Ever since Kant and Hegel, the notion of autonomy—the idea that we are beholden to no law except one we impose upon ourselves—has been considered the truest philosophical expression of human freedom. But could our commitment to autonomy, as Theodor Adorno asked, be related to the extreme evils that we have witnessed in modernity? In Autonomy after Auschwitz, Martin Shuster explores this difficult question with astonishing theoretical acumen, examining the precise ways autonomy can lead us down a path of (...) evil and how it might be prevented from doing so. Shuster uncovers dangers in the notion of autonomy as it was originally conceived by Kant. Putting Adorno into dialogue with a range of European philosophers, notably Kant, Hegel, Horkheimer, and Habermas—as well as with a variety of contemporary Anglo-American thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, and Robert Pippin—he illuminates Adorno’s important revisions to this fraught concept and how his different understanding of autonomous agency, fully articulated, might open up new and positive social and political possibilities. Altogether, Autonomy after Auschwitz is a meditation on modern evil and human agency, one that demonstrates the tremendous ethical stakes at the heart of philosophy. (shrink)

Consequentialism, one of the major theories of normative ethics, maintains that the moral rightness of an act is determined solely by the act's consequences and its alternatives. The traditional form of consequentialism is one-dimensional, in that the rightness of an act is a function of a single moral aspect, such as the sum total of wellbeing it produces. In this book Martin Peterson introduces a new type of consequentialist theory: multidimensional consequentialism. According to this theory, an act's moral rightness (...) depends on several separate dimensions, including individual wellbeing, equality and risk. Peterson's novel approach shows that moral views about equality and risk that were previously thought to be mutually incompatible can be rendered compatible, and his precise theoretical discussion helps the reader to understand better the distinction between consequentialist and non-consequentialist theories. His book will interest a wide range of readers in ethics. (shrink)

We give modest upper bounds for consistency strengths for two well-studied combinatorial principles. These bounds range at the level of subcompact cardinals, which is significantly below a κ+-supercompact cardinal. All previously known upper bounds on these principles ranged at the level of some degree of supercompactness. We show that by using any of the standard modified Prikry forcings it is possible to turn a measurable subcompact cardinal into ℵω and make the principle □ℵω,<ω fail in the generic extension. We also (...) show that by using Lévy collapse followed by standard iterated club shooting it is possible to turn a subcompact cardinal into ℵ2 and arrange in the generic extension that simultaneous reflection holds at ℵ2, and at the same time, every stationary subset of ℵ3 concentrating on points of cofinality ω has a reflection point of cofinality ω1. (shrink)

This book explores a question central to philosophy--namely, what does it take for a belief to be justified or rational? According to a widespread view, whether one has justification for believing a proposition is determined by how probable that proposition is, given one's evidence. In this book this view is rejected and replaced with another: in order for one to have justification for believing a proposition, one's evidence must normically support it--roughly, one's evidence must make the falsity of that proposition (...) abnormal in the sense of calling for special, independent explanation. This conception of justification bears upon a range of topics in epistemology and beyond. Ultimately, this way of looking at justification guides us to a new, unfamiliar picture of how we should respond to our evidence and manage our own fallibility. This picture is developed here. (shrink)

In this book, psychologists and philosophers describe and discuss a range of case studies of delusional beliefs, drawing out general lessons both for the cognitive architecture of the mind and for the notion of rationality, and exploring connections between the delusional beliefs that occur in schizophrenia and the flawed understanding of beliefs that is characteristic of autism.

Did Adam and Eve act rationally in eating the fruit of the forbidden tree? That can seem to depend solely on whether they had found the best means to their ends, in the spirit of the 'economic' theories of rationality. In this 1995 book, Martin Hollis respects the elegance and power of these theories but judges their paradoxes endemic. He argues that social action cannot be understood by viewing human beings as abstract individuals with preferences in search of satisfaction, (...) nor by divorcing practical reason from questions of the rationality of norms, principles, practices and ends. These essays, focused on the themes of 'rational choice', 'roles and reasons' and 'other cultures, other minds', make the point and explore alternative approaches. Culled in revised form from twenty-five years' work, the essays range across periods and disciplines with a philosophical imagination and vivid prose, which will engage philosophers and social scientists alike. (shrink)

The paper makes three points about the role of double dissociation in cognitive neuropsychology. First, arguments from double dissociation to separate modules work by inference to the best, not the only possible, explanation. Second, in the development of computational cognitive neuropsychology, the contribution of connectionist cognitive science has been to broaden the range of potential explanations of double dissociation. As a result, the competition between explanations, and the characteristic features of the assessment of theories against the criteria of probability and (...) explanatory value, are more visible. Third, cognitive neuropsychology is a division of cognitive psychology but the practice of cognitive neuropsychology proceeds on assumptions that go beyond the subject matter of cognitive psychology. Given such assumptions, neuroscientific findings about lesion location may enhance the value of double dissociation in shifting the balance of support between cognitive theories. (shrink)

