Practically Religious: Worldly Benefits and the Common Religion of Japan. Ian Reader and George J. Tanabe Jr. Hawai'i University Press, Honolulu 1998. xii, 303 pp. $45 ISBN 0-8248-2065-7; $22.95 ISBN 0-8248-209-8.

Myoe the Dreamkeeper, Fantasy and Knowledge in Early Kamakura Buddhism. George Tanabe, Jr. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992. xiv, 291 pp. $35.

Economic rights - rights to use, possess, exchange, and otherwise dispose of property - are at the centre of some of the most important and fundamental disputes in Western moral and political theory. This book provides a fresh look at assumptions that are sometimes overlooked in debates about capitalism, socialism and the welfare state. Essays in this book by internationally renowned academic lawyers, economists, and philosophers, explore what sort of economic rights people ought to have, how they ought to be (...) conceived of and grounded, and the consequences that would ensue were one system or another set up to ensure them; the related question of the nature of various economic systems and how well they do at guaranteeing such rights are also discussed. (shrink)

: The development of the interdisciplinary areas of cognitive, affective and action neurosciences contributes to the identification of neurobiological bases of conscious experience. The structure of consciousness was philosophically conceived a century ago as consisting of a subjective pole, the bearer of experiences, and an objective pole composed of experienced contents. In more recent formulations, Nagel refers to a “point of view”, in which qualitative experiences are anchored, while Velmans understands that phenomenal content is composed of mental representations “projected” to (...) the space external to the brains that construct them. In Freudian psychology, the conscious mind contains a tension between the Id and the Ego. How to relate this bipolar structure with the results of neuroscience? I propose the notion of projection [also used by Williford et al. ] as a bridge principle connecting the neurobiological systems of knowing, feeling and acting with the bipolar structure. The projective process is considered responsible for the generation of the sense of self and the sense of the world, composing an informational phenomenal field generated by the nervous system and experienced in the first-person perspective. After presenting the projective hypothesis, I discuss its philosophical status, relating it to the phenomenal and high-order thought approaches, and a mathematical model of projection. Eight ways of testing the status of the projective hypothesis are briefly mentioned. Resumo: O desenvolvimento de áreas interdisciplinares das neurociências, contribui para a identificação das bases neurobiológicas da experiência consciente. A estrutura intrínseca da experiência consciente foi filosoficamente concebida há um século como consistindo de um pólo subjetivo, o portador de experiências, e um pólo objetivo, composto dos conteúdos experimentados. Em formulações mais recentes, Thomas Nagel refere-se a um “ponto de vista”, no qual experiências qualitativas são ancoradas, enquanto Max Velmans entende que o conteúdo fenomenal é composto de representações mentais “projetadas” para o espaço externo ao cérebro que as constrói. Na psicologia freudiana, a mente consciente contém uma tensão entre o Id e o Ego. Como relacionar esta estrutura bipolar com os resultados da neurociência? Proponho a noção de projeção como princípio-ponte, conectando os sistemas neurobiológicos do saber, sentir e agir com a estrutura bipolar. O processo projetivo é considerado responsável pela geração do sentido do eu e do sentido do mundo, compondo um campo fenomenal informacional gerado pelo sistema nervoso e vivenciado na perspectiva da primeira pessoa. Após apresentar a hipótese projetiva, discuto seu status filosófico, relacionando-o às abordagens fenomenológicas, à teoria do pensamento de ordem superior e ao modelo matemático da projeção. Oito maneiras de testar o status da hipótese projetiva são brevemente mencionadas. (shrink)

In The Varieties of Reference, Gareth Evans argues that the content of perceptual experience is nonconceptual, in a sense I shall explain momentarily. More recently, in his book Mind and World, John McDowell has argued that the reasons Evans gives for this claim are not compelling and, moreover, that Evans’s view is a version of “the Myth of the Given”: More precisely, Evans’s view is alleged to suffer from the same sorts of problems that plague sense-datum theories of perception. In (...) particular, McDowell argues that perceptual experience must be within “the space of reasons,” that perception must be able to give us reasons for, that is, to justify, our beliefs about the world: And, according to him, no state that does not have conceptual content can be a reason for a belief. Now, there are many ways in which Evans’s basic idea, that perceptual content is nonconceptual, might be developed; some of these, I shall argue, would be vulnerable to the objections McDowell brings against him. But I shall also argue that there is a way of developing it that is not vulnerable to these objections. (shrink)

