Introduction: from grammatology to cultural graphology -- The psychopathology of writing -- Type ornament -- Sign tailoring -- Psychoanalytic graphology.

Fleming, Daniel J; Ryan, Thomas Three recent phrases of Pope Francis warrant attention and guide this article. First, there is his call for 'witnesses of God's love' in his tribute to modern martyrs. The second is 'the pedagogy of grace' and the work of the Spirit explained in 'Amoris Laetitia'. Third, from the same document, we find his discussion of accompaniment in the process of moral discernment within the church. With these as guideposts and drawing on recent studies in (...) moral philosophy and psychology, this article unfolds in five steps: setting the scene; witness in relation to moral understanding and intersubjectivity; intersubjectivity and conscience; a pedagogy of grace: Holy Spirit and nonbelievers; and a pedagogy of grace in relation to moral development. (shrink)

This collection of previously unpublished essays presents a new approach to the history of analytic philosophy--one that does not assume at the outset a general characterization of the distinguishing elements of the analytic tradition. Drawing together a venerable group of contributors, including John Rawls and Hilary Putnam, this volume explores the historical contexts in which analytic philosophers have worked, revealing multiple discontinuities and misunderstandings as well as a complex interaction between science and philosophical reflection.

A German translation with 2017 postscript of Floyd, Juliet. 2012. "Wittgenstein's Diagonal Argument: A Variation on Cantor and Turing." In Epistemology versus Ontology, Logic, Epistemology: Essays in Honor of Per Martin-Löf, edited by P. Dybjer, S. Lindström, E. Palmgren and G. Sundholm, 25-44. Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media. An analysis of philosophical aspects of Turing's diagonal argument in his (136) "On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem" in relation to Wittgenstein's writings on Turing and Cantor.

Singular they has emerged as a key term in contemporary gender politics, reflecting growing usage of they/them as nonbinary personal pronouns. Drawing on interviews with 54 progressive gender activists, we consider how singular they can be used to resist and redo aspects of the prevailing gender structure. We identify three distinct usages of singular they: as a nonbinary personal pronoun, as a universal gender-neutral pronoun, and as an indefinite pronoun when a person’s self-identified gender is unknown. While previous research on (...) singular they as a gender-inclusive language practice has focused primarily on its usage as a nonbinary personal pronoun, our findings point to the relevance for gender politics of all three usages. Our analysis offers new insight into how nonbinary they challenges dominant gender norms and practices beyond incorporating additional gender categories. Given our findings, we propose further investigation of how using gender-neutral pronouns for everyone in specific contexts can advance progressive activists’ goals. Finally, we argue that the longstanding usage of singular they as an indefinite pronoun has new importance today in affirming gender as a self-determined identity. (shrink)

It is not obvious why we are conscious. Why can’t all of our mental activities take place unconsciously? What is consciousness for? We aim to make progress on this question, focusing on conscious vision. We review evidence on the timescale of visual consciousness, showing that it is surprisingly slow: postdictive effects reveal windows of unconscious integration lasting up to 400 milliseconds. We argue that if consciousness is slow, it cannot be for online action-guidance. Instead, we propose that conscious vision evolved (...) to support offline cognition, in tandem with the larger visual sensory horizons afforded by the water-to-land transition. Smaller visual horizons typical in aquatic environments require fast, reflexive actions of the sort that are guided unconsciously in humans. Conversely, larger terrestrial visual horizons allow benefits to accrue from “model-based” planning of the sort that is associated with consciousness in humans. We further propose that the acquisition of these capacities for internal simulation and planning provided pressures for the evolution of reality monitoring—the capacity to distinguish between internally and externally triggered signals, and to solve “Hamlet’s problem” in perception—the problem of when to stop integrating evidence, and fix a particular model of reality. In line with higher-order theories of consciousness, we associate the emergence of consciousness with the emergence of this reality monitoring function. We discuss novel empirical predictions that arise from this account, and explore its implications for the distribution of conscious (vs. unconscious) vision in aquatic and terrestrial animals. (shrink)

[This Invited Paper will be published in December 2016.].

