The past 25 years have seen a rapid growth of knowledge about brain mechanisms involved in visual mental imagery. These advances have largely been made independently of the long history of philosophical – and even psychological – reckoning with imagery and its parent concept ‘imagination’. We suggest that the view from these empirical findings can be widened by an appreciation of imagination’s intellectual history, and we seek to show how that history both created the conditions for – and presents challenges (...) to – the scientific endeavor. We focus on the neuroscientific literature’s most commonly used task – imagining a concrete object – and, after sketching what is known of the neurobiological mechanisms involved, we examine the same basic act of imagining from the perspective of several key positions in the history of philosophy and psychology. We present positions that, firstly, contextualize and inform the neuroscientific account, and secondly, pose conceptual and methodological challenges to the scientific analysis of imagery. We conclude by reflecting on the intellectual history of visualization in the light of contemporary science, and the extent to which such science may resolve long-standing theoretical debates. (shrink)

Spanning a critical period--from the turbulent era of the American and French Revolutions through to the calmer waters of the nineteenth centuries, this book will help all students of political ideas to gain a fuller appreciation of the great works which form the foundation of the subject. Seven classic texts have been chosen for analysis: Hamilton's The Federalist, Sieyes' What is the Third Estate?, Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, Hegel's The Philosophy of Right, de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, (...) Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto, and Mill's On Liberty. Together they illustrate and express the main themes of the period. The most prominent of these is the growing distinction between the state and society and the problems that this brings in its train. Other themes embrace the interplay of revolution and reaction, the growth of representative government, and the challenge posed by democracy. The clear analysis and explanation contained in each essay will enable the reader to return to the original texts with a new understanding and insight. (shrink)

For years, both psychologists and the general public have been fascinated with the notion that there are gender differences in cognitive abilities; even now, flashy cover stories exploiting this idea dominate major news magazines, while research focuses on differences in verbal, mathematical, spatial, and scientific abilities across gender. This new volume in the Counterpoints series not only summarizes and addresses the validity of such research, but also questions its ideology and consequences. Why do we search so intently for these differences? (...) And what are the social and cultural implications of this relentless emphasis? Do biological mechanisms, in fact, contribute to the male-female differences in cognition? These are just a few of the questions generated by this controversial topic as it is debated throughout the book. (shrink)

The chapters published in this volume developed from presentations, and their associated discussions at a conference organised by the Scottish Branch of the British Psychological Society, held at Rothesay, Isle of Bute, Scotland in September 1987. The goal of the conference was to bring together workers across a wide area of neuropsychological research to discuss recent technological advances, developments in assessment and rehabilitation, and to address theoretical issues of current interest. Thus, the chapters in this book include contributions on the (...) use of Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography in neuropsychological research, studies of hemi spheric specialisation and cooperation, alcoholic and Alzheimer type dementia, prosopagnosia and facial processing, the assessment, management and rehabilitation of memory problems, the assessment of premorbid intellectual status and issues in developmental neuropsychology. Many of those engaged in research and clinical practice in neuropsychology encounter a range of topic at least as wide as this in their professional lives. The opportunity for researchers and clinicians to discuss some of the key issues in the field was invaluable and we hope that readers gain as much from the material presented here as the participants did from the meeting itself. (shrink)

Multilevel research strategies characterize contemporary molecular inquiry into biological systems. We outline conceptual, methodological, and explanatory dimensions of these multilevel strategies in microbial ecology, systems biology, protein research, and developmental biology. This review of emerging lines of inquiry in these fields suggests that multilevel research in molecular life sciences has significant implications for philosophical understandings of explanation, modeling, and representation.