Philosophical defenses of cognitive/evolutionary psychological accounts of racialism claim that classification based on phenotypical features of humans was common historically and is evidence for a species-typical, cognitive mechanism for essentializing. They conclude that social constructionist accounts of racialism must be supplemented by cognitive/evolutionary psychology. This article argues that phenotypical classifications were uncommon historically until such classifications were socially constructed. Moreover, some philosophers equivocate between two different meanings of “racial thinking.” The article concludes that social constructionist accounts are far more robust (...) than psychological accounts for the origins of racialism. (shrink)

According to the colored-brain thesis, sense data or qualia are real physical-chemical qualities, located inside the brain, possibly at a specific locus. Our hypothesis is that the seats of phenomenal consciousness have a structure and a materiality. According to the proposed view, a chromatic quale emerges when a certain pixel of the visual sensorium is fed with a certain pattern Σ of spikes; a change in this pattern quickly changes the color that is subjectively generated. How could one manage to (...) measure chromatic qualia? In principle, with nanoscopical techniques, one could capture all the patterns that fall on the sensorium, and transmit the information to other media. But this does not capture the qualia. However, if the patterns are made to fall on a tissue of the same kind, typically inside another person’s brain, this other person will have roughly the same subjective experience as the first person. The model is used to explore two different situations involving qualia inversion. The paper also explores Cartesian materialism, and the claim that phenomenal time and space are identical to a region of physical time and space. (shrink)

Professors Battersby and Phelan have presented a lively challenge. They urge readers to reject the later, fuzzy Hirsch, in favor of an earlier, truer Hirsch.Their first objection is that Hirsch 2 has mistaken the nature of literary meaning. Battersby and Phelan reject the view that a literary work carries a general meaning analogous to the concept of “bicycle” that can be exemplified by all bicycles. They propose that a literary work is “more appropriately conceived as … a Schwinn or even (...) a red Schwinn three-speed with a blue seat and two flat tires”. They object to my adoption of Sir Philip Sidney’s claim that literature provides both the general concept and the particular example simultaneously. By saying that literature does both things at once I conflate and confuse, they say, two different intentions, because, as they aver, an exemplified concept cannot be further exemplified”.This claim reinstates the familiar New Critical doctrine that a literary concept is unique among concepts in that it can never be dissevered from its particular embodiment. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of numerous works including Validity in Interpretation and The Aims of Interpretation. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry include “Against Interpretation?” and “The Politics of Theories of Interpretation”. His most recent contributions is “Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted”. (shrink)

