This chapter contains sections titled: From Tennis for Two to Worlds of Warcraft Imaginary Worlds and Works of Fiction Fictional or Virtual? Interactive Fiction.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Videogames and Interactive FictionGrant TavinorIIn the third-person crime simulator Grand Theft Auto 3, the fictional performing of all sorts of criminal nuisance is a possibility. (Squeamish readers, or those that are adamant videogames are playing a decisive role in the moral degeneration of modern society might want to turn away now!) Here is one possibility for players of the game: while driving around in the rundown red-light district (...) of Portland Island, try stopping beside one of the women dressed in leather dresses and knee-high stockings who say things like "Have you ever been down south?" The fictional woman will bend down to the car window and eventually hop in. Now drive to a secluded area, stop the car, and wait. What happens? The car begins to rock up and down, slowly at first, and then more quickly, squeaking all the while. As it does, your health meter increases and the cash meter decreases. Eventually, after the car has stopped rocking, the prostitute exits and walks away. This is all obviously of questionable taste. But the really horrible part is that it is possible to mug the prostitute and take back your money!Though I am reluctant to tell you this, the first time I discovered the trick, I felt a sort of sadistic joy at my reprehensible behavior. Friends in the room at the time thought the whole incident hilarious; except for one who thought it extremely revolting. Perhaps now though, I feel guilty for what I did to the prostitute. (Hence my reluctance to let you know of my sinister fictional activities!) Of course, this episode raises a host of ethical questions; I will not attempt to answer them here. What I am interested in is the possibility of fictional interaction itself. The important point is that this fictive episode seems to show that it is possible in the case of videogames to feel guilty or ashamed for what one [End Page 24] does in a fictional world. But how is this possible? What does interacting with a videogame amount to that it allows for this intimate (and dubious) emotional connection?There is a wide and impressive literature in the analytic philosophy of the arts concerning the nature of fiction and the practice that surrounds it; this literature gives us an ideal theoretical basis from which to explore the topic of videogames. But also, videogames will allow us to return our attention to the theory, perhaps perceiving areas in which it can be improved, so as to become more generally applicable. I begin this paper by setting out some initial descriptive examples of the ways in which videogames are interactive fictions. After discussing an ambiguity in the notion of what it is to interact with a fiction, I deal with two prominent aspects of that interaction; that focused on fictive props, and the apparent interaction players have with fictional worlds. Next, I argue that the interactive nature of videogames alters the character of our interest in them. Rather than a focus on interpretive and sympathetic engagement with narratives, videogames involve their appreciators in an active engagement with the problem spaces or kinetic narratives of gameplay. Finally, I argue that because action and emotion are close cognitive bedfellows, and because emotion plays an important role in the psychology of fictive practice, that the emotions experienced by videogame players will be distinctive to that fictive form.IIVideogames provide their players with a variety of opportunities for interactive engagement. The last ten years have seen significant development in the extent of the fictive interactivity of videogames, especially with the advent of the "next generation" consoles such as Playstation 2 and X-Box, and the burgeoning genre of PC gaming. With the intention of providing some descriptive substance for the following theoretical discussions, in this section I present some examples of the ways in which modern videogames are interactive fictions, and how they differ to more traditional fictive forms in this respect.Many videogames involve exploring an environment. In Grand Theft Auto 3, the player, in the guise of a criminal protagonist, is able to explore the streets of Liberty City. Completing the objectives of the... (shrink)

As technology improves, artificial systems are increasingly able to behave in human-like ways: holding a conversation; providing information, advice, and support; or taking on the role of therapist, teacher, or counsellor. This enhanced behavioural complexity, we argue, encourages deeper forms of affective engagement on the part of the human user, with the artificial agent helping to stabilise, subdue, prolong, or intensify a person’s emotional condition. Here, we defend a fictionalist account of human/AI interaction, according to which these encounters involve (...) an elaborate practise of imaginative pretence: a make-believe in which the artificial agent is attributed a life of its own. We attend, specifically, to the temporal characteristics of these fictions, and to what we imagine artificial agents are doing when we are not looking at them. (shrink)

What do players of videogames mean when they say they want to shoot zombies? Surely they know that the zombies are not real, and that they cannot really shoot them, but only control a fictional character who does so. Some philosophers of fiction argue that we need the concept of imaginative desires to explain situations in which people feel desires towards fictional characters or desires that motivate pretend actions. Others claim that we can explain these situations without complicating human (...) psychology with a novel mental state. Within their debates, however, these scholars exclusively focus on non-interactive fictions and children’s games of make-believe. In this paper, I argue that our experience of immersive, interactive fictions like videogames gives us cause to reappraise the concept of imaginative desires. Moreover, I describe how i-desires are a useful conceptual tool within videogame development and can shed new light on apparently immoral in-game actions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.2 (2001) 151-176 [Access article in PDF] Beyond the Comedy and Tragedy of Authority: The Invisible Father in Plato's Republic Claudia Baracchi They say that, when asked who the noble are, Simonides answered: those with ancestral wealth. --Aristotle, fr. 92 Rose When the victor of the mule-race offered him only a small recompense, Simonides would not compose a poem, for he could not endure poetizing in (...) honor of half-asses; but on being offered an adequate amount he wrote, "Greetings, daughters of storm-footed horses!" Yet, they were daughters of the asses also. --Aristotle, Rhet. 1405b Socrates was driving them to agree that the same man could know how to compose both comedy and tragedy and that a skillful tragic poet could also be a comic poet. They were thus driven, though hardly following and getting drowsy; Aristophanes fell asleep first and, as day was breaking, Agathon also. --Plato, Symp. 223d Introductory remarks What follows is a reading of Plato's Republic in the light of Aristophanes' Clouds. More precisely, what is here offered is the bare outline of such a reading--a set of preliminary notes that, by illuminating the inceptive stages of the Republic (especially book 1), constitutes a propaedeutic to the interpretation of the Platonic dialogue as a whole. Questions that one would typically be expected to raise in this context, questions regarding the relation of philosophy to poetry, the nexus between the Aristophanean and the Platonic Socrates, or Aristophanes' comedy in connection with the fate of the historical Socrates, will here remain unaddressed or will be touched upon only marginally (and obliquely). Far from accidental, this qualified [End Page 151] silence reflects a certain reluctance simply to take up these issues in their time-honored formulations and to speak under the force of their dictation. In this way, perhaps (and only perhaps), motifs of the Platonic discourse that would otherwise remain almost imperceptible if not altogether inaccessible--despite their pervasiveness--may come to show themselves.Leo Strauss wrote that Plato's Socrates may be seen, at least in part, as "a reaction or response to the Aristophanean Socrates" (1966, 316 n 20). The present study articulates the suggestion that the dialogue on the Republic may be understood as a response to Aristophanes' Clouds. Indeed, we shall see how the dialogue makes its own the problems delineated in the comedy, how it rewrites them, and how it unfolds in an attempt to address them. In spite of its remoteness from the tone and mode of the comedy, the Platonic text offers a meticulously punctual, even contrapuntal transcription of the main thematic features of the Clouds--as if an infinitely compelling provocation were to be found there, calling for thinking. The philosophical venture seems to be called forth and stem from such ground--as if comedy were the matter (indeed, the subject matter) of philosophy.Emerging from this interpretive approach to the Republic is the centrality of the figure of paternity, namely, of authority and instituted power. The Clouds depicts fatherhood in its dejection and loss of credibility. What this caricatured remnant of paternity signals is the simultaneous collapse of the orders of the divine, of ancestral authority, and of legality. This is the plexus of problems taken up in the Platonic dialogue.But the question of decay and the dying of the city mark the opening of the dialogue in a rather inconspicuous, even unapparent way. In the Republic, all terms are reversed. Indeed, the rendition of paternity one finds in the Republic is virtually opposite to the risible father of the comedy. Here, a dignified old man commanding respect seems to safeguard the integrity of the family, and hence the stability of the polis, both in its intrapolitical-juridical structures (regulating communal interaction) and in its relation to the gods, to its beyond. Yet, in spite of this inversion, it will become apparent that paternal authority has become an empty simulacrum. Simultaneously, the relation to the gods has become mere commerce, ancestral authority is invoked as a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Space, Place and Capitalism: The Literary Geographies of “The Unknown Industrial Prisoner” by Brett HeinoDavid McLaughlinSpace, Place and Capitalism: The Literary Geographies of “The Unknown Industrial Prisoner” BY BRETT HEINO Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021I would not be the first to describe Brett Heino’s new book as timely. Its publication in 2021 coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of David Ireland’s The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (1971). (...) This experimental novel, centered on a “kaleidoscopic vision” of its characters and their lives, tells the story of a group of workers at the Puroil refinery in a fictionalized part of Sydney. In Heino’s own words, this project emerged from a desire to write about industrialization and representation in Australian fiction. Working primarily as a legal scholar and historian, this work represents his first foray into literary geography.At the heart of Heino’s argument is a question: What does literature know about space? In his pursuit of a spatially-directed reading of The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, Heino eschews work in literary geography that cultural geographers might recognize— particularly the writings of Sheila Hones, the doyenne of an emerging interdiscipline of literary geography, whose practitioners work at the interstices between literary studies and geography. Heino criticizes this interdisciplinary literary geography as being too focused on establishing the “sovereignty” or “imperialism” of fictional space at the expense of recognizing the [End Page 132] role of literature in the world. Arguably, such a stance is a misreading of the thinking within literary geography that “reading literature is essentially an experimental process in which the categorical distinction between the frames of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ become blurred,”1 and where the “ontological distinction between literary and non- literary spaces” is undermined.2 Neither of these statements supposes that reading literature is a practice by which the world falls away and nothing remains but the book. Instead, following Doreen Massey’s idea that space is a complicated process of events and happenings, literary geographers in this mold argue that fiction is a part of life as it happens, and reading is a constitutive practice in the co- production of space.In its place, Heino emphasizes a form of literary geographical thinking that understands literature’s role as being separate from, but intimately connected to, the actual world. His theoretical framework is multi-layered, borrowing from Marxist literary scholars, including Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson, and Marxist geographers, including Henri Lefebvre. In essence, however, it can be expressed neatly in the following quotation from geocritic Bertrand Westphal:Fiction does not reproduce the real, but actualises new virtualities that had remained unformulated, and then goes on to interact with the real according to the hypertextual logic of interfaces... fiction detects possibilities buried in the folds of the real, knowing that these folds have not been temporised.3I think that Heino’s rejection of what he characterizes as poststructural literary geography, of the kind represented in his analysis of Sheila Hones’s work, misses some opportunities. First, there are similarities between his conception of literary geography and those he leaves aside— not least, their shared acceptance of the productive tension that sits between literature as text and world as practical, non- representational, and exceeding narrative. Secondly, the shared aim of both approaches is to understand how “representation ‘takes place’ and precisely how texts are part of what happens.”4 This is particularly powerful in the light of Heino’s aim to understand the development and contents of literary texts in materialist terms. Despite these areas [End Page 133] of convergence, Heino’s argument that literary geography’s potential to analyze class and political structures remains untapped is well founded. This is where Heino’s contribution is at its strongest.Heino’s work is at its most convincing when he discusses the realities of “abstract space” that both permeate the spaces of The Unknown Industrial Prisoner and structure the very fabric of latter- twentieth century Australia. Running through both Heino’s critique and Ireland’s novel is an understanding “that the inherent drive of capital is towards the creation of a fragmented, homogenised and hierarchised space within which it can produce and... (shrink)

Philosophy as Fiction seeks to account for the peculiar power of philosophical literature by taking as its case study the paradigmatic generic hybrid of the twentieth century, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. At once philosophical--in that it presents claims, and even deploys arguments concerning such traditionally philosophical issues as knowledge, self-deception, selfhood, love, friendship, and art--and literary, in that its situations are imaginary and its stylization inescapably prominent, Proust's novel presents us with a conundrum. How should it (...) be read? Can the two discursive structures co-exist, or must philosophy inevitably undermine literature (by sapping the narrative of its vitality) and literature undermine philosophy (by placing its claims in the mouth of an often unreliable narrator)? In the case of Proust at least, the result is greater than the sum of its parts. Not only can a coherent, distinctive philosophical system be extracted from the Recherche, once the narrator's periodic waywardness is taken into account; not only does a powerfully original style pervade its every nook, overtly reinforcing some theories and covertly exemplifying others; but aspects of the philosophy also serve literary ends, contributing more to character than to conceptual framework. What is more, aspects of the aesthetics serve philosophical ends, enabling a reader to engage in an active manner with an alternative art of living. Unlike the "essay" Proust might have written, his novel grants us the opportunity to use it as a practice ground for cooperation among our faculties, for the careful sifting of memories, for the complex procedures involved in self-fashioning, and for the related art of self-deception. It is only because the narrator's insights do not always add up--a weakness, so long as one treats the novel as a straightforward treatise--that it can produce its training effect, a feature that turns out to be its ultimate strength. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nishida and Western PhilosophyAmos YongNishida and Western Philosophy. By Robert Wilkinson. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009. vii + 175 pp.Robert Wilkinson is a comparative philosopher who teaches at Open University in Edinburgh and has worked for years in the areas of comparative philosophy of mind and comparative aesthetics. This book should be read as part of a larger discussion of the philosophy of Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), which began (...) with Keiji Nishitani (Nishida Kitarō, trans. S. Yamamoto and J. W. Heisig, University of California Press, 1991) and continues with Robert E. Carter (The Nothingness Beyond God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nishida Kitaro, Paragon House, 1997) and Robert J.Wargo (The Logic of Nothingness: A Study of Nishida Kitarō, University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), among others. Going beyond his predecessors, however—even though it is unfortunate that Wilkinson does not interact much with them explicitly—Nishida and Western Philosophy prosecutes a clear even if perhaps controversial thesis: that in the end, Nishida’s philosophy of self-contradictory identity was, as a natural outgrowth of his Buddhist and Zen experience of satori (awakening), fundamentally incommensurable with the philosophy of identity that has characterized the major trajectory of the Western philosophical tradition.There are four chapters to the book (besides the introduction and then the summary and conclusions). The first focuses on Nishida’s starting point, the Zen Buddhist experience of enlightenment regarding the ultimate emptiness (mu), which albeit a difficult term to translate can be understood at least in part as referring to the nonduality, or even the interrelatedness, of all reality. Nishida’s work can be seen as a lifelong quest to formalize this experiential insight systematically in dialogue with the Western philosophical tradition. In a sense, this can be understood as a spirituality in search of a metaphysic, and given the emergence of Japan on the world stage at the beginning of the twentieth century, it is not surprising that up-and-coming Japanese philosophers like Nishida sought to legitimate their own insights in the Western idiom. But precisely for the same reason, however, Nishida rarely appealed to Asian sources, even within the Buddhist tradition, especially in his earlier work.Chapter 2 explicates Nishida’s early philosophy of pure experience, particularly as summarized in his Inquiry into the Good (1911; English translation: Yale University Press, 1990). The major dialogue partner at this point was William James and his notion of radical empiricism, which provided Nishida with Western conceptual resources to think through the primordial base from out of which conscious experience emerged. Thus did pure experience point to the nondual dimension of consciousness before the split between subject and object. Nishida never repudiated his Jamesian connection, although his ongoing work pushed him further and deeper into the metaphysical and ontological dimensions of consciousness that eventually left behind James’s more psychologically driven formulations.Next Wilkinson turns to Nishida’s second major book, Intuition and Reflection in [End Page 231] Self-Consciousness (1917; English translation: State University of New York Press, 1987), and focuses primarily on the Japanese philosopher’s interactions with the Neo-Kantian school of philosophy, Fichte, and Bergson. Each of these provided specific resources for this stage of Nishida’s philosophical project. The Neo-Kantians helped him to think about how the noumena-phenomena and fact-value distinctions contrasted with his own philosophical intuitions regarding their primordial unity in historicity. Fichte enabled the forging of a philosophy of action-consciousness, which promised to go beyond the subject-object distinction, even if in the end (for Nishida), the Fichtean ego remained “trapped” within the logic of identity rather than becoming “delivered” by or within the Zen logic of no-thingness. Bergson, meanwhile, was attractive precisely because of his dynamic (rather than static) philosophy of elan vital or conscious becoming even if Nishida was already discerning at this time that the Bergsonian elan both presumed an ontological togetherness that succumbed to the Western logic of identity on the one hand, and was not sufficiently attentive to the contrary of becoming—death, or the lapsing back into no-thingness—which was a prominent feature of historical reality on the other hand. Yet these Western interlocutors... (shrink)

