This collection highlights such issues as how the nature of time is relevant to the question of whether God is temporal and how God's other attributes are ...

J. N. (Jitendra Nath) Mohanty (1928–2023). -/- Professor J. N. Mohanty has characterized his life and philosophy as being both “inside” and “outside” East and West, i.e., inside and outside traditions of India and those of the West, living in both India and United States: geographically, culturally, and philosophically; while also traveling the world: Melbourne to Moscow. Most of his academic time was spent teaching at the University of Oklahoma, The New School Graduate Faculty, and finally Temple University. Yet his (...) preeminent work in Husserlian phenomenology developed alongside his eminent work in Indian philosophy: describing his interests as “a fusion of disparate horizons.” -/- J. N. Mohanty was born September 26, 1928, in Cuttack (Odisha, East India). After graduating from high school, he went on to study both Indian and Western philosophy in Calcutta, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees. There he read Whitehead and Kant’s First Critique; although he wanted to include mathematics in his curriculum, he was led instead to include Indian philosophy and Sanskrit. On the shelves of his teacher, Ras Vihar Das, he came upon a copy of the English translation (Ideas I, 1931) of Edmund Husserl’s classic Ideen I (1913), which presented Husserl’s ground-breaking conception of phenomenology. In 1952–1954 he left India for the first time, reaching Göttingen to study mathematics and philosophy, which earned him a doctorate in mathematics and “philosophy of mathematical sciences” (in his own words). In Göttingen, Mohanty found the powerful mathematical world that Husserl himself had earlier interacted with, where several Husserl students had formed the Göttingen school of phenomenology. During these years Mohanty studied primarily mathematics, alongside Kant and also Vedic Sanskrit. From his friend Günter Patzig, interpreter of Aristotle and Frege, Mohanty was drawn to Frege in relation to mathematical logic. He attended lectures of Heidegger, intrigued by his ontological thinking. Yet, despite the Husserlian legacy, Mohanty was completely self-taught in his studies of Husserl (as he has reported). With a doctorate in mathematics, and ideas from Kant and Frege in his philosophical background, Mohanty set about crafting his own conception of philosophy grounded in phenomenology, drawing on Husserl’s extensive work, critically sifting through Husserl’s texts and their emerging concepts of intentionality, meaning, subject, intersubjectivity, and world. In between he wrote his first book-length study: on phenomenological insights in Nicolai Hartmann and A. N. Whitehead (1958). -/- Over many decades Mohanty formulated and argued, in analytical detail, for a conception of phenomenology and its place in philosophy, later presented in a clear and concise book titled Transcendental Phenomenology: An Analytic Account (1989). Over these very decades the same scholar explored classical and recent Indian philosophy, thinking through kindred ideas of consciousness, self, and knowledge drawn from the Indian philosophical contexts. While writing on Nyāya theory of truth, he also pondered whether the world and finite individual are illusory or real, and whether Marx, Arendt, Gandhi (whom he heard speak in Calcutta), or Vinoba Bhave (with whom he marched across India for the land-grant movement) could best navigate post-Independent India’s social and svarāj or self-rule reforms. The two Mohantys, thinking through a vision of self and world, turned out to be “non-different” or “non-dual” as they each practiced critical phenomenology from both inside and outside the respective philosophical and cultural traditions. Numerous students, fellows, and colleagues or collaborators have benefited immensely from this infusion and unified approach to diversity in philosophical thought. In the 2000s, moving into retirement, Mohanty wrote two long books devoted to his understanding of Husserl and phenomenology and the calling of philosophy itself. This two-volume study shows Mohanty himself thinking through Husserl, critically, in The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: A Historical Introduction (2008), and Edmund Husserl’s Freiburg Years: 1916–1938. As Mohanty worked on Husserl, he carefully indicated where he agreed and where he rejected or changed ideas, all part of his practice in phenomenology of “description and interpretation.” It was the same pattern he used in addressing the thought of Husserl vis-à-vis Kant or Frege or even Quine. -/- As Mohanty developed his understanding of phenomenology over the years, he wrote books on theory of meaning and the concept of intentionality, developing a model of ideal meaning and its foundation in intentionality, drawing on Husserl’s results. He followed these with the book Husserl and Frege (1982), linking the thought of those foundational figures for the “continental” and “analytic” traditions, respectively, in twentieth-century Western philosophy. Over his long career Mohanty addressed both traditions in his clear and accessible writing style. While developing his views on phenomenology, Mohanty regularly looked to “Husserl and his others,” evaluating views in Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and then Derrida and others in the wake of Husserl. With his background in Kant, Mohanty also looked toward Heidegger and Hegel in relation to Husserl’s later work in the Crisis (1935–38). Similarly, he looked to contemporary analytic philosophers, adjudicating his own, oft-wise Husserlian views in relation to Frege, Nagel, and others. Amid his active scholarly career, Mohanty co-founded the journal Husserl Studies, and was editorial advisor to Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, Philosophy East & West, Journal of Indian Philosophy, Sophia, among others. -/- Yet all this while Mohanty was also thinking and writing about Indian philosophy and its relation to phenomenology. In his own retrospective, Indian philosophy is “the permanent background” of his Husserlian thinking, while Kant is the recurrent Western background of his Husserlian phenomenology. Mohanty’s form of “transcendental phenomenology” evolved, in his own perspective, against the background of his studies of Navya-Nyāya on logic and Vedānta on consciousness, in Indian philosophy, and against the background of Kant’s First Critique on the transcendental, in Western philosophy. Accordingly, Mohanty’s study of logical form and of the intentionality of consciousness seeks a fusion of East and West in the conception of transcendental phenomenology. (Cf. Mohanty’s apt response to critics in The Empirical and the Transcendental (2000).) Even in the context of North American Husserl scholarship, Mohanty has exercised an earnest fusion of East and West. For the so-called East Coast and West Coast interpretations of Husserl’s crucial notion of noema both find a sympathetic spirit in J. N. Mohanty’s careful and nuanced interpretation of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. With Mohanty the two faces of the noema are the logical (Fregean) and the phenomenal (Kantian), and these views of intentional structure join in consciousness—in a way resonant with Indian thought. -/- - David Woodruff Smith (UC Irvine) and Purushottama Bilimoria (SFSU, San Francisco; University of Melbourne) -/- For photo of Prof Mohanty visit APA online memorial_minutes2023 Courtesy of APA Memorial Minutes (& Proceedings) 2023 . (shrink)

