We often lament our limited nature as human beings. Supernatural is certainly no stranger to this theme and often contrasts the many weaknesses of man to the awesome power of angels, demons, and otherworldly creatures. It should be enough to show that angels can reasonably be atheists by showing two things. First, the best arguments in favor of the existence of God are no better if Anna and Cas think about them, and second, that these angels are also in no (...) better position than we are to deny what is perhaps the strongest argument against the existence of God. The cosmological argument for the existence of God begins with a couple of observations about the universe. The first is pretty obvious‐“things exist.” The second is that everything that exists was caused to exist as it is. (shrink)

Apolitical, amoral, an aesthete whose writings point toward some form of liberation: this is the figure who emerges from most recent scholarship on Friedrich ...

This important book provides a theory about the nature of fiction, and about the relation between the author, the reader and the fictional text. The approach is philosophical: that is to say, the author offers an account of key concepts such as fictional truth, fictional characters, and fiction itself. The book argues that the concept of fiction can be explained partly in terms of communicative intentions, partly in terms of a condition which excludes relations of counterfactual dependence between the world (...) and the text. This communicative model is then applied to the following problems: how can something be 'true in the story' without being explicitly stated in the text? In what ways does interpreting a fictional story depend upon grasping its author's intentions? Is there always a unique best interpretation of a fictional text? What is the correct semantics for fictional names? What is the nature of our emotional response to a fictional work? In answering these questions the author explores the complex interaction between author, reader, and text. This interaction requires the reader to construct a 'fictional author' - a character in the story whose personality, beliefs and emotional states must be interpreted if the reader is to grasp the meaning of the work. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to outline an ethics development activity that uses scenarios in university classes to further the knowledge, engagement, and enhancement of the ethical actions of the students. By starting with a brief review of the objective and use of scenarios in ethics research, the paper progresses to explain the activity, debrief the activity, and finally to provide an analysis of the activity with examples. Included in this activity are ways to incorporate a discussion of Kant’s (...) Categorical Imperative Theories, NCA Credo of Ethical Communication, and the use of videos for Milgram’s Blind Obedience and Stanford’s Prison studies—thus making this activity useful across all disciplines. (shrink)

I am grateful to Catharine Abell and Jonathan Gilmore for their comments and for the opportunity to think again about some important questions. Before I respond.

This is a book about the nature of film: about the nature of moving images, about the viewer's relation to film, and about the kinds of narrative that film is capable of presenting. It represents a very decisive break with the semiotic and psychoanalytic theories of film which have dominated discussion. The central thesis is that film is essentially a pictorial medium and that the movement of film images is real rather than illusory. A general theory of pictorial representation is (...) presented, which insists on the realism of pictures and the impossibility of assimilating them to language. It criticizes attempts to explain the psychology of film viewing in terms of the viewer's imaginary occupation of a position within the world of film. On the contrary, film viewing is nearly always impersonal. (shrink)

In this thoroughly revised and updated second edition of the highly successful _Ecological Ethics_, Patrick Curry shows that a new and truly ecological ethic is both possible and urgently needed. With this distinctive proposition in mind, Curry introduces and discusses all the major concepts needed to understand the full range of ecological ethics. He discusses light green or anthropocentric ethics with the examples of stewardship, lifeboat ethics, and social ecology; the mid-green or intermediate ethics of animal liberation/rights; and (...) dark or deep green ecocentric ethics. Particular attention is given to the Land Ethic, the Gaia Hypothesis and Deep Ecology and its offshoots: Deep Green Theory, Left Biocentrism and the Earth Manifesto. Ecofeminism is also considered and attention is paid to the close relationship between ecocentrism and virtue ethics. Other chapters discuss green ethics as post-secular, moral pluralism and pragmatism, green citizenship, and human population in the light of ecological ethics. In this new edition, all these have been updated and joined by discussions of climate change, sustainable economies, education, and food from an ecocentric perspective. This comprehensive and wide-ranging textbook offers a radical but critical introduction to the subject which puts ecocentrism and the critique of anthropocentrism back at the top of the ethical, intellectual and political agenda. It will be of great interest to students and activists, and to a wider public. (shrink)