Among philosophers as well as linguists the battle is still joined between those who view the correlation between meaning and linguistic form as strictly determined by convention and those who argue for the essential indeterminacy of the relationship between meaning and form.1 Plato's Cratylus aside, the philosphical dialogue that forms the locus classicus of this debate is the following: "You're holding it upside down!" Alice interrupted. "To be sure I was!" Humpty Dumpty said gaily, as she turned it round for (...) him. "I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying. that seems to be done right - though I haven't time to look it over thoroughly just now - and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents -" "Certainly," said Alice. "And only one for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!" "I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't - till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'" "But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."2 · 1. This should not be taken as an argument for the indeterminacy of linguistic meaning itself. Quite the contrary; it is because meaning can be stable and determinate despite variations in mental acts and linguistic forms that the relation between form and meaning must be indeterminate on the basis merely of rules and conventions.· 2. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, chap. 6. E. D. Hirsch, Jr. is Kenan Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Validity in Interpretation and Wordsworth and Schelling: A Typological Study of Romanticism. A second edition of his book on Blake, Innocence and Experience, will appear next year, as will a new book on critical theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the SubjectJames J. Brown Jr. and Joshua GunnActs of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the Subject by Thomas Rickert. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Pp. x + 252. $24.95, hardcover.Thomas Rickert had a falling-out with his brother, and this distresses him so much that his disrupted relation is described as “traumatic.” Rickert reports that while listening (...) to a portable CD player during a run on an unexpectedly warm winter day, a song by the now defunct jazz/rock band Morphine reminded him of a happy time at a pool hall with his brother (24). Mediated—or better, medicated—by music, the homological happiness of running in the sun and a positive past memory also resurfaced a painful relational rupture, the reason of which Rickert omits to underscore that mysterious, “little detail or object” of the Real that marks his singular finitude as a writing subject (216 n. 11). We’ll want to come back to this curiously deliberate omission, but for the present we note Rickert is not simply an undead author but a human being with relations and feelings. He is not just a gifted scholar or a bundle of reflections, but a nexus of body and movement and words and affect. If there is anything that Rickert’s study can be said to work through with brilliance, humor, and grace, it is the reality of complex personhood.Rickert’s brotherly confession comes in Chapter 1 as a way to introduce a psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity, and more specifically, to help illustrate how trauma works itself out as an afterwardness or “belatedness” ( Nachträglichkeit ): traumatic events from the past are not reckoned with or worked-through until some coincidence or reminder, such as a similar [End Page 183] sensory experience, reintroduces the event in doubled re-presentation (18–27). This implies the “subject” (a paradigm person) is a kind of timedelay, a self-conscious temporal moving that becomes this way through re-presentation. The rhetorical subject is analogously a retrojected reckoning with events past (not all traumatic) that Rickert identifies as a scene of writing, a locus that has important implications for rhetorical studies in general and writing pedagogy in particular. Rickert’s logic is as follows: if we agree that the subject is a belated one in the psychoanalytic sense, then how we teach rhetoric needs to change. Rickert opens the book with the observation that his students are producing excellent cultural critiques but that such critiques do not lead the students to change their actions (1–7), perhaps evidence enough that something is not quite right in a classroom grounded by “cultural studies pedagogy” and ideology critique—or at the very least, proof that something has changed. The opening gambit is simply that a “postpedagogy” premised on an understanding of rhetorical subjectivity as belatedness is better than a status quo rooted in the rational subject of the Enlightenment.Mostly through a Žižek-filtered, Lacanian lens, Acts of Enjoyment then undertakes a retake of the rhetorical field, frequently scanning from the traumatic ontology of the rhetorical subject to that domain of knowledge that we hold dear, the subject of rhetoric. In Chapter 2, the (primal) scene thus shifts from the slo-mo subject to rhetorical studies, initially through a reassessment of Kinneavy’s “communications triangle,” but ultimately in response to the shock treatment of poststructuralism. The initial theoretical traumas introduced by Victor Vitanza, Diane Davis, Sharon Crowley, and others discussed in Chapter 1 are threaded into an account of “poststructural” redress in Chapter 2: as is true of all forms of trauma, the initial poststructural jolt delivered to the concept of subjectivity was deadened; poststructural theory was eventually used to “shore up rather than challenge Kinneavy’s triangle” (37). To truly work-through our traumatized subject in both senses, we need a second trauma: Lacanian psychoanalysis. Presumably, “poststructuralist thought” is to be opposed because it has no account of the subject (21–24); “Lacan,” after all, “is not a poststructuralist” (48). The remainder of the chapter is then used to deploy Lacan’s conceptual lexicon.Just as... (shrink)

Disease represents a principal tentacle of natural selection and a staple theme of evolutionary medicine. However, it is through a small portal of entry and a very long lineage that disease as sickness entered behavioural spaces and human consciousness. This has a long evolutionary history. Anyone interested in the origins of medicine and psychiatry as social institution has to start with analysis of how mind and body were conceptualised and played out behaviourally following the pongid/hominin split and thereafter. The early (...) evolution of medicine provides a template for clarifying elemental characteristics of mind and minding. Sickness and healing in chimpanzees represents an early manifestation of (ethno) medicine, termed a behavioural tradition, which is found played out in routines of helping, caring, and healing as well as other social behaviours. Chimpanzees seem to know they are sick since they resort to self-medication when exhibiting signs and symptoms of disease. Also, they help those exhibiting physical and cognitive disability. Among hominins, awareness of consequences and implications of sickness and coping with them represented an important feature of human consciousness and a major factor in the origins of vaunted human abilities involving language, cognition, and culture as we know them. A philosophical examination of the early evolution of sickness and healing provides a window into an understanding of evolving human capacities such as self-awareness, awareness and implications of suffering, theory of mind, altruism, conceptual grasp of sickness and healing and morality. (shrink)

