The segregation of image parts into foreground and background is an important aspect of the neural computation of 3D scene perception. To achieve such segregation, the brain needs information about border ownership; that is, the belongingness of a contour to a specific surface represented in the image. This article presents psychophysical data derived from 3D percepts of figure and ground that were generated by presenting 2D images composed of spatially disjoint shapes that pointed inward or outward relative to the (...) continuous boundaries that they induced along their collinear edges. The shapes in some images had the same contrast (black or white) with respect to the background gray. Other images included opposite contrasts along each induced continuous boundary. Psychophysical results demonstrate conditions under which figure-ground judgment probabilities in response to these ambiguous displays are determined by the orientation of contrasts only, not by their relative contrasts, despite the fact that many border ownership cells in cortical area V2 respond to a preferred relative contrast. Studies are also reviewed in which both polarity-specific and polarity-invariant properties obtain perceptual figure-ground grouping results. The FACADE and 3D LAMINART models are used to explain these data. Keywords: figure-ground separation, border ownership, perceptual grouping, surface filling-in, V2, V4, FACADE Theory. (shrink)

If aesthetics is both surface and depth, impassioned immediacy yet also critical distance of judgment, how can this doubleness be held together in one ...

This essay analyses the way in which the relation between surface and depth in modern painting is endowed with philosophical significance in the work of Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel Henry. Whereas Foucault considered the work of Magritte and Manet to undermine the notion of depth as such, by showing the movement of ‘similitude’, Merleau-Ponty and Henry saw post-impressionist painting as engendering an experience of depth that exceeds the Cartesian model of space as res extensa. (...) The motif of painterly surface thus brings into debate two significant movements in French twentieth-century thought: structuralism and phenomenology; in each case, the engagement with painterly technique becomes a way of grasping broader questions regarding the relation between perceptual experience and linguistic meaning. (shrink)

Philosophers seldom ask questions regarding how certain phenomena occur, because such questions tend to be the province of the sciences or of technology. However, the question how pictures have depth requires philosophical reflection because it takes place on the surface of pictorial objects and involves both physical and phenomenal, i.e. aesthetic, features of those surfaces. This essay examines how pictures have depth by first separating the aesthetic question from interpretive considerations, and thereby refining the question how pictures (...) have depth. Next it explicates two sorts of conceptual tools required to understand the question: several complex concepts needed to understand surfaces, and the concept of intensity. These are then used to understand how pictures can have depth by showing how intensities produce both an aesthetic surface and depth within it. (shrink)

The films The Bling Ring, Spring Breakers, and Drive, were all dismissed for their depthlessness. This article argues that we need to explore the depths and variety of their engagement with surface in order to fully appreciate what these films are trying to say. The article proposes that these films in fact employ three different “strategies” of surface engagement, in and through their aesthetics; The Bling Ring relies on a sense of “skimming”, Spring Breakers engages ideas of “drifting”, (...) while Drive promotes a sense of “gliding” or “coasting”. Analysis of these strategies of surface aesthetics reveals that the films make dialectic categories of depth and surface, sign and meaning, form and content, indistinguishable, and it is precisely in doing so that they offer complex critique on the crimes they display, and the state of our current hyper-mediated and networked world. These films are not only about the stories they tell but abo... (shrink)

Fitouchi et al. persuasively argue against popular disgust-based accounts of puritanical morality. However, they do not consider alternative account of moral condemnation that is also based on the psychology of disgust. We argue that these other disgust-based accounts are more promising than those dismissed in the target article.

We show that true colors as defined by Chevreul (1839) produce unsuspected simultaneous brightness induction effects on their immediate grey backgrounds when these are placed on a darker (black) general background surrounding two spatially separated configurations. Assimilation and apparent contrast may occur in one and the same stimulus display. We examined the possible link between these effects and the perceived depth of the color patterns which induce them as a function of their luminance contrast. Patterns of square-shaped inducers of (...) a single color (red, green, blue, yellow, or grey) were placed on background fields of a lighter and a darker grey, presented on a darker screen. Inducers were always darker on one side of the display and brighter on the other in a given trial. The intensity of the grey backgrounds varied between trials only. This permitted generating four inducer luminance contrasts, presented in random order, for each color. Background fields were either spatially separated or consisted of a single grey field on the black screen. Experiments were run under three environmental conditions: dark-adaptation, daylight, and rod-saturation after exposure to bright light. In a first task, we measured probabilities of contrast, assimilation, and no effect in a three-alternative forced-choice procedure (background appears brighter on the ‘left’, on the ‘right’ or the ‘same’). Visual adaptation and inducer contrast had no significant influence on the induction effects produced by colored inducers. Achromatic inducers produced significantly stronger contrast effects after dark-adaptation, and significantly stronger assimilation in daylight conditions. Grouping two backgrounds into a single one was found to significantly decrease probabilities of apparent contrast. Under the same conditions, we measured probabilities of the inducers to be perceived as nearer to the observer inducers. These, as predicted by Chevreul’s law of contrast, were determined by the luminance contrast of the inducers only, with significantly higher probabilities of brighter inducers to be seen as nearer, and a marked asymmetry between effects produced by inducers of opposite sign. Implications of these findings for theories which attempt to link simultaneous induction effects to the relative depth of object surfaces in the visual field are discussed. (shrink)

