Time and Existence

Philosophy ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 53 (204) ◽  
pp. 215-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Genevieve Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Space Time ◽  
Time Slice ◽  
Equal Footing ◽  
The World ◽  
Metaphysics Of Time ◽  
Temporal Reality ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship

Much debate in contemporary metaphysics of time has centred on whether or not tense is essential to the understanding of a temporal reality. The rival positions in this debate are associated with two very different pictures of the relationship between time and existence. Those who argue for the dispensability of tense see the phenomenon of tense as an epistemological accretion which infects our perception of the world but is in no way essential to a complete description of reality. With respect to existence, things past and future are supposed to be on an equal footing with things present. Thus the Quinean ‘time slice’ ontology, which sees the world as a four-dimensional entity in space-time, repudiates any ontological significance to the differences between past, present and future. For the Quinean, what differences we see between past, present and future existents pertain to our limited mode of access to reality. In a perception which grasped the world as it really is tense differences would have no place. In this respect the Quinean position resembles Spinoza's claim in the Ethics that in so far as the mind conceives a thing under the dictates of reason it is affected equally, whether the idea be of a thing future, past or present.

The open subject and translations from nature: Answers to the Anthropocene in contemporary poetry (Gennadij Ajgi, Les Murray, Christian Lehnert)

2021 ◽  
pp. 205301962110386
Author(s):  
Henrieke Stahl (Trier)
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Perception ◽  
Contemporary Poetry ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Equal Footing ◽  
The World ◽  
Hierarchical Levels ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Living Being

With the help of the concepts ‘aura’ and ‘autopoiesis’, the relationship between poetry and natural phenomena can be defined as a ‘translation from nature’. Gennadij Ajgi translates his auratic manner of perceiving into poetry. For him, the poem becomes an epistemic medium transcending the sensory perception of nature for a hidden, spiritual level. Les Murray, conversely, demonstrates an autopoietic understanding of nature: The poet himself becomes the medium of the living being. Christian Lehnert takes up impulses from both orientations. He combines the opposing concepts so that they correspond to the hierarchical levels of his religious and metaphysical vision of the world. The three authors all aim to alter the attitude of humans towards nature through their ‘translation from nature into poetry’ so that humankind will open itself towards nature and raise it from an object which can be instrumentalised to an autonomous subject on equal footing with humanity itself.

Uncentred Minds

2020 ◽  
pp. 107-117
Author(s):  
Jonardon Ganeri
Keyword(s):  
Fernando Pessoa ◽  
The World ◽  
Simone Weil ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship

In this chapter I explore the relationship between Fernando Pessoa and Buddhism. I first introduce the brilliant French philosopher Simone Weil (1909–43), a contemporary of Pessoa but someone of whom he certainly had never heard. One way to read her remarks is as directed against the positional use of ‘I’, against the deployment in thought and speech of a positional conception of self. One should abandon forms of self-consciousness that are grounded in one’s thinking of oneself as the one at the centre of a landscape of sensation. For Weil, it is precisely such contact with reality as attention makes possible which holds the uncentred mind together, preventing its content being ‘a phantasmagoric fluttering with no centre or sense’. The uncentred mind would thus be a sort of conformal and aperspectival map of reality, standing in correspondence with the world without any privileged perspectival point. With these distinctions in mind, we say more of the mind of Alberto Caeiro, and address the question whether he is a Buddhist heteronym.

scholarly journals The Body Surpassed Towards the World and Perception Surpassed Towards Action: A Comparison between Enactivism and Sartre’s Phenomenology

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-99
Author(s):  
Federico Zilio
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Complete Analysis ◽  
Sense Making ◽  
Environment Interaction ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Key Points ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Perception Action

Enactivism maintains that the mind is not produced and localized inside the head but is distributed along and through brain-body-environment interactions. This idea of an intrinsic relationship between the agent and the world derives from the classical phenomenological investigations of the body (Merleau-Ponty in particular). This paper discusses similarities and differences between enactivism and Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenology, which is not usually considered as a paradigmatic example of the relationship between phenomenological investigations and enactivism (or 4E theories in general). After a preliminary analysis of the three principal varieties of enactivism (sensorimotor, autopoietic and radical), I will present Sartre’s account of the body, addressing some key points that can be related to the current enactivist positions: perception-action unity, anti-representationalism, anti-internalism, organism-environment interaction, and sense-making cognition. Despite some basic similarities, enactivism and Sartre’s phenomenology move in different directions as to how these concepts are developed. Nevertheless, I will suggest that Sartre’s phenomenology is useful to the enactivist approaches to provide a broader and more complete analysis of consciousness and cognition, by developing a pluralist account of corporeality, enriching the investigation of the organism-environment coupling through an existentialist perspective, and reincluding the concept of subjectivity without the hypostatisation of an I-subject detached from body and world.

