Wilson's comments on The Market Experience are deficient for at least three reasons. First, his lack of knowledge regarding subjective well?being deprives him of an adequate frame of reference from which to evaluate my work. Second, he fails to appreciate that a theory may legitimately draw upon more than one explanatory factor. Third, Wilson apparently did not read the entire book.

Augustine is the person from the ancient world about whom we know most. He is the author of an intimate masterpiece, the Confessions, which continues to delight its many admirers. In it he writes about his infancy and his schooling in the classics in late Roman North Africa, his remarkable mother, his sexual sins ('Give me chastity, but not yet,' he famously prayed), his time in an outlawed heretical sect, his worldly career and friendships and his gradual return to God. (...) His account of his own eventual conversion is a classic study of anguish, hesitation and what he believes to be God's intervention. It has inspired philosophers, Christian thinkers and monastic followers, but it still leaves readers wondering why exactly Augustine chose to compose a work like none before it. Robin Lane Fox follows Augustine on a brilliantly described journey, combining the latest scholarship with recently found letters and sermons by Augustine himself to give a portrait of his subject which is subtly different from older biographies. Augustine's heretical years as a Manichaean, his relation to non-Christian philosophy, his mystical aspirations and the nature of his conversion are among the aspects of his life which stand out in a sharper light. For the first time Lane Fox compares him with two contemporaries, an older pagan and a younger Christian, each of whom also wrote about themselves and who illumine Augustine's life and writings by their different choices. More than a decade passed between Augustine's conversion and his beginning the Confessions. Lane Fox argues that the Confessions and their thinking were the results of a long gestation over these years, not a sudden change of perspective, but that they were then written as a single swift composition and that its final books are a coherent consummation of its scriptural meditation and personal biography. This exceptional study reminds us why we are so excited and so moved by Augustine's story. Praise for Pagans and Christians 'This open-hearted and learned book is one that any scholar of the ancient world and of early Christianity would be proud to have written... Lane Fox has opened his pages to let in an entirely new world.' Peter Brown, New York Review of Books 'A work of generous humanity and recondite erudition... of consuming interest to all of us who want to know and understand the consequences of the ancient world.' Henry Chadwick, Financial Times Praise for The Unauthorised Version 'I don't know where one would turn for an account of the Bible so clear, so lively and, in many respects, so just.' Frank Kermode, Guardian 'Magnificent... delivered with authority and verve. Learned but never pedantic, he is an unfailingly incisive, thought-provoking, humane, courteous, and often entertaining guide.' Economist. (shrink)

In virtue of what does a sign have meaning? This is the question raised by Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations. Semantic dispositionalism is a (type of) theory that purports to answer this question. The present paper argues that semantic dispositionalism faces a heretofore unnoticed problem, one that ultimately comes down to its reliance on unanalyzed notions of repeated types of signs. In the context of responding to the rule-following paradox—and offering a putative solution to it—this amounts to simply assuming a solution to (...) the problem in one domain and using it to solve the same problem in another. Given, moreover, the level at which the rule-following paradox undercuts dispositionalism—the level of the notion of a sign's repetition—the objections made to the view also rule out causal/informational theories of meaning as well as communitarian/assertion-theoretic ones as potential solutions to the rule-following paradox. (shrink)

A new reading of Plato’s political thought Plato famously defends the rule of knowledge. Knowledge, for him, is of the good. But what is rule? In this study, Melissa Lane reveals how political office and rule were woven together in Greek vocabulary and practices that both connected and distinguished between rule in general and office as a constitutionally limited kind of rule in particular. In doing so, Lane shows Plato to have been deeply concerned with the roles and (...) relationships between rulers and ruled. Adopting a longstanding Greek expectation that a ruler should serve the good of the ruled, Plato’s major political dialogues—the Republic, the Statesman, and Laws—explore how different kinds of rule might best serve that good. With this book, Lane offers the first account of the clearly marked vocabulary of offices at the heart of all three of these dialogues, explaining how such offices fit within the broader organization and theorizing of rule. Lane argues that taking Plato’s interest in rule and office seriously reveals tyranny as ultimately a kind of anarchy, lacking the order as well as the purpose of rule. When we think of tyranny in this way, we see how Plato invokes rule and office as underpinning freedom and friendship as political values, and how Greek slavery shaped Plato’s account of freedom. Reading Plato both in the Greek context and in dialogue with contemporary thinkers, Lane argues that rule and office belong at the center of Platonic, Greek, and contemporary political thought. (shrink)

Etudes présentées au Colloque Pascal, thématique des Pensées à l'Université de Western Ontario en 1984.

