I present and defend an account of three-place trustworthiness according to which B is trustworthy with respect to A in domain of interaction D, if and only if she is competent with respect to that domain, and she would take the fact that A is counting on her, were A to do so in this domain, to be a compelling reason for acting as counted on. This is not the whole story of trustworthiness, however, for we want those we can (...) count on to identify themselves so that we can place our trust wisely. (shrink)

Just as testimony is affected by unjust social relations, so too is intellectual self-trust. I defend an account of intellectual self-trust that explains both why it is properly thought of as trust and why it is directed at the self, and explore its relationship to social power. Intellectual self-trust is neither a matter of having dispositions to rely on one?s epistemic methods and mechanisms, nor having a set of beliefs about which ones are reliable. Instead, it is a stance that (...) an agent takes towards her own cognitive methods and mechanisms, comprising both cognitive and affective elements. Our intellectual self-trust is created and sustained socially and is thus porous to social power. Unjust social relations cause epistemic injustice, which undermines self-trust among the underprivileged; unjust social relations cause excessive self-trust among the privileged, which perpetuates epistemic injustice, which further undermines the self-trust of the disadvantaged in a vicious feedback loop. I conclude by exploring ways in which socially distorted intellectual self-trust can become better calibrated. (shrink)

Lucidly and persuasively written, this book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars seeking to understand Irigaray's original contribution to philosophical and feminist thought.

A resurgence of interest in inner speech as a core feature of human experience has not yet coincided with methodological progress in the empirical study of the phenomenon. The present article reports the development and psychometric validation of a novel instrument, the Varieties of Inner Speech Questionnaire , designed to assess the phenomenological properties of inner speech along dimensions of dialogicality, condensed/expanded quality, evaluative/motivational nature, and the extent to which inner speech incorporates other people’s voices. In response to findings that (...) some forms of psychopathology may relate to inner speech, anxiety, depression, and proneness to auditory and visual hallucinations were also assessed. Anxiety, but not depression, was found to be uniquely positively related to both evaluative/motivational inner speech and the presence of other voices in inner speech. Only dialogic inner speech predicted auditory hallucination-proneness, with no inner speech variables predicting levels of visual hallucinations/disturbances. Directions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Using as case studies two early diagrams that represent mechanisms of the cell division cycle, we aim to extend prior philosophical analyses of the roles of diagrams in scientific reasoning, and specifically their role in biological reasoning. The diagrams we discuss are, in practice, integral and indispensible elements of reasoning from experimental data about the cell division cycle to mathematical models of the cycle’s molecular mechanisms. In accordance with prior analyses, the diagrams provide functional explanations of the cell cycle and (...) facilitate the construction of mathematical models of the cell cycle. But, extending beyond those analyses, we show how diagrams facilitate the construction of mathematical models, and we argue that the diagrams permit nomological explanations of the cell cycle. We further argue that what makes diagrams integral and indispensible for explanation and model construction is their nature as locality aids: they group together information that is to be used together in a way that sentential representations do not. (shrink)

The origins of philosophy of education as a discipline are relatively late, and can be traced in the Anglo-American academic world from the 1960s and a specific emphasis on conceptual problems deriving from the analytical tradition of philosophy. In more recent years, however, there has been a notable ‘Continentalist’ turn in the discipline, leading to a re-evaluation of key texts and philosophers from the French and German traditions and their relation to the discourse of education. One paradigmatic example here is (...) the work of the French postmodernist thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard. In this essay, I explore how Lyotard’s powerful critique of education in his early work, especially with regard to his influence on the May ‘68 events at Nanterre University, can be seen as crucially important, now again, to a current crisis in educational philosophy in the Western world. Moreover, Lyotard’s post-’68 work, with his paradigmatic The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge as especially important, can be seen as providing a very challenging riposte to both ‘managerialist’ and instrumentalist philosophies on the one side but also to overly simplistic ‘liberatory’ educational critiques on the other side. (shrink)

