This paper introduces a series of lectures Ernst Kantorowicz offered to the Army Specialized Training Program in 1943 in order to reconsider the development of his intellectual biography. These “wartime lectures” constitute Kantorowicz’s only sustained discussion of modern German history and his only intellectual engagement with Nazism. Introducing these lectures thus presents an opportunity to re-examine the relationship between Kantorowicz’s early and mature works through his assessment of Nazi Germany. For Kantorowicz, Nazism was the violent result of a German commitment (...) to political prophecy. At the core of Kantorowicz’s lectures was a criticism of political theology and its role in modern history. In making this criticism, Kantorowicz simultaneously distanced himself from the prophetic register of his earlier writings. Moreover, recovering Kantorowicz’s concern with modern political theology is also important in foregrounding the intellectual genealogy of The King’s Two Bodies, a work often separated from its more telling subtitle: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Together, this paper argues that the most significant changes in Kantorowicz’s writings can be traced to the intellectual circumstances of the Second World War. (shrink)

P. T. Geach, notoriously, holds the Relative Identity Thesis, according to which a meaningful judgment of identity is always, implicitly or explicitly, relative to some general term. ‘The same’ is a fragmentary expression, and has no significance unless we say or mean ‘the same X’, where ‘X’ represents a general term (what Frege calls a Begriffswort or Begriffsausdruck). (P. T. Geach, Mental Acts (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), p. 69. I maintain that it makes no sense to judge whether (...) things are ‘the same’, or remain ‘the same’, unless we add or understand some general term - ‘the same F’. (P. T. Geach, Reference and Generality, third Edition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 63f. I am arguing for the thesis that identity is relative. When one says ‘x is identical with y’, this, I hold, is an incomplete expression; it is short for ‘x is the same A as y’, where ‘A’ represents some count noun understood from the context of utterance - or else, it is just a vague expression of a half-formed thought. (P. T. Geach, ‘Identity,’ Review of Metaphysics 21 (1967-8), p. 3.) One of the ways Geach seeks to support this is by tying it to the well nigh universally admired Fregean thesis about cardinality. (shrink)

An increasing amount of data is now available from public and private sources. Furthermore, the types, formats, and number of sources of data are also increasing. Techniques for extracting, storing, processing, and analyzing such data have been developed in the last few years for managing this bewildering variety based on a structure called a knowledge graph. Industry has devoted a great deal of effort to the development of knowledge graphs, and knowledge graphs are now critical to the functions of intelligent (...) virtual assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. The goal of the Ontology Summit 2020 was to understand not only what knowledge graphs are but also where they originated, why they are so popular, the current issues, and their future prospects. The summit sessions examined many examples of knowledge graphs and surveyed the relevant standards that exist and are in development for knowledge graphs. The purpose of this Communiqué is to summarize our understanding from the Summit in order to foster research and development of knowledge graphs. (shrink)

Who produces sound and music? And in what spaces, localities and contexts? As the production of sound and music in the 21st Century converges with multimedia, these questions are critically addressed in this new edited collection by Samantha Bennett and Eliot Bates. Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound features 16 brand new articles by leading thinkers from the fields of music, audio engineering, anthropology and media. Innovative and timely, this collection represents scholars from around the world, (...) revisiting established themes such as record production and the construction of genre with new perspectives, as well as exploring issues in cultural and virtual production. (shrink)

There are many connections among artificial intelligence, learning, reasoning and ontologies. The Ontology Summit 2017 explored, identified and articulated the relationships among these areas. As p...

David Lewis famously takes mereology ‘to be perfectly understood, unproblematic, and certain". In this chapter, the author proceeds by articulating four theses that Lewis holds about composition. Three of them are familiar; Lewis himself explicitly articulates and relies upon them. The fourth remains implicit, but it is nonetheless important. The four theses include: composition is unique (the same things cannot have two different fusions); composition is unrestricted (any two things whatsoever have a fusion); composition is ontologically innocent (composed entities do (...) not "count" beyond their parts); and composition is unmysterious (it is not problematic to treat it as primitive, and can function in demystifying explanations). The author devotes a section to each thesis: explaining what it says, pointing to the texts that illustrate that Lewis believes it, and explaining why Lewis believes it. Lewis uses the label ‘uniqueness’ and explicitly endorses the thesis. (shrink)

The underdetermination thesis poses a threat to rational choice of scientific theories. We discuss two arguments for the thesis. One draws its strength from deductivism together with the existence thesis, and the other is defended on the basis of the failure of a reliable inductive method. We adopt a partially subjective/objective pragmatic Bayesian epistemology of science framework, and reject both arguments for the thesis. Thus, in science we are able to reinstate rational choice called into question by the underdetermination thesis.

