This chapter brings together important contributions from geographers, historians, sociologists and media theorists, and looks at these through the lens of social philosophy on the nature of resistance and oppression, to articulate and understand both the positive and negative ways in which industrial nostalgia shapes present-day working-class identities. Celebrations of abandoned industrial sites have been criticised by some as inflicting a form of violence on working-class people (High and Lewis 2007), transforming sites of working-class loss into objects of nostalgic appreciation (...) in ways which marginalise those who worked there, and which close the past off from the working-class present (Lasch 1991). More positive views about industrial nostalgia argue that it provides a way to assert working-class pride in hostile environments, serving as a basis for present-day solidarity (Loveday 2014; Gibbs 2021). By examining this existing literature on deindustrialisation through a social philosophical perspective, our aim here is to shed some light on this phenomenon, in which industrial nostalgia can function both as a tool of oppression but also as a form of resistance against oppression. (shrink)

Statistics play a critical role in biological and clinical research. To promote logically consistent representation and classification of statistical entities, we have developed the Ontology of Biological and Clinical Statistics (OBCS). OBCS extends the Ontology of Biomedical Investigations (OBI), an OBO Foundry ontology supported by some 20 communities. Currently, OBCS contains 686 terms, including 381 classes imported from OBI and 147 classes specific to OBCS. The goal of this paper is to present OBCS for community critique and to describe a (...) number of use cases designed to illustrate its potential applications. The OBCS project and source code are available at http://obcs.googlecode.com. (shrink)

Statistics play a critical role in biological and clinical research. However, most reports of scientific results in the published literature make it difficult for the reader to reproduce the statistical analyses performed in achieving those results because they provide inadequate documentation of the statistical tests and algorithms applied. The Ontology of Biological and Clinical Statistics (OBCS) is put forward here as a step towards solving this problem. Terms in OBCS, including ‘data collection’, ‘data transformation in statistics’, ‘data visualization’, ‘statistical data (...) analysis’, and ‘drawing a conclusion based on data’, cover the major types of statistical processes used in basic biological research and clinical outcome studies. OBCS is aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and extends the Ontology of Biomedical Investigations (OBI), an OBO (Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies) Foundry ontology supported by over 20 research communities. We discuss two examples illustrating how the ontology is being applied. In the first (biological) use case, we describe how OBCS was applied to represent the high throughput microarray data analysis of immunological transcriptional profiles in human subjects vaccinated with an influenza vaccine. In the second (clinical outcomes) use case, we applied OBCS to represent the processing of electronic health care data to determine the associations between hospital staffing levels and patient mortality. Our case studies were designed to show how OBCS can be used for the consistent representation of statistical analysis pipelines under two different research paradigms. By representing statistics-related terms and their relations in a rigorous fashion, OBCS facilitates standard data analysis and integration, and supports reproducible biological and clinical research. (shrink)

In recent years, a significant body of literature has emerged on the subject of epistemic injustice: wrongful harms done to people in their capacities as knowers. Up to now this literature has ignored the role that attention has to play in epistemic injustice. This paper makes a first step towards addressing this gap. We argue that giving someone less attention than they are due, which we call an epistemic attention deficit, is a distinct form of epistemic injustice. We begin by (...) outlining what we mean by epistemic attention deficits, which we understand as a failure to pay someone the attention they are due in their role as an epistemic agent. We argue that these deficits constitute epistemic injustices for two reasons. First, they affect someone’s ability to influence what others believe. Second, they affect one’s ability to influence the shared common ground in which testimonial exchanges take place. We then outline the various ways in which epistemic attention deficits harm those who are subject to them. We argue that epistemic attention deficits are harms in and of themselves because they deprive people of an essential component of epistemic agency. Moreover, epistemic attention deficits reduce an agent’s ability to participate in valuable epistemic practices. These two forms of harm have important impacts on educational performance and the distribution of resources. Finally, we argue that epistemic attention deficits both hinder and shape the development of epistemic agency. We finish by exploring some practical implications arising from our discussion. (shrink)

