CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE BRAIN SELF-REGULATION PARADOX The relationship of consciousness to biology has intrigued mankind thoroughout recorded history. However, little progress has been made not only in understanding these issues but also in raising fundamental questions central to the problem. As Davidson and Davidson note in their introduction, William James suggested, almost a century ago in his Principles of Psychology, that the brain was the organ of mind and be havior. James went so far as to suggest that the remainder (...) of the Principles was but a "footnote" to this central thesis. This volume brings together diverse biobehavioral scientists who are addressing the various aspects of the mindlbrainlbodylbehavior issue. Although some of the authors have previously published together in other volumes, by and large the particular combination of authors and topics selected by the editors makes this volume unique and timely. Unlike the Consciousness and Self-Regulation series (Schwartz & Shapiro, 1976, 1978), also published by Plenum, this volume is devoted entirely to a psychobiological approach to consciousness. Although readers will differ in their interest in specific chapters, the well-rounded investigator who is concerned with the psychobiology of consciousness will want to become intimately acquainted with all the views presented in this volume. As noted by the individual contributors, the topic of this volume stimulates fundamental questions which, on the surface, may appear trivial, yet, on further reflection, turn out to have deep significance. (shrink)

Aesthetic alienation may be described as the paradoxical relationship whereby art and truth have come to be divorced from one another while nonetheless remaining entwined. J. M. Bernstein not only finds the separation of art and truth problematic, but also contends that we continue to experience art as sensuous and particular, thus complicating and challenging the cultural self-understanding of modernity. Bernstein focuses on the work of four key philosophers—Kant, Heidegger, Derrida, and Adorno—and provides powerful new interpretations of their views. Bernstein (...) shows how each of the three post-Kantian aesthetics to construct a philosophical language that can criticize and displace the categorical assumption of modernity. He also examines in detail their responses to questions concerning the relations among art, philosophy, and politics in modern societies. (shrink)

SummaryIt is shown that the concept of understanding cannot be reduced to a combination of knowing that, knowing how, and knowledge by acquaintence. First, it is shown that understanding and knowledge have different objects. Then “understanding what” is analyzed along Aristotelian lines. In the central part of the paper it is shown that understanding objects defined by constitutive rules involves a non‐propositional component. This notion of “understanding” is shown to cut across the humanist‐scientist dichotomy.

persuasive argument for the claim that we ought to evaluate mathematics from a mathematical point of view and reject extra-mathematical standards. Maddy considers the objection that her arguments leave it open for an ‘astrological naturalist’ to make an analogous claim: that we ought to reject extra-astrological standards in the evaluation of astrology. In this paper, I attempt to show that Maddy's response to this objection is insufficient, for it ultimately either (1) undermines mathematical naturalism itself, leaving us with only scientific (...) naturalism, or (2) leaves open the possibility of other unpalatable naturalisms. (shrink)

Despite optimistic reports about the results of amputation for advanced vascular disease, the patient’s assessment of advantages and disadvantages is seldom acknowledged. A detailed social study of 67 amputees has revealed considerable disparity between the patient’s views and those of the medical staff. About a third of the patients are forced to retire from active work by the amputation; about three-quarters report a serious decline in their social activities; only about half are really independent with prostheses in the long term; (...) a quarter report severe and intractable symptoms related to their amputation stumps; only about a quarter feel that the amputation was definitely beneficial; and only about one in five feel that the medical staff have provided adequate support during their hospital stay. Amputees face physical and financial disability, isolation, and discomfort. Every effort must be made to explain the implications of amputation honestly and realistically and to ensure continuing patient assessment and support. (shrink)

Arguably, the most promising and compelling route to demonstrating the significance of Hegel’s thought to contemporary philosophy has been the series of recent readings that construe Hegel as continuing and completing Kant’s Copernican turn. Paul Redding explicitly locates his interpretation within this program, seeing the hermeneutic dimension of Hegel’s thought as providing for the possibility of continuing the Kantian project. Kant’s Copernican turn can be loosely stated as the procedure of reflectively uncovering unexperienced conditions of experience that contribute to the (...) nature of experience in ways that require its further re-determination and re-description. What a hemeneutic take on this reflective procedure adds is that foremost among those conditions are contexts of intersubjective or dialogical relations—structures of recognition. While perhaps disappointing to anyone interested in the problem of textual interpretation, there is finally nothing more to Redding’s account of Hegel’s “hermeneutics” than the establishing of recognitive structures as forming the ultimate horizon of human experience. I take Redding’s relentless tracking of the problem of recognition to be one of his book’s virtues. (shrink)

This essay originated as a reply to Richard Rorty's ”Habermas, Derrida, and the Functions of Philosophy“. In it, I contest Rorty's deployment of the categories of private selfcreation and the collective political enterprise of increasing freedom, first developed in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, to demonstrate that the philosophical projects of Habermas and Derrida are complementary rather than antagonistic. The focus of my critique is two-fold: firstly, I contend that so-called critiques of metaphysics are always simutaneously engaging with some form of (...) social domination or disintegration (e.g. nihilism or societal rationalization); secondly, I argue that the fault-line in Rorty's thought that structures his categories is his, Davidson inspired, naturalized philosophy of language. This philosophy of language falls afoul of Heidegger's analysis of the present-to-hand. (shrink)

