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1. The Digital Scholar: Philosopher's Lab: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Vladimir A. Kutyrev Владимир Александрович Кутырев
Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology as a Philosophical Foresight of the Information Era
Трансцендентальная Феноменология Гуссерля Как Философское Предшествие Информационной Эпохи

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In this paper, we suggest an updated idea about the development of philosophy in the twentieth century. Its historical meaning is in the transition from metaphysics to transcendentalism, from the realistic model of the world to the postmodernist one. We demonstrate that transcendental phe-nomenology is a forerunner of structural and in-formation revolutions. It developed the catego-ries that appear speculative counter-parts of the conceptual apparatus of informationalism. The “keyword” of phenomenology is noe-ma = a thing of consciousness = a mental con-sciousness thing, which is information about a thing. Transcenden-tal-cognitive modelling turns all things into num-bers. It results in a denial of humanity and their life-world by technoscience. Husserl seems to be the first ideologist and, at the same time, the first criticist of the Transmodern era.
2. The Digital Scholar: Philosopher's Lab: Volume > 1 > Issue: 2
M. Weller Мартин Веллер
The Digital Scholar Revisited
Цифровой Ученый: Новое Прочтение

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The book The Digital Scholar was published in 2011, and used Boyer’s framework of scholarship to examine the possible impact of digital, networked technology on scholarly practice. In 2011 the general attitude towards digital scholarship was cautious, although areas of innovative prac-tice were emerging. Using this book as a basis, the author considers changes in digital scholarship since its publication. Five key themes are identified: mainstreaming of digital scholarship, so that it is a widely accepted and encouraged practice; the shift to open, with the emphasis on the benefits that open practice brings rather than the digital or networked aspects; policy implementation, particularly in areas of educational technology platforms, open access policies and open educational resources; network identity, emphasising the development of academic identity through social media and other tools; criticality of digital scholarship, which examines the negative issues associated with online abuse, privacy and data usage. Each of these themes is explored, and their impact in terms of Boyer’s original framing of scholarly activity considered. Boyer’s four scholarly activities of discovery, integration, application and teaching can be viewed from the perspective of these five themes. In conclusion what has been realised does not con-stitute a revolution in academic practice, but rather a gradual acceptance and utilisation of digi-tal scholarship techniques, practices and values. It is simultaneously true that both radical change has taken place, and nothing has fundamentally altered. Much of the increased adoption in academia mirrors the wider penetration of social media tools amongst society in general, so academics are more likely to have an identity in such places that mixes professional and personal.
3. The Digital Scholar: Philosopher's Lab: Volume > 2 > Issue: 3
Julita Slipkauskaitė Юлита Слипкаускаите
The significance of the idea of impetus for the development of natural science
Роль идеи импетуса в развитии естественных наук

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In the discourse around theories explaining scientific progress, natural philosophy of the Late Medieval Period is seen as playing the role of apologetics. For philosophers of science, with their repudiation of metaphysics, the task of providing a rational reconstruction of how scientific progress has occurred is nigh on impossible. Even explanations such as the Popperian and the Kuhnian strain under great difficulty and provide only partly satisfactory results. In his “Logik der Forschung” (1934) Karl Raimund Popper argues that metaphysics plays an accidental part in the emergence of new scientific ideas. Correspondingly, in “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” (1962), by carrying out theoretical interpretations and classification of empirical facts without their metaphysical premises, Thomas Kuhn comes to the conclusion that natural science was formed under the influence of erroneous interpretations of Aristotelian natural philosophy presented by medieval natural philosophers. These are some of the reasons why medievalists are still made to defend late medieval natural philosophy from shallow convictions that at medieval universities nothing of any significance to contemporary science and philosophy took place at all. Seeking to render a fragment of a coherent reconstruction of the development of natural philosophy, I will investigate one idea of late medieval philosophy – the explanation of motion (impetus). The main statement of the paper holds that the ideas of late medieval natural philosophy have a decisive significance for the development of modern natural science instead of accidental or negative one. In the paper, following Aristotelian philosophical approach, premises of Jean Buridan’s theory of impetus will be exposed. Then, debates over the explanation of projectile motion are going to be presented, and finally, the necessary significance of this metaphysical idea on the modifications of natural philosophy is going to be ascertained.
