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Parts and Places
Thinking about space is thinking about spatial things. The table is on the carpet; hence the carpet is under the table. The vase is in the box; hence the box is not in the vase. But what does it mean for an object to be somewhere? How are objects tied to the space they occupy? In this book Roberto Casati and Achille C. Varzi address some of the fundamental issues in the philosophy of spatial representation. Their starting point is an analysis of the interplay betwen mereology (the study of part/whole relations), topology (the study of spatial continuity and comapctness) and the theory of spatial location proper. This leads to a unified framework for spatial representation understood quite broadly as a theory of the representation of spatial entities. The framework is then tested against some classical metaphysical questions such as: Are parts essential to their whole? Is spatial co-location a sufficient criterion of identity? What (if anything) distinguishes material objects from events and other spatial entities? The concluding chapters deal with applications to topics as diverse as the logical analysis of movement and the semantics of maps.
Insurmountable Simplicities
Why do mirrors seem to invert left and right but not up and down? How do we know whether strawberries taste the same for everyone? Where is it written that we must observe the law, and if it is not written, why should we observe it? What if we could swap brains-or the rest of our bodies? Insurmountable Simplicities is filled with captivating and inventive stories, dialogues, and epistolary exchanges that illuminate the many philosophical conundrums of everyday life. Clear, concise, and intellectually engaging, this internationally acclaimed book covers a range of themes, such as personal identity, causality and responsibility, fortune, the nature of things, the paradoxes of time and space, and the interplay between logic and language, and brilliantly demonstrates that the beauty of philosophy resides in its engagement with the simplicities of the world, insurmountable as they might initially appear.
The Cognitive Life of Maps
The “mapness of maps”—how maps live in interaction with their users, and what this tells us about what they are and how they work. In a sense, maps are temporarily alive for those who design, draw, and use them. They have, for the moment, a cognitive life. To grapple with what this means—to ask how maps can be alive, and what kind of life they have—is to explore the core question of what maps are. And this is what Roberto Casati does in The Cognitive Life of Maps, in the process assembling the conceptual tools for understanding why maps have the power they have, why they are so widely used, and how we use (and misuse) them. Drawing on insights from cognitive science and philosophy ...
Holes and Other Superficialities
"This is an exciting epistemological experiment. It is wonderful to see how intelligent philosophers can take a modest concept, such as that of the hole, as a starting point for an immense and brilliant exercise.... The writing is delightful." -- Valentino Braitenberg, Director, Max-Planck-Institut fü r Biologische Kybernetick "The idea of "Holes and Other Superficialities" is wonderfully counterintuitive: The authors want us to think of absences as full-fledged cognitive entities. The book describes a grand variety of holes -- holes in doughnuts, tunnels through blocks, flowing gaps in regularly-spaced flowerbed, and hundreds more. There are an enormous number of beautifully-rendered illus...
The Visual World of Shadows
How the perception of shadows, studied by vision scientists and visual artists, reveals the inner workings of the visual system. In The Visual World of Shadows, Roberto Casati and Patrick Cavanagh examine how the perception of shadows, as studied by vision scientists and visual artists, reveals the inner workings of the visual system. Shadows are at once a massive problem for vision—which must distinguish them from objects or material features of objects—and a resource, signaling the presence, location, shape, and size of objects. Casati and Cavanagh draw up an inventory of information retrievable from shadows, showing their amazing variety. They present an overview of the visual system,...
Holes and Other Superficialities
This fascinating investigation on the borderlines of metaphysics, everyday geometry, and the theory of perception seeks to answer two basic questions: Do holes really exist? And if so, what are they? Holes are among entities that down-to-earth philosophers would like to expel from their ontological inventory. Casati and Varzi argue in favor of their existence and explore the consequences of this unorthodox approach—odd as these might appear. They examine the ontology of holes, their geometry, their part-whole relations, their identity, their causal role, and the ways we perceive them. A Bradford Book
Naturalizing Phenomenology
This ambitious work aims to shed new light on the relations between Husserlian phenomenology and the present-day efforts toward a scientific theory of cognitionwith its complex structure of disciplines, levels of explanation, and conflicting hypotheses. The books primary goal is not to present a new exegesis of Husserls writings, although it does not dismiss the importance of such interpretive and critical work. Rather, the contributors assess the extent to which the kind of phenomenological investigation Husserl initiated favors the construction of a scientific theory of cognition, particularly in contributing to specific contemporary theories either by complementing or by questioning...
The Shadow Club
Science shows that the common-sense picture of the world is populated with awkward entities that should be simply unacceptable because they are immaterial. Shadows are an example. Shadows are holes in light - and holes are the prototypical immaterial entities. Shadows are absences, negatives entities. They are mysterious objects. Yet shadows, despite their questionable status, have been crucial in the progress of many scientific disciplines. Altitude and the size of the earth were measured by comparing shadows and they have played a major role in astronomy, geography and in the scientific study of perspective. The study of eclipses; the study of the earth's shape; the invention of linear perspective in the Renaissance; the understanding of mathematical projections: the red thread linking the history of these discoveries is the fact that shadows contain an enormous amount of information which may be properly unpacked by the reader of this book.
Lewisian Themes
David Lewis's untimely death on 14 October 2001 deprived the philosophical community of one of the outstanding philosophers of the 20th century. As many obituaries remarked, Lewis has an undeniable place in the history of analytical philosophy. His work defines much of the current agenda in metaphysics, philosophical logic, and the philosophy of mind and language. This volume, an expanded edition of a special issue of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, covers many of the topics for which Lewis was well known, including possible worlds, counterpart theory, vagueness, knowledge, probability, essence, fiction, laws, conditionals, desire and belief, and truth. Many of the papers are by very established philosophers; others are by younger scholars including many he taught. The volume also includes Lewis's Jack Smart Lecture at the Australian National University, "How Many Lives has Schrödinger's Cat?," published here for the first time. Lewisian Themes will be an invaluable resource for anyone studying Lewis's work and a major contribution to the many topics that he mastered.
Shadows of Being
This book is a study of the phenomena of shadows, meant in a broader sense as “symbolic forms”. The shadow is a less real, “surface” replica of some more real form. From the Platonic point of view, empirical objects are “shadows of ideas”, while from the modern “natural” point of view, shadows are seen and conceived primarily as “weaker” replicas of bodies, which give evidence of their material reality. In the first three essays here, several topics from the Ancient Egypt and Greece to modern arts and sciences are considered, while in the fourth essay, the contemporary virtual reality, cyber-technology and the internet as our parallel “shadow world” are discussed from the philosophical point of view. The main and innovative point of this book is the connection between the meaning of shadows in philosophy and art on the one hand, and their role in modern science and technology on the other. The book will appeal to a wide span of readers, from academic circles, students, and artists, to the general reader interested in the humanities, especially in philosophy and art.
