This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Subject & Object is a thematic collection of classic works by Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, designed to foreground the authors' philosophical concerns, especially in the areas of epistemology, ontology, and method. The volume, which includes lucid introductions to all of the selections, illustrates Frankfurt School approaches to questions such as the nature of reason; the limits of empiricism, pragmatism and Kantian transcendental idealism; the case for materialism; the difficulty of thinking counterfactually; and the ideological character (...) of mainstream social science. Many of the pieces in the volume are otherwise out of print. Subject & Object will be a resource for social, political, and cultural theorists who may be less familiar with the philosophical aspects of the Frankfurt School, for analytic philosophers who may not have had previous exposure to their work at all, and for anyone wanting access to these seminal texts. (shrink)

A view widely held by epistemologists is that there is a distinction between subjective and objective epistemic justification, analogous to the commonly drawn distinction between subjective and objective justification in ethics. Richard Brandt offers a clear statement of this line of thought.

Confirmation is commonly identified with positive relevance, E being said to confirm H if and only if E increases the probability of H. Today, analyses of this general kind are usually Bayesian ones that take the relevant probabilities to be subjective. I argue that these subjective Bayesian analyses are irremediably flawed. In their place I propose a relevance analysis that makes confirmation objective and which, I show, avoids the flaws of the subjective analyses. What I am proposing is in some (...) ways a return to Carnap's conception of confirmation, though there are also important differences between my analysis and his. My analysis includes new accounts of what evidence is and of the indexicality of confirmation claims. Finally, I defend my analysis against Achinstein's criticisms of the relevance concept of confirmation. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that certain perceptual relations are represented in visual experience.

Although the use of pronouns has been extensively investigated in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), most studies have focused on English, and no study to date has investigated the use of subject pronouns in null subject languages. The present study aims to fill this gap by investigating the use of subject and object pronouns in 5- to 8-year-old Greek-speaking high-functioning children with ASD compared to individually matched typically developing age and language controls. The ‘Frog where (...) are you’ (Mayer, 1969) narrative task was used to elicit subject and object pronouns as well as DPs. Greek is a null subject language, and as a result, subject pronouns most often remain without phonological content. The results showed that both groups used more null than overt subject pronouns, indicating that children with ASD know that Greek is a null subject language. TD children used more null subjects than subject DPs, whereas children with ASD used an equal proportion of null subjects and subject DPs. In terms of object pronouns, both groups produced more clitics and object DPs than strong object pronouns, but the difference between clitics and DPs did not reach significance in either of the groups. Importantly, the groups did not differ from each other in the use of ambiguous pronouns in both the subject and object position. The ASD children’s avoidance to use pronominal subjects can be taken as evidence that they use a strategy to avoid infelicitous reference. This would suggest that the ASD children’s difficulties with pronouns is not due to difficulties in core grammar. (shrink)

Subjects and Objects provides the philosophical groundwork for the determination of the limits ofion in art. This involves extensive consideration of the subject-object relationship and properties of subjects and objects that pertain to making and apprehending works of art.

In this paper, I explore the relationship between the subject and the object from the perspective of scientific realism. I first characterize the scientific realist position that I adopt. I then address the question of the nature of scientific knowledge from a realist point of view. Next I consider the question of how to locate the knowing subject within the context of scientific realism. After that I consider the place of mind in an objective world. I close (...) with some general remarks on the topic. (shrink)

Many definitions and theories of self assume that ‘self’ refers to some thing or process that exists as part of the universe. Similarly, ‘consciousness’ is assumed to refer to a property of such a part. These basic assumptions are mistaken, and generate some of the deepest confusions in the philosophy of mind. Such distinctions as seer/seen, hearer/heard, and thinker/thought generalize to subject/object. The distinction between subject and object is prior to any theories about the nature of (...) the self: before I can even begin to wonder what I am, I must have already realized that I am. Whatever I may call it cannot be conceived correctly as any kind of object or property. The distinction between subject and object is more fundamental than the Cartesian distinction between mind and matter, with which it is commonly conflated. ‘I am conscious’ and ‘I am’ are variant expressions of the same basic realization, suggesting that ‘consciousness’ and ‘being’ are convergent concepts. (shrink)

