Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one correct logic. This very general characterization gives rise to a whole family of positions. I argue that not all of them are stable. The main argument in the paper is inspired by considerations known as the “collapse problem”, and it aims at the most popular form of logical pluralism advocated by JC Beall and Greg Restall. I argue that there is a more general argument available that challenges all variants (...) of logical pluralism that meet the following three conditions: that there are at least two correct logical systems characterized in terms of different consequence relations, that there is some sort of rivalry among the correct logics, and that logical consequence is normative. The hypothesis I argue for amounts to conditional claim: If a position satisfies all these conditions, then that position is unstable in the sense that it collapses into competing positions. (shrink)

In addressing thescientific study of consciousness, Crick and Koch state, It is probable that at any moment some active neuronal processes in your head correlate with consciousness, while others do not: what is the difference between them? (1998, p. 97). Evidence from electrophysiological and brain-imaging studies of binocular rivalry supports the premise of this statement and answers to some extent, the question posed. I discuss these recent developments and outline the rationale and experimental evidence for the interhemispheric switch hypothesis (...) of perceptual rivalry. According to this model, the perceptual alternations of rivalry reflect hemispheric alternations, suggesting that visual consciousness of rivalling stimuli may be unihemispheric at any one time (Miller et al., 2000). However, in this paper, I suggest that interhemispheric switching could involve alternating unihemispheric attentional selection of neuronal processes for access to visual consciousness. On this view, visual consciousness during rivalry could be bi hemispheric because the processes constitutive of attentional selection may be distinct from those constitutive of visual consciousness. This is a special case of the important distinction between the neuronal correlates and constitution of visual consciousness. (shrink)

The rivalry between religions is obvious on a number of fronts: in wars between Christians, Muslims, and Hindus; in sectarian violence between Catholics and Protestants, or between Shia and Sunni; in the persecution of doctrinal heretics; in the splintering of new sects along doctrinal lines; in efforts to proselytize; and so on.

Rivalry is an attempt to understand facets of entrepreneurial societies by integrating the economic analysis with historical, political and psychological considerations, customarily shunned by economists. The author argues that decisions to make new business ventures, and readiness to take risks are both related to concepts of ranking hierarchies on local, national or international levels. He then constructs a theory of business enterprise and of rivalry supported by evidence on entrepreneurship, innovation, advertising, all examined with their historical, political or (...) organisational concerns. This notion of rivalry among businessmen is used to derive guidelines for anti-trust legislation. Instead of pricing, profitability, concentration ratios and other criteria used today to infer non-competitive behaviour, he suggests using a measure of a firm's relative rate of innovation to infer it. By extending the notion of rivalry to the political sphere, national and international, guidelines are derived to evaluate the performance of state-owned enterprises and to examine policies related to free trade. (shrink)

Among psychologists and vision scientists,binocular rivalry has enjoyed sustainedinterest for decades dating back to the 19thcentury. In recent years, however, rivalry''saudience has expanded to includeneuroscientists who envision rivalry as a tool for exploring the neural concomitants ofconscious visual awareness and perceptualorganization. For rivalry''s potential to berealized, workers using this tool need toknow details of this fascinating phenomenon,and providing those details is the purpose ofthis article. After placing rivalry in ahistorical context, I summarize major findingsconcerning the (...) spatial characteristics and thetemporal dynamics of rivalry, discuss two majortheoretical accounts of rivalry ( eye vs stimulus rivalry) and speculate on possibleneural concomitants of binocular rivalry. (shrink)

Cognitive functions like perception, memory, language, or consciousness are based on highly parallel and distributed information processing by the brain. One of the major unresolved questions is how information can be integrated and how coherent representational states can be established in the distributed neuronal systems subserving these functions. It has been suggested that this so-called ''binding problem'' may be solved in the temporal domain. The hypothesis is that synchronization of neuronal discharges can serve for the integration of distributed neurons into (...) cell assemblies and that this process may underlie the selection of perceptually and behaviorally relevant information. As we intend to show here, this temporal binding hypothesis has implications for the search of the neural correlate of consciousness. We review experimental results, mainly obtained in the visual system, which support the notion of temporal binding. In particular, we discuss recent experiments on the neural mechanisms of binocular rivalry which suggest that appropriate synchronization among cortical neurons may be one of the necessary conditions for the buildup of perceptual states and awareness of sensory stimuli. (shrink)

