The Kantian Roots of Merleau-Ponty's Account of Pathology

One of the more striking aspects of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945) is his use of psychological case studies in pathology. For Merleau-Ponty, a philosophical interpretation of phenomena like aphasia and psychic blindness promises to shed light not just on the nature of pathology, but on the nature of human existence more generally. In this paper, I show that although Merleau-Ponty is surely a pioneer in this use of pathology, his work is deeply indebted to an earlier philosophical study of pathology offered by the German Neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer in the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1929). More specifically, I argue that Merleau-Ponty, in fact, follows Cassirer in placing Kant's notion of the productive imagination at the centre of his account of pathology and the features of existence it illuminates. Recognizing the debt Merleau-Ponty's account of pathology has to the Kantian tradition not only acts as a corrective to more recent interpretation of Merleau-Ponty's views of pathology (Dreyfus, Romdenh-Romluc), but also recommends we resist the prevailing tendency to treat Merleau-Ponty's philosophy as anti-Kantian. Instead, my interpretation seeks to restore Merleau-Ponty's place within the Kantian tradition

A Combinatorial Model for Exceptional Sequences in Type A

Exceptional sequences are certain ordered sequences of quiver representations. We use noncrossing edge-labeled trees in a disk with boundary vertices (expanding on T. Araya's work) to classify exceptional sequences of representations of Q, the linearly-ordered quiver with n vertices. We also show how to use variations of this model to classify c-matrices of Q, to interpret exceptional sequences as linear extensions, and to give a simple bijection between exceptional sequences and certain chains in the lattice of noncrossing partitions. In the case of c-matrices, we also give an interpretation of c-matrix mutation in terms of our noncrossing trees with directed edges.Comment: 18 page

Putting the social back in socialism: developing a welfare system in modern China

Thesis (B.A.)--Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses

How Can Robots Adapt To A Social Human World? A Study Into The Role Gestures Can Play In Human-Robot Relations

There is no doubt that robots are now starting to increasingly be integrated into mainstream society, and as they do the amount of contact and the number of interactions they have with humans will increase at a similar rate. These interactions open a new set of issues for robot designers and programmers. What is the best way for robots to interact with humans? This study tested the importance of gestures in creating effective human-robot interactions. Conducted using the PR2, this study explored the role of gestures in two basic kinds of communications: the robot communicating a need: low power) to an unsuspecting human, and a robot building trust with a human participant on an instruction reading task. We predicted that gestures would lead to more effective interactions than the non-gesture controls. We also used the opportunity to explore a largely unresearched area in proxemics: the idea that loose, “bouncing†arms led to lower attributions of dominance than stiff, fixed arms. Our research highlighted the importance of gestures in communication, particularly among people who tended to look at robots as more than machines