Unlike those with type 1 blindsight, people who have type 2 blindsight have some sort of consciousness of the stimuli in their blind field. What is the nature of that consciousness? Is it visual experience? I address these questions by considering whether we can establish the existence of any structural—necessary—features of visual experience. I argue that it is very difficult to establish the existence of any such features. In particular, I investigate whether it is possible to visually, or (...) more generally perceptually, experience form or movement at a distance from our body, without experiencing colour. The traditional answer, advocated by Aristotle, and some other philosophers, up to and including the present day, is that it is not and hence colour is a structural feature of visual experience. I argue that there is no good reason to think that this is impossible, and provide evidence from four cases—sensory substitution, achomatopsia, phantom contours and amodal completion—in favour of the idea that it is possible. If it is possible then one important reason for rejecting the idea that people with type 2 blindsight do not have visual experiences is undermined. I suggest further experiments that could be done to help settle the matter. (shrink)

Suppose that our life choices result in unpredictable experiences, as L.A. Paul has recently argued. What does this mean for the possibility of rational prudential choice? Not as much as Paul thinks. First, what’s valuable about experience is its broadly hedonic quality, and empirical studies suggest we tend to significantly overestimate the impact of our choices in this respect. Second, contrary to what Paul suggests, the value of finding out what an outcome is like for us does not suffice (...) to rationalize life choices, because much more important values are at stake. Third, because these other prudential goods, such as achievement, personal relationships, and meaningfulness, are typically more important than the quality of our experience (which is in any case unlikely to be bad when we achieve non- experiential goods), life choices should be made on what I call a story- regarding rather than experience-regarding basis. (shrink)

This essay explores the unique temporal experience in anxiety. Drawing on first-person accounts as well as examples from literature, I attempt to show how anxiety not only disrupts our physiological and cognitive timing but also disturbs the embodied rhythms of everyday social life. The primary goal, however, is to articulate the extent to which human existence itself is a temporally structured event and to identity the ways that anxiety disrupts this structure. Using Martin Heidegger’s account of human existence as (...) a point of departure, I show how the mood of anxiety has the power to alter our self-interpretations by closing down or constricting our experience of the future. I argue that a constricted future impedes our ability ‘to be’ because it closes off the range of projective meanings that we would ordinarily draw on to create or fashion our identities. (shrink)

It is part of the phenomenology of perceptual experiences that objects seem to be presented to us. The first guide to objects is their perceptual presence. Further reflection shows that we take the objects of our perceptual experiences to be among the causes of our experiences. However, not all causes of the experience are also objects of the experience. This raises the question indicated in the title of this paper. We argue that taking phenomenal presence as the guide (...) to the objects of perception, we can see that at least in two sensory modalities, smell and touch, there is no uniform answer to this question. The objects of olfactory and tactile experiences can move along the causal chain. Accordingly, the content of olfactory and tactile experience may vary. (shrink)

First published in 1949 expressly to introduce logical positivism to English speakers. Reichenbach, with Rudolph Carnap, founded logical positivism, a form of epistemofogy that privileged scientific over metaphysical truths.

Two universal functional principles of Grossberg’s Adaptive Resonance Theory decipher the brain code of all biological learning and adaptive intelligence. Low-level representations of multisensory stimuli in their immediate environmental context are formed on the basis of bottom-up activation and under the control of top-down matching rules that integrate high-level, long-term traces of contextual configuration. These universal coding principles lead to the establishment of lasting brain signatures of perceptual experience in all living species, from aplysiae to primates. They are re-visited (...) in this concept paper on the basis of examples drawn from the original code and from some of the most recent related empirical findings on contextual modulation in the brain, highlighting the potential of Grossberg’s pioneering insights and groundbreaking theoretical work for intelligent solutions in the domain of developmental and cognitive robotics. (shrink)

