Albert Newen

One of the most pressing questions concerning singular demonstrative mental contents is what makes their content singular: that is to say, what makes it the case that individual objects are the representata of these mental states. Many philosophers have required sophisticated intellectual capacities for singular content to be possible, such as the possession of an elaborate scheme of space and time. A more recent reaction to this strategy proposes to account for singular content solely on the basis of empirical models of visual processing. We believe both sides make good points, and offer an intermediate way of looking into singular content. Our suggestion is that singular content may be traced to psychological capacities to form flexible, abstract representations in the prefrontal cortex. This allows them to be sustained for increasingly longer periods of time and extrapolated beyond the context of perception, thus going beyond lowlevel sensory representations while also falling short of more sophisticated intellectual abilities.

There is an increasing amount of empirical work investigating the sense of agency, i.e. the registration that we are the initiators of our own actions. Many studies try to relate the sense of agency to an internal feed-forward mechanism, called the ‘‘comparator model’’. In this paper, we draw a sharp distinction between a non-conceptual level of feeling of agency and a conceptual level of judgement of agency. By analyzing recent empirical studies, we show that the comparator model is not able to explain either. Rather, we argue for a two-step account: a multifactorial weighting process of different agency indicators accounts for the feeling of agency, which is, in a second step, further processed by conceptual modules to form an attribution judgement. This new framework is then applied to disruptions of agency in schizophrenia, for which the comparator model also fails. Two further extensions are discussed: We show that the comparator model can neither be extended to account for the sense of ownership (which also has to be differentiated into a feeling and a judgement of ownership) nor for the sense of agency for thoughts. Our framework, however, is able to provide a unified account for the sense of agency for both actions and thoughts.

4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) is a relatively young and thriving field of interdisciplinary research. It assumes that cognition is shaped and structured by dynamic interactions between the brain, body, and both the physical and social environments. With essays from leading scholars and researchers, The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition investigates this recent paradigm. It addresses the central issues of embodied cognition by focusing on recent trends, such as Bayesian inference and predictive coding, and presenting new insights, such as the development of false belief understanding. The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition also introduces new theoretical paradigms for understanding emotion and conceptualizing the interactions between cognition, language, and culture. With an entire section dedicated to the application of 4E cognition in disciplines such as psychiatry and robotics, and critical notes aimed at stimulating discussion, this Oxford handbook is the definitive guide to 4E cognition. Aimed at neuroscientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and philosophers, The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in this young and thriving field.

Social stimuli grab our attention: we attend to them in an automatic and bottom-up manner, and ascribe them a higher degree of saliency compared to non-social stimuli. However, it has rarely been investigated how variations in attention affect the processing of social stimuli, although the answer could help us uncover details of social cognition processes such as action understanding. In the present study, we examined how changes to bottom-up attention affects neural EEG-responses associated with intentional action processing. We induced an increase in bottom-up attention by using hypnosis. We recorded the electroencephalographic µ-wave suppression of hypnotized participants when presented with intentional actions in first and third person perspective in a video-clip paradigm. Previous studies have shown that the µ-rhythm is selectively suppressed both when executing and observing goal-directed motor actions; hence it can be used as a neural signal for intentional action processing. Our results show that neutral hypnotic trance increases µ-suppression in highly suggestible participants when they observe intentional actions. This suggests that social action processing is enhanced when bottom-up attentional processes are predominant. Our findings support the Social Relevance Hypothesis, according to which social action processing is a bottom-up driven attentional process, and can thus be altered as a function of bottom-up processing devoted to a social stimulus.

Der Tractatus logico-philosophicus zeichnet sich durch eine eigenwillige Verbindung von logischem und physikalischem Atomismus aus. Der Zusammenhang von logischer und naturwissenschaftlicher Analyse wird bei Wittgenstein durch die Bildtheorie hergestellt und führt zu einem bildabhängigen Realismus. Diese Version des Realismus wird in einem Modell von physikalischen Eigenschaftspartikeln rekonstruiert. Die Gegenstände sind weder,bare particulars' ohne Eigenschaften noch Vektoren mit geometrischen Eigenschaften, sondern physikalische Partikel, die durch einen Vektor vollständig beschrieben werden können. In diesem Modell bekommen die Aussagen über den Zusammenhang von Sprache und Welt einen klaren Sinn.

