What is Wrong with Husserl's Scientific Anti-Realism?

It is widely thought that focusing on highly skilled movements while performing them hinders their execution. Once you have developed the ability to tee off in golf, play an arpeggio on the piano, or perform a pirouette in ballet, attention to what your body is doing is thought to lead to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis. Here I re-examine this view and argue that it lacks support when taken as a general thesis. Although bodily awareness may often interfere with well-developed rote skills, like climbing stairs, I suggest that it is typically not detrimental to the skills of expert athletes, performing artists, and other individuals who endeavor to achieve excellence. Along the way, I present a critical analysis of some philosophical theories and behavioral studies on the relationship between attention and bodily movement, an explanation of why attention may be beneficial at the highest level of performance and an error theory that explains why many have thought the contrary. Though tentative, I present my view as a challenge to the widespread starting assumption in research on highly skilled movement that at the pinnacle of skill attention to one's movement is detrimental.     

Husserl’s Foundation of the Formal Sciences in his “Logical Investigations”

This article is composed of three sections that investigate the epistemological foundations of Husserl’s idea of logic from the Logical Investigations. First, it shows the general structure of this logic. Husserl conceives of logic as a comprehensive, multi-layered theory of possible theories that has its most fundamental level in a doctrine of meaning. This doctrine aims to determine the elementary categories that constitute every possible meaning (meaning-categories). The second section presents the main idea of Husserl’s search for an epistemological foundation for knowledge, science and logic. Their epistemological clarification can only be reached through a detailed analysis of the structure of those intentions that give us what is meant in our intentions. To reveal the intuitive giveness of logical forms is the ultimate aim of Husserl’s epistemology of logic. Logical forms and meaning-categories can only be given in a certain higher-order intuition that Husserl calls categorical intuition. The third section of this article distinguishes different kinds of categorical intuition and shows how the most basic logical categories and concepts are given to us in a categorical abstraction.     

What is involved in forgiving?

Conclusion I have argued that forgiveness paradigmatically involves overcoming moral anger, of which resentment is the central case. I have argued, as well, that forgiveness may involve overcoming any form of anger so long as the belief that you have been wrongfully harmed is partially constitutive of it, and that overcoming other negative emotions caused by a wrongdoer's misdeed may, given appropriate qualifications, count as forgiveness. Those qualifications indicate, however, significant differences between moral anger and other negative emotions; differences which must be taken into account when determining whether overcoming negative emotions other than moral anger count as forgiveness. I have proposed, too, that forgiveness requires neither overcoming all negative feelings (other than moral anger) nor the judgment that the offender is a wrongdoer.I must acknowledge that my analysis is incomplete, focusing as it does on the forgiver rather than on the person forgiven. After all, there are two sides to forgiveness. Not all forgiving involves a struggle to overcome negative feelings; sometimes it is a social transaction of a more casual sort that is effected by the simple speech act I forgive you. My analysis is incomplete insofar as it treats exclusively of forgiveness as a process and fails to offer an analysis of forgiveness as an act. Finally, a complete theory of forgiveness requires an account of the conditions under which forgiveness qualifies as a moral virtue, and such an account is beyond the scope of this essay. Though I have not offered a complete theory of forgiveness, my effort to clarify a dimension of what is involved in a common type of forgiveness may clear the way for answering related questions about it, and thereby lead to a fuller account of forgiveness as a moral phenomenon.     

What is Pragmatism in Brazil Today?

This paper analyses the relations between Pragmatism and Brazilian culture, nowadays defined as a plural culture. It shows that the introduction of Pragmatism into Brazilian educational movements in the past actually made such culture much more receptive to pragmatist ideas. After discussing the concepts of truth and minimalism on Richard Rorty’s Philosophical Papers, the authors conclude that Brazilian education today is receptive to the conception in which new narratives can be used as a powerful instrument to change the world.     

What is spiritual? What is spiritual suffering?

The author offers definitions for "spiritual" and for "spiritual suffering," suggesting that human spiritual needs include Love, Faith, Hope, Virtue, and Beauty. Spiritual suffering is experienced when these needs are unfulfilled. Spiritual care involves assisting in the fulfillment of these needs. He considers the constant movement between spiritual needs and fulfillments, encouraging use of fluid (not static) assessment methods using "spiritual spectra." As a model, this outline of basic spiritual needs may serve as the foundation for many current spiritual assessment tools.     

What is being revealed in 2020?