Nikos K. Logothetis University of Manchester, Manchester, UK In binocular rivalry, the visual percept alternates stochastically between two dichoptically presented stimuli. It is established that both processes related to the eye of origin and binocular, stimulus-related processes account for these fluctuations in conscious perception. Here we studied how their relative contributions vary over time. We applied brief disruptions to rivalry displays, concurrent with an optional eye swap, at varying time intervals after one stimulus became visible (dominant). We found (...) that early in a dominance phase the dominant eye determined the percept by stabilizing its own contribution (regardless of the stimulus), with an additional yet weaker stabilizing contribution of the stimulus (regardless of the eye). Their stabilizing contributions declined in parallel with time so that late in a dominance phase the stimulus (and in some cases also the eye-based) contribution turned negative, favoring a perceptual (or ocular) switch. Our findings show that depending on the time, first processes related to the eye of origin and then those related to the stimulus can have a greater net influence on the stability of the conscious percept. Their co-varying change may be due to feedback from image- to eyeof-origin representations. (shrink)

We investigated binocular rivalry in the twocerebral hemispheres of callosotomized(split-brain) observers. We found that rivalryoccurs for complex stimuli in split-brainobservers, and that it is similar in the twohemispheres. This poses difficulties for twotheories of rivalry: (1) that rivalry occursbecause of switching of activity between thetwo hemispheres, and (2) that rivalry iscontrolled by a structure in the rightfrontoparietal cortex. Instead, similar rivalryfrom the two hemispheres is consistent with atheory that its mechanism is low in the visualsystem, at (...) which each hemisphere conducts asimilar analysis of its half of visual space. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beyond Rivalry?Rethinking Community in View of Apocalyptical ViolenceAndreas Oberprantacher (bio)But the republic of crime must also be the republic of the suicide of criminals, and down to the last among them—the sacrifice of the sacrificers unleashed in passion.—Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative CommunityThe Crisis and Apocalyptic Intensification of RivalryAt first it seemed as if the "rivalry between two rates of speed"1 set at the center of Derrida's essay (...) "No Apocalypse, Not Now," published more than twenty years ago in Diacritics, had finally come to an end, at least in the form of a general and unmistakable division of the world into two competing geopolitical units. Following the breakdown of the USSR, the former super-enemy of the industrialized Northwest, that part of the world that claimed and still claims to be the sole referent of the adjective free, the dynamics of ideological rivalry had, at first, lost considerable momentum. After half a century of mostly symmetrical even if undeclared wars, the period from 1989 to 1991 was truly significant, [End Page 175] for it marked a moment of epistemological crisis, a moment when political fractions that derived their identity from a binary tension were all of a sudden stunned: no visible enemy anymore to deter, no willing scapegoat to blame, just eschatological abandonment.The aftershocks of this historical event can be traced in today's commentaries on and analyses of the political situation: It is certainly no coincidence that two of the most influential US-American political analysts, Samuel Huntington and Bruce Hoffman, both at the same time direct their attention toward questions about the conditions of social identity and cohesion, though from inverted perspectives. In his recent book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (2004), Huntington bemoans the "deconstruction of the American identity,"2 as it challenges—along with certain political developments—"the substance, and the desirability of this concept of America."3 Huntington's fervent interest in US-American identity and his call for its renewal become readily comprehensible when read against the background of his concern that an existential threat might again be imminent, possibly in the form of jihadist terrorism. In Huntington's argument, however, the United States's potential confrontation with militant Islamist movements—the explicit subtext of his book—is not assessed only in terms of political risks and military expenditures; for Huntington, this confrontation also holds out a unique chance of rediscovering one's own (lost, forgotten) identity. Revealing himself as an attentive reader of Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political, Huntington argues that "the absence of an ideological threat produced an absence of purpose.... The ideal enemy for America would be ideologically hostile, racially and culturally different, and militarily strong enough to pose a credible threat to American security."4While Huntington is concerned with reaffirming and securing a phantasmagoric vision of the United States's past glory, Hoffman, on the other hand, may be mentioned as a political analyst deeply worried about the inverse aspect of the epistemological crisis, i.e., worried by the fact that "the United States has utterly failed to fulfill the timeless admonition to 'know your enemy'"5 by declaring an all too abstract global war on terrorism. In his commentary, published in March 2007 under the title "Fighting Blind: We Can't Win if We Don't Know the Enemy" in the Washington Post, he argues that a long-term strategy is desperately needed to identify "our adversaries, who are much too elusive and complicated to be vanquished by mere decapitation."6Taking Huntington's and Hoffman's positions seriously as paradigmatic examples of a wider and well-established discursive strategy that calls for a renewed need for binary-opposed collective identities—us/them; the coalition [End Page 176] of the willing/the axis of evil—in order to affirm a state of potentially ubiquitous and highly moralized rivalry, one may well argue with Schmitt that "a new nomos of the earth" is immanent.7 In Schmitt's understanding, such a new paradigm of warfare will no longer be characterized by relative understandings of enmity, but by enemies declared "totally criminal... (shrink)

