A dizzying trip through the mind(s) of the provocative and influential thinker Nick Land. During the 1990s British philosopher Nick Land's unique work, variously described as “rabid nihilism,” “mad black deleuzianism,” and “cybergothic,” developed perhaps the only rigorous and culturally-engaged escape route out of the malaise of “continental philosophy” —a route that was implacably blocked by the academy. However, Land's work has continued to exert an influence, both through the British “speculative realist” philosophers who studied with him, and through the (...) many cultural producers—writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers—who have been invigorated by his uncompromising and abrasive philosophical vision. Beginning with Land's early radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant and Bataille, the volume collects together the papers, talks and articles of the mid-90s—long the subject of rumour and vague legend (including some work which has never previously appeared in print)—in which Land developed his futuristic theory-fiction of cybercapitalism gone amok; and ends with his enigmatic later writings in which Ballardian fictions, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology and the occult are smeared into unrecognisable hybrids. Fanged Noumena gives a dizzying perspective on the entire trajectory of this provocative and influential thinker's work, and has introduced his unique voice to a new generation of readers. (shrink)

I give an argument against nonconceptualist readings of Kants claim that intuitions and concepts constitute two distinct kinds of representation than is assumed by proponents of nonconceptualist readings. I present such an interpretation and outline the alternative reading of the Deduction that results.

In the recent debate between conceptualists and nonconceptualists about perceptual content, Kant’s notion of intuition has been invoked on both sides. Conceptualists claim Kant as a forerunner of their position, arguing that Kantian intuitions have the same kind of content as conceptual thought. On the other hand, nonconceptualists claim Kant as a forerunner of their own position, contending that Kantian intuitions have a distinctly nonconceptual kind of content. In this paper, I argue first, that both sides are wrong about Kant, (...) secondly, that neither side can properly account for the epistemic function of intuition, and thirdly, that Kant’s own notion of intuition contains the resources for a third alternative. The epistemic function of an intuition for Kant is to furnish the sensory representation of an object of cognition. Conceptualism cannot account for this function because it construes perception as a species of thought. As a proper appreciation of Kant’s reasons for insisting upon the heterogeneity of thought and perception puts one in a position to see, any view that does this will fail to do justice to the distinctly sensory nature of intuition. Nonconceptualism, on the other hand, cannot account for the epistemic function of intuition because it views intuition as self-standing, and thus as completely independent from thought. As a consequence, nonconceptualism is not entitled to claim that an intuition is itself a cognitive state. I show that Kant’s actual view avoids both these extremes because it involves a different way of conceiving how perception is informed by conceptual thought. Building on this conception, Kant is able to preserve the distinctly sensory nature of intuition, while also securing proper cognitive standing for it. As a result, Kant’s notion of intuition provides the resources for an alternative account of how thought relates to the senses – one that avoids the shortcomings of the positions staked out in the contemporary debate. (shrink)

Each of Kant’s three Critiques offers an account of the nature of a mental faculty and arrives at this account by means of a procedure I call ‘faculty analysis’. Faculty analysis is often regarded as among the least defensible aspects of Kant’s position; as a consequence, philosophers seeking to inherit Kantian ideas tend to transpose them into a different methodological context. I argue that this is a mistake: in fact faculty analysis is a live option for philosophical inquiry today. My (...) argument is as follows: Faculty analysis is a live option for certain kinds of philosophical theories if so-called “agentialist” views about the nature of belief are correct. There are good reasons for thinking that such views are correct. So faculty analysis should not be dismissed out of hand. Since the first premise in this argument bears a lot of weight, a large part of the paper is devoted to clarifying and defending it, in part by arguing that Kant himself holds a version of agentialism about belief. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that attention to Kant's philosophy of mathematics sheds light on the doctrine that there are two stems of the cognitive capacity, which are distinct, but equally necessary for cognition. Specifically, I argue for the following four claims: The distinctive structure of outer sensible intuitions must be understood in terms of the concept of magnitude. The act of sensibly representing a magnitude involves a special act of spontaneity Kant ascribes to a capacity he (...) calls the productive imagination. Contrary to what is assumed by many commentators, it is not the case that the Two Stems Doctrine implies that a representation is either sensible or spontaneity-dependent, but not both. Outer sensible intuitions are both sensible and spontaneity-dependent – they are sensible because they exhibit the kind of structure Kant takes to be distinctive of outer sensible intuitions, and they depend on spontaneity because they are cases of sensibly representing a magnitude. (shrink)