More generally, within videogame studies, glitches are often described as an interesting part of the player experience, for example as possibilities to gain unfair advantages in games (Bainbridge & Bainbridge 2007; Newman 2008; Meades 2015), expressive tools to create humorous effects (Jaroslav Švelch 2014), jarring confrontations with forms of non-human agency (Janik 2017; Gualeni 2019), or as ways to create glitch-art (Menkman 2011). But when it comes to the specifically fictional experience of videogames, there seems to be a consensus (...) that glitches have no role to play except for breaking the players’ feeling of immersion and the reality effect of the game’s fictional environment (cf. Holmes 2010: 261; Kubiński 2014: 135; Janik 2017: 75). -/- Here, we focus on the underexplored fictional relevance of videogame glitches. For this purpose, we will make use philosophical theories on fiction, as well as standard suggestions about how best to deal with unintended errors within fiction. Focusing on glitches like that of Red Dead Redemption's so-called manimals, we argue that glitches, more than any kinds of mistakes in traditional, non-interactive fictions, can actually have a significant influence on the fictional worlds of the work in which they appear. In particular, we will show that some glitches generate new fictional content without this content being intended by a videogame’s creators, and will offer practical ways for dealing with the inconsistencies that inevitably accompany such glitch-generated fictions. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to see how mental and language representations are unique from a video-game perspective, using two main criteria. First, I will posit that the level of being both an interactive work of fiction and a self-involving interactive fiction belongs to a fuzzy interval and that some works – and, therefore, some video games – are more immersive than others. Second, I will observe how propositions tie the player’s representations of the real (...) world and the game world. Starting from psychological theories of pretense in children’s make-believe games, I will then expand Nichols and Stich’s cognitive theory of pretense to include an extra layer related to the game world, i.e., player-specific representations that govern player-specific propositions. The representations dealing with the work world are the socially shared ones, while the possible-world representations, dealing with most of the game world, are player-specific and tied to unique language use. (shrink)

Color conveys critical information about the flavor of food and drink by providing clues as to edibility, flavor identity, and flavor intensity. Despite the fact that more than 100 published papers have investigated the influence of color on flavor perception in humans, surprisingly little research has considered how cognitive and contextual constraints may mediate color–flavor interactions. In this review, we argue that the discrepancies demonstrated in previously-published color–flavor studies may, at least in part, reflect differences in the sensory (...) expectations that different people generate as a result of their prior associative experiences. We propose that color–flavor interactions in flavor perception cannot be understood solely in terms of the principles of multisensory integration but that the role of higher-level cognitive factors, such as expectations, must also be considered. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Male Reproductive Strategies in Sherwood Anderson's "The Untold Lie"Judith P. SaundersSingled out repeatedly as one of the finest stories in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, "The Untold Lie" (1919) has attracted surprisingly little sustained critical comment.1 Like all the stories in the Winesburg cycle, this one delineates a revelatory moment of inner turmoil. There is little outward action; conflict and suspense are generated chiefly in the interior of the protagonist's (...) psyche, focusing on his ambivalence as husband and father. Readers become privy to "the buried life" of unacknowledged impulses and the "hidden truth" of repressed resentments,2 as Anderson's central characters struggle with the antithetical "choices available to the individual as biology works its will."3 A portrait of the male mind deliberating the relative advantages of alternative reproductive strategies, the story notably repays biosocial investigation. The theoretical framework, as well as the intellectual rationale, for undertaking biosocial investigation of literary texts has been explained ably by critics and aestheticians such as Joseph Carroll, Brett Cooke, Ellen Dissanayake, Robert Story, and others. Readers unfamiliar with the historical and theoretical foundations of Darwinian literary criticism will find useful commentary in works by these and other thinkers in this rapidly growing field.4Anderson concentrates on the interactions between two men at different stages in life, one middle-aged, perhaps fifty, and one youthful, "only twenty-two."5 The older man, Ray Pearson, has made his most important reproductive decisions well before the story begins: he has been married for many years and fathered half a dozen children (p. 203). He works as a farm hand, eking out a meagre living for his family by means of hard physical labor. A few details are sufficient to suggest [End Page 311] his poverty: his house is "tumble-down," his children "thin-legged," his coat torn and shiny with age (pp. 203, 206). Ray's wife, "sharp" in both features and voice, appears to be a perpetually anxious scold, concerned with fundamental problems of family subsistence. Ray's direct fitness (as measured by reproductive success) promises to be respectable, but the task of rearing his numerous offspring to adulthood has required and will continue to require his utmost effort and full-time commitment. He is just barely able to support his family (food is being purchased on a day-by-day basis), and there is little margin of safety in his situation.As foil to Ray, Anderson presents Hal Winters, a man not only younger but different in physique, in temperament, and in social class. Hal is big, tall, and broad shouldered; by way of contrast, Ray's shoulders are described as "rounded by too much and too hard labor," and he is "almost a foot shorter" than the robust Hal (p. 203ff). Inclined to prototypical masculine display, Hal is observed "roistering" about the town at night, dressing in "cheap flashy clothes." He challenges his own father in a fist fight, and as a result he is arrested and jailed. His brash and often reckless behavior is very unlike that of the "quiet, nervous," and "altogether serious" Ray. In the community Hal has the reputation of "a bad one." A fighter, a drinker, and a womanizer, he is "always up to some devilment." Unsurprisingly, Hal's family background is said not to be particularly respectable. The fathers of both Hal and Ray are small-business owners: the Winters operate a sawmill, the Pearsons a bakery. (The narrator never explains why Ray did not join or succeed his father in the bakery business, which presumably would have offered him a better income and a physically less onerous profession.) The stated difference in social standing appears to derive from the two families' differing records of conduct.Hal's aggressive propensities seem to be at least in part hereditary. He is "the worst" of three notoriously bad brothers, all sired by "a confirmed old reprobate" (pp. 202–3). The father, old Windpeter Winters, is remembered best for the gratuitous violence of his death. Drunk, he drove his team of horses along the railroad tracks straight into the path of an oncoming train, having slashed with his whip at a neighbor who... (shrink)

Saul Smilansky's Illusionism suggests that some false beliefs are important enough to warrant the indefinite perpetuation of illusions in order to protect the larger moral community from breaking down. In this article I suggest that this position actualises an old educational paradox where education is expected to protect the common moral community (even if this means maintaining some illusions), and at the same time promote the pursuit of truth. Taking Smilansky's position of Illusionism as a starting point, I argue that (...) while Illusionism highlights and addresses an important problem—that sometimes false beliefs can function to maintain social stability where the truth threatens to unsettle it—relying on indefinite illusions is problematic from an educational point of view. It is difficult to justify that education, being at least in part motivated by truth-seeking, should (or even could) be grounded in illusion. Taking seriously the fact that a dimension of education concerns maintaining social stability, I suggest that Spinoza's notion of fiction can complement Smilansky's view in that it can be conceived in terms of an instrument for maintaining social stability and promoting truth-seeking without assuming that one end is pursued at the expense of the other. (shrink)

Advocates of interactionism in the ethical criticism of art argue that ethical value impacts aesthetic value. The debate is concerned with “the intrinsic question”: the question of whether ethical flaws/merits in artworks’ manifested attitudes affect their aesthetic value (Gaut 2007: 9). This paper argues that the assumption that artworks have intrinsic ethical value is problematic at least in regards to a significant subset of works: fictional artworks. I argue that, insofar as their ethical value emerges only from attitudes attributable (...) to actual agents, fictional artworks only have extrinsic ethical value. I show that what is at stake for interactionism is whether ethical judgements concerning artists’ attitudes in a context, rather than manifested attitudes, are ever aesthetically relevant. I conclude that, without buying into extreme actual intentionalism, a still controversial theory of interpretation that ties artworks’ meaning to actual artists, interactionism fails to show that ethical flaws/merits are aesthetic flaws/merits. (shrink)

