History of the Philosophy of Mind

This chapter explores the prospects and consequences of various ways to forge Newton ian connections to Hume's philosophy. Two points of view are offered from which these connections are visible and evaluable: first, Hume's experimental method for the studying of the mind, particularly his reliance on analysis, synthesis and successive approxima tions in relation to Newton's method and Newton-inspired methodologies; and second, the relation of Hume's model of the mind to Newton's model of the natural world, particu larly the congruence of Hume's theory of association with the chemical idea of elective affinities as opposed to gravity. In conclusion, the chapter summarizes the significance of these connections for competing interpretations of Hume's science of the mind.

"Was legt die Bedeutung sprachlicher Ausdrücke fest? Sind es die mentalen Zustände der Sprachbenutzer oder Faktoren außerhalb der Sprecher? Locke scheint von der simplen internalistischen These auszugehen, daß Wörter primär die Ideen im Geiste des Sprechers bezeichnen, und sich damit auf einen unhaltbaren Mentalismus zu verpflichten. Die vorliegende Studie möchte diesem verbreiteten Bild mit einer historisch und systematisch umfassenden Auseinandersetzung entgegentreten, die Lockes Konzeption letztlich als einen sozialen Externalismus ausweist, gemäß dem die Sprachgemeinschaft entscheidender Faktor für die Fixierung
sprachlicher Bedeutung ist. Dieser Ansatz wird in fünf Schritten
präsentiert: (1) Nach einer Exposition der Problemstellung in Lockes Essay wird (2) eine historische Analyse der inner- und außerscholastischen frühneuzeitlichen Diskussionskontexte unternommen, um zunächst Lockes Wende zur Sprache textnah zu rekonstruieren und (3) die ausführliche Erörterung der umstrittenen Ideen- und Urteilstheorie vorzubereiten.
Vor diesem Hintergrund wird (4) Lockes gescholtene "Hauptthese“ systematisch im Rahmen seiner Semantik und Abstraktionstheorie verortet sowie (5) in Konfrontation mit gegenwärtigen Positionen als Ingredienz eines sozialen Externalismus verteidigt."

On yedinci yüzyılda ilk kez tarih sahnesine çıktığından beri, gerek felsefi gerekse bilimsel çok sayıda araştırma ve tartışmaya konu olan "zihin" kavramının kökenleri modernite öncesinde hem felsefe hem de dinlerin en önemli öğelerinden biri olan "ruh" kavramında bulunmaktadır. Dolayısıyla, zihin kavramına tam anlamıyla vakıf olabilmek, kavramın mahiyetini, içeriğini, kapsamını ve ruh kavramından hangi açılardan farklılaştığını idrak edebilmek için ruhun tarihinin hesaba katılması gerektiği açıktır. Bu çalışmanın amacı, tarihsel kaynakların elverdiği ölçüde, hikâyenin en başına dönerek antik Yunan mitolojisi ve felsefesindeki ruh kavram(lar)ını, ilkel düşünceyi arka plana alarak incelemek ve ruh kavramının geçirdiği üniterleşme sürecini ortaya koymaktır. Anahtar Kelimeler: Ruh, psukhe, antik Yunan felsefesi, Homeros, Orpheusçuluk, ruhun üniterleşmesi. Abstract The origin of the concept of "mind", which has been the subject to a large number of philosophical and scientific investigations since it first got to stage of history in the seventeenth century, can be found in the concept of the "soul" which has been one of the most important constituents of both philosophy and religion before modernity. Therefore, in order to have a grasp of this concept, to comprehend the true nature, content and extent of it and how it differs from the concept of the soul, it is necessary

