In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Comparative Critical Perspectives on the AnthropoceneAn IntroductionAdeline Johns-Putra (bio) and Xianmin Shen (bio)Ever since Eugene Stoermer coined the term Anthropocene in the 1980s and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Crutzen identified the present period as the Anthropocene, this ecological and geographical concept has been adopted in other disciplines beyond the realm of science and has taken on particular resonance in the environmental humanities. This is because the advent (...) of the Anthropocene not only connotes a physical phenomenon, that is, a possible new geological epoch in which the damaging effect of the human species on all other species and on our planetary home has become so great as to leave a mark in the planet's fabric. It is also a revelation of human liability and responsibility, in which that stratigraphical scar must be recognized and the global socioeconomic dynamics of exceptionalism and exploitation that it belies reckoned with. This reckoning is one between those with the greatest responsibility for that impact, who are also the ones who will feel that impact least, and those with the least responsibility, who will feel that impact most. Moreover, those vulnerabilities lie with both human and nonhuman individuals: the Anthropocene demands that human-nonhuman as well as intra-human injustices are dealt with, that the ways in which global systems are interlocked with planetary ones are properly understood.Such questions of justice require a critical response, in various senses of the word and its origins. This encompasses a measure of scrutiny and critique; an honest judgment and even criticism of faults and shortcomings; and an awareness of urgency and crisis. With this in mind, and with both planetary and global questions of justice before us, we have [End Page 1] sought with this special issue of Intertexts to bring together analyses of sociocultural representations and discourse in the widest sense (not just literary or other artistic texts, but political events). We asked that these analyses consider how such discourse has been shaped by global workings now taken for granted—the trappings of modernity and the impulses of capitalism—and also to ponder the potential for reshaping those dynamics as part of a collective consciousness.Anthropocene Criticality: The Planetary, the Global, and the WorldWhat kind of Anthropocene criticality would be both an act of recognition of human responsibility and a reckoning across boundaries (whether intra- or interspecies) of agency, power, and vulnerability? How, in other words, do we take full stock of what is signified by anthropos in the term Anthropocene? We invoke here a range of frames for understanding the place of anthropos both as and within the collective that experiences—altogether but not all the same—the Anthropocene. We call these the "planetary," the "global," and the "world."1 We are not the first to distinguish between these terms and to employ them as devices for (re)framing and (re)visualizing the web of human-nonhuman as well as human-human relationships. In 1999, Gayatri Spivak spoke of the "imperative to re-imagine the planet" and, in this talk and updates of it in 2012 and 2014, outlined the need to contemplate "planetarity" instead of "globalism" (An Aesthetic Education, 335–50). In the fields of comparative literature and world literature, debates have occurred over what Pheng Cheah suggests is the encroachment of ideas of "globalization" on to notions of "worldliness" (28), with the question complicated more recently by what Sarah Nuttall sees as the possibility for a "planetary literature" (924–41). What we offer here adopts and adapts these conversations, and as we define and deploy our terms below we will indicate how these overlap.Under the rubric of the "planetary" we place Anthropocene discussions of how to truly comprehend the human as species and as geological agent, that is, both as one species of many and as a species that has occupied an outsized positionality alongside any other species (even [End Page 2] the idea of an "alpha species" seems hardly to do justice to the magnitude of anthropogenic effect on every inch of the biospheric fabric, from the deepest oceans to the upper levels of atmosphere, lasting for millennia). This is not merely about sentimental catch-phrasing... (shrink)

Linguistics. Artificial intelligence. Related fields. Computation.

Compared to other forms of memory, episodic memory is commonly viewed as special for being distinctively metarepresentational and, relatedly, uniquely human. There is an inherent ambiguity in these conceptions, however, because “episodic memory” has two closely connected yet subtly distinct uses, one designating the recollective experience and the other designating the underlying neurocognitive system. Since experience and system sit at different levels of theorizing, their disentanglement is not only necessary but also fruitful for generating novel theoretical hypotheses. To show this, (...) I first argue that accepting the phenomenally conscious contents of episodic remembering as metarepresentational does not necessitate a metarepresentational conception of the episodic memory system. In its stead, I sketch an alternative account on which the metarepresentational character of episodic remembering is generated through the interaction of first-order outputs of the episodic memory system with other neurocognitive components of the brain. Complemented with a first-order account of the memory system, the system-experience distinction further supplies a novel understanding of the human uniqueness of episodic recollection, one that is compatible with there being an evolutionarily conserved episodic memory system. Overall, by distinguishing the two equivocal senses of “episodic memory” in our theorizing, we unearth an opportunity to understand how the distinctive phenomenology of our episodic recollection is related to and implemented in the cognitive architecture. (shrink)

The spatial organization of the genome is intimately linked to its biological function, yet our understanding of higher order genomic structure is coarse, fragmented and incomplete. In the nucleus of eukaryotic cells, interphase chromosomes occupy distinct.

