Background: Maximum safe resection of infiltrative brain tumors in eloquent area is the primary objective in surgical neuro-oncology. This goal can be achieved with direct electrical stimulation to perform a functional mapping of the brain in patients awake intraoperatively. When awake surgery is not possible, we propose a pipeline procedure that combines advanced techniques aiming at performing a dissection that respects the anatomo-functional connectivity of the peritumoral region. This procedure can benefit from intraoperative monitoring with computerized tomography scan and brain (...) shift correction. Associated with this intraoperative monitoring, the additional value of preoperative investigation combining brain mapping by navigated transcranial magnetic stimulation with various neuroimaging modalities has not yet been reported.Case Report: A 42-year-old left-handed man had increased intracranial pressure, left hand muscle deficit, and dysarthria, related to an infiltrative tumor of the right frontal lobe with large mass effect and circumscribed contrast enhancement in motor and premotor cortical areas. Spectroscopy profile and intratumoral calcifications on CT-scan suggested an WHO grade III glioma, later confirmed by histology. The aforementioned surgical procedure was considered, since standard awake surgery was not appropriate for this patient. In preoperative time, nTMS mapping of motor function was performed, combined with magnetic resonance imaging -based tractography reconstruction of 6 neural tracts and resting-state functional MRI connectivity of sensorimotor and language networks. In intraoperative time, DES mapping was performed with motor evoked response recording and tumor resection was optimized using non-rigid image transformation of the preoperative data to iCT data. Image guidance was updated with correction for brain shift and tissue deformation using biomechanical modeling taking into account brain elastic properties. This correction was done at crucial surgical steps, i.e., when tumor bulged through the craniotomy after dura mater opening and when approaching the presumed eloquent brain regions. This procedure allowed a total resection of the tumor region with contrast enhancement as well as a complete regression of IICP and dysarthria. Hand paresis remained stable with no additional deficit. Postoperative nTMS mapping confirmed the good functional outcome.Conclusion: This case report and technical note highlights the value of preoperative functional evaluation by nTMS updated intraoperatively with correction of brain deformation by iCT. This multimodal approach may become the optimized technique of reference for patients with brain tumors in eloquent areas that are unsuitable for awake brain surgery. (shrink)

This paper defends hedonic intentionalism, the view that all pleasures, including bodily pleasures, are directed towards objects distinct from themselves. Brentano is the leading proponent of this view. My goal here is to disentangle his significant proposals from the more disputable ones so as to arrive at a hopefully promising version of hedonic intentionalism. I mainly focus on bodily pleasures, which constitute the main troublemakers for hedonic intentionalism. Section 1 introduces the problem raised by bodily pleasures for hedonic intentionalism and (...) some of the main reactions to it. Sections 2 and 3 rebut two main approaches equating bodily pleasures with non- intentional episodes. More precisely, section 2 argues that bodily pleasures cannot be purely non-intentional self-conscious feelings, by relying on Brentano’s objection to Hamilton’s theory of pleasure. Section 3 argues that bodily pleasures cannot be non-intentional sensory qualities by relying on Brentano’s objections to Stumpf’s theory of pleasure. Section 4 develops a brentanian view of the intentionality of bodily pleasures by claiming bodily pleasures are directed at a sui generis class of sensory qualities. Section 5 presents an objection to Brentano’s later theory of pleasure according to which all sensory pleasures are directed at sensing acts. (shrink)

This book presents the framework for a new, comprehensive approach to cognitive science. The proposed paradigm, enaction, offers an alternative to cognitive science's classical, first-generation Computational Theory of Mind. _Enaction_, first articulated by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch in _The Embodied Mind_, breaks from CTM's formalisms of information processing and symbolic representations to view cognition as grounded in the sensorimotor dynamics of the interactions between a living organism and its environment. A living organism enacts the world it lives in; its embodied (...) action in the world constitutes its perception and thereby grounds its cognition. _Enaction_ offers a range of perspectives on this exciting new approach to embodied cognitive science. Some chapters offer manifestos for the enaction paradigm; others address specific areas of research, including artificial intelligence, developmental psychology, neuroscience, language, phenomenology, and culture and cognition. Three themes emerge as testimony to the originality and specificity of enaction as a paradigm: the relation between first-person lived experience and third-person natural science; the ambition to provide an encompassing framework applicable at levels from the cell to society; and the difficulties of reflexivity. Taken together, the chapters offer nothing less than the framework for a far-reaching renewal of cognitive science. Contributors: Renaud Barbaras, Didier Bottineau, Giovanna Colombetti, Diego Cosmelli, Hanne De Jaegher, Ezequiel A. Di Paolo. Andreas K. Engel, Olivier Gapenne, Véronique Havelange, Edwin Hutchins, Michel Le Van Quyen, Rafael E. Núñez, Marieke Rohde, Benny Shanon, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Adam Sheya, Linda B. Smith, John Stewart, Evan Thompson. (shrink)

