Zsuzsanna Kondor

• PhD
• Senior Researcher at Research Centre for the Humanities

Accepting the idea that the mental representations of concepts, diagrams, relations, plans, etc., are thought-shapers, I suggest going a bit further. Any kind of representation, be it mental or public, i.e., accessible to others, bears thought-shaping potential, albeit not in the same manner. Just as the idea of embodied cognition takes into consid...

In the present paper, I will investigate how consciousness studies and theories of social cognition relate to each other, and suggest that despite the results of scientific research, both social cognition and consciousness can be better understood within a wider framework, i.e., not exclusively in terms of intra-cranial processes. I will attempt to...

In the present paper I will investigate how language and the concepts we use can delude us when scientific theories suggest that abstraction, as a necessary condition of concepts, is rooted in anatomical structures of the brain, and that language as it expresses meaning is based on embodied cognition, i.e., language is deeply integrated into our ph...

Various theories suggest conscious phenomena are based exclusively on brain activity, while others regard them as a result of the interaction between embodied agents and their environment. In this paper, I will consider whether this divergence entails the acceptance of the fact that different theories can be applied in different scales (as in the c...

This book presents a wide range of thinking about how the discipline of philosophy has engaged and might in the future engage with the profound questions raised by rapidly shifting methods of communication. Although social media and telecommunications have dramatically altered the daily lives of people, and no technology has enjoyed the same rapid...

Although scientific practice sometimes encounters philosophical difficulties , it cannot shoulder the burden of resolving them. This can lead to controversies. An unavoidable difficulty is rooted in the linguistic attitude, i.e., in the fact that to a considerable extent we express our thoughts in words. I will attempt to illuminate some important...

In this paper I will investigate whether the extended mind hypothesis and the enactive approach share a common theoretical ground. Although the idea of embodied cognition appears to be a common foundation, I suggest this is only apparently the case. I propose that the notion of embodiment, as the enactive approach construes it, provides an adequate...

Images (as public representations) are increasingly ubiquitous in our lives as compared with the lives of our ancestors. With an increasing technical ease, images can provide a huge amount of information – sometimes obvious, sometimes requiring special expertise. The present volume is devoted to images as they mobilize cognition and theorizing. Tho...

According to a widely accepted conception, " an image cannot be seen as such without the paradoxical trick of consciousness, an ability to see something as 'there' and 'not there' at the same time " 1 ; or as Belting paraphrases Walter Benjamin's idea, " what an image is: the presence of an absence " 2 . In my talk, I will examine the roots of this...

Heidegger is often considered as a philosopher who stands against pictures, a belief that is based on his 1938 paper, The Age of the World Picture. First, as an introduction, I will attempt to show that his criticism under the heading of The Age of the World Picture is targeted not at pictures, but rather at the traditional dualistic approach which...

In my paper, I will challenge the customary distinction of virtual and real. I will suggest that, although I would be able to distinguish whether I am driving a car or using a car-driving simulator, still, on the basis of perception and motor responses, there is no significant difference between virtual and real environments. Moreover, virtual...

We can approach different depictive systems (i.e., pictorial and linguistic) from the perspective of cognitive capabilities. The difficulty that arises from the logically encoded incapability of expressing the relation between the depictive system and the depicted world within the given depictive framework can be eliminated only by stepping beyond...

In this paper, I suggest that the perennial endeavour to understand how language and thought work leads to a major recurrent fallacy: the introduction of new entities/conceptual variables with misleading and elusive functions, apparently helpful, but in the event difficult, or indeed impossible, to grasp. It is obvious that the oft-quoted mental di...

Changes in everyday life are becoming more and more pervasive: mobile technology is creating new habits in nearly all aspects of life. Accessing information (be it textual or multimodal), colleagues, family members, or friends, can be done with a never-before-experienced ease. Accordingly, there is no need for fixed-term working hours (separated fr...

In the present talk I would like to demonstrate that although cognitive science sprang from analytic philosophy, the latter's main presuppositions can hardly, if at all, harmonize with recent findings in cognitive research. The central endeavour to reach a better " understanding of understanding and thought in general " (using Brandom's phrase) 1 i...

In this paper, I argue for the integrative power of mobile devices both from a cognitive and social point of view. (The ease of building new elements into the framework of earlier acquired knowledge is crucially important when considering any kind of learning activity.) As part of my reasoning, I rely considerably on the lessons of cognitive evolut...

Critical rationality has far-reaching roots in Western philosophy. The author of this paper intends to reveal the origins of this kind of rationality, and to shed light on the reasons of its current tarnsformation. Doing so, she relies on the notion of literacy by Istvan Hajnal and that of the Toronto Circle, some special manifestations of this kin...

Being mobile has become crucial for the organization of our everyday work and life. New communications technologies provide the opportunity to organize activities more and more flexibly and effectively. However, this increasing ease of organizational activities has its special price: the traditional division between the different fields of activiti...

"Technology-enhanced Learning" gains special importance if we look closely at the concept of technology on the one hand, and learning activity placed into the framework of communications technology on the other. The importance of communications technology has been emphasized by many Hungarian scholars in the first third of the 20th century and due...

A tudományfilozófiában és a tudománytörténet-írásban azok a törekvések tűnnek ígéreteseknek, amelyek egyrészt szintetizálják a tudomány történeti és filozófiai mozzanatait, másrészt túllépnek a szűkebb tudományfilozófián, amennyiben az interdiszciplinaritás felé mozdulnak el, és/vagy visszahelyezik a tudomány problémáját a filozófia alapvetőbb kont...