There are two different varieties of question concerning the unity of consciousness: questions about unity at a time, and unity over time. A recent trend in the debate about unity has been to attempt to provide a ‘generalized’ account that purports to solve both problems in the same way. This attempt can be seen in the accounts of Barry Dainton and Michael Tye. In this paper, I argue that there are crucial differences between unity over (...) time and unity at a time that make it impossible to provide a generalized account of unity. The source of these crucial differences is the phenomenon of the ‘continuity of consciousness’. I argue that accounts of unity over time have to provide an account of this continuity, and that there is no phenomenon analogous to continuity in the case of unity at a time. Attention to the continuity of consciousness reveals crucial structural differences between the two varieties of unity. These structural differences make it impossible to provide a generalized account of unity. I show that the problems faced by Dainton’s and Tye’s accounts in the light of the structural differences make their accounts of unity appear far less appealing than they might initially have looked. I conclude by noting that, in the light of the important differences between the two varieties of unity, it is a mistake to attempt to model accounts of unity over time on accounts of unity at a time. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the implications of adopting one model of self rather than another in respect to one particular feature of our mental life. The need to explain synchronic unity in normal subjectivity, and also to explain the apparent and puzzling absence of synchronic unity in certain symptoms of severe mental disorder, I show, becomes more pressing with one particular model. But in the process of developing that explanation we learn something about subjectivity and (...) perhaps also something about brain functioning. (shrink)

The manifest fact of experiential unity—namely, that a single experience often seems to be composed of multiple features and multiple objects—was lodged as a key objection to the Buddhist no-self view by Nyāya philosophers in the classical Indian tradition. We revisit the Nyāya-Buddhist debate on this issue. The early Nyāya experiential unity arguments depend on diachronic unification of experiences in memory, but later Nyāya philosophers explicitly widened the scope to incorporate new unity arguments that invoke synchronic (...) unification in experiences. We argue that classical responses to this objection in the Buddhist traditions are not satisfactory. We offer a new solution on behalf of the Buddhists, with some help from cognitive sciences. We argue that there are different kinds of experiential unity and that, once we distinguish between these kinds, the Nyāya argument becomes difficult to sustain. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The manifest fact of experiential unity—namely, that a single experience often seems to be composed of multiple features and multiple objects—was lodged as a key objection to the Buddhist no-self view by Nyāya philosophers in the classical Indian tradition. We revisit the Nyāya-Buddhist debate on this issue. The early Nyāya experiential unity arguments depend on diachronic unification of experiences in memory, but later Nyāya philosophers explicitly widened the scope to incorporate new unity arguments that invoke (...) class='Hi'>synchronic unification in experiences. We argue that classical responses to this objection in the Buddhist traditions are not satisfactory. We offer a new solution on behalf of the Buddhists, with some help from cognitive sciences. We argue that there are different kinds of experiential unity and that, once we distinguish between these kinds, the Nyāya argument becomes difficult to sustain. (shrink)

Synchronic and diachronic unity of consciousness and their in­terrelation pose interdisciplinary problems that can only be addressed by the combined means of philosophical and scien­tific theories. In the first part of the article the author briefly reviews psychological and materialistic accounts of personal identity. Historically these accounts were introduced to solve the problem of diachronic identity of persons, i.e., the problem of their persistence through time. She argues that they don’t explain how synchronic unity of consciousness, (...) subjectively experienced as the unity of the phenomenal field, correlates with diachronic identity of persons. In the second part of the article the author reviews Tim Bayne’s “virtual phenomenalism”. In the third part of the article she formulates two questions that virtual phenomenalism has to answer in order to solve the problems that face both the psychological and the materialistic accounts of personal identity. The first question concerns some cognitive and neurobiological characteristics of consciousness that Bayne invokes in order to propose an original solution of the problem of the synchronic unity of consciousness. It might be asked whether the same characteristics can undermine Bayne’s solution of the problem of the diachronic unity of consciousness. The second question is a development of Bernard Williams’ arguments against psychological accounts of personal identity. The author suggests that similar arguments can be used against virtual phenomenalism. (shrink)

Adults and infants display a robust ability to perceive the unity of a center-occluded object when the visible ends of the object undergo common motion (e.g. Kellman, P.J., Spelke, E.S., 1983. Perception of partly occluded objects in infancy. Cognitive Psychology 15, 483±524). Ecologically oriented accounts of this ability focus on the primacy of motion in the perception of segregated objects, but Gestalt theory suggests a broader possibility: observers may perceive object unity by detecting patterns of synchronous change, of (...) which common motion is a special case. We investigated this possibility with observations of adults and 4-month-old infants. Participants viewed a center-occluded object whose visible surfaces were either misaligned or aligned, stationary or moving, and unchanging or synchronously changing in color or bright- ness in various temporal patterns (e.g. ¯ashing). Both alignment and common motion con- tributed to adults' perception of object unity, but synchronous color changes did not. For infants, motion was an important determinant of object unity, but other synchronous changes and edge alignment were not. When a stationary object with aligned edges underwent syn- chronous changes in color or brightness, infants showed high levels of attention to the object, but their perception of its unity appeared to be indeterminate. An inherent preference for fast over slow ¯ash rates, and a novelty preference elicited by a change in rate, both indicated that infants detected the synchronous changes, although they failed to use them as information for object unity. These ®ndings favor ecologically oriented accounts of object perception in which surface motion plays a privileged role. Ó 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Recent philosophical discourse on emergence has developed with particular concern for the distinction between weak and strong emergence and with the primary focus on detailed analysis of the concept of supervenience. However, in the last decade and as a new departure, attention has been devoted to the distinction between synchronic and diachronic emergence. In this philosophical context, there is an ongoing general belief that these two concepts are so different that it is impossible to establish for them a general (...) unifying framework. It is the purpose of this paper to support an alternative view, i.e. that these concepts are different but not mutually exclusive, and that attending to appearance and persistence can, in this context, lead to an acceptable unifying framework for these two, differing concepts of emergence. (shrink)