This seminal work by political philosopher C.B. Macpherson was first published by the Clarendon Press in 1962, and remains of key importance to the study of liberal-democratic theory half-a-century later. In it, Macpherson argues that the chief difficulty of the notion of individualism that underpins classical liberalism lies in what he calls its "possessive quality" - "its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them." Under such a conception, (...) the essence of humanity becomes freedom from dependence on the wills of others; society is little more than a system of economic relations; and political society becomes a means of safeguarding private property and the system of economic relations rooted in property. As the New Statesman declared: "It is rare for a book to change the intellectual landscape. It is even more unusual for this to happen when the subject is one that has been thoroughly investigated by generations of historians.... Until the appearance of Professor Macpherson's book, it seemed unlikely that anything radically new could be said about so well-worn a topic. The unexpected has happened, and the shock waves are still being absorbed." A new introduction by Frank Cunningham puts the work in a twenty-first-century context. (shrink)

Thousands of youth suffering from acquired brain injury or other early-life neurological disease live, mature, and learn with only limited communication and interaction with their world. Such cognitively capable children are ideal candidates for brain-computer interfaces. While BCI systems are rapidly evolving, a fundamental gap exists between technological innovators and the patients and families who stand to benefit. Forays into translating BCI systems to children in recent years have revealed that kids can learn to operate simple BCI with proficiency akin (...) to adults. BCI could bring significant boons to the lives of many children with severe physical impairment, supporting their complex physical and social needs. However, children have been neglected in BCI research and a collaborative BCI research community is required to unite and push pediatric BCI development forward. To this end, the pediatric BCI Canada collaborative network was formed, under a unified goal to cooperatively drive forward pediatric BCI innovation and impact. This article reflects on the topics and discussions raised in the foundational BCI-CAN meeting held in Toronto, ON, Canada in November 2019 and suggests the next steps required to see BCI impact the lives of children with severe neurological disease and their families. (shrink)

The paper presents a new theory of perceptual demonstrative thought, the property-dependent theory. It argues that the theory is superior to both the object-dependent theory (Evans, McDowell) and the object-independent theory (Burge).

The Forge of the Spirit: Structure, Motion, and Meaning in the Japanese Martial Tradition. John J. Donohue. New York: Garland, 1991. 252 p. $37 (cloth).

In recent years there has been a substantial amount of research on emotional intelligence (EI) across a wide range of disciplines. Also, this term has been receiving increasing attention in the popular business press. This article extends previous research by seeking to determine whether there is a relationship between emotional intelligence and ethical judgment among practicing managers with respect to questions of ethical nature that can arise in their professional activity. It analyzes the results of a survey of 324 managers (...) enrolled in executive MBA programs from five universities in the southeastern and northeastern United States. This study is based on a model presented by Forsyth showing two dimensions that play an important role in ethical evaluation and behavior. Respondents were classified into one of four groups according to their idealism and relativism levels—situationists, subjectivists, absolutists, and exceptionists. The four ideological group’s scores were compared. The results indicate significant differences between the situationists and absolutists on the one hand, and subjectivists and exceptionists on the other. The former’s emotional intelligence scores were significantly higher thus demonstrating a strong relationship between emotional intelligence and ethical ideology. The results raise important implications for practitioners and educators. (shrink)