4. The Digital Scholar: Philosopher's Lab: Volume > 3 > Issue: 1
Joseph Wilson Джозеф Уилсон
Constraints on generality: The (mis-)use of generic propositions in scientific prose
Ограничения На Общее

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Generic propositions are statements that make general claims about ‘kinds’ that are found in a wide variety of written genres and speech. By definition, generics do not include in their structure any reference to the conditions under which they hold true. Their misuse in popular scientific writing, however, can erode the public’s confidence in the process of science itself when they discover that conclusions are highly contingent on certain truth conditions. The language used in scholarly scientific papers often includes qualifiers and hedges, the epistemological consequences of which have been explored by Bruno Latour, Thomas Kuhn, Ian Hacking and others. Some research shows that abstracts, however, of-ten include generic statements that are not warranted by the scientific evidence described in the full text. Similarly, when accounts of scientific discoveries appear in popular media, journalists often remove qualifiers, hedges and context markers that existed in the original study. Studies in anthropology by Joseph Dumit, Annemarie Mol, Harris Solomon and others explore the human reactions to such pronouncements. One possible solution to the over-use of generics in scientific abstracts, especially for studies that rely on human subjects, is the inclusion of a mandatory section entitled “Constraints on Generality,” as suggested by Gutiérrez and Rogoff (2003). Other suggestions include using less nominalized verbs and more past-tense descriptions of what actually occurred in the particular study.
5. The Digital Scholar: Philosopher's Lab: Volume > 3 > Issue: 1
Christian Dayé Orcid-ID Кристиан Дайé
Fast trade?: Interdisciplinarity under time pressure
Быстрый Обмен?

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This paper addresses two questions. The first is: Do cross-disciplinary teams that exist only for rather short periods of time have a chance to realize some form of dialogue across disciplinary boundaries? To approach this topic, the concept of trading zones is applied, as it has been introduced by Peter Galison and developed by other authors. Empirical data come from participant observation during a workshop on sonification, i.e. the auditory display of data. In this context, a second question is addressed. While there exists a vivid discussion on how to measure outcome or performance of research projects, there has been no attempt to measure the degree of interdisciplinarity within a collaborative structure. I propose a methodology that attempts to transfer concepts found within qualitative frameworks onto a quantitative research strategy. In concluding, I discuss some flaws of this approach and propose further lines of work.
6. The Digital Scholar: Philosopher's Lab: Volume > 3 > Issue: 1
Marfuga Iskandarova, Elena Simakova Марфуга Искандарова
Technologising the wave: constructing an energy resource in science and policy
Технологизация Волны

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Despite the recent shift from renewable energy to a low carbon policy, the UK policy discourse still recognises marine energy as part of the country’s future energy mix. Production of what we call an “assemblage” of technology and ocean waves triggers complex sets of initiatives that provide the basis for the economic viability and credibility of wave energy extraction. However, questions are rarely asked about how the natural phenomenon being part of this assemblage is construed as a resource to become a key element of promises and assessments of potential of renewable energy. This study sheds light on under-explored aspects of the credibility–economy and valuation practices formed around renewable energy that have not yet been problematised in social studies of energy. Arguing that ocean waves become an energy resource largely through resource assessment practices, we examine such practices in the context of the production of scientific and policy discourses around wave energy. Considering waves as an object of expertise, we examine how “wave data” constituted through measurements, statistical analysis, modelling and visualisation, contribute to the assessment and legitimisation of wave energy developments. We also evaluate the prospects for wave energy to be a “good” in future economic exchange.
7. The Digital Scholar: Philosopher's Lab: Volume > 3 > Issue: 1
Jennifer Shields Дженнифер Шилдс
Do democracies need knOWLedge?
Нужно Ли Демократиям Знание?

