A Self-Forming Vessel: Aristotle,Plasticity, and the Developing Nature of the Intellect

ABSTRACT

Highlighting the relations between De Anima II.5 and De Anima III.4, this paper argues that Aristotle held a surprisingly dynamic view of the intellect. According to this view, the intellect is in a constant development brought about by its own activity. This dynamic view distinguishes the intellect from both physical objects and from sense-perception. For Aristotle the intellect is a “nothing” that gradually becomes something by thinking. The paper traces the logic of this idea and its meaning. It defends the simple thesis that in the intellect alone first and second transitions are bound together: that every concrete thought is also a determination of the possibility of the intellect. This, I will suggest, was known to ancient commentators who distinguished between not two but three “intellects” in De Anima; not only the possible and actual intellects, but also the acquired intellect. It is the unique conceptual structure of the acquired intellect that this paper sketches.     

Truth as transcendental in Thomas Aquinas

Aquinas presents his most complete exposition of the transcendentals inDe veritate 1, 1, that deals with the question “What is truth?”. The thesis of this paper is that the question of truth is essential for the understanding of his doctrine of the transcendentals. The first part of the paper (sections 1–4) analyzes Thomas's conception of truth. Two approaches to truth can be found in his work. The first approach, based on Aristotle's claim that “truth is not in things but in the mind”, leads to the idea that the proper place of truth is in the intellect. The second approach is ontological: Thomas also acknowledges that there is truth in every being. The famous definition of truth as “adequation of thing and intellect” enables him to integrate the two approaches. Truth is a relation between two terms, both of which can be called “true” because both are essential for the conformity between thing and intellect. The second part of the paper (sections 5–7) deals with the manner in which Thomas gives truth a place in the doctrine of the transcendentals, and shows that his conception of truth leads to important innovations in this doctrine: the introduction of relational transcendentals and the correlation between spirit and being. If “truth” is transcendental, it must be convertible with “being”. Sect. 6 discusses objections that Thomas advances himself to this convertibility. Sect. 7 deals with a difficulty in his account of truth as a relational transcendental. Ontological truth expresses a relation to an intellect but the relation to the human intellect is accidental for the truth of things. Essential for their truth can only be a practical intellect that causes things. In this way, Thomas argues, the divine intellect relates to all things.     

Defense,dreams and rationality

Are some mental activities rational but unconscious? Psychopathological symptoms, it is said, have a sense — they are seen as “compromise-formations” which express the “intentions” of agents even though the agents are totally unaware of “bringing about” such symptoms. Philosophers, who often claim that such a conception is simply contradictory or incoherent, have shed little light on the puzzles and apparent paradoxes that surround the issue. It is argued here that Freud's two models of explanation — the mechanistic and the intentionalistic — each fail to provide a basis for an explanatory account of the phenomenon of unconscious defense. An examination of the problem of dream “composition” helps explain why Freud's dependence upon “rational homunculi” is inappropriate and misleading. Finally, an alternative model which depends neither upon Freud's version of mechanism nor upon his lavish anthropormorphism is suggested. Ladies and Gentlemen, — It was discovered one day that the pathological symptoms of certain neurotic patients have a sense. On this discovery the psychoanalytic method of treatment was founded. It happened in the course of the treament that patients, instead of bringing forward their symptoms, brought forward dreams. A suspicion thus arose that the dreams too had a sense.     

Syntax,Semantics, and Intentional Aspects

Abstract

It is widely assumed that the meaning of at least some types of expressions involves more than their reference to objects, and hence that there may be co-referential expressions which differ in meaning. It is also widely assumed that “syntax does not suffice for semantics”, i.e. that we cannot account for the fact that expressions have semantic properties in purely syntactical or computational terms. The main goal of the paper is to argue against a third related assumption, namely that what is responsible for a difference in meaning between co-referential expressions is the computational difference in the cognitive functioning of the expressions. “Intentional aspects” of expressions—those features which their meanings involve in addition to reference—cannot be syntacticized, since they are individuated not in terms of any cognitive feature, but rather in terms of those properties of the referents through which the expressions refer to them, and cognitive features cannot determine such properties in exactly the same sense as they cannot determine reference.     

