The computational society.

460 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:3 JULY 1996 Graeme Hunter, editor. Spinoza: The Enduring Questions. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Pp. xi + 182. Cloth, $70.00. This volume of eight essays is dedicated to the memory of the late David Savan, and originated from a conference held in his honor prior to his untimely death. The lead essay is by Savan himself, and most of the other essays acknowledge the influence of his work. The first three essays address not only an "enduring question," but a question about enduring: namely, the nature of eternality and immortality in Spinoza's metaphysics. In a dense and detailed essay that amply rewards close analysis, Savan aims to clarify Spinoza's conception of eternity. That conception, Savan argues, cannot be identified with any of the three main conceptions dominant in previous philosophizing: (1) eternity as sempiternity; (2) eternity as Platonic timelessness; and (3) eternity as necessary existence, following from a thing's own essence. Chief among his reasons is that Spinoza characterizes eternity not as one superlative kind of existence, but rather as "existence itself," conceived in a certain way (i.e., conceived as "following from the definition itself of the eternal thing"). On Savan's interpretation, Spinoza has a strict or absolute sense of "eternity" in which only God can be said to be eternal, and another, qualified sense in which all singular things are eternal (as well as being contingent and durational). Thus, on Savan's interpretation, each individual human mind is itself eternal. His attribution of this latter doctrine to Spinoza is greatly facilitated by three other aspects of his interpretive procedure: (1) his unwillingness to draw a distinction between "eternal" and "conceived under a form of eternity"; his treatment of a thing's formal and actual essences as two "aspects" (eternal and durational, respectively) of what is in reality the same essence; and (3) his nominalizing tendency to read Spinoza as identifying (or nearly identifying) singular things with their essences. The result is that Spinoza's various remarks about the conceivability of the human mind "under a form of eternity" and about the eternality of the formal essence of the human mind can all be recruited as evidence that Spinoza regarded human minds themselves as eternal. Savan goes on to attribute to Spinoza the seemingly un-Spinozistic doctrine that "each distinctive existent is eternally free." In the essay immediately following Savan's, James C. Morrison outlines and reaffirms the strong textual evidence that, for Spinoza, it is only a part of each individual mind, and not the individual human mind itself, that is eternal. Leslie Armour offers a wildly speculative interpretation of Spinoza according to which human minds survive death because they will be re-expressed--complete with sets of distinctive personal memories--at some future time (or perhaps even "in some different world"), so that God and his eternal idea of each human being's essence may be expressed with maximal reality. Armour recommends interpreting Spinoza as holding this doctrine of the "afterlife as a continuing adventure" partly because of the doctrine's alleged capacity to provide emotional comfort--evidently without noticing that Spinoza's psychology involves a claim to demonstrate that the emotions attending adequate understanding are themselves capable of overcoming fear of death, quite without the need for quasiresurrections or quasi-reincarnations. BOOK REVIEWS 461 Edwin Curley's "Notes on a Neglected Masterpiece: Spinoza and the Science of Hermeneutics" takes as its starting point Savan's claim that Spinoza is the "founder of scientific hermeneutics." Rejccting the most extreme interpretation of this claim--i.e., that Spinoza created scientific hermeneutics ex nihilo--Curlcy carefully compares Spinoza 's contributions to Biblical criticism with those of Hobbes and Isaac La Peyr~re, and concludes that Spinoza's work possesses, in addition to a generally higher level of hermeneutical rigor, something quite specific that they do not--namely, "a well worked-out theory of what is required for the interpretation of a text." This theory demands that we begin by applying to textual interpretation the Cartesian strategy of "removing all prejudices" and preconceptions; doing so allows us to interpret a text such as the Bible in...

Maurice Bloch (2012) argues that ethnographers’ animosity toward and ignorance of cognitive science is based on a false dichotomy between ‘nature’ (as in universal human nature) and ‘culture’. Bloch characterises ethnography as evoking and describing culturally and historically specific symbolic systems that ground and enable meaningful lives. He further argues that there is no such thing as ‘super-organic meaning’. All meaning, even culturally constructed meaning, is the product of individual human minds and must be interpreted by individual minds. Cognitive science, including philosophy and linguistics as well as psychology, is the science of mental representations, and thus of the symbols individual minds create, interpret and use in practice, communication and thought. Bloch argues that ignoring the science of mental representation, at the very least, makes the work of ethnographers less nuanced and rich than it might otherwise be and, at worst, leads to theoretical commitments that are deeply counterproductive. Conversely, he argues that cognitive scientists’ refusal or inability to understand the profound lessons of the work of ethnographers from Malinowski through Boas through Evans-Pritchard through Geertz symmetrically makes their work less nuanced and rich thanitmightotherwisebeandsimilarlyleadstoavoidable,theoreticallyimportant,errors. Here I focus on the latter possibility. I respond to two of Bloch’ sw orries concerning where cognitive science has gone wrong by virtue of not properly appreciating the cultural/historical specificity of symbol systems. Although I believe these worries are groundless, I endorse Bloch’s call for rapprochement, and conclude with other reasons cognitive scientists should enlist in the more sustained collaboration Bloch advocates. Bloch’s worries:

