Questioning reality -- The hair of the dog -- Good/bad -- Resistance and the side effect -- Putting resistance on the couch -- Modern medicine : a health report -- Psychotherapeutic paradox -- Loops -- Dialectics -- Paradox within the home -- The staying-with-it principle -- Immunization and immunotherapy -- A little poison is good for you -- The strange obsession of Dr. Hahnemann -- From gods to genes -- RPM -- Such stuff as dreams -- The attack of the (...) evil things -- Becoming well. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Images >> Visual Vertigo:Gaëlle Foray's Homage to the DiscardedAmber Bal (bio)Gaëlle Foray's artistic style invites renewed meditation upon the two human processes that surround the artwork: first, the metamorphosis of raw materials into aesthetic object at the hands of the artist, and second, the phenomenology of perceiving art. On the side of reception (in other words, the viewer's experience of Foray's works), the artworks demand first to be felt. (...) Only following an immediate visceral "strike" of abstract, unfocused perception, does the analytical eye proceed to examine these intricate works up close, parsing their immense and meticulous detail. On the side of artistic creation, Foray's methods elicit questions about the artist's relationship to Earth's finite materials, to the tension between environmental awareness and our own extractive practices. Foray's response to issues of waste and consumption at the heart of artistic endeavors is that she exclusively uses discarded materials; a form of recycling, gleaning, and/or foraging in the lived world. Yet, her approach is distinct from the well-established use of objet trouvés ("found objects") in modern art. Unlike "anti-artworks" such as Marcel Duchamp's 1917 Fontaine (a porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt") or Piero Manzoni's 1961 Merda d'artista, both of which offer "common objects" in their original state for aesthetic contemplation, Foray's works are not "readymades." As opposed to what Steven Goldsmith describes as Duchamp's "subordinat[ion] of form to concept," Foray manipulates and defamiliarizes her recycled artistic material through processes of collage and bricolage.1 She describes the transformation of collected objects as a means of "paying homage to waste," from natural matter like animal bones, minerals, and fossils to synthetic waste such as long-discarded plastic toys or Tupperware containers, abandoned family photo albums, and démodé dinner party utensils from the eighties.2What emerges from the selection of Foray's works featured in this issue is a clash between the ephemerality of the human lifespan and planetary spatio-temporal dimensions. Her artistic process forces vertiginous acknowledgement of the fragility of human existence as it presses up against that which the human tries to capture through art: the world. What's more, Earth's monumental landscapes only ever figure as and in fragments. Two specific conflicts return across Foray's works to create this sense of vertigo. First is the contrast between the limited human lifespan and the eternity of the fossil; as the latter is often figured alongside photographs of humans or man-made materials in a manner that draws attention to this unfathomably large geological temporal scale. A secondary contrast arises from Foray's recurrent human-nature juxtaposition as the boundedness of human life continually knocks up against raw and unruly natural matter. Foray's recourse to diverse textures and materials heightens these oppositions—schist lies atop bone, the smooth veneer of a photograph envelops a human form but rests against the jagged edges of a stone. As we shall explore through ruminations on specific pieces, her method prompts inquiry into the relationship between these human [End Page 110] and geological timescales, attesting Foray's remarkable ability to capture brevity and limitlessness in tandem. Of equal note is Foray's repeated, self-reflexive wink to art's mediation of the world through a "framing effect," as she regularly makes the protective screen of a work or staging of an exhibition space integral to the artwork itself. This is her own means of drawing attention to the conditions in which the work of art is encountered, both exaggerating the distantiating function of the frame in classical art which "served to make [artwork] discontinuous with its surroundings" and building upon the "readymade" tradition's abolition of the barrier between viewer and artwork.3Foray's pieces, composed from an amalgam of natural matter and industrial or household waste, operate as self-contained ecosystems that are akin to stumbling upon a diorama that has escaped from its box, or a snowglobe whose glass sphere has been shattered and from which the liquid has drained away. In La Mer (see pages 34/35), the background's glitter and the iridescent blues... (shrink)

Although Darwin insisted that human intelligence could be fully explained by the theory of evolution, the codiscoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, claimed that abstract intelligence was of no use to ancestral humans and could only be explained by intelligent design. Wallace’s apparent paradox can be dissolved with two hypotheses about human cognition. One is that intelligence is an adaptation to a knowledge-using, socially interdependent lifestyle, the “cognitive niche.” This embraces the ability to overcome the evolutionary fixed defenses of (...) plants and animals by applications of reasoning, including weapons, traps, coordinated driving of game, and detoxification of plants. Such reasoning exploits intuitive theories about different aspects of the world, such as objects, forces, paths, places, states, substances, and other people’s beliefs and desires. The theory explains many zoologically unusual traits in Homo sapiens, including our complex toolkit, wide range of habitats and diets, extended childhoods and long lives, hypersociality, complex mating, division into cultures, and language (which multiplies the benefit of knowledge because know-how is useful not only for its practical benefits but as a trade good with others, enhancing the evolution.. (shrink)

In this original work, Steven DeLay, using a wide breadth of philosophical sources, articulates a view of selfhood which emphasizes humanity’s ineluctable experience before-God.

