This book will be a part of Routledge's "New Problems of Philosophy" series.

A popular view has it that the mental representations underlying human pretense are not beliefs, but are “belief-like” in important ways. This view typically posits a distinctive cognitive attitude (a “DCA”) called “imagination” that is taken toward the propositions entertained during pretense, along with correspondingly distinct elements of cognitive architecture. This paper argues that the characteristics of pretense motivating such views of imagination can be explained without positing a DCA, or other cognitive architectural features beyond those regulating normal belief and (...) desire. On the present “Single Attitude” account of imagination, propositional imagining just is a form of believing. The Single Attitude account is also distinguished from “metarepresentational” accounts of pretense, which hold that both pretending and recognizing pretense in others require one to have concepts of mental states. It is argued, to the contrary, that pretending and recognizing pretense require neither a DCA nor possession of mental state concepts. (shrink)

Involuntary commitment links the healthcare, public health, and legislative systems to act as a “carceral health-service.” While masquerading as more humane and medicalized, such coercive modalities nevertheless further reinforce the systems, structures, practices, and policies of structural oppression and white supremacy. We argue that due to involuntary commitment’s inextricable connection to the carceral system, and a longer history of violent social control, this legal framework cannot and must not be held out as a viable alternative to the criminal legal system (...) responses to behavioral and mental health challenges. Instead, this article proposes true alternatives to incarceration that are centered on liberation that seeks to shrink the carceral system’s grasp on individuals’ and communities’ lives. In this, we draw inspiration from street-level praxis and action theory emanating from grassroots organizations and community organizers across the country under a Public Health Abolition framework. (shrink)

The theories of reasoned action and planned behaviour have fundamentally changed the view that attitudes directly translate into behaviour by introducing intentions as a crucial intervening stage. Much research across numerous ethical contexts has drawn on these theories to offer a better understanding of how consumers form intentions to act in an ethical way. Persistently, researchers have suggested and discussed the existence of an intention–behaviour gap in ethical consumption. Yet, the factors that influence the extent of this gap and its (...) magnitude have not been systematically examined. We, therefore, contribute to the debate on the intention–behaviour gap by reviewing the empirical TRA/tpb studies that have assessed both intention and behaviour in ethical contexts. The findings from our review show that few studies assessed the intention–behaviour relationship and as a result, there is limited empirical evidence to date to quantify more accurately the intention–behaviour gap in ethical consumption. Our second contribution aims to provide an empirical case study which assesses the magnitude of the intention–behaviour gap in the context of avoidance of sweatshop clothing and to assess the roles of planning and actual behavioural control in potentially reducing the intention–behaviour gap. The findings of our case study suggest that there is indeed a large gap between intention and behaviour, and we conclude by calling for more empirical longitudinal studies to assess the complex nature of the relationship between intention and behaviour. (shrink)

One feature of the individuals Nietzsche considers paradigms of greatness is that they are, in some capacity, rare —an exception to the majority.1 It would be difficult to overstate the frequency of this association in the texts. From as early as UM, Nietzsche repeatedly contrasts the “rarest and most valuable exemplars” with the pejorative “herd [Heerde]”, the “common [gemein]”, the “mediocre [mittelmässig]”, and the “rabble [Pöbel]”.2 This contrast becomes more explicit in Nietzsche’s mature period, where, for example, he writes plainly (...) that “what can be common has ever but little... (shrink)

Much of what we say is never said aloud. It occurs only silently, as inner speech. We chastise, congratulate, joke and cajole, all without making a sound. This distinctively human ability to create public language in the privacy of our own minds is no less remarkable for its familiarity. And yet, until recently, inner speech remained at the periphery of philosophical and psychological theorizing. This essay collection, from an interdisciplinary group of leading philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, displays the rapidly growing (...) interest among researchers in the puzzles surrounding the nature and cognitive role of the inner voice. Questions explored include: the aids and obstacles inner speech presents to self-knowledge; the complex relation it bears to overt speech production and perception; the means by which inner speech can be identified and empirically assessed; its role in generating auditory verbal hallucinations; and its relationship to conceptual thought itself. (shrink)

