A flood of new multidisciplinary work on the causes of depersonalization disorder provides a new way to think about the feeling that experiences “belong” to the self. In this paper I argue that this feeling, baptized “mineness” or “subjective presence” : 565–573, 2013) emerges from a multilevel interaction between emotional, affective and cognitive processing. The “self” to which experience is attributed is a predictive model made by the mind to explain the modulation of affect as the organism progresses through the (...) world. When the world no longer produces predicted affect the organism needs to explain this unpredicted absence of feeling. It is important to this account that cognition and perception are otherwise intact. Consequently the mind’s representation of the world and its emotionally salient properties are unchanged, leading the mind to predict a characteristic affective response. When that prediction is not fulfilled the organisms feels as if she is no longer present in experience. This is reported at the as feeling of depersonalization. (shrink)

W.V.O.Quine’s doctrine of referential inscrutability (RI) is the thesis that, first, linguistic reference must always be determined relative to an interpretation of the discourse and, second, that the empirical evidence always underdetermines our choice of interpretation--at least in principle. Although this thesis is a central result of Quine’s theory of language, it was long unclear just how much force RI actually carried. At best, Quine’s discussions provided localized examples of RI (e.g., ‘gavagai’), supplemented merely by arguments for the (in principle) (...) constructability of more general referentially divergent manuals. In defense of Quine, Gerald Massey provides a method for generating large-scale referentially divergent manuals for a complex language. I argue that, while Massey’s rival manuals do meet Quine’s translational criteria, they are demonstrably inferior to their commonsensical “homophonic” competitor. This result provides a clear indication of seminal deficiencies in Quine’s behaviorial approach to the theory of language. Next I argue that Quine’s acceptance of standard assumptions about the nature of perception strongly influences the shape of his semantical theory. Finally, I suggest how an alternative to the standard account of perception might provide grounds for a more adequate understanding of language. (shrink)

Our global ecological crisis demands that we question the rationality of the culture that has caused it: western modernity's free market capitalism. Philip Goodchild develops arguments from Nietzsche, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marx, to suggest that our love of Western modernity is an expression of a piety in which capitalism becomes a global religion, in practice, if not always in belief. This book presents a philosophical alternative that demands attention from philosophers, critical theorists, philosophers of religion, theologians, and those in (...) ecological politics. (shrink)

When asked to explain their solutions to a problem, both adults and children gesture as they talk. These gestures at times convey information that is not conveyed in speech and thus reveal thoughts that are distinct from those revealed in speech. In this study, we use the classic Tower of Hanoi puzzle to validate the claim that gesture and speech taken together can reflect the activation of two cognitive strategies within a single response. The Tower of Hanoi is a well‐studied (...) puzzle, known to be most efficiently solved by activating subroutines at theoretically defined choice points. When asked to explain how they solved the Tower of Hanoi puzzle, both adults and children produced significantly more gesture‐speech mismatches—explanations in which speech conveyed one path and gesture another—at these theoretically defined choice points than they produced at non‐choice points. Even when the participants did not solve the problem efficiently, gesture could be used to indicate where the participants were deciding between alternative paths. Gesture can, thus, serve as a useful adjunct to speech when attempting to discover cognitive processes in problem‐solving. (shrink)

Philip Percival; X*—Absolute Truth, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 94, Issue 1, 1 June 1994, Pages 189–214, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelia.

The case of pain asymbolia is a case study that provides evidence of the mechanisms underlying the relationship between bodily experience, affective experience, and self-awareness. On one account pain asymbolia is the result of an affective deficit. Sensory signals of bodily damage are not associated with characteristic negative affect. Cochrane endorses this account as part of his version of a “conceptual act” theory of affective experience. In contrast, I propose an active inference account of affect in general and pain asymbolia (...) in particular. In the active inference framework the self is inferred as the endogenous cause of bodily and affective experience in the process of organismic regulation. This preserves Cochranes ambition to ground affect in bodily regulation but avoids the problem for affective deficit accounts of asymbolia that cannot do justice to the neural correlates. (shrink)

Jennifer Radden has drawn attention to two features of delusion, ambivalence and subjectivity, which are problematic for theories of delusion that treat delusions as empirical beliefs. She argues for an ‘attitude’ theory of delusion. I argue that once the cognitive architecture of delusion formation is properly described the debate between doxastic and attitude theorists loses its edge. That architecture suggests that delusions are produced by activity in the ‘default mode network’ unsupervised by networks required for decontextualized processing. The cognitive properties (...) of these networks explain the features of delusion which generate the debate between doxastic and attitude theorists. (shrink)

The deposition of the political -- From paradox to partage : on citizenship and teletechnologies -- The disposition of being -- Being communist -- Seattle and the space of exposure.

