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Once one sees that criminal law presuppose that those subject to it must at least be rational agents, the subject of the previous chapter, the question arises as to what other fundamental attributes the law might suppose persons to have. The chapter explores a number of such features: autonomy (in four different senses), emotionality, unified character, unified consciousness, and Intentionality. Some further features are often assumed to be presupposed about persons by the law, namely freedom of the will, mind-stuff existing outside the natural world, souls, and the like; but these are rejected as legal presuppositions about persons and moral agency.

Taurus poses questions about the nature of death and life whereby the two are indistinguishable from one another. One of the main technical features and optical tropes in the film is that of the dissolve shot which emphasises the blurring of boundaries between all states and which codes subjectivity in terms of transience and transcendence. I demonstrate how film as a form of art constructs particular forms of subjectivity and relates them to the discourse of intelligence—cinema as a metaphor for thought. Sokurov is interested in a type of ontology which is invisible and is a matter of transcendental evocation, guessing and anticipation, and one which is visible but only to the subject itself in the ultimate act of internalising knowledge and experiencing it as a knowledge-world. Sokurov never reduces one to another and instead engages in the retroactive act of re-assembling knowledge-worlds as matters of relation and intentionality. His worlds are infinite in the composition and limited by duration and change. The worlds of Sokurov are always political in that they contradict the laws of being, and particularly the ontology of spectatorship. This chapter sets the agenda for my further investigation.

Comprehension of actions is a core social skill. Here we provide a critical review of the dominant mirror neuron theory of action comprehension. Recent data demonstrate that parts of the mirror system respond to actions performed by nonhuman shapes and are insensitive to actor identity. Regions beyond the mirror system are also important for action comprehension. We suggest this data is not compatible with a strong mirror system hypothesis, and we outline alternative theories.

Recent research shows that from an early age, infants appear to attribute mental states such as goals, dispositions, perceptions, and beliefs to agents—whether human or nonhuman. Agents are entities that can detect their environment and exert control over their actions. In the present chapter, we review evidence on infants’ understanding about nonhuman agents. We describe results highlighting certain featural information and behavioral cues infants may use to identify agents. In light of the empirical results, we discuss our theoretical account and speculate on the learning mechanisms involved in early psychological understanding.

This chapter presents a series of studies describing the social perception of helping and hindering—an ability that likely is integral to the maintenance of cooperative interactions. Two aspects of this perception are considered both in infants and adults: the detection of the actions (e.g., the interaction of motion patterns and goal attribution systems that ultimately provides the percept of helping or hindering) and the interpretation of the action (e.g., as positive or negative, as justifiable or praiseworthy, or as indicative of the actors’ underlying dispositions). It will be suggested that the human brain appears to be ready, at an early age, to create a meaningful understanding of even sparse, stylized representations of helping and hindering.

We present a series of studies using a new methodology—the dwell-time paradigm—to investigate observers’ sensitivity to structure within unfolding action sequences. Viewers advance at their own pace through slides extracted from digitized videos; dwell times for each slide are recorded. Findings reveal that adults, preschoolers, and even infants display sensitivity to both segmental and hierarchical structure within events. Other work hints that dwell times may also reflect infants’ and adults’ sensitivity to violations of causal structure. In addition, social context (e.g., pedagogy) appears to influence both infants’ dwell-time patterns and their later successful enactment of a sequence. Although questions remain about the precise way to characterize dwell-time effects, the paradigm shows promise for providing altogether new information about action processing and how it changes with development.

The ability to understand others’ actions as intentional is a critical foundation for human social functioning. Equally critical is the ability to recruit this knowledge rapidly in the course of social interactions to generate online predictions about others’ actions. Recent experiments have recruited eye-tracking methods to investigate infants’ visual anticipation of others’ actions. In this chapter, we consider this newly emerging literature in the context of the larger existing body of work that has principally used visual habituation methods to investigate infants’ offline action understanding. This older body of work has shown that infants have relatively rich and generative knowledge about others’ intentional actions and that this knowledge is structured, at least in part, by infants’ own action experience. We consider whether infants’ online anticipation of others’ actions recruits this body of knowledge and conclude that although there is initial evidence to indicate that it does, many questions are yet to be answered.

Typically, the actions of agents in classical animacy displays are synthetically created, thus forming artificial displays of biological movement. Therefore, the link between the motion in animacy displays and that of actual biological motion is unclear. In this chapter we will look at work being done to clarify this relationship. We will first discuss a modern approach to the creation of animacy displays whereby full-video displays of human interactions are reduced into simple animacy displays; this results in animate shapes whose motions are directly derived from human actions. Second, we will review what is known about the ability of typically developed adults and people with autism spectrum disorders to perceive the intentionality within these displays. Finally, we will explore the effects that motion parameters such as speed and acceleration, measured directly from original human actions, have on the perception of intent; fMRI studies that connect neural networks to motion parameters, and the resultant perception of animacy and intention, will also be examined.

We can identify social agents in our environment not only on the basis of how they look, but also on the basis of how they move—and even simple geometric shapes can give rise to rich percepts of animacy and intentionality based on their motion patterns. But why should we think that such phenomena truly reflect visual processing, as opposed to higher-level judgment and categorization based on visual input? This chapter explores five lines of evidence: (1) The phenomenology of visual experience, (2) dramatic dependence on subtle visual display details, (3) implicit influences on visual performance, (4) activation of visual brain areas, and (5) interactions with other visual processes. Collectively, this evidence provides compelling support for the idea that visual processing itself traffics in animacy and intentionality.