George Eliot strikingly describes one of her characters as making a mistake because he has gotten his thoughts “entangled in metaphors,” saying that we all do the same. I argue that Eliot is here giving us more than an illuminating description, but drawing our attention to a distinctive kind of mistake—a form of irrationality, in fact—of which metaphor can be an ineliminable part of the correct explanation. Her fictional case helps illuminate both a neglected function of the imagination, and (...) a pervasive way in which metaphor can affect it. The function is the creation and maintenance of what I call imaginative expectations, which are relatively stable imaginative representations of future events or experiences, analogous to latent memories. These imaginative expectations have a distinctive causal profile and distinct ways of interacting with other mental activities. I argue that their formation is subject to at least two norms—a “source” norm and an “experience” norm—and show how metaphorical framing can give rise to violations of either. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Garrison on Beauty in Artworks as a Response to Regulatory PowerA Focus on Butler and KantKelly Coble (bio)As Garrison concedes, critical theory and Confucian philosophy will strike many of his readers as unlikely interlocutors. One would be hard-pressed to find two intellectual traditions more historically and culturally remote, and at least at first glance, more antithetical in their stances on authority and cultural power. In Reconsidering the Life (...) of Power Garrison prosecutes a brilliant case against these appearances, bringing these traditions into sustained and productive conversation. He is able to do so successfully by steadfastly refraining from a style of intercultural philosophy that would force these traditions into abrupt conversation—an errand that would involve stripping each tradition of the cultural and historical circumstances that give it life (p. 31). Instead, Garrison delineates a vast, rhizomatic network in which these traditions can be observed interacting and intersecting, displaying "intriguing similarities as well as informative divergences" (p. 50). Tracing such a network is a daunting task, demanding one bring to bear (i) an elegant, accessible rhetorical style; (ii) redoubtable scholarly erudition: the book features close readings of texts by European philosophers from Kant to Foucault and Butler, Confucius and major figures in the classical Confucian tradition, and leading contemporary scholars of (and in) Confucian philosophy; and not least (iii) an original argument breathing fresh life into the many texts, old and new, under examination.In what follows I offer a summary of a large part of that argument and offer critical comment on a small part of it. As Garrison's title indicates, the book can profitably be read as a sympathetic development of, and critical response to, Butler's account of the psychodynamics of power as developed, [End Page 821] above all, in their 1997 The Psychic Life of Power. Of course, what sets Garrison's endeavor apart from the standard commentary is the use he makes of Confucian insights. One impetus for his doing so is recognition of fertile common ground. The poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, queer-theoretical tradition of which Butler is a major contributor shares with the Confucian tradition a "particular insight into how the relational self arises discursively through naming, ritual, and performance" (p. 49).On what grounds, then, does Butler's account of power merit a critical response, according to Garrison, and how do Confucian insights help shape that response? The point de départ of Butler's 1997 book is Foucault's affiliated notions of assujettissement ("subjection" or "subjugation") and subjectivation (in English as in French). "Subjectivation" is Foucault's coinage for the complex process responsible at once for the formation and maintenance of subjects and their subjection and subordination, a para-doxical achievement that is a hallmark of panoptic regulatory power. As Butler observes, subjection signifies "the way regulatory power maintains subjects in subordination by producing and exploiting the demand for continuity, visibility, and place."1 (We note that Butler's influential account of the performativity of gender also draws heavily on this concept of subjectivation.) In their 1997 book Butler gives systematic attention to the following dynamic: subjects depend on the subordinating effects of regulatory power for their existence, giving them an existential stake in, and concomitant desire for, their own subordination. Building on the Foucauldian thesis that the "psychic operation of the norm offers a more insidious route for regulatory power than explicit coercion," Butler proceeds through Hegel's "unhappy consciousness" and Nietzsche's "bad conscience" to an original reading of Freud's melancholia.2 As in Hegel and Nietzsche, so also in Freud, Butler observes, the ego is said to "turn back upon itself," taking itself "not only as an object of love, but of aggression and hate as well."3 And as in Hegel and Nietzsche, so also in Freud, this idea of a turn from the object to the ego that produces the ego, Butler observes, both defies intelligibility and describes a scene of failure. In Butler's words, "The turn from the object to the ego can never quite be accomplished," and as a result the subject "is haunted by an inassimilable remainder, a melancholia that marks the limits of subjectivation."4So far, Garrison... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 122.3 (2001) 451-454 [Access article in PDF] Susan P. Mattern. Rome and the Enemy: Imperial Strategy in the Principate. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999. xxi + 259 pp. Cloth, $35.00. This well-written book is nothing if not bold. Its time frame is, broadly speaking, the first two and a half centuries A.D. Its basis is the view that has met increasingly (...) wide acceptance over the past quarter-century, that the Romans' conduct of foreign relations was altogether different from what we assume of modern states. The Roman mindset, motivation, intelligence, and strategy are all alien to us and thus require evaluation on their own terms. Consequently, in five chapters Mattern first examines the character and education of Rome's small decision-making elite. She next moves to their "image of the world," variously gained through campaigning, geographical knowledge, intelligence, and ethnology. A chapter on strategy follows, treating the size and deployment of the Roman army and the different means by which the empire was defined and defended. Income and expenditure are the focus of the fourth chapter, with particular reference to the expense of maintaining the army, the cost of warfare, and the economic gain to be made from conquests. Finally a chapter on "values" concludes the book--the unashamed glorification of conquest, the prestige accruing to the Romans in general and to the emperor in particular, and reinforcement of the sense that it was discipline, both moral and organizational, that made Rome supreme over other peoples. [End Page 451]The discussion of all these aspects displays insight and balanced judgment, and the accompanying bibliography is valuable (some notes are repetitious, however: cf. 117 n. 163 with 172 n. 36). The work of Ampelius (ed. Budé 1993) might have been cited (25) as another example of how weak even a schoolmaster's geographical knowledge could be. Although, to be sure, it is true that "bird's-eye view" was hardly an option for Roman representations of the world (26), we might still recall Artemidorus' (Oneirocritica 2.68) vision of dreamers flying along and looking down at the landscape below, while the presentation of Rome's Marble Plan is large-scale and ichnographic. The Tabula Banasitana (AE 1971.534) merits citing as a prime example of Marcus Aurelius' pondering with care the bestowal of benefits upon people on a remote fringe of the empire (180). In stating that we shall never know where the Teutoburg Forest was, let alone the site of Varus' defeat (167), Mattern seems to overlook the finds made at Kalkriese (see now W. Schlüter in J. D. Creighton and R. J. A. Wilson, eds., Roman Germany: Studies in Cultural Interaction [1999] 125-59); equally, she shows no awareness of a kernel of truth in the tradition that Hadrian abandoned Dacia, at least in part (104; cf. Barrington Atlas, Directory, 1376). In treating the Roman concern to save "face" (177), there is more to be made of L. Caesennius Paetus as scapegoat. The major step of annexing Armenia must surely reflect instructions he brought with him from Rome, rather than just a personal preference (cf. 92 n. 46), but all the blame for the rapid, catastrophic failure of the annexation attempt is then heaped upon him alone. Tacitus grasped Rome's vulnerability in this region. He has the Parthian cavalry commander Vasaces coolly dismiss Paetus' bluster about long-standing Roman control there: "imaginem retinendi largiendive penes nos, vim penes Parthos" (Ann. 15.14). Later, after Corbulo's diplomatic victory, Tacitus can detail the official tokens of respect insisted upon by Tiridates during his journey to Rome and conclude ironically: "scilicet externae superbiae sueto non inerat notitia nostri apud quos vis imperii valet, inania tramittuntur" (Ann. 15.31).These and other sundry observations aside, it is the book's principal thesis that invites comment, namely Mattern's sweeping claim: "I would argue that Rome's real strategy lay in the realm of psychology. The empire was defended not by 'scientific frontiers,' however we might choose to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Community and the “Absolutely Feminine”Sheri I. Hoem (bio)I’ve emphasized the importance of the moment of dissent in the process of constructing knowledge, lying at the heart of the community of thought.—Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern ExplainedMaurice Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community places side by side a “community” of writers who confront the very possibility of community as it comes to be inscribed in politico-philosophical and literary modes. His “little book” [56], (...) as he calls it, takes up these modes of discourse separately, in two parts. The first section of his text, “The Negative Community,” constitutes an analytical defense of Bataille’s theoretical concepts of community as they have been interpreted by Jean-Luc Nancy in The Inoperative Community. Blanchot engages the question of community, communion, and communism not simply to contest or continue Nancy’s text, but to restore Bataille to a brotherhood, or “fraternity” [26] of friends and scholars who have come to think in terms of an “unworking” [23] or “negative” community. The second section of Blanchot’s text, “The Community of Lovers,” performs a critical reading of Marguerite Duras’s fictional work The Malady of Death.In The Inoperative Community—the pretext, at least in part, for part one of Blanchot’s little book—Nancy credits Bataille as having “gone farthest into the crucial experience of the modern destiny of community” [16] in that Bataille’s thinking reveals the experience of discerning communism’s failure, followed by a fascination with fascism, and finally a “withdrawal from communitarian enterprises” [16–17] altogether. According to Nancy, at the juncture of the historical and theoretical failings of community, Bataille abandons all forms of community other than “an accursed isolation of lovers and of the artist” [24]. Admitting that he is dealing only with ‘“themes’” rather than with Bataille’s “writing” itself, Nancy nevertheless asserts that Bataille’s thinking on community has always been limited by “the theme of the sovereignty of the subject” [23], even in his community of lovers:Bataille’s lovers are also, at the limit, a subject and an object—where the subject, moreover, is always the man, and the object always the woman, due no doubt to a very classical manipulation of sexual difference in an appropriation of self by self. (However, on another register and in another reading of Bataille’s text, it is not certain that love and jouissance do not pertain essentially to the woman—and to the woman in man. To discuss this it would be necessary to consider Bataille’s writing... something I cannot do here, inasmuch as I am for the moment considering only its “themes.”).[24]Nancy’s reading of Bataille thus clears a space for Nancy’s own investigation into the possibility of community after or beyond the subject, so to speak. Instead of a subject described as an (undivided) individual, Nancy speaks of a “singular being” who is always already othered. Singular beings as such are “constituted by... sharing that makes them [End Page 49] others: other for one another... ‘“communicating’ by not ‘communing’” [25]. For Nancy, it is the very experience of the limits of communication that allows each being to discover a certain singularity in common.Blanchot too reflects on the “theme” of community in Bataille’s works without examining Bataille’s “writing” as such, but he reads Bataille differently. Blanchot demonstrates how Bataille’s thinking gives the effect of “mutation” [4], that Bataille comes to an understanding of self-difference beyond the subject, beyond the limits imposed by Nancy’s reading, beyond the classical construct of subject/object discourse. Blanchot’s “Negative Community” establishes Bataille as one who experienced stages of thought: his thought exhibited its own infidelity.Blanchot turns to certain of Bataille’s terms, particularly “sacrifice,” “ecstasy,” and “inner experience,” to present an alternative to Nancy’s reading. According to Blanchot, the “inner experience” (l’expérience intérieure) is a concept in Bataille that does the opposite of what one might expect. The “inner experience,” Blanchot explains, is amovement of contestation that, coming from the subject, devastates it, but has as a deeper origin the relationship with the other which is community itself... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Sources of MemoryJeffrey Andrew Barash“What does it mean to remember?” This question might seem commonplace when it is confined to the domain of events recalled in past individual experience; but even in this restricted sense, when memory recalls, for example, a first personal encounter with birth or with death, the singularity of the remembered image places the deeper possibilities of human understanding in relief. Such experiences punctuating everyday (...) life highlight the central place of memory as a source of human identity.With a few notable exceptions, such as Henri Bergson or Maurice Halb-wachs, this central role of memory was rarely a topic of interest in the theoretical orientations of our century. It played only a peripheral role in the different philosophical orientations and in the human sciences of this century until, very recently, new attempts have been made to comprehend the significance of memory, above all in the fields of intellectual history and philosophy. Without dealing exhaustively with the bibliography of works on memory, I will mention what seem to me to be the signs of a recent renewal of questioning in this area of interest to historians and philosophers alike. This will lead me to the specific problem I will address in the pages that follow.One of the chief sources of the historian’s recent interest in memory has been the historians’ conflict (Historikerstreit) of the 1980s concerning the interpretation of the German and European past since the rise to power of Nazism and in the aftermath of World War II. As the generations who lived through and—from a given perspective—remembered these events increasingly disappear, the question concerning their precise historical meaning has reemerged with a new urgency. In this vein, for example, as the relatively new periodical History and Memory: Studies in the Representation of the Past and the collection of essays Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” edited by Saul Friedlander, amply attest, the relation of memory to historical narrative is as important as it is problematic: to the extent that eyewitness memory claims a status of objectivity beyond the fictional sphere of [End Page 707] the imagination, its role in informing historical narrative involves the very issue of objectivity itself. 1Independently of this query concerning the relation of memory and history in recent scholarship focusing on the twentieth century, a number of studies have attempted to place the idea of memory in historical perspective during premodern periods. In this regard, we may cite Janet Coleman’s recently published work, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past and Mary Carruthers’s treatment of the subject of memory in the medieval period in The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. 2 A number of other recent works in the field of intellectual history have attempted to grapple with the intriguing problem of the historicity of the phenomenon of memory in the West. This idea of the historicity of memory has been inspired at least in part by Pierre Nora’s essay, “Between Memory and History,” which introduced the multi-volume series he directed, Les Lieux de mémoire. In this vein, Patrick H. Hutton’s History as an Art of Memory, Matt K. Matsuda’s The Memory of the Modern, and Richard Terdiman’s Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis all center on the historical transforma-tions to which, according to the different perspectives of their works, “memory” has been subject. 3 Like Nora, they link this historicity of the social and cultural role of memory to the radical transformations that Western civilization has undergone in the modern period.In a philosophical perspective David Farrell Krell’s work, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing: On the Verge, presents a very different idea of the phenomenon of memory. 4 Where the intellectual historians of modernity stress the mutations in the role of memory, Krell, following in the footsteps of Jacques Derrida, emphasizes one essential line of continuity that, to his mind, has tied [End Page 708] together the tradition of philosophical reflection on memory from Plato and Aristotle up until Freud: the metaphoric reference to memory as the faculty... (shrink)

On est porté à sous-estimer le rôle authentiquement productif de la raison dans la Dialectique transcendantale de la Critique de la raison pure. Cet article propose une illustration de ce rôle à l'occasion des Paralogismes de la raison pure, qui ne sont rendus possibles que sur la base d'une fiction négative opérée à partir du sens interne. Cette illustration s'inscrit dans la perspective plus large d'une interprétation de la Dialectique transcendantale en vertu d'une théorie du schématisme, laissée au second (...) plan par Kant en raison de la prépondérance des motivations critiques.We tend to underestimate the authentically productive role of reason in the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason. This paper suggests an illustration of this role as it can be traced in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason, which themselves became possible on the basis of a negative fiction exerted toward the inner sense. This illustration is part of a larger perspective aiming at an interpretation of the Transcendental Dialectic on the ground of a theory of schematism, which is somehow overshadowed by Kant's critical intentions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sophie, Greta, Cuiyuan, and Feminist DesireStories by Ding Ling, Alice Munro, and Eileen ChangYuhui Bao (bio) and Ian Dennis (bio)Desire has a history and, for a literary criticism inflected by mimetic theory, novelistic prose fiction offers a privileged view of its unfolding. We study novelistic fiction, as opposed to various romance genres, to grasp that history, for what its authors have been able to see, understand, and (...) dramatize—this is the procedural model, indeed the authority established by René Girard and that has largely governed such criticism thereafter.1 But of the three short fictions we consider here—two Chinese and one Canadian—only two are fully novelistic in character, in that they attempt to describe and diagnose—rather than merely express—emergent and changing desires. Students of Girard, of course, recognize here the distinction between the romanesque and romantique. to which one might add the understandings of genre developed by a number of other theorists.2However, we might also concede that all fictions are invariably and to some degree romantic—some desire, necessarily mediated, is always operative, in writers and readers alike, before or even as it is demystified, if indeed it is. Furthermore, a passionate fictional commitment to that which Girard boldly [End Page 131] designated the mensonge romantique may actually reveal or clarify, at least for later readers, that which the author seeks half- or unconsciously to conceal. It is with this possibility in mind that we propose to consider our other subject fiction, "Miss Sophie's Diary" (莎菲女士的日记 sha fei nv shi de ri ji; 1927) by the pioneering Chinese woman writer Ding Ling (丁玲 ding ling).3 "Miss Sophie's Diary," to be clear, is no simple romance; it is at least hybrid, and in its brave if perhaps only partially successful pursuit of the truth of desire, subtly revelatory. Miss Sophie (莎菲 sha fei), chronically ill with tuberculosis and half-separated from a human world she both longs for and despises, with her aggrieved sense of superiority and desperate, shameful longing for those she passionately feels to be her inferiors, with her loquacious rationalizing and constant, perverse reversals of attitude, is a kind of Dostoyevskian "underground woman," afflicted as well with a touch of the "nausea" later made prestigious by J.-P. Sartre.4 She is clearly a harbinger of her own culture's precipitation into the world of internally mediated, indeed, metaphysical desire, what we might also call the market world, the modernity Girard credits the great European novelists from Stendhal onward with diagnosing. This story has long been described as an unprecedented and "frank" revelation "of a Chinese woman's sexual feelings and contempt for conventional views," expressing an "outspoken and unrelenting individualism."5 At the same time, it has been seen as a product of the fatally compromised and ultimately unsuccessful May Fourth literary movement,6 and not necessarily representative of its author's overall fictional production. From an orthodox Girardian critical perspective, however, the crucial interpretative question might be the degree to which Ding Ling is aware of the sources of the newly enfranchised desires her heroine wrestles with, or, as we might also put it, the degree of separation between the author's understanding and that of Miss Sophie. But such a question is perhaps easily enough answered. Ding Ling clearly does not share Girard's "novelistic" perspective on the operation of desire. But from our current perspective, does her best-known work nonetheless offer, however imperfectly, certain now-recognizable insights into historical processes of desire that our other two writers more fully realize?"Miss Sophie's Diary" is famous in China for the delicacy, depth, and explicitness with which those bold and passionate sexual desires of Sophie are exposed, even as such desires are (perhaps reassuringly) defeated, or at least revealed as illusory. Clearly the story reflects a period of cultural and personal crisis. "I was extremely confused at that time," she wrote in a later phase of self-critique. "On one hand, I was radically rebellious, believing blindly in social revolution; on the other hand, I indulged myself in a petty bourgeoisie sense, departing from revolution, so I was trapped in loneliness, struggle and misery [End... (shrink)

