Kendall Walton’s project in ‘Categories of Art’ (1970) is to answer two questions. First, does the history of an artwork’s production determine its aesthetic properties? Second, how – if at all – should knowledge of the history of a work’s production influence our aesthetic judgments of its properties? While his answer to the first has been clearly understood, his answer to the second less so. Contrary to how many have interpreted Walton, such knowledge is not necessary for making aesthetic judgments; (...) perceiving an artwork as belonging to a (correct) category of art requires no art-historical knowledge whatsoever. Moreover, contextualist attempts to incorporate art-historical knowledge via the mechanism of cognitive penetration are incompatible with Walton’s claim that categories of art must be perceptually distinguishable. Here I propose a way of elaborating Walton’s view that avoids this difficulty and reconciles contextualism with aesthetic perception, the view that we perceive aesthetic properties. (shrink)

This paper surveys the current philosophical discussion of the ethics of risk imposition, placing it in the context of relevant work in psychology, economics and social theory. The central philosophical problem starts from the observation that it is not practically possible to assign people individual rights not to be exposed to risk, as virtually all activity imposes some risk on others. This is the ‘problem of paralysis’. However, the obvious alternative theory that exposure to risk is justified when its total (...) benefits exceed its total costs faces the standard distributional challenges of consequentialism. Forms of contractualism have been proposed as a solution, but how exactly such theories can be formulated remains problematic, especially when confronted with the difficult cases of mass, novel, risk such as climate change. (shrink)

Because no single person or group holds knowledge about all aspects of research, mechanisms are needed to support knowledge exchange and engagement. Expertise in the research setting necessarily includes scientific and methodological expertise, but also expertise gained through the experience of participating in research and/or being a recipient of research outcomes. Engagement is, by its nature, reciprocal and relational: the process of engaging research participants, patients, citizens and others brings them closer to the research but also brings the research closer (...) to them. When translating research into practice, engaging the public and other stakeholders is explicitly intended to make the outcomes of translation relevant to its constituency of users. In practice, engagement faces numerous challenges and is often time-consuming, expensive and ‘thorny’ work. We explore the epistemic and ontological considerations and implications of four common critiques of engagement methodologies that contest: representativeness, communication and articulation, impacts and outcome, and democracy. The ECOUTER methodology addresses problems of representation and epistemic foundationalism using a methodology that asks, “How could it be otherwise?” ECOUTER affords the possibility of engagement where spatial and temporal constraints are present, relying on saturation as a method of ‘keeping open’ the possible considerations that might emerge and including reflexive use of qualitative analytic methods. This paper describes the ECOUTER process, focusing on one worked example and detailing lessons learned from four other pilots. ECOUTER uses mind-mapping techniques to ‘open up’ engagement, iteratively and organically. ECOUTER aims to balance the breadth, accessibility and user-determination of the scope of engagement. An ECOUTER exercise comprises four stages: engagement and knowledge exchange; analysis of mindmap contributions; development of a conceptual schema ; and feedback, refinement and development of recommendations. ECOUTER refuses fixed truths but also refuses a fixed nature. Its promise lies in its flexibility, adaptability and openness. ECOUTER will be formed and re-formed by the needs and creativity of those who use it. (shrink)

While the view that we perceive aesthetic properties may seem intuitive, it has received little in the way of explicit defence. It also gives rise to a puzzle. The first strand of this puzzle is that we often cannot perceive aesthetic properties of artworks without training, yet much aesthetic training involves the acquisition of knowledge, such as when an artwork was made, and by whom. How, if at all, can this knowledge affect our perception of an artwork’s aesthetic properties? The (...) second strand of the puzzle arises when we widen the scope of aesthetic experience. The very same aesthetic properties that seem to require training for their perception in artworks do not appear to require training to perceive in objects of everyday aesthetic appreciation and natural phenomena. In this paper I argue that a prominent extant attempt to explain how training is compatible with aesthetic perception—cognitive permeation—is an inadequate solution. I also develop a positive view of aesthetic perception that provides a unified solution to both strands of the puzzle. (shrink)