Deleuze’s reversal of Platonism shifted the traditional emphasis on thinking that which participates in a concept to that in which a claim to participation occurs. The first part of this article presents a reading of this reversal that highlights the implications of Deleuze’s ontology for his non-ontological account of participation, highlighting how this ontology builds on aspects of Plato’s philosophy recovered from beneath the later Platonic tradition of philosophy and supports Deleuze’s account of the rival claims of philosophy and opinion (...) to participate in thought. The second part outlines the difficulties presented by philosophy’s constitutive participation in friendship, love, and rivalry for it to be able to achieve its distinctive task of creating concepts that defeat opinion’s rival claims to address the problems that present themselves to thought. (shrink)

RIVALRY AND CENTRAL PLANNING: THE SOCIALIST CALCULATION DEBATE RECONSIDERED by Don Lavoie. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 208 pp., $34.95.

In addressing the scientific study of consciousness, Crick and Koch state, “It is prob- able that at any moment some active neuronal processes in your head correlate with consciousness, while others do not: what is the difference between them?” (1998, p. 97). Evidence from electro- physiological and brain-imaging studies of binocular rivalry supports the premise of this statement and answers to some extent, the question posed. I discuss these recent developments and outline the rationale and experimental evidence for the (...) interhemispheric switch hypothesis of perceptual rivalry. According to this model, the perceptual alternations of rivalry reflect hemispheric alterna- tions, suggesting that visual consciousness of rivalling stimuli may be unihemispheric at any one time (Miller et al., 2000). However, in this paper, I suggest that interhemispheric switching could involve alternating unihemispheric attentional selection of neuronal processes for access to visual consciousness. On this view, visual consciousness during rivalry could be bihemispheric because the processes constitutive of attentional selection may be distinct from those constitutive of visual consciousness. This is a special case of the important distinction between the neuronal correlates and constitution of visual consciousness. (shrink)

This paper proposes a description of the moral obligations of economic agents. It will show that a threefold division should be adopted to distinguish moral obligations applying to their interactions in the market, obligations applying to their interactions inside business firms and obligations applying to their interactions with agents outside the market. Competition might be permissible in the first case since markets are special patterns of social interactions (called adversarial schemes). They produce their benefits when agents try to satisfy exclusive (...) preferences at the expense of others. However, moral obligations inside the firm and moral obligations outside the market are of a different nature. This argument will be developed in the two first parts of this paper. In the third part, it will outline the relevant strengths of that account in relation with two popular views of economic agents’ moral obligations: the shareholder primacy view and the stakeholder theory. (shrink)

Binocular rivalry provides a useful situation for studying the relation between the temporal flow of conscious experience and the temporal dynamics of neural activity. After proposing a phenomenological framework for understanding temporal aspects of consciousness, we review experimental research on multistable perception and binocular rivalry, singling out various methodological, theoretical, and empirical aspects of this research relevant to studying the flow of experience. We then review an experimental study from our group explicitly concerned with relating the temporal dynamics (...) of rivalrous experience to the temporal dynamics of cortical activity. Drawing attention to the importance of dealing with ongoing activity and its inherent changing nature at both phenomenological and neurodynamical levels, we argue that the notions of recurrence and variability are pertinent to understanding rivalry in particular and the flow of experience in general. (shrink)

Physiological studies of binocular rivalry have provided important clues to the relationship between neural activity in the brain and visual awareness.However, uncertainty about these insights has been raised by a recent study showing that the events underlying binocular rivalry occur earlier in the visual pathway than was previously thought.

The issues of religious proselytization as well as the construction of house of worship are of main contentious topics inciting tensions between religious adherents, particularly between the minority Christians and the majority Muslims in contemporary Indonesia. This article discusses these two inter-religious problems and poses a question to extent that the competition between Muslim and Christians, both in their missionary activities and the building of new house of worship, inflicting inter-religious relation in contemporary Indonesia. Taken some cases as points of (...) discussion, this article further offers that inclusive dialogue and social justice are solutions to minimize—even to prevent—the worsening tension between Muslim and Christians. (shrink)

What is analytical philosophy of education (APE)? And what has been its place in the history of the subject over the last fifty years? In a recent essay in Ethics and Education (Vol 2, No 2 October 2007) on ‘Rival conceptions of the philosophy of education’, Paul Standish described a number of features of APE. Relying on both historical and philosophical argument, the present paper critically assesses these eight points, as well as another five points delineating APE in the Introduction (...) to The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education. (shrink)

Economic exchange constitutes the basis of many, but not all, aspects of human cooperation. The incentives overlap with, but remain distinct in important ways, from other fundamental aspects of cooperation, including the organization of collective violence for combat. The specific alignment of sometimes-conflicting goals helps inform the construction of political ideology.