ἔτεκεν δ᾽, ἁνίκα Μοῖραιτέλεϲαν, ταυρόκερων θεὸν 100ϲτεφάνωϲέν τε δρακόντωνϲτεφάνοιϲ, ἔνθεν ἄγραν θηρότροφον μαι-νάδεϲ ἀμφιβάλλονται πλοκάμοιϲ.102-3 θηρότροφον praeeunte Musgrave Allen : -τρόφοι ‹L›P The subject of ἔτεκεν and ϲτεφάνωϲεν is Zeus. If the text is right, Zeus gave birth to Dionysus, and Zeus then crowned him with snakes. This note argues that the text is corrupt because vase painting shows Dionysus born already crowned, and the notion that Zeus should crown anyone is quite exceptional. I conclude that in 101 Euripides probably (...) wrote ϲτεφανωθέντα, not ϲτεφάνωϲέν τε. (shrink)

Contemporary notions of what constitutes tribal self government for Indigenous Peoples in the legal systems of the nation-states Canada, New Zealand and the United States of America have their origins in philosophies and theories developed by European nation-states generally, in relation to their colonial expansion into what is now called the Americas. This thesis examines the nature of these theories, and how they have formed the basis for legal precedent and public policy in the three nation-states. A representative analysis of (...) three contemporary issues will serve to illustrate the outcome of this legal/political history. I look at three sites. These are the British Columbia Treaty Process in Canada, the Waka Umanga legislation in New Zealand, and legal developments arising from the Indian Reorganization Act in the United States. Full sovereignty from an Indigenous Peoples worldview existed for Indigenous nations, and with it, self government. The notion of self government as a viable and contemporary public policy initiative is well grounded in law and history. It would seem that current initiatives to acknowledge this inherent right are more about preserving colonial hegemony rather then engaging in honest negotiation. Current initiatives are converging into a single public policy goal; namely the corporatisation of Indigenous Peoples legal personality and self governing capacity. What used to be distinct nation-state development now seems to be a four nation-state (CANZUS) unified plan being implemented on four different fronts. Clearly, from the legal history, self government is something fundamentally different from self-management. The advent of Legal Positivism has played a significant role in assumptions that inherent sovereignty and self government never existed under European legal systems. The framework of tribal self governance must be viewed in the context of the values of the specific People to be a true expression of an Indigenous Nation exercising self government. This fundamental distinction can be traced back to the legal history. The foundational laws regarding interactions with Indigenous Peoples were developed under theories of natural law. The contemporary state practice is conducted under positivist law, with a nod toward developing human rights standards. Only through continued advocacy for the legal recognition of inherent rights will the nation-states be challenged on their self management agenda. (shrink)

SUPERANNO A unique collection of photographs by WRA photographer Hikaru Iwasaki focuses on resettlement using photos of Japanese Americans following their release from WRA camps from 1943 to 1945. Author Lane Hirabayashi explores the use of photography in the WRA mission to encourage “loyal” Japanese Americans to return to society at large, and convince Euro-Americans this was safe. Hirabayashi also assesses the success of the WRA project, and the multiple uses of the photographs over time.

This paper outlines a defense of the project of seeking to interpret Plato’s political thought as a valid method of interpreting Plato. It does so in two stages: in the first part, by rebutting denials of the possibility of interpreting Plato’s thought at all; in the second part, by identifying one set of ideas arguably central to Plato’s political thought, namely, his profound rejection of political anarchy, understood in terms of the absence of the authority of officeholders and posited both (...) as characteristic of democracy and as the origin of tyranny. This approach to anarchy and its relationship to tyranny is, I contend, a Platonic innovation, and must be understood against the background of Greek writings that straightforwardly opposed the two. I aim here to show, on the one hand, that denying tout court the project of seeking to interpret Plato’s political thought is an implausibly extreme position, and, on the other, that pursuing that project can bear valuable fruit. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper explores and reevaluates the place of Plato in the history of liberty. In the first half, reevaluating the view that he invents a concept of ‘positive liberty’ in the Republic, I argue for two claims: that he does not do so, insofar as this is not the way that virtuous psychological self-mastery in the Republic is understood, and that the Republic works primarily with the inverse concept of slavery, relying on entrenched Greek ideas about the badness of the (...) status of being a slave and the actions and dispositions associated with it. Turning in the second half to seek Platonic innovation not in the domain of ‘positive liberty’ but in reflection on liberty as a political value, understood as the liberty of action of citizens within the laws, I argue for two further claims: that as such a political value, liberty is limited and reshaped in both the Republic and the Laws to be compatible with obedience to rule / willingness to be ruled, ideally willing obedience; and that for this limited and reshaped value to be secured, such obedience must be manifested not only in regard to a constitution’s laws, but also to the magistrates who hold office within it. (shrink)