Does the scope of beliefs that people can form on the basis of perception remain fixed, or can it be amplified with learning? The answer to this question is important for our understanding of why and when we ought to trust experts, and also for assessing the plausibility of epistemic foundationalism. The empirical study of perceptual expertise suggests that experts can indeed enrich their perceptual experiences through learning. Yet this does not settle the epistemic status of their beliefs. One might (...) hold that the background knowledge of experts is the cause of their enriched perceptual experience – what is known as cognitive permeation – and so their subsequent beliefs are only mediately justified because they are epistemically dependent on this background knowledge. I argue against this view. Perceptual expertise is not the result of cognitive permeation but is rather the result of perceptual learning, and perceptual learning does not involve cognition in a way that entails cognitive permeation. Perceptual expertise thus provides a means of widening the scope of the immediately justified beliefs that experts can form. (shrink)

This article offers an account of organizational change to explain why women leaders are underrepresented compared to women athletes in many sports organizations. I distinguish between accommodation and transformation as forms of change: the former includes women without challenging binary constructions of gender, the latter transforms an organization’s gendered logic. Through a case study of the International Olympic Committee from 1967-1995, I trace how the organization came to define gender equity primarily in terms of accommodating women’s segregated athletic participation. Key (...) to this was the construction of women’s bodies as athletically able but inferior to men, an arrangement formalized in codified rules and procedures and legitimized by external stakeholders. Defined in these terms, gender equity did little to transform the organization’s binary and hierarchically gendered logic, which continued to shape the informal norms and procedures associated with the organization’s allegedly gender-neutral and meritocratic yet male-dominated leadership. I argue that the exclusion of women from ostensibly gender-integrated leadership positions allows organizations to avoid revealing gender similarity between men and women. This maintains a logic underpinned by notions of binary gender difference and masculine superiority. (shrink)

This article explores the often-disparate commitments the chaplain has made to both the institutional church as well as the hospital system through the lens of the baptismal rite. As baptism is primarily a religious act meant to initiate new members into the Christian faith and a specific community, the chaplain must grapple with the meaning of baptism in the hospital system, a place of crisis and transient community. It is the numinous presence that binds the chaplain’s disparate commitments together in (...) the liminal space between the clinical and ecclesial within which the chaplain exists. The numinous expands the boundaries of institutions often at odds. The chaplain finds meaning and purpose by bearing witness and remaining committed to this numinous presence that binds. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that predictive processing (PP) theory cannot account for the phenomenon of affect-biased attention prioritized attention to stimuli that are affectively salient because of their associations with reward or punishment. Specifically, the PP hypothesis that selective attention can be analyzed in terms of the optimization of precision expectations cannot accommodate affect-biased attention; affectively salient stimuli can capture our attention even when precision expectations are low. We review the prospects of three recent attempts to accommodate affect with (...) tools internal to PP theory: Miller and Clark’s (2018) embodied inference; Seth’s (2013) interoceptive inference; and Joffily and Coricelli’s (2013) rate of change of free energy. In each case we argue that the account does not resolve the challenge from affect-biased attention. For this reason, we conclude that prediction error minimization is not sufficient to explain all mental phenomena, contrary to the claim that the PP framework provides a unified theory of all mental phenomena or the brain ‘s cognitive functioning. Nevertheless, we suggest that empirical investigation of the interaction between affective salience and precision expectations should prove helpful in understanding the limits of PP theory, and may provide new directions for the application of a Bayesian perspective to perception. (shrink)

This article examines motifs of falling, recoiling, and turning across Chester Himes’ oeuvre as figurations of Black susceptibility to racial violence. These images reference and reconstruct an event from Himes’ early adulthood: his catastrophic fall down an elevator shaft. Taking a psychoanalytically oriented approach, I analyze the metonymic connections between these motifs, rather than reading them in their chronological order, using Jean Laplanche’s theory of après-coup. I argue that the recursive quality of these images in Himes’ work is not merely (...) an unconscious repetition or conscious working through of a traumatic biographical event but part of an endeavor to imagine different ways to inhabit and survive the structural trauma of Jim Crow America. (shrink)

