This article reports results from a program that produces high‐quality animation of facial expressions and head movements as automatically as possible in conjunction with meaning‐based speech synthesis, including spoken intonation. The goal of the research is as much to test and define our theories of the formal semantics for such gestures, as to produce convincing animation. Towards this end, we have produced a high‐level programming language for three‐dimensional (3‐D) animation of facial expressions. We have been concerned primarily with expressions conveying (...) information correlated with the intonation of the voice: This includes the differences of timing, pitch, and emphasis that are related to such semantic distinctions of discourse as “focus,”“topic,” and “comment,”“theme” and “rheme,” or “given” and “new” information. We are also interested in the relation of affect or emotion to facial expression. Until now, systems have not embodied such rule‐governed translation from spoken utterance meaning to facial expressions. Our system embodies rules that describe and coordinate these relations: intonation/information, intonation/affect, and facial expressions/affect. A meaning representation includes discourse information: What is contrastive/background information in the given context, and what is the “topic” or “theme” of the discourse? The system maps the meaning representation into how accents and their placement are chosen, how they are conveyed over facial expression, and how speech and facial expressions are coordinated. This determines a sequence of functional groups: lip shapes, conversational signals, punctuators, regulators, and manipulators. Our algorithms then impose synchrony, create coarticulation effects, and determine affectual signals, eye and head movements. The lowest level representation is the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which makes the generation system portable to other facial models. (shrink)

Most economists are committed to some version of egoism. After distinguishing among the various sorts of egoistic claims, l cite the empirical literature against psychological egoism and show that attempts to account for this data make these economists' previous empirical claims tautological. Moreover, the assumption of egoism has undesirable consequences, especially for students; if people believe that others behave egoistically, they are more likely to behave egoistically themselves. As an alternative to egoism I recommend the commitment model of Robert Frank. (...) The equivalent of egoism at the organizational level is that business firms seek (should seek) to maximize profits. I present arguments to show that a conscious attempt by managers to maximize profits is likely to fail. A committed altruism is more likely to raise profits. I suggest that a firm should take as its primary purpose providing meaningful work for employees. (shrink)

The concepts of freedom and equality lie at the heart of much contemporary political debate. But how, exactly, are these concepts to be understood? And do they really represent desirable political values? Norman begins from the premise that freedom and equality are rooted in human experience, and thus have a real and objective content. He then argues that the attempt to clarify these concepts is therefore not just a matter of idle philosophical speculation, but also a matter of practical (...) politics, for the philosophical conclusions we reach also have important implications for the day-to-day world of political action. Touching on the work of such influential thinkers as Mill, Berlin, Hayek, Nozick, Rawls, and Williams, this book serves as a valuable introduction to the central issues in political philosophy. (shrink)

Socratic philosophy represents a long-standing tradition within philosophy that understands the journey to truth in terms of the traveler's innate capacity. Anamnesis, maieutics, and elenchus each confirm that truth is not utterly foreign but is instead always within my possession or grasp. Other people, to the extent that they participate in my philosophical exploration, serve only to enable my capabilities or potential. They are not teachers to me. Nor would I need them, since I am always already in the neighborhood (...) of truth. ;Emmanuel Levinas's description of the "face to face" encounter between people challenges the adequacy of this model. Another person is not simply a midwife who leads me to a recovery of truth that was always within me or within my domain. Rather, the Other comes to me from a dimension of height or transcendence and teaches me. By this teaching Levinas means that I, as one who might claim truth for myself, find myself put into question. Before the Other I discover that my claims to knowledge are inadequate, even unjust, insofar as the Other exceeds, and thereby resists, my comprehensive claim on the world. The Other, in other words, reveals the naivete and the dogmatism characteristic of my familiar world, and puts me on a new and unforseen path to truth. ;This dissertation, by way of an explication of the category of transcendence, examines how the autonomous world of Socratic maieutics is transformed by the teaching encounter with another person into a heteronomous world. Heteronomy suggests my answerability to an order beyond the resources of anamnesis. This answerability, which Levinas describes as my responsibility to the Other, demands that we re-examine language not in terms of its systematicity or thematic capability but as the condition for all speaking whatsoever, i.e., my being called into communication. The word of the Other signifies a transcendent domain, a domain beyond my familiar world. It also makes possible a sincere life lived to the Other. (shrink)

Fenton et al. present a Bayesian‐network analysis of the case, using their previously developed set of building blocks (‘idioms’). They claim that these idioms, combined with their opportunity‐based method for estimating the prior probability of guilt, reduce the subjectivity of their analysis. Although their Bayesian model is less cognitively feasible than scenario‐ or argumentation‐based models, they claim that it does model the standard approach to legal proof, which is to continually revise beliefs under new evidence.

