Mr. Clark argues that if Kant is to be interpreted as a realist his theory of space and time must be based on inductive argument. In support of this contention he suggests that a realist must be a nominalist and, hence, can legitimately advance only inductive arguments in support of his doctrines. But Mr. Clark goes further than this. He states that "if Kant is not to be taken as a realist, still his arguments, as written in the (...) Critique, are as a matter of fact inductive." I am not sure in what sense Mr. Clark is using the term "realist" here. I fail to see that realism necessarily implies nominalism or, for that matter, that even an inductive argument is possible for a thoroughgoing nominalist. But this point is not particularly important for the discussion of Kant's views since Kant is an idealist as well as a realist. In my article I attempted to stress the realistic side of Kant's theory. But I did not mean to argue that his position can be construed as exclusively realistic. Kant characterizes his theory as maintaining at once the "empirical reality and transcendental ideality" of space and time. His formal idealism was expressly designed to provide an escape from nominalism and to make possible a non-inductive or "transcendental" method of proof. Kant would agree with Mr. Clark that if space and time are regarded as things-in-themselves we can have no a priori knowledge of them. Space and time are real for Kant, but only as forms of appearances. I did not mean to obscure the idealistic feature of space and time, but only to stress the fact that Kant did not regard them as psychologically ideal. Mr. Clark mistakenly concludes that Kant's doctrine must be either realistic or idealistic but not both. (shrink)

In this thorough compendium, nineteen accomplished scholars explore, in some manner the values they find inherent in the world, their nature, and revelence through the thought of Frederick Ferré. These essays, informed by the insights of Ferré and coming from manifold perspectives—ethics, philosophy, theology, and environmental studies, advance an ambitious challenge to current intellectual and scholarly fashions.

In this thorough compendium, nineteen accomplished scholars explore, in some manner the values they find inherent in the world, their nature, and revelence through the thought of Frederick FerrZ. These essays, informed by the insights of FerrZ and coming from manifold perspectives—ethics, philosophy, theology, and environmental studies, advance an ambitious challenge to current intellectual and scholarly fashions.

Predictive processing has begun to offer new insights into the nature of conscious experience—but the link is not straightforward. A wide variety of systems may be described as predictive machines, raising the question: what differentiates those for which it makes sense to talk about conscious experience? One possible answer lies in the involvement of a higher-order form of prediction error, termed expected free energy. In this paper we explore under what conditions the minimization of this new quantity might underpin conscious (...) experience. Our suggestion is that the minimisation of Expected Free Energy is not in itself sufficient for the occurrence of conscious experience. Instead, it is relevant only insofar as it helps deliver what Ward et al. ( 2011 ) have previously described as a _sense of our own poise over an action space_. Perceptual experience, we will argue, is nothing other than the process that puts current actions in contact with goals and intentions, enabling some creatures to know the space of options that their current situation makes available. This proposal fits with recent work suggesting a deep link between conscious contents and contents computed at an ‘intermediate’ level of processing, apt for controlling action. (shrink)

Predictive processing accounts of neural function view the brain as a kind of prediction machine that forms models of its environment in order to anticipate the upcoming stream of sensory stimulation. These models are then continuously updated in light of incoming error signals. Predictive processing has offered a powerful new perspective on cognition, action, and perception. In this chapter we apply the insights from predictive processing to the study of emotions. The upshot is a picture of emotion as inseparable from (...) perception and cognition, and a key feature of the embodied mind. (shrink)

We read with interest the extended essay published from Riisfeldt and are encouraged by an empirical ethics article which attempts to ground theory and its claims in the real world. However, such attempts also have real-world consequences. We are concerned to read the paper’s conclusion that clinical evidence weakens the distinction between euthanasia and normal palliative care prescribing. This is important. Globally, the most significant barrier to adequate symptom control in people with life-limiting illness is poor access to opioid analgesia. (...) Opiophobia makes clinicians reluctant to prescribe and their patients reluctant to take opioids that might provide significant improvements in quality of life. We argue that the evidence base for the safety of opioid prescribing is broader than that presented, restricting the search to palliative care literature produces significant bias as safety experience and literature for opioids and sedatives exists in many fields. This is not acknowledged in the synthesis presented. By considering additional evidence, we reject the need for agnosticism and reaffirm that palliative opioid prescribing is safe. Second, palliative sedation in a clinical context is a poorly defined concept covering multiple interventions and treatment intentions. We detail these and show that continuous deep palliative sedation is a specific practice that remains controversial globally and is not considered routine practice. Rejecting agnosticism towards opioids and excluding CDPS from the definition of routine care allows the rejection of Riisfeldt’s headline conclusion. On these grounds, we reaffirm the important distinction between palliative care prescribing and euthanasia in practice. (shrink)

The purpose of this book is to advance responsible rehabilitation of the speculative philosophy of history. It challenges the idea popularized by thinkers such as and Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean-François Lyotard that historical meta-mythology and meta-narrative are philosophically obsolete. As long as humanity, viewed anthropologically, lives by over-arching narrative, the quest for a version that survives rational criticism remains vital. Here human rights serve as the key to unlock such a version. Despite the fact that the Hegelian philosophy of history (...) has often been derided, something very similar currently functions as the official ideology of the world community: the idea of history as the story of freedom. This book does not retell the world-historical story of freedom. Rather, it uncovers it, beginning with the current age of human rights and working backward through the great role-model civilizations of history. Its conclusion is that a forward retelling of the story of freedom as the story of human rights can be justified by dewesternizing the story. The book contains critical responses from specialized scholars and re-presentative of selected world cultures. The volume includes illustrations, and a guest Afterword by Donald Phillip Verene. It is a companion-volume to the author's Hegel's Logic: Between History and Dialectic (North-western University Press, 1996). (shrink)