ACQUISITION AND FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF MANDING WITH AUTISTIC STUDENTS

Three autistic students were trained to request a specific object from an adult “supplier” with the sentence, “Give me —” and to deliver that object to another adult, the “director.” Subsequently, the degree to which the object offered by the supplier controlled the “Give me —” verbal response was assessed by delivering to the student an object other than the one requested. Despite knowing the names of all objects used in the experiment, students accepted and delivered to the director any object offered by the supplier regardless of its match with the requested object. After training to say “That's not it. Give me —” when nonrequested objects were offered, students responded differentially to requested and nonrequested objects, suggesting control of the “Give me —” response by the requested object, a characteristic of a mand. These results generalized across settings and objects. Results are discussed in terms of the training technique to establish manding and the functional analysis of the resulting verbal behavior.     

Rewriting the flesh of the world for the new human: Merleau-Ponty,Fanon, and Wynter on the ethics of futurity

This article reads Maurice Merleau-Ponty's ontology of the “flesh of the world” alongside the ontology that seems to undergird Frantz Fanon's sociodiagnostics as well as his theory of sociogeny. It argues that reading Fanonian sociogeny in terms of the ambiguity and intercorporeality of the flesh of the world renders the ethical and political imperatives of Fanon's decolonial project all the more pressing, since the “new human” is prefigured—if not totally determined—in the national consciousness obtained by “les damnés” through the decolonization process. It then examines how Sylvia Wynter's Fanonian call to (re)fashion the future of humanness through (re)conceptualizing “being human as praxis,” also seems to rely on this ontology of the flesh of the world. Bringing these arguments together, the article suggests that the conceptual content of the new human can be found in the liberation struggles of les damnés across what Wynter calls the “poverty archipelagos” wrought by colonial humanism. Hence, the “new skin” for which Fanon calls is fashioned through forming international solidarity with les damnés, with the conceptual content of the new humanism emerging sociogenically—and autopoetically—from those struggles themselves.     

Material Objects,Constitution, and Mysterianism

It is sometimes claimed that ordinary objects, such as mountains and chairs, are not material in their own right, but only in virtue of the fact that they are constituted by matter. As Fine puts it, they are “only derivatively material” (2003, 211). In this paper I argue that invoking “constitution” to account for the materiality of things that are not material in their own right explains nothing and renders the admission that these objects are indeed material completely mysterious. Although there may be metaphysical contexts in which mysterianism can be accepted with equanimity, I further argue, the question of the materiality of quotidian objects is not one of them.     

ANIMAL SUFFERING,EVOLUTION, AND THE ORIGINS OF EVIL: TOWARD A “FREE CREATURES” DEFENSE

Does an affirmation of theistic evolution make the task of theodicy impossible? In this article, I will review a number of ancient and contemporary responses to the problem of evil as it concerns animal suffering and suggest a possible way forward which employs the ancient Jewish insight that evil—as resistance to God's will that results in suffering and alienation from God's purposes—precedes the arrival of human beings and already has a firm foothold in the nonhuman animal world long before humans are ever tempted to go astray. This theological intuition is conferred renewed relevance in light of the empirical reality of evolutionary gradualism and continuity and in view of the recent findings of cognitive ethology. Consequently, I suggest that taking biological evolution seriously entails understanding “moral evil” as a prehuman phenomenon that emerges gradually through the actions and intentions of “free creatures” which—as evolutionary history unfolded—increasingly possessed greater levels of freedom and degrees of moral culpability.     

The open-object illusion: size perception is greatly influenced by object boundaries

This study presents a new powerful visual illusion, in which simple “open” objects—ones with missing boundaries—are perceived as bigger than the same size, fully “closed” objects. In a series of experiments that employed a continuous-response adjustment procedure, it was found that the lack of vertical boundaries inflated the perceived width of an object, whereas the lack of horizontal boundaries inflated its perceived length. The effect was highly robust and it was replicated across different stimulus types and experimental parameters, with almost all observers exhibiting a strong effect. In contrast to the overestimation of the size of an object due to missing boundaries, the inclusion of inner boundaries within an object caused observers to underestimate its size, suggesting that filled space sometimes shrinks, rather than inflates, the perceived size of an object. The open-object illusion bears practical implications for graphics and design as well as important theoretical implications. Specifically, it indicates that the perception of an object’s area is not veridical but rather critically depends on contour closure. It is suggested that the visual system extends the missing boundaries of open contour objects, which results in an overestimation of the object’s size.     