Pretense is a topic of keen interest to philosophers and psychologists. But what is it, really, to pretend? What features qualify an act as pretense? Surprisingly little has been said on this foundational question. Here I defend an account of what it is to pretend, distinguishing pretense from a variety of related but distinct phenomena, such as (mere) copying and practicing. I show how we can distinguish pretense from sincerity by sole appeal to a person's beliefs, desires, and intentions – (...) and without circular recourse to an ‘intention to pretend’ or to a sui generis mental state of ‘imagining.’. (shrink)

The point of this paper is to reveal a dogma in the ordinary conception of sensory imagination, and to suggest another way forward. The dogma springs from two main sources: a too close comparison of mental imagery to perceptual experience, and a too strong division between mental imagery and the traditional propositional attitudes (such as belief and desire). The result is an unworkable conception of the correctness conditions of sensory imaginings—one lacking any link between the conditions under which an imagining (...) aids human action and inference and the conditions under which it is veridical. The proposed solution is, first, to posit a variety of imaginative attitudes—akin to the traditional propositional attitudes—which have different associated correctness (or satisfaction) conditions. The second part of the solution is to allow for imaginings with “hybrid” contents, in the sense that both mental images and representations with language-like constituent structure contribute to the content of imaginings. (shrink)

The concept of well-being is correlated with social indicators linked in turn with the classical notion of “the good life”. The paper, instead, emphasizes the importance of relational aspects. It develops a reflection on the dialectic of interpersonal and systemic trust and mistrust, and it analyzes different semantic nuances of the notion of trust. A society characterized by well-being evidences strong type agency, a society with low levels of well being evidences weak type agency. Trust is a social resource indispensable (...) for sustaining agency, society’s self-transformation and well-being. While trust is traditionally thought to contribute to social cohesion, mistrusting the rulers can also be considered a positive countervailing force in contemporary democracies. At the same time, the distrust sedimented in time creates, on the one hand, a saving expectation and on the other, paternalisation as a search for a substitute trust. (shrink)

Este artículo trata de la actitud de la ley islámica acerca del transporte marítimo de las mujeres y de cómo las autoridades jurídicas musulmanas consideraban su presencia en los barcos. Discute las condiciones bajo las cuales las mujeres eran acomodadas y tratadas en los barcos así como el comportamiento personal y social que se esperaba de ellas. Con el fin de aplicar la ética islámica y las normas marítimas, los juristas informaban a los armadores, tripulaciones y pasajeros de cómo actuar (...) en el caso de comportamiento inmoral por alguna o varias de las partes. El trabajo se centra en el Mediterráneo Islámico, pero trata brevemente el castigo de la conducta social ofensiva en la Malasia islámica del siglo XIII. Por último, considera también la posición legal islámica sobre el transporte de musulmanes en barcos cristianos. (shrink)

This article explores the rise and fall of an Afrikaner psychological association: the Psychological Institute of the Republic of South Africa (PIRSA). It presents rhetorical, discursive and social analyses of presidential addresses delivered at PIRSA congresses between 1962 and 1977, identifying the emergence of a discourse of volksdiens (ethnic-national service) during the 1960s that called for the ethnic-national relevance of the discipline. With the Afrikaner nation vulnerable to the triple threat of communism, capitalism and egalitarianism, PIRSA insisted that psychological research (...) be dedicated towards addressing these and other dangers. In the 1970s, however, such appeals became less prominent as discussions of South African issues slipped off the agenda. Curiously, at a time when the apartheid state was in decline, PIRSA’s psychologists were concerned with everything but the survival of Afrikanerdom. The unraveling of PIRSA’s quest for ethnic-national relevance mirrored the disintegration of the state’s apartheid rationality, which resulted from a concatenation of political, economic and cultural upheavals. (shrink)

Scott Durham _Phantom Communities: The Simulacrum and the Limits of Postmodernism_ Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998 ISBN: 0-8047-3336-8 258 pp.