Issues of methodology are central to the philosophy of moral progress. However, the idea that effective moral methodology, as well as being instrumental to progress, might also constitute progress has not been adequately explored. This paper will critically assess the merits of this idea – what I call ‘pure proceduralism about moral progress’ – taking Philip Kitcher's recent theory of ‘democratic contractualism’ (2021) as a test case. An epistemology of pure procedural moral progress will be sketched: namely, a naturalised epistemology (...) of paradigmatic instances of moral progress. Assuming an ideal procedure exists and has been at least approximately instantiated (an empirical claim), we learn about its form by studying paradigms of historical moral progress. From this epistemological method will be derived theoretical constraints on what can count as a theory of moral progress per se: it must capture the core semantic constraints on the term ‘moral progress,’ those features without which we would not recognise a change as moral progress. While this poses a tougher challenge for pure proceduralism than for more traditional approaches to moral methodology, it will be concluded that the potential of pure proceduralism as a viable metaethics of moral progress remains an exciting open question. (shrink)

Previous research has suggested that bodily signals from internal organs are associated with diverse cortical and subcortical processes involved in sensory-motor functions, beyond homeostatic reflexes. For instance, a recent study demonstrated that the preparation and execution of voluntary actions, as well as its underlying neural activity, are coupled with the breathing cycle. In the current study, we investigated whether such breathing-action coupling is limited to voluntary motor action or whether it is also present for mental actions not involving any overt (...) bodily movement. To answer this question, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), and respiratory signals while participants were conducting a voluntary action paradigm including self-initiated motor execution (ME), motor imagery (MI), and visual imagery (VI) tasks. We observed that the voluntary initiation of ME, MI, and VI are similarly coupled with the respiration phase. In addition, EEG analysis revealed the existence of readiness potential (RP) waveforms in all three tasks (i.e., ME, MI, VI), as well as a coupling between the RP amplitude and the respiratory phase. Our findings show that the voluntary initiation of both imagined and overt action is coupled with respiration, and further suggest that the breathing system is involved in preparatory processes of voluntary action by contributing to the temporal decision of when to initiate the action plan, regardless of whether this culminates in overt movements. -/- . (shrink)

Chemiosmotic coupling − the harnessing of electrochemical ion gradients across membranes to drive metabolism − is as universally conserved as the genetic code. As argued previously in these pages, such deep conservation suggests that ion gradients arose early in evolution, and might have played a role in the origin of life. Alkaline hydrothermal vents harbour pH gradients of similar polarity and magnitude to those employed by modern cells, one of many properties that make them attractive models for life's origin. Their (...) congruence with the physiology of anaerobic autotrophs that use the acetyl CoA pathway to fix CO2 gives the alkaline vent model broad appeal to biologists. Recently, however, a paper by Baz Jackson criticized the hypothesis, concluding that natural pH gradients were unlikely to have played any role in the origin of life. Unfortunately, Jackson mainly criticized his own interpretations of the theory, not what the literature says. This counterpoint is intended to set the record straight. (shrink)

Fictionalist theories of metaphor hold that metaphorical utterances aim at fictionality. Fictionalism successfully explains speaker judgments about the truth and aptness of metaphorical utterances, and it also accurately predicts the data around metaphor and autistic individuals (who have deficits in both imaginative play and metaphor comprehension). But fictionalism is not a viable theory of metaphor, despite these merits, because of (what I call) the problem of semantic entailment: semantic entailments that are normally valid fail under metaphorical interpretation, but fictionalism predicts (...) otherwise. I argue this to ultimately show that theorists of metaphor should reject the linguistic side of the fictionalist story; but this leaves open the possibility of accepting psychological fictionalism, i.e., the hypothesis that fiction/make-believe is central to the cognitive processing of metaphor. Coupling psychological fictionalism with a different theory of metaphorical meaning and content (such as contextualism) promises to keep the explanatory upsides of traditional fictionalism while avoiding the problem of semantic entailment. (shrink)

Philosophical and scientific investigations of the proprietary aspects of self—mineness or mental ownership—often presuppose that searching for unique constituents is a productive strategy. But there seem not to be any unique constituents. Here, it is argued that the “self-specificity” paradigm, which emphasizes subjective perspective, fails. Previously, it was argued that mode of access also fails to explain mineness. Fortunately, these failures, when leavened by other findings (those that exhibit varieties and vagaries of mineness), intimate an approach better suited to searching (...) for an explanation. Having an alternative in hand, one that shows promise of achieving explanatory adequacy, provides an additional reason to suspend the search for unique constituents. In short, a negative and a positive thesis are developed: we should cease looking for unique constituents and should seek to explain mineness in accord with the model developed here. This model rejects attempts to explain the phenomenon in terms of either a narrative or a minimal sense of self; it seeks to explain at a “molecular” level, one that appeals to multiple, interacting dimensions. The molecular-level model allows for the possibility that subjective perspective is distinct from a stark perspective (one that does not imply mineness). It proposes that the confounding of tacit expectations plays an important role in explaining mental ownership and its complement, disownership. But the confounding of tacit expectations is not sufficient. Because we are able to be aware of the existence of mental states that do not belong to self, we require a mechanism for determining degree of self-relatedness. One such mechanism is proposed here, and it is shown how this mechanism can be integrated into a general model of mental ownership. In the spirit of suggesting how this model might be able to help resolve outstanding problems, the question as to whether inserted thoughts belong to the patient who reports them is also considered. (shrink)