Ingvar Johansson has argued that there are not only determinate universals, but also determinable ones. I here argue that this view is misguided by reviving a line of argument to the following effect: what makes determinates falling under a same determinable similar cannot be distinct from what makes them different. If true, some similarities — imperfect similarities between simple determinate properties — are not grounded in any kind of property-sharing. I suggest that determinables are better understood as maximal disjunctions of (...) brutely and imperfectly similar determinates. Such brute similarities have been thought to clash with realism about universals. I argue that this worry stems from the mistaken assumption that perfect and imperfect similarities are relations of a same kind. If exact and inexact resemblances are distinct and heterogeneous explananda, the realist about universals might explain the first thanks to property-sharing, while happily leaving imperfect similarities between properties unexplained. (shrink)

Of all the things we do and say, most will never be repeated or reproduced. Once in a while, however, an idea or a practice generates a chain of transmission that covers more distance through space and time than any individual person ever could. What makes such transmission chains possible? For two centuries, the dominant view was that humans owe their cultural prosperity to their powers of imitation. In this view, modern cultures exist because the people who carry them are (...) gifted at remembering, storing and reproducing information. How Traditions Live and Die proposes an alternative to this standard view. What makes traditions live is not a general-purpose imitation capacity. Cultural transmission is partial, selective, often unfaithful. Some traditions live on in spite of this, because they tap into widespread and basic cognitive preferences. These attractive traditions spread, not by being better retained or more accurately transferred, but because they are transmitted over and over. This theory is used to shed light on various puzzles of cultural change and to explain the special relation that links the human species to its cultures. Morin combines recent work in cognitive anthropology with new advances in quantitative cultural history, to map and predict the diffusion of traditions. This book is both an introduction and an accessible alternative to contemporary theories of cultural evolution. (shrink)

Evaluative theories of emotions purport to shed light on the nature of emotions by appealing to values. Three kinds of evaluative theories of emotions dominate the recent literature: the judgment theory equates emotions with value judgments; the perceptual theory equates emotions with perceptions of values, and the attitudinal theory equates emotions with evaluative attitudes. This paper defends a fourth kind of evaluative theory of emotions, mostly neglected so far: the reactive theory. Reactive theories claim that emotions are attitudes which arise (...) in reaction to perceptions of value. (shrink)

High and low alexithymia scorers were confronted with a modified visual oddball task that allowed the study of categorical perception of emotional expressions on faces. Participants had to quickly detect a deviant (rare) morphed face that shared or did not share the same emotional expression as the frequent one. Expected categorical perception effects, which were also neurophysiologically indexed, showed that rare stimuli were detected faster if they depicted a different emotional expression compared to rare stimuli depicting the same emotional expression (...) than the frequent one. Even if no differences were observed at a behavioural level, high alexithymia scorers evidenced overall delayed neurophysiological responses in components related to the attentional processing of rare emotional faces. Moreover, the categorical perception effects for event-related components associated with the attentional processing were smaller in high alexithymia scorers and were even absent for anger. These results show that high alexithymia scorers present discrimination delays that are already observed at the attentional level. (shrink)

I defend the view that the experience of resistance gives us a direct phenomenal access to the mind-independence of perceptual objects. In the first part, I address a humean objection against the very possibility of experiencing existential mind-independence. The possibility of an experience of mind-independence being secured, I argue in the second part that the experience of resistance is the only kind of experience by which we directly access existential mind-independence.

This paper argues (i) that the possibility of experiencing at once pleasures and unpleasures does not threaten the contrariety of pleasure and unpleasure. (ii) That the hedonic balance calculated by adding all pleasures and displeasures of a subject at a time yields an abstract result that does not correspond to any new psychological reality. There are no resultant feelings. (iii) That there are nevertheless, in some cases, sentimental fusions: when the co-occurent pleasures and unpleasures do not have any bodily location, (...) and that their intentional object vanishes, they truly fuse with each other, giving rise to sentimental mixtures in which the initial pleasures and unpleasures are no longer discernible. (shrink)

