This paper is concerned with the transformation in the Middle English Partonope of Blois of French place-names that appear in its source, Partonopeus de Blois. Six of the twenty-two French toponyms in the version of Partonopeus drawn upon by Partonope appear at least once in the English text in a different form. At first sight these divergences seem either to be insignificant substitutions or else to arise from common scribal errors. Closer consideration suggests, however, that they are in at least (...) some cases intentional. The principal effect of these alterations, which has escaped the attention of previous scholars, is to shift the location of the Somegur episode from the Vexin to Ponthieu. Given the probable dating of Partonope to the second quarter of the fifteenth century, this relocation may have been designed to avoid a transfer to the Lancastrians of the implicit criticism in Partonopeus of Henry II's possession of Normandy. (shrink)

DeLancey shows that our understanding of emotion provides essential insight on key issues in philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence. He offers us a bold new approach to the study of the mind based on the latest scientific research and provides an accessible overview of the science of emotion.

Visual experiences seem to exhibit phenomenological particularity: when you look at some object, it – that particular object – looks some way to you. But experiences exhibit generality too: when you look at a distinct but qualitatively identical object, things seem the same to you as they did in seeing the first object. Naïve realist accounts of visual experience have often been thought to have a problem with each of these observations. It has been claimed that naïve realist views cannot (...) account for the generality of visual experiences, and that the naïve realist explanation of particularity has unacceptable implications for self- knowledge: the knowledge we have of the character of our own experiences. We argue in this paper that neither claim is correct: naïve realism can explain the generality of experiences, and the naïve realist explanation of particularity raises no problems for our self-knowledge. (shrink)

We describe a model of iterated belief revision that extends the AGM theory of revision to account for the effect of a revision on the conditional beliefs of an agent. In particular, this model ensures that an agent makes as few changes as possible to the conditional component of its belief set. Adopting the Ramsey test, minimal conditional revision provides acceptance conditions for arbitrary right-nested conditionals. We show that problem of determining acceptance of any such nested conditional can be reduced (...) to acceptance tests for unnested conditionals. Thus, iterated revision can be accomplished in a "virtual" manner, using uniterated revision. (shrink)

We add texture to the conclusion of Duchon and Drake (Journal of Business Ethics, 85, 2009, 301) that extreme narcissism is associated with unethical conduct. We argue that the special features possessed by financial accounting facilitate extreme narcissism in susceptible CEOs. In particular, we propose that extremely narcissistic CEOs are key players in a recurring discourse cycle facilitated by financial accounting language and measures. Such CEOs project themselves as the corporation they lead, construct a narrative about the corporation and themselves (...) using financial accounting measures, and then reflect on how their accounting-constructed performance is perceived by stakeholders. We do not present empirical evidence about whether the use of accounting language and measures leads to unethical behaviour by extreme narcissistic CEOs — although the conclusions of Duchon and Drake (2009) suggest empirical support is probable. Rather, we focus on developing alertness to the potential for accounting, when engaged by an extremely narcissistic CEO, to be a precursor or implement of unethical behaviour. (shrink)

Justification for psychiatric paternalism is most easily established where mental illness renders the person mentally incompetent, depriving him of the capacity for rational agency and for autonomy, hence undermining the basis for liberal rights against paternalism. But some philosophers, and no doubt some doctors, have been deeply concerned by the inadequacy of the concept of mental incompetence to encapsulate some apparently appealing cases for psychiatric paternalism. We ought to view mental incompetence as just one subset of a broader justification for (...) psychiatric paternalism. The very basis of liberal limitations on psychiatric paternalism, whether described in terms of rights to autonomy or as respect for differences in values and lifestyles, presupposes a sense of moral persistence, and hence some sufficiently persistent self. Paternalistic intervention is warranted when we are unable to govern our lives in a manner consistent with the goals and values that comprise that ‘self’. One way that can occur is when we lack the mental capacities required for autonomy, such that we are unable to interpret and interact with our environment in order to meaningfully pursue our goals, i.e. mental incompetence. But it can also occur when we are subject to impositions that alter our goals without altering our capacity to pursue them — i.e. when it is our ‘self’ that is impaired rather than our competence. (shrink)

Ordinary cases of object seeing involve the visual perception of space and spatial location. But does seeing an object require such spatial perception? An empirical challenge to the idea that it does comes from reflection upon Bálint's syndrome, for some suppose that in Bálint's syndrome subjects can see objects without seeing space or spatial location. In this article, I question whether the empirical evidence available to us adequately supports this understanding of Bálint's syndrome, and explain how the aforementioned empirical challenge (...) can be resisted. (shrink)

