The Primacy of Perception in Husserl's Theory of Imagining

When a person acts for a reason, mental events have causal effects. This makes it tempting, given various metaphysical considerations, to identify each (human) mental event with some biochemical event. But this token identity thesis is not mandatory and it is implausible. We can instead adopt a non‐Cartesian form of dualism, according to which many mental events are causes distinct from any biochemical events, but persons are spatiotemporal things with physical and mental properties (that supervene on physical properties). Actions are themselves mental events (tryings) that typically cause bodily motions, which also have biochemical causes; and actions are typically caused by other mental events. This does not lead to an objectionable form of overdetermination, given the proposed sufficient condition for causation, which is stated in terms of explanation. An especially relevant form of explanation involves subsuming events under ceteris paribus laws. The overall account avoids objections to standard covering‐law (and regularity) conceptions of causation. An appendix addresses questions about mental content, and how such questions bear on the token identity thesis.

Husserl on the Ego and its Eidos (CartesianMeditations, IV) ALFREDO FERRARIN THE THEORY OF the intentionality of consciousness is essential for Husserl's philosophy, and in particular for his mature theory of the ego. But it runs into serious difficulties when it has to account for consciousness's transcendental constitution of its own reflective experience and its relation to immanent time. This intricate knot, the inseparability of time and constitution, is most visibly displayed in Husserl's writings from the 192os up to the notion of the eidos ego in the fourth Cartesian Meditation. In this paper I want to dwell on the most problematic aspects of this theory. After a few preliminary remarks about the intentionality of consciousness (section 1), I try to place the theory of the substrate of habitualities in the context of Husserl's evolution on the issue of the reflection of the ego on itself (section ~). I briefly follow the threads of Husserl's shifting position from the Logical Investigat /ons and Ideas I to Ideas II, the Cartesian Meditations and the Cr/s/s. I indicate Husserl's works are quoted with the following abbreviations: CM = Cartesiani.~heMeditationen, Husserliana Bd. I, hrsg. v. S. Strasser (Den Haag, 195o); Cartes /an M ~ , trans. D. Cairns (Dordrecht, 196o) SW = Husserl, ShorterWorks,ed. P. McCormick and F. Elliston (Notre Dame, 198a) IZ = Zur Phttnomenologiedes inneren Zeilheun~tseim (z893-z 917), Husserliana Bd. X, hrsg. v. R. Boehm (Den Haag, 1966) Ideen I = ldeen zu einer reinen Ph~nomenologieund ph~nomenologischenPhilosophic, Husserliana Bd. III, hrsg. v. W. Biemel (Den Haag, t95o); Ideas I, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague, Boston, Lancaster, s983) ldeen// = ld., Hussefliana Bd. IV, hrsg. v. M. Biemel (Den Haag, 1952); Ideas I1, trans. R. Rojcewiczand A. Schuwer (Dordrecht, Boston, London, x989) FTL = Forma/eund transzendenta~Log/k,Husserliana Bd. XVII, hrsg. v. P. Janssen (Den Haag, t974) Kr/sh = Kr/s/sder europ~/schenW/ssen~haften,Husserliana Bd. VI, hrsg. v. W. Biemel (Den Haag, 1954) I wish to express my gratitude to Pierre Kerszberg and Alessandra Fussi for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of the paper, and to Graham Harman for checking the final version of my English text. [645] 646 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 32:4 OCTOBER 1994 some historical antecedents, in particular Aristotle, of Husserl's theory of abiding properties which, as far as I can see, have not been pointed out before. Husserl's Entwicklungsgeschichte on the topic of the pure ego has already been the object of important scholarly works, of which Kern's 1964 Husserl und Kant seems to me the best example. But what the secondary literature does not do is develop thematically the ambiguities of Husserl's definitions of consciousness and temporality in a unitary and comprehensive way. While I follow the lead of Berger, Broekman, Kern, Marbach,' and others, I find that their work does not sufficientlystress the difficulties at the core ofintentionality and reflective timeconsciousness . Therefore, although section 2 is a necessary presupposition for drawing some critical conclusions in the final two sections, it does not exhaust my theme. After clarifying the peculiarity of the notions of essence, intuition, transcendental and apriori, as well as their irl:educibility to a Kantian meaning, I turn to the "de facto transcendental ego" resulting from eidetic variation (section 3) in order to introduce an examination of temporality. The difficulties in the twofold requirement, namely, that consciousness be the identical subject of its Erlebnisse and be synthetically unified in time, concern the unity, primacy, and mutual relation of time and consciousness in the constitution of our experience. They have been heady pointed out by Ricoeur in his commentary on the Cartesian Meditations. But what I want to argue in section 4, going beyond Ricoeur's text, is that the tension between temporally constituted and constitutive consciousness in the ego's reflection on its own retentions and protensions does not simply make the question of time ambiguous, but has crucial and problematic bearings on the very definition of consciousness as intentionality. In this respect, it seems very significant to me that post-Husserlian phenomenology has dissociated the analysis of temporality from that of intentionality . On the...

