A history of disease theory, from Classical Antiquity to modern times, discussing the various supposed causes to which people of different eras attributed disease.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:From First Hesitation to Scenic ImaginationOriginary Thinking with Eric GansAndrew Bartlett (bio)Taken together, the publication of Eric Gans’s The Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day (2008), the recent release of Adam Katz’s anthology The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry (2007),1 and the organization of three international gatherings devoted to generative anthropology2 suggest a recent infusion of vital energy into the forward movement (...) of generative anthropology. The goal of this review essay is to add a little to that infusion. The essay surveys the six major books of Eric Gans in which the originary hypothesis is defined, developed, tested, and taken onto various intellectual terrains. It has been composed with the readers of Contagion in mind. Insofar as it has a definable stance, that stance emphasises elements of generative anthropology that might encourage scholars and students familiar with the ideas of René Girard but more or less unfamiliar with the thinking of Eric Gans to begin studying Gans free of inhibitions about discontinuities between his way of thinking and that of Girard. This essay’s mode is one of affirmative exposition rather than critical suspicion. Its multiple suggestions are advanced in the conviction that neglecting one thinker for the sake of the other does an injustice to both. [End Page 89]IThe person ready to study the book where generative anthropology began—The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (1981)—should be set for an extraordinary experience. It stands as the most austere, abstract, and taxing of Gans’s books; but by virtue of those very qualities, the most rewarding and the best basis for understanding subsequent elaborations of the hypothesis. The Origin of Language may feel odd to readers who come to it working “backward” from later volumes or articles. In it, key terms in the later works, such as “resentment,” “mimetic,” “scenic,” even the adjective “originary,” do not figure prominently. In expositions where Gans explains the differences between René Girard’s institutional theory of representation (which proposes that language evolved somehow as a side effect of ritual) and Gans’s formal theory of representation, there is an odd thickness of cautious deference, a propriety verging on a reluctance to disagree. In Girard’s thought, the maximal form of human culture, the institution of ritual as it evolved from episodes of collective murder, is foundational; by contrast, in Gans, the minimal form of human culture, linguistic exchange as it has evolved in a dialectic of desire and representation, is foundational. Nor for Gans are the earliest “victims” of collective violence human ones; Gans’s hypothesis puts an object initially of appetite (most easily figured as food), transfigured by the sign into a desire-object, into the center of the scene of representation. The humans in generative anthropology are less murderous and more hungry than those in mimetic theory; the economic-consumerist element of human beings enjoys a privilege in Gans’s system that it does not have in the system of Girard, with its more orthodox otherworldliness.Generative anthropology is about human language. It takes linguistic exchange, the deferral of violence through representation, as the essence of the human. The title The Origin of Language reflects this. Gans’s hypothesis is that human language began with a communally mediated abortive gesture of appropriation toward a central object of appetite in a scenic event; that abortive gesture of appropriation is the gesture of originary thinking. Originary thinking now, even as I am doing it here, does what it did then at the beginning of human thought: it reflects on its own origin. The emission of the first human sign, that first abortive gesture of appropriation, is the object of the hypothesis. The mimetic paradox of rivalry and imitation familiar to students of Girard precedes the emission of the first ostensive gesture-sign, generating the double-bind circumstances that make possible its being chosen. For Gans, the collective violence familiar to students of Girard follows the emission of the first ostensive [End Page 90] sign; indeed, violence is intensified by the abortive gesture of appropriation—because what was an object merely of appetite before the... (shrink)

In his last book René Girard depicts apocalypse as disclosure of mimetic violence that is world-ending. He claims that in times of violent pandemic we are not called to fight for this world, but follow Christ in his withdrawal from the world. However, such an assertion creates serious theoretical and practical issues for the effort to heal interhuman relations from the virus of mimetic hostility. I argue for the importance of restoring a foundational distinction between passionate love and acquisitive mimetic (...) desire from the forgotten regions of Girard’s oeuvre. With Max Scheler’s interpretation of Stendhal’s concept of l’amour passion, I explore in each thinker a fundamental insight about possibilities of transforming violent contagion through empathy and loving commitment to the world. I conclude that respective “passive” and “active” approaches to the contagion of mimetic rivalry and violence are necessary and equally valuable. (shrink)

The Shape of Thought: How Mental Adaptations Evolve presents a road map for an evolutionary psychology of the twenty-first century. It brings together theory from biology and cognitive science to show how the brain can be composed of specialized adaptations, and yet also an organ of plasticity. Although mental adaptations have typically been seen as monolithic, hard-wired components frozen in the evolutionary past, The Shape of Thought presents a new view of mental adaptations as diverse and variable, with (...) distinct functions and evolutionary histories that shape how they develop, what information they use, and what they do with that information. The book describes how advances in evolutionary developmental biology can be applied to the brain by focusing on the design of the developmental systems that build it. Crucially, developmental systems can be plastic, designed by the process of natural selection to build adaptive phenotypes using the rich information available in our social and physical environments. This approach bridges the long-standing divide between "nativist" approaches to development, based on innateness, and "empiricist" approaches, based on learning. It shows how a view of humans as a flexible, culturally-dependent species is compatible with a complexly specialized brain, and how the nature of our flexibility can be better understood by confronting the evolved design of the organ on which that flexibility depends. (shrink)

This book describes the history of economic thought, focusing on the development of economic theory from Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' to the late twentieth century.

In this thought-provoking work, Tony D. Sampson presents a contagion theory fit for the age of networks. Unlike memes and microbial contagions, _Virality_ does not restrict itself to biological analogies and medical metaphors. It instead points toward a theory of contagious assemblages, events, and affects. For Sampson, contagion is not necessarily a positive or negative force of encounter; it is how society comes together and relates. Sampson argues that a biological knowledge of contagion has been universally distributed by (...) way of the rhetoric of fear used in the antivirus industry and other popular discourses surrounding network culture. This awareness is also detectable in concerns over _too much connectivity_, such as problems of global financial crisis and terrorism. Sampson’s “virality” is as established as that of the biological meme and microbe but is not understood through representational thinking expressed in metaphors and analogies. Rather, Sampson interprets contagion theory through the social relationalities first established in Gabriel Tarde’s microsociology and subsequently recognized in Gilles Deleuze’s ontological worldview. According to Sampson, the reliance on representational thinking to explain the social behavior of networking—including that engaged in by nonhumans such as computers—allows language to overcategorize and limit analysis by imposing identities, oppositions, and resemblances on contagious phenomena. It is the power of these categories that impinges on social and cultural domains. Assemblage theory, on the other hand, is all about relationality and encounter, helping us to understand the viral as a positively sociological event, building from the molecular outward, long before it becomes biological. (shrink)

The book Mozi , named after master Mo, was compiled in the course of the fifth-third centuries BCE. The seven studies included in the The Mozi as an Evolving Text analyse the Core Chapters, Dialogues, and Opening Chapters of the Mozi as an evolving text.