This paper addresses the view that schizophrenia involves disturbance of the minimal self, and that this distinguishes it from other psychiatric conditions. I challenge the distinction between a minimal and an interpersonally constituted sense of self, through a consideration of the relationship between psychosis and interpersonally induced trauma. First of all, I suggest that even minimal self-experience must include a pre-reflective sense of what kind of intentional state one is in. Then I address the extent to which human experience and thought are interpersonally regulated. I propose that traumatic events, in childhood and/or in adulthood, can erode a primitive form of “trust” in other people that the integrity of intentionality depends upon, thus disrupting the phenomenological boundaries between intentional state types. I conclude that a distinction between minimal and interpersonal self is untenable, and that schizophrenia should be thought of in relational terms rather than simply as a disorder of the individual.

Chapter 5 does two things: it clarifies the features of world-involving but contentless Ur-intentionality and how this fundamental form of intentionality can be understood naturalistically. It explains how it is possible to make sense of REC’s proposal that basic minds are contentless while nonetheless holding on to the claim that such minds exhibit a kind of basic intentionality. It does so by situating REC’s notion of Ur-intentionality within the larger history of attempts to explicate the notion of intentionality simpliciter, showing that there is conceptual space for and reason to believe in a nonrepresentational form of intentionality. The second part of the chapter provides a fresh analysis of how and why this most basic kind of intentionality can be best accounted for in naturalistic terms by means of a RECtified teleosemantics—one stripped of problematic semantic ambitions and put to different theoretical use, namely, that of explicating the most basic, nonsemantic forms of world-involving cognition.

This chapter explores the intricacies of Levinas's reflections on transcendence in the various stages of his intellectual biography, particularly as they relate to the tropes of the infinite and illeity that are essential to his conception of alterity. Deviating from Husserl's reflections on the intentional structure of consciousness, Levinas argues that infinity and transcendence, the wholly other, are to be excluded from the domain of phenomenology and the criterion of truth as the showing of what comes to light. The determination of the transcendence of the subject from the standpoint of the practical intentionality of affective life set Levinas on a course of thinking from which he never diverged, culminating in his more advanced articulations of ethics as first philosophy and the emphasis he placed on the radical transcendence necessary to establish the ground for genuine alterity. The phenomenological fascination with the nonphenomenalizable can be pinpointed as the essential thought that informed Levinas's critique of ontological realism—the narcissistic reduction of the other to the same—throughout his life, the philosophical venture toward a transcendence that is not to be relocated absolutely in the domain of immanence. The rhetoric of his texts indicate, however, that he could not avoid characterizing transcendence in personal terms that efface the clear distinction between human and divine and thus jeopardize the concept of an irreducible alterity of the transcendent that is truly other.

The paper explains why Haugeland’s interpretation of Heidegger is indispensable for understanding Heidegger’s work; why his Heideggerian account of commitment is indispensible for understanding what it is to be a self; and why this account of selfhood is indispensible to philosophy generally. The first indispensability concerns Haugeland’s insight that Heidegger advances beyond traditional metaphysics by showing how not just “essence” (essentia) but also “existence” (existentia) is meaningful. The second indispensability lies in Haugeland’s grasp of the methodological connection between Division I and Division II of Being and Time, which shows that what it is to be “I myself” is a function neither of consciousness nor self-consciousness, but depends on my taking responsibility for the normative force of the norms that enable entities to show up as they in truth are. Finally, this insight is indispensible to philosophy generally. Drawing on Joseph Rouse’s charge that Haugeland’s concept of “objectivity” involves a residual scientism and voluntarism, I offer a defense that brings Haugeland’s his account of existential death together with Heiedegger’s claim, in Being and Time, that science tries to grasp the occurrent in its basic unintelligibility, and his claim, in “What is Metaphysics?,” that science aims to give entities “the first and last word.”

This paper explicates and connects two of Haugeland’s most controversial philosophical claims: his puzzling claim that the characteristic form of intentionality and human understanding is love, and his revisionist interpretation of Heidegger’s account of “existential death” in Being and Time. The former claim responds to Haugeland’s implicit classification and telling criticisms of the predominant alternative conceptions of intentionality. Haugeland argues that these alternatives actually fit different phenomena (“ersatz” or “lapsed” intentionality) that fall short of even the most ordinary human comportments. The latter claim treats “death” as concerned not with human mortality, but with the objective accountability of entire domains of human activity and understanding. Heidegger thereby has a deeper, more adequate account of intentionality and understanding directly complementing Haugeland’s re-conception of intentionality as a form of love. This reading also brings Being and Time into closer critical engagement with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This juxtaposition further illuminates Heidegger’s Kantian emphasis upon the finitude of human understanding, and brings out the political significance of Being and Time in constructively revealing ways despite Heidegger’s own later disastrous political involvement.

This chapter explores the implications of the book’s attempt to understand the role that futurity plays in the phenomenological method. These implications are both within the book (for example, why the discussion of Husserl, Levinas and Derrida but not of Heidegger; why the focus on methodological issues) and beyond the book (for example, how futurity can help us see the continuity between Husserl and the ‘theological turn’ in phenomenology). It then provides an overview of the argument of the entire book, leading to the conclusions that: a) an understanding of futurity is essential to any understanding of phenomenology; b) phenomenology has an essentially non-epistemological focus; and c) phenomenology is best understood as the promissory discipline.