Visual imagination (or visualization) is peculiar in being both free, in that what we imagine is up to us, and useful to a wide variety of practical reasoning tasks. How can we rely upon our visualizations in practical reasoning if what we imagine is subject to our whims? The key to answering this puzzle, I argue, is to provide an account of what constrains the sequence in which the representations featured in visualization unfold—an account that is consistent with its freedom. (...) Three different proposals are outlined, building on theories that link visualization to sensorimotor predictive mechanisms (e.g., efference copies, forward models ). Each sees visualization as a kind of reasoning, where its freedom consists in our ability to choose the topic of the reasoning. Of the three options, I argue that the approach many will find most attractive—that visualization is a kind of off-line perception, and is therefore in some sense misrepresentational—should be rejected. The two remaining proposals both conceive of visualization as a form of sensorimotor reasoning that is constitutive of one’s commitments concerning the way certain kinds of visuomotor scenarios unfold. According to the first, these commitments impinge on one’s web of belief from without, in the manner of normal perceptual experience; according to the second, these commitments just are one’s (occurrent) beliefs about such generalizations. I conclude that, despite being initially counterintuitive, the view of visualization as a kind of occurrent belief is the most promising. (shrink)

If imagination is subject to the will, in the sense that people choose the content of their own imaginings, how is it that one nevertheless can learn from what one imagines? This chapter argues for a way forward in addressing this perennial puzzle, both with respect to propositional imagination and sensory imagination. Making progress requires looking carefully at the interplay between one’s intentions and various kinds of constraints that may be operative in the generation of imaginings. Lessons are drawn from (...) the existing literature on propositional imagination and from the control theory literature concerning the prediction and comparison mechanisms (or “forward models”) involved in ordinary perception. A more general conclusion is reached that, once we have the tools to understand how some imaginings are both under willful control and helpfully guide action and inference, we will have what we need to understand the cognitive basis of imagination in general. (shrink)

​Imagination will remain a mystery—we will not be able to explain imagination—until we can break it into parts we already understand. Explaining Imagination is a guidebook for doing just that, where the parts are other ordinary mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, and decisions. In different combinations and contexts, these states constitute cases of imagining. This reductive approach to imagination is at direct odds with the current orthodoxy, according to which imagination is a sui generis mental state or process—one with (...) its own inscrutable principles of operation. Explaining Imagination upends that view, showing how, on closer inspection, the imaginings at work in hypothetical reasoning, pretense, the enjoyment of fiction, and creativity are reducible to other familiar mental states—judgments, beliefs, desires, and decisions among them. Crisscrossing contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and aesthetics, Explaining Imagination argues that a clearer understanding of imagination is already well within reach. (shrink)

It is often held that in imagining experiences we exploit a special imagistic way of representing mentality—one that enables us to think about mental states in terms of what it is like to have them. According to some, when this way of thinking about the mind is paired with more objective means, an explanatory gap between the phenomenal and physical features of mental states arises. This paper advances a view along those lines, but with a twist. What many take for (...) a special imagistic way of thinking about experiences is instead a special way of misconstruing them. It is this tendency to misrepresent experiences through the use of imagery that gives rise to the appearance of an explanatory gap. The pervasiveness and tenacity of this misrepresentational reflex can be traced to its roots in a particular heuristic for monitoring and remembering the mental states of others. The arguments together amount to a new path for defending the transparency of perceptual experience. (shrink)

Abstract: How it is that one's own thoughts can seem to be someone else's? After noting some common missteps of other approaches to this puzzle, I develop a novel cognitive solution, drawing on and critiquing theories that understand inserted thoughts and auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia as stemming from mismatches between predicted and actual sensory feedback. Considerable attention is paid to forging links between the first-person phenomenology of thought insertion and the posits (e.g. efference copy, corollary discharge) of current cognitive (...) theories. I show how deficits in the subconscious mechanisms regulating inner speech may lead to a 'fractured phenomenology' responsible for schizophrenic patients' reports of inserted thoughts and auditory verbal hallucinations. Supporting work on virtual environments is discussed, and lessons concerning the fixity of delusional belief are drawn. (shrink)

The nomination of candidate genes underlying complex traits is often focused on genetic variations that alter mRNA abundance or result in non‐conservative changes in amino acids. Although inconspicuous in complex trait analysis, genetic variants that affect splicing or RNA editing can also generate proteomic diversity and impact genetic traits. Indeed, it is known that splicing and RNA editing modulate several traits in humans and model organisms. Using high‐throughput RNA sequencing (RNA‐seq) analysis, it is now possible to integrate the genetics of (...) transcript abundance, alternative splicing (AS) and editing with the analysis of complex traits. We recently demonstrated that both AS and mRNA editing are modulated by genetic and environmental factors, and potentially engender phenotypic diversity in a genetically segregating mouse population. Therefore, the analysis of splicing and RNA editing can expand not only the regulatory landscape of transcriptome and proteome complexity, but also the repertoire of candidate genes for complex traits. (shrink)