In recent years much has been said about how new democracies are backsliding or have regressed since the turn of the century when hope and optimism about the future spread of democracy was widespread. However, ideas that democracy would spread were based on institutional and governance indicators rather than from the perspective of everyday citizens. When we look at public attitudes towards democracy during this period, we can see that such optimism was perhaps misplaced or premature. Drawing on findings from (...) the AsiaBarometer and the World Values Survey, this research finds that public attitudes during this time were not overly convinced by democracy and certainly not yet satisfied with their government's performance in terms of providing basic democratic freedoms and independence. (shrink)

This paper presents a modified random network model to illustrate how groups can form in the absence of evolutionary forces, assuming groups are collections of entities at any level of organization. This model is inspired by the Zero Force Evolutionary Law, which states that there is always a tendency for diversity and complexity to increase in any evolutionary system containing variation and heredity. That is, in the absence of evolutionary forces, the expectation is a continual increase in diversity and complexity (...) at any level of biological hierarchy. I show that, when modeled, this expectation of increasing variation results not only in the formation of groups, but also in a higher probability of group formation than is found in a model that is purely random. (shrink)

This essay seeks to understand the complex response to the current Black Lives Matter protests against police violence, which pose deeper questions about the forms of politics that black citizens—who are experiencing a defining moment of racial terror in the United States in the twenty-first century—can and should pursue. When other citizens and state institutions betray a lack of care and concern for black suffering, which in turn makes it impossible for those wrongs to be redressed, is it fair to (...) ask blacks to enact “appropriate” democratic politics? These questions are explored via a reading of Danielle Allen and Ralph Ellison’s meditations on the problem of democratic loss and Hannah Arendt’s critique of school desegregation battles in the 1960s. I suggest that there is a conceptual trap in romantic historical narratives of black activism (especially the civil rights movement) that recast peaceful acquiescence to loss as a form of democratic exemplarity. (shrink)

Cadherin‐mediated cell‐cell adhesion is perturbed in protein tyrosine kinase (PTK)‐transformed cells. While cadherins themselves appear to be poor PTK substrates, their cytoplasmic binding partners, the Arm catenins, are excellent PTK substrates and therefore good candidates for mediating PTK‐induced changes in cadherin behavior. These proteins, p120ctn, β‐catenin and plakoglobin, bind to the cytoplasmic region of classical cadherins and function to modulate adhesion and/or bridge cadherins to the actin cytoskeleton. In addition, as demonstrated recently for β‐catenin, these proteins also have crucial signaling (...) roles that may or may not be related to their effects on cell‐cell adhesion. Tyrosine phosphorylation of cadherin complexes is well documented and widely believed to modulate cell adhesiveness. The data to date, however, is largely correlative and the mechanism of action remains unresolved. In this review, we discuss the current literature and suggest models whereby tyrosine phosphorylation of Arm catenins contribute to regulation or perturbation of cadherin function. (shrink)

Solidarity-the reciprocal relations of trust and obligation between citizens that are essential for a thriving polity-is a basic goal of all political communities. Yet it is extremely difficult to achieve, especially in multiracial societies. In an era of increasing global migration and democratization, that issue is more pressing than perhaps ever before. In the past few decades, racial diversity and the problems of justice that often accompany it have risen dramatically throughout the world. It features prominently nearly everywhere: from the (...) United States, where it has been a perennial social and political problem, to Europe, which has experienced an unprecedented influx of Muslim and African immigrants, to Latin America, where the rise of vocal black and indigenous movements has brought the question to the fore. Political theorists have long wrestled with the topic of political solidarity, but they have not had much to say about the impact of race on such solidarity, except to claim that what is necessary is to move beyond race. The prevailing approach has been: How can a multicultural and multiracial polity, with all of the different allegiances inherent in it, be transformed into a unified, liberal one? Juliet Hooker flips this question around. In multiracial and multicultural societies, she argues, the practice of political solidarity has been indelibly shaped by the social fact of race. The starting point should thus be the existence of racialized solidarity itself: How can we create political solidarity when racial and cultural diversity are more or less permanent? Unlike the tendency to claim that the best way to deal with the problem of racism is to abandon the concept of race altogether, Hooker stresses the importance of coming to terms with racial injustice, and explores the role that it plays in both the United States and Latin America. Coming to terms with the lasting power of racial identity, she contends, is the starting point for any political project attempting to achieve solidarity. (shrink)

A survey of Wittgenstein's writings on logic and mathematics; an analytical bibliography of contemporary articles on rule-following, social constructivism, Wittgenstein, Godel, and constructivism is appended. Various historical accounts of the nature of mathematical knowledge glossed over the effects of linguistic expression on our understanding of its status and content. Initially Wittgenstein rejected Frege's and Russell's logicism, aiming to operationalize the notions of logical consequence, necessity and sense. Vienna positivists took this to place analysis of meaning at the heart of philosophy, (...) while Ramey took extensionalism to result. Wittgenstein's interest in rule-following emerged through his reactions to these attempted appropriations. (shrink)