In "The Disunity of Consciousness," Gerard O'Brien and Jon Opie argue that human consciousness is not synchronically unified. They suggest that the orthodox conception of the unity of consciousness admits of two readings, neither of which they find persuasive. According to them, "a conscious individual does not have a single consciousness, but several distinct phenomenal consciousnesses, at least one for each of the senses, running in parallel." They call this conception of consciousness the _multi-track account. I make three points (...) in reply: (1) O'Brien and Opie's characterization of the orthodox conception of the unity of consciousness is problematic; (2) their arguments in support of the multitrack account are unpersuasive; and (3) the phenomenon of intersensory integration suggests that O'Brien and Opie are wrong to claim that "the only sense in which it is correct to talk of a 'unified' consciousness (...) is that in which the representational contents of the various components coincide.". (shrink)

We talk of the differences between the old Camus and the new Camus. Often such talk is equivalent to talk of the differences between Camus’ old self and Camus’ new self, between Camus’ diachronous selves. In other contexts, contexts which I shall ignore, the old and the new Camus is something we can read, provide literary criticism of, ponder over. In these contexts it is to the literary works of the old and new Camus that we are referring. The same (...) kind of ambiguity attaches to the expressions ‘the early Beethoven’ and ‘the later Beethoven’. (shrink)

The question “What makes a group of simultaneous experiences the experiences of a single person?” has been nearly ignored in the philosophical literature for the past few decades. The most common answer to this much neglected question is “Two simultaneous experiences belong to a single person if there is a common consciousness or awareness of them.” However, consciousness and awareness are difficult concepts to analyze, so that little of substance has been said of the answer. Recently, Oaklander has argued that (...) the awareness answer is deficient for a different reason, claiming that it fails because “it ultimately rests on an analysis of the unity of consciousness that is itself circular or otherwise inadequate” Oaklander 1987, p. 525). Oaklander's criticism is especially interesting because, according to it, the awareness account of synchronic personal identity falls prey to the main problem facing the memory account of diachronic identity, namely the problem of branching. In this paper, I shall argue that there is no important symmetry. Whatever its other flaws may be, the awareness account is immune to the branching problem; its immunity is due to formal differences between synchronic and diachronic identity. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to explore some metaphysical and psychological implications of the (contentious) idealist interpretation of the belief in external objects ("bodies") Hume ascribes to us in the Treatise. More specifically, I will argue that the interpretation commits Hume to the claim that space is spatially fragmented, both synchronically and (even more so) diachronically, and renders Hume incapable of allowing for all the spatial thoughts we think we can have. But (perhaps surprisingly) it does not impugn Hume's (...) view of causation. (shrink)

In this chapter, we explore the role of habit in giving shape to conscious experience and importantly to our pre-reflective awareness of ourselves which includes the sense of mineness that accompanies our conscious experience. For the most part, discussions in philosophy of mind and phenomenology concerning pre-reflective self-awareness are focused on determining the relationship between phenomenal consciousness and selfhood. For this reason perhaps, the existence of pre-reflective self-awareness is usually appealed to as evidence for a form of selfhood that appears (...) within conscious experience as a component of its synchronic unity. In this chapter, however, we will concern ourselves with the pre-reflective sense of ourselves that appears in conscious experience as it pertains to the diachronic unity of the self—that is the sense of a unitary self as existing over the course of multiple episodic experiences. Our aim is to provide a phenomenological account of the relationship between the minimal, pre-reflective sense of self and what is often termed the ‘narrative self.’ We will argue that habits play a role in preserving the significance of our past in our present experience and in unifying our experience as a self for whom the world is present across disparate episodes of experience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.4 (2003) 357-359 [Access article in PDF] Learning From Disunity Jennifer Radden In describing his four cases, Lloyd Wells (2003) throws out a challenge. He asks his readers to recognize similarities between their own more ordinary self-identity and the discontinuous narrative and seeming absence of a steady authorial subject resulting from disorders such as depression, schizophrenia, and Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). In light of these (...) cases, he implies, the unity of the self we have unreflectively assumed until now to be universal requires reconsideration. Psychopathology seems to force a sharpening, clarification, and closer conceptualization of our philosophical theories of self-identity.While acknowledging that philosophical categories and theories of narrative identity can help us to assess the ravages wrought by mental disorder, James Phillips (2003) is also respectful of the contribution of psychopathology to theorizing about identity: he ends his thoughtful discussion of Wells' cases by looking not at how philosophy can enlighten us about psychopathology but at how cases such as these can illuminate philosophical categories. Speculating on the tragic absence of narrative identity in schizophrenia and advanced Alzheimer's disease, Phillips concludes that, as he puts it, psychopathology "reconfigures the contours of our notion of narrative identity and requires a looser, minimized, nonsubstantial notion of the narrative self" and argues for a self that "transcends the limits and loss of narrative identity" (2003, 326).I also support the approach, shared by Wells and Phillips, that allows psychopathology to clarify and illuminate philosophical concepts and categories. Here, in a handful of footnotes to their insights, I want to point out ways that cases from psychopathology reveal distinguishable elements or aspects of self-identity often confused because, in the normal case, they form an unquestioned and apparently indissoluble unity. One of these is the difference between synchronic and diachronic subjective unity. Another is the difference between the elements of authorship and temporality in conceptions of narrative identity. And last is the difference between what I shall call constitutional identity and self-identity. Synchronic and Diachronic Identity The difference between synchronic and diachronic identity, elements so seamlessly blurred in more ordinary subjectivity, is nicely illustrated by Wells' cases. Mary's dissociative states leave her with interruptions in her diachronic identity: the memory of her experiences is fragmented and incoherent. Yet at any given moment, her synchronic unity is unimpaired. She recognizes and can describe the oneness of her experiences and their boundaries; she is aware which are her experiences and which are not. For all her scatteredness and dissociation, as Phillips puts it in describing Mary's case: "there is a strong and [End Page 357] articulate narrator... the fact remains that this I is there" (2003, 318).In contrast, the shy and self-conscious adolescent Edward seems to suffer not from diachronic but from synchronic disunity. (And if anything, as Melvin Woody [2003] points out, Edward's "narrative" seems to fuel the comparisons which so distress him about his uncomfortable and distressing subjective experiences.) Edward struggles to "delineate what's inside my mind and what's outside it... " When he thinks about what he sees as a firm boundary around the self in others which is not well demarcated in his own case, he remarks "... I completely lose any sense of myself" (p. 330).Thought insertion or "made" feelings in psychosis provide similar instances of such fracturing of their sufferer's synchronic identity (it is perhaps such experiences that Edward alludes to here; Wells' quotations are too sparse for us to tell). Just as Edward complains of losing any sense of himself, so other sufferers from these alarming conditions complain of losing a sense of the self's boundaries, of possession and mind control, and of being the unwelcome host to alien thoughts, feelings, and intentions.In normal experience diachronic and synchronic unity—my oneness across time and at a time—form a seamless whole. These cases, where one or the other is compromised, vividly remind us that these two forms of unity must be distinguished. Narrative Identity Phillips (2003) explicates an analysis of narrative identity which comprises entwined but distinguishable features: a narrating... (shrink)