The Turing Test is of limited use for entities differing substantially from human performance levels. We suggest an extension of Turing’s idea to a more differentiated measure - the "Turing Ratio" - which provides a framework for comparing human and algorithmic task performance, up to and beyond human performance levels. Games and talent levels derived from pairwise comparisons provide examples of the concept. We also discuss the related notions of intelligence amplification and task breadth. Intelligence amplification measures total computational efficiency (...) (the computational benefit gained relative to investment, including programmer time, hardware, and so on); we argue that evolutionary computation is a key amplifier of human intelligence. Task breadth is an attempt to weight Turing Ratios by the frequency and importance of the task they measure - doing well at a broad range of tasks is an empirical definition of “intelligence”. Measuring Turing Ratios and considering task breadth, prior knowledge, and time series of the measures may yield long-term insight into both open-ended computational approaches and the underlying task domains being measured. (shrink)

Le mégaprojet de centrale au charbon Thar (Thar Coal Mega Power Project) est l’un des plus ambitieux du Pakistan. Il affectera directement les communautés du désert de Thar sur une superficie d’environ neuf mille kilomètres carrés. Plus de deux cent cinquante villages seront évacués pour assurer son succès économique. Le projet a d’ores et déjà provoqué des migrations, des spéculations sur le sol, l’usurpation de pâturages communs et le rejet des communautés. Les conflits dans la région revêtent deux faces. D’abord, (...) on constate des conflits entre les communautés autochtones, l’État et les fonctionnaires de la Sindh Engro Coal Mining Company (SECMC). Ensuite, les problèmes intracommunautaires se sont transformés en conflits religieux entre musulmans et hindous, bien que les causes sous-jacentes soient environnementales. Cet article fournit une description critique des conflits, de l’usurpation de la terre, des processus de spéculation et d’accumulation dans la zone du projet. (shrink)

El autor postula que la mundialización ha llegado a ser una “máquina incontrolable y excluyente”, gobernada por mecanismos económicos que se han emancipado de la ética y de las culturas, en un proyecto de exterminación de la diversidad cultural y de las raíces de la existencia autónoma de los humanos. Frente a ello, y siguiendo el principio de Gandhi, postula una economía no-violenta.

Since the late-1980s the rise of the Internet and the emergence of the Networked Society have led to a rapid and profound transformation of everyday life. Underpinning this revolution is the computer – a media technology that is capable of not only transforming itself, but almost every other machine and media process that humans have used throughout history. In _Philosophy of Media_, Hassan and Sutherland explore the philosophical and technological trajectory of media from Classical Greece until today, casting a (...) new and revealing light upon the global media condition. Key topics include: the mediation of politics the question of objectivity automata and the metaphor of the machine analogue and digital technological determinism. Laid out in a clear and engaging format, _Philosophy of Media_ provides an accessible and comprehensive exploration of the origins of the network society. It is essential reading for students of philosophy, media theory, politics, history and communication studies. (shrink)

Many philosophers and psychologists have sought to explain experiences of auditory verbal hallucinations and “inserted thoughts” in schizophrenia in terms of a failure on the part of patients to appropriately monitor their own inner speech. These self-monitoring accounts have recently been challenged by some who argue that AVHs are better explained in terms of the spontaneous activation of auditory-verbal representations. This paper defends two kinds of self-monitoring approach against the spontaneous activation account. The defense requires first making some important clarifications (...) concerning what is at issue in the dispute between the two forms of theory. A popular but problematic self-monitoring theory is then contrasted with two more plausible conceptions of what the relevant self-monitoring deficits involve. The first appeals to deficits in the neural mechanisms that normally filter or attenuate sensory signals that are the result of one’s own actions. The second, less familiar, form of self-monitoring approach draws an important analogy between Wernicke’s aphasia and AVHs in schizophrenia. This style of self-monitoring theory pursues possible connections among AVHs, inserted thoughts, and the disorganized speech characteristic formal thought disorder. (shrink)

Many theorists claim that inner speech is importantly linked to human metacognition (thinking about one's own thinking). However, their proposals all rely upon unworkable conceptions of the content and structure of inner speech episodes. The core problem is that they require inner speech episodes to have both auditory-phonological contents and propositional/semantic content. Difficulties for the views emerge when we look closely at how such contents might be integrated into one or more states or processes. The result is that, if inner (...) speech is especially valuable to metacognition, we do not currently understand why it is. The article concludes with two positive proposals for understanding the content and structure of inner speech episodes, which should serve as constraints on future accounts of the metacognitive value of inner speech. (shrink)

The internationalization of professional practices and the export of western technology and higher education are accompanied by a need to establish international standards of ethics across different professions. This pioneering and provocative group of essays constitutes essential reading for those interested in understanding, formulating, and teaching ethical standards for professions in an international and particularly cross-cultural context.

