Moral Imagination

Moral imagination provides leaders with insight into others and the world and helps them make moral decisions and form visions. Leaders need imagination to determine the values they embrace and the feelings that these values engender in themselves and others. Leaders use imagination to animate values, apply moral principles to particular situations, and understand the moral aspects of situations. Imagination and moral values are the fundamental components of a vision

The nature of the animacy organization in human ventral temporal cortex

The principles underlying the animacy organization of the ventral temporal cortex (VTC) remain hotly debated, with recent evidence pointing to an animacy continuum rather than a dichotomy. What drives this continuum? According to the visual categorization hypothesis, the continuum reflects the degree to which animals contain animal-diagnostic features. By contrast, the agency hypothesis posits that the continuum reflects the degree to which animals are perceived as (social) agents. Here, we tested both hypotheses with a stimulus set in which visual categorizability and agency were dissociated based on representations in convolutional neural networks and behavioral experiments. Using fMRI, we found that visual categorizability and agency explained independent components of the animacy continuum in VTC. Modeled together, they fully explained the animacy continuum. Finally, clusters explained by visual categorizability were localized posterior to clusters explained by agency. These results show that multiple organizing principles, including agency, underlie the animacy continuum in VTC.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, code+data at - https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/VXWG9 Update - added supplementary results and edited abstrac

Getting the message across : ten principles for web animation

The growing use of animation in Web pages testifies to the increasing ease with which such multimedia components can be created. This trend indicates a commitment to animation that is often unmatched by the skill of the implementers. The present paper details a set of ten commandments for web animation, intending to sensitise budding animators to key aspects that may impair the communicational effectiveness of their animation. These guidelines are drawn from an extensive literature survey coloured by personal experience of using Web animation packages. Our ten principles are further elucidated by a Web-based on-line tutorial

Perceiving animacy from shape

Superordinate visual classification—for example, identifying an image as “animal,” “plant,” or “mineral”—is computationally challenging because radically different items (e.g., “octopus,” “dog”) must be grouped into a common class (“animal”). It is plausible that learning superordinate categories teaches us not only the membership of particular (familiar) items, but also general features that are shared across class members, aiding us in classifying novel (unfamiliar) items. Here, we investigated visual shape features associated with animate and inanimate classes. One group of participants viewed images of 75 unfamiliar and atypical items and provided separate ratings of how much each image looked like an animal, plant, and mineral. Results show systematic tradeoffs between the ratings, indicating a class-like organization of items. A second group rated each image in terms of 22 midlevel shape features (e.g., “symmetrical,” “curved”). The results confirm that superordinate classes are associated with particular shape features (e.g., “animals” generally have high “symmetry” ratings). Moreover, linear discriminant analysis based on the 22-D feature vectors predicts the perceived classes approximately as well as the ground truth classification. This suggests that a generic set of midlevel visual shape features forms the basis for superordinate classification of novel objects along the animacy continuum

Neoplatonism and English Gothic Architecture

A letter written by Robert Grosseteste, the first chancellor of Oxford University and later Bishop of Lincoln from 1235 to 1253, illustrates the role that Neoplatonism played in the creative process of the architect in the Middle Ages. The letter was written from Oxford in around 1200, to Master Adam Rufus, a former student. According to Grosseteste, “It is said that the design is the model to which the craftsman looks to make his handiwork, in imitation of it and in its likeness.” Grosseteste’s letter exhibits a familiarity with the Enneads of Plotinus, which Grosseteste probably was not able to read directly but would have known through texts such as the Theology of Aristotle. In Enneads V.8.1, Plotinus compares two blocks of stone, one of which is carved into a statue by a craftsman, so that in which “the form is not in the material; it is in the designer before ever it enters into the stone…”, the forma artificii of Grosseteste. Grosseteste uses the analogy of architecture: “So imagine in the artist’s mind the design of the work to be made, as in the mind of the architect the design and likeness of the house to be built; to this pattern and model he looks only that he may make the house in imitation of it.” The material of the building is organized in imitation of the idea in the mind of the architect; like the forms of nature in relation to the archetypes of the Platonic demiurge, the building is a shadow or reflection of the architectural idea. In the Enneads I.6.3, Plotinus asked, “On what principle does the architect, when he finds the house standing before him correspondent with his inner ideal of a house, pronounce it beautiful?” In his cosmologies De Luce (or On Light, 1225–1228) and De lineis, angulis et figuris (or On lines, angles and figures, 1228–1233), written at Oxford, Robert Grosseteste would describe natural bodies as being formed by mathematical and geometrical entities created from light, as reflected from the lux spiritualis, the incorporeal, spiritual light; and in the Commentary on the Posterior Analytics (1228–1235) and the Hexaemeron (c. 1237), Grosseteste would describe the ascension of the soul from the material intellect to the agent intellect, in the apprehension of the divine intellect, intelligentia. These concepts show the influence of Plato and Plotinus and explain in part the intentions of the medieval architect

Neoplatonism in the Risala (De intellectu) of Alfarabi

The Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Proclus played an important role in the development of the Aristotelian concepts of intellect and perception in the Arabic commentators on Aristotle. Plotinus was not known to Arab scholars by name, but books Four to Six of the Enneads from the third century, as compiled by Porphyry, were paraphrased in the text called the Theology of Aristotle, which was translated between 833 and 842 by the circle of al-Kindi in Baghdad. The translation combined Aristole, Plotinus, and Christian and Islamic doctrines, and had a significant effect on early Islamic philosophy. The al-Kindi circle also translated the Elements of Theology of Proclus in the ninth century. An Arabic work derived from the Elements of Theology, called Kitab al-khayr al-mahd, was believed to have been written in an early school of Neoplatonism in the eighth or ninth century in the Near East. It was translated into Latin as the Liber de Causis or Liber Aristotelis de Expositione Bonitatis Purae, by Gerard of Cremona in 1180