In recent years, philosophical developments of the notion of distributed and/or scaffolded cognition have given rise to the “extended mind” thesis. Against the popular belief that the mind resides solely in the brain, advocates of the extended mind thesis defend the claim that a significant portion of human cognition literally extends beyond the brain into the body and a heterogeneous array of physical props, tools, and cultural techniques that are reliably present in the environment in which people grow, think, and (...) act (Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 1997, 2003, 2008; Wilson 2004; Rowlands 1999, 2012; Menary 2007; Theiner 2011). However, as commentators who are friendly to the idea of distributed cognition have pointed out, the philosophical debate over extended cognition has predominantly focused on the impact of tools on our thinking while somewhat neglecting the distinctively social and cultural dimensions of cognitive scaffolding (Sterelny 2004, 2010; Caporael 1997a, 1997b; Smith and Semin 2004; Wilson 2005; Barnier et al. 2008; Sutton et al. 2010; Theiner, Allen, and Goldstone 2010). -/- To reorient the reigning paradigm, Hutchins (2010, 445) has recently proposed the “hypothesis of enculturated cognition” (HEnC) as an alternative to Clark’s (2003, 2008) largely individualistic vision of the extended mind. According to the HEnC, the “ecological assemblies of human cognition make pervasive use of cultural products” and are typically “assembled … in ongoing cultural practices” (ibid.). Cultural practices, for Hutchins, are essentially “the things people do in interaction with one another” (ibid., 440). My goal in this chapter is to follow up on Hutchins’s call to “spur the program forward” (ibid., 445), by generalizing Kirsh and Maglio’s (1994) distinction between pragmatic and epistemic actions from the level of individuals to the level of groups. The concept of a collective epistemic action refers to the ways in which groups of people actively change the structure of their social organization, with the epistemic goal of reshaping and augmenting their cognitive performance as integrated collectivities. By placing a renewed emphasis on the interactions between people, rather than between people and their tools, I hope to reconnect the cognitive-scientifically-driven “extended mind” thesis with complementary areas of social-scientific research in which groups are analyzed as the seats of action and cognition in their own right. In particular, the literature to which I aim to build a bridge in this paper is, on the one hand, certain segments of social and organizational psychology (Larson and Christensen 1993; Hinsz et al. 1997; Mohammed and Dumville 2001), and, on the other hand, theories of collective and institutional action (Ostrom 1990; List and Pettit 2011). (shrink)