This essay explores the unique temporal experience in anxiety. Drawing on first-person accounts as well as examples from literature, I attempt to show how anxiety not only disrupts our physiological and cognitive timing but also disturbs the embodied rhythms of everyday social life. The primary goal, however, is to articulate the extent to which human existence itself is a temporally structured event and to identity the ways that anxiety disrupts this structure. Using Martin Heidegger’s account of human existence as (...) a point of departure, I show how the mood of anxiety has the power to alter our self-interpretations by closing down or constricting our experience of the future. I argue that a constricted future impedes our ability ‘to be’ because it closes off the range of projective meanings that we would ordinarily draw on to create or fashion our identities. (shrink)

Several theorists argue that one does not experience something as being at or coming from a distance or direction in olfaction. In contrast to this, I suggest that there can be a variety of spatial aspects of both synchronic and diachronic olfactory experiences, including spatial distance and direction. I emphasise, however, that these are not aspects of every olfactory experience. Thus, I suggest renouncing the widespread assumption there is a uniform account of the nature, including the spatial nature, (...) of what is experienced in olfactory experience. (shrink)

Every episodic memory entails a sense of identity, which allows us to mentally travel through time. There is a special way by which the subject who is remembering comes into contact with the self that is embedded in the episodic simulation of memory: we can directly and robustly experience the protagonist in memory as ourselves. This paper explores what constitutes such experience in memory. On the face of it, the issue may seem trivial: of course, we are able (...) to entertain a sense of identity—the experience of our recollection structurally resembles our perception of the original event. However, given the phenomenon of observer memory, in which our visual perspective is decoupled from our embodied dimension, it is unclear whether it is the observing or the embodied one that is identified. This phenomenon is important not only in illustrating the complexity of identification but also in assessing how best to address it. In this paper, the issue is analyzed through concepts introduced from the literature on bodily self-consciousness. The potential approaches to addressing the issue of identification are examined, including the inheritance view, according to which the identification relies on the inheritance of mnemonic content from the original experience. I propose and argue for the self-simulation view, which suggests that what results in the experience of “I am this” in memory is the observing and the embodied dimensions as well as the relation between them, which enable different ways of projecting oneself into an episodic simulation. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This paper explores two kinds of selection effects on perception by the subject’s own psychological states, such as desires, fears, or beliefs. Such states can influence the selection of objects for perceptual experience, or they can influence the selection of perceptual experience for uptake in the process of belief-formation. It is argued that both kinds of selection effects are rationally assessable, even when the subject is not aware of their influence on the selection.

The papers collected here comprise the proceedings of a Workshop in honor ofMerrilee and Wes Salmon, held in Florence on May 17-18, 1996. The aim of the meeting was to pay homage to these two American scholars, whose contact with Italian and European Universities and Institutes had a major influence on "Continental" thought in the field of epistemology and probability. In fact, Merrilee and Wes spent various periods lecturing at the Universities of Bologna, Florence, Rome, Trieste, Catania and Pisa, as (...) well as in the University of Constance, where they helped to build a strong cultural "bridge" with the Pittsburgh Center for the Philosophy of Science. The Florence Center for the History and Philosophy of Science is particularly thankful to the Salmons for their ongoing cooperation and frequent visits. We must not forget that Wes Salmon was in the Florence Center and at the Philosophy Department of Florence, as visiting scholar, on many occasions, and that he made important contributions which have later appeared in Italian journals, such as Iride and Rivista di jilosojia. Merrilee was a speaker at the Conference on "Genetics, Linguistics, and Archaeology" (May 20-24,1991), organized by the Florence Center. Both Wes and Merrilee often enlivened the arguments of the initiatives they took part in. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to introduce Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences’ thematic issue on disordered temporalities. The authors begin by discussing the main reason for the neglect of temporal experience in present-day psychiatric nosologies, mainly, its reduction to clock time. Methodological challenges facing research on temporal experience include addressing the felt sense of time, its structure, and its pre-reflective aspects in the life-world setting. In the second part, the paper covers the contributions to the thematic issue (...) concerning temporal experience in anxiety, depression, mania, addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, and in recovery from psychosis. The authors argue in favor of integrative and cross-disciplinary approaches. In conclusion, they present time as a significant aspect of human suffering. (shrink)