Over the past half-century, the Freeman laboratory has accumulated a large volume of data and a correspondingly extensive interpretive framework centered around an alternative perspective on brain function, that of dynamical systems. The purpose of this paper is first briefly to summarise this work, and bring it into dialogue with other perspectives. The contents of consciousness are seen as an inevitably sparse sample of events in the perception–action cycle. The paper proceeds to an attempt to elucidate the contents of this (...) sparse sample. A critical concept is that of selfhood, and how it presents itself phenomenologically. It is argued that our experience of selfhood is an artifact of the necessity of preservation of subject/object relations. As this part of metaphysics has been badly misunderstood, we scrutinise it at some length in quantum mechanics, biology, and cognition. It is argued that Pattee's approach, while valuable, tends to premature closure on these issues. The paper then proceeds to outline a view on how selfhood is best considered wrt the immune response. This is interrelated with phenomenology, and some data are adduced to support this central hypothesis. Finally, consequences for the social sciences in general are hinted at. (shrink)

This essay argues that the philosophy of the Mengzi is not an idealism or naturalism which makes morality something innate. These interpretations are limited by Cartesian presuppositions of objectivity and subjectivity, which were not a part of the Mengzi’s philosophical repertoire. This essay rehearses the problem of subjectivity and objectivity in Western philosophy. It then argues that no such dichotomy informed the Mengzi; instead, it maintains that minds and their worlds are mutually entailing and constituting. It explores the relationship between (...) the concepts of heart-mind, human nature, and tian, arguing that heart-mind is the emergence of human nature which is the internalized interpretive framework of an external Confucian morality referred to as tian. It argues that humans are situated within historical traditions that provide their world horizons. There is no world beyond the Confucian world and no mind beyond the Confucian mind: the Mengzi is a realism with a Confucian face. (shrink)

In this paper, it is argued that the question ldquo;What is life?rdquo; time and again emergesmdash;and within the confines of an objectivistic/subjectivistic frame of thought has to emergemdash;as a symptom, a non-deciphered, cryptic message that insists on being interpreted. br /Our hypothesis is that the failure to measure up the living to the standards of objectification has been taken too frequently from an objectivistic angle, leading to a simple postponement of an objective treatment of the living, and meanwhile confining it (...) to the domain of the subjective, the relative and the metaphorical. As a consequence, the truly important question of the co-constitutive relation between objectivity and subjectivity is thereby evaded. A critical, transcendental account can be relevant in this regard, not only because of the fact that objectivity and subjectivity are seen as co-constitutive, but also because it addresses the question of the embeddedness of objectivity and subjectivity from within the living dynamics.br /This hypothesis will be articulated on the basis of Erwin Schrouml;dingerrsquo;s famous little book on ldquo;What is life?rdquo;, in dialogue with Robert Rosenrsquo;s critical reading of it. It appears that Schrouml;dinger considered the living as a genuine challenge for classical objectification procedures. However, it is doubtful whether this brought him to a critical reading of objectivity or to the acknowledgment of a constitutive role of subjectivity in relation to objectivity. We argue that his viewpoint has the merit ofnbsp; expressing the difficulty of the living within the field of the physical sciences, but does not really transcend the objectivism/subjectivism opposition. At this point, Rosenrsquo;s relational account takes up the challenge more radically by acknowledging the need for a new epistemology and a new metaphysics in relation to living systems, and by attributing a place to classical objectivity from within this ldquo;new sciencerdquo;. In conclusion, we return to Kantrsquo;s epistemological proposal, and show its potential relevance in this debate. (shrink)