it is sometimes said that one of Kant’s decisive advances over his predecessors was to have anticipated Frege’s functional theory of concepts, along with its corollary that a concept has significance only in the context of the whole proposition.1 Kant is said to break with a tradition that held that there is a self-standing species of concept-use—called apprehensio simplex, or the conceiving of an idea—in which one represents objects by having a concept before one’s mind, independently of connecting it with (...) other concepts in judgment.2 Since Kant’s use of ‘judgment’ covers what Frege calls judging as well as what he calls grasping a thought, the idea is that according to Kant the only way for a thinker to use a.. (shrink)

The human visual system is amazing in its ability to guide us in a wide range of tasks - driving, reading, playing ball games, or reading music. Somehow our eyes just manage to find the information we need to perform such tasks. This book explores how our eyes process and communicate the data needed for us to negotiate the world around us.

Examines the development iun the period between Descartes and the mid 19th century of the concept of form in semantics.

The requirement of gauge invariance for the Schwinger-DeWitt equations, interpreted as a manifestly covariant quantum theory for the evolution of a system in spacetime, implies the existence of a five-dimensional pre-Maxwell field on the manifold of spacetime and “proper time” τ. The Maxwell theory is contained in this theory; integration of the field equations over τ restores the Maxwell equations with the usual interpretation of the sources. Following Schwinger's techniques, we study the Green's functions for the five-dimensional hyperbolic field equations (...) for both signatures ± [corresponding to O(4, 1) or O(3, 2) symmetry of the field equations] of the proper time derivative. The classification of the Green's functions follows that of the four-dimensional theory for “massive” fields, for which the “mass” squared may be positive or negative, respectively. The Green's functions for the five-dimensional field are then given by the Fourier transform over the “mass” parameter. We derive the Green's functions corresponding to the principal part ΔP and the homogeneous function Δ 1 ; all of the Green's functions can be expressed in terms of these, as for the usual field equations with definite mass. In the O(3, 2) case, the principal part function has support for x2⩾τ2, corresponding to spacelike propagation, as well as along the light cone x2=0 (for τ=0). There can be no transmission ofinformation in spacelike directions, with this propagator, since the Maxwell field, obtained by integration over τ, does not contain this component of the support. Measurements are characterized by such an integration. The spacelike field therefore can dynamically establish spacelike correlations. (shrink)

I raise three objections for Gava’s thesis that the primary task of the Critique of Pure Reason is to develop a doctrine of method for metaphysics, understood as an account of the special kind of unity that a body of cognitions must exhibit to count as a science. First, I argue that this thesis has difficulty accommodating Kant’s concern with explaining the possibility of synthetic a priori judgements. This concern is motivated by a question that is prior to the issue (...) of scientific unity. Second, I argue that the context of the passage in which Kant calls the Critique a treatise on method makes clear that the remark concerns the Copernican Turn. This suggests that the method treated in the book is the procedure required by the Copernican Turn. Third, I dispute Gava’s claim that the idea that confers unity on metaphysics is the cosmopolitan concept of philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Kant’s theory of spatial representation supports a Moderate Conceptualist view of his theory of intuition, according to which Kantian intuitions depend for their objective purport on actualizations of spontaneity in a particular kind of synthesis. In making the case for this I focus on three aspects of the theory of spatial representation: the distinction Kant draws between what he calls the original representation of space and the representations of determinate spaces; the doctrine of the (...) productive imagination; and the related doctrine of the a priori determination of sensibility by understanding. I introduce Moderate Conceptualism, explain why these three aspects support it, and consider a number of objections. (shrink)