Within the context of increased global migration and mobility, education occupies a central role which is being transformed by new human movements and cultural diversity, flows, and networks. Studies under the umbrella terms of migration, mobility, and mobilities reveal the complexity of these concepts. The field of study ranges from global child mobility as a response to poverty, to the reconceptualising of notions of inclusion in relation to pastoralist lifestyles, to the ways in which new offshore institutions and transnational diasporas (...) shape the educational experiences of students, families, and teachers. At the heart of this new research is a need to explore how identity, integration, and social stratification play a role in the story of global migration between and within the Global North and South. This volume focuses on three major themes: poverty, migration, social mobility and social reproduction; networks of migration within and across national education systems; and higher education and international student mobility, and the concerns and opportunities that go along with this mobility. The international group of researchers who have contributed to this book demonstrate how educational institutions are part of a common global project characterised by fluidity, how the social fabric of educational institutions responds to demographic diversity, and how new social differentiations occur as a result of human movement. By bringing together these contributions, a number of important theoretical and empirical methodological dimensions are identified that need more attention within the growing field of migration and education studies. This volume shows how mobilities and transnational interconnectedness create multiple interactions that tie our different educational projects together. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education. _. (shrink)

Through close reading of medical and cultural texts, this article demonstrates how the narrativisation of relational harm underpinned the emerging categorisation of ‘addiction’ in the 19th century: excessive consumption was conceived through its detrimental impact upon others, and more specifically, upon the family. The problem was portrayed as physiological, psychological, and social: ‘addiction’ could not be located securely within a single individual, nor was it conceived simply as a social vice. While other societal themes emerge in the medical writing of (...) the period, such as the relationship between drinking and criminality, and the visibility of drinking in the working-classes, these are not presented as proto-diagnostic criteria in the same way as relational harm. In theorising addiction, medicine relied upon rhetorical devices and narrative modes, and authors and artists took an active role in defining the terms of the debate around drinking, drug use, and gambling. Charles Dickens and George Cruikshank represent childhood through the adult's compulsive behaviour, which the child witnesses, while the adult's behaviour itself is conceived as harm directed towards child. The article demonstrates how 21st-century attitudes, particularly located in the fields of psychiatric diagnosis and child protection social work, echo debates established by 19th-century narratives, arguing that that the disease model of addiction was closely associated with the medico-legal production of childhood. Nineteenth-century narratives of addiction therefore anticipate late 20th- and 21st-century attitudes regarding the impact of parental substance use upon children. (shrink)

The acquaintance debate in aesthetics has been traditionally divided between pessimists, who argue that testimony does not provide others with aesthetic knowledge of artworks, and optimists, who hold that acquaintance with an artwork is not a necessary precondition for acquiring aesthetic knowledge. In this paper I propose a reconciliationist solution to the acquaintance debate: while aesthetic knowledge can be had via testimony, aesthetic judgment requires acquaintance with the artwork. I develop this solution by situating it within a virtue aesthetics framework (...) based on Ernest Sosa's virtue epistemology. I go on to apply the solution to the debates on moral testimony and expert testimony. An interesting variant on Gettier cases emerges: cases in which subjects have knowledge, but it has been formed by the wrong competence. (shrink)

In this article, our concern is to describe how body(ies) and self are performed in women’s birth narratives through the mediation of a number of significant elements, including technical devices. We will show how, in these narratives, (1) action is distributed among a series of actants, including professionals and technology; (2) that dichotomies appear which cannot be reduced to one of body/mind, but are more adequately described in terms of ‘body-in-labour’/’embodied self’, each of them being locally performed through the mediation (...) of medical practices, knowledge and technologies, the definition of these elements and of their relations being specific to each obstetrical configuration; (3) that part of professionals’ activities is devoted to the detailed management of the articulation between the body-in-labour and the embodied self, and to monitoring their joint transformations. (shrink)

