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15Il dualismo da Cartesio a Leibniz: Cartesio, Cordemoy, La Forge, Malebranche, Leibniz by Salvatore Nicolosi (review)Isis 82 (1): 136-137. 1991.
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108Descartes's Meditations as Cognitive ExercisesPhilosophy and Literature 9 (1): 41-58. 1985.According to the reading offered here, Descartes' use of the meditative mode of writing was not a mere rhetorical device to win an audience accustomed to the spiritual retreat. His choice of the literary form of the spiritual exercise was consonant with, if not determined by, his theory of the mind and of the basis of human knowledge. Since Descartes' conception of knowledge implied the priority of the intellect over the senses, and indeed the priority of an intellect operating independently of …Read more
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939Science, Certainty, and DescartesPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1988. 1988.During the 1630s Descartes recognized that he could not expect all legitimate claims in natural science to meet the standard of absolute certainty. The realization resulted from a change in his physics, which itself arose not through methodological reflections, but through developments in his substantive metaphysical doctrines. Descartes discovered the metaphysical foundations of his physics in 1629-30; as a consequence, the style of explanation employed in his physical writings changed. His ear…Read more
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28Force (God) in Descartes' PhysicsIn John Cottingham (ed.), Descartes, Oxford University Press. pp. 281-310. 1997.Reprint of: Gary Hatfield, Force (God) in Descartes' physics, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 10 (2):113-140 (1979) Abstract. It is difficult to evaluate the role of activity - of force or of that which has causal efficacy - in Descartes’ natural philosophy. On the one hand, Descartes claims to include in his natural philosophy only that which can be described geometrically, which amounts to matter (extended substance) in motion (where this motion is described kinematically)…Read more
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38The Locus of Masking Shape-at-a-SlantPerception and Psychophysics 24 (6): 501-504. 1978.Twelve subjects provided shape and orientation judgments for a set of projectively equivalent, variously rotated rectangles under three viewing conditions—monoptic, dichoptic, and binocular—with and without the presence of a pattern mask. In the absence of the mask, partial constancy was exhibited under the first two conditions and near perfect constancy under the binocular condition. Orientation was discriminated. Presence of the mask produced projective shape matching and diminished orientatio…Read more
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18Functional Equivalence of Masking and Cue Reduction in Perception of Shape at a SlantPerception and Psychophysics 23 (2): 137-144. 1978.In a backward masking paradigm Epstein, Hatfield, and Muise (1977) found that presentation of a frontoparallel pattern mask caused the perceived shape of elliptical figures which were rotated in depth to conform to a projective shape function. The current study extended the masking function by examining the effect of a mask which was partially or wholly cotemporal with the target. The study also assessed the functional equivalence of the masking treatment and the conventional treatment for minim…Read more
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73Psicologia, Filosofia e Ciencia Cognitiva: Reflexões Sobre a História e a Filosofia da Psicologia ExperimentalIn Saulo de Freitas Araujo (ed.), História e Filosofia da Psicologia: Perspectivas Contemporâneas, Editora Ufjf. pp. 223-258. 2012.This article critically examines the views that psychology first came into existence as a discipline ca. 1879, that philosophy and psychology were estranged in the ensuing decades, that psychology finally became scientific through the influence of logical empiricism, and that it should now disappear in favor of cognitive science and neuroscience. It argues that psychology had a natural philosophical phase (from antiquity) that waxed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that this psycholo…Read more
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42Gibsonian representations and connectionist symbol-processing: Prospects for unificationPsychological Research 52 243-52. 1990.Not long ago the standard view in cognitive science was that representations are symbols in an internal representational system or language of thought and that psychological processes are computations defined over such representations. This orthodoxy has been challenged by adherents of functional analysis and by connectionists. Functional analysis as practiced by Marr is consistent with an analysis of representation that grants primacy to a stands for conception of representation. Connectionism …Read more
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267Routledge philosophy guidebook to Descartes and the meditationsRoutledge. 2002.Descartes' Meditations is one of the most widely read philosophical texts and has marked the beginning of what we now consider as modern philosophy. It is the first text that most students of philosophy are introduced to and this Guidebook will be an indispensable introduction to what is undeniably one of the most important texts in the history of philosophy. Gary Hatfield offers a clear and concise introduction to Descartes' background, a careful reading of the Meditations and a methodological …Read more
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31René DescartesIn Steven M. Emmanuel (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to the Modern Philosophers: From Descartes to Nietzsche, Blackwell. pp. 1-27. 2001.An introduction to Descartes as a philosopher. Situates his philosophy within the context of Descartes' efforts to forge a new natural philosophy, including original work on the theory of the senses and the passions and emotions.
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29Descartes’s Theory of Mind (review)International Philosophical Quarterly 45 (1): 124-127. 2005.Review of Desmond Clarke's _Descartes's Theory of Mind_. Focuses on Clarke's discussions of animal sentience, substance dualism, and the relation of metaphysics to natural philosophy in Descartes.