This article interrogates the persistence of critical frameworks informed by depth-models of hermeneutics, and the repercussions the equation of “depth” with meaningfulness has for the appreciation of the “shallow” aesthetics of post-classical action cinema. Oppositions such as depth/surface, body/mind, and proximity/distance associated with a hermeneutics of depth are not neutral, but rather exist in a “violent hierarchy”. This ensures that works or styles that foreground surface are automatically deemed to be meaningless. One influential example (...) of this logic is Fredric Jameson's dismissal of postmodern superficiality in favour of modernist depth. In contrast, this article will explore alternative models of postmodern superficiality. Taking up Catherine Constable's reading of Linda Hutcheon, I will endeavour to demonstrate the benefits of adopting a postmodern critical perspective when engaging with texts that resist or problematise depth-models. Through a close reading of a key se... (shrink)

ArgumentThe Thematic Apperception Test was a projective psychological test created by Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray and his lover Christina Morgan in the 1930s. The test entered the nascent intelligence service of the United States during the Second World War due to its celebrated reputation for revealing the deepest aspects of an individual's unconscious. It subsequently spread as a scientifically objective research tool capable not only of dredging the unconscious depths, but also of determining the best candidate for a management (...) position, the psychological complexes of human nature, and the unique characteristics of a culture. Two suppositions underlie the utility of the test. One is the power of narrative. The test entails a calculated abuse of the subjects tested, based on their inability to interpret their own narrative. The form of the test requires that a subject fail to decipher the coded, unconscious meaning their narrative reveals. Murray believed the interpretation of a subject's narrative and the projection contained therein depended exclusively on the psychologist. This view of interpretation stems from the seemingly more reasonable belief of nineteenth-century Romantic thinkers that a literary text serves as a proxy for an author's deepest self. The TAT also supposes that there is something beyond consciousness closely resembling a psychoanalytic unconscious, which also has clear precedents in nineteenth-century German thought. Murray's views on literary interpretation, his view of psychology as well as the continuing prevalence of the TAT, signals a nineteenth-century concept of self that insists “on relations of depth and surface, inner and outer life”. It is clear the hermeneutic practice of Freud's psychoanalysis, amplified in Jung, drew on literary conceptions of the unconscious wider than those of nineteenth-century psychology. (shrink)

This book examines the role of philosophy and philosophers in bioethics. Academics often see bioethical studies as too practical while decision makers tend to see them as too theoretical. The purpose of this collection of new essays by an international group of distinguished scholars is to explore the troubled relationship between theory and practice in the ethical assessment of medicine, health care, and new medical and genetic technologies. The book is divided into six parts. In the first part, philosophers consider (...) the definition of bioethics, the nature of applied ethics more generally, and the possibility of combining utilitarian and liberal strands of thinking in moral and political studies. In the second part, authors discuss the place and justification of principles in bioethics and the significance of medical and nursing experience in moral decision making. The third part addresses the complementary principles of dignity, autonomy, precaution, and solidarity, and their use in theoretical and practical settings. In the fourth part, public health measures and experimental research are defended against traditional moral concerns. Part five scrutinizes parental responsibilities in bearing and rearing children, especially the reasons for and against human reproduction in individual cases. In part six, enhancements to human nature by various means are analyzed. Following in the footsteps of four previous collections in the Values in Bioethics special series by the same editorial team—Scratching the Surface of Bioethics, Bioethics and Social Reality, Ethics in Biomedical Research, and Arguments and Analysis in Bioethics—this book, compiled in honor of Professor Matti Häyry’s 50th birthday, drills into the core of the discipline to show the philosophical depths that lie under the polished surface of policy-driven everyday bioethics. (shrink)

While poststructuralist feminist theorists have clarified our understanding of the gendered subject as produced through a matrix of language, culture, and psycho-sexual affects, they have found agency difficult to ground. I argue that this is because in these theories the body has served primarily as an inscribed surface. In response to this surface body, particular to this age, I have turned to Merleau-Ponty's concept of depth which allows us to theorize the agency crucial to feminist politics. While (...) the poststructuralists' rejection of depth is largely due to its roots in Cartesian rationality, depth is much more than this. Rather than allowing for the impossibility of political action, depth means that as bodily moving and acting subjects we are part of Being, and thus part of the questions raised in this age, even if it is a mark of this age that this tends to be forgotten. (shrink)