In this paper, I aim to articulate, at least in part, what makes Sara Ahmed’s uses and analyses of metaphors fruitful for thinking about problems in the social world. I argue that Ahmed’s these metaphorical concepts perform three functions. First, her analyses improve our understanding of the social world precisely because we already understand the world through metaphors. They draw out the metaphors we use to think about ourselves and others and, in doing so, allow us to think (...) more carefully about those metaphors. To support this claim, I will draw on the insights of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their seminal Metaphors We Live By. Second, one thing that Ahmed’s analyses of metaphors often allow us to see is that the movement and arrangement of bodies in the social world can be analyzed in poetic terms. To be clear, it is not just that we linguistically express and understand bodies through metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and the like, but also that the movement, arrangement, and reactions of our bodies are themselves experienced as metaphorical and metonymical, and that they provide the foundation for understanding social reality in metaphorical terms. Finally, as a result of the first two functions, Ahmed helps us imagine ways to intervene so that we can change how we live and interact with others. Specifically, to work toward positive social change, we might both rework the metaphorical concepts we use to understand the social world and alter our practices of movement that, all too often, reify existing social boundaries and inequalities. (shrink)

Compromise arises in contexts where irreconcilable claims must nonetheless somehow be resolved. Ordinary people in everyday life, politicians and artists, doctors engaging in research, humanitarian workers providing aid in the midst of war – all of them will have faced situations where compromise appeared to be the only reasonable option, and yet will have felt that there was nevertheless something deeply wrong with it. The aim of this paper is to help make sense of that sentiment. The focus of this (...) paper will be on some aspects of the morality of compromise. Its lynchpin will be to construe compromise as a joint action, in particular, a joint wrongdoing – taking part in, and sharing responsibility for, the doing of things that are wrong from the point of view of those who are the parties to the compromise. The question of ‘what is wrong with compromise?’ is thus recast as a question of ‘what is my part in the wrongs being done as part of the compromise?’ It is tempting to suppose that a compromise serves to dilute personal responsibility, parsing it out among parties to the compromise. Viewing a compromise as a joint action, in contrast, will help us to see how a compromise actually increases responsibility among parties to it. They are now jointly collaborating in some action that each of them sees as wrong, at least in part (albeit in differing parts). Discussions of compromise traditionally prioritize the inter-personal aspect – compromise, in the transitive form of ‘compromising with’ someone. But I argue that the intransitive form – ‘compromise of’ – deserves pride of place. The reason for prioritizing the intransitive ‘compromise of’ is simple: that is what is involved in the intra-personal calculation that must, of necessity, go on inside one's own head in the process of deciding whether or not to agree to a 'compromise with' someone else. In this paper I shall concentrate specifically on compromises of principles, or (more precisely) on ‘matters of principled concern to the compromising parties’. Not only is that the most troubling and morally problematic sort of compromise, it is also logically the most central case. I demonstrate that that is so by shifting the focus from inter-personal compromise to the more fundamental intra-personal process underlying it – the compromise we are involved in when adjudicating among our own conflicting values, to decide whether or not to agree to a compromise of the inter-personal sort. This is the subject of the first section of the paper below. Compromise involves resolving conflicts of principles through mutual concessions that are accepted and undertaken by all parties. Doing so may be on-balance desirable, not only from some larger perspective (of social peace, or whatever) but also from each party's own perspective. Nevertheless, from each party's perspective, compromise necessarily involves interacting with, and sometimes contributing to, wrongdoing. Morally, something is lost, even if more is gained on balance. (shrink)

The chapter considers the “paradox of fiction,” understood as the claim that it is in some sense irrational or inappropriate to respond emotionally to mere fictions. Several theorists have held that special features of imagination, or other “arational” mental reflexes, play a role in its resolution. I argue, to the contrary, that imagination need not enter into the solution, and that the paradox can be resolved in a way that shows our responses to fictions to be reasonable (...) and warranted, even if our emotional reactions to fiction are caused by beliefs and desires. Coming to terms with the paradox requires both properly understanding the “rug-pull” structure of the examples used to motivate it, and appreciating the specific emotional norms relevant to fiction appreciation. Related proposals by Livingston & Mele (1997) and Gilmore (2011) are discussed; their relevance to and coherence with the present account are explained. [This is Chapter 11 of Explaining Imagination.]. (shrink)

Decision making in any brain is imperfect and costly in terms of time and energy. Operating under such constraints, an organism could be in a position to improve performance if an opportunity arose to exploit informative patterns in the environment being searched. Such an improvement of performance could entail both faster and more accurate (i.e., reward-maximizing) decisions. The present study investigated the extent to which human participants could learn to take advantage of immediate patterns in the spatial arrangement of serially (...) presented foods such that a region of space would consistently be associated with greater subjective value. Eye movements leading up to choices demonstrated rapidly induced biases in the selective allocation of visual fixation and attention that were accompanied by both faster and more accurate choices of desired goods as implicit learning occurred. However, for the control condition with its spatially balanced reward environment, these subjects exhibited preexisting lateralized biases for eye and hand movements (i.e., leftward and rightward, respectively) that could act in opposition not only to each other but also to the orienting biases elicited by the experimental manipulation, producing an asymmetry between the left and right hemifields with respect to performance. Potentially owing at least in part to learned cultural conventions (e.g., reading from left to right), the findings herein particularly revealed an intrinsic leftward bias underlying initial saccades in the midst of more immediate feedback-directed processes for which spatial biases can be learned flexibly to optimize oculomotor and manual control in value-based decision making. The present study thus replicates general findings of learned attentional biases in a novel context with inherently rewarding stimuli and goes on to further elucidate the interactions between endogenous and exogenous biases. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, a.d. 50–250Maud W. GleasonSimon Swain. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, a.d. 50–250. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. xii 1 499 pp. Cloth, $90.How do people who by birth, wealth, and education consider themselves entitled to leadership in their local communities conceive of their relationship to the imperial power that both authorizes and (...) limits their local autonomy? In the case of the Greek-speaking city-states under the Roman empire, language was clearly a crucial component of local and personal identity. This language, educated Greek, and the paideia that it presupposed, also served to distinguish the leading citizens of the various “Greek” cities from the shopkeepers of their streets and the peasants of their hinterlands.One thing that makes the picture confusing is the fact that “the Romans,” against whom “the Greeks” might be expected to define themselves, were likewise propertied aristocrats who professed admiration for Greek culture and in many cases put some serious effort into acquiring it themselves. So one of the things we would like to know is to what extent “Hellenism” was conceived by the ancients to be a matter of ethnicity or education. The answer is not straightforward.To be a Hellene one had to be able to display oneself as elaborately acculturated. For this particular aristocracy, the medium of elaboration was language. The artificiality of this acculturation process was concealed, as it generally is, by nearly invisible scrims designed to make the cultural look natural. Notable among these was the historical fiction that claimed for a Greek-speaking city an origin from a hero of Greek history or myth. Thus Greek aristocrats propagated themselves culturally through arduous acquisition of an elite dialect, but euphemized this process through the myth of genetic contact with the glory days. To be a Hellene was to participate in a strange charade of talking as if the Roman Empire and the Latin language did not exist. Once Roman dominance over the Mediterranean was secure, Greeks (at least in the formal literary productions that survived them) avoided talking about Rome. To say the least, this reluctance makes the Greeks’ attitude towards Rome difficult to assess. Yet this is what Swain has bravely and thoroughly set out to do.Swain’s book is in two parts. The first focuses on the role of language in [End Page 307] forming the identity of elite Greeks in the Second Sophistic (a period of literary renaissance lasting approximately from the mid-first to the mid-third century a.d.); the second examines what the chief Greek writers of that period had to say about Rome. Chapter 1 discusses the language consciousness of the Greek elite, who on formal occasions eschewed the dialect in common use (koine) to speak and write a belletristic Attic modeled on the great stylists of the past. Ironically, the “Asian”/“Attic” antithesis, with its conservative moral and political overtones, originally developed as part of Roman stylistic debate (24). We see it in Cicero, and in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who functioned in effect as an apologist for Roman rule because Roman rule ensured that the right sort of people retained control of local government in the Greek cities. Dionysius in his historical writing went to elaborate lengths to show that Rome was really a Greek city on the Isocratean (nondemocratic) model (26). It is interesting to speculate why subsequent authors did not follow this approach. Perhaps, once their dominance in their cities was firmly secured by Rome’s hegemony, Greek aristocrats preferred to avert their gaze from the system that propped them up, and to elaborate instead the fiction that it was their Greekness that entitled them to effortless success.To explain the “repristinization” of linguistic features in the Atticizing movement Swain offers an interesting survey of the role of katharevousa in modern Greece (35–40). (There is also of course the phenomenon of “Oxford English,” which Fellows of All Souls are perhaps disinclined to pursue.) Chapter 2 discusses how purism worked out in practice (Favorinus, Lucian, Athenaeus, and some lexicographers). A test case: Galen practiced “purism... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Transcendental Phenomenology as Human Possibility: Husserl and Fink on the Phenomenologizing Subject by Denis DŽANIĆD. J. HobbsDŽANIĆ, Denis. Transcendental Phenomenology as Human Possibility: Husserl and Fink on the Phenomenologizing Subject. Cham: Springer, 2023. x + 236 pp. Cloth, $119.99Denis Džanić’s Transcendental Phenomenology as Human Possibility, despite its superficially historical focus on a specific period of collaboration between Edmund Husserl and his somewhat wayward protégé Eugen Fink, addresses key (...) systematic issues in transcendental phenomenology, namely, how the act of phenomenologizing should be understood in connection with the specific human beings who aim to become phenomenologists, and what the answer to this question tells us about both the genuine subject of phenomenology and the motivation for phenomenologizing. These questions are important for our understanding of not only the historical development of phenomenology but also the practice and goals of phenomenology—specifically, for a conception of phenomenologizing as a project in which we, as particular, historical, empirical figures, might want to engage.Much of the book focuses on laying the groundwork for understanding these complicated issues both historically and systematically. Džanić does an admirable job of tracing the rapidly evolving interactions between Husserl and Fink, both as intellectual collaborators on this philosophical project and as a pair of very human figures who ultimately found themselves pursuing quite different solutions to the problems of the subject and origin of phenomenology. He focuses particularly on the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, Fink’s attempt to extend Husserl’s famous text to include a phenomenology of the act of phenomenologizing itself (including Husserl’s marginal comments on the text), although he draws on a number of other significant texts and manuscripts (mostly Husserl’s, albeit with an extended aside on Heidegger) wherever they are helpful for explicating the complex evolution of Husserl’s thought on the subject. Admittedly, the book thus takes on a challenging task—both because of the difficult nature of this topic and because of the obscurity of the technical terms required to discuss it. However, despite the necessarily enigmatic character of the relevant language, Džanić’s attempts to explore the main outlines of this issue are worthwhile, particularly due to his ability to resist the temptation to view Husserl’s thought here as monolithic.In the early chapters, Džanić explicates in detail the rather complicated solution that Fink proposed to this difficulty, namely, the abandonment (to some extent) of the ultimately human origin of phenomenology in favor of a fundamentally nonhuman (and eventually meontic) conception of the transcendental ego, which generated a great deal of elaborate and (at least in the Sixth Meditation) inadequately supported speculation. For Fink, both the motivation to phenomenologize and the act of phenomenologizing itself ultimately stem from a source that is fundamentally prior to—in a(n onto)logical rather than temporal sense—any empirical ego or empirical act of phenomenologizing, a source that merely “enworlds” itself (in various complicated senses that Džanić does [End Page 145] an admirable job of clarifying) in the apparently anthropologistic, everyday world of individual phenomenologists. Džanić calls this interpretation of phenomenology Fink’s “epistemological anti-humanism,” and it serves as the basis for one potential (radically anti-Heideggerian but nevertheless somewhat disappointing) solution to the question of why we should phenomenologize at all. As Džanić notes, this solution was at least briefly taken up by Fink’s mentor Husserl himself, although the degree to which Husserl actually endorsed this path beyond the level of a fleeting flirtation remains questionable. Ultimately, as Džanić rightly highlights and as becomes abundantly clear in Husserl’s (often rather scathing) notes on Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation, he abandoned this interpretation.Accordingly, in the later chapters of the book, Džanić traces Husserl’s ultimate development of a quite different solution to the problems of the origin and motivation of phenomenology—a solution that, unlike his brief foray into Finkian grandeur, views the act of phenomenologizing as essentially rooted in human possibility (that is, as part of the famous lifeworld that features so prominently in Husserl’s work, especially in the Crisis and other late texts). After his collaboration with and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Eternal Life and Human Happiness in Heaven: Philosophical Problems, Thomistic Solutions by Christopher M. BrownElizabeth C. Shaw and Staff*BROWN, Christopher M. Eternal Life and Human Happiness in Heaven: Philosophical Problems, Thomistic Solutions. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2021. xiii + 487 pp. Cloth, $75.00The contents of the book are straightforwardly announced by the title. Christopher Brown entertains four apparent problems about eternal life in heaven (...) considered by contemporary philosophers and theologians and offers solutions to them from the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. The book consists of seventeen chapters together with an introduction and conclusion and is divided into four parts. In the first part Brown lays out the problems and the solutions to them proposed by contemporary philosophers and theologians. In the second part he explains St. Thomas's distinction between essential and accidental reward in heaven and goes on to treat of the former—which consists in the beatific vision, that is, our beholding of God—and its proper accidents—which are delight, joy, and charity. In the third part he then deals with the accidental reward, which has to do with the perfected condition of our glorified bodies, society with other persons, and so on. Finally, in the fourth part Brown, drawing on his expositions of St. Thomas's doctrine in the two previous parts, details Thomistic solutions to the four problems discussed in the first part and argues that these solutions are superior to those proposed by the contemporary philosophers and theologians he has engaged.So, what are the four problems that Brown addresses? Let's present them as questions. (1) Is heaven just a private communion between a human person and God, or is it a perfect community centered on God that also involves angels, other human persons, and other creatures? (2) Is heaven just a spiritual affair, or are our resurrected bodies a part of it? (3) Is heaven a static or dynamic reality? (4) Is heaven boring?The answers are as follows. Ad primum: Heaven is a perfect community centered on God that also involves angels, other human persons, and other creatures. Ad secundum: Heaven is a spiritual and physical affair that includes our souls and our resurrected bodies. Ad tertium: Heaven is a dynamic reality. Ad quartum: Heaven is not boring!I cannot cover here all of the specifics of the way Brown shows how St. Thomas arrives at these answers. People who know St. Thomas well, even if they have not reflected much on these problems before, probably will [End Page 135] not have great difficulty thinking through how he might get to the first and second answers, at least in general terms. But the third and fourth, I think, call for further comment. My comments will necessarily be brief.If I understand Brown correctly, he wants to say (and contends that St. Thomas holds) that heaven is dynamic insofar as in heaven we are in act. But we can be in act in two senses: We can be in act in an unchanging way or in a changing way. In heaven my capacities to know God and to love him are both fully perfected, that is, they are fully actualized and undergo no change. But in heaven we will enjoy our resurrected bodies as well, and our bodies will also be active and interacting with other bodies. This activity will entail change. So, either way we will be active in heaven and, therefore, heaven will be something dynamic.What, then, about the problem of boredom? Because we will be perfectly happy in heaven, argues Brown (interpreting St. Thomas), heaven won't be boring. But the matter doesn't end there. Brown points out that Brian Ribeiro, developing an idea of Bernard Williams, objects that a person who is perfectly happy in the way that we are supposed to be in heaven, cannot be personally identical with any person in this life because the conditions of the beatified person and the nonbeatified person are just too radically different for there to be continuity between the two. Brown replies that St. Thomas convincingly shows that God can, by grace, prepare persons in this... (shrink)

