The title of this book refers to a particular construction of the world that brooks no uncertainty: 'things are the way I believe them to be'.

Edmund Gettier’s paper “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” first appeared in an issue of Analysis , dated June of 1963, and although it’s tempting to wax hyperbolic when discussing the paper’s importance and influence, it is fair to say that its impact on contemporary philosophy has been substantial and wide-ranging. Epistemology has benefited from 50 years of sincere and rigorous discussion of issues arising from the paper, and Gettier’s conclusion that knowledge is not justified true belief is sometimes offered as (...) an example of the reality of philosophical progress. However, what can be called the Gettier problem has little to do with the text of the famous paper itself. The importance of the Gettier problem does not depend on the attribution of the tripartite theory of knowledge to Plato, Chisholm, and Ayer, nor on the psychological plausibility of the par .. (shrink)

The missing piece of the puzzle: the discovery of the Higgs boson On July 4, 2012 the CMS and ATLAS collaborations at the large hadron collider jointly announced the discovery of a new elementary particle, which resembled the Higgs boson, the last remaining undiscovered piece of the standard model of elementary particles. Both groups claimed to have observed a five-standard-deviation effect above background, the gold standard for discovery in high-energy physics. In this essay I will briefly discuss the how the (...) CMS collaboration performed the experiment and analyzed the data. I will also show the experimental results. (shrink)

Buzz marketing has emerged as a popular, viable adjunct to traditional marketing communication, yet has received little critical scrutiny from an ethical perspective. This investigation represents an initial excursion into the public mind regarding the acceptability of buzz marketing techniques. One hundred thirty-one participants evaluated scenarios descriptive of actual live buzz campaigns varying in degree of transparency and deception. More negative perceptions were associated with deceptive approaches than overt ones, and participants were less accepting of peer-to-peer campaigns than performance-to-peer campaigns. (...) Respondents classified as moral idealists evaluated live buzz campaigns more negatively than moral relativists. The author discusses the implications of these findings for connected marketing strategies and public policy and offers recommendations for connected marketing practitioners. (shrink)

Identities formed with proper names may be contingent. this claim is made first through an example. the paper then develops a theory of the semantics of concrete things, with contingent identity as a consequence. this general theory lets concrete things be made up canonically from fundamental physical entities. it includes theories of proper names, variables, cross-world identity with respect to a sortal, and modal and dispositional properties. the theory, it is argued, is coherent and superior to its rivals, in that (...) it stems naturally from a systematic picture of the physical world. (shrink)

The concepts of meaning and mental content resist naturalistic analysis. This is because they are normative: they depend on ideas of how things ought to be.

Most people not only think that it is possible for reasonable people to disagree, but that it is possible for people to recognize that they are parties to a reasonable disagreement. The aim of this paper is to explain how such mutually recognized reasonable disagreements are possible. I appeal to an which implies a form of relativism about reasonable belief, based on the idea that whether a belief is reasonable for a person can depend on the fact that she has (...) inherited a particular worldview from her community. (shrink)

I can ask myself what to do, and I can ask myself what I ought to do. Are these the same question? We can imagine conjuring up a distinction, I’m sure. Suppose, though, I just told you this: “I have figured out what I ought to do, and I have figured out what to do.” Would you understand immediately what distinction I was making? To do so, you would have to exercise ingenuity. I have in mind here an “all things (...) considered” ought that I can use in my thinking, an ought that is not specifically moral, in that it doesn’t settle by sheer rules of language that I ought always to abide by morality. For this ought, the question of what I ought to do seems just to be the question of what to do. (shrink)

