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306Psyche and Soma: Physicians and metaphysicians on the mind-body problem from antiquity to enlightenmentAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 81 (1). 2003.Book Information Psyche And Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body Problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment. Psyche And Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body Problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment John P. Wright Paul Potter Oxford Clarendon Press 2000 xii + 298, Hardback £45.00 Edited by John P. Wright; Paul Potter . Clarendon Press. Oxford. Pp. xii + 298,. Hardback:£45.00.
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201Review of Elizabeth A. Wilson, Neural Geographies: feminism and the microstructure of cognition (review)Philosophy in Review/ Comptes Rendus Philosophiques 299-301. 1999.Writing within and against the set critical practices of psychoanalytic-deconstructive-Foucauldian-feminist cultural theory, Elizabeth Wilson demonstrates, in this provocative and original book, the productivity and the pleasure of direct, complicitous engagement with the contemporary cognitive sciences. Wilson forges an eclectic method in reaction to the 'zealous but disavowed moralism' of those high cultural Theorists whose 'disciplining compulsion' concocts a monolithic picture of science in …Read more
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140Material agency, skills, and history: Distributed cognition and the archaeology of memoryIn C. Knappett & L. Malafouris (eds.), Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach, Springer. 2007.for Lambros Malafouris and Carl Knappett (eds), Material Agency: towards a non-anthropocentric approach (Springer, late 2007)
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299Rene DescartesIn W. H. McNeill (ed.), The Berkshire encyclopedia of world history: Vol 2, Berkshire Publishing. pp. 513-514. 2005.Even though the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes has been remembered primarily for his contributions to Western philosophy, he also showed a curiosity about many aspects of the natural world. His mechanistic and rationalistic methods have been criticized as often as they have been praised, but they provided a framework for subsequent scientific inquiry.
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957Consensus collaboration enhances group and individual recall accuracyQuarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 65 (1). 2012.We often remember in groups, yet research on collaborative recall finds “collaborative inhibition”: Recalling with others has costs compared to recalling alone. In related paradigms, remembering with others introduces errors into recall. We compared costs and benefits of two collaboration procedures—turn taking and consensus. First, 135 individuals learned a word list and recalled it alone (Recall 1). Then, 45 participants in three-member groups took turns to recall, 45 participants in three-mem…Read more
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1486From individual memory to collective memory: Theoretical and empirical perspectivesMemory 16 (3): 177-182. 2008.Very often our memories of the past are of experiences or events we shared with others. And ‘‘in many circumstances in society, remembering is a social event’’ (Roediger, Bergman, & Meade, 2000, p. 129): parents and children reminisce about significant family events, friends discuss a movie they just saw together, students study for exams with their roommates, colleagues remind one another of information relevant to an important group decision, and complete strangers discuss a crime they happene…Read more
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462Looking beyond memory studies: comparisons and integrationsMemory Studies 2 (3): 299-302. 2009.Projects in memory studies are best driven by topic not tradition, because the phenomena under investigation are usually interactive, not neatly compartmentalized. This imposes open-endedness not only in tracing diverse activities of remembering across the spread of relevant disciplines, but also in looking beyond memory altogether in order better to understand its diverse manifestations.
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1321Minds in and out of time: memory, embodied skill, anachronism, and performanceTextual Practice 26 (4): 587-607. 2012.Contemporary critical instincts, in early modern studies as elsewhere in literary theory, often dismiss invocations of mind and cognition as inevitably ahistorical, as performing a retrograde version of anachronism. Arguing that our experience of time is inherently anachronistic and polytemporal, we draw on the frameworks of distributed cognition and extended mind to theorize cognition as itself distributed, cultural, and temporal. Intelligent, embodied action is a hybrid process, involving the…Read more
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1089Reflections on Emotions, Imagination, and Moral Reasoning Toward an Integrated, Multidisciplinary Approach to Moral CognitionIn Robyn Langdon & Catriona Mackenzie (eds.), Emotions, Imagination, and Moral Reasoning, Psychology Press. pp. 327-347. 2012.B eginning with the problem of integrating diverse disciplinary perspectives on moral cognition, we argue that the various disciplines have an interest in developing a common conceptual framework for moral cognition research. We discuss issues arising in the other chapters in this volume that might serve as focal points for future investigation and as the basis for the eventual development of such a framework. These include the role of theory in binding together diverse phenomena and the role of…Read more
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882Cognitive Ecology as a Framework for Shakespearean StudiesShakespeare Studies 39 94-103. 2011.‘‘COGNITIVE ECOLOGY’’ is a fruitful model for Shakespearian studies, early modern literary and cultural history, and theatrical history more widely. Cognitive ecologies are the multidimensional contexts in which we remember, feel, think, sense, communicate, imagine, and act, often collaboratively, on the fly, and in rich ongoing interaction with our environments. Along with the anthropologist Edwin Hutchins,1 we use the term ‘‘cognitive ecology’’ to integrate a number of recent approaches to cult…Read more
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389Controlling the passions: passion, memory, and the moral physiology of self in seventeenth-century neurophilosophyIn S. Gaukroger (ed.), The Soft Underbelly of Reason: The Passions in the Seventeenth Century, Routledge. pp. 115-146. 1998.Some natural philosophers in the 17th century believed that they could control their own innards, specifically the animal spirits coursing incessantly through brain and nerves, in order to discipline or harness passion, cognition and action under rational guidance. This chapter addresses the mechanisms thought necessary after Eden for controlling the physiology of passion. The tragedy of human embedding in the body, with its cognitive and moral limitations, was paired with a sense of our confine…Read more
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44Stefano Franchi and Güven Güzeldere, eds., Mechanical Bodies, Computational Minds: Artificial Intelligence from Automata to Cyborgs Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 26 (6): 414-416. 2006.review of Stefano Franchi and Güven Güzeldere, eds., Mechanical Bodies, Computational Minds: Artificial Intelligence from Automata to Cyborgs.