How do speakers learn the social meaning of different linguistic variants, and what factors influence how likely a particular social–linguistic association is to be learned? It has been argued that the social meaning of more salient variants should be learned faster, and that learners' pre‐existing experience of a variant will influence its salience. In this paper, we report two artificial‐language‐learning experiments investigating this. Each experiment involved two language‐learning stages followed by a test. The first stage introduced the artificial language (...) and trained participants in it, while the second stage added a simple social context using images of cartoon aliens. The first learning stage was intended to establish participants' experience with the artificial language in general and with the distribution of linguistic variants in particular. The second stage, in which linguistic stimuli were accompanied by images of particular aliens, was intended to simulate the acquisition of linguistic variants in a social context. In our first experiment, we manipulated whether a particular linguistic variant, associated with one species of alien in the second learning phase, had been encountered in the first learning phase. In the second experiment, we manipulated whether the variant had been encountered in the same grammatical context. In both cases we predicted that the unexpectedness of a new variant or a new grammatical context for an old variant would increase the variant's salience and facilitate the learning of its social meaning. This is what we found, although in the second experiment, the effect was driven by better learners. Our results suggest that unexpectedness increases the salience of variants and makes their social distribution easier to learn, deepening our understanding of the role of individual language experience in the acquisition of sociolinguistic meaning. (shrink)

A novel problem or task may seem difficult at first, but with enough practice, it can become easy and routine. Practice and the process of learning is often accompanied by some mild cognitive uneas...

Two universal functional principles of Grossberg’s Adaptive Resonance Theory [19] decipher the brain code of all biological learning and adaptive intelligence. Low-level representations of multisensory stimuli in their immediate environmental context are formed on the basis of bottom-up activation and under the control of top-down matching rules that integrate high-level long-term traces of contextual configuration. These universal coding principles lead to the establishment of lasting brain signatures of perceptual experience in all living species, from aplysiae to primates. They are (...) re-visited in this concept paper here on the basis of examples drawn from the original code and from some of the most recent related empirical findings on contextual modulation in the brain, highlighting the potential of Grossberg’s pioneering insights and groundbreaking theoretical work for intelligent solutions in the domain of developmental and cognitive robotics. (shrink)

I argue that perceptual experience provides us with both phenomenal and factive evidence. To a first approximation, we can understand phenomenal evidence as determined by how our environment sensorily seems to us when we are experiencing. To a first approximation, we can understand factive evidence as necessarily determined by the environment to which we are perceptually related such that the evidence is guaranteed to be an accurate guide to the environment. I argue that the rational source of both phenomenal (...) and factive evidence lies in employing perceptual capacities that we have in virtue of being perceivers. In showing that both kinds of evidence have the same rational source, I provide a unified account of perceptual evidence and its rational source in perceptual experience. (shrink)

This paper is part of a larger project about the relation between mathematics and transcendental philosophy that I think is the most interesting feature of Kant’s philosophy of mathematics. This general view is that in the course of arguing independently of mathematical considerations for conditions of experience, Kant also establishes conditions of the possibility of mathematics. My broad aim in this paper is to clarify the sense in which this is an accurate description of Kant’s view of the relation (...) between mathematics and transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

Cognitive science has recently made some startling discoveries about temporal experience, and these discoveries have been drafted into philosophical service. We survey recent appeals to cognitive science in the philosophical debate over whether time objectively passes. Since this research is currently in its infancy, we identify some directions for future research.