In this paper we study substantive assumptions in social interaction. By substantive assumptions we mean contingent assumptions about what the players know and believe about each other’s choices and information. We first explain why substantive assumptions are fundamental for the analysis of games and, more generally, social interaction. Then we show that they can be compared formally, and that there exist contexts where no substantive assumptions are being made. Finally we show that the questions raised in this paper are related (...) to a number of issues concerning “large” structures in epistemic game theory. (shrink)

The amount of information conveyed by linguistic conventions depends on their precision, yet the codes that humans and other animals use to communicate are quite ambiguous: they may map several vague meanings to the same symbol. How does semantic precision evolve, and what are the constraints that limit it? We address this question using a multiplayer gaming app, where individuals communicate with one another in a scaled-up referential game. Here, the goal is for a sender to use black and white (...) symbols to communicate colors. We expected that the players’ mappings between symbols and colors would grow more specific over time, through a selection process whereby precise mappings are preferentially copied. We found that players become increasingly more precise in their use of symbols over the course of their interactions. This trend did not, however, result from selective copying of precise mappings. We explore the implications of this result for the study of lexical ambiguity, Zipf's Law of Meaning, and disagreements over semantic conventions. (shrink)

Cultural forms are constrained by cognitive biases, and writing is thought to have evolved to fit basic visual preferences, but little is known about the history and mechanisms of that evolution. Cognitive constraints have been documented for the topology of script features, but not for their orientation. Orientation anisotropy in human vision, as revealed by the oblique effect, suggests that cardinal orientations, being easier to process, should be overrepresented in letters. As this study of 116 scripts shows, the orientation of (...) strokes inside written characters massively favors cardinal directions, and it is organized in such a way as to make letter recognition easier: Cardinal and oblique strokes tend not to mix, and mirror symmetry is anisotropic, favoring vertical over horizontal symmetry. Phylogenetic analyses and recently invented scripts show that cultural evolution over the last three millennia cannot be the sole cause of these effects. (shrink)

Cognitive gadgets puts forward an ambitious claim: language, mindreading, and imitation evolved by cultural group selection. Defending this claim requires more than Heyes' spirited and effective critique of nativist claims. The latest human “cognitive gadgets,” such as literacy, did not spread through cultural group selection. Why should social cognition be different? The book leaves this question pending. It also makes strong assumptions regarding cultural evolution: it is moved by selection rather than transformation; it relies on high‐fidelity imitation; it requires specific (...) cognitive adaptations to cultural learning. Each of these assumptions raises crucial yet unaddressed difficulties. (shrink)

This study examines to what extent different types of CEOs in family firms influence external and internal stakeholder-related CSP as compared to CEOs in nonfamily firms. Linking family CEO and nonfamily CEO with CSR outcomes, we provide evidence that family CEOs are positively associated with both external and internal CSR, whereas nonfamily CEOs within family firms tend to be negatively associated with both external and internal CSR. We show that the incumbent CEO’s age moderates the above relationships, indicating the existence (...) of shifting family priorities and suggesting a tendency toward CSR conformity as the salience of succession concerns increases. (shrink)

We make physical efforts when we swim, carry shopping bags, push heavy doors, or cycle up hills. A growing concern among philosophers and scientists in related fields is the absence of a well-defined concept for physical efforts. This paper addresses this issue by presenting a force-based definition of physical efforts. In Sect. 1, we explore the shortcomings of existing definitions of effort. Section 2 introduces the force-based account of efforts according to which making an effort consists in exerting a force (...) so as to make an object move or stay at rest. Section 3 introduces three central distinctions stemming from the account: failed vs. successful efforts; resisted vs. unresisted efforts; and efforts vs. effortful actions. Section 4 presents a key objection, to the effect that the force-based theory cannot account for the difficulty of efforts: efforts usually feel difficult, but effort’s difficulty is not always a function of the magnitude of force(s) exerted. Section 5 argues that the most in-depth account of difficulty so far, that developed by Bradford ( 2015 ), cannot account for the difficulty of efforts. Sections 6 & 7 develop a novel account of effort’s difficulty. (shrink)

“Irregular auditing” are actions taken by an auditor during an engagement that reduce evidence-gathering effectiveness inappropriately. The paper presents the results of an empirical study of the reasons given by auditors for their own irregular auditing. It is based on a questionnaire survey of 170 audit seniors working in Big Four audit firms in France. The study uses Schlenker’s (1997) triangle model of responsibility as the theoretical framework to analyze the respondents’ explanations of their behavior.

