Is aesthetics a product of evolution? Are human aesthetic behaviors in fact evolutionary adaptations? The creation of artistic objects and experiences is an important aesthetic behavior. But so is the perception of aesthetic phenomena qua aesthetic. The question of evolutionary aesthetics is whether humans have evolved the capacity not only to make beautiful things but also to appreciate the aesthetic qualities in things. Are our near-universal love of music and cute baby animals essential to our species’ evolutionary development, which took (...) place over thousands of years? In other words, do aesthetic practice and appreciation help people to survive or reproduce? Do aesthetic behaviors help to propel natural selection? If so, what does that tell us about ourselves as human beings? What does it tell us about art, our other aesthetic practices, and aesthetic experience? (shrink)

In this special issue on animals and aesthetics, contributors explore encounters with animals in art and thought.

This issue profiles various attempts, both successful and fraught, to engage the divide between asceticism and opulence, between materialism and poverty.

In this issue, our contributors demonstrate how art in the city, art “about” the city, art compared to the city, can bring to attention the insidious forces underlying every city’s gleaming, wide-awake veneer.

In her book, Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett thinks through what ontological, political, and ecological questions would look like if humans could admit that matter and nonhuman things are living, creative agents; the contributors to this issue of Evental Aesthetics begin to think through what aesthetic questions would look like.

This issue is dedicated to thinking about art and current aesthetic perspectives through Hegelianism.

In "Aesthetic Histories" our contributors’ shared concern is the inspiring and confounding, healthy and uncomfortable and above all inevitable relationship between history and aesthetic praxis.

A hijacking is a violent takeover, a misappropriation of something for a purpose other than its intended one, by parties other than those for whom the thing was meant. This issue explores the aesthetic practices and consequences of unauthorized repurposing.

This article considers the conceptual significance of relationality in Sappho. It argues that Sappho's poetry reconstitutes systems of relation by making evident exceptions to their explanatory capacity. These exceptions can be profitably understood through the rubric of the “event.” Drawing in particular on the relational function of prepositions and Alain Badiou's philosophical work on the event, the article examines how “thinking prepositionally” alongside Sappho reveals both the relations that make up the situational world of her poetry as well as (...) those evental moments of non-relation through which that world is impossibly transformed. The article concludes with considerations of Sapphic fidelity—that is, how Sappho's poetry realizes the transformative potential of the event—and the poet's articulation of the event through figures of preeminence and comparison. (shrink)

Attempts are made to transform the basis of elementary probability theory into the logical calculus.We obtain the propositional calculus NP by a naive approach. As rules of transformation, NP has rules of the classical propositional logic (for events), rules of the ukasiewicz logic 0 (for probabilities) and axioms of probability theory, in the form of rules of inference. We prove equivalence of NP with a fragmentary probability theory, in which one may only add and subtract probabilities.

The theoretical notion of ‘construal’ captures the idea that the way in which we describe a scene reflects our conceptualization of it. Relying on the concept of ception – which conjoins conception and perception – we operationalized construal and employed a Visual World Paradigm to establish which aspects of linguistic scene description modulate visual scene perception, thereby affecting event conception. By analysing viewing behaviour after alternating ways of describing location (prepositions), agentivity (active/passive voice) and transfer (NP/pp datives), we found (...) that the linguistic construal of a scene affects its spontaneous visual perception in two ways: either by determining the order in which the components of a scene are accessed or by modulating the distribution of attention over the components, making them more or less salient than they naturally are. We also found evidence for the existence of a cline in the construal effect with stronger expressive differences, such as the prepositional manipulation, inducing more prominent changes in visual perception than the dative manipulation. We discuss the claims language can lay to affecting visual information uptake and hence conceptualization of a static scene in the light of these results. (shrink)

