In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE HOLINESS OF THE CHURCH IN LUMEN GENTIUM HE NOTION OF the Church as a smner, not often spoken of in Catholic theology of other times, has become quite common in recent years.1 Among the questions of a pastoral and theological nature that have given rise to it, the following may be noted: a) The ecumenical question. Many would wish the Church as such to accuse herself of sin, (...) as a means towards reconciliation. b) The idea borrowed from traditional Protestant theology of a certain compatibility between sin and holiness,2 the simul sanctus et pecca.tor of Luther. c) The notion of evil as a mere deficiency properly belonging to a given stage of development of the Cosmos; such is t:he understanding of Teilhard de Chardin.3 1 The mark of holiness has been applied to the Church more than any of the other three, from the very beginning of Christian times; Baptismal creeds are a clear witness to this. 2 Cf. n. 66 on Kiing. 3 "What is the inevitable complement of anything which results from such a process (an evolutive one) but having to pay the price of some losses? Lack of harmony and physical decomposition in the Pre-Vivant, suffering in the Vivant, sin in the dominion of Freedom..." (Comment je crois) ; "We must say that God, in spite of his power, cannot unite any creature to himself without necessarily entering into battle with Evil, because Evil appears inevitably with the first atom of being which creation 'releases' into existence. Creation and sinlessness are terms as much at loggerheads with divine Power and Wisdom as creature with unicity" (Notes sur les modes de l'ac-tion divine dans l'Universe-yr. 1920). Undoubtedly, sin in its effects is a lack of what man (and creation dependent on him) should have, but the point that Teilhard misses is that the 'deficiency' due to sin (unlike other imperfections found in creation) is due to the responsible action of human beings, and has no inevitability about it. 673 674 PAUL o'cALLAGHAN d) An increased awareness of the social dimension of sm. Undoubtedly sin has numerous (though divisive) social efects.4 But it would be incorrect to affirm that sin is an entirely social phenomenon.5 An application of such a notion to the Church would be an easy next stage. e) A certain undoing of the constrast between the ' Kingdom of God' and the 'world ',6 to the detriment, let it be said, both of the eternity and definitiveness of the former, and the progressive sanctification of the latter. The Church then, not belonging so intimately to the All-Holy, may be more easily looked upon as a sinner. f) Another factor has been the positive humanizing em4 In the Apostolic Exhortation Reeonciliatio et Paenitentia (English translation ; London: CTS, 1984) where Pope John Paul II ga.thers together the findings of the 1983 Synod of Bishops, many acceptable ways of understanding ' social sin' are explained: as mystically ' dragging down ' the whole world; in the sense that it goes in the detriment of our neighbour; in the relationships between various human communities (n.16: p. 51-54). 5 For example, the following words of G. Gutierrez: "No se trata, en la perspectiva liberadora, de! pecado como realidad individual, privada e intimista, afirmada justo lo necesario para necesitar una redenci6n 'espiritual ', que no cuestiona el orclen en que vivimos. Se trata del pecado como un hecho social, hist6rico... El pecatlo se da en estructures opresoras en la explotaci6n del hombre por el hombre, en la dominaci6n y esclavitud de los pueblos, razas y clases sociales. El pecado surge, entonces, como la alienaci6n fundamental, como la rniz de una situaci6n de injusticia y explotaci6n" Teofogia de la liberaci6n (Salamana: Sigueme, 1972), p. 236-237. And in a more recent work of his: " pecar es optar por la opresi6n y contra la liberaci6n " La fuerza hist6rioa de los pobres, (Lima, 1979) p. 19. As J. M. IbaiiezLanglois points out, this statement would be fine if it were to say 'to opt for oppression and against liberation is sinful', that is one more among many possible sins: Teologia de la liberacion... (shrink)

Each contributor to this book has used personal experience as the basis from which to frame his individual sociological perspectives. Because they have personalized their work, their accounts are real, and recognizable as having come from 'real' persons, about 'real' experiences. There are no objectively-distanced disembodied third person entities in these accounts. These writers are actual people whose stories will make you laugh, cry, think, and want to know more.