This book provides a multidisciplinary analysis of the potential conflict between a government’s duty to protect children and a parent’ right to raise children in a manner they see fit. Using philosophical, bioethical, and legal analysis, the author engages with key scholars in pediatric decision-making and individual and religious rights theory. Going beyond the parent-child dyad, the author is deeply concerned both with the inteests of the broader society and with the appropriate limits of government interference in the private sphere. (...) The text offers a balance of individual and population interests, maximizing liberty but safeguarding against harm. Bioethics and law professors will therefore be able to use this text for both a foundational overview as well as specific, subject-level analysis. Clinicians such as pediatricians and gynecologists, as well as policy-makers can use this text to achieve balance between these often competing claims. The book is written by a physician with practical and theoretical knowledge of the subject, and deep sympathy for the parental and family perspectives. As such, the book proposes a new way of evaluating parental and state interventions in children's’ healthcare: a refreshing approach and a useful addition to the literature. (shrink)

The first major publication in English on the bamboo slips excavated from a late fourth century B.C. Chu-state tomb at Guodian, Hubei, in 1993. The slip texts include both Daoist and Confucian works, many previously unknown. Thie monograph is a full account of the international conference held on these texts, at which leading scholars from China, the United States, Europe, and Japan analyzed the Laozi materials and a previously unknown cosmological text. In addition, the contents include nine essays on topics (...) such as the archaeological background of the discovery, conservation of the slip-texts, and the relation of the Guodian Laozi materials to the received Laozi text. An annotated edition of the Guodian Laozi materials and the cosmological text are included, as well as a critical bibliography with summary of Chinese scholarship on the Guodian texts in the year following the conference. (shrink)

The aim of this long essay is to explain why the philosopher-ruler of Plato's Republic descends “with regret” or having been “compelled” from his contemplation of the Forms to rule the state. It offers a new, optimistic interpretation of his goal in so descending, namely to try to make everyone into a philosopher. After a brief introductory section, I turn to the argument of the Republic to show both that the philosopher's understanding of the Good causes him to try to (...) maximize the amount of good in the cosmos, and that, since every rational person is capable, in virtue of his rational soul, of becoming a philosopher, this amounts to adopting the aforementioned goal. In the third section, I argue that the source of his regret cannot be that he sacrifices his own happiness in descending. Here the vehicle is a consideration of the “Plotinian” reading of the Republic, whose conclusion is that once he has achieved knowledge of the Forms, the philosopher can neither increase his happiness by further study, nor lose his happiness. Hence, if he is true to his goal, he has to try to improve the lot of others. In the next section, I argue that the Timaeus' account of the Demiurge's construction of the cosmos helps us to understand both the nature of the ruler's attempts to make everyone a philosopher and why he also understands that he will inevitably fail. Here the key idea is to link the Timaeus' account of Necessity or the Wandering Cause with the circumstances facing the philosopher in ruling the state. In the conclusion, I sketch how this account of the philosopher's reason for descending suggests that the best or ideal city in the Republic is not the tripartite kallipolis, but is rather a version of the City of Pigs. Footnotesa Parts of this paper have been presented to audiences at Princeton, UCLA, the Australian Association of Philosophy, Monash University, Kansas, and Berkeley. I am indebted to those in the audiences on all those occasions. Special thanks are owed to Chris Bobonich, David Keyt, Fred Miller, and the other contributors to this volume. (shrink)

This essay shows that truth cannot be divorced from human experience and an individual’s world view, his or her weltanschauung. There exist different weltanschauungen that favour alternative truths. Thus, loosely speaking, truth is determined by context. It may be socially acceptable to prefer one among the alternative truths as truly true, but this goal necessarily involves taking an ideological perspective on what is perceived and accepted as the sole truth. In other words, it is prejudiced. The truth value assigned to (...) the proposition God exists starkly illustrates this claim, but in the course of this essay I demonstrate that alternative truths are widespread and that conflicting truths can co-exist within a community even when they create dissension. A hegemonic group will assert a preference for one truth over its alternatives, but that does not eliminate the existence of alternative truths. Alternative weltanschauungen need to be managed somehow, and the recognition that alternative truths exist is one step in their management. (shrink)

