In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mind, Theaters, and the Anatomy of ConsciousnessDonald Beecher"All unified theories of cognition today involve theater metaphors."—Bernard J. BaarsAmong the most perplexing challenges for cognitive philoso-phers are those pertaining to representationalism, Gilbert Ryle's denial of the "ghost in the machine," the languages of cognition, and the "self" as the one-time audience and author of consciousness.1 Each of these topics can be discussed metaphorically in terms of the theater. The (...) mind is a kind of acting space in which thoughts and images are in some fashion prepared and represented in rapid sequence. Consciousness is a theatrical machine behind which there is a director who helps to determine how the narrative of the mind will play itself out. The discrete "I" is not only the prompter of consciousness, but its audience, receiving all that is played in the mind's theater. Or, in the words of C. S. Sherrington, "each waking day is a stage dominated for good or ill, in comedy, farce or tragedy by a dramatis persona, the 'self,' and so it will be until the curtain drops."2 The problem, however, is that in matters so difficult to comprehend as the workings of the human brain and the mind operations attached to it, metaphors develop vectors of their own that shade and nuance understanding in ways that obstruct the plasticity of analysis. For this reason, theater analogies in relation to consciousness have been widely endorsed in characterizing its distinctive operations, yet widely criticized for epitomizing the philosophical thinking in the past (and the present) that detaches consciousness from the emotions, the body, and the material world. For the latter reason, the metaphor of [End Page 1] the theater will generally be found wanting, as it is in Dennett's assault on what he labels "the Cartesian theater." And yet there are compelling reasons why this metaphor may persist for a time to come as the image of choice for illustrating the operations of consciousness.Arguably, the earliest intimations of mind as resembling a theater emerged at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It was not only an age that fostered a renewed interest in dramatized spectacle, but one that confronted, through theater metaphors, the illusory nature of human experience. The rise of the modern theater, and speculations upon reality in relation to happenings in the mind, are quite separate phenomena, but, arguably, a sense of the theater as a place of memory, of illusions projected as realities, and of experience provided the best "thought experiment" for dealing with the paradoxes of mentation. In fact, the emerging sense of reality as an illusion was tantamount to a major paradigm shift, one that has remained at the center of western philosophy from the time of Descartes to the present day. That there could be a disparity between the phenomena of mind and the world of extension was a watershed in epistemological thinking, and it followed, as a matter of course, that the illusions associated with perception would find expression in the illusions associated with theatrical representation. The result was that the medieval metaphor of the speculum, emphasizing the mind as the faithful reflection of reality, was replaced by the theater, in which the necessary conventions permitting belief came to bear on the understanding of the data which the mind represented to itself. In short, conventions are to the theater what adequate representation is to the mind—the necessary slippages whereby perceptions function as reality.Parallel insights into the mind as a theater came about through sixteenth-century inquiries into mnemonics techniques for the improvement of memory. This metaphor of mind came about by analogy with memory theaters of the kind epitomized in the Idea del Theatro (1550) of Giulio Camillo. He chose the theater simply as the most apt edifice in which to house his elaborate set of memory prompts. His goal was to devise an actual working machine for enhancing recall. He chose the theater because of its architectural complexity and multi-sectionality which he could in turn invest with information. Yet insofar as the theater functioned in relation to memory through the art of mnemonics, it became an extension of mind, and... (shrink)

