Focusing, in part, on the influence of Jurassic-era seas on the philosophical beliefs of the Hopi and Zuni cultures of the American Southwest, the article investigates the fluid cognitive processes of the human mind and methodically investigates the presence of historical content in works from oracy-based peoples. Formal analyses of the embedded data encoded in historical oral narratives are provided and are based on Barber and Barber’s mytho-linguistic framework. The application of Roger C. Echo-Hawk’s methodology for the assessment of narrative (...) works that can contribute to cultural affiliation in consultations relating to the Native American Graves Protection Repatriation Act is considered as a possible model for similar change in the areas of assessing the relevance of material culture. The necessity of creating a similar critical framework for evaluations of the visual arts of ancient pre-historic era in the United States in keeping with the trend in narrative studies is discussed in support of the development of ‘period eye’ perspectives on which future objective studies may be based. The valid contexts an approximated period eye perspective can provide for more authentic replications of complex metaphorical relationships and cosmographies on the visual plane is demonstrated in the article’s final drawings. (shrink)

This book is a comparative study in the history of ideas. It is an innovative examination of the intellectual background, affiliations and contexts of two major twentieth-century thinkers and an historical interpretation of their work in aesthetics, cultural theory, literary history, and philosophy. Unlike all existing texts on Lukacs and Bakhtin, this book offers a comparison of their writings at different stages of their intellectual development and in the broad context of the ideas of their time. The book introduces unknown (...) archival material and discusses hitherto disregarded or overlooked texts by Lukacs and Bakhtin. It puts forward new readings of best-known work on Dostoevsky, Rabelais, and Goethe and treats in an original way the question of the coherence of Bakhtin's ouevre. The book offers valuable insight into the sources of Bakhtin's terminological repertoire and through examination of Bakhtin's and Lukacs's intellectual affiliations--of the limits and substance of their originality as thinkers. Lukacs and Bakhtin emerge from the book as thinkers, whose intellectual careers followed strikingly similar paths. They both were confronted with similar agendas and questions posed for them by their time. Bakhtin however, had to find answers not only for this common agenda but also to the answers that Lukacs himself had already provided. (shrink)

Modern psychology does not address the great variety of elements constituting subjective experience or the relations among them. This essay examines ideas on the fine structure of awareness and suggests a more precisely characterized set of variables, useful to all psychologists interested in awareness, whether their focus is on computer simulation, neuroscience, or clinical intervention. This view builds on William James' insight into the qualitative differences among the parts of subjective experience, a concept nearly forgotten until recently reinterpreted in contemporary (...) cognitive terms by Mangan. I review, revise, and expand these ideas, and suggest their application to self-monitoring in several domains, including metacognition, action, and emotion. Sharpening and extending the distinctions James drew among key descriptive aspects of awareness gives us a more differentiated vocabulary for research and theory. (shrink)

This book offers original research by leading scholars from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Russia, which covers the central areas of ...

Several legal scholars have recently argued that U.S. tort law’s physical-emotional distinction commits tort to the objectionable position of mind-body dualism, but they have not considered the distinction’s role as an aid to judicial cognition and decision-making. Drawing primarily on the law of negligent infliction of emotional distress, this essay argues that tort’s physical-emotional distinction is not a relic of mind-body dualism but a heuristic that judges have used to structure and simplify the difficult but unavoidable task of drawing lines (...) between legally cognizable and non-cognizable harm. The analysis has at least three normative implications: (1) users of tort’s physical-emotional distinction should clarify that they neither endorse dualism nor depreciate emotional harm; (2) because judicial expertise may not extend to the task of drawing lines between legally cognizable and non-cognizable harm, judicial performance in this area may be more adequate than critics suggest; and (3) although it may not be possible to determine the optimal way of drawing lines between legally cognizable and non-cognizable emotional harm, moral-philosophical tools such as Rawlsian and Scanlonian contractualism may be able to identify partial or pro tanto considerations for choosing among different ways of doing so. (shrink)