Advances in machine learning and the development of very large knowledge graphs have accompanied a proliferation of ontologies of many types and for many purposes. These ontologies are commonly developed independently, and as a result, it can be difficult to communicate about and between them. To address this difficulty of communication, ontologies and the communities they serve must agree on how their respective terminologies and formalizations relate to each other. The process of coming into accord and agreement is called “harmonization.” (...) The Ontology Summit 2021 examined the overall landscape of ontologies, the many kinds of ontology generation and harmonization, as well as the sustainability of ontologies. The Communiqué synthesizes and summarizes the findings of the summit as well as earlier summits on related issues. One of the major impediments to harmonization is the relatively poor quality of natural language definitions in many ontologies. The summit surveyed the state of the art in natural language definition development, based on lexicographic principles, as well as examples of ongoing projects that are explicitly dealing with harmonization and sustainability. (shrink)

Edward Harold Fulcher Swain (1883?1970) developed a unique idea about the importance of forests, advocating the creation of a new society based upon forests, and he pursued policies to implement his unique vision of forestry when he served as the Director of Queensland's Forestry Board from 1918 to 1924 and the Forestry Commissioner for New South Wales from 1935 to 1948. Swain's beliefs developed out of a combination of his Australian experiences and connections with foresters in the British Empire and (...) America. When he could not convince Australian elites about the need to create a forest-based society, he asked foresters at the 1947 Empire Forestry Conference in London to assert the primacy of forestry in land management in the British Empire. Many foresters positively received parts of Swain's argument, but his ideas could never be fully implemented in the British Empire because of the dominance of agrarian doctrines of development in post-Second World War colonial planning and the rapid process of decolonization. Swain's life sheds light onto current debates among historians about the origin and legacy of forestry in Australia and the British Empire. His ideas, many that parallel the basic tenets of modern environmentalism, require historians to rethink the relationship between Empire forestry and environmentalism. (shrink)

An exploration of the relationship between imagination and intuition and the workings of visual perception, in light of Polanyi’s epistemology, helps us to understand aesthetic seeing. The artist and contemplative learn to see anew and accordingly grasp extraordinary coherences of meaning.

Volume 24, Issue 8, August 2024, Page 37-40.

Scientific knowledge and technological expertise continue to evolve rapidly. Such innovation gives rise to new benefits as well as risks, at an ever-increasing pace. Within this context, regulatory regimes must function in order to address policymakers’ objectives. Innovation, though, can challenge the functioning and effectiveness of regulatory regimes. Questions over fit, effectiveness, and capacity of these regimes to ensure the safe entry of such technologies, and their products, onto the market will be asked in parallel to their development. With this (...) in mind, this article examines the strengths and weaknesses of current regulatory frameworks, including those designed for biotechnology, cosmetics, novel organisms, and foods, in order to inform and help shape Australia’s regulatory landscape around innovation. By focusing on Australia, the article illustrates the need to assess future changes to regulatory frameworks using a careful balancing of key factors. These include, for example, horizon scanning and monitoring, availability of appropriate data, existing health, safety, environmental, ethical, and social risks and impacts, and regulatory capacity. The article argues that rather than using one of these factors in isolation, a careful assessment of where each factor stands can lead regulators to an approach that properly manages the potential risks of emerging technologies. (shrink)

