The Asperian Design

Reality is two-fold, composed of the lighted world as revealed in Genesis, and the darker primordiality which preceded it. The illuminated represents that which the human mind can comprehend, manipulate and re-order to its will: a “designed” and mechanical universe of parts. But behind it, in the backspace of reality, remains the darkness. A formless state of pre-creation, the darkness exists as an endless series of intertwining “signatures” – single possibilities waiting to be created in the illuminated forefront of reality. Permitting each and every part of the lighted world to be connected to the rest, it possesses a “design” all of its own. The question is, if we are blind in the dark, how could we ever come to know it

The Field

Life is a battlefield onto which we are thrown at birth, with only fate and fortune settling upon where we land. Wherever we land, whether it's on the front lines or surrounded by a network of defenses, we are all asking the same question: why are we here? The problem with this question, however, is that we tend to answer it from our own relative positions, and so we all arrive at different conclusions. The many answers we've created have filled the field. They have become banners that are raised high so that we can see and follow them. These banners are always at risk of being toppled though; always at risk of losing their capacity for belief. But then, what if belief is more than a mere by-product of our universal search? What if belief can change the very fabric of this field? That is, what if truth is actually irrelevant, and the only real thing that makes up this battlefield is the belief, and consequently the collective will, which we invest in our answers

Watching, sight, and the temporal shape of perceptual activity

There has been relatively little discussion, in contemporary philosophy of mind, of the active aspects of perceptual processes. This essay presents and offers some preliminary development of a view about what it is for an agent to watch a particular material object throughout a period of time. On this view, watching is a kind of perceptual activity distinguished by a distinctive epistemic role. The essay presents a puzzle about watching an object that arises through elementary reflection on the consequences of two apparent truths about watching an object throughout a period of time. It proposes that the puzzle can be resolved by a view according to which for an agent to watch an object throughout a period of time is for that agent to maintain visual awareness of that object with the aim of perceptually knowing what that object is doing. The essay goes on to make some further suggestions about how the apparatus developed in connection with the notion of watching may enable us to offer related explanations of other kinds of perceptual activity. It proposes that a useful distinction can be drawn between perceptual activities like watching which have as their aim knowledge of what an object is doing and activities like looking or visually scrutinizing which have as their aims knowledge of the states or conditions of the objects of perceptual awareness

X-The agential profile of perceptual experience

Reflection on cases involving the occurrence of various types of perceptual activity suggests that the phenomenal character of perceptual experience can be partly determined by agential factors. I discuss the significance of these kinds of case for the dispute about phenomenal character that is at the core of recent philosophy of perception. I then go on to sketch an account of how active and passive elements of phenomenal character are related to one another in activities like watching and looking at things

The perception of activity

There is a much-discussed form of argument the conclusion of which is that we do not directly perceive space-filling material objects themselves, only parts of their surfaces. Donald Davidson's view that events are temporal particulars invites a structurally similar argument about the direct perception of events. In this paper, I spell out such an argument and consider a number of possible solutions to it. I explore the idea that a satisfactory response to this problem in the philosophy of perception can be grounded in a temporal ontology that includes temporal stuff as well as temporal particulars. I discuss different ways of developing this idea, and I go on to identify what I take to be the most promising version of an approach of this kind

Failures of rationality and self-knowledge in addiction

The focus of this chapter is the account of akrasia in alcoholism suggested by the Alcoholics Anonymous literature. The chapter begins by sketching out this account of akrasia. It then goes on to raise a number of questions about this account. It attempts to resolve these questions in terms of the idea that alcoholic relapse involves a dis- order of mental state. Various features of alcoholic action and thought in relapse are traced to characteristic features of this state. The chapter develops the idea that such states as “obsession with alcohol” are malformed varieties of the normal condition of wakefulness, and that aspects of the disorder involved in alcoholism can be explained in terms of this relation

Bridging Gaps through Light: An Archaeological Exploration of Light and Dark in the Atlantic Scottish Iron Age