Dasein contra Mensch: Heidegger und Cassirer in Davos -- Rosenzweig und Heidegger -- Dass die Philosophie nur abendländisch-europäisch sei-- und was nun? Frage an Heidegger und Husserl -- Das Geschick des Abendlandes -- Sein, Geschichte, Ereignis -- Wahrheit in Heideggers Denken -- Der Erste Weltkrieg oder wie der Tod in die Philosophie Einzug hielt.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 1-13 [Access article in PDF] From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: The Local/Global Context Ihab Hassan I What Was Postmodernism? What was postmodernism, and what is it still? I believe it is a revenant, the return of the irrepressible; every time we are rid of it, its ghost rises back. Like a ghost, it eludes definition. Certainly, I know less about postmodernism today than I (...) did thirty years ago, when I began to write about it. This may be because postmodernism has changed, I have changed, the world has changed.But this is only to confirm Nietzsche's insight, that if an idea has a history, it is already an interpretation, subject to future revision. What escapes interpretation and reinterpretation is a Platonic Idea or an abstract analytical concept, like a circle or a triangle. Romanticism, modernism, postmodernism, however, like humanism or realism, will shift and slide continually with time, particularly in an age of ideological conflict and media hype.All this has not prevented postmodernism from haunting the discourse of architecture, the arts, the humanities, the social and sometimes even the physical sciences; haunting not only academic but also public speech in business, politics, the media, and entertainment industries; haunting the language of private life styles like postmodern cuisine--just add a dash of raspberry vinegar. Yet no consensus obtains on what postmodernism really means.The term, let alone the concept, may thus belong to what philosophers call an essentially contested category. That is, in plainer language, if you put in a room the main discussants of the concept--say Leslie Fiedler, Charles Jencks, Jean-François Lyotard, Bernard Smith, Rosalind Krauss, Fredric Jameson, Marjorie Perloff, Linda Hutcheon and, just to [End Page 1] add to the confusion, myself--locked the room and threw away the key, no consensus would emerge between the discussants after a week. But a thin trickle of blood might appear beneath the sill.Let us not despair: though we may be unable to define or exorcise the ghost of postmodernism, we can approach it, surprising it from various angles, perhaps teasing it into a partial light. In the process, we may discover a family of words congenial to postmodernism. Here are some current uses of the term: 1. Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (Spain), Ashton Raggatt McDougall's Storey Hall in Melbourne (Australia), and Arata Isozaki's Tsukuba Center (Japan) are considered examples of postmodern architecture. They depart from the pure angular geometries of the Bauhaus, the minimal steel and glass boxes of Mies van der Rohe, mixing aesthetic and historical elements, flirting with fragments, fantasy, and even kitsch. 2. In a recent encyclical, titled "Fideset Ratio," Pope John Paul II actually used the word postmodernism to condemn extreme relativism in values and beliefs, acute irony and skepticism toward reason, and the denial of any possibility of truth, human or divine. 3. In cultural studies, a highly politicized field, the term postmodernism is often used in opposition to postcolonialism, the former deemed historically feckless, being unpolitical or, worse, not politically correct. 4. In Pop culture, postmodernism--or PoMo as Yuppies call it insouciantly--refers to a wide range of phenomena, from Andy Warhol to Madonna, from the colossal plaster Mona Lisa I saw advertising a pachinko parlor in Tokyo to the giant, cardboard figure of Michelangelo's David--pink dayglo glasses, canary shorts, a camera slung across bare, brawny shoulders--advertising KonTiki Travel in New Zealand. What do all these have in common? Well, fragments, hybridity, relativism, play, parody, pastiche, an ironic, anti-ideological stance, an ethos bordering on kitsch and camp. So, we have begun to build a family of words applying to postmodernism; we have begun to create a context, if not a definition, for it. More impatient or ambitious readers can consult Hans Bertens' The Idea of the Postmodern, the best and fairest [End Page 2] introduction I know to the topic. But now I must make my second move or feint to approach postmodernism from a different perspective. II Postmodernism/Posmodernity. I make this move by... (shrink)

