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1
Intentionality in Husserl and Heidegger: The problem of original method and phenomenon of phenomenology. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993.
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2
Kriegel, Uriah, ed. Phenomenal Intentionality. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199764297.001.0001.
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Mendelovici, Angela. The Phenomenal Intentionality Theory. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190863807.003.0005.
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This chapter introduces the phenomenal intentionality theory (PIT), on which all original intentionality arises from phenomenal consciousness. It argues that PIT succeeds precisely where its main competitors, the tracking and functional role theories discussed in previous chapters, fail. The version of PIT that this chapter and the remainder of the book defends is strong identity PIT, on which all intentionality arises from phenomenal consciousness (strong PIT), and (roughly) phenomenal states give rise to intentional states simply by being identical to them (identity PIT). In short, according to strong identity PIT, every intentional state is identical to a phenomenal state. This chapter closes by previewing how later chapters handle certain challenging cases for PIT, including those of thoughts, states with broad or object-involving contents, standing states, and nonconscious occurrent states. The recommended treatment rejects derived intentionality and so qualifies as a version of strong PIT.
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Mendelovici, Angela. The Phenomenal Basis of Intentionality. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190863807.001.0001.
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Some mental states seem to be "of" or "about" things or to "say" something. For example, a thought might represent that grass is green, and a visual experience might represent a blue cup. This is intentionality. The aim of this book is to explain this phenomenon. Once we understand intentionality as a phenomenon to be explained, rather than a posit in a theory explaining something else, we can see that there are glaring empirical and in-principle difficulties with currently popular tracking and functional role theories of intentionality, which aim to account for intentionality in terms of tracking relations and functional roles. This book develops an alternative theory, the phenomenal intentionality theory (PIT), on which the source of intentionality is none other than phenomenal consciousness, the subjective, felt, or qualitative aspect of mental life. While PIT avoids the problems that plague tracking and functional role theories, it faces its own challenges in accounting for the rich and complex contents of thoughts and the contents of nonconscious states. In responding to these challenges, this book proposes a novel version of PIT, one on which all intentionality is phenomenal intentionality, though we in some sense represent many non-phenomenal contents by ascribing them to ourselves. This book further argues that phenomenal consciousness is an intrinsic feature of mental life, resulting in a view that is radically internalistic in spirit: Our phenomenally represented contents are literally in our heads, and any non-phenomenal contents we in some sense represent are expressly targeted by us.
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Kriegel, Uriah. Intentionality. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198791485.003.0003.
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This chapter argues for two main claims. First, it is argued that, unlike the notion of intentionality central to modern philosophy of mind, Brentano’s notion of intentionality has nothing to do with mental states’ capacity to track elements in the environment; rather, it has to do with a phenomenal feature in virtue of which conscious experiences present something to the subject. Secondly, it is argued that, contrary to common wisdom in Brentano scholarship, there is no real evidence that Brentano took intentionality to be a relation to immanent objects; rather, his mature theory clearly casts intentionality as an intrinsic, non-relational property, and a property in the first instance of subjects (rather than of subjects’ internal states).
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Mendelovici, Angela. Conclusion: Intentionality and Other Related Phenomena. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190863807.003.0010.
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This concluding chapter reviews the view of intentionality argued for in this book, which is an aspect-theoretic version of strong identity PIT. On this view, roughly, every intentional state is identical to some non-relational phenomenal state. Chapter 1 rejected various ways of fixing reference on intentionality via its role in folk psychological or scientific theories, helping us navigate the world, or securing conditions of truth and reference, arguing that it might turn out that something other than intentionality plays these roles. This chapter returns to these ways of fixing reference on intentionality and argues that the arguments presented in this book suggest that what plays these roles is either intentionality together with further ingredients or something else entirely. The chapter closes by articulating a core intuition behind internalism and suggesting that the view developed in this book, despite being compatible with externalism, is radically internalistic.
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Mendelovici, Angela. Nonconscious States. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190863807.003.0008.
