Browsing by Author "Zammito, John"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Drilling Down: Can Historians Operationalize Koselleck’s Stratigraphical Times?
    (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) Zammito, John
    According to Reinhart Koselleck, in every moment a congeries of “temporal strata” are effectively co-present, but not necessarily coherent, hence the “simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous.” Contrast this with the notion of a zeitgeist in which every aspect of a historical moment is integrated by some master principle. There are so many trajectories active in any present that it is unlikely that one might coordinate all of them, if not unwise even to believe that they are coordinated. Not only does each historical present demonstrate at best rhizomic or patchy coherences across domains, but it also registers different paces and intensities in the temporal deployment of the domains. Nevertheless, coherence remains a compelling regulative ideal. Fortunately, path-dependency—cumulation as constraint—is a discriminable feature of the several distinct “layers of time” or diachronic flows co-present in any given historical moment. Moreover, that some strata of experience remain roughly constant enables us to appraise the variation of others. If too many elements enter into simultaneous crisis, if we hit the “perfect storm,” then our capacity to comprehend (like that of our objects of inquiry) may be severely impaired. These insights from Koselleck are eminently applicable and deserve recognition and gratitude in historical epistemology.
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    Leibniz on Modality
    (2014-04-17) Mills, Jacob Shaw; Kulstad, Mark A.; Grandy, Richard E.; Zammito, John; Brown, Gregory
    This dissertation is a systematic account of the concept of modality in Leibniz’s thought. In chapter 1 I will give a detailed account of the metaphysics of Leibnizian possible worlds and show how to link them up with the notion of a possible world as it functions in contemporary possible worlds semantics. I then conclude with some observations on what it means to have a possible worlds semantics and give my solution to a standard problem with Leibniz’s infinite analysis approach to modality. In chapter 2 I show the development of and eventual deep connection in Leibniz thought between the infinite analysis and possible worlds accounts. Possible worlds supply the reason for the infinity of the analysis involved in contingent predicates. Chapter 3 begins with a summary of attempts in the literature to avoid the scope of Leibniz’s essentialism. I then argue that Leibniz employed an intensional theory of reference and provide a model for it. I conclude with an account of Leibniz’s treatment of counterfactuals. Lastly, in chapter 4 I give a treatment of Leibniz’s per se and moral modality. I conclude by showing in what sense Leibniz thought all of an individual’s properties are intrinsic and in what sense he didn’t think all of an individual’s properties were essential.
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    Perceptual Links: Attention, Experience, and Demonstrative Thought
    (2015-04-22) Barkasi, Michael; O'Callaghan, Casey; Siewert, Charles; Grandy, Richard; Zammito, John
    Perception is conscious: perceiving involves a first-person experience of what’s perceived. It’s widely held that these perceptual experiences are independent of what's perceived. Viewing two visually indiscriminable #2 pencils would involve the same experience, despite viewing different objects. It’s also widely held that conscious perception enables thinking about what's perceiving. When you see one of those pencils you can think, THAT is a pencil. Some philosophers, including John McDowell and John Campbell, have suggested that these two features engender a puzzle: how can perceptual experiences make perceived objects available for thought when they’re independent of those objects? This dissertation is a collection of four papers which address this question. The first (chapter 2) argues that, under two minimal assumptions, conscious perception makes objects available for thought only if experience is not object independent. The second (chapter 3) argues that conscious perception makes objects available for thought by enabling voluntarily attention to them. The third (chapter 4) integrates empirical work on multiple-object tracking and philosophical work on attention to argue that conscious perception isn’t mediated by the construction of representations within the visual system. The fourth (chapter 5) uses philosophical methods and neurophysiology to give an account of the role of experience itself in how perception makes objects available for thought. A concluding chapter combines and extends results from the previous chapters to give a naive realist (vs representationalist) account of perceptual experience. The questions about perceptual experience addressed in this dissertation (object dependent or independent? naive realist or representationalist?) are fundamental to our understanding of experience. Not only do they get at its basic nature, but their answers constrain how we might give scientifically respectable, or naturalistic, explanations of experience as well as how we might explain perceptual hallucinations and illusions.