On June 11, 1963, in a dramatic gesture that caught the nation's attention, Governor George Wallace physically blocked the entrance to Foster Auditorium on the University of Alabama's campus. His intent was to defy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, sent on behalf of the Kennedy administration to force Alabama to accept court-ordered desegregation. After a tense confrontation, President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and Wallace backed down, allowing Vivian Malone and James Hood to become the first African Americans to (...) enroll successfully at their state's flagship university. That night, John F. Kennedy went on television to declare civil rights a "moral issue" and to commit his administration to this cause. That same night, Medgar Evers was shot dead. In The Schoolhouse Door, E. Culpepper Clark provides a riveting account of the events that led to Wallace's historic stand, tracing a tangle of intrigue and resistance that stretched from the 1940s, when the university rejected black applicants outright, to the post-Brown v. Board of Education era. We are there in July 1955 when Thurgood Marshall and lawyers at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund win for Autherine Lucy and "all similarly situated" the right to enroll at the university. We are in the car with Lucy in February 1956 as university officials escort her to class, shielding her from a mob jeering "Lynch the nigger," "Keep 'Bama white," and "hit the nigger whore." Clark exposes the many means, including threats and intimidation, used by university and state officials to discourage black applicants following the Lucy episode. And he explains how University of Alabama president Frank Anthony Rose eventually cooperated with the Kennedy administration to ensure a smooth transition toward desegregation. We also witness Robert Kennedy's remarkable face-to-face plea for Wallace's cooperation and the governor's adamant refusal: "I will never submit voluntarily to any integration in a school system in Alabama." As Clark writes, Wallace's carefully orchestrated surrender would leave the forces of white supremacy free to fight another day. And the Kennedys' public embrace of the civil rights movement would set in motion a political transformation that changed the presidential base of the Democratic party for the next thirty years. In these pages, full of courageous black applicants, fist-shaking demonstrators, and powerful politicians, Clark captures the dramatic confrontations that transformed the University of Alabama into a proving ground for the civil rights movement and gave the nation unforgettable symbols for its struggle to achieve racial justice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“The Whole Internal World His Own”: Locke and Metaphor ReconsideredS. H. ClarkWhy need I name thy Boyle, whose pious search, Amid the dark recesses of his works, The great Creator sought? And why thy Locke, Who made the whole internal world his own?Oh decus! Anglicae certe oh lux altera gentis!... Tu caecas rerum causas, fontemque severum Pande, Pater; tibi enim, tibi, veri magne Sacerdos, Corda patent hominum, atque altae (...) penetralia Mentis.Fourfold Annihilation & at the clangor of the Arrows of Intellect The innumerable Chariots of the Almighty appeard in Heaven And Bacon & Newton & Locke, & Milton & Shakespear & Chaucer1Two features of these encomia to John Locke, composed by James Thomson, Thomas Gray, and William Blake, are immediately striking. Firstly, they are delivered by poets in a tradition customarily seen as a reaction to the intellectual climate induced by Locke’s Essay, a book which Blake famously claimed to regard with “Contempt and Abhorrence.” 2 Secondly, the familiar and somewhat hackneyed characterizations of Locke as philosopher of common-sense, [End Page 241] empiricism, and liberal ideology are refreshingly absent. For Gray he is “veri magne Sacerdos,” great priest of truth; Thomson places him in a pantheon including Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, and Chaucer; and this ranking is explicitly endorsed in Blake’s “Milton & Shakspear & Chaucer.” Comparable praise of Locke’s imaginative power is conspicuously absent from even the most generous tributes of recent commentators. 3Even if Locke’s philosophical contribution to a variety of debates is fully acknowledged, the question remains of why his major work, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, was held in such high popular esteem—veneration is not too strong a word—during the subsequent century. The text itself appears an improbable candidate for such canonization: George Saintsbury accused its prose of being “positively mean in every point of style,” 4 and certainly in comparison with the poised and lucid ironies of Berkeley and Hume, it cannot but appear prolix, diffuse, and repetitive. The chief (and frequently only) merit grudgingly accorded to it is of disarming informality. Rosalie Colie’s emphasis on the “exploitation of the generic and rhetorical possibilities in the essay form itself “ highlights the conscious manipulation of authorial distance through which Locke creates the effect of sprawling inclusiveness and incom-pletion, but at the expense of conceding that “in exchange for the frankness with which the essayist appeared to present his thinking self, he was allowed certain liberties from logical rigour.” 5 Though the suggestion that a major philosophical text seeks to evade “logical rigour” might seem damning enough, there is a still more insidious equation of Locke’s “middle-style,” his desire “to make, what I have to say, as easie and intelligible to all sort of Readers as I can,” with a complicity with the expectations of his audience. 6 Other critics, notably John Richetti, have put a more positive gloss on the “simple and fortuitously concocted circle of friends” to whom the Essay is addressed, but even these accounts have been obliged to stress the representative and consensual nature of Locke’s thought. 7 This view is perhaps most elegantly expressed by Leslie Stephen: “Locke ruled the thought of his own and the coming period [End Page 242] because he interpreted so completely the fundamental beliefs which had been worked out at this time. He ruled, that is, by obeying.” 8William Walker correctly observes that “identifying and interpreting metaphors of mind” in the Essay are “standard practices of mainstream philosophical commentary from Leibniz to Rorty,” but also notes that these analyses are usually concerned with the degree to which Locke’s reliance on figuration was at variance with and compromised his epistemological doctrine. 9 I would argue that the poetic tributes previously quoted offer a more suggestive and adequate guide to the original impact of his work. In order to substantiate this claim, I shall begin by examining Locke’s apparent renunciation of, yet paradoxical dependence upon metaphor; go on to look at the connection of the “Horizon” to the elegiac presentation of memory and the ethic of mental “Labour”; and conclude by analyzing the complex interdependence of candle and sun within the light imagery employed in the... (shrink)

In his meditation on Emerson's self-reliance, George Kateb argues that Emerson's entrance into antislavery politics, particularly his calls for collective mobilization, constitutes a “deviation from his theory of self-reliance, not its transformation.” Though Emerson often imagines a self-reliance that can lead to action, his descriptions of the fundamental attitude of the self towards the world suggest passivity, attention, and waiting. Because he rules out logical or teleological sources for inspiration, his conception of self-reliance is fundamentally at odds with progressivist (...) narratives of history. His sense of “entranced waiting” flirts with an anarchic potentiality that he must reject in order to call for social solidarity and progressive action against slavery. In “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Melville takes the radical outsidedness of self-reliance to its conclusion, transforming Emersonian waiting into Bartleby's catatonic stillness. Emerson's waiting for inspiration becomes the copyist's quiet demand that his employer wait with him rather than use charitable actions to free himself from the burden Bartleby imposes. Bartleby obstructs the lawyer's ideas of improvement as well as his conception of himself as a moral agent in a world of moral possibility. Simone Weil provides a similar version of a quietist waiting with. To an ungenerous “active searching” she opposes a fundamental generosity, a “waiting or attentive and faithful immobility” through which one is able to recognize “that the sufferer exists.” For Weil, as for Melville, there is no passage from such a recognition to a conception of history as progress. The sufferer is not a problem to be solved within a narrative of social improvement but the source of an unlimited and impossible obligation. (shrink)

