Amit Goswami published his book, "The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World", in 1993. In 1996, he and Henry Swift started up the online newsletter Science Within Consciousness, which carries articles and news features connected with the Goswamian philosophy. Below, I comment on Goswami 's metaphysical theories as represented in his writings in the SWC newsletter, especially in his pieces: Monistic Idealism May Provide Better Ontology for Cognitive Science: A Reply to Dyer, The Hard Question: View from A (...) Science Within Consciousness, Toward an Understanding of the Paranormal, Amit Goswami was a professor at the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. He taught physics for 32 years in the USA, mostly at Oregon. He now is Senior Resident Researcher at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. (shrink)

Previous studies have shown that misperceptions and illusory experiences can occur if sensory stimulation is withdrawn or becomes invariant even for short periods of time. Using a perceptual deprivation paradigm, we created a monotonous audiovisual environment and asked participants to verbally report any auditory, visual or body-related phenomena they experienced. The data (analysed using a variant of interpretative phenomenological analysis) revealed two main themes: (1) reported sensory phenomena have different spatial characteristics ranging from simple percepts to the feeling of immersion (...) in a complex multisensory environment and (2) the active contribution of the perceiver where participants report engaging in exploratory processes even when there is nothing to find. Detailed analysis of the qualitative data further showed that participants who reported more perceptual phenomena were more likely to report internal bodily sensations, move more during the experiment and score higher on the Revised Hallucination Scale than those reporting fewer percepts explicitly linking perceptual deprivation to somatic phenomena. The results demonstrate how the variety of sensory experiences induced by perceptual deprivation can give further insight into the factors mediating conscious awareness and may suggest ways in which the brain imposes meaning on the environment under invariant sensory conditions. (shrink)

The interplay of introduction and elimination rules for propositional connectives is often seen as suggesting a distinguished role for intuitionistic logic. We prove three formal results concerning intuitionistic propositional logic that bear on that perspective, and discuss their significance. First, for a range of connectives including both negation and the falsum, there are no classically or intuitionistically correct introduction rules. Second, irrespective of the choice of negation or the falsum as a primitive connective, classical and intuitionistic consequence satisfy exactly the (...) same structural, introduction, and elimination (briefly, elementary) rules. Third, for falsum as primitive only, intuitionistic consequence is the least consequence relation that satisfies all classically correct elementary rules. (shrink)

To william james, conscious life was a stream; to Edmund Husserl, a flow. These metaphors point to the marvelous continuity of experience as it weaves through the world of thought and things. We might similarly talk about the flow of the body, as I reach for my cup of coffee. A physiologist could decompose the action, isolating the contribution of each muscle and joint to the whole. This functional analysis would constitute one form of explanation of the movement. As we (...) replace "I grab the cup" with the physiologist's account, there is a shift in level of description and a turn toward underlying processes, but the physiologist has added nothing to nature. Explanation of this sort, functional reduction, is simply a .. (shrink)

This new edition of Genevieve Lloyd's classic study of the maleness of reason in philosophy contains a new introduction and bibliographical essay assessing the book's place in the explosion of writing and gender since 1984.

Could "cognitive neuroscience" be an oxymoron? "Cognitive" and "neuroscience" cohere only to the extent that the entities identified as "cognitive" can be coordinated with entities identified as neural. This coordination is typically construed as intertheoretic reduction between "levels" of scientific description. On the cognitive side, folk psychological concepts crystallize into behavioral taxonomies, which are further analyzed into purported cognitive capacities. These capacities are expressed or operationalized in paradigmatic experimental tasks. These cogs comprise a stable ontology, sustaining more than a century (...) of psychology. On the neural side, the biological hierarchy from cells to brains also affords a . (shrink)

The diverse papers which make up this book are variations on a theme which is based in biological science - yet none of the contributors is really a biologist. Our metaphor for describing what we are doing here is that we have gathered together in a room because that particular room provides us with a certain view of our individual areas of interest - a view that may have been previously obscured. We are visiting the house of biology in the (...) hope that we may see more clearly things that we each find baffling about our particular field of work in education, research, or daily living. (shrink)

