scholarly journals From the Closet of the Mind to Mindedness: Rethinking 'Animism' at the Crossover of Science Studies, Postcolonial Ethnography and Environmental Humanities

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fani Cettl
Keyword(s):  
Animal Ethics ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Environmental Humanities ◽  
World Picture ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Discourses ◽  
The Mind

Recently the concept of animism has been radically rethought at the crossover of postcolonial ethnography, environmental humanities and science studies. This reconceptualization aims at decolonising western sciences, destabilising an anthropocentric world picture, and articulating an environmental and animal ethics in the age of the Anthropocene. It decidedly abandons the controversial colonial epistemology in which animism was first introduced as a primitive and regressive belief in the supernatural spirits. In this essay I would like to situate this current rethinking of animism into a genealogy of historical discourses, following scholarship that has theorized one aspect of the Enlightenment secularisation processes as the internalisation of spirits and ghosts from nonhuman materiality on the outside into the space of the human mind. Building on this approach, I propose that the current, post-Enlightenment, posthumanist, cross-disciplinary rethinking of animism can be said to mark a certain historical reversal: an externalization of what has been seen as within and of the human mind, which I will in this essay term mindedness, to the outside nonhuman materiality (again).

An Inquiry into Thomas Jefferson's Ideas of Beauty

2000 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Hafertepe
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Standard Of Taste ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Art And Architecture ◽  
Good Proportion

A careful reading of eighteenth-century aesthetics provides a view of Thomas Jefferson's thinking about art and architecture quite different from the existing scholarly paradigm. Jefferson owned, read, and quoted Enlightenment philosophy and criticism, most notably that of Henry Home, known as Lord Kames. Far from privileging reason over emotion, these philosophers held that all people are created with innate senses of beauty and morality, as well as a rational faculty. Because of the sense of beauty, certain qualities in objects can inspire the idea of beauty in the mind; other ideas of beauty are comparative, requiring use of the rational faculty. Jefferson's aesthetic theory was informed by his understanding of the human mind, which led to an architecture rooted in good proportion and to didactic paintings rooted in history ancient and modern. As with other Enlightenment thinkers, Jefferson endorsed the entire classical tradition, admiring not only the architecture of ancient Rome and modern Paris but also of Palladio and the French Baroque. Similarly, he admired the work of minor Baroque painters as well as the neoclassicism of Jacques-Louis David. Nor was Jeffersonian classicism nationalistic; rather, he endorsed the Enlightenment concept of a universal and uniform standard of taste.

Aristotle's Formal Identity of Intellect and Object: A Solution to the Problem of Modal Epistemology

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-107
Author(s):  
Robert C. Koons
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
Modal Epistemology ◽  
De Anima ◽  
Object A ◽  
Formal Identity ◽  
Identity Thesis ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Objects ◽  
Aristotelian Metaphysics

In De Anima Book III, Aristotle subscribed to a theory of formal identity between the human mind and the extra-mental objects of our understanding. This has been one of the most controversial features of Aristotelian metaphysics of the mind. I offer here a defense of the Formal Identity Thesis, based on specifically epistemological arguments about our knowledge of necessary or essential truths.

scholarly journals Application of Eye Tracking Technology in Aviation, Maritime, and Construction Industries: A Systematic Review

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (13) ◽  
pp. 4289
Author(s):  
Daniel Martinez-Marquez ◽  
Sravan Pingali ◽  
Kriengsak Panuwatwanich ◽  
Rodney A. Stewart ◽  
Sherif Mohamed
Keyword(s):  
Eye Tracking ◽  
Human Error ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Mental Performance ◽  
Medical Scientist ◽  
Future Research Directions ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Attention Failure ◽  
Demographic Distribution

Most accidents in the aviation, maritime, and construction industries are caused by human error, which can be traced back to impaired mental performance and attention failure. In 1596, Du Laurens, a French anatomist and medical scientist, said that the eyes are the windows of the mind. Eye tracking research dates back almost 150 years and it has been widely used in different fields for several purposes. Overall, eye tracking technologies provide the means to capture in real time a variety of eye movements that reflect different human cognitive, emotional, and physiological states, which can be used to gain a wider understanding of the human mind in different scenarios. This systematic literature review explored the different applications of eye tracking research in three high-risk industries, namely aviation, maritime, and construction. The results of this research uncovered the demographic distribution and applications of eye tracking research, as well as the different technologies that have been integrated to study the visual, cognitive, and attentional aspects of human mental performance. Moreover, different research gaps and potential future research directions were highlighted in relation to the usage of additional technologies to support, validate, and enhance eye tracking research to better understand human mental performance.

Where Does Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index Come From?