Part I: The Life of Cognitive Science:. William Bechtel, Adele Abrahamsen, and George Graham. Part II: Areas of Study in Cognitive Science:. 1. Analogy: Dedre Gentner. 2. Animal Cognition: Herbert L. Roitblat. 3. Attention: A.H.C. Van Der Heijden. 4. Brain Mapping: Jennifer Mundale. 5. Cognitive Anthropology: Charles W. Nuckolls. 6. Cognitive and Linguistic Development: Adele Abrahamsen. 7. Conceptual Change: Nancy J. Nersessian. 8. Conceptual Organization: Douglas Medin and Sandra R. Waxman. 9. Consciousness: Owen Flanagan. 10. Decision Making: J. Frank (...) Yates and Paul A. Estin. 11. Emotions: Paul E. Griffiths. 12. Imagery and Spatial Representation: Rita E. Anderson. 13. Language Evolution and Neuromechanisms: Terrence W. Deacon. 14. Language Processing: Kathryn Bock and Susan M. Garnsey. 15. Linguistics Theory: D. Terence Langendoen. 16. Machine Learning: Paul Thagard. 17. Memory: Henry L. Roediger III and Lyn M. Goff. 18. Perception: Cees Van Leeuwen. 19. Perception: Color: Austen Clark. 20. Problem Solving: Kevin Dunbar. 21. Reasoning: Lance J. Rips. 22. Social Cognition: Alan J. Lambert and Alison L. Chasteen. 23. Unconscious Intelligence: Rhianon Allen and Arthur S. Reber. 24. Understanding Texts: Art Graesser and Pam Tipping. 25. Word Meaning: Barbara C. Malt. Part III: Methodologies of Cognitive Science:. 26. Artificial Intelligence: Ron Sun. 27. Behavioral Experimentation: Alexander Pollatsek and Keith Rayner. 28. Cognitive Ethology: Marc Bekoff. 29. Deficits and Pathologies: Christopher D. Frith. 30. Ethnomethodology: Barry Saferstein. 31. Functional Analysis: Brian Macwhinney. 32. Neuroimaging: Randy L. Buckner and Steven E. Petersen. 33. Protocal Analysis: K. Anders Ericsson. 34. Single Neuron Electrophysiology: B. E. Stein, M.T. Wallace, and T.R. Stanford. 35. Structural Analysis: Robert Frank. Part IV: Stances in Cognitive Science:. 36. Case-based Reasoning: David B. Leake. 37. Cognitive Linguistics: Michael Tomasello. 38. Connectionism, Artificial Life, and Dynamical Systems: Jeffrey L. Elman. 39. Embodied, Situated, and Distributed Cognition: Andy Clark. 40. Mediated Action: James V. Wertsch. 41. Neurobiological Modeling: P. Read Montague and Peter Dayan. 42. Production Systems: Christian D. Schunn and David Klahr. Part V: Controversies in Cognitive Science:. 43. The Binding Problem: Valerie Gray Hardcastle. 44. Heuristics and Satisficing: Robert C. Richardson. 45. Innate Knowledge: Barbara Landau. 46. Innateness and Emergentism: Elizabeth Bates, Jeffrey L. Elman, Mark H. Johnson, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett. 47. Intentionality: Gilbert Harman. 48. Levels of Explanation and Cognition Architectures: Robert N. McCauley. 49. Modularity: Irene Appelbaum. 50. Representation and Computation: Robert S. Stufflebeam. 51. Representations: Dorrit Billman. 52. Rules: Terence Horgan and John Tienson. 53. Stage Theories Refuted: Donald G. Mackay. Part VI: Cognitive Science in the Real World:. 54. Education: John T. Bruer. 55. Ethics: Mark L. Johnson. 56. Everyday Life Environments: Alex Kirlik. 57. Institutions and Economics: Douglass C. North. 58. Legal Reasoning: Edwina L. Rissland. 59. Mental Retardation: Norman W. Bray, Kevin D. Reilly, Lisa F. Huffman, Lisa A. Grupe, Mark F. Villa, Kathryn L. Fletcher, and Vivek Anumolu. 60. Science: William F. Brewer and Punyashloke Mishra. Selective Biographies of Major Contributors to Cognitive Science: William Bechtel and Tadeusz Zawidzki. (shrink)

Throughout his discussion, Clark speaks constantly of phenomenal and qualitative properties. But properties, like any other posited entities, ought to earn their explanatory keep, and this I don't think Clark's phenomenal or qualitative properties actually do. I argue that all the work he enlists for them could be done better by purely intentional contents of our sentient states; that is, they could better be regarded as mere intentional properties, not real ones. Clark eschews such intentionalism, but I (...) see no reason for him to resist a properly deflated version of it that I sketch. Moreover, such intentionalism seems to me to stand a better chance than Clark's reliance on properties in explaining the peculiar ways in which experience appears to us that so concern the qualiaphile. (shrink)

Clark Butler presents an innovative analysis of Hegel's most challenging work in _Hegel's Logic_ -- the first major English-language treatment of Hegel's _Science of Logic_ to appear in nearly fifteen years. Although earlier commentators on the _Logic_ have considered standard analytical philosophy-and with it modern logic-in opposition to Hegel. Butler views it as a legitimate approach in terms of which Hegel needs to be understood. This interpretation allows him to address the rigor of Hegel's thought on several levels as (...) at once an exercise in purely conceptual redefinition and a full-bodied work in metaphysical ontology and even theology. The result is an account of the _Logic_ intelligible to analytical philosophers as well as non-specialists. (shrink)