Photographic truth has traditionally been theorized on the basis of ‘correctness’, whereby the image’s mechanically produced correspondence to reality guarantees its truth. This article suggests that Christian Patterson’s photobook Redheaded Peckerwood (2011) engages with a notion of photographic truth that can more usefully be understood in relation to Martin Heidegger’s descriptions of truth as aletheia or ‘unconcealing’. By including ambiguity, mystery and fiction in this nonetheless seemingly truthful retelling of historical events, the work suggests that a straightforward notion of the (...) photograph’s transparency to the world is insufficient to explain the truth of photography. (shrink)

It is clear that where a disease affects men and women differently, research on potential therapies or cures should include both men and women and should examine whether the therapy is effective and safe for both sexes. In this paper we consider whether there is an appropriate role for law in regulating to ensure an examination of these sex- and gender-specific aspects in health research. We consider the relative advantages and disadvantages of pursuing a regulatory approach to achieving gender equity (...) in the field of women’s health by exploring first, the meaning of gender equity, and second, the regulatory mechanisms that might be best suited to promoting the goal of gender equity. Within our examination of different regulatory forms and mechanisms, we also interrogate the shift from gender-neutral provisions relating to sex in favor of generalized notions of fairness that remove any specific consideration of sex. (shrink)

This response to Paul Russell looks at how we should understand the moral sentiments and their role in action. I think that there is an important tension in Russell’s interpretation of this role. On the one hand, aspects of Russell’s position commit him to some kind of rationalism about the emotions: for instance, he has argued that P. F. Strawson’s account of the reactive is crudely naturalistic; and he has claimed that emotions are constitutive of our sensitivity to moral reasons. (...) On the other hand, he has explicitly endorsed a Humean view of motivation which, I will argue, is incompatible with these rationalist commitments. As well as pointing out the tension and arguing that it should be resolved in the direction of rationalism, I sketch the kind of rationalism that Russell needs: that reason can, through the autonomous progress of moral inquiry, give rise to new forms of emotion. (shrink)

Communities of respect are communities of people sharing common practices or a (partial) way of life; they include families, clubs, religious groups, and political parties. This book develops a detailed account of such communities in terms of the rational structure of their members' reactive attitudes, arguing that they are fundamental in three interrelated ways to understanding what it is to be a person. First, it is only by being a member of a community of respect that one can be a (...) responsible agent having dignity; such an agent therefore has certain rights as well as the authority to demand that fellow members recognize her dignity and follow the norms of the community, norms compliance with which they likewise have the authority to demand from her. Second, by prescribing or proscribing both actions and values, communities of respect can shape the identities of its members in ways that others have the authority to enforce, thereby revealing an important interpersonal dimension of the identities of persons. Finally, all of this is grounded in a distinctively interpersonal form of practical rationality in virtue of which we jointly have reasons to recognize the dignity and authority of fellow members and so to comply with their authoritative demands, as well as to respect (and so comply with) the norms of the community. Hence we persons are essentially social creatures. (shrink)

"Neuroscience and Philosophy" begins with an excerpt from "Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience," in which Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker question the ...

In the course of his painstaking study of ancient verse, Ferdinand de Saussure came up with an intriguing theory about the phonetics of the poetry he scrutinised. He postulated that the “jeux phoniques” he detected in the texts he analysed was proof that their authors were attempting to “parasite” the surface level meaning of their verse with a “hypotexte.” This hypotexte consisted of “anagrams” of “mots thèmes” whose phonetic properties were “isosyllabically diffracted” throughout the rest of the host text. Today (...) it is generally accepted that Saussure was wrong about this. Few however maintain that what he discerned in the phonetic depths of the verse he auscultated was no more than the figment of a fertile imagination. But if this be so, what exactly had he detected? This paper maintains that what Saussure stumbled upon was the trace of a contribution made to ancient verse by melodically and metrically organised sounds. This was inevitable. Virtually all the texts he probed were “carmina sacra” that were composed to be sung and accompanied by music. This musical accompaniment had a decisive impact on the phonetics of the “lexemic” words in the Poetry that has survived. This is so because sung verse cannot “euphoniously” accommodate a musical accompaniment unless its phonetics constituents are selected, concatenated and intoned in such a way as to follow the melodic contours and rhythm patterns that modulate their articulation. In addition, the point of making verse consist both of melodically organised arrangements of sound and of organisations of sound in which one can recognise ordinary words was not simply ornamental. The real point was to bi-nature what one was hearing. In other words, the goal was to “over-signify” the usual meanings of the “logocentric” words in the verse with a separate but complementary meaning and narrative encoded in melodised tones and metered rhythms. Why qualify the accompanying music as “acousmatic voices”? Because the music in question was added to song to give a voice to whichever tutelary divinity the song was performed to honour. That’s what makes “acousmatic voices” an especially apt epithet for characterising the melodically and rhythmically structured bodies of sound Saussure so presciently discerned in the phonetic depths of the poésie phonisante he probed. The point of their being in poetry was to give a voice to the agencies to whom the object or occasion of verse is beholden for its Being-in-the-world. (shrink)

