Cogitations, the last of the posthumous publications, is a collection of occasional writings representing Bion's attempts to clarify and evaluate both his own ideas and those of others by casting them in written form and frequently addressing them to an imaginary audience. Covering a period between February 1958 and April 1979, Cogitations delves into a wide range of material - psychoanalysis and science, mathematics and logic, literature and semantics. Some form a background to Bion's theoretical development, showing the doubts and arguments leading to the ideas expressed in his books, others highlighting and detailing some of the more abstract points in them, and some exploring topics destined for books that were to remain unwritten.

This book offers an alternate approach to aesthetic anthropology through an inquiry into the work of 5 contemporary artists. The author shifts traditional ideas of aesthetic experience and the creative act away from the faculty of the imagination towards the faculty of cogitation, suggesting a new "anthropology of cogitation" that is underwritten by a general, artistic intelligence.The book draws from three interconnected resources: the vital "ecology of mind," theorized by anthropologist Gregory Bateson; the salutary play in intermediary "potential spaces," advocated by British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott; and the virtus cogitativa found in the oeuvre of Ibn Rushd (Latin Averroes), the 12th century rationalist thinker known for innovating Aristotelian psychology and science of the soul.By opening a new dialogue between anthropology, art history, and philosophy, Tarek Elhaik examines image-work, ethical demands, and aesthetic struggles of his interlocutors, the artists Adrian Piper, Anna Maria Maiolino, Mathias Goeritz, Mounir Fatmi, and Silvia Gruner.

When we go to a baseball stadium and cheer a person like Babe Ruth for hitting the ball harder, higher, further and more often than the other players, we are cheering him as our representative. We cheer people of exceptional accomplishment whose achievements are so highly visible and so obviously measurable because we, too, are faced with the complexity of the lives that we live and are challenged to perform feats of heroic proportions just to be able to say that we have lived our lives well when we come to the end. In the novel, Babe Ruth says, "There ain't nothin' like a game of baseball. There ain't nothin' like a beautiful summer day, with the clouds light and fluffy and the sun on the back of your shoulders and a nice liftin' breeze comin' down onto the field from out of the stands." The man who feels this way about the game he loves is a man who faces enormous challenges, digs deep down inside himself and finds whatever is needed in order to triumph in the game of life. This makes him a fitting representative for us all; we all hit spectacular home runs in out own quiet ways.

Annotation Descartes's cogito ergo sum is at once one of the simplest and most puzzling of philosophical arguments. Although most philosophers agree that the argument is valid, they do not agree about why it is valid. And the most generally accepted account, on which the inference becomes a standard logical argument once a missing premise is supplied, contradicts Descartes's own statements about the cogito.

This book develops a novel theory of intentionality. It argues that intentionality is an internal essential relation of constitution between an intentional state and an object, or between such a state and a possible state of affairs as subsisting. The author’s main claim is that intentionality is a fundamentally modal property, hence a non (scientifically) natural property in that it does not supervene, either locally or globally, on its nonmodal physical basis. This is the property, primarily for an intentional mental state, to be constituted by the entities it is about. In the case of intentionality of reference, such constituents are objects, in the sense of individuals; in the case of intentionality of content, such constituents are possible states of affairs as subsisting. Constitution is meant in a mereologically literal sense: those constituents are essential parts of the relevant states. As a result, the theory claims not only that intentionality is relational but also that it is an internal, essential relation holding between an intentional state and its object or proposition-like content. Intentionality as Constitution will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and cognitive science.