...) The second phase, more recent, inspired by classical and modern research into the social representation's field, will serve us as a basis for a new hypothesis about anchoring. We will attempt to suggest that traditional familiarization allocated to anchoring can also work in the opposite sense, transmitting and guaranteeing the non-familiar, establishing strangeness. Finally, we are arguing that social representations are more than a simple theory, just as the symbol is always more than what it symbolizes. (shrink)

Asif A. Ghazanfar,1,3,* Hjalmar K. Turesson,1,3 statistical pattern recognition [16, 17] and psychophys- Joost X. Maier,1 Ralph van Dinther,2 ics [13, 18–23] have suggested that formants are signif- Roy D. Patterson,2 and Nikos K. Logothetis1 icant contributors to these indexical cues. It is likely, 1Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics then, that detecting formants could have provided 72076 Tuebingen ancestral primates with indexical cues necessary for Germany navigating the complex social interactions that are the 2Centre for the Neural Basis (...) of Hearing essence of primate societies. One important indexical Department of Physiology cue is body size. Formant cues related to body size University of Cambridge could be used by monkeys to determine the sex (in sex- CB2 3EG Cambridge ually dimorphic species), degree of potential threat (e.g., United Kingdom whether a competitor is larger or smaller), and/or age of an individual, as such cues do for human listeners [13, 18, 20, 21]. Summary Formants are the result of acoustic filtering by the supralaryngeal vocal tract—the nasal and oral cavities Vocal-tract resonances (or formants) are acoustic sigabove the vocal folds. During vocal production, pulses natures in the voice and are related to the shape and of air generated by the rapid movement of the vocal length of the vocal tract. Formants play an important folds produce an acoustic signal. The frequency of these role in human communication, helping us not only to pulses—the glottal-pulse rate—determines the fundadistinguish several different speech sounds [1], but mental frequency of the signal, which in turn is perceived also to extract important information related to the as pitch. As the signal passes through the supralaryngphysical characteristics of the speaker, so-called ineal vocal tract, it excites resonances, resulting in the dexical cues. How did formants come to play such an enhancement of particular frequency bands; these are important role in human vocal communication? One the formants.. (shrink)

We consider a paradox involving indicative conditionals (‘ifs’) and deontic modals (‘oughts’). After considering and rejecting several standard options for resolv- ing the paradox—including rejecting various premises, positing an ambiguity or hidden contextual sensitivity, and positing a non-obvious logical form—we offer a semantics for deontic modals and indicative conditionals that resolves the paradox by making modus ponens invalid. We argue that this is a result to be welcomed on independent grounds, and we show that rejecting the general validity of modus (...) ponens is compatible with vindicating most ordinary uses of modus ponens in reasoning. (shrink)

Every attempt to examine our consciousness’s passive life and its dynamic in its various forms inevitably intersects with our primal awareness of the future. Even though Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness enjoys a certain fame, his conception of our primordial relation to the future has not been adequately accounted for. The book at hand aims to offer a close study of Husserl’s view of protentional consciousness and to trace its unique contribution to our overall awareness of time. It offers an extensive (...) analysis of various aspects of protention by investigating its connection to different fields and levels of experience. To achieve such a task, the book stresses the need to enrich the familiar formal account of protention with a material one. Thus, alongside issues pertaining exclusively to the form of protention, such as its relation to fulfillment as well as its double-intentional structure, various other dimensions are discussed, such as the phenomena of disappointment and correction as well as the role hyle plays in both of them. In the same vein, special attention is given to the relation between protentional consciousness and affectivity, thus shedding light on the dynamic unity of our living-present. What this study purports to show is that Husserl’s phenomenology is equipped to offer a solid account of the thinnest and subtlest ways in which we are aware of the future in our experiential life. (shrink)