Perceptual learning is an enduring change in the perceptual system – and our resulting perceptions – due to practice or repeated exposure to a perceptual stimulus. It is involved in the acquisition of perceptual expertise: the ability to make rapid and reliable high-level categorizations of objects unavailable to novices. Attentional weighting is one process by which perceptual learning occurs. Advancing our understanding of this process is of particular importance for understanding what is learned in perceptual learning. Attentional weighting seems to (...) favour the hypothesis that what experts learn is simply to better direct their attention to elements of the stimulus relevant to making post-perceptual categorizations. Here I argue against this hypothesis. Attentional weighting is an integral component of the process that allows experts to come to represent high-level properties in perceptual experience. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas is variously used to provide a conceptualization of ethics from which to deduce an ethical politics, an account of the movement from ethics to politics or an exhortation to continually interrupt politics in the name of ethics. What all these approaches share is a reading of Levinas where ethics and politics are separated and ethics is prioritized. My argument in this article is that if the concept of the Third is given due weight in Levinas's work then this (...) separation and prioritization is untenable. The reading advanced foregrounds the Third and in doing so demonstrates that the unproblematized ‘ethics’ often drawn from Levinas is more complex than might initially appear. I argue that if the Third is taken seriously then Levinas's work leads to a requirement to think in terms of the ethico-political, so complicating any attempt to deduce politics from ethics which draws on this. (shrink)

For many philosophers, there is a tension inherent to shame as an inward-looking, yet intersubjective, emotion: that between the role of the ashamed self and the part of the shaming Other in pronouncing the judgement of shame. Simply put, the issue is this: either the perspective of the ashamed self takes precedence in autonomously choosing to feel shame, and the necessary role of the audience is overlooked, or else the view of the shaming Other prevails in heteronomously casting the shame, (...) and the ashamed individual’s agency becomes problematically understated. I argue that this debate is fundamentally misguided insofar as it assumes that shame must be exclusively contingent upon either the perspective of the self or that of the Other, when it is in fact dependent upon both at once. This is the “double movement” of shame: an appraisal of the self that is at once social and private. (shrink)

This new Reader brings together classic pieces of gender theory, as well as examples of the sophistication of contemporary gender theory and research methodologies in the field of education. Leading international gender researchers address current debates about gender, power, identity and culture and concerns about boys’ and girls’ schooling, gender achievement patterns, the boys’ education debate, and gender relationships in the curriculum, the classroom and youth cultures. The Reader is divided into six sections which reflect contemporary concerns about Gender and (...) Education: Gender and Educational Theory Difference and Power Identity Work Knowledge and Pedagogy Reflexivity and Risk Gender and Citizenship. A specially written Introduction from the editors, both experts in feminist and masculinity research, provides a much-needed context to the current educational climate. Undergraduates, postgraduates and academics interested in education, gender studies and women’s studies will find this a stimulating and important resource. The analysis of the gender dimensions of the curriculum, teaching and alternative pedagogies also provide important insights for practitioners wishing to promote gender equality. (shrink)

This thesis is a philosophical contribution to the theories on risk communication. The topic of risk communication is approached from several different angles, but with a normative focus on equality and vulnerability. Essay I is a comment on risk perception theory and the psychometric model in particular. In risk perception research individual risk taking is described as either a result of valuing the benefits from risk taking or a failure of comprehending the severity or probability of risks. The essay argues (...) that sometimes individuals take risks simply because they are in a vulnerable position and have no other choice. Four factors are identified as crucial in risks from vulnerability: poor outset conditions, lack of reasonable options, hope and liability to disinformation. Essay II addresses the democratic approach to risk communication and the ideal of risk communication as a dialogue between more or less equal stakeholders. The Essay argues that even the more innovative and dialogue oriented approaches to risk communication are unequal. This is often blurred by the confusion between the described ideal and the description of these newer approaches. This inequality is analysed in a three-fold way: influence over the communication process; influence over and access to information; and influence over risk decisions. The Essay develops a typology of different risk communication practices and influence distributions and concludes that the form of risk communication most commonly referred in the literature is the most imbalanced kind where all three types of influence falls to the same party. Essay III explores the concept of trust, an often-mentioned objective for risk communication. The concept of trust is analyzed from previous philosophical approaches, and the idea of trust as comfortable defocusing is introduced. It is argued that not only the gains for the trustee but also the gains and risks for the truster, generally and in the case from risk communication, can be explained by this notion. It is concluded that public trust for institutions or organizations need not be framed on an individual level. Instead, the vulnerability of trusting can be counter-acted by a delegation of different stances, including both control and trust, among different individuals and institutions in society. (shrink)

