Who Were the Sea Peoples?

And that it could be open, and how to get it opened. Consider: "If [a] desire is consciously for an object… it implies, as we have seen, an intellectual apprehension at least of the difference between the object as desired and its realisation." -- T. H.  Green, Prolegomena to Ethics , p. 155 My cat likes to look out the apartment window through the screen, so she can watch and smell and hear the birds and squirrels in the garden beyond. But the glass window is often closed. When this is the case, she hops up onto the windowsill and scratches at the glass window. Now, this is never ever actually opens the window. No, what she is doing is calling our attention to the fact that she wants the window opened. Then, so long as it is not freezing or sweltering outside, one of us will go over and open it for her. It is clear to me that she has "an intellectual apprehension at least of the difference between the object as desired and its realisation," i.e., she is thin...

I am watching "Nature: Animal Odd Couples," which documents the cross-species friendships among animals. It is available on Netflix, and is much better than many such documentaries. For one thing, it has the great Temple Grandin in it. Grandin is pretty rough, for instance, on those who would say that animals don't think because they don't think with abstract symbols. She herself thinks perceptually more than with symbols (as often do I): someone who makes this claim is essentially telling her that she doesn't think, something she finds a bit offensive! In light of our previous post , I also found interesting the scientist in the documentary from Duke who seems to think that until we understand friendship from an evolutionary perspective, we haven't really understood it. (Interestingly, she says that it is only very recently that anyone was even allowed to talk about animal friendships in scientific papers!) I am not even bothering to rewind and catch he...

My cat was lying next to me in bed in Pennsylvania. The phone rang. The cats ears perked up, she jumped off of the bed, ran into the hallway, and stared at the front door. I realized she had made a generalization. In Brooklyn, where she spends almost all of her time, we have no land line. But we do have a "phone" of the same sort: it is part of the intercom system, and it rings whenever someone rings our bell from the building's foyer. The cat clearly had a thought like , "Ah! That kind of sound: whenever you hear that sort of sound, someone shows up at the front door. Better go see who it is." (That is exactly what she does in Brooklyn: when the intercom phone rings, she races to the top of the stairs, from where she can watch the door.) But how, exactly, does she have a thought similar to the one above without having words in which to formulate it? Good question! (Why, thank you, Gene, I thought so too.) My intuition is that she is thinking in sensory i...