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 390-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Cevolini
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Management ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Main Hypothesis ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Filing Cabinet ◽  
The Social ◽  
Enlightenment Project ◽  
Card Index ◽  
Social Use ◽  
The Mind

Thanks to a grant of the Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste, Bielefeld University has started a fifteen-year project (2015–2030) that includes the production of a critical edition of Niklas Luhmann’s extant works and manuscripts, as well as the digitalization of his famous card index. This valuable enterprise has rekindled interest in what many scholars hold to be a ‘holy grail’: a marvelous instrument that aided great creativity and scientific production by the German sociologist. Indeed, people feel that looking inside the filing cabinet is like looking inside the mind of a genius at work. This article suggests a different point of view, rooted in the Enlightenment project of the sociologist of Bielefeld. The main hypothesis is that in the use of a card index as a surprise generator, there is nothing particularly surprising if one considers the evolution of knowledge management in early modern Europe. Rather, the question should be: how it is possible to explain the evolutionary improbability of the social use of ‘machines’ as secondary memories for knowledge management and reproduction? This article provides some suggestions for research and tries to determine where Luhmann’s card index comes from.

scholarly journals Top-down causation and emergence: some comments on mechanisms

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
George F. R. Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Causal Power ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Information Control ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Adaptive Selection ◽  
Abstract Entities ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Medical Healthcare

Both bottom-up and top-down causation occur in the hierarchy of structure and causation. A key feature is multiple realizability of higher level functions, and consequent existence of equivalence classes of lower level variables that correspond to the same higher level state. Five essentially different classes of top-down influence can be identified, and their existence demonstrated by many real-world examples. They are: algorithmic top-down causation; top-down causation via non-adaptive information control, top-down causation via adaptive selection, top-down causation via adaptive information control and intelligent top-down causation (the effect of the human mind on the physical world). Through the mind, abstract entities such as mathematical structures have causal power. The causal slack enabling top-down action to take place lies in the structuring of the system so as to attain higher level functions; in the way the nature of lower level elements is changed by context, and in micro-indeterminism combined with adaptive selection. Understanding top-down causation can have important effects on society. Two cases will be mentioned: medical/healthcare issues, and education—in particular, teaching reading and writing. In both cases, an ongoing battle between bottom-up and top-down approaches has important consequences for society.

scholarly journals Enacting Media. An Embodied Account of Enculturation Between Neuromediality and New Cognitive Media Theory

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joerg Fingerhut
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Generative Models ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
Predictive Processing ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
The World ◽  
Media Work ◽  
The Mind

This paper argues that the still-emerging paradigm of situated cognition requires a more systematic perspective on media to capture the enculturation of the human mind. By virtue of being media, cultural artifacts present central experiential models of the world for our embodied minds to latch onto. The paper identifies references to external media within embodied, extended, enactive, and predictive approaches to cognition, which remain underdeveloped in terms of the profound impact that media have on our mind. To grasp this impact, I propose an enactive account of media that is based on expansive habits as media-structured, embodied ways of bringing forth meaning and new domains of values. We apply such habits, for instance, when seeing a picture or perceiving a movie. They become established through a process of reciprocal adaptation between media artifacts and organisms and define the range of viable actions within such a media ecology. Within an artifactual habit, we then become attuned to a specific media work (e.g., a TV series, a picture, a text, or even a city) that engages us. Both the plurality of habits and the dynamical adjustments within a habit require a more flexible neural architecture than is addressed by classical cognitive neuroscience. To detail how neural and media processes interlock, I will introduce the concept of neuromediality and discuss radical predictive processing accounts that could contribute to the externalization of the mind by treating media themselves as generative models of the world. After a short primer on general media theory, I discuss media examples in three domains: pictures and moving images; digital media; architecture and the built environment. This discussion demonstrates the need for a new cognitive media theory based on enactive artifactual habits—one that will help us gain perspective on the continuous re-mediation of our mind.

scholarly journals The Birth of the Idea of Perfectibility: From the Enlightenment to Transhumanism

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 113-131
Author(s):  
O. A. Vinogradova ◽  
A. V. Ugleva (Yastrebtseva)
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Historical Science ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Age Of Enlightenment ◽  
Human Feature ◽  
Favorable Conditions ◽  
Modern Technologies

Starting from the Age of Enlightenment, a person’s ability of self-improvement, or perfectibility, is usually seen as a fundamental human feature. However, this term, introduced into the philosophical vocabulary by J.-J. Rousseau, gradually acquired additional meaning – largely due to the works of N. de Condorcet, T. Malthus and C. Darwin. Owing to perfectibility, human beings are not only able to work on themselves: by improving their abilities, they are also able to change their environment (both social and natural) and create favorable conditions for their existence. It is no coincidence that perfectibility became the key concept of the idea of social progress proposed by French thinkers in the Age of Enlightenment, despite the fact that later it was criticized, above all, by English authors, who justified its organic and biological nature and gave a different evolutionary interpretation to this concept, without excluding perfectibility from the philosophical vocabulary. In this article, we address the opposition and mutual counterarguments of these two positions. Beyond that, we draw a parallel with some of the ideas of S. Kapitsa, who proved to be not only a critic of Malthusianism but also a direct disciple of Condorcet. In the modern age, the ideas of human self-improvement caused the development of transhumanist movement. Condorcet is more relevant than ever, and today his theory of the progress of the human mind, which influenced the genesis of modern historical science, needs a re-thinking in the newest perspective of improving the mental and physical human nature with the help of modern technologies.

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