Cognitive neuroscience has inspired a number of methodological advances to extract the highest signal-to-noise ratio from neuroimaging data. Popular techniques used to summarize behavioral data include sum-scores and item response theory. While these techniques can be useful when applied appropriately, item dimensionality and the quality of information are often left unexplored allowing poor performing items to be included in an itemset. The purpose of this study is to highlight how the application of two-stage approaches introduces parameter bias, differential item functioning (...) can manifest in cognitive neuroscience data and how techniques such as the multiple indicator multiple cause model can identify and remove items with DIF and model these data with greater sensitivity for brain–behavior relationships. This was performed using a simulation and an empirical study. The simulation explores parameter bias across two separate techniques used to summarize behavioral data: sum-scores and IRT and formative relationships with those estimated from a MIMIC model. In an empirical study participants performed an emotional identification task while concurrent electroencephalogram data were acquired across 384 trials. Participants were asked to identify the emotion presented by a static face of a child across four categories: happy, neutral, discomfort, and distress. The primary outcomes of interest were P200 event-related potential amplitude and latency within each emotion category. Instances of DIF related to correct emotion identification were explored with respect to an individual’s neurophysiology; specifically an item’s difficulty and discrimination were explored with respect to an individual’s average P200 amplitude and latency using a MIMIC model. The MIMIC model’s sensitivity was then compared to popular two-stage approaches for cognitive performance summary scores, including sum-scores and an IRT model framework and then regressing these onto the ERP characteristics. Here sensitivity refers to the magnitude and significance of coefficients relating the brain to these behavioral outcomes. The first set of analyses displayed instances of DIF within all four emotions which were then removed from all further models. The next set of analyses compared the two-stage approaches with the MIMIC model. Only the MIMIC model identified any significant brain–behavior relationships. Taken together, these results indicate that item performance can be gleaned from subject-specific biomarkers, and that techniques such as the MIMIC model may be useful tools to derive complex item-level brain–behavior relationships. (shrink)

O texto se propõe a examinar o procedimento desconstrutivo levado a cabo por Jacques Derrida com relação a aspectos da filosofia da linguagem em Edmund Husserl, através especialmente da investigação e crítica da natureza da significação.