To understand Aristotle’s conception of form, we have to see clearly the relationship between his account and Plato’s Theory of Forms. I offer a novel interpretation of Aristotle’s Moderate Realism, in which forms are simple particulars that ground the character and mutual similarity of the entities they inform. Such an account has advantages in three areas: explaining (1) the similarity of particulars, (2) the synchronic unity of composite particulars, and (3) the diachronic unity or persistence of intrinsically (...) changing particulars. (shrink)

I offer a novel account of the absurdity of Moore-paradoxical assertion in terms of an interlocutor’s fully conscious beliefs. This account starts with an original argument for the principle that fully conscious belief collects over conjunction. The argument is premised on the synchronic unity of consciousness and the transparency of belief.

In her article, “Melancholia, temporal disruption, and the torment of being both unable to live and unable to die,” Emily Hughes offers a provocative and powerful analysis of an experiential aspect of depression that is often overlooked in the psychiatric literature. Drawing on Heidegger’s account of ontological death, what he calls “dying” in Being and Time, Hughes illuminates how episodes of major depression can disrupt the synchronous unity of time that structures our experience and gives meaning to our lives. (...) When this happens, the sufferer enters a paradoxical liminal space, one in which we live through our own death, where death is understood ontologically as an inability-to-be. For Heidegger, “to... (shrink)

In this dissertation, the author articulates and defends a version of the historically important view that all consciousness involves self-consciousness. In Chapter 1, the author defends a certain conception of the role of phenomenology in the theory of consciousness. The author argues that any theory of consciousness must account for the properties that phenomenology reveals consciousness to have. The most important properties in this regard are structural: temporality, synchronic unity, and self-referentiality. It is argued that these properties can (...) be given a rigorous description and that mathematical models of the structure of consciousness can be developed. ;In Chapter 2, the author argues that there are no phenomenological data that preclude a theory that identifies consciousness with a brain process. By carefully attending to what consciousness can and cannot reveal about itself in introspection, the author argues, one can see clearly that phenomenology can play its necessary role in the theory of consciousness without at the same time undermining physicalism. ;In Chapter 3, the author discusses the structural phenomenological data. The discussion is informed by the classic work of William James as well as the work of the Phenomenological philosophers, Edmund Husserl, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Aron Gurwitsch. ;In Chapter 4, the author examines various versions of the view that all consciousness involves self-consciousness. The author argues that any adequate theory of the type must maintain that states or phases of consciousness must be genuinely self-referential. The author then goes on to present a model of the self-referential structure of consciousness using some tools from contemporary Set Theory. ;In Chapter 5, the author replies to certain important objections to the self-referentialist theory of consciousness. ;In Chapter 6, the author examines some connections the theory defended bears to the mathematico-computational theory of consciousness suggested by Douglas Hofstadter and to the outstanding neurobiological theories of consciousness presented by Antonio Damasio and Gerald Edelman. ;In Chapter 7, the author argues that the supposition that consciousness is the embodiment of a certain self-referential structure implies elegant solutions to some outstanding problems in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

This paper provides an outline and critical introduction to a symposium on Garfield’s Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy. The main issues addressed concern: (i) the problem of personal identity, specifically the issue of whether the no-self view can satisfactorily account for such phenomena as agency, responsibility, rationality, and subjectivity, and the synchronic unity of consciousness they presuppose; (ii) a critique of phenomenal realism, which is shown to rests on a false dilemma, namely: either we must take (...) people’s introspective reports as reliable testimony, or see the task of phenomenology as necessarily involving what people believe about their introspective report; and (iii) the consequences of adopting Garfield’s physicalist stance for our understanding of Buddhist views of consciousness and the self. (shrink)

Sidney Shoemaker has given an influential explanation of the absurdity of Moore-paradoxical belief in terms of conscious belief. Here I offer a novel account of the absurdity of Moore-paradoxical assertion in terms of an interlocutor’s fully conscious beliefs. This account starts with an original argument for the principle that fully conscious belief collects over conjunction. The argument is premised on the synchronic unity of consciousness and the transparency of belief.

The boundary problem on defining the conceptual scope and limits of a mental disorder may be tackled at either side of the boundary. On one side, philosophers and philosophically minded clinicians tried clarifying the concept of mental disorder and its related concepts of mental illness and dysfunction in their use and definition. On the other side, Mohammed Rashed's article gives a substantive and refreshing account of this neglected side in terms of social recognition. Thereby the boundary is clarified from the (...) outside through the limits set by the epistemic status of identity claims and the diachronic and synchronic unity of the self-conceptions that make up a person's identity.Stimulated by and building... (shrink)

This chapter begins with a discussion of Dennett's view of self-representation. It introduces the so-called “Joycean Machine”, special narrative module in the brain charged with production of an autobiography. It is argued that the synchronic unity of the thinking subject is the unity of voice and agency wrought by the unifying activity of the Joycean Machine. In dynamical terms, the collective voice can have a causal role. Turned outward, it can mediate the communication between systems, allowing them (...) to act as unified agents in interaction with one another. Turned inward, it can govern the activity of the components. (shrink)