Article Free Access Share on Spatial querying for image retrieval: a user-oriented evaluation Authors: Joemon M. Jose School of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, The Robert Gordon University Aberdeen, AB25 1HG, Scotland School of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, The Robert Gordon University Aberdeen, AB25 1HG, ScotlandView Profile , Jonathan Furner School of Information and Media, The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, AB24 4FP, Scotland School of Information and Media, The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, AB24 4FP, ScotlandView Profile , David J. Harper School of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, The Robert Gordon University Aberdeen, AB25 1HG, Scotland School of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, The Robert Gordon University Aberdeen, AB25 1HG, ScotlandView Profile Authors Info & Claims SIGIR '98: Proceedings of the 21st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrievalAugust 1998 Pages 232–240https://doi.org/10.1145/290941.291000Online:01 August 1998Publication History 40citation894DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations40Total Downloads894Last 12 Months3Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

This topos is focused on intentions, with an emphasis on integrating philosophical analysis and empirical findings. Theorizing about human action has a long history in philosophy, and the nature of intention and intentional action has received a lot of attention in recent analytic philosophy. At the same time, intentional action has become an empirically studied phenomenon in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Many results obtained in these areas have been incorporated within the current philosophical debate, while at the same time scientists have often adopted in their experiments and models philosophical assumptions on the nature of intention and intentional action. As a result, the study of intentions is nowadays a thriving enterprise, where both conceptual and empirical issues are discussed in a dialogue across disciplines. This is well reflected in the selection of papers published here. Davide Rigoni and Marcel Brass discuss the social and neural consequences of disbelieving in free will. Contemporary neuroscience enables the experimental investigation of complex psychological functions related to free will, such as conscious intention, decision-making and selfcontrol. The findings of this research have attracted a lot of media coverage, with frequent claims to the effect that free will is nothing more than an illusion. Rigoni and Brass ask whether, why, and how such neuroscientific findings influence our everyday belief in free will. Based on an extensive review of the literature in experimental philosophy, social psychology and cognitive neuroscience, they show that inducing disbelief in free will has an impact on folk psychology, social behavior and intentional action. Ariel Furstenberg argues for the existence of non-executed unconscious proximal intentions, i.e., unconscious proximal intentions to act that do not result in overt movement. He first presents a conceptual framework that accounts for the phenomenon of non-executed proximal intention and the related phenomenon of change in proximal intention. Then he turns to empirical findings, claiming that a specific EEG signal could provide a neural correlate of a non-executed proximal intention, thus justifying usage of the concept of ‘‘intention’’ even for mental states that never result in overt action. The question of how to account for intentions in the absence of overt action is also central in Zoe Drayson’s discussion of mental agency in post-coma patients. She critically reviews recent findings which suggest that intentional mental action may be reliably revealed by a certain pattern of neural activity, thus allowing to attribute conscious awareness to patients in vegetative states, with important legal and ethical consequences. However, Drayson identifies two key weaknesses in this so-called ‘argument from volition’: first, while the neuroimaging data may provide evidence for the existence of certain mental events, it is neutral with regard to whether these mental events constitute mental actions; second, it is difficult to see how one could set up a neuroimaging task that would enable us to make the required discrimination. Elisabeth Pacherie tackles a foundational question in the philosophy of action: How do conscious intentions relate to actions? She first presents the traditional philosophical view of the structure of agency, in which conscious intentions are the causes of actions, as well as two important worries raised by recent empirical findings: skepticism about the role of consciousness in the causation M. Schlosser (&) F. Paglieri School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: markus.schlosser@ucd.ie