In this volume Martin Heidegger confronts the philosophical problems of language and begins to unfold the meaning begind his famous and little understood phrase "Language is the House of Being." The "Dialogue on Language," between Heidegger and a Japanese friend, together with the four lectures that follow, present Heidegger's central ideas on the origin, nature, and significance of language. These essays reveal how one of the most profound philosophers of our century relates language to his earlier and continuing preoccupation (...) with the nature of Being and himan being. One the Way to Language enable readers to understand how central language became to Heidegger's analysis of the nature of Being. On the Way to Language demonstrates that an interest in the meaning of language is one of the strongest bonds between analytic philosophy and Heidegger. It is an ideal source for studying his sustained interest in the problems and possibilities of human language and brilliantly underscores the originality and range of his thinking. (shrink)

Why do we watch and like horror films? Despite a century of horror film-making and en-tertainment, little research has examined the human motivation to watch fictional horror and how horror film influences individuals’ behavioural, cognitive and emotional re-sponses. This review provides the first synthesis of the empirical literature on the psy-chology of horror film using multi-disciplinary research from psychology, psychotherapy, communication studies, development studies, clinical psychology, and media studies. The paper considers the motivations for people’s decision to watch horror, why (...) people enjoy horror, how individual differences influence responses to, and preference for, hor-ror film, how exposure to horror film changes behaviour, how horror film is designed to achieve its effects, why we fear and why we fear specific classes of stimuli, and how lik-ing for horror develops during childhood and adolescence. The literature suggests that (1) low empathy and fearfulness are associated with more enjoyment and desire to watch horror film but that specific dimensions of empathy are better predictors of people’s re-sponses than are others; (2) there is a positive relationship between sensation-seeking and horror enjoyment/preference but this relationship is not consistent; (3) men and boys prefer to watch, enjoy and seek our horror more than do women and girls; (4) women are more prone to disgust sensitivity or anxiety than are men and this may mediate the sex difference in the enjoyment of horror; (5) younger children are afraid of symbolic stimuli whereas older children become afraid of concrete or realistic stimuli; (6) in terms of coping with horror, physical coping strategies are more successful in younger children; priming with information about the feared object reduces fear and increases children’s enjoyment of frightening television and film. A number of limitations in the literature are identified, including the multifarious range of horror stimuli used in studies, disparities in methods, small sample sizes, and a lack of research on cross-cultural differences and similarities. Ideas for future research are explored. (shrink)

Opposition to inducement payments for research subjects is an international orthodoxy amongst writers of ethics committee guidelines. We offer an argument in favour of these payments. We also critically evaluate the best arguments we can find or devise against such payments, and except in one very limited range of circumstances, we find these unconvincing.

Responsible research and innovation features the dialog of science “with society,” and research performed “for society,” i.e., for the benefit of the people. I focus on this latter, outcome-oriented notion of RRI and discuss two kinds of problems. The first one concerns options to anticipate the future course of science and technology. Such foresight knowledge seems necessary for subjecting research to demands of social and moral responsibility. However, predicting science and technology is widely considered impossible. The second problem concerns moral (...) evaluation. The benefit or harm produced by certain research and innovation achievements is often hard to estimate. Against this background of uncertainty in factual and moral assessment, I explore opportunities left for RRI. First, RRI should contribute to maintaining a wide range of approaches. Second, judgments about RRI should draw on zones of convergence among the variety of research approaches pursued. Third, decisions about implementing a technology should be revisable. Fourth, the more specific inclusion of demands from society should be reserved to technology development. Fifth, in many respects, the social compatibility of a new technology is due rather to the social context than the inherent features of the product. Favorable circumstances are transparency, representation of all relevant parties, and procedural fairness. As a result, some of the benefits and detriments of research and innovation can be identified without detailed knowledge of future findings. (shrink)