The Covid-19 pandemic is exposing how humans have long related to nature, and revealing aspects of classism and racism that have long been ignored. Drawing on spiritual resources, such as Luther, might the polarizing, self versus other tendencies be overcome and the long pandemic rooted in economic class and racism more effectively addressed today? Can this result in a “new normal”?     

What is iso and what is morphic in isomorphism?

Summary Isomorphism is not a simple concept. As a rule, the term applies to geometrical sameness. However, mathematicians use the term to denote algebriac linear, invertible relationships. Substantively there is also a problem: isomorphism may refer to the brain-experience relation, to the brain-environment relation, or to a three-way relationship of all of these. This commentary summarizes work done and discussions by the author with Wolfgang Köhler regarding these meanings of isomorphism.     

What is conceptual research in psychoanalysis?1

The development of psychoanalysis as a science and clinical practice has always relied heavily on various forms of conceptual research. Thus, conceptual research has clarifi ed, formulated and reformulated psychoanalytic concepts permitting to better shape the fi ndings emerging in the clinical setting. By enhancing clarity and explicitness in concept usage it has facilitated the integration of existing psychoanalytic thinking as well as the development of new ways of looking at clinical and extraclinical data. Moreover, it has offered conceptual bridges to neighbouring disciplines particularly interested in psychoanalysis, e.g. philosophy, sociology, aesthetics, history of art and literature, and more recently cognitive science/neuroscience. In the present phase of psychoanalytic pluralism, of worldwide scientifi c communication among psychoanalysts irrespective of language differences and furthermore of an intensifying dialogue with other disciplines, the relevance of conceptual research is steadily increasing. Yet, it still often seems insuffi ciently clear how conceptual research can be differentiated from clinical and empirical research in psychoanalysis. Therefore, the Subcommittee for Conceptual Research of the IPA presents some of its considerations on the similarities and the differences between various forms of clinical and extraclinical research, their specifi c aims, quality criteria and thus their specifi c chances as well as their specifi c limitations in this paper. Examples taken from six issues of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 2002‐3 serve as illustrations for seven different subtypes of conceptual research.     

What is the signal in signal detection?

This study concerns the nature of the stimulus represented along the decision axis in the yes/no auditory detection task. Two contrasting interpretations, absolute and difference representation of the stimulus, are tested by raising the carrier tone embedded within the background “noise” to the level of the signal, on occasional “catch” trials. Results indicate that difference detection may be the preferred mode of operation when a carrier tone is present and the task is a difficult one. Implications for the TSD model are discussed in terms of the relative efficiency of the two detection mechanisms.     

What is primed in priming from imagery?

Priming from imagery is typically weaker than that from perception. This has been interpreted as resulting from weaker activation of perceptual processes. However, for imagery and perception, commonality is only half the story: Each is also characterized by specific processes. If priming can be due to both unshared and shared components of imagery and perception, then it should be possible to observe greater priming from imagery than from perception. Two new priming experiments were designed to test this hypothesis, while controlling incidental task differences. In both experiments, participants studied objects by counting their parts (from a mental image or a picture). Experiment 1 used a word-picture matching test task, which was hypothesized to depend on stimulus processing specific to perception, and Experiment 2 a size judgment test task, which was hypothesized to depend on retrieval and generation processes specific to imagery. As predicted, priming for perceived objects was greater than priming for imagined objects in the word-picture matching task. Conversely, in the size judgment task, more priming from imagery than from perception was observed. These results support the conclusions that (a) imagery and perception have substantial unshared processes, and (b) these processes contribute to priming.     

What is the reference in reference repulsion?

Reference repulsion is a mechanism posited to explain systematic biases of direction judgment of single drifting dot displays (Rauber and Treue, 1998 Perception 27 393-402). Rauber and Treue obtained systematic but, surprisingly, very different effects depending upon whether standard and comparison stimuli were presented simultaneously or successively. Successive effects were described as exhibiting repulsion from both vertical and horizontal cardinal axes, whereas simultaneous effects showed repulsion from horizontal only. We contend that the proposed mechanism makes no testable predictions because the so-called reference can only be specified a posteriori, a fact acknowledged by Rauber and Treue. We attempted to replicate Rauber and Treue's experiments, but we obtained no systematic biases of direction judgment. Comparisons across several studies suggest that errors in direction judgments of single drifting dot patterns vary widely in magnitude and direction, as might be expected with what are essentially baseline or pretest measures. In our view, reference repulsion describes neither a real perceptual mechanism nor a predictable pattern of direction misjudgments.