Mark Textor presents a critical study of the work of Franz Brentano, one of the most important thinkers of the nineteenth century. His work has influenced analytic philosophers like Russell as well as phenomenologists like Husserl and Sartre, and continues to shape debates in the philosophy of mind. Brentano made intentionality a central topic in the philosophy of mind by proposing that 'directedness' is the distinctive feature of the mental. The first part of the book investigates Brentano's intentionalism as well (...) as attempts to improve or develop it. Textor argues that there is no plausible version of this doctrine, and rejects it in favour of a mark of the mental proposed by Brentano's student Husserl: mental phenomena have no appearances. The second part of the book develops and defends Brentano's view about the structure of perceptual awareness. Awareness of a mental activity and this mental activity are not distinct mental acts, the first representing the second. They are one and the same activity that has several objects. Textor shows that Brentano held that intentionality is plural - directedness is directedness on some objects - and shows how the plural conception solves thorny problems. The third part of the book is devoted to Brentano's view of pleasure and pain. Textor draws out parallels between enjoying an activity and awareness of it and argues that enjoying an activity and the activity enjoyed are not distinct. The final part of the book extends the plural view to the conscious mental life of a thinker at a time (the unity of synchronic consciousness): it is one mental act with many objects. (shrink)

Is a subject who undergoes an experience necessarily aware of undergoing the experience? According to the view here developed, a positive answer to this question should be accepted if ‘awareness’ is understood in a specific way, - in the sense of what will be called ‘primitive awareness’. Primitive awareness of being experientially presented with something involves, furthermore, being pre-reflectively aware of oneself as an experiencing subject. An argument is developed for the claims that pre-reflective self-awareness is the basis of our (...) understanding of what it is to be an experiencing subject and that that understanding reveals what being an experiencing subject consists in and what it is for experiences to belong to one single experiencer. Claim is used in an argument in favor of the so-called simple view with respect to synchronic and diachronic unity of consciousness. (shrink)

The complex and long genesis of the Daodejing is widely known. Whether it was originally composed by a single author, the legendary Laozi, or whether it emerged over time as a sort of collective anthology ancient sayings, the text underwent countless changes made by copyists and commentators over the centuries, and the Daodejing extensively published today is clearly something different from its first (and second) versions. For this reason, as well as for the nature of Chinese thought itself, it seems (...) inappropriate to search for a philosophical “system” in the Daodejing. Nonetheless, the text can shed light on the view of nature permeating classical China. The paper will focus on three issues. The first is the ontological non-individualization of the Dao, which is the counterpart to the epistemological individualization of the human and social world. The second is the kind of metaphysics that can frame these features: a metaphysics of diachronic events, processes, and emergences, rather than a synchronic metaphysics of objects, substances, and monadic properties. The third, finally, is the fragmenting power of language, which through naming and knowledge creates that individualization that splits the undivided unity of the Dao. (shrink)

The book is a second volume of the project, which is focused on a systematic examination of aesthetic experience by the unification of philosophical and cognitive-scientific approaches to beauty and aesthetic experience. This volume is focused on the analysis of selected aspects of aesthetic experience, especially on methodological problems and aspects of philosophical and scientific research, the question of the complementarity and compatibility of methods, and needs to interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research. Authors of the chapters are considering about diverse areas (...) of perception of beauty, e.g.: pleasure by face perception; the synchronicity by music; the problems of musical chills; the psychosomatic unity of dance; or the problem of development of aesthetic appreciation. (shrink)

In this paper, I present an informational approach to the nature of personal identity. In “Plato and the problem of the chariot”, I use Plato’s famous metaphor of the chariot to introduce a specific problem regarding the nature of the self as an informational multiagent system: what keeps the self together as a whole and coherent unity? In “Egology and its two branches” and “Egology as synchronic individualisation”, I outline two branches of the theory of the self: one (...) concerning the individualisation of the self as an entity, the other concerning the identification of such entity. I argue that both presuppose an informational approach, defend the view that the individualisation of the self is logically prior to its identification , and suggest that such individualisation can be provided in informational terms. Hence, in “A reconciling hypothesis: the three membranes model”, I offer an informational individualisation of the self, based on a tripartite model, which can help to solve the problem of the chariot. Once this model of the self is outlined, in “ICTs as technologies of the self” I use it to show how ICTs may be interpreted as technologies of the self. In “The logic of realisation”, I introduce the concept of “realization” (Aristotle’s anagnorisis ) and support the rather Spinozian view according to which, from the perspective of informational structural realism, selves are the final stage in the development of informational structures. The final “Conclusion: from the egology to the ecology of the self” briefly concludes the article with a reference to the purposeful shaping of the self, in a shift from egology to ecology. (shrink)

Fortunately, there is heat; and Freudenthal is keen to promote it as an overlooked central factor in Aristotle’s theory of material substance. He begins in agreement with the many scholars who argue that Aristotle’s theory of the four elements underdetermines the plain fact that there are organic substances which exhibit both synchronic and diachronic unity. He goes further than most, however, by arguing that left unaugmented Aristotle’s account of the four basic elements would positively preclude the existence of (...) these forms of unity. For Aristotle embraces the Presocratic picture of the four elements as engaged in “endemic strife”, so constituted that their natural propensities lead them to separate and dissolve rather than to unite and synthesize. Thus, for example, each of the four elements has a natural direction, which ought to result in fire and air ever moving upward and away from earth and water, which will move downward if unimpeded. Hence, as Aristotle himself recognizes, some agent force is required to hold the four elements together when they are mixed. (shrink)

In the first full-length study in any modern language dedicated to the Meteorologica, Malcolm Wilson presents a groundbreaking interpretation of Aristotle's natural philosophy. Divided into two parts, the book first addresses general philosophical and scientific issues by placing the treatise in a diachronic frame comprising Aristotle's predecessors and in a synchronic frame comprising his other physical works. It argues that Aristotle thought of meteorological phenomena as intermediary or 'dualizing' between the cosmos as a whole and the manifold world of (...) terrestrial animals. Engaging with the best current literature on Aristotle's theories of science and metaphysics, Wilson focuses on issues of aetiology, teleology and the structure and unity of science. The second half of the book illustrates Aristotle's principal concerns in a section-by-section treatment of the meteorological phenomena and provides solutions to many of the problems that have been raised since the time of the ancient commentators. (shrink)

In eighteenth-century French natural history, the notion of preformation was not only a model for a small preexisting embryo that gradually extended its shape through the influx of particles, but also for an order that coordinated the dynamic relation between organic parts. Preformation depended therefore also on a hidden order behind the continuity of visible forms. Louis Bourguet, Charles Bonnet, and Georges Cuvier distinguished three organizational levels: First, the synchronic or functional order of organic systems; second, the diachronic order (...) of the initiation of mechanical processes; and third, the hierarchical order that regulates the interaction of organic parts. In this essay, I reconstruct and compare the three organizational levels in the writings of Bourguet, Bonnet and Cuvier, relate their models of organic unity to the principle of perfection, and contrast these models with Georges Buffon's critique of system theories. (shrink)