Understanding how activity in the brain leads to a subjective percept is of great interest to philosophers and neuroscientists alike. In the last years, neurophysiological experiments have approached this problem directly by measuring neural signals in animals as they experience well-defined visual percepts. Stimuli in these studies are often inherently ambiguous, and thus rely upon the subjective report, generally from trained monkeys, to provide a measure of perception. By correlating activity levels in the brain to this report, one can speculate (...) on the role of individual neurons and groups of neurons in the formation and maintenance of a particular percept. However, in order to draw valid conclusions from such experiments, it is critical that the responses accurately and reliably reflect what is perceived. For this reason, a number of behavioural paradigms have been developed to control and evaluate the truthfulness of responses from behaving animals. Here we describe several approaches to optimizing the reliability of a monkey's perceptual report, and argue that their combination provides an invaluable approach in the study of subjective visual perception. (shrink)

As prose dramatic texts Plato's dialogues would have been read by their original audience as an alternative type of theatrical composition. The 'paradox' of the dialogue form is explained by his appropriation of the discourse of theatre, the dominant public mode of communication of his time. The oral performance of his works is suggested both by the pragmatics of the publication of literary texts in the classical period and by his original role as a Sokratic dialogue-writer and the creator of (...) a fourth dramatic genre. Support comes from a number of pieces of evidence, from a statue of Sokrates in the Academy to a mosaic of Sokrates in Mytilene, which point to a centuries-old tradition of treating the dialogues in the context of performance literature and testify to the significance of the image of 'Plato the prose dramatist' for his original and subsequent audiences. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Mill’s ‘Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity’ regarding the human will and action cannot apply on all cases, and that the human mind has potentially the capacity to create freely a will or action that, no matter what kind of knowledge we possess, cannot be predicted. More precisely, I argue against Mill’s attempt of conjunction between the freedom of the will and the ‘Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity’ while I attempt a comparison with the relevant Kantian approach. (...) I then claim that a will cannot be free and be predicted at the same time, as both the elements of freedom and unpredictability of the will are founded on the very process of its formulation as an outcome of genuine creativity. I, thus, attempt to propose a more substantially free view of free will and action than the ones presented by the prominent conceptions. (shrink)

Jacques Rancière is one of the central figures in the contemporary debates on aesthetics and politics. This introduction maps the shift of focus in Rancière’s writing from political theory to contemporary art practice and also traces the enduring interest in ideas on equality and creativity. It situates Rancière’s rich body of writing in relation to key theorists such as the philosopher Alain Badiou, art historian Terry Smith and anthropologist George E. Marcus. I argue that Rancière offers a distinctive approach in (...) this broad field by clarifying the specificity of the artist’s task in the production of critical and creative transformation, or what he calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’. In conclusion, I complement Rancière’s invocation to break out of the oppositional paradigm in which the political and aesthetic are usually confined by outlining some further methodological techniques for addressing contemporary art. (shrink)

In his later work, Foucault was more skeptical of theory than he was of norms. His apparent evasion of normative theory was not meant to suggest, as some interpreters have thought, that norm ative theory is useless or oppressive, but rather that it is fragile and uncertain, that it depends for its practical effect on something essen tially untheorizable: character, or what Foucault alternately called 'ethos' and 'philosophical life'. This conception of ethos suggests a way to make sense of Foucault's (...) 'cryptonormativism' - his apparent tendency to rely tacitly on norms that he publicly rejected - and sheds light on his views on authorship and the purpose of genealogy. Key Words: enlightenment • ethics • Foucault • genealogy • particularism. (shrink)

We normally take it for granted that other people will live on after we ourselves have died. Even if we do not believe in a personal afterlife in which we survive our own deaths, we assume that there will be a "collective afterlife" in which humanity survives long after we are gone. Samuel Scheffler maintains that this assumption plays a surprising - indeed astonishing - role in our lives.

Often our reason for doing something is an "instrumental reason": that doing that is a means to doing something else that we have reason to do. What principles govern this "instrumental transmission" of reasons from ends to means? Negatively, I argue against principles often invoked in the literature, which focus on necessary or sufficient means. Positively, I propose a principle, "General Transmission," which answers to two intuitive desiderata: that reason transmits to means that are "probabilizing" and "nonsuperfluous" with respect to (...) the relevant end. I then apply General Transmission to the debate over "detachment": whether "wide-scope" reason for a material conditional or disjunction implies "narrow-scope" reason for the consequent or disjuncts. (shrink)