Representing a broad attempt to open up debate on an issue that has been largely overlooked, this thesis aims to explore the relationship between Atlantic Scotland’s Iron Age communities (and in particular, the broch cultures of Northern Scotland) and light – a complex, multifaceted, and universally significant facet of human existence. Thus far, the role of light has received little interest in prehistoric studies, and when such an interest does occur, it has often been restricted to entrance orientation research. Indeed, little attempt has actually been made to understand how light was orchestrated to shape social experience in the past, or how differing dimensions of light work to reveal or conceal aspects of social life; how was light experienced? What did light mean? Proposing an alternative approach to the study of light, these are questions which this thesis aims to explore; seeking to understand how Scottish Iron Age society orchestrated and manipulated light to create social experience. Due to light’s complexity, the thesis sections its study into a number of separate themes: structural orientation, the cosmological model and space, light and functionality, the psychological impact of light and dark, and light in the landscape and the influence of the weather and the environment. To explore each of these, the thesis pursues a plural methodology, combining typical data-based approaches (map-based studies, broad ranging landscape and GIS research; architectural-typological studies) with more qualitative analysis (e.g. phenomenology, ethnographic analogy, folklore analysis), attempting to explore both the physical and cognitive effects of light and darkness in the past

Preventing Non-Contact ACL Injuries in Female Athletes: What Can We Learn from the Dancers?

Study design: Cross-sectional case control.
 Objectives: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of dance experience and movement instruction on lower extremity kinematics and muscle activation during landing tasks Background/Aim: Current research demonstrates that dancers exhibit a much lower incidence of ACL injuries when compared to athletes of other sports despite the fact that dancers jump and land frequently in their training and performance. The mechanism that underlies this disparity is unclear.
 Methods: We analyzed lower extremity biomechanics during landing in 27 subjects (age 18-25 years, 12 dancers and 15 non-dancers). In the non-instructed (NI) conditions, participants were shown a video in which a successful landing was demonstrated. They were then shown the same videos with specific verbal instructions (VI) on how to perform the landings. Surface electromyography (EMG) was used to measure the activation of gluteus maximus and medius during the deceleration phase of landings. Peak hip knee and hip frontal plane angles were acquired using a 3-D motion capture system. Two-way mixed measures ANOVAs were used to assess the effects of group (dancers vs. non-dancers) and instruction (NI vs. VI) on the biomechanical variables.
 Results: During landings, dancers demonstrated greater gluteus maximus activation and maintained generally more neutral hip and knee alignments when compared to non-dancers. A significant interaction showed that instruction led to increased knee valgus angle in non-dancers but not dancers Conclusions: Our findings suggested that dance training experience may lead to safer landing mechanics. Specific acute movement instruction can potentially deteriorate the mechanics of those with no dance training experience

Time, Mind and Aristotle. An Interview with Thomas Crowther

An Interview with Thomas Crowther.An Interview with Thomas Crowther

Two conceptions of conceptualism and nonconceptualism

Though it enjoys widespread support, the claim that perceptual experiences possess nonconceptual content has been vigorously disputed in the recent literature by those who argue that the content of perceptual experience must be conceptual content. Nonconceptualism and conceptualism are often assumed to be well-defined theoretical approaches that each constitute unitary claims about the contents of experience. In this paper I try to show that this implicit assumption is mistaken, and what consequences this has for the debate about perceptual experience. I distinguish between two different ways that nonconceptualist (and conceptualist) proposals about perceptual content can be understood: as claims about the constituents that compose perceptual contents or as claims about whether a subject’s undergoing experiences with those contents requires them to possess the concepts that characterize those contents. I maintain that these ways of understanding conceptualism and nonconceptualism are orthogonal to one another. This is revealed by the conceptual coherence of positions in which the contents of experiences have both conceptual and nonconceptual features; positions which possess their own distinctive sources of philosophical motivation. I argue that the fact that there is a place in conceptual space for such positions, and that there may be good reason for theorists to adopt them, creates difficulties for both the central argument for nonconceptualism and the central argument for conceptualism. I set out each of these arguments; the Argument from Possession-Independence and the Epistemically-Driven Argument. I then try to show how the existence of mixed positions about perceptual content derived from a clear distinction between compositional and possessional considerations constitutes a significant obstacle for those arguments as they stand. The takehome message of the paper is that unless one clearly acknowledges the distinction between issues about the composition of perceptual content and issues about how subject’s capacities to undergo certain experiences relates to their possession of concepts one runs the risk of embracing unsatisfying philosophical arguments in which conclusions relevant to one conception of nonconceptual and conceptual content are grounded on arguments that concern only the other; arguments that cannot, in themselves, sustain them