Starting with an account of some of the main elements that are constitutive of the contemporary approach to the phenomena of religion, whereby special attention shall be given to the phenomenological approaches to the phenomenon of Religion as such, this paper shall, in the following moment, proceed with a reflexive analysis of some of the crucial analytic aspects of religion on the basis of a philosophical study of one of its most universal manifestations, i.e., the phenomenon of Prayer. We shall (...) analyze different forms of prayer, which have a span that goes from its manifestation in the Prayer of Silence to its manifestation in the Cultic expression of Prayer. Following this analysis, attention will especially be given to the need for an identification of some of the dangers and menacesattached to an ideological or fundamentalist approach to Religion. Finally, what we intend to show is the creative power of the tension that is given between what Jean-Luc Marion calls the Idolatric and the Iconic, since in this very tension we can explore the true dimension of what Religion is both in its essence and in its manifestations. (shrink)

Objective of this text is to present some descriptive arguments in regard to the assertion that our affectivity constitutes is a socially structured reality. We start with the hypothesis according to which the affective life of the human being reaches its most specific goal through a process of constitution of desire in which my preferences are always defined according to the preferences of others. In order to demonstrate the conditioned character of our preferences, we shall consider ideas derived both from (...) the phenomenology of Michel Henry and Emmanuel Housset, but also from the mimetic anthropology developed by Paul Dumouchel in line with the anthropological thought of René Girard. We show that not only our own, but also the preferences of others are socially conditioned. The language of our affections belongs to the order of conditioned propositional acts, that is, of those who are not carriers of their own conditions of truth. Our emotional life is like an act of language, whose realization presupposes conditions that are no longer in the hands of the subject of the discourse. The text ends with a brief consideration of the ontological sense of the virtue of gratitude. (shrink)

This dissertation provides an analysis of both the text and the context of the philosophy of love developed by Judah Abravanel, also known as Leone Ebreo . As a member of one of the most prestigious Jewish families of the Renaissance, Leone Ebreo was born and raised in Portugal, found temporary refuge in Spain and, after the exodus of 1492, lived most of his life in Renaissance Italy as a man-in-exile. His Dialoghi d'amore, which were first published in Rome in (...) 1535, are a conversation of and about love between a man and a woman, i.e., Filone and Sofia . We defend that the work was intended as a parable or diagram about the very nature of Philo-Sophy, and, at the same time, as a profound elaboration of the cosmic or transcendental nature of love itself. The Dialoghi d'amore are, thus, both a dramatic representation of a particular philosophy of love and a demonstration of how philosophy as such constitutes a form of love. ;A detailed analysis of Leone Ebreo's thought, both a major example of Renaissance Philosophy and a model of interpretation, will here be the way toward progress in our own philosophical treatment of love and of the ontological condition it manifests. Since they constitute a paradigmatic example of philosophical eclecticism in the Renaissance, the Dialoghi d'amore will be read as the representative encyclopedia about the culture of sixteenth-century Europe that they in fact are. ;Through a con-textual reading of Leone Ebreo's work we try to illustrate both the philosophical importance and the existential relevance of a text that, located as it is at a crucial moment of transition between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age, is clearly centered upon the Idea of Love and, as such, came to play a significant role in the development of European thought and letters. (shrink)

This is a study of the epistemology of indexical reference, Or its foundation in the intentionality of the speaker's awareness of the referent. Where the referent is the object of the speaker's acquaintance on that occasion, The sense expressed is the generic content of that awareness. This, Indexical sense determines indexical reference, But indexical sense works by appeal to the context of the speaker's awareness of the referent. It is discussed how, By virtue of indexical sense, Indexical reference is rigid, (...) I.E. Picks out the same referent in any possible world. (shrink)

