In Queer Social Philosophy, Randall Halle analyzes key texts in the tradition of German critical theory from the perspective of contemporary queer theory, exposing gender and sexuality restrictions that undermine those texts' claims of universal truth. Addressing such figures as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Adorno, and Habermas, Halle offers a unique contribution to contemporary debates about sexuality, civil society, and politics.

Using cinema to explore the visual aspects of alterity, Randall Halle analyzes how we become cognizant of each other and how we perceive and judge another person in a visual field. Halle draws on insights from philosophy and recent developments in cognitive and neuroscience to argue that there is no pure "natural" sight. We always see in a particular way, from a particular vantage point, and through a specific apparatus, and Halle shows how human beings have used cinema to experiment (...) with the apparatus of seeing for over a century. Visual alterity goes beyond seeing difference to being conscious of how one sees difference. Investigating the process allows us to move from mere perception to apperception, or conscious perception. Innovative and insightful, Visual Alterity merges film theory with philosophy and cutting-edge science to propose new ways of perceiving and knowing. (shrink)

Foucault's discussion of the panopticon is the best-known engagement with visual epistemology, the relationship of sight and knowledge. Yet the panopticon is only one form of visual epistemology and all technologies of perspective position and situate their subjects. As a colloquial statement of visual epistemology we might say: you are how you see. This essay focuses on the cinematic episteme or how the technology of cinema configures a way of seeing and way of knowing. Specifically this essay takes up a (...) narrower question of visual alterity. Beginning from Hegel's discussion of consciousness, it asks how within and through film we recognise our self and how can we see the other? To carry out the analysis, the essay attends in particular to two films Baby I will Make You Sweat (1994) and La Moderna Poesia (2000) by experimental and underground artist Birgit Hein. These films combine incongruous and even conflicting representational strategies that particularly enable an exploration of visual alterity. Both films on the one hand narrate a highly subjective experience of self/other relations within the context of a travel narrative: a woman seeking to recapture some sense of life, travels to an unfamiliar destination, enters into new environments and takes up relationships, sometimes intimate, with strangers. On the other hand they both rely on a form of aesthetic abstraction that leaves the film without renaissance perspective, panoptic organizing, shot-reverse shot, continuity editing, i.e. an of the typical representational strategies of alterity found in narrative films. (shrink)

In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points (...) that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms. (shrink)

The collection presents a variety of promising new directions in Royce scholarship from an international group of scholars, including historical reinterpretations, explorations of Royce's ethics of loyalty and religious philosophy, and contemporary applications of his ideas in psychology, the problem of reference, neo-pragmatism, and literary aesthetics.