The study to follow is concerned with the structure of romance in the ancient and Renaissance periods from the perspective of nostalgia, to be defined here as one of the most deeply engrained features of the human psyche. The argument in brief is that of all the literary genres of the early modern era, romance tells the story of homecoming with the greatest sense of imperative, constituting a tropism in the form of a literary motif that originates in the evolutionary (...) engineering of the species. But first to the genre itself. Invariably, these are tales not only of outbound adventure, whether by choice or destiny, but of the return to a place or community that constitutes refuge, family, origins, reunion .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:SuspenseDonald BeecherSuspense is one of those workaday terms so integrated into the discussion of literature that definition would hardly seem necessary. It does receive pro forma entries in most literary handbooks, but never provokes more than a statement of the self-evident: that it is a "state of uncertainty, anticipation and curiosity as to the outcome of a story or play, or any kind of narrative in verse or prose,"1 (...) that such anticipations arise "particularly as they affect a character for whom one has sympathy," and that plot types vary in ways that affect the ethos of suspense: those situations in which the outcome is uncertain and readers are concerned with how they will be resolved, and those in which the outcome is inevitable and readers, in their fear, concentrate merely on knowing when the catastrophe will be complete.2 Indicatively, Roger Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms gives it a pass altogether.3 But even these generic representations of the concept must venture such quizzical terms as "state" and "sympathy," both of which are seen to inhere not in texts and narratives, but in spectators and readers. Suspense, then, must have two sides: that which is invested in the design of the story as an emotion prompt; and that which is a feature of mind.This critical divide can be stated in many ways. One could say that evaluating the emotionality embedded in a text is an act of literary criticism, while the study of the emotionality aroused by literature belongs to cognitive psychology. These are, of course, two sides to the proverbial coin worthy of critical alignment—namely that which authors know about organizing narratives to produce suspense, and that which readers "know" through the constitution of their brains about responding to situations of alarm or disorientation involving themselves or others, and the compelling limbic reinforcement that impels them toward ends [End Page 255] that will release them from incertitude or danger. The critical challenge at this juncture is to decide whether a study of suspense should begin in narratology or psychology, for without the récit of events in time there are no prompts, even though suspense as experience does not reside in texts but in psyches.Wolfgang Iser calls for a balanced approach to literary study in general that "lays full stress on the idea that, in considering a literary work, one must take into account not only the actual text, but also, in equal measure, the actions involved in responding to that text."4 But that does not help in determining whether suspense should be defined according to a minimum prescription of narrative procedures and characteristics, or as a literary subset of a human, genetically-conditioned response mechanism selectively engineered to meet a range of stressors in the environment.The first question in the creation of a rapprochement between these domains must deal with the very capacity for mind states to be emotionally moved by literary configurations, insofar as literary suspense borrows from the vocabulary of limbic arousal responses. The second question pertains to what readers are brought to feel more particularly for make-believe persons in make-believe situations of danger. Are these also make-believe emotions, for then it must be determined what an exclusively literary emotion might be. Subsequent questions must deal with the range of suspense arousing situations, whether they involve only protagonists, their desires and prospects, or whether suspense applies to any motivated pursuit of information deemed vital to mental satisfaction. These distinctions and their relationship will prove critical.Almost universally, in the limited number of critical studies that exist, literary suspense entails liked characters under duress whose futures are perilous and uncertain—futures about which readers hold strong preferences. This perspective stands in opposition to potentially broader definitions that include curiosity, problem-solving sequences, cognitive jags, or pattern completion. One obstacle is that problem-solving activities appear to exceed the capacities of minds already absorbed in the events of fictive worlds, arriving merely as distractions from the conditions of high, dramatic suspense. They can be said to fall outside the fictive representation altogether, particularly as they pertain to the patterns of fiction, or a... (shrink)

In Adapted Brains and Imaginary Worlds, Donald Beecher explores the characteristics and idiosyncrasies of the brain as they affect the study of fiction. He builds upon insights from the cognitive sciences to explain how we actualize imaginary persons, read the clues to their intentional states, assess their representations of selfhood, and empathize with their felt experiences in imaginary environments. He considers how our own faculty of memory, in all its selective particularity and planned oblivion, becomes an increasingly significant (...) dimension of the critical act, and how our own emotions become aggressive readers of literary experience, culminating in states which define the genres of literature. Beecher illustrates his points with examples from major works of the Renaissance period, including Dr Faustus, The Faerie Queene, Measure for Measure, The Yorkshire Tragedy, Menaphon, The Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolphus, and The Moral Philosophy of Doni. In this volume, studies in the science of mind come into their own in explaining the architectures of the brain that shape such emergent properties as empathy, suspense, curiosity, the formation of communities, gossip, rationalization, confabulation, and so much more that pertains to the behaviour of characters, the orientation of readers, and the construction of meaning. Discussing a breadth of topics – from the mysteries of the criminal mind to the psychology of tears – Adapted Brains and Imaginary Worlds is the most comprehensive work available on the study of fictional worlds and their relation to the constitution of the human brain. (shrink)

