THE ALHACENIAN ACCOUNT OF SPATIAL PERCEPTION AND ITS EPISTEMOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. MARK SMITH
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Spatial Perception ◽  
Crystalline Lens ◽  
The Other ◽  
External Objects ◽  
Latin West ◽  
Visual Imaging ◽  
The One ◽  
The Brain

From the late thirteenth to the early seventeenth century, the process of visual imaging was understood in the Latin West as an essentially subjective act initiated by the eye and completed by the brain. The crystalline lens took center stage in this act, its role determined by its peculiar physical and sensitive capacities. As a physical body, on the one hand, it was disposed to accept the physical impressions of light and color radiating to it from external objects. As a sensitive body, on the other hand, it was enabled by the visual spirit flowing to it from the brain to feel those impressions visually. Acting as a sentient selector of visual information, the lens transformed the brute physical impressions of light and color into visual impressions. These, in turn, gave rise to perceptual “depictions” that were passed back along the stream of visual spirits to the brain. Known in Scholastic parlance as “intentional species,” these depictions served as virtual representations of their generating objects. As such, they provided the wherewithal not only for perception, but also for conception and cognition.

William Croone’s theory of muscular contraction

1961 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-178 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Spinal Cord ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Muscle Contraction ◽  
Muscular Contraction ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
First Person ◽  
Muscular Movement ◽  
The One ◽  
The Brain

In the mid-seventeenth century William Croone had been the earliest among his contemporaries to concern himself with muscular motion. Thus, much of the discussion on muscular movement in the period after 1664 is either a commentary upon Croone’s views or is derived from them, and his influence was thus widespread, especially on the Continent. The background to Croone’s own views is largely that of Greek physiology as represented in the works of Galen. The first person who had a theory of muscle contraction seems to have been Erasistratus. Galen says that Erasistratus of Chios (fl. 290 b.c.) considered that when a muscle is filled with pneuma its breadth increases while its length diminishes and for this reason it is contracted. (1) Galen himself was impressed by the contractility of muscle and by the fact that this contractility depends on the nerve arising from the spinal cord and entering the muscle, where it branches repeatedly and sends its branches into all parts of the muscle. If the nerve, entering the muscle, be cut or injured or merely compressed the muscle loses all movement and sensitivity. (2) Galen considered that a muscle is made up of fibres and flesh. (3) The fibres of the muscle are continuous with those of its tendons at either end. In the body of the muscle itself the fibres are spread apart by the flesh contained in the interspaces between them. Each of these continuous fibres extending through both the tendon and the muscle Galen considers to be made up of finer fibres—on the one hand of inert and insensitive fibres of the same kind as occur in ligaments and, on the other hand, of sensitive fibres which are simply fine extensions of the branches of the nerves. (4) Galen does not, however, seem to offer, as does Erasistratus any mechanism to account for muscle contraction. To Galen the muscle is simply moved by the motor faculty which comes from the brain.

scholarly journals Bio-Inspired Modality Fusion for Active Speaker Detection

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 3397
Author(s):  
Gustavo Assunção ◽  
Nuno Gonçalves ◽  
Paulo Menezes
Keyword(s):  
Superior Colliculus ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Validation Process ◽  
Detection Approach ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Speaker Detection ◽  
The One ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Fusion Ability

Human beings have developed fantastic abilities to integrate information from various sensory sources exploring their inherent complementarity. Perceptual capabilities are therefore heightened, enabling, for instance, the well-known "cocktail party" and McGurk effects, i.e., speech disambiguation from a panoply of sound signals. This fusion ability is also key in refining the perception of sound source location, as in distinguishing whose voice is being heard in a group conversation. Furthermore, neuroscience has successfully identified the superior colliculus region in the brain as the one responsible for this modality fusion, with a handful of biological models having been proposed to approach its underlying neurophysiological process. Deriving inspiration from one of these models, this paper presents a methodology for effectively fusing correlated auditory and visual information for active speaker detection. Such an ability can have a wide range of applications, from teleconferencing systems to social robotics. The detection approach initially routes auditory and visual information through two specialized neural network structures. The resulting embeddings are fused via a novel layer based on the superior colliculus, whose topological structure emulates spatial neuron cross-mapping of unimodal perceptual fields. The validation process employed two publicly available datasets, with achieved results confirming and greatly surpassing initial expectations.