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Representation and rule-instantiation in connectionist systemsIn Terence E. Horgan & John L. Tienson (eds.), Connectionism and the Philosophy of Mind, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1991.There is disagreement over the notion of representation in cognitive science. Many investigators equate representations with symbols, that is, with syntactically defined elements in an internal symbol system. In recent years there have been two challenges to this orthodoxy. First, a number of philosophers, including many outside the symbolist orthodoxy, have argued that "representation" should be understood in its classical sense, as denoting a "stands for" relation between representation and re…Read more
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35PsychologyIn Allen W. Wood & Songsuk Susan Hahn (eds.), The Cambridge history of philosophy in the nineteenth century (1790-1870), Cambridge University Press. pp. 241-262. 2011.The quantitative experimental scientific psychology that became prominent by the turn of the twentieth century grew from three main areas of intellectual inquiry. First and most directly, it arose out of the traditional psychology of the philosophy curriculum, as expressed in theories of mind and cognition. Second, it adopted the attitudes of the new natural philosophy of the scientific revolution, attitudes of empirically driven causal analysis and exact observation and experimentation. Third, …Read more
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38Consciousness and Persons (review)Review of Metaphysics 59 (3): 687-688. 2006.Review of Michael Tye, Consciousness and Persons: Unity and Identity. MIT Press, 2003.
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24Psychology, epistemology, and the problem of the external world : Russell and beforeIn Erich H. Reck (ed.), The Historical turn in Analytic Philosophy, Palgrave-macmillan. 2013.This chapter examines Russell’s appreciation of the relevance of psychology for the theory of knowledge, especially in connection with the problem of the external world, and the background for this appreciation in British philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Russell wrote in 1914 that “the epistemological order of deduction includes both logical and psychological considerations.” Indeed, the notion of what is “psychologically derivative” played a crucial role in his epistemolog…Read more
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73Introduction: The Evolution of Mind, Brain, and CultureIn Gary Hatfield & Holly Pittman (eds.), The Evolution of Mind, Brain, and Culture, University of Pennsylvania Press. pp. 1-44. 2013.This introductory chapter surveys some basic findings on primate evolution and the evolution of mind; examines socially transmitted traditions in relation to the concept of culture; recounts the sources of evidence regarding the evolution of mind and culture; charts the history of evolutionary approaches to mind and behavior since Darwin; reviews several prominent theoretical syntheses concerning the evolution of the human mind and behavior; and, along the way, introduces the specific questions …Read more
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1256The Sensory Core and the Medieval Foundations of Early Modern Perceptual TheoryIsis 70 (3): 363-384. 1979.This article seeks the origin, in the theories of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), Descartes, and Berkeley, of two-stage theories of spatial perception, which hold that visual perception involves both an immediate representation of the proximal stimulus in a two-dimensional ‘‘sensory core’’ and also a subsequent perception of the three dimensional world. The works of Ibn al-Haytham, Descartes, and Berkeley already frame the major theoretical options that guided visual theory into the twentieth century.…Read more
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91Natural Geometry in Descartes and KeplerRes Philosophica 92 (1): 117-148. 2015.According to Kepler and Descartes, the geometry of the triangle formed by the two eyes when focused on a single point affords perception of the distance to that point. Kepler characterized the processes involved as associative learning. Descartes described the processes as a “ natural geometry.” Many interpreters have Descartes holding that perceivers calculate the distance to the focal point using angle-side-angle, calculations that are reduced to unnoticed mental habits in adult vision. This a…Read more
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57Cartesian Psychology of Antoine Le GrandIn Mihnea Dobre & Tammy Nyden (eds.), Cartesian Empiricisms, Springer. pp. 251-274. 2014.In the Aristotelian curriculum, De anima or the study of the soul fell under the rubric of physics. This area of study covered the vital (“vegetative”), sensitive, and rational powers of the soul. Descartes’ substance dualism restricted reason or intellect, and conscious sensation, to human minds. Having denied mind to nonhuman animals, Descartes was required to explain all animal behavior using material mechanisms possessing only the properties of size, shape, position, and motion. Within the f…Read more
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1495The cognitive facultiesIn Daniel Garber & Michael Ayers (eds.), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, Cambridge University Press. 1998.During the seventeenth century the major cognitive faculties--sense, imagination, memory, and understanding or intellect--became the central focus of argument in metaphysics and epistemology to an extent not seen before. The theory of the intellect, long an important auxiliary to metaphysics, became the focus of metaphysical dispute, especially over the scope and powers of the intellect and the existence of a `pure' intellect. Rationalist metaphysicians such as Descartes, Spinoza, and Malebranch…Read more
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2649Gestalt psychology and the philosophy of mindPhilosophical Psychology 7 (2): 163-181. 1994.The Gestalt psychologists adopted a set of positions on mind-body issues that seem like an odd mix. They sought to combine a version of naturalism and physiological reductionism with an insistence on the reality of the phenomenal and the attribution of meanings to objects as natural characteristics. After reviewing basic positions in contemporary philosophy of mind, we examine the Gestalt position, characterizing it m terms of phenomenal realism and programmatic reductionism. We then distinguish…Read more