Gerald Sykes -- Aldous Huxley -- Gerald Heard -- Christopher Isherwood -- John van Druten -- Marianna Masin -- J. Crawford Lewis -- Dorothy F. Mercer -- Kurt Friedrichs -- Swami Atulananda -- Jane Molard -- The Countess of Sandwich -- John Yale -- Joan Rayne -- Durgacharan -- Pravrajika Saradaprana.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:F. H. Bradley and the Working-out of Absolute Idealism* JOHN HERMAN RANDALL, JR. FRANCIS HERBERTBRADLEY (1846-1924) 1 agreed with the other English idealists that the real world is the experienced world. But he started with the fundamental conviction that "experience" is more than "thought," as Green had maintained. Bradley's basic drive is the refusal to abolish "feeling" in favor of knowledge and intelligibility. "Feeling" is a fundamental and (...) ineradicable aspect of "reality"m more fundamental, in fact, than thinking. In the immediately experienced world, all intelligible distinctions and relations are merged in a "whole of feeling" which is the ultimate subject-matter of philosophy. "Thought" arises out of feeling, out of "immediacy," as an interpretation of immediate experience by distinguishing relations and aspects in it. "Knowledge " is only one aspect of the experienced world; it needs blending with "feeling" and will to include all the experienced aspects. "Feeling" starts for Bradley, in his Principles of Logic (1883), in pretty much the empiricist sense, as isolated sensations, and as subjective (in flavor at least). It then becomes neutral: "feeling" is identified with "the felt"; and it grows richer, attempting to include the whole wealth of immediate experience. Thus Bradley gets very close to Dewey's conception of "direct experience," "non-reflective experience," without, however, Dewey's biological analysis. It is through this conception of experience that Bradley approaches the naturalism to which his thinking almost arrived at the end. Thought, that is, has a setting in experience " it is relational, and by its analysis it breaks up experienced and felt wholes. There is a double insistence in Bradley. On the one hand, reality is experienced, but is not adequately expressed in thought. On the other, reality/s accessible to knowledge. What has often been called Bradley's "skepticism" is really an objective relativism. Thought, logical structure, is not ultimate. In Appearance and *This study of F. It. Bradley is based on one of five chapters on post-ttegehan philosophical Ideahsm in Britain and America to be included in my forthcoming Career oJ Philosophy in Modem Times, Vol.III: The Hundred Years Since Darwin. ISee Bradley ed. of Mind, XXXIV (1925); A. E. Taylor, "F. H. Bradley"; J. H. Muirhead, "Bradley's Place in Philosophy." See also T. M. Forsyth, English Philosophy (London: 1910), chap. VII, 2rid part; Rudolf Kagey, F. H. Bradley's Logic (New York: 1931). The best philosophical analyses of Bradley are Robert D. Mack, The Appeal to Immediate Experience (New York: 1945),and Richard Wollheim,F. H. Bradley (Pelican Books, 1959). [245] 246 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Reality, he insists it is really self-contradictory; then later he emphasizes rather that it is always relative to its particular subiect-matter. The real, experienced world is never identical with the intelligible world, yet it is also never "extraneous " to it. The relation of the two can be said to be, in Aristotelian terms, that of substance to form, that of what is to its intelligible aspect. The intelligible world, the system of science and knowledge, thus fundamentally needs criticism in the light of its setting in the experienced world. This is not only the entire drive of Dewey's Experience and Nature; it is the expression of that whole current of thought on the Continent which began with the criticism of Hegel's "panlogism" in the 1840's and is today called "Existentialism." Bradley is the British counterpart of all those who have criticized philosophies of logical structure like T. H. Green's, or like the other contemporary forms of Neo-Kantianism in Germany and France. The "known world" is a world of relations distingflished in the richer "real world." These distinctions are ultimately relative to their particular setting, but in that setting they are valid enough. Bradley's celebrated doctrine of the "degrees of truth and reality" means that practically knowledge is "true"; any idea which fulfills its purpose of rendering some portion or aspect of experience intelligible and significant and meaningful, and which is not ousted by a better idea, Bradley is willing to say is "so far true." It is valid, in its own sphere and purpose, despite its ultimate inconsistency; the wave-theory... (shrink)