This article draws attention to several different practices of observation, manipulation, and experimentation with the surface of natural things. Beginning from the observation that the surfaces of natural things invited observation, manipulation, measurement, and re-configuration, with the promise to unveil the knowledge of depths, this article explores how practical knowledge about the surface of things and bodies led to new conceptions of nature and matter as composed of layers, corpuscles, and artificially reproducible solid parts in early modern Europe. (...) This article explores issues of knowledge production, and studies the ways in which material knowledge-making practices contributed to the habits of observing and experimenting with the surface of nature. By discussing three groups of cases in which nature was known by its surface and practice was mixed with theoretical appraisals of matter—surgeons, butchers, and food-cutters; gardeners and agronomists; and physicians—this article argues that “cognitive models” focusing on the description as well as the manipulation of natural surfaces informed both artisanal practices and natural philosophy, bridging the “high” and the “low” in the age of the “scientific revolution.”. (shrink)

Lucas van Valckenborch’s Winter Landscape hangs in the Kinsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It was painted four hundred years ago as one of a set of the four seasons. Measured by sales of reproductions, it is one of the most popular paintings in the museum, though it is by no means the most distinguished example of the genre to which it belongs. The picture is a snow scene. In the long series of represented planed that recede from foreground to horizon, fallen (...) snow covers fields and roves. Across the surface of the canvas and scarcely diminishing in scale from bottom to top, touches of white paint represent falling snow. It is not a small painting, and these are not mere feathery indications, but palpable dabs from a loaded brush. To a taste fed on Modernist painting—or, for the pedantic, to a prejudice fuelled by Modernist accounts of painting—it is by virtue of this surprising frankness that the painting achieves more than mere anecdotal charm. It is not the illusion of depth in the picture that holds our sophisticated attention, nor the atmospheric re-creation of a leaden sky, nor do we admit to being engaged by the over-rehearsed animation of the peasants. What gives us pleasurable pause is the strange and distinctive form of skepticism about appearances that is set in play when the allure of imaginative depth meets resistance from the vividness of decorated surface.5 5. Wollheim uses the term ‘twofoldness’ for ‘this strange duality—of seeing the marked surface, and of seeing something in the surface.’ In his account this experience leads to a thematizing of the image, which ‘ushers in representation.’ Translated into his terminology, my suggestion would be that the Winter Landscape can be seen as catering to a Modernistic taste for the thematizing of ‘twofoldness’ itself. Charles Harrison is staff tutor and reader in the history of art at the Open University. He is the author of English Art and Modernism 1900-1939 , and he is now completing a second volume, English Art and Modernism 1940-1985. He is co-author of A Provisional History of Art & Language , and his most recent book—Essays on Art and Language—is due out in 1989. He has been associated with the Art & Language group since 1971 and is editor of the journal Art-Language. (shrink)

SummaryThis paper contains a detailed investigation of the way ordinary persons talk about surfaces. Among the results achieved are: 1) No theory of perception can be correct which holds that it is a necessary condition for seeing an object that we must also see its surface; 2) Not all cases of visual perception can be analyzed in terms of seeing part of some surface as a necessary condition for seeing the object which has that surface; 3) Not (...) every physical object has a surface, and 4) surfaces are sometimes identified with a particular medium, such as macadam, and sometimes are considered as a kind of logical entity — not visible, without depth, having no mass, a “mere outer aspect.”. (shrink)

The thresholds of human observers detecting line targets improve significantly when the targets are presented in a spatial context of collinear inducing stimuli. This phenomenon is referred to as spatial facilitation, and may reflect the output of long-range interactions between cortical feature detectors. Spatial facilitation has thus far been observed with luminance-defined, achromatic stimuli on achromatic backgrounds. This study compares spatial facilitation with line targets and collinear, edge-like inducers defined by luminance contrast to spatial facilitation with targets and inducers defined (...) by color contrast. The results of a first experiment show that achromatic inducers facilitate the detection of achromatic targets on gray and colored backgrounds, but tend to suppress the detection of chromatic targets. Chromatic inducers facilitate the detection of chromatic targets on gray and colored backgrounds, but tend to suppress the detection of achromatic targets. Chromatic spatial facilitation appears to be strongest when inducers and background are isoluminant. The results of a second experiment show that spatial facilitation with chromatic targets and inducers requires a longer exposure duration of the inducers than spatial facilitation with achromatic targets and inducers, which is already fully effective at an inducer exposure of 30 ms only. The findings point towards two separate mechanisms for spatial facilitation with collinear form stimuli: one that operates in the domain of luminance, and one that operates in the domain of color contrast. These results are consistent with neural models of boundary and surface formation which suggest that achromatic and chromatic visual cues are represented on different cortical surface representations that are capable of selectively attracting attention. Multiple copies of these achromatic and chromatic surface representations exist corresponding to different ranges of perceived depth from an observer, and each can attract attention to itself. Color and contrast differences between inducing and test stimuli, and transient responses to inducing stimuli, can cause attention to shift across these surface representations in ways that sometimes enhance and sometimes interfere with target detection. (shrink)

