Remarks on Myth, Interpretation, and Violence

This essay discloses a personal reaction to the events of September 11th filtered through the experience of teaching a class on film that explores the heroic quest. American myths and the archetypes they contain can be turned upside down by an event such as the attack on the World Trade Center. By acknowledging that acts of interpretation in which we all engage are powerful tools, and more particularly by understanding the variety of interpretations surrounding the Prophet Muhammad's Night Journey and Ascension, we could increase our own capacity to achieve a healthier interpretation of Islam in all of its multiplicity.     

Intersubjectivity and Receptive Experience

Wilfrid Sellars's iconic exposé of the ‘myth of the given’ taught us that experience must present the world to us as normatively laden, in the sense that the contents of experience must license inferences, rule out and justify various beliefs, and rationalize actions. Somehow our beliefs must be governed by the objects as they present themselves to us. Often this requirement is cashed out using language that attributes agent‐like properties to objects: we are described as ‘accountable to’ objects, while objects ‘hold us’ to standards, and so forth. But such language is either deeply anti‐naturalistic or trades on a set of metaphors in need of a literal translation. We offer an explanation of how the material features of the world, as received in experience, can rationally constrain our beliefs and practices—one that makes no recourse to this imagery. In particular, we examine the structure of ostensive practices (that is, practices of directing one another's attention to objects and features of the world) and the distinctive role they play in making us jointly beholden to how things actually are.     

Intersubjectivity in perception

The embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended approaches to cognition explicate many important details for a phenomenology of perception, and are consistent with some of the traditional phenomenological analyses. Theorists working in these areas, however, often fail to provide an account of how intersubjectivity might relate to perception. This paper suggests some ways in which intersubjectivity is important for an adequate account of perception.

Intersubjectivity without subjectivism

Paper read at meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy on 13 October 1990.     

镜像神经元与主体间性现象学

来自神经科学最新研究发现的镜像神经元在对现象学理论主体间性的解释方面做出了极其重要的贡献。G.Rizzolatti和V.Gallese通过对灵长类动物的实验发现了一个位于大脑运动前区具有表征其它动物视觉编码的运动功能的神经元系统。这些镜像神经元可以表征与个体自身行为相似的动作图式。这些研究可能会延伸到关于人类其他认知与情感功能的研究。我将会分析这一神经科学发现是如何被"转译"成现象学意义上我们自身经验到的感知、情感和意志。     

Genesis and Intersubjectivity: Levels of Mediation

I will make a brief comment on the thesis of José C. Loredo-Narciandi and José C. Sánchez-González (2012) “Neither Dichotomies Nor Dualism; Simply Genesis”. Denying any reductionism and reification, they insists the importance of inseparable relation between subject and object, then discuss about genesis. I pointed out that their argument lacks an important element, i.e., mediator that differ from mere physical object. After discussing mediators nature, I discriminate the three level of interaction which mediated by mediator. The first is the pre-interaction level, the second is physical interaction level and the third is sign or language interaction level. The last argument of mine is about how we can solve the problem of reification and reductionism. In the argument it is pointed out that intersubjectivity is key concept for understanding and solving the problem appropriately.     

Remarks on counterpossibles

Since the publication of David Lewis’ Counterfactuals, the standard line on subjunctive conditionals with impossible antecedents (or counterpossibles) has been that they are vacuously true. That is, a conditional of the form ‘If p were the case, q would be the case’ is trivially true whenever the antecedent, p, is impossible. The primary justification is that Lewis’ semantics best approximates the English subjunctive conditional, and that a vacuous treatment of counterpossibles is a consequence of that very elegant theory. Another justification derives from the classical lore than if an impossibility were true, then anything goes. In this paper we defend non-vacuism, the view that counterpossibles are sometimes non-vacuously true and sometimes non-vacuously false. We do so while retaining a Lewisian semantics, which is to say, the approach we favor does not require us to abandon classical logic or a similarity semantics. It does however require us to countenance impossible worlds. An impossible worlds treatment of counterpossibles is suggested (but not defended) by Lewis (Counterfactuals. Blackwell, Oxford, 1973), and developed by Nolan (Notre Dame J Formal Logic 38:325–527, 1997), Kment (Mind 115:261–310, 2006a: Philos Perspect 20:237–302, 2006b), and Vander Laan (In: Jackson F, Priest G (eds) Lewisian themes. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004). We follow this tradition, and develop an account of comparative similarity for impossible worlds.     

Remarks on Wishes and Counterfactuals

A kind of 'isomorphism' is commented on, between the relation of wants to indicative conditionals and the relation of wishes to counter-factual conditionals. Among other things, it is suggested that Richard Jeffrey's theory of decision applies equally to degrees of 'wishedforness'.     

Remarks on aggression

This paper attempts to draw attention to the difference between the states of mind and inner worlds of neurotic, borderline and psychopathic patients, with reference to different types of destructiveness: anger in the neurotic patient; desperate vengeful hatred in the borderline paranoid; and a cold addiction to violence in the psychopath. Discussion focuses on technical issues and the need to meet the psychopathic patient where he really is, in the inner bleak emotional cemetery he may be inhabiting. Although most patients refuse to stay put in the neat schematic categories outlined, they do seem to appreciate and to need the therapist's recognition of the specific quality of these vastly different states of mind.