Nietzsche's use of metaphor has been widely noted but rarely focused to explore specific images in great detail. A Nietzschean Bestiary gathers essays devoted to the most notorious and celebrated beasts in Nietzsche's work. The essays illustrate Nietzsche's ample use of animal imagery, and link it to the dual philosophical purposes of recovering and revivifying human animality, which plays a significant role in his call for de-deifying nature.

Good Morning! When I was asked to talk on the subject of Dying in America at a breakfast meeting, It occurred to me that I might get to make some wisecracks about how we eat, at a breakfast where we would be served croissants, butter, sausage and eggs, and berries served with Devonshire cream: certainly the most tasteful form of dying in America! Nor have we been disappointed: quiche and ham should do quite nicely. Then, after last Tuesday’s election, someone (...) approached me and asked if my talk was gong to be on Democratic Party politics. I suppose the title “Dying in America: might fit that subject very nicely! Another wag asked whether I was going to discuss the Buffalo Bills’ current football season . . . . All of these possible applications of the phrase “Dying in America” point to the enormous importance we attach to the idea of dying, and the ways we use that idea in our very metaphorical language. That kind of richness of language is a sure sign, as Joseph Campbell would remind us, that culturally pervasive myths are constructed around the idea of dying. Now, I don’t intend to talk about Campbell’s views at all today, and I will avoid a short course on myths. But I will make just one or two observations about myths so that you are not uncomfortable with my later use of the term. For one of our myths about myths is that, in this educated and scientifically literate society, we don’t have any myths; myths are supposed to be the glue of fictional beliefs that holds primitive societies together, and we certainly are not primitive. Well, let me explain how I intend to use the idea of myth to illuminate some of our values and practices associated with the idea of dying in America. First, by a myth I mean a culturally pervasive set of beliefs and values that tends to center on a single, simple archetypal image or scenario. And second, by calling something mythic I mean to invoke perhaps a number of myths operating as a cluster of culturally important determinants of attitudes and behaviors.. (shrink)

In a paper titled, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics”, published 20 years after Wigner’s seminal paper, the mathematician Richard W. Hamming discussed what he took to be Wigner’s problem of Unreasonable Effectiveness and offered some partial explanations for this phenomenon. Whether Hamming succeeds in his explanations as answers to Wigner’s puzzle is addressed by other scholars in recent years I, on the other hand, raise a more fundamental question: does Hamming succeed in raising the same question as Wigner? The (...) answer is no. My goal is to show that Hamming’s reading misses Wigner’s highly original formulation of the problem.Through a close and contextual reading of Wigner’s work, as I will show, we are led in new directions in addressing and solving the applicability problem. (shrink)

The elimination of ambiguity and redundancy are unquestioned goals in the exact sciences, and yet, as this paper shows, there are inescapable lower bounds that constrain our wish to eliminate them. The author discusses contributions by Richard Hamming (inventor of the Hamming code) and Satosi Watanabe (originator of the Theorems of the Ugly Duckling). Utilizing certain of their results, the author leads readers to recognize the unavoidable, central roles in effective communication, of redundancy, and of ambiguity of meaning, reference, (...) and identification. (shrink)

This book is a succinct introduction to the orienting of attention.

Philosophers are increasingly coming to recognize the importance of Freudian theory for the understanding of the mind. The picture Freud presents of the mind's growth and organization holds implications not just for such perennial questions as the relation of mind and body, the nature of memory and personal identity, the interplay of cognitive and affective processes in reasoning and acting, but also for the very way in which these questions are conceived and an interpretation of the mind is sought. This (...) volume of essays, by some of today's leading philosophers, explores all these topics, as well as the methods, results and status of the theory itself, while two 'classical' discussions by Wittgenstein and Sartre are also included. A number of the contributions – those by Donald Davidson, W. D. Hart, Jim Hopkins, Adam Morton, David Pears and Richard Wollheim – have not been published before, and a very useful bibliography is provided. It is an anthology that will be vital to anyone interested in Freudian theory and, more generally, in philosophical psychology. (shrink)