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Nonconscious states, like standing beliefs and nonconscious states involved in early visual processing, pose a challenge for PIT: They seem to be intentional but not phenomenal. This chapter addresses this challenge. It begins by considering versions of PIT that take nonconscious states to have derived intentionality, arguing that none of the suggested derivation mechanisms is up to the task of generating new instances of intentionality. This chapter then recommends an alternative treatment of nonconscious states on which neither standing states nor most nonconscious occurrent states are genuinely intentional, though the self-ascriptivist view described in Chapter 7 might be extended to accommodate some standing state contents, and perhaps even standing states in their entirety. This chapter also suggests that some nonconscious occurrent states might have phenomenal properties we are not aware of and so might have phenomenal intentionality we are also not aware of.
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Carman, Taylor. Phenomenology. Edited by Herman Cappelen, Tamar Szabó Gendler, and John Hawthorne. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199668779.013.31.
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This article explores the role of phenomenology in philosophical inquiry. It begins by discussing Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological reductions (the “transcendental” and the “eidetic”), the sharp distinction he draws between consciousness and reality, and his intuitive claims about intentionality. It then considers Martin Heidegger’s conceptions of phenomenon and phenomenology in relation to hermeneutics before returning to Husserl’s argument that we have a direct intuition, not just of entities, but of the phenomenal appearance of their being (and nonbeing). It also examines Heidegger’s claim that “ontology is possible only as phenomenology” and concludes by assessing phenomenology’s legacy and relevance to philosophy.
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Ganeri, Jonardon. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198757405.003.0018.
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This book is an exploration of the reorientations that take place when attention is given priority in the analysis of mind. In this book it is argued that attention has an explanatory role in understanding the concept of the intentionality or directedness of the mental; the nature of mental action in general; of specific mental actions such as intending, remembering, introspecting, and empathizing; the character of the phenomenal and of cognitive access; the unity of consciousness; the epistemology of perception; the nature of persons and their identity; the distinction between self and other, and the moral psychology that rests upon it.
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Ganeri, Jonardon. Perceptual Attention. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198757405.003.0005.
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Conscious attention performs two distinct roles in experience, a role of placing and a role of focusing, roles which match a distinction between selection and access endorsed in recent theories of attention. The intentionality of conscious experience consists in two sorts of attentional action, a focusing at and a placing on, the first lending to experience a perspectival categorical content and the second structuring its phenomenal character. Placing should be thought of more like opening a window for consciousness than as shining a spotlight, and focusing has to do with accessing the properties of whatever the window opens onto. A window is an aperture whose boundaries are defined by what is excluded—in this case, distractors.
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Radcliffe, Elizabeth S. The Passions as Original Existences. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199573295.003.0005.
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Hume’s thesis that reason and passion cannot be opposed depends in part on his defense of the claim that because passions do not represent, they cannot oppose the representations, or beliefs, that reason yields. Hume’s characterization of the passions as “original existences,” which do not refer to anything outside of themselves, is remarkable. For it does seem, contrary to Hume’s other words, that passions have intentionality and make reference to their objects; it also appears that Hume is inconsistent, since he explicitly depicts indirect passions as having objects. Chapter 4 vindicates Hume’s view of the passions as having objects, but without making reference to them, and shows that while Hume has both a phenomenal and a structural conception of passion, each is appropriate for its own context. It also examines in what sense passions can be thought “reasonable.”
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Maloney, J. Christopher. Intentionalism, Cognition, and Representation. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190854751.003.0002.
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This chapter continues consideration of reductive intentionalism without embracing the doctrine, framing it in the context of cognitive science. Cognition, including perception, is representation. An agent’s cognitive, perhaps perceptual, state is a relation binding the agent to a proposition by means of her mental representation. Intentionalism would explicate the phenomenal character of a perceiver's experience in terms of the content of her prevailing perceptual representation. While minimal intentionalism maintains that the phenomenal character of the perceiver's experience merely supervenes on her representation's content, maximal intentionalism would reduce character to content. For maximal intentionalism maintains that phenomenal character is simply what introspection finds. Yet, according to maximal intentionalism, introspection, when tuned to conscious perception, detects only the content of experience. Hence, the maximalist identifies phenomenal character with the content carried by perceptual representation.
