Last updated by tomash on 2014-11-17. Originally submitted by tomash on 2014-11-14.
Dwight Holbrook
Do you wake up in the morning or do you only think you do so?
Clash of Civilizations: the Neuro- and Cognitive Sciences vs. Direct Realism
Hands on definitions of terms:
Neuroscience: the study of the brain and body on the cellular, neural, and genetic level.
Cognitive sciences: the study of the mind and how we think.
Direct realism:
(a) “In sense-perception we are directly aware of the existence and nature of the surrounding physical world.”) (J. Darcy, 1985: 147)
(b) “In the case of perceptual experience, what experiences fundamentally aim to do is put us in contact with objects around us.” (M. Tye, 2009: 75)
(c) “Perceptual experience is transparent, one ‘sees’ straight through it to the world.” (S. Coleman, p. 2)
Clash of civilizations: Borrowed from a book by that name, the clash in this talk refers to the semantic turf battle over how (and by whose decree) we distinguish “real” from “seeming”, “experience” from “data”, “present time” from “clock time”, “human” from “cognitive interface”, or how we can speak of “free will” apart from “predisposed” or “predetermined”, and so on.
For example, is it an oxymoron or is it now legitimate to talk about “neurons talking to each other”? Is it still clear that the human experience of talking is made metaphorical when neuroscience appropriates that word? Or has neuroscience reconfigured the literal meaning so as to apply in the context of neurons – in effect opting to change the semantics of “talking”? Similarly, is “experience” gravitating in the direction of neural patterns and measured activities, “present time” in the direction of clock time, etc.?
Aim of this talk: The clash we discuss will borrow from some of the quoted distinctions above to demonstrate, using four examples, how direct realism can be both defended in these instances and justified in throwing into question the ground on which the neuro- and cognitive sciences are founded.
Hubert van den Berg
CULTURAL EXCHANGE IN A TIME OF GLOBAL CONFLICT
How Dutch-Flemish poetry came to Poznań in the First World War
In studies on cultural exchange, war is often regarded as an impediment of cultural transfer. In many ways, the First World War indeed interrupted and blocked cultural mobility. As for literature, e.g. German-French literary exchange ended abruptly in August 1914. However, new ways of literary mobility emerged during the war.
As a result, poetry by the Guido Gezelle, a major Dutch-Flemish modernist writer, landed in the Poznań based Polish modernist journal Zdrój. In May 1918, the review published a translation of Gezelle's poem "Bezoek bij 't graf" by one of the protagonists of Młoda Polska, Zenon Przesmycki. He could use for his translation both German and French editions of Gezelle, which were part of German and French propaganda operations, but also related - as in the case of Przesmycki himself - in previous interest in contemporary Belgian literature.
As a small case study, my reconstruction of the different itineraries of Gezelle's offers a panorama of the way(s) of European literary exchange and the factors involved that brought Dutch literature to Poznań in a remarkable way, next to the subject of the poem, "Odwiedziny na grobie", "Visit to the grave", as it fitted, though written many decades before, in a tragic way perfectly to the Great War constellation, when the whole continent submerged in military clashes and massive carnage and not only in Flanders fields whole landscapes were turned into cemeteries.