This paper gives an analysis of the adverbial quantifiers exemplified in “I regretted it every time I had dinner with him.” Sentences of this kind display what I call a ‘matching effect’; they are true if every event in the denotation oftime I had dinner with him can be matched with an event regretting that dinner event. They are thus truth-conditionally equivalent to sentences of the form “There are at least as many As as Bs.” The difficulties of giving a (...) compositional interpretation to sentences of this form have been discussed in, e.g., Boolos 1981. I first show that the matching effect is semantic and not pragmatic. I then give an analysis of these sentences in a neo-Davidsonian framework, interpreting the adverbials as quantifiers over events. Syntactically they are analyzed as objects of a null preposition. This allows a simple compositional semantic interpretation in which the null preposition is interpreted exactly as other prepositions are by Davidson (1967), namely as denoting a function from the event argument of the matrix verb to the prepositional object. The matching effect then follows automatically. I extend the analysis to account for other sentences which directly instantiate the schema “For every A there is a B” and its equivalents, and show how the matching effect follows in general from the functional nature of thematic roles and prepositions. (shrink)

By considering Davidson’s analysis of prepositions as defining individual events predicates, I argue against his semantics for action sentences and stress some logico-linguistic puzzles concerning both the interpretive pretension and the referential indifference of this proposal. Inspired by Evans as well as by Grice, I advance another interpretive semantics for those cases which does not take as assumption the individual character of events and argue for a constructivist approach to events in action discourse.

Broadly speaking, ancient concepts of causality in terms of explanatory priority have been contrasted with modern discussions of causality concerned with agents or events sufficient to produce effects. As Richard Taylor claimed in the 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy, of the four causes considered by Aristotle, all but the notion of efficient cause is now archaic. What we will consider here is a notion even less familiar than Aristotelian material, formal, and final causes—what we will call 'demonstrational causality'. Demonstrational causality (...) refers to the dependence of the conclusion on the premises of a demonstration. Here, if ever, we have a case of explanational priority, since among other things what is required of the premises is that they be better known or more manifest than the conclusion. But, oddly enough, Aristotle and his medieval commentators describe demonstrational causality in the same terms as efficient causality. Aristotle speaks of the conclusion as an "effect" of the premises; his commentators speak of the "sufficiency" of first principles or axioms in producing the conclusion. (shrink)

Quantum Logic in Historical and Philosophical Perspective Quantum Logic was developed as an attempt to construct a propositional structure that would allow for describing the events of interest in Quantum Mechanics. QL replaced the Boolean structure, which, although suitable for the discourse of classical physics, was inadequate for representing the atomic realm. The … Continue reading Quantum Logic →.

In this study of events and their places in our language and thought, Bennett propounds and defends views about what kind of item an event is, how the language of events works, and about how these two themes are interrelated. He argues that most of the supposedly metaphysical literature is really about the semantics of their names, and that the true metaphysic of events--known by Leibniz and rediscovered by Kim--has not been universally accepted because it has been (...) tarred with the brush of a false semantic theory. (shrink)

Background and Objective: Understanding how trauma impacts the self-structure of individuals suffering from the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms is a complex matter and despite several attempts to explain the relationship between trauma and the “Self”, this issue still lacks clarity. Therefore, adopting a new theoretical perspective may help understand PTSD deeper and to shed light on the underlying psychophysiological mechanisms. Methods: In this study, we employed the “three-dimensional construct model of the experiential selfhood” where three major components of selfhood (...) (phenomenal first-person agency, embodiment, and reflection/narration) are related to three Operational Modules (OMs) of the self-referential brain network. These modules can be reliably estimated through operational synchrony analysis of the Electroencephalogram (EEG). Six individuals with PTSD symptoms and twenty-nine sex-, age- and demographic- (race, education, marital status) matched healthy controls underwent resting state EEG signal acquisition with the following estimation of the synchrony strength within every OM. Results: Our results indicate that subjects with PTSD symptoms had significantly stronger EEG operational synchrony within anterior and right posterior OMs as well as significantly weaker EEG operational synchrony within left posterior OM compared to healthy controls. Moreover, increased the functional integrity of the anterior OM was positively associated with hyperactivity symptoms, reduced synchrony of the left posterior OM was associated with greater avoidance, and increased right posterior OM integrity was positively correlated with intrusion and mood symptoms. Conclusion: The results are interpreted in light of the triad model of selfhood and its theoretical and clinical implications (including a new treatment approach) are discussed. (shrink)