The Perceived Role of Ethics and Social Responsibility (PRESOR) instrument was developed in the United States by Singhapakdi et al. (1996b) as a reliable and valid scale to measure the perceived role of ethics and social responsibility in achieving organizational effectiveness. This study was carried out to confirm the factorial structure of the instrument and to assess its reliability and validity for use in Hong Kong, the finance and service heart of the Asia-Pacific region and a culture with clear differences (...) in ethical attitudes and perceptions from those of the United States. Constructive replication of the exploratory factor analytic procedure of the original study with a representative sample of Hong Kong managers failed to support the hypothesized scale structure but instead suggested a different, two-factor, structure. Confirmatory factor analysis defined the alternative model which comprised two interpretable, negatively intercorrelated factorial scales, "Importance of ethics and social responsibility" and "Subordination of ethics and social responsibility in the achievement of organizational effectiveness". The model showed a high level of goodness-of-fit for the population and the two subscales, comprised of five items and four items respectively, were shown to have acceptable internal consistency reliability. Correlational and multiple regression analysis showed highly significant levels of association with the ethical ideology dimensions of the EPQ (Forsyth, 1980), used in the validation of the original scale, and with two ethical philosophy subscales derived from the ATBEQ (Preble and Reichel, 1988). The instrument is short, easily administered, is psychometrically sound and has considerable potential in the study of the perceived role of ethics and social responsibility in the achievement of organizational effectiveness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Recent and Classic References at the Interface of Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Abnormal PsychologyArticlesAggernaes, A. 1972. The expanded reality of hallucinations and other psychological phenomena. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 48: 220–238.Anonymous. 1991. Child sexual abuse and the limits of responsibility. Lancet 337: 890.Anonymous. 1993. Mental incapacity and medical treatment. Lancet 341: 1123–1124.Appelbaum, M. D., and A. Creer. 1993. Confidentiality in group therapy. Hospital and Community Psychiatry 44: 311–312.Beatson, J. A. 1993. (...) The psychiatrist and peer review—a psychodynamic review of the literature. Australia and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 27: 311–318.Berrios, G. E. 1987. Dementia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: a conceptual history. Psychological Medicine 17: 829–837.Blackburn, R. 1988. On moral judgments and personality disorders: the myth of psychopathic personality revisited. British Journal of Psychiatry 153: 505–512.Blackmon, W. D. 1993. Are psychoanalytic billing practices ethical? American Journal of Psychotherapy 47: 613–620.Blashfield, R. K., and J. G. Draguns. 1976. Evaluative criteria for psychiatric classification. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 85, no. 2: 140–150.Blashfield, R. K., J. Sprock, and A. K. Fuller. 1990. Suggested guidelines for including or excluding categories in the DSM-IV. Comprehensive Psychiatry 31, no. 1: 15–19.Blashfield, R. K., J. Sprock, D. Haymaker et al. 1989. The family resemblance hypothesis applied to psychiatric classification. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 177: 492–497.Borys, D. S. 1994. Maintaining therapeutic boundaries: the motive is therapeutic effectiveness not defensive practice. Ethics and Behavior 4, no. 3: 267–273.Brown, W. M. 1985. On defining disease. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 10: 311–328.Bub, J. 1994a. Is cognitive neuropsychology possible? Proceedings of the Biennial Meetings of the Philosophy of Science Association 1: 417–427.Bub, J. 1994b. Testing models of cognition through the analysis of brain-damaged performance. British Journal of Philosophy of Science 45, no. 3: 837–855.Buck, C. 1989. Problems with the Popperian approach: A response to Pearce and Crawford-Brown. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 42: 185–187.Buck, R. 1994. The neuropsychology of communication: spontaneous and symbolic aspects. Journal of Pragmatics 22, no. 3-4: 265–278.Camp, N. M. 1993. The Vietnam war and the ethics of combat psychiatry. American Journal of Psychiatry 150: 1000–1009.Crockett, C. 1961. Ethics, metaphysics, and psychoanalysis. Inquiry 4: 37–52.Dalton, E., K. Hopper, and S. Reiner. 1976. Ethical issues in behavior control. Values and Ethics in Health Care 2: 1–40.Faust, D. 1993a. Use and then prove, or prove and then use? Some thoughts on the ethics of mental health professionals’ courtroom involvement. Ethics and Behavior 3, no. 3-4: 359–380.Fodor, J., and E. Lepore. 1994. What is the connection principle? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54: 4.Foss, L. 1994. Putting the mind back into the body: a successor scientific medical model. Theoretical Medicine 15, no. 3: 291–313.Galletly, C. A. 1993. Psychiatrist-patient sexual relationships: the ethical dilemmas. Australia and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 27: 133–139.Glymour, C. 1994. On the methods of cognitive neuropsychology. British Journal of Philosophy of Science 45, no. 3: 815–835.Gottlieb, M. C. 1994. Ethical decision making, boundaries, and treatment effectiveness: a reprise. Ethics and Behavior 4, no. 3: 287–293.Gutheil, T. G. 1994. Discussion of Lazarus’s “How certain boundaries and ethics diminish therapeutic effectiveness”. Ethics and Behavior 4, no. 3: 295–298.Helme, T. 1993. A special defence—a psychiatric approach to formalising euthanasia. British Journal of Psychiatry 163: 456–466.Kovel, J. 1976–77. Therapy in late capitalism. Telos 30: 73–92.Lazarus, A. A. 1994a. How certain boundaries and ethics diminish therapeutic effectiveness. Ethics and Behavior 4, no. 3: 255–261.Lazarus, A. A. 1994b. The illusion of the therapist’s power and the patient’s fragility: my rejoinder. Ethics and Behavior 4, no. 3: 299–306.Lehrman, N. S. 1980. Psychiatric power and responsibility: Abuse and abdication, a proposed corrective conference. The Humanist 40: 9–13.Lockhart, T. 1992. Professions, confidentiality, and moral uncertainty. Professional Ethics: A Multidisciplinary Journal 1, no. 3-4: 33–52.Margolin, S. G. 1964. The scientific status of psychoanalytic clinical evidence (II). Inquiry 7: 37... (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper investigates influences upon the development of library classification systems in nineteenth-century Britain. Two case studies – Edward Edwards's ‘scheme of classification for a town library’ of 1859 and the Bibliotheca Lindesiana of the earls of Crawford who made a number of significant contributions to the development of library classification over a fifty-year period – are deployed to explore how classification schemes reflected the habituses of their creators and how they were shaped by their socio-economic, epistemological and (...) geographical contexts. The paper also investigates the discourse of classification, examining authors’ claims for the legitimacy, widespread applicability and superiority of their schemes, while revealing how these claims were compromised or modified by practical considerations. The case studies suggest that a modernizing narrative of a transition in the second half of the nineteenth century from an aristocratic, largely rural and amateur paradigm of knowledge formation to a bourgeois, urban and professional model requires significant modification: a more nuanced approach is required, which recognizes the permeability of geographic and social boundaries and the continued relevance of aristocratic libraries as key sites of knowledge formation until the end of the century. (shrink)