Previously conducted structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies on the neuroanatomical correlates of mathematical abilities and competencies have a number of methodological limitations. Besides small sample sizes, the majority of these studies have employed voxel-based morphometry (VBM) – a method that, although it is easily to implement, has some major drawbacks. Taking this into account, the current study is the first to investigate in a large sample of typically developed adults the associations between mathematical abilities and variations in brain (...) class='Hi'>surface structure by using surface-based morphometry (SBM). SBM is a method that also allows the investigation of brain morphometry by avoiding the pitfalls of VBM. Eighty-nine young adults were tested with a large battery of psychometric tests to measure mathematical competencies in four different areas: (1) simple arithmetic, (2) complex arithmetic, (3) higher-order mathematics and (4) numerical intelligence. In addition, we asked participants for their mathematics grade of their final school exam. Inside the MRI scanner, we collected high-resolution T1-weighted anatomical images from each subject. SBM analyses were performed with the computational anatomy toolbox (CAT12) and indices for cortical thickness, for cortical surface complexity, for gyrification and for sulcal depth were calculated. Further analyses revealed associations between (1) the cortical surface complexity of the right superior temporal gyrus and numerical intelligence, (2) the depth of the right central sulcus and adults’ ability to solve complex arithmetic problems and (3) the depth of the left parieto-occipital sulcus and adults’ higher-order mathematics competence. Interestingly, no relationships with previously reported brain regions were observed, thus, suggesting the importance of similar research to confirm the role of the brain regions found in this study. (shrink)

Using photographs and testimonials, we will analyze details of the “miracle of the spinning sun” on October 13, 1917, at solar noon near Fatima. The phenomenon predicted ahead of time, occurred as the clouds cleared on what began as a rainy day. Various explanations have been presented but do not stand up to a comparative analysis of eyewitnesses, weather data, and photographs. This article aims to bring clarity to this event through the analysis of certified photographs and testimonies comparing them (...) to official meteorological and astronomical data. Our study confirms key points of the testimonials while focusing on objective data. The shadows and reflections reveal two soft light sources emerging from a rather dark background: one seen as a “pale sun”, and another overhead, fuzzy and as softly bright. The latter, likely being caused by a clear cloud, blurred the shadows of the weak “sun”. Strangely, the portions of clothing exposed to this “sun” dried quickly. This warm source, uncannily moonlike, was also able to cast distinct shadows on sloping surfaces and under objects. Eventually, these shadows will help us to estimate the height of the “sun” at ~30°, lower than the expected 42°. Therefore, the directly observed source could not have been the sun, and most probably not any physiological, psychological, or meteorological effect. (shrink)

“Being is an ocean in perpetual agitation,Of this ocean people perceive but the waves.On the apparent surface of the ocean, hidden in them,Look at the surging waves arising from secret depths!”One of the leitmotifs of the literature of Iranian Sufism is the “quest for the Orient” (istishraq). It is an Orient that is neither localized nor localizable in the realm of positive geography. It escapes our normal perception; it is the mystic Orient, point of Origin and of Return, located (...) at the “heavenly pole” of the cosmic North. It figures in that geographia imaginalis that is perceived only by the power of the imagination. It is located, then, beyond the devastated lands of this sensible world, lands that incarnate troubled and dispersed hearts for Iranian Sufism. (shrink)

Due to the large-scale mining of mineral resources, the surface strata in many areas have collapsed and even developed into deformation and subsidence. Based on the conventional geotechnical deformation monitoring technology, the surface deformation prediction and disaster caused by the conventional geotechnical deformation monitoring technology can be avoided. In this paper, based on GIS, combined with the analysis of surface settlement, the surface settlement, slope value, curvature deformation value, horizontal displacement, and corresponding horizontal deformation formula are (...) comprehensively analyzed and studied. In order to make the surface deformation visualization and realize the high approximation processing with the subsidence area, this paper innovatively introduces the 3D visualization settlement data analysis and realizes the calculation result analysis and corresponding retrieval multiple visualization in the subsidence area depth prediction process. On this basis, the prediction data of subsidence area can be optimized and analyzed so as to master the efficient and accurate law of surface deformation. In the experimental part, a mine is taken as the experimental object, and the 3D visual monitoring processing is carried out. In this paper, the main method to prevent electromagnetic leakage of the computer system is the source suppression method. The source suppression method solves the problem fundamentally by reducing or eliminating the emission of computer electromagnetic leakage source. In the actual experiment, the effect of this method is very effective. The experimental results show that the prediction results and corresponding early warning accuracy of the system are significantly improved compared with the traditional scheme, which provides practical significance for disaster prevention and corresponding environmental impact assessment. (shrink)