It is not unusual to speculate on the contrary-to-fact implications of political assassinations. Lincoln's is the classic case in point, but we need only think of Julius Caesar, Gandhi, or John Kennedy, if we require further examples. One totally neglected case in this context is that of Moritz Schlick. One of the remote consequences of his murder, on June 22, 1936, which was most definitely a political assassination, is that today's academic world may well have been an entirely different one (...) if he had gone on to lead the Vienna Circle into exile. That group of young philosophers of science had formed as he assumed the University of Vienna's chair of natural philosophy in 1922. A quarter of a century later, the entire English-speaking world (and Scandinavia) was in thrall to “logical positivism,” a caricature of scientific philosophy as the circle conceived it but an incredibly powerful intellectual standpoint, for all that. The view that all genuine knowledge can be quantified not only dominated philosophy but transformed the nature of universities to the point of threatening the very existence of the humanities, which could scarcely meet this demand. The polemical and oversimplified view of Rudolf Carnap's strong program for scientific philosophy simply found no place for disciplines based on mere description (ethnology) or on understanding complex interlinked constellations of events as they develop over time (history and its myriad allied disciplines).The die was cast, and the humanities became saddled with an inferiority complex that, even today, they have only partially shaken off. Only disciplines that employed mathematical methods in aid of rigorous explanation, working collectively in networks like those of physics or chemistry, were worthy of being institutionalized at universities. Since the humanities were, for the most part, embodied in individual researchers burning the Midnight Oil as they pondered the Eternal Verities, they were disqualified as sciences. They would have to reform themselves radically or disappear. The battle commenced, and sensitive observers can attest that, administrative rhetoric to the contrary, it still goes on. Had Schlick lived on, the pluralism and tolerance that was part of his view of the world might well have carried more influence than the more radical elements in the group ultimately did, and so the humanities might well have fared better in a more secure environment than they have done.Edmonds's The Murder of Professor Schlick does not venture into such speculations. Instead, it offers us a vibrant, suspense-filled narrative replete with as much information as the reader can digest (and more). Briefly, Edmonds presents a fully detailed, complex version of the high drama of the rise and decline of logical positivism in both its philosophical and its political dimensions, complete with vivid portraits of the characters whose thought and personalities supplied that movement with its dazzling dynamism. They include such characters as Schlick himself; the irrepressible Otto Neurath, who had been a minister in the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic; Rudolf Carnap, the circle's standard-bearer; Ludwig Wittgenstein, its unwilling ideal; Bertrand Russell, its Promethean inspiration; the eccentric Kurt Gödel; the rabbi Josef Schächter; the clever Englishman A. J. Ayer; America's rising star, W. V. Quine; the perennial contrarian, Karl Popper; the unfortunate Friedrich Waismann, doomed to failure in all his efforts; the tragic Edgar Zilsel, who committed suicide in American exile; and several frequently neglected women, such as Rose Rand, Olga Hahn, Marie Reidemeister, and Olga Taussky. In addition, the strong Jewish presence in the circle and the surrounding anti-Semitism that was a continuing stumbling block to it are clearly and powerfully described.These are but highlights of Edmond's narrative, but they are proof positive that his study is where to begin an encounter with the Vienna Circle and thus with the philosophical view that, more than any other, has conferred its character on modern thought and deeply molded people who have never heard of it. (shrink)

