Time in Music and Philosophy

The kind of sense music makes, is bound up with how forms of meaning, including in verbal language, are connected to time. Traditional cyclical, epic, and goal-oriented senses of time all play a role in modern musical forms, even though the mythical, religious, and metaphysical content of these forms is hollowed out by scientific advances. The chapter considers aspects of the work of Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Dewey, Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, focusing particularly on the relations between self-consciousness, time, and rhythm, and on how these contribute to the constitution of meaning. The chapter argues that it may make more sense for philosophy to attend to what music reveals about time which can only be grasped by active participation in music, than to seek a comprehensive explanatory account of music and time.

The Role of Predictability During Negation Processing in Truth-Value Judgment Tasks

In experiments investigating the processing of true and false negative sentences, it is often reported that polarity interacts with truth-value, in the sense that true sentences lead to faster reaction times than false sentences in affirmative conditions whereas the same does not hold for negative sentences. Various reasons for this difference between affirmative and negative sentences have been discussed in the literature (e.g., lexical associations, predictability, ease of comparing sentence and world). In the present study, we excluded lexical associations as a potential influencing factor. Participants saw artificial visual worlds (e.g., a white square and a black circle) and corresponding sentences (i.e., “The square/circle is (not) white”). The results showed a clear effect of truth-value for affirmative sentences (true faster than false) but not for negative sentences. This result implies that the well-known truth-value-by-polarity interaction cannot solely be due to long-term lexical associations. Additional predictability manipulations allowed us to also rule out an explanatory account that attributes the missing truth-value effect for negative sentences to low predictability. We also discuss the viability of an informativeness account.

Edgework: Viewing curiosity as fundamentally relational

Most theories of curiosity emphasize the acquisition of information. Such conceptualizations focus on the actions of the knower in seeking units of knowledge. Each unit is valued as an unknown and appropriated in becoming known. Yet, recent advances across a range of disciplines from philosophy to cognitive science suggest that it may be time to complement the acquisitional theory of curiosity with a connectional theory of curiosity. This alternative perspective focuses on the actions of the knower in seeking relations among informational units, laying down lines of intersection, and thereby building a scaffold or network of knowledge. Intuitively, curiosity becomes edgework. In this chapter, we dwell on the notion of edgework, wrestle with its relation to prior accounts, and exercise its unique features to craft alternative reasons for curiosity's value to humanity. To begin, we engage in a philosophical discussion of the evidence for connectional curiosity across the last two millennia in the Western intellectual tradition. We then move to a contemporary operationalization of connectional curiosity in the mathematical language of network science. To make our discussion more concrete, we walk through a case study of humans browsing Wikipedia. The groundwork laid, we turn to the practical question of how (if at all) the paradigm of curiosity as edgework manifests in the contemporary lives of humans today. Does such a conceptualization help us to better understand the relations between curiosity and mental health? Might the edgework paradigm explain the drive to build specific structures of knowledge? Would the account help us to encode, test, and validate existing theories of curiosity, or propose new ones? Could it clarify why and how our culture values curiosity, in its multiple manifestations, plethora of practices, and kindred kinds in many bodies? In considering interdisciplinary answers to these questions, we find that the notion of edgework offers a fresh, flexible, and explanatory account of curiosity. More broadly, it uncovers new opportunities to use the lens of science to examine, probe, and interrogate this important dimension of the human experience.

Mimetic Desire and Ressentiment in the Case of the Japan–South Korea Trade Dispute

The purpose of this paper is to provide an explanatory account of the role of emotions in the trade dispute between Japan and South Korea which started in July 2019. Building on an integrated approach to the study of emotions in international relations, it argues that the collective experience of emotions in situations of conflict has to be understood in relation to the moralities assumed by the parties involved. It proposes a theoretical framework combining the concepts of mimetic desire and ressentiment coined by René Girard and Friedrich Nietzsche, respectively, in order to problematize the dialectic of power-justice underlying the processes of legitimation and self-justification by the two countries. In this sense, the strong emotional reactivity between both elites and people in South Korea and Japan can be attributed to the contradictions between the desires for superiority and equality channelled by nation-state-centred narratives. It concludes that ending the cycle of emotional reactivity requires both parties to move toward commitments to justice and empathy at the domestic and international levels.

Altitude and the distributional typology of language structure: Ejectives and beyond

The first decades of the 21st century have witnessed a renewed interest in the relationship between language structure and the various social and ecological niches in which the languages of the world are used and against the background of which they evolved. In this context, Everett (2013) argued for direct geographical influences on the sound structure of languages. It was observed that ejective consonants, produced with a sudden burst of non-pulmonic air to a salient acoustic effect, tend to occur in high-altitude environments in which these sounds may be adaptive due to a reduced articulatory effort and/or to prevent desiccation. Here, we evaluate this claim and at the same time place it into a broader context. We observe that the distribution of another class of typologically unusual sounds, uvulars, is highly similar to that of ejectives, but that the proposed explanations are not available to account for the similar geographical patterning of uvulars. Hence, we test an alternative explanatory account that would posit indirect rather than direct environmental influences on language structure that are mediated by anthropological factors, in particular the relative sociolinguistic isolation of speech communities at the highest altitudes. Applying Bayesian Logistic Mixed Effects Regression to a large database of phonological inventories of the world’s languages, however, we do not find strong support for either a correlation of ejectives or uvulars with high-altitude environments, though the association is somewhat stronger for ejectives than uvulars. A phylogenetic exploration of the development of both classes of sounds in two large language families spoken in widely different environments, Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan, together with a qualitative assessment of the dedicated literature, in contrast, suggests a strong role of language contact rather than environmental factors.