This paper provides an account of truth in interactive fiction. Interactive fiction allows the audience to make choices, resulting in many different possible fictions within each interactive fiction, unlike in literary fiction where there is just one. Adequately capturing this feature of interactive fiction requires us to address familiar issues regarding impossible fiction and the nature of time in fiction. Truth in interactive fiction thus requires a (...) complex account to capture its multitude of fictions. It is argued that a full account of truth in interactive fiction requires distinguishing two works for each interactive fiction, which contain distinct fictional truths. The actual work encompasses what is in fact represented as fictional (hence mistakes can be fictionally true in this work), whilst in the implied work, truth in fiction is governed by authorial intention, hence mistakes are not fictionally true. This dual account best captures our aesthetic evaluation of interactive fictions, for which we often need to distinguish how the work actually is from how it was intended to be. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:388 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Beyond the Edge of Certainty: Essays in Contemporary Science and Philosophy. Edited with an Introduction by Robert G. Colodny. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965.) This is the second volume of lectures on various current topics in the philosophy of the physical, biological, and social sciences which has been published under the auspices of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of (...) Pittsburg. Volume I, Frontiers o] Science and Philosophy, also edited by Professor Colodny, appeared in 1962. Five of the seven lectures contained in this volume treat topics which fall within the philosophy of physics. The persistent student who is without a technical background in either logic or physics will find these for the most part quite readable. Considering this, it is worthy of note that, while the lectures are not of uniform quality in this respect, several problems are treated with sufficient freshness of insight to justify the interest of the philosopher of science as such. Since I cannot discuss all of the lectures, I will restrict my comments, for the most part, to those the significance of which I think I understand best and which deal significantly with some aspect of the history of philosophy. In "Newton's First Law: A Philosopher's Door into Natural Philosophy," Norwood Russell Hanson exhibits what has become a widely accepted analysis of Newton's First Law as a model to be applied to theories in science which must be regarded as, in some sense, true, but which, in principle, are not empirically demonstrable. Briant Ellis, in "The Origin and Nature of Newton's Laws of Motion," deals in a somewhat parallel way with all three of Newton's laws of motion. It is argued that these laws are primarily conceptual in origin. Evidence is marshalled that they were derived from Cartesian physics. That no amount of empirical work could establish or provide support for a principle of natural motion is held by Ellis to be due to the fact that "force" is conceived as something that exists only in order to explain effects. "Since we are at liberty to choose to regard whatever changes or states we please as natural (i.e., as not being effects) it follows that the forces which we should say are operative in nature depend upon the choices we actually make" (65). It would, I think be difficult to show that any one of the points Ellis makes, with the exception of his interesting historical note on the probable origin of Newton's laws of motion, has not previously been made. All, or nearly all, of these points were set forth, at least in outline, for example, by William Werkmeister in A Philosophy o] Science. The approach Ellis makes to his development of the concept of "force," however, is both fresh and incisive and worthy of careful study. In "A Philosopher looks at Quantum Mechanics," Hillary Putnam exhibits the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics of Bohr and Heisenberg, viewed in historical perspective, as the most adequate of several unsatisfactory theories. He finds the locus of the problem to lie in a suitable definition of "measurement." Noting that Heisenberg's definition (improperly) appeals to the macrocosm conceived in terms of classical mechanics, he seeks to clarify some of the issues that must follow the attempt to define measurement within the context of quantum mechanics. Putnam holds the relative sharpness of macroobservables for Bohr and Heisenberg to be an underived assumption of their theory. Since the quantities of which macro-observables are supposed to be averages are not (in quantum mechanics) required always to exist, this assumption cannot be derived from a plausible definition of macro-observables together with a suitable formulation of the laws of quantum mechanics. Moving from Bohr and Heisenberg's conclusion that measurement requires interaction of a system (or part of a system) measured with respect to an outside system, and that macroobservables do not exist unless measured, measurement for quantum mechanics is defined as "an interaction in which a system A (the 'measured' system), which was previously isolated, interacts with a system B (the 'measuring' system) in such a way as to cause a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 122.3 (2001) 433-436 [Access article in PDF] Sarah Iles Johnston. Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999. xxi + 329 pp. Cloth, $40.00. This book, which focuses on ancient Greek beliefs about how the dead interact with the living, is an important addition to the study of Greek religion. The subject (...) has become unusually popular in recent years, and when Johnston wrote in her preface that "scholars of our generation... have paid the topic little attention" (xi), she had no way of knowing that two other books on the topic were being published nearly simultaneously with her own. Fortunately, there is so much to say about ancient beliefs concerning ghosts that the three studies do not overlap much. Antonio Stramaglia's Res inauditae, incredulae: Storie di fantasmi nel mondo greco-latino (Bari 1999) and D. Felton's Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity (Austin 1999) take broad views, examining both Greek and Roman ghost stories from literary and folkloric points of view, respectively. Johnston's book focuses only on the Greek dead, and does so in more detail and with more attention to the religious aspects of the living-dead interaction than either of the other books. She uses models developed by cultural anthropology to examine how Greek ideas about the dead changed over time in response to changing social conditions, including contacts with other cultures and the development of the polis.Johnston divides her study into three major parts. Part 1, "A Short History of the Dead in Ancient Greece," covers several aspects of the Greek view of the dead in the archaic and classical periods. First we have a brief chronological overview of the dead in Greek society from the Homeric poems to the fifth century B.C. The information is unfortunately rather scattered and uneven, and Johnston gives much of it simply as introductory material for later parts of her book: "This is a topic that I take up in depth in another chapter" (10); "As we shall see in chapter 6" (18); "This... is analyzed in depth in chapter 3" (19). This brief survey might best have been included in an introduction (there is only a short prologue), since it does not stand well on its own here and does not accomplish much overall other than to provide us with several very general conclusions: that the Greeks, like many other peoples, believed that the unburied or prematurely dead were angry with the living and could harm them; that the dead could be called up by the living to serve them; that other than this, the dead are not particularly active, at least in early Greek belief.Part 1 also includes information concerning rituals to the dead and the role of the goe\s. For this discussion Johnston takes a topical rather than chronological approach to the problem of what the Greeks believed about the dead versus what they did about the dead; "participants need not have believed in a ritual to go through its motions" (37). Johnston briefly describes the nature of rituals for and against the dead, distinguishing funerals and festivals that expressed affection from defensive rituals and festivals held out of fear, to avert the wrath of the dead. One particularly interesting section deals with the relatively recent finds of [End Page 433] the Selinuntine lex sacra, the Cyrenean inscriptions, and the rituals for the dead described thereon: both contain detailed descriptions of real aversion rituals involving the appeasement of ancestral spirits. Johnston is careful to remind the reader of the fragmentary nature of this particular evidence and at times sounds overly defensive or cautious: "although the evidence is too scant for us to be certain" (58); "its brevity makes it impossible for us to be sure" (62). Much of Johnston's argument is therefore highly hypothetical but nonetheless interesting and provocative. She concludes that the dead began to be perceived as a bigger source of problems in the late... (shrink)

The following paper aims to explore the plausibility of considering movement and place part of the conventionality of social life and interactions from an ethnomethodological point of view and asks whether there is a conventionality to the very distinction between actions being ‘mobile’ and/or ‘inert’—if we can speak of this as, at least in part, conventional, then we can further ask, whether this conventionality plays a part in the social construction of space and the socio-spatial order (...) more generally. After arriving at this question by looking at Giddens and Garfinkel, the paper differentiates four types of movement: drifting, circling, mobility, and circulating. The latter is then used to show how a key aspect of social order is not simply experience of being ‘enclosed’ by a boundary or division of space, but that instead, most of the time, spatial order is simply taken for granted and movement is experienced and neither ‘here’ nor ‘there’. Circulation, then, helps us to account for our ability to move within a place without necessarily having to leave it. Circulation describes the process of accomplishing the interiority of a place and the paper will claim that this is achieved by glossing over particular borders and boundaries as we traverse space. (shrink)

This article seeks to examine recent popular fiction on Richard of Gloucester (1452–1485), later Richard III. Of particular focus is the portrayal of Richard's pet hounds — specifically the Irish wolfhound depicted in Sharon Penman's novel, The Sunne in Splendour (1982). The article investigates the dialectic between the mythology of Richard as overplayed villain and as domestic family man, with the wolfhound as the centre-piece of this domesticity — an iconography which is at odds with the traditional stereotypes of (...) Richard. (shrink)

This article seeks to examine recent popular fiction on Richard of Gloucester (1452–1485), later Richard III. Of particular focus is the portrayal of Richard's pet hounds — specifically the Irish wolfhound depicted in Sharon Penman's novel, The Sunne in Splendour (1982). The article investigates the dialectic between the mythology of Richard as overplayed villain and as domestic family man, with the wolfhound as the centre-piece of this domesticity — an iconography which is at odds with the traditional stereotypes of (...) Richard. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:TOWARD A GENERAL THEORY OF FICTION by James D. Parsons When nelson Goodman writes, "All fiction is literal, literary falsehood," he seems to be disregarding at least one noteworthy tradition.1 The tradition I have in mind includes works by Jeremy Bendiam, Hans Vaihinger, Tobias Dantzig, Wallace Stevens, and a host ofother writers in many fields who have been laboring for more man two centuries to clear (...) the ground for a general theory of fiction. Such a general dieory would, if its exponents are right about its relevemce, be situated at the very heart of die law, literature, religion, science, mathematics — in fact, of humem life itself. Fiction dien would be no neirrow litereiry falsehood, but a kind of pressure, eis Wedlace Stevens said, which die imagination exerts "against die pressure of reality," and which "helps us to live our lives,"2 or, in Hans Vaihingens metaphor, "a scaffolding afterwards to be demolished" 3 — that is, elfter it heis served its constructive purpose. A fiction is a vitally useful creation of die mind corresponding to nothing in the real world. Most people eire aware of some of these fictions, from the perfect geometric figures of Euclid to the black box of contemporary axiomatics. There are many odiers. The notion diat all human beings are equal before die law is a fiction that can serve opposing purposes: it can work as an instrument for securing greater justice in the courts and in society, or it can function as ceimouflage, helping to perpetuate em unjust legal system and em oppressive social order — emd probably in any actual situation it serves both purposes at once. In die science of mechanics the idea of a pure vacuum, in which moving objects meet with no resistance, was for some centuries a useful fiction diat made possible the exact mathematiced analysis of motion in memy forms — another useful fiction. The notion of normality in psychology — mat diere is a universal standard of reference for human behavior — is stdl utilized by clinical and laboratory workers in the field, in spite of the metssive sociological emd ethnographic criticisms that have been leveled against it. In science generally, the idea that 92 James D. Parsons93 diere is a community of experts who by dieir combined influence decide what the trudi is in every field is a fiction diat seems to have come to the end of its usefulness, diough some philosophers have written about it as if it were a reality and not a fiction at edl. The fictions I have cited so far are none of them literary, nor être diey fedse in the ordinetry meaning of the word. They are simply not true; they describe nothing mat exists, except in die mind, emd cem be considered false only if one forgets what they eire emd tries, illegitimately, to apply tests of trudi to them in a direct way. Among the fictions mat might be called literary are the fictions derived from mydis. Now, a myth is a story told in answer to a question or a series of questions that has never been asked, eidier about the real world or (most likely) about the perennial performance of a ritual. The mydi is designed to forestall the questioning, because the questions that might be raised would be too embarrassing or because questions about some aspects of reality ceuinot be formulated without distorting our relation to them. These are the aspects of reedity that can be viewed only out of die corner of the eye, that disappear when we focus our gaze upon diem, and mat can be identified only indirectly.4 The more explicitly fictional devices, too, of poetry, drama, and the novel develop out of the attempt to achieve some sort of cognizeuice of the seune aspects of reality that are related in mydis. I do not meetn to imply that literature, of which mydi is a part, is concerned only with such disconcerting or evanescent aspects of reality. Literature, like all the great realms of culture, is concerned with the whole of reality. It has to be, omerwise its more passionate, its more ediereed concerns would have no lodging place, no environment in which to maintain... (shrink)

