The term liberal arts is widely used but seldom defined. While casual usage allows license for flexibility, academics should exercise care with terms that probe the vitals of their calling. This paper proposes a workable definition of liberal arts. It draws upon historical usage to address several concerns that figure into such a definition: it clarifies what an art is, it differentiates arts from sciences, it distinguishes liberal arts from other arts, and it also distinguishes liberal arts from humanities. Alternative (...) definitions may also be viable, but only if they duly recognize historical usage and differentiate the term liberal arts from terms related to it. (shrink)

The question at hand is whether or not a liberal arts education can be politically neutral, but the very fact that this question is phrased in the curious manner that it is, which is to say that we place emphasis on "can" as opposed to "is" or "how we might better ensure," speaks to the nature of a problem that much more deeply rooted than the mere question of scholarly polarization. Borrowing from Christopher Schlect of New Saint Andrews (...) College, we might say that the "liberal arts teach us how to learn—how to freely gain knowledge and understanding," and that the manner in which they do this is by teaching students not only methodologies for solving problems that are presented to them, but also how to identify problems of their own accord (79). That would mean, by definition, that a political neutral liberal arts curriculum would necessitate not only an active awareness of one's ethical orientation, but also an active tempering of the biases that accompany that orientation out of respect for the spirit of liberalism and in recognition of one's own fallible nature. Unfortunately, since, as I intend to illustrate, our moral and therefore political senses are similar to aesthetic taste as described by Kant in his third critique, they carry with them the paradoxicality of pure subjectivity tethered to the expectation of universality, making the possibility of political neutrality in the liberal arts a grim proposition, to put it at its absolute mildest. In order to determine whether this problem is in any way manageable, it is necessary to analyze of the nature of moral and political taste in a general sense, the rhetoric that educator use toward members of opposing moral frameworks, how that rhetoric is buttressed by institutional teloi, and finally, how different systems of normative ethics might contribute to neutrality in the liberal arts. (shrink)

When recalling events that one personally experienced, sometimes one sees oneself in the remembered scene: from an external, detached 'observer perspective'. In such cases one remembers from-the-outside. Remembering from-the-outside is a common yet curious case of personal memory. This book disentangles the puzzles posed by such memories.

Hugely influential, Michel Foucault's work has not only impacted a diverse range of disciplines—from history and sociology to fine arts, feminism, and gay and lesbian studies—but has also profoundly shaped Western culture at a street level. -/- Yet until now there has been no overarching systematic approach to his work from a Reformed perspective—let alone one that is as fair and accessible as Watkin's. After walking us through key elements of Foucault's thought, Watkin both critiques and answers Foucault through the (...) Bible's teaching on history, power, and identity. His insights are necessary reading for anyone who wants to engage thoughtfully with the ideas of our culture. (shrink)

The openness of joint awareness between two or more subjects is a perceptual phenomenon. It involves a certain mutual awareness between the subjects, an awareness that makes reference to that very awareness itself. Properly characterized, such awareness can generate iterated awareness ‘x is aware that y is aware that x is aware...’ to whatever level the subjects can sustain. The openness should not be characterized in terms of Lewis–Schiffer common knowledge, the conditions for which are not met in many basic (...) cases of joint attention. A range of phenomena, including linguistic communication and other interpersonal relations, that have previously been described in terms of common knowledge should rather be seen as involving open joint awareness. An Appendix to this chapter discusses the relations of this approach to Barwise's discussions, and disputes the claim that these mental phenomena require the postulation of self-involving situations. (shrink)

The aim of the book is to make Socrates' investigation and resolution of the questions that still concern us as human beings more accessible to serious contemporary readers.