This book traces the development of theories of the self and personal identity from the ancient Greeks to the present day. From Plato and Aristotle to Freud and Foucault, Raymond Martin and John Barresi explore the works of a wide range of thinkers and reveal the larger intellectual trends, controversies, and ideas that have revolutionized the way we think about ourselves. The authors open with ancient Greece, where the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and the materialistic atomists laid the groundwork (...) for future theories. They then discuss the ideas of the church fathers and medieval and Renaissance philosophers, including St. Paul, Philo, Augustine, Aquinas, and Montaigne. In their coverage of the emergence of a new mechanistic conception of nature in the seventeenth century, Martin and Barresi note a shift away from religious and purely philosophical notions of self and personal identity to more scientific and social conceptions, a trend that has continued to the present day. They explore modern philosophy and psychology, including the origins of different traditions within each discipline, and explain both the theoretical relevance of feminism and gender and ethnic studies and also the ways that Derrida and other recent thinkers have challenged the very idea that a unified self or personal identity even exists. Martin and Barresi cover a number of issues broached by philosophers and psychologists, such as the existence of a fixed and unchanging self and whether the concept of the soul has a use outside of religious contexts. They address the question of whether notions of the soul and the self are still viable in today's world. Together, they reveal the fascinating ways in which great thinkers have grappled with these and other questions and the astounding impact their ideas have had on the development of self-understanding in the west. (shrink)

Recent science and technology studies have analyzed questions of nonexpert participation in science, technology, and science policy from an empirically grounded perspective. The introduction to this special issue offers a double contribution to this debate. First, it presents a summary of the state of the art and an outline of the historical emergence of the participatory question. The argument distinguishes four periods since the late nineteenth century, each with a specific relationship between expert and nonexpert knowledge ranging from a hybrid, (...) to a politicized, to an autonomous, to a participatory relationship. Second, the introduction summarizes the contributions to this issue. Their common concern is to take the debate one step further by critically reflecting the problems and limitations of participatory practices. The contributions point out the need for contextualizing the participatory question within the wider social, economic, and political circumstances in which participatory science and technology is set. (shrink)

Images, ranging from visualizations of the nanoscale to future visions, abound within and beyond the world of nanotechnology. Rather than the contrast between imaging , i.e. creating images that are understood as offering a view on what is out there, and imagining , i.e. creating images offering impressions of how the nanoscale could look like and images presenting visions of worlds that might be realized, it is the entanglement between imaging and imagining which is the key to understanding what images (...) do. Three main arenas of entanglement of imag(in)ing and the tensions involved are discussed: production practices and use of visualizations of the nanoscale; imag(in)ing the future and the present; and entanglements of nanoscience and art. In these three arenas one sees struggles about which images might stand for nanotechnology, but also some stabilization of the entanglement of imag(in)ing, for example in established rules in the practices of visualizing the nanoscale. Three images have become iconic, through the combination of their wide reception and further circulation. All three, the IBM logo, the Foresight Institute’s Nanogear image, and the so-called Nanolouse, depict actual or imagined technoscientific objects and are thus seen as representing technoscientific achievements – while marking out territory. (shrink)

Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance. Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its often contradictory (...) implications in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From consideration of French Impressionism to analysis of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded accounts of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty. His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of "scopic regimes." Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, _Downcast Eyes_ will consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians. (shrink)

Traditional mechanistic accounts of language processing derive almost entirely from the study of monologue. Yet, the most natural and basic form of language use is dialogue. As a result, these accounts may only offer limited theories of the mechanisms that underlie language processing in general. We propose a mechanistic account of dialogue, the interactive alignment account, and use it to derive a number of predictions about basic language processes. The account assumes that, in dialogue, the linguistic representations employed by the (...) interlocutors become aligned at many levels, as a result of a largely automatic process. This process greatly simplifies production and comprehension in dialogue. After considering the evidence for the interactive alignment model, we concentrate on three aspects of processing that follow from it. It makes use of a simple interactive inference mechanism, enables the development of local dialogue routines that greatly simplify language processing, and explains the origins of self-monitoring in production. We consider the need for a grammatical framework that is designed to deal with language in dialogue rather than monologue, and discuss a range of implications of the account. Key Words: common ground; dialogue; dialogue routines; language comprehension; language production; monitoring; perception-behavior link. (shrink)

Currently, production and comprehension are regarded as quite distinct in accounts of language processing. In rejecting this dichotomy, we instead assert that producing and understanding are interwoven, and that this interweaving is what enables people to predict themselves and each other. We start by noting that production and comprehension are forms of action and action perception. We then consider the evidence for interweaving in action, action perception, and joint action, and explain such evidence in terms of prediction. Specifically, we assume (...) that actors construct forward models of their actions before they execute those actions, and that perceivers of others' actions covertly imitate those actions, then construct forward models of those actions. We use these accounts of action, action perception, and joint action to develop accounts of production, comprehension, and interactive language. Importantly, they incorporate well-defined levels of linguistic representation. We show how speakers and comprehenders use covert imitation and forward modeling to make predictions at these levels of representation, how they interweave production and comprehension processes, and how they use these predictions to monitor the upcoming utterances. We show how these accounts explain a range of behavioral and neuroscientific data on language processing and discuss some of the implications of our proposal. (shrink)