This book assesses how Vatican II opened up the Catholic Church to encounter, dialogue, and engagement with other world religions. Opening with a contribution from the President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, it next explores the impact, relevance, and promise of the Declaration Nostra Aetate before turning to consider how Vatican II in general has influenced interfaith dialogue and the intellectual and comparative study of world religions in the postconciliar decades, as well as the contribution (...) of particular past and present thinkers to the formation of current interreligious and comparative theological methods. Additionally, chapters consider interreligious dialogue vis-à-vis theological anthropology in conciliar documents; openness to the spiritual practices of other faith traditions as a way of encouraging positive interreligious encounter; the role of lay and new ecclesial movements in interreligious dialogue; and the development of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue. Finally, it includes a range of perspectives on the fruits and future of Vatican’s II’s opening to particular faiths such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. (shrink)

Casey O’Callaghan has argued that rather than hearing meanings, we hear phonemes. In this note I argue that valuable though they are in an account of speech perception – depending on how we define ‘hearing’ – phonemes either don’t explain enough or they go too far. So, they are not the right tool for his criticism of the semantic perceptual account (SPA).

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:LUBLIN THOMISM 1 THE TEXTS of the philosophers associated with the Catholic University of Lublin, thanks to the tireless work and energy of an editorial board under bhe direction and support of Marie Lescoe, are at last appearing in English.2 'Dhe Lublin school is Thomist in inspiration and avowed adherence. It is Thomist, however, in a manner which makes liberal use of the works of Continental philosophers in the (...) phenomenological and "existentialist" traditions: hence the label, "existential personaiism." 3 A supplementary label of this sort is needed if we are to include within the Lublin school the work of one of its most iIIustrious members, Karol Wojtyia, whose writings employ the phenomenological method, eschew scholastic argument, and acknowledge a chief indebtedness to Max Scheler. Even the more recognizably scholastic Lublin philosophers, such as Mieczylaw Krapiec, O.P., President -Rector of the University, whose I-Man is the first complete book to be translated and printed in English, quote Roman Ingarden generously, speak familiarly about man as Being-towards-death, and discuss religion and culture in terms of intentionality. 1 Mieczylaw A. Krapiec, O.P., I-Man (New Britain: Mariel Press, 1983); (an abridged, student edition of I-11.fon-Mariel Press, 1985-is now available also); Karol Wojtyla, The Acting Person, (Boston: D. Reidel, 1979); Edmund Morawiec, "L'Objet et La Tache de la Philosophie Chretienne" in J. N. Zycinski, ed., The Human Person and Philosophy in the Contemporary World (Krakow: The Pontifical Faculty of Theology, 1980). 2 It may interest readers to know that a Chinese translation of I-Man is in preparation. The project is coordinated by Dr. Audrey Donnithorne involving the collaboration of Louis Chow and Matthias Lu. s Of. Andrew Woznicki, A Christian Humanism; Karol Wojtyla's Existential Personalism, and Ronald F. Lawler, The Christian Personalism of John Paul II (Fransciscan Herald Press, 1981). 307 308 ROGER DUNCAN Just because of their deep indebtedness to and immersion in Continental philosophy, it is important to begin by stating what the Lublin philosophers are not. They are not, first of all, phenomenologists or existentialists in the strict sense, by which I mean they do not hold the sceptical epistemological premises usually associated with these labels. Existentialists deny the classical doctrine of truth according to which truth is the adaequatio ad rern of the intellect. Instead they maintain that when I look at, say, an egg, and say to myself, " Here I am, one being among others like this egg here ", I am being naive because I have not yet seen that the distinction between myself and the egg arises within t:he phenomenal field and therefore cannot be uncritically assumed in an account of knowing. The subject-object distinction, they say, is not one more distinction between objects, like that between the egg and the chicken it came from; it cannot be understood as an intellectual grasp of one individual substance by another individual substance. For this reason, according to the existentialists, we must not think of knowledge as an overcoming of the isolation of self-consciousness, but rather as the origination of a distinction, a negative act identical with that of selfconsciousness in its self-transcendence. Awareness of the egg is not a grasp of the egg in itself so much as a self-conscious mitosis which incidentally constitutes the egg as object.4 The realist answer, as Chesterton said, is that eggs are eggs. The fact that the distinction between the egg and the chicken appears within consciousness, and that the subject can see a similarity with the distinction btween himself and the egg,.provides no argument for the unreality of either distinction unless you assume from the start that intentional objectification