When I first read Snow, I was deeply conscious, page by page, of its enormously dense character. It was clear from the outset that this novel was much more than the account of a Westernized Turkish journalist's failed attempt to cover a suicide wave among young girls in the provincial Turkish city of Kars. Almost from the start, the multidimensional narrative about Turkish youth weaved together all sorts of strains of political, religious, and social conflicts in a drama about coming (...) of age in a land whose culture is never far from that of Europe and vice versa. Here was an incredibly sensitive effort to probe the social dynamics of a culture that was scarcely understood in Europe (and scarcely understood at home).Having finished the novel's four hundred and some pages, I was deeply impressed with what I had read but depressed by how little of what I had read I was in a position to comprehend; it was simply too richly detailed and nuanced for me to digest. Too much was going on. For days, if not weeks, after having put Snow down, my mind would drift back to the novel, alighting on a theme or a character from the novel that had left me wondering and moved me further to ponder its meaning. The subtlety that went into writing the book, the confusions implicit in the strivings of its characters, and the consequent hopelessness of their situations hit me like a ton of bricks. In a way that was difficult to articulate, I could experience something of the hopes, fears, and confusions that ran through the minds of those characters. The vicarious experience of a culture that was at once familiar and deeply alien, the comprehension of which was imperative to European society, was powerfully and skillfully expressed without being trumpeted. Thus it was impossible to forget things that did not enter directly into the story but were nevertheless clearly insinuated in the narrative: for example, the continual reference to things Armenian in a place from which Armenians had long since disappeared—but above all the snow, falling silently and gently, scarcely observed by the protagonists, on nearly every page, without ever having the slightest impact on the narrative. The continual dusting of snow on all sorts of scenes, violent, touching, amusing, intriguing, lent the story an almost eerie poetic quality that only a master storyteller could weave into sadness and tragedy (Is this an allusion to Joyce's “The Dead”?). It was clear that one reading would not suffice for me to absorb the content of this novel.About a year later, I decided to tackle the book once again in the hope of obtaining a more ordered sense of the personalities and situations it presents. This time, it was clear that reading the book was of necessity a systematic project. So I decided to read it chapter by chapter, daily, in order to “live” with it. That procedure considerably enhanced the enjoyment involved in the act of reading, but in the end I scarcely grasped much more than I had done originally. When I was finished, I was satisfied with myself for having fulfilled a demanding task, but my lack of further enlightenment on turning the last page left me almost as unsatisfied as I had been the first time. It was not that I had failed to deepen my understanding of difficult and confusing themes that were crucial to comprehending European problems. Still, I was not less aware than after my first reading of the work that much of the Turkish experience described in it was eluding me—so much so that it would be worth my while to pick up Snow a third time. Need I say more? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Circumcision:Ordinary and Universal in My CommunityAllan J. JacobsMy1 circumcision experiences are remarkable mostly for their ordinariness. My wife Danaë gave birth to our son Perseus2 while I was a resident in obstetrics and gynecology in a city where we had no family. Perseus was circumcised in a Jewish brit milah3 ceremony on the eighth day of his life, as were my wife's and my male ancestors back into ancient (...) times. We were relieved because Perseus had just recovered from a potentially serious condition. After a difficult forceps delivery, his blood bilirubin rose almost to the point where he might have developed the dreaded kernicterus syndrome. Kernicterus can cause permanent severe motor, intellectual and visual impairment. It was unclear whether he would be discharged from the hospital in time. He had to spend a week in restraints under a bright light whose frequency degraded bilirubin. Happily, he came home the day before the scheduled brit.Our four parents attended the brit. Danaë's father was the sandek,4 being granted the honor of holding our son on his lap during the circumcision ceremony. The mohel, or circumciser, was the local Conservative rabbi. We were mildly anxious because he didn't do many circumcisions in this city with few Jews. Perseus cried briefly after he was circumcised. The circumcision undoubtedly was far less stressful than treatment of elevated bilirubin. The circumcision certainly was less painful than the prodding and sticks for the many blood tests he had to undergo in the hospital, not to mention the pain of his difficult forceps delivery. Perseus did not seem to have much discomfort in his penis afterward, and had no circumcision complications.After the brit, our parents and my resident colleagues ate refreshments and chatted for an hour or so. A brit milah is a happy occasion, but not an elaborate one. It marks the end of the joy, anxiety, and excitement of the child's birth and its aftermath and is followed by the less exalted rhythm of feedings, diaper changes, and sleep deprivation.At the brit, our boys are assigned Hebrew names and confirmed in the Biblical covenant between God and the Hebrew people established between God and Abraham, and reaffirmed between God and Moses. Regardless of the historical truth of the formation of the covenant, it is accepted as a myth tantamount to [End Page 71] truth. In other words, regardless of its literal truth, such a myth is to be regarded as true because it concretizes God's demands or a moral truth. The covenant is real for me whether or not there was a historical Abraham. As with other religious commitments, the obligation to circumcise our sons is unprovable, but binding. On this basis, Perseus's ancestors on both sides were circumcised in brit milah ceremonies for many centuries into the past.My two grandsons were circumcised as well. Achilles was circumcised among friends and relatives. The mohel was an experienced obstetrician who was certified to officiate at a brit milah following the practices of Conservative Judaism. He administered adequate analgesia with topical local anesthetic cream followed by an injected regional block. Achilles slept through his circumcision, suffered no complications, and had little discomfort afterward. My other grandson had a circumcision performed as an infant outside the context of Judaism and is not being raised as a Jew.The two brit milah in my family were beautiful, dignified ceremonies, welcoming the infants into the Jewish fold, and bestowing their Hebrew names.5 Some of my relatives, including Perseus's son, had circumcisions performed in a medical setting without a ceremony. None of the many boys in my family had obvious short- or long-term problems with their circumcisions. My social circle has many Reform and Conservative Jews. I have never heard any Jewish man in my circle of acquaintances complain about his circumcision. Circumcision is a given. Problems are rare, and an exposed glans is the norm. Our men typically enjoy sex and have no difficulty in fathering children. Circumcision is part of the comforting cocoon of custom and tribe that helps to protect us as a group. It also reinforces Jewish endogamy... (shrink)