In the product-design domain, metaphors are used as a means of communication between designers and users. A designer generates a metaphor by deciding on a quality of a target to highlight and selecting a corresponding source that conveys this quality; the user interprets the designer’s intentions via the end product. The depth of the generated metaphor can be assessed by the extent to which the highlighted quality is salient for the target: Metaphors focusing on a salient quality of the (...) target are termed “surface” metaphors, whereas those focusing on a non-salient quality are called “deep” metaphors. In this article, we investigated both the effect of the expertise level of the designer and different types of intention on metaphor depth, through a study in which groups of expert and novice designers were asked to generate metaphors and external judges evaluated the depth of the metaphors created. Results indicated that having a pragmatic intention.. (shrink)

The realist injunction to attend to the ‘realities of politics’ when we do political philosophy, though obviously appropriate, is highly platitudinous. By drawing on the underappreciated realist insights of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and Hannah Arendt, we elaborate a neglected distinction between two antagonistic conceptions of political reality – the realism of surface and the realism of depth – and consider its implications for the recent realist turn. We illustrate how that distinction reveals some neglected tensions and incoherencies (...) within contemporary realism and go some way towards untangling and addressing these. Specifically, we enrich the realist charge and highlight two directions which realist scholarship can pursue in its endeavour to offer a meaningful alternative to moralism: an emphasis on i) Vichian fantasia – a kind of knowledge which entails historical awareness but also sensitivity to philology; and ii) suffering and injustice as a basis for critique and for developing a suitable political sphere. (shrink)

The realist injunction to attend to the ‘realities of politics’ when we do political philosophy, though obviously appropriate, is highly platitudinous. By drawing on the underappreciated realist insights of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and Hannah Arendt, we elaborate a neglected distinction between two antagonistic conceptions of political reality – the realism of surface and the realism of depth – and consider its implications for the recent realist turn. We illustrate how that distinction reveals some neglected tensions and incoherencies (...) within contemporary realism and go some way towards untangling and addressing these. Specifically, we enrich the realist charge and highlight two directions which realist scholarship can pursue in its endeavour to offer a meaningful alternative to moralism: an emphasis on i) Vichian fantasia – a kind of knowledge which entails historical awareness but also sensitivity to philology; and ii) suffering and injustice as a basis for critique and for developing a suitable political sphere. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 9, Page 1277-1301, November 2022. The realist injunction to attend to the ‘realities of politics’ when we do political philosophy, though obviously appropriate, is highly platitudinous. By drawing on the underappreciated realist insights of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and Hannah Arendt, we elaborate a neglected distinction between two antagonistic conceptions of political reality – the realism of surface and the realism of depth – and consider its implications for the recent realist (...) turn. We illustrate how that distinction reveals some neglected tensions and incoherencies within contemporary realism and go some way towards untangling and addressing these. Specifically, we enrich the realist charge and highlight two directions which realist scholarship can pursue in its endeavour to offer a meaningful alternative to moralism: an emphasis on i) Vichian fantasia – a kind of knowledge which entails historical awareness but also sensitivity to philology; and ii) suffering and injustice as a basis for critique and for developing a suitable political sphere. (shrink)

Since in Modernism inner meaning is doubted or believed lost, the question arises of what an interpretation ignoring the established dialectics of outside and inside and limiting itself to an exclusive surface would look like. Henri Matisse’s decorations’ raise questions about the differences between figure and background, appearance and essence, inside and outside. Instead of reference to depth under the surface, it is density and expansion, concentration and contraction, which determine the occurrence of meaning on the (...) class='Hi'>surface. Matisse presents himself as a flâneur of the surface, as if he wanted to show us, in the words of Gilles Deleuze, that ‘[i]t is by following the border, by skirting the surface, that one passes from bodies to the corporeal’. (shrink)

What happens when we blur time and allow ourselves to haunt or to become haunted by ghosts of the past? Drawing on archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data, Blurring Timescapes, Subverting Erasure demonstrates the value of conceiving of ghosts not just as metaphors, but as mechanisms for making the past more concrete and allowing the negative specters of enduring historical legacies, such as colonialism and capitalism, to be exorcised.