In this paper, we approach the idea of group cognition from the perspective of the “extended mind” thesis, as a special case of the more general claim that systems larger than the individual human, but containing that human, are capable of cognition (Clark, 2008; Clark & Chalmers, 1998). Instead of deliberating about “the mark of the cognitive” (Adams & Aizawa, 2008), our discussion of group cognition is tied to particular cognitive capacities. We review recent studies of group problem-solving (...) and group memory which reveal that specific cognitive capacities that are commonly ascribed to individuals are also aptly ascribed at the level of groups. These case studies show how dense interactions among people within a group lead to both similarity-inducing and differentiating dynamics that affect the group's ability to solve problems. This supports our claim that groups have organization-dependent cognitive capacities that go beyond the simple aggregation of the cognitive capacities of individuals. Group cognition is thus an emergent phenomenon in the sense of Wimsatt (1986). We further argue that anybody who rejects our strategy for showing that cognitive properties can be instantiated at multiple levels in the organizational hierarchy on a priori grounds is a “demergentist,” and thus incurs the burden of proof for explaining why cognitive properties are “stuck” at a certain level of organizational structure. Finally, we show that our analysis of group cognition escapes the “coupling-constitution” charge that has been leveled against the extended mind thesis (Adams & Aizawa, 2008). (shrink)

We set out by noting the preference for circular flows in ecological thought, and the related abhorrence of inefficiency and waste that Western ecology shares with mainstream economic thinking. This has often been manifest in a shared disdain both for uncontained, free-burning fire and for ‘unmanaged’ sexual desire. The paper constructs a ‘pyrosexual’ counter-narrative that explores the mutually constitutive and generative implication of sex and fire. Bringing together the solar ecology of Georges Bataille, feminist and queer thinking about sexuality and (...) reproduction, and a range of ways of theorising biological life and fire, we explore how fire mediates between organismic desire and the energetic dynamics of the earth and solar system. The first section takes a genealogical approach to fire and sex that traces their entanglement from the initial ‘assembling’ of fire through to the emergence of a fire-handling creature. The second section looks at how fire has been contained and intensified by human actors, and the role that heat-driven transformations of inorganic matter have played in the incitement and channeling of desire in urban spaces. The third section addresses the development of industrial ‘heat engines’ and the implications for desire and reproduction of tapping vast reservoirs of subterranean solar energy. We round off by beginning to consider what alternative possibilities might lie in the renegotiation of sex and fire on a planet undergoing rapid change. (shrink)

As portrayed in Andy Clark’s extended mind thesis, human minds are inherently disposed to expand their reach outwards, incorporating and feeding off an open-ended variety of tools and scaffolds to satisfy their hunger for cognitive expansion. According to Steve Fuller’s heterodox Christian vision of transhumanism, humans are deities in the making, destined to redeem their fallen state with the help of modern science and technology. In this chapter, I re-examine Clark’s EMT through the prism of Fuller’s transhumanism, with (...) the aim of unearthing a subterranean influence of theological tropes that are sweeping along beneath the naturalistic veneer of Clark’s thesis. Starting from four theological principles, which Fuller regards as foundational to his version of transhumanism, I review the philosophical narrative which, in Fuller’s view, provides the best philosophical motivation for the contemporary transhumanist project. On the basis of my reconstruction, I show how distant intellectual offshoots of the same principles mobilized by Fuller are also at play in Clark’s EMT – dressed up in secular garb, for sure, and in a materialistically inflected form, yet with a recognizably transhumanist bent. Undertaking this “archeology” of the EMT takes us surprisingly deep into the history of Western thought – to a point where Clark’s evocative “natural-born cyborg” image of humanity, with its emphasis on the radical openness of human nature to transcend itself, comes into view as a subtly blended continuation of certain historically consequential articulations of the Christian doctrine that humans are born “in the image and likeness” of God. (shrink)

The “extended mind” thesis (Clark, 2008) has focused primarily on the interactions between single individuals and cognitive artifacts, resulting in a relative neglect of interactions between people. At the same time, the idea that groups can have cognitive properties of their own has gained new ascendancy in various fields concerned with collective behavior. My main goal in this paper is to propose an understanding of group cognition as an emergent form of socially distributed cognition. To that end, I first (...) clarify the relevant notions of cognition and emergence that are at play in the contemporary debate. I then apply our conceptual framework to recent developments in the theory of transactive memory systems (Wegner, 1986), arguing that the idea of group cognition is neither trivial nor shrouded in metaphysical mystery. (shrink)

In my dissertation, I explore the remarkable talent of human beings to modify and co-opt resources of their material and socio-cultural environment, and integrate them with their biological capacities in order to enhance their cognitive prowess. In the first part, I clarify and defend the claim – known as the extended mind thesis – that a significant portion of human cognition literally extends beyond the head into the world, actively incorporating our bodies and an intricate web of material resources ( (...) class='Hi'>Clark, 2003, 2008; Wilson, 2004). Yet since much of distinctively human cognition occurs when we think in groups, I argue that the bias of this thesis to view cognition as an essentially solitary (albeit bodily or technologically extended) activity is misplaced. In the second part, I re-deploy the idea of cognitive extensions to establish a scientifically respectable version of the group mind thesis – i.e., the claim that groups can have emergent cognitive properties and capacities in their own right. (shrink)