When it comes to climate change, the greatest difficulty we face is that we do not know the likely degree of change or its cost, which means that environmental policy decisions have to be made under uncertainty. This book offers an accessible philosophical treatment of the broad range of ethical and policy challenges posed by climate change uncertainty. Drawing on both the philosophy of science and ethics, Martin Bunzl shows how tackling climate change revolves around weighing up our interests (...) now against those of future generations, which requires that we examine our assumptions about the value of present costs versus future benefits. In an engaging, conversational style, Bunzl looks at questions such as our responsibility towards non-human life, the interests of the developing and developed worlds, and how the circumstances of poverty shape the perception of risk, ultimate developing and defending a view of humanity and its place in the world that makes sense of our duty to Nature without treating it as a rights bearer. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of environmental studies, philosophy, politics and sociology as well as policy makers. (shrink)

Many theorists have dismissed a priori the idea that distributional information could play a significant role in syntactic category acquisition. We demonstrate empirically that such information provides a powerful cue to syntactic category membership, which can be exploited by a variety of simple, psychologically plausible mechanisms. We present a range of results using a large corpus of child‐directed speech and explore their psychological implications. While our results show that a considerable amount of information concerning the syntactic categories can be obtained (...) from distributional information alone, we stress that many other sources of information may also be potential contributors to the identification of syntactic classes. (shrink)

Interviewing as part of broadcast news includes a wide range of practices that go beyond calling public figures to account in ways that have received so much attention and analysis in the research literature. This article examines a major strand of news interviewing which it identifies as ‘experiential’ and argues, on the basis of close discourse analysis of interviews drawn from coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2005 London bombings, that the focus on personal experience and emotion in (...) them is managed in ways quite distinct from accountability interviewing. Indeed, the apparently formulaic quality of the verbal performance in these interviews gives shape to experience in a fashion close to ritual but demands a quite different kind of alignment from the audience than that implicated by accountability interviewing. (shrink)

Warner here puts forward a much broader discussion of rationality than that which underlies today's polarization between analytic and continental philosophy. Through a series of case-studies the author explores ancient conceptions of dialectic and rhetoric in relation to the positive role given to sentiment or "the heart" by Pascal, Hume, and Nietzsche. These studies point to an understanding of philosophy which undercuts fashionable disputes and which helps to reaffirm a range of ideas long marginalized by the dominance of the geometric (...) model of philosophical argument. (shrink)

In this 2007 volume, eighteen of the world's leading scholars present original essays on various aspects of atheism: its history, both ancient and modern, defense and implications. The topic is examined in terms of its implications for a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, religion, feminism, postmodernism, sociology and psychology. In its defense, both classical and contemporary theistic arguments are criticized, and, the argument from evil, and impossibility arguments, along with a non religious basis for morality are defended. These essays (...) give a broad understanding of atheism and a lucid introduction to this controversial topic. (shrink)

At a time where the relevance of the social sciences is under threat, this innovative book offers a speculative experimentation on the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences to rethink what 'relevance' is, and to cultivate a new ethos of knowledge-making for an eventful world. Engaging a diverse a range of thinkers including Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze and Isabelle Stengers, as well as the American pragmatists John Dewey and William James, Martin Savransky challenges longstanding assumptions in the (...) social sciences and argues that relevance is an event that is part and parcel of the immanent and situated processes by which things come to matter. He develops new conceptual tools for cultivating an empiricist ethos of inquiry that is attuned to the question of how things come to matter- an ethics that turns social inquiry into a veritable adventure. The result is an original and rigorous book that infuses knowledge-practices in the social sciences with new sensibilities, creative possibilities, and novel habits of thinking, knowing, and feeling. (shrink)

Originally published in 1981. This is a book for the final year undergraduate or first year graduate who intends to proceed with serious research in philosophical logic. It will be welcomed by both lecturers and students for its careful consideration of main themes ranging from Gricean accounts of meaning to two dimensional modal logic. The first part of the book is concerned with the nature of the semantic theorist's project, and particularly with the crucial concepts of meaning, truth, and semantic (...) structure. The second and third parts deal with various constructions that are found in natural languages: names, quantifiers, definite descriptions, and modal operators. Throughout, while assuming some familiarity with philosophical logic and elementary formal logic, the text provides a clear exposition. It brings together related ideas, and in some places refines and improves upon existing accounts. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The argument that the modern democratic state is fairly autonomous, because mass publics have limited knowledge of government and limited interest in politics, ignores the full range of possibilities. The character of a nation’s parties and other political institutions greatly affects the extent of political participation among even citizens who are well informed and concerned about public affairs. And under appropriate conditions, the mobilization and enthusiastic engagement of the public will actually increase state power.

