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A lecture delivered in 2006 by pope Benedict XVI at the University of Regensburg became famous because of a reference of the speaker to the allegedly different ways Christians and Muslims were supposed to view the duty of propagating religious faith. A passage from the Byzantine emperor (1391-1425) Manuel II Palaiologos’ (1350-1425) Dialogue with a Certain Persian, who Ηeld the Οffice of Muterizes, in Ankara of Galatia was quoted, where Muslims from their very appear ance on earth up to that time were accused of regarding violence against “non-believers” as a legitimate means of disseminating their faith. In contrast, it was held by an appeal to some of Palaiologos’ statements on the rational character of Christian morality (an appeal that also made Palaiologos’ text famous for a while), Christianity excluded violence against other religions from its mentality, partly because, having been blessedly cultivated from almost its very beginnings within a culture imbued with the «Hellenic (i.e. the Greek philosophical) spirit», accepted «reason» as a substantial criterion for judging the morality of human acts, religious behaviour included, and regarded God’s will and His commandments as e limine in conformity with reason. It is not my intention, of course, to be entangled in any inter-religious discussion (which may have been the aim of the Pope’s reference to Manuel II, as the very date of the lecture suggests). Instead, I would like to comment on the validity of the scholarly material that formed the background to the way Palaiologos’ text was used in that lecture.
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Si l’année où Dante écrit De Monarchia reste jusqu’aujourd’hui inconnue, on ne peut établir qu’un terminus ad quem (1317)1, il est cependant certain que cet ouvrage est l’oeuvre d’un exilé qui se réfugie à Vérone après avoir été condamné à mort en 1302 par les guelfes noirs. C’est là qu’il conçoit ce traité de philosophie politique, avant de s’établir ensuite à Bologne [...]
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No more than a few years ago could open an article concerning neurophenomenology with a statement describing recent rediscovery of the problem of consciousness by the cognitive sciences and pointing to the fact that right now, explaining conscious experience in neuroscientific or computational terms poses the greatest challenge for those sciences. Today however, constatations of this sort start to sound like trivial descriptions of a universally recognized state of affairs. The question of “how the water of the physical brain is turned into a wine of consciousness” is now among the mainstream problems of cognitive science.
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Joanna Rządkowska, Alicja Paracka and Natalia Frankowska (Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Faculty in Sopot), are the authors of the research study: “Non-Stimulating tradition: the influence of temperament on art preferences’’. Boiling down their precise report they state that the connection between temperament and preferences in appreciation of the plastic arts is inconclusive. It appears that temperament is able to influence preference changes during strong emotional arousal. The fact that we perceive art differently in terms of fear and no fear situations, may have some implications for art therapy. It doesn’t seem to us that it could have implications for the general judgement of modern art and its “utility’’ – we don’t blame the authors for that.
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Without an exaggeration we can adapt an expression “from a manifesto to progress” as a motto for neurophenomenology. As the manifesto can serve an article: ‘Neurophenomenology – a methodological remedy for the hard problem’ (Varela 1996/2000). The aim of the research program initiated by the late Francisco Varela was to naturalize phenomenology in the frame of neurobiology, and to apply it to the different areas of theory and practice in science and philosophy (embodiment, enactivism). It meets certain challenges like the explanatory gap or the problem of clarity and credibility of the subjective reports. Hence one could easily fall into doubts concerning usefulness and the cognitive possibilities of phenomenology itself, which have been already described by Daniel Dennett (2007) (who has proposed an alternative heterophenomenology) and Thomas Metzinger (2004).
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Focusing on the emulation and it’s derivatives, I would like to introduce You the profile of the American philosopher and cognitivist Rick Gush. It’s going to be the introduction to the interesting – as I see it – as well as the stimulating interview, which we have arranged with Grush this year in August. At for the last part of this section we propose my own text, inspired by the Grush’s researches but linked to them in a rather loosen way, that takes an issue of bodily basics of self-consciousness. Being more precise: of bodily form of self-consciousness. Simultaneously I have a pleasure to announce that the emulation-simulationbodily section will be continued in our magazine – in the context of Grush’s researches as well as other authors.