Since the 1960s, many artists have incorporated ecological concerns into their work, an endeavor that has required new strategies in art-making. To explore recent American manifestations of these interests, the David and Alfred Smart Museum commissioned new projects from artists Mark Dion, Peter Fend, and Dan Peterman, each focusing on interrelationships between particular organisms—human beings-and a specific group of sites—a museum building, a river landscape, and a university campus. The results, exhibited at the Smart Museum during the summer of (...) 2000, evoke the varied scales, from the microscopic to the global, at which human actions affect the environment. This catalog documents each of the artists' projects through an array of images and words: Smart Museum Associate Curator Stephanie Smith provides an introduction and brief overviews of the three projects, each of the artists contribute statements, and photographers Susan Anderson and Tom van Eynde document—in over 100 images—the processes and projects that comprise the exhibition. (shrink)

What role should a motivation to do the right thing, read de dicto, play in the life of a virtuous agent? According to a prominent argument from Michael Smith, those who are only motivated by such a desire are moral fetishists. Since Smith’s argument, a number of philosophers have examined what role this desire would play in the life of the morally virtuous agent. My primary aim in this paper is an historical one. I will show that much (...) of this discussion can be found in Adam Smith’s The Theory of the Moral Sentiments (1764), published over two hundred years before Michael Smith’s The Moral Problem. I will then argue that there is an important insight to be found in Adam Smith’s book that is missing from the contemporary discussion. According to Adam Smith, while a de dicto desire to do the right thing can play an important role in the life of a virtuous agent, the person who is only ever motivated by this desire will often be epistemically disadvantaged compared to the person who possesses the appropriate sentiments. I will argue that Adam Smith’s claim is plausible given his own view of the moral sentiments as providing the foundation of morality. In addition, there is good reason to accept Smith’s claim even for those who do not accept his view of the foundational role of the moral sentiments. (shrink)

Edmund Gettier (1963) argued that there can be justified true belief (JTB) that is not knowledge. I question the correctness of his argument by showing that Smith of Gettier’s famous examples does not earn justification for his incidentally true beliefs, while a doxastically more conscientious person S would come to hold justified but false beliefs. So, Gettier’s (and analogous) cases do not result in justified _and_ true belief. This is due to a tension between deductive closure of justification and (...) evidential support. For being justified, any believing, disbelieving, or withholding of deductively inferred propositions must be distributed proportionally to given evidential support. This proportionality principle has primacy over deductive closure in case of conflict. My argument does not save the JTB-account. But, instead of merely referring to an intuition, it explains why subjects in Gettier situations do not earn knowledge. (shrink)

Historians of the Victorian period have begun to re-evaluate the general background and impact of Darwin's theory of the origin of species by means of natural selection. An emerging picture suggests that the Darwinian theory of evolution was only one aspect of a more general change in intellectual positions. It is possible to summarize two correlated developments in the second half of the nineteenth century: the seculariszation of majors areas of thought, and the increasing breakdown of a common intellectual milieu. (...) Studies in linguistics, historical criticism, socio-political theory, theologys, and anthropology, besides evolutionary theory, contributed to these developments. It has also been argued that the background of evolutionary thought lay within a relatively unified early Victorian intellectual context with shared religious, moral, and scientific concepts. Evolutionary theory contributed to the disintegration of this shared context, but it did not intrinsically assume a clear demarcation between value-laden ideas and scientific ideas. On the one hand, in the later Victorian period, religious and scientific intellectuals found it increasingly hard to share common ground. On the other hand, they did sometimes share an enthusiasm for applying biological models to social and ethical theory. It is necessary to look closely before ascribing any increased differentiation of positions to the impact of evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom has had it that the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace and his colleague Henry Walter Bates journeyed to the Amazon in 1848 with two intentions in mind: to collect natural history specimens, and to consider evidential materials that might reveal the causal basis of organic evolution. This understanding has been questioned recently by the historian John van Wyhe, who points out that with regard to the second matter, at least, there appears to be no evidence of a “smoking (...) gun” variety proving it so. In the present essay the circumstances of Wallace’s interest in the matter are reviewed, and van Wyhe is taken to task with alternate explanations for the facts he introduces in his argument. The conclusion is that Wallace almost certainly did have the second objective in mind when he left for both the Amazon, and the Far East. Keywords: Alfred Russel Wallace, Henry Walter Bates, evolution, natural selection. (shrink)

This study argues that the 18th century, so long regarded as the age of reason, should also be considered the age of passions. Eighteenth-century writers began to explore self-interest, sociability and love, and to manipulate them in ways that would have momentous consequences for the development of Western culture. When carefully cultivated: self-interest led to prudent behaviour and national improvement; sociability contributed to inter-group harmony and national identity; the powerful attraction between the sexes metamorphosed into politics and altruism.