Ideas about soul and body – about thinking or remembering, mind and life, brain and self – remain both diverse and controversial in our neurocentric age. The history of these ideas is significant both in its own right and to aid our understanding of the complex sources and nature of our concepts of mind, cognition, and psychology, which are all terms with puzzling, difficult histories. These topics are not the domain of specialists alone, and studies of emotion, perception, or reasoning have never been isolated theoretical endeavours. As Francis Bacon described human philosophy or ‘the knowledge of our selves’, within which he located the study of body, soul, and mind, it ‘deserveth the more accurate handling, by how much it toucheth us more nearly’ (1605/ 2000: 93). The history of ideas in these domains is
particularly challenging given the practical dimensions and implications of theories of mind. Because theories of human nature and debates about body and mind do ‘touch us’ so ‘nearly’,
they attract and can thus reveal, in specific historical contexts, interconnected discourses or associations which may be quite unlike our own. This chapter retains a focus, however, on the history of theories of mind: we address an array of distinctive positi
ons inmetaphysics and psychology which emerged in wider British debate, each with potential religious, moral, and political implications. We proceed by selectively surveying the conceptual inheritance and challenges for British philosophers in the early seventeenth century with regard to both the soul and the humoral temperament of body and mind. We look at some of the eclectic systems developed by British philosophers of the soul in the mid-century period, and at different ways new ideas in both medicine and metaphysics were integrated.

Although we commonly take our thoughts to be about external things that exist independently of ourselves, Spinoza’s notion of intentionality suggests that our ideas are primarily about our own bodies. What are we to make of this somewhat revisionary tenet? Do our thoughts never reach out to the things themselves? This paper attempts to reconstruct Spinoza’s notion of intentionality in two steps. Firstly, I will place his position in the larger context of his metaphysical tenets and discuss how his theory of ideas provides an explanation of inten-tional content. Secondly, I will address the question of how Spinoza accounts for what we customarily take to be thoughts about external things as such. I shall argue that, for Spinoza, intentional content always involves propositional attitudes which are ultimately governed by our striving for self-preservation (conatus). In accentuating the links between his theory of propositional attitudes and his conatus principle, I hope to show how he challenges the traditional view of intentionality as grasping objects in a mind-independent world in favour of the thesis that we represent things as they are beneficial to us.

This paper suggests that reference to phenomenal qualities is best understood as involving iconicity, that is, a passage from sign-vehicle to object that exploits a similarity between the two. This contrasts with a version of the ‘phenomenal concept strategy’ that takes indexicality to be central. However, since it is doubtful that phenomenal qualities are capable of causally interacting with anything, indexical reference seems inappropriate. While a theorist like David Papineau is independently coming to something akin to iconicity, I think some of the awkwardness that plagues his account would be remedied by transitioning to a more inclusive philosophy of signs.

Despite its central importance in Hegel’s mature system, the section Subjective Spirit in his Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences has attracted relatively little attention in the reception history of Hegel’s work. The most influential early readers of Hegel were mostly interested in other parts of Hegel’s system; and relatively soon after Hegel’s death more empirically oriented approaches to the topics of Subjective Spirit won the day, displacing the overly ‘speculative’, armchair philosophical approach that Hegel was seen as representing. Hegel’s direct disciples and moderate ‘centre Hegelians’ Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz and Karl Ludwig Michelet did write extensive commentaries on Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit,  but their influence paled in comparison to the more politically astute and independently creative Hegelian ‘left’ who mostly focused on the Philosophy of Right or the Phenomenology of Spirit, as well as to the Hegelian ‘right’ who were mostly interested in Hegel’s views on religion and history. The long neglect of Subjective Spirit shows even today in the curious way in which the recent revival of Hegel as an epistemologist and a philosopher of mind, or of “mindedness”,  has mostly ignored this text —even if systematically speaking Subjective Spirit is the part of Hegel’s system where issues of knowledge and of the mind are explicitly at stake.
There is also a widely spread view according to which Hegel was engaged in his Jena-writings in a project of ‘detranscendentalizing’ the Kantian subject of knowledge and action problematically divided between the empirical and transcendental, or in other words of consistently conceptualizing it as a living individual human person embedded in the natural and social world, in language and in intersubjective interaction. According to this view, after Jena Hegel for whatever reason gave up this project and in his later work regressed into a dubious metaphysics of a ‘spirit’ which obfuscates the concrete lived reality of the human individual.  Whatever the truth about Hegel’s metaphysics,  this article aims to show that in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit Hegel develops a thoroughly ‘detranscendentalized’ account of the human person as the “concrete” flesh and blood subject of knowledge and action, an account which deserves much more attention than it has so far received.
In short, whereas the section ‘Anthropology—Soul’ of Subjective Spirit (see previous chapter) deals with the bodily aspects of the concrete subject, the section ‘Phenomenology of Spirit—Consciousness’ deals with the various dimensions of intentionality, or in other word of the subject’s theoretical and practical relation to objectivity, and finally the section ‘Psychology—Spirit’ deals with the intrasubjective or mental processes and activities at work in the various object-relations. Eventually all of the three chapters contribute to a holistic picture of the human person as the “concrete subject”  of knowing and acting, yet reconstructing this picture requires a proper understanding of the structure of the text which at first sight, on a simple linear reading, appears rather fragmentary and thus confusing. This article focuses on the Psychology-section, and the thematically closely connected Phenomenology-section.
I will first (1.) reconstructs the ‘parallel architectonics’ of the Phenomenology and Psychology, the understanding of which is essential for comprehending the substantial views Hegel puts forth in them. I will then (2.) draw on this reconstruction and introduce central elements of Hegel’s account of the human person as the concrete subject of knowledge and action as it unfolds in the text.