ABSTRACTThe presence of emotional words and content in stories has been shown to enhance a story’s memorability, and its cultural success. Yet, recent cultural trends run in the opposite direction. Using the Google Books corpus, coupled with two metadata-rich corpora of Anglophone fiction books, we show a decrease in emotionality in English-speaking literature starting plausibly in the nineteenth century. We show that this decrease cannot be explained by changes unrelated to emotionality, and that, in our three corpora, the decrease is (...) driven almost entirely by a decline in the proportion of positive emotion-related words, while the frequency of negative emotion-related words shows little if any decline. Consistently with previous studies, we also find a link between ageing and negative emotionality at the individual level. (shrink)

In order to understand the place Max Scheler occupied in the debates of his time around the notion of Europe, this article aims to shed some light on the possible convergences between Max Scheler and Rudolf Eucken, who was his thesis director at Jena. The article begins by outlining Rudolf Eucken's conception of Europe, then it identifies a number of points in common between the two authors, before finally measuring the extent of these convergences in Scheler's conception of Europe. At (...) the end of the discussion, it appears that the reception of Augustinianism and a shared conception of community reveal interesting links between the two authors. This connection will give the twenty-first-century reader a better understanding of the framework in which Max Scheler's reflections on Europe are set. (shrink)

An ideography is a general-purpose code made of pictures that do not encode language, which can be used autonomously – not just as a mnemonic prop – to encode information on a broad range of topics. Why are viable ideographies so hard to find? I contend that self-sufficient graphic codes need to be narrowly specialized. Writing systems are only an apparent exception: At their core, they are notations of a spoken language. Even if they also encode nonlinguistic information, they are (...) useless to someone who lacks linguistic competence in the encoded language or a related one. The versatility of writing is thus vicarious: Writing borrows it from spoken language. Why is it so difficult to build a fully generalist graphic code? The most widespread answer points to a learnability problem. We possess specialized cognitive resources for learning spoken language, but lack them for graphic codes. I argue in favor of a different account: What is difficult about graphic codes is not so much learning or teaching them as getting every user to learn and teach the same code. This standardization problem does not affect spoken or signed languages as much. Those are based on cheap and transient signals, allowing for easy online repairing of miscommunication, and require face-to-face interactions where the advantages of common ground are maximized. Graphic codes lack these advantages, which makes them smaller in size and more specialized. (shrink)

In his ‘Theory of Light and Colours’, presented to the Royal Society in November 1801, Thomas Young defended a mechanical explanation of the coloured fringes observed outside of the shadow of an opaque object – the so-called ‘colours by inflection’ – that was based on the hypothesis of an ethereal density gradient surrounding all material bodies. However, two years later, he publicly rejected that hypothesis, without giving much detail of his reasons. Although Geoffrey Cantor has demonstrated the crucial role of (...) mechanical and astronomical arguments in explaining the withdrawal of this fundamental hypothesis long ago, the purpose of this article is to draw deeper attention to a set of experiments performed by David Brewster on the inflection of light, described in a letter he addressed to the Royal Society in January 1802, but was retained by William Herschel, and finally was neither read before the Society, nor published in its Philosophical Transactions. For the hypothesis that will be evaluated here is that these unpublished experiments of Brewster’s were eventually known to Young through the mediation of Herschel, and eventually played a significant role in Young’s rejection of his ether distribution hypothesis. (shrink)

Adolf Reinach belongs to the Brentanian lineage of Austrian Aristotelianism. His theory of social acts is well known, but his account of ownership has been mostly overlooked. This paper introduces and defends Reinach’s account of ownership. Ownership, for Reinach, is not a bundle of property rights. On the contrary, he argues that ownership is a primitive and indivisible relation between a person and a thing that grounds property rights. Most importantly, Reinach asserts that the nature ownership is not determined by (...) positive law but presupposed by it. Some have objected that such realism raises insuperable difficulties as to the origin of ownership, difficulties that could only be dealt with under a more conventionalist approach. I argue that the independence of the nature ownership from positive law is, in fact, compatible with the claim that its existence is dependent on human conventions. (shrink)

A quick, but inconclusive, way to defend generous realism is to rely on the reciprocal conceptual dependency between component and resultant forces. Conceptually, there cannot be component without compounds, nor compounds, or resultants, without components. If there are only component forces, then they are not really component ; and if there are only resultant forces then there are not really resultant.