It is 50 years since Stephen Wexler’s essay, Practicing Law for Poor People, was published.1 By any reasonable measure, this has become and remains an iconic piece. Whether he is agreed with or dis...

Health care workers or others may wish to override parental decisions because of their impact on the health or safetySafety of a child or others. Justification of such an action requires two types of principle: an authorityAuthority principle that designates the process for reversal, and anPrincipal, interventionintervention principleIntervention principle that specifies the grounds for reversal. It is generally accepted that states may overruleOverruleparentsParents’ decisions for good cause. I argue that the role of the state is to provide sufficient protection against (...) parental malfeasance. Parental malfeasance can be construed as either exposing a child to harmHarm or as insufficient defense of the child’s interestsChild's interests. I propose a test to determine what sorts of parental decisions might trigger intervention. I also propose constraints on government action to minimize government unfairness in applying the test. I show how this plays out in application. (shrink)

Stephen Edelston Toulmin, philosopher and historian of science, pioneer in the logical analysis of substantive argumentation, was educated in physics and philosophy at Cambridge, where he studied with Paul Dirac, John Wisdom and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Cambridge, Issac Newton’s university, remained his philosophical home: he always was very critical of the way that philosophy was done at The Other Place, as Oxford is known there. The only philosopher whom he really revered there was John Austin – although it is necessary hastily (...) to add that he deeply respected Gilbert Ryle and Isaiah Berlin. Like the latter, he considered himself a “public intellectual”. As such he was delighted to be invited to become a contributor to Encounter and later, from the mid-1960s a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. He was fascinated by Wittgenstein, attending as many of his classes as he could, but had no interest in becoming close to him. Both the idea of discipleship and Wittgenstein’s dominating personally were uncongenial to him. Like Wittgenstein and Berlin he was never at home among professional philosophers . On occasion his relationships with philosophers could be stormy indeed as was the case with Sir Karl Popper and Nelson Goodman. He prided himself on being an amateur and was only mildly disturbed when “experts” chided him as a bungler. His deepest belief was that professional philosophers do not determine what the real problems of philosophy are; rather those problems arise out of conundrums in human life. That meant for him engaging in intense dialogues, with physicists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, medical doctors, lawyers, musician artists and, of course, historians of science. (shrink)

Schönberg liet zijn pogingen om Igisch te componeren vergezeld gaan met kritische en analytische geschriften. Hij wilde, net als vele andere kritische intellectuelen van zijn tijd, een authentieke Weense muziekcultuur ontwikkelen, die zich tegen de heersende esthetische smaak keerde. Zijn hekel aan populaire muziek was eerder gegrond op morele dan op esthetische overwegingen. Mooie muziek leidt tot dagdromen en niet tot nadenken, vond hij. Zijn werk eist een aktieve deelname van de luisteraar, die de idee achter de muziek moet trachten (...) te vinden. (shrink)

