Introspective Training Apprehensively Defended: Reflections on Titchener's Lab Manual

To study conscious experience we must, to some extent, trust introspective reports; yet introspective reports often do not merit our trust. A century ago, E.B. Titchener advocated extensive introspective training as a means of resolving this difficulty. He describes many of his training techniques in his four-volume laboratory manual of 1901- 1905. This paper explores Titchener's laboratory manual with an eye to general questions about the prospects of introspective training for contemporary consciousness studies, with a focus on the following examples: introspective knowledge of the combination tones that arise when a musical interval is played; the 'flight of colours' in the afterimage of a field of bright, broad- spectrum light; and the possibility of non-obvious visual illusions. Introspective training appears to have some merit, but also to involve significant hazards

Why Did We Think We Dreamed in Black and White?

In the 1950's, dream researchers commonly thought that dreams were predominantly a black-and-white phenomenon, although both earlier and later treatments of dreaming presume or assert that dreams have color. The first half of the twentieth century saw the rise of black-and-white film media, and it is likely that the emergence of the view that dreams are black-and-white was connected with this change in media technology. If our opinions about basic features of our dreams can change with changes in technology, it seems to follow that our knowledge of the phenomenology of our own dreams is much less secure than we might at first have thought it to be

Do Ethicists and Political Philosophers Vote More Often Than Other Professors?

If philosophical moral reflection improves moral behavior, one might expect ethics professors to behave morally better than socially similar non-ethicists. Under the assumption that forms of political engagement such as voting have moral worth, we looked at the rate at which a sample of professional ethicists—and political philosophers as a subgroup of ethicists—voted in eight years’ worth of elections. We compared ethicists’ and political philosophers’ voting rates with the voting rates of three other groups: philosophers not specializing in ethics, political scientists, and a comparison group of professors specializing in neither philosophy nor political science. All groups voted at about the same rate, except for the political scientists, who voted about 10–15% more often. On the face of it, this finding conflicts with the expectation that ethicists will behave more responsibly than non-ethicists

Schumann’s Frauenliebe Und Leben: An analysis of “Nun hast du mir den ersten Schmerz getan”

Nun hast du mir den ersten Schmerz getan ( Now you have caused me pain for the first time ) is the eighth and final song in Robert Schumann\u27s Frauenliebe Und Leben song cycle, based upon a poem cycle by Adelbert con Chamisso, which follows the stages of love as told by the woman—the narrator. Unique from the previous seven songs in both content and musicality, this song mourns the loss of the woman in the poem’s husband. Schumann uses techniques such as tonal unclarity, dynamics, tempo markings, and a lack of cadences in order to connect the music to Chamisso\u27s words, expressing the somber mood of the poem. Each of the three sections in the song capture a different part of the woman’s feelings—initial sadness, emptiness, and finally, reminiscence—and are accompanied with different harmonies, dynamics, and tempos accordingly. A piano coda in the reminiscent section repeats melodic material from song one in the cycle, bringing the whole cycle full-circle. The unification of the words and music presents a more persuasive and expressive interpretation of the woman’s feelings in the poem from beginning to end, making this song the most important in the cycle

How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation

Researchers from the 1940's through the present have found that normal, sighted people can echolocate - that is, detect properties of silent objects by attending to sound reflected from them. We argue that echolocation is a normal part of our conscious, perceptual experience. Despite this, we argue that people are often grossly mistaken about their experience of echolocation. If so, echolocation provides a counterexample to the view that we cannot be seriously mistaken about our own current conscious experience

Women in Philosophy: Quantitative Analyses of Specialization, Prevalence, Visibility, and Generational Change

Abstract: We present several quantitative analyses of the prevalence and visibility of women in moral, political, and social philosophy, compared to other areas of philosophy, and how the situation has changed over time

Virtual Library Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann

The „Virtual Library Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann“ is planned as a book index with attached weblinks to digitized historical printed works and reflects the former, in original lost private library of the famous baroque architect in Dresden. The index was developed in 2013/14 by the subproject-team of the TU Dresden within the European Network of Baroque Cultural Heritage (ENBaCH). In 2017 the virtual library has been brought up-to-date with regard to the transcribed book titles and the additional weblinks within the context of the Project Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann (1662-1736): Die Schloss- und Zwingerplanungen für Dresden. Planen und Bauen im “modus romanus” of the TU Dresden, supported by the Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung

Do things look flat

Abstract Does a penny viewed at an angle in some sense look elliptical, as though projected on a two-dimensional surface? Many philosophers have said such things, from Malebranche (1674/1997) and Hume (1739Hume ( /1978, through early sense-data theorists, to Tye Abstract Word Count: 124 Text Word Count: 337