Déjà vu is the striking sense that the present situation feels familiar, alongside the realization that it has to be new. According to the Gestalt familiarity hypothesis, déjà vu results when the configuration of elements within a scene maps onto a configuration previously seen, but the previous scene fails to come to mind. We examined this using virtual reality technology. When a new immersive VR scene resembled a previously-viewed scene in its configuration but people failed to recall the previously-viewed scene, (...) familiarity ratings and reports of déjà vu were indeed higher than for completely novel scenes. People also exhibited the contrasting sense of newness and of familiarity that is characteristic of déjà vu. Familiarity ratings and déjà vu reports among scenes recognized as new increased with increasing feature-match of a scene to one stored in memory, suggesting that feature-matching can produce familiarity and déjà vu when recall fails. (shrink)

The significance of consciousness in modern science is discussed by leading authorities from a variety of disciplines. Presenting a wide-ranging survey of current thinking on this important topic, the contributors address such issues as the status of different aspects of consciousness; the criteria for using the concept of consciousness and identifying instances of it; the basis of consciousness in functional brain organization; the relationship between different levels of theoretical discourse; and the functions of consciousness.

Anthony Everett gives a philosophical defence of the common-sense view that there are no such things as fictional people, places, and things. He argues that our talk and thought about such fictional objects takes place within the scope of a pretense, and that we gain little but lose much by accepting fictional realism.

Both critique and an appropriation of a large and diverse body of work, Home and Beyond is a major contribution to contemporary Husserl scholarship.

The question of modernity has provoked a vigorous debate in the work of thinkers from Hegel to Habermas. Our own self-styled postmodern age has seen no end to this debate, which now receives a major and wide-ranging intervention from the theorist and critic Anthony J. Cascardi. Offering an historical account of the origins and transformations of the rational subject or self as it is represented in Descartes, Cervantes, Pascal, Hobbes and the Don Juan myth, he carries his argument across (...) the fields of epistemology, literature, political science, religion and psychology. The modern subject proves to be positioned within conflicting discourses, in a culture characterised by its 'detotalised totality'. Max Weber's concept of 'world disenchantment' enables Cascardi to make a searching critique of modernity's sense of its absoluteness, divorced from an archaic, 'enchanted' world. He advocates in its place a more fruitful relationship between historical analysis and theoretical speculation, offering constructive new alternatives to current orthodoxy regarding subjectivity and modernity. (shrink)

Moral Emotions builds upon the philosophical theory of persons begun in _Phenomenology and Mysticism _and marks a new stage of phenomenology. Author Anthony J. Steinbock finds personhood analyzing key emotions, called moral emotions. _Moral Emotions _offers a systematic account of the moral emotions, described here as pride, shame, and guilt as emotions of self-givenness; repentance, hope, and despair as emotions of possibility; and trusting, loving, and humility as emotions of otherness. The author argues these reveal basic structures of interpersonal (...) experience. By exhibiting their own kind of cognition and evidence, the moral emotions not only help to clarify the meaning of person, they reveal novel concepts of freedom, critique, and normativity. As such, they are able to engage our contemporary social imaginaries at the impasse of modernity and postmodernity. (shrink)

What is the relationship between contemporary intellectual culture and the European Enlightenment it claims to reject? In Consequences of Enlightenment, Anthony Cascardi revisits the arguments advanced in Horkheimer and Adorno's seminal work Dialectic of Enlightenment. Cascardi argues against the view that postmodern culture has rejected Enlightenment beliefs and explores instead the continuities contemporary theory shares with Kant's failed ambition to bring the project of Enlightenment to completion. He explores the link between aesthetics and politics in thinkers as diverse as (...) Habermas, Derrida, Arendt, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Wittgenstein in order to reverse the tendency to see works of art simply in terms of the worldly practices among which they are situated. (shrink)

