Meta-Encyclopaedic Reflections on the Beginning of Philosophy

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Umur Başdaş

Abstract Since in Hegel's view the end of philosophy coincides with its beginning, it is reasonable to expect that the end of the Encyclopaedia sheds some light on the Science of Logic. The Encyclopaedia concludes with three syllogisms in which logic, nature and spirit are related to each other in three different ways. This article analyses these three final syllogisms with an eye to how they can contribute to our understanding of the logical movement that starts from pure being. Trendelenburg and Schelling, like many others after them, think that Hegel's project in the Science of Logic is doomed from the start, because there can be no such thing as a non-temporal, purely logical movement. I argue that the three final syllogisms contain Hegel's response to this challenge. I call them ‘meta-encyclopaedic reflections’ in the sense that they take the whole encyclopaedic presentation of the Hegelian system as an object of critical inquiry and identify its limitations. The core of my approach is to examine how each one of these syllogisms situate us, namely the philosophizing subjects, vis-à-vis the world as disclosed by them. They demand that we shift from a third-person to a first-person perspective towards the world. The logical categories initially appear to move of their own accord only due to the limitations of the third-person perspective of the encyclopaedic presentation, which is to be sublated in a higher, first-person perspective. Hence, Hegel would happily admit that a purely logical movement is a mere appearance, but he would also claim that his philosophy can immanently explain the necessity of this appearance in the beginning of philosophy, and explain it better than his critics.

2021 ◽  
pp. 40-79
Author(s):  
Hilary Kornblith

Knowledge may be examined from the third-person perspective, as psychologists and sociologists do, or it may be examined from the first-person perspective, as each of us does when we reflect on what we ought to believe. This chapter takes the third-person perspective. One obvious source of knowledge is perception, and some general features of how our perceptual systems are able to pick up information about the world around us are highlighted. The role of the study of visual illusions in this research is an important focus of the chapter. Our ability to draw out the consequences of things we know by way of inference is another important source of knowledge, and some general features of how inference achieves its successes are discussed. Structural similarities between the ways in which perception works and the ways in which inference works are highlighted.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Alexey Tumialis ◽  
Alexey Smirnov ◽  
Kirill Fadeev ◽  
Tatiana Alikovskaia ◽  
Pavel Khoroshikh ◽  
...  

The perspective of perceiving one’s action affects its speed and accuracy. In the present study, we investigated the change in accuracy and kinematics when subjects throw darts from the first-person perspective and the third-person perspective with varying angles of view. To model the third-person perspective, subjects were looking at themselves as well as the scene through the virtual reality head-mounted display (VR HMD). The scene was supplied by a video feed from the camera located to the up and 0, 20 and 40 degrees to the right behind the subjects. The 28 subjects wore a motion capture suit to register their right hand displacement, velocity and acceleration, as well as torso rotation during the dart throws. The results indicated that mean accuracy shifted in opposite direction with the changes of camera location in vertical axis and in congruent direction in horizontal axis. Kinematic data revealed a smaller angle of torso rotation to the left in all third-person perspective conditions before and during the throw. The amplitude, speed and acceleration in third-person condition were lower compared to the first-person view condition, before the peak velocity of the hand in the direction toward the target and after the peak velocity in lowering the hand. Moreover, the hand movement angle was smaller in the third-person perspective conditions with 20 and 40 angle of view, compared with the first-person perspective condition just preceding the time of peak velocity, and the difference between conditions predicted the changes in mean accuracy of the throws. Thus, the results of this study revealed that subject’s localization contributed to the transformation of the motor program.


10.2196/18888 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. e18888
Author(s):  
Susanne M van der Veen ◽  
Alexander Stamenkovic ◽  
Megan E Applegate ◽  
Samuel T Leitkam ◽  
Christopher R France ◽  
...  

