Tim Bayne draws on philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience in defence of the claim that consciousness is unified. He develops an account of what it means to say that consciousness is unified, and then applies this account to a variety of cases - drawn from both normal and pathological forms of experience - in which the unity of consciousness is said to break down. He goes on to explore the implications of the unity of consciousness for theories of consciousness, for the (...) sense of embodiment, and for accounts of the self. The Unity of Consciousness draws on a wide range of findings within philosophy and the sciences of the mind to construct an account of the unity of consciousness that is both conceptually sophisticated and scientifically informed. (shrink)

We call our thoughts conscious, and we also say the same of our bodily sensations, perceptions and other sensory experiences. But thoughts and sensory experiences are very different phenomena, both from the point of view of their subject and in their functional or cognitive role. Does this mean, then, that there are very different kinds or varieties of consciousness? Philosophers do often talk about different kinds of consciousness: Christopher Hill, for example, claims that ‘it is customary to distinguish five forms (...) of consciousness’ (Hill 2009: 1). These are: agent consciousness, propositional consciousness, introspective consciousness, relational consciousness and phenomenal consciousness; to which Hill adds experiential consciousness, making six in total. (shrink)

Neuropsychological results are increasingly cited in cognitive theories although their methodology has been severely criticised. The book argues for an eclectic approach but particularly stresses the use of single-case studies. A range of potential artifacts exists when inferences are made from such studies to the organisation of normal function – for example, resource differences among tasks, premorbid individual differences, and reorganisation of function. The use of “strong” and “classical” dissociations minimises potential artifacts. The theoretical convergence between findings from fields where (...) cognitive neuropsychology is well developed and those from the normal literature strongly suggests that the potential artifacts are not critical. The fields examined in detail in this respect are short-term memory, reading, writing, the organisation of input and output speech systems, and visual perception. Functional dissociation data suggest that not only are input systems organised modularly, but so are central systems. This conclusion is supported by findings on impairment of knowledge, visual attention, supervisory functions, memory, and consciousness. (shrink)

Motivated by accounts of concept use in autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) and a computational model of weak central coherence (O'Loughlin and Thagard, 2000) we examined comprehension and production vocabulary in typically-developing children and those with ASD and Down syndrome (DS). Controlling for frequency, familiarity, length and imageability, Colorado Meaningfulness played a hitherto unremarked role in the vocabularies of children with ASD. High Colorado Meaningful words were underrepresented in the comprehension vocabularies of 2- to 12-year-olds with ASD. The Colorado Meaningfulness of (...) a word is a measure of how many words can be associated with it. Situations in which high Colorado Meaningfulness words are encountered are typically highly variable, and words with High Colorado Meaningfulness often involve extensive use of context. Our data suggest that the number of contexts in which a particular word can appear has a role in determining vocabulary in ASD. This suggestion is consistent with the weak central coherence theory of autism. (shrink)

Introduction: Archaeology and Post-Structuralism Ian Bapty and Tim Yates i If it recedes one day, leaving behind its works and signs on the shores of our ...

Millianism is the familiar view that some expressions, such as proper names, contribute only their referent to the semantic content of sentences in which they occur. Inan (Philosophical Studies 2010) has recently argued that the Millian is committed to the following odd conclusion: There may be questions that he is able to grasp but that he cannot answer, either affirmatively, negatively, or with a simple I don’t know . The Millian is indeed committed to this conclusion. But we intend to (...) show that Inan’s argument generalizes, so that everyone who accepts certain largely uncontroversial principles is committed to the odd conclusion that there may be questions that are graspable but not answerable. (shrink)

The present paper deals with the famous punishment of the delatores by Trajan in a spectaculum described in chapters 33-36 of Pliny’s Panegyricus. The examination of this scene on a literary level with the help of textual analysis and interpretation seeks to illustrate how Pliny displays Trajan’s actions as well as the devices and techniques that Pliny uses to achieve his panegyrical purpose. Noteworthy is the integration of religious terminology, the choice of perspective and the actual comparisons with Trajan’s predecessors. (...) Thus, Trajan appears as a link between humans and gods, and Pliny’s depiction of his actions elevates him to the divine level as far as possible. (shrink)

This chapter begins with Augustine of Hippo’s curious assumption, in The City of God, that in The Golden Ass the claim to have been transformed into a donkey was Apuleius’, rather than that of the fictional narrator, Lucius. Why should Augustine have made such a glaring error? The chapter argues that antiquity lacked a strong sense of ‘the narrator’. What we tend to call ‘first-person’, antiquity would have understood as ‘fictional autobiography’, in which the author illusionistically impersonates the narrating character.

Numerical probabilities are eliminated in favor of qualitative notions, with an eye to isolating what it is about probabilities that is essential to judgements of acceptability. A basic choice point is whether the conjunction of two propositions, each acceptable, must be deemed acceptable. Concepts of acceptability closed under conjunction are analyzed within Keisler's weak logic for generalized quantifiers — or more specifically, filter quantifiers. In a different direction, the notion of a filter is generalized so as to allow sets with (...) probability non-infinitesimally below 1 to be acceptable. (shrink)

Though we are in broad agreement with much of Elqayam & Evans' (E&E's) position, we criticize two aspects of their argument. First, rejecting normativism is unlikely to yield the benefits that E&E seek. Second, their conception of rational norms is overly restrictive and, as a consequence, their arguments at most challenge a relatively restrictive version of normativism.

This paper is a response to Ted Toadvine’s article “Gestalts and Refrains: On the Musical Structure of Nature,” in Environmental Philosophy 2.2 (2005). We propose a more generous interpretation of Naess’s gestalt ontology, one that we believe mitigates Toadvine’s criticisms. Gestalt ontology and refrain ontology offer two different yet compatible ontologies for environmental philosophers searching for viable alternatives to scientific reductionism. Encouraging many ontologies also encourages a rich philosophical pluralism.

We provide complete classifications of algebras of partial maps for a significant swathe of combinations of operations not previously classified. Our focus is the many subsidiary operations that arise in recent considerations of the ‘override’ and ‘update’ operations arising in specification languages. These other operations turn out to have an older pedigree: domain restriction, set subtraction and intersection. All signatures considered include domain restriction, at least as a term. Combinations of the operations are classified and given complete axiomatizations with and (...) without the presence of functional composition. Each classification is achieved by way of providing a concrete representation of the corresponding abstract algebras as partial maps acting on special kinds of filters determined with respect to various induced orders. In contrast to many negative results in the broader area, all of the considered combinations lead to finite axiomatizations. (shrink)

Analytic philosophy is sometimes said to have particularly close connections to logic and to science, and no particularly interesting or close relation to its own history. It is argued here that although the connections to logic and science have been important in the development of analytic philosophy, these connections do not come close to characterizing the nature of analytic philosophy, either as a body of doctrines or as a philosophical method. We will do better to understand analytic philosophy – and (...) its relationship to continental philosophy – if we see it as a historically constructed collection of texts, which define its key problems and concerns. It is true, however, that analytic philosophy has paid little attention to the history of the subject. This is both its strength – since it allows for a distinctive kind of creativity – and its weakness – since ignoring history can encourage a philosophical variety of “normal science.”. (shrink)