The terms neoliberalism and neoliberal play a variety of roles ranging from major to trivial in the papers they appear in. Both phrases carry pejorative connotations in nurse writing. Yet irrespective of the role assumed in argument, readers are rarely provided with enough information to determine what the descriptors mean in a substantive or concrete sense. It is proposed that scholars who use these terms in their work should consider expressing themselves more carefully than often occurs at present. Virtue signalling (...) in academic writing should, absent critical argument, be discouraged. (shrink)

What is happiness? How is it related to morality and virtue? Does living with illusion promote or diminish happiness? Is it better to pursue happiness with a partner than alone? Philosopher Mike W. Martin addresses these and other questions as he connects the meaning of happiness with the philosophical notion of "the good life." Defining happiness as loving one's life and valuing it in ways manifested by ample enjoyment and a deep sense of meaning, Martin explores the ways (...) in which happiness interacts with all other dimensions of good lives--in particular with moral decency and goodness, authenticity, mental health, self-fulfillment, and meaningfulness. He interweaves a variety of examples from memoirs, novels, and films along the way, connecting his discussion of the philosophical issues to related topics that interest all of us: virtue, love, philanthropy, suffering, simplicity, balancing work and leisure, and much more. Drawing on wide-ranging and robust evidence, Martin also makes the case that we need a "politics of happiness" whereby government would apply the results of recent "happiness studies" in psychology to public policy. (shrink)

This paper offers a preliminary account of the educative potential of mindfulness by revisiting the long-debated status of physical activity and sport as educationally worthwhile. We argue that previous attempts in the tradition of analytic philosophy of education to offer a justification of physical activity and sport have not been sufficiently grounded in the most distinctive feature of those activities—the body. As an alternative, we claim that the theory and practice of body-based mindfulness can explain how physical activity can satisfy (...) the analytic philosopher of education R.S. Peters’ requirement that for an activity to be educationally worthwhile, it must possess ‘wide-ranging cognitive content’. We conclude that physical activity and sport are justifiable on Petersian grounds: physical activity can broaden understanding mostly inaccessible to the kinds of theoretical activities that Peters argued are exemplary. We then assess the implications for this argument... (shrink)

Young children help others in a range of situations, relatively indiscriminate of the characteristics of those they help. Recent results have suggested that young children’s helping behaviour extends even to humanoid robots. However, it has been unclear how characteristics of robots would influence children’s helping behaviour. Considering previous findings suggesting that certain robot features influence adults’ perception of and their behaviour towards robots, the question arises of whether young children’s behaviour and perception would follow the same principles. The current study (...) investigated whether two key characteristics of a humanoid robot (animate autonomy and friendly expressiveness) would affect children’s instrumental helping behaviour and their perception of the robot as an animate being. Eighty-two 3-year-old children participated in one of four experimental conditions manipulating a robot’s ostensible animate autonomy (high/low) and friendly expressiveness (friendly/neutral). Helping was assessed in an out-of-reach task and animacy ratings were assessed in a post-test interview. Results suggested that both children’s helping behaviour, as well as their perception of the robot as animate, were unaffected by the robot’s characteristics. The findings indicate that young children’s helping behaviour extends largely indiscriminately across two important characteristics. These results increase our understanding of the development of children’s altruistic behaviour and animate-inanimate distinctions. Our findings also raise important ethical questions for the field of child-robot interaction. (shrink)

This up-to-date introduction to decision theory offers comprehensive and accessible discussions of decision-making under ignorance and risk, the foundations of utility theory, the debate over subjective and objective probability, Bayesianism, causal decision theory, game theory, and social choice theory. No mathematical skills are assumed, and all concepts and results are explained in non-technical and intuitive as well as more formal ways. There are over 100 exercises with solutions, and a glossary of key terms and concepts. An emphasis on foundational aspects (...) of normative decision theory (rather than descriptive decision theory) makes the book particularly useful for philosophy students, but it will appeal to readers in a range of disciplines including economics, psychology, political science and computer science. • Has over 100 end of chapter review questions and exercises with solutions • Includes a chapter on how to draw a decision matrix • Explains the link between individual decision making, game theory and social choice theory Contents Preface; 1. Introduction; 2. The decision matrix; 3. Decisions under ignorance; 4. Decisions under risk; 5. Utility; 6. The mathematics of probability; 7. The philosophy of probability; 8. Why should we accept the preference axioms; 9. Causal vs. evidential decision theory; 10. Bayesian vs. non-Bayesian decision theory; 11. Game theory I: basic concepts and zero sum games; 12. Game theory II: nonzero sum and co-operative games; 13. Social choice theory; 14. Overview of descriptive decision theory; Appendix A. Glossary; Appendix B. Proof of the von Neumann-Morgenstern theorem; Further reading; Index. (shrink)