scholarly journals The Primordial in the Philosophy of Nasir Khusraw

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 65-80
Author(s):  
T. G. Korneeva
Keyword(s):  
Word Of God ◽  
Material World ◽  
Necessary Being ◽  
Arab Muslim ◽  
The World ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Universe

The article deals with the problem of determining the primordial in the philosophy of Nasir Khusraw, the Isma‘ili thinker of the 11th century. It seems to be an obvious answer that «the primordial is God», but this statement becomes impossible in Isma‘ilism due to the absolute separation of the transcendent incomprehensible God from the world manifested in intelligible and sensuous diversity. The article deals with the origins of the problem of the relationship of the single original and the multiple world, gives a brief overview of solutions to this issue by different schools of Arab Muslim philosophy. Within the framework of Isma‘ilism, two schemes of the process of creation of the universe were proposed, one of which was actively developed by Nasir Khusraw. According to the views of the Isma‘ili philosopher, the basis of all things is the word of God: it has an absolute being and potentially contains all things. The consequence of the word of God is the Universal Mind, which is endowed with the necessary being and has knowledge of all things. The Universal Soul, which emerges from the Universal Mind, has the power to create and thereby materializes the knowledge of the Universal Mind in the diversity of the material world. So, what can be called the initial? God, in fact, is taken out of the field of reasoning, He only speaks His word. The word of God is the cause of all things, but it does not give existence to the world. The world is created by the universal Soul, it is its Creator, but the Universal Soul itself is the creation of the Universal Mind, the consequence of the word of God. In Nasir Khusraw’s doctrine of being it is impossible to distinguish a single primordial, its functions are distributed between the word of God, his inseparable consequence the Universal Mind and the Universal Soul which derived from the Mind.

Perspectives on Patterns

2011 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Christian Kohls ◽  
Joachim Wedekind
Keyword(s):  
Schema Theory ◽  
Pattern Languages ◽  
The Core ◽  
Pattern Approach ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Core Concepts ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Different Levels

Patterns are systematic approaches to documenting and classifying recurrent problems and their solutions. Patterns are usually based on empirical observations of good practices. This chapter provides a brief introduction to the core concepts of patterns, and distinguishes between patterns in the real world, patterns in the heads of designers, and pattern descriptions. It starts with basic definitions and explains the relationship between context, problems, forces, and solutions. Key concepts such as connecting patterns into pattern languages, finding whole forms, and sharing best practices among peers are elaborated. To distinguish between patterns in the world, in the heads of designers and in documentations it introduces a vocabulary that may clarify the different meanings of the term “pattern” in the context of design. A discussion of how patterns are recognized and induced by practitioners resolves why there are patterns at different levels of granularity and abstraction. Schema theory provides a theoretical framework to understand how successful strategies of problem solving are stored in the mind of an expert. To share this knowledge, patterns can be described in various ways using different pattern formats or templates. While there are many benefits of the pattern approach, both the pattern author and the pattern user face some challenges. Therefore some of the major benefits and challenges are discussed at the end of the chapter.

GRAVITATIONAL ANOMALY AND THE WORLD TOPOLOGY

1992 ◽  
Vol 07 (01) ◽  
pp. 33-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
ASHIM ROY ◽  
PRATUL BANDYOPADHYAY
Keyword(s):  
Space Time ◽  
Quantum Geometry ◽  
Gravitational Anomaly ◽  
Quantization Procedure ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Here it is shown that the gravitational anomaly is compensated by the torsion term in the Einstein–Cartan action when the geometrical and topological origin of torsion is considered in the context of quantum geometry characterizing the quantization procedure of a fermion. The relationship of this anomaly with Pontryagin index is then established. The relevance of this index in the origin of topological fixtures like wormholes in space-time has also been discussed.