So Lentricchia has fulfilled one of his purposes in this essay. He has subverted the patriarchy from within: that is, he has subverted Bloom’s literary history as well as the essentialist feminism associated with it. But he has not fulfilled his affiliated purpose of establishing a dialogue between feminists and feminized males. The “feminization” of literary studies by patriarchal figures like Bloom does not account for the feminization of Stoddard, Gilder, Van Dyke, Woodberry, or Stedman. Their feminization, like that of (...) the Stevens who felt positively lady-like, was not the result of patriarchal oppression. And it will not disappear as the result of the subversion of the patriarchy by a feminized male. Mistaking the work of feminization with the work of the patriarch eradicates the feminine. By identifying the difference between a feminization produced by the patriarchy and a feminine cultural sphere, Lentricchia has made room for the different cultural conversation he wants to develop. But this conversation can take place only after the backdrop of an oppressive patriarch can drop away.This conversation might begin with an account of that cultural sphere in which women are the agency to which Lentricchia alludes. It might begin when we recall that the model for the culture’s “Emmeline Grangerfords” was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Little Eva. The social change Little Eva helped effect was the emancipation of both slaves and slaveholders. Donald E. Pease is professor of English and American literature at Dartmouth College. His articles on nineteenth-century authors and literature have appeared in a number of journals. He is the coeditor, with Walter Benn Michaels, of American Renaissance Reconsidered, and is the author of Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Contexts, which won the Mark H. Ingraham Prize in 1987. (shrink)

Individuals of some animal species have been taught simple versions of human language despite their natural communication systems failing to rise to the level of a simple language. How is it, then, that some animals can master a version of language, yet none of them deploy this capacity in their own communication system? I first examine the key design features that are often used to evaluate language-like properties of natural animal communication systems. I then consider one candidate animal system, bird (...) song, because it has several of the key design features or their precursors, including social learning and cultural transmission of their vocal signals. I conclude that although bird song communication is nuanced and complex, and has the acoustic potential for productivity, it is not productive – it cannot be used to say many different things. Finally, I discuss the debate over whether animal communication should be viewed as a cooperative information transmission process, as we typically view human language, or as a competitive process where signaler and receiver vie for control. The debate points to a necessary condition for the evolution of a simple language that has generally been overlooked: the degree of to which the interests of the signaler and receiver align. While strong cognitive and signal production mechanisms are necessary pre-adaptations for a simple language, they are not sufficient. Also necessary is the existence of identical or near-identical interests of signaler and receiver and a socio-ecology that requires high-level cooperation across a range of contexts. In the case of our hominid ancestors, these contexts included hunting, gathering, child care and, perhaps, warfare. I argue that the key condition for the evolution of human language was the extreme interdependency that existed among unrelated individuals in the hunter-gatherer societies of our hominid ancestors. This extreme interdependency produced multiple prosocial adaptations for effective intragroup cooperation, which in partnership with advanced cognitive abilities, set the stage for the evolution of language. (shrink)

Cochrane has developed a linked data infrastructure to make the evidence and data from its rich repositories more discoverable to facilitate evidence-based health decision-making. These annotated resources can enhance the study and understanding of biomarkers and surrogate endpoints.

What is the relation between a reason and an action when the reason explains the action by giving the agent's reason for doing what he did? We may call such explanations rationalizations, and say that the reason rationalizes the action. In this paper I want to defend the ancient - and common-sense - position that rationalization is a species of ordinary causal explanation. The defense no doubt requires some redeployment, but not more or less complete abandonment of the position, as (...) urged by many recent writers. (shrink)

This textbook is a flexible and affordable collection of classic and contemporary primary sources in philosophy. The readings cover seven basic topics of Western Philosophy. The selections are long enough to present a self-contained argument but not so lengthy that students lose track of the main point. Each reading has an outline with study questions, questions for reflection and discussion, and an annotated bibliography. The book includes a glossary and an appendix on logic and argumentation.

In this volume--the first, focused study of Hume on time and identity--Baxter focuses on Hume’s treatment of the concept of numerical identity, which is central to Hume's famous discussions of the external world and personal identity. Hume raises a long unappreciated, and still unresolved, difficulty with the concept of identity: how to represent something as "a medium betwixt unity and number." Superficial resemblance to Frege’s famous puzzle has kept the difficulty in the shadows. Hume’s way of addressing it makes sense (...) only in the context of his unorthodox theory of time. Baxter shows the defensibility of that theory against past dismissive interpretations, especially of Hume’s stance on infinite divisibility. Later the author shows how the difficulty underlies Hume’s later worries about his theory of personal identity, in a new reading motivated by Hume’s important appeals to consciousness. Baxter casts Hume throughout as an acute metaphysician, and reconciles this side of Hume with his overarching Pyrrhonian skepticism. (shrink)