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625The myths, constructs and integrity of memory (review)Times Literary Supplement 5722. 2012.Selling “existences” for $25 a shot, hypnotists in 1950s America took their soul-searching clients back before birth to access memories from their previous lives. This brief “nationwide preoccupation” with past-life regression is one of eleven episodes richly documented in Alison Winter’s history of memory in the twentieth century. It followed reports from Morey Bernstein, a Colorado businessman, that when he hypnotized a local housewife, she remembered vivid details of her life as “Bridey Murph…Read more
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61Adaptive misbeliefs and false memoriesBehavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (6): 535-536. 2009.McKay & Dennett (M&D) suggest that some positive illusions are adaptive. But there is a bidirectional link between memory and positive illusions: Biased autobiographical memories filter incoming information, and self-enhancing information is preferentially attended and used to update memory. Extending M&D's approach, I ask if certain false memories might be adaptive, defending a broad view of the psychosocial functions of remembering.
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216Review of Don Dedrick, naming the Rainbow: Colour language, colour science, and culture (review)Philosophy in Review/ Comptes Rendus Philosophiques 106-109. 2001.By spotlighting the irreducible role of cognitive processes between biology and culture, this synthesis and critique of the universalist tradition in colour science offers a genuine starting-point for all future 'serious inquiry into the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of colour classification'.
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818Spongy Brains and Material MemoriesIn Mary Floyd-Wilson & Garrett Sullivan (eds.), Embodiment and Environment in Early Modern England, Palgrave. 2007.Embodied human minds operate in and spread across a vast and uneven world of things—artifacts, technologies, and institutions which they have collectively constructed and maintained through cultural and individual history. This chapter seeks to add a historical dimension to the enthusiastically future-oriented study of “natural-born cyborgs” in the philosophy of cognitive science,3 and a cognitive dimension to recent work on material memories and symbol systems in early modern England, bringing …Read more
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1232We Remember, We Forget: Collaborative Remembering in Older CouplesDiscourse Processes 48 (4): 267-303. 2011.Transactive memory theory describes the processes by which benefits for memory can occur when remembering is shared in dyads or groups. In contrast, cognitive psychology experiments demonstrate that social influences on memory disrupt and inhibit individual recall. However, most research in cognitive psychology has focused on groups of strangers recalling relatively meaningless stimuli. In the current study, we examined social influences on memory in groups with a shared history, who were recall…Read more
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266Memory: Philosophical issuesIn L. Nadel (ed.), Encyclopedia of cognitive science: Vol 2, Macmillan. pp. 1109-1113. 2002.Memory is a set of cognitive capacities by which humans and other animals retain information and reconstruct past experiences, usually for present purposes. Philosophical investigation into memory is in part continuous with the development of cognitive scientific theories, but includes related inquiries into metaphysics and personal identity.
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206Review of Dennis Des Chene, Spirits and Clocks: machine and organism in Descartes (review)British Journal for the History of Science 36 233-235. 2003.This rangy and precise book deserves to be read even by those historians who think they are bored with Descartes. While offering surprising and detailed readings of bewildering texts like theDescription of the Human Body, Des Chene constructs a powerful, sad narrative of the Cartesian disenchantment of the body. Along the way he also delivers provocative views on topics as various as teleology, the role of illustrations in the history of mechanism, theories of the sexual differentiation of the f…Read more
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346MemoryStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2017.Remembering is one of the most characteristic and most puzzling of human activities. Personal memory, in particular - the ability mentally to travel back into the past, as leading psychologist Endel Tulving puts it - often has intense emotional or moral significance: it is perhaps the most striking manifestation of the peculiar way human beings are embedded in time, and of our limited but genuine freedom from our present environment and our immediate needs. Memory has been significant in the his…Read more
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3324Memory before the game: switching perspectives in imagining and remembering sport and movementJournal of Mental Imagery 36 (1/2): 85-95. 2012.This paper addresses relations between memory and imagery in expert sport in relation to visual or visuospatial perspective. Imagining, remembering, and moving potentially interact via related forms of episodic simulation, whether future- or past-directed. Sometimes I see myself engaged in action: many experts report switching between such external visual perspectives and an internal, 'own-eyes', or field perspective on their past or possible performance. Perspective in retrieval and in imagery …Read more
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121Descartes' Natural Philosophy (edited book)Routledge. 2000.The most comprehensive collection of essays on Descartes' scientific writings ever published, this volume offers a detailed reassessment of Descartes' scientific work and its bearing on his philosophy. The 35 essays, written by some of the world's leading scholars, cover topics as diverse as optics, cosmology and medicine, and will be of vital interest to all historians of philosophy or science.