How must experience of time be structured in time? In particular, does the following principle, which I will call inheritance, hold: for any temporal property apparently presented in perceptual experience, experience itself has that same temporal property. For instance, if I hear Paul McCartney singing ‘Hey Jude’, must my auditory experience of the ‘Hey’ itself precede my auditory experience of the ‘Jude’, or can the temporal order of these experiences come apart from the order the (...) words are experienced as having? A number of recent authors (Phillips Experience and Time, ‘The Temporal Structure of Experience’, Soteriou ‘Perceiving Events’, Hoerl ‘“A Succession of Feelings, in and of Itself, is Not a Feeling of Succession”’, Rashbrook) claim, to paraphrase Martin (399), that inheritance best characterises how our temporal experience seems to initial reflective intuition. For this reason, Phillips takes the principle to form part of our naïve view of temporal experience. An opposing group of theorists object that inheritance is subject to empirical counter-example. This article surveys such challenges. Section 2 considers Grush's case against inheritance based on postdiction. Section 3 examines Watzl's anti-inheritance argument based on silencing effects. Finally, Section 4 explores a number of alleged counter-examples proposed by Lee (‘Temporal Experience and the Temporal Structure of Experience’). Section 1 provides essential background to the debate. (shrink)

The author examines the epistemological project of analytic philosophy, which went through stages of transformation marked by the influence of Frege and Russell. The article emphasizes the main points of the first stage of analytic philosophy, during which the sphere of experience merged with language. The next stage defines a new subject - Wittgenstein's "language subject". According to the author, this subject of speech makes decisions about the sense or absurdity of sentences based on logical form and belongs to (...) the transcendental subject of speech in general. But in the end, the epistemological project of analytic philosophy moved to new directions in which questions about experience lost their relevance. (shrink)

The experience machine was traditionally thought to refute hedonism about welfare. In recent years, however, the tide has turned: many philosophers have argued not merely that the experience machine doesn't rule out hedonism, but that it doesn't count against it at all. I argue for a moderate position between those two extremes: although the experience machine doesn't decisively rule out hedonism, it provides us with some reason to reject it. I also argue for a particular way of (...) using the experience machine to argue against hedonism – one that appeals directly to intuitions about the welfare values of experientially identical lives rather than to claims about what we value or claims about whether we would, or should, plug into the machine. The two issues are connected: the conviction that the experience machine leaves hedonism unscathed is partly due to neglect of the best way to use the experience machine. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.How to Use the Experience MachineVolume 28, Issue 3EDEN LIN DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0953820815000424Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. How to Use the Experience MachineVolume 28, Issue 3EDEN LIN DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0953820815000424Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. How to Use the Experience MachineVolume 28, Issue 3EDEN LIN DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0953820815000424Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

This book aims to offer an account of conscious experience and of concepts that help us understand empirical reasoning and empirical dialectic. The account offered possesses, it is claimed, two virtues. First, it provides great theoretical freedom. It allows the theoretician freedom to radically reconceive the world. The theoretician may, for example, begin with the conception that colors are genuine qualities of physical bodies and may, in light of empirical findings, shift to the conception that colors are not genuine (...) qualities at all. Second, the account grants empirical reason a great power to constrain: empirical reason can force a particular conception of the self and the world on the rational inquirer. These seemingly contrary virtues are reconciled through a novel treatment of presentation and appearances in the account offered of conscious experience and a novel treatment of ostensive definitions in the account offered of concepts. The argument of the book is buttressed by a critical study of the principal approaches to experience and reason found in the philosophical literature.--. (shrink)