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Mendelovici, Angela. Fixing Reference on Intentionality. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190863807.003.0001.
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This chapter fixes reference on our target, intentionality. "Intentionality" is sometimes defined as the "aboutness" or "directedness" of mental states. While such definitions succeed at gesturing towards the phenomenon of interest, they are too fuzzy and metaphorical to fix firmly upon it. This chapter recommends an alternative ostensive way of defining "intentionality" as the feature of mental states that we at least sometimes notice introspectively in ourselves and are tempted to describe using representational terms like "of" or "about". This chapter argues that this definition does a better job than alternative definitions—such as those in terms of folk psychology, the mind-brain sciences, and truth and reference—at capturing the phenomenon that talk of "aboutness" and "directedness" is gesturing at.
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Brown, Derek H. Projectivism and Phenomenal Presence. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199666416.003.0010.
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Projectivism asserts that we project subjective aspects of perception into what we experience as the world outside ourselves. It is minimally familiar from various phantom pains, afterimages, and hallucinations. Views like sense-datum theory arguably assert a more global, Strong Projectivism: all perceptual experiences involve and only involve direct awareness of projected elements. Strong Projectivism is an underappreciated variety of intentionalism. It straightforwardly explains the transparency of experience, and phenomena qualia theorists offer to avoid intentionalism, including blurry vision and spectrum inversion. Finally, projectivism illuminates residual qualia-friendly cases involving imagination and emotion. Although some cases may provide instances of non-projected, non-intentional aspects of experience, most do not. Thus, the notion of phenomenal presence drawn from projectivism does justice to a great many of the forces at play in debates surrounding qualia and intentionalism. We should bound toward Strong Projectivism.
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Maloney, J. Christopher. Intentionalism and Recurrent Cognitive Content. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190854751.003.0001.
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Conscious perception carries distinctive phenomenal character. Intentionalism would account for this character by appeal to the wealth of information embedded in perceptual content while also cautioning that such opulent content exceeds the poor grasp of other types of conscious cognitive consideration. Intentionalism adds that introspective comparison of the differing phenomenal characters of contrastive perceptual episodes reveals only the episodes’ difference in content. Accordingly, intentionalism concludes that perceptual content alone determines phenomenal character. However, this conclusion fatally fails to accommodate the recalcitrant fact that the content of perceptual experience inferentially permeates reasoning, both theoretical and practical. So, the content of perception cannot be peculiar to that sensuous mode of cognition. Hence, it would seem that intentionalism is false.
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Maloney, J. Christopher. Intentionalism’s Troubles Begin. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190854751.003.0003.
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This chapter puzzles over intentionalism’s odd exportation of the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. Evidently, a perceptual state's phenomenal character is intrinsic to the state while its content is not. So, intentionalism’s reduction of character to content stumbles right out of the blocks. Also, but contrary to fact, if content were phenomenally determinative, all cognitive states with the same content would have the same character. Since perceptual content admits of minimal logical or conceptual complexity, over time a perceiver may find herself in perceptual states that have the same content but, contrary to intentionalism, different phenomenal characters. Moreover, throughout a continuous period of phenomenally stable conscious perception a perceiver might reason from, or about, her experiential content. Her reasoning would ensure fluctuation in her cognitive content despite the constancy of her phenomenal character. In short, perceptual content’s availability to cognition generally undermines intentionalism. Content does not determine character.
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Textor, Mark. Some Marks of Mental Phenomena. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199685479.003.0002.