‘Fictional games’ are playful activities and ludic artefacts that were conceptualised to be part of fictional worlds. These games cannot – or at least were not originally meant to – be actually played. This interdisciplinary article discusses fictional games, focusing on those appearing in works of sf. Its objective is that of exploring how fictional games can function as utopian devices. Drawing on game studies, utopian studies, and sf studies, the first half of the article introduces the notion (...) of fictional games and provides an initial articulation of their utopian potential. The second half focuses, instead, on the analysis of one (science-)fictional game in particular: the game of Azad, described in Iain M. Banks’s 1988 sf novel The Player of Games. This analysis is instrumental in clarifying the utopian qualities that are inherent in the activity of play such as its being uncertain and contingent. By presenting relationships of power through a game (and, finally, as a game), utopian fictional games such as Azad serve as a reminder that every socio-political situation – even the most dystopian ones – is ultimately indeterminate, and retains the possibility of change. (shrink)

In the 2016 film Doctor Strange, the title character undergoes a radical transition from successful neurosurgeon to highly skilled sorcerer. Unsurprisingly, he finds this transition difficult, in no small part because he thinks that sorcery seems somehow “unscientific.” Nevertheless, he eventually comes to adopt sorcery as wholeheartedly as he had embraced medicine. Some of his reasons for making this transition are personal, such as his desire to fix his injured hands and, later, to help others. Strange also displays the (...) same sorts of motivations that might drive any scientist: his intellectual curiosity drives him to understand how the Ancient One cured a paraplegic, and his desire to make a positive difference leads him to push the boundaries of sorcery. -/- This chapter will examine what Strange’s transition can teach us about the nature of scientific inquiry. More specifically, we’ll think about when it might make sense for scientists like Dr. Strange to change their approach. This will also allow us to explore what it means to practice science more generally. Some of what we learn might be surprising. For example, while it might seem obvious to us (and maybe even to Strange) that sorcery can’t count as a science, there are reasons for doubting this quick conclusion, at least in the sort of world that Dr. Strange lives in. Finally, we’ll consider what all of this means for science in our world, where things differ quite significantly. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Fictionalist Psychiatry?Sam Wilkinson, PhD (bio)I am deeply sympathetic to what Giulio Ongaro (2024a, 2024b, 2024c) writes in these three excellent interlocking papers. I will argue that there is a slightly more efficient way of approaching these issues. It involves adopting fictionalism rather than externalism (although fictionalism can accommodate externalist insights). Fictionalism is something that Ongaro briefly, and approvingly, mentions, in the final paper, but there is an (...) implicit realism in the initial approach. I am not sure there is much disagreement, however, and perhaps we end up in the same place, having approached from different starting points. The fictionalist approach is largely compatible with all of the substantive things Ongaro wants to say, but is, strictly speaking, in tension with the most natural interpretation of externalism, namely, construed as a form of descriptivism and realism (two notions I unpack later).Externalism, Evaluativism, and Social IntegrationA major theme of the first paper is that mainstream internalist Western psychiatry is bad at integrating the social dimension of mental illness. I agree. Furthermore, recent externalistic (enactive and predictive processing) approaches, while better, are still lacking in that they collapse the “social” into the “psychosocial.” Again, I agree. But my diagnosis (excuse the pun) is slightly different. The social dimension of illness concerns in large part the evaluative nature of illness, not the need to descriptively, causally capture a complex, objectively real phenomenon called “illness.”Having said this, in integrating this evaluative social dimension, we need to tread carefully lest we fail to meet the “demarcation challenge” (Murphy, 2008). This concerns the challenge of demarcating different kinds of problem. Humans have always had problems, for which they have needed help, accommodation, allowances made, and so on, but how do you distinguish mental health problems, from other kinds of problems? How do you distinguish money woes, or marital strife, both of which certainly cause unhappiness, or even psychological states that look like psychiatric symptoms (e.g., anxiety, low mood), from properly mental health problems?The biomedical “internalist” says: Easy! Either there is something objectively wrong with you, or there is not. However, notice that this is exactly [End Page 337] what externalists can say too, to the extent that they are trying to describe and define disorder in value-free terms. The only difference is that the internalist will talk about what is wrong within the biological boundaries of the organism, whereas the externalist will go beyond that.Externalism about a particular phenomenon, if it is to be a non-trivial position, needs to be sensitive to the distinction between cause and constitution (or what Adams & Azaiwa [2001] call “coupling-constitution confusion”). We see this in externalism about the mind in general. In the Extended Mind Hypothesis (Clark & Chalmers 1998), the claim is not that Otto’s notebook causally contributes to Otto’s mind (his belief about where MOMA is). Nobody would deny that. The interesting claim is that the notebook is constitutive of his belief: it is literally part of his mind. Similarly, nobody is denying that external (e.g., social) factors cause mental health problems, the question is: Do they constitute those problems? Externalism takes this question seriously and answers in the affirmative, at least in some cases. But the articulation of this has to be nuanced.Suppose I have crippling anxiety over financial concerns. Anxiety can be a mental health problem, but if, in this case, you transferring money into my bank account makes my anxiety disappear, then one might think this is not a mental health problem. It is a money problem. Or is it? Enter fictionalism (Wilkinson, 2022).Fictionalism is the view that calling someone mentally ill is not describing them as having a particular property, but involves something like engaging in a fiction, a fiction that has been constructed in order to encourage certain courses of action. According to fictionalism, given the facts, there is a lot of wiggle room about how we are to think of, and respond to, people’s problems.To borrow some insights from meta-ethics, when we examine normative discourse (one canonical domain being ethics) we can ask: what does the discourse do? And what... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics CommentaryNeil Pickering, Senior LecturerThe underlying problem for Mr. T’s doctors and his wife is that Mr. T seems unable for much of the time to realise that he is ill. This gives his doctors and other mental health workers, and indeed his wife, very little room for manoeuvre with him. His illness apparently makes him dangerous, because of his beliefs that others are involved in conspiracies against him, (...) which seem to arise from his condition, and this danger particularly affects his wife who has been subject to threats by Mr. T. The initial question is whether Mr. T’s doctors should support or collude in Mrs. T’s proposal to medicate her husband surreptitiously — and if not, what is the alternative? A no less important question is how Mrs. T’s safety might be assured. Underlying these issues is a wider question about the relation between the mentally ill and their doctors, relations (partners and other family members) and society. Mr. T’s behaviours threaten to isolate him from his loved ones and from society.Presumably, Mrs. T’s hope is that giving Mr. T medication will keep his symptoms under control, ensuring her safety and enabling him to retain his relationship with her and perhaps with others; in short, maintaining his place in society. There is also strong evidence that a delay in psychiatric treatment is related to poorer outcomes in terms of, for example, increased morbidity.1 Moreover, some form of long-term medication does seem to be the main hope of achieving a desirable outcome in Mr. T’s case. It seems from the case description that some control of Mr. T’s symptoms results from his taking his medication, and his return to delusions comes only when he gives up on it. It is not made clear, however, why he does give up on it. [End Page 212]From the description of Mr. T, one gets the strong impression of behaviours dominated by the command hallucinations and the paranoid delusions that seem to gather around them. However, there are also, perhaps, periods where other motivations and beliefs have some grip on his life. We are told he has a job, and of course he has the relationship with his wife. What seems to happen is that, at least as far as the latter goes, when his illness reasserts itself, the meaning of his wife’s relationship to him becomes changed in his mind, and Mrs. T becomes part of the conspiracy he believes aims to kill him.Nonetheless, it is unacceptable for Mr. T’s doctors to support Mrs. T’s plan or to collude in it. The primary reason for this is not that it will be a potential disaster — though it stands a good chance of failing and going terribly wrong. There may be dangers to those who administer covert medication if discovered by a paranoid patient in addition to dangers for Mr. T who may misinterpret the side effects of the drugs he is unaware he is taking, or take other drugs that may interact with the drug he is receiving covertly.2 The primary objection to psychiatrists’ colluding in this is that using a third person to surreptitiously deliver medication to Mr. T is to betray his trust in the medical profession, and that this is unacceptable.Mr. T seems to have at best an ambivalent relationship with the medical profession. He seems unable to develop any long-term trust in them, and after a short time off his medication, any trust he may have developed disappears and he turns to his own judgement as to whether he is ill or not, ignoring the advice of his psychiatrist. The trust that the medical profession enjoys from patients is partly responsible for giving it its authority over their actions; and is partly why doctors and other health workers are offered great access to details about a person’s private life. Since this is so basic to the success of the doctor-patient relationship, but is also rather fragile, it is incumbent upon doctors to seek to retain their patients’ trust.So, in the usual situation, the patient and doctor... (shrink)

Science is popularly understood as being an ideal of impartial algorithmic objectivity that provides us with a realistic description of the world down to the last detail. The essays collected in this book—written by some of the leading experts in the field—challenge this popular image right at its heart, taking as their starting point that science trades not only in truth, but in fiction, too. With case studies that range from physics to economics and to biology, _Fictions in Science_ (...) reveals that fictions are as ubiquitous in scientific narratives and practice as they are in any other human endeavor, including literature and art. Of course scientific activity, most prominently in the formal sciences, employs logically precise algorithmic thinking. However, the key to the predictive and technological success of the empirical sciences might well lie elsewhere—perhaps even in scientists’ extraordinary creative imagination instead. As these essays demonstrate, within the bounds of what is empirically possible, a scientist’s capacity for invention and creative thinking matches that of any writer or artist. (shrink)

We present a meta-analytic review on the processing of negations in conditional reasoning about affirmation problems (Modus Ponens: "MP", Affirmation of the Consequent "AC") and denial problems (Denial of the Antecedent "DA", and Modus Tollens "MT"). Findings correct previous generalisations about the phenomena. First, the effects of negation in the part of the conditional about which an inference is made, are not constrained to denial problems. These inferential-negation effects are also observed on AC. Second, there generally are reliable effects (...) of a negation in the clause referred to by the categorical premise, and these referred-negation effects are constrained to the logically fallacious AC and DA inferences. All findings are presented and discussed in relation to contemporary mental model (MM) and mental logic (ML) theories. It is argued that a double-negation elimination hypothesis provides a sufficient explanation of inferential-negation effects within both MM theory and ML theory, if the latter is extended by a validating search for counter examples. Both MM and ML theories adhere to a processing scheme that allows them to incorporate an account of referred-negation effects based on the thesis that counter-example frequency is modulated by the scope of a contrast class delineated by a false affirmative. We conclude that MM and ML theories provide adequate processing schemes to accommodate for the explanatory hypotheses, at least in principle. In practice, both approaches remain equivocal as regards the connectivity and interactivity with long-term memory knowledge invoked in generating, manipulating, and testing the mental representations of negative state of affairs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.2 (2003) 133-134 [Access article in PDF] Fictional Beings J. M. Coetzee What Does It Mean, "To Understand"? A tennis coach is teaching a young player a forehand topspin drive. He does so with a mixture of demonstrations (nonverbal) and explanations (verbal), such as, "At the moment of impact you roll the wrist over like this" (demonstrates). The player tries the stroke again and again, (...) and each time the coach shakes his head and says, "You haven't got it yet." Then the player gets the stroke right. The coach says "Now you've got it! Now you understand! Now let's do it again!"Is this a legitimate use of the word understand? I think it is. The coach intends the following: At first you may have understood my words but from your actions—the practice strokes you played—I could not see that you had understood my meaning. Then, when you got the stroke right, and could repeat it, I saw that you had finally understood the meaning behind my words.Understanding is in this case the effective translation of words, or words plus demonstrations, into actions, where effectiveness can be easily measured. The translation is from a verbal, or mixed verbal, system into an entirely nonverbal system of electrochemical impulses.Conversely, one can picture an exhaustive analysis of forehand topspin drives by André Agassi, conducted by microphotography, implanted sensors, and so on, to issue in a mixed verbal and diagrammatic account of how Agassi plays the stroke. In this case the physiologic system of the stroke has been successfully translated into a (partially) verbal system. Again, it would be meaningful to say that the sports physiologist who does the analysis has come to understand how the stroke is played.Although in both these cases understanding is conceived of as a translation process, I concentrate from here onward on the translation process from the verbal to the nonverbal, exemplified by understanding how to play a particular stroke.The coach says X and the player tries to "do" X, but fails and fails, until finally he succeeds. When the player has at last "done" X, he has understood. Thereafter, by steps, the player ceases to depend on the coach and the coach's X: the player can do X by himself; he understands X in the sense that whenever he says X to himself he can do X. He has made X his own.I read The Sound and the Fury, the part devoted to Benjy. Benjy says X and I don't understand. I understand the words on the page one by one, many of the sentences I understand one by one in the sense that I can translate them into other English sentences, but I don't understand the logic that gets Benjy from one sentence to the next, I don't understand the references of many words that are usually referential, and sometimes I am baffled by the syntax.For whatever reason, I go on reading Benjy. In a few respects I begin to understand better. For instance, there are sentences that stop in midstride, and I begin to suspect that such sentences stop because Benjy does not want to think what [End Page 133] comes next—that is to say, that the Faulkner behind Benjy means me to understand that Benjy lacks the wherewithal to face what would naturally come next. Mainly, however, I remain in the dark.Then I begin to experience something interesting. I find that I am, in my mind, going through some of the movements of Benjy's language. I am, as it were, practicing the characteristic strokes of his game. Although I remain, for the most part, unable to translate his pages into connected discourse—that is, into a discourse in which the logical connection between one sentence and the next is, however faulty, at least clear—I am better and better able to "do" Benjy."Doing" Benjy in this case means more than parrot-like repetition of Benjy's words. I can now speak of "entering Benjy" in a way that makes sense. I... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 216-223 [Access article in PDF] Notes and Fragments Genre Fiction and "The Origin of the Work of Art" Nancy J. Holland I FIRST, A CONFESSION. Like, I suspect, many of my readers, I am an unpublished fiction writer. Unlike most of the closet fiction writers in academia, however, I write genre fiction. The question that immediately follows is how that (...) writing is related to the intellectual work I do in philosophy.This question, of course, is open to a broad range of answers, from the possibility that the two aren't related at all, to potential Freudian answers it might take years of therapy to unearth. Teaching informs one's life, however, as much as the reverse, and in teaching Martin Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art" to my Metaphysics class last year, I began to understand at least one dimension of the appeal that writing genre fiction has for me as a philosopher.But first, let me explain what I mean by genre fiction. In what follows, I will be referring primarily to four forms of genre fiction that have clear roots in the nineteenth century in Western Europe and North America: two gender-segregated genres, the western and the romance, and two gender-marked genres, science fiction and detective novels. I will be comparing these to two other forms of "popular culture" that also developed in the nineteenth century and have, I would argue, similar relationships to the older, more "legitimate," more elite art forms which they closely resemble: photography 1 and popular music, [End Page 216] especially those forms of popular music such as ragtime, blues, jazz, and rock that are informed by the African-American experience in the United States. 2These "low brow" art forms all appear to have arisen out of the growth of the middle class in developing parts of the world during the nineteenth century and the correlative confluence of greater leisure, greater aggregate prosperity, and higher levels of education across a broader spectrum of society. Further, these art forms all combine the surface appearance of their respective "high brow" correlate arts with the reassurance of repetition that is the cornerstone of the folk arts with which they are also correlated. Each of these forms of popular culture balances itself, then, between a demand for more and more "works of art" (and/or class aspirations based on the appearance of such) and a demand for the familiar in a rapidly changing, materially challenging world.Thus, photography gives us a frozen and thereby purified visual reality, an icon of memory to which we can return at will. The truth it reveals is most often starker than that of folk painting and portraiture, but also gives the appearance of being free from the subjectivity of the artist. Great iconic photographs such as the kiss on V-E day, I have heard it said, become more real than the reality they encapsulated.Popular music similarly combines often amazing musical complexity (which is not unknown, although rarer, in western folk music) with the reassurance of a form that not only repeats itself within a song, but also between songs of the same genre. Thus, blues can be recognized by both the minor chords in its melodies and the characteristic rhyme pattern of its lyrics. Moreover, most western popular music, even to some extent free-form jazz, has a familiar and reassuring beginning-middle-end structure, both melodically and dynamically, that locates a listener immediately within the song's "story-arc." 3This same beginning-middle-end structure is one clear hallmark of genre fiction. Another is repetition. We all immediately know the plot of a detective novel or science fiction adventure: where it will begin, what the key stages of the story will be, and how it will end—not just happily, but with a specific form of reassuring outcome, be it the victory of well-intentioned intelligence over cunning evil or humanity's ability to survive even the most alien (and so most familiar) of threats. At... (shrink)