The proponents of strong lexicalism hold the view that “words” are formed in the lexicon and are opaque for the syntax ((Dowty 1979), (DiSciullo and Williams 1987), (Jackendoff 1990) and many others). Modular morphology, on the other hand, offers the possibility that at least some words are partially formed in the syntax ((Baker 1988), (Borer 1988), (Hale and Keyser 1994), (Chomsky 1995) and many others). In (Stechow 1995) and (Stechow 1996) it has been argued that facts observed with German wieder (...) “again” cannot be accounted for within the framework of strong lexicalism and therefore favour the second position. The authors of this paper want to check these claims by investigating the behaviour of the German adverb fast “ almost”, the other classical adverb to which the method of decomposition has been applied in the linguistic literature (cf. (McCawley 1971)). Most adverbs cannot look into lexical decomposition structures, but some can. In order to have a suitable name, let us call these D-adverbs. Again and almost are the prototypical representatives of this class. The method adopted is to investigate whether fast has access to different aspects of verbal meaning depending on its position. Following (Dowty 1979), resultative verbs and prepositions are decomposed into BECOME + XP, where XP is the result state. Agentive verbs contain an additional AGENT part. Other thematic relations connecting the subject and the event are HOLDER and cause. If the syntax tells us that an adverb like wieder or fast must have wide scope with respect to BECOME, then we expect other readings than in a configuration where fast can have narrow scope with respect to BECOME. In other words, the motivation for decomposition is syntactic and semantic. The idea is that certain function projections in the classical VP have a meaning and hence scopally interact with adverbs. (shrink)

Various as these are, they have enough in common for them all to count as events, and in recent years philosophers have turned their attention to this..

The proponents of strong lexicalism hold the view that “words” are formed in the lexicon and are opaque for the syntax ((Dowty 1979), (DiSciullo and Williams 1987), (Jackendoff 1990) and many others). Modular morphology, on the other hand, offers the possibility that at least some words are partially formed in the syntax ((Baker 1988), (Borer 1988), (Hale and Keyser 1994), (Chomsky 1995) and many others). In (Stechow 1995) and (Stechow 1996) it has been argued that facts observed with German wieder (...) “again” cannot be accounted for within the framework of strong lexicalism and therefore favour the second position. The authors of this paper want to check these claims by investigating the behaviour of the German adverb fast “ almost”, the other classical adverb to which the method of decomposition has been applied in the linguistic literature (cf. (McCawley 1971)). Most adverbs cannot look into lexical decomposition structures, but some can. In order to have a suitable name, let us call these D-adverbs. Again and almost are the prototypical representatives of this class. The method adopted is to investigate whether fast has access to different aspects of verbal meaning depending on its position. Following (Dowty 1979), resultative verbs and prepositions are decomposed into BECOME + XP, where XP is the result state. Agentive verbs contain an additional AGENT part. Other thematic relations connecting the subject and the event are HOLDER and cause. If the syntax tells us that an adverb like wieder or fast must have wide scope with respect to BECOME, then we expect other readings than in a configuration where fast can have narrow scope with respect to BECOME. In other words, the motivation for decomposition is syntactic and semantic. The idea is that certain function projections in the classical VP have a meaning and hence scopally interact with adverbs. (shrink)

Claude Romano seeks to change all that, to describe precisely what sort of phenomenon an event is and to establish how it can be grasped via a phenomenology.

