In this paper, I consider the import of the metaphysics of statues to the decolonizing statues debate. On the one hand, this may seem an odd starting point: after all, the issues surrounding decolonizing statues are political, moral and, perhaps, aesthetic. I agree; however, presuppositions about the nature of statues may well be shaping the political imaginary about decolonizing statues. Indeed, when expressing political and moral claims such as ‘decolonizing statues erases history’, or that ‘decolonizing statues destroys objects that help (...) us to remember a (bygone) past’, I suggest that, from a metaphysical point of view, this relies on a notion of statues as singular objects. Drawing upon material constitution debates in metaphysics, I suggest that thinking about statues as multiple, co-locating objects, might deepen our theoretical understanding of decolonial activism because it allows us to think about the relationship of statues to history and culture in a much more critical way. As such, my analysis is intended to extend our metaphysical understanding of decolonial activism. Furthermore, it stands as a challenge to anyone who thinks that certain effects to history and culture follow, metaphysically speaking, from decolonial activism. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print. What is cultural ‘appropriation’? What is cultural ‘appreciation’? Whatever the complex answer to this question, cultural appropriation is commonly defined as ‘the taking of something produced by members of one culture by members of another’, whilst appreciation is typically understood as mere ‘exploration’: ‘Appreciation explores whatever is there’. These provisional definitions suggest that there is an in-principle distinction between the two concepts that presupposes the following: what is appreciated is already available; what is (...) appropriated was, prior to its being taken, not already there or available. Moreover, perhaps appreciation, when contrasted to appropriation, is unproblematic precisely due to this basic difference. In this paper, we argue that the exclusive disjunction – appropriation or appreciation – rests on a false distinction between the two. We also show that this distinction presupposes a false normative principle that to the extent that x is appreciation rather than appropriation, then x is not – relevant to this issue – a wrong. Against these presuppositions, we defend the view that appropriation is already built into appreciation. This does not mean that we cannot ask questions of appreciation, but that questions of appreciation do not preclude the problematics of appropriation. (shrink)

The first new translation of this work to appear in more than twenty-five years, the Columbia I Ching presents the classic book of changes for the world of today.

Love comes in many forms. From friendship to parenthood, from the lover to the altruist, it touches all our lives. As time passes by this remains constant in the human experience. Love's Philosophy explores the basic expressions of love. In this book, White takes into account classical and historical perspecitives. His reflections explain the historical and contemporary formations of love, and offer alternative models to that most encompassing sensation, love.

What motivates manufacturing companies to make costly investments in producing in an environmentally clean manner? The traditional argument is that such behaviour is value reducing, and that therefore, firms must be forced by regulation to invest in "green" production processes. A counter-argument is that firms have an incentive to make environmental investments in an attempt to attract "green" consumers and investors, hence gaining competitive advantage over their rivals. In this paper, we employ a game-theoretic approach that demonstrates that competing firms' (...) incentives to make voluntary investments in environmental "clean-up" are affected by the size of the investment costs and the extent of consumer and investor "green" awareness. We argue that an increase in green behaviour can be induced by a combination of governmental subsidies for firms that invest in environmentally clean production processes, together with an education program that promotes "green" awareness amongst consumers, investors and the managers themselves. (shrink)

Logical psychologism is the position that logic is a special branch of psychology, that logical laws are descriptíons of experience to be arrived at through observation, and are a posteriori.The accepted arguments against logical psychologism are effective only when directed against this extreme version. However, the clauses in the above characterization are independent and ambiguous, and may be considered separately. This separation permits a reconsideration of less extreme attempts to tie logic to psychology, such as those defended by Mill and (...) Boole. It also provides the basis for a reexamination of the relationship between logic and psychology, and raises the possibility of a deeper investigation into the nature of logic itself. (shrink)

From The Birth of Tragedy on, Nietzsche worked to comprehend the nature of the individual. Richard White shows how Nietzsche was inspired and guided by the question of personal "sovereignty" and how through his writings sought to provoke the very sovereignty he described. White argues that Nietzsche is a philosopher our contemporary age must therefore come to understand if we are ever to secure a genuinely meaningful direction for the future. Profoundly relevant to our era, Nietzsche's philosophy addresses a (...) version of individuality that allows us to move beyond the self-dispossession of mass society and the alternative of selfish individualism - to fully understand how one becomes what one is. (shrink)

