Az észlelés tartalma

Author(s): Levente Papp / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 4/2020

This study deals with the intentionality of perception with a primary focus on the content of experience. My question is: as long as we think about the general character of conscious intentionality as fundamentally a “subject‒psychological mode‒content‒object” structure, how can we apply this scheme to the nature of perception? Firstly, I will clarify how I intend to use the concept of perception, and I will briefly elaborate on the meaning of the mentioned intentional structure, generally construed. After this brief introduction, I will try to make a fundamental distinction between sensation and perception defending the thesis that conceptual contents are not essential to perception as such. Following this, I will pursue the question of what we mean by the content of perception in light of the content-object distinction given that we have put aside conceptual content. In the end, with the help of a couple of examples, I will try to make sense of what nonconceptual content is.

Može li misao da nastavi bez tela?

Author(s): Jean-François Lyotard / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 2-3/1995

Koherencyjna koncepcja błędu reprezentacyjnego w kontekście badań nad mechanizmami powstawania błędnych reprezentacji pamięciowych

Author(s): Robert Poczobut / Language(s): Polish Issue: 3/2020

The aim of this paper is to provide a critical analysis of Krystyna Bielecka’s position presented in her book: I Err, Therefore I Think. What is Misrepresentation? (Błądzę, więc myślę. Co to jest błędna reprezentacja?). The paper also contains a sketch of an alternative naturalistic account of cognitive misrepresentations based on the mechanistic model of scientific explanation. In my opinion the main problem of the theory of cognitive (mis)representations concerns formation mechanisms - neurobiological, psychological, social and other. I briefly illustrate my position by examples of mechanism of memory misrepresentations. The final part of the paper contains some comments on the general theory of cognitive (mis)representations and the role that philosophy can play in its construction.

Comment on “Affordances in "Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back”

Author(s): Daniel C. Dennett / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

I am grateful to Zuzanna Rucińska for her wide-ranging discussion of different definitions and understandings of affordances, but I am not persuaded by her that the difficulties she exposes are not “just philosophers’” difficulties. By this I mean that philosophers can tie themselves in knots over whether colors are “external” properties or “internal” or “mental” properties or whether colors even exist, but the science of color and its related and constituent phenomena is hardly touched by these engaging puzzles. Color is actually one of the few phenomena of the manifest image that does occasionally mislead scientists into avoidable culs-de-sac, encouraging them to take the Hard Problem seriously, for instance, but in general, our understanding of what color is and isn’t is steadily improving thanks to scientists leaving these ontological problems to the philosophers, who are welcome to them. (For the record, I declared colors to be real “lovely” properties in Consciousness Explained (pp. 379–80), a distinction picked up usefully by my student Tony Chemero. They are not definable-more precisely they would not be defined-without reference to a class of “observers.”) Affordances are, like colors, lovely properties. […]

What is ‘Representation’? - a Debate Between Tyler Burge and John McDowell (with a Reference to Daniel Dennett)

Author(s): Sofia Miguens / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

In this article I try to bring out the different conceptions of representation which lie behind Tyler Burge’s and John McDowell’s approaches to perceptual experience. As I go along I relate their motivations for defending (or attacking) disjunctivism to such conceptions of representation. In the case of McDowell I look at the origins of his position in his criticism of Daniel Dennett’s view of perception and consciousness in the 1980s-1990s. Further differences in the debate are traced back to diverging conceptions of the respective roles of philosophy and cognitive science when dealing with perception. Although it is not directly explored here, McDowell Kantian view of mind as active lies at the background of the dispute with Burge.

Individuality, Collectivity and the Intersubjective Constitution of Intentionality

Author(s): Patrizio Lo Presti / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

This paper argues that first-person singular I- and first-person plural we-intentionality are constituted in normative second-person relations. Their relata are individuals who mutually recognize each other as loci of responsibility. Such relations constitute an I-You, which is argued to be sufficient for both singular I- and plural we-intentionality. Whenever there is I-intentionality there is we-intentionality, because whenever the relevant second-person relations obtain, conditions sufficient for both are satisfied. Consequently, the possibility of autonomous individual I-intentionality as well as plurally shared we-intentionality depends on at least two individuals involved in normative mutual recognition. Neither individual is an intentional ‘I’ independently of entering the I-You, and when they do so they are an intentional ‘we.’