The scope of Philosophy in Multiple Voices provides the reader with eight philosophical streams of thought-African-American, Afro-Caribbean, Asian-American, Feminist, Latin-American, Lesbian, Native-American and Queer-that introduce readers to alternative, complex philosophical questions concerning gendered, sexed, racial and ethnic identities, canon formation, and meta-philosophy. The overriding theme of the text is that philosophy is pluralistic in voice, rich in diversity, and ought to valorize democratic intellectual spaces of philosophical engagement.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bonaventure's Inception Address as Regent Master at Paris:Omnium ArtifexRandall B. SmithInception as Master and the Principium in AulaAfter nineteen years of study at the University of Paris—six in the study of Arts (1235–1241), two lecturing in the Arts (1241–1243), five as auditor theologiae (1243–1248), two as a baccalarius biblicus and as a lector biblicus for the Franciscans (1248–1251), two as a baccalarius sententiarius (1251–1253), and one as a baccalarius (...) formatus (1253–1254)—Bonaventure of Bagnoregio was incepted as magister regens (regent master) around Easter (12 April) in 1254 to replace William of Middleton in the Franciscan chair at the University of Paris.1At that time, the inception ceremonies for an incoming regent master consisted of several parts. On the appointed day, the candidate would be officially received by the chancellor of the university in the ceremonial hall, the aula, of the bishop before the assembled faculty and students of the university. The previous evening would have been spent responding to bachelors and masters in a complex series of "disputed questions."2 But on the morning of the next day, the presiding master would have stood and placed on Bonaventure's head a biretta and said aloud: "I place on you the magisterial biretta in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen." After birettas had been distributed to the other masters to place on their own heads, the gathered company sat down to hear the new master deliver his inaugural lecture, the principium in aula.According to University regulations, the principium address was to be a praise of sacred Scripture, and although it was one of the high [End Page 211] points in the inception ceremony, the inception address was supposed to be delivered "briefly" (breve) and "quickly terminated" (celeriter terminato).3 When Friar Thomas Aquinas incepted in 1256, two years after Bonaventure, his principium address was completed in about ten minutes. Brother Bonaventure's principium, a translation of which follows this introduction, would require about forty minutes or more to read out loud. But then, as Aquinas himself might have said, "briefly" can be said in several ways.4 A study of earlier principium addresses by other masters shows, moreover, that the length of these addresses varied from master to master.5The Principium in Aula and the Sermo Modernus StyleThe earliest records we have of masters who incepted at Paris reveal that their inception principia addresses were always delivered in the contemporary style of preaching, the so-called "sermo modernus" or "modern sermon" style. There is no need for our present purposes to trace the development of the sermo modernus style, other than to say that its origins lie in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, and that it had become highly developed, with numerous preaching manuals and reference materials to help preachers master its forms, by the time Thomas and Bonaventure were incepted as masters at Paris, in 1256 and 1254 respectively.6 [End Page 212]In brief, three things were especially characteristic of these thirteenth century sermo modernus style sermons: (1) the thema, a biblical verse, usually from the day's readings that the preacher would use to lend structure and order to the entire sermon; (2) the divisio of the thema, and (3) the dilatatio of each of the parts created by this opening divisio.7The thema verse served as a structuring device which provided an outline of the topics to be covered in the sermon. When the sermon was preached, the thema verse also served as a mnemonic device to help the listeners identify their place within the progress of the whole and then recall the contents of the sermon after it was finished. To recall the contents of the sermon, one merely had to bring to mind the opening thema verse, and each word would suggest the topics the preacher had associated with it.8So, for example, in the principium address Bonaventure delivered at his inception as master, Bonaventure took as his opening thema a verse from Wisdom 7:1, Omnium artifex docuit me sapientia ("The maker of all things... (shrink)

