Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 1, January 2022.

This article expands Cavell’s interpretation of The Philadelphia Story (1940) in relation to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1596) and gendered democratic flourishing. My first section rehearses Geraldine Heng’s argument in Empire of Magic (2004) that the medieval romance genre channels Crusades trauma into imagined British nationhood, as embodied by Merlin. My second section finds a second wave of romantic overflow in Shakespeare’s play via the fairy king Oberon. My third section identifies Cary Grant's “C. K. Dexter Haven” as (...) the film’s Merlin/Oberon. The Dionysian current of this Merlin-Oberlin-Grant flow I call “magical weakness,” a strategic male self-weakening for gendered democratic flourishing. (shrink)

Discusses the fundamental question of how life can continue to evolve on Earth.

The dream solution of the continuum hypothesis would be a solution by which we settle the continuum hypothesis on the basis of a newly discovered fundamental principle of set theory, a missing axiom, widely regarded as true. Such a dream solution would indeed be a solution, since we would all accept the new axiom along with its consequences. In this article, however, I argue that such a dream solution to $\mathrm {CH}$ is unattainable.

Dream experiences are heterogenous and involve a complex and varied phenomenology. While mental states like belief and desire can be easily characterised by their attitudes and contents, dreaming seems to involve a variety of attitudes, including beliefs, desires, and more. How do we make sense of dreaming itself as well as its relationship to the attitudes involved? We outline an attitudinal pluralism about dreaming. Attitudinal pluralism is the view that the dream self can adopt a variety of attitudes—beliefs, (...) desires, hopes, fears, etc.—towards the content of the dreamscape. On this view, there are multiple attitudes that the dream self can adopt within the simulated dream world. The best way to understand this pluralism is not by narrowly taking dreaming to just involve thinking itself, but rather by taking dreaming to involve a dream self experiencing thoughts within the dream. The attitudes belong to the dream self (the character one identifies with in the dream) not the dreamer per se (the sleeping subject). This attitudinal pluralism has consequences for thinking about the nature of dream experiences and the content of dream memories. First, the attitudes we experience as part of the dream world seem to go beyond mere phenomenology and may be part of the ontological structure of dream experiences. Second, accuracy in dream memories will involve recalling the various attitudes that one adopted while dreaming. Understood in this way, accuracy in dream memory requires a condition of authenticity, such that the dream memory represents not just the content of the dreamscape, but the way in which the dream subject experienced the dream world. Accurate dream memories will be authentic dream memories. (shrink)

This book discusses the puzzle about death which is one of several extra-philosophical puzzles about the self. "Valberg's book is thoughtful, original, and challenging.

“The Matrix is a computer-generated dreamworld built to keep us under control” Morpheus, early in The Matrix. “ In dreaming, you are not only out of control, you don’t even know it…I was completely duped again and again the minute my pons, my amygdala, my perihippocampal cortex, my anterior cingulate, my visual association and parietal opercular cortices were revved up and my dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was muffled” ” J. Allan Hobson, The Dream Drugstore, p.64 The Matrix is an exercise (...) in ambivalence, and at the very heart of that ambivalence lies the Dream. In our dreams, we are not in control. Real dreaming, unlike many popular philosophers’ fictions, is an altered state, closely related to the states induced by chemical manipulations such as the use of (certain) medical or recreational drugs. The dreaming brain is not like the wakeful brain. Normal sensory input is blocked, attentional capacities are impaired or lost, memory is distorted, reasoning and logic are weakened, narratives run wild, self-reflection is dampened or destroyed, emotion and instinct are hyperstimulated, and forms of ‘top-down’ willed control and decision-making diluted and easily overwhelmed. (shrink)

As a response to the semantic and logical paradoxes, theorists often reject some principles of classical logic. However, classical logic is entangled with mathematics, and giving up mathematics is too high a price to pay, even for nonclassical theorists. The so-called recapture theorems come to the rescue. When reasoning with concepts such as truth/class membership/property instantiation, (These are examples of concepts that are taken to satisfy naive rules such as the naive truth schema and naive comprehension, and that therefore are (...) compatible with a solution to paradox cast in the logics considered below. Other notions of similar kind can be added to the list.) if one is interested in consequences of the theory that only contain mathematical vocabulary, nothing is lost by reasoning in the nonclassical framework. This article shows that this claim is highly misleading, if not simply false. Under natural assumptions, some well-established approaches to recapture are incorrect. (shrink)