This paper explores the meaning of Veblenian instrumental value from the perspective of two strands of twentieth-century systems literature: the theories of Niklas Luhmann and C. West Churchman. The distinct Veblenian approach to defining instrumental value is in terms of the "generic ends of life" implicated in the development of technological knowledge. Based on Luhmann's work, the paper argues that the complexity of technological knowledge would overburden the individual human mind. Consequently, it needs to be reduced through the institution of the business firm, the meaning of which is shown to be in substituting private ownership and profit-seeking motivation for those segments of technological complexity that cannot be grasped by the individual mind. Churchman's work is utilized to discuss the possibility of attaining instrumental value by "sweeping-in" the complexity that has been reduced by the business firm. This sweeping-in is the task of the Deweyian "public" manifesting itself in law and comparable forms of public regulation. Thus, the proposed systems theory perspective explains pecuniary value as a complexity-reducing device, and instrumental value as the human capacity to preserve sensitivity to those aspects of complexity that are suppressed by pecuniary value.

The pragmatist tradition in philosophy has left a sound legacy in many contemporary research fields. John Dewey’s continuist and emergentist approach to the nature-or-nurture problem in relation to the individual human mind has been regained lately in evolutionist psychology and related disciplines. For Dewey, language plays a fundamental role in creating and maintaining this continuity between the individual mind and the social and physical environment humans inhabit. The present article will focus on a few contemporary lines of research that identify language as the ‘glue’ that bonds each individual to one another and to society, with a decisive impact on the development of one’s own mind.

<strong>Abstract. </strong>The paper is focused on the study of the political conflict image from the perspective of psychosemantics. The integral psychosemantic approach to the political conflict allowed establishing semantic universals viewed as students’ evaluation of the conflict’s image. Among the parameters were active, dangerous, open, rational, moral, close, aggressive, etc. The results of the students’ semantic space study through the semantic differential showed that the semantic constructs of “political conflict” image as reflected in the minds of the students, and “real political conflict” image are different, since the reality is able to change their cognitive interpretation and emotional attitude.

Distributed cognition in early literacy

Human Selves, Chronic Illness, and the Ethics of Medicine One of the rare pleasures of being at The Hearings Center and involved in discussions of medical ethics is that occasionally we are shaken to our philosophic boots. Amidst our deliberations, we come to the sudden and stunning realization that we do not really know what we are talking about. We rediscover that medical ethics hovers over a philosophic abyss. Fortunately this does not happen often, or we would not be able to carry on with our work. Ordinarily we are like the Harlem Globetrotters of old. We emerge from our offices, the bioethicist's locker room, gather around the conference table, and toss around our cherished ethical principles, autonomy, beneficence, and justice. We twirl them on our fingers, bounce them off our lips, and dribble them through our legs. Ignoring the abyss, we put on a great show and skillfully employ our conceptions, assuming both that they are adequate and that we all know what they mean and imply. This is "Sweet Georgia Brown" ethics, and it is lively, interesting, and usually serves us well. But occasionally the music stops, and we become mired in philosophic quandary. Consider one of our fundamental ethical values: respect for persons and individual autonomy. We ethically require our health care providers to obtain our informed consent, either direct or substituted, before they practice their medicine on us. But who and what are these professionals finally supposed to respect? Is it our rational decision-making capacities? Our individual bodily integrity and historical, biographical, temporally deep selves? Our lives amidst immediate family and friends? Or our active lives pursued within particular and concrete wordly settings, cultural and natural? How we answer this question importantly determines our particular ethical duties. However, such an answer depends on our conception of a human self, of who we are. This, in turn, determines what in practice we want respected or cared for, and what individual human autonomy, may concretely mean. It is precisely here, with the human self, that we stare into the philosophic abyss. "You would not find out the boundaries of the soul, even by traveling along every path: so deep a measure (Logos) does it have." Thus spoke the presocratic Heraclitus (Fragment 45). After all these years, we still lose ourselves along the footpaths of the soul. No doubt it is difficult enough to understand the enigmatic Heraclitus, yet there is one thing we can learn from his aphoristic arrows. The understanding of the self is not a matter of scientific or empirical knowledge that can be decided once and for all. It is a task for philosophic or speculative interpretation, and is essentially open-ended. It is a metaphysical question finally requiring bold fights of rational imagination, always tentative, aiming at an adequate conceptual elucidation of who we are and what we experience and endure. In our ongoing efforts to understand ourselves adequately, we moderns are importantly undermined by recent metaphysical speculation. We poorly comprehend the essential relation of our concrete selves to our organic bodies and to the world abroad. The chief philosophic culprit is arguably the modern conception of "substance," originally fashioned in the great period of substance and genius, the seventeenth century. Here is the crucial point from which critical and speculative reflections should commence. We must begin, of course, with Descartes and his famous and fateful partition of reality into three types of substance--God, Res Extensa, and Res Cogitans: the Divine Being, extended or physical things, and thinking things. A substance is conceived as that which requires nothing else in order to exist, an entity that can be alone by itself, in need of no other in order to be. For example, a human individual's mind does not require a body in order to exist, nor does a body need a human mind, and God requires neither. …