Inquiries into the nature of scientific modeling have tended to focus their attention on mathematical models and, relatedly, to think of nonconcrete models as mathematical structures. The arguments of this article are arguments for rethinking both tendencies. Nonmathematical models play an important role in the sciences, and our account of scientific modeling must accommodate that fact. One key to making such accommodations, moreover, is to recognize that one kind of thing we use the term ‘model’ to refer to is a (...) collection of propositions. (shrink)

Eos or the Wider Aspects of Cosmogony J H Jeans Originally published in 1928 "A fascinating summary of his tremendous conclusions…" Times Literary Supplement "No book in the series surpasses Eos in brilliance and profundity…" Is this universe permanent or transitory? If transitory, is it near its end or just beginning? Is life common or rare? Where does life stand in relation t the stupendous mass of inert matter? These and other issues are lucidly dealt with in this book. 80pp, (...) 6 b&w plates Hermes, or the Future of Chemistry T W Jones Originally published in 1928. "A complete and readable survey of chemical developments, making special reference to bio-chemistry, synthetic fuels, and catalysis." Manchester Guardian "Tells us…with brilliant clarity, what chemistry and its achievements are likely to be in the future." Morning Post Chemistry as the means of human emancipation is the subject of this book. Today chemistry is one off the master factors of our existence; tomorrow, the author argues, it will dominate every phase of life, winning for man the goal of all endeavour: economic freedom, and may also effect a startling change in man himself. 82pp. Sybilla or the Future of Prophecy C A Mace Originally published in 1927 "An entertaining and instructive pamphlet." Morning Post An examination of the possibilities of scientific forecasting. 90pp Archimedes or the Future of Physics L L Whyte Originally published in 1928. "This book will be an inspiration. The writer is a clear and fearless thinker." Discovery When this volume was written, physics, biology and psychology were, in the author’s view, converging towards a scientific synthesis of unprecedented importance whose influence on thought and social custom would be profound. This book interprets those events. 88pp. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between compromise and fairness, and considers in particular why, if a fair outcome to a conflict is available, the conflict should still be subject to compromise. It sets out the defining features of compromise and explains how fair compromise differs from both principled and pragmatic compromise. The fairness relating to compromise can be of two types: procedural or end-state. It is the coherence of end-state fairness with compromise that proves the more puzzling case. We offer (...) reasons why people should be allowed to resolve conflicting or competing claims through compromise, even if compromise comes at the expense of end-state fairness, but we resist the suggestion that the primary rationale for compromise is to be found in non-ideal circumstances. (shrink)

Essays on a wide range of areas and topics in Asian studies for scholars looking to incorporate Asia into their worldview and teaching. Contributors give contemporary presence to Asian studies through a variety of themes and topics in this multidisciplined and interdisciplinary volume. In an era of globalization, scholars trained in Western traditions increasingly see the need to add materials and perspectives that have been lacking in the past. Accessibly written and void of jargon, this work provides an adaptable entrée (...) to Asia for the integration of topics into courses in the humanities, social sciences, cultural studies, and global studies. Guiding principles, developed at the East-West Center, include noting uncommon differences, the interplay among Asian societies and traditions, the erosion of authenticity and cultural tradition as an Asian phenomenon as well as a Western one, and the possibilities Asian concepts offer for conceiving culture outside Asian contexts. The work ranges from South to Southeast to East Asia. Essays deal with art, aesthetics, popular culture, religion, geopolitical realities, geography, history, and contemporary times. “This volume truly lies at the intersection of scholarship and teaching. Each essay has the potential to help rethink approaches to scholarly issues, and there is a great deal of material for classroom discussion and examples. The book’s breadth—covering India, China, Korea, the Sea of Malay, Bhutan, and other locations—is impressive.” — Robert André LaFleur, Beloit College. (shrink)