A Note on Prototypes,Convexity and Fuzzy Sets

The work on prototypes in ontologies pioneered by Rosch [10] and elaborated by Lakoff [8] and Freund [3] is related to vagueness in the sense that the more remote an instance is from a prototype the fewer people agree that it is an example of that prototype. An intuitive example is the prototypical “mother”, and it is observed that more specific instances like ”single mother”, “adoptive mother”, “surrogate mother”, etc., are less and less likely to be classified as “mothers” by experimental subjects. From a different direction Gärdenfors [4] provided a persuasive account of natural predicates to resolve paradoxes of induction like Goodman’s “Grue” predicate [5]. Gärdenfors proposed that “quality dimensions” arising from human cognition and perception impose topologies on concepts such that the ones that appear “natural” to us are convex in these topologies. We show that these two cognitive principles — prototypes and predicate convexity — are equivalent to unimodal (convex) fuzzy characteristic functions for sets. Then we examine the case when the fuzzy set characteristic function is not convex, in particular when it is multi-modal. We argue that this is an indication that the fuzzy concept should really be regarded as a super concept in which the decomposed components are subconcepts in an ontological taxonomy.     

Historical relativism and the essence of Christianity

This article is a series of reflections by a historian who is also a theologian on some of the theological challenges raised by historicism and the historical study of Christianity. In particular, the question is raised as to whether it is still meaningful to speak of Christianity as having some form of normative “core” given at some point in the past, or an unchanging normative “essence” by which all forms of Christianity can be evaluated. The article begins with a brief look at Adolf von Harnack’s lectures on the essence of Christianity from 1900, before moving into reflections on historical change, relativity and normativity. The author rejects the idea of a religion having an unchanging normative core or essence. Like any other human institution, Christianity has been continually changing and adapting to new contexts, even though its representatives might claim an unchanging continuity. The article concludes with some reflections on the possible contours of a modest theology informed by these historicist reflections.     

Heidegger,Communal Being,and Politics

There are two critical, but opposite interpretations of Heidegger’s understanding of being as a social ontology. One charges Heidegger with adhering to an anti-social “private irony,” while the other charges him with promoting a “self-canceling” totality. The current essay replies to these two charges with a discussion of Heidegger’s understanding of being as “communal being,” which is implicated both in the early Heidegger’s concept of “being-in-the-world-with-others” and in the later Heidegger’s keyword of Ereignis. It argues that Heidegger’s understanding of being as communal being is neither identical with totalitizing publicness nor the same as voluntaristic egotism. According to Heidegger, both the publicness of das Man and voluntaristic egotism are the real threats to humanity at present. Because of them, we human beings are in danger of being uprooted from the earth upon which we—as communal beings—have already and always dwelled and lived with others from the very beginning of human history.     

Hegel,modal logic,and the social nature of mind

ABSTRACT

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit provides a fascinating picture of individual minds caught up in “recognitive” relations so as to constitute a realm—“spirit”—which, while necessarily embedded in nature, is not reducible to it. In this essay I suggest a contemporary path for developing Hegel's suggestive ideas in a way that broadly conforms to the demands of his own system, such that one moves from logic to a philosophy of mind. Hence I draw on Hegel's “subjective logic”, understood in the light of modern modal logic, in an attempt to model the way minds might be thought as connected by way of shared intentional contents. Here, we should not be surprised at some of the parallels that emerge between the approaches of Hegel and the modal logician Arthur Prior, as Prior had testified to the influence of his teacher, John N. Findlay, who himself had strong Hegelian leanings. In the final section, Robert Stalnaker's version of possible-world semantics is suggested as a framework within which Hegel's recognitive account of the mind might be understood.     