This collection of essays is a critical document in Continental philosophy, reflecting its recent history, its present state, and its debt to Calvin O. Schrag. It begins with an overview of philosophy's role and responsibility or "task" and of Schrag's contributions to it, written from the perspective of a resolute defender of the phenomenological tradition that Schrag's work has extended and reconfigured. The essays are organized around the four conceptual figures widely considered Schrag's most significant and original philosophical achievements: transversal (...) rationality, the self after post-modernity, the fourth cultural value sphere, and communication praxis. The authors focus on topics ranging from Cartesian rationality to Foucauldian rational relativism; from transcendence in relation to the self to the Schragean self's connections with discourse, action, and community; from religion's disruptive presence in contemporary philosophy to recent developments in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

The study “Psychoanalysis—its image and its public” intimates that common sense is increasingly informed by science. But common sense asserts its autonomy and, in turn, may affect the trajectory of science. This is a process that leads to many differentiations—in common sense, in scientific innovation and in political and regulatory structures. Bauer and Gaskell's toblerone model of triangles of mediation provided a distillation of their reading of “La Psychanalyse.” Here it was argued that representations are multi-modal phenomena necessitating the use (...) of multiple methodologies .In this paper we briefly summarise these arguments and elaborate ways in which social representation theory can be considered a progressive research programme. “Progressive” because as the theory has developed it has extended the range and depth of its conceptual basis; it provides a new synthesis for the social scientific understanding of the phenomena of common sense and of representation; it acts as an antidote to the reductionism of public opinion and, finally, it is a stimulus to depart from disciplinary silos. However, there remain unresolved issues: how to segment the relevant social milieus and how to close the feedback loop from common sense to science? (shrink)

There has been a longstanding interest in discovering or uncovering resemblances among what are ostensibly diverse religious schemas by employing a range of methodological approaches and tools. However, it is generally considered a problematic undertaking. Jonathan Z. Smith has produced a large body of work aimed at explicating this and has tacitly based his model of comparison on metaphor, which is traditionally understood to connote similarity between two or more things, as based on a linguistic or pragmatic assessment. However, another (...) possible approach is cognitive. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have championed the view of “conceptual metaphor,” which regards metaphor as being pervasive not only in language, but also in thought and action. Indeed, according to them, it basically structures our conceptual operations and hence views of the world through partially mapping knowledge across ontological domains, generally from the concrete to the abstract. I shall argue that a similar mechanism can fruitfully be applied to comparing religious schemas, as based on the postulated relationship between the domains of human and divine, physical and abstract, and as realized through expressions of journeying and reflection. (shrink)

On Blindness opens the eyes of the sighted to the world as experience by the blind, offering a unique opportunity to explore the challenges, frustrations, joys - and extraordinary insights - experienced in the everyday business of discovering the world without sight. What difference doessight or its absence make to our ideas about the world? What begins as a philosophical exchange between the noted philosopher and broadcaster Bryan Magee and the late Martin Milligan, activist and philosopher blind almost from (...) birth, develops into a personal and intense discussion of the implications of blindness. The debate is vigorous and oftenheated; sometimes contentious, it is always stimulating. In discussing the range of blind experience, from those born blind to those who became blind - including those who have to cope with the shock of gaining sight they had never before possessed - On Blindness argues strongly against the notionthat blindness is a simple experience. This extraordinary book casts new light on one of the most fundamental aspects of human experience. It will make fascinating reading for anyone interested in sight and blindness from a personal, practical or philosophical point of view. This dictionary is intended for anyone who enjoys food andwould like a handy, non-technical guide to the terms they encounter on food labels, in advertising or in the media. Its broad coverage of food and nutrition makes it invaluable for consumers, cooks, and a range of students and practitioners in the fields of catering, home economies, foodtechnology, and health care. (shrink)

Shakespeare's Coriolanus is one of the most brilliant political plays ever written. Despite its ancient Roman setting, it remains a perennially relevant study of the relationship between personality and politics. The Introduction to this new edition illuminates its relevance to Shakespeare'sown time and to later ages while also emphasizing the wide range of interpretations that are possible in performance.

