The Theory of Event Coding (TEC) provides a preliminary account of the interaction between perception and action, which is consistent with several recent findings in the area of motor control. Significant issues require integration and elaboration, however; particularly, distractor interference, automatic motor corrections, internal models of action, and neuroanatomical bases for the link between perception and action.

La structure qui sous-tend la composition du poème de Parménide est très élaborée, il est aisé de s’en rendre compte. La déesse y parle des ensei­gnements qu’elle s’apprête à délivrer et, dans les fragments 10 et 11, elle offre un panorama détaillé de tout un ensemble de questions qu’elle va traiter aussitôt après. Un certain nombre d’éléments métatextuels se trouvent de cette façon insérés dans le texte écrit au premier degré et en interrompent le cours. D’autres passages de texte à (...) métatexte (et vice versa) se rencontrent d’ailleurs dans les fragments, mettant ainsi en évidence de frappantes discontinuités et des change­ments significatifs dans le type de saturation provoqué dans l’auditoire. Tout cela fait comprendre que les enseignements délivrés dans le poème sont immer­gés dans une infrastructure beaucoup plus « construite » et « étudiée », beaucoup plus consciente que celle qui apparaît dans tant d’autres textes de la même épo­que ou antérieurs. D’où l’importance d’une recherche spécifiquement consacrée à la composition du poème dans son ensemble. La formule rassurante de B10.1, « tu apprendras » (εἴσῃ), prend dans cette recherche une importance particulière, parce qu’elle démontre que Parménide lui-même a donné une valeur explicitement positive à ce qui, jusque peu aupara­vant, faisait l’objet de jugements fortement négatifs. Cette incohérence n’est donc pas une conjecture de notre part, mais quelque chose dont Parménide ne peut pas ne pas s’être rendu compte, ce qui signifie vraisemblablement que la seconde partie du poème expose des connaissances auxquelles il était parvenu dans une « phase précritique » de sa recherche. Sinon, à quelle autre explication pourrait-on penser? (shrink)

Thales the Measurer offers a comprehensive and iconoclastic account of Thales of Miletus, considering the full extent of our evidence to build a new picture of his intellectual interests and activity. Thales is most commonly associated with the claim that 'everything is water', but closer examination of the evidence that we have suggests that he could not have said anything of the sort. His real interests, and his real innovations, lay in challenges of quantitative measurement, especially measurements related to the (...) movement of the sun. In this he had no predecessors - and, for centuries to follow, no real successors either. This book is of interest for scholars in the history of philosophy, science, and life sciences. It is aimed especially at researchers in the field, but is also accessible to students and a more general readership. (shrink)

What did the early Greek philosophers think about animals and their lives? How did they view plants? And, ultimately, what type of relationship did they envisage between all sorts of living beings? On these topics there is evidence of a prolonged investigation by several Presocratics. However, scholarship has paid little attention to these issues and to the surprisingly "modern" development they received in Presocratics' doctrines. This book fills this lacuna through a detailed (and largely unprecedented) analysis of the extant evidence. (...) The volume includes also the first extensive collection of the ancient sources pertaining to living beings and life in early Greek philosophy, organized chronologically and thematically. (shrink)

Philosophical considerations as well as several recent studies from neurophysiology, neuropsychology, and psychophysics converged in showing that the peripersonal space is structured in a body-centred manner and represented through integrated sensory inputs. Multisensory representations may deserve the function of coding peripersonal space for avoiding or interacting with objects. Neuropsychological evidence is reviewed for dynamic interactions between space representations and action execution, as revealed by the behavioural effects that the use of a tool, as a physical extension of the reachable space, (...) produces on visual–tactile extinction. In particular, tool-use transiently modifies action space representation in a functionally effective way. The possibility is discussed that the investigation of multisensory space representations for action provides an empirical way to consider in its specificity pre-reflexive self-consciousness by considering the intertwining of self-relatedness and object-directness of spatial experience shaped by multisensory and sensorimotor integrations. (shrink)