In this paper I consider a theory developed within cognitive neuropsychiatry to explain two delusions of misidentification, the Capgras and the Cotard delusions. These delusions are classified together with others in which the subject misidentifies persons, places or objects, including parts of her own body. Strictly speaking, the Cotard may not, at the level of content, be a delusion of misidentification, but I have described it as such because the theory I discuss treats it as sharing a causal and a (...) conceptual structure with the Capgras delusion. That theory, associated particularly with the work of Andy Young, raises a Wittgensteinian echo in its claim that, at the subpersonal, information-processing, level, perceptual recognition of familiar faces and scenes is laden with affect. Where affect is absent or distorted as a result of neurological damage the subject “feels” strange in the presence of familiar scenes or people. Thus Young and Leafhead in their discussion of the Cotard delusion: “What the patients often give as evidence of their nonexistence or death is that they don’t have proper feeling.”. (shrink)

It is often argued that human emotions, and the cognitions that accompany them, involve refinements of, and extensions to, more basic functionality shared with other species. Such refinements may rely on common or on distinct processes and representations. Multi-level theories of cognition and affect make distinctions between qualitatively different types of representations often dealing with bodily, affective and cognitive attributes of self-related meanings. This paper will adopt a particular multi-level perspective on mental architecture and show how a mechanism of subsystem (...) differentiation could have allowed an evolutionarily “old” role for emotion in the control of action to have altered into one more closely coupled to meaning systems. We conclude by outlining some illustrative consequences of our analysis that might usefully be addressed in research in comparative psychology, cognitive archaeology, and in laboratory research on memory for emotional material. (shrink)

Panpsychism is the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. This chapter outlines two major arguments for panpsychism, one in terms of its role in solving the hard problem of consciousness, and two the intrinsic nature argument. It also responds to the worry that panpsychism is too counterintuitive to be true.

Whether institutions and not just individual doctors have a right to not participate in medical assistance in dying (MAID) is controversial, but there is a tendency to frame the issue of institutional non‐participation in a particular way. Conscience is central to this framing. Non‐participating health centres are assumed to be religious and full participation is expected unless a centre objects on conscience grounds. In this paper we seek to reframe the issue. Institutional non‐participation is plausibly not primarily, let alone exclusively, (...) about conscience. We seek to reframe the issue by making two main points. First, institutional non‐participation is primarily a matter of institutional self‐governance. We suggest that institutions have a natural right of self‐governance which, in the case of health centres such as hospitals or hospices, includes the right to choose whether or not to offer MAID. Second, there are various legitimate reasons unrelated to conscience for which a health centre might not offer MAID. These range from considerations such as institutional capacity and expertise to a potential contradiction with palliative care and a concern to not conflate palliative care and MAID in public consciousness. It is a mistake to frame the conversation simply in terms of conscience‐based opposition to MAID or full participation. Our goal is to open up new space in the conversation, for reasons unrelated to conscience as well as for non‐religious health centres who might nonetheless have legitimate grounds for not participating in MAID. (shrink)

This volume contains nine chapters of translation, by a range of leading scholars, focusing on core themes in the philosophy of Zhu Xi (1130-1200), one of the most influential Chinese thinkers of the later Confucian tradition. -/- Table of Contents: Chapter One: Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Ethics by Philip J. Ivanhoe Chapter Two: Moral Psychology and Cultivating the Self by Curie Virág Chapter Three: Politics and Government by Justin Tiwald Chapter Four: Poetry, Literature, Textual Study, and Hermeneutics by On-cho Ng (...) Chapter Five: Social Conditions of His Time by Beverly Bossler Chapter Six: Heaven, Ghosts and Spirits, and Ritual by Hoyt Tillman Chapter Seven: Criticisms of Buddhism, Daoism, and the Learning of the Heart-mind by Ellen Neskar and Ari Borrell Chapter Eight: Science and Natural Philosophy by Yung Sik Kim Chapter Nine: Zhu Xi's Commentarial Work: Abiding in the Mean and the Constant by Daniel Gardner. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Formalism Enhanced Formalism Beyond Formalism.