An often-overlooked characteristic of the human mind is its propensity to wander. Despite growing interest in the science of mind-wandering, most studies operationalize mind-wandering by its task-unrelated contents. But these contents may be orthogonal to the processes that determine how thoughts unfold over time, remaining stable or wandering from one topic to another. In this chapter, we emphasize the importance of incorporating such processes into current definitions of mind-wandering, and propose that mind-wandering and other forms of spontaneous thought (such (...) as dreaming and creativity) are mental states that arise and transition relatively freely due to an absence of constraints on cognition. We review existing psychological, philosophical and neuroscientific research on spontaneous thought through the lens of this framework, and call for additional research into the dynamic properties of the mind and brain. (shrink)

"Krell writes here with a brilliance of style that few other philosophers can match." —John Sallis Although the Romantic Age is usually thought of as idealizing nature as the source of birth, life, and creativity, David Farrell Krell focuses on the preoccupation of three key German Romantic thinkers—Novalis, Schelling, and Hegel—with nature’s destructive powers—contagion, disease, and death.

The various attempts to find the definitive political thought of Malcolm X, after his break with the Nation of Islam, have resulted in clashing interpretations. Malcolm X’s speeches, writings, and other public forums are the root cause of the tensions. Malcolm X’s thinking is most rich and informative if its ambiguities are accepted as such and each side of a particular tension is explored. Each pole of the four tensions identified here is highly relevant for present American racial dilemmas (...) and racial progress. (shrink)

Advances in the empirical sectors of biology are beginning to reveal evolvability as a major evolutionary process. Yet evolvability’s theoretical role is still intensely debated. Since its inception nearly thirty years ago, the evolvability research front has put a strong emphasis on the non-genetic mechanisms that influence the short-term evolvability of individuals within populations by causing phenotypic heterogeneity, such as developmental trait plasticity, phenotypic plasticity, modularity, the G-P map, robustness, and/or epigenetic variation. However, genetic evolvability mechanisms such as mutation or (...) recombination have a deeper history in evolutionary thought that is often overlooked by those in the evolvability research front, with recent evidence suggesting that species switch to genetic evolvability mechanisms when short-term evolvability strategies fail to relieve selective pressures. For this reason, a causal distinction must be made between genetic evolvability and the more recently emphasized non-genetic (or evo-devo) evolvability to allow for its maturation as a central explanatory concept. I conclude by arguing that the anachronisms of the scientific process are the main culprit behind recent divisions in biology and likely beyond. To streamline theoretical progress, we need to build a new science with new underlying philosophies like restricted pluralism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:History-Writing as Protest: Kingship and the Beginning of Historical Narrative James G. Williams Syracuse University I. Introduction This paper is an attempt to apply René Girard's mimetic theory to the origins of historical writing, specifically the composing ofIsrael's story, vis- à-vis the origin of kingship. What I do not intend to deal with is the exact chronological beginning of historical narrative in ancient Israel. Whether or not this sort (...) of writing began immediately, it is quite clear that kingship is a problem in a way that no other office or role was in the scriptural texts. In the study of Israelite historiography and Israel's understanding of history there are many issues that have been discussed and debated. Among English speaking scholars the works of John Van Seters have been, in recent years, the most widely read on this topic.l Van Seters himself argues that the "Court History" or "Succession Narrative" in 2 Samuel and the Yahwist (J) narrative ofthe Pentateuch, or Torah, which scholars have commonly thought to be the oldest ancient Israelite history works, were composed in the exilic period (after c. 586 B.C.E.) subsequent to the completion of the "Deuteronomic work" (Josh., Judg., Books of Sam., Books of Kings). A Greek model of history writing was by then known and used by the authors of these histories previously and wrongly understood to be so old. However, prior to these historical works influenced by a Greek model was the work ofthe Deuteronomist, i.e., the books ofJoshua through Samuel, which integrated various earlier sources and traditions into a view of Israel's past that was informed by a definite theology ofhistory. This history is that of "the first known historian 1 In his approach to the texts Van Seters does not deal with any of the questions raised in the recent readings and hermeneutic approaches informed by literary theory. 92James G. Williams in Western civilization truly to deserve that designation" (Van Seters, "Search" 362). My purpose is not to argue with most of Van Seters's conclusions. In my judgment he is right to question the thesis of Hermann Gunkel and Gerhard von Rad that history writing evolved from earlier legend (Saga). I likewise agree that although there are many parallels among Israelite, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Hittite texts (including divine intervention in history, as shown by Bertil Albrektson), one still does not find among these other peoples a genre that could be called historiography. Van Seters borrows Johan Huizinga 's definition of history as "the intellectual form in which a civilization renders account to itself of its past" ("Search" 1). I think the definition is helpful but it lacks both a generative center and a delimitation of literary form. I propose that it be changed by extending it in two respects: (1) The intellectual form of self-understanding is rooted in the sacred as its primary problematic. In this essay I will try to show that the beginning of history writing in ancient Israel both starts from and attempts to break from the ancient sacred order as mediated through the sacral institution ofkingship. (2) Concerning literary form, history in the sense intended here requires a narrative about a nation and specific individuals (even if the divine and miracles are part of this world) that is long and continuous enough to form a coherent picture ofthe significant past. There was clearly no writing like that prior to Israelite historiography. I think the main problem in Van Seters's approach is that he misses the impulse ofhistory writing. That impulse is kingship. I don't mean this simply in the older sense, going back to L. Rost and Gerhard von Rad, that history writing begins with the cultural efflorescence that emerged in the reign of Solomon (c. 960-922 B.CE.) and used even earlier sources stemming from the period of David's rule (c. 1000-960 B.CE.).2 Kingship was, rather, an office created by the fundamental dynamic of culture, namely the sacred and its mechanisms. What made Israel different, I will argue, is that it established this office, thus becoming "like all the nations," and yet many of its distinctive witnesses... (shrink)