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Without an exaggeration we can adapt an expression “from a manifesto to progress” as a motto for neurophenomenology. As the manifesto can serve an article: ‘Neurophenomenology – a methodological remedy for the hard problem’ (Varela 1996/2000). The aim of the research program initiated by the late Francisco Varela was to naturalize phenomenology in the frame of neurobiology, and to apply it to the different areas of theory and practice in science and philosophy (embodiment, enactivism). It meets certain challenges like the explanatory gap or the problem of clarity and credibility of the subjective reports. Hence one could easily fall into doubts concerning usefulness and the cognitive possibilities of phenomenology itself, which have been already described by Daniel Dennett (2007) (who has proposed an alternative heterophenomenology) and Thomas Metzinger (2004).
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It is now conventional wisdom that conscious experience — or in Nagel’s canonical characterization, “what it is like to be” for an organism — is what makes the mind-body problem so intractable. By the same token, our current conceptions of the mind-body relation are inadequate and some conceptual development is urgently needed. Our overall aim in this paper is to make some progress towards that conceptual development. We first examine a currently neglected, yet fundamental aspect of consciousness. This aspect is the spontaneity of consciousness, by which we mean its inner plasticity and inner purposiveness. We then sketch a “neurophenomenological” framework for thinking about the relationship between the spontaneity of consciousness and dynamic patterns of brain activity as studied in cognitive neuroscience. We conclude by proposing that the conscious mentality of sentient organisms or animals is active and dynamic, and that this “enactive” conception of consciousness can help us to move beyond the classical dichotomy between materialism and dualism.
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There can be seen a strong relationship between mental activity and physical experience in the field of communication. Cognitive linguistics underlines the linguistic ubiquity of metaphor, which engages physicality, embodiment and manipulation, even in regard to abstract concepts. The model of metaphor that seems to be particularly interesting for its creativeness and provocation, is characterized by the general name: Mental Activity is Manipulation. To introduce its clear example I suggest to refer to representative works of Buddhist literature instead of the colloquial speech. The metaphors present in Buddhist literature are reduced to the pure manipulation of simple objects, without ambiguity, transcendence or mysticism. The highest form of mental activity is like eating porridge and washing up the cup afterwards.
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We argue that phenomenology can be of central and positive importance to the cognitive sciences, and that it can also learn from the empirical research conducted in those sciences. We discuss the project of naturalizing phenomenology and how this can be best accomplished. We provide several examples of how phenomenology and the cognitive sciences can integrate their research. Specifically, we consider issues related to embodied cognition and intersubjectivity. We provide a detailed analysis of issues related to time consciousness, with reference to understanding schizophrenia and the loss of the sense of agency. We offer a positive proposal to address these issues based on a neurobiological dynamic-systems model.
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According to Peter Halligan, […] it is important to consider that the experience of our body is largely the product of a continuously updated „phantom” generated by the brain. (Halligan 2002: 266). Next, he adds: I will argue (not withstanding pathology to the physical body) that the prevalent common sense assumption of phantom experience as pathological is wrongheaded and largely based on a long-standing and pernicious folk assumption that the physical body is necessary for experience of a body. (Halligan 2002: 252). These two remarks can serve as a backdrop for a discussion of the problem of bodily self-consciousness presented in the article. If experiencing a phantom of an amputated limb is indeed not pathological, and if normal bodily experience is de facto based on the body phantom constructed by the brain, then our conception of this very phantom should prove relevant when trying to explain bodily self-consciousness. In the article, I propose that the body phantom is a phenomenal and functional model of one’s own body. This model has two aspects. On the one hand, it functions as a tacit sensory representation of the body that is at the same time related to the motor aspects of body functioning.