This research take Taiwan native place writer Liu Ke xiang as the discussion object, after locking its 2000, composed the roaming books were the ranges of study, used the text analytic method, take the text in “with him”, “the time rhythm”, “the spatial route” did as three big research faces, after analysis induction, grasped the author to roam the written idea and the vein is as follows: First, has combed the text time rhythm and the spatial route discovered that in the author writing, “the human” is one of roaming elements, but in non-roaming “the only main body”, transmits the humanity also to belong to the nature, the nature namely the idea which belongs to for the humanity; Next, by roaming, the humanity unceasingly and his dialog, a piece of command humanity is naturally getting more and more full, moreover lets the humanity because of with naturally he dialog, retrieves completely, also locates the humanity self-and naturally he relations. Furthermore, present paper by “slow. Inundation. The vine” the tertiary concept, elaborates Liu Kexiang in the text multi-direction “roaming” the image to assume obviously; what “slow” refers to fords is roaming timeliness, shows calm which one kind does not rush to time; “inundates” refers to fords the non-sense of purpose traveling, in comfortablely along with being popular, expansion tourist map; As for “vine”, then refers to fords the traveling angle of view “thoroughly”, “to expand extends”, like the vine exquisite observation small life, the small detail, the thing which neglects long-term ── by these three concepts, the author are proposed specifically attentively with the traditional traveling: Rushes to time, catches up with the way big jing courtyard traveling concept which the traveling schedule, gives a cursory look. The author regarding the Taiwan roaming literature biggest contribution, lies in the significance which will roam, relaxes the description by individual sense organ's body and mind, strengthened in the general travel literature the mind return written part, also unceasing ruminates embarks with the difference which returns; And because of roaming expands, but for the humanity self-and he harmonious corresponding relationships' search, the roaming goal is also naturally affable from individual body and mind, and one kind the life manner which is fastidious about the leisure and savors, the deepening, but for with naturally he dialog as well as harmonious relational ultimate tracking down.

Relating second language acquisition to linguistics means looking at the nature of both linguistics and second language research. Chomsky (1986a, p. 3) defined three basic questions for linguistics: (i) What Constitutes Knowledge of Language? The prime goal of linguistics is to describe the language contents of the human mind; its task is to represent what native speakers know about language — their linguistic competence. Achieving this goal means producing a fully explicit representation of the speaker’s competence, that is to say, a generative grammar of a ‘particular language’. From the outset, this question defines linguistics as based on the internal reality of language in the individual mind rather than on the external reality of language in society. (ii) How is Knowledge of Language Acquired? A second goal for linguistics is discovering how knowledge of language comes into being — how linguistic competence is acquired by the human mind. Chomsky proposes to achieve this goal by describing how innate principles of the child’s mind create linguistic competence, that is to say how the child’s mind turns the language input it encounters into a grammar by using its built-in capabilities. Phrased in another way, knowledge of language is not only created by the human mind but also constrained by its structure.