Colour information not only helps sustain the survival of animal species by guiding sexual selection and foraging behaviour but also is an important factor in the cultural and technological development of our own species. This is illustrated by examples from the visual arts and from state-of-the-art imaging technology, where the strategic use of colour has become a powerful tool for guiding the planning and execution of interventional procedures. The functional role of colour information in terms of its potential benefits to (...) behavioural success across the species is addressed in the introduction here to clarify why colour perception may have evolved to generate behavioural success. It is argued that evolutionary and environmental pressures influence not only colour trait production in the different species but also their ability to process and exploit colour information for goal-specific purposes. We then leap straight to the human primate with insight from current research on the facilitating role of colour cues on performance training with precision technology for image-guided surgical planning and intervention. It is shown that local colour cues in two-dimensional images generated by a surgical fisheye camera help individuals become more precise rapidly across a limited number of trial sets in simulator training for specific manual gestures with a tool. This facilitating effect of a local colour cue on performance evolution in a video-controlled simulator (pick-and-place) task can be explained in terms of colour-based figure-ground segregation facilitating attention to local image parts when more than two layers of subjective surface depth are present, as in all natural and surgical images. (shrink)

Archaeology has been an important source of metaphors for some of the key intellectuals of the 20th century: Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Alois Riegl and Michel Foucault, amongst many others. However, this power has also turned against archaeology, because the discipline has been dealt with perfunctorily as a mere provider of metaphors that other intellectuals have exploited. Scholars from different fields continue to explore areas in which archaeologists have been working for over two centuries, with little or no reference to (...) the discipline. It seems that excavation, stratigraphy or ruins only become important at a trans-disciplinary level when people from outside archaeology pay attention to them and somehow dematerialize them. Meanwhile, archaeologists have been usually more interested in borrowing theories from other fields, rather than in developing the theoretical potential of the same concepts that other thinkers find so useful. The time is ripe for archaeologists to address a wider audience and engage in theoretical debates from a position of equality, not of subalternity. Reclaiming Archaeology explores how archaeology can be useful to rethink modernity's big issues, and more specifically late modernity (broadly understood as the 20th and 21st centuries). The book contains a series of original essays, not necessarily following the conventional academic rules of archaeological writing or thinking, allowing rhetoric to have its place in disclosing the archaeological. In each of the four sections that constitute this book (method, time, heritage and materiality), the contributors deal with different archaeological tropes, such as excavation, surface/depth, genealogy, ruins, fragments, repressed memories and traces. They criticize their modernist implications and rework them in creative ways, in order to show the power of archaeology not just to understand the past, but also the present. Reclaiming Archaeology includes essays from a diverse array of archaeologists who have dealt in one way or another with modernity, including scholars from non-Anglophone countries who have approached the issue in original ways during recent years, as well as contributors from other fields who engage in a creative dialogue with archaeology and the work of archaeologists. (shrink)

I argue that Plato thinks that the soul has location, surface, depth, and extension, and that the Timaeus’ composition of the soul out of eight circles is intended literally. A novel contribution is the development of an account of corporeality that denies the entailment that the soul is corporeal. I conclude by examining Aristotle’s objection to the Timaeus’ psychology and then the intellectual history of this reading of Plato.

This article provides the first comprehensive reconstruction and analysis of Hintikka’s attempt to obtain a measure of the information yield of deductive inferences. The reconstruction is detailed by necessity due to the originality of Hintikka’s contribution. The analysis will turn out to be destructive. It dismisses Hintikka’s distinction between surface information and depth information as being of any utility towards obtaining a measure of the information yield of deductive inferences. Hintikka is right to identify the failure of canonical (...) information theory to give an account of the information yield of deductions as a scandal, however this article demonstrates that his attempt to provide such an account fails. It fails primarily because it applies to only a restricted set of deductions in the polyadic predicate calculus, and fails to apply at all to the deductions in the monadic predicate calculus and the propositional calculus. Some corollaries of these facts are a number of undesirable and counterintuitive results concerning the proposed relation of linguistic meaning (and hence synonymy) with surface information. Some of these results will be seen to contradict Hintikka’s stated aims, whilst others are seen to be false. The consequence is that the problem of obtaining a measure of the information yield of deductive inferences remains an open one. The failure of Hintikka’s proposal will suggest that a purely syntactic approach to the problem be abandoned in favour of an intrinsically semantic one. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida offers his recent commentary on the early career of Paul de Man as an urgent intervention in a discussion he fears is going awry. The most pressing danger he sees in the recent revelations is that they have played into the hands of de Man’s antagonists, who are now ready to denounce the whole of his career and even deconstruction itself. Against such indiscriminate critiques Derrida hurls the epithet: totalitarian. He is attempting to reseize the initiative in the (...) discussion and to reset the terms of the debate. His agenda extends across historical, theoretical, and political questions.He wants to affirm that a radical, indeed absolute break separates the later from the earlier de Man. He also wants to show that the young de man, however firmly committed to fascist ideology and however much an accomplice of the Nazis occupying Belgium, at the same time regularly distanced himself from that ideology and even undermined its meanings. Moreover, Derrida boldly takes up the challenge that these revelations have cast on the intellectual movement he and de Man have shaped. Can deconstruction come to grips with the political and intellectual history of its own leading American proponent? And can deconstruction in the process make a distinctive contribution to the understanding of fascism and intellectuals’ participation in it? John Brenkman is associate professor of English at Northwestern University. He is the author of Culture and Domination . Jules David Law is assistant professor of English at Northwestern University. He is currently working on a book-length study of the metaphors of surface, depth, and reflection in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British prose. (shrink)