Aquinas's intelligible species have been widely interpreted as playing their crucial theoretical role in Aquinas's cognition theory in virtue of being what I call "psychological devices." With a comprehensive study of previous controversies about Aquinas's intelligible species, it argues that the well-known "realism vs. representationalism" debates actually amount to a relatively small disagreement within the "Psychological Device View."  In reality, I argue, these debates miss the mark: The cognitive role of intelligible species in Aquinas can be completely understood in terms of their being forms of intellectual being--what I call the "Formal Constituent View."

We begin with Reza Negarestani's Intelligence and Spirit, retaining it as our guiding compass while navigating philosophy of mind. Espousing non-reductive physicalism, how do we pick out the specific relevant physical notion(s) from physical facts, specifically in relation to phenomenal experience? Beginning with a historical review of Gilbert Ryle's behaviorism and moving through Hilary Putnam's machine-state functionalism and Wilfrid Sellars' inferential framework, up to more contemporaneous computationalist-and cognitivist-functionalism (Gualtiero Piccinini), we survey accounts of mentality that countenance the emergence of mental states vide input-and output-scheme. Ultimately arriving at the conclusion that functionalism cannot account for problems such as no-cognition reports, we see any robust defense of physicalism must appeal to other principles. Thus we move on to the question of emergence, not as it pertains to the hard(er) problem, but to the matter of conceptual externalization of mental properties from physical properties. Accordingly, we navigate Karen Bennett's compatibilist solution to the exclusion argument against mental causation for the non-reductive physicalist position, according to which the physical effects of mental cases are not overdetermined, demonstrating that this backfires by offering a path for the mind-body interactionist Dualist to claim causal closure by appealing to this same schema. We conclude with a series of conceptual musings regarding rationality which take into account our challenges and findings, querying about whether phenomenal consciousness is a fundamentally private, or socially configured, notion. The immediate consciousness of the existence of outer things i s not presupposed but proved in the preceding theorem, whether we have insight into the possibility of this consciousness or not. The question about the latter would be whether we have only an inner sense but no outer one, rather merely outer imagination. But it is clear that in order for us even to imagine something as external, i.e., to exhibit it to sense in intuition, we must already have an outer sense, and by this means immediately distinguish the

Albert the Great's cognitive psychology extends beyond the specifi c interest of analysing human cognition. This article argues that some animal species, especially primates, have the ability to grasp the material world in a meaningful, i.e., intentional way and display complex types of behaviour that makes it plausible to assume that they have inferential capacities. The physiological similarities between many animal species and human beings allow to establish that those similarities also hold on the cognitive level of sensory knowledge. Thus, if human beings are able to perform certain inferential tasks based solely on sensory information, so can those animals on account of their physiological similarities, namely because they have sense organs and a structured brain that houses the inner senses which are needed to perform those activities. This leads to the idea that, if some animal species engaged in mental activities similar to human mental activities, then they could be said to perform complex tasks, such as basic forms of thinking. But since animals do not have a conceptual apparatus at their disposal, their acts of thinking, or rather proto-thinking, would have to be non-conceptual. Hence, for Albert the Great intelligence in nature manifests itself in various degrees and it does not entail a Cartesian dualistic hiatus between mind and matter.