Anthony Everett () argues that those who embrace the reality of fictional entities run into trouble when it comes to specifying criteria of character identity. More specifically, he argues that realists must reject natural principles governing the identity and distinctness of fictional characters due to the existence of fictions which leave it indeterminate whether certain characters are identical and the existence of fictions which say inconsistent things about the identities of their characters. Everett's critique has deservedly drawn much attention and (...) a number of defensive moves have been made by, or on the behalf of, fictional realists. My goal in this paper is to move this debate on a further step. I have three goals: to clarify the importance of Everett's discussion of identity criteria within the context of fictional realism, to reassess Everett's objections to realism in light of the resultant literature, and to develop a novel strategy for responding to Everett's concerns. On the approach to be developed, the problems emerge due to an indeterminacy inherent in the concept of a fictional character itself. (shrink)

The evolution of nonconceptive sexuality in bonobos and chimpanzees is discussed from a functional perspective. Bonobos and chimpanzees have three functions of sexual activity in common (paternity confusion, practice sex, and exchange for favors), but only bonobos use sex purely for communication about social relationships. Bonobo hypersexuality appears closely linked to the evolution of female-female alliances. I suggest that these alliances were made possible by relaxed feeding competition, that they were favored through their effect on reducing sexual coercion, and that (...) they are ultimately responsible for the relaxed social conditions that allowed the evolution of “communication sex.”. (shrink)

Some theorists hold that there is no serious, significant issue concerning cosmopolitanism. They hold that cosmopolitanism is either the anodyne doctrine that we have some duties to distant strangers merely on the ground of shared humanity or the absurd doctrine that we have no special moral duties based on special-ties such as those of friendship, family, and national community. This essay argues against this deflationary position by defending (1) a very extreme cosmopolitan doctrine that denies special-tie moral duties altogether and (...) (2) a slightly milder but still extreme form of cosmopolitanism that allows that there might be special-tie moral duties to intimate associates such as friends and family members but denies that broader social group associations such as those of subjection to a national state or national or ethnic community memberships ever constitute special ties that ground special moral duties. The defense proceeds by rebutting bad arguments leveled against extreme cosmopolitanisms. (shrink)

The country's leading libertarian scholar sets forth the essential principles for a legal system that best balances individual liberty versus the common good.

It is widely maintained that a clinical trial is ethical only if some form of equipoise between the treatments being compared obtains. To be in equipoise between two treatments A and B is to be cognitively indifferent between the statement ‘A is strictly more effective than B’ and its negation. It is natural to claim that equipoise regarding A and B is necessary for randomised assignment to treatments A and B to be beneficent and non‐maleficent and is sufficient for such (...) an assignment to be fair. Cashing this out precisely is difficult, and various forms of equipoise have been discussed which consider whose equipoise is relevant to the decision. This is to make judgement of equipoise something to be managed socially, while its prima facie significance is supposedly cognitive. Recent reconstructions of equipoise‐like concepts in epistemology give clues about how to understand equipoise cognitively. In this paper I examine some of this work and discuss how successful it has been. I suggest that while this work is promising, it still has far to go, and that while equipoise remains the best theory we have of the cognitive justification for clinical trials, it is nonetheless incoherent. (shrink)

Over the last dozen years, the writings of Richard Taruskin have transformed the debate about "early music" and "authenticity." Text and Act collects for the first time the most important of Taruskin's essays and reviews from this period, many of which now classics in the field. Taking a wide-ranging cultural view of the phenomenon, he shows that the movement, far from reviving ancient traditions, in fact represents the only truly modern style of performance being offered today. He goes on (...) to contend that the movement is therefore far more valuable and even authentic than the historical verisimilitude for which it ostensibly strives could ever be. These essays cast fresh light on many aspects of contemporary music-making and music-thinking, mixing lighthearted debunking with impassioned argumentation. Taruskin ranges from theoretical speculation to practical criticism, and covers a repertory spanning from Bach to Stravinsky. Including a newly written introduction, Text and Act collects the very best of one of our most incisive musical thinkers. (shrink)

It is well known that Leibniz advocated the actual infinite, but that he did not admit infinite collections or infinite numbers. But his assimilation of this account to the scholastic notion of the syncategorematic infinite has given rise to controversy. A common interpretation is that in mathematics Leibniz’s syncategorematic infinite is identical with the Aristotelian potential infinite, so that it applies only to ideal entities, and is therefore distinct from the actual infinite that applies to the actual world. Against this, (...) I argue in this paper that Leibniz’s actual infinite, understood syncategorematically, applies to any entities that are actually infinite in multitude, whether numbers, actual parts of matter, or monads. It signifies that there are more of them than can be assigned a number, but that there is no infinite number or collection of them, which notion involves a contradiction. Similarly, to say that a magnitude is actually infinitely small in the syncategorematic sense is to say that no matter how small a magnitude one takes, there is a smaller, but there are no actual infinitesimals. In geometry one may calculate with expressions apparently denoting such entities, on the understanding that they are fictions, standing for variable magnitudes that can be made arbitrarily small, so as to produce demonstrations that there is no error in the resulting expressions. (shrink)

