The Anthropology of Sport and Human Movement represents a collection of work that reveals and explores the often times dramatic relationship of our biology and culture that is inextricably woven into a tapestry of movement patterns. It explores the underpinning of human movement, reflected in play, sport, games and human culture from an evolutionary perspective and contemporary expression of sport and human movement.

This collection assembles Church's referee reports, Fitch's 1963 paper, and nineteen new papers on the knowability paradox.

Lewis/Stalnaker semantics has it that all counterpossibles (i.e., counterfactual conditionals with impossible antecedents) are vacuously true. Non-vacuism, by contrast, says the truth-values of counterpossibles are affected by the truth-values of the consequents. Some counterpossibles are true, some false. Williamson objects to non-vacuism. He asks us to consider someone who answered ‘11’ to ‘What is 5 + 7?’ but who mistakenly believes that he answered ‘13’. For the non-vacuist, (1) is false, (2) true: (1) If 5 + 7 were 13, x (...) would have got that sum right (2) If 5 + 7 were 13, x would have got that sum wrong Williamson is not persuaded by the initial intuitiveness of such examples: ... they tend to fall apart when thought through. For example, if 5 + 7 were 13 then 5 + 6 would be 12, and so (by another eleven steps) 0 would be 1, so if the number of right answers I gave were 0, the number of right answers I gave would be 1. (2006) That’s the whole argument—much of it implicit. Alan Baker’s critique (2007) of Brogaard and Salerno (2007) prompts us to say something less abbreviated about a less abbreviated form of Wiliamson’s argument. Then we further develop our (2007) counterfactual analysis of essense. (shrink)

FRIELING: HARMONIE UND RHYTHMUS IN NATUR UND KUNST.

My first plea has to do with the adequacy of this approach for the diverse purposes that philosophers set out for conceptual analysis. It is unclear what to make of concepts that do not lend themselves to obvious analysis in terms of the sorts of benefits that motivate Fisher’s intuitive cases. Some of the central concepts of philosophy — just the ones that where conceptual analysis ought to be most at home — like Knowledge or Person or Just State are (...) not ones where the benefit of determining whether something falls under that concept is as direct as Fisher’s intuitive case suggests. Indeed, in the case of Knowledge, for instance, it is not clear that there is much benefit at all in determining whether something falls under the concept. My sense is that the benefit of philosophical concepts is in their role in a much larger framework of understanding our humanity. That 1 framework has some currency to philosophers, and perhaps there can be some abstract assignment of benefit to the conceptual joints of that framework, but it seems more like the benefit is in the holistic aspects of the framework. If this is right, then the benefit afforded by the individual concepts is going to be massively indirect. The problem appears to be that, for some concepts, PCA’s premier virtue begins to look like a vice. Fisher says, Our explication of concept-meaning will determine which meanings we attribute to various first-order concepts, and that, in turn, will guide our application of those concepts. …[W]e need an explication that will attribute to each concept a meaning that, if employed as application conditions for that concept, would do well to sustain the regular ways in which that concept has been beneficially used (p. 9). (shrink)

This paper presents results from the analysis of business school dean responses to a survey designed to determine how sustainability, including sustainable business practices and climate change content, is being incorporated into business school curriculum. Information is also gathered on how schools and colleges of business are preparing instructors to incorporate sustainability-related content into their courses, the preferred programmatic approaches for offering content to students, and the barriers that impede modification of current curriculum to incorporate sustainability. It concludes with a (...) discussion of research that colleges and schools of business might conduct as part of their strategy to better understand how to bring their curriculum into alignment with new student demands for these topics. Background information on higher education commitment to sustainability is provided. (shrink)

Objective or subjective : that is the question -- The science of nature and the nature of science -- Theory : explanation, not speculation -- Is science the whole story? -- Our unique universe -- Nature's laws -- Facing the universe -- The hunt for reality.