evaluable but as the thick states that they probably are: namely as states not only "aiming at truth", but as inherently intertwined with motivating emotions and guiding evaluations. This is why I'd like to call Spinoza's ideas not only beliefs, but -with a nod to Bernard Williams -thick beliefs. 4

C. S. Peirce introduced the term “icon” for sign-vehicles that signify their objects in virtue of some shared quality. This qualitative kinship, however, threatens to collapse the relata of the sign into one and the same thing. Accordingly, the late-medieval philosopher of signs John Poinsot held that, “no matter how perfect, a concept [...] always retains a distinction, therefore, between the thing signified and itself signifying.” Poinsot is touted by his present-day advocates as a realist, but I believe that, judged by realist standards, his requirement of minimal dissimilarity backfires. Poinsot thinks that, in analyzing the sign, we should stop before a full merger between sign-vehicle and object is reached. Peirce, by contrast, saw good reason to push the analysis all the way down to one isolated quality. Because such a qualitative merger can lend support to realism, I favour Peirce’s stance.

Imagine that you look around and notice a green apple on the table in front of you. Given this perception, it seems quite natural to assume that you also know that there is a green apple on the table. The move from a perceptual state to a knowledge claim is quite effortless. We regularly justify such claims by appealing to our sense perception: «I know that the apple is on the table, because I've just seen it there.» But what exactly is it that we appeal to? So-called foundationalists might say that our sense experience forms a privileged basis of knowledge, and then give a reason as to why sense experience is a particularly secure ground or perhaps even the only ground of true knowledge claims. One such argument is that sensations or sense-data are naturally caused and thus immune to error. So-called coherentists might object that this is mistaken; for even if we take ourselves to be appealing to sense experience, we do in fact rely on something that is already conceptual and not mere sense experience. Even if we assume that we rely on what we see, what we in fact 'see' is already conceptualized and propositional. It is not a raw sense-datum that we notice; rather we already 'see' something as a green apple. Accordingly, our appeal to (conceptualized) sensations is not immune to error and has thus a normative dimension. Now, who is right? Before addressing this question we should first take a step back and see what the discussion is about. Prima facie, the discussion between foundationalists and coherentists resembles the debate between what we take to be classical empiricists and ration-

Nous and phren: intellectual knowledge, reasoning, and erotic
wisdom in Socrates and Plato.

The word nous, which is crucial for the epistemology of the Phaedo and the Republic, despite their evident differences, occurs rarely in the Socratic dialogues and in the testimonies of the first generation of Socratics. My claim is that the study of the notion of nous is of great interest for understanding the difference between the epistemologies of Socrates and Plato, and, in
particular, that it is possible to catch their differences exactly throught the distinction between noein and phronein. If for Plato knowledge is intellectual, for Socrates it is practical; if the dialectics brings us to the vision of the ideas, the Socratic method of definitions brings us to aporia; if vision is crucial for the nous, listening and feeling are so for the phronesis.
After having clarified the use of the terminology of nous and phronesis in the tradition precedent and posterior to Socrates and Plato (ch. 1), I analyse the specificities of the two methods through the interpretations of some key passages belonging not only to Plato but also to Xenophon and Aristophanes. In chapter 2 I discuss the Socratic phronesis, underlying the cognitive valence of aporia as the “non-seeing” paths of escape in the elenchus (in contrast to
the Platonic paradigm of knowledge as vision) and emphasizing the notion of listening to the daimonion as practical reasoning. In ch. 3 I treat the Platonic nous in particular regarding its relations with the dianoia in the dialectic process and with eros. Eros allows the successful attainment of knowledge, overcoming the Socratic and aporetic outcome and attaining the notion of knowledge as the enlightening of vision. In the conclusion I claim that Socrates pursued a negative outcome in order to bring his interlocutors face to face with the aporia and, therefore, that is a purely Platonic goal to wish to resolve the Socratic impasse. The novelty of Platonic epistemology lies exactly in the invention of the intellectual object – the ideas – that realizes from an ontological point of view
the Socratic notion of universal, and giving to the nous the central role in the epistemology, since it is the capacity to grasp these objects. Platonic epistrophe is a katharsis of the “second level” which wishes to resolve positively the Socratic purification of errors, as being that of the “first level”. The necessity of negation, “not seeing” and silence that belongs to the Socratic method acquires in Plato the character of a positive generation of knowledge through the overabundance of the nous.
Despite these important differences that should be underlined to grasp the specificities of the Socratic and Platonic methods, the role of eros in the acquisition of knowledge highlights a line of continuity between the two and, therefore, between phronesis and nous. Noetic contemplation represents, therefore, the Platonic passion for knowledge and his faith in its
practical efficacy, exactly as does the Socratic erotic wisdom.