The vocabulary of the art-critic seems to consist of two groups of words, those that refer to the formal or surface properties of the work of art, and those which refer to properties we can at first loosely term imaginative. The first group consists of words and phrases like “unity” , “coherence”, “consistency”, “compactness”, “elegance”, and so on. The way such words are cashed will consist in an analysis of the determinate formal qualities of the work of art as evidence (...) of the skill of the artist as a craftsman. (shrink)

_The Pursuit of Existentialism_ explores how existentialism has survived and how its key themes and concerns remain integral to continental philosophy today. _The Pursuit of Existentialism_ places the creation of existentialism - in the work of Sartre, Camus and Beauvoir - in its historical context, assessing how it drew on the work of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. The book then goes on to focus on the complex heritage of post-Sartrean thinking from Heidegger to today. Theorists and schools covered include: Heidegger's infamous (...) critique of existentialism; "the dissident surrealists" from Bataille to Blanchot; feminist thinking from Arendt to Kristeva; postmodernist theorising from Baudrillard and Lyotard; psychoanalytic thinking from Lacan and Žižek; and deconstructive and political philosophy from Derrida and Badiou. (shrink)

In recent years, the popularity of the inimitable Slavoj Žižek has perhaps cast a shadow over the collective influence exerted by Slovenian intellectuals on modern day philosophy. Yet despite his image as an isolated genius, this timely book relocates Žižek as a thinker whose ideas are born of a specifically Slovenian context. Although only coming to international notice in the early 1990s, the Slovenian school needs to be understood as the culmination of a series of intellectual, artistic and political movements (...) inextricably connected to the quest for the succession of Slovenia from Yugoslavia. These developments in thought must also be seen in the light of one of the giants of Continental philosophy: Jacques Lacan.Featuring brand new interviews with three of its forerunners - Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar and Alenka Zupancic - this fascinating account details each philosopher's individual concerns, whilst shedding light on the complex genealogy and continuing development of the Slovenian Neo-Lacanian school. Rarely are we afforded such an opportunity to study the birth of a philosophy from a seminal moment in modern history. (shrink)

Slippery slope arguments have been important in the euthanasia debate for at least half a century. In 1957 the Cambridge legal scholar Glanville Williams wrote a controversial book, The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law, in which he presented the decriminalizing of euthanasia as a modern liberal proposal taking its rightful place alongside proposals to decriminalize contraception, sterilization, abortion, and attempted suicide (all of which the book also advocated).1 Opposition to these reforms was in turn presented as exclusively religious (...) and particularly Roman Catholic. Thus Williams asserted that "euthanasia can be condemned only according to religious opinion" (1957, p. 312).The following year, in .. (shrink)

The position adopted in this paper is inspired by Edgar Morin’s paradigm of complexity and his critique of scientific and philosophical forms of reductionism. This paper is based on research focusing on the diversity of conceptions of critique developed in academic discourses. It aims to challenge the fragmentation and the reduction framing the understanding of this notion in educational sciences. The reflection begins with the introduction of some of Morin’s assumptions concerning the paradigm of complexity. The next section provides a (...) definition of the idea of critique and explores some limits associated with contemporary references framing this notion. Theories of critique are at the core of several educational theories. Based on the literature identified in French-speaking and English-speaking critical traditions in education, several factors determining the way the idea of critique is reduced in education are highlighted. Stressing the tacit character of those variables challenges the limits of traditional conceptions of critique in contemporary education. The position adopted denounces therefore the fact that the current development of theories of critique in education does not provide a framework considering more systematically their conditions of emergence, their own limitations, as well as the antagonistic, complementary and contradictory relationships, which connect them to one another. Based on this position, this paper finally suggests that a distinction be made between “hypocritique” and “hypercritique” as a semantic artifact, stressing the importance of challenging existing theories of critique in education according to the level of complexity that one may attribute to them. (shrink)