It can sometimes be that when a great artist works in a particular genre, what is done within that genre can make one see as if for the first time what that genre really is, why for centuries the genre has been important, what its logic is, and what, in the end, that genre is for. I want to suggest that this is so in the case of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, and in the case of still life. Chardin’s still life painting (...) can reveal, as almost no other classical painting of still life can, what is at stake in still life, and what is that made still life one of the enduring categories of classical European painting. Understanding Chardin can force us right back to the fundamentals of the genre, to still life’s origins in antiquity, and to the extraordinary development of the genre in the seventeenth century. Here I will be trying to investigate the genre of still life in the light of what Chardin’s work reveals about it. In a sense I will be treating hardin as a critic, and not only as a painter, though everything he has to say about the genre is said in paint, and not as argument. If we can see Chardin’s work with eyes fresh enough, we can let Chardin reveal to us still life’s inner logic, its specific problems and solutions, and not only his solutions, but the solutions other still life painters look towards. In fact we probably have to turn to a painter to understand what still life is concerned with. It has always been the least discussed and the least theorised of the classical genres, and even today it is hard to find discussions of still life at a level of sophistication comparable to that of history painting, landscape, or portraiture. It is the genre farthest from language, and so the hardest for discourse to reach. There is no obvious tradition of theoretical work on still life, and in these circumstances it is appropriate to turn to a painter’s practice for guidance. But first I need to make some preliminary observations about a striking and defining feature of the genre: its exclusion of the human form, and its seeming assault on the value and prestige of the human subject. Norman Bryson is professor of comparative literature at the University of Rochester and editor of the series Cambridge New Art History and Criticism. He is the author of Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix and the editor of Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France . He is currently completing a study of still life painting, Looking at the Overlooked. (shrink)

Eleonore Stump argues in her article in this volume that Aquinas’s theory of knowledge is not classical foundationalism, as it has sometimes seemed to be, but, instead, a version of reliabilism. I'm convinced that her thesis is important and well-supported, and it has led me to begin a re-examination of one aspect of Aquinas’s theory of knowledge from the new viewpoint Stump’s work provides. I think the results tend to confirm her account while revealing further details of Aquinas’s reliabilism.My topic (...) is not reliabilism itself. Instead, I am focusing on Aquinas’s account of the reliability of the fundamental operations of the two human cognitive faculties, sense and intellect. Accounts of cognitive reliability have a place in most theories about the justification of belief, of course, and so they are found in more than one sort of epistemology; but reliabilism might be said to need them most. (shrink)

In this essay, I consider the implications for traditional philosophical ethics posed by discoveries in brain research or neurocognition as well as psychological discoveries concerning human biases and cognitive limitations presented in behavioral economics. I conclude that although there still is much for philosophical ethics to do, the empirical research shows that human freedom and responsibility for ethical decisions is somewhat diminished and that choice architecture and nudges through public policy become important for getting people to do the right thing.

SIECLE DES LUMIERES, HISTOIRE, 18e siècle.

Basado en argumentos previos, propongo una [auto] etnografía civil, públicamente responsable, que aborde las temáticas centrales de self, raza, género, clase, sociedad y democracia. Comienzo con la pedagogía de la esperanza y la imaginación sociológica y etnográfica. Paso entonces al etnógrafo y los estudios culturales, revisando varios modelos de etnografía crítica. A continuación, examino la pedagogía performativa crítica, la política y la teoría racial crítica, concluyendo con una breve discusión sobre la práctica de una política cultural performativa.

The philosophy of memory has been largely dominated by what could be called ‘the representative theory of memory’. In trying to give an account of ‘what goes on in one's mind’ when one remembers something, or of what ‘the mental content of remembering’ consists, philosophers have usually insisted that there must be some sort of mental image, picture, or copy of what is remembered. Aristotle said that there must be ‘something like a picture or impression’; William James thought that there (...) must be in the mind 'an image or copy’ of the original event; Russell said that ‘Memory demands an image’. In addition to the image or copy a variety of other mental phenomena have been thought to be necessary. In order for a memory image to be distinguished from an expectation image, the former must be accompanied by ‘a feeling of pastness’. One has confidence that the image is of something that actually occurred because the image is attended by ‘a feeling of familiarity’. And in order that you may be sure that the past event not merely occurred but that you witnessed it, your image of the event must be presented to you with a feeling of ‘warmth and intimacy’. When all the required phenomena are put together, the mental content of remembering turns out to be, as William James says, ‘a very complex representation’. (shrink)