Beyond the Schools of Psychology 2: A Digital Analysis of Psychological Review, 1904–1923

In order to better understand the broader trends and points of contention in early American psychology, it is conventional to organize the relevant material in terms of “schools” of psychology—structuralism, functionalism, etc. Although not without value, this scheme marginalizes many otherwise significant figures, and tends to exclude a large number of secondary, but interesting, individuals. In an effort to address these problems, we grouped all the articles that appeared in the second and third decades of Psychological Review into five‐year blocks, and then cluster analyzed each block by the articles’ verbal similarity to each other. This resulted in a number of significant intellectual “genres” of psychology that are ignored by the usual “schools” taxonomy. It also made “visible” a number of figures who are typically downplayed or ignored in conventional histories of the discipline, and it provide us with an intellectual context in which to understand their contributions.     

An Elegy,a Love Song,and a Lullaby

In the course of the past decade, I have found himself looking as much to poets and the experience of reading poetry as to the work of other analysts in my ongoing effort to become a psychoanalyst. Both the poet and the psychoanalyst are individuals whose life's work is that of making “raid[s] [on] the inarticulate” (Eliot, 1940, p. 128) in their effort to delve as deeply as possible into what it is to be human and to render that experience in the medium of language. To this end, I offer a reading of Seamus Heaney's (1987) “Clearances,” an elegy Heaney wrote for his mother soon after her death. I explore the ways in which the experience of mourning—whether in a poem or in an analytic experience—is not simply “conveyed” (as if illuminating something already there) but created in the very act of writing/saying the poem or of bringing feelings to life in words in an analytic session.

I begin by presenting a brief biographical account of Heaney not to “explain” his poetry in analytic terms but to allow the reader to create a more imaginative, more human reading of the poem as he or she enters into the conversation between the life of the man and the life of the poetry. Then I discuss the ways in which “Clearances” comes to life as a variety of coexisting forms of love that together shape an experience of grief.     

The Cognitive Architecture of Perceived Animacy: Intention,Attention, and Memory

Human vision supports social perception by efficiently detecting agents and extracting rich information about their actions, goals, and intentions. Here, we explore the cognitive architecture of perceived animacy by constructing Bayesian models that integrate domain‐specific hypotheses of social agency with domain‐general cognitive constraints on sensory, memory, and attentional processing. Our model posits that perceived animacy combines a bottom–up, feature‐based, parallel search for goal‐directed movements with a top–down selection process for intent inference. The interaction of these architecturally distinct processes makes perceived animacy fast, flexible, and yet cognitively efficient. In the context of chasing, in which a predator (the “wolf”) pursues a prey (the “sheep”), our model addresses the computational challenge of identifying target agents among varying numbers of distractor objects, despite a quadratic increase in the number of possible interactions as more objects appear in a scene. By comparing modeling results with human psychophysics in several studies, we show that the effectiveness and efficiency of human perceived animacy can be explained by a Bayesian ideal observer model with realistic cognitive constraints. These results provide an understanding of perceived animacy at the algorithmic level—how it is achieved by cognitive mechanisms such as attention and working memory, and how it can be integrated with higher‐level reasoning about social agency.     

Spatial attention is necessary for object-based attention: Evidence from temporal-order judgments

Attentional selection is a dynamic process that relies on multiple types of representations. That object representations contribute to attentional selection has been known for decades; however, most evidence for this contribution has been gleaned from studies that have relied on various forms of spatial cueing (some endogenous and some exogenous). It has thus remained unclear whether object-based attentional selection is a direct result of spatial cuing, or whether it still emerges without any spatial marker. Here we used a novel method—the temporal-order judgment (TOJ)—to examine whether object-based guidance emerges in the absence of spatial cuing. Participants were presented with two rectangles oriented either horizontally or vertically. Following a 150-ms preview time, two target stimuli were presented on the same or on different objects, and participants were asked to report which of the two stimuli had appeared first. The targets consisted of stimuli that formed a percept of a “hole” or a “hill.” First, we demonstrated that the “hill” target was indeed processed faster, as evidenced by a positive perceived simultaneity (PSS) measure. We then demonstrated that if two targets appeared with equal probabilities on the same and on different objects, the PSS values, although positive, were not modulated by the objects. In a subsequent set of experiments, we showed that objects can modulate attentional allocation—however, only when they are biased by a spatial (endogenous) cue. In other words, in the absence of a spatial cue or bias, object representations do not guide attentional selection. In addition to providing new constraints for theories of object-based attentional guidance, these experiments introduce a novel paradigm for measuring object-based attentional effects.     