This thesis is about demandingness objections. It is claimed that various moral theories ask too much of moral agents, and for that reason should be rejected or modified accordingly. In the first chapter, I consider what this objection entails, particularly distinguishing it from Bernard Williams's integrity objection. The second chapter investigates several attempts to undermine the objection. I contend that their arguments for a more burdensome conception of morality fail, and that accepting their `extreme' view would leave us unable to (...) explain much of our moral phenomenology. In the third chapter, I analyse what features of a moral theory make it susceptible to demandingness objections. Through this discussion I highlight social factors and psychological factors as potential candidates for generating the problem. Making use of these potential diagnoses, in chapter four, I examine the responses to demandingness objections by Richard Miller and Liam Murphy, which can provide verdicts sensitive to these features. In the fifth chapter, I examine the concept of blame and its relationship to moral wrongness. Noting this relationship and how an action's difficulty can affect whether we deem conduct blameworthy, I consider a recent proposal by Brian McElwee, that the difficulty of certain actions explains why they are too demanding. I reject this proposal, instead regarding difficulty as providing excuse conditions. However, through the discussion I draw attention to the fact that sub-optimal behaviour often does not need an excuse, suggesting that there is no `default' obligation to do the best. In the final chapter, I offer a way to consider how obligations are generated, utilising the concept of reasonableness. By incorporating this concept, and giving it a relativistic analysis, I suggest a theory can avoid demandingness objections. (shrink)

In this review of Matthew DeCoursey’s book on the aesthetics of drama education, I acknowledge the originality and usefulness of the theoretical framework he provides and attempt to summarize its key features. In applying them to an example of my own practice, I make use of the conceptual terminology DeCoursey has introduced and argue that it is both effective and illuminating to the practitioner. In tracing the trajectory of DeCoursey’s subsequent analysis of key theorists in the field, the study of (...) scripted drama, and the extensive use of drama across the curriculum, I attempt to do justice to the strengths of his argument, as well as pointing out what I perceive as some of its inherent weaknesses. I conclude by indicating some gaps in his attention to both historical and current practices in the field while still commending the book for its much-needed contribution. (shrink)

By pairing translations of _Gorgias_ and _Rhetoric_, along with an outstanding introductory essay, Joe Sachs demonstrates Aristotles response to Plato. If in the _Gorgias_ Plato probes the question of what is problematic in rhetoric, in _Rhetoric_, Aristotle continues the thread by looking at what makes rhetoric useful. By juxtaposing the two texts, an interesting "conversation" is illuminated—one which students of philosophy and rhetoric will find key in their analytical pursuits. Focus Philosophical Library translations are close to and are non-interpretative of (...) the original text, with the notes and a glossary intending to provide the reader with some sense of the terms and the concepts as they were understood by Aristotle and Plato’s immediate audience. (shrink)

Whilst much has been said about the implications of predictive processing for our scientific understanding of cognition, there has been comparatively little discussion of how this new paradigm fits with our everyday understanding of the mind, i.e. folk psychology. This paper aims to assess the relationship between folk psychology and predictive processing, which will first require making a distinction between two ways of understanding folk psychology: as propositional attitude psychology and as a broader folk psychological discourse. It will be argued (...) that folk psychology in this broader sense is compatible with predictive processing, despite the fact that there is an apparent incompatibility between predictive processing and a literalist interpretation of propositional attitude psychology. The distinction between these two kinds of folk psychology allows us to accept that our scientific usage of folk concepts requires revision, whilst rejecting the suggestion that we should eliminate folk psychology entirely. (shrink)

This introduction briefly lays out the basics of Kant’s concept, transcendental freedom, and some of its discontents. It also provides an overview of the dossier itself, introducing Katerina Deligiorgi’s discussion of ought-implies-can, Patrick Frierson’s account of degrees of responsibility, and Jeanine Grenberg’s treatment of the third-person.