This intriguing volume provides a thorough examination of the historical roots of global climate change as a field of inquiry, from the Enlightenment to the late twentieth century. Based on primary and archival sources, the book is filled with interesting perspectives on what people have understood, experienced, and feared about the climate and its changes in the past. Chapters explore climate and culture in Enlightenment thought; climate debates in early America; the development of international networks of observation; the scientific transformation (...) of climate discourse; and early contributions to understanding terrestrial temperature changes, infrared radiation, and the carbon dioxide theory of climate. But perhaps most important, this book shows what a study of the past has to offer the interdisciplinary investigation of current environmental problems. (shrink)

This is the first of two papers responding to ‘recent’ commentary on various aspects of hyperplane dependence by several authors. In this paper I focus on the issues of the relations of HD to state reduction and unitary evolution. The authors who’s comments I address here are Maudlin and Myrvold. In the second paper of this set I focus on HD dynamical variables and localizable properties and measurements and address comments of de Koning, Halvorson, Clifton and Wallace. Each paper ends (...) with some reflections on the implications of HD for the ontology of Minkowski space-time. To set the stage for my responses, I begin this paper with some general position statements designed to correct what seem to be widespread and erroneous construals of some of my views. Two central points are argued for in this first paper. First, dynamical evolution occurs not only within foliations of Minkowski space-time. Rather the transition from the physical state of affairs on any one hyperplane to any other, whether the hyperplanes intersect or are parallel, is always an instance of dynamical evolution between them, generated by some active combination of boost-like transformations and/or time-like translations and/or state reductions and ‘reconstructions’. This point gives rise to a generalized conception of a history of dynamical evolution, allowing for the use of parameterized families of hyperplanes that multiply cover some portions of space-time. Nevertheless, and this is the second central point, for any two generalized histories, H and H’, the quantum states for a system on all the hyperplanes of H from the asymptotic past up to some hyperplane, h, determine the quantum states for the system on all the hyperplanes of H’ from the asymptotic past up to any hyperplane, h’, such that h’ lies to the past of all those state reduction regions that lie to the future of all hyperplanes of H that are ‘earlier’ than h. Consideration of these results should defuse concerns that have been voiced about the coherence and consistency of HD. A position closely related to the second point has already been argued for by Myrvold. (shrink)

Our hope and aim was to provoke debate and research on the hypothesis that conscious experiences form quality spaces [1], so we were very pleased to receive letters from Dołęga, Mentec and Cleeremans [2] and Song [3] making constructive suggestions for taking this enquiry in new directions. Our focus was on how various computational theories of consciousness can accommodate the quality space hypothesis. Dołęga et al. make the helpful observation that this should also be investigated diachronically – both developmentally, and (...) during learning. Song points to valuable work that expands our methods for investigating quality spaces. She also argues that non-conventional approaches, like Integrated Information Theory (IIT), will be needed to account for the qualitative character of consciousness. Work on IIT has been valuable in pointing to the importance of the phenomenon we grapple with in our paper – the potential interconnectedness of conscious experiences – which other theories of consciousness have tended to overlook. However, we respectfully disagree that tackling the phenomenon necessitates a non-conventional scientific approach. (shrink)

A survey of open questions in the field; definitions of “emergence” and “media” are given, as well as their relationship to big data. Rationale for the volume is given, and c. 100 word descriptions and analyses of each essay in the volume are put forward. The volume is differentiated from other books and approaches, and open problems and questions set forth.

Cult Criminals is a set of early Victorian novels 'sensationally' popular with readers and of immense influence in the development of the novel form. All six novels, commonly labelled 'Newgate' novels, scandalized the Victorians by glamorizing criminals and led to a bitter literary controversy between Dickens and Thackeray, who damned the former's Oliver Twist as a 'Newgate' novel. At the heart of the 'Newgate' debate lay questions concerning the moral and social function of the novel, the relationship between romance and (...) realism in fiction, and whether crime should be portrayed in fiction at all. The Newgate novels function as a bridge between the eighteenth- century tradition of crime fiction and the detective and crime novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as encapsulating many of the social and cultural shifts that took place in the early Victorian period. (shrink)