The remarkable modern speculations concerning non-Euclidean sorts of space, of which Prof. Helmholtz gave some account in No. III. of MIND, are likely to be hailed as one of the chief difficulties with which the Kantian theory of space will have to deal. Digital edition compiled by Gabriele Dörflinger. Heidelberg University Library.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Despite the many successes of the relativistic quantum theory developed by Horwitz et al., certain difficulties persist in the associated covariant classical mechanics. In this paper, we explore these difficulties through an examination of the classical. Coulomb problem in the framework of off-shell electrodynamics. As the local gauge theory of a covariant quantum mechanics with evolution paratmeter τ, off-shell electrodynamics constitutes a dynamical theory of ppacetime events, interacting through five τ-dependent pre-Maxwell potentials. We present a straightforward solution of the classical (...) equations of motion, for a test event traversing the field induced by a “fixed” event (an event moving uniformly along the time axis at a fixed point in space). This solution is seen to be unsatisfactory, and reveals the essential difficulties in the formalism at the classical levels. We then offer a new model of the particle current—as a certain distribution of the event currents on the worldline—which eliminates these difficulties and permits comparison of classisical off-shell electrodynamics with the standard Maxwell theory. In this model, the “fixed” event induces a Yukawa-type potential, permitting a semiclassical identification of the pre-Maxwell time scale λ with the inverse mass of the intervening photon. Numerical solutions to the equations of motion are compared with the standard Maxwell solutions, and are seen to coincide when λ≳10−6 seconds, providing an initial estimate of this parameter. It is also demonstrated that the proposed model provides a natural interpretation for the photon mass cut-off required for the renormalizability of the off-shell quantum electrodynamics. (shrink)

Philosophers seeking to formulate a philosophy of mind that offers an alternative to the cur-rently dominant reductionist positions frequently appeal to the Kantian thesis that the mind is essentially spontaneous. Yet it is far from clear what the content of this thesis is, and what recommends it. In this paper, I discuss this question and propose a new answer – one that makes better philosophical and textual sense of Kant’s own claims than I believe has hitherto been offered. I do (...) this by focusing on Kant’s claim that, in particular, the represen-tation of categorial unity is spontaneous, rather than receptive. What I call the Single Spe-cies View of Spontaneity locates the rationale for this thesis in the fact that all representa-tion of categorial unity takes place in judgment and that judgment must be conceived as spontaneous. Against this I argue that Kant accepts a Two Species View of Spontaneity, according to which categorial unity can be represented in acts other than judgment. I defend this view by giving an account of Kant’s motivation for regarding categorial unity as spon-taneous, which has both a negative and a positive component. The negative component shows that categorial unity could not be accounted for by a mind whose representational capacities are entirely receptive. The positive component argues that Kant’s conception of cognition as the non-accidental agreement of a representation with its object requires him to hold that the mind is capable of an exercise of spontaneity that is directly involved in sense-perception and, therefore, distinct from judgment. It thus emerges that, properly under-stood, Kant’s thesis about the spontaneity of the mind has a much wider scope and rests on very different grounds than is commonly believed. (shrink)

According to a widely held view, a Kantian intuition functions like a singular term. I argue that this view is false. Its apparent plausibility, both textual and philosophical, rests on attributing to Kant a Fregean conception of judgment. I show that Kant does not hold a Fregean conception of judgment and argue that, as a consequence, intuition cannot be understood on analogy with singular terms.

Recently, in the framework of a relativistic quantum theory with invariant evolution parameter, solutions have been found for the two-body bound state, whose mass spectrum agrees with the nonrelativistic Schrödinger energy spectrum. In this paper, we study the radiative transitions of these states in the dipole approximation and find that the selection rules are identical with those of the usual nonrelativistic theory, expressed in a manifestly covariant form. In addition to the transverse and longitudinal polarizations of the nonrelativistic theory, we (...) find a “scalar” transition, induced by the relative time coordinate, which is of the same type as the longitudinal transition, expressing the Lorentz covariance of the theory. (shrink)

This article infuses texture and context to the new professional role of the pedagogist in early childhood education in Canada. Inspired by the Italian role of the pedagogista, in the Canadian context pedagogists carry out situated work concerned with proposing and collectively creating pedagogical experiences hospitable to invention in the fraught spaces of early childhood education. In particular, the article recounts pedagogists’ modes of response: reading and interpreting; intersecting and interrupting; asking unconventional questions; and intending and discerning. Contrasting these modes (...) of response with professional skills or competencies, we sketch them as acts, gestures, and movements that orient pedagogists in certain ways and put in motion the processes that delineate how educational experiences are composed and configured in early childhood. Through this careful sketching, we take up a guiding question—what might be unique to the work of a pedagogist?—as well as a central assertion—that the work of a pedagogist cannot focus solely on curriculum making. (shrink)