Anthony J. Lisska presents a new analysis of Thomas Aquinas's theory of perception. While much work has been undertaken on Aquinas's texts, little has been devoted principally to his theory of perception and less still on a discussion of inner sense. The thesis of intentionality serves as the philosophical backdrop of this analysis while incorporating insights from Brentano and from recent scholarship. The principal thrust is on the importance of inner sense, a much-overlooked area of Aquinas's philosophy of mind, (...) with special reference to the vis cogitativa. Approaching the texts of Aquinas from contemporary analytic philosophy, Lisska suggests a modest 'innate' or 'structured' interpretation for the role of this inner sense faculty. He argues that were it not for the vis cogitativa, Aquinas would be unable to account for an awareness of the principal ontological category in his metaphysics. (shrink)

Aquinas needs no introduction as one of the greatest minds of the middle ages. Highly influential on the development of Christian doctrine, his ideas are still of fundamental philosophical importance. This new critique of his natural law theory discusses the theory's background in Aristotle and advances new interpretations of contemporary legal issues which hark back to Aquinas.

Max Weber’s sociological theories of secularization have vastly influenced the study of Protestant belief. _Protestant Modernity_ offers a multifaceted understanding of secularization within the broader context of nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism. Anthony J. Carroll reconstructs Weber’s original writings to highlight Protestant motifs, reviews current secularization theories, and settles debates about contested meanings of secularization in this volume that will be essential reading for students and scholars of theology and the sociology of religion.

Exploring the first-person narratives of three figures from the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic mystical traditions—St. Teresa of Avila, Rabbi Dov Baer, and Rzbihn Baql—Anthony J. Steinbock provides a complete phenomenology of mysticism based in the Abrahamic religious traditions. He relates a broad range of religious experiences, or verticality, to philosophical problems of evidence, selfhood, and otherness. From this philosophical description of vertical experience, Steinbock develops a social and cultural critique in terms of idolatry—as pride, secularism, and fundamentalism—and suggests that (...) contemporary understandings of human experience must come from a fuller, more open view of religious experience. (shrink)

This paper has two motivations. First, I want to delineate structurally the dimensions of phenomenological method: not merely the static and genetic methods, but along with them I want to introduce the new ideas of generativity and generative method (Section 2). Second, because these dimensions cannot merely be treated structurally, I want to examine their dynamic interrelation, that is, the system of motivations obtaining between them. I will do this by elaborating the phenomenological concept of "leading clue" (Section 3). Finally, (...) I will conclude by addressing the relation of phenomenology to generativity (Section 4). (shrink)

Exploring the first-person narratives of three figures from the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic mystical traditions—St. Teresa of Avila, Rabbi Dov Baer, and Rzbihn Baql—Anthony J. Steinbock provides a complete phenomenology of mysticism based in the Abrahamic religious traditions. He relates a broad range of religious experiences, or verticality, to philosophical problems of evidence, selfhood, and otherness. From this philosophical description of vertical experience, Steinbock develops a social and cultural critique in terms of idolatry—as pride, secularism, and fundamentalism—and suggests that (...) contemporary understandings of human experience must come from a fuller, more open view of religious experience. (shrink)

This major new work by Anthony J. Steinbock, a leading authority in Phenomenology and Husserl Studies, explores an interrelated set of problems in Husserl's phenomenology and provides an excellent example of phenomenology in practice, demonstrating how its methods and resources shed light on philosophical problems.

Addressing the matter of attention from a phenomenological perspective as it bears on the problem of becoming aware, I draw on Edmund Husserl''s analyses and distinctions that mark his genetic phenomenology. I describe several experiential levels of affective force and modes of attentiveness, ranging from what I call dispositional orientation and passive discernment to so-called higher levels of attentiveness in cognitive interest, judicative objectivation, and conceptualization. These modes of attentiveness can be understood as motivating a still more active mode of (...) reflective attention, i.e., philosophical attentiveness, and to this extent, even it would be subject to varying influences of affection. What role, if any, does affection play in a peculiar kind of reflective attention that is phenomenological? I conclude by briefly considering phenomenological reflective attentiveness and its relation to affection. (shrink)

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics had a profound influence on generations of later philosophers, not only in the ancient era but also in the medieval period and beyond. In this book, Anthony Celano explores how medieval authors recast Aristotle's Ethics according to their own moral ideals. He argues that the moral standard for the Ethics is a human one, which is based upon the ethical tradition and the best practices of a given society. In the Middle Ages, this human standard was (...) replaced by one that is universally applicable, since its foundation is eternal immutable divine law. Celano resolves the conflicting accounts of happiness in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, demonstrates the importance of the virtue of phronesis, and shows how the medieval view of moral reasoning alters Aristotle's concept of moral wisdom. (shrink)