It is traditionally maintained that according to Aristotle, matter provides a principle of individuation. Objections of several sorts have been raised against this interpretation. One objection holds that for Aristotle it is form, rather than matter, that individuates. A more radical objection is that Aristotle does not propose any principle of individuation at all. Any adequate discussion of this issue must make clear precisely what problems such a principle is meant to address. This in turn requires that several important distinctions (...) be observed: (1) principles of individuation vs. principles of unity; (2) metaphysical vs. epistemological principles; (3) synchronic vs. diachronic unity and individuation; numerical vs. qualitative identity. After examining the objections in the light of these distinctions, I conclude that the objections cannot be sustained, and that, with appropriate qualifications, the traditional interpretation gives us the right idea about Aristotle. (shrink)

The paper's focus is on pragmatic arguments for various ‘rationality constraints’ on a decision maker’s state of mind: on his beliefs or preferences. An argument of this kind purports to show that a violator of a given constraint can be exposed to a decision problem in which he will act to his guaranteed disadvantage. Dramatically put, he can be exploited by a clever bookie who doesn’t know more than the agent himself. Examples of pragmatic arguments of this kind are (...) class='Hi'>synchronic Dutch Books, for the standard probability axioms, diachronic Dutch Books, for the more controversial principles of reflection and conditionalization, and Money Pumps, for the transitivity requirement on preferences. The proposed exploitation set-ups share a common feature. If the violator of a given constraint is logically and mathematically competent, he can be exploited only if he is disunified in his decision-making. Exploitation is possible only if the agent makes decisions on various issues he confronts one by one, rather than on all of them together. Unity in decision making may be quite costly and is often inconvenient, especially when it concerns opportunity packages that are spread over time. Therefore, pragmatic arguments should be seen as delivering conditional conclusions: “To afford being disunified as a decision maker, you’d better satisfy these constraints.” Arguments of this kind fail to establish the inherent rationality of the constraints under consideration. Levi’s view of the status of pragmatic arguments (cf. Levi 2002) is diametrally opposed. According to him, only synchronic pragmatic arguments are valid (indeed, categorically valid). The diachronic ones, he argues, lack any validity at all. This line of reasoning is questioned in the paper. (shrink)

The following article deals with Alfred Schutz’s contribution to the theory of action and interaction by pointing out the possibly most compelling phenomenological starting position, i.e, the decomposition of the unity of an action. The article stresses that Schutz’s methodical interpretive sociology in thissense has always refused the assimilation of action-events to material occurrences. In contrast to empiricist theories of action which wrongly substantialize actionevents by treating them as material events, the phenomenological account gives reason to the assumption that (...) there must be a systematic gap between at least two subjective estimations of the meaning of action. In other words, the introspective analysis of the subjective constitution of meaning means to take the problem of double contingency seriously. Phenomenology, for its temporal and conceptual resolution, seems much more appropriate to reconstruct the complex structures of “presence,” “identity,” and “intersubjectivity” than empiricist accounts. The article proposes in the end the need for an alternative concept of presence:Instead of confusing levels of cooperation with allegedly “objective” synchronicity, phenomenology reminds us to elaborate an alternative concept of simultaneity, i.e, a simultaneity on the level of performativity and tacit knowledge. The latter could be the warrantor for co-reference. (shrink)

Sydney Shoemaker leads today’s “neo-Lockean” liberation of persons from the conservative animalist charge of “neo-Aristotelians” such as Eric Olson, according to whom persons are biological entities and who challenge all neo-Lockean views on grounds that abstracting from strictly physical, or bodily, criteria plays fast and loose with our identities. There is a fundamental mistake on both sides: a false dichotomy between bodily continuity versus psychological continuity theories of personal identity. Neo-Lockeans, like everyone else today who relies on Locke’s analysis of (...) personal identity, including Derek Parfit, have either completely distorted or not understood Locke’s actual view. Shoemaker’s defense, which uses a “package deal” definition that relies on internal relations of synchronic and diachronic unity and employs the Ramsey–Lewis account to define personal identity, leaves far less room for psychological continuity views than for my own view, which, independently of its radical implications, is that (a) consciousness makes personal identity, and (b) in consciousness alone personal identity consists—which happens to be also Locke’s actual view. Moreover, the ubiquitous Fregean conception of borders and the so-called “ambiguity of is” collapse in the light of what Hintikka has called the “Frege trichotomy.” The Ramsey–Lewis account, due to the problematic way Shoemaker tries to bind the variables, makes it impossible for the neo-Lockean ala Shoemaker to fulfill the uniqueness clause required by all such Lewis style definitions; such attempts avoid circularity only at the expense of mistaking isomorphism with identity. Contrary to what virtually all philosophers writing on the topic assume, fission does not destroy personal identity. A proper analysis of public versus perspectival identification, derived using actual case studies from neuropsychiatry, provides the scientific, mathematical and logical frameworks for a new theory of self-reference, wherein “consciousness,” “self-consciousness,” and the “I,” can be precisely defined in terms of the subject and the subject-in-itself. (shrink)

The view that living beings as well as plant-based medicaments possess causal properties that are caused by the causal properties of their constituents, without being reducible to the combination of the causal properties of these constituents goes back to ancient thinkers such as Alexander of Aphrodisias and Johannes Philoponus. In the early modern period, this view was not only criticized by natural philosophers taking a reductionist stance; it was also criticized by Neo-Platonic thinkers such as Jean Fernel. One of the (...) relatively few early modern natural philosophers who adopted an emergentist position was Jacob Schegk. The present article discusses whether Schegk’s analysis of the structure of plants and medicaments offers the theoretical resources required to answer Fernel’s critique of the tradition going back to Alexander. In particular, it examines whether Schegk’s account of synchronic upward causation and diachronic downward causation could offer solutions to two interrelated problems identified by Fernel: the question of whether a mere aggregates of material particles could form a composite that possesses substantiality, not only accidental unity; and the question of whether multitudes of material particles could bring forth simple forms, whose existence seems to be presupposed by powers that cannot be ascribed to the constituents. (shrink)

