356,474 research outputs found

    The mythical countertextual : from Derrida to Badiou

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    The modern era stages a confrontation between humanity and its finitude. God is dead. The thing in itself, the world as it is in itself, us as we are in ourselves, are all recognised as being ultimately beyond our cognitive grasp. The realisation that the act of thinking cannot be fully taken into consideration in the thought that is produced by that act, forces the yawning of the chasm out of which a veritable plague of dualisms emerge. No matter how hard or deeply we think, a part of who or what we are – perhaps the constitutive part – remains irrevocably in the shadows. Without being able to take account of this in a way that might allow us to subtract it from what already counts as knowledge, to reveal the pure datum unsullied, as it were, by human hands, such knowledge – which might previously have been considered absolute – is revealed as irredeemably relational. To say what something is, is always, on some level, to say what it is for us. What this means is that even that of which we are most sure must, in the last analysis, be considered subjective. It is in this regard that Badiou speaks of ‘disobjectivation’ and of ‘the destitution of the category of object’, characteristics of what he refers to as ‘the age of poets’ [manifesto for philosophy, 72].)peer-reviewe

    Unconscious Thought in Peripatetic Philosophy

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    In Aristotle’s De anima 3.5, the relation between intellect and thought, and between thought and object, is not accessible to discursive or conscious thought; an understanding of the relation requires nous, intuitive or “unconscious” thought. The “active” intellect is accessible to discursive reason only sporadically. “Mind does not think intermittently” (De anima 430a10–25): mind is always thinking, consciously and unconsciously. Alexander of Aphrodisias saw the active intellect as transcendent in relation to the material intellect. The thought which is an object of thought is immaterial, or unconscious. In his De intellectu (108), there must be something at work in thought for which “what it is to be intellect does not lie in its being thought by us,” that is, unconscious. In the De anima of Themistius, mind as passive, in its material potentiality, is destructible and subject to time, but mind as active is free from its material conditions. Discursive thinking is equivalent to thinking in time; time is not present in the same way in unconscious thought or dreams.In the De intellectu of Alfarabi, when intellect “thinks that existent thing which is an intellect in actuality, it does not think an existing thing outside of itself but it only thinks itself,” in unconscious thought. Intellect as the object of its own thought is inaccessible to conscious reason. Intellect ascends from material to agent intellect and we ascend “from that which is best known to us to that which is unknown,” in the unconscious. The knowledge of things which are most accessible to intellect is the lowest form of knowledge; in order to develop, intellect must come to grasp the knowledge which is least accessible and most unconscious. In the Liber Naturalis of Avicenna, intellect is seen as a palimpsest of traces of forms and thoughts of varying clarity in relation to cognition, conscious thought. Unconscious thought is seen as the intelligible in cognition in the Aristotelian model, only accessible to conscious thought or actual intellect to varying degrees. The active intellect of Averroes can be seen as a form of unconscious thought. In his Long Commentary on the De anima, the activity of the active intellect makes images intelligible in unconscious thought, according to Franz Brentano

    Unconscious Perception and Perceptual Knowledge

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    It has been objected recently that naĂŻve realism is inconsistent with an empirically well-supported hypothesis that unconscious perception is possible. Because epistemological disjunctivism is plausible only in conjunction with naĂŻve realism (for a reason I provide), the objection reaches it too. In response, I show that the unconscious perception hypothesis can be changed from a problem into an advantage of epistemological disjunctivism. I do this by suggesting that: (i) naĂŻve realism is consistent with the hypothesis; (ii) the contrast between epistemological disjunctivism and epistemic externalism explains the difference in epistemic import between conscious and unconscious perception

    The role of the cerebellum in unconsciuos and conscious processing of emotions: a review

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    Studies from the past three decades have demonstrated that there is cerebellar involvement in the emotional domain. Emotional processing in humans requires both unconscious and conscious mechanisms. A significant amount of evidence indicates that the cerebellum is one of the cerebral structures that subserve emotional processing, although conflicting data have been reported on its function in unconscious and conscious mechanisms. This review discusses the available clinical, neuroimaging and neurophysiological data on this issue. We also propose a model in which the cerebellum acts as a mediator between the internal state and external environment for the unconscious and conscious levels of emotional processing

    Plotinus: The First Philosopher of the Unconscious

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    Plotinus is sometimes referred to as “the first philosopher of the unconscious.” In his 1960 essay “Consciousness and Unconsciousness in Plotinus,” Hans Rudolph Schwyzer called Plotinus “the discoverer of the unconscious.” What exactly was Plotinus’ unconscious? In the Enneads, Plotinus asks about soul and intellect: “Why then
do we not consciously grasp them
? For not everything which is in the soul is immediately perceptible” (V.1.12.1–15).[i] In the De anima of Aristotle, “Mind does not think intermittently” (430a10–25).[ii]We cannot remember eternal mind in us, because passive mind is perishable. Is the productive or active intelligence in our mind that of which we are not conscious? Can productive intelligence be compared to unconscious thought? Plotinus suggests that we do not notice the activity of intellect because it is not engaged with objects of sense perception. The intellect must involve an activity prior to awareness. Awareness of intellectual activity only occurs when thinking is reflected as in a mirror, but knowledge in discursive reason, reason transitioning from one object to the next in a temporal sequence, is not self-knowledge. Only in the activity of intellect inaccessible to discursive reason is thinking as the equivalent of being. The intellectual act in mind is only apprehended when it is brought into the image-making power of mind through the logos or linguistic articulation; “we are always intellectually active but do not always apprehend our activity” (IV.3.30.1–17). If the Intellectual is the unconscious, then unconscious reason is superior to conscious reason. The inability of conscious reason to know itself in the illusion of self-consciousness is the premise of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century
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