The concept of first-personness is well defined in grammar, but it has developed two discrepant senses in common usage and in the psychology and philosophy literatures. First-personness is taken to mean phenomenal experience , and also to mean a person's point of view. However, since we can nonconsciously perceive, judge and behave, all from a point of view which we must name ‘our own', these acts can be called first-person acts even though they are nonconscious. Therefore, I propose that the (...) main idea behind first-personness is the point of view; that it is not a unique property of consciousness; and that consciousness will be easier to understand if it is not freighted with extraneous issues. This essay explores the concepts underlying point of view and entity. Entiticity is viewed as a matter of degree and as a matter of convention. It is found most coherent to consider an entity's point of view as the total set of discriminations or interactions made possible by the entity's present state and context. Whether or not an entity is a person or is conscious is irrelevant to its having a point of view referenced to itself. Even inanimate objects can receive input and act only in so far as they are enabled or limited by their points of view. Since humans find it awkward at first to say that non-human or non-biological entities have a first-person point of view, it would be best to drop the reference to person in this context. C.S. Peirce's term ‘firstness', developed in 1891, might do nicely. This analysis of first-personness applies equally to agents as it does to subjects. Once these terms are clarified, it is easier to see how a superordinate entity reconciles conflict when its relatively autonomous subsystems have points of view discrepant from each other or from the whole. This has application in untangling confusions concerning the duality of the cerebral hemispheres and the results of their disconnection in relation to the popular assumption of personal unity. (shrink)

This article examines Alexandre Kojève’s attempts to differentiate between philosophy and wisdom; he thought of the two, particularly later on in his career, but also earlier, as distinctly non-identical. I trace Kojève’s transition from philosophy to practice in the corridors of power, motivated by his quest for wisdom, by outlining in some detail his stance on globalisation and the role of the state in his post-war dialogue with Carl Schmitt.

This paper discusses exile and emigration as factors in the encounters of art, philosophy, cultural criticism, and political power in Soviet Russia under Stalin. While by now we possess considerable knowledge about emigration and exile from Eastern and Central Europe to the West in the 1920s and 1930s, we have tended to under-research and under-conceptualize the alternative destination. Seemingly less glamorous and lastingly tainted by the open glorification or silent acquiescence to Stalin and the purges, Moscow as a place of (...) emigration and exile of left East-Central European intellectuals in the 1930s presents a uniquely important trajectory, the study of which contributes to enriching and refining our understanding not just of the history of international communism, but also – and perhaps more importantly – of the formation of the intellectual and political elites that were to shape life in the Eastern Bloc after 1945. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Georg Lukács, for it is in his work, and the attendant debates and disagreements, that an entire constellation of questions around Realism is first compellingly formulated. The purpose of the paper is to revisit Lukács’ theory of realism as a response to a host of mainstream currents shaping the landscape of Continental philosophy in the first three decades of the 20th century. Particular attention is paid to the problem of form and truth at the core of (...) Lukács’ theory of realism. (shrink)

Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism brings together ten innovative contributions by outstanding scholars working across a wide array of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Interdisciplinary in its methodology and compass, with a strong comparative European dimension, the volume examines discourses ranging from literature, historiography, music and opera to anthropology and political philosophy. It makes an original contribution to the study of 18th-century ideas of universal peace, progress and wealth as the foundation of future debates on cosmopolitanism. At the same time, it (...) analyses examples of counter-reaction to these ideas and discusses the relevance of the Enlightenment for subsequent polemics on cosmopolitanism, including 21st-century debates in sociology, politics and legal theory. (shrink)

(2010). “Meaningful Educational Opportunity” May Not be Equality of Educational Opportunity [Essay Review of the Book Moving Every Child Ahead: From NCLB Hype to Meaningful Educational Opportunity] Educational Studies: Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 116-128.

In this book we attempted to gather together a set of chapters that describe new ways of approaching questions about aesthetics and innovation. Rather than going over old ground, the chapters describe attempts to break out in new directions. The book begins with a description of von Ehrenfels development of a Gestalt theory of aesthetics so evocative of the Vienna of 1900 that readers will wish that they had been there to experience the intellectual excitement and ends with a survey (...) the very latest research on brain scan research on perception of art. In between, we encounter chapters as diverse as a description of cognitive effects on art perception and on the analogies between oscillations in art history and waves in the physical world. About half of the book contains chapters by well known western psychological aestheticians and half chapters by Russian scholars many of whom will be new to western readers. As well as describing new methods and results, the chapters by Russian scholars will be novel to most western readers, because the Russian perspective on aesthetics and innovation is rather different than the traditional western perspectives. Looking at phenomena from new viewpoints never hurts and very often helps in science. (shrink)