The thought and actions of Giselle Donnard opened singular spaces of analysis, anchored in the apprehension of manifold international realities. Giselle was a ’go-between’ of the sort that rejects binary choices and performs improbables hybridizations. She sought to make the complexity and diversity of social evolutions heard, by being at the same time radical and pragmatic, bringing together singularities and multitudes.

People are shocked to discover the desperate conditions facing young women in the so-called « sensitive » neighborhoods; but this very real state of affairs is only a logical consequence of failing public policies, which display little concern for supporting egalitarian relations between the sexes. Under close analysis, the dynamics of cooperation and autonomy among immigrant women in the suburbs proves to be interethnic, innovative, and oriented toward the conquest of public space. Urban policy ignores these women. So who do (...) they threaten? (shrink)

Perceptual learning is commonly understood as conferring some benefit to the learner, such as allowing for the extraction of more information from the environment. However, perceptual learning can be biased in several different ways, some of which do not appear to provide such a benefit. Here we outline a systematic framework for thinking about bias in perceptual learning and discuss how several cases fit into this framework. We argue these biases are compatible with an understanding in which perceptual learning is (...) beneficial, but that its benefits are tied to both a person's narrow interests and the training environment or domain, and so if there are changes to either of these, then benefits can turn into liabilities, though these are often temporary. (shrink)

By analyzing the discussion on a health forum, we examine how wearing sanitary masks during the Covid-19 pandemic changed people’s lives and what adjustments were required. During our review, we encountered theories referred to by participants as “conspiracy theories” that led to heated exchanges on the forum. Surprisingly, these interactions promoted, rather than prevented, collective exploration and resulted in a rich discussion of the issues related to wearing masks. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, we first analyze the (...) dynamics of the discussion, its progression, and the conditions under which it was maintained over time, even given the radical expression of irreconcilable positions. Second, we examine the results of the discussion in terms of describing the problems triggered by the mask and the different authorities on which these descriptions were based. We conclude that the boundaries between science and non-science were occasionally blurred because of the wavering of scientific authorities and the uncertainty of the questions related to the pandemic, rather than because of a generalized distrust of science. We recognize that paradoxically, “conspiracist” theories contribute to the production of knowledge and that the adherence to these theories may stem more from the personal experiences of the individuals who profess them, rather than from the contaminating power of conspiracy theories. (shrink)

What kind of moral principle could be sufficiently restrictive to avoid the kind of large-scale risks that have resulted in catastrophe in the past, while at the same time not be so restrictive as to halt desirable progress? Is there such a principle that is not merely a precautionary principle, but one that could be based on firm moral grounds? In this article, I set out to explore a simple idea: might it be the case that reparability could serve as (...) a moral constraint against risky policy decisions? The idea is simple, but comes in two forms. First, that it is morally wrong to impose a risk for harm that is, in principle, irreparable, such that it would bring about a permanent loss of a kind qua kind. Second, that it is morally wrong to impose a risk for a reparable (but not compensable) harm that exceeds what realistically could be repaired. I set out here to do two things. First, I describe the moral problem to be addressed for any principle-guiding decisions about risk. A central claim in this article is that risk decisions are epistemically impaired decisions, and that we must, alongside outcome uncertainty, also take both epistemic uncertainty and moral uncertainty into account. Second, I introduce the idea of reparability as a moral constraint in the form of two versions of the Reparability Principle. Such a principle, I argue, could have some interesting advantages that seem both morally intuitive and that come with some advantages against some of the epistemic challenges posed by risk impositions. (shrink)