The concept of metaphor as primarily a vehicle for conveying ideas, even if unusual ones, seems to me as wrong as the parent idea that a metaphor has a special meaning. I agree with the view that metaphors cannot be paraphrased, but I think this is not because metaphors say something too novel for literal expression but because there is nothing there to paraphrase. Paraphrase, whether possible or not, inappropriate to what is said: we try, in paraphrase, to say it (...) another way. But if I am right, a metaphor doesn't say anything beyond its literal meaning . This is not, of course, to deny that a metaphor has a point, nor that that point can be brought out by using further words. . . . My disagreement is with the explanation of how metaphor works its wonders. To anticipate: I depend on the distinction between what words mean and what they are used to do. I think metaphor belongs exclusively to the domain of use. It is something brought off by the imaginative employment of words and sentences and depends entirely on the ordinary meanings of those words and hence on the ordinary meanings of the sentences they comprise. Donald Davidson is University Professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many important essays, including "Actions, Reasons and Causes," "Causal Relations," and "Truth and Meaning," coauthor of Decision-Making: An Experimental Approach, and coeditor of Words and Objections, Semantics of Natural Language, and The Logic of Grammar. (shrink)

Problems of Rationality is the eagerly awaited fourth volume of Donald Davidson 's philosophical writings. From the 1960s until his death in August 2003 Davidson was perhaps the most influential figure in English-language philosophy, and his work has had a profound effect upon the discipline. His unified theory of the interpretation of thought, meaning, and action holds that rationality is a necessary condition for both mind and interpretation. Davidson here develops this theory to illuminate value judgements and how we (...) understand them; to investigate what the conditions are for attributing mental states to an object or creature; and to grapple with the problems presented by thoughts and actions which seem to be irrational. Anyone working on knowledge, mind, and language will find these essays essential reading. (shrink)

I argue that an individual has aspects numerically identical with it and each other that nonetheless qualitatively differ from it and each other. This discernibility of identicals does not violate Leibniz's Law, however, which concerns only individuals and is silent about their aspects. They are not in its domain of quantification. To argue that there are aspects I will appeal to the internal conflicts of conscious beings. I do not mean to imply that aspects are confined to such cases, but (...) the best way to start is to recognize them experientially. We can feel the conflicts within ourselves. In doing so we can feel some of our aspects. I will try to enhance our understanding of the concept of aspect by listing and formalizing some principles for its use. After that I will argue that all sorts of individual things have aspects, not just people who are conflicted. (shrink)

The concept of metaphor as primarily a vehicle for conveying ideas, even if unusual ones, seems to me as wrong as the parent idea that a metaphor has a special meaning. I agree with the view that metaphors cannot be paraphrased, but I think this is not because metaphors say something too novel for literal expression but because there is nothing there to paraphrase. Paraphrase, whether possible or not, inappropriate to what is said: we try, in paraphrase, to say it (...) another way. But if I am right, a metaphor doesn't say anything beyond its literal meaning. This is not, of course, to deny that a metaphor has a point, nor that that point can be brought out by using further words.... My disagreement is with the explanation of how metaphor works its wonders. To anticipate: I depend on the distinction between what words mean and what they are used to do. I think metaphor belongs exclusively to the domain of use. It is something brought off by the imaginative employment of words and sentences and depends entirely on the ordinary meanings of those words and hence on the ordinary meanings of the sentences they comprise. Donald Davidson is University Professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many important essays, including "Actions, Reasons and Causes," "Causal Relations," and "Truth and Meaning," coauthor of Decision-Making: An Experimental Approach, and coeditor of Words and Objections, Semantics of Natural Language, and The Logic of Grammar. (shrink)

David Hume is famous as a sceptical philosopher but the nature of his scepticism is difficult to pin down. Hume's True Scepticism provides the first sustained interpretation of Part 4 of Book 1 of Hume's Treatise: his deepest engagement with sceptical arguments, in which he notes that, while reason shows that we ought not to believe the verdicts of reason or the senses, we do so nonetheless. Donald C. Ainslie addresses Hume's theory of representation; his criticisms of Locke, Descartes, (...) and other predecessors; his account of the imagination; his understanding of perceptions and sensory belief; and his bundle theory of the mind and his later rejection of it. (shrink)