Historical scientists frequently face incomplete data, and lack direct experimental access to their targets. This has led some philosophers and scientists to be pessimistic about the epistemic potential of the historical sciences. And yet, historical science often produces plausible, sophisticated hypotheses. I explain this capacity to generate knowledge in the face of apparent evidential scarcity by examining recent work on Thylacoleo carnifex, the ‘marsupial lion’. Here, we see two important methodological features. First, historical scientists are methodological omnivores, that is, they (...) construct purpose-built epistemic tools tailored to generate evidence about highly specific targets. This allows them to produce multiple streams of independent evidence and thus maximize their epistemic reach. Second, investigative scaffolding: research proceeds in a piece-meal fashion, information only gaining evidential relevance once certain hypotheses are well supported. I illustrate scaffolding in a discussion of the nature of functional ascription in paleobiology. Frequently, different senses of ‘function’ are not discriminated during paleobiological investigation—something which can mar adaptationist investigations of extant organisms. However, I argue that, due to scaffolding, conflating senses of ‘function’ can be the right thing to do. Coarse-grained functional hypotheses are required before it is clear what evidence could discriminate between more fine-grained ones. I draw on omnivory and scaffolding to argue that pessimists make a bad empirical bet. It is a bad idea to bet against the epistemic fortunes of such opportunistic and resourceful scientists, especially when we have reason to think we will systematically underestimate the amount of evidence ultimately available to them. (shrink)

Ethnographic analogy, the use of comparative data from anthropology to inform reconstructions of past human societies, has a troubled history. Archaeologists often express concern about, or outright reject, the practice—and sometimes do so in problematically general terms. This is odd, as the use of comparative data in archaeology is the same pattern of reasoning as the ‘comparative method’ in biology, which is a well-developed and robust set of inferences which play a central role in discovering the biological past. In pointing (...) out this continuity, I argue that there is no ‘special pleading’ on the part of archaeologists in this regard: biologists must overcome analogous epistemic difficulties in their use of comparative data. I then go on to emphasize the local, empirically tractable ways in which particular ethnographic analogies may be licensed. (shrink)

This book is a major new introduction to the field of ecological ethics. Taking issue with the common assumption that existing human ethics can be 'extended' to meet the demands of the ongoing ecological crisis, Patrick Curry shows that a new and truly ecological ethic is both possible and urgently needed. With this distinctive proposition in mind, Curry introduces and discusses all the major concepts needed to understand the full range of ecological ethics. Focussing first on the major (...) concepts of ethics - religious and secular - and value, Curry then examines the gradations of ecological ethics. He discusses light green, shallow or anthropomorphic ethics with the examples of stewardship, lifeboat ethics, and social ecology; mid-green or intermediate ethics represented by animal liberation/rights and biocentrism; and dark green, deep, or ecocentric ethics. Particular attention is given to the various kinds of ecocentric ethics, such as the Land Ethic, The Gaia Hypothesis, and Deep Ecology and its offshoots: Deep Green Theory, Left Biocentrism and the Earth Manifesto. Ecofeminism is also considered in this context. The concluding chapters discuss green ethics as post-secular, moral pluralism and pragmatism, green citizenship, and human population in the light of ecological ethics. This comprehensive and wide-ranging textbook offers a radical but critical introduction to the subject. It will be of great interest to students, activists, and to a wider public concerned with the ecocrisis, its main theories, debates, and possible solutions. (shrink)

