Experiential evidence shows that pain is associated with common meanings. These include a meaning of threat or danger, which is experienced as immediately distressing or unpleasant; cognitive meanings, which are focused on the long-term consequences of having chronic pain; and existential meanings such as hopelessness, which are more about the person with chronic pain than the pain itself. This interdisciplinary book - the second in the three-volume Meanings of Pain series edited by Dr Simon van Rysewyk - aims to better (...) understand pain by describing experiences of pain and the meanings these experiences hold for the people living through them. The lived experiences of pain described here involve various types of chronic pain, including spinal pain, labour pain, rheumatic pain, diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome, endometriosis-associated pain, and cancer-related pain. Two chapters provide narrative descriptions of pain, recounted and interpreted by people with pain. Language is important to understanding the meaning of pain since it is the primary tool human beings use to manipulate meaning. As discussed in the book, linguistic meaning may hold clues to understanding some pain-related experiences, including the stigmatisation of people with pain, the dynamics of patient-clinician communication, and other issues, such as relationships between pain, public policy and the law, and attempts to develop a taxonomy of pain that is meaningful for patients. Clinical implications are described in each chapter. This book is intended for people with pain, their family members or caregivers, clinicians, researchers, advocates, and policy makers. (shrink)

This article mounts a defense of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) from various criticisms made in Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek’s co-edited anthology Subject Lessons. Along with Sbriglia and Žižek’s own Introduction to the volume, the article responds to the chapters by Todd McGowan, Adrian Johnston, and Molly Anne Rothenberg, the three in which my own version of OOO is most frequently discussed.

This brief paper builds on my recently published work on financial capitalism. My objective here is (a) to sketch an account of the primary social features of post-1970s financialised capitalism, (b) to identify select dynamics or mechanisms that have resulted in these features, (c) to outline a programme of research to enhance our explanatory understanding of the ‘fractured society’ via the sociological concepts of structure, culture and agency, and (d) to broach, characterize and assess likely prospects and triggers for the (...) accomplishment of a credible, defensible post-capitalist societal formation. (shrink)

We have seen that proofs of soundness of (Boolean) DS, EFQ and of ABS — and hence the legitimation of these inferences — can be achieved only be appealing to the very form of reasoning in question. But this by no means implies that we have to fall back on classical reasoning willy-nilly. Many logical theories can provide the relevant boot-strapping. Decision between them has, therefore, to be made on other grounds. The grounds include the many criteria familiar from the (...) philosophy of science: theoretical integrity (e.g., paucity of ad hoc hypotheses), adequacy to the data (explaining the data of inference —all inferences, not just those chosen from consistent domains!) and so on. This paper has not attempted to address these issues in general. All it demonstrates is that the charge that a dialetheist solution to the semantic paradoxes can be maintained only by making some intelligible notion ineffable cannot be made to stick. The dialetheist has a coherent position, endorsing the T-scheme, but rejecting DS, EFQ (even Boolean DS and EFQ) and ABS. And any argument to the effect that the relevant notions are both ineffable and intelligible begs the question. The case against consistent “solutions” to the semantic paradoxes therefore remains intact. (shrink)

Teleosemantics seeks to explain meaning and other intentional phenomena in terms of their function in the life of the species. This volume of new essays from an impressive line-up of well-known contributors offers a valuable summary of the current state of the teleosemantics debate.

Encountering Tragedy contests Rousseau's munificent ontological presumption, probes the necessary and disturbing fictions of the Founding and delineates the ...

A crucial question here is what, exactly, the conditional in the naive truth/set comprehension principles is. In 'Logic of Paradox', I outlined two options. One is to take it to be the material conditional of the extensional paraconsistent logic LP. Call this "Strategy 1". LP is a relatively weak logic, however. In particular, the material conditional does not detach. The other strategy is to take it to be some detachable conditional. Call this "Strategy 2". The aim of the present essay (...) is to investigate Stragey 1. It is not to advocate it. The work is simply an extended exploration of the strategy, its strengths, its weaknesses, and the various dierent ways in which it may be implemented. In the first part of the paper I will set up the appropriate background details. In the second, I will look at the strategy as it applies to the semantic paradoxes. In the third I will look at how it applies to the set-theoretic paradoxes. (shrink)

_Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction_ is a lively and accessible introduction to one of philosophy's most active and important areas of research.

A number of different theories of truthlikeness have been proposed, but most can be classified into one of two different main programmes: the probability-content programme and the likeness programme.1 In Brink and Heidema [1987] we are offered a further proposal, with the attraction of some novelty. I argue that while the heuristic path taken by the authors is rather remote from what they call ‘the well-worn paths’,2 in fact their point of arrival is rather closer to existing proposals within the (...) likeness approach than might at first appear. It is the purpose of this note to outline the logical connections and to assess the reasons which have been offered in favour of the new proposal. (shrink)

Originally published in 1990. Each of the 12 chapters in this book build upon an approach to the analysis of spoken and written texts that is centred upon the recipient rather than the producer, for the abilities of listeners and readers deserve much attention. This book should be of interest to students and lecturers of linguistics, literary studies, English, education, communication studies and psychology.