Humans possess great capacity for behavioral and cultural change, but our ability to manage change is still limited. This article has two major objectives: first, to sketch a basic science of intentional change centered on evolution; second, to provide examples of intentional behavioral and cultural change from the applied behavioral sciences, which are largely unknown to the basic sciences community.All species have evolved mechanisms of phenotypic plasticity that enable them to respond adaptively to their environments. Some mechanisms of phenotypic plasticity (...) count as evolutionary processes in their own right. The human capacity for symbolic thought provides an inheritance system having the same kind of combinatorial diversity as does genetic recombination and antibody formation. Taking these propositions seriously allows an integration of major traditions within the basic behavioral sciences, such as behaviorism, social constructivism, social psychology, cognitive psychology, and evolutionary psychology, which are often isolated and even conceptualized as opposed to one another.The applied behavioral sciences include well-validated examples of successfully managing behavioral and cultural change at scales ranging from individuals to small groups to large populations. However, these examples are largely unknown beyond their disciplinary boundaries, for lack of a unifying theoretical framework. Viewed from an evolutionary perspective, they are examples of managing evolved mechanisms of phenotypic plasticity, including open-ended processes of variation and selection.Once the many branches of the basic and applied behavioral sciences become conceptually unified, we are closer to a science of intentional change than one might think. (shrink)

Yawning has a well documented contagious effect: viewing or hearing a yawn—as well as talking or thinking about yawns—causes human subjects to yawn. While comparative ethological and neurological accounts suggest that yawning is a function of primitive biological structures in the brain stem, these analyses do not account for infectious yawning caused by representational and semantic states. Investigating the relationship between perceptual and cognitive avenues of yawn induction affords a unique opportunity to examine how higher level cognitive faculties interact with (...) involuntary or automated processing systems. In this paper, I examine three distinct attempts to reconcile the cognitive properties of contagious yawning with its physiological basis—one neurological, one philosophical, and one functional. None of these accounts are unproblematic, and the most plausible hypothesis for the evolution of contagious yawning does not satisfactorily explain the cognitive iterations of the phenomenon . I argue that the most likely explanation of the contagion links perceptual elements of witnessed yawns to conceptual representations. More centrally, this kind of integrated account has repercussions for general theories of human thought and rationality, and suggests that higher level representational states engage neurophysiological structures in determining human behavior. (shrink)

Evolving Dharma is a next-generation book about meditation, Buddhism, and the contemplative path. It explores how the dharma (the path, the way, the teachings of the Buddha) has evolved in astonishing ways and how dharma practice evolves in one's own life. Instead of approaching the dharma as spirituality, therapy, or self-help, scholar and practicing Buddhist Jay Michaelson presents it as a set of technologies for upgrading the brain, for physically enhancing its capacity for wisdom and compassion. In the last (...) twenty years, Buddhism has exploded well beyond its former boundaries. Meditation is being taught to prisoners, cancer patients, and children. It is being practiced online--by geeks, hipsters, and punks; by atheists, Christians, and Jews; by people who are not "spiritual." It's not even "Buddhism" anymore, having evolved out of its original religious context and into dozens of new ones. Evolving Dharma is the first book to take stock of these trends, and to speak in real-life terms about how they affect the practice of meditation and the path to upgrading the mind. Michaelson is fearless, unorthodox, and irreverent, yet his book is also based on his decade of meditation practice and teaching as well as his ten years of work as an LGBT activist. Including forays into neuroscience and cultural criticism and Michaelson's personal stories of his five months spent in silent retreat, life-changing realizations, pain, joy, and insight, this is not an ironic, wading-into-spirituality memoir but a thoughtful, important work that takes its subject seriously, both as discipline and as individual narrative. Chapter titles include "The Dharma Evolves By Disappearing," "The Evolution of Enlightenment," and "When Every Mystical State You've Ever Wanted Isn't Enough.". (shrink)

Introduction Jamie Allen Time, of all the dimensions readily presented to experience, seems to do so most readily through things. Stuff, in supposed counter-valence to the negentropic resilience of living things, appears to us as that which degrades through time, and demarcates a more technical chronometry of sequential events. Situated outside the rotting of fruit and the ticking of clocks, a “deep time” persists. Like the ultra-hearing of the bat, and the infra-vision of the boa-constrictor, there exist living and non-living (...) agents and entities capable of revealing the fixity and finitude of our own perceptual frames for thinking and understanding. The recordings presented here consist of four extracts of documents made in deep geological repository sites (for the storage of nuclear waste). Here re-presented are the Yucca Mountain Repository; HADES, in Mol, Belgium; Gorleben in Germany and a further recording from Forsmark in Sweden (pretty much inaudible behind a loop of a pop song). These recordings are imagined acoustic amplifications of deep time, just as the astronomer’s telescope is (thought of a certain way), also a time machine. Stars and nuclear waste are unapparent objects of temporal thought. Andy Weir is an artist from London researching effects of deprioritised subjectivity and contemporary art. This project draws on work developing sonic fictions, stealthy earworms, and micropolitical agencies. Prompted for further thoughts about the recordings presented here, he offered up the interspersed discussion included. —JA Yucca Mountain Repository, Nevada, USA by continent I became interested in these sites originally as spaces that allude to a time outside of the human (‘deep time’) as they are designed to store waste ‘without future maintenance’. The very fact of thinking about these spaces or working on them—engineering etc.. (as I’m particularly interested them in a kind of practice rather than just an object of thought), in other words, forces a confrontation with thought of the extinction of humanity. I was interested in this as a production of affect at odds with the expected ‘ironic, can be whatever you like’ interpretive condition of contemporary art (art under the condition of neoliberalism, say, where the individual subject is prioritised as a free autonomous producer of the meaning of the work) When I thought about this a bit though it ran into paradoxes—yes, I could allude to deep time, but in doing so I just allude to its un-representability, drawing attention to the limits of representation and so reaffirming it—I was stuck in a representation/non-representational negative dialectic. In trying to somehow create a figure for deep time I was either reducing it to my description of it, or presenting it as irreducible. HADES Facility, Mol, Belgium by continent I don’t think I’ve escaped this in the work but my response to it was to create a sonic-fiction. This was based on the idea of a viral transmission of the affect of deep time (this is the ‘pyroclastic-soaked chrono-dread’) through receiving apparatuses, transforming the screen into an intercessor or mediating lure for the outside, a site of exposure multiplying virulently through its dissemination, invoking as much as trying to represent these spaces, the sounds as durations of exposure to contagious materials, and fictions as a way of excavating the strangeness of a world opaque to subjective reconfiguration... Testing out I suppose ways that art could start thinking about figuring the reality of ecological crisis. Gorleben Repository, Lower Saxony, Germany by continent While everything remains at the level of fiction I think the work is problematic. It doesn’t really model anything, giving too much authority to either romantic abandonment or the recuperation of romantic abandonment under its description by theory/philosophy, all contained and controlled by me within a fairly limited condition of what art can do. Deep Time Contagion is precisely a materialisation of and transmission of this paradox (i.e. with screen-media can only present deep time as unrepresentable or draw attention to an inability to present it) taking the comfort/panic induced by this paradox as its material. I’m working now on some new projects that take this as a point of departure. Forsmark Repository, Sweden (Robitussin Mix) by continent. (shrink)

