writing guide - reports and dissertations

guidance notes on preparing a project report or masters dissertatio

Radically enactive high cognition

I advance the Radically Enactive Cognition (REC) program by developing Hutto & Satne’s (2015) and Hutto & Myin’s (2017) idea that contentful cognition emerges through sociocultural activities, which require a contentless form of intentionality. Proponents of REC then face a functional challenge: what is the function of higher cognitive skills, given the empirical findings that engaging in higher-cognitive activities is not correlated with cognitive amelioration (Kornblith, 2012)? I answer that functional challenge by arguing that higher cognition is an adaptive tool of the social systems we are embedded in, therefore, it is not necessarily aimed at achieving better cognitive states. In order to do so, I suggest interpreting key insights from autopoietic enactivism through REC lenses

Aristotle's Foundationalism

For Aristotle, demonstrative knowledge is the result of what he calls ‘intellectual learning’, a process in which the knowledge of a conclusion depends on previous knowledge of the premises. Since demonstrations are ultimately based on indemonstrable principles (the knowledge of which is called ‘νοῦς’), Aristotle is often described as advancing a foundationalist doctrine. Without disputing the nomenclature, I shall attempt to show that Aristotle’s ‘foundationalism’ should not be taken as a rationalist theory of epistemic justification, as if the first principles of science could be known as such independently of their explanatory connections to demonstrable propositions. I shall argue that knowing first principles as such involves knowing them as explanatory of other scientific propositions. I shall then explain in which way noetic and demonstrative knowledge are in a sense interdependent cognitive states – even though νοῦς remains distinct from (and, in Aristotle’s words, more ‘accurate’ than) demonstrative knowledge

New light on some artists impressions of a visit to St Paul's Grotto in the 17th century

The cult of St Paul in Malta derives from the Apostle s shipwreck (Acts of the Apostles, Chapters 27 and 28) which gained specific shape and interpretation through oral and written interpretations and accounts over the centuries. The centre of this cult was 'La Grotta di S. Paolo' in Rabat (Malta). The Counter Reformation programme with its efforts to renovate and re-establish concrete objects of veneration and Malta's increasing prosperity and her economic 'opening' towards Europe after 1530 were crucial factors in the history of this cult. The focus of this paper is directed on three distinguished artists' visit to the grotto in the 17'" century, and its echoes in their works and writings. The comments on the shrine by Joachim von Sandrarf, Willem Schellinkx, and Lambert Friedrich Corfey have, until now, escaped the attention of scholars.peer-reviewe

{\Gamma}-species, quotients, and graph enumeration

The theory of {\Gamma}-species is developed to allow species-theoretic study of quotient structures in a categorically rigorous fashion. This new approach is then applied to two graph-enumeration problems which were previously unsolved in the unlabeled case-bipartite blocks and general k-trees.Comment: 84 pages, 10 figures, dissertatio