Russell's later theory of perception by Thomas A. Wilson 1. CONSTRUCTION OF THE THEORY THIS ESSAY IS primarily an account of Bertrand Russell's later theory of perception. Russell scholarship has tended to ignore his views on this topic, and on epistemology generally, as published in his works after The Analysis ofMind in 1921. This omission has lately begun to be corrected,I and this work is offered as a contribution to that end. In Human Knowledge, Russell maintains that common sense divides the world of human experience into mental and physical objects and events. Mental events include emotions, feelings of pleasure and pain, sentiments, passions, desires, and volitions. All of these mental occurr- .ences are capable of perception by the human subject to whom and in I Perhaps the reasons for this omission may be found in Russell's bewildering changes of position from the Platonic realism of The Problems ofPhilosophy through the constructionism of Our Knowledge of the External World to the logical atomism of "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism". The reasons for these changes have lately been made clear by the publication of Theory of Knowledge: The 1913 Manuscript, ed. Elizabeth Ramsden Eames in collaboration with Kenneth Blackwell, Vol. 7ofThe Collected Papers ofBertrand Russell (London and Boston: George Allen and Unwin, 1984). For works providing a remedy to the lack of attention paid to Russell's later epistemology, see A. J. Ayer, "The Causal Theory of Perception", Aristotelian Society: Supplemental Volume, 51 (1977): 105-25; Renford Bambrough, "Conflict and the Scope of Reason", Ratio, 20 (Dec. 1978): 77-91; Aaron BenZeev, "The Analytic, Syntheticand 'A Priori"', Scientia, 1I4 (Oct. 1979): 481-93; William Edward Morris, "Moore and Russell on Philosophy and Science", Metaphilosophy, 10 (April 1979): 11I-38; and C. Mason Myers, "The Concept of Substance", Southern Journal of Philosophy, 15 (Winter 1977): 505-19. 26 Russell's later theory of perception 27 whom they happen, and they are all classified as events in that person's life.2 Physical things and events are those occurrences which are believed by common sense to take place outside of the human subject, such as a noise or a flash of lightning. They also include inferences to what is not perceived, such as the centre of the earth and (at the time when Russell wrote) the dark side of the moon (pp. 224-5). These common-sense notions are on the whole adequate as regards mental events but confused enough to require "radical alteration" as to the nature of physical objects and events. What is known without inference about such allegedly external events as "seeing the sun", for example , is that what is actually seen is a mental event in the perceiving human subject. Similarly, in the case ofseeing tables and chairs, what is actually seen are percepts in the private visual space of the perceiver and what is felt consists of tactual sensations in the private tactual space of the perceiver (p. 225). Inferences of this sort are unnoticed by common sense. They are only revealed by the examination of the relation of physics to common sense. Russell observes that physics starts out with the intention of justifying naive realism but ends by elaborating a theory which holds that the perception of a table or chair, for instance, only resembles the physical table or chair in certain abstract structural respects (ibid.). Physical objects and events must be assumed to cause the perceptions of human beings since otherwise there is no reason to accept science in general, and the refusal of this acceptance is probably irrational (p. 228). Positive grounds for the assumption that there are physical and mental events are based ona distinction between these two types ofevents which are clearer than that provided by common sense. A physical event is one which, if it is known to occur, is an event which is inferred and is not known to be mental. A mental event, on the other hand, is known otherwise than by inference (p. 229). Given this distinction, the inference from the existence of a percept, such as a red colour patch or the hardness ofa common-sensical table, to the existence of a physical object...

Causation, Intentionality, and Cognitive Action Theory

Given a so‐called naturalistic theory of mental content (of the sort urged by Fodor and others), one might be able to maintain that certain biochemical events have the very mental contents that some mental events have, thereby avoiding many arguments against identity theses. But given the arguments, one cannot assume that there is a naturalistic theory to be had. And by drawing on Stalnaker, we can sketch an account of ‘where content comes from’ given which, it is implausible that biochemical events have mental content.