Much has been said about the formative process that occurs via the “hidden curriculum” of medical education during which many students experience a disconnect between the professional values espoused within the formal curriculum and the implicit values communicated through interactions with peers and mentors. Less attention, however, has been paid to the formation of the future medical self that takes place during students’ premedical years, a time in which many undergraduate students seek out immersive clinical experiences —such as medical scribing— (...) before applying to medical school. Despite the fact that medical scribes undoubtedly are affected by their clinical experiences, scribes are rarely offered opportunities to reflect on them. The authors contend that the developmental processes of medical scribes, especially those who intend on pursuing a career in the health professions, ought to be supported. This can be achieved, at least in part, through engaging in well-designed reflective sessions with other scribes. Encouraging students to reflect on their experiences can help them make sense of troubling events and give voice to the inconsistencies and value conflicts within medical practice that are so often ignored. The authors describe the development of their new Reflective Scribe program and offer suggestions for future directions. (shrink)

Aristotle is no exception in seeing a connection between causation and necessity, and teleological causation is no exception for Aristotle. His discussions of teleology in the Physics and in Parts of Animals i 1 both make this connection explicitly, by presenting final causation as involving necessity ‘from a hypothesis (ex hupotheseôs)’, usually referred to in the literature as ‘hypothetical necessity’. Hypothetical necessity is evidently invoked to express the thought that, given the functions and activities of living things, certain of their (...) features cannot be otherwise. Further, it appears that these necessity claims are meant to have explanatory force: that is, it seems that according to Aristotle, to grasp that A hypothetically necessitates B is to understand, at least in part, why B is the case. The trouble is that while Aristotle and his commentators do indeed seem to think that his appeals to hypothetical necessity are supposed to have explanatory power, their various glosses on the notion make it difficult to see how this could be the case. That is, he and his commentators seem, contrary to their intentions, to present appeals to hypothetical necessity as exemplifying patterns of inference that do not, in fact, have explanatory power. The challenge, then, is to provide an understanding of hypothetical necessity that allows us say how the patterns of inference invoking it are successful as explanations, and to distinguish them from patterns of inference that are not. I suggest that if we look in closer detail at the patterns of explanation Aristotle associates with hypothetical necessity, and the ways in which these are supposed to be distinctive, we can offer an account of what hypothetical necessity is and how it can have explanatory power. (shrink)

At least since the time of Aristotle, it has been widely accepted that “man is by nature a social animal”. We eat, sleep, talk, laugh, cry, love, fight and create in ways that integrally depend on others and the social norms that we collectively generate and maintain. Yet in spite of the widely accepted importance of human sociality in underlying our daily activities, its exact manifestation and function is consistently overlooked by many academic disciplines. Cognitive science, for example, regularly (...) neglects the manner in which social interactions and interactively generated norms canalise and constitute our cognitive processes. Without the inescapable ubiquity of dynamic social norms, any given agent simply could not cognise as a human. In this thesis, I aim to use a range of insights – from phenomenology, social psychology, neuroscience, cultural anthropology and gender studies – to clarify the role of sociality for human life. More specifically, the thesis can be broadly separated into three parts. I begin with a broad explanation of how human agents are fundamentally tied to worldly entities and other agents in a way that characterises their ontological existence. In chapters 3 and 4, I criticise two recent and much-discussed theories of social cognition – namely, we-mode cognition and participatory sense-making – for failing to make intelligible the social constitution of human existence. In the later chapters, I then propose foundations for a more satisfactory theory of social cognition, as well as explicating a view of human selfhood as ‘biosocial’, such that even the autonomy of biological bodies is socially codified from a human perspective. Taken together, the aforementioned chapters should contribute to calls for a new direction in social cognitive science, whilst also yielding novel insights into the nature of human selfhood. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Marcia Muelder Eaton ANTHONY POWELL AND THE AESTHETIC LIFE Anthony POWELL'S work has been looked at carefully by relatively few critical scholars, in spite of the fact that he has been called "the most elegant writer presently working in the English language." ' I am surprised at how little he is read — at least in the United States. He is a splendid writer, often entertaining, always a (...) skilled craftsman. His earlier novels {Afternoon Men, 1931; Venusberg, 1932; From a View to a Death, 1933; Agents and Patients, 1936; and What's Become of Waring, 1939) are short satiric and ironic comedies dealing mainly with London bohemia in the 1920s. His later fictional work is a twelve volume tour de force (A Question of Upbringing, 1951; A Buyer's Market, 1952; The Acceptance World, 1955; At Lady Molly's, 1957; Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, 1960; The Kindly Ones, 1962; The Valley of Bones, 1964; The Soldier's Art, 1966; The Military Philosophers, 1968; Books Do Furnish a Room, 1971; Temporary Kings, 1973; Hearing Secret Harmonies, 1975) 2 in which the narrator, NicholasJenkins, attempts, with varying degrees of success, to make sense of life as A Dance to the Music of Time. Both the early and later works are populated by many characters. Manageable in the short, independent novels, they become so numerous in the interdependent volumes of Dance that several critics are dubious about anyone's keeping them straight; had I read them as they were published — with months, sometimes years and the novels of others between appearances — I am sure it would have been impossible to keep track of the minor characters. In 1960, Time and Tide published a cast ofcharacters for "readers who find it difficult to remember from book to book details of family and other more tenuous relationships between characters who have a habit of popping up surprisingly in the most unexpected places."3 The entries provide the following kinds of information: "McReith, Lady (Gwen): friend of Babs Templer and Jimmy Stripling; goes to bed with 166 Marcia Muelder Eaton167 Peter Templer when staying in the Templer (senior) house.... Tolland, George: son of Lord Warminster: was in Coldstream for some years then went into city. Very correct." More recently Hilary Spurling has compiled a book-length guide to the plots and characters ofDance. It also includes an index of books, paintings, and places referred to.4 Even with these guides there are loose ends, and it is not always clear what functions certain minor characters serve. Nonetheless, the popping-up in unexpected places is, as I hope to show, essential to the theme of the work. Powell is by no means universally acclaimed; his novels have been described as "contrived,"5 and "pseudo-Proustian" and "blandly snobbish."6 The early novels have been said to "tell about 'twentyish emancipation, silly parties at which drunks behave stupidly, ambitious young men on the make for the daughters of fox-hunting families, all with an air of slightness and couldn't-care less." 7 And Dance has likewise been scorned: To begin with, each character is introduced as he first appears to the narrator, who immediately speculates for three or four pages on the probable nature of a character who is blond, has small ears, and wears a black overcoat. The overcoat then says a few desultory words, whereupon the narrator takes several pages of pain to modify his original opinion in the light of this additional evidence.8 Like all parodies, these have some truth in them. But it is simplistic to describe his work in these terms — it amounts to painting in colors far too crude what is an enormously subtle picture of life. Powell's "easy modulations," as John Russell has called his novels,9 capture intricacies of human behavior and interaction in a profound and original way. And Powell's focus on ritual and the attempts of people to play chosen roles, ultimately provides a genuinely metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic interpretation of life. It is hopeless to try to provide a synopsis of the twelve volumes. The novels follow Nicholas Jenkins from his school days to late middle age. Friends such as Peter Templer, Charles... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Welcome To The Pharmacy: Addiction, Transcendence, and Virtual RealityAnn Weinstone (bio)1. The Question of Addiction and TranscendenceIt has become a truism to say that virtual reality (VR) is addictive. Case, the protagonist of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, dreams of connection to the net like a junkie jonesing for a fix. In Jeff Noon’s novel Vurt, you get to cyberspace by tickling the back of your throat with addictive, government-produced feathers. (...) Verity of Kathleen Ann Goonan’s Queen City Jazz sports nanotechnology implants that compel her to enter virtual worlds into which she sinks with feelings of deep bliss. As in Vurt, in Pat Cadigan’s Synners, everything’s an addiction: cyberspace, people, rock and roll.But let’s move away from fiction. Graphic cyberartist Nicole Stenger, a self-professed neo-Platonist, writes, “[a]nd what if the passage to a new level of humanity actually meant abolishing indeed the natural one, or at least some part of it?... Will it not require immense effort to recover from this enhancement of the senses, from this habit of perfection? [Stenger 57]. Michael Benedikt, editor of Cyberspace: First Steps, deems VR “a new and irresistible development in the elaboration of human culture and business under the sign of technology” [1; my emphasis]. Ad copy for “Origin,” a VR game, reads, “You must die to learn how to live.... Death is not an option. It’s an addiction.” And an article in the New York Times titled “The Lure and Addiction of Life on Line” displays a graphic of a bespectacled male, tapping away at a computer located inside of a panopticon-sized rendering of a globe to which the avid user is happily chained [see Asciu]. From advertisements to scholarly texts, it is difficult to find any writing about VR that does not engage in and, as I will argue, rely upon the rhetorics of addiction. William Gibson dubbed cyberspace a “consensual hallucination.” That was 1984. In 1996, critic Robert Markley rechristened VR “a consensual cliché” [56]. Surely, the “addictiveness” of cyberspace contributes to the sense of tired familiarity. My question is this: Why does cyberspace have to be addictive? What work is addiction doing in discourses of virtual reality?In this essay, I’m concerned with the production of what might be called hyper-real transcendence. Jean Baudrillard, in his influential schema “three orders of simulacra,” identifies a first, “natural” order in which “a transcendent world, a radically different universe, is portrayed... in contrast to the continent of the real” [309]. I propose that a third-order, hyper-real, transcendence has survived the collapse of the distance between the model and the original. This transcendence relies on rhetorics of disembodiment, [End Page 77] immortality, and extra-human reproductive and generative powers within virtual spaces. Such spaces include scholarly and technical essays about VR or cyberspace, science fiction, advertisements for VR games, VR game narratives, and other advertising copy that borrows from current discourses of virtuality. My discussion takes place in a field crowded with talk of the death of logocentrism and the end of phonocentric culture. 1 Derrida has written that “scientific language [e.g. computer code] challenges intrinsically and with increasing profundity the ideal of phonetic writing” [Grammatology 10], the logocentric relation of voice to mental experiences. Baudrillard writes mournfully that the “third-order” world of simulated simulacra, of hyper-reality, leaves “no room for any kind of transcendentalism” [310]. Baudrillard and Derrida write with differing affects of the same effect—the waning or death of the foundation of Western notions of transcendence. In this tradition, transcendence commences with the penetration of the self by a supra-enlivened Other, whether that other be a king, a god, nature, the voice of logos, the Law, or an abstracted version of vitality itself. Particularly, I question the persistent coupling of rhetorics of transcendence with rhetorics of addiction. My initial point will be that following the established Western logocentric tradition, rhetorical relationships of addiction between VR users and VR narratives are the “software” with which hyper-real transcendence is produced and sustained. In other words, VR demands, as the price of transcendence, that the user become of the medium... (shrink)

