Online research in philosophy

Machine generated contents note: 1. Rationality, idealism, monism, and beyond Michael Della Rocca; 2. Kant's idea of the unconditioned and Spinoza's the fourth antinomy and the ideal of pure reason Omri Boehm; 3. The question is whether a purely apparent person is possible Karl Ameriks; 4. Herder and Spinoza Michael Forster; 5. Goethe's Spinozism Eckart Förster; 6. Fichte on freedom: the Spinozistic background Allen Wood; 7. Fichte on the consciousness of Spinoza's God Johannes Haag; 8. Spinoza in Schelling's early (...) conception of intellectual intuition Dalia Nassar; 9. Schelling's philosophy of identity and Spinoza's ethica more geometrico Michael Vater; 10. 'Omnis determinatio est negatio' - determination, negation, and self-negation in Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel Yitzhak Y. Melamed; 11. Thought and metaphysics: Hegel's critical reception of Spinoza Dean Moyar; 12. Two models of metaphysical inferentialism: Spinoza and Hegel Gunnar Hinricks; 13. Trendelenburg and Spinoza Fred Beiser; 14. Replies on behalf of Spinoza Don Garrett. (shrink)

In “Extensionality of Parthood and Composition,”1 Achille Varzi mounts a spirited defense of the extensionality of parthood, or ‘EP’. According to EP, if x and y are composite objects with all the same proper parts then x = y.2 A number of philosophers, he notes, have objected that EP is false on the grounds that, for example, a statue and lump of clay (or a tinkertoy house and the wood from which it is made, in Varzi’s example) are distinct (...) yet share all their proper parts. A number of considerations — for example, that a statue and lump of clay have different persistence conditions — are commonly raised to support this non-extensionalist conclusion. Varzi maintains, on the other hand, that this case and others like it do not support non-extensionalism. However, there are reasons to doubt the cogency of his argument. In outline, Varzi’s argument runs as follows. Suppose that (i) α and β are (say) a statue and a lump, respectively,3 and also suppose that (ii) α = β. ∗This is a draft and so unsuitable for citation in any form. Any comments or suggestions are welcome and can be emailed to me at markscala@gmail.com. Check back periodically for newer versions. 1Varzi 2008 2Varzi 2008, p. 108. 3To avoid complications, let’s assume throughout that they have the same lifespan. Naturally, we should suppose they are co-located. (shrink)

This paper takes as its starting point the conjoining of the perceived and conceived spaces of what Soja (1996) calls Thirdspace and what Lefebvre calls ‘lived space’ to launch a discussion about ideas surrounding contemporary concepts of community. The sites under discussion are the ubiquitous shopping malls and the enclave estates or master planned communities (mpcs) which, it is argued, by their design offer only ‘illusions of community.’ The claim in this paper is that within these spaces of control are (...) spatialities of resistance–vagrant spaces-that can, under certain circumstances, point to the—poverty of participation—in the community experience. (shrink)

Developmental research suggests that some of the mechanisms that underlie numerical cognition are present and functional in human infancy. To investigate these mechanisms and their developmental course, psychologists have turned to behavioral and electrophysiological methods using briefly presented displays. These methods, however, depend on the assumption that young infants can extract numerical information rapidly. Here we test this assumption and begin to investigate the speed of numerical processing in five-month-old infants. Infants successfully discriminated between arrays of 4 vs. 8 dots (...) on the basis of number when a new array appeared every 2 s, but not when a new array appeared every 1.0 or 1.5 s. These results suggest alternative interpretations of past findings, provide constraints on the design of future experiments, and introduce a new method for probing infants’ enumeration process. Further experiments using this method provide initial evidence that infants’ enumeration mechanism operates in parallel and yields increasingly accurate numerical representations over time, as does the enumeration mechanism used by adults in symbolic and non-symbolic tasks. q 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)