This paper considers the real and imagined geographies of livestock animals. In doing so, it reconsiders the spatial relationship between people and domesticated farm animals. Some consideration is given to the origins of domestication and comparisons are drawn between the natural and domesticated geographies of animals. The paper mainly focuses on the contemporary geographies of livestock animals and, in particular, "rare breeds" of British livestock animals. Attention is given to the spatial relationship these animals have with people and the place (...) of these animals in the British countryside today. The paper concludes by highlighting why it is important to consider livestock animal breeds as part of on-going research into the geographies of domestic livestock animals. (shrink)

BackgroundResearchers conducting community-based participatory action research (CBPAR) in highly collectivistic and socioeconomically disadvantaged community settings in sub-Saharan Africa are confronted with the distinctive challenge of balancing universal ethical standards with local standards, where traditional customs or beliefs may conflict with regulatory requirements and ethical guidelines underlying the informed consent (IC) process. The unique ethnic, socioeconomic, and cultural diversities in these settings have important implications for the IC process, such as individual decisional autonomy, beneficence, confidentiality, and signing the IC document.Main textDrawing (...) on insights and field observations from conducting CBPARs across several rural, highly communal, low literate, and low-income communities in Ghana, we discuss some theoretical, ethico-cultural, and methodological challenges associated with applying the universal, Western individualistic cultural value-laden IC process in sub-Saharan Africa. By citing field situations, we discuss how local cultural customs and the socioeconomic adversities prevalent in these settings can influence (and disrupt) the information disclosure process, individual decisional authority for consent, and voluntariness. We review the theoretical assumptions of the Declaration of Helsinki’s statement on IC and discuss its limitations as an ultimate guide for the conduct of social science research in the highly communal African context. We argue that the IC process in these settings should include strategies directed at preventing deception and coercion, in addition to ensuring respect for individual autonomy. We urge Universities, research institutions, and institutional review boards in Africa to design and promote the use of context-appropriate ethical IC guidelines that take into consideration both the local customs and traditional practices of the people as well as the scientific principles underpinning the universal IC standards.ConclusionWe recommend that, rather than adopt a universal one-size-fits-all IC approach, researchers working in the rural, highly collectivistic, low literate, socioeconomically disadvantaged settings of sub-Saharan Africa should deeply consider the roles and influence of cultural values and traditional practices on the IC and the research process. We encourage researchers to collaborate with target communities and stakeholders in the design and implementation of context-appropriate IC to prevent ethics dumping and safeguard the integrity of the research process. (shrink)

In last year’s Review Gregory Brown took issue with Laurence Carlin’s interpretation of Leibniz’s argument as to why there could be no world soul. Carlin’s contention, in Brown’s words, is that Leibniz denies a soul to the world but not to bodies on the grounds that “while both the world and [an] aggregate of limited spatial extent are infinite in multitude, the former, but not the latter, is infinite in respect of magnitude and hence cannot be considered a whole”. Brown (...) casts doubt on this interpretation—or rather, he begins by questioning its adequacy as an interpretation of a central passage, only to concede its essential correctness as an interpretation of Leibniz’s position, and to turn his attack on the latter itself. In this note I shall argue that Brown underestimates the subtlety of Leibniz’s views on the infinite, and that Carlin is basically correct in his suggestion that the infinite magnitude of the world is what precludes it from having even the phenomenal unity that a body does. (shrink)

In this paper, I ask three questions of the liberal. In each, I fill in philosophical detail around a certain sort of complaint raised in current public debates about their position. In the first, I probe the limits of the liberal's tolerance for civil disobedience; in the second, I ask how the liberal can adjudicate the most divisive moral disputes of the age; and, in the third, I suggest the liberal faces a problem when there is substantial disagreement about the (...) boundaries of the rational and the reasonable. (shrink)

One pressing question facing Barnes andWilliams is that of which vari- eties of metaphysical indeterminacy can be can accommodated within their framework. In what remains, I shall examine whether their framework can allow that it sometimes metaphysically indeterminate whether an object exists. I shall begin by outlining an argument, due to Theodore Sider, to the conclusion that vague existence is impossible.