Articles from the semiotic point of view, through the "Poems" and "easy" comparison, discusses the "Book" class artistic features. Integrated in the form of symbols, in the chapter structure, sentence use of the phrase, in the selection and deep implication on the images, the "easy" and "poetry" with isomorphic relationship. Appear in later works of art similar images, the prototype can be traced back to the "poetry" is more-resort "easy." The essay discuss the characteristic of analogous art in the Book (...) of Changes in terms of semeiology through comparing the Book of Songs with the Book of Changes. By comparison the writer draw a conclusion that they were in the relation of heterogeneity and homoorganicity in the comprehensiveness of constructing symbol, in the structure of sections and chapters, in the use of lexical and sentential expressions, in the choice of images and deep signification. The heterogeneous images appear in the art pieces of later ages, and its protomodel could be found in the Book of Changes more than in the Book of Songs. (shrink)

Trying to pursue their own academic independent value, but perhaps just wishful thinking, because the political authority of the powerful enough to swallow the idea of any self-righteous. The late 1890s to the late 1970s during the revolution 80 years Legalism studies have shown that academic intentionally or unintentionally, and always found between the external political environment associated with, or actively trying to Kuangjiu ills of academic, political struggle or forced to become the academic mouthpiece. Thus, not aloof from the (...) world of academic research is bound to its external problems worth noting. Academic study's aspirtion for an independent value of it own might be no more than a wishful thinking in face of the powerful political authorities that can lick up any self-imposing ideas like this. Study of Legalism during the 80 years' revolution, dating from the late 1890s to the late 1970s, indicates that consciously or unconsciously, academic study is always connected with external political environment. Either it struggles to make a change in troubled times or it is reduced to the verbal weapon of political battles. Therefore, academic study is destined not to be held aloof from the world outside and hence those external factors are worth probing into. (shrink)

In analyzing oppressive systems like racism, social theorists have articulated accounts of the dynamic interaction and mutual dependence between psychological components, such as individuals’ patterns of thought and action, and social components, such as formal institutions and informal interactions. We argue for the further inclusion of physical components, such as material artifacts and spatial environments. Drawing on socially situated and ecologically embedded approaches in the cognitive sciences, we argue that physical components of racism are not only shaped by, but also (...) shape psychological and social components of racism. Indeed, while our initial focus is on racism and racist things, we contend that our framework is also applicable to other oppressive systems, including sexism, classism, and ableism. This is because racist things are part of a broader class of oppressive things, which are material artifacts and spatial environments that are in congruence with an oppressive system. (shrink)

Bringing together Deleuze, Blanchot, and Foucault, this book provides a detailed and original exploration of the ideas that influenced Deleuze's thought leading up to and throughout his cinema volumes and, as a result, proposes a new definition of art. Examining Blanchot's suggestion that art and dream are "outside" of power, as imagination has neither reality nor truth, and Foucault's theory that power forms knowledge by valuing life, Eugene Brent Young relates these to both Deleuze's philosophy of time and his (...) work with Guattari on art. In doing so, he uses case studies from literature and popular film, including Kafka's Castle, Villeneuve's Arrival, and Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. Providing important new insights for those working in literary and cinematic studies, this book advances a new definition of art as that which reverses the realities and truths of power to express obscure ideas and values beyond both our exterior and interior worlds. (shrink)

It is well-known that racism is encoded into the social practices and institutions of medicine. Less well-known is that racism is encoded into the material artifacts of medicine. We argue that many medical devices are not merely biased, but materialize oppression. An oppressive device exhibits a harmful bias that reflects and perpetuates unjust power relations. Using pulse oximeters and spirometers as case studies, we show how medical devices can materialize oppression along various axes of social difference, including race, gender, class, (...) and ability. Our account uses political philosophy and cognitive science to give a theoretical basis for understanding materialized oppression, explaining how artifacts encode and carry oppressive ideas from the past to the present and future. Oppressive medical devices present a moral aggregation problem. To remedy this problem, we suggest redundantly layered solutions that are coordinated to disrupt reciprocal causal connections between the attitudes, practices, and artifacts of oppressive systems. (shrink)

In déjà vu, a novel experience feels strangely familiar. Here we propose that this phenomenology is best seen as consisting in an illusory feeling of identification of the gist of the current scene or event, rather than in the intensity of the fluency-based, metacognitive feeling of familiarity.