Throughout his career, Jean-Paul Sartre had a contentious theoretical relationship with psychoanalysis. Nowhere is this more evident than in his criticisms of the concept of the unconscious. For him, the unconscious represents a hidden psychological depth that is anathema to the notion of human freedom. In this paper, I argue that Lacan’s conception of the unconscious-structured-like-a-language overcomes many of Sartre’s most damning objections. I demonstrate that Lacan shares with Sartre a concern to rid the psyche of hidden depths. Both (...) thinkers therefore reject the depth psychological conception of the unconscious and arrive at strikingly similar positions on the nature of the unconscious. In this way, I show that the conceptual analogues that Sartre develops in order to avoid the psychoanalytic unconscious lead him to a position on the unconscious with which Lacan could be in agreement. This indicates that Sartre’s philosophical position is not as at odds with Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis as is typically thought. (shrink)

The age of information, media, and virtuality is transforming every aspect of human experience. Questions that have long haunted the philosophical imagination are becoming urgent practical concerns: Where does the natural end and the artificial begin? Is there a difference between the material and the immaterial? In his new work, Mark C. Taylor extends his ongoing investigation of postmodern worlds by critically examining a wide range of contemporary cultural practices. Nothing defines postmodernism so well as its refusal of depth, (...) its emphasis on appearance and spectacle, its tendency to collapse a three-dimensional world in which image and reality are distinct into a two-dimensional world in which they merge. The postmodern world, Taylor argues, is a world of surfaces, and the postmodern condition is one of profound superficiality. For many cultural commentators, postmodernism's inescapable play of surfaces is cause for despair. Taylor, on the other hand, shows that the disappearance of depth in postmodern culture is actually a liberation repleat with creative possibilities. Taylor introduces readers to a popular culture in which detectives--the postmodern heroes of Paul Auster and Dennis Potter--lift surfaces only to find more surfaces, and in which fashion advertising plays transparency against hiding. Taylor looks at the contemporary preoccupation with body piercing and tattooing, and asks whether these practices actually reveal or conceal. Phrenology and skin diseases, the "religious" architecture of Las Vegas, the limitless spread of computer networks--all are brought within the scope of Taylor's brilliant analysis. Postmodernism, he shows, has given us a new sense of the superficial, one in which the issue is not the absence of meaning but its uncontrollable, ecstatic proliferation. Embodying the very tendencies it analyzes, Hiding is unique. Conceived and developed with well-known designers Michael Rock and Susan Sellars, this work transgresses the boundary that customarily separates graphic design from the story within a text. The product of nearly three decades of reflection and writing, Hiding opens a window on contemporary culture. To follow the remarkable course Taylor charts is to see both our present and past differently and to encounter a future as disorienting as it is alluring. (shrink)

Los estudios sobre la fenomenología de Ortega apenas han atendido al víncunlo entre forma o estructura y campo del fenómeno. Ortega ha insistido en la formalidad del ámbito de aparición de los fenómenos, que ha vinculado con su radicalidad. La forma del ámbito emerge dentro del campo como un juego de diferencias, de la que el par superficie/ profundidad es el fundamental. En este trabajo vamos a mostrar que la formalidad del ámbito tiene un ejemplo señalado en los análisis del (...) campo visual en el horizonte de las Meditaciones. (shrink)

Victor Vasarely's (1906–1997) important legacy to the study of human perception is brought to the forefront and discussed. A large part of his impressive work conveys the appearance of striking three-dimensional shapes and structures in a large-scale pictorial plane. Current perception science explains such effects by invoking brain mechanisms for the processing of monocular (2D) depth cues. Here in this study, we illustrate and explain local effects of 2D color and contrast cues on the perceptual organization in terms of (...) figure-ground assignments, i.e. which local surfaces are likely to be seen as “nearer” or “bigger” in the image plane. Paired configurations are embedded in a larger, structurally ambivalent pictorial context inspired by some of Vasarely's creations. The figure-ground effects these configurations produce reveal a significant correlation between perceptual solutions for “nearer” and “bigger” when other geometric depth cues are missing. In consistency with previous findings on similar, albeit simpler visual displays, a specific color may compete with luminance contrast to resolve the planar ambiguity of a complex pattern context at a critical point in the hierarchical resolution of figure-ground uncertainty. The potential role of color temperature in this process is brought forward here. Vasarely intuitively understood and successfully exploited the subtle context effects accounted for in this paper, well before empirical investigation had set out to study and explain them in terms of information processing by the visual brain. (shrink)