The young women had survived the car crash, after a fashion. In the five months since parts of her brain had been crushed, she could open her eyes but didn't respond to sights, sounds or jabs. In the jargon of neurology, she was judged to be in a persistent vegetative state. In crueler everyday language, she was a vegetable.

In this paper I argue against Brandom's two-ply theory of action. For Brandom, action is the result of an agent acknowledging a practical commitment and then causally responding to that commitment by acting. Action is social because the content of the commitment upon which one acts is socially conferred in the game of giving and asking for reasons. On my proposal, instead of seeing action as the coupling of a rational capacity to acknowledge commitments and a non-rational capacity to reliably (...) respond to these commitments, we should see action as the coupling, or potential coupling, of a capacity to reason practically and a capacity to act on habits and bodily skills. In putting forward this alternative model of action, I aim to replace Brandom's rationalist brand of Pragmatism with a more classical kind, one that will let us see action as social not only at the level of reasons but also at the level of bodily habits and skills. (shrink)

v. 1. A doctrine of divine illumination -- v. 2. God at the core of cognition.

This book provides a comprehensive collection of readings with an ontological emphasis. Topics include abstracta - properties, numbers, and propositions, secondary qualities, and concreta - events.

Hans Reichenbach, a philosopher of science who was one of five students in Einstein's first seminar on the general theory of relativity, became Einstein's bulldog, defending the theory against criticism from philosophers, physicists, and popular commentators. This book chronicles the development of Reichenbach's reconstruction of Einstein's theory in a way that clearly sets out all of its philosophical commitments and its physical predictions as well as the battles that Reichenbach fought on its behalf, in both the academic and popular press. (...) The essays include reviews and responses to philosophical colleagues; polemical discussions with physicists Max Born and D. C. Miller; as well as popular articles meant for the layperson. At a time when physics and philosophy were both undergoing revolutionary changes in content and method, this book is a window into the development of scientific philosophy and the role of the philosopher. (shrink)

Most evidence for the role of regular inflection as a default operation comes from languages that confound the morphological properties of regular and irregular forms with their phonological characteristics. For instance, regular plurals tend to faithfully preserve the base’s phonology, whereas irregular nouns tend to alter it. The distinction between regular and irregular inflection may thus be an epiphenomenon of phonological faithfulness. In Hebrew noun inflection, however, morphological regularity and phonological faithfulness can be distinguished: Nouns whose stems change in the (...) plural may take either a regular or an irregular suffix, and nouns whose stems are preserved in the plural may take either a regular or an irregular suffix. We use this dissociation to examine two hallmarks of default inflection: its lack of dependence on analogies from similar regular nouns, and its application to nonroots such as names. We show that these hallmarks of regularity may be found whether or not the plural form preserves the stem faithfully: People apply the regular suffix to novel nouns that don’t resemble existing nouns, and to names that sound like irregular nouns, regardless of whether the stem is ordinarily preserved in the plural of that family of nouns. Moreover, when they pluralize names, they do not apply the stem changes that are found in their homophonous nouns, replicating an effect found in English and German. These findings show that the distinction between regular and irregular phenomena cannot be reduced to differences in the kinds of phonological changes associated with those phenomena in English. Instead, regularity and irregularity must be distinguished in terms of the kinds of mental computations that effect them: symbolic operations versus memorized idiosyncrasies. A corollary is that complex words are not generally dichotomizable as “regular” or “irregular”; different aspects of a word may be regular or irregular depending on whether they violate the rule for that aspect and hence must be stored in memory.. (shrink)

Some elementary properties of tachyons are described and then it is argued that the claim that (T) Tachyons exist, is incompatible with the truth of the Special Theory of Relativity (STR). First it is argued that from T, STR, and the negation of the principle that (Pl) Effect never precedes cause, one can derive a paradoxical conclusion, one of the so-called "causal paradoxes". An obvious response is to affirm (Pl), but then it is argued that (Pl) and (T) entail that (...) STR is false. (shrink)

Do dogs live in the same world as humans? Is it wrong to think dogs have personalities and emotions? What are dogs thinking and what’s the nature of canine wisdom? This is a book for thoughtful dog-lovers who want to explore the deeper issues raised by dogs and their relationships with humans. Twenty philosophers and dog-lovers reveal their experiences with dogs and give their insights on dog-related themes of metaphysics and ethics.