In `Underestimating Self-Control' (1997a), I argued that Jeanette Kennett and Michael Smith (1996) underestimate our capacity for synchronic self-control. They argued for a solution to a puzzle about such self-control that features non-actional exercises' of self-control. I argued in response that `a more robust, actional exercise of self-control is open to agents in scenarios of the sort in question' (1997a: 119). They disagree (Kennett and Smith 1997).In Mele 1997a, I resisted the temptation to criticize Kennett and Smith's (...) attempted resolution, because I thought it better to concentrate on sketching an alternative resolution. Here, I will argue that the resolution they offer is problematic and reply to their criticism (1997) of my suggested resolution. (shrink)

John E. Smith has contributed to contemporary philosophy in primarily four distinct capacities; first, as a philosopher of religion and God; second, as an indefatigable defender of philosophical reflection in its classical sense ( a sense inclusive of, but not limited to, metaphysics); third, as a participant in the reconstruction of experience and reason so boldly inaugurated by Hegel then redically transformed by the classical American pragmatists, and significantly augmented by such thinkers as Josiah Royce, william Earnest Hocking, and (...) Alfred North Whitehead; fourth, as an interpreter of philosophical texts and traditions (Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche no less than Charles Peirce, WIlliam James and John Dewey; German idealism as well as American; the Augustinian tradition no less than the pragmatic). Reason, Experience, and God provides an important and comprehensive look at the work of John E. Smith by collected essays which each address aspects of his life-long work. A response by John E. Smith himself draws a line of continuity between the pieces. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.2 (2005) 97-103 [Access article in PDF] MoMA as Educator: The Legacy of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Ralph A. Smith Professor Emeritus University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art by Sybil Gordon Kantor. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002, xxv, 472 pp., $39.95. ISBN 0-262-11258-2 Sybil Kantor's history of the (...) intellectual origins of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an engaging account of Alfred Barr, Jr.'s, pivotal role in acquainting an American audience with the modernist movement in art that had developed in Europe and the Soviet Union in the first part of the twentieth century. Scrupulously documented, Kantor's narrative relies heavily on interviews with Barr's contemporaries, his publications, and his extensive correspondence. She also limns portraits of major figures who either influenced his ideas or were instrumental in establishing MoMA. Although the book is very informative about modern art, according to its author it is not intended to be strictly a history of that art. Rather, it is devoted to Barr's early development, his personal characteristics, his attitude toward the cultural and political climate of the times, his definitions of modernism and formalism, and finally, his legacy.Kantor traces Barr's career through the decade of the 1920s, which culminated in his being named the first director of MoMA in 1929; the expansive years of the 1930s and 1940s when, as Kantor puts it, Barr and the museum were at full throttle; and the later years when Barr was relieved of his director's responsibilities to allow him to spend more time on writing and the mounting of exhibitions. He retired from the museum in 1967, began to show signs of ill health in the mid-1970s, and died at the age of 79 in 1981. The Early Years Barr began his studies in the history of art at Princeton where he took courses with Frank Jewett Mather, who taught about modern art, and with Charles Rufus Morey, a distinguished medievalist whose teaching ranged beyond the architecture and sculpture of the Middle Ages to the other arts of that era. Morey's example of comprehensiveness would later stimulate Barr to think along similar lines about modern art and the organization of MoMA. At Harvard's graduate school Barr learned the skills of connoisseurship and museum management from Paul Sachs whose students went on to become directors of major museums across America. Sachs also encouraged Barr's interest in modern art and provided him with numerous letters of [End Page 97] introduction to scholars and museum directors — and occasionally withfunds for his travels.1 Lincoln Kirstein was a close friend, art critic, and earlyally, while Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Walter Gropius, and Philip Johnson significantly affected Barr's understanding of architecture. A large cast of artists, patrons, collectors, writers, trustees, and editors of "little magazines"(so-called because of their relatively small numbers of readers) also enter the scene and play various roles. A few words are in order about Barr himself who, Kantor says, exhibited more rebelliousness, a larger vision, and greater discipline than most of those around him. Barr the Man Kantor portrays a mind and sensibility possessed of exceptional discernment for the new, the difficult, and the worthwhile in the art of the early twentieth century. Barr's feeling for order, organization, and clarity of relations; his commitment to perfection, freedom, and truth; and his faith in the capacity of modern art to overcome prejudices and improve the taste of Americans are not merely reflections of the disciplinary habits inculcated by Barr's Presbyterian upbringing. They also reveal the classical tastes acquired through his art-historical studies and echo the temper of the age.The time — the 1920s through the 1940s — valued both the rationalism of science with its methods of problem solving and the insights of psychoanalysis with its probing of the irrational. Belief in the inevitable progress promised by advances in technology was, however... (shrink)

