ONE BRAIN,TWO MINDS: AN ESSAY ON PRIMORDIAL AND ADVANCED MENTAL ACTIVITY

The Primordial Mind in Health and Illness: A Cross‐Cultural Perspective. By Michael Robbins. London/New York: Routledge, 2011. 240 pp.     

FINDING THE SOMETHING IN NOTHING

Formless Infinity: Clinical Explorations of Matte Blanco and Bion. By Riccardo Lombardi. Translated by Karen Christenfeld, Gina Atkinson, Andrea Sabbadini, and Philip Slotkin. London/New York: Routledge, 2016. 282 pp.     

Evidentiality in language and cognition

What is the relation between language and thought? Specifically, how do linguistic and conceptual representations make contact during language learning? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the acquisition of evidentiality (the linguistic encoding of information source) and its relation to children's evidential reasoning. Previous studies have hypothesized that the acquisition of evidentiality is complicated by the subtleness and abstractness of the underlying concepts; other studies have suggested that learning a language which systematically (e.g. grammatically) marks evidential categories might serve as a pacesetter for early reasoning about sources of information. We conducted experimental studies with children learning Korean (a language with evidential morphology) and English (a language without grammaticalized evidentiality) in order to test these hypotheses. Our experiments compared 3- and 4-year-old Korean children's knowledge of the semantics and discourse functions of evidential morphemes to their (non-linguistic) ability to recognize and report different types of evidential sources. They also compared Korean children's source monitoring abilities to the source monitoring abilities of English-speaking children of the same age. We found that Korean-speaking children have considerable success in producing evidential morphology but their comprehension of such morphology is very fragile. Nevertheless, young Korean speakers are able to reason successfully about sources of information in non-linguistic tasks; furthermore, their performance in these tasks is similar to that of English-speaking peers. These results support the conclusion that the acquisition of evidential expressions poses considerable problems for learners; however, these problems are not (necessarily) conceptual in nature. Our data also suggest that, contrary to relativistic expectations, children's ability to reason about sources of information proceeds along similar lines in diverse language-learning populations and is not tied to the acquisition of the linguistic markers of evidentiality in the exposure language. We discuss implications of our findings for the relationship between linguistic and conceptual representations during development.     

Supervision, transference and countertransference

The author discusses supervision, transference and countertransference as seen in the context of the clinical case of a patient who had been first seen as a training analysis case and who later, in a fortuitous way, was treated by the supervisor of the training analysis. The supervisor, who in the first instance did not recognize the patient, discusses the reasons for this unusual experience in terms of the presence and absence of transference during the analysis of this patient as a training case and the problems inherent in the task of supervising. The patient's feelings towards the first and the second analyst and the vicissitudes of transference and countertransference during the supervision of the training analysis and its influence on the presentation of the analytical sessions by the student are also detailed and discussed. The question of recorded supervision presentations and their possible influence on the dynamics of supervision is raised.     

Experience and self-consciousness

Does all conscious experience essentially involve self-consciousness? In his Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person, Dan Zahavi answers “yes”. I criticize three core arguments offered in support of this answer—a well-known regress argument, what I call the “interview argument,” and a phenomenological argument. Drawing on Sartre, I introduce a phenomenological contrast between plain experience and self-conscious experience. The contrast challenges the thesis that conscious experience entails self-consciousness.     

Systematicity redux

One of the main challenges that Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn (Cognition 28:3–71, 1988) posed for any connectionist theory of cognitive architecture is to explain the systematicity of thought without implementing a Language of Thought (LOT) architecture. The systematicity challenge presents a dilemma: if connectionism cannot explain the systematicity of thought, then it fails to offer an adequate theory of cognitive architecture; and if it explains the systematicity of thought by implementing a LOT architecture, then it fails to offer an alternative to the LOT hypothesis. Given that thought is systematic, connectionism can offer an adequate alternative to the LOT hypothesis only if it can meet the challenge. Although some critics tried to meet the challenge, others argued that it need not be met since thought is not in fact systematic; and some claimed not to even understand the claim that thought is systematic. I do not here examine attempts to answer the challenge. Instead, I defend the challenge itself by explicating the notion of systematicity in a way that I hope makes clear that thought is indeed systematic, and so that to offer an adequate alternative to the LOT hypothesis, connectionism must meet the challenge.     