Temporality and Truth

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel W. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Continuous Variation ◽  
Pure Form ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
Time Image ◽  
Positive Light

This paper examines the intersecting of the themes of temporality and truth in Deleuze's philosophy. For the ancients, truth was something eternal: what was true was true in all times and in all places. Temporality (coming to be and passing away) was the realm of the mutable, not the eternal. In the seventeenth century, change began to be seen in a positive light (progress, evolution, and so on), but this change was seen to be possible only because of the immutable laws of nature that govern change. It was not until philosophers such as Bergson, James, Whitehead – and then Deleuze – that time began to be taken seriously on its own account. On the one hand, in Deleuze, time, freed from its subordination to movement, now becomes autonomous: it is the pure form of change (continuous variation) that lies at the basis of Deleuze's metaphysics in Difference and Repetition (and is explored more thematically in The Time-Image). As a result, on the other hand, the false, freed from its subordination to the form of the true, assumes a power of its own (the power of the false), which in turn implies a new ‘analytic of the concept’ that Deleuze develops in What Is Philosophy?

scholarly journals Evolution in the Brain, Evolution in the Mind: The Hierarchical Brain and the Interface between Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-377
Author(s):  
Leonardo Niro Nascimento
Keyword(s):  
Brain Evolution ◽  
The Other ◽  
Common Source ◽  
Evolutionary Models ◽  
Anatomy And Physiology ◽  
Psychodynamically Oriented ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Shed Light

This article first aims to demonstrate the different ways the work of the English neurologist John Hughlings Jackson influenced Freud. It argues that these can be summarized in six points. It is further argued that the framework proposed by Jackson continued to be pursued by twentieth-century neuroscientists such as Papez, MacLean and Panksepp in terms of tripartite hierarchical evolutionary models. Finally, the account presented here aims to shed light on the analogies encountered by psychodynamically oriented neuroscientists, between contemporary accounts of the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system on the one hand, and Freudian models of the mind on the other. These parallels, I will suggest, are not coincidental. They have a historical underpinning, as both accounts most likely originate from a common source: John Hughlings Jackson's tripartite evolutionary hierarchical view of the brain.

scholarly journals The Bishop’s Role in Two Non-Catholic States

2015 ◽  
Vol 95 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 245-255
Author(s):  
Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Crucial Aspect ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Confessional Identity ◽  
The One ◽  
Catholic Reform

This paper contrasts the very different roles played by the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland, on the one hand, and Turkish-occupied Hungary, on the other, in the movement of early modern religious reform. It suggests that the decision of Propaganda Fide to adopt an episcopal model of organisation in Ireland after 1618, despite the obvious difficulties posed by the Protestant nature of the state, was a crucial aspect of the consolidation of a Catholic confessional identity within the island. The importance of the hierarchy in leadership terms was subsequently demonstrated in the short-lived period of de facto independence during the 1640s and after the repression of the Cromwellian period the episcopal model was successfully revived in the later seventeenth century. The paper also offers a parallel examination of the case of Turkish Hungary, where an effective episcopal model of reform could not be adopted, principally because of the jurisdictional jealousy of the Habsburg Kings of Hungary, who continued to claim rights of nomination to Turkish controlled dioceses but whose nominees were unable to reside in their sees. Consequently, the hierarchy of Turkish-occupied Hungary played little or no role in the movement of Catholic reform, prior to the Habsburg reconquest.

Paradoxes of Christian Solitude in the Seventeenth Century

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Louis Quantin
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
The Other ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Moral Dimension ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Status ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The One

AbstractIn seventeenth-century religious discourse, the status of solitude was deeply ambivalent: on the one hand, solitude was valued as a setting and preparation for self-knowledge and meditation; on the other hand, it had negative associations with singularity, pride and even schism. The ambiguity of solitude reflected a crucial tension between the temptation to withdraw from contemporary society, as hopelessly corrupt, and endeavours to reform it. Ecclesiastical movements which stood at the margins of confessional orthodoxies, such as Jansenism (especially in its moral dimension of Rigorism), Puritanism and Pietism, targeted individual conscience but also worked at controlling and disciplining popular behaviour. They may be understood as attempts to pursue simultaneously withdrawal and engagement.

scholarly journals Dynamics of Continuity and Change: Shifts in Labour Relations in the Potosí Mines (1680–1812)

2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (S24) ◽  
pp. 93-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rossana Barragán Romano
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Economic Sectors ◽  
Labour Relations ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
The One

AbstractLabour relations in the silver mines of Potosí are almost synonymous with the mita, a system of unfree work that lasted from the end of the sixteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, behind this continuity there were important changes, but also other forms of work, both free and self-employed. The analysis here is focused on how the “polity” contributed to shape labour relations, especially from the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. This article scrutinizes the labour policies of the Spanish monarchy on the one hand, which favoured certain economic sectors and regions to ensure revenue, and on the other the initiatives both of mine entrepreneurs and workers – unfree, free, and self-employed – who all contributed to changing the system of labour.