Three ways of unifying participles and nominalizations

In their chapter ‘Three ways of unifying participles and nominalizations: The case of Udmurt’ Dékány and Georgieva discuss the fact that the same morpheme appears in both DNs and participial relative clauses with relative systematicity in different language families. This makes it unlikely that we are dealing with unconnected cases of accidental homophony in the lexicon. Instead, a principled syntactic account is called for. The authors aim to lay out the hypothesis space for an explanatory account of the cross-linguistic participle-nominalizer polysemy, and to discuss which of the hypotheses is best suited to capture the Udmurt facts in particular. They present three different ways in which the polysemy can be given a unified syntactic account, such that the same lexical entry underlies the shared suffix of relatives and DNs. They then proceed to the empirical focus of the chapter, detailing the morpho-syntactic properties of Udmurt relatives and DNs with -m. They argue against treating -m as a nominalizing head and develop an account of -m as a head in the extended verbal projection. <173>

What do models of visual perception tell us about visual phenomenology?

Computational models of visual processing aim to provide a compact, explanatory account of the complex neural processes that underlie visual perception and behavior. But what, if anything, do current modeling approaches say about how conscious visual experience arises from neural processing? Here, we introduce the reader to four commonly used models for understanding visual computations, neural activity, and behavior: signal detection theory, drift diffusion, probabilistic population codes, and sampling. In an attempt to bridge these modeling approaches with experimental and philosophical work on the neural basis of conscious visual perception, we lay out possible relationships between the components of the models and the contents of phenomenal visual experience. We find no unique relation between model components and phenomenal experience in any model; rather, there are multiple logically possible mappings from models to experience. Going forward, we suggest that there are scientific opportunities to develop models that predict and explain a variety of subjective reports and philosophical opportunities to consider what aspects of phenomenal experience are promising scientific targets.

German Teachers’ Digital Habitus and Their Pandemic Pedagogy

After closing public schools in early 2020 to slow the spread of Covid-19, attempts to provide continuity of education in Germany by means of digital tools faltered in variety of ways, with insufficient competence and inadequate technology leading to inequitable access and uneven implementation. Understanding how German teachers were caught unprepared in this time of crisis, especially in comparison with their European neighbors, requires an examination of their habitus as discussed by Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) that accounts for their behaviors beyond existing models regarding technology acceptance. Drawing on existing sociological and media-related studies, this contribution will describe the attitudes of German teachers and educational decision-makers in light of their digital, cultural, and educational habitus to provide a partial explanatory account for the current state of affairs. It will show how traditional skepticism for innovation among teachers in general, and German teachers in particular, is reinforced by demographic and sociological characteristics of the German teacher population and the nature of German schooling. After describing extant conditions regarding digitally mediated educational experiences during the initial Covid-19 phase in Germany based on emerging data, this article will subsequently identify prospective issues in this area in the near future. While the transition to digital teaching and learning has the potential to bring about a number of challenges, early data suggests that a possibility of significant positive development may occur as well. Based on these indications, the article will conclude with implications for teacher professionalization going forward.

Foucault, Normativity, and Freedom: A Reappraisal

The aim of this article is to contribute to the recently revived debate over the normativity of Foucault’s genealogical method. More specifically, I shall respond to Fraser’s charge that Foucault’s rejection of humanism is unjustified because he cannot state why a totally panopticized, autonomous society would be objectionable. After dismissing a non-normative defence strategy of Foucault’s work, I shall proceed as follows: firstly, I shall clarify Fou-cault’s model of critique as a practice of problematization geared to free his addressees from their captivation to the system of truths sustaining the power mechanisms of modern biopolitics. Secondly, I shall argue that Fraser’s society should be resisted because it would reproduce this regime of captivity, thereby obstructing the exercise of freedom as self-transformation. Thirdly, I shall contend that Foucault’s normative orientation to a post-humanist conception of freedom as self-transformation finds a contextual, explanatory account in his attempt to revitalize the emancipatory project of Enlightenment modernity through a transformative problematization of our normative commitments. Moreover, I shall show that the standard of validity of this effort is represented by Foucault’s exemplary embodiment of the critical ethos of the Enlightenment in both his style of existence and theoretical activity. Finally, the article terminates by illustrating three shortcomings of Foucault’s normative approach.