Few philosophers that have been studied as much as Ibn Sīnā have been as much misunderstood. His extraordinary ability to reflect upon and write in a variety of styles about seemingly every topic in every domain has steered his thought from philosophy and theology to mysticism and esoterism. Instead of helping us to learn and understand better Ibn Sīnā than he has previously been understood, the recent surge of Avicennan studies only adds more confusion to the already complex social context (...) which he was living in. (shrink)

This essay unites current philosophical thinking on imagination with a burgeoning debate in the philosophy of memory over whether episodic remembering is simply a kind of imagining. So far, this debate has been hampered by a lack of clarity in the notion of imagining at issue. Several options are considered and constructive imagining is identified as the relevant kind. Next, a functionalist account of episodic remembering is defended as a means to establishing two key points: first, one need not defend (...) a factive view of remembering in order to hold that causal connections to past experiences are essential to how rememberings are typed; and, second, current theories that equate remembering with imagining are in fact consistent with a functionalist theory that includes causal connections in its account of what it is to remember. This suggests that remembering is not a kind of imagining and clarifies what it would take to establish the contrary. (shrink)

Morphological forms are used to refer to the root of a word and its material with which its letters are built, and to its functions, derivations, and morphological structures that characterize it in addition to its semantic and lexical functions. The Arabic language includes many morphological structures with a single root, such as (the Most Merciful and the Most Merciful) and (Hafez and Hafeez). and (Shakour and Shaker) (Ghafara, Ghafer, and Ghafoor). These morphological connotations of the same root, despite the (...) closeness in their meanings, differ in their semantic contexts depending on the root of the word, its structure, and its derivation. Hence, the study of the beautiful names according to the meter (Ghafoor, Ghafir, and Ghafar) came to determine their morphological functions, their linguistic connotations, and the contexts in which they appeared in the Qur’anic text. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Postmodernism:A Self-InterviewIhab HassanThe following interview did not take place in Ihab Hassan's study in Milwaukee, with a view of Lake Michigan, rippling turquoise, blue, and mauve under a sky of fluffy paratactical clouds.Interviewer: You are sometimes known as the Father...Hassan: Please! At most, the Godfather of Postmodernism, though I don't know who the Godmother is. Maybe Madam Hype?I: Why hype?H: Because postmodernism began as a genuinely contested (...) idea and is fading as a form of media hype.I: Can you define it, however tentatively?H: I would prefer not to. In fact, I cannot, no more than I can define romanticism or modernism in a sentence or paragraph. Such definitions are best left to some onomastic genius. Once, I offered a table of features contrasting modernism with postmodernism. Once is quite enough.I: Why is that?H: Because it was as widely cited as pounced upon, nearly everyone ignoring my pointed disclaimer: "Yet the dichotomies this table represents remain insecure, equivocal. For differences shift, defer, even collapse; concepts in any one vertical column are not all equivalent; and inversions and exceptions, in both modernism and postmodernism, abound."I: Well, if we can't define postmodernism, how can we talk about it? [End Page 223]H: The way we talk about everything else: say, freedom, justice, love, spirit, happiness.... We talk about postmodernism by using the word in various verbal contexts—Wittgenstein would have said "language games"—and seeing what happens.I: What happens?H: Some discussions engage postmodernism and clarify it in certain perspectives, without actually defining it: for instance, the works of Hans Bertens, Charles Jencks, Andreas Huyssen, even Fredric Jameson....I: Why even Jameson?H: Because Marxism has a tenuous relation to contemporary reality, as everyone knows except some Western academics.I: Some would say that the entire phenomenon of postmodernism is an exercise of Western academics.H: That's a bit of a non sequitur but true enough, true up to a point. Remember, the phenomenon has overflowed its theoretical origins to become a kind of ironic cultural awareness, a mode of historical reflexivity—if you wish, a perpetually anxious exercise in self-definition.I: But Western, always Western, right?H: Japan has contributed vigorously to postmodernism, especially in art and architecture. So, instead of saying "Western," let's say high-tech, mass-media, omni-consuming societies.I: That, in effect, excludes four fifths of the world, wouldn't you say?H: Yes—and no. You see, cultural postmodernism has mutated into geopolitical postmodernity. By the latter, I mean both globalization with its thousand faces (multinational capitalism, cyber technology, cultural imperialism, "Americanization"), and counter-globalization with as many masks (local knowledge, old cultural traditions, postcolonial ideologies, anti-Western resentments). It's the monster phenomenon of our time.As I have written a good deal about this phenomenon, most recently in Angelika, I won't repeat myself here. The point, however, is that postmodernity is a planetary process, postmodernism is not.I: That suggests a political dimension, which some say you have slighted in your work. How would you respond to that criticism?H: Writing in the late sixties and early seventies about postmodernism, I lacked the benefits of hindsight. For instance, I focused on high culture, Beckett and Borges and Nabokov and Barthelme and Barth. I did not foresee then that postmodernism would become a media phenomenon, involving pop and kitsch. And I recognized the emergent process of globalization only in the Seventies, in Paracriticisms (1975).But I "slighted" the political only in the sense that I did not give it [End Page 224] priority, did not make it an "absolute horizon." In fact, I believe that a primary emphasis on politics flattens, impoverishes our lives. The current paradigm in the humanities ignores the inner cost of "politics."I: Forgive me, but that's another example of what some colleagues in the profession perceive as your contrary or cross-grained character. Can you explain why politics impoverishes our lives?H: Conformists—remember Harold Rosenberg's quip about "the herd of independent minds"?—are quick to discover perversity everywhere. But never mind that. The gravamen is that politics... (shrink)

