This cutting-edge handbook brings together an international roster of scholars to examine many facets of comics and graphic novels. Contributor essays provide authoritative, up-to-date overviewsof the major topics and questions within comic studies, offering readers a truly global approach to understanding the field.

[Frank Ebersole is a philosopher] "whose contribution to philosophy... is the greatest of anyone this [the 20th] century, especially in the areas of philosophy of language, theory of knowledge, and perception." from Wittgenstein, Empiricism, and Language by John W. Cook (Oxford University Press, 1999). Language and Perception has nine chapters: seven that address philosophical problems about language and two (chapters 2 and 9) that are more metaphilosophical The metaphilosophical chapters discuss philosophical pictures and some of Frank Ebersole's basic (...) ideas about philosophy. The other seven essays let you participate in his unique struggles to come to terms with such questions as: What is the meaning of a word? Isn't Wittgenstein's idea that things called by the same name have family resemblances significantly flawed? Does language determine what we perceive? Does a thing's being red cause it to look red (the causal theory of perception)? Must the action of speaking be analyzed into simpler actions such as making sounds? Can a bodily movement be part of an action? Is fatalism implied by "what one might say" about the future? Are "natural-kind" words like proper names? are they rigid designators? This and its companion volume, Meaning and Saying, are not just other philosophy books about the philosophy of language. In both books Ebersole, by carefully using examples, convincingly shows that the problems are the products of philosophical pictures. The examples also make the pictures less compelling. How the Second Edition Differs from the First Edition This edition differs from the first edition (University Press of America, 1979) in several ways. Pictures: Material that was formerly part of a postscript to chapter 1 has been revised and is now its own chapter, chapter 2, "Pictures and Wittgenstein on Pictures." As a result the following chapters were renumbered. Essay removed: Chapter 7 in the first edition, "Truth and Fate: Future Actions," has been removed. Essay added: A new essay, entitled "Proper Names and Other Names," has been added to the volume. It's a revised version of an essay originally published in Philosophical Investigations, Oct., 1982, with the title "Stalking the Rigid Designator." Postscript: Material that was formerly part of the preface is now revised and placed as chapter 9 at the end, entitled "Postscript." Improved text: Throughout the book, Ebersole has made corrections, stylistic improvements, and changed the wording to remove ambiguities. Preface The book is concerned with questions about the "relations of language to reality": Does physical reality predetermine the form of our language? Does it determine the kinds of words in our simple, basic vocabulary? Does our language in basic ways determine the way we perceive reality? Does our language embody the outlines of a certain theory of perception? And does it incorporate a certain view of human actions and of the future? These questions are expressions of the problems in the philosophy of language that people inevitably get themselves into while dealing with other philosophical problems. And these are problems in the philosophy of language that have direct consequences for the way one deals with problems in other branches of philosophy. At. (shrink)

A geometric model is proposed in which the interaction types, namely the strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational interactions, are stratified in a five-dimensional manifold. The strong and electromagnetic interactions are confined to disjoint four-spaces and the weak and gravitational interactions are proposed unified in a five-manifold bounded topologically by the strong and electromagnetic four-spaces. Further, some advantages of the five-dimensional approach to current-current interactions are discussed, and a five-dimensional approach to PCAC is presented. The model is presented in hopes of (...) reconciling some contradictory lines of theoretical thought, and new fields for investigation are stressed. (shrink)

A brief review is given of the continuous spontaneous localization (CSL) model, in which a classical field interacts with quantized particles to cause dynamical wavefunction collapse. One of the model's predictions is that particles “spontaneously” gain energy at a slow rate. When applied to the excitation of a nucleon in a Ge nucleus, it is shown how a limit on the relative collapse rates of neutron and proton can be obtained, and a rough estimate is made from data. When applied (...) to the spontaneous excitation of 1s electrons in Ge, by a more detailed analysis of more accurate data than given previously, an updated limit is obtained on the relative collapse rates of the electron and proton, suggesting that the coupling of the field to electrons and nucleons is mass proportional. (shrink)

An attempt to discover what can be learned from the recent work of Frank Tipler on the Omega Point theory requires an analysis of his framework of understanding from scientific, philosophical, and theological perspectives. A critique of his crucial ideas, and of the salient points raised by some of his critics, can then be undertaken within the compass of his strengths. A critique of the critiques of Tipler's work allows one to evaluate the extent and limitations of his contributions.