As an outcome of scientific thinking, evolutionary theories change in accordance with progress made. Here, we trace the evolution of evolutionary thought through seven different research schools that have arisen since the introduction of Darwin’s Origin of Species. These schools include Darwinism, the Modern Synthesis, Micro-, Meso-, and Macroevolution, Ecology, and Reticulate Evolution. The schools of Darwinism and the Modern Synthesis together lie at the foundation of the Neo-Darwinian paradigm. This paradigm has now expanded into the schools of Microevolution, (...) Mesoevolution, and Macroevolution that respectively study how genes, organisms, and species evolve over time. The school of Ecology instead investigates how genes, organisms, and species interact with one another and with the physical environment in space. The Eco-Evo-Devo paradigm attempts to integrate the tenets of Ecology with those of Micro-, Meso-, and Macroevolutionary research. The Reticulate Evolution school studies non-selectionist mechanisms such as symbiosis, symbiogenesis, lateral gene transfer, infective heredity, and hybridization. This paper outlines the major research directions and points of controversies that arise between these distinct schools. It furthermore situates the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and Third Way of Evolution along these schools. The call for an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis originated in the Mesoevolution school, while scholars active in the Third Way of Evolution movement are developing ways to recognize the important contributions made by all evolution schools. (shrink)

Our knowledge of the evolution of human thought is limited not only by the nature of the evidence, but also by the values we bring to the authoritative scientific study of our ancestors. The tendency to see human thought as linear progress in rational capacities has been popular since the Enlightenment, and in the wake of Darwinism has been extended to other species as well. Human communication can be used to transmit useful information, but is rooted in symbolic (...) processes that are nonrational—that is, they involve choosing among functionally equivalent alternatives, any of which is as good an option as any other. The evolution of human thought cannot be realistically isolated from the evolution of human society or human communication, neither of which is rooted in obvious rationality. (shrink)

The lived experience of COVID-19 forcibly returns us to our bodies. This essay uses this return to embodiment to consider how our senses, as well as our “sense” of space, have been reoriented by this pandemic. It turns to certain strands within feminist philosophy that have questioned the privileged place vision has been accorded in the history of Western thought, as well as to mid-twentieth century phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s aim to rediscover the world of perception by philosophically centring the (...) body, as touchstones to put forth a phenomenology of contagion. Contagion makes us confront our phenomenological and embodied experience of tactility. This focus on tactility undermines the philosophical hierarchy of the senses that accords sight as the most “noble” of the senses in Western canonical thought. While COVID-19 results in us rediscovering our bodies through touch in a moment of fear and panic, this essay considers how this rediscovery may be harnessed for different, possibly more just, futures. (shrink)

The theme of this essay is rather simple, though its demonstration is not. It is that humans think reflexively or metamentally because -- and often in the forms in which -- they interpret each other. In this essay ‘metamental’ means ‘about mental’ and ‘reflexive mind’ means ‘a mind thinking about its own thoughts.’ To think reflexively or metamentally is to think about thoughts deliberately and explicitly, as in thinking that my current thoughts about metamentation are right. Thinking about thoughts requires (...) understanding thoughts as thoughts, as mental structures that represent; it also requires an ability to relate thoughts to other thoughts and to recognize such inter-thought relations. Since metamentation is essential to and uniquely distinctive of human minds, the idea that it originates in interpreting other minds can be encapsulated in the slogan that minds are minded because minds mind minds. This word play translates as: minds evolve into reflexive minds because they mind other minds -- where ‘minding other minds’ means interacting and bonding with other minds, being concerned or curious about them, representing their relations to the world, manipulating and using these relations for some purpose, and the like. All of this amounts (in my terminology) to interpreting other minds in social contexts of cooperation, communication, education, politics, and so on. It follows that intermental relations among individuals, handled by a distinct competence for interpretation, are essential to the evolution of abilities to represent intramental relations among thoughts, typical of a reflexive mind. I take ‘interpretation’ to be a convenient, short, and grammatically flexible label for what is known in philosophy as commonsense or folk psychology and in psychology as theory of mind, mindreading, or naive psychology. Interpretation is a cognitive rapport between an interpreter (she, in this book) and a subject (he), whereby she represents his mind-world relations, from the simplest, such as seeing.... (shrink)