Neste artigo tenta-se uma aproximação do pensamento de E. Levinas em sua busca de aberturas no discurso-do-serpara a emergência ética do sentido, de um Sentido desconstrutor dos sentidos constituídos, Sentido dos sentidos e do não-sentido. Trata-se, assim, de uma tentativa de superação do esquecimento mais tipico do centralismo da nossa tradição de pensamento: o da Intriga, que é também tensão, do Outro no seio do Mesmo - ou seja, da Transcendência na e à ordem do mundo. Mais do que o (...) esquecimento do Ser, é o esquecimento do Outro que está na origem da presente crftica à filosofia estabelecida - "visibilidade do Mesmo para o Mesmo". Assim, entendendo-se a si mesmo como pequeno ensaio de abertura a uma "ontologia do Exilio" - "ontologia relational", capaz de renunciar ao primado dos esquemas de uma constituição transcendental do sentido e ao privitégio tradicionalmente concedido à manifestação e à presença -, o presente artigo fazuma abordagem do tratamento dado por E. Levinas (prestando em certo momento também atenção ao caminho colateral de M. Heidegger) a três fundamentais dimensões do nosso ser-no-mundo - a interrogação, a linguagem e o corpo - em ordem a uma redefinição do Sentido e da Inteligibilidade da Transcendência, ou seja, à produção de um discurso aberto à vivacidade do enigma que é a presença do Outro no seio do Mesmo. O resultado é como que uma prova em ordem a uma (futura) "filosofia da encarnação", de um pensamento da subjectividade humana em termos de "maternidade e vulnerabilidade", de um ser-aberto à intriga da relação radical no ser. /// Cet article essaye une approximation de la pensée de E. Levinas en cherchant des ouvertures dans le discours-de-l'être à l'émergence éthique du sens, sens déconstructeur des sens constitués, Sens du sens et du non-sens. Il s'agit, done, d'essayer une supération de l'oubliement le plus typique du centralisme de notre tradition de la pensée: l'oubliement de l'Intrigue, qui est aussi tension, de l'Autre dans le Mdme, e'est-à-dire de la Transcendance dans et à l'ordre du monde. Plus qu'oubliement de l'être, e'est l'oubliement de l'Autre qui est à l'origine de la présente critique à la philosophie établie - "visibilité du Même pour le Même". Se comprenant soi-même comme un petit essai d'ouverture à une "ontologie de l'Exile" - "ontologie relationelle", capable de renoncer au primat des schèmes d'une constitution transcendantale du sens et au privilège traditionellement donné par E. Levinas à la manifestation et à la présence, cet article considère le traitement donné par E. Levinas (avec quelque attention au chemin colllatéral de M. Heidegger) à trois dimensions fondamentales de notre être-dans-le-monde - l'interrogation, le langage et le corps - pour une redéfinition du Sens et de l'Intelligibilité de la Transcendance, c'est-à-dire pour un discours ouvert à l'énigme qui est la présence de l'Autre dans le Même. Le résultat est une façon d'épreuve pour une (future) philosophie de l'incarnation, d'une pensée de la subjectivité humaine par rapport à la maternité et vulnérabilité, d'un "être-ouvert à l'intrigue de la relation radical dans l'être. /// In this article an attempt is made to approach Levinas's thought from the perspective of his search for openings that can be discovered in ontological discourse and that point towards the emergence of meaning as ethical, of Meaning which deconstructs constituted meanings, the Meaning of meanings and of non-meaning. It involves an overcoming of the kind of forgetting which is central to our philosophical tradition: that of Intrigue, the tension of the Other in the heart of the Same, i. e., of Transcendence in the order of the world. More than the forgetting of Being, it is the forgetting of the Other that is at the source of the criticism of established philosophy - "the visibility of the Same for itself". In proposing an "ontology of exile", a "relational ontology", capable of renouncing the primacy of transcendental constitution of meaning and the privilege given to manifestation and presence, this article considers Levinas's treatment (with some attention given to Heidegger in this regard) of three fundamental dimensions of our being-in-the-world: interrogation, language, and the body. A redefinition of Meaning and of Inteligibility of Transcendence is thereby sought by being attentive to the production of a discourse which is sensitive to the enigma of the Other in the Same. The possibility of a (future) philosophy of incarnation, where human subjectivity can be thought of in terms of maternity and vulnerability to the degree that it is open to the intrigue in the heart of being, is being tested here. (shrink)