This essay is a defense of the social construction of racialism. I follow a standard definition of “racialism” which is the belief that “there are heritable characteristics, possessed by members of our species, that allow us to divide them into a small set of races, in such a way that all the members of these races share certain traits and tendencies with each other that they do not share with other members of any other race”. In particular I want to (...) defend the “radical” social-constructive thesis that holds “the concept of race is exclusively the product of historical and cultural causes. It claims that humans do not tend to classify people into races when groups with different phenotypes meet, save for particular historical circumstances”. The quoted position is the consensus view among historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists who study racialism but has recently been criticized by philosophical defenders of cognitive/evolutionary psychological approaches to racialism. Drawing on developmental studies as well as historical and contemporary cross-cultural research, CEP philosophers point to similarities of racialism across time and space. They hold that social constructionist approaches to racialism cannot explain these similarities. I hold that SC approaches do explain these similarities and that such similarities actually pose a significant challenge to the proposed CEP research program on racialism. (shrink)

A recent trend in Russell scholarship has been towards the thesis that, contrary to his own recollections, Bertrand Russell really didn’t need the 1905 theory of descriptions to deflate an excessive ontology, because (1) there was no excessive ontology in The Principles of Mathematics, at least not one with golden mountains and the like, and so (2) Russell’s real motive, at least his main one, was not ontological but rather was to replace the incoherent sense–reference distinction on which the old (...) theory of denoting depended. I want to gently dispute that thesis by showing that Russell’s old theory in the Principles was ambivalent on ontic commitment to non-existent things and it could not give an adequate account of the central problem which Russell faced before “On Denoting”, viz. our apparent discourse—including our ability to make true and false propositions—about non-existent things. I also show briefly how the new theory solves the old problem. (shrink)

The I Ching, or Book of Changes, has been one of the two or three most influential books in the Chinese canon. It has been used by people on all levels of society, both as a method of divination and as a source of essential ideas about the nature of heaven, earth, and humankind. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Sung dynasty literati turned to it for guidance in their fundamental reworking of the classical traditions. This book explores how four (...) leading thinkers — Su Shih, Shao Yung, Ch’eng I, and Chu Hsi — applied the I Ching to these projects. These four men used the Book of Changes in strikingly different ways. Yet each claimed to find in it a sure foundation for human values. Their work established not only new meanings for the text but also new models for governance and moral philosophy that would be debated throughout the next thousand years of Chinese intellectual history. By focusing on their uses of the I Ching, this study casts a unique light on the complex continuity-within-change and rich diversity of Sung culture. (shrink)

In a recent paper titled “Mencius and an Ethics of the New Century,” Donald J. Munro argues that recent theories in the evolutionary sciences regarding the biological basis of altruism and infant bonding might lend credence to Mencius’ philosophy of human nature.1 Such theories, says Munro, support Mencius’ contention that certain moral concepts derive from something that is inborn. What such naturalistic theories do not address, however, is whether or not these moral concepts are also “founded on something transcendental,” and (...) by this Munro is referring to the suggestion that “human nature” (renxing 人性) is derived from “Heaven” (tian 天).2 Munro suggests that contemporary philosophers who draw inspiration from .. (shrink)

This paper attempts to outline some of the important concepts and ideas used in system analysis which is taken to be a general mode of analysis used in all sciences. Systems are seen from three perspectives: (1) that involving the relationship between system and environment, (2) that involving interaction between several systems, and (3) that involving one type of system composed of other types of systems. The writers also discuss the concepts "structure" and "equilibrium" as they apply to system analysis, (...) the point being made that the use of these concepts in the social sciences has often been vague or even incorrect. (shrink)