1. I know that Sydney Shoemaker thinks that persons and their identities are real things. The word ‘construct’ enters my critique only in my IV, in the wake of my questions—cognate with the ‘fair question’ Shoemaker mentions in his last paragraph—about the weirdly impersonal characterization of mental states into which Shoemaker is forced by his desire to see personal identity as a matter of synchronic and diachronic unity relations holding between mental states. I see the impersonality of these (...) characterizations as the price Shoemaker pays for his refusal to acknowledge that the relation of persons to states is conceptually prior to the unity relation between states. The causality that Shoemaker sees as involved in the ‘immanent causation’ by which substances persist is recognized much better in the same what? approach of S & SR, the what importing reference to a thing-kind with some specific way of behaving. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 480-484 [Access article in PDF] The Raymond Tallis Reader, edited by Michael Grant; xxx & 382 pp. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, $79.95. For some people, the name Raymond Tallis evokes theoretical controversy, oversimplified arguments, biting rhetoric, and bruised egos. For others, like the editor of The Raymond Tallis Reader, Michael Grant, he is a twenty-first-century man of Enlightenment who has the vision and the (...) courage to reveal the foibles of poststructuralist literary and cultural theory. It should come as no surprise that an overview of his work so far shows that both of these views are justified, though incomplete.This selection of Tallis's writings draws on most of his published works, aside from his clinical writings. Texts range from philosophical investigations into the nature of consciousness to close methodological critiques of poststructuralist (or what Tallis also calls post-Saussurean) theory. He has consistently argued that that such theories are fundamentally flawed by relativism, obscurantism [End Page 480] and anti-humanist concepts (such as the language-bound subject), and many of his views are shared by scholars such as Wendell V. Harris (Beyond Poststructuralism and Literary Meaning) and Paisley Livingston (Literary Knowledge). "It is poststructuralism," Tallis writes, "that has brought to a climax the anti-rationalist, anti-individualist and, indeed, anti-humanist strains of the Counter-Enlightenment thought" (p. 152). Tallis has done a valuable service in expressing the most common objections to such theorizing with clarity and vigor, and The Raymond Tallis Reader is useful in collecting his arguments in a single volume, with Grant's prefaces to each reading providing a clear view of the main points. The collection does, however, also bring into focus some of the problems involved in Tallis's critiques. He is an admirable synthesizer of thought, but does occasionally fall into the trap of unsupported generalizations he spends so much effort in trying to eradicate in the writings of others.The first of section of the book focuses on Tallis's conception of "the explicit animal," on rescuing the idea of consciousness and rational will from scientistic neurological theories. Such views may come as a surprise to those readers who have come to know Tallis as the champion of Enlightenment thinking. He argues, however, that even though neurology has been in many ways invaluable, it has not been able to explain the synchronic and diachronic unity of the self, which collects the various impulses experienced by a human being and which preserves a connection between them over time.The second section brings together writings concerning the nature of language. Again, the central concept is explicitness: Tallis emphasizes the way human language differs from animal signaling systems or natural signs by virtue of being composed of explicit signs—signs in the Saussurean sense of combining a signifier with a signified in an arbitrary fashion. What he absolutely denies, however, is that such a system of signs would be completely cut off from reality: "Because words do not mirror the world, it does not follow that discourse is cut off from the world" (p. 134). Those theorists who have taken the step from defining the relationship between the signifier and the signified as arbitrary to declaring the relationship between reality and the sign as a whole to be equally arbitrary, have moved from Saussurean theories to what Tallis calls post-Saussurean thinking. His main objection lies in the way such theories deny the existence and efficacy of individual, explicit and conscious human selves: "Our contemporary anti-Enlightenment figures see society, or one of its proxies such as history, socially mediated instincts or language, as being anterior to, and transcending, the individuals that make it up.... The post-Saussureans... saw selves vanish completely into nodes in sign systems or soluble fish in a boundless sea of discourse" (pp. 148-49). Tallis particularly opposes the Lacanian view of the language-bound psyche. When discussing Lacan's mirror stage he attacks not only Lacan's obscurantist style and undefined terminology, but also the self-contradictory and empirically unsupported theory of the child's entry into the Symbolic... (shrink)

Pandit Gopinath Kaviraj of Varanasi, India was a well-known interpreter of the Hindu Tantric traditions, who also practiced kundalini yoga according to his own understanding of four sequential paths. This study attempts to reconstruct the stages of Kaviraj's system of Tantric yoga by analyzing and integrating innumerable partial discussions scattered throughout his writings, in an effort to reveal the hidden structure of transformations. Primary research materials include collections of Kaviraj's essays on the Hindu Tantric traditions written in Bengali and Hindi, (...) and his philosophical notebook, Svasambedana . ;The concepts of formal and material ontologies, developed for linguistic theory by Ashok Kumar Gangadeen, are adopted in analyzing the category structure of Kaviraj's four paths. A synchronic methodology is used to present Kaviraj's interpretations of the Kashmir Saiva, S akta Tantric and Sahajiy a Vaisnava traditions in relation to known Tantric concepts and practices, found in the classical texts and secondary literature on these traditions. Categories that belong to the material ontologies of the various Tantric sects are examined for trans-sectarian thematic unity and for explicating the processual patterns that constitute the formal ontology which Kaviraj sees as underlying his own four paths. This formal ontology is based on the principle of increments of consciousness by which kundalini/ develops. ;Each of Kaviraj's Tantric paths incorporates orthodox Hindu forms of spiritual realization, but utilizes different means to them, as well as moves beyond them to uniquely Tantric forms of integral realization. Technical terms are discussed from the relevant traditional Hindu perspective and then from their revalorization in relation to uniquely Tantric forms of yogic realization. ;Kaviraj's systemic perspective on the architectonics of his four Tantric paths is also reconstructed and systematized from various schemata found in Svasambedana. Analyses are concerned both with structural replication and with understanding the series of paths as a single continuum based on laws of dialectical synthesis. Finally, there is a discussion of Kaviraj's supreme integral yoga , his own advanced practice for universal integral Self-realization, as taught by his guru and other adepts of the Jnanaganj asram of Tibet. An inquiry is made into its kala-structure, and it is suggested to be an innovative fifth path which utilizes the structure of the other four paths for the bestowal of universal grace. (shrink)