We live in a human-rights world. The language of human-rights claims and numerous human-rights institutions shape almost all aspects of our political lives, yet we struggle to know how to judge this development. Scholars give us good reason to be both supportive and sceptical of the universal claims that human rights enable, alternatively suggesting that they are pillars of cross-cultural understanding of justice or the ideological justification of a violent and exclusionary global order. All too often, however, our evaluations of (...) our human-rights world are not based on sustained consideration of their complex, ambiguous and often contradictory consequences. Reconstructing Human Rights argues that human rights are only as good as the ends they help us realise. We must attend to what ethical principles actually do in the world to know their value. So, for human rights we need to consider how the identity of humanity and the concept of rights shape our thinking, structure our political activity and contribute to social change. Reconstructing Human Rights defends human rights as a tool that should enable us to challenge political authority and established constellations of political membership by making new claims possible. Human rights mobilise the identity of humanity to make demands upon the terms of legitimate authority and challenges established political memberships. In this work, it is argued that this tool should be guided by a democratising ethos in pursuit of that enables claims for more democratic forms of politics and more inclusive political communities. While this work directly engages with debates about human rights in philosophy and political theory, in connecting our evaluations of the value of human rights to their worldly consequences, it will also be of interest to scholars considering human rights across disciplines, including Law, Sociology, and Anthropology. (shrink)

Policymakers who seek to make scientifically informed decisions are constantly confronted by scientific uncertainty and expert disagreement. This thesis asks: how can policymakers rationally respond to expert disagreement and scientific uncertainty? This is a work of non-ideal theory, which applies formal philosophical tools developed by ideal theorists to more realistic cases of policymaking under scientific uncertainty. I start with Bayesian approaches to expert testimony and the problem of expert disagreement, arguing that two popular approaches— supra-Bayesianism and the standard model of (...) expert deference—are insufficient. I develop a novel model of expert deference and show how it can deal with many of these problems raised for them. I then turn to opinion pooling, a popular method for dealing with disagreement. I show that various theoretical motivations for pooling functions are irrelevant to realistic policymaking cases. This leads to a cautious recommendation of linear pooling. However, I then show that any pooling method relies on value judgements, that are hidden in the selection of the scoring rule. My focus then narrows to a more specific case of scientific uncertainty: multiple models of the same system. I introduce a particular case study involving hurricane models developed to support insurance decision-making. I recapitulate my analysis of opinion pooling in the context of model ensembles, confirming that my hesitations apply. This motivates a shift of perspective, to viewing the problem as a decision theoretic one. I rework a recently developed ambiguity theory, called the confidence approach, to take input from model ensembles. I show how it facilitates the resolution of the policymaker’s problem in a way that avoids the issues encountered in previous chapters. This concludes my main study of the problem of expert disagreement. In the final chapter, I turn to methodological reflection. I argue that philosophers who employ the mathematical methods of the prior chapters are modelling. Employing results from the philosophy of scientific models, I develop the theory of normative modelling. I argue that it has important methodological conclusions for the practice of formal epistemology, ruling out popular moves such as searching for counterexamples. (shrink)

_Teachers as Researchers_ urges teachers - as both producers and consumers of knowledge - to engage in the debate about educational research by undertaking meaningful research themselves. Teachers are being encouraged to carry out research in order to improve their effectiveness in the classroom, but this book suggests that they also reflect on and challenge the reductionist and technicist methods that promote a 'top down' system of education. It argues that only by engaging in complex, critical research will teachers rediscover (...) their professional status, empower their practice in the classroom and improve the quality of education for their pupils. Now re-released to introduce this classic guide for teachers, the new edition of _Teachers as Researchers_ now also includes an introductory chapter by Shirley R. Steinberg that sets the book within the context of both the subject and the historical perspective. In addition, she also provides information on some key writing that extends the bibliography of this influential book thereby bringing the material fully up to date with current research. Postgraduate students of education and experienced teachers will find much to inspire and encourage them in this definitive book. (shrink)