Der Tractatus logico-philosophicus zeichnet sich durch eine eigenwillige Verbindung von logischem und physikalischem Atomismus aus. Der Zusammenhang von logischer und naturwissenschaftlicher Analyse wird bei Wittgenstein durch die Bildtheorie hergestellt und führt zu einem bildabhängigen Realismus. Diese Version des Realismus wird in einem Modell von physikalischen Eigenschaftspartikeln rekonstruiert. Die Gegenstände sind weder,bare particulars' ohne Eigenschaften noch Vektoren mit geometrischen Eigenschaften, sondern physikalische Partikel, die durch einen Vektor vollständig beschrieben werden können. In diesem Modell bekommen die Aussagen über den Zusammenhang von Sprache und Welt einen klaren Sinn.

Bei einer groben Betrachtungsweise wird meist nur zwischen dem frühen und dem späten Wittgenstein unterschieden, dem Verfasser des Tractatus logico-philosophicus von 1918 und dem Verfasser der 1953 posthum veröffentlichten Philosophischen Untersuchungen. Die Fülle der nachgelassenen Schriften erlaubt es uns jedoch, ein klares Bild der Entwicklung seines Denkens zu zeichnen. Im Zentrum des Aufsatzes steht die Diskussion des Farbenausschlusses, wobei dieser besagt, daß zwei Farben nicht zur selben Zeit am selben Ort gegeben sein können. Zunächst wird geklärt, wie sich die Sprachphilosophie Wittgensteins durch die Thesen zum Farbenausschluß in dem Aufsatz „Some Remarks on Logical Form" im Vergleich zu seiner Position im TLP geändert hat. Die Thesen in SR bilden eine Übergangsposition vom TLP hin zu einer Kalkültheorie der Bedeutung, die sich 1931/32 ausbildete. Alle diese Positionen bewegen sich noch im Rahmen einer allgemein verstandenen Bildtheorie, die durch die Veränderungen stetig unterhöhlt und erst 1932/33 von einer Gebrauchstheorie der Bedeutung abgelöst wird. Das Modell von der Entwicklung der Sprachphilosophie Wittgensteins kann als Bild der insgesamt umfassenden, aber stufenweise erfolgenden Änderung der Theorie der sprachlichen Bedeutung charakterisiert werden

The project initiated with this journal can be essentially characterized by three aspects. First of all, the articles cover philosophical theses from the entire history of philosophy, including modern systematic theses as long as these are strongly tied to relevant historical philosophical positions. Secondly, the method chosen is logical analysis. A third and final aspect is the journal's underlying, albeit ambitious goal of promoting the philosophical "enlightenment" of the history of philosophy by means of the published contributions. In order to delineate the content of this project more precisely, it is important to clarify the concepts "logical analysis" and "philosophical enlightenment". In this introductory paper I wish to exemplify the method of conceptual logical analysis by analyzing the concept of philosophical enlightenment. On this basis it can then be clarified what is meant by making philosophical enlightenment fruitful in dealing with the history of philosophy, which, in turn, accurately describes the purpose of this journal

An outstanding philosopher-logician, Gottlob Frege's work has received much attention in recent years. In the pursuit of Frege's main goal to solidify the foundations of mathematics and scientific work, Frege conceived a comprehensive philosophy of language and developed the main thesis of logicism, that mathematics is reducible to logic. This book contains essays covering a large range of issues related to Frege that will be of great interest to philosophers working on these issues. This volume represents an important addition to the study of Frege. This book contains essays from some of the most important contemporary philosophers investigating Frege's ideas. Treating issues of contemporary interest, this book discusses topics either in a Fregean spirit or in dialogue with Frege's original views. The wide implications of Frege's views are evident in the variety of topics presented in this volume, from the Frege fundamentals to innovative interpretations that break new ground in the study of Frege. Key papers concern the ontological status of propositions and concepts, recent attempts to improve on the semantics of singular terms, the question of how to construe the content of concept-expressions, and other themes within the common grounds in which ontology and philosophical semantics intersect