This guide accompanies the following article: Matthew Kieran, ‘Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)moral Character of Art Works and Inter‐Relations to Artistic Value’. Philosophy Compass 1/2 (2006): pp. 129–143, doi: 10.1111/j.1747‐9991.2006.00019.x Author’s Introduction Up until fairly recently it was philosophical orthodoxy – at least within analytic aesthetics broadly construed – to hold that the appreciation and evaluation of works as art and moral considerations pertaining to them are conceptually distinct. However, following on from the idea that artistic value (...) is broader than aesthetic value, the last 15 years has seen an explosion of interest in exploring possible inter‐relations between the appreciative and ethical character of works as art. Consideration of these issues has a distinguished philosophical history but as the Compass survey article suggests (‘Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)Moral Character of Art Works and Inter‐Relations to Artistic Value.’Philosophy Compass 1.2 (2006): 129–43), it is only very recently that figures in the field have returned to it to develop more precisely what they take the relationships to be and why. Consensus is, unsurprisingly, lacking. The reinvigoration of the issues has led sophisticated formalists or autonomists to mount a more considered defence of the idea that aesthetic and literary values are indeed conceptually distinct from the justification or otherwise of the moral perspective or views endorsed in a work (Topic I). The challenges presented by such a defence are many but amongst them are appeals to critical practice (Lamarque and Olsen), scepticism about whether or not art really can give us bona fide knowledge (Stolnitz) and the recognition that truth often seems to be far removed from what it is we value in our appreciation of works (Lamarque). One way to motivate consideration of the relevance of a work’s moral character to its artistic value concerns the phenomena of imaginative resistance. At least sometimes it would seem that, as Hume originally suggested, we either cannot or will not enter imaginatively into the perspective solicited by a work due to its morally problematic character (Topic II). In some cases, it would seem that as a matter of psychological fact, we cannot do so since it is impossible for us to imagine how it could be that a certain attitude or action is morally permissible or good (Walton). The question then is whether or not this is a function of morality in particular or constraints on imaginative possibility more generally and what else is involved. At other times, the phenomena seem to be driven by a moral reluctance to allow ourselves to enter into the dramatic perspective involved (Moran) or evaluation of the attitude expressed (Stokes). Nonetheless, it is far from obvious that this is so of all the attitudes or responses we judge to be morally problematic. After all, it looks like we can and indeed often do suspend or background particular cognitive and moral commitments in engaging with all sorts of works (Nichols and Weinberg). If the moral character of a work interacts with how we appreciate and evaluate them, then the pressing question is this: is there any systematic account of the relationship available to us? One way is to consider the relationship between our emotional responses to works and their moral character (Topic III). After all, art works often solicit various emotional responses from us to follow the work and make use of moral concepts in so doing (Carroll). Indeed, whether or not a work merits the sought for emotional responses often seems to be internally related to ethical considerations (Gaut). Yet, it is not obvious that we should apply our moral concepts or respond emotionally in our imaginative engagement with works as art as we should in real life (Kieran, Jacobson). A different route is via the thought that art can convey knowledge (Topic IV). There might be particular kinds of moral knowledge art distinctively suited to conveying (Nussbaum) or it may just be that art does so particularly effectively (Carroll, Gaut, Kieran). Either way where this can be tied to the artistic means and appreciation of a work it would seem that to cultivate moral understanding contributes to the value of a work and to betray misunderstanding is a defect. Without denying the relevance of the moral character of a work some authors have wanted to claim that sometimes the immoral aspect of a work can contribute to rather than lessen its artistic value (Topic V). One route is to claim that there is no systematic theoretical account of the relationship available and what the right thing to say is depends on the particular case involved (Jacobson). Another involves the claim that this is so when the defect connects up in an appropriate way to one of the values of art. Thus, it has been claimed, only where a work reveals something which adds to intelligibility, knowledge or understanding in virtue of its morally problematic aspect can this be so (Kieran). The latter position looks like it could in principle be held whilst nonetheless maintaining that the typical or standard relationship is as the moralists would have it. Yet perhaps allowing valence change for such reasons is less a mark of principled explanation and more a function of downright inconsistency or incoherence (Harold). The topics themselves and suggested readings given below follow the structure articulated above as further amplified in the Compass survey article. The design and structure given below can be easily compressed or expanded further. Author Recommends 1 Carroll, Noël. ‘Art, Narrative and Moral Understanding.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 126–60. 2 This article develops the idea that engaging with narrative art calls on moral concepts and emotions and can thereby clarify our moral understanding. 2 Carroll, Noël. Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 4 Part IV consists of six distinct essays on questions concerning the inter‐relations between art and morality including the essay cited above and the author’s articulation and defence of moderate moralism. 3 Gaut, Berys. ‘The Ethical Criticism of Art.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 182–203. 4 Gaut, Berys. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. 7 This monograph provides the most exhaustive treatment of the issues and defends the claim that, where relevant, whenever a work is morally flawed it is of lesser value as art and wherever it is morally virtuous the work’s value as art is enhanced. Chapters 7 and 8 defend concern ethical knowledge and chapter 10 is a development of the article cited above concerning emotional responses. Chapter 3 also gives a useful conceptual map of the issues and options in the debate. 5 Jacobson, Daniel. ‘In Praise of Immoral Art.’Philosophical Topics 25 (1997): 155–99. 9 A wide ranging and extended treatment of relevant issues which objects to generalising moral treatments of our responses to art works and defends the idea that particular works can be better because of rather than despite their moral defects. 6 Kieran, Matthew. ‘Forbidden Knowledge: The Challenge of Cognitive Immoralism.’Art and Morality. Ed. Sebastian Gardner and José Luis Bermúdez. London: Routledge, 2003. 56–73. 11 A general argument for immoralism is elaborated by outlining when, where and why a work’s morally problematic character can contribute to its artistic value for principled reasons (through enhancing moral understanding). 7 Kieran, Matthew. Revealing Art. London: Routledge, 2005. Chapter 4. 13 This chapter argues against both aestheticism and straightforward moralism about art, elaborating a defence of immoralism in relation to visual art whilst ranging over issues from pornographic art to the nature and demands of different genres in art. 8 Lamarque, Peter. ‘Cognitive Values in the Arts: Marking the Boundaries.’ Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, 127–39. 15 This article concisely outlines and defends a sophisticated aestheticism that denies the importance of truth to artistic value. 9 Stolnitz, Jerome. ‘On the Cognitive Triviality of Art.’British Journal of Aesthetics 32.3 (1992): 191–200. 17 This article articulates and defends the claim that no knowledge of any interesting or significant kind can be afforded by works appreciated and evaluated as art. 10 Walton, Kendall. ‘Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality, I.’Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. 68 (1994): 27–51. 19 This article builds on some comments from Hume to develop the idea that when engaging with fictions it seems impossible imaginatively to enter into radically deviant moral attitudes. Online Materials ‘Aesthetics and Ethics: The State of the Art.’American Society of Aesthetics online (Jeffrey Dean):. ‘Art, Censorship and Morality’ downloadable podcast of Nigel Warburton interviewing Matthew Kieran at Tate Britain (BBC/ou Open2.net as part of the Ethics Bites series):. ‘Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)Moral Character of Art Works and Inter‐Relations to Artistic Value.’Philosophy Compass 1.2 (2006): 129–43 (Matthew Kieran):. ‘Ethical Criticism of Art.’Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Ella Peek):. ‘Fascinating Fascism.’New York Review of Books Piece Discussing Leni Riefenstahl (Susan Sontag):. ‘The Beheading of St. John the Baptist (1450s), Giovanni de Paolo’ (Tom Lubbock):. Vladimir Nabokov and Lionel Trilling discuss Lolita (CBS):. Sample Syllabus Topic I Autonomism/aestheticism • Anderson, James C. and Jeffrey T. Dean. ‘Moderate Autonomism.’British Journal of Aesthetics 38.2 (1998): 150–66. • Beardsley, Monroe. Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958. Chapter 12. • Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement.Trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1952 [1790]. • Lamarque, Peter. ‘Cognitive Values in the Arts: Marking the Boundaries.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, 127–39. • ——. ‘Tragedy and Moral Value.’Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73.2 (1995): 239–49. • Lamarque, Peter and Stein Olsen. Truth, Fiction and Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Chapter 10. • Stolnitz, Jerome. ‘On the Cognitive Triviality of Art.’British Journal of Aesthetics 32.3 (1992): 191–200. Topic II Imaginative Capacities, Intelligibility and Resistance • Moran, Richard. ‘The Expression of Feeling in Imagination.’Philosophical Review 103.1 (1994): 75–106. • Nichols, Shaun. ‘Just the Imagination: Why Imagining Doesn’t Behave Like Believing’. Mind & Language 21.4 (2006): 459–74. • Stokes, Dustin. ‘The Evaluative Character of Imaginative Resistance’. British Journal of Aesthetics 46.4 (2006): 387–405. • Tanner, Michael. ‘Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality, II’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 68 (1994): 51–66. • Walton, Kendall (1994). ‘Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality, I’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 68 (1994): 27–51. • Weinberg, Jonathan. ‘Configuring the Cognitive Imagination.’New Waves in Aesthetics. Eds. K. Stock and K. Thomson‐Jones. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 203–23. Topic III Moralism and Emotions • Carroll, Noël. ‘Moderate Moralism.’British Journal of Aesthetics 36.3 (1996): 223–37. • Carroll, Noël. ‘Art, Narrative and Moral Understanding.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.126–60. • Gaut, Berys. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Chapter 10. • ——. ‘The Ethical Criticism of Art.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 182–203. • Hume, David. ‘Of the Standard of Taste.’Selected Essays. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993 [1757]. 133–53. • Kieran, Matthew. ‘Emotions, Art and Immorality.’Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of Emotions. Ed. Peter Goldie. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. 681–703. • Tolstoy, Leo. What is Art?. London: Penguin, 2004. Chapters 5 and 15. Topic IV Moralism and Knowledge • Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. M. Heath. London: Penguin, 1996 [367–322 BC]. • Carroll, Noël. ‘The Wheel of Virtue: Art, Literature and Moral Knowledge.’Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60.1 (2002): 3–26. • Gaut, Berys. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Chapters 7 and 8. • Gaut, Berys. ‘Art and Cognition.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 115–26. • Kieran, Matthew. ‘Art, Imagination and the Cultivation of Morals.’Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54.4 (1996): 337–51. • Nussbaum, Martha. ‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible: Literature and the Moral Imagination.’Love’s Knowledge. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. 148–68. • Plato. The Republic. Trans. D. Lee. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. Book 10. Topic V Immoralist Contextualism • Harold, James. ‘Immoralism and the Valence Constraint.’British Journal of Aesthetics 48.1 (2008): 45–64. • Jacobson, Daniel. ‘In Praise of Immoral Art.’Philosophical Topics 25 (1997): 155–99. • ——. ‘Ethical Criticism and the Vices of Moderation.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 342–55. • John, Eileen. ‘Artistic Value and Moral Opportunism.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 331–41. • Kieran, Matthew. ‘Forbidden Knowledge:The Challenge of Cognitive Immoralism.’Art and Morality. Ed. Sebastian Gardner and José Luis Bermúdez. London: Routledge, 2003. 56–73. • Kieran, Matthew. Revealing Art. London: Routledge, 2005. Chapter 4. • Patridge, Stephanie. ‘Moral Vices as Artistic Virtues: Eugene Onegin and Alice.’Philosophia 36.2 (2008): 181–93. Focus Questions 1 What is the strongest argument for the claim that the moral character of a work is not relevant to its artistic value? Does artistic or literary criticism tend to concern itself with the truth or morality of works? If so, in what ways? If not, why do you think this is? 2 What different explanations might there be for difficulty with or resistance to imaginatively entering into attitudes you take to be immoral? How might this relate to the way our imaginings work as contrasted with belief? How might different literary or artistic treatments of the same subject matter make a difference? 3 How do narrative works draw on our moral concepts and responses? Can we suspend our normal moral commitments or application of moral concepts in responding emotionally to art works? Should we respond emotionally to art works as we ought to respond to real world events we witness? Why? Why not? 4 How, if at all, do art works convey moral understanding? How, if at all, is this related to the kinds of moral knowledge art works can teach or reveal to us? When, where and why might this be tied to the artistic value of a work? How can we tell where a work enhances our moral understanding as opposed to misleading or distorting it? 5 What art works do you value overall as art which commend or endorse moral values and attitudes that you do not? Is appreciation of them always marred or lessened by the morally dubious aspect? If not, what explains the differences in evaluation? What, if anything, might you learn by engaging with works which endorse moral attitudes or apply moral concepts different from those you take to be justified? How, if at all, might this connect up with what makes them valuable as art? (shrink)

Many countries around the world embrace freedom and democracy as part of their political culture. However, culture is at least in part a human response to the ecological challenges that a society faces; hence, it should not be surprising that the degree to which societies regulate the level of individual freedom is related to environmental circumstances. Previous research suggests that levels of societal freedom across countries are systematically related to three types of ecological threats: prevalence of pathogens, (...) climate challenges, and natural disaster threat. Though their incidence overlaps, the literature has not yet provided a competitive test. Drawing upon the ecocultural framework, we tested five rival hypotheses, alternately focused on the above ecological factors and their interactions with economic wealth in explaining country variations in socio-political freedom. Focusing on data from 150 countries, we performed a series of linear mixed-effects regressions predicting freedom in the domains of politics, media, and economy. We found that countries with higher pathogen prevalence were more likely to suppress democracy and media freedom. Economic wealth, however, moderated the effect of pathogen prevalence on economic freedom, with the main effect being only found among wealthy countries, but not among poor countries. In contrast, natural disaster threat predicted political freedom and press freedom only among poor countries, consistent with the idea that disaster threat accompanied by poor resources promote socio-political freedom as a means of increasing collective survival. Throughout our analyses, we found no support for hypotheses based on climatic challenges. In addition, our multilevel approach revealed that country scores for socio-political freedom were highly clustered within world regions, accounting for substantial portions of variance. Overall, the present research offers a nuanced view of the interplay between ecology and wealth in the emergence of socio-political freedom. We discuss new directions in future research considering methodological and theoretical contributions of the present findings. (shrink)