Suddenly Mrs. Reilly remembered the horrible night that she and Mr. Reilly had gone to the Prytania to see Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in Red Dust. In the heat and confusion that had followed their return home, nice Mr. Reilly had tried one of his indirect approaches, and Ignatius was conceived. Poor Mr. Reilly. He had never gone to another movie as long as he lived (p. 79).
Another interesting paper by Shaun (OK, I know the image is associated with William’s classic work but I like the image and it’s salient).
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Plato’s simile of light – the images of the Sun, the Divided Line and the Cave are outlined in the Republic at the close of Book VI and at the beginning of Book VII. The simile of light has attracted a vast literature from Nettleship’s Victorian lectures, down through the work of James Adam, Henry Jackson and A.S. Ferguson’s brilliant series of articles, to the more recent work of Cross and Woozley, Raven, White and Annas. Of course, there are too many shades and possibilities of interpretation to be canvassed fully in such a limited space but I have been influenced at different points by different scholars. I merely put forward the views I hold about the context, functionality and continuity of the three images.
The simile of light has both a “forward” and a “backward” context. By the forward context I mean that the simile anticipates, and is a metaphorical representation of, the education of the guardians as spelt out by Plato in the remainder of Book VII, after the Cave. And it is through this education that the philosopher will come to know the Form of the Good, the foundation of all value, to be able to govern effectively. So when Socrates presses men to define, what is meant by justice? they resort to characterizing justice in terms of certain just acts. To avoid ethical particularism Socrates needs to abstract from the individual action. So if you claim to know what justice is then presumably you can capture the conditions for justice in a definitional claim. Socrates thus appeals to a universalizability, i.e. the Form of Justice or any other virtue which ultimately participates in the one great universal, the Good. Just as the Sun provides a teleological picture of the world (Rees 1965: xxxv) so too by analogy, consciously or unconsciously, does man participate in the Good. This is reiterated lucidly by Boyd (1922: 128) when he says that ‘in effect that what justice or any other virtue is, we must see it in its relations to life as a whole’.
Now to the “backward” context. Plato does say what the Form of the Good is not – it is not pleasure and it is not knowledge. The point is: can he reasonably assume that there is such a thing, given the metaphysical arguments of the Republic so far? It’s the metaphysical role of the Form of the Good that’s primarily important to Plato. He feels the need for an ultimate explanatory principle – and the Form of the Good fits the bill. There is the temptation to view the Form of the Good as omni-explanatory (Cross and Woozley 1964: 183 cite Cherniss as commending the theory for its philosophical economy), a framework for a kind of theodicy or impersonal God. The Form of the Good “only explains the existence of goodness wherever goodness occurs”. The Form of the Good is the principle of reality, since goodness and reality are interrelated, and is fundamental to any attempt to making the world intelligible. Plato is thus committed to the idea that there is no difference of ultimate nature between facts and values in the world: goodness and values are just as real or indeed more real than other things. Just as the sun provides light, the intermediary between the eye and its object, so the Good provides the intermediary between the mind and its object, thereby making knowledge possible. The Line further illustrates this relation between the two orders of reality, the visible and the intelligible, but from a cognitive point of view – the states of mind in which one apprehends.
That the sun is primarily metaphysical in purpose is the least contentious of the three similes’ interpretations. The Sun is the child of the Good (508b) occupying in the visible world a position analogous to that of the Form of the Good in the world of Forms. Without the Good other Forms would not be known. Further, all the universals whether they be moral properties or mathematical entities (perfect virtue, perfect circles etc.) necessarily exist even independently of any particulars to exemplify them. The Good by analogy with the Sun is the source not only of their intelligibility, “but also of their being and reality; yet it is not itself that reality, but is beyond it, and superior to it in dignity and power” (509b). Likewise “the Sun . . . not only makes the things we see visible, but causes the processes of generation, growth and nourishment, without itself being such a process.”
I do need to reiterate that Plato does not suggest that the Idea of the Good provides a complete explanation of the entire universe, comprising both the intelligible and sensible realms, recalling the comments on the omni-explanatory function of the Form of the Good in the previous section. Cross and Woozley (1964: 183) make this point that the “completely real” world of Forms cannot deny the “semi-real” world of our banal reality. It is a common inference that because Plato constructs only one line, i.e. a common scale, that its segments represent a progression through its four stages. This orthodoxy (Nettleship 1901: 238-258) emphasizes this progression or “passing” that the mind needs to go through. Ferguson (1921: 147-150) refutes the view arising from the assumption of the Line’s being an exhaustive classification by maintaining that the Line is a continuation of the Sun simile (indeed as Plato says at 509c) whereby the Line simile is an illustration of “how two successive methods of studying the intelligible may lead to knowledge of that transcendent Good, still using the convenient symbolism of the visible” (Ferguson 1921:136), highlighting the contrast between the two methods of mathematics and philosophy, represented in the two upper segments.