Geoffrey Lloyd engages in a wide-ranging exploration of what we can learn from the study of ancient civilizations that is relevant to fundamental problems, both intellectual and moral, that we still face today. These include, in philosophy of science, the question of the incommensurability of paradigms, the debate between realism and relativism or constructivism, and between correspondence and coherence conceptions of truth. How far is it possible to arrive at an understanding of alien systems of belief? Is it possible (...) to talk meaningfully of 'science' and of its various constituent disciplines, 'astronomy' 'geography' 'anatomy' and so on, in the ancient world? Are logic and its laws universal? Is there one ontology - a single world - to which all attempts at understanding must be considered to be directed? When we encounter apparently very different views of reality, how far can that be put down to a difference in conceptions of what needs explaining, or of what counts as an explanation, or to different preferred modes of reasoning or styles of inquiry? Do the notions of truth and belief represent reliable cross-cultural universals? In another area, what can ancient history teach us about today's social and political problems? Are the discourses of human nature and of human rights universally applicable? What political institutions do we need to help secure equity and justice within nation states and between them? Lloyd sets out to answer all these questions, and to argue that the study of the science and culture of ancient Greece and China provided a precious resource in order to advance a wealth of modern debates. (shrink)

Reproduction of the original: Spencer’s Philosophy of Science by C. Lloyd Morgan.

This volume presents introductory chapters from internationally-renowned experts on eleven of Leibniz's key philosophical writings. Offering accessible accounts of the ideas and arguments of his work, along with information on their composition and context, this book is an invaluable companion to the study of Leibniz.

Long before science as we know it existed, sophisticated studies of the physical world were undertaken-in Mesopotamia, India, China, and Greece. G. E. R. Lloyd explores the methods, subject-matter, and aims of those studies. He illuminates the origins of human intellectual inquiry, finding similarities and differences across cultures.

On 1 November 1755, the city of Lisbon in Portugal was virtually destroyed by the largest documented seismic event ever to hit Europe. It is often claimed that the catastrophe severely damaged the plausibility of Leibniz’s optimism, and even the wider project of theodicy. Leibniz died several decades before the Lisbon earthquake struck, and so was unable to address it and the challenges thrown up by it, which would have included an account of how the event was consistent with God’s (...) providence. Contemporary scholars are of the view that Leibniz explained natural disasters like earthquakes as nothing more than the unfortunate consequences of the normal workings of simple laws of nature, and that God permits such disasters to happen because it would be unworthy of him to overrule the laws he has established. There certainly is this line of thinking in Leibniz’s writings, but it is far from being the whole story, as we shall see. The aim of this paper is to determine what Leibniz’s response to the Lisbon earthquake would have been, had he lived to know about the event. (shrink)

Leibniz wished that his Theodicy (1710) would have as great and as wide an impact as possible, and to further this end we find him in his correspondence with Caroline often expressing his desire that the book be translated into English. Despite his wishes, and Caroline’s efforts, this was not to happen in his lifetime (indeed, it did not happen until 1951, almost 250 years after Leibniz’s death). But even though the Theodicy did not make quite the impact in England (...) that Leibniz had hoped it would, it did draw some attention from the English intelligentsia. In this paper I shall focus on two responses to the Theodicy that were made in England in the years immediately following its publication. First, I shall consider the response of Michel de la Roche and his efforts to promote the book to an English audience in 1711 (efforts which only came to Leibniz’s attention much later, in 1713). De la Roche’s response was broadly positive, though his admiration for the Theodicy was tempered by his belief that Leibniz had struggled – unsuccessfully – to reconcile free will with divine foreknowledge. Second, I shall consider the largely negative response of George Smalridge, the Bishop of Bristol, who delivered his verdict on the book in a letter to Sophie written in 1714. Leibniz subsequently wrote a point-by-point rebuttal of (most of) Smalridge’s criticisms in a letter to Caroline, conceding only one very minor point to the Bishop. As we shall see, some of the points of substance raised by de la Roche and Smalridge have loomed over the Theodicy ever since. (shrink)

This volume examines the poetics of bird mimicry: the way birds mimic humans, and the way humans mimic birds. Drawing from 18th-century studies, romantic studies, American studies, 20th-century studies, and postcolonial studies, the collection offers new models for combining comparative and global studies of literature and culture.

Uncertainty about funding; difficulty in determining research priorities ; and concern about technology transfer (the lack of application of research results): these words stand out in the language of scientific/industrial research and development, today. So called technology transfer seems to be the central issue because the criteria for determining research priorities and funding decisions are mostly based on the expected "pay off", i.e. the economic benefits which will result from the research findings being put into use within the industry. This (...) applies, not only in situations where the industry is providing a proportion of the funding, as in most agricultural research, but to scientific research generally which is intended for the "public good.". (shrink)

Examines the role played by the Aristotelian logic in Neoplatonic philosophers. To start with, it is remarked that Aristotelian Organon was regarded not only as a corpus of logical texts but also as an introduction to philosophy. Focuses on several Neoplatonic Aristotelian commentators, from Alexander of Aphrodisias to Byzantine thinkers, presenting both the characteristics of their works and their lack of interest in discussing their own philosophical view. Finally, it is observed that, although not original, these commentaries provide a rather (...) reliable and correct investigation of Aristotle. (shrink)