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Brentano, following Mill, conceived of psychology as the science of mental phenomena. In the framework of this conception of psychology, he made proposals about how to distinguish physical from mental phenomena. The chapter introduces and assesses three such proposals: Non-Spatiality, Inner Perception, and Consciousness. Brentano’s Inner Perception turns out to be immune to objections that are often directed against epistemic marks of the mental. His Non-Spatiality and Consciousness turn out to be controversial and subject to regress threats, respectively. The chapter prepares the stage for a discussion of Brentano’s Thesis that intentionality is the mark of the mental. It also introduces key concepts of Brentano’s philosophy.
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Textor, Mark. Brentano's Mind. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199685479.001.0001.
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Brentano is one of the ‘grandfathers’ of philosophy of mind. His work influenced analytic philosophers like Russell and Chisholm as well as phenomenologists like Husserl and Sartre and continues to shape debates in the philosophy of mind. Brentano made intentionality a central topic in the philosophy of mind by proposing that ‘directedness’ is the mark of the mental. The book’s first part investigates Brentano’s intentionalism and attempts to improve or develop it. I argue that there is no plausible version of this doctrine and reject it in favour of a mark of the mental proposed by Brentano’s student Husserl: mental phenomena have no appearances. The book’s second part develops and defends Brentano’s metaphysics of awareness. Awareness of a mental activity and this mental activity are not distinct mental acts, the first representing the second. They are one and the same activity directed on several objects. Brentano’s basic insight is that intentionality is plural: directedness is always directedness on some objects. I will assess Brentano’s arguments for this view and argue that the plural conception of intentionality solves thorny problems about perceptual consciousness (II.1). I will go on to articulate Brentano’s distinction between awareness and observation in the proposed framework (II.2). In the next part (II.3) I use enjoying an activity as a model for awareness of it and explore the intentionality and nature of pleasure. The book’s final part (II.4) extends the plural view to the conscious mental life of a thinker at a time (the unity of synchronic consciousness): it is one mental act with many objects.
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Hopkins, Burt C. Intentionality in Husserl and Heidegger: The Problem of the Original Method and Phenomenon of Phenomenology. Hopkins B C, 2010.
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Maloney, J. Christopher. Intentionalism and Troubling Peculiar Perceptual Content. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190854751.003.0004.
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Defending intentionalism, some argue that perceptual content is idiosyncratically nonconceptual: conceptually innocent; defiant of verbalization; or too richly fine-grained for subsumption under concepts carrying ratiocination. No: perception is conceptual in a manner that fits the cognitive capacities of perceivers generally. If perception is subservient to attention, a speaker's perceptual content admits of relatively simple reports implying rudimentary conceptualization. Perception's content is neither too rich nor fine-grained for expression or conceptualization. Intentionalism's temptation towards the contrary be may be urged by memory’s misguided tendency towards constructive confabulation. So, perceptual content may be neither so rich, dense, nor determinate as post-perceptual consideration and testimony may suggest. Finally, Sperling’s early important empirical work on perceptual memory cuts against intentionalism's conjecture of perception's nonconceptual content. Sperling discovered that perceptual memory can completely rehearse its recollected content. Accordingly, but contrary to intentionalism, memory might echo perception's content yet shed its phenomenal character.
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Textor, Mark. A Brief Conclusion. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199685479.003.0014.
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I would like the reader to take away from this book the following morals.First, Brentano was wrong to say that intentionality is the most distinctive mark of mental phenomena (see PES, 75 [I, 137]). Our conception of mental phenomena in not unified by the thesis that all and only mental acts have an object. It cannot be so unified because the notion of direction or of-ness itself is neither unified nor generally applicable to mental phenomena. Even if intentionality is a first-person concept that one can only come to grasp if one can instantiate and introspectively access mental acts, propositional and interrogative attitudes pose insuperable problems for Brentano’s Thesis....
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Textor, Mark. Brentano’s Thesis Revisited. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199685479.003.0003.