„Nie myślę, lecz jestem”: mózg, umysł i serce filmowej postaci zombie w kontekście paradygmatu posthumanistycznego

Author(s): Jacek Nowakowski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 34/2018

The article presents the character of the zombie popular in the contemporary audio-visual culture by placing it in the context of post humanist paradigm. He concentrates on the brain symbolism representative for the character, which, in the classical understanding of the living dead, due to dissimilar functioning, makes it different from humans and their brain-like traits: the mind and heart. Analysing the recent films such as Warm Bodies and The Girl with All the Gifts, he demonstrates the present inadequacy of such a division. Unlike the classical Night of the Living Dead, they are in line with post anthropocentric and new materialism philosophy, by differently symbolically depicting the role and place of the human in the world. It is presently tantamount to the place of non-humans: animals, objects, artefacts and monsters including the living dead. The change of the cultural and film paradigm observed in zombie horrors indicates a deeper strategy of authors of those popular films.

ENACTIVISM AND PERFORMANCE ART: PUTTING ON DISPLAY OUR PERCEPTION

Author(s): Antonio Ianniello / Language(s): English Issue: 2 Suppl./2021

Seeing, according to the enactive approach, is not something that happens inside our brain, rather it is something we do, but, as I will argue thanks to the performance art, it is something we do together. The performing arts, with their characteristics – autopoietic feedback loop, spectator/performer exchange, oscillation of the dichotomous subject-object pair - constitute a model through which to investigate the nature of our perception, which is constitutively relational, participative, and transformative.

Warum tötete Raskol’nikov eigentlich? Motivierung im Lichte einer psychohistorischen Motivation

Author(s): Nils Meier / Language(s): German Issue: 38/2021

This paper shows that the text of the novel Crime and Punishment places plot and characters in the context of a specific historical epoch. The epoch implies a specific psychological structure of the characters. One aspect of this psychological structure is singled out and demonstrated on the basis of its intra-fictional as well as its extra-fictional motivating effect. In this way, the old riddle of why Raskolnikov actually became a murderer is solved.

THE THINKING OF THE THOUGHTLESSNESS OF EVIL: HANNAH ARENDT’S ACCOUNT ON THINKING AS CONDITIONING AGAINST EVIL-DOING

Author(s): Elvīra Šimfa / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

Hannah Arendt describes thinking as an undetermined process, i.e., as a process that is not conditioned by any event in the world since it does not follow from any specific event in the world and it is not aimed at any such event. The essential feature of thinking is that it is excluded from the world. And in relation to this property of thinking Arendt asks: “Could the activity of thinking as such [..] regardless of results and specific content, [..] be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually ‘condition’ them against it?” (Arendt 1978, 5). Considering the importance of Immanuel Kant’s account on the mechanism of moral action for Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann’s type of evil, in this article the author argues that it is not the lack of thinking “regardless of results and specific content”, therefore, not thinking as such, that can serve as a condition against evil-doing, but rather the ability to form a positive principle upon which to act, therefore it is the determinate rather than indeterminate thinking that can prevent evil-doing.

How Not to Argue about the Compatibility of Predictive Processing and 4E Cognition

Author(s): Yavuz Recep Başoğlu / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2021

In theories of cognition, 4E approaches to cognition are seen to refrain from employing robust representations in contrast to Predictive Process, where such posits are utilized extensively. Despite this notable dissimilarity with regard to posits they employ in explaining certain cognitive phenomena, it has been repeatedly argued that they are in fact compatible. As one may expect, these arguments mostly end up contending either that Predictive Process is actually nonrepresentational or that 4E approaches are representational. In this paper, I will argue that such arguments are inadequate for the indicated purpose for several reasons: the variety of representational posits in Predictive Process, the diverse attitudes of practitioners of 4E approaches toward representations and the unconstrained use of the term “representation” in cognitive science. Hence, here I will try to demonstrate that any single argument, if it depends on representational 4E approaches or nonrepresentational Predictive Process, falls short of encompassing this heterogeneity in pertinent debates. Then, I will analyze similar arguments provided by Jacob Hohwy and Michael Kirchhoff to illustrate how destructive this seemingly ordinary criticism is.