The English critic Bentley first proposed emending the transmitted text of Troades 1109 from teget, the reading of all manuscripts, to leget. Bentley's suggestion subsequently gained wide acceptance and was printed in many later editions of the tragedies, including those of Leo , Richter , and Moricca . More recent critics have favoured retention of the manuscript reading. Carlsson, for example, underlines the distinctive alliterative quality which the reading teget imparts to the line; and the latest commentator on the Troades (...) has produced a spirited defence of the transmitted text: Andromache has not yet realized the condition of the corpse, and is thinking, not of gathering up fragmented limbs, but merely of the formal requirements of burial. What Carlsson defends on grounds of alliteration should be retained on grounds of sense: teget tumuloque tradet is a doublet of which the second part makes clear the religious meaning of the first, more general, word. (shrink)

Based on concepts of self-organization, we interpret apparent motion as the result of a so-called non-equilibrium phase transition of the perceptual system with the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) acting as a control parameter. Accordingly, we predict a significantly increasing variance of the quality index of apparent motion close to critical SOAs. [Shepard].

Drawing on a landscape analysis of existing data-sharing initiatives, in-depth interviews with expert stakeholders, and public deliberations with community advisory panels across the U.S., we describe features of the evolving medical information commons. We identify participant-centricity and trustworthiness as the most important features of an MIC and discuss the implications for those seeking to create a sustainable, useful, and widely available collection of linked resources for research and other purposes.

Recent studies uncovered critical roles of the adhesion protein E‐cadherin in health and disease. Global inactivation of Cdh1, the gene encoding E‐cadherin in mice, results in early embryonic lethality due to an inability to form the trophectodermal epithelium. To unravel E‐cadherin's functions beyond development, numerous mouse lines with tissue‐specific disruption of Cdh1 have been generated. The consequences of E‐cadherin loss showed great variability depending on the tissue in question, ranging from nearly undetectable changes to a complete loss of tissue structure (...) and function. This review focuses on these studies and discusses how they provided important insights into E‐cadherin's role in cell adhesion, proliferation and differentiation, and its consequences for biological processes as epithelial‐to‐mesenchymal transition, vascularization, and carcinogenesis. Lastly, we present some perspectives and possible approaches for future research. (shrink)

A critical discussion is provided of three central assumptions underlying Nunez's approach to modeling cortical activity. A plea is made for neurophysiologically realistic models involving nonlinearities, multiple time scales, and stochasticity.

We give a historical overview of the development of almost 50 years of empirical research on the affordances in the past and in the present. Defined by James Jerome Gibson in the early development of the Ecological Approach to Perception and Action as the prime of perception and action, affordances have become a rich topic of investigation in the fields of human movement science and experimental psychology. The methodological origins of the empirical research performed on affordances can be traced back (...) to the mid 1980’s and the works of Warren (1984, 1988) and Michaels (1988). Most of the research in Ecological Psychology performed since has focused on the actualization of discretely defined actions, the perception of action boundaries, the calculation of pi-numbers, and the measurement of response times. The research efforts have resulted in advancements in the understanding of the dynamic nature of affordances, affordances in a social context and the importance of calibration for perception of affordances. Although affordances are seen as an instrumental part of the control of action most studies investigating affordances do not pay attention to the control of the action. We conclude that affordances are still primarily treated as a utility to select behaviour, which creates a conceptual barrier that hinders deeper understanding of affordances. A focus on action-boundaries has largely prevented advancement in other aspects of affordances, most notably an integrative understanding of the role of affordances in the control of action. (shrink)

This chapter describes the potential far‐reaching consequences of contemplative higher education for the fields of science and medicine.

