Philosophy as Anti-Religion in the Work of Alain Badiou

The Heideggerian rupture in the history of philosophy in the name of a phenomenological and poetic ontology has provided an opening which many of the key figures in twentieth century continental thought have exploited. However, this opening was marked by Heidegger himself as an ambiguous one, insofar as metaphysics was perhaps integrally ‘onto-theology,’ that is, ultimately continuous with the world-historical capture of the thought of being. This piece argues that the philosophy of Alain Badiou, which departs from the recognition that Heidegger is the ‘last universally recognised philosopher’, provides the means for a radical reconsideration of the philosophy-theology relationship in its specifically Heideggerian form, involving as it does further questions of science and technology, the status of the poem, and the nature of ontological thought as such. We argue that, through the deployment of mathematics as ontology, the Gordian knot of onto-theology and its legion of consequences can be cut, and a new assemblage of many of the key Heideggerian motifs can be put into play: the poem, history, and philosophy itself.

R34D1NG W0RD5 W1TH NUMB3R5

Letter identities and number identities are usually thought to imply different cortical mechanisms. Specifically, the left fusiform gyrus responds more to letters than to digits (T. A. Polk et al., 2002). However, a widely circulated statement on the internet illustrates that it is possible to use numbers (leet digits) as parts of words, 4ND TH3 R35ULT1NG S3NT3NC3 C4N B3 R34D W1TH0UT GR34T 3FF0RT. Two masked priming lexical decision experiments were conducted to determine whether leet digits produce (automatic) lexical activation. Results showed that words are identified substantially faster when they are preceded by a masked leet word (M4T3R14L-MATERIAL) than when they are preceded by a control condition with other letters or digits. In addition, there was only a negligible advantage of the identity condition over the related leet condition. This leet-priming effect is not specific to numbers: A prime in which leet digits are replaced by letter-like symbols (M(Delta symbol)T(euro symbol)R!(Delta symbol)L - MATERIAL) facilitates word processing to the same degree as an identity prime. Therefore, the cognitive system regularizes the shape of the leet digits and letter-like symbols embedded in words with very little cost.     

A principal components analysis of dynamic spatial memory biases

Research has shown that spatial memory for moving targets is often biased in the direction of implied momentum and implied gravity, suggesting that representations of the subjective experiences of these physical principles contribute to such biases. The present study examined the association between these spatial memory biases. Observers viewed targets that moved horizontally from left to right before disappearing or viewed briefly shown stationary targets. After a target disappeared, observers indicated the vanishing position of the target. Principal components analysis revealed that biases along the horizontal axis of motion loaded on separate components from biases along the vertical axis orthogonal to motion. The findings support the hypothesis that implied momentum and implied gravity biases have unique influences on spatial memory.     

Using FMRI to test models of complex cognition

This article investigates the potential of fMRI to test assumptions about different components in models of complex cognitive tasks. If the components of a model can be associated with specific brain regions, one can make predictions for the temporal course of the BOLD response in these regions. An event-locked procedure is described for dealing with temporal variability and bringing model runs and individual data trials into alignment. Statistical methods for testing the model are described that deal with the scan-to-scan correlations in the errors of measurement of the BOLD signal. This approach is illustrated using a "sacrificial" ACT-R model that involves mapping 6 modules onto 6 brain regions in an experiment from Ravizza, Anderson, and Carter (in press) concerned with equation solving. The model's visual encoding predicted the BOLD response in the fusiform gyrus, its controlled retrieval predicted the BOLD response in the lateral inferior prefrontal cortex, and its subgoal setting predicted the BOLD response in the anterior cingulate cortex. On the other hand, its motor programming failed to predict anticipatory activation in the motor cortex, its representational changes failed to predicted the pattern of activity in the posterior parietal cortex, and its procedural component failed to predict an initial spike in caudate. The results illustrate the power of such data to direct the development of a theory of complex problem solving, both at the level of a specific task model as well as at the level of the cognitive architecture.     