Chapter 1: Introduction to Social Work Values and Ethics -- Chapter 2: Managing Ethical Issues -- Chapter 3: Social Justice -- Chapter 4: Client Autonomy, Self-Determination, and Informed Consent -- Chapter 5: Privacy, Confidentiality, and Exceptions -- Chapter 6: Professional Competence, Incompetence, and Impairment -- Chapter 7: Cultural Competence, Humility, Awareness, and Responsiveness -- Chapter 8: Professional Boundaries, Dual Relationships, and Conflicts of Interest -- Chapter 9: Responsibilities in Practice Settings -- Chapter 10: Access to Services -- Chapter 11: Honesty (...) and Integrity -- Chapter 12: Social Work Accountability and Regulation -- Chapter 13: Risk-Benefit Management -- Chapter 14: Conclusion. (shrink)

The lively debate over the constitutional foundations of judicial review has been marred by a formalism which obscures its point and value.ed from genuine issues of substance, the rival positions offer inadequate accounts of the legitimacy of judicial review; constitutional theory must regain its connection with questions of political principle and moral value. Although the critics of ultra vires have rightly emphasized the foundational role of the common law, they have misconceived its nature and implications. On the one hand, they (...) have invited the charge of judicial supremacism by marginalizing the role of legislative intent; on the other, their affirmation of absolute parliamentary sovereignty (within the context of this debate) undermines the critique of ultra vires. In substance, therefore, the rival camps occupy essentially the same ground, equally trapped by a formalism that entrenches a stark confrontation between parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law. A conception of shared sovereignty, or interdependent sovereignties, provides a better foundation for judicial review. (shrink)

Modern aesthetics is divided into two branches – the Anglo-American and the Continental. A major cause of this division is their divergent views about the place of history in aesthetics, the first tending to minimize historical considerations, while the second readily embraces them. This article explores the place of history in André Malraux's theory of art and argues that his thinking quickly resolves this long-standing disagreement. (This text is a translation of the published French version.).

Donald Preziosi, an influential modern voice in art history, argues that his discipline has proved ‘particularly effective in naturalizing and validating the very idea of art as a “universal” human phenomenon’. If this claim is true, it would mean, in my view, that art history has done a serious disservice to our modern understanding of art. For as the French art theorist, André Malraux, points out, the idea of art is definitely not a universal human phenomenon, there being ample evidence (...) that the vast majority of cultures throughout history, have not regarded their painting, sculpture, poetry, and music as ‘art’. -/- Today, of course, we willingly regard many works from non-European and early cultures as art and welcome them into art museums, but this is a recent development, barely more than a century old. This paper examines certain major issues arising from this situation, including: when and why the idea of art arose; the radical change in the word’s meaning that occurred after Manet; how this change led to the inclusion of many non-European and ancient works in our modern world of art; and the inadequate responses to these developments by modern philosophers of art and art historians. (shrink)

It’s common knowledge that those objects we regard as great works of art have a capacity to survive across time. But that observation is only a half-truth: it tells us nothing about the nature of this power of survival – about how art endures. -/- This question was once at the heart of Western thinking about art. The Renaissance solved it by claiming that great art is “timeless”, “eternal” – impervious to time, a belief that exerted a powerful influence on (...) Enlightenment philosophers and, later, on modern aesthetics. -/- The notion that art is timeless was contradicted by nineteenth century thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, and Taine who stressed the historical embeddedness of art. The conflict of these two ideas, together with other major factors discussed in this paper, has left us today without a viable account of the nature of art’s capacity to transcend time. -/- This paper proposes an alternative solution: the proposition that art survives by a process of metamorphosis. But the principal emphasis of the paper is on the question itself: how does art transcend time? (a question that has nothing to do with the so-called “test of time”). If modern aesthetics is to remain relevant to our modern world of art, in which the art of the past – stretching back to Lascaux and beyond – is as important as Picasso and contemporary art, it urgently needs to address this neglected question. (shrink)