In defense of the immortality of the soul Thomas Aquinas uses body-soul-hylomorphism  in a way that seems to be quite different from the Aristotelian paradigm.

„Thomas von Aquin zum Verhältnis von Leib und Intellekt”, in: U. Meixner/ A. Newen (Hgg.), Seele, Denken, Bewusstsein. Zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Geistes, Berlin/New York: De Gruyter 2003, 124-152.

In this paper, I will explore a transformation of Newtonian view (dynamic corpuscularity) from its mechanical reductionist approach that structured the Enlightenment science of mind in Britain to vitalistic autonomy of thinking matter. David Hartley (1705-1757) and its theory of vibrations serve as a case study. In particular, I will focus on the transformation of mechanical reductionism in natural philosophy within the development of physiology and chemistry, as can be seen analyzing the physiological basis of associationist psychology from Hartley's Conjecturae (1746) and his celebrated book Observations on Man (1749) to its legacies (on the one hand, Priestley, and on the other, Thomas Brown). The longevity of this model (a sixth edition of the Observations was published in 1834) was particularly significant in Europe until the collapse of the associationist school after James Ward's (1843-1925) article "Psychology" for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1886), where Ward introduces, partially influenced by Lotze, a strong argument against associationism based on the unity and continuity of active conscious life.

In the late 16 th and early 17 th centuries, a number of 'liberal Jesuit scholastics' produced the last great synthesis of Aristotelian psychology with Christian theology. In this magnificently sympathetic reconstruction of their systems of the soul, Dennis Des Chene rescues Toletus, Suarez, and the other 'schoolmen' from the neglect resulting from scornful dismissals by Descartes and his fellows. Deliberating bypassing the political and medical contexts of their work, and focussing almost exclusively on Jesuit rather than other, 'dissident' Renaissance Aristotelianisms, Des Chene focusses intensely on intellectual history, what he calls at one point 'the flurry of subtleties' of these astonishing systematic commentaries on Aristotle.

The proposed special issues covers the period seventeenth- and eighteenth century and focuses on the issue of how a sample of influential thinkers of that period conceptualised the human agent’s mental abilities as governing perception, action and moral behaviour. The representative thinkers included in this issue are: Descartes, Cudworth, Locke, Spinoza, Malebranche, Leibniz, Reid, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant.
During the period under consideration in this proposed issue there is a great revival of interest in the powers, capacities or faculties of the human mind, leading to innovative accounts which partially ground in a broad sense, modern psychology. Having inherited a general classification of the cognitive and moral powers from late Scholasticism, many authors during the period under consideration were mainly interested in putting them to work, to explain and describe how we think and perceive (rather than the contents of our thoughts and perceptions). Accordingly, the proposed special issue examines several aspects of the mental life, including perception, attention, reflection, imagination, consciousness, conscience, self-knowledge, activity and passivity of thought.

Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817–1881) fut l’une des figures majeures de la philosophie allemande au XIXe siècle. Philosophe, logicien, psychologue, médecin, il a connu à son époque une renommée extraordinaire. Professeur de philosophie à l’Université de Göttingen, où
il succéda à Herbart, il mena un parcours de recherche aussi original qu’influent. Entre romantisme et positivisme, entre naturalisme et historicisme, sa doctrine ne s’est jamais confondue avec les courants les plus importants de son époque. Admirée et suivie, autant en Allemagne qu’à l’étranger, sa pensée fut ensuite, après sa mort, condamnée à l’oubli en raison de son supposé éclectisme méthodologique et, finalement, classée sous la rubrique ambiguë d’« idéal-réalisme ». Le legs de Lotze s’inscrit dans un rapport complexe à la phénoménologie,
à la philosophie analytique naissante, au pragmatisme américain et au néokantisme allemand jusqu’à Heidegger. L’analyse de ce legs n’a cependant jamais bénéficié d’une réflexion critique capable d’en mesurer la portée et les limites. Par un travail d’évaluation historico-critique, ce volume se propose de combler cette lacune.

