Book Review: “Playing With My Dog Katie. An Ethnomethodological Study of Dog – Human Interaction.” by David Goode. Purdue University Press, 2007, pp. 228

The book by David Goode gives us a possibility to take an extraordinary excursion to unremarkable and inscrutable world, so common for us that we do not usually notice it, although we participate in it everyday. It is a reconstructed world that shows us methods that we use in mundane life to establish an order in it and to live with others going through concrete situations. Our live consists of just these situations that we live by (as playing with a dog, talking with others, lining up the store, etc.) and not of socio – demographic data from the end of sociological questionnaires and of many other abstractions used by sociologists. What is observable and analisable not always becomes a topic of the sociological research. Ethnomethodology, a perspective used in the book, wants just to go into details and to extract them to the surface. We should not rest our analysis on the “shadows” of reality, that are cast by still available and analyzable empirical phenomena, although difficult to analyze because of sociological methods and common sense perception used by sociologists.

Urban Commoning: An Assessment of Its Aesthetic Dimension

The practice of urban commoning continues to tickle the imagination of activists and academics alike. Urban commoning’s aesthetic dimension, yet, has not been fully understood. This contribution seeks to fill such gap and approaches aesthetics in the literal sense: That which presents itself to sense perception. The article thus asks: To what extent may commoning practices that are dedicated to the disclosure of unheard voices (hence having an aesthetic dimension) shift urban power relations? This contribution takes its cue in Jacques Rancière’s theory of aesthetics and has the commoning experiment of Pension Almonde as its central case. Pension Almonde constituted a commons‐based, temporary occupation of a vacant social housing complex in Rotterdam, aimed specifically to undo the subordinate position of urban nomads and orphaned cultural initiatives. The article finally develops the distinction between a particular‐aesthetic dimension (making unheard voices merely perceptible) and a universal‐aesthetic dimension (shifting power relations) of urban commoning. Given the case’s lack of collective agency and external resonance, urban power relations remained in place.

A Participatory Assessment of Perceived Neighbourhood Walkability in a Small Urban Environment

Walkability has become a research topic of great concern for preserving public health, especially in the era of the COVID-19 outbreak. Today more than ever, urban and transport policies, constrained by social distancing measures and travel restrictions, must be conceptualized and implemented with a particular emphasis on sustainable walkability. Most of the walkability models apply observation and subjective methods to measure walkability, whereas few studies address walkability based on sense perception. To fill this gap, we aim at investigating the perceived neighbourhood walkability (PNW) based on sense perception in a neighbourhood of Brussels. We designed a survey that integrates 22 items grouped into 5 dimensions (cleanness, visual aesthetics, landscape and nature, feeling of pressure, feeling of safety), as well as the socio-demographic attributes of the participants. Using various statistical methods, we show that socio-demographics have almost no effects on perceived neighbourhood walkability. Nonetheless, we found significant differences between groups of different educational backgrounds. Furthermore, using a binomial regression model, we found strong associations between PNW and at least one item from each grouping dimension. Finally, we show that based on a deep neural network for classification, the items have good predictive capabilities (78% of classification accuracy). These findings can help integrate sense perception into objective measurement methods of walkable environments. Additionally, policy recommendations should be targeted based on differences of perception across socio-demographic groups.

Sense-Perception, Reasoning and Forms in Plotinus

This paper discusses the role of innate concepts derived from Intellect in Plotinus’ account of cognition of the sensible realm. Several passages have been claimed as evidence for such innateness, but an analysis of them shows that they do not support this claim. It is tentatively suggested that, nevertheless, some very general concepts such as difference, sameness and being are integral to the faculty of sense and play a crucial role in concept formation. It is further argued that reasoning about the sensible realm takes place to a large extent without the involvement of the higher realms of Plotinus’ hierarchy of being. Clearly, however, for value concepts such as those of goodness, justice and beauty human beings are dependent upon an illumination from Intellect.

Attention in Augustine

The article treats the role of attention (intentio or attentio) in Augustine’s analysis of sense perception, the notion of time, and the Trinitarian structure of the human mind. The term intentio covers a broad range of meanings in Augustine’s usage. Its most fundamental meaning is the life-giving presence of the soul in the body, intensified in attention’s being concentrated on a particular thing or experience; Augustine also uses the term attentio in this latter sense. According to his analysis of time, by way of attention (intentio or attentio), the soul fixes the present in which the future passes into the past. Due to the intention of the soul, the form abstracted from an external object is both imprinted into the sense organ and retained in the memory in order to be, by intention again, recalled before the sight of mind. As “the intention of the will” or just “the will”, attention connects intellectual understanding with memory. In Augustine’s eyes, attention has a different quality depending on the object it is oriented to, and a different intensity, ranging from inattentive distraction (distentio) to concentrated effort (intentio).