Seize universitaires americains, europeens et israeliens, reunis en 2002 a Jerusalem a l'initiative de Joelle Hansel, Shalom Rosenberg, Richard A. Cohen et Ami Bouganim, interrogent l'ensemble de l'oeuvre d'Emmanuel Levinas : ses ecrits philosophiques, etudes phenomenologiques, essais sur le judaisme, lectures talmudiques, commentaires de textes litteraires ou poetiques, reflexions sur des questions d'actualite, prises de position a l'egard de courants ou d'ideologies contemporains et textes sur l'art. Des questions majeures servent de trait d'union entre ces etudes : la relation de (...) Levinas a Husserl et Heidegger; le probleme de la subjectivite; intersubjectivite et alterite; le Tiers, la justice et l'Etat; le sionisme et l'Etat d'Israel; theologie et religion; l'hermeneutique talmudique de Levinas; sa conception du judaisme. (shrink)

At least since the time of Aristotle, it has been widely accepted that “man is by nature a social animal”. We eat, sleep, talk, laugh, cry, love, fight and create in ways that integrally depend on others and the social norms that we collectively generate and maintain. Yet in spite of the widely accepted importance of human sociality in underlying our daily activities, its exact manifestation and function is consistently overlooked by many academic disciplines. Cognitive science, for example, regularly neglects (...) the manner in which social interactions and interactively generated norms canalise and constitute our cognitive processes. Without the inescapable ubiquity of dynamic social norms, any given agent simply could not cognise as a human. In this thesis, I aim to use a range of insights – from phenomenology, social psychology, neuroscience, cultural anthropology and gender studies – to clarify the role of sociality for human life. More specifically, the thesis can be broadly separated into three parts. I begin with a broad explanation of how human agents are fundamentally tied to worldly entities and other agents in a way that characterises their ontological existence. In chapters 3 and 4, I criticise two recent and much-discussed theories of social cognition – namely, we-mode cognition and participatory sense-making – for failing to make intelligible the social constitution of human existence. In the later chapters, I then propose foundations for a more satisfactory theory of social cognition, as well as explicating a view of human selfhood as ‘biosocial’, such that even the autonomy of biological bodies is socially codified from a human perspective. Taken together, the aforementioned chapters should contribute to calls for a new direction in social cognitive science, whilst also yielding novel insights into the nature of human selfhood. (shrink)

A lecture concerned with women as philosophers and as philosophical thinkers. Some bibliographical information in the footnotes.

One of the central issues dividing proponents of metaphysical interpretations of transcendental idealism concerns Kant’s views on the distinctness of things in themselves and appearances. Proponents of metaphysical one-object interpretations claim that things in themselves and appearances are related by some kind of one-object grounding relation, through which the grounding and grounded relata are different aspects of the same object. Proponents of metaphysical two-object interpretations, by contrast, claim that things in themselves and appearances are related by some kind of two-object (...) grounding relation, through which the grounding and grounded relata involve distinct objects. By way of investigating Kant’s overarching account of grounding, I will argue that the most plausible metaphysical interpretation of transcendental idealism is one on which we can know that there are things in themselves grounding appearances, but not which specific kind of one- or two-object grounding relation obtain between them. Our ignorance of things in themselves therefore extends to their distinctness from appearances — pace both metaphysical one-object interpretations and metaphysical two-object interpretations. (shrink)

Questions the research, assumptions, and intention behind Danish statistician Bj²rn Lomborg's attacks on peer-reviewed scientific theories of global warming.

"He completed the assignment in two phases: The photographs made during the first phase capture the natural ruggedness of the terrain and establish its relationship to the developed neighboring enclaves. Those made during the second phase not only record the actual construction process but also reveal Deal's personal perspective on the qualities of light and the creation of form. Represented in this book as a selection from the resulting portfolio, Topos, a Greek word meaning place, site, position, and occasion - (...) Deal's artistic legacy to the Gerry Center."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