This essay reviews Michael Peters' book The Chinese Dream: Educating the Future, an edited collection of his articles exploring the concept of the Chinese Dream. The essays starts with the analogy between dreams and their role in psychoanalysis and dreams as an ideal representation of a nation's ethos. The introductory part illustrates this analogy with the example of the growing importance of the Chinese Dream. The central part of the essay examines the most important aspects of Peters' (...) book The Chinese Dream: Educating the Future. The concluding part raises the importance of education in the national dream narrative. (shrink)

이 논문의 목적은 꿈에 대한 철학적 탐구의 가능성을 제시하는 것이다. 필자는 십 수 년 간 이 주제를 탐구하고 수많은 꿈들을 분석하면서 철학적 꿈분석의 원리와 방법론을 정립해왔다. 여기서 필자가 ‘철학적 꿈분석’이라고 명명하는 것의 체계적인 방법론을 모두 다루기는 어려우며, 이 논문에서는 그 핵심 방법의 하나인 ‘숙고적 연상’에 초점을 두어 논의하고자 한다. 구체적으로 철학적 꿈분석의 방법으로 자유연상이 아니라 숙고적 연상을 지지하며, 숙고적 연상이 기존의 꿈 이론들과 비교하여 어떤 차이를 갖는지 또 어떤 점에서 더 설득력 있는 방법인지 논하고자 한다. 즉 꿈의 무의식에 접근하는 프로이트 (...) 자유연상법의 문제를 비판적으로 검토하면서, 숙고를 배제하는 자유연상(정신분석)보다 숙고에 의해 인도되는 연상(철학적 꿈분석)이 몇 가지 중요한 점에서 더 나은 분석방법이라는 것을 사례분석을 통해 제시하고자 한다. (shrink)

A common objection to Sosa’s epistemology is that it countenances, in an objectionable way, unsafe knowledge. This objection, under closer inspection, turns out to be in far worse shape than Sosa’s critics have realised. Sosa and his defenders have offered two central response types to the idea that allowing unsafe knowledge is problematic: one response type adverts to the animal/reflective knowledge distinction that is characteristic of bi-level virtue epistemology. The other less-discussed response type appeals to the threat of dream (...) scepticism, and in particular, to the idea that many of our everyday perceptual beliefs are unsafe through the nearness of the dream possibility. The latter dreaming response to the safety objection to Sosa’s virtue epistemology has largely flown under the radar in contemporary discussions of safety and knowledge. We think that, suitably articulated in view of research in the philosophy and science of dreaming, it has much more going for it than has been appreciated. This paper further develops, beyond what Sosa does himself, the dreaming argument in response to those who think safety (as traditionally understood) is a condition on knowledge and who object to Sosa’s account on the grounds that it fails this condition. The payoffs of further developing this argument will be not only a better understanding of the importance of insights about dreaming against safety as a condition on knowledge, but also some reason to think a weaker safety condition, one that is relativised to SSS (i.e., skill/shape/situation) conditions for competence exercise, gets better results all things considered as an anti-luck codicil on knowledge. (shrink)

A history of western philosophy from Descartes to the French Revolution.

ABSTRACTThe ‘dream of the butterfly,’ which seals the second chapter of the Zhuangzi, is often interpreted as undergirded by the bipolarity of dreaming and awakening or by the elusive interchange of identities between Zhuangzi and the butterfly, dreamer and dreamed. In this paper I argue that the underlying structure of the story may be better interpreted as exhibiting not two, but three stages of development, consistently echoing other tripartite parables in the Zhuangzi. In my reinterpretation I rely on the (...) phenomenology of dreams proposed by the Spanish philosopher María Zambrano, which distinguishes among three states: the primal dream, characterized by atemporality and wholeness; wakefulness, characterized by temporality and analytic thinking; and the creative dream, in which reality discloses itself as a meaningful, holistic unity. I suggest that Zhuangzi’s parable describes a similar self-transformative threefold process culminating in the joyous freedom of a shifting multifaceted subjectivity centered in the timeless pivot of the Dao. (shrink)