This paper argues that pleasure and pains are not qualia and they are not to be analyzed in terms of supposedly antecedently intelligible mental states like bodily sensation or desire. Rather, pleasure and pain are char- acteristic of a distinctive kind of evaluation that is common to emotions, desires, and (some) bodily sensations. These are felt evaluations: pas- sive responses to attend to and be motivated by the import of something impressing itself on us, responses that are nonetheless simultaneously con- (...) stitutive of that import by virtue of the broader rational patterns of which they are a part and that they serve to de?ne. This account of felt eval- uations makes sense of the way in which pleasures and pains grab our attention and motivate us to act and of the peculiar dual objectivity and subjectivity of their implicit evaluations, while o?ering a phenomenology adequate to both emotional and bodily pleasures and pains. (shrink)

In _influx & efflux_ Jane Bennett pursues a question that was bracketed in her book _Vibrant Matter_: how to think about human agency in a world teeming with powerful nonhuman influences? “Influx _& _efflux”—a phrase borrowed from Whitman's "Song of Myself"—refers to everyday movements whereby outside influences enter bodies, infuse and confuse their organization, and then exit, themselves having been transformed into something new. How to describe the human efforts involved in that process? What kinds of “I” and “we” (...) can live well and act effectively in a world of so many other lively materialities? Drawing upon Whitman, Thoreau, Caillois, Whitehead, and other poetic writers, Bennett links a nonanthropocentric model of self to a radically egalitarian pluralism and also to a syntax and style of writing appropriate to the entangled world in which we live. The book tries to enact the uncanny process by which we “write up” influences that pervade, enable, and disrupt us. (shrink)

We frequently speak of certain things or phenomena being built out of or based in others. Making Things Up concerns these relations, which connect more fundamental things to less fundamental things: Karen Bennett calls these 'building relations'. She aims to illuminate what it means to say that one thing is more fundamental than another.

Talks collected from lectures given by Bennett with Gurdjieff's approval, to help people understand All and Everything: Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. Bennett regarded Gurdjieff's All and Everything as a work of superhuman genius.

Critical writing about music and music history in nineteenth-century Britain was permeated with metaphor and analogy. Music and Metaphor examines how over-arching theories of music history were affected by reference to various figurative linguistic templates adopted from other disciplines such as art, religion, politics and science.

There are some philosophical questions that can be answered without attention to the social context in which evidence is produced and distributed.ing away from social context is an excellent way to ignore messy details and lay bare the underlying structure of the limits of inference. Idealization is entirely appropriate when one is essentially asking: In the best of all possible worlds, what am I entitled to infer? Yet, philosophers’ concerns often go beyond this domain. As an example I examine the (...) debate on mechanistic evidence and then reevaluate a canonical case study in this debate. I show that for the assessment of actual evidence, produced in a world that is far from ideal, omission of the social aspects of medical epistemology leads philosophers to draw the wrong lessons from cases they take as paradigmatic cases for their views. I close by arguing that social epistemology provides an avenue to incorporate these complications and provides the necessary framework to understand medical evidence. (shrink)

In _Vibrant Matter_ the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change (...) were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as the_ _effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events. Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy. (shrink)

