Online research in philosophy

It has been thought that the prospects for non-naturalism about normativity may be significantly advanced if non-naturalists take the relation of being a reason as the basic normative entity, and so if, inter alia, they endorse a buck-passing account of value. This is thought to yield theoretical benefits regarding (i) the open question argument, (ii) the defence against the charge of queerness, and (iii) demands of parsimony. In the paper I contest these claims. Non- naturalists need not focus on reasons, and so need not, as non-naturalists, endorse a buck-passing account of value. They can choose to hold evaluative notions to be the basic ones, or to have a (reasoned) plurality of basic normative concepts and properties. The debate with the naturalist in those three respects is not going to be significantly influenced by such preliminary conceptual decisions.

This essay attempts to make sense of Augustine's claim that time is a mental affection. He has been criticized, by Russell for instance, for advocating a subjective theory of time, thereby confusing the issue of what time is with the issue of what it is like to experience time. I defend Augustine from this criticism. His interest in time emerges out of confessional philosophy, and when this context is taken into account, his association of time with affection implies the converse of what it has mostly been taken to imply: not that time is in his experience of time, but that his experience of time is discomfortingly timeless.

Introduction Ordinary experience seems both to take place in time and to concern things that happen in time. This seemingly simple fact is the starting ...

We discuss how modified dual-task approaches may be used to verify the degree to which cognitive tasks are capacity demanding. We also delineate some of the complexities associated with the use of the “double easy-to-hard” paradigm for testing claim of Halford, Wilson & Phillips that hierarchical reasoning imposes processing demands equivalent to those of transitive reasoning.

I shall refer to all theories according to which time passes (including dynamic versions of presentism, ‘growing block’ theories, ‘shrinking tree’ theories, and so on) under the umbrella term ‘A-theory’, and I shall use the term ‘B-theory’ in the standard way to refer to the theory according to which time does not pass, and although events are ordered in time there is no objective present time.1 Many philosophers, both A- and B-theorists, have agreed that in experience we are, or at least seem to be, aware of time passing.

Maudlin’s “On the Passing of Time” suggests a pairing not often found in the metaphysics of time: eternalism (i.e. that the past, present, and future are all equally real) and Absolute Becoming, the view that the passage of time brings new events into existence. Maudlin's pairing begs the question of what, given eternalism, could Absolute Becoming mean in a block universe, a question to which Maudlin does not provide a clear answer. Therefore, we consider two classic accounts of Absolute Becoming, those of C.D. Broad and Howard Stein, to determine the extent to which either may realize Maudlin's goal of a union between eternalism and Absolute Becoming. Our analysis finds Stein’s account more accommodating than Broad's to not only eternalism but also special relativity; however, there is a giant gap between the kind of Absolute Becoming that we seem to experience (and which motivates Maudlin) and Stein's Absolute Becoming. While it isn't clear what account of Absolute Becoming Maudlin has in mind, we conclude that there is no extant conception of Absolute Becoming that can answer to the experience of becoming that motivates Maudlin.

We summarize several experiments indicating that the saccadic system is capable of simultaneously programming two movements toward different goals. This concurrent processing of saccades can lead to the execution of two saccades separated by an extremely short intersaccadic interval. This supports the idea of target competition proposed in Findlay & Walker's article, but suggests a greater degree of parallel processing. We provide evidence that concurrent processing of two saccades is not limited to higher-level planning subsystems; rather, it also involves both regions close enough to the motor output that it can systematically affect saccade trajectory.

ERP studies have shown modulation of activation in left frontal and posterior cortical language areas, as well as recruitment of right hemisphere homologues, based on task demands. Furthermore, blood-flow studies have demonstrated changes in the neural circuitry of word processing based on experience. The neural areas and time course of language processing are plastic depending on task demands and experience.