Since the mid-20th century, the so-called analytic philosophy has been considered the dominant philosophical tradition in English-speaking countries, especially England and the United States. Despite this, there is still no clarity or the slightest consensus on what analytic philosophy means. Given this scenario, I argue in this paper that analytic philosophy has never really constituted itself as a philosophical school. My objective is to show how the criticisms that have been made of philosophy in recent centuries – including the obscurantism (...) of philosophical texts, the lack of methodological rigor of philosophical investigations, and the lack of attention of philosophers to scientific advances – have not really been eliminated by analytical philosophers but only “pushed” by them to what they began to call, a few decades ago, in a vague way, continental philosophy. (shrink)

A fictional Kuhn-versus-Davidson student considers whether a post-revolutionary theoretical framework can be presented to pre-revolutionary scientists, focusing on the two sex theory being communicated to one sex theorists. The student argues that the pre-revolutionary scientist can always translate talk of two sexes back into familiar terms, which prevents grasping what the post-revolutionary scientist intended to communicate. (See academia dot edu for the first of this series, probably better than this installment.).

De-anthropocentrism is the leitmotif of philosophy in the twenty-first century, encouraging diverse and competing thoughts as to how this goal may be achieved. This article argues that the method by which we may achieve de-anthropocentrism is ethical rather than metaphysical – it must involve a creation of the self, rather than an interpretation of the given human conditions. Through engagements with the thought of Nietzsche, Levinas, and Foucault, and a close reading of Baudelaire’s poem “La Beauté,” I will illustrate three (...) ethical commitments essential to de-anthropocentrism: to abandon the claim to knowledge associated with human reason, to remain in perpetual quest of an object, and to transgress the given perceptual structure through aesthetic experience. In contrast to Kantian philosophy built upon universal human reason, art is the ethical arena where each artist creates their own way to relate to the object, while de-anthropocentrism occurs – this article argues – when the artist includes the self as the field of creation. Object-Oriented Ontology in my assessment is the only branch of philosophy that truly achieves de-anthropocentrism. (shrink)

Anthropology of Consciousness, EarlyView.

Consciousness can be studied only if subjective experience is documented and quantified, yet first-person accounts of the effects of brain injury on conscious experience are as rare as they are potentially useful. This report documents the alterations in waking, sleeping, and dreaming caused by a lateral medullary infarct. Total insomnia and the initial suppression of dreaming was followed by the gradual recovery of both functions. A visual hallucinosis during waking that was associated with the initial period of sleep and (...) class='Hi'>dream suppression is described in detail. Since the changes in sleep and their recovery are comparable to results of animal experiments, it can be concluded that damage to the medullary brain stem causes extreme but short-lived alterations in conscious state and that substantial recovery occurs even though the damage to the brain stem endures. (shrink)

This article explores the intertextual connection between Eteocles’ dream in Statius’ThebaidBook 2 and the brief reference to his ambiguous dream at Aesch.Sept.710−11. In Aeschylus’ play, Eteocles understands the true meaning of the dream belatedly, as he is about to enter into a duel with his brother Polynices. The article argues that the ambiguous character of the Aeschylean dream forms the basis of the dream in Statius, and that the poet develops the scene further through elements (...) of epic dream sequences that align his narrative with the epic tradition. However, Statius emphasizes even more the ambiguity of Eteocles’ dream to highlight the tragic nature of his character. Following ancient dream theorists, the discussion shows next that the obscurity of the dream in theThebaidcan be understood as the product of the fusion of different dream classes, which are evoked in the description of the dream in Statius. The proposed interpretation suggests that, on the basis of their personal experience of dreams and their familiarity with popular dream theories, Statius’ readers would have been able to perceive the irony between Laius’ message and Jupiter's true intentions, all of which enhance Eteocles’ tragic character. (shrink)

In this book J. Allan Hobson offers a new understanding of altered states of consciousness based on knowledge of how our brain chemistry is balanced when we are...