This article reviews experimental evidence for a specific sensorimotor function which can be dissociated from higher level representations of space. It attempts to delineate this function on the basis of results obtained by psychophysical experiments performed with brain damaged and healthy subjects. Eye and hand movement control exhibit automatic features, such that they are incompatible with conscious control. In addition, they rely on a reference frame different from the one used by conscious perception. Neuropsychological cases provide a strong support for (...) this specific motor representation of space, which can be spared in patients with lesions of primary sensory systems who have lost conscious perception of visual, tactile or proprioceptive stimuli. Observation of these patients also showed that their motor behavior can be ''attracted'' by a goal only under specific conditions, that is, when the response is immediate and when no cognitive representation of this goal is elaborated at the same time. Beyond the issue of the dissociation between an implicit motor representation and more cognitive processing of spatial information, the issue of the interaction between these two systems is thus a matter of interest. It is suggested that the conscious, cognitive representation of a stimulus can contaminate or override the short-lived motor representation, but no reciprocal influence seem to occur. The interaction observed in patients can also be investigated in normals. The literature provides examples of interaction between sensorimotor and cognitive framing of space, which confirm that immediate action is not mediated by the same system as delayed action, and that elaborating a categorial representation of the action goal prevents the expression of the short-lived sensorimotor representation. It is concluded that action can be controlled by a sensory system which is specialized for on-line processing of relevant goal characteristics. The temporal constraints of this system are such that it can affect the action before a full sensory analysis of this goal has been completed. The performance obtained on the basis of this spatial sensory processing suggests that short-lived motor representations may rather be considered as real ''presentation'' of the action world, which share its metric properties. (shrink)

A further step in Pylyshyn's discontinuity thesis is to examine the penetrability of haptic (tactual-kinesthetic) perception. The study of the perception of orientation and the “oblique effect” (lower performance in oblique orientations than in vertical–horizontal orientations) in the visual and haptic modalities allows this question to be discussed. We suggest that part of the visual process generating the visual oblique effect is cognitively impenetrable, whereas all haptic processes generating the haptic oblique effect are cognitively penetrable.

INTRODUCTION Beyond Dissociations Reassembling the mind-brain after all? Yves Rossetti Antti Revonsuo "Comme des banes de poissons de meme espece, ...

A visual analogue, two-route model of somatosensory processing is advanced in this commentary. Touch for perception is seen as separate from, although interconnected with, touch for action. Separate modules are additionally proposed for internal (body) and external (object-related) somatosensation. Here we ask whether dissociation (divide) guarantees better efficiency (impera) in terms of the heuristic model within the somatosensory modality and across modalities.

Some data concerning visual illusions are hardly compatible with the perception–action model, assuming that only the perception system is influenced by visual context. The planning–control dichotomy offers an alternative that better accounts for some controversy in experimental data. We tested the two models by submitting the patient I. G. to the induced Roelofs effect. The similitude of the results of I. G. and control subjects favoured Glover's model, which, however, presents a paradox that needs to be clarified.

Is there any ecological purpose in assuming that perception for action exists only through a global array of energy? Unlike Stoffregen & Bardy, who assume that behavior consists of movements, we would argue that behavior consists of a stable coupling between perception and action achieved through experience in an adaptive context. Determining target position in an aiming manual task and temporal control of impact movement illustrate that patterns of energy used for action are task-dependent.

Dienes & Perner's (D&P's) target articles proposes an analysis of explicit knowledge based on a progressive transformation of implicit into explicit products, applying this gradient to different aspects of knowledge that can be represented. The goal is to integrate a philosophical concept of knowledge with relevant psychophysical and neuropsychological data. D&P seem to fill an impressive portion of the gap between these two areas. We focus on two examples where a full synthesis of theoretical and empirical data seems difficult to (...) establish and would require further refinement of the model: action representation and the closely related consciousness of action, which is in turn related to self-consciousness. (shrink)

Philosophy is often taken to be something that is always possible, so that everyone is fully entitled sketching a ‘philosophy’ of his/her own. Nevertheless, it is widely assumed that philosophy began in Miletus with Thales. But it is equally well known that the Presocratics remained unaware of being philosophers, and therefore could not even have wanted to be identified that way. These three points are not mutually compatible. So, what lies behind them? What is escaping our attention when we state (...) them? Probably an event in Plato’s life that has too often gone unnoticed: the key role he played in giving form and substance to philosophy, and in getting it to take root once and for all. Failure to acknowledge how, when, and on whose initiative philosophy came to occupy a very important place in Western culture and education for two and a half millennia; not including a note on this process in biographies of Plato; and overlooking another key event that probably occurred about 350-45 BC - these are just some of the unwelcome effects linked to the usual silence about the period in which philosophy took form. (shrink)