Comparatives are among the most extensively investigated constructions in generative grammar, yet comparatives involving attributive adjectives have received a relatively small amount of attention. This paper investigates a complex array of facts in this domain that shows that attributive comparatives, unlike other comparatives, are well-formed only if some type of ellipsis operation applies within the comparative clause. Incorporating data from English, Polish, Czech, Greek, and Bulgarian, we argue that these facts support two important conclusions. First, violations of Ross’s Left Branch (...) Condition that involve attributive modifiers should not be accounted for in terms of constraints on LF representations (such as the Empty Category Principle), but rather in terms of the principle of Full Interpretation at the PF interface. Second, ellipsis must be analyzed as deletion of syntactic material from the phonological representation. In addition, we present new evidence from pseudogapping constructions that favors an articulated syntax of attributive modification in which certain types of attributive modifiers may occur outside DP. (shrink)

This paper offers a new argument against raising and killing sentient non-human animals for food. It is immoral to non-lethally impair sentient non-human animals for pleasure, and since raising and killing sentient animals for gustatory pleasure impairs them to a much greater degree, it also is wrong. This is because of the impairment principle: if it is immoral to impair an organism to some degree, then, ceteris paribus, it is immoral to impair it to a higher degree. This argument is (...) structurally analogous to Perry Hendricks’s impairment argument for the immorality of abortion. However, the argument is more defensible applied to the raising and killing of sentient nonhuman animals for food because of the sentience of the non-human animals involved. I explain how the argument is distinct from other pro-vegan, pro-vegetarian arguments. (shrink)

The growing field of neuro-philosophy throws up important issues for our society about how we understand the persistence of personal identity over time: if my brain is damaged or otherwise altered, do I become a different person? This chapter explores some of the work of the French neuro-philosopher Catherine Malabou as she asks, and tries to answer, this fundamental question about who we think we are, giving a non-reductive materialist account of self-identity. I argue that Malabou has implicit within her (...) writing the seeds of a more adequate account which would not understand identity and personhood to be immanent to the material brain but would embrace a broader notion of identity distributed across relationships, institutions, and shared common narratives. (shrink)

The similarities between the concept of cosmopolitanism and the concept of the world-state are, in some regards, fairly intuitive. At the very least, the theme of universalism is often seen as common to both. The precise form of a universalized ethical or political order, however, is not expressly conceptually determined by either cosmopolitanism or the world-state; both are susceptible to pluralist interpretations. Further, we cannot assume that an ethical concern will either motivate the creation of, or become a central policy (...) issue to, a world-state, in the way that a concern for moral universalism—sometimes referred to as ‘moral minimalism’—is inseparable from the cosmopolitan project more generally. Nor does cosmopolitanism have a necessary political component in the manner in which the world-state does. Nevertheless, we may assume that any form of global government should have some minimal degree of responsibility and concern for the welfare of all world-citizens. This paper considers Michael Walzer’s analysis of moral minimalism, and posits that this concept could form a common normativebasis for both moral cosmopolitanism and the reform of existing institutions of global governance, as well as having possible applications for the drafting of just policies for a potential world-state. (shrink)

The feeling that one was ‘born in the wrong time’ we call malchronia. This is distinct from mere nostalgia, in that it may generate the longing to transcend the temporal present in favor of a time of which one has had no experience, or even a timeless state of being. Implicit in malchronetic longing is the rejection of one’s experience of one’s own time, making it a revolutionary and utopian inclination. In this article we examine two dominant strategies—primitive weapons in (...) the war on time, really—that have been developed in the hopes of delivering individuals to a future beyond the reach of their natural life spans: cryonics and bionics. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate the foundations of Plotinus’ innovative theory that prime matter is unaffectable. I begin by showing that Plotinus’ main arguments for this thesis (in Ennead 3.6) all rely upon the controversial assumption that the properties prime matter underlies are not properties of prime matter itself. It is then argued that prime matter’s privation of sensible qualities has its conceptual basis in an idiosyncratic understanding of form-matter composition generally, and its primary doctrinal basis in Aristotle’s critical reports (...) on the Platonists’ substratum in Physics 1.9. While Plotinus finds Platonic authority for unaffectible matter in the Receptacle passage of the Timaeus, it is Aristotle’s testimony that provides the crucial impetus for reading that text in this way. On this basis, Plotinus develops a Platonist conception of form’s inherence in matter with distinctively non-Aristotelian features. (shrink)