falsifies or fails to reach being " in itself". But this is a decision, not an a.rgument. Of course once you make it all kinds of curious and very deep condusions follow, conclusions which the Lublin Thomists deny. 4 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 174; Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), p. 75. LUBLIN THOMISM 309 Nevertheless, it does not seem advisable to have to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Self-Predication and the "Third Man" Argument ROGER A. SHINER 1.1. IN COMMPm'mO on the 'Third Man' Argument (TMA), Proclus z produces the following line of thought. He argues that. if the relation of resemblance between Form and particular were symmetrical, the argument in question would be valid; the relation is not, however, symmetrical. Where a Form and particular are both alike, have the quality of likeness, the likeness (...) of that which is derived is not the same as the likeness of that from which it is derived, just because of the former's derivatory nature. Consequently, ~k tt~v ala01]x~ bttotoi3c0at ~re[vot~ (sc. xo~ ~Semv), abx~ 8~ xo6~ot~ oSr~xt, 'the sensible particulars resemble the Forms, but they are not in the same relation of resemblance to the particulars' (ibid., 913.29-30). That is to say, the bare relation of similarity may be symmetrical, but the relation of a similar copy to a similar original is not; the copy is 'a copy of' the original, but the original/s not 'a copy of' the copy. This way of defending the Theory of Forms against the TMA I shall for purposes of identification call the 'Ontological Defence'. It lays stress on the ontological difference between Form and particular in order to avoid the fatal implication that the relation between them is symmetrical. If we use the language of predication, the point is as follows: the TMA is valid, if the Forms have a given term predicated of them severally in exactly the same sense as it is predicated of their respective dependent particulars. This, however, is not the case, for the quality in virtue of which a given term is predicated of a given Form differs in ontological status from the quality in virtue of which that term is predicated of that Form's dependent particulars. Thus we see that underlying the Ontological x I am grateful for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper to Professor Gilbert Ryle, Professor John F. Malcolm and two anonymous readers for this Journal. Since this paper went to press, the following relevant articles have appeared: G. Vlastos, "'Self Predication' in Plato's Later Period," Philosophical Review, LXXVIII (1969), 74-78, and "Plato's 'Third Man' Argument (Parm. 132al-b2): Text and Logic," Philosophical Quarterly, XIX (1969), 289-301; K. W. Rankin, "The Duplicity of Plato's Third Man," Mind, LXXVIII (1969), 178-197; T. O. Smith, "'The Theory of Forms, Relations and Infinite Regress," Dialogue, VIII (1969), 116-123. 2 Proelus, In Platonis Parmenidem, ed. V. Cousin, Paris, 1864; 912.27 ft. [3711 372 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Defence is the following assumption--the fact that the Forms are self-predicating only causes problems for the Theory of Forms, if a given Form F and its corresponding particulars, a set of f things, have 'F' predicated of them univocally, are F in precisely the same sense. My thesis in this paper is that this latter assumption is false, it is, rather, quite sufficient for the Self-Predication Assumption (SPA) to be vicious, if 'F' is predicated of both Form and particular not equivocally. This is not the same as 'univocally', and furthermore it is not possible that Plato could have thought of the predication of a term of both Form and particular as equivocal, the only alternative left to him to escape the TMA. The SPA, therefore, is required for the Theory of Forms to make sense, and leads to an ineradicable defect in that Theory. 1.2. One minor terminological point must be noted before we proceed. There are two versions of the TMA in the Parmenides; the first runs from 131eS-132b2, and the second from 132c11-133a7. The second of these explicitly employs the language of copy-resemblance, 7mpdS~tytm ('paradigm'), 6lxoio)tta ('likeness'), ~tKao0~vat ('resemble') as an explication of ~t~0e~tq ('participation'): the first employs the lan~.,uage of cttx6 ~ xai3xa.., eIvat ('that by which things are...'), which, as Plato has already indicated (Phaedo 100d6-8), is deliberatety noncommittal as to the relation between Forms and particulars. I shall refer to the first argument as TMA(1) and the second... (shrink)

Talking about objects requires talking with objects, presenting objects in speech to identify a term's referent. I say This figure is a circle while handing you a ring. The ring is a prop, a perceptual object referenced by an extra-sentential event to identify the extension of a term, its director ('This figure'). Props operate in speech acts and their products, not in sentences. Intra-sentential objects we talk with are displays. Displayed objects needn't be words but must be like words, perceptually, (...) reproductively, and syntactically. Displays are presented by their syntactical position, as terms, with a term-like function. Semantically they are props. The O in FOD (This figure O is a circle) is a prop-like referent, not a term. The O in OD (O is a circle) may be that of FOD, but that display may have semantically and syntactically