The External World

The Yogācāra school of Mahāyāna Buddhism denies the existence of external objects, holding that only mental entities are ultimately real. This chapter examines the arguments developed by Yogācāra philosophers for that thesis, as well as objections raised by Buddhist realists. It begins with examination of Buddhist arguments against physicalism, which were principally aimed at the Cārvāka school of Indian materialism. It then discusses the route to idealism by way of the representationalist theory of sense perception that was supported by a time-lag argument. Idealism as such was subsequently supported by appeal to parsimony, as well as by considerations to do with infinite divisibility, and arguably by the claim that physical objects and cognitions are never grasped separately.

Multimodal Modeling: Bridging Biosemiotics and Social Semiotics

This paper explores a semiotic notion of body as starting point for bridging biosemiotic with social semiotic theory. The cornerstone of the argument is that the social semiotic criticism of the classic view of meaning as double articulation can support the criticism of language-centrism that lies at the foundation of biosemiotics. Besides the pragmatic epistemological advantages implicit in a theoretical synthesis, I argue that this brings a semiotic contribution to philosophy of mind broadly. Also, it contributes to overcoming the polemic in linguistics between, loosely put, cognitive universalism and cultural relativism. This possibility is revealed by the recent convergence of various semiotic theories towards a criticism of the classic notion of meaning as double articulation. In biosemiotics, the interest to explicate meaning as multiply articulated stems from the construal of Umwelt as relying on the variety of sense perception channels and semiotic systems that a species has at its disposal. Recently, social semiotics developed an unexplored interest for embodiment by starting from the other end, namely the consideration of the modal heterogeneity of meaning. To bridge these notions, I employ the cognitive semantic notion of embodiment and Mittelberg’s cognitive semiotic notion of exbodiment. In light of these, I explore the possible intricacies between the biosemiotic notion of primary modeling system and concepts referring to preconceptual structures for knowledge organization stemming from cognitive linguistics. Further, Mittelberg’s concept of exbodiment allows for a construal of meaning articulation as mediation between the exbodying and embodying directions of mind.

“And Her Heart Fluttered”: The Psychopathology of Desire in the Argonautika

<p>This thesis investigates the way that Apollonios constructs Medea’s psyche and body in response to contemporary medical and philosophical influences in order to portray realistically the way that erōs manifests itself in Medea as both sickness and mental illness. Apollonios delves into Medea’s psyche and exposes how it functions in moments of intense desire, pain, indecision and introspection while under the powerful sways of erōs. Medea’s erōs manifests as erratic and dangerous behaviour and crippling indecision, the analysis of which is done in light of Chrusippos’ discussion of Euripides’ Medea’s akrasia. Apollonios draws from Euripides’ version to depict Medea in a different stage of her life, making a similar life-altering decision: whether or not to help Jason and betray her family or stay at home and watch him die. Apollonios makes the audience sympathize with Medea by showing her as a victim of destructive erōs and by exhibiting her emotional suffering. He heightens the degree that the internal is depicted and the very fact that he does internalize Medea shows an interest in her side of the story. It humanizes her to see her motivations, her fears, her desires and her moral dilemmas. Apollonios twists the image of Medea that an audience may expect to see by focusing, in Book 3 at least, almost entirely on her maidenhood and her struggle between exercising maidenly shame and giving in to the temptation of Jason. Apollonios makes the audience understand and sympathize with Medea by delving into the workings of her psyche and explaining her pleasure and pain, and most importantly, explaining why she cannot act rationally. erōs also manifests itself inside Medea and in turn this is expressed in Medea’s outward appearance as medical symptoms, like those of fever. In addition, by incorporating contemporary medical discoveries like the nervous system Apollonios is able to utilize the new conceptions of sense-perception to realistically show the way that destructive emotions manifest themselves as perceivable physical pain. Apollonios draws on philosophical and medical influences to heighten the realism of Medea’s physical and psychological pain and pleasure while simultaneously providing a forceful warning of the destructiveness of erōs’ nature.</p>