The docility hypothesis holds that human social learning produces genuinely altruistic behaviors as a maladaptive by-product. This article examines five possible sources of such altruistic mistakes. The first two mechanisms, the smoke-detector principle and the cost-accuracy tradeoff, are not specifically linked to social learning. Both predict that it may be adaptive for cooperators to allow some altruistic mistakes to happen, as long as those mistakes are rare and cost little. The other three mechanisms are specific to social learning: Through culture, (...) individuals may come to adopt altruistic norms selected at the group level. Culture may provide people with cheap, accessible, but occasionally mediocre information that they are too reliant upon—a kind of informational dumping. Lastly, people may copy sources good to follow in one domain but not in another, thus committing calibration errors. I argue that those sources of errors are unlikely to lead to important amounts of altruism toward non-kin. Experimental evidence shows humans to be sufficiently skeptical, discriminative, and conscious of their own interest to avoid such altruistic mistakes in most cases. Docile altruism is unlikely to be an important aspect of human cooperation. (shrink)

This chapter aims to contribute to the endeavour of investigating nonhuman animals as experiencing subjects in their own right with their own species-specific histories. Our focus is on the examination of pain experience in animals. We argue that there is need for more research in which pain experience in animals is accounted for in species-specific terms. Making use of empirical studies in the fields of neurobiology, evolutionary-developmental biology, comparative psychology, and cognitive ethology, we try to offer a phenomenological analysis of (...) indications and expressions of pain experience in animals. We attempt to show how different animals are capable of indicating and expressing specific and unique experiences of pain in terms of their particular species, evolution, and places of living in human and natural contexts. (shrink)

Il est courant de diviser le champ d’investigation de l’éthique entre trois sous- domaines : la méta-éthique, l’éthique normative et l’éthique appliquée. L’éthique appliquée est le domaine le plus concret : on y traite par exemple des questions de savoir s’il faut autoriser l’avortement, l’euthanasie, la peine de mort... L’éthique normative traite de ces questions à un niveau plus abstrait : elle se demande ce qui fait qu’une action ou un type d’action est moralement bonne ou mauvaise. La relation entre (...) l’éthique normative et l’éthique appliquée est un peu comme la relation entre la science pure, comme la physique, et l’ingénierie (Timmons : 17). Le domaine le plus abstrait de l’éthique est la méta-ethique : elle ne s’occupe par de la question de savoir ce qui fait qu’une action est bonne ou mauvaise (éthique normative) et encore moins de la question de savoir si le suicide est moralement bon ou mauvais. Elle s’intéresse à trois types de questions. Les premières sont métaphysiques : qu’est-ce qu’une valeur, qu’une norme (sont-ce des propriétés naturelles comme la masse, des propriétés non naturelles ? Des choses qui n’existent pas ?) ? Existe-t-il des valeurs objectives ? Les secondes sont épistémologiques : comment connaissons-nous les valeurs et les normes ? Par la raison ? L’intuition ? Les émotions ? Dans la mesure où la méta-éthique semble être le domaine le plus abstrait de l’éthique, la prudence pédagogique voudrait qu’on l’étudie en dernier : commencer par un cas concret, puis remonter petit à petit vers des questions plus abstraites. Pour des raisons qui vous apparaîtront j’espère au fur et à mesure, j’ai choisi de commencer néanmoins par des questions qui relève de la méta-éthique. Nous aborderons l’éthique normative et l’éthique appliquée dans la deuxième partie du cours. (shrink)

The proper sensible criterion of sensory individuation holds that senses are individuated by the special kind of sensibles on which they exclusively bear about (colors for sight, sounds for hearing, etc.). H. P. Grice objected to the proper sensibles criterion that it cannot account for the phenomenal difference between feeling and seeing shapes or other common sensibles. That paper advances a novel answer to Grice's objection. Admittedly, the upholder of the proper sensible criterion must bind the proper sensibles –i.e. colors– (...) to the common sensibles –i.e. shapes– so as to account for the visual phenomenal character of shapes. But, as Grice rightly objected, neither association, nor ontological dependence will do –I spend some time isolating why dependence is a bad answer here, basically because the dependence of shape on colors is generic, and that genericity is arguably not part of the phenomenal content of perception. -/- Grice is wrong, however, to think that once association and dependence have been rebutted, there is no other way to attach color to extension. The right way to connect proper and common sensibles is rather trivial, although it seems to have been widely neglected: proper sensibles FILL common ones. To see a shape, by contrast to feeling it, is to perceived as filled by some color. To feel a shape, is to perceive it as, say, filled by pressure. Filling in is the phenomenal connection between proper and common sensibles. -/- One important corollary of that proposal is that proper sensibles –color, pressure, noise, taste...– have to belong to the category of stuffs, in the sense of uncountable entities. Against the widespread view that colors are properties, which have countable instances, the last part of the paper argues that colors are phenomenal stuffs, which fill some visual area. One commits a category mistake in asking: "How many tropes/instances of this determinate redness is there on that ladybird". One should rather ask "How much of this determinate redness is there on that ladybird". (shrink)