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This paper serves to review the book Why Democracies Need Science, written by Harry Collins and Robert Evans. Of particular interest to this paper is the institution of The Owls, which Collins and Evans propose in their text. A theme which is present throughout the book, a theme which Collins and Evans seek to work through is that of post-truth; the first section of the paper will address the concept of post-truth. Next, the birds of science will be examined, in the second section; this is a classification system Collins and Evans develop, from a borrowed analogy from Richard Feynman. After examining the eagle scien-tists, the hawk scientific fundamentalists, and the vulture philosopher-apologists, attention will be paid to The Owls of science. The third section per-tains to The Owls. The Owls are an institution which Collins and Evans note and which includes social scientists and those with a rigorous under-standing of the social analysis of science [Collins, Evans, 2017, p. 78]. The role of The Owls is to serve to better advise politicians in a post-truth era. The purpose of this paper is to argue that the theorized institution of The Owls is an insufficient mechanism to deal with a post-truth era. After introducing The Owls, the fourth section of the paper considers the neutrality of an Owl, as a consensus does not guarantee truth or correctness. The fifth section then examines The Owls and democracy, as Collins and Evans do not specify the type of democracy in which The Owls would operate. The sixth section notes the exclusivity present within the institution of The Owls, as it is restricted to only two occupations, and is seemingly elitist. Finally, I conclude by asking the question – what does this mean for science and technology studies? As the institution of The Owls seems like an insufficient one to deal with a post-truth era.
8. The Digital Scholar: Philosopher's Lab: Volume > 3 > Issue: 2
Alexander Ruser Александер Рузер
The revolutions postponed: scientific evidence, dominant ideologies and the defenders of status quo
Отложенные Революции

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Philosophers of Science have developed sophisti-cated models for explaining how scientific revolu-tions are brought about and more generally how scientists deal with facts that contradict pre-existing assumptions and theoretical concepts. Likewise historians of science and sociologists of knowledge have produced comprehensive studies on how scientific breakthroughs have sparked social revolution and how social factors fostered or hampered scientific developments. However, scientific revolutions and scientific “progress” always seem to be at the center of at-tention. The equally important question of why sometimes new evidence and contradicting evi-dence fail to trigger a scientific revolution has been largely neglected though. Improving our understanding of “called off” or “postponed” rev-olutions not only contributes to analyses of suc-cessful scientific revolutions. Understanding how defenders of the status quo manage to suppress new information and ignore scientific facts is cru-cial to understanding scientific and political con-troversy. This contribution therefore seeks to out-line a conceptual model for probing into the “black box” of scientific revoltions. In addition it will outline a potential framework for analyzing the survival of neoclassic economic theory after the global financial crisis.
9. Essays in Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
Cynthia Freeland Aesthetics and the Senses: Introduction
10. Essays in Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
Jennifer A. McMahon The Aesthetics of Perception: Form as a Sign of Intention
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Aesthetic judgment has often been characterized as a sensuous cognitively unmediated engagement in sensory items whether visual, auditory, haptic, olfactory or gustatory. However, new art forms challenge this assumption. At the very least, new art forms provide evidence of intention which triggers a search for meaning in the perceiver. Perceived order excites the ascription of intention. The ascription of intention employs background knowledge and experience, or in other words, implicates the perceiver’s conceptual framework. In our response to art of every description we witness the incorrigible tendency in humans to construct meaningful narratives to account for events. Such meaningful narratives always implicitly involve the ascription of intention, even when the agent of the intention is not explicitly acknowledged or even clearly conceived. This principle of intention-in-order may seem incompatible with another truism which is that art is a source of novel ideas and essentially a critique of prevailing values and norms including conceptual schemes. I argue on the contrary that the human impulse to read intention in order is a precondition of art’s critical edge. Creativity is possible even though there is no raw perceptual data to which we have conscious access. That is, there are no sensory items, unmediated by the concepts we have internalized through our interaction with our communities, to which we have conscious access.
11. Essays in Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
Justin L. Harmon The Sensuous as Source of Demand: A Response to Jennifer McMahon’s “Aesthetics of Perception”
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In this response paper I defend an alternative position to both Jennifer McMahon’s neo-Kantian view on the aesthetics of perceptual experience, and the sense-data theory that she rightly repudiates. McMahon argues that sense perception is informed by concepts “all the way out,” and that the empiricist notion of unmediated sensuous access to entities in the world is untenable. She further claims that art is demanding inasmuch as it compels one to engage in an open-ended, cognitive interpretive process with sensuous phenomena, and that it is this very process that opens up a space for critique of the entrenched representational concepts by which we navigate the world. In contrast, I argue that the sensuous itself is a source of demand. Perceptual objects, in virtue of their material constitution, are inexhaustible plexuses of meaning that demand a kind of sensuous, interpretive response on the part of our bodily posture and orientation. Works of art offer opportunities for critique insofar as they reveal dimensions of sensuous reality hitherto covered over by status quo conceptual distributions. McMahon is right that sensuous objects are never simply given. But, I claim, she is wrong to suggest that it is only by way of conceptual mediation that we make contact with the world. On the contrary, the sensuous self-presentation of things is always at the same time a demand on our sensory apparatus that resists encapsulation by concepts.