William Louis Poteat , a North Carolina intellectual of the Progressive Era, gained a reputation as a leading liberal in southern higher education. This book, which was recognized by a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities publication grant, is useful for historians of science because it illustrates how scientific ideas, particularly Darwinism, were diffused into a rural and isolated society.From his student years to the end of his life, Poteat was intimately connected with a Southern Baptist college, Wake Forest. He (...) matriculated at Wake Forest and became a tutor there in 1878. Although almost entirely self‐taught in the sciences, he became a popular and respected professor of biology. As his knowledge of science came from reading contemporary papers and monographs rather than from traditional study, he developed a perspective more modern than that of most of his peers. He rose through the ranks, ultimately becoming president of Wake Forest in 1905.Relatively early in his career, Poteat began the work that earned him a place in southern history by writing articles and giving lectures on the ways in which science and religion were related. By the end of his first decade as a faculty member, he had become convinced of the importance of Darwin's theory of evolution and had decided that it posed no threat to traditional Christianity. In supporting this view, Poteat followed the lead of mainstream European and Northern American churches, which had no problem reconciling evolution with the Book of Genesis and its description of creation occurring in seven days. After all, who knew what a day meant in the mind of God? Many Southern Protestants, however, rejected this position.Randal Hall sees Poteat as an advocate of a liberal social philosophy fully in accord with the social gospel of the Progressive age. As a leading proponent for change in his state, Poteat “personified North Carolina Progressivism” , and his defense of Darwin was of a piece with his philosophy. But it is unclear whether Poteat's admiration for Darwin stemmed from an understanding of science or an obsession with eugenics, an obsession that in time came to dominate his thinking.Poteat vigorously used his position as president of the Southern Baptist Education Association to promote theories of eugenics. Although Darwin did not actively promote racism, followers of his thought such as Poteat could easily educe racist ideas from it. They could argue, for example, that individuals should speed up the process of producing superior humans by helping nature along through the process of selective breeding. Concerned with the large number of Americans who were institutionalized, and the even greater number who were barely educated, Poteat maintained that the government should control the right to reproduce and sterilize the unfit, including the “self‐centered, the coarse‐fibered, and the discourteous” . He thought that civilization would crumble unless such procedures were put in place, because there would be an “overproduction of under‐men” . Indeed, following this same line of thought, he opposed war because it foolishly wasted “our best blood” . He called for federal legislation to govern marriage and divorce, requiring applicants to meet his moral requirements and to pass a rigorous medical examination. Even in conservative North Carolina, these ideas provoked astonishment. A leading Raleigh newspaper accused Poteat of wanting to be the “boss of a human stock farm” .Although Randal Hall's book is primarily a biography of William Louis Poteat—and secondarily a history of Wake Forest as it evolved from a tiny Baptist school into a major college—it is also a study of the split personalities of Southern Progressives. On the one hand, they rejected rule by educated leaders; on the other, they wanted government to control the most intimate aspects of life, such as reproduction. Poteat thought that all these things should be overseen by a “genteel Christian community led by a liberal elite” . The complexity and cognitive dissonance of Southern Progressives are well illustrated in this book. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education by Randall Everett AllsupJuliet HessRandall Everett Allsup, Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016).As a leading voice in music education, Randall Allsup works continually to reconceptualize music education toward democratic and socially just praxis.1 He routinely challenges the field to become self-conscious of practices that limit forward movement, providing (...) powerful critiques2 and urging music education toward open possibilities.3 Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education is work that will shift our field. His comprehensive philosophy of music education looks, longs, for moral openings4 through which twenty-first-century music education may become a space of possibility. His writing interweaves stories and theory toward what he calls an "open philosophy," drawing upon the ideas of John Dewey, Maxine Greene, and Roland Barthes. Allsup introduces stories of Dapper Dan, Jiro Ono, Kafka, Atul Gawande, and the Orpheus Orchestra in New York City to illustrate powerful points about current and possible paradigms of music education.Chapter 1, "Toward Open Encounters," discusses the making and breaking of the law (tradition) and explores how tradition and the Master-Apprentice model restrict what is possible in music education. Allsup explores the nature of music education and the limitations it places upon its participants. Chapter 2, "Music-Teacher Quality and Expertise," asks fundamental questions of our field and [End Page 100] explores and challenges the "place and purpose of public schooling in a democratic society."5 Allsup speaks to the function of education and critiques music education. Chapter 3, "learning in laboratories," puts forward a Deweyan laboratory model in which a museum is at the center of the school with learning laboratories situated around it. He explores what this structural fluidity might enable and develops notions of lawmaking and lawbreaking, extending possibilities of the open encounter. The final chapter, "looking, Longing, for Moral Openings," calls on music educators to embrace a more open music education paradigm. Allsup draws upon Greene to challenge music education to move "from the predictable to the possible."6 He puts forward the Orpheus Orchestra, a conductorless orchestra, as one possibility.I situate myself as an anti-racist, anti-colonial, feminist scholar rooted in anti-oppression scholarship.7 locating my review through this framework, I elaborate upon what I see as the major strengths and limitations of this work, drawing upon Judith Butler8 and postcolonial theory. significantly, Allsup's book calls upon music education to "give an account of [it]self" and promotes a self-consciousness crucial for our field in the age of high stakes accountability measures. I contend that he provides a music education philosophy for what stuart Hall terms the "postcolonial moment"9 and ultimately positions music education as a space of possibility. Alongside these strengths, I offer a challenge toward what I view as the open possibilities of closed forms and a critique of his "pedagogy of travel and surprise."Judith Butler points to the impossibility of giving an account of oneself. she notes,I speak as an 'I,' but do not make the mistake of thinking that I know precisely all that I am doing when I speak in that way. I find that my very formation implicates the other and me, that my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others.10Butler notes the subject's "partial opacity to [her]self."11 In Remixing the Classroom, Allsup calls upon music educators to account for the practices and traditions continually reinscribed in the field. He poses challenging but fundamental questions in the work in music education, asking readers to consider what they do unconsciously. Butler asserts we can never fully account for ourselves. Allsup challenges the field to try, pushing music educators to face hard truths and limitations of what music education is and has been. In chapter 1, for example, he argues:To call a studying musician "unmusical" is to extinguish a light; it is to act as if the future is certain and that human potential is somehow fixed. It is to act [End Page 101... (shrink)

Over the last few decades, several scientific studies have attempted to measure the effectiveness of prayer in bringing about healing. But can we really test the therapeutic effect of prayer in the same way that we test conventional medicinal treatments? On the contrary, in this article, I present three arguments in support of the conclusion that such attempts to measure the effectiveness of prayer are based on flawed assumptions. One implication of this is that the failure to draw a positive (...) statistical relationship between prayer and healing does not constitute good evidence against the value of prayer.Export citation. (shrink)