To resume, then, the need for a written Law specifically prohibiting Genocide. (1) It should by now be evident that “the pleasure principle” needs its ethical mandate, beyond the “reality principle” of a social field that can no longer be considered homeostatic and nonconflictual. The fantasmatic character of human pleasure must not only be accounted for in any ethic today, it must take primacy. Fantasy formations grow ever central in our lives; fantasy is the support of our “reality.” (2) The (...) writing of such a Law would permit the enunciation of positively negative content, thereby reframing the Other as lacking; and it would also provide a way for the increasingly stateless “citizens” of the postmodern, “global” community, to be asked to decide on the necessarily paired alternatives (Good and Evil, to kill or to love) which have once again become the starkest of possibilities for them. Only this kind of decision — which is not that of the vel — suffers resistance to the will of the people when it is a malignant will-to- jouissance. (shrink)

The article considers the changing position of women and the family from the Second World War until today using the UK as its example. It offers a theoretical perspective by setting out to examine the possibility that the rise of second-wave feminism both reflected and spearheaded an aspect of demographic transition to non-replacement populations. It considers the tension between the formation of ‘sexual difference’ to enable reproduction and what it calls the ‘engendering of gender’ in lateral relations which are indifferent (...) to procreation. With the achievements of feminism as a political vanguard and the demographic transition as its socioeconomic base, women were no longer defined by the family; their definition ceased to depend on procreation. The article proposes that the new use of the term ‘gender’ entered the political arena to become a key concept of feminism to indicate non-procreative sexuality and sexual relations that need not be heterosexual or biologically procreative. Judith Butler’s well-known suggestion that ‘gender’ troubles the status quo in a revolutionary manner cannot be sustained. Rather than disturbing the universe, the advent of ‘gender’ reflects the transition to a new demographic order. (shrink)

In Timothie Bright and the Origins of Early Modern Shorthand, J. D. Fleming brings together two areas of sixteenth-century intellectual history. One is the period emergence of artificial systems for verbatim shorthand notation-a crucial episode in the history of information. The other is the ancient medical discourse of melancholy humour, or black bile. Timothie Bright (1550-1615), physician and priest, prompts the juxtaposition. For he was the author, not only of the period's original shorthand manual-Characterie (1588)-but also of the first (...) book in English on the dark humour: The Treatise of Melancholy (1586). Bright's account of melancholy involves a cybernetic phenomenology of the human. Essentially, we are psyches (souls or minds). We are sealed off from our bodies, operating them as automata across an interface. Psychological presence, for Bright, is illusion and pathology. Engrossing performances or representations therefore bring great danger, and so does the doctrine of predestination-less for its content than its typical delivery. Painful preaching was indispensable in sixteenth-century English Protestantism. But it falls foul of Bright's proscriptions. This is followed by his publication of the first known system for verbatim shorthand notation since antiquity, its technique heavily inflected toward a vocabulary of the pulpit. The passionate, oral performance of the inspired preacher receives an unprecedented textual preservative-and prophylactic. Bright's technology of information serves his phenomenology of alienation. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the early modern period, the tradition of melancholy, and the history of information-as theory, and technology. (shrink)

Following a comparative study of canonical liberal philosophers Hayek and Rawls, Juliet Williams reveals a new direction for conceptualizing limited government in the twenty-first century, highlighting the central role that democratic politics--rather than philosophical principles--should play in determining the uses and limits of state power in a liberal regime. Williams draws on recent scholarship in the field of democratic theory and cultural studies in arguing for a shift in the ways liberals approach the study of politics.

A survey of current evidence available concerning Wittgenstein's attitude toward, and knowledge of, Gödel's first incompleteness theorem, including his discussions with Turing, Watson and others in 1937–1939, and later testimony of Goodstein and Kreisel; 2) Discussion of the philosophical and historical importance of Wittgenstein's attitude toward Gödel's and other theorems in mathematical logic, contrasting this attitude with that of, e.g., Penrose; 3) Replies to an instructive criticism of my 1995 paper by Mark Steiner which assesses the importance of Tarski's semantical (...) work, both for our understanding of Wittgenstein's remarks on Gödel, and our understanding of Gödel's theorem itself. (shrink)

There is an important but underappreciated ambiguity in Hobbes’ concept of personhood. In one sense, persons are representatives or actors. In the other sense, persons are representees or characters. An estate agent is a person in the first sense; her client is a person in the second. This ambiguity is crucial for understanding Hobbes’ claim that the state is a person. Most scholars follow the first sense of ‘person’, which suggests that the state is a kind of actor – in (...) modern terms, a ‘corporate agent’. I argue that Hobbes’ state is a person only in the second sense: a character rather than an actor. If there are any primitive corporate agents in Hobbes’ political thought, they are representative assemblies, not states or corporations. Contemporary political theorists and philosophers tend to miss what is unique and valuable about Hobbes’ idea of state personality because they project the idea of corporate agency onto it. (shrink)

A look at Wittgenstein's comments on the incompleteness theorem with an inter-pretation that is consistent with what Gödel proved.