12. Essays in Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
Cameron Buckner Ordering Our Attributions-of-Order: Commentary on McMahon
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In her target article, Jennifer McMahon argues that we understand art not by explicitly interpreting “raw percepts,” but rather by engaging with our implicit tendencies to interpret complex stimuli in terms of culturally-engrained preconceptions and narratives. These attributions of order require a shared conceptual and cultural background, and thus one might worry that in denying access to raw percepts, the view dulls art’s critical edge. Against this worry, McMahon argues that art can continue to create and innovate by inviting us to critically reflect upon the very preconceptions on which our engagement with it necessarily depends. In this commentary, I place these attributions of order in historical and empirical context. In addition, I discuss a lingering, related mystery — the possibility of the occasionally punctuated character of artistic evolution, in which prevailing aesthetic conventions are replaced with almost entirely new ones. I suggest that such radical breaks with the past are possible even given the concept-ladeness of perception, but are only likely to succeed when they tap into a culturally-invariant bedrock of more basic attributions of order.
13. Essays in Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
Owen Ewald, Ursula Krentz Beauty and Beholders: Are Past Intuitions Correct?
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This essay discusses four definitions of beauty from Western philosophy in light of recent experimental work from the more modern fields of psychology and biology. The first idea, derived from Plato, that beauty consists of relationships between parts, is partially confirmed by recent psychological experiments on infants and adults. The second idea, that beauty consists of one salient feature amid a mass of details, is more recent, perhaps from Hume, and is confirmed by some experiments on adults, but this finding has not been replicated in non-Western cultures. The third idea, that beauty is based on utility, occurs in Plato but is more difficult to support through experiments; biology suggests that a longing for beauty, not merely for survival, is an evolutionary target. Finally, the fourth idea, that beauty is a type of cognitive pleasure, is a constant thread from Plato through the work of Aquinas and Kant and seems to confirm a preference for an optimum level of complexity by adults, but cannot explain a parallel preference for complexity in human infants.
14. Essays in Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
Kathleen Coessens Sensory Fluidity: Dialogues of Imagination in Art
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How do artists share, translate, reveal their imagination by using different semiotic systems; how can the audience partake in this imagination receiving only images, words, notation, sounds? Starting from artwork of the novelist Italo Calvino and the composers Helmut Lachenmann and Gyorgy Kurtag, this article addresses the relation among imagination, perception, remembrance and expression. The ‘images’ used, be they visual, verbal, auditory or haptic, are much more than images. They concentrate in themselves layers of subjective and intersubjective perceptual, cognitive and emotive experiences. I will argue that imagination relies upon sensory fluidity. This allows us (1) to integrate sensorial experiences from different perceptual origins — synaesthesia, (2) to link past, present and future by way of sensorial and embodied patterns of remembrance — embodied sedimentation, and (3) to share intersubjective patterns of affect and effect, bridging idiosyncratic and universal human experiences.
15. Essays in Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
Mark Paterson Movement for Movement’s Sake?: On the Relationship Between Kinaesthesia and Aesthetics
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Movement and, more particularly, kinesthesia as a modality and as a metaphor has become of interest at the intersection of phenomenology and cognitive science. In this paper I wish to combine three historically related strands, aisthêsis, kinesthesis and aesthetics, to advance an argument concerning the aesthetic value of certain somatic sensations. Firstly, by capitalizing on a recent regard for somatic or inner bodily senses, including kinesthesia, proprioception and the vestibular system by drawing lines of historical continuity from earlier philosophical investigations on bodily background experience, initially from aisthêsis, Aristotle’s concept of the sensory faculty. Secondly, concepts of the sensate body are advanced through discoveries in the nervous system and related discussions of the ‘inner’ senses such as Charles Bell’s ‘muscle sense’ (1826), and what Charles Sherrington later termed ‘proprio-ception’ (1906). Thirdly, we consider the possibility of aesthetic status for those inner senses, where recently aesthetic arguments by Montero (2006) and Cole and Montero (2007) seek to determine aesthetic criteria for proprioception, and similarly in dance theory the aesthetic status of kinesthesia has been questioned (e.g. Foster 2011). Finally we consider whether previous exposure to a ‘grammar’ of movement is a factor in determining the relative aesthetic value.