How do concert pianists commit to memory the structure of a piece of music like Bach’s Italian Concerto, learning it well enough to remember it in the highly charged setting of a crowded performance venue, yet remaining open to the freshness of expression of the moment? Playing to this audience, in this state, now, requires openness to specificity, to interpretation, a working dynamicism that mere rote learning will not provide. Chaffin, Imreh and Crawford’s innovative and detailed research suggests that (...) the key to this skill is a declarative mental roadmap aiding musical performance. This hypothesis is neatly and unintentionally summarized by professional pianist Imreh, who states when learning a new piece of music “My fingers were playing the notes just fine. The practice I needed was in my head. I had to learn to keep track of where I was. It was a matter of learning exactly what I needed to be thinking of as I played, and at exactly what point. (shrink)

How do concert pianists commit to memory the structure of a piece of music like Bach’s Italian Concerto, learning it well enough to remember it in the highly charged setting of a crowded performance venue, yet remaining open to the freshness of expression of the moment? Playing to this audience, in this state, now, requires openness to specificity, to interpretation, a working dynamicism that mere rote learning will not provide. Chaffin, Imreh and Crawford’s innovative and detailed research suggests that (...) the key to this skill is a declarative mental roadmap aiding musical performance. This hypothesis is neatly and unintentionally summarized by professional pianist Imreh, who states when learning a new piece of music “My fingers were playing the notes just fine. The practice I needed was in my head. I had to learn to keep track of where I was. It was a matter of learning exactly what I needed to be thinking of as I played, and at exactly what point. . .” (Chaffin & Imreh 1997, p.326). (shrink)

Wisely, the authors begin this book by describing it as a polemic. They argue that most contemporary analytic metaphysics is a waste of time and resources since contemporary ‘neo-scholastic’ metaphysical theorizing cannot hope to attain objective truth given its penchant for making a priori claims about the nature of the world which are backed up by appeal to intuition. In engaging in this activity, metaphysicians have, the authors claim, abandoned hope of locating any interesting connection between their metaphysical pronouncements and (...) how our best empirical theories describe the world. Moreover, the success attained by empirical science just cannot be matched by metaphysical theorizing and so, faced with this asymmetry, empirical science wins: a priori metaphysical theorizing must give way to a naturalistic form of metaphysics, a positive account of which the authors attempt to elucidate in the second and third, rather lengthy chapters of the book.The first chapter consists of a statement of the authors’ negative view, a vigorous, sustained and sometimes withering attack upon contemporary a priori metaphysics. Most ire is reserved for those who indulge in what the authors call ‘pseudo-scientific metaphysics’; that is, those who pay lip service to keeping their metaphysical speculation in tune with physics, only to constrain their ontology in such a way that the entities and processes within it do not even play a role in current physical theory, or are in straightforward contradiction with it. Much philosophy of science and scientific metaphysics is too superficial and simplistic to deserve the name and bears more relation to ‘the philosophy of “A” Level chemistry’. The guilty in this respect include David Lewis, Jaegwon Kim, Jonathan Lowe, Donald Davidson, Jerry Fodor, Crawford Elder, Trenton Merricks among …. (shrink)

In _Real Natures and Familiar Objects_ Crawford Elder defends, with qualifications, the ontology of common sense. He argues that we exist -- that no gloss is necessary for the statement "human beings exist" to show that it is true of the world as it really is -- and that we are surrounded by many of the medium-sized objects in which common sense believes. He argues further that these familiar medium-sized objects not only exist, but have essential properties, which we (...) are often able to determine by observation. The starting point of his argument is that ontology should operate under empirical load -- that is, it should give special weight to the objects and properties that we treat as real in our best predictions and explanations of what happens in the world. Elder calls this presumption "mildly controversial" because it entails that arguments are needed for certain widely assumed positions such as "mereological universalism". Elder begins by defending realism about essentialness. He then defends this view of familiar objects against causal exclusion arguments and worries about vagueness. Finally, he argues that many of the objects in which common sense believes really exist, including artifacts and biological devices shaped by natural selection, and that we too exist, as products of natural selection. (shrink)

Introduction. The roots of liberal-democratic theory -- Problems of interpretation -- Hobbe : the political obligation of the market. Philosophy and political theory -- Human nature and the state of nature -- Models of society -- Political obligation -- Penetration and limits of Hobbe's political theory -- The Levellers : franchise and freedom. The problem of franchise -- Types of franchise -- The record -- Theoretical implications -- Harrington : the opportunity state. Unexamined ambiguities -- The balance and the gentry (...) -- The bourgeois society -- The equal commonwealth and the equal agrarian -- The self-cancelling balance principle -- Harrington's stature --Locke : the political theory of appropriation. Interpretations -- The theory of property right -- Class differentials in natural rights and rationality -- The ambiguous state of nature -- The ambiguous civil society -- Unsettled problems reconsidered -- Possessive individualism and liberal democracy. The seventeenth-century foundations -- The twentieth-century dilemma -- Appendix : Social classes and franchise classes in England, circa 1648. (shrink)