Automating Humanity is the shocking and eye-opening new manifesto from international award-winning designer Joe Toscano that unravels and lays bare the power agendas of the world's greatest tech titans in plain language, and delivers a fair warning to policymakers, civilians, and industry professionals alike: we need a strategy for the future, and we need it now. Automating Humanity is an insider's perspective on everything Big Tech doesn't want the public to know--or think about--from the addictions installed on a global scale (...) to the profits being driven by fake news and disinformation, to the way they're manipulating the world for profit and using our data to train systems that will automate jobs at an explosive, unprecedented scale. Toscano provides a critique of modern regulation, including parts of the new European Union's General Data Proctection Regulation (GDPR) suggesting how we can create proactive, adaptable regulation that satisfies both the needs of consumer safety and commercial success in the international economy. The content touches on everything from technology, economics, and public policy to psychology, history, and ethics, and is written in a way that is accessible to everyone from the average reader to the technical expert. (shrink)

Functionalism offers an account of the relations that hold between behavioural functions, information and neural processing, and conscious experience from which one can draw two inferences: for any discriminable difference between qualia there must be an equivalent discriminable difference in function; and for any discriminable functional difference within a behavioural domain associated with qualia, there must be a discriminable difference between qualia. The phenomenon of coloured hearing synaesthesia appears to contradict the second of these inferences. We report data showing that (...) this form of synaesthesia is genuine and probably results from an aberrant projection from cortical language areas to a region specialized for the perception of colour. Since functionalism purports to be a general account of consciousness, one such negative instance, if it can be further sustained empirically, is sufficient to invalidate it. (shrink)

The answer is surprising, and what we're about to learn will wake us up to a reality most of us never knew existed.The reason we're so oblivious is because we've all been operating at human speed, relying on our own physical power and our five senses. But there is something extremely important we've all been missing. It holds the key to everything good--the key to life, success, happiness, peace of mind, and understanding beyond our wildest imagination. It's perhaps the best-kept (...) secret in the history of mankind and it packs a staggering, invigorating message that can change your life for the better--improving understanding, eliminating anxiety, and helping to extend your living years indefinitely. All we have to do is open our eyes and ears.We're all inundated with this secret at all times. It's present in our favorite songs and movies, the stories we tell our children, and even in every commercial campaign! The secret is broadcast in famous news stories including the coronavirus pandemic, the sinking of the Titanic, or the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11. It's in ordinary life activities such as breathing, sleeping, waking up, traveling, sex, and getting married and changing one's name.Now, bestselling author and award-winning journalist Joe Kovacs reveals the solution--cracking the divine code that shifts our minds from operating at slow, human speed and making the jump to the incredibly quick "God speed."Hundreds of ancient mysteries and prophecies are instantly unsealed as the master key that unlocks the mystery of everything is now in your hands. (shrink)

I argue that normative formal epistemology (NFE) is best understood as modelling, in the sense that this is the reconstruction of its methodology on which NFE is doing best. I focus on Bayesianism and show that it has the characteristics of modelling. But modelling is a scientific enterprise, while NFE is normative. I thus develop an account of normative models on which they are idealised representations put to normative purposes. Normative assumptions, such as the transitivity of comparative credence, are characterised (...) as modelling idealisations motivated normatively. I then survey the landscape of methodological options: what might formal epistemologists be up to? I argue the choice is essentially binary: modelling or theorising. If NFE is theorising it is doing very poorly: generating false claims with no clear methodology for separating out what is to be taken seriously. Modelling, by contrast, is a successful methodology precisely suited to the management of useful falsehoods. Regarding NFE as modelling is not costless, however. First, our normative inferences are less direct and are muddied by the presence of descriptive idealisations. Second, our models are purpose-specific and limited in their scope. I close with suggestions for how to adapt our practice. (shrink)

In both the literal and metaphorical senses, it seemed as if 1970s America was running out of gas.

The philosophy of the Presocratics still governs scholarly discussion today. This important volume grapples with a host of philosophical issues and philological and historical problems inherent in interpreting Presocratic philosophers.