In this article I will begin by discussing recent criticism, by Mauro Antonelli and Werner Sauer, of the ontological interpretation of Franz Brentano’s concept of intentionality, as formulated by i.a. Roderick Chisholm. I will then outline some apparent inconsistencies of the positions advocated by Antonelli and Sauer with Brentano’s formulations of his theory in several works and lectures. This new evaluation of (unpublished) sources will then lead to a sketch of a new approach to Brentano’s theory of intentionality. Specifically, it will be argued that the notion of “intentional object” is inherently and un- avoidably ambiguous in every act of external perception, due to the fact that we can only have improper intentions directed at the external world.

If an individual has great physical strength and his body is beautiful , but the ability to reason logically* is absent, he seems to many people grotesque, unpleasant and stupid.

If a person has a lot of money, but the ability to reason logically is absent, he is often despised by a majority.

If a person has learned and memorized all the details of science, in which he deals, but the ability to reason logically is absent, he is considered abstracted from real life.

The ability to reason logically is the only quality in the intellectual sense _______________________________________________

*Reason logically – to form concepts to completion.
that gives one homo sapiens superiority over the other. This is the main human quality that separates "Julius Caesar" from the uncouth man.
A great number of people do not feel the boundaries between reality and fiction, between knowledge, which can be verified in experience and knowledge that goes beyond it and is only a fruit of the mind. And this is not surprising, because we accept this visible, orderly world for granted, building in our mind the same orderly schemas  that do not correspond to the underlying reality, and are often mistaken in our judgments. But, at the same time, if we take a closer look at nature, everything will become perfectly clear. The reason for this is a modern culture, which has largely distorted our thinking.

Imagine a contemperary individual who spends many hours sitting at the computer in interactive websites. He has plunged into a world of digital reality, he has gone through all the most difficult levels of a video game; he's an expert in everything, his own opinion he considers the only correct one. This person will tell you about God, culture, politics... moreover, he still dares to criticize the government, which pays him unemployment benefits and social security guarantees... Let's mentally send this super clever man  to Ancient Greece, in the times of the fearless heroes, which were considered inferior in their physical strength and mental capabilities only to the immortal gods. For the Spartans, for example, verbosity was a sign of stupidity. If such an expert would not be killed immediately, he would be made  a laughingstock for the nation. Although Sparta did not give the world any outstanding thinkers, as Athens, nevertheless it left the eternal memory of the fearless warriors who loved and defended their homeland.

Unfortunately, this is a price for technologies, which leads to a dulling of the natural human qualities. We don't need to remember much information. Why? After all, we can always go to Google and find the answer to almost any question. We don't need excessive physical strength: it is replaced by machines; we do not need excessive skills, vision, efforts for getting a piece of bread. Life has become much easier but, unfortunately, the price of such simplicity is very high to unceremoniously surrender into the hands of progress, without standing for our mental and physical development. If we do not defend our natural qualities from civilization, we are doomed to complete degradation. After all, by nature we are given a physical body so that we can contact with this world, and the mind to perceive it. All around us is in constant motion, and the one who is passive in life,  is not in harmony with nature.

Within the 'evolutionary' paradigm, there naturally and rightly are competing biogenetic theories of how the modern human type came to exist. This includes such theory as pertains to human artfulness. But-and-thus, David Huron observes that these theories all are post hoc theories. Therefore, while, within that paradigm, it is well and good to think that ‘nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution’, it is quite another matter to say just what particular sense that is.

Steven Davies, a faithful proponent of such 'evolution', asks in his recent book, The Artful Species, how humans have come to have art. But, Davies seems essentially as comfortable with (A) the anthropo-exclusive theory that the other animals have no artistic sense, as such, as with (B) any other theory of the biological nature, or animal characteristic, of artfulness. Thus, despite Davies's welcoming (A) as a live possibility, he seems fully to allow that the paradigmatically human capacity for artifact is what defines art itself.