Reasoning research suggests that people use more stringent criteria when they evaluate others' arguments than when they produce arguments themselves. To demonstrate this “selective laziness,” we used a choice blindness manipulation. In two experiments, participants had to produce a series of arguments in response to reasoning problems, and they were then asked to evaluate other people's arguments about the same problems. Unknown to the participants, in one of the trials, they were presented with their own argument as if it was (...) someone else's. Among those participants who accepted the manipulation and thus thought they were evaluating someone else's argument, more than half rejected the arguments that were in fact their own. Moreover, participants were more likely to reject their own arguments for invalid than for valid answers. This demonstrates that people are more critical of other people's arguments than of their own, without being overly critical: They are better able to tell valid from invalid arguments when the arguments are someone else's rather than their own. (shrink)

In this work drawn from lectures delivered in 1994 a founding figure of cultural studies reflects on the divisive, deadly consequences of our politics of identification. Stuart Hall untangles the power relations that permeate race, ethnicity, and nationhood and shows how oppressed groups broke apart old hierarchies of difference in Western culture.

A critical account of the key connections between twentieth-century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and nineteenth-century German idealist G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel, Deleuze, and the Critique of Representation provides a critical account of the key connections between twentieth-century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and nineteenth-century German idealist G. W. F. Hegel. While Hegel has been recognized as one of the key targets of Deleuze’s philosophical writing, Henry Somers-Hall shows how Deleuze’s antipathy to Hegel has its roots in a problem the (...) two thinkers both try to address: getting beyond a philosophy of judgment and the restrictions of Kant’s transcendental idealism. By tracing the development of their attempts to address this problem, Somers-Hall offers an interpretation of the sweep of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy, providing a series of analyses of key moments in the history of thought, including the logics of Aristotle and Russell, Kant’s own philosophy of judgment, and the philosophy of Bergson. He also develops a novel interpretation of Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, and situates his philosophy in relation to the broader post-Kantian tradition. In addition to Deleuze’s relation to Hegel, the book makes important contributions to the study of Deleuze’s philosophy of mathematics, as well as to the study of several underappreciated areas of Hegel’s own philosophy. (shrink)

Both realist and anti-realist accounts of natural kinds possess prima facie virtues: realists can straightforwardly make sense of the apparent objectivity of the natural kinds, and anti-realists, their knowability. This paper formulates a properly anti-realist account designed to capture both merits. In particular, it recommends understanding natural kinds as ‘categorical bottlenecks,’ those categories that not only best serve us, with our idiosyncratic aims and cognitive capacities, but also those of a wide range of alternative agents. By endorsing an ultimately subjective (...) categorical principle, this view sidesteps epistemological difficulties facing realist views. Yet, it nevertheless identifies natural kinds that are fairly, though not completely, stance-independent or objective. (shrink)

The principle of sufficient reason threatens modal collapse. Some have suggested that by appealing to the indefinite extensibility of contingent truth, the threat is neutralized. This paper argues that this is not so. If the indefinite extensibility of contingent truth is developed in an analogous fashion to the most promising models of the indefinite extensibility of the concept set, plausible principles permit the derivation of modal collapse.

What is it about a person's becoming an adult that makes it generally inappropriate to treat that person paternalistically any longer? The Standard View holds that a mere difference in age or stage of life cannot in itself be morally relevant, but only matters insofar as it is correlated with the development of capacities for mature practical reasoning. This paper defends the contrary view: two people can have all the same general psychological attributes and yet the mere fact that one (...) person is at the beginning of a life and another in the middle of one can justify treating the younger person more paternalistically than the older one. Recognising the moral relevance of age, moreover, is crucial if one is to accommodate both the liberal moral ideal of respect for autonomy and our demanding educational aims, given that these otherwise come into conflict with one another. (shrink)

The interventionist account of causal explanation, in the version presented by Jim Woodward, has been recently claimed capable of buttressing the widely felt—though poorly understood—hunch that high-level, relatively abstract explanations, of the sort provided by sciences like biology, psychology and economics, are in some cases explanatorily optimal. It is the aim of this paper to show that this is mistaken. Due to a lack of effective constraints on the causal variables at the heart of the interventionist causal-explanatory scheme, as presently (...) formulated it is either unable to prefer high-level explanations to low, or systematically overshoots, recommending explanations at so high of a level as to be virtually vacuous. (shrink)