In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein conveyed the idea that ethics cannot be located in an object or self-standing subject matter of propositional discourse, true or false. At the same time, he took his work to have an eminently ethical purpose, and his attitude was not that of the emotivist. The trajectory of this conception of the normativity of philosophy as it developed in his subsequent thought is traced. It is explained that and how the notion of a ‘form of life’ (...) (Lebensform) emerged only in his later thought, in 1937, earmarking a significant step forward in his philosophical method. We argue that the concept of Lebensform represents a way of domesticating logic itself, the very idea of a claim or reason, supplementing the idea of a ‘language game’, which it deepens. Lebensform is contrasted with the phenomenologists’ Lebenswelt through a reading of the notions of ‘I’, ‘world’ and ‘self’ as they were treated in the Tractatus, The Blue and Brown Books and Philosophical Investigations. Finally, the notion of Lebensform is shown to have replaced the notion of culture (Kultur) in Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein’s spring 1937 ‘domestication’ of the nature of logic is shown to have been fully consonant with the idea that he was influenced by his reading Alan Turing’s 1936/1937 paper, ‘On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem’. (shrink)

For neoclassical economists, Homo economicus, or economic human, represents the ideal employee: an energetic worker bee that is a rational yet competitive decision-maker. Alternatively, one could view the concept as a cold and selfish workaholic endlessly seeking the accumulation of money and advancement - a chilling representation of capitalism. Or perhaps, as Peter Fleming argues, Homo economicus does not actually exist at all. In The Death of Homo Economicus, Fleming presents this controversial claim with the same fierce logic (...) and perception that launched his Guardian column into popularity. Fleming argues that as an invented model of a human being, Homo economicus is, in reality, a tool used by economists and capitalists to manage our social world through the state, business, and even family. As workers, we are barraged with constant reminders that we should always strive toward this ideal persona. It's implied - and sometimes directly stated - that if we don't then we are failures. Ironically, the people most often encouraged to emulate this model are those most predisposed to fail due to their socioeconomic circumstances: the poor, the unemployed, students, and prisoners. Fleming illuminates why a peculiar proactive negativity now marks everyday life in capitalist societies, and he explores how this warped, unattainable model for workers would cause chaos if enacted to the letter. Timely and revelatory, The Death of Homo Economicus offers a sharp, scathing critique of who we are supposed to be in the workplace and beyond"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Wagering contingent on a previous decision, or post-decision wagering, has recently been proposed to measure conscious awareness. Whilst intuitively appealing, it remains unclear whether economic context interacts with subjective confidence and how such interactions might impact on the measurement of awareness. Here we propose a signal detection model which predicts that advantageous wagers placed on the identity of preceding stimuli are affected by loss aversion, despite stimulus visibility remaining constant. This pattern of predicted results was evident in a psychophysical task (...) where we independently manipulated perceptual and economic factors. Changes in wagering behaviour induced by changes in wager size were largely driven by changes in criterion, consistent with the model. However, for near-threshold stimuli, a reduction in wagering efficiency was also evident, consistent with an apparent but potentially illusory decrease in awareness of the stimulus. These findings challenge an assertion that post-decision wagering provides a direct index of subjective awareness. (shrink)

On 19 June 2019, Victoria's 'Voluntary Assisted Dying' Act came into effect. The Act makes legal two interventions at the end of life. In most cases, it allows a doctor to prescribe a patient who meets certain criteria with a lethal substance, which it is supposed a patient will take at a time and place of their choosing to end their life. In rarer cases, where a patient is unable to ingest the lethal substance, it also allows for a doctor (...) to administer such a substance to the same end. In the Victorian legislation these interventions have been given the umbrella term of 'Voluntary Assisted Dying'. In Catholic ethics, as in most bioethical frameworks, these acts are referred to as physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. (shrink)