A novel treatment of the capacity for shared attention, joint action, and perceptual common knowledge. In The Shared World, Axel Seemann offers a new treatment of the capacity to perceive, act on, and know about the world together with others. Seemann argues that creatures capable of joint attention stand in a unique perceptual and epistemic relation to their surroundings; they operate in an en…
"A Bradford book.""Contemporary discussions of the success of science often invoke an ancient metaphor from Plato's Phaedrus: successful theories should 'carve nature at its joints.' But is nature really 'jointed'? Are there natural kinds of things around which our theories cut? The essays in this volume offer reflections by a distinguished group of philosophers on a series of intertwined issue…
Beginning with the early works of Aristotle, the interpretation of the verb "to be" runs through Western linguistic thought like Ariadne's thread. As it unravels, it becomes intertwined with philosophy, metaphysics, logic, and even with mathematics -- so much so that Bertrand Russell showed no hesitation in proclaiming that the verb "to be" was a disgrace to the human race. With the conviction …
"Today, in the age of CCTV, drones, medical body scans, and satellite images, photography is increasingly decoupled from human agency and human vision. In Nonhuman Photography, Joanna Zylinska offers a new philosophy of photography, going beyond the human-centric view to consider imaging practices from which the human is absent. Zylinska argues further that even those images produced by humans,…
"Over the past fifty years, enormous progress has been made in understanding visual mechanisms and treating eye disorders. And yet the scientist is not always aware of the latest clinical advances and the clinician is often not up to date on the basic scientific discoveries. Writing in nontechnical language, John and Joseph Dowling, a neuroscientist and an ophthalmologist, examine vision from b…
Push a button and turn on the television; tap a button and get a ride; click a button and "like" something. The touch of a finger can set an appliance, a car, or a system in motion, even if the user doesn't understand the underlying mechanisms or algorithms. How did buttons become so ubiquitous? Why do people love them, loathe them, and fear them? In Power Button, Rachel Plotnick traces the ori…
A proposal that the concept of minimal content--a narrow, first-person, non-phenomenal concept--plays a necessary, pivotal, foundational, and unifying role in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language.In this highly original monograph, Nicholas Georgalis proposes that the concept of minimal content is fundamental both to the philosophy of mind and to the philosophy of language. He a…
The long-awaited second edition of an authoritative reference on electrophysiologic vision testing, including detailed information on techniques and problems, basic physiology and anatomy, theoretical concepts, and clinical findings; with extensive new material. This authoritative text is the only comprehensive reference available on electrophysiologic vision testing, offering both practical in…
The voice was not a major philosophical topic until the 1960s, when Derrida and Lacan separately proposed it as a central theoretical concern. Here, Dolar goes beyond Derrida's idea of "phonocentrism" and revives and develops Lacan's claim that the voice is one of the paramount embodiments of the psychoanalytic object. He proposes that, apart from the uses of the voice as a vehicle of meaning a…
"In this book, Kourken Michaelian builds on research in the psychology of memory to develop an innovative philosophical account of the nature of remembering and memory knowledge.\sCurrent philosophical approaches to memory rest on assumptions that are incompatible with the rich body of theory and data coming from psychology.\sMichaelian argues that abandoning those assumptions will result in a …