Shamatha, Transcendental, and Stillness Meditation are said to aim for “contentless” experiences, where mental content such as thoughts, perceptions, and mental images is absent. Silence is understood to be a central feature of those experiences. The main source of information about the experiences is texts by experts from within the three traditions. Previous research has tended not to use an explicit scientific method for selecting and reviewing expert texts on meditation. We have identified evidence synthesis as a robust and transparent method that is suitable for this purpose. In this paper we use evidence synthesis based on expert texts to examine silence/quietness as a feature of the contentless experiences in the three practices. Objective criteria were used to select a sample of 135 expert texts. A database containing the expert descriptions of the meditation techniques and experiences was produced by extracting the relevant material from the publications and coding that material to differentiate individual features. The database, which forms part of the Supplementary Material for this paper, identifies each feature of the contentless experiences referred to in the expert texts, including silence/quietness. Our key finding is that the experts indicate silence/quietness has a particular connection with stillness, and the absence of concepts, mental activity/noise, thoughts, and disturbance. Further analysis leads to the following insights. The silence/quietness reflects the absence of thoughts and sounds, and this fits neatly with a conception of silence/quietness as the absence of internal and external noise. In some cases the terms silence and quietness may also reflect the absence of other disturbances such as non-auditory perceptions, mental images, and negative feelings. That would fit with a conception of silence/quietness as complete calm or absence of disturbance. It is not clear from the expert texts how silence/quietness is distinct from other features such as stillness that also reflect the absence of disturbances. As a separate matter, silence/quietness has connections with all the other features of the contentless experiences, but the closeness of the connections varies. Our work uncovers fine distinctions and ambiguities which lead to new research questions that can be explored in future studies.

In a series of essays, collectively published as Brainstorms,' D. C. Dennett proposes to radically change our views on psychological explanation. As part of this project, he must convince us that his account of mental images is consistent with his general project. Doing so entails giving an account of mental images which reduces the main issues to questions within the domain of the experimental psychologist more particularly, the neurophysiologist but which at the same time reserves some room for all of the things that people have traditionally wanted to say about their mental images: what they looked like, and so on. It is important for him to do this because only such an analysis will fit comfortably with his more general strategy for dealing with 'philosophy of mind.' In what follows, I will argue that Dennett's proposed analysis of mental images is inadequate, and that its inadequacies raise doubts about the more general project. Before embarking on that task, it might help to give a brief sketch of Dennett's more general position. The general concept in Dennett's theory is that of intentionality. That is, his main concern is to analyze what we mean by talking about human beings as intentional systems, things with beliefs, desires, and other intentional states. With respect to intentionality, Dennett holds three apparently incompatible theses; explaining away the apparent incompatibility will serve as a fair introduction to his approach. The first thesis is that one ought to try to 'legitimize' rather than 'reduce' intentional talk about mental events (p. xvii). (This is true of at least some such talk: Dennett also wants to argue that some mentalistic concepts are so ill-defined that

Smyslem článku je představit a kriticky k sobě vztáhnout Brentanovu a Husserlovu teorii abstrakce, jak je obsažena v jeho Logických zkoumáních, a z ní vycházející konceptualistické a realistické teorie obecnosti. Nejprve vycházím z rozboru Brentanova konceptualismu, a to zejména vzhledem k některým historickým inspiracím jeho teorie, jako dva možné zdroje jsem vybral Aristotelský konceptualismus a novověkou konceptualistickou pozici školy z Port-Royal. Následně se věnuji Husserlově kritice nominalismu a z ní plynoucí teorie názoru obecných entit. Zasazuji tuto nauku do všeobecnější nauky o formách intencionality vědomí obecnosti v Logických zkoumáních a ukazuji, že tato nauka je nedořešená a ponechává mnoho k projasnění. Následně se vracím k Brentanovi a ukazuji, opět v souvislosti s port-royalskou teorií Antoina Arnaulda, že Brentanův konceptualismus taktéž končí ve slepé uličce. The goal of the article is to describe and critically asses Brentano's and Husserl's theories of abstraction and their ensuing theories of generality. At the beginning I describe Brentano's Conceptualism with regard to some of its historical sources, especially with regard to Aristotelism and the school of Port-Royal. I then approach Husserl's critique of Nominalism from his Logical Investigations and his theory if general intuition. I try to put the theory of general intuition into the wider context of Husserl's theory of generality in Logical Investigations in order to show a fundamental problem and a certain unclarity of this position. I then go back to Brentano to show, yet again in relation to Antoin Arnaulds theory, that Brentano's conceptualism is not tenable.