Erving Goffman's distinctive contribution to an understanding of others was grounded in his information control and ritual models of the interaction process. This contribution centered on the forms of the interaction order rather than self-other relations as traditionally conceived in phenomenology. Goffman came to phenomenology as a sympathetic but critical outsider who sought resources for the sociological mining of the interaction order. His engagement with phenomenological thinkers (principally Gustav Ichheiser, Jean-Paul Sartre and Alfred Schutz) has to be understood in (...) these terms. The article traces basic differences in analytical focus through a range of phenomenological critiques of Goffman and a comparison of salient aspects of Schutz's and Goffman's writings. While the contrasts have perhaps been overplayed, I conclude that Goffman's thinking about others probably owed more to his pragmatist roots than to his later encounters with phenomenology. (shrink)

Myths of the Self is a departure from the standard fare of postmodern thought. In a unique and brilliant turn, Smith argues that the best way of dealing with the topic of the self is a synthesis of a narrative theory of identity, using Ricoeur as a source, along with the constructive "postmodern" metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead. The resulting synthesis is a new and potentially invigorating spin on the genesis of postmodern thought.

Alfred Schutz's "Fragments on the phenomenology of music" has been edited from a manuscript written in Lake Placid during the week of July 16th to July 23rd ...

This book investigates the extensive and growing economic inequalities that characterize the affluent market societies in which we currently live. It uses insights both from political philosophy and the new science of happiness to make the case for more just alternatives. We diagnose the damaging impact that existing inequalities have on our well-being. We draw on philosophical, psychological, social scientific and other insights to diagnose what has gone wrong in our highly unequal and frequently unhappy societies. Combining the approaches both (...) of philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Georg Wilhem Friedrich Hegel, John Rawls and Philip Pettit and analyses from political economists, we uncover the economic, social and political mechanisms that create and perpetuate income and wealth inequality. The key claim is that wealthy elites engage in rent seeking and opportunity hoarding and shape our social, economic and political structures in ways that benefit them and harm the rest. We assess important insights from the new science of happiness to assess the impact of inequality on the well-being of the poor, the middle class and the rich. We specifically examine the role of key emotions, such as shame (amongst the poor), envy and admiration (towards and for the rich). We discuss which emotional narratives serve to justify and entrench excessive inequalities in income and wealth. The result is an explanation of the emotional regime that characterizes our capitalist societies and that perpetuates the unfair gap between the extravagance of the rich and the misery of the poor. We conclude with policies and proposals to re-shape this emotional regime in the interests of justice and solidarity. (shrink)

This article concerns two of the last great metaphysical thinkers: Austin Farrer and Alfred North Whitehead. It also concerns a fundamental cosmological question: does the world point inexorably to God? Often, attempts to formulate and answer this question still stand firm on the Aristotelian categories of scholastic theology. Confronting these head-on, Farrer and Whitehead offered an antidote to Aristotle’s outdated metaphysics. They re-conceived being in active terms. This deployment of action-concepts was designed to overcome the logical and ontological inertia (...) of divine Ipseity and so heal the breach between God and Creation. By exploring the ways Farrer and Whitehead addressed these matters, I hope to remind readers of a fertile alternative to realist/anti-realist conflicts currently dominating philosophical theology. (shrink)

In this book philosophers, scholars of religion, and activists address the theme of responsibility. Barbara Darling-Smith brings together an enlightening collection of essays that analyze the ethics of responsibility, its relational nature, and its global struggle.