According to the “extended mind” thesis, a significant portion of human cog-nition does not occur solely inside the head, but literally extends beyond the brain into the body and the world around us (Clark & Chalmers 1998; Clark 2003, 2008; Wilson 1995, 2004; Rowlands 1999, 2010; Menary 2007, 2012; Sutton 2010; Theiner 2011). One way to understand this thesis is that as human beings, we are particularly adept at creating and recruiting environmental props and scaffolds (media, tools, artifacts, (...) symbol systems) for the purpose of solving problems that would otherwise lie beyond our cognitive reach. We manipulate, scaffold, and re-design our environments in ways that transform the nature of difficult tasks that would baffle our unaided biological brains (e.g., math, logic, sequential problem-solving) into simpler types of problems that we are naturally much better equipped to solve. A central tenet of the “extended mind” thesis, then, is that “much of what matters for human-level intelligence is hidden not in the brain, nor in the technology, but in the complex and iterated interactions and collaborations between the two” (Clark 2001: 154). Over the past fifteen years or so, the “extended mind” thesis has become a hot ticket in the philosophy of mind. As with all great ideas, the thesis was hardly conceived ex nihilo, but builds on, and re-articulates many earlier strands of thought. Unfortunately, many of those cognate strands have become marginalized in contemporary philosophy of mind and psychology, and do not receive the amount of attention they deserve. Part of what we hope to accomplish with this special issue is to reverse this trend, and to rekindle the dialogue between the “extended mind” thesis and its historical predecessors. (shrink)

Does cognition sometimes literally extend into the extra-organismic environment (Clark, 2003), or is it always “merely” environmentally embedded (Rupert, 2004)? Underlying this current border dispute is the question about how to individuate cognitive processes on principled grounds. Based on recent evidence about the active role of representation selection and construction in learning how to reason (Stenning, 2002), I raise the question: what makes two distinct, modality-specific pen-and-paper manipulations of external representations – diagrams versus sentences – cognitive processes of the (...) same kind, e.g. episodes of syllogistic reasoning? In response, I defend a “division of labor” hypothesis, according to which external representations are dependent on perceptually grounded neural representations and mechanisms to guide our behavior; these internal mechanisms, however, are dependent on external representations to have their syllogistic content fixed. Only their joint contributions qualify the extended computational process as an episode of syllogistic reasoning in good standing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Remembering Lewis E. HahnGeorge C. H. Sun, President, John Howie, Professor Emeritus, Thomas Alexander, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Kenneth W. Stikkers, Professor and Chair, Randall Auxier, Professor, Robert Hahn, Professor, Joseph Wu, Professor Emeritus, Elizabeth R. Eames, Professor Emeritus, Martin Lu, Professor of Philosophy, George Kimball Plochmann, Professor Emeritus, Matt Sronkoski, Philosophy Graduate and Academic Adviser, Dave Clarke, Professor Emeritus, Eugenie Gatens-Robinson, Professor Emerita, Hans H. (...) Rudnick, Professor Emeritus, Stephen Bickham, Professor EmeritusPresident, and Don Mikula (bio)The following testimonials were offered on the occasion of a memorial gathering for Dr. Lewis E. Hahn held on February 19, 2005, and were compiled for presentation here by Sharon (Hahn) Crowell.A Tribute to Dr. Lewis E. Hahn (1908-2004) from a Global PerspectiveGeorge C. H. Sun President, Thomé H. Fang Institute, Inc., Mobile, AlabamaAmong the philosophical community in both the East and the West, no word of introduction is needed for our beloved Master, who was the recipient of numerous distinctions and honors, with titles that included "Man of the Year in Philosophy" and "Award of Lifetime Achievement." The very name "Lewis E. Hahn" itself already stands now for genuineness, dedication, and fulfillment.A great work is a dialogue with eternity; a great person is such a work. In less than thirty years he succeeded in developing Carbondale from what had been a small college town in the Midwest into the Mecca of American philosophy. His most important achievements were the Dewey Center and the Pepper Archives that he helped install at SIUC These, among other such institutions, will remain a unique contribution, a glory of American philosophy, and a monument in the history of human thought.For posterity Lewis E. Hahn will remain an object of wonder and amazement. How is it possible for one human being to have accomplished so much, so well, and in so short a span of time—less than one century—in breadth, depth, and diversity? Some one hundred years ago, by bridging the gap between the New World and the Old, William James was hailed as the great genius of international friendship among philosophical thinkers, but we now find a greater genius in Lewis E. Hahn, who succeeded in bringing together the peoples of East and West from at least four continents: Europe, Australia, America (both North and Latin America), and Asia. To my knowledge, few of his predecessors and contemporaries have been half so widely read and liberal-minded as he was, in view of the range and scope of the Library of Living Philosophers that he helped continue after the passing of its founder, Dr. Paul A. Schilpp.What type of man was Hahn, our younger generation will wonder? Only a pluralist approach can help us understand the true character of such a legendary pluralist-contextualist. In short, he was "a full personality." As I recall, while working on my dissertation with him in the 1970s, we had a brief discussion on Confucius, the sage of ancient China. "A full personality!" was his laconic assessment. Suddenly I realized, to quote the Analects: "The Master is talking about himself!" For, as the Buddhists put it, only a Buddha can understand a Buddha. Or, as William James put it, only one who has philosophy can appreciate philosophy. Many friends [End Page 1] of my generation admire him so much; Te Chen of Hong Kong calls him "a great Confucian in America." Those who regret the loss of many precious Confucian virtues in China today have now rediscovered them in the person of Lewis E. Hahn! If Nietzsche called Kant "a great Chinese in Königsberg," it is simply because he had not encountered our own Master.A paradigm of academic leadership, Dr. Hahn is simply irreplaceable—this is a tribute I personally heard in Carbondale in the late 1960s. It is not an exaggeration to say that he was a superb administrator, and he could have been the best Secretary of the State we ever had, for he possessed more in the way of philosophical wisdom than all his predecessors put together! As a great teacher, he was no less "serene, good, learned, wise, and ardent" than... (shrink)

Clark and Krauss [1977] presents a classification of complete, satisfiable and o-categorical theories in first order languages with finite non-logical vocabularies. In 1988 the first author modified this classification and raised three questions about the distribution of finitely axiomatizable theories. This paper answers two of those questions.