Orthodox epistemological disjunctivism involves the idea that paradigm cases of visual perceptual knowledge are based on visual perceptual states which are propositional, and hence representational. Given this, the orthodox version of epistemological disjunctivism takes on controversial representational commitments in the philosophy of perception. Must epistemological disjunctivism involve these commitments? I don’t think so. Here I argue that we can take epistemological disjunctivism in a new direction and develop a version of the view free of these representational commitments. The basic idea (...) is that instead of conceiving of knowledge grounding perceptions as states in which one sees that such-and-such is the case, we should instead conceive of them as states or episodes in which one sees a thing, we should conceive of them as thing-seeings. I’ll suggest that we can cast such seeings in a knowledge grounding role without conceiving of them as representational. But this is because we can put thing-seeings to epistemological work, in the framework of epistemological disjunctivism, whilst remaining neutral on whether or not they are propositional, or representational at all. The point, then, is not to replace epistemological disjunctivism’s controversial representational commitments with controversial non-representational commitments. The point is, rather, that epistemological disjunctivism can be developed with fewer commitments in the philosophy of perception than is usually appreciated. (shrink)

The argument from illusion attempts to establish the bold claim that we are never perceptually aware of ordinary material objects. The argument has rightly received a great deal critical of scrutiny. But here we develop a criticism that, to our knowledge, has not hitherto been explored. We consider the canonical form of the argument as it is captured in contemporary expositions. There are two stages to our criticism. First, we show that the argument is invalid. Second, we identify premises that (...) can be used to make the argument valid. But we argue that the obvious fixes are problematic. If our arguments are successful, we show that the argument from illusion is even more difficult to defend than is commonly acknowledged. (shrink)

Personification has received little philosophical attention, but Daniel Nolan has recently argued that it has important ramifications for the relationship between fictional representation and possibility. Nolan argues that personification involves the representation of metaphysically impossible identities, which is problematic for anyone who denies that fictions can have impossible content. We develop an account of personification which illuminates how personification enhances engagement with fiction, without need of impossible content. Rather than representing an identity, personification is something that is done with representations—a (...) matter of use rather than content—and involves only a comparison of possibilities. We illustrate our account using the personification of death in the film Meet Joe Black, and show that there are no grounds for taking it to be fictionally true that there is a metaphysically impossible identity between Death and death. (shrink)

A revision of papers originally presented at a public symposium on The legitimation of evil held by the Wright Institute. Bibliography: p. 361-374.

Canon is a concept from aesthetics that has become a regular subject of commonplace discussions. The nature of canon, especially as it is used in these commonplace discussions, has not been subject to adequate philosophical scrutiny. We attempt to remedy that by placing canon in its historical and philosophical context, exploring and rejecting several common accounts, and presenting some basics of how canon works. We reject the accounts that place control with the author or the legal property holder, which appear (...) to be the most commonly held accounts. (shrink)

This book is an exploration and defense of the coherence of classical theism’s doctrine of divine aseity in the face of the challenge posed by Platonism with respect to abstract objects. A synoptic work in analytic philosophy of religion, the book engages discussions in philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metaontology. It addresses absolute creationism, non-Platonic realism, fictionalism, neutralism, and alternative logics and semantics, among other topics. The book offers a helpful taxonomy of the wide range of options (...) available to the classical theist for dealing with the challenge of Platonism. It probes in detail the diverse views on the reality of abstract objects and their compatibility with classical theism. It contains a most thorough discussion, rooted in careful exegesis, of the biblical and patristic basis of the doctrine of divine aseity. Finally, it challenges the influential Quinean metaontological theses concerning the way in which we make ontological commitments. (shrink)

The case for computationalism about the mind is in doubt when we acknowledge that there are mental phenomena that require, for a proper accounting, that we get below the level of symbol processing. Such phenomena show us that a computational theory of mind cannot be complete. Chief among these phenomena is emotion.