It has been proposed that performance in the think – no think task represents a laboratory analogue of the voluntary form of memory repression. The central prediction of this repression hypothesis is that performance in the TNT task will be influenced by emotional characteristics of the material to be remembered. This prediction was tested in two experiments by asking participants to learn paired associates in which the first item was either emotionally positive or emotionally negative . The second word was (...) always emotionally neutral . Consistent with the repression hypothesis, significant memory suppression was observed in both experiments following ‘no think’ instructions for memories associated with emotionally negative material. No suppression was observed for memories associated with emotionally positive information. Implications of these findings for the relationship between performance in the TNT task and the controversial notion of memory repression are considered. (shrink)

Leading phenomenologist Tony Steinbock intervenes in contemporary discussion around the concept of the gift, providing a critical reading of the main figures on the problem of the gift and offering a new perspective on the gift, situating it in the emotional sphere, specifically in relation to loving and humility.

Literature and philosophy have long shared an interest in questions of truth, value, and form. And yet, from ancient times to the present, they have often sharply diverged, both in their approach to these questions and in their relationship to one another. Moreover, the vast differences among individual writers, historical periods, and languages pose challenges for anyone wishing to understand the relationship between them. This Introduction provides a synthetic and original guide to this vast terrain. It uncovers the deep interests (...) that literature and philosophy share while offering a lucid account of their differences. It sheds new light on many standing debates and offers students and scholars of literary criticism, literary theory, and philosophy a chance to think freshly about questions that have preoccupied the Western tradition from its very beginnings up until the present. (shrink)

Contemporary aesthetic theory is embedded in a culture dominated by images, and so would seem to require a reversal of Plato's critique of image-making. In adopting this stance, aesthetic theory follows in the footsteps of Nietzsche, whose own project was conceived as a reversal of Platonism. But the critique of Plato that underpins these views is based on a tradition that has misconstrued some of Plato's fundamental ideas. For this reason, the standard critique of Platonism is ineffective as a critical (...) response to the culture of images. Aesthetic theory needs instead to produce a critique of the contemporary image-world based on the view that it emerges from a transformation in the paradigm of production. Images are no longer merely a part of the world that is produced, but themselves have a crucial role in the process of production. (shrink)

Considering the philosophic intelligence that has set out to discredit it, intentionalism in critical interpretation has shown an uncanny resilience. Beginning perhaps most explicitly with the New Criticism, continuing through the analytic tradition in philosophy, and culminating most recently in deconstructionism, philosophers and literary theorists have kept under sustained attack the notion that authorial intention can provide a guide to interpretation, a criterion of textual meaning, or a standard for the validation of criticism. Yet intentionalist criticism still has avid theoretical (...) defenders and plenty of informal practitioners. The essay that follows, while an exercise in neither such defense nor practice, nevertheless attempts to demonstrate why intentional questions can be expected to be of permanent concern to criticism. (shrink)

This work contains the Latin text of an early medieval commentary on the first three books of Aristotle's Ethics. The commentary appears here in print for the first time, supported by an introduction considering the significance of the work and the attribution of it to the Dominican author, Robert Kilwardby (c. 1215-1279). Celano argues that the commentary represents an early phase in the reception of Aristotle's Ethics in the thirteenth century, and that Kilwardby demonstrates a perceptive understanding of the meaning (...) of Aristotle's moral philosophy showing its importance for the curriculum in the Arts Faculties of universities in the Middle Ages. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate the experience of hope by focusing on experiences that seem to rival hope, namely, disappointment, desperation, panic, hopelessness, and despair. I explore these issues phenomenologically by examining five kinds of experiences that counter hope (or in some instances, seem to do so): first, by noting the cases in which hope simply is not operative, then by treating the significance of both desperation and pessimism, next by examining the experience of hopelessness, and finally, by treating the (...) experience of despair. Here despair is shown to constitute the most profound challenge to hope among these experiences and to be foundational for the others, even though it is disclosed ultimately as founded in hope. (shrink)