Background Visual representation of oneself is likely to affect movement patterns. Prior work in virtual dodgeball showed greater excursion of the ankles, knees, hips, spine, and shoulder occurs when presented in the first-person perspective compared to the third-person perspective. However, the mode of presentation differed between the two conditions such that a head-mounted display was used to present the avatar in the first-person perspective, but a 3D television (3DTV) display was used to present the avatar in the third-person. Thus, it is unknown whether changes in joint excursions are driven by the visual display (head-mounted display versus 3DTV) or avatar perspective during virtual gameplay. Objective This study aimed to determine the influence of avatar perspective on joint excursion in healthy individuals playing virtual dodgeball using a head-mounted display. Methods Participants (n=29, 15 male, 14 female) performed full-body movements to intercept launched virtual targets presented in a game of virtual dodgeball using a head-mounted display. Two avatar perspectives were compared during each session of gameplay. A first-person perspective was created by placing the center of the displayed content at the bridge of the participant’s nose, while a third-person perspective was created by placing the camera view at the participant’s eye level but set 1 m behind the participant avatar. During gameplay, virtual dodgeballs were launched at a consistent velocity of 30 m/s to one of nine locations determined by a combination of three different intended impact heights and three different directions (left, center, or right) based on subject anthropometrics. Joint kinematics and angular excursions of the ankles, knees, hips, lumbar spine, elbows, and shoulders were assessed. Results The change in joint excursions from initial posture to the interception of the virtual dodgeball were averaged across trials. Separate repeated-measures ANOVAs revealed greater excursions of the ankle (P=.010), knee (P=.001), hip (P=.0014), spine (P=.001), and shoulder (P=.001) joints while playing virtual dodgeball in the first versus third-person perspective. Aligning with the expectations, there was a significant effect of impact height on joint excursions. Conclusions As clinicians develop treatment strategies in virtual reality to shape motion in orthopedic populations, it is important to be aware that changes in avatar perspective can significantly influence motor behavior. These data are important for the development of virtual reality assessment and treatment tools that are becoming increasingly practical for home and clinic-based rehabilitation.


2015 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Moran

AbstractIn philosophy it is widely recognized that a person’s first-person perspective on his own thought and action is importantly different from the third-person perspective we may have on the thought and actions of other people. In daily life it is natural to ask someone what he is doing or what he thinks about something, on the assumption that he knows what he is doing or what he is thinking. Some philosophers, however, argue that it is impossible to speak of knowledge in this context because the idea of knowledge requires a kind of distance between subject and object, a distance that is not present in the first-person context. I argue that this denial of self-knowledge is a paradoxical conclusion that we can resist, while retaining what is distinctive about the first-person.


2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 249-262
Author(s):  
James Mensch

Summary In speaking of the social dimensions of human experience, we inevitably become involved in the debate regarding how they are to be studied. Should we embrace the first-person perspective, which is that of the phenomenologists, and begin with the experiences composing our directly experienced lifeworld? Alternately, should we follow the lead of natural scientists and take up the third-person perspective? This is the perspective that asserts that we must begin with what is true for everyone, i.e., with what is available to both me and Others (the “they” that forms the grammatical third person). Both perspectives are one sided in that each presupposes the other for its intelligibility. The third-person perspective is Cartesian and, as I show, privileges space, while the first-person perspective is social in Levinas’s sense and presupposes time. Our reality, I argue, embraces both perspectives and is, in fact, set by their intertwining.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sima Ebrahimian ◽  
Bradley Mattan ◽  
Mazaher Rezaei

Abstract Background: Lack of empathy is one of the main characteristics of narcissists. However, it is not clear whether there is a similar deficit in other facets of mentalizing, such as perspective-taking.Method: In this study, we measured the taking visual perspectives ascribed to different targets (e.g., first-person self, third-person self-avatar, and third-person stranger avatar). Our study focused on separate groups of individuals with high and low self-reported narcissistic traits. Results: Participants reporting high Narcissism scores showed higher accuracy in a third-person perspective-taking task than did their low-Narcissism counterparts. However, when the first-person perspective was incongruent with the third-person (first person vs. self- tagged avatar), the accuracy of their responses decreased.Conclusions: The discrepancy between the two types of perspective taking of people with high narcissism can probably mean that the narcissistic people perfectly identify / empathize with one object (person, avatar, character, etc.) and therefore their perspective-taking is disrupted when they need to identify with more than one object that represent their self-attributed perspectives.


Author(s):  
Diana E. Gasparyan ◽  

In this article, it is shown that in some theories defending the non-reductive nature of the firstperson perspective it is possible to find a very inconsistent attitude. Such theories are associated by the author to a so-called moderate naturalism. The article demonstrates the difference between moderate and radical naturalism. Radical naturalism completely abandons the idea of subjectivity as unobservable from a third-person perspective. On the contrary, moderate naturalism defends the irreducibility of subjectivity, but believes subjectivity to be a part of the nature. As a case of moderate naturalism, the article considers the approaches of Lynne Baker and Thomas Metzinger. Exemplifying these approaches to the first-person perspective, it is shown that in the case of certain work strategies focused on the first-person perspective, it is possible that a so-called description error may appear, by which a description error of subjectivity — when it is placed in the world as a part of nature, existing according to its laws — is understood. The logic of this error points to one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s statements about the incorrect placement of the eye in the perspective of the eye view itself. If the first-person perspective is introduced as a point of view (or a point of observation), then its subsequent shift to the observation result area leads to description error. If there is no observation, as well as no viewpoint, we lose the very idea of first-person perspective and actually take the position of radical naturalism.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yusuke Matsuda ◽  
Junya Nakamura ◽  
Tomohiro Amemiya ◽  
Yasushi Ikei ◽  
Michiteru Kitazaki