Making a unique appearance in Descartes’ texts and giving rise to a range of contested interpretations is the phrase substantia pura as it is applied to mens humana in contrast to corpus humanum in the Synopsis: “the human mind is not made up of any accidents in this way, but is a pure substance.”1 Descartes’ meaning seems plain enough — unlike the human body the mind is not constituted by its changing “accidents”, by its “different objects of understanding and different desires and sensations”. This notion of substance excludes individual bodies, but includes “body in general” as well as individual minds.

Complex design problems require more knowledge than any single person possesses because the knowledge relevant to a problem is usually distributed among stakeholders. Bringing different and often controversial points of view together to create a shared understanding among these stakeholders can lead to new insights, new ideas, and new artifacts. New media that allow owners of problems to contribute to framing and resolving complex design problems can extend the power of the individual human mind. Based on our past work and study of other approaches, systems, and collaborative and participatory processes, this article identifies challenges we see as the limiting factors for future collaborative human-computer systems. The Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory (EDC) is introduced as an integrated physical, and computational environment addressing some of these challenges. The vision behind the EDC shifts future development away from the computer as the focal point, toward an emphasis that tries to improve our understanding of the human, social, and cultural system that creates the context for use. This work is based on new conceptual principles that include creating shared understanding among various stakeholders, contextualizing information to the task at hand, and creating objects to think with in collaborative design activities. Although the EDC framework is applicable to different domains; our initial effort has focused on the domain of urban planning (specifically transportation planning) and community development.

PurposeThe current debate between two theoretical approaches in library and information science and knowledge organization (KO), the cognitive one and the sociological one, is addressed in view of their possible integration in a more general model. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approachPersonal knowledge of individual users, as focused in the cognitive approach, and social production and use of knowledge, as focused in the sociological approach, are reconnected to the theory of levels of reality, particularly in the versions of Nicolai Hartmann and Karl R. Popper (three worlds). The notions of artefact and mentefact, as proposed in anthropological literature and applied in some KO systems, are also examined as further contributions to the generalized framework. Some criticisms to these models are reviewed and discussed.FindingsBoth the cognitive approach and the sociological approach, if taken in isolation, prove to be cases of philosophical monism as they emphasize a single level over the others. On the other hand, each of them can be considered as a component of a pluralist ontology and epistemology, where individual minds and social communities are but two successive levels in knowledge production and use, and are followed by a further level of “objectivated spirit”; this can in turn be analyzed into artefacts and mentefacts. While all these levels are relevant to information science, mentefacts and their properties are its most peculiar objects of study, which make it distinct from such other disciplines as psychology and sociology.Originality/valueThis analysis shows how existing approaches can benefit from additional notions contributed by levels theory, to develop more complete and accurate models of information and knowledge phenomena.

J M Keynes’s Mathematical Platonism(Realism) in the A Treatise on Probability, Like Kurt Godel’s Mathematical Platonism, Held That All Mathematical Entities Were Independent of the Human Mind, but They Could Be Perceived or Intuited Directly From The Abstract Universe in Which They Existed: Keynes Was Both a Platonist (Logicist) and Aristotelian (Empiricist)

Zhang Zai's philosophy is perhaps the most complete exposition of Confucianism from the Northern Song. His theory of ethics which emphasizes the practice of etiquette and moral standard is highly valued, and the objectives of his teaching are the reorientation of scholarship and the personal attainment of sagehood. This study considers aspects of ritual practice, focusing on four aspects to his discourse of ”zhi li cheng xing:” its origin in the Way of Heaven, its textual basis, its content in the individual mind and in human relations, as well its practical application in daily life. These four aspects are analyzed step by step to understand how his practical ritual theory and his theoretical philosophy are part of a consistent body of thinking and how he intended them to be put into practice. This demonstrates how Zhang Zai's philosophy has a dual focus in both ethics and practice.The main characteristic of his ritual theory is that the tai xu and tai he that make up his cosmology, giving a natural principal to human society in its three levels of public rituals, the order of human social relationships, and the meaning of individual life. The inner ability to comprehend cosmological order to the highest level enables the complete expression of the nature of Heaven and Earth, while the outer body can physically practice the rituals. This unity of inner and outer, together creates the possibility of bringing ”human nature to completion.” In his view, this is the true meaning of ethics. A life conforming to ritual will also be in accord with the Way of Heaven. This paper shows how Zhang Zai in his willingness to himself provides a model of actually practicing traditional ritual, and in the end he was able to alter human customs, which makes him a scholar whose work truly had animpact on society.

The Origins of Grammaticizable Notions: Beyond the Individual Mind