Olfactory rivalry can occur when a binary mixture is sniffed repeatedly, with one percept dominating then the other. Experiment 1 demonstrated olfactory rivalry using several new techniques. Experiments 2 and 3 examined whether participants can notice rivalry. Participants received trials composed of odor pairs: either a mixture followed by the same mixture; or a pure odor followed by the same pure odor. On some trials participants judged whether the two stimuli were the same or different, to see (...) if they could detect rivalry. On other trials participants judged the quality of each odor, allowing us to determine whether rivalry occurred. We found evidence for rivalry when we compared reports of odor quality for one stimulus and then the other, but no evidence that participants could detect this change. These findings are consistent with the idea that people can experience olfactory illusions, but may not know they have occurred. (shrink)

This paper considers further evidence that five comic poets as opposed to three competed at the Lenaia and City Dionysia festivals in Athens during the Peloponnesian War. Aristophanes’ abuse of his comic rivals Phrynichos, Ameipsias and Lykis in the opening scene ofFrogs, produced at the Lenaia of 405, is interpreted as a response to his immediate competitors at the dramatic contest that year. A survey of the evidence elsewhere in comedy suggests that comic poets usually reserved such attacks on rival (...) poets for occasions when all were in direct competition at the same festival. Further analysis of Aristophanes’ competitive strategies also suggests these poets immediate participation in the festival and therefore that five poets competed at the Lenaia that year. (shrink)

Sports are an excellent venue for demonstrating evolutionary principles to audiences not familiar with academic research. Team sports and sports fandom feature dynamics of in-group loyalty and intergroup competition, influenced by our evolved coalitional psychology. We predicted that reactions to expressions signaling mutual team/group allegiance would vary as a function of the territorial context. Reactions should become more prevalent, positive, and enthusiastic as one moves from the home territory to a contested area, and from a contested area to a rival’s (...) territory during active rival engagement. We also predicted that men would be more responsive than women based on sex differences in evolved coalitional psychology. The research team visited public places immediately prior to 2016–2017 collegiate football and basketball games. A male research confederate wore a sweatshirt displaying the logo of one of the competing university teams and vocalized the team’s most popular slogan when he saw a fan displaying similar logos. Observers followed 5 m behind, recording reactions and response positivity/enthusiasm. Reaction tone was most positive in the rival territory, least positive in the home territory, and intermediate in the periphery and contested territory. Rates of “no reaction” were lowest in the rival territory but were highest in the periphery. Men had higher reaction rates and more positive and enthusiastic reaction tones than women. Reactions generally followed predictions based on expected signal value. This project provides evidence that coalitional psychology influences dynamics related to university sports team rivalries and that context matters for expressions of alliance. (shrink)

Susan B. Levin argues that Plato's engagement with medicine is richer than previously recognized and that he views it as an important rival for authority on nature and flourishing. Levin shows further that Plato's work, particularly the Laws, holds significant promise for bioethics that has so far been nearly untapped.

In 1967 Guy Debord published the pamphlet-sized The Society of the Spectacle, a book written in the form of a collection of short theses. Debord was criticized for inventing the “spectacle” out of thin air by thinkers of his time such as Michel Foucault. We can, however, detect salient manifestations of the Debordian spectacular society in China of the 2010s. This paper demonstrates a deep and pervasive trend of spectacularization in China by analyzing (a) Taobao as a desire-creating machine producing (...) the buy-buy-buy fanaticism, (b) the beautifying operation that has engendered perverted effects in sexual relationship, (c) the spectacular dialectic epitomized by the celebrity culture, and (d) the reality-twisting effects of the spectacles. The paper further offers a comparative analysis of the contemporary spectacles vis-à-vis the Maoist spectacles of the 1960s, which sheds light in understanding the enactment of antientertainment actions in recent years. The spectacles in contemporary China, in the fashion depicted by Debord half a century ago, have effectively produced a specific worldview of commodity and consumption, and this worldview transforms itself, through blind trust, into a type of objective force. The social terrains needed for spreading and cultivating socialist values were heavily colonized by the such spectacles (consumption, beautification, celebrity culture, entertainment); the latter have significantly absorbed the masses’ attention in the last decade to such level that it has almost occupied all spaces for communication and played the leading role in regulating people’s daily lives. The “Beauty is justice!” slogan that has been extremely popular in contemporary China reveals one significant change in Chinese culture and its sociopolitical effect: the trend of spectacularization, through elevating spectacle to the supreme value and turning the country into a spectacular (un)reality, has not only homogenized China but also effectively depoliticized the country. (shrink)