Idealizing conditions are scapegoats for scientific hypotheses, too often blamed for falsehood better attributed to less obvious sources. But while the tendency to blame idealizations is common among both philosophers of science and scientists themselves, the blame is misplaced. Attention to the nature of idealizing conditions, the content of idealized hypotheses, and scientists’ attitudes toward those hypotheses shows that idealizing conditions are blameless when hypotheses misrepresent. These conditions help to determine the content of idealized hypotheses, and they do so in (...) a way that prevents those hypotheses from being false by virtue of their constituent idealizations. (shrink)

It is often claimed that elite professional athletes are role models and as such have certain duties to behave in morally appropriate ways. The argument is that given their influential status and influence, they should be good examples rather than bad ones. In relation to alcohol consumption and the problematic behaviours associated with excessive consumption, many professional athletes are bad role models. They consume too much and behave badly. Drawing on neo-Aristotelian insights I argue the following. First, persons who exhibit (...) good character and virtues like self-control are preferable to those who exemplify vice like recklessness and selfishness in general and in relation to alcohol consumption in particular. To exhibit virtue is both good in itself and preferable from a moral education perspective. In other words it is better to exemplify virtue in front of others who may follow the example. Second, acting well and becoming the right sort is notoriously difficult and the moral atmosphere or the ethos of the culture in which virtue plays out has a significant impact. It is important therefore to include the ethos of sporting practice in any proposed reform of drinking behaviour such that tolerance and tacit promotion of masculine drinking practices is eschewed in favour of responsible and considerate consumption. Finally I argue that we must cultivate the proper virtue of emulation so that people who are admired or esteemed (sporting heroes) by young people in particular are not copied blindly. In other words it is important to cultivate a critical capacity to recognise worthy role models and to avoid identifying with unworthy characters, practices and vices. Part of this process is to highlight proper and worthy role models inside and outside of sport. In conclusion, I believe that although bad role models are grabbing the headlines in relation to problematic drinking practices, there are good role models in sport who should be lauded as exemplars of good character living a worthwhile sporting life. Such characters can show those inside and outside the practice community a more responsible and considerate approach to alcohol. (shrink)

Prompted by the ever-increasing cesarean rate, this paper considers the interpretive disjunct between two significant strands of feminist analysis that have arisen in the last four decades as a consequence of the phenomenon of medicalized birth. In contrast to the dominant paradigm of bioethical “Principalism,” both modes of analysis, understood as “the critique of industrialized labor” and “the critique of idealized labor,” are attentive to the way in which social discourses inform bioethical deliberation and practice, but significantly diverge in the (...) nature of their accounts. The “industrialization critique” understands the culture of medical intervention to be impelled by an “obstetric desire” to appropriate women's reproductive potency, whereas the “idealization critique” relates new mothers’ “low childbirth satisfaction” to a pernicious normative ideal propagated by the natural childbirth movement. This paper will explore the anatomy of both critiques and interrogate their fidelity to the phenomenological insight of the body as chiasm between material and ideal. I will argue that while the insights of the idealization critique are well grounded, we must exercise caution about the critique's tendency to reductively understand the embodied experience of labor as entirely discursively produced, a gesture that risks re-performing the dematerialization of women often effected through obstetric intervention itself. (shrink)

There is an apparent gap between public policy on embryo research in the United Kingdom and its ostensible justification. The rationale is respect for the “special status” of the embryo, but the policy actively promotes research in which embryos are destroyed. Richard Harries argues that this is consistent because, the “special status” of the human embryo is less than the absolute status of persons. However, this intermediate moral status does no evident work in decisions relating to the human embryo. Rather, (...) public policy seems to be based on a different account of “special status”: that developed by Mary Warnock. According to this, the embryo has no inherent status and the language of “special status” serves rather to accommodate the feelings of those who object to embryo research. This “emotivist” account is highly problematic, not so much for its attitude to the embryo as for its subversion of public moral reasoning. (shrink)

In this paper I criticize arguments by Pauline Phemister and Matthew Stuart that John Locke's position in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding allows for natural kinds based on similarities among real essences. On my reading of Locke, not only are similarities among real essences irrelevant to species, but natural kind theories based on them are unintelligible.