In the existing philosophical interpretations of mystical experience (constructivism, essentialism, etc.), its essence is usually seen in the features of "mystical knowledge". At the same time, the value-semantic foundations of mystical experience and its existential aspect remain in the shadows. In this article, the mystical experience is analyzed from the standpoint of the theories of the subject's objective activity - the theory of activity (developed in Russian psychology), enactivism, and the concept of the "life world". It is (...) shown that the essence of mystical experience is manifested not in cognitive, but in value-semantic, existential attitude to the world, which is represented by two groups of value-semantic viewpoints. In the first, the dependence of the subject on the sacred object of mystical experience is expressed, in the second - the volitional focus of the subject on overcoming such dependence, "mastering", "acquiring" the sacred object. These attitudes reflect the duality of the need-motivational sphere of consciousness, which gives the activity of the subject, on the one hand, activity, energy, and on the other, meaning. In mystical experience, the subject of active "development", "acquisition" (which can be both real and virtual) is an imaginative "otherworldly reality". The analysis allows us to conclude that mystical experience is one of the forms of motivational states of consciousness. Its peculiarity is that it is aimed at realizing the need for the harmonization of the subject's relations with the natural and social environment, the subject's finding the meaning of the "existence of his self" in an always open to the future, incomplete life world. It is the motivational basis that gives the mystical experience an improvisational character, as well as a creative, renewing potential (within the boundaries of the sensory-emotional experience of the world by the subject). The article also analyzes the concept of semantic reality. It is shown that the semantic foundations of mystical experience reflect the individually unique aspects of human life, are the result of the interactions of many factors of socio-cultural, individual-personal nature (psychological, medical, pharmacological, gender, psychiatric, etc.). (shrink)

One solution to the problem of moral knowledge is to claim that we can acquire it a posteriori through moral experience. But what is a moral experience? When we examine the most compelling putative cases, we find features which, I argue, are best explained by the hypothesis that moral experiences are emotions. To preempt an objection, I argue that putative cases of emotionless moral experience can be explained away. Finally, I allay the worry that emotions are an (...) unsuitable basis for moral knowledge. I conclude that those who believe in moral experience should hold that it consists of emotion. (shrink)

The novel COVID-19 has created an exogenous shock to capital markets and, hence, an ideal opportunity for researchers to assess whether CSR-related activities provide an insurance-like mechanism to protect firms against the shock. Using a large sample of 4361 firms domiciled in 40 countries, we investigate the roles of CSR reporting and assurance in the negative consequences of COVID-19 on firm value. The results confirm that prior CSR reporting experience buffers firms against the adverse effects of the health crisis. (...) The results also support that not only does the assurance on CSR reports create a buffering effect against the health crisis, but it also intensifies the buffering effects of prior CSR reporting experience against the pandemic. Moreover, using difference-in-difference method for testing the link between CSR reporting and firm value, we show that the positive association of reporting and assurance with firm value is more pronounced during the pandemic as compared with the years preceding it. The results of this study are robust to various analyses. Replicating the analyses to the context of the global financial crisis, we find that prior CSR reporting experience and assurance provide similar buffering effects when a market is exposed to various exogenous shocks. The results also hold for the mandatory disclosure regimes. By distinguishing first and subsequent reports and assurance, we show that, unlike subsequent CSR reports and assurance, the initial ones cannot mitigate the negative effects of the crisis on firm value, indicating that stakeholders take into account longer-term CSR reporting experiences. Aside from reporting and assurance aspects of CSR, we analyze the role of CSR report's quality and accuracy and show that the adoption of Global Reporting Initiatives (GRI) frameworks can enhance socially responsible firms' resilience against systematic shocks. (shrink)

This article defends the existence of _borderline consciousness._ In borderline consciousness, conscious experience is neither determinately present nor determinately absent, but rather somewhere between. The argument in brief is this. In considering what types of systems are conscious, we face a quadrilemma. Either nothing is conscious, or everything is conscious, or there’s a sharp boundary across the apparent continuum between conscious systems and nonconscious ones, or consciousness is a vague property admitting indeterminate cases. Assuming mainstream naturalism about consciousness, we (...) ought to reject the first three options, which forces us to the fourth, indeterminacy. Standard objections to the existence of borderline consciousness turn on the inconceivability of borderline cases. However, borderline cases are only inconceivable by an inappropriately demanding standard of conceivability. I conclude with some plausible cases and applications. (shrink)