Possible worlds represent you as being certain ways, as having a different lives, different hopes, and different friends. A foundational question in the philosophy of modality thus emerges: in virtue of what does a world represent you in these ways? In this paper, we focus on David Lewis's answer to this metarepresentational question: Counterpart Theory.

The prelims comprise: The Nature of Aristotelian Justification The Endoxa Finding and Explaining Errors Can there be Proof in Ethics? Foundationalism The Test of Experience Is Aristotle's Method too Conservative? “Brought up Well” Notes References Further reading.

Aesthetic attitude theories suggest we must attend disinterestedly to the properties of objects to experience aesthetic delight in them: we view them without regard to their use for us. Bence Nanay’s recent revival of the concept explains it through the distribution of our attention over the many properties of individual objects. While agreeing with Nanay’s approach, I argue such perception presupposes certain intentionality towards the object in the Fregean-Husserlian sense. Whether we see the same object as informative or aesthetically gratifying (...) depends on whether we understand it as, say, a map or as a work of design or art. Furthermore, intending an object as aesthetic means we treat it as internally coherent: its properties are defined in relation to one another, rather than the purposes of a subject. This, I conclude, even affects the presentation of historical or moral values that obviously originate outside the object of aesthetic appreciation. (shrink)

In this reassessment of Descartes' debt to his mentor Isaac Beeckman, I argue that they share the same basic conception of motion: the force of a body's motion—understood as the force of persisting in that motion, shorn of any connotations of internal cause—is conserved through God's direct action, is proportional to the speed and magnitude of the body, and is gained or lost only through collisions. I contend that this constitutes a fully coherent ontology of motion, original with Beeckman and (...) consistent with his atomism, which, notwithstanding Descartes' own profoundly original contributions to the theory of motion, is basic to all Descartes' further work in natural philosophy. (shrink)

_Reconceptualizing STEM Education_ explores and maps out research and development ideas and issues around five central practice themes: Systems Thinking; Model-Based Reasoning; Quantitative Reasoning; Equity, Epistemic, and Ethical Outcomes; and STEM Communication and Outreach. These themes are aligned with the comprehensive agenda for the reform of science and engineering education set out by the 2015 PISA Framework, the US Next Generation Science Standards and the US National Research Council’s A Framework for K-12 Science Education. The new practice-focused agenda has implications (...) for the redesign of preK-12 education for alignment of curriculum-instruction-assessment; STEM teacher education and professional development; postsecondary, further, and graduate studies; and out-of-school informal education. In each section, experts set out powerful ideas followed by two eminent discussant responses that both respond to and provoke additional ideas from the lead papers. In the associated website highly distinguished, nationally recognized STEM education scholars and policymakers engage in deep conversations and considerations addressing core practices that guide STEM education. (shrink)

Several philosophers have questioned the possibility of a genetic epistemology, an epistemology concerned with the developmental transitions between successive states of knowledge in the individual person. Since most arguments against the possibility of a genetic epistemology crucially depend upon a sharp distinction between the genesis of an idea and its justification, I argue that current philosophy of science raises serious questions about the universal validity of this distinction. Then I discuss several senses of the genetic fallacy, indicating which sense of (...) ‘genesis’ is relevant to epistemology. Next I consider the objection that psychology is irrelevant to epistemology, and that since "genetic epistemology" is really psychology, "genetic epistemology" is irrelevant to a real epistemology. Finally, I take up the objection that nothing discovered in genetic psychology could be relevant to a genetic epistemology. These last two arguments are based upon what I claim to be a mistaken notion of the nature of psychology. Suitably interpreted, psychology can assist genetic epistemology precisely in the way that the history of science assists current philosonhv of science. *I owe considerable thanks to Jann Benson, Ken Freeman, Bernie Rollin and Ron Williams for their helpful discussions concerning many of the issues discussed in this paper. I also wish to thank David Hamlyn, John Heil, William Lycan, Harvey Siegel and an anonymous reviewer for their comments and suggestions. It goes without saying that none of these individuals (especially Hamlyn and Siegel) necessarily agree with me. An earlier version of this paper was read at Colorado State University where the audience's comments were beneficial. (shrink)

This article examines a popular complaint against the fictionalist account of possible objects bruited by Gideon Rosen. This is the complaint that modal fictionalism is, in some sense or other, hopelessly artificial. I shall separate two different strands to this worry and examine each in turn. As we shall see, neither strand to the objection is intractable.