Philosophers struggle to explain why human beings with deep cognitive impairments have a higher moral status than certain non-human animals. Modal personism promises to solve this problem. It claims that humans who lack the capacities of “personhood” and the potential to develop them nonetheless could have been persons. I argue that modal personism has poor prospects because it's hard to see how we could offer a plausible account of modal personhood. I search for an adequate understanding of modal personhood by (...) considering existing accounts and sketching new ones. But each account fails, either because it objectionably excludes some deeply cognitively impaired humans from the class of modal persons or because it makes modal personhood doubtfully relevant to moral status. And the modal personist cannot solve this problem by appealing to the misfortune suffered by modal persons. (shrink)

A well‐established principle of language is that there is a preference for closely related words to be close together in the sentence. This can be expressed as a preference for dependency length minimization (DLM). In this study, we explore quantitatively the degree to which natural languages reflect DLM. We extract the dependencies from natural language text and reorder the words in such a way as to minimize dependency length. Comparing the original text with these optimal linearizations (and also with random (...) linearizations) reveals the degree to which natural language minimizes dependency length. Tests on English data show that English shows a strong effect of DLM, with dependency length much closer to optimal than to random; the optimal English grammar also has many specific features in common with English. In German, too, dependency length is significantly less than random, but the effect is much weaker than in English. We conclude by speculating about some possible reasons for this difference between English and German. (shrink)

This article presents the conceptual groundwork for a “poetics of the self” by theorizing how and why a creative praxis rooted in Ricoeur’s philosophy of the will and hermeneutics of the living metaphor contributes to an individual’s on-going development of self-awareness. Its focus is on the affective fragility that manifests in an individual’s intermediary status of polarities – finitude and infinitude, freedom and nature – in conjunction with Ricœur’s tensional status of metaphorical truth. The act of writing poetry, it suggests, (...) can be an aesthetic mediation that develops insight into the primordial discord of the servile will. (shrink)

In 1833, Henry Alford, a Cambridge don, writes to an ‘earthly friend’ entreating help to cure his intolerance for some of his fellow Cantabrigians. He is, subsequently, visited in dreams by an unearthly friend. One hundred and sixty years later, John Holloway writes Civitatula, a poem celebrating Cambridge University's history. The year before, Holloway had been busy protesting the award of Derrida's Honorary Doctorate there. Reflecting on the turbulence of 1968, Holloway's narrator suggests a Cantabrigian encounter with extra-terrestrials as tonic (...) to this agitation. These oneiric visitations coalesce around a certain saying otherwise, which is also the saying of the other. They thus come into the orbit of Bartleby the Scrivener, he whom Derrida considers ‘the secret of literature’. This post-critical work of conspiracy theory considers, then, the force of this ‘secret’ in both space and time, whilst posing the question of how fantastic might the search for meaning become. (shrink)

This is the first study of the Cambridge Affair. Drawing upon archival and unpublished material, little-known texts pertaining to the Affair, and Derrida’s own oeuvre, this original account offers an historical and philosophical reconstruction of this crucial debate.