Our thesis is that proprioception is not a sixth sense distinct from the sense of touch, but a part of that tactile (or haptic) sense. The tactile sense is defined as the sense whose direct intentional objects are macroscopic mechanical properties. We first argue (against D. Armstrong, 1962; B. O'Shaughnessy 1989, 1995, 1998 and M. Martin, 1992, 1993,1995) that the two following claims are incompatible : (i) proprioception is a sense distinct from touch; (ii) touch is a bipolar modality, that (...) intrinsically has both a subjective-bodily pole and objective pole. We then argue that the bipolarity of touch should be preferred over the introduction of a sui generis sense of the body. We try to revive Aristotle suggestion according to which the body is the tactile medium (like the air for sight). Since this medium is constantly changing its shape, we need some specific channel of information about its state : proprioception, functionally defined, is that part of touch which informs us about the state of this changing tactile medium. Though muscular and articular receptors are usually dedicated to inform us about the mechanical properties of the tactile media, and the skin receptors about the mechanical properties of the tactile objects, this is not essentially so. In weighting or wielding experiments we access the weight of external objects even when skin sensitivity is absent; in prosthetic touch, the skin receptors play the role usually assigned to muscle and articular receptors, namely to inform us about the mechanical state of the tactile medium. So proprioception, anatomically defined, can play both the role of informing us about the tactile medium, or about the tactile objects. That other sensory modalities also rely on proprioceptive information should be understood in terms of cross-modal dependencies: of sight, hearing, smell, taste...on touch. (shrink)

Une affirmation récurrente parcourt les travaux récents consacrés à Georges Canguilhem : l’essor des études canguilhémiennes aurait avant tout permis de prendre conscience du caractère pleinement philosophique de cette œuvre, laquelle aurait été indûment considérée comme relevant avant tout de l’histoire des sciences ou de l’épistémologie. On s’interroge ici sur le sens de cette redécouverte. Comment la philosophie canguilhémienne aurait-elle pu être oubliée? On montrera dans cet article que cette affirmation surprenante doit être resituée dans un contexte de débats académiques, (...) en France et à l’étranger, concernant la nature de la philosophie des sciences. (shrink)

The thesis defended is that ordinary perception does not present us with the existential independence of its objects from itself. The phenomenology of ordinary perception is mute with respect to the subject-object distinction. I call this view "phenomenal neutral monism" : though neutral monists are wrong about the metaphysics of perception (in every perceptual episode, there is a distinction between the perceptual act and its perceptual objet), they are right about its phenomenology. I first argue that this view is not (...) as counter-intuitive as it might initially seem, by stressing (i) that the lack of presentation of the mind-independence of perceptual objects does not entail their being presented as mind-dependent. (ii) That phenomenal neutral monism is true of ordinary perception in the thin sense, but not in the thick sense (that includes expectations, guesses, feelings etc. grounded on thin perception). (iii) That the concept of a perceptual perspective or point of view should not be confused with the concept of the subject or intentional act of perception. Second, I propose three positive arguments in favor of phenomenal neutral monism. (i) It does justice to the recurring idea that only resistance to our will presents us with the world qua independent from us. (ii) It does justice to the recurring idea that the most natural attitude towards the perceptual world is that of being absorbed in it. (iii) It is entailed by the view that intentional acts are phenomenally transparent (a view held by Russell and Moore, and most contemporary representationalists) together with the view that in order to be presented with a relation (here the act-object distinction) one has to be presented with its relata. (shrink)

This response takes advantage of the diverse and wide-ranging series of commentaries to clarify some aspects of the target article, and flesh out other aspects. My central point is a plea to take graphic codes seriously as codes, rather than as a kind of visual art or as a byproduct of spoken language; only in this way can the puzzle of ideography be identified and solved. In this perspective, I argue that graphic codes do not derive their expressive power from (...) iconicity alone (unlike visual arts), and I clarify the peculiar relationship that ties writing to spoken language. I then discuss three possible solutions to the puzzle of ideography. I argue that a learning account still cannot explain why ideographies fail to evolve, even if we emancipate the learning account from the version that Liberman put forward; I develop my preferred solution, the “standardization account,” and contrast it with a third solution suggested by some commentaries, which says that ideographies do not evolve because they would make communication too costly. I consider, by way of conclusion, the consequences of these views for the future evolution of ideography. (shrink)