管子经济思想散论

管仲的经济思想主要体现在《管子》中的《轻重》诸篇中。管予经济思想的特点是：重视人民普遍的生活需求,把国库存在的意义与人民的生活需求联系在一起考虑,对于暴富现象,他们认为是造成贫富不均的因素,国家的作用是要限制暴富,均衡人民的生活水平,这些都与现代西方的经济观点接近。     

尚秉和易学思想考

尚秉和是我国上世纪易学泰斗,其身后留下的《焦氏易林注》、《焦氏易诂》、《周易尚氏学》等系列易著,至今仍是学人治易的重要参考书。为了帮助今人了解尚氏其人其作,本文对尚氏生平行状及其易学思想作一番全面、深入的探考。     

试论《周易》中的生命哲学

《周易》在中国哲学中具有重要的地位,对中国传统文化产生了深远的影响。不管是儒家思想还是道家思想,皆与《周易》有千丝万缕的联系。而《易传》对《周易》古经的系统化解读,则从根本上将本为卜筮之书的《周易》提升为哲学与人生智慧之书。《易传》哲学的核心则是其所阐释的天人合一的生命哲学。受《易传》的影响,中国传统文化也以关注个体生命形下存在与形上存在的合一,乃至整个宇宙生命的有机运行为核心。《周易》将整个宇宙视为一个有机的生命体,在阴阳交互作用中这一生命体一直处于“生生不息”的状态中。这一宇宙生成论将分别表征天地的乾坤两卦作为创生世界万物的基元,而人则是天地人三才中的重要一员。《易传》的这一思想突出了人的主体性地位。而人若要充分发挥其主体性地位,则需要以“诚”为媒介,通过“进德修业”、“继善成性”来实现人与天的德性的合一,同时又要“与时偕行”,实现人与天的自然的合一。前者被后世的儒家所继承与发扬,而后者则为后世道教、中医学等所借鉴。《周易》所宣扬的天人合一的思想与西方占主导地位的主客二分的思想迥异,而与在西方被边缘化的历程哲学有内在的相通之处。基于西方主客二分观念的科学思想虽极大地促进了生产力的发展,但由此而导致的人的身心的分裂及环境污染等问题亦不容忽视。《周易》中的天人合一思想与历程哲学在弥补西方科学思想的不足方面可以发挥重要的作用。     

Imagining human enhancement: whose future,which rationality?

This article critically evaluates bettering human life. Because this involves lives that do not exist yet, the article investigates human eugenics and enhancement through the social prism of ‘the imaginary’ (defined ‘as a set of assumptions and concepts for thinking and speaking about human enhancement and its future direction’) [1]. “Exploring basic assumptions underlying the idea of human enhancement” investigates underlying assumptions and claims for human enhancement. Firstly, human eugenics and enhancement entangles a factual as well as a normative claim about what improvement/betterment maybe constitutive of. Secondly, claims about what a better life is, is often a future orientated claim about whether certain kinds of life that do not exist yet should ever exist. Moral images of thought are introduced and how they work to make normative judgments about lives that do not exist. This implicates the moral problem of difference, where an image of a ‘better’ life—classically expressed in eugenics as a ‘superior’ and/or ‘normal’ life—necessarily entails inferiority and/or deviance from a norm. “Moral imagination in contemporary fiction and the history of old eugenics”, introduces moral images in history of eugenics and demonstrates how examples fall foul of the problem. “The new (liberal) eugenics and the moral image of therapy” examines progress in contemporary debates, the move from authoritarian to non-authoritarian eugenics (human enhancement), and how, to some extent, this has solved the problem of difference, through liberal defence of personal choice. “The heart of the eugenic issue” suggests that personal choice in liberal non-authoritarian eugenics is not immune to basic drive behind all eugenic arguments; desire as lack which is expressed as the continual dissatisfaction of not having our future expectations met.