What is the concept of sense developed by Deleuze in his 1969 Logic of Sense? This paper attempts to answer this question analysing the three dimensions of language that Deleuze isolates: the primary order of noises and intensities ; the secondary order of sense ; and the tertiary organisation of propositions. What renders language possible is that which separates sounds from bodies and organises them into propositions, freeing them for the expressive function. Deleuze argues that it is the dimension of (...) sense that brings about this genesis of language, and he analyses in detail the three syntheses that bring about the production of this surface of sense. Yet Deleuze also distinguishes between two types of non-sense: the nonsense of Lewis Carroll's portmanteau words, which remain ensconced in the dimension of sense, and the more profound nonsense of Antonin Artaud's psychotic scream-breaths, which penetrate the almost unbearable world of the primary order of noise and intensities. In the end, the focus of Logic of Sense is less the surface domain of sense than the primary depth of corporeal intensities. What Deleuze calls a ‘minor’ use of language is nothing other than an intensive use of language that constitutes a principle of metamorphosis. (shrink)

Wittgenstein distinguishes two areas of what he calls the “use” of a word. First, there is the application of a word in the construction of a sentence, which he calls the “surface grammar.” Second, there is a usage that goes beyond the merely verbal part of language games, the rules governing which he terms “depth grammar.” These latter rules constitute what the preliminary work for the Investigations still referred to as “logical form.” To spell out Wittgenstein's analogy a (...) little, he must mean that, just as we are accustomed to saying the alphabet aloud in a certain way, so too are we familiar with the forms of expression of our language, for example with the subject predicate form. One became familiar with the forms in the course of originally learning how to use them ‐ that is, in learning certain ways of forming linguistic complexes at the level of content. (shrink)

This landmark study examines the role played by the rediscovery of the writings of the ancient atomists, Epicurus and Lucretius, in the articulation of the major philosophical systems of the seventeenth century, and, more broadly, their influence on the evolution of natural science and moral and political philosophy. The target of sustained and trenchant philosophical criticism by Cicero, and of opprobrium by the Christian Fathers of the early Church, for its unflinching commitment to the absence of divine supervision and the (...) finitude of life, the Epicurean philosophy surfaced again in the period of the Scientific Revolution, when it displaced scholastic Aristotelianism. Both modern social contract theory and utilitarianism in ethics were grounded in its tenets. Catherine Wilson shows how the distinctive Epicurean image of the natural and social worlds took hold in philosophy, and how it is an acknowledged, and often unacknowledged presence in the writings of Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes, Boyle, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley. With chapters devoted to Epicurean physics and cosmology, the corpuscularian or "mechanical" philosophy, the question of the mortality of the soul, the grounds of political authority, the contested nature of the experimental philosophy, sensuality, curiosity, and the role of pleasure and utility in ethics, the author makes a persuasive case for the significance of materialism in seventeenth-century philosophy without underestimating the depth and significance of the opposition to it, and for its continued importance in the contemporary world. Lucretius's great poem, On the Nature of Things, supplies the frame of reference for this deeply-researched inquiry into the origins of modern philosophy. (shrink)

Experimental phenomenology has demonstrated that perception is much richer than stimulus. As is seen in color perception, one and the same stimulus provides more than several modes of appearance or perceptual dimensions. Similarly, there are various perceptual dimensions in form perception. Even a simple geometrical figure inducing visual illusion gives not only perceptual impressions of size, shape, slant, depth, and orientation, but also affective or aesthetic impressions. The present study reviews our experimental phenomenological work on visual illusion and experimental (...) aesthetics, and examines how aesthetic preference is influenced by stimulus factors determining visual illusions including anomalous surface and transparency as well as geometrical illusion. Along with line figures producing geometrical illusions, illusory surface figures inducing neon color spreading and transparency effects were used as test patterns. Participants made both of psychophysical judgments and of aesthetic judgments for the same test pattern. Both of geometrical illusions and aesthetic preferences were found to change similarly as a function of stimulus variables such as the number of filling lines and the size ratio of the inner and outer figural components. Also, following specific stimulus variables such as lightness contrast ratio and spatial interval between inducing figural elements (so called ``packmen''), strong effects of color spreading and transparency were accompanied with strong preferences. It seems that the paradigm to investigate aesthetic phenomena along with perceptual dimensions is useful to bridge the gap between experimental phenomenology and experimental aesthetics. (shrink)