: In this paper I argue that Velmens’ reflexive model of perceptual consciousness is useful for understanding the first-person perspective and sentience in animals. I then offer a defense of the proposal that ray-finned bony fish have a first-person perspective and sentience. This defense has two prongs. The first prong is presence of a substantial body of evidence that the neuroanatomy of the fish brain exhibits basic organizational principles associated with consciousness in mammals. These principles include a relationship between a (...) second-order sensory relay, the preglomerular complex, and the fish pallium which bears a resemblance to the relationship between the mammalian thalamus and the neocortex, the existence of feedback/feedforward and reentrant circuitry in the pallium, and structural and functional differences among divisions of the fish pallium. The second prong is the existence of behaviors in fish that exhibit significant flexibility in the presence of environmental change and require relational learning among stimuli distributed in space, over time, or both. I conclude that, although they are instantiated differently, a first-person perspective and sentience are present in fish. Resumo: Neste artigo, argumento que o modelo reflexivo de consciência perceptiva de Velmans é útil para se entender a perspectiva de primeira pessoa e a sentiência em animais. Em seguida, ofereço uma defesa da proposta de que os peixes ósseos com nadadeiras raiadas tenham sentiência e perspectiva de primeira pessoa. Esta defesa tem dois momentos. O primeiro ponto é a presença de um corpo substancial de evidências de que a neuroanatomia do cérebro de peixes exibe os princípios organizacionais básicos associados à consciência em mamíferos. Esses princípios incluem a interação entre um relê sensorial de segunda ordem e o pálio, os quais apresentam, respectivamente, estreita semelhança com o tálamo e o neocórtex dos mamíferos; a existência de circuitos de retroalimentação e reentrada, assim como diferenças estruturais e funcionais entre as divisões do pálio. A segunda questão é a existência de comportamentos de peixes que exibem flexibilidade significativa na presença de mudanças ambientais e requerem aprendizado relacional entre estímulos distribuídos no espaço, ao longo do tempo, ou ambos. Concluo que, embora sejam instanciados de maneira diferente dos mamíferos, uma perspectiva de primeira pessoa e sentiência estão presentes nos peixes. (shrink)

: In prior essays I have sketched a “modal model” of consciousness. That model “factors” out several distinct forms of awareness in the phenomenological structure of a typical act of consciousness. Here we consider implications of the model à propos of contemporary theories of consciousness. In particular, we distinguish phenomenality from other features of awareness in a conscious experience: “what it is like” to have an experience involves several different factors. Further, we should see these factors as typical of consciousness, (...) rather than essential features, allowing that some elements of awareness may be absent while others are present in certain less typical cases. Keywords : consciousness; Higher-order Theories of Consciousness; Self-representational Theories of Consciousness; Phenomenality; Phenomenological Theories of Consciousness I diversi elementi della coscienza Riassunto : In lavori precedenti ho cercato di proporre un “modello modale” della coscienza. Questo modello “considera” forme differenti e distinte di consapevolezza che sono presenti nella struttura fenomenologica di un atto tipico di coscienza. Qui intendo considerare alcune implicazioni di questo modello in relazione ad alcune teorie contemporanee della coscienza. In particolare, distingueremo la fenomenicità da altre proprietà della consapevolezza all’interno di un’esperienza cosciente: il “che cosa si prova” a essere titolari un’esperienza implica elementi differenti e distinti. Inoltre, dovremo considerare questi elementi come caratteri tipici della coscienza e non come proprietà essenziali, riconoscendo che alcuni elementi della consapevolezza possono essere assenti, mentre altri sono presenti in alcuni casi meno frequenti. Parole chiave : coscienza; Teorie della coscienza di alto livello; Teorie auto-rappresentazionali della coscienza; Fenomenicità; Teorie fenomenologiche della coscienza. (shrink)