This book scrutinizes the practice of sailing and its relation to philosophy of mind. Sailing brings about a peculiar human-artifact interaction which can lead to unexplored research paths. The idea behind this collection is that this interaction is better scrutinized by sailor scientists/philosophers to open up new possible pathways in research. Fascinating theoretical breakthroughs have been provided by observing sailing practices with the most well-known being Hutchins' introduction in cognitive science of the concept of "distributed cognition." However, in times past, sailing has both fueled philosophical metaphors, from Theseus' ship to Plato's image of the intellect as the boatperson of the soul, and inspired philosophers' views (as happened to Herder during a stormy sea trip). The ecology of sailing is highly constrained: sailboats move at the surface between a compressible fluid and an uncompressible fluid. Wind originates in certain specific circumstances. Only certain sequences of actions are possible to take advantage of this ecology. The ontology of sailing is both of the boat and of the ocean/wind system. It highlights the fact that sailboats have been for centuries arguably the most complex technological artifacts in each culture that developed them, precisely because the environment they are engaging is so peculiar and demanding - almost the precise dual of Sapiens' adaptive environment. This volume will appeal to philosophers of mind, cognitive psychologists, and marine professionals.

This book scrutinizes the practice of sailing and its relation to philosophy of mind. Sailing brings about a peculiar human-artifact interaction which can lead to unexplored research paths. The idea behind this collection is that this interaction is better scrutinized by sailor scientists/philosophers to open up new possible pathways in research. Fascinating theoretical breakthroughs have been provided by observing sailing practices with the most well-known being Hutchins’ introduction in cognitive science of the concept of “distributed cognition.� However, in times past, sailing has both fueled philosophical metaphors, from Theseus’ ship to Plato’s image of the intellect as the boatperson of the soul, and inspired philosophers’ views (as happened to Herder during a stormy sea trip).  The ecology of sailing is highly constrained: sailboats move at the surface between a compressible fluid and an uncompressible fluid. Wind originates in certain specific circumstances. Only certain sequences of actions are possible to take advantage of this ecology. The ontology of sailing is both of the boat and of the ocean/wind system. It highlights the fact that sailboats have been for centuries arguably the most complex technological artifacts in each culture that developed them, precisely because the environment they are engaging is so peculiar and demanding - almost the precise dual of Sapiens’ adaptive environment. This volume will appeal to philosophers of mind, cognitive psychologists, and marine professionals.

"Perhaps not all the stories that follow are true. They could, however, be true, and the Reader is invited to ponder this." So begins Insurmountable Simplicities, Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi's colorful incarnation of the many philosophical conundrums that hide in the wrinkles of everyday life. Why do mirrors seem to invert left and right but not up and down? How do we know whether strawberries taste the same for everyone? Where is it written that we must observe the law, and if it is not written, why should we observe it? What if we could swap brains-or the rest of our bodies? Insurmountable Simplicities is filled with stories, dialogues, and epistolary exchanges that cover a range of themes-such as personal identity, causality and responsibility, fortune, the nature of things, the paradoxes of time and space, the interface between logic and language-in captivating and inventive ways. Clear, concise, and intellectually engaging, this internationally acclaimed book brilliantly demonstrates that the beauty of philosophy resides in its thorough engagement with the simplicities of the world, insurmountable as they might initially appear.

A remarkable exploration of how shadows have forever fascinated us: their extraordinary hold on our fears and imagination; their importance to astronomers, scientists, philosophers, and artists; their influence on myth and religious beliefs.
What's stranger than a shadow? Shadows are messengers from the world of darkness, images that we can't shake off, black spots that have troubled our sleep through the ages. And yet shadows have been the key to unlocking some of our toughest scientific problems: the reason for eclipses, the distances between planets, the shape and size of the earth, the structure of the solar system, the nature of time itself. In this unique study--combining history, science, and anthropology--Roberto Casati discusses the famous and the obscure who, armed with imagination and creativity, struggled with the concept of shadow and provided us with explanations of and uses for our constant companion. Among those who were part of this "shadow club" were Eratosthenes and Galileo, ancient Arab astrono-mers and modern mathematicians, classical Greek painters and Leonardo da Vinci. And now, the name Casati--who has given us the first book devoted to the subject--can be added.
Roberto Casati was born in Milan in 1961. A research director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, he lives in Paris and works at the Institut Nicod, a laboratory of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and of the Ecole Normales. He studies the cognition of strange things--images, colors, sounds, places, holes--and shadows. With Achille Varzi he is the author of Holes and Other Superficialities and Parts and Places.

"From the Hardcover edition.

Thinking about space is thinking about spatial things. The table is on the carpet; hence the carpet is under the table. The vase is in the box; hence the box is not in the vase. But what does it mean for an object to be somewhere? How are objects tied to the space they occupy? In this book Roberto Casati and Achille C. Varzi address some of the fundamental issues in the philosophy of spatial representation. Their starting point is an analysis of the interplay between mereology (the study of part/whole relations), topology (the study of spatial continuity and compactness), and the theory of spatial location proper. This leads to a unified framework for spatial representation understood quite broadly as a theory of the representation of spatial entities. The framework is then tested against some classical metaphysical questions such as: Are parts essential to their wholes? Is spatial co-location a sufficient criterion of identity? What (if anything) distinguishes material objects from events and other spatial entities? The concluding chapters deal with applications to topics as diverse as the logical analysis of movement and the semantics of maps.

This investigation on the borderlines of metaphysics, everyday geometry and the theory of perception seeks to answer two basic questions: Do holes really exist? If they do, what are they? Holes are among entities that down-to-earth philosophers would like to expel from their ontological inventory. Casati and Varzi argues in favour of holes' existence, examining their ontology of holes, their geometry, their part-whole relations, their identity, their causal role and the ways we perceive them.

Some concepts, such as colour concepts or value concepts, seem to bear traces of the mind's own make-up. For instance, an extreme position would be that colours and values are not in the world at all, they instead are mere projections that tell us more about the users of response-dependent concepts than about the world they inhabit. But even setting aside such extreme views, a number of important philosophical and psychological questions remain open. What exactly is response-dependence, and does any concept have this feature? What is the appropriate metaphysics for properties represented by response-dependent concepts, and for these concepts themselves? What determines the extension of such properties? How are we to account for knowledge expressed in terms of response-dependent concepts? What mechanisms correctly explain the origins of response-dependent concepts, and their role in representation?