This book seeks to arrive at a better understanding of the relationships between the objective and subjective aspects of time. It discusses the existence of fluent time, a controversial concept in many areas, from philosophy to physics. Fluent time is understood as directional time with a past, a present and a future. We experience fluent time in our lives and we adopt a temporal perspective in our ways of knowing and acting. Nevertheless, the existence of fluent time has been debated (...) for both philosophical and scientific reasons, thus creating a rift between the subjective and objective aspects of time. Starting from the basic notion of points of view, or perspectives, this book explores the relationships between objective or external time, as it has been conceptualized by science, and subjective or internal time, which is involved in our lived experiences. It establishes a general framework encompassing the nature, structure and mode of existence of points of view, in which the objective and subjective aspects of time can be integrated. The book mainly addresses researchers and postgraduates in philosophy and logic. Additionally, it offers inspiration for physicists and computer scientists involved in the modeling and simulation of complex behaviors for which the representation of internal time should be considered together with the notion of objective, external time. (shrink)

This book seeks to arrive at a better understanding of the relationships between the objective and subjective aspects of time. It discusses the existence of fluent time, a controversial concept in many areas, from philosophy to physics. Fluent time is understood as directional time with a past, a present, and a future. We experience fluent time in our lives and we adopt a temporal perspective in our ways of knowing and acting. Nevertheless, the existence of fluent time has been debated (...) for both philosophical and scientific reasons, thus creating a rift between the subjective and objective aspects of time. Starting from the basic notion of points of view, or perspectives, this book explores the relationships between objective or external time, as it has been conceptualized by science, and subjective or internal time, which is involved in our lived experiences. It establishes a general framework encompassing the nature, structure and mode of existence of points of view, in which the objective and subjective aspects of time can be integrated. The book mainly addresses researchers and postgraduates in philosophy and logic. Additionally, it offers inspiration for physicists and computer scientists involved in the modeling and simulation of complex behaviors for which the representation of internal time should be considered together with the notion of objective, external time. (shrink)

This book seeks to arrive at a better understanding of the relationships between the objective and subjective aspects of time. It discusses the existence of fluent time, a controversial concept in many areas, from philosophy to physics. Fluent time is understood as directional time with a past, a present and a future. We experience fluent time in our lives and we adopt a temporal perspective in our ways of knowing and acting. Nevertheless, the existence of fluent time has been debated (...) for both philosophical and scientific reasons, thus creating a rift between the subjective and objective aspects of time. Starting from the basic notion of points of view, or perspectives, this book explores the relationships between objective or external time, as it has been conceptualized by science, and subjective or internal time, which is involved in our lived experiences. It establishes a general framework encompassing the nature, structure and mode of existence of points of view, in which the objective and subjective aspects of time can be integrated. The book mainly addresses researchers and postgraduates in philosophy and logic. Additionally, it offers inspiration for physicists and computer scientists involved in the modeling and simulation of complex behaviors for which the representation of internal time should be considered together with the notion of objective, external time. (shrink)

This book seeks to arrive at a better understanding of the relationships between the objective and subjective aspects of time. It discusses the existence of fluent time, a controversial concept in many areas, from philosophy to physics. Fluent time is understood as directional time with a past, a present and a future. We experience fluent time in our lives and we adopt a temporal perspective in our ways of knowing and acting. Nevertheless, the existence of fluent time has been debated (...) for both philosophical and scientific reasons, thus creating a rift between the subjective and objective aspects of time. Starting from the basic notion of points of view, or perspectives, this book explores the relationships between objective or external time, as it has been conceptualized by science, and subjective or internal time, which is involved in our lived experiences. It establishes a general framework encompassing the nature, structure and mode of existence of points of view, in which the objective and subjective aspects of time can be integrated. The book mainly addresses researchers and postgraduates in philosophy and logic. Additionally, it offers inspiration for physicists and computer scientists involved in the modeling and simulation of complex behaviors for which the representation of internal time should be considered together with the notion of objective, external time. (shrink)

An important contribution to the study of philosophical theology.