Inspired by recent developments in science studies, this book offers an innovative type of analysis of the recent history of rational expectations economics. In the course of exploring the multiple dimensions of rational expectations analysis, Professor Sent focuses on the work of Thomas Sargent, an instrumental pioneer in the development of this school of thought. The investigation attempts to avoid a Whiggish history that sees Sargent's development as inevitably progressing to better and better economic analysis. Instead, it provides an (...) illustration of what happened to the approach through a contextualization of Sargent's work vis-á-vis that of other scholars and ideas. The treatment aims to illuminate some of the shifting negotiations and alliances that characterize the rise and shift of direction in rational expectations economics. The Evolving Rationality of Rational Expectations won the 1998 Gunnar Myrdal Prize of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy for the best monograph on a theme broadly in accord with the EAEPE Theoretical Perspectives. (shrink)

: An examination of two thought experiments in contemporary physics reveals that the same thought experiment can be reanalyzed from the perspective of different and incompatible theories. This fact undermines those accounts of thought experiments that claim their justificatory power comes from their ability to reveal the laws of nature. While thought experiments do play a genuine evaluative role in science, they do so by testing the nonempirical virtues of a theory, such as consistency and explanatory (...) power. I conclude that, while their interpretation presupposes a whole set of background theories and putative laws, thought experiments nonetheless can evolve and be retooled for different theories and ends. (shrink)

This review takes a historical perspective on concepts in the psychology of motivation and emotion, and surveys recent developments, debates and applications. Old debates over emotion have recently risen again. For example, are emotions necessarily subjective feelings? Do animals have emotions? I review evidence that emotions exist also as core psychological processes, which have objectively detectable features, and which can occur either with subjective feelings or without them. Evidence is offered also that studies of emotion in animals can give new (...) insights into human emotions. Beyond emotion, motivation concepts also have changed over decades, and debates still continue. Motivation was once thought in terms of aversive drives, and reward was thought of in terms of drive reduction. Motivation-as-drive concepts were largely replaced by motivation-as-incentive concepts, yet aversive drive concepts still occasionally surface in motivation neuroscience today. Among incentive motivation concepts, incentive salience is a core process, mediated by brain mesocorticolimbic systems (dopamine-related systems) and sometimes called ‘wanting’ (in quotation marks), to distinguish it from cognitive forms of desire (wanting without quotation marks). Incentive salience as ‘wanting’ is separable also from pleasure ‘liking’ for the same reward, which has important implications for several human clinical disorders. Ordinarily, incentive salience adds motivational urgency to cognitive desires, but ‘wanting’ and cognitive desires can dissociate in some conditions. Excessive incentive salience can cause addictions, in which excessive ‘wanting’ can diverge from cognitive desires. Conversely, lack of incentive salience may cause motivational forms of anhedonia in depression or schizophrenia, whereas a negatively-valenced form of ‘fearful salience’ may contribute to paranoia. Finally, negative ‘fear’ and ‘disgust’ have both partial overlap but also important neural differences. (shrink)

Depictive expressions of thought predate written language by thousands of years. They have evolved in communities through a kind of informal user testing that has refined them. Analyzing common visual communications reveals consistencies that illuminate how people think as well as guide design; the process can be brought into the laboratory and accelerated. Like language, visual communications abstract and schematize; unlike language, they use properties of the page (e.g., proximity and place: center, horizontal/up–down, vertical/left–right) and the marks on it (...) (e.g., dots, lines, arrows, boxes, blobs, likenesses, symbols) to convey meanings. The visual expressions of these meanings (e.g., individual, category, order, relation, correspondence, continuum, hierarchy) have analogs in language, gesture, and especially in the patterns that are created when people design the world around them, arranging things into piles and rows and hierarchies and arrays, spatial-abstraction-action interconnections termed spractions. The designed world is a diagram. (shrink)

Philosophical Thought in Russia in the Second Half of the 20th Century is the first book of its kind that offers a systematic overview of an often misrepresented period in Russia's philosophy. Focusing on philosophical ideas produced during the late 1950s – early 1990s, it reconstructs the development of genuine philosophical thought in the Soviet period and introduces those non-dogmatic Russian thinkers who saw in philosophy a means of reforming social and intellectual life. Covering such areas of philosophical (...) inquiry as philosophy of science, philosophical anthropology, the history of philosophy, activity approach as well as communication and dialogue studies, the volume presents and thoroughly discusses central topics and concepts developed by Soviet thinkers in that particular fields. Written by a team of internationally recognized scholars from Russia and abroad, it examines the work of well-known Soviet philosophers (such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Evald Ilyenkov and Merab Mamardashvili) as well as those important figures (such as Vladimir Bibler, Alexander Zinoviev, Yury Lotman, Georgy Shchedrovitsky, Genrich Batishchev, Sergey Rubinstein, and others) who have often been overlooked. By introducing and examining original philosophical ideas that evolved in the Soviet period, the book confirms that not all Soviet philosophy was dogmatic and tied to orthodox Marxism and the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. It shows Russian philosophical development of the Soviet period in a new light, as a philosophy defined by a genuine discourse of exploration and intellectual progress, rather than stagnation and dogmatism. In addition to providing the historical and cultural background that explains the development of the 20th-century Russian philosophy, the book also puts the discussed ideas and theories in the context of contemporary philosophical discussions showing their relevance to nowadays debates in Western philosophy. With short biographies of key thinkers, an extensive current bibliography and a detailed chronology of Soviet philosophy, this research resource provides a new understanding of the Soviet period and its intellectual legacy 100 years after the Russian Revolution. (shrink)

This discussion paper draws on previous literature, and new primary research into human trafficking and sexual exploitation, outlining how the discipline of Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) has evolved over the past fifty years. The discipline has moved through the following six distinct schools of thought: (1) Peace Studies (disarmament, nonviolence), (2) Conflict Management (ADR), (3) Conflict Resolution (problem solving, human needs), (4) Conflict Transformation (reconciliation, local people’s culture), (5) Peace and Conflict Studies (peacebuilding), and (6) Critical and Emancipatory (...) Peacebuilding (the local people’s resiliency, and social justice). While these PACS eras can be distinguished, there is also considerable overlap between them. This paper explores some of those definable periods. (shrink)