The world of Wing Chun has lost one of its greats. Sifu was a very modest man and averse to any form of self-promotion. I feel privileged to have been a student of his – his style was marked by great precision and any lack of artifice. He always brought a smile to my face in class when employing some amusing (at least to me) analogy to try and get a point across.
Dr. G.K. Khoe was a slender very fit Chinese who was brought up in Indonesia. He was on a one year sabbatical leave from a Dutch University to do some chemical engineering research at UBC. His strong scientific background put an engineering perspective on all that he taught. He mentioned that the traditional teaching from his teacher Wong Kiu (often written Wang Kiu) was not quite as organized but Wong Kiu allowed him to ask thousands of questions to bring all the details of the art. Wong Kiu’s method concentrated on chi sau. He wanted the student feel what to do. He would correct you on the spot during the dynamic action, which Dr. Khoe described as trying to play with an octopus with eight arms attacking you. Wong Kiu was so rooted that he was impossible to move. Later one of my large 240 pound police officer students said the same about Dr. Khoe. (quote from here)
The intro to Joel’s paper:
Everybody knows that time, the body and the environment are important for cognition. You would not get much thinking done if you were not in a sufficiently oxygen-rich environment or if your body did not operate so as to deliver that oxygen to your organs in just the right quantities at just the right times. In addition, it is almost a truism that what we do with our bodies and environments is tremendously important for mental life; we all rely on diaries and shopping lists to help supplement our notoriously unreliable memories, and even adults sometimes resort to counting on their fingers in order to speed up calculations. This practical significance, however, has not often amounted to a kind of theoretical significance for cognitive science; an agent’s body, environment and temporal co-ordination have mostly been seen as (mere) implementation details.
There is, however, a growing and laudable interest in a nexus of concepts one can usefully refer to as the DEEDS approach to cognitive science. Central to this development is the idea that the mind is essentially “situated”. Embodied, embedded and distributed approaches try to understand cognitive systems with reference to the bodies, environments and social structures in which they are physically situated. Dynamical cognitive science tries to do justice to the temporal situatedness of cognition, by emphasising the importance of time and timing. Both aspects of this theoretical reorientation have gone hand in hand with a novel and intriguing set of example phenomena that advocates of the DEEDS approach regard as paradigmatically cognitive. Whereas classical cognitive science was concerned with abilities such as chess-playing and logic-crunching, many now see abilities such as sensori-motor co-ordination and obstacle avoidance as central. Brian Cantwell Smith (1999) captures this new zeitgeist, by noting that the DEEDS approach “… views intelligent human behaviour as engaged, socially and materially embodied activity, arising within the specific concrete details of particular (natural) settings, rather than as an abstract, detached, general purpose process of logical or formal ratiocination” (p. 769).
In this paper, I want to draw out a distinction between two different readings of the DEEDS hypothesis. On one reading, the DEEDS approach makes a metaphysical claim about the nature and location of cognitive processes—it claims that they may, in some cases, be constituted by factors which lie outside of the physical boundaries of the organism. On the other reading, the DEEDS approach advances a methodological prescription about how we ought to do cognitive science—it claims that more attention should be paid to bodily and environmental factors than has hitherto been the case. These two claims are often run together by advocates of the DEEDS approach, but they are worth teasing apart. For one thing, the distinction has some historical precedent—both behaviourism and the dynamical approach to cognition have already been outlined in accordance with similar distinctions. Further, I will argue that the methodological reading of the DEEDS approach is “pursuitworthy” independently of the metaphysical reading. It can also avoid some of the major objections that have targeted the latter. Thus, I conclude that the DEEDS approach cannot be dismissed as straightforwardly as some of its opponents would wish.
Wonderful lineup including New Birth Brass Band, Preservation Hall Brass Band, Meschiya Lake and the Little Big Horns, Palmetto Bug Stompers, Treme Brass Band and many more. And its free!!!
Here is a three part interview led by the ever reliable and precise expositor, Bryan Magee. I’m not sure that things have changed that much since this programme in 1978 in that while Heidegger is fully accepted (and suggestively reinterpreted) by those of us in cognitive science, mainstream analytical philosophy still sees him as a wacky and wooly Continental as Ayer, Popper and Carnap were wont to do, the exception being Ryle (Mind, New Series, Vol. 38, No. 151, Jul., 1929, pp. 355-370). Of course, it doesn’t help that Heidegger has been assimilated into circles that have no philosophical culture and he is deployed merely a hanger/filter for all manner of pompous tripe. Whatever qualms Ryle has about Being and Time he writes:
He shows himself to be a thinker of real importance by the immense subtlety and searchingness of his examination of con- sciousness, by the boldness and originality of his methods and conclusions, and by the unflagging energy with which he tries to think behind the stock categories of orthodox philosophy and psychology.
Magee concedes that Heidegger deals with heavy-duty issues whose philosophical outlook was of great value to his preparation for this interview. Even Barrett, a student of Carnap, came to Heidegger through Carnap’s dismissal of Heidegger.
The Guardian obit.