In the footsteps of biological motion and multisensory perception: judgments of audiovisual temporal relations are enhanced for upright walkers

Observers judged whether a periodically moving visual display (point-light walker) had the same temporal frequency as a series of auditory beeps that in some cases coincided with the apparent footsteps of the walker. Performance in this multisensory judgment was consistently better for upright point-light walkers than for inverted point-light walkers or scrambled control stimuli, even though the temporal information was the same in the three types of stimuli. The advantage with upright walkers disappeared when the visual "footsteps" were not phase-locked with the auditory events (and instead offset by 50% of the gait cycle). This finding indicates there was some specificity to the naturally experienced multisensory relation, and that temporal perception was not simply better for upright walkers per se. These experiments indicate that the gestalt of visual stimuli can substantially affect multisensory judgments, even in the context of a temporal task (for which audition is often considered dominant). This effect appears to be constrained by the ecological validity of the particular pairings.     

Submitting to defeat: social anxiety, dominance threat, and decrements in testosterone

ABSTRACT— Although theory suggests a link between social anxiety and social dominance, direct empirical evidence for this link is limited. The present experiment tested the hypothesis that socially anxious individuals, particularly men, would respond to a social-dominance threat by exhibiting decrements in their testosterone levels, an endocrinological change that typically reflects pronounced social submission in humans and other animals. Participants were randomly assigned to either win or lose a rigged face-to-face competition with a confederate. Although no zero-order relationship between social anxiety and level of testosterone was observed, testosterone levels showed a pronounced drop among socially anxious men who lost the competition. No significant changes were observed in nonanxious men or in women. This research provides novel insight into the nature and consequences of social anxiety, and also illustrates the utility of integrating social psychological theory with endocrinological approaches to psychological science.     

NoA’s ark: Influence of the number of associates in visual word recognition

The main aim of this study was to explore the extent to which the number of associates of a word (NoA) influences lexical access, in four tasks that focus on different processes of visual word recognition: lexical decision, reading aloud, progressive demasking, and online sentence reading. Results consistently showed that words with a dense associative neighborhood (high-NoA words) were processed faster than words with a sparse neighborhood (low-NoA words), extending previous findings from English lexical decision and categorization experiments. These results are interpreted in terms of the higher degree of semantic richness of high-NoA words as compared with low-NoA words. 2008 Psychonomic Society, Inc. Author Note     

Physical Action Without Interaction

In “Action without interaction” (2005) I showed that one might act on a physical system (there, a particle), without interacting with it, by the procedure of making it disappear. This paper presents further extensions and a critique of that result. These extensions show why physical actions without interaction are possible, while underscoring the philosophical fertility of a characteristic approach to the actual infinite inaugurated by Benardete.

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Redeeming, Ruling, and Reaping: British Missionary Societies, the East India Company, and the India-to-China Opium Trade

At the end of the 19th century, British missionaries campaigned to abolish the India-to-China opium trade, whose profits were crucial for British ambitions in Asia. This challenge by the missionaries had been slow to emerge, however, and focusing only on that well-known opposition masks the preceding half-century of accommodations and compromises with the opium traffic, both on the production end (Bengal) and on the receiving end (in Macau and Canton). Our research addresses the subjective calculus that was at work for the missionaries and asks how their reading of that calculus affected their movement across the spectrum from unconcern to outrage about opium. At the core of their enterprise from beginning to end was their unwavering commitment to the evangelical "Great Commission," which spelled out the obligation to bring the Christian gospel to unsaved multitudes around the world. We argue that they consistently embraced whatever was pragmatically necessary to advance that goal and resisted whatever threatened to block movement toward it. Beneath changeability on the surface, a thread of value-rational coherence ran through a century of calculated and strategic missionary activity. The same thread is likely to be in evidence in other theaters of global evangelism where missionaries were (are) involved in secular controversies.     

Male risk-taking as a context-sensitive signaling device

Evolutionary theorists have suggested that sex differences in risk-taking are due ultimately to greater intrasexual competition among men (compared with women) over access to mating opportunities. The current work provides one of the first direct tests of the hypothesis that risk-taking serves self-presentational functions associated with mating. Results of an experimental study indicated a strong positive relationship between sexual arousal and risk-taking, but only in men exposed to a romantically available female confederate who purportedly would view their risk-taking performance. Findings suggest that risk-taking can serve as a signaling device in the context of mating, that this function is sex-specific, and that it is highly sensitive both to the situational context and to the current psychological state of the risk-taker. This research highlights the utility of an evolutionary approach in understanding the proximate social psychological determinants of risky decision-making.