The present study aimed to investigate three questions concerning Kahneman’s Endowment Effect. (a) Does the Endowment Effect apply to negotiations on intangible items such as intellectual resources and time invested in academic chores? (b) Does the sequence in which proposals are presented to the negotiators influence the Endowment Effect and, if so, how? (c) Does the Endowment Effect have the same impact in on-going negotiations as in one-shot negotiations? The investigation focused on the trade-off made by students between advanced courses (...) and seminars, which we term as Academic Chores Trade-Off (ACTO). The results indicated the existence of the Endowment Effect in negotiations on the above intangible items (ACTO) but could also be partially interpreted as reflecting the negotiators attempts to improve their positions. The results also supported the existence of a Sequence Effect combined with an intensification of the Endowment Effect. The Endowment Effect in on-going negotiations was not found to be significantly different from that in the one-shot format. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary by design and intent, this volume brings together nine essays by established and new scholars from Russia, Britain, and North America to explore the historical contexts and current relevance of the work of the Bakhtin Circle for social theory, philosophy, history, and linguistics. The articles demonstrate that exploring the background of Bakhtinian thought is a better way of appreciating their significance for the analysis of contemporary social and cultural phenomena.

We are demonstrating that the Luttinger model with short range interaction can be treated as a type of Fermi liquid. In line with the main dogma of Landau’s theory one can define a fermion excitation renormalized by interaction and show that in terms of these fermions any excited state of the system is described by free particles. The fermions are a mixture of renormalized right and left electrons. The electric charge and chirality of the Landau quasi-particle is discussed.

The paper questions some of the premises in studying academic spin-offs in developed countries, claiming that when taken as characteristics of ‘academic spin-offs per se,’ they are of little help in understanding the phenomenon in the Eastern European countries during the transitional and post-transitional periods after 1989. It argues for the necessity of adopting a path-dependent approach, which takes into consideration the institutional and organisational specificities of local economies and research systems and their evolution, which strongly influence the patterns of (...) spin-off activity. The paper provides new findings and original arguments in support of Balazs’ seminal theses (Balazs 1995, 1996) about the emergence of academic spin-offs during the early transition. It reveals key economic and policy mechanisms bearing on academic entrepreneurship in Eastern Europe, such as the tensions between economic and political nomenclatures of former Communist Parties, where the dismantling or preservation of the power of political nomenclature resulted in different patterns of development—rapid reforms in the ‘first wave’ of EU accession countries or the establishment of rent-seeking and assets-stripping economies in countries like Bulgaria and Romania, making the transition period especially difficult. In the latter, a specific economic environment emerged, unknown in Western Europe and in the ‘champions’ of transition—such as suppression of the authentic entrepreneurship in a number of economic sectors, disintegration of corporate structures, etc. Thus, the paper reveals the common ground behind the two conflicting tendencies in post-socialist academic spin-offs, partially outlined in other research (Simeonova 1995; Pavlova 2000): as an authentic form of academic entrepreneurship grasping the opportunities opened up by the economic crisis and compensating failures in science and technology policy on the one hand, and as specific rent-seeking strategy draining valuable public assets on the other (the latter, in turn, boosting the negative attitudes in local scientific communities). The paper provides new findings about the evolution of the academic spin-offs in Bulgaria along the two polar trends and their positive and negative repercussions on parent research institutions. The results were achieved in the PROKNOW Project, EC 6th Framework Program. (shrink)

While art and science still functioned side-by-side during the Renaissance, their methods and perspectives diverged during the nineteenth century, creating a still enduring separation between the "two cultures". Recently, artists and scientists again collaborate more frequently, as promoted most radically by the ArtScience movement. This approach aims at a true synthesis between the intuitive, imaginative methods of art and the rational, rule-governed methods of science. To prepare the grounds for a theoretical synthesis, this paper surveys the fundamental commonalities and differences (...) between science and art. Science and art are united in their creative investigation, where coherence, pattern or meaning play a vital role in the development of concepts, while relying on concrete representations to experiment with the resulting insights. On the other hand, according to the standard conception, science seeks an understanding that is universal, objective and unambiguous, while art focuses on unique, subjective and open-ended experiences. Both offer prospect and coherence, mystery and complexity, albeit with science preferring the former and art, the latter. The paper concludes with some examples of artscience works that combine all these aspects. (shrink)