The Revenge Problem threatens every approach to the semantic paradoxes that proceeds by introducing nonclassical semantic values. Given any such collection Δ of additional semantic values, one can construct a Revenge sentence:This sentence is either false or has a value in Δ.TheEmbracing Revengeview, developed independently by Roy T. Cook and Phlippe Schlenker, addresses this problem by suggesting that the class of nonclassical semantic values is indefinitely extensible, with each successive Revenge sentence introducing a new ‘pathological’ semantic value into the discourse. (...) The view is explicitly motivated in terms of the idea that every notion thatseemsto be expressible should, if at all possible,beexpressible. Extant work on the Embracing Revenge view has failed to live up to this promise, since the formal languages developed within such work are expressively impoverished. We rectify this here by developing a much richer formal language, and semantics for that language, and we then prove an extremely powerful expressive completeness result for the system in question. (shrink)

LEGO and Creativity -- LEGO, Ethics, and Rules -- LEGO and Identity -- LEGO, Consumption, and Culture -- LEGO, Metaphysics, and Math.

The Embracing Revenge account of semantic paradox avoids the expressive limitations of previous approaches based on the Kripkean fixed point construction by replacing a single language with an indefinitely extensible sequence of languages, each of which contains the resources to fully characterize the semantics of the previous languages. In this paper we extend the account developed in Cook, Cook, Schlenker, and Tourville and Cook via the addition of intensional operators such as ``is paradoxical''. In this extended framework we are able (...) to characterize the difference between sentences, such as the Liar and the Truth-teller, that receive the same semantic value in minimal fixed points yet seem to involve distinct semantic phenomena. (shrink)

‘Feminist logic’ may sound like an impossible, incoherent, or irrelevant project, but it is none of these. We begin by delineating three categories into which projects in feminist logic might fall: philosophical logic, philosophy of logic, and pedagogy. We then defuse two distinct objections to the very idea of feminist logic: the irrelevance argument and the independence argument. Having done so, we turn to a particular kind of project in feminist philosophy of logic: Valerie Plumwood's feminist argument for a relevance (...) logic. Plumwood's work serves as our primary case study as we turn to the project of considering three different ways we might understand her argument and revisionist arguments like it: as a priori theorizing, as ameliorative conceptual engineering, or as instances of anti-exceptionalist approaches to logic. After arguing that the anti-exceptionalist approach seems to provide the most promising means of understanding the kind of project undertaken in a feminist challenge to classical logic, we briefly address the consequences that this might have for logic instruction. Here, we argue for the perhaps unexpected conclusion that feminist programs ought to offer more, not less, instruction in logic for those who take interest. (shrink)

It is shown that the logical truth of instances of the T-schema is incompatible with the formal nature of logical truth. In particular, since the formality of logical truth entails that the set of logical truths is closed under substitution, the logical truth of T-schema instances entails that all sentences are logical truths.

Roy T Cook examines the Yablo paradox--a paradoxical, infinite sequence of sentences, each of which entails the falsity of all others that follow it. He focuses on questions of characterization, circularity, and generalizability, and pays special attention to the idea that it provides us with a semantic paradox that involves no circularity.

Abstractionism is a philosophical account of the ontology of mathematics according to which abstract objects are grounded in a process of abstraction. Abstraction involves arranging a domain of underlying objects into classes and then identifying … Continue reading Abstractionism →.

While new generations of implantable brain computer interface devices are being developed, evidence in the literature about their impact on the patient experience is lagging. In this article, we address this knowledge gap by analysing data from the first-in-human clinical trial to study patients with implanted BCI advisory devices. We explored perceptions of self-change across six patients who volunteered to be implanted with artificially intelligent BCI devices. We used qualitative methodological tools grounded in phenomenology to conduct in-depth, semi-structured interviews. Results (...) show that, on the one hand, BCIs can positively increase a sense of the self and control; on the other hand, they can induce radical distress, feelings of loss of control, and a rupture of patient identity. We conclude by offering suggestions for the proactive creation of preparedness protocols specific to intelligent—predictive and advisory—BCI technologies essential to prevent potential iatrogenic harms. (shrink)