Roughly, behaviorist accounts of self-knowledge hold that first persons acquire knowledge of their own minds in just the same way other persons do: by means of behavioral evidence. One obvious problem for such accounts is that the fail to explain the great asymmetry between the authority of first person as opposed to other person attributions of thoughts and other mental states and events. Another is that the means of acquisition seems so different: other persons must infer my mental contents from my behavior, whereas I need not. In this paper, I articulate a specifically Sellarsian behavioristic account of our knowledge of our own and others’ minds, and defend it against these two obvious objections. I further defend it against objections from Davidson, to the effect that Sellars’ account in particular cannot properly formulate the asymmetry at issue, and that behaviorism in general cannot account for the a priori character of the asymmetry. I argue that Davidson misinterprets Sellars at key points, and also misconstrues his own explanandum: What Sellars account can explain is an asymmetry in the reliability of first and other person attributions, but this asymmetry is not a priori. What is a priori is an asymmetry in the practice of according epistemic authority to such attributions. I argue that this asymmetry is what Davidson can and does explain, by appeal to the constitutive features of radical interpretation. But accepting this explanation does not require the rejection of Sellars’ account of the way that first and other persons in fact arrive at beliefs about their mental contents. The two approaches — one descriptive and empirical, the other constitutive and ideal — are compatible.

This paper defends an interpretation of Husserl's theory of language, specifically as it appears in the Logical Investigations, as an example of a larger body of theories dubbed 'language as calculus'. Although this particular interpretation has been previously defended by other authors, such as Hintikka and Kusch, this paper proposes to contribute to the discussion by arguing that what makes this interpretation plausible are Husserl's distinction between the notions of meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment, his view that meaning is instantiated through meaning-intending acts of transcendental consciousness, and his view that the content of meaning-intending acts is ideal meaning simpliciter. As well, the paper argues that the phenomenological method of reduction itself presupposes the notion that reality as such can be reached by subtracting the influence of the language of the natural attitude and its ontological commitments and it, thus, presupposes the conception of language as a reinterpretable calculus.

A clinical example illustrates the thesis that the experience of feeling empty, like any other mental event, can be understood in terms of the conflicting wishes, prohibitions , compromises, and gratifications that color any experience in ways that clarify its meaning. Theoretical hypotheses which explain mental events and experiences as the result of deficiencies of structures are difficult to translate into therapeutic practices. This is especially true in the case of the experience of emptiness which, in and of itself and often vigorously, asserts an absence of content. The equating of deficiencies of structures, however formulated, with deficiencies in mental content or activity can result in unconsciously joining the empty patient in repudiating important aspects of internal life, maintaining ultimately pathological gratifications , and often contributing to treatment stalemates in which the "absence of content" is often preferred to the presence of frightening wishes, fantasies, and memories.

Conventional research programs adopt efficient cause as a metaphor for how mental events affect behavior. Such theory-constitutive metaphors usefully restrict the purview of research programs, to define the space of possibilities. However, conventional research programs have not yet offered a plausible account of how intentional contents control action, and such an account may be beyond the range of its theoretical possibilities. Circular causality supplies a more inclusive metaphor for how mental events might control behavior. Circular causality perpetuates dynamic structures in time. Mental contents are seen as emergent dynamic constraints perpetuated in time and vertically coupled across their multiple timescales. Intentional contents are accommodated as extraordinary boundary conditions (constraints) that evolve on timescales longer than those of motor coordination (Kugler & Turvey, 1987). Intentional contents, on their longer timescales, are thus available to control embodied processes on shorter timescales. One key assumption-that constraints are vertically coupled in time-is motivated empirically by correlated noise, long-range correlations in the background variability of measured laboratory performances.

1 hypothesis about children's developing conception of the mind is that preschoolers are limited to an understanding that persons have internal, mental contents like thoughts and beliefs, whereas older children and adults conceive of the mind itself as an independent, active structure or processor. Adults' conception of the mind in this independent active fashion seems evident in their use of personified mental metaphor (e.g., "My mind tricked me"). 3 studies examined the development and consolidation of this active, personified view. Study 1 provided an analysis of natural language data regarding 1 child's uses of vision words such as see and look from age 2 1/2 to 8 years. We examined the child's use of such words to refer literally to perception (e.g., "I see the TV") and also to refer nonliterally to active mental processes such as comprehension and inference (e.g., "I see what you mean"). Studies 2 and 3 examined 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds' comprehension and production of mental metaphors. In a metaphor comprehension task, we asked children to interpret personified metaphoric statements about the mind (e.g., "My mind wandered") and 3 comparison domains, mechanics (e.g., "The car is dead"), nature (e.g., "The wind is howling"), and emotion (e.g., "Her heart was smiling"). In an explanation task, we asked children to explain the processes underlying the making of both instant photos and mental images. The findings reveal a developing ability to interpret and produce statements personifying the mind and provide considerable evidence about children's movement toward a conception of the mind as an independent entity deserving reference and conceptualization in its own right.