Plamondon's kinematic theory is very powerful from a descriptive point of view. Unfortunately, the fact that it neglects some fundamental features of the motor system, such as nonlinear inertial torque interactions or joint redundancies, limits its explanatory power and biological validity. As a consequence, the data presented by Plamondon & Alimi should be analyzed and interpreted with caution. There appears to be a gap between the observations reported by the authors and some of the conclusions they draw.

The concept of a conservative control strategy minimizing the number of degrees of freedom used is criticised with reference to 3-D simple reaching and grasping experiments. The vector error in a redundant system would not be the prime controlled variable, but rather the posture for reaching, as exemplified by nearly straight displacements in joint space as opposed to curved ones in task space.

Il Parmenide _phusikos_ e il meccanismo di Antikitera: Risposta alle osservazioni di N.-L. Cordero.

The present paper makes the following points. The summary given in Sextus Emp. Math. VII is of much greater value than usually acknowledged, since it preserves several key elements of Gorgias’ communicational strategy. A sketchy trilemma is available in the opening sentence of Philolaos as well as in a passage of Plato’s Parmenides. This is evidence in favor of the hypothesis that the very first known trilemma was devised by Gorgias and not by Sextus himself or Aenesidemus. Not unlike Zeno, (...) Gorgias enjoyed to be neither serious nor joking, but remained somewhat halfway. This point is seldom acknowledged, though it is crucial in order to understand that he pretends to claim, but his claims do not amount to any points of doctrine. That he remains halfway should not prevent us from appreciating some of his ideas, but, at the same time, we should not expect full intellectual adhesion to what he tells us. Besides, something similar occurs in most of Plato’s dialogues.. Gorgias owes a lot to Melissus. (shrink)

‘Substance’ (substantia, zelfstandigheid) is a key term of Spinoza’s philosophy. Like almost all of Spinoza’s philosophical vocabulary, Spinoza did not invent this term, which has a long history that can be traced back at least to Aristotle. Yet, Spinoza radicalized the traditional notion of substance and made a very powerful use of it by demonstrating – or at least attempting to demonstrate -- that there is only one, unique substance -- God (or Nature) -- and that all other things are (...) merely modes or states of God. Some of Spinoza’s readers understood these claims as committing him to the view that only God truly exists, and while this interpretation is not groundless, we will later see that this enticing and bold reading of Spinoza as an ‘acosmist’ comes at the expense of another audacious claim Spinoza advances, i.e., that God/Nature is absolutely and actually infinite. But before we reach this last conclusion, we have a long way to go. So, let me first provide an overview of our plan. In the first section of this paper we will examine Spinoza’s definitions of ‘substance’ and ‘God’ at the opening of his magnum opus, the Ethics. Following a preliminary clarification of these two terms and their relations to the other key terms defined at the beginning of the Ethics, we will briefly address the Aristotelian and Cartesian background of Spinoza’s discussion of substance. In the second section, we will study the properties of the fundamental binary relations pertaining to Spinoza’s substance: inherence, conception, and causation. The third section will be dedicated to a clarification of Spinoza’s claim that God, the unique substance, is absolutely infinite. This essential feature of Spinoza’s substance has been largely neglected in recent Anglo-American scholarship, a neglect which has brought about an unfortunate tendency to domesticate Spinoza’s metaphysics to more contemporary views. The fourth section will study the nature of Spinoza’s monism. It will discuss and criticize the interesting yet controversial views of the eminent Spinoza scholar, Martial Gueroult, about the plurality of substances in the beginning of the Ethics; address Spinoza’s claim in Letter 50 that, strictly speaking, it is improper to describe God as “one”; and, finally, evaluate Spinoza’s kind of monism against the distinction between existence and priority monism recently introduced into the contemporary philosophical literature. The fifth and final section will explain the nature, reality, and manner of existence of modes. We therefore have an ambitious plan; let’s get down to business. (shrink)