Book reviewed:;Jerrold J. Katz, Cogitations: A Study of the Cogito in Relation to the Philosophy of Language and a Study of It in Relation to the Cogito;Book reviewed:;Jerrold J. Katz, Cogitations: A Study of the Cogito in Relation to the Philosophy of Language and a Study of It in Relation to the Cogito;Book reviewed:;Jerrold J. Katz, Cogitations: A Study of the Cogito in Relation to the Philosophy of Language and a Study of It in Relation to the Cogito;Book reviewed:;Jerrold J. (...) Katz, Cogitations: A Study of the Cogito in Relation to the Philosophy of Language and a Study of It in Relation to the Cogito;Book reviewed:;Jerrold J. Katz, Cogitations: A Study of the Cogito in Relation to the Philosophy of Language and a Study of It in Relation to the Cogito;Book reviewed:;Jerrold J. Katz, Cogitations: A Study of the Cogito in Relation to the Philosophy of Language and a Study of It in Relation to the Cogito;Book reviewed:;Jerrold J. Katz, Cogitations: A Study of the Cogito in Relation to the Philosophy of Language and a Study of It in Relation to the Cogito;Book reviewed:;Jerrold J. Katz, Cogitations: A Study of the Cogito in Relation to the Philosophy of Language and a Study of It in Relation to the Cogito;Book reviewed:;Jerrold J. Katz, Cogitations: A Study of the Cogito in Relation to the Philosophy of Language and a Study of It in Relation to the Cogito;Book reviewed:;Jerrold J. Katz, Cogitations: A Study of the Cogito in Relation to the Philosophy of Language and a Study of It in Relation to the Cogito. (shrink)

The article analyses the idea that according to the averroist Jean de Jandun, Master of Arts in Paris at the beginning of the 14th century, human beings are composed of a «double form» the separated intellect on the one hand, the cogitative soul on the other hand. After recalling several major accounts of the time, we explore Jean's reading of Averroes' major conceptions concerning the problem. Finally, we challenge the idea according to which we observe in his writings the (...) radical thesis of a sometimes cogitating sometimes thinking «double human being» that makes of the homo intelligens a punctual and exclusive new being, which is accidentally produced while the thinking takes place. (shrink)

The cogito ergo sum of Descartes is one of the best-known--and simplest--of all philosophical formulations, but ever since it was first propounded it has defied any formal accounting of its validity. How is it that so simple and important an argument has caused such difficulty and such philosophical controversy? In this pioneering work, Jerrold Katz argues that the problem with the cogito lies where it is least suspected--in a deficiency in the theory of language and logic that Cartesian scholars have (...) brought to the study of the cogito. Katz contends that the laws of traditional logic have distorted Descartes's reasoning so that it no longer fits either Descartes's own account of the cogito in his writings or the role he assigns it in his project. Katz proposes that the cogito can be understood as an example of "analytic entailment," a concept in the philosophy of language whereby a statement can be a formally valid inference without depending on a law of logic. Developing and defending his thesis, he shows us that by grappling with an historical philosophical problem it is possible to make an original contribution to the advance of contemporary philosopy. (shrink)

The cogito ergo sum of Descartes is one of the best-known of all philosophical formulations, but ever since it was first propounded it has defied any formal accounting of its validity. How is it that so simple and important an argument has caused such difficulty and such philosophical controversy? In this pioneering work, Jerrold Katz argues that the problem with the cogito lies where it is least suspected--in a deficiency in the theory of language and logic that Cartesian scholars have (...) brought to the study of the cogito. Katz contends that the laws of traditional logic have distorted Descartes's reasoning so that it no longer fits either Descartes's own account of the cogito in his writings or the role he assigns it in his project. Katz proposes that the cogito can be understood as an example of "analytic entailment," a concept in the philosophy of language whereby a statement can be a formally valid inference without depending on a law of logic. Developing and defending his thesis, he shows us that by grappling with an historical philosophical problem it is possible to make an original contribution to the advance of contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Book reviewed:Jerrold J. Katz, Cogitations: A Study of the Cogito in Relation to the Philosophy of Language and a Study of It in Relation to the Cogito.

Book reviewed:Jerrold J. Katz, Cogitations: A Study of the Cogito in Relation to the Philosophy of Language and a Study of It in Relation to the Cogito.

