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The World at Our Fingertips
What difference is there between the visual experience of watching the moon in the sky and the visual experience of seeing a snake slither by your foot? It is easy to believe our interpretation of the world is split into a binary mode, between the bodily self and everything outside it. There is, however, a buffer zone in the immediate surrounding of the body, known as peripersonal space, in which boundaries are blurred. The notion of peripersonal space calls into question not only our entrenched theories of perception, but also has major implications on the way we perceive personal and social awareness. Research has yielded a vast array of exciting discoveries on peripersonal space, across a...
Self-Experience
Recent debates on phenomenal consciousness have shown renewed interest for the idea that experience generally includes an experience of the self—a self-experience—whatever else it may present the self with. When a subject has an ordinary experience (as of a bouncing red ball, for example), the thought goes, she is not just phenomenally aware of the world as being presented in a certain way (a bouncy, reddish, roundish way in this case); she is also phenomenally aware of the fact that it is presented to her. This supposed phenomenal dimension has been variously called mineness, for-me-ness, pre-reflective self-awareness and subjective character, among others. This view, associated with hi...
Understanding the nature of the body model underlying position sense
Accurate information about body structure and posture is fundamental for effective control of our actions. It is often assumed that healthy adults have accurate representations of their body. Although people's abilities to visually recognize their own body size and shape are relatively good, the implicit spatial representation of their body is extremely distorted when measured in proprioceptive localization tasks. The aim of this thesis is to understand the nature of spatial distortions of the body model measured in those localization tasks. We especially investigate the perceptual-cognitive components contributing to distortions of implicit representation of the human hand and compare those distortions with the one found on objects in similar tasks.
The God Who Lives
Christian theology has affirmed throughout its history that God is a "living" God. But what does it mean that God lives? Why does it matter? Does God live like us? If God does not live like us what is the difference between our living and God's living? These are the questions Adam Pryor addresses in The God Who Lives. The book considers "life" as a conceptual problem, examining how new studies about the emergence of life have critical implications for interpreting the religious symbol "God is living." In particular, Pryor suggests how absence and desire, what is termed "abstential desire," are critical principles of life for scientific and philosophical thinking today. He goes on to develop a constructive theological proposal in which the theological meaning of the symbol "God is living" is interpreted in terms of the insights garnered from the principle of abstential desire, concluding that God can be understood as akin to the role played by absence in living things. Life is an absent but effective whole in relation to the material parts of which it is comprised. God as living is a similarly effective absence in relation to the world.
The Time of Popular Sovereignty
Democracy is usually conceived as based on self-rule or rule by the people, and it is this which is taken to ground the legitimacy of the democratic form of government. But who constitutes the people? Democratic political theory has a potentially fatal weakness at its core unless it can answer this question satisfactorily. In The Time of Popular Sovereignty, Paulina Ochoa Espejo examines the problems the concept of the people raises for liberal democratic theory, constitutional theory, and critical theory. She argues that to solve these problems, the people cannot be conceived as simply a collection of individuals. Rather, the people should be seen as a series of events, an ongoing process unfolding in time. She then offers a new theory of democratic peoplehood, laying the foundations for a new theory of democratic legitimacy.
The Subject's Matter
An interdisciplinary and comprehensive treatment of bodily self-consciousness, considering representation of the body, the sense of bodily ownership, and representation of the self. The body may be the object we know the best. It is the only object from which we constantly receive a flow of information through sight and touch; and it is the only object we can experience from the inside, through our proprioceptive, vestibular, and visceral senses. Yet there have been very few books that have attempted to consolidate our understanding of the body as it figures in our experience and self-awareness. This volume offers an interdisciplinary and comprehensive treatment of bodily self-awareness, the...
Emergence in Science and Philosophy
The concept of emergence has seen a significant resurgence in philosophy and the sciences, yet debates regarding emergentist and reductionist visions of the natural world continue to be hampered by imprecision or ambiguity. Emergent phenomena are said to arise out of and be sustained by more basic phenomena, while at the same time exerting a "top-down" control upon those very sustaining processes. To some critics, this has the air of magic, as it seems to suggest a kind of circular causality. Other critics deem the concept of emergence to be objectionably anti-naturalistic. Objections such as these have led many thinkers to construe emergent phenomena instead as coarse-grained patterns in th...
The Role of Visual Cues in Body Size Estimation
Our body is central to what we define as our self. The mental representation of our physical appearance, often called body image, can have a great influence on our psychological health. Given the increase in body mass index worldwide and the societal pressure to conform to body ideals, it is important to gain a better understanding of the nature of body representations and factors that play a role in body size estimation tasks. This doctoral thesis takes a multifaceted approach for investigating the role of different visual cues in the estimation of own body size and shape by using a variety of experimental methods and novel state-of-the-art computer graphics methods. Two visual cues were considered: visual perspective and identity cues in the visual appearance of a body (shape, and color-information), as well as their interactions with own body size and gender. High ecological validity was achieved by testing body size estimation in natural settings, when looking into a mirror, and by generating biometrically plausible virtual bodies based on 3D body scans and statistical body models, and simulating real-world scenarios in immersive virtual reality.
A Philosophy Guide to Street Art and the Law
What is the relationship between street art and the law? In A Philosophy Guide to Street Art and the Law, Andrea Baldini argues that street art has a constitutive relationship with the law. A crucial aspect of the identity of this urban art kind depends on its capacity to turn upside down dominant uses of public spaces. Street artists subvert those laws and social norms that regulate the city. Baldini shows that street art has not only transformed public spaces and their functions into artistic material, but has also turned its rebellious attitude toward the law into a creative resource. He aims at elucidating and arguing for this claim, while drawing important implications at the level of street art’s metaphysics, value, and relationship with rights of intellectual property, in particular copyright and moral rights. At the other end of the spectrum of contractual art, street art is outlaw art.
Sounding Off
This volume presents a selection of lively essays on philosophy of music by Peter Kivy, the leading expert on the subject. He explores the nature of musical genius; the subject of authenticity in performance and interpretation; musical representation and meaning; and the notion of music as the pure, formal structure of expressive sound.