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In Psychologie, Brentano introduced a new mark of mental phenomena: all and only mental phenomena are intentional. No physical state or property is intentional. Under the label ‘Brentano’s Thesis’ this mark of the mental has guided philosophical research both by phenomenologists and by analytic philosophers of mind. This chapter reconstructs the view of intentionality that underlies Brentano’s Thesis and finds it under-explained. Brentano clearly struggled to convey to his readers what he took to be the common feature of the mental. The chapter goes on to assess attempts to explain intentionality in independently intelligible terms by such philosophers as Chisholm, Crane, and Molnar, and finds them all wanting.
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Maloney, J. Christopher. Higher Order Theory. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190854751.003.0005.
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Rosenthal's rendition of representationalism denies intentionalism. His higher order theory instead asserts that a perceptual state's phenomenal character is set by that state's being related to, because represented by, another, but higher order, cognitive state. The theory arises from the doubtful supposition of unconscious perception and mistakenly construes intrinsic phenomenal character extrinsically, as one state's serving as the content of another. Yet it remains mysterious how and why a higher order state might be so potent as to determine phenomenal character at all. Better to resist higher order theory’s embrace of dubious unconscious perceptual states and account for states so-called simply in terms of humdrum mnemonic malfeasance. Moreover, since the suspect theory allows higher order misrepresentation, it implies sufferance of impossible phenomenal character. Equally problematic, representationalism pitched at the higher order entails the existence of bogus phenomenal character when upstairs states represent downstairs nonperceptual states.
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Maloney, J. Christopher. Dual Aspect Theory. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190854751.003.0006.
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Carruthers proposes a subtle dispositionalist rendition of higher order theory regarding phenomenal character. The theory would distinguish unconscious movement management from conscious attitude management as perceptual processes. Each process takes perceptual representations as inputs. A representation subject to attitude management is apt to induce a higher order representation of itself that secures a self-referential aspect of its content supposedly determinative of phenomenal character. Unfortunately, the account requires a problematic cognitive ambiguity while failing to explain why attitude, but not movement, management, determines character. Moreover, normal variation in attitudinal management conflicts with the constancy typical of phenomenal character. And although an agent denied perceptual access to a scene about which she is otherwise well informed would suffer no phenomenal character, dispositionalist theory entails otherwise. Such problems, together with the results of the previous chapters, suggest that, whether cloaked under intentionalism or higher order theory, representationalism mistakes content for character.
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Maloney, J. Christopher. What It Is Like To Perceive. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190854751.001.0001.
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Conscious perception is a distinctive mode of cognition marked by its manifestly sensuous phenomenal character. Why? An intentionalist may reply that perception is a kind of psychological state realized by an oddly contentful mental representation. A higher order theorist might alternatively answer that a perceptual state is sensuous since it is the content of a higher order cognitive state. Neither of these representationalists is right. It is not the content of any mental state that ensures perception's phenomenal character. Rather, the unique structure of a perceptual representation determines perception's sensuous side. For a perceptual representation is an extended mental representation of a peculiar sort. It is a representation in which the vehicle of reference is itself the very object to which that vehicle refers. Perceptual representation thus differs from all other forms of cognitive representation in a way that directly acquaints a perceiver with whatever real object she perceives. Perception is sensuous because it is unbrokered cognitive contact with something present. This confrontational mode of cognition owes its phenomenal character not to what it represents but rather to how it represents. What it is like to perceive is bluntly - but exactly - to represent something real that is really at hand. Conscious perception is just direct acquaintance with what's there.
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Garrett, Don. Representation and Consciousness in Spinoza’s Naturalistic Theory of the Imagination. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195307771.003.0018.
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Margaret Wilson argued that Spinoza’s theory of mind cannot “recognize and take account of” such specific phenomena of human mentality as ignorance of many internal bodily states, representation of the external world, consciousness, and the expression of mentality in behavior. By resolving a set of puzzles about the scope, representational content, consciousness, and bodily expression of imagination more generally, this chapter defends Spinoza’s panpsychistic theory of mind against these objections. The key lies in understanding his theory of the imagination itself; his doctrines concerning a number of closely related topics such as inherence, intellect, confusion, conatus, perfection, and “power of thinking”; and what may be called his “incremental naturalism” that is, his guiding conviction that intentionality, desire, belief, understanding, and consciousness are already present in their most rudimentary forms throughout nature. The chapter argues that Spinoza identifies consciousness (conscientia), in its various degrees, with power of thinking (cogitandi potentia).