This book focuses on the reconfiguration of aesthetic anthropology into an anthropological problem of cogitation, opening up a fascinating new dialogue between the domains of anthropology, philosophy, and art. Tarek Elhaik embarks on an inquiry composed of a series of cogitations based on fieldwork in an ecology of artistic and scientific practices: from conceptual art exhibitions to architectural environments; from photographic montages to the videotaping of spirit seances; from artistic interventions in natural history museums to ongoing dialogues between performance artists (...) and marine scientists. The chapters examine the image-work, ethical demands, and aesthetic struggles of interlocuters including artists Mathias Goeritz, Mounir Fatmi, Silvia Gruner, Joan Jonas, and Patricia Lagarde. (shrink)

Though, in view of Descartes' challenge to the epistemological credentials of "reason" early in the Meditations, one expects him to resist the claim that the professedly invulnerable cogito argument works through the suppressed premise "Everything that thinks, exists," interpreters have been hard-pressed to convert comprendre here into pardonner. Loath to convict Descartes of confusing a psychological point about inferential process with a logical one about the conditions for validity, many are driven to implausible construals, for example, the ingenious performative construal, (...) on which "cogito" does not express a premise. In this fast-paced study Jerrold Katz, calling on his Chomsky-inspired theorising about natural languages, offers a via media. At the core is the thesis that validity is not always a matter of logical form--hence a rejection of the view whose contemporary prestige derives from Frege. According to Katz, the validity of analytic entailments is a function not of logical form but of the senses of the contributing linguistic elements. The cogito argument, Katz maintains, falls into this class. Thus, comprendre avec pardonner: Descartes is not being evasive when he holds that there is an argumentational move from "cogito" to "sum" while denying that the argument, as presented, is enthymematic. (shrink)

This "inspirational" book of thoughts steers clear of inspirational mush. It reads pleasantly, and adequately serves the author's aim: "to bring the thoughts of the great closer to the reader." Carelessly edited, over-priced.--C. D.

In June 2018 the Texan philosopher and distinguished bioethicist Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. crossed the great divide to meet his maker, as he would probably put it. His work remains till now the most systematic effort to fully revise Bioethics based on the doctrines of the Orthodox Christian theology, while it is also apreciseaccount ofEthics and Bioethics in the “after God” era. Engelhardt was anexcellent master of ancient Greek, medieval, western and eastern philosophy, and after heconverted from the Roman Catholic to (...) the Eastern Orthodox Church – officially the Orthodox Catholic Church – he indulged in the works of the Holy Fathers andbecame greatly influenced by them. This is clearlymanifest in his views and continuous reference to Fathers and Ecclesiastical Writers. His conversion crucially influenced not only his bioethical views, but also his entire philosophical system. This magnificent journey obviously turned the Texan philosopher into a true Theologist – not in the academic sense, but in the one the Orthodox Catholic Church accepts, according to which “a Theologist is a person of God, from God, before God and speaks to praise God”. Engelhardt was not the first to deal with bioethical issues under the spectrum of Orthodox Theology, but he was the first to unravel both secular and Western-Church Bioethics and suggest a totally different version of Bioethicsbased on the principles of Orthodox ethics, the ceremonial and esoteric life of the Orthodox Church, having previously made himself a true communicant of both the paternal tradition and dogmatic teaching. (shrink)

Ce travail consiste à développer un sujet très spécial dans le corpus de la philosophie du moyen âge, plus précisément question de noétique chez un philosophe de l�occident musulman, mais l�article présent est juste la première partie de l�ensemble du travail, mais il reflète déjà la nouveauté et l�originalité de ce philosophe de l�Espagne musulmane. Le plus essentiel dans la noétique d�Ibn Bajja c�est l absence de l�intellect en puissance dans le schème des intellects, il y a juste l�intellect en (...) acte et la faculté cogitative, et la matière de la faculté cogitative ce sont les formes spirituelles intermédiaires, et là (nous pensons) un point important de l�originalité d�Ibn Bajja, ce sont des formes très proches de la nature des intelligibles grâce à la division des formes de la fantasia en deux parties: 1. par antériorité sur ce qui ressemble au sensible. 2. par postériorité sur ce qui ressemble à l�espèce. (shrink)