This volume of essays examines the problem of mind, looking at how the problem has appeared to neuroscientists from classical antiquity through to contemporary times. Beginning with a look at ventricular neuropsychology in antiquity, this book goes on to look at Spinozan ideas on the links between mind and body, Thomas Willis and the foundation of Neurology, Hooke’s mechanical model of the mind and Joseph Priestley’s approach to the mind-body problem. The volume offers a chapter on the 19th century Ottoman (...) perspective on western thinking. Further chapters trace the work of nineteenth century scholars including George Henry Lewes, Herbert Spencer and Emil du Bois-Reymond. The book covers significant work from the twentieth century, including an examination of Alfred North Whitehead and the history of consciousness, and particular attention is given to the development of quantum consciousness. Chapters on slavery and the self and the development of an understanding of Dualism bring this examination up to date on the latest 21st century work in the field. At the heart of this book is the matter of how we define the problem of consciousness itself: has there been any progress in our understanding of the working of mind and brain? This work at the interface between science and the humanities will appeal to experts from across many fields who wish to develop their understanding of the problem of consciousness, including scholars of Neuroscience, Behavioural Science and the History of Science. (shrink)

This is a personal account of an intersection of the schools of research in foundations of geometry founded by Alfred Tarski and Friedrich Bachmann. Their academic lineages and the origins of the schools are also described, as well as the mathematics that resulted from this intersection.

In a 1961 interview, Beckett warded off philosophical interpretations of his work: ‘I’m no intellectual. All I am is feeling’. Despite the emotional intensity of Beckett’s post-war writing, Beckett criticism has tended to ignore this claim, preferring the kinds of philosophical readings that Beckett here rejects. In particular, Beckett criticism underestimates the element of rage in his work. This paper argues that Beckett’s post-war breakthrough is enabled by a radical reconsideration of the nature of feeling and of rage in particular. (...) It involves the rejection of the idea of rage as pathological and the embrace of a positive conception of rage as drive or compulsion, a locus of energy and even pleasure.This paper reads the ‘Moran’ section of Molloy as a kind of ‘rage fable’, drawing on the ancient Greek concept of thymos, of anger as a virtue. It draws on Alfred Adler’s theory of the ‘masculine protest’, with which Beckett was familiar from his extensive note-taking on Adler in 1934-5, and Sianne Ngai’s discussion of the distinction between irritation and rage. According to this reading, Moran’s report charts a narrative of thymotic liberation from the irritations of servitude, prefiguring the Unnamable’s abandonment to impersonal affective intensities. It ends by suggesting that the prose of the Trilogy might be better understood, not as a ‘syntax of weakness’ but as a ‘syntax of rage’, a stylistic correlative of the imperious drive of thymos. We might then begin to understand the Trilogy as the epic of a heroic, impersonal, implacable and liberated rage. (shrink)

For a recent book about Alfred Tarski this reviewer needed to describe briefly and edit carefully some translations of Polish works on mathematical philosophy that lay outside his background in mat...

Mediation services arise in contexts where the notions of community cohesion, relationship integrity and social order are valued over their opposites (disorder, dissent, conflict etc). Yet it is not at all clear whether and how the mediation of conflict works to re-establish harmony or consensus. Indeed it is not at all clear that mediation is always effective or just. It has even been suggested that some conflicts (e.g. work-place, commercial and sexual assault) are either not resolved or not resolved justly (...) by mediation. On the other hand, advocates maintain that mediation can bring resolution and repair to ongoing relationships, promote community harmony, and empower people to be self-determining in the construction and maintenance of their resolutions. Whether mediation is adjudged positively or not, all mediation is instantiated in, indeed performed through, talk. In this paper I examine mediations from an Australian mediation program, and use Conversation Analysis to expose the practical methods by which mediators achieve consensus between disputants. I then examine a case in which mediation has failed to produce the sought-after consensus, and explore one way of understanding the failure of mediation in that case. (shrink)

This chapter provides a historical reconstruction of how Alfred Schutz’s American writings were critically engaged by the feminist sociologists Dorothy E. Smith and Patricia Hill Collins. Schutz’s articulation of a phenomenological sociology in relation to, among others, the sociology of Talcott Parsons and the philosophies of science of Ernest Nagel and Carl G. Hempel proved fruitful to Smith in the development of her feminist standpoint theory in her 1987 The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Collins (...) likewise draws on Schutz’s writing in the development of her own standpoint theory in her 1986 paper “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” but in a way that addresses some of her own concerns with Smith’s feminist sociology. As I hope to show with the recovery of this underappreciated history, the critical insights of Smith and Collins with regard to the possible uses and limits of phenomenology for feminist theorizing, are still valuable today. (shrink)