40 papers in the library · 27 citations · publishing 2017-2018
Oxford Scholarship Online December 21, 2017 Kélina Gotman
Choreomania became distinctly political. Missionary physicians and neuroscientists stationed in Madagascar and Brazil compared trance-like revolutionary uprisings to the literature on choreomania. Unlike earlier cases, however, these ‘movement disorders’, large-scale anti-colonial demonstrations characterized by shaking, frothing, falling, and visions—as well as, in Madagascar, ancestor...
Oxford Scholarship Online November 23, 2017 Michelle Sizemore
This theoretical chapter introduces a largely overlooked tradition of mysticism in the politics, art, religion, and culture of post-revolutionary U.S. society. Civil mysticism refers to nonsectarian practices of transcendence that engender the people, namely political and social rituals such as maypole ceremonies, presidential inaugurations, and literary pilgrimages. This chapter elaborates on...
Oxford Scholarship Online October 19, 2017 David L. Mcmahan
Meditation is often described in terms of internal “states” that presumably arise in anyone who practices them diligently. These practices, however, only “work” in specific social and cultural contexts, and the work they do may be quite different in divergent contexts. McMahan theorizes meditation practices as cultivating ways of being in specific social imaginaries constituted by a cultural...
Oxford Scholarship Online October 19, 2017 Evan Thompson
Cognitive neuroscience tends to conceptualize mindfulness meditation as inner observation of a private mental realm of thoughts, feelings, and body sensations, and tries to model mindfulness as instantiated in neural networks visible through brain imaging tools such as EEG and fMRI. This approach confuses the biological conditions for mindfulness with mindfulness itself, which, as classically...
Oxford Scholarship Online October 19, 2017 Thomas G. Bever
Every language-learning child eventually automatically segments the organization of word sequences into natural units. Within the natural units, processing of normal conversation reveals a disconnect between listener’s representation of the sound and meaning of utterances. A compressed or absent word at a point early in a sequence is unintelligible until later acoustic information, yet...
Oxford Scholarship Online August 24, 2017 Shaun Gallagher 12 citations
An enactivist approach to understanding the mind, in its fullest sense, is not just a matter of action-oriented processes; enactivism is about more than action and sensory–motor contingencies. To understand cognition as richly embodied this chapter considers factors involving affectivity and intersubjectivity. Empirical studies show that affectivity, in a wide sense that includes hunger,...
Oxford Scholarship Online August 24, 2017 Shaun Gallagher
This chapter maps out a range of embodied cognition (EC) theories, starting with ‘weak EC’, which focuses on body-formatted representations and the neural reuse hypothesis, and remains close to traditional cognitivist conceptions of the mind. This approach to EC is then contrasted to functionalist proposals for extended mind, to a biological model of EC, and finally to enactivist proposals....
Oxford Scholarship Online August 24, 2017 Kenneth Borris
This book defines Platonism’s roles in early modern theories of literature, then turns to reappraise the Platonizing major poet Edmund Spenser. Platonic concerns and conceptions profoundly affected early modern English and continental poetics, yet the effects have had little attention. Literary Platonism energized pursuits of the sublime, and knowledge of this approach to poetry yields cogent...
Oxford Scholarship Online August 24, 2017 Philip Goff
This chapter explores and defends a form of cosmopsychism: the combination of panpsychism and priority monism (the latter being the view that there is only one fundamental individual). The crucial advantage of cosmopsychism is that it offers a solution to the Subject Irreducibility Problem, discussed in the last chapter. After developing the view in response to various challenges, an empirical...
Oxford Scholarship Online August 24, 2017 Philip Goff
This is the first of two chapters discussing the most notorious problem facing Russellian monism: the combination problem. This is actually a family of difficulties, each reflecting the challenge of how to make sense of everyday human and animal experience intelligibly arising from more fundamental conscious or protoconscious features of reality. Key challenges facing panpsychist and...
Oxford Scholarship Online August 24, 2017 Susan A. J. Stuart
Every action, touch, utterance, and look, every listening, taste, smell, and feel is a living question. But it is no ordinary propositional one-by-one question, rather it is a plenisentient sensing and probing non-propositional enquiry about how our world is and how we anticipate its becoming. Using the notion of enkinaesthesia, this paper explores the ways in which an agent’s affectively...
Oxford Scholarship Online August 24, 2017 Philip Goff
This chapter outlines a consciousness-based approach to metaphysics: analytic phenomenology. Chapter 5 argued that introspection reveals the essential nature of our conscious states. Analytic phenomenology builds on this, taking our introspective grasp of the nature of consciousness as a crucial source of data for metaphysical enquiry. This methodology is explored in relation to contemporary...
Oxford Scholarship Online July 20, 2017
The essays in this volume explore those aspects of Kant’s writings which concern issues in the philosophy of mind. These issues are central to any understanding of Kant’s Critical philosophy and they bear upon contemporary discussions in the philosophy of mind. Fourteen specially written essays address such questions as: What role does mental processing play in Kant’s account of intuition? In...
Oxford Scholarship Online June 22, 2017 Frédéric Pouillaude
This chapter argues that Erwin Straus assigns dance very definitely to the domain of smooth space. Music is dance’s condition of possibility because it establishes the only space that could be adequate to dancing: an acoustic space, both homogeneous and nebulous, in which the directionality of praxis is obliterated. This acoustic space of dance contrasts with the optical space of directed and...
Oxford Scholarship Online June 22, 2017 Richard Moran
The “rationalizing interpretation” view of psychological discourse, associated with Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett, has been widely influential as a reconstruction of our practices of ascribing attitudes to others, and as an account of the meaning of psychological terms. This perspective has lent support to a wider assumption in philosophy of mind, that we should think of our ordinary use...