One might naturally suppose that philosophers of art would take a strong interest in the idea of creation in the context of art. In fact, this has often not been the case. In analytic aesthetics, the issue tends to dwell on the sidelines and in continental aesthetics a shadow has sometimes been cast over the topic by the notion of the “death of the author” and by the claim, as Roland Barthes put it, that the author is only ever able (...) to “imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original”. This paper explains the understanding of artistic creation developed by the French art theorist André Malraux in his well-known book The Voices of Silence. Malraux argues that the true artist is involved in a creative act in the full sense of the term – creation ex nihilo – despite the debt he or she often owes to other artists. The paper also comments briefly on possible reasons why traditional post-Enlightenment aesthetics has said so little about the topic in question. (shrink)

Explores the failure of analytic aesthetics to examine the question of the capacity of art to transcend time, and its own commitment – seldom explicitly acknowledged – to the assumption that this capacity functions through the traditional, but no longer viable, notion of timelessness inherited from Enlightenment aesthetics.

This paper sets out to assess the internal coherence of Roy Bhaskar's transcendental realist account of science. Whilst fully supporting his transcendental derivation of a stratified ontology of structures and generative mechanisms from the scientific practice of experimentation, I argue that Bhaskar's adoption of the stance of epistemic relativism results in his inability to defend the generalizability of this ontology. My argument against his epistemic stance turns on the fact that it rests on a false dichotomy between epistemic relativism and (...) epistemic absolutism, and, moreover, that it is quite unnecessary for his efforts to avoid the excesses of epistemological foundationalism. The net result of this stance, in my view, is an inability to sustain the normative force of the concepts of truth and scientific explanation precisely at a time when postmodern authors are denying their privileged status. (shrink)

A fundamental question facing the cognitive sciences is why it is so difficult for us to look at the world in new ways. Experts, in particular, appear to have extreme difficulty in questioning the foundations for their belief. This I argue is because we can only view our world through mental paradigms. Such paradigms, our mindsets, have evolved so that we can respond automatically to things of importance but, by having mindsets, we are intrinsically prejudiced. I suggest that infantile autism (...) provides valuable insight into what a mind would be like if it were not to have paradigms. Because we are constrained to look at the world through our mindsets, the only way to see more is to acquire more mindsets. But, to actually be original, it is also necessary to subvert conventional wisdom and this would appear to be culturally dependent. Accordingly, understanding creativity necessitates examining the collective perspectives of diverse disciplines, encompassing abnormal minds as well as the historical transformations of different cultures. (shrink)

Examines (1) the birth of art-as-beauty in Western art and the concomitant birth of the idea of art itself; (2) the death of art-of-beauty from Manet onwards. Also looks briefly at some major implications for aesthetics (the philosophy of art). Paper includes some relevant reproductions.

It has long been recognised that great art, whether visual art, literature or music, has a special capacity to “live on” – to endure – long after the moment of its creation. Thus, our world of art today includes, for example, ancient Mesopotamian sculpture, Shakespeare’s plays, and the music of medieval times. How does this capacity to endure operate? Or to ask that question another way: what does “endure” mean in the case of art? The Renaissance concluded that art endures (...) because it is timeless – impervious to change, “eternal”, “immortal” – and this solution, which was ratified without question by Enlightenment philosophers of art such as Hume and Kant, still lingers on in some quarters today. But developments since the nineteenth century have gravely weakened the credibility of the proposition that art is immortal, and the idea is now effectively dead. This leaves us with a major dilemma: if art is not impervious to change, how exactly does it endure? If the time-honoured solution of immortality is no longer viable, what alternative explanation can we find to replace it? -/- This paper explains why immortality is dead, describes our contemporary dilemma, and briefly canvasses a possible solution. (shrink)

Includes 40 short reflections which address the ways in which we face the prospect of death and loss out of which the first 20 reflections are designed to be read by those living with a life-threatening illness; and the other 20 are reflections on living with grief, especially bereavement.