The landscape of the Sundarbans today is a product of two countervailing forces: conversion of wetland forests to cropland vs. sequestration of the forests in reserves to be managed for long-term sustained yield of wood products. For two centures, land-hungry peasants strove to transform the native tidal forest vegetation into an agroecosystem dominated by paddy rice and fish culture. During the colonial period, their reclamation efforts were encouraged by landlords and speculators, who were themselves encouraged by increasingly favorable state policies (...) (land grants, tax incentives, cadastral surveys, and eventually colonization projects and subsidized irrigation) designed by revenue officials to maximize the rate of transformation of wetland forest to taxable agricultural land.In the late nineteenth century, as the rate of agricultural conversion increased, the colonial Forest Department succcessfully sought to preserve large areas of the remaining Sundarbans tidal forest by giving them legal status as Reserved or Protected Forests. These forests were intensively managed to provide a sustainable supply of timber and firewood for the increasing population of southern Bengal. Institutionalization of conflicting policies by the Revenue and Forest Departments reflected the escalating needs for both food and forest products as the colony grew. Today, supplies of some economically valuable trees have been depleted, and some mammals are locally extinct (although the Bengal tiger remains), but government policy in both Bangladesh and India now favors use of the Sundarbans as forest rather than its transformation to agricultural land. Further expansion of cropland to meet the grain demands of the burgeoning Bengali population in both nations has largely taken place outside the boundaries of the Sundarbans. Overexploitation of these forests for wood products remains a possibility, but large-scale clearing for rice paddies is unlikely under present policies. (shrink)

Bioethicists commenting on conscientious objection and abortion should consider the empirical data on abortion providers. Abortion providers do not fall neatly into groups of providers and objectors, and ambivalence is a key theme in their experience. Practical details of abortion services further upset the dichotomy. These empirical facts are important because they demonstrate that the way the issue is described in analytical bioethics does not reflect reality. Addressing conscientious objection as a barrier to patient access requires engaging with those who (...) provide the service and those who are able to but do not. The experiences of doctors facing these decisions potentially challenge and expand our understanding of the issue as an ethical concern. (shrink)

In The Heart of Wisdom, White examines spiritual concepts like generosity, suffering, and joy, incorporating the various perspectives of great philosophers, including Nietzsche, Aristotle, and Derrida, as well as Eastern wisdom traditions, including Buddhism and Vedanta philosophy.

Science; Ethics; Politics; Beyond recombinant dna.

The use of lateralised cues by predators and fellows may not strongly affect lateralisation. Conservatism of development is a possible source of consistency across vertebrates. Individuals with partial reversal, affecting only one ability, or with varying degree of control of response by one hemisphere do exist. Their incidence may depend on varying selection of behavioural phenotypes such as risk taking.

In Search of the Way deals with intellectual and religious developments in early-modern Japan. It touches on the fate of Christianity but mainly covers Buddhism, Shinto, and Neo-Confucianism, particularly the latter. Of central concern is the constant debate over how society should be organized and how the individual can achieve self-fulfilment as just one element of a larger whole. It touches on such matters as ritual, pilgrimage, and religion in practice, but the emphasis is on ideological debate, disagreement, and consensus.

_Esotericism, Art, and Imagination_ is a uniquely wide- ranging collection of articles by scholars in the field of Western esotericism, focusing on themes of poetry, drama, film, literature, and art. Included here are articles illuminating such diverse topics as the Gnostic fiction of Philip Pullman, alchemical images, the Tarot, surrealism, esoteric films, and much more. This collection reveals the richness and complexity of the intersections between esotericism, artistic creators, and their works. Authors include Joscelyn Godwin, Cathy Gutierrez, M. E. Warlick, (...) Eric Wilson, and many others. (shrink)

Richard White explores how moral virtues affect and support social movements such as pacifism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, and animal rights. White's philosophical treatment of virtue ethics is extended through historical and cross-cultural analysis to help the reader understand and acquire moral wisdom.

This is a review essay of Quassim Cassam, Self-Knowledge for Humans (Oxford, 2014) and John Doris, Talking to Our Selves (Oxford, 2015). In it I question whether Cassam succeeds in his challenge to Richard Moran's account of first-personal authority, and whether Doris is right that experimental evidence for unconscious influences on behavior generates skeptical worries on accounts that regard accurate self-knowledge as a precondition of agency.