Conscious awareness comprises two distinct states, autonoetic and noetic awareness. Schizophrenia impairs autonoetic, but not noetic, awareness. We investigated the strategic regulation of relevant and irrelevant contents of conscious awareness in schizophrenia using a directed forgetting paradigm. Twenty-one patients with schizophrenia and 21 normal controls were presented with words and told to learn some of them and forget others. In a subsequent test, they were asked to recognize all the words they had seen previously and give remember, know or guess (...) responses according to whether they recognized words on the basis of autonoetic awareness, noetic awareness, or guessing. Overall, patients showed the same degree of a directed forgetting effect as normal subjects. However, whereas the effect was observed both for remember and know responses in normal subjects, it was observed for know, but not for remember, responses in patients. These results indicate that patients with schizophrenia exhibit an impaired strategic regulation of contents of autonetic awareness for relevant and irrelevant information. (shrink)

Our thesis is that there is a notion of justification, corresponding to the active exercise of a competence in order to attain truth, whose value is explained neither by reliabilism, nor by the usual versions of credit theory.

In the vast field of Roman Ingarden’s ontology, film seems to occupy very little space. Indeed, Ingarden dedicated only two short texts to it. This paper aims at reconstructing Ingarden’s theory of film by expanding on the intuitions and sketches presented in those texts, using Ingarden’s general inquiries on aesthetics and specific inquiries on various forms of art The paper first focuses on the mode of being of film, trying to elaborate the distinctions made by Ingarden between physical foundation, work (...) of art, and aesthetic object and elucidating the relations between film and reality. The paper then moves on to the investigation of silent pictures as an art of pure visibility, then to talking pictures, taking into consideration all the modifications induced by sound and music. Ontological and aesthetical considerations jointly underpin this attempt to show the richness and significance of Ingarden’s theories. (shrink)

Mixed feelings occur when a same subject experience both pleasure and displeasure at the same time. I argued that mixed feelings are not only possible, but that they constitute a widespread phenomenon. In the first part, I answer to three objections against the possibility of mixed feelings, the most important one being that mixed feelings contradict the view that pleasure and displeasure are contraries. In the second part, I argue that pleasure in effort, the pleasure we take in doing things, (...) is a widespread phenomenon that constitutes a case of mixed feeling of a special sort: a case where the displeasure grounds or explains the pleasure. I argue that none of the usual strategies of the enemies of mixed feelings for dealing with putative cases of mixed feelings (oscillation between pleasure and displeasure, rejection of one of the two feelings) achieves to deal with pleasure in effort. (shrink)

Samuel Johnson claimed to have refuted Berkeley by kicking a stone. It is generally thought that Johnson misses the point of Berkeley's immaterialism for a rather obvious reason: Berkeley never denied that the stone feels solid, but only that the stone could exist independently of any mind. I argue that Johnson was on the right track. On my interpretation, Johnson’s idea is that because the stone feels to resist our effort, the stone seems to have causal powers. But if appearances (...) are to be taken at face value, as Berkeley insists, then the stone has causal powers. I argue that such causal powers threaten not only Berkeley’s view that only minds are active, but also, and more fundamentally, his central claim that sensible things depend on perception. (shrink)

Can one refute Berkeleyan phenomenalism by arguing that sensory objects seem mind-independent, and that, according to Berkeley, experience is to be taken at face value? Relying on Mackie’s recent discussion of the issue, I argue, first, that phenomenalism cannot be straightforwardly refuted by relying on perceptual or bodily experience of mind-independence together with the truthfulness of experience. However, I maintain, second that phenomenalism can be indirectly refuted by appealing to the bodily experience of resistance. Such experience presents us with the (...) causal activity of the resisting physical object. If experience is truthful, as the phenomenalist has it, physical objects are causally active. But then their effects no longer depend on our perceiving them, on pain of overdetermination. (shrink)