Metaphysics and the Modern World makes the abiding questions of the nature of the self, world, and God available for the modern reader. Donald Phillip Verene presents these questions in both their systematic and historical dimensions, beginning with Aristotle's claim in his Metaphysics that philosophy begins in wonder. The first three chapters concern the origin of metaphysics as the transformation of the conception of reality in ancient Greek mythology, the ontological argument as the basis of Christian metaphysics, and the (...) Renaissance cosmology of infinite worlds and the coincidence of contraries. The final four chapters present the central issues of the metaphysics of history through the New Science of Vico, the principle of true infinity of Hegel's Logic, the dialectic of spirit and life in Cassirer's Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, and the conception of actual entities and God in Whitehead's Process and Reality. In these discussions, the reader will find a lively and learned account of a field of philosophy that is often thought difficult to access, but in this work becomes most accessible and a pleasure to read. -- back cover. (shrink)

Back to the Concrete: A Pragmatist Response to Oppression Pragmatism is a vital tool for society today, both because it addresses our more pressing social problems and because it advances beyond other available solutions. As a good deal of recent European philosophy has shown, as in the cases of Adorno and Agamben, for example, our social life is mediated by abstractions that oppress us. With its focus on the immediacy of experience, pragmatism enables us to overcome these abstractions and return (...) to concrete life in a liberating way. I argue against Agamben, however, that the return to concrete life amounts to anarchism. I show that it leads to liberalism instead, along the lines laid out by Dewey in Liberalism and Social Action, in which freed individuality is compatible with the exercise of social intelligence and planning. (shrink)

Dewey on The Emotions This paper explores John Dewey's theory of the emotions and his reasons for developing it. The author considers two competing accounts for why Dewey might have developed his theory: one based on his attempt to clarify rationality and one based on his attempt to make us morally responsive agents to nature. After a close examination of key texts, the author concludes that Dewey's theory is designed to make us morally responsive. Dewey's theory of the emotions serves (...) his purpose of arguing for our re-union with nature, in a manner similar, in fact, to Hegel, with the addition that Dewey makes it our express goal to be concerned for nature in our return to it. (shrink)

This essay develops the relation, implicit in Essay 11, of intentional action to behaviour described in purely physical terms; Davidson repeats from Essay 3 that an action counts as intentional if the agent caused it, and asks to which degree a study of action thus conceived permits being scientific. Davidson stresses the central importance of a normative concept of rationality in attributing reasons to agents ; because this concept has no echo in physical theory, any explanatory schema governed by the (...) concept is irreducible to physical theory. Davidson adduces several facts that prevent us from giving strict laws connecting reasons and action: first, we cannot give conditions that are not only necessary but also sufficient for an action to be intentional, using only the concepts of belief, desire, and cause----for we cannot specify the ”right way’ in which beliefs and desires cause actions ; second, a certain holism of the mental pervades explanations of human behaviour: we cannot assign beliefs and desires independently of and prior to the actions they cause, a point Davidson takes Ramsey’s work on subjective probability to have shown. Davidson appends a set of replies to critics, which clarify his attitude to psychology as a science, his analysis of statements of law, the principle of causal interaction, and the relation between mutually irreducible explanatory schema. (shrink)

A theory of radical interpretation gives the meanings of all sentences of a language, and can be verified by evidence available to someone who does not understand the language. Such evidence cannot include detailed information concerning the beliefs and intentions of speakers, and therefore the theory must simultaneously interpret the utterances of speakers and specify (some of) his beliefs. Analogies and connections with decision theory suggest the kind of theory that will serve for radical interpretation, and how permissible evidence can (...) support it. (shrink)

Scientific evidence is crucial in a burgeoning number of litigated cases, legislative enactments, regulatory decisions, and scholarly arguments. Evaluating Scientific Evidence explores the question of what counts as scientific knowledge, a question that has become a focus of heated courtroom and scholarly debate, not only in the United States, but in other common law countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. Controversies are rife over what is permissible use of genetic information, whether chemical exposure causes disease, whether future (...) dangerousness of violent or sexual offenders can be predicted, whether such time-honored methods of criminal identification have any better foundation than ancient divination rituals, among other important topics. This book examines the process of evaluating scientific evidence in both civil and criminal contexts, and explains how decisions by nonscientists that embody scientific knowledge can be improved. (shrink)