Unlike Davies, this article rejects (A), and this precisely in order to demonstrate (B).

As artifacts, boats originated in essentially the same way in which any human technology originated: humans saw useful potentials for artifactive refinement of the functional spectrums of the natural environment and its underlying natural phenomenon. More to the point of human art, there exists in nature the very kinds of patterns of sound that, despite that nature characteristically presents these as non-isolated from the cacophony constituting the total of a given natural sonic environment, are exact analogous to the human paradigmatic case of music. Thus, while the melodic and tonal combinations spontaneous to, say, songbirds reflect that cacophony, human paradigmatic music is indicative of the human capacity to perceive, and in many ways practically appreciate and utilize, the regularized structures that are the more basic to nature than are nature's unfiltered sets of data in a given sensory domain.

So the reality is that even human musicality is analogous to what may be called humans' 'boaticality'. A boat humans make is not a human characteristic (direct biological instinct), but merely the result of something that is: that of a combination of (1) a need or desire to traverse water, and (2) a sense that there are more effective ways for humans to do that than by swimming or by taking the opportunities nature occasionally provides for riding on or in something as it floats. This reality would not be so readily perceived by humans who, if growing up always having to face traversing water, never met any human who grew up otherwise. The human capacity for enjoying the mere forms of things is likewise paradigmatic.

Thus, the specifically human instance of artfulness is equal to humans' likewise paradigmatic capacities of refection of self, other, and the whole cosmos, which includes the supposedly purely purposeless actions that, in fact, comprise the exercise of self-identity; reflection upon the structures of possibility; the provocation of passion; the extension of visceral sense; etc..

It may seem an open question whether the normal instance of self-identity in the modern human type can, say, reflect equally well without artful perceptions as with such perceptions. But, it is not at all clear that there is a strict distinction between humans’ artful perception and humans’ merely ‘ordinary’, ‘practical’, 'utilitarian' perception. This is not to say that humans are incapable of mistakenly reifying utilitarian sensibilities as deliberatively narrowly rationalistic, anti-spontaneity sensibilities. It simply is to make the point that the issue of distinction here surely is the case between 'music' and 'non-musical' 'sound'. This is both because there is no simple hard distinction between ‘music’ and 'other sound' and because even a constant tone of sound is like a miniature, albeit simple, orchestra: its regular waves of pressure constitute all three of harmony, melody, and rhythm. No bird seems the least to care for the fine recursive structure of a feather, and so sees nothing of any deeper structures than what it might happen to notice at an 'uncaring' glance.

And it is universal to humans to seek to obtain sonically isolated experiences of 'music'.

So, the human sonic expressions of humans' capacity to refine and isolate sounds are like their refining wood to make a boat: neither of these human artifacts is a ‘human construct’ alien to the natural world. They are, rather, reflections of a common animal biological reality of the perceptions of which only humans have no upper limit. All animals have an artful sense, but not enough as ever to care to make it its own end. A dog may howl at the sound of a piano, but no dog hums to itself as a form of sound play. If humans, somehow, had no means of making sounds except with their voices, yet they would retain their infinite capacity to fully divide things into functional distinctions such that they could still conceive, and thus initiate practice, of 'music' as deeply distinct from the more practical and social uses of vocalizing.

A view of prominence in the philosophy of emotion is that emotional experiences are not self-standing intentional experiences. Instead, they inherit the intentional content they have from their cognitive bases. One implication is that emotions whose intentional contents differ in terms of the modal and temporal properties of the relevant particular object – because the intentional contents on which they are based differ in these respects – nonetheless need not differ qua emotion-type. This leads to the same-emotional attitude, different content claim: It is possible to have the same emotional attitude towards a range of (different) contents, as provided by different cognitive bases. This paper argues that this claim is mistaken. By appealing to the specific case of imagination, the same emotional-attitude, different content claim is challenged. Drawing on phenomenological observations made by Jean-Paul Sartre, supplemented with independently plausible considerations, I argue we should recognise a distinct class of emotion-types, which I call affective imaginings. Affective imaginings contrast with emotional experiences whose cognitive bases are sense-perceptual experiences (affective perceptions). The contrast turns on the way the different contents across these cases modifies the attitudinal character of the emotional experience, motivating the positing of two irreducible classes of emotional experiences.