Rational explanation of action out of emotion faces a number of challenges. The Wrong Explanation Challenge says that explaining action out of emotion by reference to a purpose rather than an emotion gets it wrong. The Redundancy Challenge says that if explanation of an action by reference to emotion is sufficient then rational explanation is redundant. And the No Further Justification Challenge says that there is no more to say, at the level of rational explanation, about why people act as (...) they do out of a particular emotion. Furthermore, even if these challenges can be addressed, there is a Problem of Expressive Action, since many actions out of emotion seem unpromising candidates for being guided by normative practical reasons of the prudential, instrumental, deontic or consequentialist sort. In response, I argue that many actions out of emotions should be understood as expressive actions guided by the agent's conception of normative practical reasons: specifically, their conception of expressive reasons. (shrink)

'Mr Bennett, as was to be expected, has written a first-rate book on Kant's Analytic. It is vivid, entertaining, and extremely instructive. It will be found of absorbing interest both by those who already know the Critique and by those - if there are any such - who have a developed interest in philosophy, yet no direct acquaintance with Kant. These last it will surely drive to the text and, as surely, will drive them to approach it in a (...) truly philosophical spirit. Bennett's Kant is not a giant immersed, or frozen, in time. He is a great contemporary - a little out of touch, admittedly, with recent developments in mathematics and physics - but one with whom we can all argue, against him, at his side, or obliquely to him. And so Bennett does argue, continuously, fiercely, and fruitfully; and summons to join in the argument, at appropriate moments, those older contemporaries, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, and Hume, and those younger contemporaries, Wittgenstein, Ryle, Ayler, Quine, Quinton, Warnock, and others. This is splendid, and a necessary corrective to that extraordinary isolation in which Kant tends to be islanded, partly indeed, by his own unique qualities, but partly by oceans of the wrong kind of respect. Bennett, continuously engaging his great antagonist, shows the right kind.'. (shrink)

There is now a general consensus amongst philosophers in the values in science literature that values necessarily play a role in core areas of scientific inquiry. We argue that attention should now be turned from debating the value-free ideal to delineating legitimate from illegitimate influences of values in science, a project we dub “The New Demarcation Problem.” First, we review past attempts to demarcate the uses of values and propose a categorization of the strategies by where they seek to draw (...) legitimacy from. Next, we propose a set of desiderata for what we take to be a satisfactory solution and present a case study where conflicting sets of values clearly impinge on science, but where the legitimacy of their influence is ambiguous. We use these desiderata and the case study to illustrate what we take to be the strengths and weaknesses of current strategies. To be clear, our goal is not to answer the question we pose, but to articulate a framework within which a solution can be judged. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that our practice of giving and demanding apologies is rationalized by a belief that apologies make a difference to our normative situation. The characteristic normative effects of an apology are, I claim, that it removes an obligation on others to distance themselves from the wrongdoer, and that it makes the apologizer personally accountable to the addressee for their future compliance with the obligation they violated. However, if we ask what rationalizes that belief, two influential views (...) on the literature on apology – that I call the Reassurance View and the Performing Deference View – prove to be inadequate. In particular, these views cannot explain how apology can be both an expression of remorse for one’s wrongdoing but also a performative through which, by carrying out certain canonical actions, one can – all at once – change one’s normative situation. In order to explain these features of apology, I suggest that we see apology as akin to a normative power, but a normative power that is exercised expressively, or by an expressive action. In particular, I suggest that we see the power of apology as exercised by the performance of the expressive action of dissociation. (shrink)

The author comments on the article “The neurobiology of addiction: Implications for voluntary control of behavior,‘ by S. E. Hyman. Hyman presents that addiction is a brain disease or a moral condition. The authors present that addiction is a strong preference, similar to appetitive preferences. They state that addiction is merely a form of pleasure-seeking. The authors conclude that the problem of addiction is the problem of the management of pleasure, not treatment of a disease. Accession Number: 24077914; Authors: Foddy, (...) Bennett 1; Email Address: bennett@foddy.net Savulescu, Julian 2; Affiliations: 1: University of Melbourne, Monash University, Australia; 2: University of Oxford; Subject: EDITORIALS; Subject: ADDICTIONS; Subject: HYMAN, S. E.; Subject: BRAIN -- Diseases; Subject: PLEASURE; Subject: NEUROBIOLOGY; Subject: BEHAVIOR; Number of Pages: 4p. (shrink)