Gregory Currie defends the view that works of fiction guide the imagination, and then considers whether fiction can also guide our beliefs. He makes a case for modesty about learning from fiction, as it is easy to be too optimistic about the psychological insights of authors, and empathy is hard to acquire while not always morally advantageous.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private LifeDavid FredrickKristina Milnor. Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private Life. Oxford Studies in Classical Literature and Gender Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. xii + 360 pp. Cloth, $99.It is the often-difficult task of social history to explain how a given institution (e.g., marriage, education, the army) changed across different types of cultural expression (e.g., legal (...) and moral prescriptions, representation in visual art and literature) and in lived experience. In this fruitful and sometimes brilliant study, Kristina Milnor explores the repositioning of women during the Augustan period with respect to the distinction between public and private life. Over the course of an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue, she develops the argument that the Augustan period "invented" private life or, more precisely, new strategies for representing private life, in order to make the imperial system look like a return to traditional Roman family values. In making this argument, Milnor looks back to the Republic and forward to Nero; she assembles a wide range of literary and material evidence and makes judicious use of theory. Milnor is primarily concerned with textual representation; as she puts it at one point, the volume is "a study of representation rather than reality" (40–41). However, she does include substantial sections on architecture and space, and in the end it is not clear whether Milnor sees architecture in the Augustan period as a mode of representation or as something that by reshaping behavior necessarily transformed private life in lived experience.The introduction uses Vergil's simile of the housewife spinning in Aeneid 8 to set up the much-debated distinction between "public" and "private" in Roman culture. Milnor notes that the original meaning of privatus during the republic is narrowly oppositional, "a man without a political or military position," but broadened during the empire to mean more generally, "anyone... who did not hold the ultimate 'public' role of emperor" (20). Hence privatus and "domestic" do not mean the same thing: "privatus is necessarily a political word," while "the domestic... functions as a kind of moralized privacy, a concept whose strength lies in its allegiance to supposedly transcendent and apolitical ethical truths" (27). Women emerge during the Augustan period as the preferred symbols of this "moralized privacy," and while the physical and social circumstances of Roman women were highly disparate, the representation of female virtues remains consistent: "the domestic ideal was a construct which did not 'truthfully' represent any woman's life, even at the same time as it purported to represent them all" (38).In the first chapter ("Reading and Writing Gender on the Augustan Palatine"), Milnor argues that Augustus' Palatine complex is "engendered" by the prominence of Niobe, Cleopatra, and the Danaids in its decorative program, pointing to the problematic display of female virtue in the princeps' house. Because of Augustus' unprecedented political position, the "private" behavior of the women in his house became a kind of public performance, a tension that persists in Augustus' larger treatment of the city. In Tristia 2, Ovid addresses Augustus as a fellow author whose "text" is the city of Rome, and just as women [End Page 605] have misread Ovid's poetry licentiously, they frequently appropriate Rome's temples and porticoes for sexual liaisons. Milnor observes that this disingenuous argument at least recognizes women as active and resisting readers of texts, noting further that imperial women (Octavia and Livia) are paradoxically empowered as "authors" of significant public spaces precisely because they were seen to be expressing politically disinterested virtues. The chapter concludes with a look back at Cicero's de Domo Sua, which casts Clodius as a feminized abuser of public space in his appropriation of the Portico of Catulus for his shrine of Libertas; the restoration of Cicero's house, meanwhile, represents the restoration of the Roman state. Milnor argues that this anticipates Augustus' use of his own house as a symbol for Rome, and thus as the site for a paradoxically public performance of the traditions of Roman domesticity.The second chapter, "Domesticity and Display in Vitruvius' de Architectura," begins with two significant questions. Why, if... (shrink)

The scientific investigation of music requires contributions from a diverse array of disciplines. Given the diverse methodologies, interests and research targets of the disciplines involved, we argue that there is a plurality of legitimate research questions about music, necessitating a focus on integration. In light of this we recommend a pluralistic conception of music—that there is no unitary definition divorced from some discipline, research question or context. This has important implications for how the scientific study of music ought to proceed: (...) we show that some definitions are complementary, that is, they reflect different research interests and ought to be retained and, where possible, integrated, while others are antagonistic, they represent real empirical disagreement about music’s nature and how to account for it. We illustrate this in discussion of two related issues: questions about the evolutionary function of music, and questions of the innateness of music. These debates have been, in light of pluralism, misconceived. We suggest that, in both cases, scientists ought to proceed by constructing integrated models which take into account the dynamic interaction between different aspects of music. (shrink)

Can we be realists about a general category but pluralists about concepts relating to that category? I argue that paleobiological methods of delineating species are not affected by differing species concepts, and that this underwrites an argument that species concept pluralists should be species category realists. First, the criteria by which paleobiologists delineate species are ‘indifferent’ to the species category. That is, their method for identifying species applies equally to any species concept. To identify a new species, paleobiologists show that (...) interspecies processes, such as phenotypic plasticity, sexual dimorphism, or ontogenetic diversity, are a worse explanation of the variance between specimens than intraspecies processes. As opposed to operating under a single or plurality of species concepts, then, paleobiologists use abductive inferences, which would be required regardless of any particular species concept. Second, paleobiologists are frequently interested in large-scale, long-term morphological patterns in the fossil record, and resolving the fine-grained differences which result from different species concepts is irrelevant at those scales. I argue that this claim about paleobiological practice supports what I call ‘indifference realism’ about the species category. The indifference realist argues that when legitimate investigation is indifferent to a plurality of concepts, we should be realists about the category those concepts pertain to. (shrink)