Gildea suggests that the more people who really understand what good history entails, the more likely history is to triumph over myth. He sees positive signs in public history, citizen historians and community projects, debunking claims that ‘you cannot rewrite history’, arguing that good history that’s attuned to its times must be rewritten.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Partial Truth (Poems 2015–19) by Christopher NorrisNiall GildeaNorris, Christopher. A Partial Truth (Poems 2015–19). The Seventh Quarry Press, 2019. 133pp.“No interval but some event takes place.”(Norris, “Freeze-Frame,” A Partial Truth)A Partial Truth, a collection of thirty-seven pieces, is the seventh volume of poetry by philosopher and literary theorist Christopher Norris. Nobody familiar with Norris’s distinguished career will be surprised to learn that his recent turn to versification (...) is not a repudiation of intellectual and rhetorical seriousness, but a re-emphasis of the same using resources not typically found in academic prose. Norris, an interdisciplinarian long before that term became a slogan, has in his work clocked up considerable epistemological mileage across diverse terrain, his critical friendship with deconstruction leading him to important interventions in analytic and Continental philosophy, institutional critique, philosophy of science and mathematics, legal studies, music, politics and, after all, creative criticism.Creative criticism is a relatively embryonic genre, until recently typified generally by a prose that owes a debt to Jacques Derrida’s Cir-confession, Glas and La carte postale. This is a style that foregrounds the philosophical unsaid – the repressed autobiographical, desirous, and otherwise messy constituents of that canon. It does so in part by jettisoning the academic politesse, and let’s say timidity, which help maintain such statutes of limitation. In a more specific way, creative criticism may be understood as a Romantic development set in train by the “Yale School” of deconstruction and its fellow travelers, straining in their own ways against the subordinate role of the reader and critic instituted by the likes of Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot.In the foreword to his 2017 volume The Winnowing Fan, Norris at once compliments this “strong” critical rebelliousness (xii), and critiques its ecstatic, quasi-apocalyptic hubris, provisionally aligning his own creative criticism with the “poetic diction” (xxi) of eighteenth-century figures such as Dryden and Pope. It is an analogy with caveats – not least Norris’s stated allergy to the “air of arrogance” (Tempus-Fugitives ix) of [End Page 122] their heavily end-stopped tendentiousness – but one which schematizes a poetics that both carries a definite argument and could not make this argument otherwise than in a manner reliant on verse’s formal properties.Note, however, the fact that Norris takes his distance from both strong criticism and those eighteenth-century essayists on the grounds of their shared self-assurance. A steadier presiding influence is William Empson, whose enmity towards Eliotic New Criticism, which “fixes a prescriptive gulf between poetry and other kinds of discourse,” makes him a political forebear, dissenting from modern forms of literary historical doctrinalism, specifically “that whole anti-rationalist complex of ideas that made the discontinuity between poetic and non-poetic language into a shibboleth of aesthetic, ethical, and (though rarely advertised as such) socio-political principle” (Tempus-Fugitives xix–xx). Norris is no straightforward disciple of Empson – who regarded Derrida, and the other “horrible Frenchmen” Norris used to invite him to read, as “so very disgusting, in a simple moral or social way, that I cannot stomach them” (qtd. in Haffenden 52). And yet, one constant quality of both Norris’s verse and prose criticism is a welcome sobriety of explication when it comes to the more recondite or outright flamboyant enclaves of modern European thought.A Partial Truth, and Norris’s books of verse generally, are explicit in outlining the ways in which his poetry functions as a reaction to the diaristic, mumbling slackness of much contemporary poetry; but does his turn to verse also indicate some reaction to contemporary theory? A Partial Truth’s “Foreword,” with modesty, states that “[i]f these poems have any distinctive merit then it lies in the treatment of interesting ideas in a way that deploys certain formal means to draw out complexities and further implications that would lie beyond the reach of a prose rendition” (14). We will specify some of the relations between form and discursive complexity presently, but for now, it is worth suggesting that Norris’s commitment to verse forms of historically recognizable kinds forecloses from him the mealy-mouthed, argumentatively fugitive character of... (shrink)

In noun phrase coordinate constructions, there is a strong tendency for the syntactic structure of the second conjunct to match that of the first; the second conjunct in such constructions is therefore low in syntactic information. The theory of uniform information density predicts that low-information syntactic constructions will be counterbalanced by high information in other aspects of that part of the sentence, and high-information constructions will be counterbalanced by other low-information components. Three predictions follow: lexical probabilities will be lower in (...) second conjuncts than first conjuncts; lexical probabilities will be lower in matching second conjuncts than nonmatching ones; and syntactic repetition should be especially common for low-frequency NP expansions. Corpus analysis provides support for all three of these predictions. (shrink)