Some philosophers claim that emotions are, at best, hindrances to the discovery of evaluative truths, while others omit them entirely from their epistemology of value. I argue, however, that this is a mistake. Drawing an evaluative parallel with Frank Jackson’s Mary case, I show there is a distinctive way in which emotions epistemically enhance evaluative judgment. This is, in fact, a conclusion philosophers of emotion have been eager to endorse. However, after considering several influential proposals—such as the view that emotions (...) generate evaluative concepts, or the view that emotions justify evaluative beliefs on the model of perception—I conclude that the most promising contender is the notion that emotional experience acquaints us with evaluative properties. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the sociality of emotional experience in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. Specifically, I describe four key mechanisms through which an individual's sociocultural context shapes her emotional experience on Nietzsche's view—emotional contagion as habitual affective mimicry, the production of emotions' felt character through the assimilation of dominant social beliefs and norms, affective interpretation à la Christopher Fowles, and the imposition of dominant notions of emotional appropriateness—fleshing out a dimension of Nietzsche's thought which is largely (...) taken for granted but remains undertreated. After detailing these mechanisms, I argue that attending to the sociality of emotional experience in Nietzsche's thought is crucial not only for understanding key elements of his moral psychology (including certain of his reflections on freedom and self‐transformation), but also for understanding his interpretation of nihilism as a psychological‐affective phenomenon produced by the society to which one belongs. On Nietzsche's view, attending to the sociality of emotion helps individuals recognize the way in which the sociocultural contexts they inhabit might undermine their flourishing—and also helps them envision the conditions (especially sociocultural conditions) requisite for healthier, more empowering emotional lives. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the implications of grief for philosophical theorising about absence experience. I argue that whilst some absence experiences that occur in grief might be explained by extant philosophical accounts of absence experience, others need different treatment. I propose that grieving subjects' descriptions of feeling as if the world seems empty or a part of them seems missing can be understood as referring to a distinctive type of absence experience. In these profound absence experiences, (...) I will argue, the absence of a person as a condition on various possibilities is made manifest in the structure of experience over time. Thus, by paying close attention to grief, we can see that even accounts of absence experience that are presented as in competition with one another may not be so, and that to explain all kinds of absence experience we sometimes need to appeal to something overlooked in other accounts, and which is neither straightforwardly perceptual or cognitive. I also suggest that we would have good reason to take such experiences to be part of and not merely psychological effects of grief. (shrink)

His is a journey marked by the questioning of experience itself, until what is reached is sovereign laughter, non-knowledge, and a Presence in no way distinct from Absence, where "The mind moves in a strange world where anguish and ecstasy ...

Can we directly experience change? Although some philosophers have denied it, the phenomenological evidence is unambiguous: we can, and do. But how is this possible? What structures or features of consciousness render such experience possible? A variety of very different answers to this question have been proposed, answers which have very different implications for the nature of consciousness itself. In this brief survey no attempt is made to engage with the often complex (and sometimes obscure) literature on this (...) topic. Instead, a largely schematic examination of the main options is conducted, with a view to determining the most promising avenues for further investigation. (shrink)

Autism research has recently witnessed an embodied turn. In response to the cognitivist approaches dominating the field, phenomenological scholars have suggested a reconceptualization of autism as a disorder of embodied intersubjectivity. Part of this interest in autistic embodiment concerns the role of sensory differences, which have recently been added to the diagnostic criteria of autism. While research suggests that sensory differences are implicated in a wide array of autistic social difficulties, it has not yet been explored how sensory and social (...) experience in autism relate on a phenomenological level. Given the importance of the sensory dimension of social encounters in phenomenological analyses of autism, this question must be considered crucial. This article investigates the role played by sensory differences in autistic social experience. Through a phenomenological analysis informed primarily by the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty with particular emphasis on the relation between intersubjectivity and perception, I argue that sensory differences affect the way other people appear in autistic experience on a pre-reflective level. By drawing on autistic young adults’ experiential descriptions of social encounters, this article identifies three aspects of how sensory differences affect social experiences in autism. First, social encounters manifested as sensorially disturbing, chaotic, and unpredictable events. Second, the embodied expressions of others appeared unfamiliar, threatening, and promoted a sense of detachment from the social world. Third, deliberate practices were employed to actively seek perceptual and social meaning in these disorienting social encounters. This analysis stresses the importance of understanding embodied intersubjectivity through its sensory dimensions. In addition, it indicates an important avenue for future research in exploring the potential role of practice in maintaining an intuitive grip on social meaning. By approaching social encounters as sensory and perceptual events, I emphasize how social difficulties in autism are inherently world-involving phenomena rather than a cognitive deficit reducible to the autistic person. (shrink)