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245Distributed memory, coupling, and historyIn R. Heath, B. Hayes, A. Heathcote & C. Hooker (eds.), Dynamical Cognitive Science: Proceedings of the Fourth Australasian Cognitive Science Conference, University of Newcastle. 1999.A case study in historical cognitive science, this paper addresses two claims made by radical proponents of new dynamical approaches. It queries their historical narrative, which sees embodied, situated cognition as correcting an individualist, atemporal framework originating in Descartes. In fact, new Descartes scholarship shows that 17th-century animal spirits neurophysiology realized a recognizably distributed model of memory; explicit representations are patterns of spirit flow, and memory t…Read more
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223History, language, and mind’. Review of Graham Richards, Mental Machinery: the origins and consequences of psychological ideas, part 1:1600-1850 (review)Metascience 5 147-150. 1994.
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471The Feel of the World: exograms, habits, and the confusion of types of memoryIn Andrew Kania (ed.), Philosophers on *Memento*, Routledge. pp. 65-86. 2009.A philosophical analysis of different kinds of memory used in the film Memento.
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210Multiple Timescales of Joint Remembering in the Crafting of aMemory-Scaffolding Tool during Collaborative DesignIn G. Airenti, B. G. Bara & G. Sandini (eds.), roceedings of EuroAsianPacific Joint Conference on Cognitive Science, . pp. 60-65. 2015.Joint remembering relies on the successful interweaving of multiple cognitive, linguistic, bodily, social and material resources, anchored in specific cultural ecosystems. Such systems for joint remembering in social interactions are composed of processes unfolding over multiple but complementary timescales which we distinguish for analytic purposes with the terms ‘coordination’, ‘collaboration’, ‘cooperation’, and ‘culture’, so as better to study their interanimation in practice. As an illustra…Read more
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718Between Individual and Collective Memory: Coordination, Interaction, DistributionSocial Research: An International Quarterly 75 23-48. 2008.Human memory in the wild often involves multiple forms of remembering at once, as habitual, affective, personal, factual, shared, and institutional memories operate at once within and across individuals and small groups. The interdisciplinary study of the ways in which history animates dynamical systems at many different timescales requires a multidimensional framework in which to analyse a broad range of social memory phenomena. Certain features of personal memory - its development, its constru…Read more
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459Critical review of Chaffin, Imreh, and Crawford, Practicing Perfection: memory and piano performance.Empirical Musicology Review 3 (3): 163-172. 2008.How do concert pianists commit to memory the structure of a piece of music like Bach’s Italian Concerto, learning it well enough to remember it in the highly charged setting of a crowded performance venue, yet remaining open to the freshness of expression of the moment? Playing to this audience, in this state, now, requires openness to specificity, to interpretation, a working dynamicism that mere rote learning will not provide. Chaffin, Imreh and Crawford’s innovative and detailed research sugg…Read more
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46Representation, reduction, and interdisciplinarity in the sciences of memoryIn Hugh Clapin (ed.), Representation in Mind, Elsevier. pp. 187--216. 2004.1. Introduction: memory and interdisciplinarity (footnote 1) Memory is studied at a bewildering number of levels, in a daunting range of disciplines, and with a vast array of methods. Is there any sense at all in which memory theorists - from neurobiologists to narrative theorists, from the developmental to the postcolonial, from the computational to the cross-cultural - are studying the same phenomena? This exploratory review paper sketches the bare outline of a positive framework for understan…Read more
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418The Creation of Space: narrative strategies, group agency, and skill in Lloyd Jones’s The Book of FameIn Chris Danta & Helen Groth (eds.), Mindful Aesthetics, Bloomsbury/ Continuum. pp. 141-160. 2014.Lloyd Jones’s *The Book of Fame*, a novel about the stunningly successful 1905 British tour of the New Zealand rugby team, represents both skilled group action and the difficulty of capturing it in words. The novel’s form is as fluid and deceptive, as adaptable and integrated, as the sweetly shaped play of the team that became known during this tour for the first time as the All Blacks. It treats sport on its own terms as a rich world, a set of bodily skills, and an honest profession in itself. …Read more