C. I. Lewis’s conception of the given element in perceptual experience was one of the targets of Sellars’ famous charge that many such conceptions fall victim to the Myth of the Given. Yet exactly what makes a conception of the given mythical has remained unclear. Here I aim to clarify this issue by discussing Eric Watkins’ recent claim that a conception exactly like the one Lewis articulated in Mind and the World Order in fact avoids the Myth. Watkins motivates this (...) claim in part by raising objections for John McDowell’s account of the Myth and argues that a better account can be extracted from Kant. I defend McDowell’s position (and reject Watkins’ Kantian account) by arguing that these objections are based on a failure to appreciate an implication of the claim (which Watkins accepts) that rational thought operates in “the logical space of reasons.” Specifically, I focus on the implication that a thinker must be in a position to understand the rational significance of her perceptual experience. Along the way I explain in what ways Watkins’ conception of the given in experience mirrors the view of Lewis. (shrink)

Speakers of English have available a set of terms dedicated to doing individual self-reference: `I' and its grammatical variants, `me', `my', `mine', etc. Speaker selection of other than these dedicated terms may invite special attention for what has prompted their use. This article draws on field recordings of talk-in-interaction in which speakers use `third-person' reference forms when speaking about themselves. We show that third-person forms are recurrently used for representing the views of someone else. We also show how — by (...) drawing on resources such as the distinction between recognitional and non-recognitional person reference forms, and on category bound attributes — the particular third-person term selected can be fitted to and thereby contribute to the action a speaker is implementing through their turn at talk. (shrink)

In the context of a covariant mechanics with Poincaré-invariant evolution parameter τ, Sa'ad, Horwitz, and Arshansky have argued that for the electromagnetic interaction to be well posed, the local gauge function of the field should include dependence on τ, as well as on the spacetime coordinates. This requirement of full gauge covariance leads to a theory of five τ-dependent gauge compensation fields, which differs in significant aspects from conventional electrodynamics, but whose zero modes coincide with the Maxwell theory. The pre-Maxwell (...) fields may exchange mass with charged particles, permitting pair annihilation even at the classical level. The total mass-energy-momentum tensor of the fields and particles is conserved. The Green's functions for the fields provide spacelike and timelike support for correlations, as well as lightlike propagation. A τ-integration of the fields—singling out the massless photons—recovers the standard Maxwell theory, which then has the character of an equilibrium limit of the underlying microscopic dynamics. The pre-Maxwell theory also turns out to be the solution of the inverse problem in variational mechanics: it is shown to be the most general local gauge theory consistent with unconstrained commutation relations in four dimensions. Posed in this framework, the extension to n-dimensions, curved background space, and non-abelian gauge symmetry becomes straightforward. (shrink)

This paper examines the Stark effect, as a first order perturbation of manifestly covariant hydrogen-like bound states. These bound states are solutions to a relativistic Schrödinger equation with invariant evolution parameter, and represent mass eigenstates whose eigenvalues correspond to the well-known energy spectrum of the nonrelativistic theory. In analogy to the nonrelativistic case, the off-diagonal perturbation leads to a lifting of the degeneracy in the mass spectrum. In the covariant case, not only do the spectral lines split, but they acquire (...) an imaginary part which is linear in the applied electric field, thus revealing induced bound state decay in first order perturbation theory. This imaginary part results from the coupling of the external field to the non-compact boost generator. In order to recover the conventional first order Stark splitting, we must include a scalar potential term. This term may be understood as a fifth gauge potential, which compensates for dependence of gauge transformations on the invariant evolution parameter. (shrink)

This study was designed to explore the hypothesis that student ratings accurately reflect selected teacher behaviors (vagueness terms and mazes) in social science. Subjects were 80 undergraduate students who were randomly assigned to one of two teaching conditions, high clarity vs. low clarity teaching. Students rated the high clarity teaching significantly higher than the low clarity teaching, t (78) = 6.22, p<.001. The authors concluded that college students can accurately distinguish between high and low clarity lessons on the basis of (...) selected low-inference teaching behaviors. Additional findings suggested that there is no causal link between vagueness terms/teacher mazes and student achievement at the knowledge (recall) level of the cognitive domain. (shrink)