Conçu comme un complément du volume consacré Aux origines du lexique philosophique européen, cet ouvrage contient des études qui tentent de montrer comment le vocabulaire philosophique a été élaboré au Moyen Âge occidental. Les penseurs médiévaux — tant les traducteurs des textes philosophiques grecs, hébraïques et arabes que les philosophes et les théologiens — ont contribué à la multiplication de néologismes et à l’affinement du sens d’anciens concepts. Par leur «travail» linguistique, qui allait de pair avec des efforts de conceptualisation, (...) ils ont forgé un langage propre à leurs diverses disciplines et orientations philosophiques. Les penseurs du Moyen Âge — d’Augustin à Suárez, en passant par tant d’autres maîtres de la scolastique — ont joué de diverses manières un rôle primordial dans la formation du vocabulaire philosophique. (shrink)

This paper considers the relevance of the theory of the cogitative power in Aquinas, as highlighted by Cornelio Fabro during his early research in the fourth decade of the past century, in contemporary neuropsychological studies, and particularly as a specific way of overcoming a dualistic approach in the psychology of perception. The thesis is coherent with an anthropological view based on the substantial unity between soul and body. As a consequence, the capacities of the cogitative faculty (estimative in (...) animals) involve a special account of perception, irreducible to pure thought and to sensations as well, an account that is present in the psychological view of M. Merleau-Ponty and J. J. Gibson. (shrink)

This paper aims at elaborating a very special topic relative to the medieval philosophy; particularly, the question of noetic as was dealt with by a philosopher of the Islamic occident. Although the article is but the first part of the whole work, it still reveals the originality and the innovative tendency brought about this philosopher. What is most essential in Ibn Bajja’s noetic is the absence of intellect in power and the presence of intellect in act, in the design of (...) intellects, in addition the substance of the cogitative faculty is the intermediate spiritual forms. It is here where shows up the most important aspect of his originality; the forms which are closer to the nature of the intelligible, by virtue of the division into two parts: 1. By anteriority with regard to who/what resembles the sensible. 2. By posteriority with regard to who/what resembles the species/the kind. (shrink)

In this paper I will delineate the psychological operations and faculties required for linguistic apprehension within a Thomistic psychology. This will require first identifying the proper object of linguistic apprehension, which will then allow me to specify the distinct operations and faculties necessary for linguisticapprehension. I will argue that the semantic value of any linguistic term is a type of incidental sensible and that its cognitive apprehension is a type of incidentalsensation. Hence, the faculties necessary for the apprehension of any (...) linguistic term’s semantic value will be the cogitative power and the intellect. The cogitativepower, because it is the faculty of particular intentions, and the intellect, because it is the faculty of universal intentions. (shrink)

Cogitation described as calculation, the living being described as a machine, cognitive functions considered as algorithmic sequences and the ‘mechanization’ of the subjective were the theoretical elements that late heideggerian anti–humanism, especially in France was able to utilize[1], even more so, after the second cybernetics or post-cybernetics movement of the late ‘60s introduced the concepts of the autopoietic and the allopoietic automata[2]. Recently, neurologists pose claims on the traditional epistemological field of philosophy, proceeding from this ontological decision, the equation of (...) human cognition to cybernetic systems. -/- The emergence of the world-wide-web in the 1990s and the global expansion of the internet during the first decades of the 21st century indicate the fallacies of the cybernetics programme to mechanize the mind. We stand witnesses to a semantic colonization of the cybernetic system, a social imaginary creation and expansion within the digital ensemblistic – identitarian organization that cannot be described by mechanical or cybernetic terms. Paradoxically, cyberspace, as a new being, a form of alterity, seems to both exacerbate and capsize the polarization between the operational and the symbolic. The creation of the internet might be more than an epistemological revolution, to use the terminology of Thomas Kuhn. It might be an ontological revolution. -/- I will try to demonstrate that the emergence of the Internet refutes any such claims, since its context and utility can only be described by means of a social epistemology based on the understanding of social significances as continuous creations of an anonymous social imaginary proposed by Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997). I will try to explore some social-semantic aspects of the cyberspace as a nexus of social representations of the individual identity that forms a new sphere of being, where the subjective and the objective merge in a virtual subjective objectivity with unique epistemological attributes and possibilities. (shrink)

Mamardašvili’s ‘classical’ paradigm of knowledge is seen to be minimally based on extrapolations from Descartes’ classical philosophy to which Mamardašvili attributes features that rather anticipate his own post-classical ontology. The latter is oriented towards the primacy of perception as a subjective process, in which the self-conscious subject constructs the world, not as illusion, but as a ‘picture’ or ‘model’ (Wittgenstein’s Bild). By examining Mamardašvili’s definition of the ‘phenomenon’ against the␣background of Husserl’s ‘reduction’, Wittgenstein’s ‘object’ and the Freudian and post-structuralist psychoanalytic (...) model of subjectivity, the paper arrives at the inference that Mamardašvili is essentially a post-Structuralist thinker who appropriates concepts from various critical and philosophical disciplines to construct his own multi-disciplinary theory of consciousness and perception. (shrink)

A suitable project for the new Millenium is to radically reconfigure our image of human rationality. Such a project is already underway, within the Cognitive Sciences, under the umbrellas of work in Situated Cognition, Distributed and De-centralized Cogition, Real-world Robotics and Artificial Life1. Such approaches, however, are often criticized for giving certain aspects of rationality too wide a berth. They focus their attention on on such superficially poor cousins as.