This article introduces the concept of technological citizenship as a status for individuals consisting of rights and obligations within bounded technological polities enforced by statist structures. The model reconciles freedom to innovate with the affirmation of the autonomy and dignity of laypersons and the assimilation of laypersons with their world. It seeks lay control over the introduction and ongoing management of environmental hazards and self-verification of safety. The rights and obligations of TC compose a "new social contract of complexity." Even (...) with different values stressed, the name, concept, and terms of TC would streamline studies of peril. (shrink)

The contemporary sociology of morality is a form of descriptive ethics that shrinks away from any sort of prescriptive ethics. Building on the moral philosophies of John Dewey, and also of Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur, and in dialogue with recent work by Stefan Bargheer, this article proposes a more ambitious program of critical social ethics that connects concerns with character and the common good but tempers them with attention to alienation and oppression.

© 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press.

This book develops a metaphysics which is missing when trust is ordered around economic theories and institutions.

We survey a variety of possible explications of the term “Individual Risk.” These in turn are based on a variety of interpretations of “Probability,” including classical, enumerative, frequency, formal, metaphysical, personal, propensity, chance and logical conceptions of probability, which we review and compare. We distinguish between “groupist” and “individualist” understandings of probability, and explore both “group to individual” and “individual to group” approaches to characterising individual risk. Although in the end that concept remains subtle and elusive, some pragmatic suggestions for (...) progress are made. (shrink)

"My interest in [Max] Scheler's critique of Kant runs back nearly a decade.... The more I read of Scheler, the more I began to see the value of a project dealing with his critique of Kant in Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die Materiale Wetethik, which would possess the virtue of focusing in a single project three important strands of philosophical interest: phenomenology, Kantianism, and ethics.... "The study is divided into six chapters and two appendices. Each of the chapters (...) constituting the body of the work contains a brief analysis of the Kantian position or discussion of the basic questions at issue in it, an exposition of Scheler's critique of the Kantian position and its presuppositions, and a detailed appraisal of Scheler's critique." -- from the introduction by the author. (shrink)

The philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and the later Wittgenstein are shown to yield a common position opposing 'realist' attempts to reduce appearance, sense, and meaning to perception-independent objects and relations. Their 'Gestalt Philosophy' thus constitutes a new form of 'anti- realism'.

Within the strategy that we call avant-garde there are two sets of tactics, one immediate, the other long term. One set could be called a tactics of short-term attention, and it is this set that has been most often noticed. Shock, surprise, self-promotion, the baiting of middle-class solemnity, outrage, a subversive playfulness, a deliberate frustration of habitual expectations, an apparent difficult or refusal of communication, a banality where profundity and seriousness were earlier the norm: these are a few of the (...) tactics that again and again appeared as part of the competitive marketplace strategy for advertising the new.To be a notorious artist was always halfway to becoming a famous one, and many were willing to take the chance that once conditions were right the slight move from notoriety to fame could be accomplished. These tactics made it clear that the problem for an artist within the modern period was first of all to stand out within a crowd, within a surplus of candidates for the few places available nationally or internationally. The rivalry for initial attention under modern conditions set every artist the question of how his own work might have clear identity and felt importance. This was, in an age of products and advertising, the problem of how to turn a style into a brand. Philip Fisher is professor of English at Harvard University and the author of Hard Facts . The essay published here forms part of his forthcoming book Making and Effacing Art. He is currently at work on a book on the philosophical and literary history of the Passions. (shrink)

We develop a mathematical and interpretative foundation for the enterprise of decision-theoretic (DT) statistical causality, which is a straightforward way of representing and addressing causal questions. DT reframes causal inference as “assisted decision-making” and aims to understand when, and how, I can make use of external data, typically observational, to help me solve a decision problem by taking advantage of assumed relationships between the data and my problem. The relationships embodied in any representation of a causal problem require deeper justification, (...) which is necessarily context-dependent. Here we clarify the considerations needed to support applications of the DT methodology. Exchangeability considerations are used to structure the required relationships, and a distinction drawn between intention to treat and intervention to treat forms the basis for the enabling condition of “ignorability.” We also show how the DT perspective unifies and sheds light on other popular formalisations of statistical causality, including potential responses and directed acyclic graphs. (shrink)