Recent advances in neuroscience lead to a wider realm for philosophy to include the science of the Darwinian-evolved computational brain, our inner world producing organ, a non-recursive super- Turing machine combining 100B synapsing-neuron DNA-computers based on the genetic code. The whole system is a logos machine offering a world map for global context, essential for our intentional grasp of opportunities. We start from the observable contrast between the chaotic universe vs. our orderly inner world, the noumenal cosmos. So far, philosophy (...) has been rehearsing our thoughts, our human-internal world, a grand painting of the outer world, how we comprehend subjectively our experience, worked up by the logos machine, but now we seek a wider horizon, how humans understand the world thanks to Darwinian evolution to adapt in response to the metaphysical gap, the chasm between the human animal and its environment, shaping the organism so it can deal with its variable world. This new horizon embraces global context coded in neural structures that support the noumenal cosmos, our inner mental world, for us as denizens of the outer environment. Kant’s inner and outer senses are fundamental ingredients of scientific philosophy. Several sections devoted to Heidegger, his lizard debunked, but his version of the metaphysical gap & his doctrine of the logos praised. Rorty and others of the behaviorist school discussed also. (shrink)

Does thought precede language, or the other way around? How does having a language affect our thoughts? Who has a language, and who can think? These questions have traditionally been addressed by philosophers, especially by rationalists concerned to identify the essential difference between humans and other animals. More recently, theorists in cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and developmental psychology have been asking these questions in more empirically grounded ways. At its best, this confluence of philosophy and science promises to blend (...) the respective strengths of each discipline, bringing abstract theory to bear on reality in a principled and focused way. At its worst, it risks degenerating into a war of words, with each side employing key expressions in its own idiosyncratic way – or worse, contaminating empirical research with a priori dogmas inherited from outmoded philosophical worldviews. In Baboon Metaphysics (2007), Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth offer an analysis of baboon cognition that promises to exemplify the very best interaction of philosophical theory and empirical research. They argue that baboons have a language of thought: a language-like representational medium, which supports the sophisticated cognitive abilities required to negotiate their complex social environment. This claim is intended to be surprising in its own right, and also to shed light on the evolution of spoken language. Because our own ancestors likely lived in a similarly complex social environment, Cheney and Seyfarth propose that the earliest humans also developed language first as a cognitive medium, and that spoken language evolved as a means to express those thoughts. There are two potential difficulties here. First, ‘Language of Thought’ (LOT) is a term of art, with much associated theoretical baggage and often comparatively little careful exposition. Thus, evaluating the claim requires getting clearer about just what LOT implies in this context.. (shrink)

In this paper, through external and internal observation (introspection), it is shown that the human mind (or spirit) can be defined as an evolving, conscious, triadic entity consisting of unitary-multiple components - intellect, sensitiveness, and power - which in turn are made of multiple ideas, sentiments, and actions, respectively. The three mind components are interdependent, each needing the support of the other two for its activity. This interdependence, which is linked to the problem of mind-body relationship, is explained by (...) the observational fact that no physical object can exist if not under particular patterns of forms/structures and associated movements/functions, patterns which are non-physical and represent the “activities” of that object. Conversely, no activity can exist if not associated to a structured and functioning physical object. “Intellect” and “sensitiveness” are regarded as the activities that necessarily arise from the extremely complex structure and physical functions of the brain and other body apparatuses (“power”). Mind can exert outwardly oriented activities, directed to external objects, or inwardly oriented activities, directed to mind itself. The latter activities give the awareness that mind is capable of undergoing evolution, i.e.,development of intellect, sensitiveness and actions. Evolution enables the mind to continuously transcend itself, and could be regarded as the source of “moral values”. Inward mind activity gives rise to moral thoughts, moral feelings and moral acts (counterpart of ideas, sentiments, and actions, produced by the outward mind activity). This conception of mind opens new perspectives in such diverse fields as ontology (the triadic nature might be extensible to all existing objects), ethics (identification of the “good” with the mind-evolution itself), and still others. (shrink)

Humans have been using fire for hundreds of millennia, creating an ancestral expansion toward the nocturnal niche. The new adaptive challenges faced at night were recurrent enough to amplify existing psychological variation in our species. Night-time is dangerous and mysterious, so it selects for individuals with higher tendencies for paranoia, risk-taking, and sociability. During night-time, individuals are generally tired and show decreased self-control and increased impulsive behaviors. The lower visibility during night-time favors the partial concealment of identity and opens more (...) opportunities for disinhibition of self-interested behaviors. Indeed, individuals with an evening-oriented chronotype are more paranoid, risk-taking, extraverted, impulsive, promiscuous, and have higher antisocial personality traits. However, under some circumstances, such as respiratory pandemics, the psychobehavioral traits favored by the nocturnal niche might be counter-productive, increasing contagion rates of a disease that can evade the behavioral immune system because its disease cues are often nonexistent or mild. The eveningness epidemiological liability hypothesis presented here suggests that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the evening-oriented psychobehavioral profile can have collectively harmful consequences: there is a clash of core tendencies between the nocturnal chronotype and the recent viral transmission-mitigating safety guidelines and rules. The pandemic safety protocols disrupt much normal social activity, particularly at night when making new social contacts is desired. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is contagious even in presymptomatic and asymptomatic individuals, which enables it to mostly evade our evolved contagious disease avoidance mechanisms. A growing body of research has indirectly shown that individual traits interfering with social distancing and anti-contagion measures are related to those of the nocturnal chronotype. Indeed, some of the social contexts that have been identified as superspreading events occur at night, such as in restaurants, bars, and nightclubs. Furthermore, nocturnal environmental conditions favor the survival of the SARS-CoV-2 virus much longer than daytime conditions. We compare the eveningness epidemiological liability hypothesis with other factors related to non-compliance with pandemic safety protocols, namely sex, age, and life history. Although there is not yet a direct link between the nocturnal chronotype and non-compliance with pandemic safety protocols, security measures and future empirical research should take this crucial evolutionary mismatch and adaptive metaproblem into account, and focus on how to avoid nocturnal individuals becoming superspreaders, offering secure alternatives for nocturnal social activities. (shrink)