16. Essays in Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
W.P. Seeley Hearing How Smooth It Looks: Selective Attention and Crossmodal Perception in the Arts
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A broad range of behavior is associated with crossmodal perception in the arts. Philosophical explanations of crossmodal perception often make reference to neuroscientific discussions of multisensory integration in selective attention. This research demonstrates that superior colliculus plays a regulative role in attention, integrating unique modality specific visual, auditory, and somatosensory spatial maps into a common spatial framework for action, and that motor skill, emotional salience, and semantic salience contribute to the integration of auditory, visual, and somatosensory information in ordinary perceptual contexts. I present a model for multisensory integration in our engagement with artworks derived from a diagnostic recognition framework for object recognition and a biased competition model for selective attention. The proposed model attributes a role to superior colliculus in a broader fronto-parietal attentional network that integrates sensory information, primes perceptual systems to the expectation of stimulus features salient to particular sensorimotor or cognitive tasks at particular locations, and inhibits the perception of task irrelevant distracters. I argue that this model demonstrates that crossmodal effects are the rule not the exception in perception and discuss ways in which it explains a range of crossmodal effects in our engagement with pictures, dance, and musical performances.
17. Essays in Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
Cynthia Freeland On Being Stereoblind in an Era of 3D Movies
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I happen to have a visual impairment known as strabismus, which means that the information from my eyes is not successfully fused in my brain, so I lack stereoscopic vision. Hence I was surprised to find I could see some depth effects of recent 3D films such as Wim Wenders’s Pina. This experience has prompted me to explore both further information about binocular vision and various disputes about the aesthetic merits of 3D films. My paper takes up the following topics: (1) a review of information about binocular vision and the problem of strabismus; (2) a summary of 3D film history and techniques; (3) a discussion of the aesthetic merits and deficits of some “best cases” of contemporary 3D films, concluding with (4) assessments of the meaning of claims about 3D cinema’s alleged superior “realism.” I consider three proposals about the superior realism of 3D movies with the aim of summarizing what the latest ventures in this mode mean to those of us who lack normal binocular vision.
18. Essays in Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
Christy Mag Uidhir Getting Emotional Over Contours: A Response to Seeley
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In the previous paper, Bill Seeley suggests that what follows from research into crossmodal perception for expression and emotion in the arts is that there is an emotional contour (i.e., a contour constitutive of the content of an emotion and potentially realizable across a range of media). As a response of sorts, I speculate as to what this might hold for philosophical and empirical enquiry into expression and emotion across the arts as well as into the nature of the emotions themselves.
19. Essays in Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
Luis Rocha Antunes The Vestibular in Film: Orientation and Balance in Gus Van Sant’s Cinema of Walking
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For decades, the audiovisual nature of the film medium has limited film scholarship to the strict consideration of sound and sight as the senses at play. Aware of the limitations of this sense-to-sense correspondence, Laura U. Marks has been the first to consistently give expression to a new and emergent line of enquiry that seeks to understand the multisensory nature of film.Adding to the emergent awareness of the cinema of the senses, neuroscience, specifically multisensory studies, has identified autonomous sensory systems beyond the classic five senses: the vestibular (orientation and balance), proprioception (posture and body position), pain, and temperature perception. This essay investigates the principles of the multisensory film experience when applied to our sense of orientation and balance in film – the vestibular in film. Here I seek to outline the neural and physiological evidence supporting the idea that we can have access to the multisensory exclusively through sound and image, based on the nature of our perception and cognition.I then apply this frame of reference to a new understanding of Gus Van Sant’s cinema of walking composed by the so-called death trilogy of Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003) and Last Days (2005) plus Paranoid Park (2007). With this analysis I show how the vestibular sense can be a powerful aesthetic and cinematic mode of filmmaking, as well revealing of the sensuous nature of film.
20. Essays in Philosophy: Volume > 13 > Issue: 2
Jim Blackmon Review of Re-Emergence: Locating Conscious Properties in a Material World, by Gerald Vision