The following article deals with Alfred Schutz’s contribution to the theory of action and interaction by pointing out the possibly most compelling phenomenological starting position, i.e, the decomposition of the unity of an action. The article stresses that Schutz’s methodical interpretive sociology in thissense has always refused the assimilation of action-events to material occurrences. In contrast to empiricist theories of action which wrongly substantialize actionevents by treating them as material events, the phenomenological account gives reason to the assumption that (...) there must be a systematic gap between at least two subjective estimations of the meaning of action. In other words, the introspective analysis of the subjective constitution of meaning means to take the problem of double contingency seriously. Phenomenology, for its temporal and conceptual resolution, seems much more appropriate to reconstruct the complex structures of “presence,” “identity,” and “intersubjectivity” than empiricist accounts. The article proposes in the end the need for an alternative concept of presence:Instead of confusing levels of cooperation with allegedly “objective” synchronicity, phenomenology reminds us to elaborate an alternative concept of simultaneity, i.e, a simultaneity on the level of performativity and tacit knowledge. The latter could be the warrantor for co-reference. (shrink)

The following article deals with Alfred Schutz’s contribution to the theory of action and interaction by pointing out the possibly most compelling phenomenological starting position, i.e, the decomposition of the unity of an action. The article stresses that Schutz’s methodical interpretive sociology in thissense has always refused the assimilation of action-events to material occurrences. In contrast to empiricist theories of action which wrongly substantialize actionevents by treating them as material events, the phenomenological account gives reason to the assumption that (...) there must be a systematic gap between at least two subjective estimations of the meaning of action. In other words, the introspective analysis of the subjective constitution of meaning means to take the problem of double contingency seriously. Phenomenology, for its temporal and conceptual resolution, seems much more appropriate to reconstruct the complex structures of “presence,” “identity,” and “intersubjectivity” than empiricist accounts. The article proposes in the end the need for an alternative concept of presence:Instead of confusing levels of cooperation with allegedly “objective” synchronicity, phenomenology reminds us to elaborate an alternative concept of simultaneity, i.e, a simultaneity on the level of performativity and tacit knowledge. The latter could be the warrantor for co-reference. (shrink)

1. I know that Sydney Shoemaker thinks that persons and their identities are real things. The word ‘construct’ enters my critique only in my IV, in the wake of my questions—cognate with the ‘fair question’ Shoemaker mentions in his last paragraph—about the weirdly impersonal characterization of mental states into which Shoemaker is forced by his desire to see personal identity as a matter of synchronic and diachronic unity relations holding between mental states. I see the impersonality of these (...) characterizations as the price Shoemaker pays for his refusal to acknowledge that the relation of persons to states is conceptually prior to the unity relation between states. The causality that Shoemaker sees as involved in the ‘immanent causation’ by which substances persist is recognized much better in the same what? approach of S & SR, the what importing reference to a thing-kind with some specific way of behaving. (shrink)

My focus is on pragmatic arguments for various ‘rationality constraints’ on a decision maker’s state of mind: on his beliefs or preferences. An argument of this kind purports to show that a violator of a given constraint can be exposed to a decision problem in which he will act to his guaranteed disadvantage. Dramatically put, he can be exploited by a clever bookie who doesn’t know more than the agent himself. Examples of pragmatic arguments of this kind are synchronic (...) Dutch Books, for the standard probability axioms, diachronic Dutch Books, for the more controversial principles of reflection and conditionalization, and Money Pumps, for the transitivity requirement on preferences. The proposed exploitation set-ups share a common feature. If the violator of a given constraint is logically and mathematically competent, he can be exploited only if he is disunified in his decision-making. Exploitation is possible only if the agent makes decisions on various issues he confronts one by one, rather than on all of them together. Unity in decision making may be quite costly and is often inconvenient, especially when it concerns opportunity packages that are spread over time. On my view, therefore, pragmatic arguments should be seen as delivering conditional conclusions: “If you want to afford being disunified as a decision maker, then you’d better satisfy these constraints.” The arguments of this kind fail to establish the inherent rationality of the constraints under consideration. Levi’s view of the status of pragmatic arguments is opposed to mine. According to him, only synchronic pragmatic arguments are valid. The diachronic ones, he argues, lack any validity at all. This line of reasoning is questioned in my paper. (shrink)

L’obiettivo che questo lavoro si propone è quello di rintracciare nella prosa appassionante e appassionata di Michele Federico Sciacca tracce che rimandano alla speculazione filosofica di Bernardo di Chiaravalle. Divisi nel tempo, ma compartecipi di un modo comune di intendere la categoria mistica, i due filosofi appaiono uniti nella condivisione di una stessa sensibilità. È una filiazione che accoglie più interrogativi che certezze, primo tra tutti, il perché Sciacca non citi mai direttamente Bernardo, cosa che invece ripetutamente fa con Agostino, (...) Tommaso, Bonaventura, e altre colonne portanti del pensiero. Sono molte in tal senso le ipotesi che vengono prese in considerazione, tra queste l’idea che per il filosofo di Giarre, Bernardo fosse non una semplice fonte, ma una lente attraverso la quale guardare meglio e più lontano. Un legame taciuto dunque, tenuto a riparo dalla vista dei più, quello che Sciacca ha lasciato crescere tra le pieghe dei suoi scritti. I due filosofi sfidano il tempo e si trovano, o ri-trovano dentro una sincronicità filosofica che li vede messaggeri dagli stessi valori. In questo forse “immaginario” dialogo tra un pensatore che ha saputo sporgere lo sguardo oltre il suo secolo, e uno che non ha mai perso occasione per riflettere e riflettersi attraverso il passato, è possibile ritrovare e godere della tensione emotiva dell’essere umano che pretende di ricongiungersi con l’Assoluto. The aim of this paper is to find in Michele Federico Sciacca’s fascinating and passionate prose traces that refer to Bernard of Clairvaux philosophical speculation. Distant in time, but sharing a common way of understanding the mystical category, the two philosophers appear united in having the same sensitivity. It is a filiation that welcomes more questions than certainties. First of all, why Sciacca never quotes Bernard directly, something that instead he repeatedly does with Augustine, Thomas, Bonaventure, and many others. In this sense, many hypotheses are taken into consideration, including the idea that for the philosopher of Giarre, Bernard was not just a source, but a lens through which to look better and further awy. A silent relationship, therefore, kept away from the sight of most, that which Sciacca has allowed to grow between the folds of his writings. The two philosophers defy time and find themselves, or refind within a philosophical synchronicity that sees them as messengers of the same values. In this perhaps “imaginary” dialogue between a thinker who has been able to look beyond his century, and one who has never missed an opportunity to reflect and reflect through the past, we can find and enjoy the emotional tension of the human being who claims to reconnect with the Absolute. (shrink)