It has recently become popular to suggest that cognition can be explained as a process of Bayesian prediction error minimization. Some advocates of this view propose that attention should be understood as the optimization of expected precisions in the prediction-error signal (Clark, 2013, 2016; Feldman & Friston, 2010; Hohwy, 2012, 2013). This proposal successfully accounts for several attention-related phenomena. We claim that it cannot account for all of them, since there are certain forms of voluntary attention that it cannot accommodate. (...) We therefore suggest that, although the theory of Bayesian prediction error minimization introduces some powerful tools for the explanation of mental phenomena, its advocates have been wrong to claim that Bayesian prediction error minimization is ‘all the brain ever does’. (shrink)

DIALETICS AT A STANDSTILL: BENJAMIN'S "DENKBILDER":0Benjamin's Thougt-Images in Einbahnstraße - Gustan Asselbergs; 0Sichtlich sich verbergend: Die Autor-Figur des Passagen-Werks - Wolfram Malte Fues; 0LIMINAL FIGURES: CHILD AND FLANEUR:0The Child at the Threshold: Walter Benjamin's Berliner Kindheit um 1900 - Corina Stan; 0The Flâneur and the Socio-Economic Critique - Nassima Sahraoui; 0UNSIGHTLY FIGURES: 0Walter Benjamin's Figures of De-Figuration: The Barbarian, the Destructive Character, and the Monster - Sami R. Khatib; 0ANGELS AND HISTORIANS: 0Closing Time: Benjamin, Temporality, and the Problem of Political (...) Organization - Bennett Carpenter; 0Of Fish and Men: Benjamin's Allegorist and the Meaning of Life - Madeleine Kasten; 0Walter Benjamin on Charlie Chaplin: The Rehabilitation of the Allegorical in Modernity - Daniel Mourenza; 0THE NARRATOR AND THE POLITICS OF SENSES: 0"Drawing o an Unlikely Source": The "Erzähler", the Islamic Revival, and Benjamin's Philosophy of Language - Ton Groeneweg; 0TRANSLATION BETWEEN FOREIGNNESS AND KINSHIP: 0Bleakness in the Age of Google: Walter Benjamin and the Possibility of Redemptive Translation - Orr Scharf; 0Walter Benjamin's Translator/Critic as a Model for Transcultural Thought and Practice - Gisela Brinker-Gabler.; 0THE TASK OF CRITIC: 0Lektüre als Opfer: Der Kritiker in "Wider ein Meisterwerk" und dem Trauerspielbuch - Anna Wotkowicz; 0THE RIGHTEOUS AS MEDIATOR OF LINGUISTIC EXPERIENCE: 0"Im Anfang war das Wort": Von Adam, zwei Bäumen und dem Gerechten - Gerard Visser. (shrink)

_The Tender Bud_ is the moving story of one woman's journey through breast cancer. The woman in question happens to be a senior psychiatrist of broad learning and deep clinical insight. Madeleine Meldin weathered the crisis of breast cancer without the support of an immediate family and in the context of ongoing professional burdens. This book is the journal that she wrote for herself as an aid to coping with the personal upheaval of diagnosis, mastectomy, and the aftermath of (...) treatment. It was written while these events unfolded. With arresting candor, Meldin chronicles her emotions at each stage of her odyssey - the recurrent cycles of denial, anxiety, and despair; the conflicting feelings engendered by her physicians, surgeons, and the treatment "establishment" in general; her struggle between resignation and emergent hopefulness. Unique to Meldin's account is her ongoing juxtaposition of the different dimensions of "having cancer." Simply and gracefully, she chronicles the everyday dimension of cancer, with its obligation to proceed maturely and dispassionately with medical and surgical care, to meet one's professional responsibilities, to maintain the appearances that allow one to carry on with one's life. Meldin excels at showing how even the most mundane experiences of everyday life - conversations with friends and colleagues, the selection of clothes, a trip to the hairdresser - became saturated with her illness, with her sense of herself as a cancer patient. (shrink)