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Douglas, Gordon C. C. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190691332.003.0001.
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The first chapter introduces and defines the phenomenon of DIY urban design: unauthorized yet intentionally functional and civic-minded improvements to urban spaces, in forms inspired by official streetscape planning and design elements. It then sets up the social and discursive contexts for the study, including its main theoretical engagements—with the persistence of social inequality, the spectrum of formality and informality, the value of the concept of legitimacy in urban placemaking, and the contradictions of participatory citizenship. The chapter also discusses the research design and methodology for the book (also described in detail in Appendix 2) and lays out a brief plan and summary of the chapters to come.
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Heylighen, Francis, and Shima Beigi. Mind Outside Brain. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198801764.003.0005.
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We approach the problem of the extended mind from a radically non-dualist perspective. The separation between mind and matter is an artifact of the mechanistic worldview, which leaves no room for mental phenomena such as agency, intentionality, or experience. We propose to replace it by an action ontology, which conceives mind and matter as aspects of the same network of processes. By adopting the intentional stance, we interpret the catalysts of elementary reactions as agents exhibiting desires, intentions, and sensations. Autopoietic networks of reactions constitute more complex super-agents, which exhibit memory, deliberation and sense-making. In the case of social networks, individual agents coordinate their actions via the propagation of challenges. The distributed cognition that emerges cannot be situated in any individual brain. This non-dualist, holistic view extends and operationalizes process metaphysics and Eastern philosophies. It is supported by both mindfulness experiences and mathematical models of action, self-organization, and cognition.
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Mendelovici, Angela. Thought. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190863807.003.0007.
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Thoughts present a challenge for PIT. They seem to represent various contents, including rich descriptive contents, broad contents, and object-involving contents, but it is not clear how PIT can accommodate them. This chapter argues that thoughts have a largely neglected kind of content, immediate content, which is plausibly phenomenally represented and from which rich descriptive, broad, and object-involving contents can be derived. On the proposed view of derived mental representation, self-ascriptivism, thoughts derivatively represent their alleged contents because we ascribe them to our thoughts' immediate contents. This self-ascription is a matter of our dispositions to have certain thoughts that specify that one content cashes out into another. Although on this view, thoughts derivatively represent their alleged contents, this kind of derived representation is not a kind of intentionality. The chapter also briefly suggests that self-ascriptivism can be applied to perceptual states and to the attitude component of propositional attitudes.
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Gallagher, Shaun. Enactivist Interventions. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198794325.001.0001.
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Enactivist Interventions explores central issues in the contemporary debates about embodied cognition, addressing interdisciplinary questions about intentionality, representation, affordances, the role of affect, and the problems of perception and cognitive penetration, action and free will, higher-order cognition, and intersubjectivity. It argues for a rethinking of the concept of mind, drawing on pragmatism, phenomenology, and cognitive science. It interprets enactivism as a philosophy of nature that has significant methodological and theoretical implications for the scientific investigation of the mind. Enactivist Interventions argues that, like the basic phenomena of perception and action, sophisticated cognitive phenomena like reflection, imagining, and mathematical reasoning are best explained in terms of an affordance-based skilled coping. It thus argues for a continuity that runs between basic action, affectivity, and a rationality that in every case remains embodied. It also discusses recent predictive models of brain function and outlines an alternative, enactivist interpretation that emphasizes the close coupling of brain, body, and environment rather than a strong boundary that isolates the brain in its internal processes. The extensive relational dynamics that integrates the brain with the extra-neural body opens into an environment that is physical, social, and cultural and that recycles back into the enactive process. Cognitive processes are in the world, situated in affordance spaces defined across evolutionary, developmental, and individual histories, and are constrained by affective processes and normative dimensions of social and cultural practices.