Nous distinguons ordinairement le corps de l’esprit : nous parvenons aisément à concevoir (même si nous n’y croyons pas forcément) que notre esprit survive à notre corps, ou qu’il aille se loger dans un autre corps. Il y a là, pensons-nous, une véritable différence de nature. Mais bien que cette distinction nous soit très intuitive, dès lors que nous cherchons à spécifier le critère sur lequel elle repose, elle se dérobe. Tout se passe comme si nous n’avions aucun mal à (...) classer les choses d’un côté ou de l’autre de la frontière qui sépare le corps de l’esprit, mais que nous ne parvenions pas à la définir précisément. A quel critère obéissons- nous en effet lorsque nous opérons une bipartition entre phénomènes mentaux et phénomènes physiques dans un ensemble tel que : une croyance, le téléphone du salon, un aimant, l’envie d’un florentin, le Mont Blanc, la vue du Mont Blanc, un claquement de porte, un regret, le bruit d’un moulin, la connaissance du théorème de Thalès, la jalousie, la couleur de la neige, le souvenir d’un citronnier à Menton ? Nous serions probablement tous d’accord pour ranger du côté des phénomènes physiques le téléphone du salon, le claquement de porte, la couleur de la neige, l’aimant, le Mont Blanc et le bruit du moulin ; et du côté des phénomènes mentaux la croyance, l’envie d’un florentin, le regret, la vue du Mont Blanc, la connaissance du théorème de Thalès, la jalousie et le souvenir d’un citronnier de Menton. Mais nous divergerions probablement si nous avions à formuler le critère d’après lequel nous avons opéré cette bipartition. La première chose à faire est donc de tenter d’examiner les critères qui peuvent nous permettre d’établir la distinction entre le corps et l’esprit afin de retenir le plus pertinent. Dans la mesure du possible, celui-ci devra être à la fois informatif (ne pas nous renvoyer simplement à la distinction intuitive que nous pratiquons quotidiennement) et neutre (par exemple être acceptable aussi bien par un dualiste que par un matérialiste). Une fois cette distinction établie, nous serons en mesure de poser trois problèmes. (shrink)

This paper defends the view that Newtonian forces are real symmetrical and non-causal relations. In the first part, I argue that Newtonian forces are real; in the second part, that they are relations; in the third part, that they are symmetrical relations; in the fourth part, that they are not causal relations, (but causal relata) by which I mean that they are not species of causation. The overall picture is anti-humean to the extent that it defends the existence of forces, (...) irreducible to spatio-temporal relations, but is still compatible with humean approaches to causation (and others) since it denies that forces are species of causation. (shrink)

Le sens commun distingue le corps de l’esprit. Il considère par exemple que les désirs et les souvenirs sont des phénomènes mentaux alors que les sons et les courants d’air sont des phénomènes physiques. Au sein de l’esprit, il distingue diverses facultés mentales : il considère par exemple que l’imagination est distincte de la volonté, qui est elle-même distincte de la perception. Au sein de la faculté perceptive, il distingue cinq sens : l’odorat, le goût, la vue, le toucher et (...) l’ouïe. Cette distinction entre différentes modalités perceptives s’avère tout à fait opératoire : nous n’avons le plus souvent aucun mal à répondre à la question « comment avez- vous perçu X : l’avez-vous vu, entendu, touché, ... ? ». En outre, cette distinction semble robuste : elle résiste par exemple à la co-occurrence d’expériences de modalités distinctes. Ainsi pouvons-nous voir et entendre un planeur à la fois. Enfin, nous semblons convaincus, en ce qui concerne les humains, du caractère exhaustif de cette distinction : il nous arrive certes de parler de l’intuition comme d’un sixième sens, ou de parler du sens de l’humour ou des affaires, mais ces expressions sont entendues en un sens figuré. (shrink)

Sometimes we say that pleasure is distinct form joy, happiness, or good mood. Some other times we say the joy, happiness or good mood are types of pleasure. This suggests the existence of two concepts of pleasure: one specific, the other generic. According to the specific concept, pleasure is one type of positive affects among others. Pleasure is to be distinguished from joy, gladness, contentment, merriment, glee, ecstasy, euphoria, exhilaration, elation, jubilation; happiness, felicity, bliss, well-being; enjoyment, amusement, fun, rejoicing, delectation, (...) enchantment, delight, rapture, relish, thrill; satisfaction, gratification, pride, triumph; good mood, jollity, gaiety, cheerfulness; relief (or at least from some of these concepts). According to the generic concept of pleasure, a pleasure is any of these positive affects. Joy, gladness, contentment, merriment, glee, ecstasy, euphoria, exhilaration, elation, jubilation, happiness, felicity, bliss, well-being, enjoyment, amusement, fun, rejoicing, delectation, enchantment, delight, rapture, relish, thrill, satisfaction, gratification, pride, triumph, good mood, jollity, gaiety, cheerfulness, relief and pleasure in the specific sense are all species of pleasures. In this thesis, I shall focus on the generic concept of pleasure, in order to address the question “what is the property of pleasantness common to all positive affects?” In order to address this question nevertheless, one need to have at least rough grip on pleasure in the specific sense and on what distinguishes it from other positive affects. I shall therefore start by hinting at the problem of the definition of the specific concept of pleasure. (shrink)