Gordon Graham presents a bold new account of Wittgenstein's philosophy, which argues for its relevance to the study of religion and aims to revitalize the philosophy of 'true religion'. He uses Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy to argue in favour of the idea that 'true religion' is to be understood as human participation in divine life.

The paper establishes the general structure of the inconsistent models of arithmetic of [7]. It is shown that such models are constituted by a sequence of nuclei. The nuclei fall into three segments: the first contains improper nuclei: the second contains proper nuclei with linear chromosomes: the third contains proper nuclei with cyclical chromosomes. The nuclei have periods which are inherited up the ordering. It is also shown that the improper nuclei can have the order type of any ordinal, of (...) the rationals, or of any other order type that can be embedded in the rationals in a certain way. (shrink)

Philosophers are intellectual cannibals; they feed on the supposed errors of their colleagues. No harm in that, it might be said. With a sophistical argument like that of the Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass to support the punishment of the innocent, progress in philosophy might be thought dependent on such voracious activities. The Queen thought that in replying to the claim that punishing the innocent was wrong one could say that if the victim really was innocent then that (...) produced a better universe than one which contained both the pain of the punishment and that of the original crime. In a similar way it might be argued that if the supposed errors of a colleague really exist, then their correction is beneficial; while if the errors do not exist then at least there is underlying agreement among philosophers, though perhaps not harmony. The sophistry, however, arises from the fact that in both cases there are other, and better, alternatives. The Queen unaccountably forgets that it would be still better in the case of innocence not to punish at all; and the philosophical apologist for intellectual cannibalism forgets, unaccountably, that it might be still better to advertise agreement rather than to feed on supposed errors which do not exist. For one thing, in that latter case the spurious conflict might positively conceal the real disagreements. Something of that latter kind happens in Timothy Sprigge’s comments on my views about William James ; James and Bradley:American Truth and British Reality, Open Court, 1994 ). I cannot, however, take much credit for stimulating Sprigge to adopt positions similar to mine for two reasons. First the apparent conflicts which conceal real agreement are relatively few, although quite important; second his own considered general view of James is certainly different from mine and marks the real disagreement between us. Accordingly I take two bites at this particular cherry; first to consider my supposed errors and second to identify the real differences between us. Timothy Sprigge claims to find a number of minor errors in my account, but I concentrate on the two major cases. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Background to the Critical Philosophy Foundations of the Critical Philosophy in the first Critique and Prolegomena.

The fifth of the five volumes in our History of Western Philosophy of Religion. This volume deals with Western philosophy of religion in the twentieth century. It contains chapters on: James; Bergson; Whitehead; Hartshorne; Dewey; Russell; Scheler; Buber; Maritain; Jaspers; Tillich; Barth; Wittgenstein; Heidegger; Levinas; Weil; Ayer; Alston; Hick; Daly; Derrida; Plantinga; and Swinburne.

This collection of readings, the first of its kind, has been chosen with a view to displaying the variety, richness and strength of the Scottish philosophical tradition.

This article discusses three recent philosophers who speak in different ways about the retroactive construction of reality by human knowledge. Bruno Latour unapologetically claims that the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II could not have died of tuberculosis, as determined by a team of French doctors in 1976, since this disease was not discovered until three thousand years after his death. Slavoj Žižek often makes comparable arguments, though his version of retroactivity draws on both psychoanalysis and dialectics in a way that is (...) never the case for Latour. Yet in his 2012 book Less Than Nothing, Žižek takes the more prudent, realist-sounding line that changes in scientific theories do not change nature itself. The real novelty in retroactive theories is provided by Thomas Kuhn, who draws our attention to a grey temporal zone in scientific discovery in which it is impossible to pinpoint the exact date of any breakthrough. For Kuhn, this stems from a dualism found in reality itself: one between the fact “that” a thing exists and the determination of “what” its properties are. The tension between these two moments is responsible for much of the vagueness and drama surrounding any paradigm shift in the sciences and is closely related to at least one plausible theory of metaphor. In closing, three Hollywood films are cited as helpful examples for understanding the different ways in which a paradigm shift works its retroactive magic. (shrink)

This account of puritanical morality is useful and innovative, but makes two errors. First, it mischaracterizes the purity foundation as being unrelated to cooperation. Second, it makes the leap from cooperation (broadly construed) to a monist account of moral cognition (as harm or fairness). We show how this leap is both conceptually incoherent and inconsistent with empirical evidence about self-control moralization.