Julian Cole argues that mathematical domains are the products of social construction. This view has an initial appeal in that it seems to salvage much that is good about traditional platonistic realism without taking on the ontological baggage. However, it also has problems. After a brief sketch of social constructivist theories and Cole’s philosophy of mathematics, I evaluate the arguments in favor of social constructivism. I also discuss two substantial problems with the theory. I argue that unless and until social (...) constructivists can address the two concerns, we have reason to be skeptical about social constructivism in the philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

Adorno contends that something of what we think of knowing and rational agency operate in ways that obscure and deform unique, singular presentations by relegating them to survival-driven interests and needs; hence, in accordance with the presumptions of transcendental idealism, we have come to mistake what are, in effect, historically contingent, species-subjective ways of viewing the world for an objective understanding of the world. And further, this interested understanding of the world is deforming in a more radical way than just (...) obscuring what is there for the sake of interested needs and purposes; these instrumental ways of knowing and acting, are broadly self-interested, in the interest of survival, without effective concern for the well-being and worth of others; by becoming generalized and exclusive, hegemonic, by driving out modes of encountering things and persons that support their differences and independence, their needs and interests, these instrumental practices are the deepest cause of t. (shrink)

[This is a revised and expanded version of an article of the same name published in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, October 2000: 31(3), 277–299.].

Présentation d'une nouvelle traduction de la Bible publiée chez Bayard, sous la direction de Frédéric Boyer, Jean-Pierre Prévost et Marc Sevin, et réalisée conjointement par vingt écrivains et vingt-sept exégètes. Ecrite dans une langue résolument contemporaine, elle rend des couleurs aux mots de la Bible et cherche à honorer les différents styles qui y sont représentés. On regrette cependant que les droits de l'intertextualité biblique y soient souvent méconnus et que la traduction des synoptiques soit si disparate. Le travail d'exégèse (...) des textes est parfois poussé très loin. Cette nouvelle traduction vient combler un vide parmi la production francophone, à côté des bibles d'étude , qu'elle ne remplace pas. (shrink)

Présentation d’une quinzaine de publications récentes sur les psaumes et le Psautier. On passe en revue des introductions et ouvrages généraux, la traduction d’H. Meschonnic, trois commentaires , des monographies sur l’histoire et la réception du texte, des travaux abordant la méthode exégétique, des études de structures, et la thèse de D. Scaiola sur les psaumes apparentés.

Arguably, there is no gesture more typical to philosophy than its repudiation, the sense that philosophical endeavor is a symptom of the pathologies or dislocations of everyday life it seeks to remedy. Throughout the nineteenth century—in the writings of the German Romantics, Young Hegelians, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche—the repudiation of philosophy is a constant. Sometimes this repudiation takes a reflective form in which traditional philosophical claims are translated into another vocabulary, or are deflated ; sometimes alternative methods are adopted that (...) attempt to undermine, explain away, what is thought of as uniquely philosophical; sometimes rhetorical strategies are adopted that aim to bring about a “conversion” in the reader away from philosophy and toward a more fully immanent or existential self-understanding; and sometimes that more everyday self-understanding that is to be the antidote to philosophical reflection is construed as not yet available but would come to be in an ideal or utopian future if particular radical transformations of current practices were accomplished. Apart from Kierkegaard, these attempts typically construe themselves as continuous with the critique of religion, as if philosophy were nothing but religious excess in rational dress, and thus continuous with modernity’s drive toward secularity. Because the stakes of repudiation are inevitably normative—the protest against philosophy for the sake of a more “realistic,” more truly natural or historical, conception of what is rational or good—the critique of philosophy becomes, despite itself, philosophical, burdened with presuppositions it can neither sustain nor forgo. In brief, this is the lesson of Daniel Brudney’s meticulous and patient excavation of the writings of the young Marx. (shrink)

The Constitution of the Athenians ascribed to Xenophon the orator.--The Politeia of the Spartans by Xenophon.--The Boeotian Constitution from the Oxyrhynchus historian.--The Constitution of Athens by Aristotle.

There are two passages in which the poet introduces a full moon to accentuate a particular aspect of a scene in his narrative; 1.1228–33 and 4.166–71. I shall concentrate on the second. Commentators have contributed various suggestions but failed to understand the specific erotic-nuptial connotation of the full moon. The same applies to the more specialized contributions of Drogemiiller and Rose. I shall first present the evidence for the nuptial associations of the full moon, then apply this idea to the (...) Apollonian passages, especially 4.166–71, and finally add a remark about the special effect obtained by Apollonius here in relation to an Homeric passage. (shrink)