The view that metaphysics is a waste of time appears to be gaining in popularity. It is held openly by many scientists and even many philosophers. I argue here that this is a consequence of the way metaphysics is usually done and the futility of a certain approach to it, and not a reason to suppose there is no useful knowledge to be acquired from its study. -/- .

Some time ago, in an article for the Journal of Consciousness Studies, David Chalmers challenged his peers to identify the ingredient missing from our current theories of consciousness, the absence of which prevents us from solving the 'hard' problem and forces us to make do with nonreductive theories. Here I respond to this challenge. I suggest that consciousness is a metaphysical problem and as such can be solved only within a global metaphysical theory. Such a theory would look very like (...) the information theory proposed by Chalmers, but with the addition of an extra phenomenon that would allow it to become fundamental. (shrink)

Richard Rorty’s liberal utopia offers an interesting model for those who wish to explore the emancipatory potential of a post-foundational account of politics, specifically liberalism. What Rorty proposes is a form of liberalism that is divorced from its Kantian metaphysical foundations. This paper will focus on the gulf that appears between Rorty’s liberal utopia in theory, the political form that it must ultimately manifest itself in, and the consequences this has for debates on pluralism, diversity, and identity, within liberal political (...) thought. -/- The strength of Rorty’s liberal utopia, in his analysis, lies in the fact that with the rejection of philosophy and metaphysics, we can simply get on with the job of reducing cruelty through experimental tinkering with the liberal political system. Instead of trying to develop intellectually sophisticated justifications for why we act, we should just act. Political action, for Rorty, does not require a philosophical or metaphysical justification. However, upon closer critical examination, we can see that whatever potential Rorty’s liberal utopia may have in theory, this is negated by the fact that at the level of political praxis, his re-description of liberalism leaves us with a conception of liberalism that is essentially unchanged. Whilst Rorty has re-situated liberalism from the philosophical to the political, his solution fails to address any internal problems. (shrink)

In this investigation of the Japanese film Kairo, I contemplate how the horrors present in the film relate to the issue of self, by examining a number of interlocking motifs. These include thematic foci on disease and technology which are more intimately and inwardly focused that the film's conclusion first appears to suggest. The true horror here, I argue, is ontological: centred on the self and its divorcing from the exterior world, especially founded in an increased use of and reliance (...) on communicative technologies. I contend that these concerns are manifested in Kairo by presenting the spread of technology as disease-like, infecting the city and the individuals who are isolated and imprisoned by their urban environment. Finally, I investigate the meanings of the apocalypse, expounding how it may be read as hopeful for the future rather than indicative of failure or doom. (shrink)

Sunohara Yuuri and Akita Masami’s series of six seppuku films (1990) are solely constituted by images of fictionalized death, revolving around the prolonged self-torture of a lone figure committing harakiri. I contend that the protagonist’s auto-immolation mirrors a formal death, each frame ‘killing’ the moment it represents. My analysis aims to explore how the solipsistic nature of selfhood is appositely symbolized by the isolation of the on-screen figures and the insistence with which the six films repeat the same scenario of (...) protracted agony across the cycle. The centralization of suffering, I argue, parallels the distance between viewer and image with the isolating nature of embodied existence. Thus, this article seeks to probe the relationship between form and content, asking what the image of death reveals about the death of the image. -/- . (shrink)

Although overshadowed by its filmic adaptations (Hideo Nakata, 1998 and Gore Verbinski, 2002), Koji Suzuki’s novel Ring (1991) is at the heart of the international explosion of interest in Japanese horror. This article seeks to explore Suzuki’s overlooked text. Unlike the film versions, the novel is more explicitly focused on the line between self-preservation and self-sacrifice, critiquing the ease with which the former is privileged over the latter. In the novel then, the horror of Sadako’s curse raises questions about the (...) terrors of moral obligation: the lead protagonist (Asakawa) projects the guilt he feels over his self-interested actions, envisaging them as an all-consuming apocalypse. (shrink)