The paper concerns a “Note on the Film,” a short appendix to Feeling and Form by Susanne Langer. The interpretation interweaves the Note into a larger context of Langer’s philosophical work – primarily in terms of her understanding of the dream as a lower symbolic form, to which the film is compared – as well as in terms of her account of literary arts among which, she suggests, cinema belongs. Langer’s references to Sergei Eisenstein are discussed and their respective (...) concepts of cinema are compared. An implicit political dimension of Langer’s writing on film is emphasized by relating her critique of modern civilization, as sketched in the last chapter of Philosophy in a New Key, to her film aesthetics. At the end of the paper I compare my interpretation of the Note with the one that was offered by Trisha Curran. (shrink)

Already a classic in its first year of publication, this landmark study of Western thought takes a fresh look at the writings of the great thinkers of classic philosophy and questions many pieces of conventional wisdom. The book invites comparison with Bertrand Russell's monumental History of Western Philosophy, "but Gottlieb's book is less idiosyncratic and based on more recent scholarship" (Colin McGinn, Los Angeles Times). A New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Best Book, and a Times Literary (...) Supplement Best Book of 2001. (from the publisher). (shrink)

The dream sceptic argues that our ordinary beliefs are not justified because we cannot know that we have not always been dreaming. This is the Always Dreaming Hypothesis (ADH). I develop the traditional coherence objection to dream scepticism and argue that the coherence objection can be reformulated in a way that makes it both plausible and defensible. Considerations about the incoherence of dreams can be given probabilistic expression in a way that shows ADH to be highly improbable. Given (...) the evidence of coherence, ADH can be rationally rejected. Even if ADH is augmented with causal information sufficient to account for the coherence and order of conscious experience, the resulting dream scepticism would then reduce to a BIV-type scepticism and thus fail to possess independent sceptical force. (shrink)

Dream research shows sex differences in dream aggression that fit very well with the findings for waking-life aggressive behaviour. Dream studies are a valuable tool for investigating variables underlying the sex difference in aggression. One might argue that studying dream aggression might be even more promising because aggression in dreams is not socially labelled, as being aggressive in waking life is.

In the piece below the author, inspired by David Scott (Stuart Hall 2017), writes a letter to the late Drucilla Cornell. She starts off by drawing on Scott’s invocation of “An ethics of receptive generosity” in relation to Hall and attributes such ethics also to Cornell. Cornell, did not only give but also knew how to receive from others. Her engagement with her own context, the different legal theoretical positions in the US legal academy at the time, in The Philosophy (...) of the Limit (Cornell 1992) is unpacked and also used as a way for the author to reflect on the different perspectives on the constitution in South Africa. The author regards Cornell’s renaming of deconstruction to the “philosophy of the limit” and its implications for legal interpretation, as well as her framing of ethical feminism as foundational to a critical jurisprudence, and a feminist jurisprudence, a jurisprudence that is feminist. She focuses on Cornell’s work on/ in South Africa, her view of revolution and her “rethinking of ethical feminism through ubuntu”. (shrink)

In this chapter, I contend that Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure provides a brilliant case study in the entangled vicissitudes of character and state sovereignty. From the hyper-moral and hyper-legalistic rigidity of Angelo, the Duke’s substitute sovereign, to the bawdy irreverence of Lucio, the Duke’s trickster double, to the indomitable life force of imprisoned Barnardine—divergent microclimates are breaking out all over town, emanating from one character to the next. Which will rule the other? Measure invites us to try on and assess (...) different political and personal identities. In what emotional bandwidth, in the name of what character ideal, shall we participate in social and political discourse and action, and with what individual and collective consequences? Do we like who we become? Might we choose to forge a different personal and collective reality? Everything depends on how the properties of government unfold: by whose agency, in what preferred (or imposed) register? In this way, Measure dramatizes freedom’s promise in the development of self and political governance against the backdrop of its Machiavellian shadow. It is a remarkably prescient lesson in the overlapping vicissitudes and responsibilities of a liberal democratic politics to come. (shrink)