What is the point of sport? For those to whom sport doesn't appeal, it seems futile, pointless. Yet a small child takes pleasure in his or her bodily capacities and adroitness. Gradually the child achieves a measure of physical coordination and mastery. Walking, jumping, dancing, catching, kicking, hitting, climbing, being in water, using an implement as a bat or racquet – all these offer a sense of achievement and satisfaction. Sport it seems to me is an extension of such activities.

Many social institutions function with rivalry, whether it is the legal adversarial system, the electoral system, competitive sports or the market. The literature on adversarial ethics (with authors such as Arthur Applbaum, David Luban and Joseph Heath) attempts to clarify what is a good behavior in these situations, but this work does not examine if institutionalized rivalry is desirable given its good and bad aspects. According to Monroe Freedman, for instance, the confrontation between lawyers in a trial may (...) help discover important facts about a case. Most economists believe that competition in the market increases economic efficiency. But institutionalized rivalry can also lead to morally wrong acts such as violence, deception or coercion. The aim of this article is to identify the conditions under which rivalry may be more or less desirable in our social arrangements. First, it will be necessary to clarify what is institutionalized rivalry and what is an adversarial scheme. Then, this article will explain what are the generic advantages and problems of adversarial schemes. Finally, this analysis will be used to outline a series of minimal requirements to consider that an adversarial scheme is desirable. (shrink)

The Kashmir issue, a principal reason for rivalry between India and Pakistan, has become the atomic flashpoint and a constant threat to the security of South Asia. The aim of this paper is to highlight the root causes of Kashmir disputes and the major events that contributed towards the Indo-Pak rivalry with respect to Kashmir. The paper highlights present political conditions in the Indian-held Kashmir also shows the role of India, Pakistan, and the United Nations in Kashmir Dispute. (...) In the end, a conclusion is presented for the devalued relations of India and Pakistan in the setting of Kashmir and its effects are analyzed. (shrink)

Past research suggests that young women perceive their same-sex friends as both facilitating the pursuit of desirable mates and competing for access to desirable mates. We propose that similar levels of physical attractiveness between young adult female friends might be one explanation for the opposing forces in their friendships. Forty-six female friendship pairs completed questionnaires about themselves, their friend, and their friendship; in addition, each woman’s picture was rated by a set of nine naive judges. Friends were similar in both (...) self-rated and other-rated level of attractiveness. Within-pair analyses revealed that women agreed on which friend was more attractive, and the less attractive members of each friendship pair (by pair consensus as well as outside judges’ ratings) perceived more mating rivalry in their friendship than did the more attractive members of each friendship pair. We offer directions for research on women’s friendships over the lifespan. (shrink)

The relationship between brain activity and conscious visual experience is central to our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying perception. Binocular rivalry, where monocular stimuli compete for perceptual dominance, has been previously used to dissociate the constant stimulus from the varying percept. We report here fMRI results from humans experiencing binocular rivalry under a dichoptic stimulation paradigm that consisted of two drifting random dot patterns with different motion coherence. Each pattern had also a different color, which both enhanced (...) rivalry and was used for reporting which of the two patterns was visible at each time. As the perception of the subjects alternated between coherent motion and motion noise, we examined the effect that these alternations had on the strength of the MR signal throughout the brain. Our results demonstrate that motion perception is able to modulate the activity of several of the visual areas which are known to be involved in motion processing. More specifically, in addition to area V5 which showed the strongest modulation, a higher activity during the perception of motion than during the perception of noise was also clearly observed in areas V3A and LOC, and less so in area V3. In previous studies, these areas had been selectively activated by motion stimuli but whether their activity reflects motion perception or not remained unclear; here we show that they are involved in motion perception as well. The present findings therefore suggest a lack of a clear distinction between ?processing? versus ?perceptual? areas in the brain, but rather that the areas involved in the processing of a specific visual attribute are also part of the neuronal network that is collectively responsible for its perceptual representation. (shrink)