[First paragraph]: This article is part of a larger project in which I suggest a historically informed philosophy of dance, called “figuration,” consisting of new interpretations of canonical philosophers. Figuration consists of two major parts, comprising (a) four basic concepts, or “moves”—namely, “positure,” “gesture,” “grace,” and “resilience”—and (b) seven types, or “families” of dance—namely, “concert,” “folk,” “societal,” “agonistic,” “animal,” “astronomical,” and “discursive.” This article is devoted to the first of these four moves, as illustrated by both its importance for Aristotle (...) and also its applicability to these seven families of dance. One goal of figuration as a whole, and the central goal of this excerpt from that larger project, is to model and justify a dancing aesthetic education pursuant to psychological and political flourishing. (shrink)

A handy guide to the major figures and issues in Christian philosophy from Augustine to the present.This volume covers a broad historical sweep and takes into account those non-Christian philosophers that have had a great impact on the Christian tradition. However, it concentrates on the issues that perplex Christian philosophers as they seek to think through their faith in a philosophical way and their philosophical beliefs in the light of their faith. Examples of the topics discussed are the question of (...) whether and how God knows the future, whether we actually know that God exists, and what Athens has to do with Jerusalem. The leaders of the recent revival of Christian analytic philosophy, especially Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, William Alston, and Robert Adams are also included. (shrink)

Changes in healthcare financing increasingly rely upon patient cost-sharing to control escalating healthcare expenditures. These changes raise new challenges for physicians that are different from those that arose either under managed care or traditional indemnity insurance. Historically, there have been two distinct bases for arguing that physicians should not consider costs in their clinical decisions—an “aspirational ethic” that exhorts physicians to treat all patients the same regardless of their ability to pay, and an “agency ethic” that calls on physicians to (...) be trustworthy advisors to their patients. In the setting of greater patient cost-sharing, physicians' aspiration and agency roles increasingly conflict. Satisfactorily navigating the new terrain of consumer-driven healthcare requires physicians to consider these two roles and how they can best be reconciled so as to maximize quality of care while respecting the heterogeneity of patients' financial resources and willingness to pay. (shrink)

Every day, thousands of polls, surveys, and rating scales are employed to elicit the attitudes of humankind. Given the ubiquitous use of these instruments, it seems we ought to have firm answers to what is measured by them, but unfortunately we do not. To help remedy this situation, we present a novel approach to investigate the nature of attitudes. We created a self-transforming paper survey of moral opinions, covering both foundational principles, and current dilemmas hotly debated in the media. This (...) survey used a magic trick to expose participants to a reversal of their previously stated attitudes, allowing us to record whether they were prepared to endorse and argue for the opposite view of what they had stated only moments ago. The result showed that the majority of the reversals remained undetected, and a full 69% of the participants failed to detect at least one of two changes. In addition, participants often constructed coherent and unequivocal arguments supporting the opposite of their original position. These results suggest a dramatic potential for flexibility in our moral attitudes, and indicates a clear role for self-attribution and post-hoc rationalization in attitude formation and change. (shrink)

Structural equations have become increasingly popular in recent years as tools for understanding causation. But standard structural equations approaches to causation face deep problems. The most philosophically interesting of these consists in their failure to incorporate a distinction between default states of an object or system, and deviations therefrom. Exploring this problem, and how to fix it, helps to illuminate the central role this distinction plays in our causal thinking.

Journal of Applied Philosophy, EarlyView.

David Lewis's influential work on the epistemology and metaphysics of objective chance has convinced many philosophers of the central importance of the following two claims: First, it is a serious cost of reductionist positions about chance (such as that occupied by Lewis) that they are, apparently, forced to modify the Principal Principle--the central principle relating objective chance to rational subjective probability--in order to avoid contradiction. Second, it is a perhaps more serious cost of the rival non-reductionist position that, unlike reductionism, (...) it can give no coherent explanation for why the Principal Principle should hold. I argue that both of these claims are fundamentally mistaken. (shrink)