Episodic memory—memory for personally experienced past events—seems to afford a distinctive kind of cognitive contact with the past. This makes it natural to think that episodic memory is centrally involved in our understanding of what it is for something to be in the past, or to be located in time—that it is either necessary or sufficient for such understanding. If this were the case, it would suggest certain straightforward evidential connections between temporal cognition and episodic memory in nonhuman animals. (...) In this paper, I argue that matters are more complicated than this. Episodic memory is memory for events and not for the times they occupy. As such, it is dissociable from temporal understanding. This is not to say that episodic memory and temporal cognition are unrelated, but that the relationship between them cannot be straightforwardly captured by claims about necessity and sufficiency. This should inform our theoretical predictions about the manifestations of episodic memory in nonhuman behaviour. (shrink)

The theory of events as property-instances has been considered one of the most widely accepted metaphysical theories of events. On the other hand, several philosophers claim that if both events and objects perdure, then objects must be identified with events. In this work, I investigate whether these two views can be held together. I shall argue that if they can, it depends on the particular theory of instantiation one is to adopt. In particular, I shall conclude (...) that the theory of events as property-instances and the view that identifies objects with events can be held together only if instances of eventive universals are temporal parts of objects – namely, those temporal parts that have the universals in question. (shrink)

A “conceptual spaces” approach is used to formalize Aristotle’s main intuitions about time and change, and other ideas about temporal points of view. That approach has been used in earlier studies about points of view. Properties of entities are represented by locations in multidimensional conceptual spaces; and concepts of entities are identified with subsets or regions of conceptual spaces. The dimensions of the spaces, called “determinables”, are qualities in a very general sense. A temporal element is introduced by adding a (...) time variable to state functions that map entities into conceptual spaces. That way, states may have some permanency or stability around time instances. Following Aristotle’s intuitions, changes and events will not be necessarily instant phenomena, instead they could be processual and interval dependent. Change is defined relatively to the interval during which the change is taking place. Time intervals themselves are taken to represent points of view. To have a point of view is to look at the world as it is in the selected interval. Many important concepts are relativized to intervals, for instance change, events, identity, ontology, potentiality, etc. The definition of points of view as intervals allows to compare points of view in relation to all these concepts. The conceptual space approach has an immediate semantic and structural character, but it is tempting to develop also logics to describe them. A formal language is introduced to show how this could be done. (shrink)

In the first part of the paper I argue that an ontology of events is precise, flexible and general enough so as to cover the three main alternative formulations of quantum mechanics as well as theories advocating an antirealistic view of the wave function. Since these formulations advocate a primitive ontology of entities living in four-dimensional spacetime, they are good candidates to connect that quantum image with the manifest image of the world. However, to the extent that some form (...) of realism about the wave function is also necessary, one needs to endorse also the idea that the wave function refers to some kind of power. In the second part, I discuss some difficulties raised by the recent proposal that in Bohmian mechanics this power is holistically possessed by all the particles in the universe. (shrink)

The object of the paper is the attempt at retracing Heidegger’s conception of the relation of time and being from his major work “Being and Time” to the lecture he gave in 1962 on “Time and Being.” In order to explain the transformation of Heidegger’s thinking between 1927 and 1962, the emphasis is put on the new understanding of the oblivion of Being as belonging to the essence of Being itself, as well as on the analysis of the double meaning, (...) temporal and ontological of presence and on Ereignis, the “event of appropriation,” which is the new name given of the relation between man and Being. (shrink)