. Many Christian theologians have proposed a universal knowledge of God implanted in all humans. Thomas Aquinas famously stated that all humans have some knowledge of God, confused though it may be. John Calvin developed this proposition in much more detail and concluded that there is a cognitive faculty in humans, the sensus divinitatis, committed to giving the cognizer knowledge of God. Independent of such theological concerns, a current movement in cognitive science proposes a radical change to the traditional boundaries (...) drawn around the human mind. Proponents of mental extension, such as Andy Clark, argue that the mind extends well beyond the body and should be approached in a much broader conceptual analysis. This essay arises from the conviction that the Extended Mind framework offers new insights into developing a cognitive understanding of the sensus divinitatis. Drawing in equal parts on current arguments for mental extension and the sensus divinitatis, the essay establishes the compatibility between the two arguments and indicates how an integration of the two can yield significant benefits for both mental extension and the sensus divinitatis: the basing of the sensus divinitatis in a specific cognitive theory that offers explanations of its functions, and the introduction of theism to the EM argument as a potentially useful component in a collaborative cognitive science effort. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John Dewey: The ChicagoYears GEORGE DYKHUIZEN DEWEYCAMETO CHICAGOin the summer of 1894 as head professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and left in January, 1905, to become professor of philosophy at Columbia University. During his Chicago years, Dewey's interests led him not only into the field of philosophy but also into that of education, and in each of these areas he acquired a retmtation which placed (...) him among the top thinkers in the country. His work in philosophy resulted in his being acclaimed, along with Charles S. Peirce and William James, as one of the three great founders of American pragmatism, and his achievements in education led to his being regarded as one of the country's most outstanding educational thinkers and a prime mover in educational reform. The University of Chicago was only four years old when Dewey arrived there, but already it had attained a high standing among the universities of the country. The main reason for this was that the University had set out to be not simply another college but a university, like the universities in Europe and like Johns Hopkins and Clark universities in this country. This meant that the graduate schools of the University were to be stressed and that a large part of the faculty was to devote itself exclusively to graduate instruction and research. The type of faculty member the University looked for "must be a teacher, but first and foremost he must be a scholar, in love with learning, with a passion for research, an investigator who could produce, and if what he produced was worthy, would wish to publish." ~ In the four years since its founding, the University had assembled one of the most outstanding faculties in the country, a faculty which included: T. C. Chamberlin in astronomy, Rolin D. Salisburg in geology, Albert Michelson in physics, Jacques Loeb in biology, J. M. Coulter in botany, Thorsten Veblen in political economy, Albion Small in sociology, Paul Shorey in Greek, J. H. Breasted in Egyptology, and R. G. Moulton in English. When Dewey came to the University, therefore, as head of the Department of Philosophy, this meant that he was to teach mostly graduate students, do research, and have associations with some of the most brilliant scholars in the country. These features of the new position had appealed strongly to Dewey when he was considering the offer to 1T. W. Goodspeed, A History of the University of Chicago. The First Quarter (Chicago: 1916), 201. [227] 228 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY become professor of philosophy at Chicago and were among the decisive factors in bringing him to the University. William Rainey Harper, president of the University, was in large measure responsible for its early successes. "Those massive buildings, millions of money, thousands of scholars and scores of teachers," wrote one of his admirers, "are a monument to the foresight, nerve, and ceaseless activity of W. R. Harper, a veritable Napoleon in the educational field." 2 Born July 26, 1856, Harper was three years older than Dewey and every bit as precocious. He received his A.B. degree from Muskingum College when he was fourteen; he entered Yale as a graduate student when he was seventeen and got his Ph.D. degree from there at the age of nineteen. Upon receiving his doctorate, he began a career teaching Hebrew first at the Baptist Union Theological Seminary in Chicago and then, in 1886, at Yale. Harper wrote extensively on theological matters and his views prompted an attack on his orthodoxy in 1888. He weathered the storm, however, and throughout his life was a staunch defender of liberal theological thought. Harper had tremendous vitality and enthusiasm, and these qualities, along with his scholarship, led to his appointment as first president of the University when it was founded in 1890. Harper and Dewey were to have close associations on the administrative level, and though many of these were to be pleasant and cordial, others turned out to be not so harmonious and led eventually to Dewey's resignation from the University. Though Harper was particularly concerned that a strong department of philosophy be established at the University, up to the time of Dewey's... (shrink)

"Religions", Mahatma Gandhi once said, "are different roads converging to the same point". But in this stimulating assessment of Christianity, Buddhism, and Vedanta, Professor Burch develops the revolutionary theory that religions, starting from the same point, take divergent roads to different goals incompatible one with the other. Whereas Gandhi asks, "What does it matter that we take different roads so long as we reach the same goal?" Dr. Burch asks, "What does it matter that in taking different roads we reach (...) different goals?" Religions, he maintains, do not have to fight each other because of their differences, or abolish their differences to avoid fighting. He is a firm believer in coexistence for religions. Ecumenicity is good "in so far as it means, on the one hand, cooperation with other faiths in their common concerns of social activities and resistance to irreligion, and on the other hand mutual respect for the other faiths themselves". Dr. Burch argues for the coexistence of three alternative Absolutes: Truth which corresponds to the religion of Hindu Advaita Vedanta, Absolute Freedom which corresponds to Buddhism, and love which corresponds to Christianity. The religious quest requires absolute commitment to one or other of these irreducible alternatives; not to truth and freedom and love, but to truth or freedom or love. In his Foreword, Professor W. Norris Clarke, S.J., of Fordham University, subjects Dr. Burch's theory to the most rigorous critical analysis, but in the end invites each reader to make the effort himself of coming to grips with the author's profound and original challenge. (shrink)