In 1990 Edward Craig published a book called Knowledge and the State of Nature in which he introduced and defended a genealogical approach to epistemology. In recent years Craig’s book has attracted a lot of attention, and his distinctive approach has been put to a wide range of uses including anti-realist metaepistemology, contextualism, relativism, anti-luck virtue epistemology, epistemic injustice, value of knowledge, pragmatism and virtue epistemology. While the number of objections to Craig’s approach has accumulated, there has been no sustained (...) attempt to develop answers to these objections. In this paper we provide answers to seven important objections in the literature. (shrink)

Leonardo da Vinci’s extensive drawings and notes devoted to anatomy do not arise in a medical context. He does not engage with surgery or “physic.” Rather, his aim is to reveal what he understood to be the divine engineering of God’s greatest creation. His earliest anatomical drawings map the conduits for the “spirits” at a deep level not practiced by other artists interested in the human body. The first set of drawings he produced in 1489 describes skulls with brilliant draftsmanship. (...) His notes for these drawings are predominantly concerned with the location of the “common sense” (sensus communis) at the geometrical center of the cranium. The next great set of drawings completed in ca. 1510 expounds the form and functions of the bones and muscles in meticulous mechanical detail, probably in collaboration with the young Paduan doctor, Marcantonio della Torre. Leonardo’s greatest realization of mathematics in anatomy comes when he looks at the valves of the heart; in studying the heart he also conceived a casting technique that he adapted to determine the form of the ventricles in the brain, radically revising the traditional arrangement of these structures. In a range of portrayals from diagrammatic to pictorial and from static to dynamic, Leonardo’s anatomical research is unrivalled in revealing the mechanics of the human body. His work in this context is an underappreciated precursor of the modern science of biomechanics. (Larger-sized versions of the Leonardo drawings presented here are available as supplementary material in the online version of this article.). (shrink)

The most recent work dealing expressly with adoption in Greece is Wentzel's article in Hermes lxv , 167–76, ‘Studien über die Adoption in Griechen-land’. Her article ranges widely over the whole subject and includes a list of all the inscriptions known to her which refer to adoptions, as well as a list of the adoptive formulae found in these inscriptions. In the present article I shall deal more fully with these formulae.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

ABSTRACTTwo new books about the Pragmatist tradition, Richard Bernstein's The Pragmatic Turn and Colin Koopman's Pragmatism as Transition, represent respectively a summing up of the past half‐century of the tradition's history and a possible program for its future development. Bernstein ecumenically considers the achievements of a wide range of thinkers from Peirce, Dewey, and James to Brandom, Putnam, and Rorty, drawing valuable lessons from each, while not sparing criticism of their flaws. Koopman also tries to bridge the gap between what (...) he calls “classicopragmatism” and “neopragmatism,” although he finds more to admire in Rorty than in his predecessors. Whereas Bernstein attempts to supplement the pragmatist tradition by turning to Habermas, Koopman finds his inspiration in Foucault. Both authors emphasize the historicist, evolutionary, and transitionalist implications of pragmatism, paying as a result insufficient attention to the historical possibilities of repetition, rupture, discontinuity, and the unexpected event. In terms of the political implications they draw, Koopman advocates a meliorist incrementalism that lacks any real bite, while Bernstein expresses dissatisfaction with the democratic pieties of Rorty's final work, but doesn't really provide a sustained alternative. (shrink)

On 7 April 2022 – coinciding with World Health Day – the British Medical Association launched its new report, Health and human rights in the new world order.1 Written during the global upheaval triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, and published just weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the report responds to a range of emerging and intensifying threats to health-related human rights globally. As the report establishes, human rights in health and healthcare matter because human suffering, and its relief, (...) are fundamental moral issues. As relief of human suffering is the primary purpose of medicine, it follows that doctors and other health professionals are often active in times of human challenge and extremity. During conflict, humanitarian crises, and, as we have so recently seen, global public health emergencies, health professionals are essential to the response. But these crises – and the response to them – can put fundamental human rights and interests under pressure. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has seen sustained indiscriminate shelling of civilian infrastructure. Whether health facilities were directly targeted is moot – the indiscriminate nature of the assault means they will inevitably be hit. Not only is this a violation of the Geneva Conventions, it undermines fundamental human rights, not least of which the right to health. Destroying health infrastructure drives further suffering and delays post-conflict recovery. Public heath emergencies can rightly require draconian measures – social distancing, enforced isolation, location tracking, economic shutdown. Although we saw their necessity during the COVID-19 outbreak, concerns were raised about disproportionate restrictions on basic rights, including rights to privacy and liberty. Human Rights Watch drew attention to the way governments unlawfully exploited COVID-19 to crack down on fundamental rights.2 Although conflicts and public health emergencies are not new, the report also tracks a number of …. (shrink)