Charles Griswold’s 2007 book Forgiveness argues that genuine forgiveness of an unexcused, unjustified and unignored offence must be normgoverned and conditional. In the same way that gift-giving is governed by norms of appropriateness, so too is forgiveness; and the appropriateness of forgiving is centrally dependent on the offender’s repentance. In response, I claim that genuine forgiveness must always be elective and unconditional, and therefore genuinely unpredictable, no matter how much – or how little – the offender repents. I consider and (...) reject one defence of unconditional forgiveness, that of Garrard and McNaughton. I then develop my own account, which builds on Bernard Williams’ notion of practical necessity. (shrink)

The ability of international ethics and political theory to establish a genuinely critical standpoint from which to evaluate uses of armed force has been challenged by various lines of argument. On one, theorists question the narrow conception of violence on which analysis relies. Were they right, it would overturn two key assumptions: first, that violence is sufficiently distinctive to merit attention as a category separate from other modes of human harming; second, that it is troubling in a special way that (...) makes acts of violence peculiarly hard to justify. This paper defends a narrow understanding of violence and a special ethics governing its use by arguing that a distinctive form of ‘Violent Agency’ is the factor uniting the category while partly accounting for the fearful connotations of the term. Violent Agency is defined first by a double intention (1) to inflict harm using a technique chosen (2) to eliminate or evade the target’s means of escaping it or defending against it. Second, the harms it aims at are destructive (as opposed to appropriative). The analysis offered connects the concept of violence to themes in international theory such as vulnerability, security, and domination, as well as the ethics of war. (shrink)

A critical interrogation of elements of Hobbes's political and natural philosophy and its capacity to enrich our understanding of the natural of democratic life.

We present a new modeling framework for recognition memory and repetition priming based on signal detection theory. We use this framework to specify and test the predictions of 4 models: (a) a single-system (SS) model, in which one continuous memory signal drives recognition and priming; (b) a multiple-systems-1 (MS1) model, in which completely independent memory signals (such as explicit and implicit memory) drive recognition and priming; (c) a multiple-systems-2 (MS2) model, in which there are also 2 memory signals, but some (...) degree of dependence is allowed between these 2 signals (and this model subsumes the SS and MS1 models as special cases); and (d) a dual-process signal detection (DPSD1) model, 1 possible extension of a dual-process theory of recognition (Yonelinas, 1994) to priming, in which a signal detection model is augmented by an independent recollection process. The predictions of the models are tested in a continuous-identification-with-recognition paradigm in both normal adults (Experiments 1–3) and amnesic individuals (using data from Conroy, Hopkins, & Squire,2005). The SS model predicted numerous results in advance. These were not predicted by the MS1 model, though could be accommodated by the more flexible MS2 model. Importantly, measures of overall model fit favored the SS model over the others. These results illustrate a new, formal approach to testing theories of explicit and implicit memory. (shrink)

Most contemporary philosophy of mathematics focuses on a small segment of mathematics, mainly the natural numbers and foundational disciplines like set theory. While there are good reasons for this approach, in this paper I will examine the philosophical problems associated with the area of mathematics known as applied mathematics. Here mathematicians pursue mathematical theories that are closely connected to the use of mathematics in the sciences and engineering. This area of mathematics seems to proceed using different methods and standards when (...) compared to much of mathematics. I argue that applied mathematics can contribute to the philosophy of mathematics and our understanding of mathematics as a whole. (shrink)