Why Did You Really Do It? Human Reasoning and Reasons for Action

Author(s): José Ángel Gascón / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2021

During the last decades several studies in cognitive psychology have shown that many of our actions do not depend on the reasons that we adduce afterwards, when we have to account for them. Our decisions seem to be often influenced by normatively or explanatorily irrelevant features of the environment of which we are not aware, and the reasons we offer for those decisions are a posteriori rationalisations. But exactly what reasons has the psychological research uncovered? In philosophy, a distinction has been commonly made between normative and motivating reasons: normative reasons make an action right, whereas motivating reasons explain our behaviour. Recently, Maria Alvarez has argued that, apart from normative (or justifying) reasons, we should further distinguish between motivating and explanatory reasons. We have, then, three kinds of reasons, and it is not clear which of them have been revealed as the real reasons for our actions by the psychological research. The answer we give to this question will have important implications both for the validity of our classifications of reasons and for our understanding of human action.

A Dilemma about the Mental

Author(s): Guy Dove,Andreas Elpidorou / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2021

Physicalism demands an explication of what it means for something to be physical. But the most popular way of providing one-viz., characterizing the physical in terms of the postulates of a scientifically derived physical theory-is met with serious trouble. Proponents of physicalism can either appeal to current physical theory or to some future physical theory (preferably an ideal and complete one). Neither option is promising: currentism almost assuredly renders physicalism false and futurism appears to render it indeterminate or trivial. The purpose of this essay is to argue that attempts to characterize the mental encounter a similar dilemma: currentism with respect to the mental is likely to be inadequate or contain falsehoods and futurism leaves too many significant questions about the nature of mentality unanswered. This new dilemma, we show, threatens both sides of the current debate surrounding the metaphysical status of the mind.

ALIÉNATION, ENTFREMDUNG – AND ALIENATION. HEGEL’S SOLIDARY DISPLACEMENT OF DIDEROT

Author(s): Asger Sørensen / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2021

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit put alienation high on the philosophical agenda, as was readily recognized by Marx. Relatively well-known is also that Hegel’s concept of alienation was inspired by Goethe’s translation of Diderot’s dialogue Rameau’s Nephew, but the details and the conceptual implications of these details typically escape scholarly attention. Recognizing the basic idea of alienation as not-belonging to or being deprived of something, I emphasize that alienation implies a movement towards the limits of the human being, in which the mental suffering this involves is conditioned by social pathologies. To substantiate this claim, I show how Diderot’s satire implies uncompromising materialist social criticism, but that it does not employ the term ‘aliénation’ but instead reserves it for a kind of frenzy that borders on insanity. My claim is then that, in Goethe’s translation of Diderot’s dialogue, and in his translation of ‘aliénation’ to ‘Entfremdung’, Hegel found a general key for the conceptual critique of the spirit of Modernity. I therefore argue that, in the Phenomenology, Hegel employed alienation in more than one sense, raising madness to the level of a characteristic of Modernity, stressing the detrimental implications for consciousness under such living conditions, emphasizing how alienation works as negation, and, finally, pointing nevertheless to the possibility of embracing social and political reality.

Les inconséquences du stylographe II

Author(s): Constantin Zaharia / Language(s): French Issue: 28/2021

Something grotesque interferes with the imagination of things not yet meant to be seen, of things which are about to come in spite of the doxa built in order to oppose free and non-syntactic expression of thought.

LACAN AND THE PROBLEMATICS OF NARCISSISM

Author(s): Maja Milić,Gordana Vulević / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2021

Narcissism, says Lacan, is an inherent characteristic of human subjectivity that rests upon the primary narcissistic identifications characteristic of the mirror stage. Unlike Kohut, who in his later works argued for the recognition of a particular nosological category, that of the so-called narcissistic disorders, Lacan asserts the opposite - that all mental disorders are essentially narcissistic. What distinguishes them is not the presence or absence of narcissism, but the different relations that the subject can develop to narcissism itself. Psychoticism and neuroticism are both narcissistic in their own ways. Put simply, all these disorders are essentially narcissistic, because what lies at their essence is the relationship between the imaginary and the symbolic order. Psychoticism leads to the loss of subjectivity in the realm of early non-integrated (narcissistic) identifications, while neuroticism is characterized by insufficient distancing. But in both cases, what is crucial is the fundamental transformation that marks the destiny of the subject, a transformation that the subject undergoes by taking the image of the other by means of the mirror stage.