Our understanding of what exactly needs protected against in order to safeguard a plausible construal of our ‘freedom of thought’ is changing. And this is because the recent influx of cognitive offloading and outsourcing—and the fast-evolving technologies that enable this—generate radical new possibilities for freedom-of-thought violating thought manipulation. This paper does three main things. First, I briefly overview how recent thinking in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science recognises—contrary to traditional Cartesian ‘internalist’ assumptions—ways in which (...) our cognitive faculties, and even our beliefs, can be materially realised by as well as stored non-biologically and extracranially. Second, and taking brain-computer interface technologies (BCIs) and the associated possibility of ‘extended’ beliefs as a reference point, I propose and defend a sufficient condition on freedom-of-thought violating (extended) thought manipulation. On the view proposed, the right not to have one’s thoughts or opinions manipulated is violated if one is (i) caused to acquire non-autonomous propositional attitudes (acquisition manipulation) or (ii) caused to have otherwise autonomous propositional attitudes non-autonomously eradicated (eradication manipulation). The implications of this view are then illustrated through four thought experiments, which map on to four distinct ways—what I call Type 1-Type 4 manipulation—in which, and with reference to the view defended, one’s freedom of thought is plausibly violated. (shrink)

This book addresses two significant and interrelated problems confronting modern theoretical physics: the unification of the forces of nature and the evolution of the universe. In bringing out the inadequacies of the prevailing approach to these questions, the need is demonstrated for more than just a new theory. The meanings of space and time themselves must be radically rethought, which requires a whole new philosophical foundation. To this end, we turn to the phenomenological writings of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. (...) Their insights into space and time bring the natural world to life in a manner well-suited to the dynamic phenomena of contemporary physics. In aligning continental thought with problems in physics and cosmology, topology is employed. Phenomenological intuitions about space and time are systematically fleshed out via an unconventional approach to this qualitative branch of mathematics. Topological phenomenology is applied to such topics as quantum gravity, cosmogony, symmetry, spin, vorticity, dimension theory, Kaluza-Klein and string theories, fermion-boson interrelatedness, hypernumbers, and the mind-matter interface. (shrink)

Abstract. Biology has been able to systematize and order its vast information through the theory of evolution, offering the possibility of a more engaged dialogue and possible integration with religious insights and emotions. Using Judaism as a focus, this essay examines ways that contemporary evolutionary theory offers room for balancing freedom and constraint, serendipity and intentionality in ways fruitful to Jewish thought and expression. This essay then looks at a productive integration of Judaism and biology in the examples of (...) co-evolution, environmental ethics, the place of humans within nature, the relationship of mind and brains, and the ways that individual and group identity blur. (shrink)

Nematodes are important parasites of humans and other animals. Nematode parasitism is thought to have evolved by free‐living, facultatively developing, arrested larvae becoming associated with animals, ultimately becoming parasites. The formation of free‐living arrested larvae of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is controlled by the environment, and involves dafachronic acid (DA) and transforming growth factor (TGF)‐β signalling. Recent data have shown that DA acid signalling plays a conserved role in controlling larval development in both free‐living and parasitic species. In contrast, (...) TGF‐β signalling does not seem to be conserved; this difference perhaps points to how nematode parasitism did evolve. (shrink)

Selection theory requires multiple, distinct, simultaneously-actualized states. In cognition, each thought or cognitive state changes the 'selection pressure' against which the next is evaluated; they are not simultaneously selected amongst. Creative thought is more a matter of honing in a vague idea through redescribing successive iterations of it from different real or imagined perspectives; in other words, actualizing potential through exposure to different contexts. It has been proven that the mathematical description of contextual change of state introduces a (...) non-Kolmogorovian probability distribution, and a classical formalism such as selection theory cannot be used. This paper argues that creative thought evolves not through a Darwinian process, but a process of context-driven actualization of potential. (shrink)

In Clark’s thoughtful analysis of the evolution of the two facets of pride, he suggests that the concurrent existence of hubristic and authentic pride in humans represents a “persistence problem,” wherein the vestigial trait (hubristic pride) continues to exist alongside the derived trait (authentic pride). In our view, evidence for the two facets does not pose a persistence problem; rather, hubristic and authentic pride both likely evolved as higher-order cognitive emotions that solve uniquely human—but distinct— evolutionary problems. Instead of being (...) conceptualized as serial homologues, with one the vestigial form of the other, we argue that hubristic and authentic pride are both derived homologues of a vestigial proto-pride emotion that existed in our shared ancestry with other primates. (shrink)

This volume offers a critical analysis and illustration of the challenges and promises of ‘stateless’ law thought, pedagogy and approaches to governance - that is, understanding and conceptualizing law in a post-national condition. Confronting the ‘transnational challenge’ posed to the traditional theoretical and institutional structures that underlie the teaching and study of law in the university, the book brings new insight to the ongoing and crucial conversation about the future shape of legal scholarship, education and practice that is emblematic (...) of the early twenty-first century. (shrink)