The disagreement over whether Aristotle recognized rights in some form unavoidably involves disagreement over what rights are, and the theory of rights itself is still highly contested. There is no consensus concerning how " right'? is to be defined, how rights are to be theoretically grounded, or how rights theory is to be applied in particular circumstances. This is not, however, a good reason to dismiss the issue of whether there are rights in Aristotle: for Aristotle, like modern rights theorists, (...) is concerned about the moral and legal status of the individual within the community, and he expresses this in terms of claims of justice. The issue is worthy of study not only because it can lead to a deeper understanding of Aristotle's conceptions of justice and the common good, but also because it may shed valuable light on the theoretical foundations of human rights, since he offers a theory of political justice which is based on a metaphysical theory of human nature. (shrink)

The discovery of participation of astrocytes as active elements in glutamatergic tripartite synapses (composed by functional units of two neurons and one astrocyte) has led to the construction of models of cognitive functioning in the human brain, focusing on associative learning, sensory integration, conscious processing and memory formation/retrieval. We have modelled human cognitive functions by means of an ensemble of functional units (tripartite synapses) connected by gap junctions that link distributed astrocytes, allowing the formation of intra- and intercellular calcium waves (...) that putatively mediate large-scale cognitive information processing. The model contains a diagram of molecular mechanisms present in tripartite synapses and contributes to explain the physiological bases of cognitive functions. It can be potentially expanded to explain emotional functions and psychiatric phenomena. (shrink)

As part of an ongoing study of causal models in the history of science, a counterfactual scenario in the history of modern astronomy is explored with the aid of computer simulations. After the definition of “linking advance”, a possible world involving technological antecedence is described, branching out in 1510, in which the telescope is invented 70 years before its actual construction, at the time in which Fracastoro actually built the first prototelescope. By using the principle of the closest possible world, (...) we estimate that in this scenario the discovery of the elliptical orbit of Mars would by anticipated by only 28 years. The second part of the paper involves an estimate of the probability of the previous scenario, guided by the principle that the actual world is the mean and using computer simulations to create possible worlds in which the time spans between advances is varied according to a gamma distribution function. Taking into account the importance of the use of the diaphragm for the invention of the telescope, the probability that the telescope were built by 1538 for a branching time at 1510 is found to be smaller than 1%. The work shows that one of the important features of computational simulations in philosophy of science is to serve as a consistency check for the intuitions and speculations of the philosopher. (shrink)

For most of the two and a half centuries since Thomas Hearne first printed the poem now known as The Battle of Maldon, scholars have read it as a factual contemporary account by a well-informed observer of a historical event. The date and circumstances of the death of Byrhtnoth, ealdorman of Essex, are attested in surviving records independent of the poem; and his fame and deeds can be traced through the charters and wills of the reigns of kings Eadwig, Eadgar, (...) Eadweard, and Aethelred. Moreover, the identities of several of the members of Byrhtnoth's heorþwerod who died with him according to the poem can be surmised if not proved by existing documents, and their relationships to their fallen leader established. In 1926 E. D. Laborde put the final piece of reality into the puzzle by showing that the Northey Island causeway just south of Maldon on the Backwater fits exactly the complicated combination of geography and tide required by the scenes and events of the poem. Today the battle site on high ground on South House Farm opposite Northey Island is marked with crossed swords on Ordnance Survey maps, and the peculiarities of the tide at the causeway are used to explain the meaning of an otherwise obscure verse of the poem. jQuery.click { event.preventDefault(); }). (shrink)

In this paper I attempt to show, against certain versions of trope theory, that properties with analyzable particularity cannot be merely exactly similar: such properties are either particularized properties (tropes) that are dissimilar to every any other trope, or else universalized properties (universals). I argue that each of the most viable standard and nonstandard particularizers that can be employed to secure the numerical difference between exactly similar properties can only succeed in grounding the particularity of properties, that is, in having (...) properties be tropes, at the expense of ruling out the possibility of their exact similarity. Here are the four nonstandard particularizers that I examine: the genealogy of a property, the history of a property, the causal effects of a property, and the duration of a property. And here are the two standard particularizers that I examine: the bearer of a property, by which I mean either a bare particular or a spatiotemporal location, and the property itself, by which I mean that the property is self-particularized. In my concluding remarks, I explain that the only remaining hope for preserving the possibility of exactly similar tropes is regarding properties as primitively particular, and that this must mean not that properties are selfparticularized but that they are particularized due to nothing. I close by arguing that this may not help trope theory after all. (shrink)