Why and under what conditions are individuals altruistic to family and friends in their social networks? Evolutionary psychology suggests that such behaviour is primarily the product of adaptations for kin- and reciprocal altruism, dependent on the degree of genetic relatedness and exchange of benefits, respectively. For this reason, individuals are expected to be more altruistic to family members than to friends: whereas family members can be the recipients of kin and reciprocal altruism, friends can be the recipients of reciprocal altruism (...) only. However, there is a question about how the effect of kinship is implemented at the proximate psychological level. One possibility is that kinship contributes to some general measure of relationship quality (such as ‘emotional closeness’), which in turn explains altruism. Another possibility is that the effect of kinship is independent of relationship quality. The present study tests between these two possibilities. Participants (N= 111) completed a self-report questionnaire about their willingness to be altruistic, and their emotional closeness, to 12 family members and friends at different positions in their extended social networks. As expected, altruism was greater for family than friends, and greater for more central layers of the network. Crucially, the results showed that kinship made a significant unique contribution to altruism, even when controlling for the effects of emotional closeness. Thus, participants were more altruistic towards kin than would be expected if altruism was dependent on emotional closeness alone – a phenomenon we label a ‘kinship premium’. These results have implications for the ongoing debate about the extent to which kin relations and friendships are distinct kinds of social relationships, and how to measure the ‘strength of ties’ in social networks. (shrink)

Our epistemic access to the past is infamously patchy: historical information degrades and disappears and bygone eras are often beyond the reach of repeatable experiments. However, historical scientists have been remarkably successful at uncovering and explaining the past. I argue that part of this success is explained by the exploitation of dependencies between historical events, entities, and processes. For instance, if sauropod dinosaurs were hot blooded, they must have been gluttons; the high-energy demands of endothermy restrict sauropod grazing strategies. Understanding (...) such dependencies extends our reach into the past in spite of incomplete data. In addition, this serves as a counterexample to two accounts of method in the historical sciences. By one, historical science proceeds by identifying ‘smoking guns’: traces that discriminate between live hypotheses. By the other, historical hypotheses are supported by consilience: the convergence of independent lines of evidence. However, testing for ‘coherency’ between past hypotheses also plays a critical role in historical confirmation. Just as historical scientists exploit dependencies between past entities and present entities to infer what the past was like, they also exploit dependencies between past entities themselves. I do not suggest that archetypical historical science proceeds in this manner. Rather, the lesson I draw is that historical methodology cannot be characterized as archetypically relying on one method or another. Historical science is at base opportunistic, and is resistant to unitary analyses. 1 Introduction2 Snowballs and Explosions: The Basic Idea3 Were Sauropods Endothermic?4 Dependent Entities and Interdependent Explanations5 Smoking Guns and Consilience. (shrink)

Wallace-Hadrill's reading of spatial hierarchy does not address the representation of gender in mythological paintings. However, a rough survey indicates that the majority are erotic and/or violent. Erotic depictions common on household items suggest that the Romans were sensitive to this content; the likely use of pattern books in selecting programs for domestic decoration suggests a synoptic awareness of it. This points to the applicability of contemporary theories of representation and power, and Mulvey's model of visual pleasure in narrative film (...) is adapted for this paper. According to Mulvey, film offers two pleasures: scopophilia, which presents the woman as aesthetic-erotic fragments, suggesting but concealing her difference ; sadistic voyeurism, which assumes difference and then investigates, punishes, or forgives it. Both are illustrated in paintings of Ariadne abandoned and rediscovered, and in other paintings which portray either the gaze or erotic violence . While these paintings seem to confirm in relation to gender what the rest of the house says about class and status, some paintings confuse the issue. The male body is often fetishized , and attacked ; gender and role are sometimes deliberately ambiguous . Such transgressions of the boundaries of the male body are not a part of Mulvey's theory, and they suggest the use of gender to complicate as well as confirm the class/status message of the house; two different negotiations of this use are found in the House of the Vettii and the House of the Ara Maxima. One can compare reversals and reassertions of gender, class and status in other evidence, in literature, pantomime and the games. (shrink)

In the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, Jesus trades in the language of hyperbole: The Pharisee and the tax collector are both caricatures of a particular way of responding to God. In itself each of these ways is not without its legitimacy. Nevertheless, the reason the Pharisee incurs God's disapproval in Jesus9 parable has to do with his misuse of religious tradition: Keeping the tradition becomes the means by which he exalts himself over others. Still, the tax (...) collector, too, can stand as a warning: Lamenting one's sins, if it does not lead to commensurate action, merely becomes an exercise in cheap grace. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2014 Heft: 202 Seiten: 533-553.