Some Economic Aspects of the Brain Drain

1979 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 7-14
Author(s):  
Harry G. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North America ◽  
Brain Drain ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Economic Aspects ◽  
National State ◽  
The One ◽  
Professional People ◽  
The Brain

The concept of “brain drain” is in its origins a nationalistic concept, by which is meant a concept that visualizes economic and cultural welfare in terms of the welfare of the residents of a national state or region, viewed as a totality, and excludes from consideration both the welfare of people born in that region who choose to leave it, and the welfare of the outside world in general. Moreover, though the available statistics are far from adequate on this point, there is generally assumed to be a net flow of trained professional people from the former colonial territories to the ex-imperial European nations, and from Europe and elsewhere to North America and particularly the United States. The concept thus lends itself easily to the expression of anti-colonial sentiments on the one hand, and anti-American sentiments on the other. The expression of such sentiments can be dignified by the presentation of brain drain as a serious economic and cultural problem, by relying on nationalistic sentiments and assumptions and ignoring the principles of economics—especially the principle that in every transaction there is both a demand and a supply—or by elevating certain theoretical economic possibilities into presumed hard facts.

Herbert Mac Cabe’s Philosophical Anthropology

Politeia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 238-260
Author(s):  
Franco Manni ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
External World ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Language System ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Individual Human

From the ideas of Aristotle, De Saussure and Wittgenstein, philosopher Herbert McCabe elaborated an original anthropology. 'Meaning' means: the role played by a part towards the whole. Senses are bodily organs and sensations allow an animal to get fragments of the external world which become 'meaningful' for the behaviour of the whole animal Besides sensations, humans are ‘linguistic animals’ because through words they are able to 'communicate', that is, to share a peculiar kind of meanings: concepts. Whereas, sense-images are stored physically in our brain and cannot be shared, even though we can relate to sense-images by words (speech coincides with thought). However, concepts do not belong to the individual human being qua individual, but to an interpersonal entity: the language system. Therefore, on the one hand, to store images is a sense-power and an operation of the brain, whereas the brain (quite paradoxically!) is not in itself the organ of thought. On the other hand, concepts do not exist on their own.

Split brains

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Schechter
Keyword(s):  
Visual Field ◽  
Information Exchange ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Right Hemisphere ◽  
The Other ◽  
Brain Surgery ◽  
Interhemispheric Interaction ◽  
Split Brain ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right

The largest fibre tract in the human brain connects the two cerebral hemispheres. A ‘split-brain’ surgery severs this structure, sometimes together with other white matter tracts connecting the right hemisphere and the left. Split-brain surgeries have long been performed on non-human animals for experimental purposes, but a number of these surgeries were also performed on adult human beings in the second half of the twentieth century, as a medical treatment for severe cases of epilepsy. A number of these people afterwards agreed to participate in ongoing research into the psychobehavioural consequences of the procedure. These experiments have helped to show that the corpus callosum is a significant source of interhemispheric interaction and information exchange in the ‘neurotypical’ brain. After split-brain surgery, the two hemispheres operate unusually independently of each other in the realm of perception, cognition, and the control of action. For instance, each hemisphere receives visual information directly from the opposite (‘contralateral’) side of space, the right hemisphere from the left visual field and the left hemisphere from the right visual field. This is true of the normal (‘neurotypical’) brain too, but in the neurotypical case interhemispheric tracts allow either hemisphere to gain access to the information that the other has received. In a split-brain subject however the information more or less stays put in whatever hemisphere initially received it. And it isn’t just visual information that is confined to one hemisphere or the other after the surgery. Rather, after split-brain surgery, each hemisphere is the source of proprietary perceptual information of various kinds, and is also the source of proprietary memories, intentions, and aptitudes. Various notions of psychological unity or integration have always been central to notions of mind, personhood, and the self. Although split-brain surgery does not prevent interhemispheric interaction or exchange, it naturally alters and impedes it. So does the split-brain subject as a whole nonetheless remain a unitary psychological being? Or could there now be two such psychological beings within one human animal – sharing one body, one face, one voice? Prominent neuropsychologists working with the subjects have often appeared to argue or assume that a split-brain subject has a divided or disunified consciousness and even two minds. Although a number of philosophers agree, the majority seem to have resisted these conscious and mental ‘duality claims’, defending alternative interpretations of the split-brain experimental results. The sources of resistance are diverse, including everything from a commitment to the necessary unity of consciousness, to recognition of those psychological processes that remain interhemispherically integrated, to concerns about what the moral and legal consequences would be of recognizing multiple psychological beings in one body. On the other hand underlying most of these arguments against the various ‘duality’ claims is the simple fact that the split-brain subject does not appear to be two persons, but one – and there are powerful conceptual, social, and moral connections between being a unitary person on the one hand and having a unified consciousness and mind on the other.

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