How should we characterize the functional role of conscious visual experience? In particular, how do the conscious contents of visual experience guide, bear upon, or otherwise inform our ongoing motor activities? According to an intuitive and philosophically influential conception, the links are often quite direct. The contents of conscious visual experience, according to this conception, are typically active in the control and guidance of our fine-tuned, real-time engagements with the surrounding three-dimensional world. But this idea is hostage (...) to empirical fortune. It is a hostage, moreover, whose safety is in serious doubt. Thus Milner and Goodale argue for a deep and abiding dissociation between the contents of conscious seeing, on the one hand, and the resources used for the on-line guidance of visuo-motor action, on the other. This ‘dual visual systems’ hypothesis, which finds many echoes in various other bodies of cognitive scientific research, poses a prima facie challenge to the Assumption of Experience-Based Control. More importantly, it provides fuel for an alternative and philosophically suggestive account of the functional role of conscious visual experience. (shrink)

Does talking about the triumph of the 1986 People Power EDSA Revolution still make sense nowadays? When the ideals of this glorious revolution are now nothing but contents of Philippine history textbooks and items of the culture industry, do we still need to re-imagine it? These are some of the reflective questions that will challenge and guide this paper‟s architecture. In what follows, the author will push all the possibilities for a Nietzschean re- thinking of the EDSA Revolution as “ (...) the experience of difference and an exemplar of ascending life. ” In the first part, an account of the nature of EDSA revolution will be illustrated; while in the second, the principle of the „ Will to Power ‟ and „ Eternal Return ‟ will be explained using Gille s Deleuze‟s rhizomatic eyeglasses. In the third, the narrative of the revolution, i.e., the process on how the Epifanio Delos Santo Avenue turned into an arena for collective-political action will be delineated. Furthermore, the concept of difference will be utilized in explaining the dynamic occurrences produced by the Dionysian assemblage of Filipino bodies. In the last, the challenge of a different return of the said revolution will be explained. (shrink)

Does the A-theory have an intuitive advantage over the B-theory? Many A-theorists have claimed so, arguing that their theory has a much better explanation for the fact that we all experience the passage of time: we experience time as passing because time really does pass. In this paper I expose and reject the argument behind the A-theorist’s claim. I argue that all parties have conceded far too easily that there is an experience that needs explaining in the (...) first place. For what exactly is an experience of temporal passage? One natural thought is that we experience passage in virtue of experiencing change, or in virtue of experiencing change as ‘dynamic’. Another is that we experience passage in virtue of experiencing events as (successively) present. None of these experiences, I argue, amounts to an experience of passage. Although there might still be other ways to experience passage, A-theorists would have to provide us with a plausible candidate experience. If there is such an experience at all, it won’t be one that qualifies as what we intuitively take to be an experience of passage. The ‘intuitive advantage’, it seems, has dissolved in any case. (shrink)

What is beautiful or ugly vary from one person another, from time to time and from culture to culture. However, at the same time, people are certain that there are aesthetic properties in the nature, artworks and other persons and, furthermore, they can be perceived by the naked eye. This article argues that experience does not reveal the aesthetic properties of the objects.