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Byrne, John H., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Invertebrate Neurobiology. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190456757.001.0001.
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Invertebrates have proven to be extremely useful models for gaining insights into the neural and molecular mechanisms of sensory processing, motor control, and higher functions, such as feeding behavior, learning and memory, navigation, and social behavior. Their enormous contribution to neuroscience is due, in part, to the relative simplicity of invertebrate nervous systems and, in part, to the large cells found in some invertebrates, like mollusks. Because of the organizms’ cell size, individual neurons can be surgically removed and assayed for expression of membrane channels, levels of second messengers, protein phosphorylation, and RNA and protein synthesis. Moreover, peptides and nucleotides can be injected into individual neurons. Other invertebrate systems such as Drosophila and Caenorhabditis elegans are ideal models for genetic approaches to the exploration of neuronal function and the neuronal bases of behavior. The Oxford Handbook of Invertebrate Neurobiology reviews neurobiological phenomena, including motor pattern generation, mechanisms of synaptic transmission, and learning and memory, as well as circadian rhythms, development, regeneration, and reproduction. Species-specific behaviors are covered in chapters on the control of swimming in annelids, crustacea, and mollusks; locomotion in hexapods; and camouflage in cephalopods. A unique feature of the handbook is the coverage of social behavior and intentionality in invertebrates. These developments are contextualized in a chapter summarizing past contributions of invertebrate research as well as areas for future studies that will continue to advance the field.
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Britton, Celia, trans. Treatise on the Whole-World. Liverpool University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781789620986.001.0001.
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This exciting, challenging book covers a wide range of subject matter, but all linked together through the key ideas of diversity and ‘Relation’. It sees our modern world, shaped by immigration and the aftermath of colonization, as a multiplicity of different communities interacting and evolving together, and argues passionately against all political and philosophical attempts to impose uniformity, universal or absolute values. This is the ‘Whole-World’, which includes not only these objective phenomena but also our consciousness of them. Glissant constantly stresses the unpredictable, ‘chaotic’ nature of the world, which, he claims, we must adapt to and not attempt to limit or control. ‘Creolization’ is not restricted to the Creole societies of the Caribbean but describes all societies in which different cultures with equal status interact to produce new configurations. This perspective produces brilliant new insights into the politicization of culture, but also language, poetry, our relationship to place and to landscapes, globalization, history, and other topics. The book is not written in the style conventionally associated with essays, but is a mixture of argument, proclamation, and poetic evocations of landscapes, lifestyles and people. Its structure is intentionally ‘chaotic’, returning several times to the same themes but seen from a slightly different point of view.
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Haslam, Nick. Reliability, Validity, and the Mixed Blessings of Operationalism. Edited by K. W. M. Fulford, Martin Davies, Richard G. T. Gipps, George Graham, John Z. Sadler, Giovanni Stanghellini, and Tim Thornton. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199579563.013.0058.
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The concepts of reliability and validity are fundamental for evaluating psychiatric diagnosis, including the "operationalist" approach pioneered in DSM-III. This chapter explores the complexity of these psychometric concepts and their interrelations. Although reliability constrains validity it does not guarantee it, and pursuing reliability in diagnosis can reduce validity. It is widely believed that the operationalist emphasis on diagnostic reliability has compromised the validity of recent psychiatric classifications. In particular, writers have argued that the drive for atheoretical diagnostic criteria has come at the cost of phenomenological richness and psychodynamic complexity. This chapter argues that although the operationalist turn may have impaired the validity of psychiatric diagnosis in some respects, these criticisms must be balanced by an appreciation of its benefits. In addition, it is suggested that some criticisms rest on a misunderstanding of the goals of operational descriptions. They should be evaluated primarily on pragmatic grounds as identification procedures and judged on their success in serving epistemic and communicative functions. Operational descriptions should not be viewed as comprehensive definitions of clinical phenomena or judged on their failure to encompass the richness and complexity of mental disorders. A diagnostic system is best understood as an intentionally delimited instrument for enabling clinical inference and communication. In essence, it is a simplified pidgin with which clinicians who speak different first languages (theoretical orientations) can conduct their shared business.