Critics across the political spectrum have worried that ordinary uses of words like 'racist', 'sexist', and 'homophobic' are becoming conceptually inflated, meaning that these expressions are getting used so widely that they lose their nuance and, thereby, their moral force. However, the charge of conceptual inflation, as well as responses to it, are standardly made without any systematic investigation of how 'racist' and other expressions condemning oppression are actually used in ordinary language. Once we examine large linguistic corpora to see (...) how these expressions are actually used, we find that English speakers have a rich linguistic repertoire for qualifying the degree to which and dimensions along which something is racist, sexist, homophobic, and so on. These facts about ordinary usage undermine the charge of conceptual inflation. Without awareness of facts about ordinary usage, theorists risk making linguistic prescriptions that are unnecessary or counterproductive. (shrink)

Gender in Chinese Philosophy The concept of gender is foundational to the general approach of Chinese thinkers. Yin and yang, core elements of Chinese cosmogony, involve correlative aspects of “dark and light,” “female and male,” and “soft and hard.” These notions, with their deeply-rooted gender connotations, recognize the necessity of interplay between these different forces … Continue reading Gender in Chinese Philosophy →.

Our goal in this paper is to articulate a novel account of the ordinary concept ART. At the core of our account is the idea that a puzzle surrounding our thought and talk about art is best understood as just one instance of a far broader phenomenon. In particular, we claim that one can make progress on this puzzle by drawing on research from cognitive science on dual character concepts. Thus, we suggest that the very same sort of phenomenon that (...) is associated with ART can also be found in a broad class of other dual character concepts, including SCIENTIST, CHRISTIAN, GANGSTER, and many others. Instead of focusing narrowly on the case of ART, we try to offer a more general account of these concepts and the puzzles to which they give rise. Then, drawing on the general theory, we introduce a series of hypotheses about art concepts, and put those hypotheses to the test in three experimental studies. (shrink)

Hoerl & McCormack claim that animals don't represent time. Because this makes a mystery of established findings in comparative psychology, there had better be some important payoff. The main one they mention is that it explains a clash of intuition about the reality of time's passage. But any theory that recognizes the representational requirements of agency can do likewise.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are arguably the most important period in philosophy’s history, given that they set a new and broad foundation for subsequent philosophical thought. Over the last decade, however, discontent among instructors has grown with coursebooks’ unwavering focus on the era’s seven most well-known philosophers—all of them white and male—and on their exclusively metaphysical and epistemological concerns. While few dispute the centrality of these figures and the questions they raised, the modern era also included essential contributions from (...) women—like Margaret Cavendish, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Émilie Du Châtelet—as well as important non-white thinkers, such as Anton Wilhelm Amo, Julien Raimond, and Ottobah Cugoano. At the same time, there has been increasing recognition that moral and political philosophy, philosophy of the natural world, and philosophy of race—also vibrant areas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—need to be better integrated with the standard coverage of metaphysics and epistemology. -/- A New Modern Philosophy: The Inclusive Anthology of Primary Sources addresses—in one volume—these valid criticisms. Weaving together multiple voices and all of the era’s vibrant areas of debate, this volume sets a new agenda for studying modern philosophy. It includes a wide range of readings from 34 thinkers, integrating essential works from all of the canonical writers along with the previously neglected philosophers. Arranged chronologically, editors Eugene Marshall and Susanne Sreedhar provide an introduction for each author that sets the thinker in his or her time period as well as in the longer debates to which the thinker contributed. Study questions and suggestions for further reading conclude each chapter. At the end of the volume, in addition to a comprehensive subject index, the book includes 13 Syllabus Modules, which will help instructors use the book to easily set up different topically structured courses, such as "The Citizen and the State," "Mind and Matter," "Education," "Theories of Perception," or "Metaphysics of Causation." -/- And an eresource offers a wide range of supplemental online resources, including essay assignments, exams, quizzes, student handouts, reading questions, and scholarly articles on teaching the history of philosophy. (shrink)

David Lewis argues that centered worlds give us a way to capture de se, or self-locating, contents in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. In recent years, centered worlds have also gained other uses in areas ranging widely from metaphysics to ethics. In this paper, I raise a problem for centered worlds and discuss the costs and benefits of different solutions. My investigation into the nature of centered worlds brings out potentially problematic implicit commitments of the theories that employ (...) them. In addition, my investigation shows that the conception of centered worlds widely attributed to David Lewis is not only problematic, but in fact not his. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn contrast to the classic view that facial expressions convey specific emotional states, recent theories have postulated that perception is a highly contextualised phenomenon. The present...