Walking is a fundamental physical activity in humans. Various virtual walking systems have been developed using treadmill or leg-support devices. Using optic flow, foot vibrations simulating footsteps, and a walking avatar, we propose a virtual walking system that does not require limb action for seated users. We aim to investigate whether a full-body or hands-and-feet-only walking avatar with either the first-person (experiment 1) or third-person (experiment 2) perspective can convey the sensation of walking in a virtual environment through optic flows and foot vibrations. The viewing direction of the virtual camera and the head of the full-body avatar were linked to the actual user's head motion. We discovered that the full-body avatar with the first-person perspective enhanced the sensations of walking, leg action, and telepresence, either through synchronous or asynchronous foot vibrations. Although the hands-and-feet-only avatar with the first-person perspective enhanced the walking sensation and telepresence, compared with the no-avatar condition, its effect was less prominent than that of the full-body avatar. However, the full-body avatar with the third-person perspective did not enhance the sensations of walking and leg action; rather, it impaired the sensations of self-motion and telepresence. Synchronous or rhythmic foot vibrations enhanced the sensations of self-motion, waking, leg action, and telepresence, irrespective of the avatar condition. These results suggest that the full-body or hands-and-feet avatar is effective for creating virtual walking experiences from the first-person perspective, but not the third-person perspective, and that the foot vibrations simulating footsteps are effective, regardless of the avatar condition.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne M van der Veen ◽  
Alexander Stamenkovic ◽  
Megan E Applegate ◽  
Samuel T Leitkam ◽  
Christopher R France ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND Visual representation of oneself is likely to affect movement patterns. Prior work in virtual dodgeball showed greater excursion of the ankles, knees, hips, spine, and shoulder occurs when presented in the first-person perspective compared to the third-person perspective. However, the mode of presentation differed between the two conditions such that a head-mounted display was used to present the avatar in the first-person perspective, but a 3D television (3DTV) display was used to present the avatar in the third-person. Thus, it is unknown whether changes in joint excursions are driven by the visual display (head-mounted display versus 3DTV) or avatar perspective during virtual gameplay. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to determine the influence of avatar perspective on joint excursion in healthy individuals playing virtual dodgeball using a head-mounted display. METHODS Participants (n=29, 15 male, 14 female) performed full-body movements to intercept launched virtual targets presented in a game of virtual dodgeball using a head-mounted display. Two avatar perspectives were compared during each session of gameplay. A first-person perspective was created by placing the center of the displayed content at the bridge of the participant’s nose, while a third-person perspective was created by placing the camera view at the participant’s eye level but set 1 m behind the participant avatar. During gameplay, virtual dodgeballs were launched at a consistent velocity of 30 m/s to one of nine locations determined by a combination of three different intended impact heights and three different directions (left, center, or right) based on subject anthropometrics. Joint kinematics and angular excursions of the ankles, knees, hips, lumbar spine, elbows, and shoulders were assessed. RESULTS The change in joint excursions from initial posture to the interception of the virtual dodgeball were averaged across trials. Separate repeated-measures ANOVAs revealed greater excursions of the ankle (<i>P</i>=.010), knee (<i>P</i>=.001), hip (<i>P</i>=.0014), spine (<i>P</i>=.001), and shoulder (<i>P</i>=.001) joints while playing virtual dodgeball in the first versus third-person perspective. Aligning with the expectations, there was a significant effect of impact height on joint excursions. CONCLUSIONS As clinicians develop treatment strategies in virtual reality to shape motion in orthopedic populations, it is important to be aware that changes in avatar perspective can significantly influence motor behavior. These data are important for the development of virtual reality assessment and treatment tools that are becoming increasingly practical for home and clinic-based rehabilitation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 07 (02) ◽  
pp. 257-275
Author(s):  
Pei Wang

This paper describes the consciousness-related aspects of the AGI system NARS, discusses the implications of this design and compares it with other relevant theories and designs. It is argued that the function of consciousness is self-awareness and self-control, and the phenomenal aspect of consciousness is the first-person perspective of the same process for which the functional aspect is the third-person perspective.


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