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62Immanuel Kant: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics: That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science: With Selections From the Critique of Pure Reason (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2004.Kant is the central figure of modern philosophy. He sought to rebuild philosophy from the ground up, and he succeeded in permanently changing its problems and methods. This revised edition of the Prolegomena, which is the best introduction to the theoretical side of his philosophy, presents his thought clearly by paying careful attention to his original language. Also included are selections from the Critique of Pure Reason, which fill out and explicate some of Kant's central arguments, and in w…Read more
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56SeeingDretskePhilosophical Studies 120 (1-3): 19-35. 2004.A commentary on Dretske, "Change Blindness" (same journal issue). Dretske analyzes standard cases of change blindness as properly being difference blindness, since the eye is in saccade when the change occurs and so the change itself (the event of the change) is not seen. He considers two models of the phenomenon, the object model and the fact model, preferring the latter. In previous work, he had affirmed the object model. I reconsider its merits, first looking more closely at the notion of dif…Read more
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73The Evolution of Mind, Brain, and Culture (edited book)University of Pennsylvania Press. 2013.Descartes boldly claimed: "I think, therefore I am." But one might well ask: Why do we think? How? When and why did our human ancestors develop language and culture? In other words, what makes the human mind human? _Evolution of Mind, Brain, and Culture_ offers a comprehensive and scientific investigation of these perennial questions. Fourteen essays bring together the work of archaeologists, cultural and physical anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, geneticists, a neuroscientist, and a…Read more
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471Force and Mind–Body InteractionIn Juan Jose Saldana (ed.), Science and Cultural Diversity: Proceedings of the XXIst International Congress of the History of Science, Autonomous National University of Mexico. pp. 3074-3089. 2005.This article calls into question the notion that seventeenth-century authors such as Descartes and Leibniz straightforwardly conceived the mind as something "outside" nature. Descartes indeed did regard matter as distinct from mind, but the question then remains as to whether he equated the natural world, and the world of laws of nature, with the material world. Similarly, Leibniz distinguished a kingdom of final causes (pertaining to souls) and a kingdom of efficient causes (pertaining to bodie…Read more
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45Representation in perception and cognition: Connectionist affordancesIn William Ramsey, Stephen P. Stich & D. Rumelhart (eds.), Philosophy and Connectionist Theory, Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 163--95. 1991.There is disagreement over the notion of representation in cognitive science. Many investigators equate representations with symbols, that is, with syntactically defined elements in an internal symbol system. In recent years there have been two challenges to this orthodoxy. First, a number of philosophers, including many outside the symbolist orthodoxy, have argued that "representation" should be understood in its classical sense, as denoting a "stands for" relation between representation and re…Read more
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26Psychology in Philosophy: Historical PerspectivesIn Sara Heinamaa & Martina Reuter (eds.), Psychology and Philosophy: Inquiries into the Soul from Late Scholasticism to Contemporary Thought, Springer. pp. 1-25. 2009.The chapter examines some common assumptions regarding the shape of the history of theories of mind. It questions the conception that the Scientific Revolution resulted in placing the mind “outside of nature.” During the seventeenth century, the followers of Descartes routinely placed study of the mind, or, at least, mind–body interaction, within “physics” considered as a science of nature in general (and so including physics in the narrow sense, biology, and psychology). By the end of the eight…Read more
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196Did Descartes have a Jamesian theory of the emotions?Philosophical Psychology 20 (4): 413-440. 2007.Rene Descartes and William James had "body first" theories of the passions or emotions, according to which sensory stimulation causes a bodily response that then causes an emotion. Both held that this bodily response also causes an initial behavioral response (such as flight from a bear) without any cognitive intervention such as an "appraisal" of the object or situation. From here they differ. Descartes proposed that the initial processes that produce fear and running are entirely mechanical. E…Read more
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393Psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science: Reflections on the history and philosophy of experimental psychologyMind and Language 17 (3): 207-232. 2002.This article critically examines the views that psychology first came into existence as a discipline ca. 1879, that philosophy and psychology were estranged in the ensuing decades, that psychology finally became scientific through the influence of logical empiricism, and that it should now disappear in favor of cognitive science and neuroscience. It argues that psychology had a natural philosophical phase (from antiquity) that waxed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that this psycholo…Read more
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39Mechanizing the Sensitive SoulIn Gideon Manning (ed.), Matter and form in early modern science and philosophy, Brill. 2012.Descartes set for himself the ambitious program of accounting for the functions of the Aristotelian vegetative and sensitive souls without invoking souls or the faculties or powers of souls in his explanations. He rejects the notion that the soul is hylomorphically present in the organs of the body so as to carry out vital and sensory functions. Rather, the body’s organs operate in a purely mechanical fashion. That is what is involved in “mechanizing” these phenomena. The role of the soul is res…Read more
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