Ist der Unterschied zwischen wissenschaftlichen Gesetzen und Theorien ein qualitativer oder lediglich von quantitativer Art? Der Autor versucht zu zeigen, daß Gesetze und Theorien fundamental verschieden sind und daß die Kenntnis ihrer verschiedenen Natur notwendig für ein richtiges Wissenschaftsverständnis ist. Aus seiner Sicht sind Theorien geistige Konstruktionen mit dem Ziel, kausale Erklärungen von empirischen Gesetzen zu geben, während diese Gesetze auf der Grundlage von Messungen entdeckt werden und die Tatsachen der Wissenschaft konstituieren. Erkenntnistheoretisch sind daher Theorien und Gesetze auf verschiedenen (...) Ebenen anzusiedeln: während Gesetze Wissen liefern, liefern Theorien Verstehen. Der Kern der Theorien besteht aus Modellen, die idealisierte Abstraktionen aus Zustandsarten darstellen. Theoretische Modelle konstituieren Ontologien, die kausale Mechanismen aufzeigen. Solche Ontologien betreffen den Bedeutungsaspekt des Gegenstandsbereichs, auf den die Theorie angewendet wird, während empirische Gesetze den Ausdrucksaspekt des gleichen Gegenstandsbereichs betreffen. Theorien erklären Gesetze, indem sie zeigen, wie der Ausdrucksaspekt lediglich der natürliche Ausdruck der Auswirkungen der Kausalmechanismen in Bedeutungsaspekt sind. (shrink)

It has been suggested that moral courage in the workplace supports more robust application of regulatory principles. A workforce with the courage to act on moral imperative, it is argued, can bolster corporate governance and promote both more stable business organisations and greater economic stability at large. Research in the area investigates the bases of moral courage, a central implication being that businesses should invest in ethical training as a matter of public policy. It is standard to present moral courage (...) as the strength of will to do the morally right thing. From a managerial perspective, however, this distorts the normative character of the kind of issues managers typically face. Doing the morally right thing commonly entails inflicting permissible harms. Such harms, though permissible, can be a source of moral concern to the conscientious manager. A difficulty for the standard account, then, is that moral courage may be expected in scenarios in which the moral implications of the manager's action have not been fully assessed. In this paper, an alternative account of moral evaluation is presented that incorporates the concern around permissible harms. The basis of such concern is found to be manager-regret. Building on this foundation, we can establish a new definition of moral courage, that understands the right action to be that which entails defensible harms, and requires courage because those harms will likely have to be defended. It should be recognised in the academic literature that moral courage has this intellectual dimension. Furthermore, managerial training and practice should reflect this understanding of moral courage if its benefits to public policy, in particular corporate governance, are to be realised. The thesis takes a novel approach to the topic that draws, centrally, on the work of Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum and Søren Kierkegaard. (shrink)

Within the academic community there has been debate around whether business ethics should be taught as a stand-alone course or rather integrated across the business curriculum. A different tack is taken here as we head in the direction of integrating business ethics beyond the traditional bounds of the business curriculum and into theatre arts. The collaboration outlined herein was established when an inter-College alliance was formed to create the devised play Cheat, a mainstage theatre production for Western Washington University (WWU), (...) in which theatre became the ground and moral theory from business ethics became the figure. The following is a detailed deconstruction of the variety of ways in which business ethics concepts and models informed the construction of Cheat. (shrink)

(a chapter from my book Libertarianism:For and Against).

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Ordinary equational logic is a connective-free fragment of first-order logic which is concerned with total functions under the relation of ordinary equality. In [AN] (see also [AN1]) and in [Cr] it has been extended in two equivalent ways into a near-equational system of logic for partial functions. The extension given in [Cr] deals with partial functions under two relationships: a relationship of existence-dependent existence and one of existence-dependent Kleene equality. For the language that involves both relationships a set of rules (...) was given that is complete. Those rules in the set that involve only existence-dependent existence turned out to be complete for the sublanguage that involves this relationship only. In the present paper we give a set of rules that is complete for the other sublanguage, namely the language of partial functions under existence-dependent Kleene equality.This language lacks a certain, often needed, power of expressing existence and fails, in particular, to be an extension of the language that underlies ordinary equational logic. That it possesses a fairly simple complete set of rules is therefore perhaps more of theoretical than of practical interest. The present paper is thus intended to serve as a supplement to [Cr] and, less directly, to [AN]. The subject is further rounded out, and some contrast is provided, by [Rob]. The systems of logic treated there are based on the weaker language in which partial functions are considered under the more basic relation of Kleene equality. (shrink)

In the chapter “A History of Ideas Concerning the Morality of Suicide, Assisted Suicide and Voluntary Euthanasia ” author Craig Paterson explores questions concerning the legitimacy of the practices of suicide, assisted suicide, and voluntary euthanasia. The aim of this article is of identifying some of the main historical protagonists, and delineating some of the key arguments that have been used for the acceptance or rejection of these practices.

Volume 39 of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values includes lectures initially scheduled during the academic year 2019-2020. Owing to the global coronavirus pandemic, some were delivered at a later date. The Tanner Lectures are published in an annual volume. In addition to permanent lectures at nine universities, the Tanner Lectures on Human Values funds special one-time lectures at selected higher educational institutions in the United States and around the world.