This study has two goals. First, we present much‐needed empirical linguistic data and systematic analyses on the spatial semantic systems in English and Korean, two languages that have been extensively compared to date in the debate on spatial language and spatial cognition. We conduct our linguistic investigation comprehensively, encompassing the domains of tight‐ and loose‐fit as well as containment and support relations. The current analysis reveals both cross‐linguistic commonalities and differences: From a common set of spatial features, each language highlights (...) a subset of those features for its principal categorization, and those primary features are importantly different between English and Korean: English speakers categorize events predominantly by containment and support relations (and do so with prepositions), whereas Korean speakers categorize them by tight‐fit and loose‐fit relations (and do so with verbs), with a further distinction of containment and support within the loose‐fit relation. The analysis also shows that the tight‐fit domain is more cross‐linguistically diverse in categorization than is the loose‐fit domain. Second, we test the language data against the nonlinguistic categorization results reported in Choi and Hattrup (2012). The results show a remarkable degree of convergence between the patterns predicted from the current linguistic analysis and those found in C&H's nonlinguistic study and thus provide empirical and strong evidence for an influence of language on nonlinguistic spatial cognition. At the same time, the study reveals areas where the two systems closely interact with each other as well as those where one is independent from the other. Taking both parts of the study together, we identify the specific roles that language and spatial perception/cognition play in spatial categorization. (shrink)

This book shows that the semantic analysis of modal notions of possibility and necessity can be used to enhance our understanding of the interpretation of reports of belief or emotional state. It introduces intuitive notation and terminology to express ideas in modern theories of modal interpretation that are normally represented in complex logical formulas, effectively updates the 1960s-era link between possible worlds and the semantics of propositional attitude ascriptions, and reconciles two disparate views of the role of events in (...) semantic interpretation, that of Donald Davidson and that of David Lewis. It reduces a host of variable behaviors of propositional attitude ascription to an intuitive and precise distinction between ascriptions that merely express a commitment to propositional content versus ones that attribute a mental state to the holder of the propositional attitude. This leads to an explanation of the nature and effects of the language disorder of fluent aphasia. (shrink)

Dutch manner of motion verbs play a prominent role in the literature on unaccusativity. As these verbs can take both hebben ‘have’ and zijn ‘be’ as their perfective auxiliaries, they are considered to show both unergative and unaccusative behavior. The general consensus is that these verbs normally take hebben, yet occur with zijn if they are ‘telicized’ by an endpoint, and that the auxiliaries are diagnostics for the syntactic status of prepositional phrases (PPs). The paper presents attested data that reveal (...) that this generalization is untenable: there are examples that take the opposite auxiliary from what the generalization predicts. To account for the full set of data, the paper takes a cognitive-grammar perspective, arguing that auxiliary choice, telicity and syntactic status of PPs are independent issues requiring their own explanations. Auxiliary choice is analyzed in terms of alternate construals of a motion event: with hebben as a type of act and with zijn as a change of location. In this manner, the paper adds to a growing body of literature that questions the usefulness of the coarse unergative–unaccusative distinction, advocating a ‘local analysis’ instead. (shrink)

This article explores the question of the political meaning of the term “revolution” and the relation that has been established and should continue to be established between revolution and freedom. To this effect, the article examines some of the main proposals set forth in this respect by three contemporary thinkers, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, with occasional references to Michel Foucault and Antonio Negri. The proposal argued for here is that Arendt’s notion of revolution and the notions of (...) event and act put forth in the radical political theories of Badiou and Žižek intersect and necessarily supplement one another. (shrink)

Violence is signaled by a mark of discontinuity, interruption, rupture. The tripartite temporality of violence, with its strong focus on the present, points to the originary violence. Moreover, the violent event is structuring the order of the action sequences in an actual violent (embodied) interaction. The interactional dynamics in violent encounters between co-present actors shapes the specific forms of the experiencing in (and of) the violent interaction. Based on how violence is experienced in an interactive situation, the phenomenon of violence (...) articulates itself according to three coordinates: directedness, co-performativity and de-capabilisation. The outlining of the structure of the lived experience of violence is revealing something irreducible in it. To understand the experience of violence as such, I propose that we accept the idea of violence per se and depart from the idea that the acts of violence are essentially moral actions. The core of the ethical-moral discussion concerning violence should be grounded instead on the moment of conversion identifiable when we take into account the reaction to violence. (shrink)

