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The Body as an Epistemological Metaphor1 of Modernism

Tekstualia, 2013

The article focuses on issues connected with literature and philosophy, and presents the body as an epistemological metaphor in modernism. The matter of corporeality in the prose of Bruno Schulz and Witold Gombrowicz is understood not just as a specifically developed literary motif and a potential object of scholarly research, but also as a philosophical category (the problem of materiality), and also an anthropological one.

In Search of the Lost World: the Modernist Quest for the Thing, Matter, and Body

Vernon Press, 2023

From a historical perspective, the book studies how modernist artists, as the first generation who began to rethink intensively the legacy of German Idealism, sought to recreate the self so as to recreate their relationships with the material world. Theoretically, the book converses with the topical de-anthropocentric interests in the 21st century and proposes that the artist may escape human-centeredness through the transformation of the self. Part One, “Artificiality,” begins the discussion with the fin-de-siècle cult of artificiality, where artists such as Theophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, J.K. Huysmans, and Gustave Moreau dedicate themselves to love stony sphinxes, marble statues, and inorganic appearances. The cult of artificiality is a mischievous subversion to Hegel’s maxim that inwardness is superior to matter. In the cult of artificiality, art is superior to nature, though art is no longer defined as immaterial imagination but rather reconfigured as mysterious appearances that defy signification and subjugate the feeling heart. Part Two, “Auto-philosophical Fiction,” discusses the genre where the artists (Marcel Proust, Walter Pater, and Virginia Woolf) set philosophical ideas in the laboratory of their lives and therefore translate their aesthetic ideals—the way they wish to relate to the world—into a journey of self-examination and self-cultivation. In Pater’s novel 'Marius the Epicurean', the hero explores how a philosophical percept may be translated into sentiments and actions, demonstrating that literature is a unique approach to truth as it renders theory into a transformative experience. Exploring the latest findings of empiricist psychology, the artists seek to escape the Kantian trap by cultivating their powers of reception and to register passing thoughts and sensations. Together, the book argues that de-anthropocentrism cannot be predicated upon a metaphysics that presumes universal subjectivity but must be a form of aesthetic inquiry that recreates the self in order to recreate our relationships with the world.

The Body's Own Space: Embodied Cognition in Berkeley and Kant

The History of Distributed Cognition, 2019

Berkeley and Kant are known for having developed philosophical critiques of materialism, critiques leading them to propose instead an epistemology based on the coherence of our mental representations. For all that the two had in common, however, Kant was adamant in distinguishing his own " empirical realism " from the immaterialist consequences entailed by Berkeley's attack on abstract ideas. Kant focused his most explicit criticisms on Berkeley's account of space, and commentators have for the most part decided that Kant either misunderstood or was simply unfamiliar with the Bishop's actual position. Rather than demonstrate that Kant understood Berkeley perfectly well—an argument that has already been forcefully made by Colin Turbayne—I want to take a different tack altogether. For it is by paying attention to Berkeley's actual account of space, an account oriented by his rejection of spatial " geometers " like Descartes, and spatial " absolutists " like Newton, that we discover an account of embodied cognition, of spatial distance and size that can only be known by way of the body's motion and touch. Perhaps even more striking, I will want to suggest, is the manner in which Kant's approach to the problem of incongruent counterparts will equally need to rely on a proprioceptive cognition, one requiring a different geometry of position altogether. My discussion proceeds in three stages, with stage one focused on Kant's efforts to distinguish his philosophical project from Berkeley's own idealist system, and stages two and three describing the manner in which their approach to spatial orientation both challenges and extends the traditional narrative of their differences as laid out in stage one.

Mind, Modality, and Meaning: Toward a Rationalist Physicalism

2013

Bibliography xi This dissertation would not be possible without assistance and support from a wide variety of individuals over the years. First and foremost, I would like to thank my parents, Pia and Marvin, to whom this thesis is dedicated. They never pushed me to become a lawyer or a doctor or to pursue a career more respectable by traditional standards. They supported me in whatever wild endeavour I chose to pursue. When I skipped about from anthropologist to mathematician to wilderness adventurer to poet to ski bum, their support did not waver (even if their eyebrows did). The same held true when I opted for graduate school in philosophy. Thanks Mom and Dad. Other members of my family played important roles in my success as well. My brothers Micah and Noah are two of the best friends and comrades one could ask for. Whatever the occasion required, they were always ready with a sympathetic ear, a funny story, or a cold beer. My aunts, uncles, and cousins deserve gratitude as well. I'd particularly like to thank my grandparents Jack and Millie. Their support-both personal and financial-enabled a poor kid from Vermont with big dreams to pursue whatever intellectual pipe dream caught his fancy. On the academic side, the members of my dissertation committee offered much needed guidance and support throughout the process of writing this dissertation and my graduate education more generally. Tyler Burge, both in person and through his writing, imparted much philosophical wisdom. In many long xii meetings, he provided philosophical stimulation and direction, a stern hand and strategic advise, and a healthy no nonsense philosophical attitude that kept me grounded. Sometimes I bristled at his demands, but the finished product is that much better for them. His extensive comments on many drafts helped polish and shape this dissertation in a multitude of ways. David Chalmers deserves credit for introducing me first through his writing to the major issues this dissertation addresses, for making seminal contributions to those topics, and later for serving as an invaluable philosophical advisor and interlocutor. Much of this dissertation targets David's work. But my criticisms demonstrate my respect and admiration for his contributions to philosophy. David and I agree on many things, and I think of myself in as defending David's big picture approach to philosophy and specifically the mind-body problem. In many ways, this dissertation, and my approach to the philosophical issues in it, especially the nature of mind and of representational content, are the bastard child of the Tyler Burge and the David Chalmers approaches. They are both intellectual giants. I am proud to count myself among their philosophical progeny. I thank Mark Greenberg for being an invaluable philosophical interlocutor. Mark and I think and operate philosophically in similar ways, and it was always helpful for me to bounce ideas off him before, during, and after, any philosophical project. Mark also deserves thanks for useful comments on a variety of papers, for his mentorship, and for teaching me many important lessons in metasemantics and the philosopy of representation more generally. I always walked away from his stimulating seminars amped up to write something new. The last essay in the dissertation-"Toward a Theory of Conceptual Mastery"-in particxiii ular owes a great deal to his tutelage. Calvin Normore is a philosophical master who seems to know about every topic in philosophy. He was an invaluable resource, always ready with a comparison between whatever problem interested me and an issue addressed by Antoine Arnauld, William of Ockam, or John Buridan. He picks up material quickly and always offers some interesting angle on the problem. I owe him thanks for getting me to consider issues from a different angle and helping me move past logjams in my thinking.

Physicalism: The Philosophical Foundations

Philosophical Books, 1996

i.e. souls. A broader defence of the coherence of the notion of the soul (so understood) unfolds with a determined effort to take on the difficulties traditionally associated with the idea of body-soul interaction, and with the demands to vindicate the notion of soul by providing adequate criteria of individuation and persistence. Appendix 1 concerns the abstract-concrete distinction. The overview taken there is notable in standing apart from almost every recent view in conceiving the distinction as at once important, exhaustive, exclusive and rather straightforwardly drawn. The intriguing proposal is, swiftly, that concreteness is constituted by instantiating a category that could have an instance that has spatial or temporal parts, and abstractness is nonconcreteness. Appendix 2 offers a defence of an Aristotelian account of continuous space and time and their (respective) parts.