Our modern culture is written culture first of all. And therefore now the perception of every sphere of human activity is connected with the purport of the Literary idea, idea of the space, which includes all metamorphoses of Writing. And so science and philosophy take on specific significance as varieties of the literaturewith corresponding stylistic descriptions. Here I consider the style 1) as particular motion of the body of Writing, in which its nature reflects; 2) as living thing, realizing not (...) verbal cultural ideals; 3) as the way and the incarnating form of the conversion of consciousness; 4) as organizing «grammatical» principle, which determines the structure of certain literary «language». The investigation of the literary styles of science and philosophy permits to expose likenesses (for example, the level of the cogitative viscidity of the texts) and differences (for example, in the principles of the construction of scientific and philosophical plots) between indicated manners. (shrink)

The Quest After Perfection, first published in 1952, is a collection of eight remarkable essays on Indian philosophy by Prof. M. Hiriyanna. The learned professor discusses at great length the topic of values, a subject that has received much attention the world over. In his own words, "Indian philosophy is essentially a philosophy of values." With great clarity, he cogitates upon Truth, Goodness, and Beauty-often called the 'eternal values' in the Western tradition. He also expounds the traditional Indian idea of (...) the purusharthas, or the goals of human life-dharma (sustainability), artha (wealth), kama (desire), moksha (release)-by sharing thoughtful insights on them. (shrink)

Along with a well-honoured tradition, we will accept that intentionality is at least a property a thought holds necessarily, i.e., in all possible worlds that contain it; more specifically, a necessary relation, namely the relation of existential dependence of the thought on its intentional object. Yet we will first of all try to show that intentionality is more than that. For we will claim that intentionality is an essential property of the thought, namely a property whose predication to the thought (...) is true in virtue of the identity, or nature, of such a thought. More particularly, for us intentionality will again be a relation, yet a relation of ontological dependence of the thought on its intentional object; specifically, the relation for the thought of being constituted by its object. Moreover, we will try to show that if intentionality is such a constitutive relation for the thought that has it, certain metaphysical consequences ensue. First, an objectual thought, a thought whose content basically consists in its intentional object, is nothing but that object in a certain cogitative modality, or, which is the same, as playing a certain motivational role for the subject entertaining the thought itself (at a certain time). Second, if an objectual thought is nothing but an intentional object in a cogitative modality, such a thought, not only as a type, but also as a token, is an abstract entity. More specifically, an objectual thought-type, an abstract object par excellence, is indeed instantiated by objectual thought-tokens which are again abstract particulars, yet of a specific kind: namely, tropes of a relational sort depending for their existence on their bearers (and possibly also on their temporal location). (shrink)

Executive function has become an important concept in explanations of psychiatric disorders, but we currently lack comprehensive models of normal executive function and of its malfunctions. Here we illustrate how defeasible logical analysis can aid progress in this area. We illustrate using autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as example disorders, and show how logical analysis reveals commonalities between linguistic and non-linguistic behaviours within each disorder, and how contrasting sub-components of executive function are involved across disorders. This analysis reveals (...) how logical analysis is as applicable to fast, automatic and unconscious reasoning as it is to slow deliberate cogitation. (shrink)

The paper develops a new holistic theory of the word by integrating semiotic, linguistic, and psychological perspectives and introduces the Cogitative-Sensory Word Model, the CogSens Model, that unites the human mind and body. Saussure’s two-sided sign is replaced by a Peirce-inspired three-sided conception in which the expression unit mediates two content units, namely, an idea content connected to the human mind and an image content linked to the human body. It is argued that it is the word that makes (...) human language a unique tool of communication. Moreover, it is demonstrated how words interact with grammar to create an utterance. Finally, it is suggested that speech perception, i.e., fission of idea and image content, is the mirror image of speech production, i.e., fusion of idea and image content. (shrink)