Among the factors necessary for the occurrence of some event, which of these are selectively highlighted in its explanation and labeled as causes — and which are explanatorily omitted, or relegated to the status of background conditions? Following J. S. Mill, most have thought that only a pragmatic answer to this question was possible. In this paper I suggest we understand this ‘causal selection problem’ in causal-explanatory terms, and propose that explanatory trade-offs between abstraction and stability can provide a principled (...) solution to it. After sketching that solution, it is applied to a few biological examples, including to a debate concerning the ‘causal democracy’ of organismal development, with an anti-democratic (though not a gene-centric) moral. (shrink)

Though biologists identify individuals as ‘male’ or ‘female’ across a broad range of animal species, the particular traits exhibited by males and females can vary tremendously. This diversity has led some to conclude that cross-animal sexes (males, or females, of whatever animal species) have “little or no explanatory power” (Dupré 1986: 447) and, thus, are not natural kinds in any traditional sense. This essay will explore considerations for and against this conclusion, ultimately arguing that the animal sexes, properly understood, are (...) “historical explanatory kinds”: groupings that can be scientifically significant even while their members differ radically in their current properties and particular histories. Whether this makes them full-fledged natural kinds is a question I take up at the very end. (shrink)

In a Ulysses contract, A gets B, at t1, to agree (i) to act at t2 in such a way that A is made to abide by her own earlier intentions and (ii) to ignore A’s later attempt to rescind the authorization. But why does A’s will at t2 lack the authority it had at t1? This article makes the case that a person has authority to enter a Ulysses contract only insofar as her expressed will at t1 is a (...) better expression of the values that remain attributable to her at t2 than is her expressed will at t2. (shrink)

The emerging field of the philosophy of dance, as suggested by Aili Bresnahan, increasingly recognizes the problem that (especially pre‐modern) dance has historically focused on bodily perfection, which privileges abled bodies as those that can best make and perform dance as art. One might expect that the philosophy of dance, given the critical and analytical powers of philosophy, might be helpful in illuminating and suggesting ameliorations for this tendency in dance. But this is particularly a difficult task since the analytic (...) philosophy of dance is too young to have achieved a comprehensive treatment of dance per se, let alone to update such a treatment in line with the demands of social justice. As a step in that direction, the present article (a) summarizes dance theorists on disabled dance (as opposed to the dance of the temporarily able‐bodied, or TAB) and then applies (b) the philosophy of art and dance to disability, (c) the philosophy of disability to dance, (d) interdisciplinary disability theory to dance, and (e) my own Figuration philosophy of dance to disability, as inspired in part by John Dewey. (shrink)

Among the factors necessary for the occurrence of some event, which of these are selectively highlighted in its explanation and labeled as causes-and which are explanatorily omitted, or relegated to the status of background conditions? Following J. S. Mill, most have thought that only a pragmatic answer to this question was possible. In this paper I suggest we understand this ‘causal selection problem’ in causal-explanatory terms, and propose that explanatory trade-offs between abstraction and stability can provide a principled solution to (...) it. After sketching that solution, it is applied to a few biological examples. (shrink)

"A Rose Hill book"--P. [4] of cover. Includes bibliographical references and index.

This paper critiques the new mechanistic explanatory program on grounds that, even when applied to the kinds of examples that it was originally designed to treat, it does not distinguish correct explanations from those that blunder. First, I offer a systematization of the explanatory account, one according to which explanations are mechanistic models that satisfy three desiderata: they must 1) represent causal relations, 2) describe the proper parts, and 3) depict the system at the right ‘level.’ Second, I argue that (...) even the most developed attempts to fulfill these desiderata fall short by failing to appropriately constrain explanatorily apt mechanistic models. -/- *This paper used to be called "The Emperor's New Mechanisms". (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to develop a new reconstruction of Sartre’s arguments against Kant’s account of the unity of experience in the transcendental deduction. In the Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre presents several arguments to show that Kant is unwarranted in moving from the claim that we can attach an ‘I think’ to our representations to the claim that this is made possible by a synthetic unity of apperception. While Sartre’s criticism of Kant’s conception of the ego is (...) central to Sartre’s existential philosophy, there is still little agreement on what Sartre’s criticisms actually amount to, let alone whether these criticisms are successful. I argue that to make sense of Sartre’s argument here, we must see it as relying on a distinction between two different models of what it is for something to be organized or determined. By doing so, we can see why Sartre believes consciousness does not need the ‘I think’ in order to be unified, but also why Sartre believes we are nonetheless led to posit this moment of unification. (shrink)