What determines the meaning of linguistic expressions: the mental states of language users or external factors? John Locke is still taken to hold the simple thesis that words primarily signify the ideas in the mind of the speaker and thus to commit himself to an untenable mentalism. The present paper challenges this widespread view and sketches an argument to the effect that Locke should be seen as defending a kind of social externalism, since, for Locke, it is primarily the speech community that plays the essential role in determining meaning.

Normativity has long been conceived as more properly pertaining to the domain of thought than to the domain of nature. This conception goes back to Kant and still figures prominently in contemporary epistemology, philosophy of mind and ethics. By offering a collection of new essays by leading scholars in early modern philosophy and specialists in contemporary philosophy, this volume goes beyond the point where nature and normativity came apart, and challenges the well-established opposition between these all too neatly separated realms. It examines how the mind’s embeddedness in nature can be conceived as a starting point for uncovering the links between naturally and conventionally determined standards governing an agent’s epistemic and moral engagement with the world. The original essays are grouped in two parts. The first part focuses on specific aspects of theories of perception, thought formation and judgment. It gestures towards an account of normativity that regards linguistic conventions and natural constraints as jointly setting the scene for the mind’s ability to conceptualise its experiences. The second part of the book asks what the norms of desirable epistemic and moral practices are. Key to this approach is an examination of human beings as parts of nature, who act as natural causes and are determined by their sensibilities and sentiments. Each part concludes with a chapter that integrates features of the historical debate into the contemporary context.​

'Common Sense and Enlightenment',March 13, 2015 - March 15, 2015, Princeton University. A long term project of the CSSP comes to fruition in 2015 when the first two volumes of a multi-authored History of Scottish Philosophy will be published by Oxford University Press. Scottish Philosophy in the 18th Century, Volume One, edited by James Harris (University of St Andrews) and Aaron Garrett (Boston University) covers Scottish Enlightenment writers and topics in morality, politics, aesthetics and religion. Scottish Philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries, edited by Gordon Graham, engages with the post-Enlightenment debates between once famous, but now much less well known, Scottish philosophers—Thomas Brown, William Hamilton, J F Ferrier, Alexander Bain, John Macmurray—with chapters on more wide ranging topics such as the Scottish reception of Kant and Hegel, the rise of Idealism, and the influence of Scottish philosophy abroad. The CSSP Spring Conference 2015 will celebrate the appearance of these two volumes. Plenary sessions and panels will take up themes from the chapters of the books - see preliminary program and list of invited speakers below.  The 2105 Spring Conference has additional financial support from the Scots Philosophical Association.

- Terça-feira 14h-18h
Objetivos e conteúdo do curso:
O que é a mente? O objetivo geral do curso é investigar a origem histórica e conceitual da noção de mente na filosofia moderna, enquanto conceito que se desenvolve entre a psicologia filosófica e a teoria do conhecimento (epistemologia). O objetivo especifico é analisar, em primeiro lugar, o diferente sentido de mente entre o racionalismo e o empirismo, de Descartes a Hume. Abordaremos o problema de se o conhecimento humano precisa de uma ferramenta separada da experiência sensível ou, ao contrário, condicionada pela experiência mesma. No primeiro caso, o curso explicará os princípios de uma metafisica da mente de Descartes a Hegel.
No secundo caso, o curso analisará a constituição de uma psicologia da mente, de Locke a Condillac.
Em segundo lugar, o curso questionará o problema da realidade do sujeito da experiência: a capacidade da consciência de reconhecer suas percepções e estados mentais como um todo unitário-ou - o que chamamos o eu - é a origem e a condição de nossa experiência ou o seu resultado final?
Partindo deste problema especifico, nesta parte do curso buscaremos expor a transformação do conceito de mente, do projeto de filosofia transcendental de Kant até o surgimento da fenomenologia de Brentano e Husserl.