Is Expertise All in the Mind?

2019 ◽  
pp. 242-261
Author(s):  
Chris Baber
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Activity ◽  
Physical Interaction ◽  
Environmental Constraints ◽  
Optimal Parameters ◽  
The World ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Action Coupling ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Perception Action

In this chapter, theories that explore the relationship between action and performance are reviewed. These theories ask whether our cognitive activity depends on “internal representations” or whether it can be explained by our interaction with the world around us. In other words, rather than projecting a model of the world outwards in order to plan and guide our actions, these approaches see physical interaction with the world as a form of cognitive activity. In other words, the focus of cognition is less about using mental representation and more about perception–action coupling between us and our world. The conclusion is that this points to an account of expertise which sees it as a matter of sensitivity to environmental constraints and opportunities, together with the ability to focus on optimal parameters in a given situation. The chapter consider ways in which such sensitivity could be probed through field study and interview with experts.

A rose is more than a rose … the diatextual constitution of subjects and objects

2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuseppe Mininni ◽  
Amelia Manuti
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
The World ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Semiotic Perspective ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Performative Power

AbstractThis paper integrates contributions coming from psychology with a phenomenological and semiotic perspective and focuses on the relationship of reciprocal constitution between “Subject” and “Object.” This relationship is evoked through radically different concepts such as the notions of “experience,” “consciousness” and “embodiment,” focusing attention on “discourse” as a macro-procedure generating the mutual link between Subject and Object. Therefore, the relationship between subject and object is identifiable through the text, namely “diatext.” It will be further argued that human beings act as “diatexters” of their existence in the world. Accordingly, psycho-discursive practices have the performative power to constitute both objects and subjects because they offer a creative solution by interlacing the “Body-Mind-Problem” to the “Mind-Culture-Problem.” In detail, the discursive resource granted by metaphors may be recognized as a modelling matrix embodying thought, as the interweaving of conceptual fields and as reasoning processes.

Semantic Pragmatism and A Priori Knawledge (or ‘Yes we could all be brains in a vat’)

2001 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Jackman
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
The Self ◽  
Semantic Externalism ◽  
Metaphysical Realism ◽  
The World ◽  
Rational Acceptability ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Brain In A Vat

Hilary Putnam has famously argued that we can know that we are not brains in a vat because the hypothesis that we are is self-refuting. While Putnam's argument has generated interest primarily as a novel response to skepticism, he originally introduced his brain in a vat scenario to help illustrate a point about the ‘mind/world relationship.’ In particular, he intended it to be part of an argument against the coherence of metaphysical realism, and thus to be part of a defense of his conception of truth as idealized rational acceptability. Putnam's discussion has already inspired a substantial body of criticism, but it will be argued here that these criticisms fail to capture the central problem with his argument. Indeed, it will be shown that, rather than simply following from his semantic externalism, Putnam's conclusions about the self-refuting character of the brain in a vat hypothesis are actually out of line with central and plausible aspects of his own account of the relationship between our minds and the world.

scholarly journals „Platoński” Marsanes i jego pitagorejski wątek

Vox Patrum ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 839-851
Author(s):  
Anna Z. Zmorzanka
Keyword(s):  
Sense Perception ◽  
Hierarchical Arrangement ◽  
The World ◽  
X 32 ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Universe

The opening part of this paper presents the influences of Middle-Platonist philosophy discernible in the ontology presupposed in the Marsanes. These are particularly conspicuous in the hierarchical arrangement of reality. At the summit of the Universe there is Invisible God, second in the hierarchy comes Barbelo, the Mind, complete with the world of intellect (identified with Platonic ideas), then follows the Soul and the world of the sense perception, which is the reflection of ideas. The second part contains a discussion of the fragment NHC X 32, 12 - 33, 6. described in the literature as „Pythagorean”. The fragment contains reference to the two eternal principles: monas and dyas, as well as to the ten cosmogonical principles. In this context the question arises as to the relationship of the cosmogo­ny assumed in this fragment and the one presupposed by the author of the Middle- Platonist exposition. Finally, it is concluded, that the Marsanes cosmogony is typi­cal of its period in being a synthesis comprising themes drawn from ontology (and cosmology) of both: Neopythagoreanism and Middle-Platonism.

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