This volume contains 17 articles on various aspects of Islamic thought in the Middle East and in Southeast Asia. The first 9 articles concentrate especially on the Qur’ān and its exegesis, Kalām and Sufism; the second 8 articles deal with Javanese Islam, and with Islam and modernity in Southeast Asia.

In this paper, I consider Mark Sagoff’s well-known discussion of the restoration of Michelangelo’s Pietà. Provocatively, he argues that the Pietà should not have been restored to its undamaged state after it was attacked. I argue that Sagoff is mistaken in this. His analysis of restoration is a result of his working view of the Pietà’s identity. Using a modal analysis of counterfactual damage to the Pietà, I argue that the notion of identity at work in his view is deeply (...) problematic. I provide an alternative analysis of the Pietà: one which supports the restoration project, provides an alternative metaphysical basis for the identity of the work, and which still captures certain aesthetic intuitions which Sagoff has correctly identified. Whilst my metaphysical analysis is proposed just on the basis of the case of the Pietà, the metaphysical and conceptual analysis involved would be helpful in considering issues in the identity of artworks more generally. (shrink)

This volume brings together J.S. Mills _On Liberty_ and a selection of important essays by such eminent scholars as Isaiah Berlin, Alan Ryan, John Rees, C.L. Ten and Richard Wollheim. As well as providing authoritative commentary upon _On Liberty_, the essays reflect a broader debate about the philosophical foundations of Mill's liberalism, particularly the question of the connection betweenMill's professed utilitarianism and his commitment to individual liberty. Introduced and edited by John Gray and G.W. Smith, the book (...) will be of interest to students of Mill, to ethical and political philosophers and to anyone interested in the contemporary status of liberalism. (shrink)

Kant argues in the Critique of Judgment (CJ) that there are two distinct modes of the sublime. This essay will concentrate on the mathematical mode. It is helpful to begin an examination of the mathematical sublime by elucidating the difference between logical estimation and aesthetic estimation; it is aesthetic estimation under strain, so Kant argues, that instigates the moment of the sublime. Logical estimation forms the cognitive basis of scientific calculations. He argues that scientific enquiry only requires an understanding of (...) the logical relationship of numbers and so does not require an aesthetic experience of those numbers. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyse the phenomenon of eeriness as a kind of strange aesthetic experience. Beginning with Fisher’s insight (The Weird and the Eerie, 2017) that we can distinguish weirdness and eeriness from uncanniness, I offer an original account of eeriness. I argue that eeriness is the appearance of an underdetermination in the spatio-temporal location of objects of experience, relative to experiencing agent; this underdetermination results in a destabilisation of the “horizon of object-ivity” within which we make sense of (...) the objects of appearance. This has the existential consequence of destabilising the subject’s sense of being-in-the world. I ground the analysis in examples from both fictional and non-fictional contexts to indicate the generality of the analysis. (shrink)

Learning about feminism can be a revelation for many students. However, for others, it can be a confounding, troubling experience. These difficulties return as problems for the teacher: how to help...

Part two of an innovative trilogy on anarchist geography, this text examines how we can better understand the ways in which space has been used for resistance.

Blindsight is the term commonly used to describe visually guided behaviour elicited by a stimulus falling within the scotoma (blind area) caused by a lesion of the striate cortex. Such is normally held to be unconscious and to be mediated by subcortical pathways involving the superior colliculus. Blindsight is of considerable theoretical importance since it suggests that destriate man is more like destriate monkey than had been previously believed and also because it supports the classical notion of two visual systems. (...) It is also of potential clinical importance, since it has been claimed recently that systematic practice in blindsight can lead to the recovery of normal visual function in patients with cortical lesions. From a review of the literature it is concluded that all of the phenomena of blindsight can be attributed either to light scatter into unimpaired parts of the visual field or to residual vision resulting from spared striate cortex. The possible contribution f other factors is also considered. It is concluded that blindsight studies have generally failed to control for such nonblindsight interpretations partly because of poor methodology and partly because of difficulties in defining the term. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore what it means for an object to be eerie. We argue that the Eerie is an index of phenomenology’s limits: it is a complex, contradictory moment in the dialectics of subject/...