76 research outputs found
Logic in Early Modern Thought
Logical reflection in early modern philosophy (EMP) is marked by the instability of the period, although it is more lasting (the Port-Royal Logic was nevertheless used as a handbook in philosophy courses until the end of the nineteenth century). It started in the sixteenth century and ended in the nineteenth century, a period of 300 years during which there were deep transformations in the conceptions of authority and scientific method. For the history of twentieth-century philosophy, it was the period of âclassical logic,â which lasted from the Renaissance to the linguistic turn conducted by Gottlob Frege.
The period was used to be thought of as centuries of little or no original contribution to logic, in which conceptions of logic were tainted by rhetoric, epistemology, and psychologism in the worst sense (Kneale and Kneale 1962; Michael 1997). From the last decades of the twentieth century, however, scholars began to regard this period more accurately with respect to reflection and changes in logic and semantics. It has recently become a promising field for historical and conceptual research; today we can say that the legacy of early modern logical reformism has a philosophical, logical, and semantic value in itself
The material soul: Strategies for naturalising the soul in an early modern epicurean context
We usually portray the early modern period as one characterised by the âbirth of subjectivityâ with Luther and Descartes as two alternate representatives of this radical break with the past, each ushering in the new era in which âIâ am the locus of judgements about the world. A sub-narrative called âthe mind-body problemâ recounts how Cartesian dualism, responding to the new promise of a mechanistic science of nature, âsplit offâ the world of the soul/mind/self from the world of extended, physical substanceâa split which has preoccupied the philosophy of mind up until the present day. We would like to call attention to a different constellation of textsâneither a robust âtraditionâ nor an isolated âepisodeâ, somewhere in betweenâwhich have in common their indebtedness to, and promotion of an embodied, Epicurean approach to the soul. These texts follow the evocative hint given in Lucretiusâ De rerum natura that âthe soul is to the body as scent is to incenseâ (in an anonymous early modern French version). They neither assert the autonomy of the soul, nor the dualism of body and soul, nor again a sheer physicalism in which âintentionalâ properties are reduced to the basic properties of matter. Rather, to borrow the title of one of these treatises (LâĂme MatĂ©rielle), they seek to articulate the concept of a material soul. We reconstruct the intellectual development of a corporeal, mortal and ultimately material soul, in between medicine, natural philosophy and metaphysics, including discussions of Malebranche and Willis, but focusing primarily on texts including the 1675 Discours anatomiques by the Epicurean physician Guillaume Lamy; the anonymous manuscript from circa 1725 entitled LâĂme MatĂ©rielle, which is essentially a compendium of texts from the later seventeenth century (Malebranche, Bayle) along with excerpts from Lucretius; and materialist writings such Julien Offray de La Mettrieâs LâHomme-Machine (1748), in order to articulate this concept of a âmaterial soulâ with its implications for notions of embodiment, materialism and selfhood
Visual dominance in the pigeon
In Experiment 1, three pigeons were trained to obtain grain by depressing one foot treadle in the presence of a 746-Hertz tone stimulus and by depressing a second foot treadle in the presence of a red light stimulus. Intertrial stimuli included white light and the absence of tone. The latencies to respond on auditory element trials were as fast, or faster, than on visual element trials, but pigeons always responded on the visual treadle when presented with a compound stimulus composed of the auditory and visual elements. In Experiment 2, pigeons were trained on the auditory-visual discrimination task using as trial stimuli increases in the intensity of auditory or visual intertrial stimuli. Again, pigeons showed visual dominance on subsequent compound stimulus test trials. In Experiment 3, on compound test trials, the onset of the visual stimulus was delayed relative to the onset of the auditory stimulus. Visual treadle responses generally occurred with delay intervals of less than 500 milliseconds, and auditory treadle responses generally occurred with delay intervals of greater than 500 milliseconds. The results are discussed in terms of Posner, Nissen, and Klein's (1976) theory of visual dominance in humans
RESPONSE ADDITIVITY: EFFECTS OF SUPERIMPOSED FREE REINFORCEMENT ON A VARIABLE-INTERVAL BASELINE 1
Early Modern Semiotics
The term âsemioticsâ appears for the first time at the end of John Lockeâs An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) in a passage referred to by Charles Sanders Peirce. Nevertheless, it would be incorrect to describe early modern theories of signs in the terms of contemporary semiotics. On the one hand, they must be contextualized in the traditional Aristotelian and Augustinian framework of Scholasticism. In fact, in many respects, and despite their undeniable modernity, the most emblematic authors of early modern semiotics, in particular Locke and the authors of Port-Royal, developed their theories along this traditional model, favoring a linguistic paradigm. On the other hand, authors like Thomas Hobbes, Pierre Gassendi, and Pierre Bayle built a renewed semiotic theory headed toward epistemology
Acute Ethanol Has Biphasic Effects on Short- and Long-Term Memory in Both Foreground and Background Contextual Fear Conditioning in C57BL/6 Mice
Response reduction through the superimposition of continuous reinforcement: a systematic replication.
Prior clinical research suggests that superimposition and subsequent removal of a schedule of continuous reinforcement (CRF) may be a viable rate-decreasing procedure in that an extinction-like condition is arranged. The arrangement of similar conditions in the laboratory, however, resulted in the quick recovery of baseline rates. Lever-pressing patterns of eight male rats maintained by different schedules of variable-ratio and variable-interval food reinforcement were examined in an A-B-A experimental design of CRF food superimposition and removal. Responding was substantially reduced during the superimposition of CRF. Upon removal of the superimposed schedule, responding quickly approached presuperimposition baseline rates
Loud noise potentiates conditioned fear in extinction using a CER (lick suppression) paradigm in rats
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