The essays in Powerful Arguments reconstruct the standards of validity underlying argumentative practices in a wide array of late imperial Chinese discourses, from the Song through the Qing dynasties. The fourteen case studies analyze concrete arguments defended or contested in areas ranging from historiography, philosophy, law, and religion to natural studies, literature, and the civil examination system. By examining uses of evidence, habits of inference, and the criteria by which some arguments were judged to be more persuasive than others, the (...) contributions recreate distinct cultures of reasoning. Together, they lay the foundations for a history of argumentative practice in one of the richest scholarly traditions outside of Europe and add a chapter to the as yet elusive global history of rationality. (shrink)

This essay examines one aspect of the wide-ranging philosophical background of the intellectual and dissident movement for human rights in one-time communist Czechoslovakia. I shall meditate on Jan Patočka 's finite responsibility, Derrida's aporetic emphasis on the infinite dimension of responsibility, and Lévinasian-Dostoyevskyan ethico-existential variations on in/finite responsibility. Havel alludes to hyperbolic ethics in a parenthetical remark on the birth of "Charta 77", the Manifesto for Human Rights in Czechoslovakia. The question before us is this: which dimension of responsibility appears (...) at this birth or, to put it otherwise, what responsibility is born in care for the soul and polis? (shrink)

In his latest book about art Arthur Danto claims that aesthetic appearance-visuality in the visual arts-has become more and more irrelevant for most of contemporary art. This essay first immanently critiques the distinction between the aesthetic and artistic properties underlying this claim. Danto's claim about the irrelevance of the aesthetic is not compatible with the spirit of his own writings: what Danto denies in After the End of Art has been a cornerstone of his theoretical work since The Transfiguration of (...) the Commonplace, namely, that the aesthetic is indeed both an elementary and a defining property of art. Examples ranging from Duchamp's Fountain to a recent installation by the Art & Language group are discussed to support this critique. Second, the essay defends Danto's contention that developing a "definition of art" is a sensible enterprise. But it turns out that Danto's "essentialism" concerning art has no essentialist implications in any specific sense. (shrink)

Few words in both everyday parlance and theoretical discourse have been as rhapsodically defended or as fervently resisted as "experience." Yet, to date, there have been no comprehensive studies of how the concept of experience has evolved over time and why so many thinkers in so many different traditions have been compelled to understand it. _Songs of Experience _is a remarkable history of Western ideas about the nature of human experience written by one of our best-known intellectual historians. With its (...) sweeping historical reach and lucid comparative analysis—qualities that have made Martin Jay's previous books so distinctive and so successful—_Songs of Experience _explores Western discourse from the sixteenth century to the present, asking why the concept of experience has been such a magnet for controversy. Resisting any single overarching narrative, Jay discovers themes and patterns that transcend individuals and particular schools of thought and illuminate the entire spectrum of intellectual history. As he explores the manifold contexts for understanding experience—epistemological, religious, aesthetic, political, and historical—Jay engages an exceptionally broad range of European and American traditions and thinkers from the American pragmatists and British Marxist humanists to the Frankfurt School and the French poststructuralists, and he delves into the thought of individual philosophers as well, including Montaigne, Bacon, Locke, Hume and Kant, Oakeshott, Collingwood, and Ankersmit. Provocative, engaging, erudite, this key work will be an essential source for anyone who joins the ongoing debate about the material, linguistic, cultural, and theoretical meaning of "experience" in modern cultures. (shrink)

This text contains 54 of Martin Gardner's most searching and challenging essays, spanning nearly six decades. Issues tackled range from the apparent inexplicability of quantum physics to the eternal question of the existence of God, and an array of subjects are covered, from philosophy, the arts and religion, to mathematics and science.

There is a type of metaphysical picture that surfaces in a range of philosophical discussions, is of intrinsic interest, and yet remains ill-understood. According to this picture, the world contains a range of standpoints relative to which different facts obtain. Any true representation of the world cannot but adopt a particular standpoint. The aim of this paper is to propose a regimentation of a metaphysics that underwrites this picture. Key components are a factive notion of metaphysical relativity, a deflationary notion (...) of adopting standpoints, and two kinds of valid inference, one that allows one to abandon standpoints and one that does not. To better understand how theories formulated in terms of this framework are situated in dialectical space, I sketch a theory in the philosophy of time that admits both temporal and atemporal standpoints. (shrink)

The classical theory of preference among monetary bets represents people as expected utility maximizers with concave utility functions. Critics of this account often rely on assumptions about preferences over wide ranges of total wealth. We derive a prediction of the theory that bears on bets at any fixed level of wealth, and test the prediction behaviorally. Our results are discrepant with the classical account. Competing theories are also examined in light of our data.

In these essays, a range of leading scholars seek both to investigate the historical, institutional and philosophical origins of deconstruction and to think through the problem of the idea of origin itself"--Provided by publisher.