This dissertation examines Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis with particular regard to the problem of nihilism, and the philosophy of history that Edmund Husserl and Georg Lukacs argue is needed in its wake to restore reason's capacity to give order and direction to human life. I understand nihilism not merely as the theory that life is devoid of value, but rather as an historical crisis in the sense of autonomy that results from the separation of fact and value in the thoroughly rationalized (...) modern world. How, I ask, does Freud respond to this crisis? And how does his response stand in relationship to those offered by philosophers? Does psychoanalysis too provide a philosophy of history? ;To answer these questions, I first examine the development of psychoanalysis in response to the suffering of neurotics as a crisis in the authority of science to address human needs. I then explicate the problem of nihilism as it is registered by both Husserl and Lukacs, examine the philosophies of history that they each construct in response to it, and consider Freud's theory of civilization in relationship to them. ;By constructing philosophical methodologies to defend reason's teleology, I argue that both Husserl and Lukacs implicitly disavow the problem that they purport to address by presupposing the autonomy of reason, and treating the problem of nihilism as the result merely of a misconception concerning its place and function in the world. As late as 1923 Freud too presupposes reason's autonomy from the terror expressed in religion. However, with his subsequent recognition of the problem presented by the unconscious sense of guilt, Freud no longer treats the rational overcoming of illusion as an intrinsic good. He sees civilization too as radically ambivalent and revises his social theory as a critique of the discontent that immanently plagues it. Rather than a philosophy of history, I argue that Freud constructs a critique of the problem presented by the persistent demand for teleological orientation in a post-historical world. (shrink)

This essay considers implications of formal mereologies and ontologies for medical metaphysics. Edward Fried’s extensional mereological account of the human body is taken as representative of a prominent strand in analytic metaphysics that has close affinities with medical positivism. I show why such accounts fail. First, I consider how Fried attempts to make sense of the medical case of Barney Clark, the first recipient of an artificial heart, and show that his analytic metaphysical categories do not have the right (...) kind of fit with the case. A proper medical metaphysic should involve a richer two way dialogue with medicine, and it should not just “apply” formal accounts worked out in other settings. Second, I argue that any effort to account for real wholes with extensional mereological sums requires all sorts of ad hoc, supplementary mechanisms that do the real work, and the full repertoire of these mechanisms involves inconsistencies and semantic shifts. Finally, I consider an alternative strand of work on non-extensional whole/part relations that is closer to medicine and that can deepen reflection on some core problems in bioethics, for example, associated with the determination of death when an organism ceases to function as a whole. In addition to the utility such formal ontologies have for addressing traditional problems such as the determination of death, philosophers of medicine should appreciate the increasingly influential role such formal tools are playing in the development of data system ontologies. Assumptions integral to these ontologies have far reaching implications for the way future research and practice in medicine will be conducted, and much greater critical reflection is needed on the full range of issues associated with the development and use of such medical ontologies. (shrink)

"This book is a sorely needed corrective. Animal Spirits is an important--maybe even a decisive--contribution at a difficult juncture in macroeconomic theory.

Fire is a force that links everyday human activities to some of the most powerful energetic movements of the Earth. Drawing together the energy-centred social theory of Georges Bataille, the fire-centred environmental history of Stephen Pyne, and the work of a number of ‘pyrotechnology’ scholars, the paper proposes that the generalized study of combustion is a key to contextualizing human energetic practices within a broader ‘economy’ of terrestrial and cosmic energy flows. We examine the relatively recent turn towards fossil-fuelled ‘internal (...) combustion’ in the light of a much longer human history of ‘broadcast’ burning of vegetation and of artisanal pyrotechnologies – the use of heat to transform diverse materials. A combustion-centred analysis, it is argued, brings human collective life into closer contact with the geochemical and geologic conditions of earthly existence, while also pointing to the significance of explorative, experimental and even playful dispositions towards energy and matter. (shrink)

The 1961 film The Misfits saw the collaboration of director John Huston with playwright Arthur Miller and brought together on screen Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe in what would be their final roles. Adding to the production’s luster, the elite photo agency Magnum was hired to do the on-set photography. The photographs of this landmark film represent the end of an era of Hollywood stardom and the emergence of a new vision of the actor’s craft.In Famous Faces Yet Not (...) Themselves, George Kouvaros offers a multilayered study of the Magnum photographs that illuminates larger changes in Hollywood acting during the postwar period. Just as the industrial context of film production evolved dramatically in the decades after the war, Kouvaros asserts, so too did the iconography associated with the figure of the actor. Photographs of Hollywood stars such as Monroe, Gable, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, and Humphrey Bogart form the basis of an evocative analysis of the way photography gave shape to fundamental shifts in the nature of screen acting, perceptions of celebrity, and the relationship between actor and audience.By closely scrutinizing the images produced on the set of one of America’s most haunting and least understood films, Kouvaros presents a new recognition of the connection between the power of star culture, art photography, and the film industry during a time of rapid social transformation. (shrink)