Some of us have suggested that what fiction makers do is offer us things to imagine, that this is what is distinctive of fiction and what distinguishes it from narrative-based but assertive activities such as journalism or history. Some of us hold, further, that it is the maker's intention which confers fictional status. Many, I think, feel the intuitive appeal of this idea at the same time as they sense looming problems for any proposal about fiction's nature based straightforwardly on (...) the identification of fiction with the to-be-imagined. I formulate a very weak version of the proposal which is not vulnerable to some objections recently presented. My formulation is in terms of supervenience. But while this version is weak, it is also quite precise, and its precision brings into view certain other problems which have not so far been attended to. To the extent that these problems are serious, the prospects for an intentional theory of fiction look, I am sorry to say, poor; the version susceptible to the objections is weak, and anything weaker still but not so susceptible could hardly be thought of as a theory of fiction, though it might supplement such a theory. (shrink)

Historical sciences like paleontology and archaeology have uncovered unimagined, remarkable and mysterious worlds in the deep past. How should we understand the success of these sciences? What is the relationship between knowledge and history? In Scientific Knowledge and the Deep Past: History Matters, Adrian Currie examines recent paleontological work on the great changes that occurred during the Cretaceous period - the emergence of flowering plants, the splitting of the mega-continent Gondwana, and the eventual fall of the dinosaurs - to analyse (...) the knowledge of historical scientists, and to reflect upon the nature of history. He argues that distinctively historical processes are 'peculiar': they have the capacity to generate their own highly specific dynamics and rules. This peculiarity, Currie argues, also explains the historian's interest in narratives and stories: the contingency, complexity and peculiarity of the past demands a narrative treatment. Overall, Currie argues that history matters for knowledge. (shrink)

Philosophers of mind (from eliminative materialists to psychofunctionalists to interpretivists) generally assume that a normative ideal delimits which mental phenomena exist (though they disagree about how to characterize the ideal in question). This assumption is dubious. A comprehensive ontology of mind includes some mental phenomena that are neither (a) explanatorily fecund posits in any branch of cognitive science that aims to unveil the mechanistic structure of cognitive systems nor (b) ideal (nor even progressively closer to ideal) posits in any given (...) folk psychological practice. Indeed, one major function of scientific psychology has been (and will be) to introduce just such (normatively suboptimal but real) mental phenomena into folk psychological taxonomies. The development and public dissemination of IQ research over the course of the 20th century is a case in point. (shrink)

This article reconsiders the relationship between interpretivism about belief and normative standards. Interpretivists have traditionally taken beliefs to be fixed in relation to norms of interpretation. However, recent work by philosophers and psychologists reveals that human belief attribution practices are governed by a rich diversity of normative standards. Interpretivists thus face a dilemma: either give up on the idea that belief is constitutively normative or countenance a context-sensitive disjunction of norms that constitute belief. Either way, interpretivists should embrace the intersubjective (...) indeterminacy of belief. (shrink)

Recreative Minds develops a philosophical theory of imagination that draws upon the latest work in psychology. This theory illuminates the use of imagination in coming to terms with art, its role in enabling us to live as social beings, and the psychological consequences of disordered imagination. The authors offer a lucid exploration of a fascinating subject.

Tommy J. Curry’s provocative book The Man-Not is a justification for Black Male Studies and won the 2018 American Book Award. He posits that we should conceptualize the Black male as a victim, oppressed by his sex. The Man-Not, therefore, is a corrective of sorts, offering a concept of Black males that could challenge the existing accounts of Black men and boys desiring the power of white men who oppress them that has been proliferated throughout academic research across disciplines. (...) -/- Curry argues that Black men struggle with death and suicide, as well as abuse and rape, and their genred existence deserves study and theorization. This book offers intellectual, historical, sociological, and psychological evidence that the analysis of patriarchy offered by mainstream feminism (including Black feminism) does not yet fully understand the role that homoeroticism, sexual violence, and vulnerability play in the deaths and lives of Black males. Curry challenges how we think of and perceive the conditions that actually affect all Black males. (shrink)

Comprehensive account of constructive theory of first-order predicate calculus. Covers formal methods including algorithms and epi-theory, brief treatment of Markov’s approach to algorithms, elementary facts about lattices and similar algebraic systems, more. Philosophical and reflective as well as mathematical. Graduate-level course. 1963 ed. Exercises.

A collection of dramatic accounts about doctors who have faced the moral dilemma of choosing between obeying rules and doing what is best for a patient offers insight into the essential principles of medical ethics and their impact on ...