Both the slasher movie and its more recent counterpart the "torture porn" film centralize graphic depictions of violence. This article inspects the nature of these portrayals by examining a motif commonly found in the cinema of homicide, dubbed here the "pure moment of murder": that is, the moment in which two characters’ bodies adjoin onscreen in an instance of graphic violence. By exploring a number of these incidents (and their various modes of representation) in American horror films ranging from Psycho (...) (1960) to Saw VI (2009), the article aims to expound how these images of slaughter demonstrate (albeit in an augmented, hyperbolic manner) a number of long-standing problems surrounding selfhood that continue to fuel philosophical discussion. The article argues that the visual adjoining of victim and killer onscreen echoes the conundrum that in order to attain identity, the individual requires and yet simultaneously repudiates the Other that constitutes unique subjectivity. (shrink)

Horror film sequels have not received as much serious critical attention as they deserve – this is especially true of the Saw franchise, which has suffered a general dismissal under the derogatory banner ‘Torture Porn’. In this article I use detailed textual analysis of the Saw series to expound how film sequels employ and complicate expected temporal and spatial relations – in particular, I investigate how the Saw sequels tie space and time into their narrative, methodological and moral sensibilities. Far (...) from being a gimmick or a means of ensuring loyalty to the franchise (one has to be familiar with the events of previous episodes to ascertain what is happening), it is my contention that the Saw cycle directly requests that we examine the nature of space and time, in terms of both cinematic technique and our lived, off-screen temporal/spatial orientations. -/- . (shrink)

Skeptics challenge God’s fairness for ordering Israel to destroy the Canaanites, but a close look at the horror of Canaanite sinfulness, the corruptive and seductive power of their sin as seen in the Canaanization of Israel, and God’s subsequently instituting Israel’s own destruction because of Israel’s committing Canaanite sin reveals that God was just in His ordering the Canaanite’s destruction. But Western culture’s embrace of “Canaanite sin” inoculates it against the seriousness of that sin and so renders it incapable of (...) responding to Canaanite sin with the appropriate moral outrage. (shrink)

Kausales Denken spielt sowohl im Alltag wie auch im wissenschaftlichen Forschungsprozess eine zentrale Rolle. Es erlaubt uns, Phänomene vorherzusagen, zu kontrollieren und zu verstehen. Kausales Denken geht über die Angabe der Ursachen eines Phänomens hinaus: Wollen wir verstehen, warum ein Fahrrad fährt, so versuchen wir, Schritt für Schritt nachzuvollziehen, wie die einzelnen Bestandteile des Fahrrads zusammenwirken, um miteinander die Bewegung zu produzieren. Wir sind an dem Mechanismus interessiert, durch den das Phänomen zustande kommt. Dieses Vorgehen wird in der Wissenschaftsphilosophie wie (...) auch in der Kognitionspsychologie mit Hilfe mechanistischer Theorien kausalen Denkens beschrieben. Der Sammelband bringt erstmals Vertreter beider Disziplinen in sechs aufeinander abgestimmten Beiträgen zusammen. Neben einer Diskussion der Kernmerkmale mechanistischen Denkens stehen insbesondere Fragen nach dem Erwerb mechanistischer Denkstrukturen und nach der Rolle von Handlungen und Handlungserfahrungen im Fokus. (shrink)

In The Retrieval of Ethics, Talbot Brewer defends an Aristotelian-inspired understanding of the good life, in which living the good life is conceived of in terms of engaging in a unified dialectical activity. In this essay, I explore the assumptions at work in Brewer's understanding of dialectical activity and raise some concerns about whether or not we have reason to embrace them. I argue that his conception of human nature and that towards which we are drawn stands in tension with (...) empirical research on motivation. Given this tension, I conclude that it is implausible to construe living the good life as a unified dialectical activity. (shrink)