Incidental fndings of potential medical signifcance are seen in approximately 5-8 percent of asymptomatic subjects and 16 percent of symptomatic subjects participating in large computed tomography colonography studies, with the incidence varying further by CT acquisition technique. While most CTC research programs have a well-defned plan to detect and disclose IFs, such plans are largely communicated only verbally. Written consent documents should also inform subjects of how IFs of potential medical signifcance will be detected and reported in CTC research studies.

It is widely held that introspection-based self-ascriptions of mental states are immune to error through misidentification , relative to the first person pronoun. Many have taken such errors to be logically impossible, arguing that the immunity holds as an “absolute” necessity. Here I discuss an actual case of craniopagus twins—twins conjoined at the head and brain—as a means to arguing that such errors are logically possible and, for all we know, nomologically possible. An important feature of the example is that (...) it is one where a person may be said to be introspectively aware of a mental state that occurs outside of her own mind. Implications are discussed for views of the relation between introspection and mental state ownership, and between introspection and epistemic criteria for the “mark of the mental.”. (shrink)

How do we know when we have imagined something? How do we distinguish our imaginings from other kinds of mental states we might have? These questions present serious, if often overlooked, challenges for theories of introspection and self-knowledge. This paper looks specifically at the difficulties imagination creates for Neo-Expressivist, outward-looking, and inner sense theories of self-knowledge. A path forward is then charted, by considering the connection between the kinds of situations in which we can reliably say that another person is (...) imagining, and those in which we can say the same about ourselves. This view is a variation on the outward-looking approach, and preserves much of the spirit of Neo-Expressivism. (shrink)

On reconnaît aujourd'hui que la pluralité juridique, c'est-à-dire la coexistence dans un même espace de plusieurs ordres ou systèmes juridiques concurrentiels, caractérise un grand nombre de sociétés de par le monde. Les juristes, et tous ceux qui s'intéressent à la diversité des cultures juridiques ainsi qu'à leur interaction, ont de plus en plus besoin de maîtriser les concepts, les techniques et les méthodes propres à l'étude pluraliste du droit. Ce manuel a pour objet de guider le chercheur désireux de mieux (...) connaître les aspects théoriques, méthodologiques et pratiques du pluralisme juridique. Il lui permettra notamment de se familiariser avec les fonctions et les usages de l'approche pluraliste, en plus de l'initier aux exigences de cette méthode sur le plan épistémologique, de même que dans le travail de terrain. Il propose également des contributions qui illustrent et interrogent la pertinence de la théorie pluraliste dans l'étude de certains phénomènes juridiques particuliers. Cet ouvrage est issu des travaux d'un collectif international d'experts francophones provenant d'horizons culturels et professionnels divers, et riches d'une expérience concrète de l'étude et de l'application de la méthode pluraliste. (shrink)