For a stable visual world, the colours of objects should appear the same under different lights. This property of colour constancy has been assumed to be fundamental to vision, and many experimental attempts have been made to quantify it. I contend here, however, that the usual methods of measurement are either too coarse or concentrate not on colour constancy itself, but on other, complementary aspects of scene perception. Whether colour constancy exists other than in nominal terms remains unclear.

On its twenty-fifth anniversary, Fides et ratio remains relevant for its bold defense of reason and the complementarity of faith and reason. It describes a philosophy that is not the preserve of academics but the duty of every person. It asserts that philosophy is never contained in one system but is always open to new questions and further insights. St. John Paul defends a philosophy that welcomes pluralism based on the richness of being but rejects a pluralism based on the (...) impossibility of knowing the truth. Reflecting on Fides et ratio, this article describes six ways that theology uses philosophy and offers five lessons for philosophers, i.e., the universal character of philosophy, the complementarity of faith and reason, the necessity and limits of pluralism, the requirements for a philosophy to be consonant with theology, and the current reinvigoration of philosophy in seminaries. (shrink)

This book is a collection of secondary essays on America's most important philosophic thinkers—statesmen, judges, writers, educators, and activists—from the colonial period to the present. Each essay is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of a noted American on the fundamental meaning of the American regime.

Richard Connell’s book brings together Aristotle’s great metaphysical insight, that everything has four causes, with the discoveries of modern natural science. Whereas many contemporary philosophers and natural scientists think the question of the nature and number of causes is irrelevant or resolved, Connell thinks that they are indispensable distinctions that have been mauled beyond recognition.

As psychology ethics begins to become more standardized and formalized globally (e.g., Gauthier, 2007) there are still educational, political, and psychological areas that require significant discussion. For example, test security has become a global issue, as psychological tests and even college entrance and graduate school admission tests have found their way online.

Shepard's analysis of how shape, motion, and color are perceptually represented can be generalized. Apparent motion and shape may be associated with a group of spatial transformations, accounting for rigid and plastic motion, and perceived object color may be associated with a group of illuminant transformations, accounting for the discriminability of surface-reflectance changes and illuminant changes beyond daylight. The phenomenological and mathematical parallels between these perceptual domains may indicate common organizational rules, rather than specific ecological adaptations. [Barlow; Hecht; Kubovy & (...) Epstein; Schwartz; Shepard; Todorovic]. (shrink)

R. J. Henle, one of the few philosophers to have a village named after him, has published the fruit of his twenty-plus years of teaching epistemology. The book is intended to be both a textbook and a contribution to philosophical literature.

Galgan wants to write a biography of being, and the character witnesses are Aristotle, Anselm, Descartes, and Feuerbach. The main points are that Anselm is a pivot between a classical and modern view of God in first philosophy, and that modern philosophers gave up the search for God by claiming to have found God to be man. Thus God was replaced by subjectivity--our subjectivity. The book is not a textual study, but does give a fairly close commentary on texts of (...) Anselm, Descartes, and Feuerbach. (shrink)

An important factor in judging whether two retinal images arise from the same object viewed from different positions may be the presence of certain properties or cues that are 'qualitative invariants' with respect to the natural transformations, particularly affine transformations, associated with changes in viewpoint. To test whether observers use certain affine qualitative cues such as concavity, convexity, collinearity, and parallelism of the image elements, a 'same-different' discrimination experiment was carried out with planar patterns that were defined by four points (...) either connected by straight line segments (line patterns) or marked by dots (dot patterns). The first three points of each pattern were generated randomly; the fourth point fell on their diagonal bisector. According to the position of that point, the patterns were concave, triangular (three points being collinear), convex, or parallel sided. In a 'same' trial, an affine transformation was applied to one of two identical patterns; in a 'different' trial, the affine transformation was applied after the point lying on the diagonal bisector was perturbed a short, fixed distance along the bisector, inwards for one pattern and outwards for the other. Observers' ability to discriminate 'same' from 'different' pairs of patterns depended strongly on the position of the fourth, displaced, point: performance varied rapidly when the position of the displaced point was such that the patterns were nearly triangular or nearly parallel sided, consistent with observers using the hypothesised qualitative cues. The experimental data were fitted with a simple probabilistic model of discrimination performance that used a combination of these qualitative cues and a single quantitative cue. (shrink)

The most striking feature of Leo Elders’s book is the broad context with which he surrounds Thomas’s doctrine of nature. For example, his discussion of the soul provides a good review of the doctrine before and after Thomas, his discussion of “time” takes us from Parmenides to Einstein. Because Elders wants to refute those who think the doctrine of Thomas is simply of historical interest, he consistently relates Thomas’s teaching to the contemporary state of the question. He does a credible (...) job of discussing everything from general field theory, to quarks, to cell biology. (shrink)