Ever since Greek antiquity "disembodied knowledge" has often been taken as synonymous with "objective truth." Yet we also have very specific mental images of the kinds of bodies that house great minds--the ascetic philosopher versus the hearty surgeon, for example. Does truth have anything to do with the belly? What difference does it make to the pursuit of knowledge whether Einstein rode a bicycle, Russell was randy, or Darwin flatulent? Bringing body and knowledge into such intimate contact is occasionally seen (...) as funny, sometimes as enraging, and more often just as pointless. Vividly written and well illustrated, Science Incarnate offers concrete historical answers to such skeptical questions about the relationships between body, mind, and knowledge. Focusing on the seventeenth century to the present, Science Incarnate explores how intellectuals sought to establish the value and authority of their ideas through public displays of their private ways of life. Patterns of eating, sleeping, exercising, being ill, and having (or avoiding) sex, as well as the marks of gender and bodily form, were proof of the presence or absence of intellectual virtue, integrity, skill, and authority. Intellectuals examined in detail include René Descartes, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Ada Lovelace. Science Incarnate is at once very funny and deeply serious, addressing issues of crucial importance to present-day discussions about the nature of knowledge and how it is produced. It incorporates much that will interest cultural and social historians, historians of science and medicine, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists. (shrink)

I am from eternity to eternity: God in Kant's early thought -- Whence then am I?: God in Kant's later thought -- Kant's only unsolvable metaphysical difficulty: created freedom -- Creating freedom: Kant's theological solution -- Interpreting Kant: three objections -- The dancer and the dance: divine action, human freedom -- Becoming divine: autonomy and the beatific vision.

Kripke’s opponents claim that gold, in all possible worlds, is a yellow metal. They believe that the atomic number can vary from world to world. Kripke inverts this, holding that while gold is, in all possible worlds, the element with atomic number 79, its surface properties may vary widely from world to world. Both views are flawed, but of the two, the rival is to be preferred. There is a better view. Gold is, in all possible worlds, the element with (...) atomic number 79. And it is, in all possible worlds, a yellow meta!. Only insofar as they give rise to familiar and important surface properties is there reason to maintain that structural properties are at the essence or nature of things. (shrink)

My intentions here are fourfold. First, I aim to provide an overview of the ethics-related activities that are regularly taking place in our universities today, looking initially at teaching in particular, and then considering the broader picture. Second, I want to consider what professional ethics does and should involve, and to raise certain questions about the relation between its concerns and the sorts of teaching the university can legitimately provide. Third, the current emphasis in professional ethics with the virtues, a (...) focus borrowed from academic philosophy is, I’ll argue, not altogether well suited to what is needed from professional activities and expertise. I end, fourth, with some suggestions, first, as to how a compromise moral theory might better suit the needs of the professions and, second, how professionals might best involve themselves in ethical debate and decision-making. (shrink)

This is both a modest and a presumptuous work. It is presumptuous because, given the vast literature on just one of its themes, it attempts to discuss not only the philosophies of both Hume and Hegel but also something of their intellectual milieu. Moreover, though the study has a delimiting perspective in the relation ship between a theory of human nature and an account of the various aspects that make up social experience, this itself is so central and protean that (...) it has necessitated a discussion of, amongst others, theories of history, language, aesthetics, law and politics. Yet it is a modest work in that, although I do think I have some fresh things to say, the study does not propose any revolutionary new reading of the material. I am not here interested in the relative validity of the theories put forward - I do not 'take sides'. Nevertheless it is part of the modest intent that recourse to Hume and Hegel in arguments pertaining to human nature will be better inform ed and more discriminating as a consequence of this study. Additionally, some distinctions herein made also shed light on some assumptions made in contem porary debates in the philosophy of social science, especially those concerning the understanding of alien belief-systems. (shrink)

This chapter examines a key focal characteristic of the Scottish Enlightenment, namely, its delineation of how a ‘science of man’ can inform and structure an account of ‘society’. The key contribution of the Scots to the rise of the human sciences lies in a conception of society as a set of interlocked institutions and behaviours. The Scots provided an analysis of both social statics and social dynamics, which shifted the focus away from the individualism that characterized early modern jurisprudence. Humans (...) as social beings are best understood in society and not as monadic individuals. The Scottish analysis also sidelined the centrality traditionally allotted to the political. Humans are social as well as political animals. Political institutions are simply one kind of institution among several, to be given no greater priority than the rest. (shrink)