Most academics agree that emotions and moods are related but distinct phenomena. The present study assessed emotion-mood distinctions among a non-academic population and compared these views with distinctions proposed in the literature. Content analysis of responses from 106 participants identified 16 themes, with cause (65% of respondents), duration (40%), control (25%), experience (15%), and consequences (14%) the most frequently cited distinctions. Among 65 contributions to the academic literature, eight themes were proposed, with duration (62% of authors), intentionality (41%), cause (31percnt;), (...) consequences (31%), and function (18%) the most frequently cited. When the eight themes cited by both academics and non-academics were rank ordered, approximately 60% overlap in opinion was evident. A data-derived summary of emotion-mood distinctions is provided. These data should prove useful to investigators interested in developing a clearer scientific distinction between emotion and mood than is currently available. (shrink)

Jean Baudrillard is one of the most famous and controversial of writers on postmodernism. But what are his key ideas? Where did they come from and why are they important? This book offers a beginner's guide to Baudrillard's thought, including his views on technology, primitivism, reworking Marxism, simulation and the hyperreal, and America and postmodernism. Richard Lane places Baudrillard's ideas in the contexts of the French and postmodern thought and examines the ongoing impact of his work. Concluding with an (...) extensively annotated bibliography of the thinker's own texts, this is the perfect companion for any student approaching the work of Jean Baudrillard. (shrink)

Can ordinary citizens in a democracy evaluate the claims of scientific experts? While a definitive answer must be case by case, some scholars have offered sharply opposed general answers: a skeptical versus an optimistic. The article addresses this basic conflict, arguing that a satisfactory answer requires a first-order engagement in judging the claims of experts which both skeptics and optimists rule out in taking the issue to be one of second-order assessments only. Having argued that such first-order judgments are necessary, (...) it then considers how they are possible, outlining a range of practices and virtues that can inform their success and likelihood, and drawing throughout on ancient Greek insights as well as contemporary social psychology and sociology of knowledge. In conclusion the ethics of democratic judgment so developed is applied to the dramatic conviction of the members of an Italian scientific risk commission in L'Aquila. (shrink)

For millennia self has been conjectured to be necessary for consciousness. But scant empirical evidence has been adduced to support this hypothesis. Inconsistent explications of “self” and failure to design apt experiments have impeded progress. Advocates of phenomenological psychiatry, however, have helped explicate “self,” and employed it to explain some psychopathological symptoms. In those studies, “self” is understood in a minimalist sense, sheer “for-me-ness.” Unfortunately, explication of the “minimal self” (MS) has relied on conceptual analysis, and applications to psychopathology have (...) been hermeneutic, allowing for many degrees of interpretive latitude. The result is that MS’s current scientific status is analogous to that of the “atom,” at the time when “atom” was just beginning to undergo transformation from a philosophical to a scientific concept. Fortunately, there is now an opportunity to promote a similar transformation for “MS.” Discovery of the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN) opened the door to neuroimaging investigations of self. Taking the DMN and other forms of intrinsic activity as a starting point, an empirical foothold can be established, one that spurs experimental research and that enables extension of research into multiple phenomena. New experimental protocols that posit “MS” can help explain phenomena hitherto not thought to be related to self, thereby hastening development of a mature science of self. In particular, targeting phenomena wherein consciousness is lost and recovered, as in some cases of Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome (UWS), allow for design of neuroimaging probes that enable detection of MS during non-conscious states. These probes, as well as other experimental protocols applied to NREM Sleep, General Anesthesia (GA), and the waking state, provide some evidence to suggest that not only can self and consciousness dissociate, MS might be a necessary precondition for conscious experience. Finally, these findings have implications for the science of consciousness: it has been suggested that “levels of consciousness” (LoC) is not a legitimate concept for the science of consciousness. But because we have the conceptual and methodological tools with which to refine investigations of MS, we have the means to identify a possible foundation—a bifurcation point—for consciousness, as well as the means by which to measure degrees of distance from that foundation. These neuroimaging investigations of MS position us to better assess whether LoC has a role to play in a mature science of consciousness. (shrink)