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Newark, Cormac, and William Weber, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190224202.001.0001.
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This collection examines the phenomenon of the operatic canon: its formation, history, current ontology and practical influence, and future. It does so by taking an international and interdisciplinary view: the workshops from which it was derived included the participation of critics, producers, artistic directors, stage directors, opera company CEOs, and even economists, from the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Italy, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Canada. The volume is structured as a series of dialogues: each subtopic is addressed by two essays, introduced jointly by the authors, and followed by a jointly compiled list of further reading. These paired essays complement each other in different ways, for example by treating the same geographical location in different periods, by providing different national or regional perspectives on the same period, or by thinking through similar conceptual issues in contrasting milieus. Part I consists of a selection of surveys of operatic production and consumption contexts in France, Italy, Germany, England, Russia, and the Americas, arranged in rough order from the late seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century. Part II is a (necessarily) limited sample of subjects that illuminate the operatic canon from different—sometimes intentionally oblique—angles, ranging from the influence of singers to the contiguous genres of operetta and musical theater, and the effects of recording and broadcast over almost 150 years. The volume concludes with two essays written by prominent figures from the opera industry who give their sense of the operatic canon’s evolution and prospects.
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Hawley, George. The Alt-Right. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/wentk/9780190905194.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
In recent years, the so-called Alt-Right, a white nationalist movement, has grown at an alarming rate. Taking advantage of high levels of racial polarization, the Alt-Right seeks to normalize explicit white identity politics. Growing from a marginalized and disorganized group of Internet trolls and propagandists, the Alt-Right became one of the major news stories of the 2016 presidential election. Discussions of the Alt-Right are now a regular part of political discourse in the United States and beyond. In The Alt-Right: What Everyone Needs to Know® , George Hawley, one of the world's leading experts on the conservative movement and right-wing radicalism, provides a clear explanation of the ideas, tactics, history, and prominent figures of one of the most disturbing movements in America today. Although it presents itself as a new phenomenon, the Alt-Right is just the latest iteration of a longstanding radical right-wing political tradition. The Alt-Right represents a genuine challenge to pluralistic liberal democracy, but its size and influence are often exaggerated. Whether intentionally or not, President Donald Trump energized the Alt-Right in 2016, yet conflating Trump's variety of right-wing politics with the Alt-Right causes many observers to both overestimate the Alt-Right's size and downplay its radicalism. Hawley provides a tour of the contemporary radical right, and explains how it differs from more mainstream varieties of conservatism. In dispassionate and accessible language, he orients readers to this disruptive and potentially dangerous political moment.
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Schmidt, Dieter, and Simon Shorvon. The End of Epilepsy? Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/med/9780198725909.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Epilepsy is a common disease of the brain, occurring in roughly 1% of all people, and although repeated epileptic seizures are its clinical hallmark, epilepsy is not just a medical phenomenon, but a social construct, with cultural, political, and financial consequences. People with epilepsy are exposed to stigma and burdened with disadvantages which can be far reaching. There are indeed many remedies, but no cure. This book provides a biography of modern epilepsy in the form of a brief and selective narrative of some of the important developments in medical and social epilepsy research, with its many ups and downs, over the period since 1860. Its anatomy of modern epilepsy in eight chapters is, inevitably in this short book, selective, and intentionally provocative. The book’s main objective is to provide both a survey of the evolution of epilepsy and its treatment in the post-Jacksonian era, and also a critical look at where we are today and how we got there. This book tries to make an effort to separate the wheat from the chaff in the development of better epilepsy care. Good and bad events and concepts of historic consequence are discussed. It is acknowledged that, although the end of epilepsy is in reach of some, there is at present no prescribed scientific path to the end of epilepsy for others. Regardless of the severity of epilepsy, patients, with the support of their physicians and modern medicine, must create their own solutions to the multiple issues they face.