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This study examined the effect of temperament on preferences for painted artwork. Our preferences are determined by different personality traits. The study presented here was a replication of the current study of Terror Management Theory (TMT) with the structures of temperament as individual differences. The results showed significant differences in preferences for traditional and modern art, depending on the degree of harmonization of the temperamental structures. Sanguines and melancholics in the no fear condition evaluated modern art most highly, however in the fear condition they evaluated traditional art most highly. This effect confirms the importance of individual differences and the situational variability of preferences in art.
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There can be seen a strong relationship between mental activity and physical experience in the field of communication. Cognitive linguistics underlines the linguistic ubiquity of metaphor, which engages physicality, embodiment and manipulation, even in regard to abstract concepts. The model of metaphor that seems to be particularly interesting for its creativeness and provocation, is characterized by the general name: Mental Activity is Manipulation. To introduce its clear example I suggest to refer to representative works of Buddhist literature instead of the colloquial speech. The metaphors present in Buddhist literature are reduced to the pure manipulation of simple objects, without ambiguity, transcendence or mysticism. The highest form of mental activity is like eating porridge and washing up the cup afterwards.
More...
This study examined the effect of temperament on preferences for painted artwork. Our preferences are determined by different personality traits. The study presented here was a replication of the current study of Terror Management Theory (TMT) with the structures of temperament as individual differences. The results showed significant differences in preferences for traditional and modern art, depending on the degree of harmonization of the temperamental structures. Sanguines and melancholics in the no fear condition evaluated modern art most highly, however in the fear condition they evaluated traditional art most highly. This effect confirms the importance of individual differences and the situational variability of preferences in art.
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This paper responds to the issues raised by D. Chalmers by offering a research direction which is quite radical because of the way in which methodological principles are linked to scientific studies of consciousness. Neuro-phenomenology is the name I use here to designate a quest to marry modern cognitive science and a disciplined approach to human experience, thereby placing myself in the lineage of the continental tradition of Phenomenology. My claim is that the so-called hard problem that animates these Special Issues can only be addressed productively by gathering a research community armed with new pragmatic tools for the development of a science of consciousness. I will claim that no piecemeal empirical correlates, nor purely theoretical principles, will really help us at this stage. We need to turn to a systematic exploration of the only link between mind and consciousness that seems both obvious and natural: the structure of human experience itself. In what follows I motivate my choice by briefly examining the current debate about consciousness at the light of Chalmer's hard problem. Next, I outline the (neuro)phenomenological strategy. Finally I conclude by discussing some of the main difficulties and consequences of this strategy.
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The lesson is familiar. Kripke’s arguments in favor of a posteriori necessary truths annul the idea that conceivability is a guide to metaphysical possibility because determining that which is a priori is a separate issue from determining that which is necessary. Modal rationalists do not completely agree with this conclusion. Following recent work on two-dimensional semantics, David Chalmers suggests that two distinct semantic values can be assigned to a statement, depending on whether we consider possible worlds as counterfactual or counteractual. The idea is that counterfactual possibilities yield familiar Kripkean intuitions, but that counteractuals fulfill the desired link between a priori conceivability and metaphysical possibility. In this paper, I discuss a problem for modal rationalism that arises through the use of material conditionals, or conditionals in the indicative mood. I then turn to Chalmers’ response, and suggest reasons why it is inadequate. I turn to another response from Chalmers, and suggest that, whilst it solves the first issue, it is incapable of grounding modal rationalism. In conclusion I will suggest a way in which a tempered version of modal rationalism can be salvaged.
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This paper is based on a criterion recently proposed by Richard Fumerton for demarcating philosophy of mind and cognitive science. I suggest to extend it to a demarcation criterion between philosophy and science in general, and put it in the context of the historical changes of boundaries between the philosophical and the scientific field. I point to a number of philosophical claims and approaches that have been made utterly obsolete by the advancement of science, and conjecture that a similar thing may happen in the future with today’s philosophy of mind: under the supposition that cognitive science manages to progress very successfully in a certain direction, our concepts for mental states could change, and the type of philosophical interest we put in them, thus reshaping the whole debate on the subject.
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