BACKGROUND: Hallucinations and delusions that complicate Parkinson’s disease could lead to nursing home placement and are linked to increased mortality. Cognitive impairments are typically associated with the presence of hallucinations but there are no data regarding whether such a relationship exists with delusions. OBJECTIVE: We hypothesized that hallucinations would be associated with executive and visuospatial disturbance. An exploratory examination of cognitive correlates of delusions was also completed to address the question of whether they differ from hallucinations. METHODS: 144 PD subjects (...) completed a neuropsychological battery to assess cognition and the SAPS to examine psychosis. Correlational analyses assessed associations between hallucinations and delusions with cognitive domains. RESULTS: 48 subjects reported psychotic symptoms: 25 experienced hallucinations without delusions, 23 had symptoms dominated by delusions. Severity and/or number of hallucination subtypes were significantly correlated with lower scores in language, memory, attention, executive functioning, and visuospatial ability. Correlations with delusions were non-significant. Tests of differences in the size of the correlations between groups revealed a significant relationship between language and visuospatial performance with hallucinations. CONCLUSIONS: Cognitive correlates of hallucinations and delusions appear to be different in PD, suggesting distinct pathogenic mechanisms and possibly anatomical substrates. Hence, delusions may not share the same associations with dementia as hallucinations. Since this is a new finding, further studies will be needed to confirm our results. (shrink)

_Threshold Concepts on the Edge_ explores new directions in threshold concept research and practice and is of relevance to teachers, learners, educational researchers and academic developers.

We explore certain difficulties in the covariant classical mechanics associated with off-shell electrodynamics, through an examination of the classical Coulomb problem. We present a straightforward solution of the classical equations of motion for a test event traversing the field induced by a “fixed” event (an event moving uniformly along the time axis at a fixed point in space). This solution reveals the essential difficulties in the formalism at the classical level. We then offer a new model of the particle, as (...) a certain distribution of events on the worldline, which eliminates these difficulties and permits comparison of classical off-shell electrodynamics with the standard Maxwell theory In this model, the “fixed” event induces a Yukawa-type potential, permitting a semiclassical identification of the pre-Maxwell time scale λ with the inverse mass of the intervening photon. Numerical solutions to the equations of motion are compared with the standard Maxwell solutions—they are seen to coincide when λ > 10–6 sec, providing an initial estimate of this parameter. (shrink)

Frateuria aurantia Swings et al. 1980 is a member of the bispecific genus Frateuria in the family Xanthomonadaceae, which is already heavily tar-geted for non-type strain genome sequencing. Strain Kondô 67T was initially identi-fied as a member of 'Acetobacter aurantius', a name that was not considered for the ap-proved list. Kondô 67T was therefore later designated as the type strain of the newly pro-posed acetogenic species Frateuria aurantia. The strain is of interest because of its triterpenoids. F. aurantia Kondô 67T (...) is the first member of the genus Frateura whose genome sequence has been deciphered, and here we describe the features of this organism, together with the complete genome sequence and annotation. The 3,603,458-bp long chromosome with its 3,200 protein-coding and 88 RNA genes is a part of the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea project. © BY-SA. (shrink)

The papers in this volume question how perceptions of space influenced understandings of the body and its functions, illness and treatment, and the surrounding natural and built environments in relation to health in the classical and...

What can you say after you say that the world—or at least human life on it—looks like it's nearing its end? How about starting with wonder at the possibility that dialogue and subjectivity—the bases of human language—are possible now? In _Time and Human Language Now_ two lifelong friends share, in the form of a long-distance e-mail correspondence, a conversation about the relation between cosmos and consciousness, and about the possibility of being responsibly open toward the future without either despair or (...) unreasoning hope. The urgency that underlies this dialogue is the conviction that there can only be reason for hope if the members of homo sapiens can learn—soon—how vital and astonishing is the phenomenon of shared human presence through language. (shrink)