The promise of language in the depths of hell: Primo Levi's Canto of Ulysses and Inferno -- The difference between difference and otherness: Il milione of Marco Polo and Calvino's Le città invisibili -- Traces of the Confucian/Mencian other: ethical moments in Sima Qian's Records of the historian -- War and the Hellenic splendor of knowing: Euripides, Hölderlin, Celan -- The saying, the said, and the betrayal of mercy in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice -- Nom de dieu, quelle race: the (...) saying, the said, and the betrayal of charity in Mongo Beti's Le pauvre Christ de Bomba -- Transcendent divinity and human responsibility in Mahfouz: "zaabalawi" and children of our alley -- That you might have my witness in your poem: Valéry, the symbolist tradition, and Edgar Bowers' later blank verse. (shrink)

For better or for worse, I find myself in the company of the `misers' of Galen Strawson's portrayal who, in response to the question, `Is there such a thing as the self?' rejoin: `Well, there is something of which the sense of the self is an accurate representation, but it does not follow that there is any such thing as the self'. Far from representing a form of `metaphysical excess', the rejoinder seems faithfully and reliably phenomenological. We need not assume (...) that reflection is mere fabrication, or that it crucially distorts the thematic posit that funds our sense of self. The focus, recognition and contextual sensitivity that condition perception may, and admittedly do, limit and modify the activity of reflection as well. Observation disturbs the observed. And likewise, reflection may well compromise its object. But the product of this `compromise', the object as disturbed, the reflective posit as distorted, is nonetheless `there', for reflection. If the way a given object appears to us is a function of our perspectival insertion into the visible world, we need not deny that the world still appears to us in just this way. And analogously, our `sense of self' may represent -- in fact, faithfully represent -- the resultant `distortion', but it would be a breach of logic to infer from this that our `sense of self' therefore represents a self untouched by distortion, an independent, `undistorted' self. Indeed, if reflection distorts, we would have no reflective access to an undistorted self, and would thus have no phenomenological warrant for assuming its existence. Pace Strawson, however, the `something' represented by our `sense of self' is not some thing. It is not `as much a thing or object as any... grain of salt', but rather, as we shall see, an atmospheric haze, or at best, an adventitious `sheen'. (shrink)

Each of our theories of mental representation provides some insight into how the mind works. However, these insights often seem incompatible, as the debates between symbolic, dynamical, emergentist, sub-symbolic, and grounded approaches to cognition attest. Mental representations—whatever they are—must share many features with each of our theories of representation, and yet there are few hypotheses about how a synthesis could be possible. Here, I develop a theory of the underpinnings of symbolic cognition that shows how sub-symbolic dynamics may give rise (...) to higher-level cognitive representations of structures, systems of knowledge, and algorithmic processes. This theory implements a version of conceptual role semantics by positing an internal universal representation language in which learners may create mental models to capture dynamics they observe in the world. The theory formalizes one account of how truly novel conceptual content may arise, allowing us to explain how even elementary logical and computational operations may be learned from a more primitive basis. I provide an implementation that learns to represent a variety of structures, including logic, number, kinship trees, regular languages, context-free languages, domains of theories like magnetism, dominance hierarchies, list structures, quantification, and computational primitives like repetition, reversal, and recursion. This account is based on simple discrete dynamical processes that could be implemented in a variety of different physical or biological systems. In particular, I describe how the required dynamics can be directly implemented in a connectionist framework. The resulting theory provides an “assembly language” for cognition, where high-level theories of symbolic computation can be implemented in simple dynamics that themselves could be encoded in biologically plausible systems. (shrink)

Merchant and Rockness (1994, p. 92) characterize earnings management as "probably the most important ethical issue facing the accounting profession" and provide initial evidence of the ethical judgments of various organizational members. The current study extends their work by examining the extent to which an individual''s ethically-related judgments in response to earnings management activities are associated with the individual''s role.In an experimental study, evening MBA students read three hypothetical scenarios involving a manager engaging in earnings management. The scenarios involved a (...) gain from an operating activity, a gain from an accounting activity, and a loss from an accounting activity. Before reading the cases, however, participants were randomly assigned to one of three roles: a shareholder, another manager from the company who is unfamiliar with the manager in the case, or another manager from the company who is familiar with the manager in the case. Following each case, participants made four ethically related judgments. (shrink)

Language comes so naturally to us that we are apt to forget what a strange and miraculous gift it is. Over the next hour you will sit in your chairs listening to a man make noise as he exhales. Why would you do such a thing? Not because the sounds are particularly melodious, but because the sounds convey information in the exact sequence of hisses and hums and squeaks and pops. As you recover the information, you think the thoughts that (...) I want you to think. Right now I am conveying ideas about language itself, but with a slightly different sequence of hisses and pops I could be talking about anything from theories of the origin of the universe to the latest plot twists in your favorite daytime drama. The fundamental scientific problem raised by language is to explain this vast expressive power. What is the trick behind our ability to fill each other’s heads with so many kinds of thoughts? (shrink)

The human brain is an extraordinary organ. It has allowed us to walk on the moon, *to discover the of matter and life,* and to play chess almost as well as a computer. But this virtuosity raises a puzzle. The brain of Homo sapiens achieved its modern form and size between fifty and a hundred thousand years ago, well before the invention of agriculture, civilizations, and writing in the last ten thousand years. Our foraging ancestors had no occasions to do (...) astrophysics or play chess, and natural selection would not have rewarded them with more babies if they had. How, then, did our outsize, *science-ready* brain evolve? (shrink)