Narrative representations can change our moral actions and thoughts, for better or for worse. In this article, I develop a theory of fictions' capacity for moral education and moral corruption that is fully sensitive to the diversity of fictions. Specifically, I argue that the way a fiction influences our moral actions and thoughts importantly depends on its genre. This theory promises new insights into practical ethical debates over pornography and media violence.

One aim of this essay is to contribute to understanding aesthetic communication—the process by which agents aim to convey thoughts and transmit knowledge about aesthetic matters to others. Our focus will be on the use of aesthetic adjectives in aesthetic communication. Although theorists working on the semantics of adjectives have developed sophisticated theories about gradable adjectives, they have tended to avoid studying aesthetic adjectives—the class of adjectives that play a central role in expressing aesthetic evaluations. And despite the wealth of (...) attention paid to aesthetic adjectives by philosophical aestheticians, they have paid little attention to contemporary linguistic theories of adjectives. We take our work to be a first step in remedying these lacunae. In this paper, we present four experiments that examine one aspect of how aesthetic adjectives ordinarily function: the context-sensitivity of their application standards. Our results present a prima facie empirical challenge to a common distinction between relative and absolute gradable adjectives because aesthetic adjectives are found to behave differently from both. Our results thus also constitute a prima facie vindication of some philosophical aestheticians’ contention that aesthetic adjectives constitute a particularly interesting segment of natural language, even if the boundaries of this segment might turn out to be different from what they had in mind. (shrink)

Imaginative resistance refers to a phenomenon in which people resist engaging in particular prompted imaginative activities. Philosophers have primarily theorized about this phenomenon from the armchair. In this paper, we demonstrate the utility of empirical methods for investigating imaginative resistance. We present two studies that help to establish the psychological reality of imaginative resistance, and to uncover one factor that is significant for explaining this phenomenon but low in psychological salience: genre. Furthermore, our studies have the methodological upshot of showing (...) how empirical tools can complement the predominant armchair approach to philosophical aesthetics. (shrink)

Imaginative immersion refers to a phenomenon in which one loses oneself in make-believe. Susanna Schellenberg says that the best explanation of imaginative immersion involves a radical revision to cognitive architecture. Instead of there being an attitude of belief and a distinct attitude of imagination, there should only be one attitude that represents a continuum between belief and imagination. -/- We argue otherwise. Although imaginative immersion is a crucial data point for theorizing about the imagination, positing a continuum between belief and (...) imagination is neither necessary nor sufficient for explaining the phenomenon. In addition, arguing against Schellenberg’s account reveals important but underappreciated lessons for theorizing about the imagination and for interpreting boxological representations of the mind. (shrink)

The goal of this short paper is to show that esthetic adjectives—exemplified by “beautiful” and “elegant”—do not pattern stably on a range of linguistic diagnostics that have been used to taxonomize the gradability properties of adjectives. We argue that a plausible explanation for this puzzling data involves distinguishing two properties of gradable adjectives that have been frequently conflated: whether an adjective’s applicability is sensitive to a comparison class, and whether an adjective’s applicability is context-dependent.

Imaginative resistance refers to a phenomenon in which people resist engaging in particular prompted imaginative activities. On one influential diagnosis of imaginative resistance, the systematic difficulties are due to these particular propositions’ discordance with real-world norms. This essay argues that this influential diagnosis is too simple. While imagination is indeed by default constrained by real-world norms during narrative engagement, it can be freed with the power of genre conventions and expectations.