Self‐Creation? On the Dignity of Human Beings

It was not through biotechnological possibilities that human beings first discovered “self‐creation” as a question. Rather, the question fits into the horizon of the primordial human desire to be like God. Against this hamartiological insight, a soteriological expectation related to technology has arisen. The latter expectation must be rejected, but not in all respects. Rather, one has to stress the inventive and constructive aspect of the dignity to rule, which is implied in human linguistic reason (λογοσ). There are, however, boundaries to be perceived and to be set. This becomes evident when embryo‐consuming research is at stake. In this context, the main question is: Wherein lies human “dignity”? This is the same question as: wherein lies the “being‐as‐person”? The author sees the fewest difficulties in attributing personhood to the beginning of life, which occurs with the fusion of ovum and sperm. This attribution is not justified by the material substrate as such. Rather, it is the result of intertwining the element, namely the lump of cells, and the word of institution, which “speaks together” the lump of cells and the person: This lump of cells is a person. Human beings are honored and enabled to use this instituting word, a φυσ?ι, because according to Gen 2:7 and 19f, God granted unto human beings linguistic reason (λογοσ), and thus the power to define. In this intertwining of element and instituting word lies the human dignity, which is undeservedly conferred on humans as a categorical gift. This absolute gratuity implies the unconditional acknowledgment of the dignity and the personhood of human beings—before one can speak of any characteristics or abilities. Psalm 8 underscores the elementary human dependency on unconditional acknowledgment as an inviolable person, an acknowledgment preceding all human characteristics and achievements. The psalm further intertwines this acknowledgment and the commission to rule, which is conferred on human beings, as an insoluble unity. What at first appear to be opposites is in fact a synopsis and inseparable connection of creaturely human determinations that correspond to God's simultaneously being the almighty creator and the compassionate, merciful father. By using “dignity” and “person” as critical terms of negotiation, theology can engage in a conversation with the societal and political public. In rejecting the dominant determination of the “person” as an autonomous, self‐determinately active, individual rational being, theology finds an ally in juridical thinking, which also acknowledges the dignity even of persons unable to act. Two consequences are to be drawn concerning biotechnology: perceiving the remaining dependency, vulnerability and vanity of human beings forces us to abandon illusions of “self‐creation” and immortality. Second, priorities are required that determine the goals and limits of research—especially in protecting the personal dignity of embryos—in the light of our accountability before God the creator and judge.     

The modal breadth of consciousness

In this paper, I argue that the intentional structure of typical human conscious experience has “modal breadth”—that the contents of experience typically include alternate possibilities. I support this claim with analyses of conscious mental processes such as the perception of temporally extended events, persistent objects, and causality, and the experience of bodily agency. While modal breadth may not be strictly necessary for consciousness per se, it is essential to many cognitive processes that are pervasive and functionally important to normal human consciousness.     

“THE MYSTERY OF HUMAN UNIQUENESS”: COMMON SENSE,SCIENCE, AND JUDAISM

Uniqueness implies singularity, incomparability. Nonetheless, as applied to everything within the human lifeworld, including ourselves, uniqueness is relativized. This becomes clear in the tension between “commonsensical” and “scientific” perspectives on the human. Our commonsense approach posits that human beings are unique among animals—unique because of our properties, most especially our consciousness, as well as because of our significance and value. From a scientific perspective, however, the uniqueness of the human—if it can be affirmed at all—is possibly a matter of degree, not kind. Additionally, the scientific perspective prescinds from judgments of the value of the human. To join these perspectives, without giving up on the importance of either one, is a philosophical and theological challenge. A Jewish approach to the challenge is offered here.