A critical review of the main themes arising out of recent literature on the semantics of ordinary event talk. The material is organized in four sections: (i) the nature of events, with emphasis on the opposition between events as particulars and events as universals; (ii) identity and indeterminacy, with emphasis on the unifier/multiplier controversy; (iii) events and logical form, with emphasis on Davidson’s treatment of the form of action sentences; (iv) linguistic applications, with emphasis on issues (...) concerning aspectual phenomena, the telicity/atelicity distinction, the treatment of statives, and temporal quantification. (shrink)

This volume covers a broad spectrum of research into the role of events in grammar. It addresses event arguments and thematic argument structure, the role of events in verbal aspectual distinctions, events and the distinction between stage and individual level predicates, and the role of events in the analysis of plurality and scope relations. It is of interest to scholars and students of theoretical linguistics, philosophers of language, computational linguists, and computer scientists.

A study of how syntax relates to meaning by a leader of the new generation of philosopher-linguists.

How did the events of the early modern period affect the way gender and the self were represented? This collection of essays attempts to respond to this question by analysing a wide spectrum of cultural concerns - humanism, technology, science, law, anatomy, literacy, domesticity, colonialism, erotic practices, and the theatre - in order to delineate the history of subjectivity and its relationship with the postmodern fragmented subject. The scope of this analysis expands the terrain explored by feminist theory, while (...) its feminist focus reveals that the subject is always gendered - although the terms in which gender is conceived and represented change across history. Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture not only explores the representation of gendered subjects, but in its commitment to balancing the productive tensions of methodological diversity, also speaks to contemporary challenges facing feminism. (shrink)

I describe and discuss one particular dimension of disagreement in the philosophical literature on episodic memory. One way of putting the disagreement is in terms of the question as to whether or not there is a difference in kind between remembering seeing x and remembering what x looks like. I argue against accounts of episodic memory that either deny that there is a clear difference between these two forms of remembering, or downplay the difference by in effect suggesting that the (...) former contains an additional ingredient not present in the latter, but otherwise treating them as the same thing. I also show that a recent ‘minimalist’ approach to episodic memory (Clayton & Russell in Neuropsychologia 47 (11): 2,330–2,340, 2009; Russell & Hanna in Mind & Language 27 (1): 29–54, 2012) fails to give a satisfactory explanatory account of the difference between the two types of remembering. I finish by sketching an alternative approach to episodic memory, which turns on the idea that episodic recollection recruits a specific form of causal reasoning that provides for a concrete sense in which remembered events are remembered as belonging to the past. (shrink)

This paper argues that a counterpart-theoretic treatment of events, combined with a counterfactual theory of causation, can help resolve three puzzles from the causation literature. First, CCT traces the apparent contextual shifts in our causal attributions to shifts in the counterpart relation which obtains in those contexts. Second, being sensitive to shifts in the counterpart relation can help diagnose what goes wrong in certain prominent examples where the transitivity of causation appears to fail. Third, CCT can help us resurrect (...) the much-maligned fragility response to the problems of late pre-emption by understanding fragility in counterpart-theoretic terms. Some reasons to prefer this CCT approach to rivals are discussed. (shrink)

The domain of contemporary physics consists of two different classes of objects: a) physical objects — point events (shortly — events), elementary particles (and their aggregates), and fields; b) spatio-temporal objects — space-time points (shortly — points), moments, space points, and their corresponding sets: space-time, time and physical space. If objects of some kind (physical or spatio-temporal) are treated as individuals, i.e. nonsets, then it is possible to define the remaining kinds of objects from both above-mentioned classes. In (...) this way one can construct two alternative monistic ontologies of physics: eventism founded on events, and pointism founded on points. It is also possible to establish a dualistic ontology of physics, based both on events and points treated as individuals. In this paper these three ontologies are presented with particular emphasis on some extreme versions of monistic ontologies. I shall compare them considering both their respective advantages and difficulties and trying to justify my own choice of eventistic ontology. (shrink)