To imagine is to form a mental representation that does not aim at things as they actually, presently, and subjectively are. One can use imagination to represent possibilities other than the actual, to represent times other than the present, and to represent perspectives other than one’s own. Unlike perceiving and believing, imagining something does not require one to consider that something to be the case. Unlike desiring or anticipating, imagining something does not require one to wish or expect that something (...) to be the case. // -/- Imagination is involved in a wide variety of human activities, and has been explored from a wide range of philosophical perspectives. Philosophers of mind have examined imagination’s role in mindreading and in pretense. Philosophical aestheticians have examined imagination’s role in creating and in engaging with different types of artworks. Epistemologists have examined imagination’s role in theoretical thought experiments and in practical decision-making. Philosophers of language have examined imagination’s role in irony and metaphor. // -/- Because of the breadth of the topic, this entry focuses exclusively on contemporary discussions of imagination in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. (shrink)

Whenever philosophers try to include a “diverse” — in the sense of not currently recognised as canon — philosophy x into their teaching and their research, they inevitably get asked: “What is x philosophy?” and “Is x philosophy really philosophy?”. -/- These metaphilosophical questions do not only arise with attempts to include “diverse” intellectual traditions, but also with attempts to include “diverse” thinkers, works, topics, and methods. First, they are asked to prove that x exists. Second, they are asked to (...) prove that x is really philosophy. To refer to the pattern of debates that these questions engender, call it conversational dynamics of diversity. (shrink)

Many studies have revealed the top-down modulation on unconscious processing. However, there is little research about how category-selective attention could modulate the unconscious processing. In the present study, using functional magnetic resonance imaging , the results showed that category-selective attention modulated unconscious face/tool processing in the middle occipital gyrus . Interestingly, MOG effects were of opposed direction for face and tool processes. During unconscious face processing, activation in MOG decreased under the face-selective attention compared with tool-selective attention. This result was (...) in line with the predictive coding theory. During unconscious tool processing, however, activation in MOG increased under the tool-selective attention compared with face-selective attention. The different effects might be ascribed to an interaction between top-down category-selective processes and bottom-up processes in the partial awareness level as proposed by Kouider, De Gardelle, Sackur, and Dupoux . Specifically, we suppose an “excessive activation” hypothesis. (shrink)

This chapter explores the theoretical and practical aspects of Chinese Mahayana Buddhism’s ethics of generosity from a philosophical point of view. Buddhism is a religion par excellence of strangification and generosity. After an introduction, I discuss some essential sources both from Indian and Chinese Buddhism. Then I develop the idea of strangification and ethic of generosity in Chinese Mahayana Buddhism, before I arrive at some words of conclusion.On the theoretical side, I explore the ontological foundation of the ethics of generosity (...) in The Awakening of Faith. This is one of the founding texts in the history of Chinese Mahayana Buddhism that offers an ontological foundation to Buddhist generosity. It does this by the affirmation of One Mind or the Mind of All Sentient Beings as the Ultimate Reality. However, it also sets certain limits to generosity by denying difference/otherness, and sees difference/otherness as merely a delusion. On the practical side, I discuss three types of gift, namely the gift of material goods, the gift of no fear and the gift of teaching Dharma, and more interestingly, the practice of huixiang 迴向 as discussed by Huiyuan in the entry “huixiang” of his Dasheng Yizhang.Some conclusive reflections are done to consider the Chinese Buddhist ethics of generosity in relation to the post-modern ethics of generosity to many others. (shrink)

Drawing on recent scholarship and delving systematically into Iamblichean texts, these ten papers establish Iamblichus as the great innovator of Neoplatonic philosophy who broadened its appeal for future generations of philosophers.

Our prior research demonstrated that the right temporoparietal junction exerted a modulatory role in ingroup bias in emotional mimicry. In this study, two experiments were conducted to further explore whether the rTPJ is a neural region for emotional mimicry or for the modulation of emotional mimicry by group membership in a sham-controlled, double-blinded, between-subject design. Both experiments employed non-invasive transcranial direct current stimulation to temporarily change the cortical excitability over the rTPJ and facial electromyography to measure facial muscle activations as (...) an index of emotional mimicry. After the anodal or sham stimulation, participants in Experiment 1 passively viewed a series of happy clips, while participants in Experiment 2 viewed happy clips performed by ethnic ingroup and outgroup models. fEMG analyses revealed that participants in Experiment 1 showed the same degree of happy mimicry for both tDCS conditions and participants in Experiment 2 showed an ingroup bias in happy mimicry in the sham condition, which disappeared in the anodal condition. Taken together, the present study demonstrated that rTPJ plays a role in the modulation of emotional mimicry by group membership. (shrink)