Created during a certain time period of the world’s art development, fictional history embodies not only a set of individual authorial creative acts, but it is the only "artistic-historical model" conditioned by a number of objective aesthetic and non-aesthetic factors. As such, fictional history represents an integral part of the national worldview. Its exploration requires a combinatorial unity of methods. The article proposes a set of modern methodological principles for studying the processes of artistic modelling of history in the (...) aesthetic consciousness on the synchronous level and their representation in literary works. The methods of academic literary criticism are combined with the advanced methods of modern interdisciplinary humanities that are based on postmodern philosophy. Thus, in the chosen combination of the scientific approaches, the heuristic potential of the structural-semiotic and structural-typological methods, mythopoetics and myth-restoration, imagology, hermeneutics, and receptive aesthetics, correlates with the methods of systematic and descriptive analysis. Such diverse theoretical combinations, the existence of a kind of "methodological sinusoid" within the study, do not contradict but complement each other. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the nature of the “I” (or “self”) and whether it is presupposed by the very existence of conscious experiences (as that which “has” them) or whether it is, instead, in some way constituted by them. I argue for the former view and try to show that the very nature of experience implies a non-constituted synchronic and diachronic transcendence of the experiencing “I” with regard to its experiences, an “I” which defies any objective characterization. Finally (...) I suggest that the self, though irreducible to inter-experiential relations, is not a “separately existing entity”, but should be conceived of as a dimension , namely the dimension of first-personal manifestation of the experiences. (shrink)

This book's dedication reads “to the man I married.” The phrase is a nice incitement to reflect on the book's topic: is the man she married identical with her present husband? Does the dedication imply a subtle reproach? a note of resignation before the inevitable fact that the man I married cannot be the one I'm married to? By the end of her book, Radden concludes that we can't get away from “normative demands of individuality” that remain anchored to common (...) sense. The challenge she takes up is to articulate the intuitions evoked by a wide spectrum of questions about unity and disunity of the person, both diachronic and synchronic. The latter include the dramatic case of Multiple Personality Syndrome or MPD, but also milder cases of dissociation. Radical amnesia, personality changes including those brought about by religious conversions, and disintegration of personality consequent on senile dementia suggest disunity through time. In all cases, Radden opts for a Rawlsian reflective equilibrium, though she rightly notes that “drawing philosophical conclusions from empirical descriptions, on the one hand, and contributing philosophical distinctions and theories to an understanding of those facts, on the other, [are] fraught with methodological dangers.”. (shrink)

Issues of personal identity are relevant in biomedical ethics, but in what way? The mainclaim that structures Quante’s book is that the debates about bioethics and medical ethicshave not been sufficiently clear about the different meanings of ‘personal identity’. Hedistinguishes four questions: 1)conditions of personhood (what properties and capacitiesmust a thing have to be a person: consciousness? self-consciousness? consciousness of timeand one’s persistence in time? rationality? capacity to recognize others and communicate with them?), 2) the question of unity or (...) synchronous identity(when can we speak aboutprecisely one person?), 3) the question of persistence or diachronous identity(when is a personat one point in time identical with a person at another point in time?) and 4) the question of personality or biographical identity(the existential conception of identity in the sense that people have identity crises). One can add to these a related question which Quanteaddresses while discussing the other questions: 5)what are we? (are we persons essentially,or are we rather human beings? is the sortal which defines our persistence conditions‘person’ or rather ‘human organism’ or maybe something else?). (shrink)

Francesco Botturi, professor of the philosophy of history at The Catholic University of Milan, is the author of several essays on Vico; in this book he takes a larger look at Vico's entire work through the guiding thread of the concept of wisdom. The idea of wisdom is the "foundation of Vico's practical philosophy", a kind of wisdom whose locus is between poetic wisdom and reflected wisdom, between imagination and concept. From a genetic point of view, poetic wisdom upholds a (...) primacy, but philosophical wisdom retains the structural primacy. According to Botturi, Vico, who wants to maintain the unity of these forms of wisdom, tries to keep them together by placing them in temporal succession. Both forms of wisdom are "complementary and irreducible paths of Vico's metaphysical transcendentality", and both constitute wisdom synchronically. Botturi articulates Vico's thought in four chapters on the concept of wisdom: chapter 1, "The Ideal of Wisdom and Epistemology of the True"; chapter 2, "Poietic Wisdom"; chapter 3, "Wisdom as Justice"; and chapter 4, "Communication of Wisdom.". (shrink)

We present in this paper a novel ontological theory of events whose central tenet is the Aristotelian distinction between the object that changes and the actual subject of change, which is what we call an individual quality. While in the Kimian tradition events are individuated by a triple ⟨ o, P, t ⟩, where o is an object, P a property, and t an interval of time, for us the simplest events are qualitative changes, individuated by a triple ⟨ o, (...) q, t ⟩, where q is an individual quality inhering in o or in one of its parts. Detaching the individuation of events from the property they exemplify results in a fine-grained theory that keeps metaphysics and semantics clearly separate, and lies between the multiplicative and the unitarian approaches. We discuss then the way language refers to events, observing that, in most cases, event descriptions refer to complex, cognitively relevant clusters of co-occurring qualitative changes, which exhibit a synchronic structure depending on the way they are described. Contra Bennett, who famously argued that the semantics of event names ultimately depends on “local context and unprincipled intuitions”, we show how the lexicon provides systematic principles for individuating such clusters and classifying them into kinds. Finally, we address some open challenges in the semantics of locative and manner modifiers. (shrink)