THE THREE DIMENSIONS OF INTENTIONALITY

Author(s): Jan Krokos / Language(s): English Issue: S1/2020

The issue of intentionality was posed anew in philosophy by Franz Brentano. However, it was Brentano himself who indicated that the source of intentionality-related problems dates back to Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The search for the original traces of this issue in the history of philosophy has led me to conclude that intentionality as an inalienable characteristic of consciousness is characterized by three-dimensionality, which is expressed in theoria, praxis and poiesis. Contemporary research focuses primarily on cognitive intentionality, examining in particular either the very subject-object relation or the immanent (intentional) object, in-existing in psychical experience (in the acts of consciousness). And yet, intentionality is a basic feature of the whole consciousness-anchored (mental) life of a human being. It determines the whole consciousness based activity of the subject in abstract theorizing, practice and production. Therefore, it manifests itself as a mode of being of a conscious (mental) entity, i.e. an entity partially constituted by intentional content, relationality, reference, directionality, openness and conscious awareness , as well as determining the meaning and the creation of purely intentional beings. Intentionality is revealed as a primary factor in the awakening of consciousness, through the building (constituting) of conscious experiences that are poietic, practical and theoretical. Each of these three ways of categorizing the nature of experience, however, indicates only the predominant aspect of a given experience, for strictly speaking experiences are determined by all three aspects. Intentionality and – consequently – all conscious experience, are thus characterized by three-dimensions: cognitive, activistic and productive. Any act of consciousness is always a form of activity that is informed by its cognitive aspect and produces something transcendent with regard to itself. The recognition of the three-dimensional nature of intentionality allows us to understand the human being and the dilemmas concerning his actions, knowledge and creativity.

OBŁĄKANI, IDIOCI I OGRANICZENIA LUDZKIEGO ROZUMU. JOHN LOCKE O LUDZKIEJ GŁUPOCIE

Author(s): Adam Grzeliński / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2021

The article discusses the various manifestations of human irrationality analyzed by John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. According to Locke, human understanding’s weaknesses have a twofold character: they can be treated as natural imperfections of cognitive faculties and as mental diseases such as madness. Locke’s analyses lead to the conclusion that the notion of human nature has no clearly delineated boundaries. Rationality, an essential quality of a human being, is only a potency that can be realized to a varying degree. Children, idiots, and madmen occupy a specific place: they are human, but their minds function in a limited way. It turns out that folly is permanently inscribed in human nature and can manifest itself as the immaturity or defect of the reason of individual people, but also of human societies. The task of philosophy is not so much to cure the human mind as to prevent its diseases. Seen from this perspective, Locke’s writings on practical issues, whether religious or political, serve this very project: preventing an excessive development of human irrationality.

OBLICZA GŁUPOTY. O WIEDZY NIEMĄDREJ I ROZTROPNEJ NIEWIEDZY

Author(s): Przemysław Rotengruber / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2021

What is foolishness? What distinguishes foolishness from folly? Is wisdom possible without folly? These questions have attracted the attention of scientists, philosophers, and poets from time immemorial. Unfortunately, their efforts have proven unsatisfactory. While there are more and more dissertations on this subject, we are not making (significant) progress in cultivating wisdom, or at least in avoiding foolishness. This article has two purposes. The first is to provide a reminder that neither science nor philosophy can offer a definitive answer to the question of how we should act in order to avoid mistakes with our life choices. Yes, science equips us with—ever new knowledge about the world, while philosophy teaches us to be consistent in thinking. Alas, this is not enough. Both science and philosophy offer competing and contradictory solutions. Therefore, the second goal of the article is to defend folly, understood as a forgotten component of life wisdom. This wisdom, unlike the knowledge gained from books, is not available except as the reward for individual striving. No scientist or philosopher will look for it on our behalf.

GRA NIEMĄDRYCH POZORÓW. JAK NIE UJMOWAĆ I NIE OPISYWAĆ GŁUPOTY

Author(s): Marcin T. Zdrenka / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2021

The article is based on a short review of the most recent, primarily Polish, literature on foolishness. Although not comprehensive, the list of described studies makes it possible to identify four types of scholarly approach to foolishness, or four types of texts in which foolishness is discussed: (1) ‘encyclopedic’ works, (2) studies which only apparently address foolishness, (3) texts in which foolishness is used as a rhetorical weapon, and (4) works whose authors attempt to ‘domesticate’ foolishness. On the basis of his analysis, the author formulates four warnings which, while increasing our vigilance against foolishness, will not ultimately protect us against it.