In Islamic theological writings, under the heading of sustenance, the focus is generally on issues such as who is the provider of sustenance, whether haram is considered sustenance, and whether Allah’s consent exists for haram sustenance. Another issue that can be found between the lines of the subject of sustenance is whether it is haram for a person to work for sustenance or not. In fact, the pursuit of means of livelihood in order to sustain one’s life is, according to (...) the general and predominant acceptance of Muslim scholars, permissible and, in cases of necessity, wajib. According to a record in Uṣūl al-niḥal, during the formative period of itizālī thought, there were Mu‘tazilite sufis (ṣūfiyyat al-Muʿtazila) such as Bishr b. al-Mu‘tamir’s disciple Abū Imrān Mūsā b. al-Raqqāshī, al-Naẓẓām’s apostate disciple Fadl al-Hadathī, and Husayn al-Kūfī, about whom no information is available. These names, who seem to have earned their livelihood through almsgiving, defended the forbiddenness (taḥrīm al-makāsib) of all kinds of endeavour for sustenance, contrary to the acceptance of Muslim thinkers. However, it should be noted that for them, the forbiddenness in making an effort for sustenance does not cover the definition of sustenance, which is ‘all the benefits’, but only the effort in obtaining sustenance through means such as trade and agriculture. It is interesting to find such an extreme tendency among the Mu‘tazilites, who came to the fore with their rationalist discourses. “How could a Mu‘tazilite defend tahrīm al-makāsib?”, the issue of abandonment of striving for sustenance (tark al-makāsib), from which the idea of tahrīm al-makāsib is thought to have evolved, is mentioned, and then the Mu‘tazilite sufis views on tahrīm al-makāsib are tried to be based mainly on Mu‘tazilite sources and the criticisms of Mu‘tazilite authors against them are included. It has been determined that Mu‘tazilite sufis justifications for defending tahrīm al-makāsib concentrate on three points: (i) the absence of a just order due to the absence of a just imam and the possibility of supporting the oppressors (rulers) intentionally or unintentionally, and as a result of this, some of them describe the land of Islam as dār al-kufr, (ii) again in relation to the issue of imamate, in an environment where there is no justice, i.e. legal/moral order, the halāl and harām are so intertwined that they cannot be separated from each other, and in order to protect oneself from harām, the things that are subject to sustenance can only be purified through charity and become halāl, and (iii) the fact that trust in Allah is obligatory and any effort to pursue sustenance is contrary to tawakkul. The Mu‘tazilite authors criticised the proponents of tahrīm al-makāsib on the grounds that it is permissible to trade while maintaining a rational and ethical attitude, that one’s intention and interest in trade are important, and that tawakkul cannot be built on the right ground. As a result, the proponents of tahrīm al-makāsib disappeared because they could not gain a foothold in the Mu‘tazilite intellectual climate due to their erroneous reasoning. (shrink)

There is an argument that has recently been deployed in favor of thinking that the mind is mostly (or even exclusively) composed of cognitive modules; an argument that draws from some ideas and concepts of evolutionary and of developmental biology. In a nutshell, the argument concludes that a mind that is massively composed of cognitive mechanisms that are cognitively modular (henceforth, c-modular) is more evolvable than a mind that is not c-modular (or that is scarcely c-modular), since a cognitive mechanism (...) that is c-modular is likely to be biologically modular (henceforth, b-modular), and b-modular characters are more evolvable (e.g., Sperber 2002, Carruthers 2005). In evolutionary biology, the evolvability of a character in an organism is understood as the “organism’s capacity to facilitate the generation of non-lethal selectable phenotypic variation from random mutation” with respect to that character. Here I will argue that the notion of cognitive modularity needed to make this argument plausible will have to be understood in terms of the biological notion of variational independence; that is, it will have to be understood in such a way that a cognitive feature is c-modular only if few or no other morphological changes (cognitive and not) are significantly correlated with variations of that feature arising in members of the relevant population. I will also argue that all –except for (possibly) one—of the connotations contained in a cluster of notions of cognitive modularity widely accepted in some of the mainstream currents of thought in classical cognitive science, are simply irrelevant to the argument. In order to argue for this, I will have to examine the question as to whether there are any strong theoretical connections between (1) those connotations and (2) notions of modularity accepted in biology, specially in evolutionary and in developmental biology, that are thought to be most relevant to arguments to the effect that biological modularity enhances evolvability. (shrink)

This is the first modern attempt to put aesthetics back on the map in classical studies. James I. Porter traces the origins of aesthetic thought and inquiry in their broadest manifestations as they evolved from before Homer down to the fourth century and then into later antiquity, with an emphasis on Greece in its earlier phases. Greek aesthetics, he argues, originated in an attention to the senses and to matter as opposed to the formalism and idealism that were enshrined (...) by Plato and Aristotle, and through whose lens most subsequent views of ancient art and aesthetics have typically been filtered. Treating aesthetics in this way can help us perceive the commonly shared basis of the diverse arts of antiquity. Reorienting our view of the ancient vocabularies of art and experience around matter and sensation, this book dramatically changes how we look upon the ancient achievements in these same areas. (shrink)

A brain-computer interface is a rapidly evolving neurotechnology connecting the human brain with a computer. In its classic form, brain activity is recorded and used to control external devices like protheses or wheelchairs. Thus, BCI users act with the power of their thoughts. While the initial development has focused on medical uses of BCIs, non-medical applications have recently been gaining more attention, for example in automobiles, airplanes, and the entertainment context. However, the attitudes of the general public towards BCIs (...) have hardly been explored. Among the general population in Germany aged 18–65 years, a representative online survey with 20 items was conducted in summer 2018 and analysed by descriptive statistics. The survey assessed: affinity for technology; previous knowledge and experience concerning BCIs; the attitude towards ethical, social and legal implications of BCI use and demographic information. Our results indicate that BCIs are a unique and puzzling way of human–machine interaction. The findings reveal a positive view and high level of trust in BCIs on the one hand but on the other hand a wide range of ethical and anthropological concerns. Agency and responsibility were clearly attributed to the BCI user. The participants’ opinions were divided regarding the impact BCIs have on humankind. In summary, a high level of ambivalence regarding BCIs was found. We suggest better information of the public and the promotion of public deliberation about BCIs in order to ensure responsible development and application of this potentially disruptive technology. (shrink)

In this paper, I deal with Heidegger’s evolving account of metaphysics, since Heidegger’s persistent concern, the question of being, is a basic metaphysical question. To date, most Heidegger scholars have focused only on a particular stage of Heidegger’s philosophy: either his early attempt to deconstruct metaphysics, or his efforts to overcome metaphysics in the 1930s, or his late embrace of ‘releasement’ from metaphysics. However, these limited approaches fail to address Heidegger’s different understandings of metaphysics, which lie at the root (...) of his changing approaches to the question of being. They also fail to explain whether there is any inner connection between the various approaches. Further, given Heidegger’s unremittingly negative attitude towards metaphysics, some scholars have even maintained that Heidegger thought it both possible and desirable to leave metaphysics behind altogether. I address these issues first by arguing that metaphysics for Heidegger has three interconnected meanings: initially it is the representation of the totality of things that are present-at-hand, a view subsequently developed into subjective representational thinking, and finally radicalized into an expression of the will to power. At each stage, Heidegger critiques the metaphysical tradition but never claims that it can be fully eliminated, since it is a mode of Dasein’s being and ultimately possiblized by being itself. For this reason, Heidegger’s own philosophy of being remains inseparable from metaphysics. (shrink)