El ensayo siguiente consiste en una reinterpretación de la obra de Frantz Fanon a partir de la problemática biopolítica iniciada por Michel Foucault. Se analizan los procesos a través de los cuales las vidas de los colonizados se determinan como inhumanas, y se insertan dentro de un "lenguaje de pura violencia", es decir de una red de poderes violentos, soberanos y totalizantes. Fanón va a pensar una puesta en jaque de aquel estado de excepción permanente colonial a partir de la (...) violencia misma, ya que se tratara para él de transformar, sobre la práctica de las luchas, la violencia en ejercicio del descubrimiento de la verdad. In this essay we approach Franz Fanon's work from a biopolitical standpoint as initiated by Michel Foucault. We analyze the processes that lead to the notion of colonized people's life as less than human with a "language of pure violence", that is, within a network of violent powers at the same time sovereign and totalizing. Fanón intends to check that permanent "state of emergency" of the colonies by means of violence itself, since fighting can be transformed from violence alone to the fight for the discovery of truth. (shrink)

Dans la continuité de leurs travaux communs des années 1980, Ernesto Laclau et Chantal Mouffe ont développé parallèlement une nouvelle théorie du populisme. Cet article la définit comme une double ontologie du politique, qui fait droit à la fois à l’inimitié, ou dimension dissociative, et à la délibération, ou dimension associative du politique. Pour distinguer leur approche des populismes de droite, Laclau et Mouffe recourent à un anti-essentialisme intransigeant qui écarte l’histoire des éléments décisifs pour la construction d’un sujet politique. (...) Ce faisant, ils assimilent les mouvements anticoloniaux et antiracistes conséquents au conservatisme ou à la réaction. Une insuffisante problématisation de la question raciale et du militantisme antiraciste, souvent invoqué mais jamais analysé par les auteurs, sont à la source de ces confusions. Cela exige une reformulation du populisme de gauche dont la question du pluralisme pourrait fournir le point de départ. (shrink)

S’inscrivant dans le champ des Black Male Studies, cet article montre comment les hommes non blancs sont souvent les grands oubliés des luttes abolitionnistes, et ce alors mêmes qu’ils représentent l’écrasante majorité des personnes incarcérées. Détaillant les raccourcis ou les omissions qui grèvent certains textes de la justice transformatrice, ce texte rappelle ainsi que l’abolition requiert un changement radical d’imaginaire, et qu’elle ne peut se faire sans se confronter à la misandrie raciale.

Despite the emphasis on the state in the history of political philosophy, the twentieth century has been characterized by a remarkable lack of philosophical reflection on the concept. Until recently analytical philosophy had eschewed those evaluative arguments about political obligation and the limits of state authority that were typical of political theory in the past in favour of the explication of the meaning of the concept. However, even here the results have been disappointing. Logical Positivist attempts to locate some unique (...) empirical phenomenon which the word state described proved unsuccessful, and indeed led to the odd conclusion that there was nothing about the state that distinguished it from some other social institutions. For example, its coercive power was said to be not unique: in some circumstances trade unions and Churches exercised similar power over their members. Ordinary language philosophers were far more interested in the complexities that surround words such as law, authority and power than in the state. In all this there was perhaps the fear that to concentrate attention on thestatewas implicitly to give credence to the discredited doctrine that it stood for some metaphysical entity; propositions about which could not be translated into propositions about the actions ofindividuals, and which represented higher values than those of ordinary human agents. (shrink)

First published in 1972, Problems of Mind begins with a consideration of the view that the human mind is an immaterial thing that does not require corporeal embodiment for its operations. It takes up the conception that "inner experiences" are "strictly identical" with brain processes. The book also deals exclusively with the doctrine called "Logical Behaviourism", which will always possess a compelling attraction for anyone who is perplexed by the psychological concepts, who has become aware of the worthlessness of an (...) appeal to introspection as an account of how we learn those concepts, and who has no inclination to identify mind with brain. The three most plausible theories of mind-body dualism, mind-brain monism, and behaviourism are all rejected, and nothing is set forth as the true theory. Norman Malcolm states that this is 'only a drop in the bucket. It will serve its purpose if it leads the reader into the writings of Wittgenstein, who is easily the most important figure in the philosophy of mind.' Problems of Mind will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of philosophy of mind, ethics, logic, and philosophy in general. (shrink)