Constructivist theory must choose between the hypothesis that felt perturbation drives cognitive development (the priority of felt perturbation) and the hypothesis that the particular process that eventually produces new cognitive structures first produces felt perturbation (the continuity of process). There is ambivalence in Piagetian theory regarding this choice. The prevalent account of constructivist theory adopts the priority of felt perturbation. However, on occasion Piaget has explicitly rejected it, simultaneously endorsing the continuity of process. First, I explicate and support this latter (...) position, arguing that felt perturbation emerges after the construction of a new cognitive structure has already begun. Next, I discuss the broader significance of rejecting the priority of felt perturbation in terms of a distinction between two types of theory of effective change, labeled Lamarckian and Darwinian in analogy with familiar theories of evolutionary change. Rejecting the priority of felt perturbation allows the development of a Darwinian perspective. In turn, the Darwinian perspective offers advantages for elaborating the analogy Piaget proposed between consciousness and the relation of form and content. (shrink)

Externalism with regard to mental content says that in order to have certain types of intentional mental states (e.g. beliefs), it is necessary to be related to the environment in the right way.

I defend Piccinini’s mechanistic account of computation against three related criticisms adapted from Sprevak’s critique of non-representational computation. I then argue that this defence highlights a major problem with what Sprevak calls the received view; namely, that representation introduces observer-relativity into our account of computation. I conclude that if we want to retain an objective account of computation, we should reject the received view.

Judgments concerning animals have arisen across a variety of established practice areas. There is, however, no publicly available repository of judgments concerning the emerging practice area of animal protection law. This has hindered the identification of individual animal protection law judgments and comprehension of the scale of animal protection law made by courts. Thus, we detail the creation of an initial animal protection law repository using natural language processing and machine learning techniques. This involved domain expert classification of 500 judgments (...) according to whether or not they were concerned with animal protection law. 400 of these judgments were used to train various models, each of which was used to predict the classification of the remaining 100 judgments. The predictions of each model were superior to a baseline measure intended to mimic current searching practice, with the best performing model being a support vector machine (SVM) approach that classified judgments according to term frequency—inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) values. Investigation of this model consisted of considering its most influential features and conducting an error analysis of all incorrectly predicted judgments. This showed the features indicative of animal protection law judgments to include terms such as ‘welfare’, ‘hunt’ and ‘cull’, and that incorrectly predicted judgments were often deemed marginal decisions by the domain expert. The TF-IDF SVM was then used to classify non-labelled judgments, resulting in an initial animal protection law repository. Inspection of this repository suggested that there were 175 animal protection judgments between January 2000 and December 2020 from the Privy Council, House of Lords, Supreme Court and upper England and Wales courts. (shrink)

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 officially opened the Great Plains to westward settlement, and the public survey of 1855 by Charles A. Manners and Joseph Ledlie along the Sixth Principal Meridian established the grid by which the uncharted expanse of the Great Plains was brought into scale. The mechanical act performed by land surveyors is believed by photographer Joe Deal to be powerfully similar to the artistic act of making a photograph.To Deal, both acts are about establishing a frame around (...) a vast scene that suggests no definite boundaries of its own. Thus, when approaching his own photographs of the Great Plains, Deal viewed his photography as a form of reenactment, a method of understanding how it felt to contain the Great Plains in smaller, more measurable units. In West and West, Deal, who was born and raised in Kansas, revisited the Kansas-Nebraska territory and applied his photographic understanding of the landscape grid and horizon line to illuminate the sense of infinite space that transcends the reality of the survey. As Deal writes in his concluding essay: “If the square, as employed in the surveys of public lands, could function like a telescope, framing smaller and smaller sections of the plains down to a transect, it can also be used as a window, equilaterally divided by the horizon, that begins with a finite section of the earth and sky and restores them in the imagination to the vastness that now exists as an idea: the landscape that is contained within the perfect symmetry of the square implies infinity.” The stunning photographs in West and West present the Great Plains from a rare perspective. From this vantage point, Deal is able to distill and contemplate its expanse. (shrink)