diverse directors, and without a specific one OD has no determinate sense Describing the display of quotations demands distinguishing displays from quotations. Quotations are repetitions of something said. Displays are perceptual objects, linguistic and non-linguistic, reproductions and originals, presented in sentences to identify a referent. Display markers are disambiguators that say: Read this as a prop. They may mark direct speech from indirect speech. Markers of quotation say: Someone said this. That historical claim is outside a sentence's propositional content. Those marks don't say: This is a display. They do make it true. Calling displays quotations muddies the study of speaking with speech. Calling both displays and intranyms quotations muddies the study of meaning and truth. Intranyms are terms, consisting of an expression flanked by lines, that denote that interior expression. Intranyms are created by stipulation to formalize a metalanguage. Formalization of a metalanguage replaces displays with intranyms. Formalized metalanguages lack the logical form and subject matter of our natural metalanguage. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Discussions :REFLECTIONS ON THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE Every discipline worthy of a name deserves to be criticized periodically, asked to explain its objects and assess its march. The history of science is no exception. Indeed, criticism at this juncture should be all the more welcomed since the subjcct has now won its place in the curriculum of Anglo-Saxon educational institutions, particularly in the United States where Ph.D. (...) program offerings are multiplying almost faster than students. 1 The pioneering days of the 1930's and 1940's are past--if not totally forgotten--and men of the "second generation" like myself who received their training in the 1950's will gain much from having their methodological presuppositions questioned. Curiously enough, there has been little discussion of this kind in print for the last decade, with the exception of articles published in Poland and Russia, where the discipline is passing through its own pioneering crisis.2 In the West, the older debates stirred up largely by British Marxists are nowadays generally disregarded and have had surprisingly little productive effect upon the field. Within the last few years, the most effective methodological discussions have stemmed from Karl Popper and his generally brilliant lot of disciples. Dr. Joseph Ag~ssi, now Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois and a member of this group, recently wrote a deliberately provocative essay entitled "Towards an historiography of science." a Agassi begins it with the arresting statement that the study of the history of science is "in a lamentable state" and ends with the implicit suggestion that an examination of the historiography of science is one of the most revealing ways to discover the discipline's failings. For Agassi, it is clear that the root of the historian's problems has been a false set of philosophical premises about the nature of science, and of its history as well. He finds that the discipline has suffered from two diseases named "inductive philosophy " and "conventionalist philosophy," for which there is a major new panacea, Popper's "critical philosophy of science." This refreshingly straightforward argument provides the essay with a ready-made structure, at the same time as it infuses it throughout with a polemical tone. Because of this tone and because of the importance of Agassi's message, he deserves to be answered. On one subject, I cannot agree more with Agassi--the need for a critical examination of the hisComell, Harvard, and the University of Wisconsin have a long-standing tradition of graduate study in the history of science. In the last few years, they have been joined by: the Case IImtitute of Technology; Indiana; Johns Hopkins; M.I.T.; Princeton ; the Universities of California (Berkeley and U.C.L.A.), Kansas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Washington; and Yale. Profeasor Duane Roller of Oklahoma has prepared a report on the present state of teaching of the history of science in the United States. 2Abstracts of the discussions can be found in the Bulletin signalgtique : Philosophie. Sciences humaines of the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. See especially Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki u (1962), special issue; and Organon (1964), no. 1. 8History and Theory. Studies in the philosophy o] history, Beiheft 2 (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1963),117pp. [235] 236 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY toriography of science. On the other hand, his interpretation of the way history of science has and is being written seems more like a misinformed caricature than a sincere effort to understand the past in all its complexity. But let us first examine his discussion of "inductivism," "conventionalism," and "Popperianism." Inductivists or Baconians---he uses the terms interchangeably--write history the way they insist science itself has developed. Just as they assume scientific theories to have emerged from the collection of evidence, they expect that the piling up of historical facts strung along a time-axis adds up to history. As Agassi sagely observes, historians of science, like other induetivists, delude themselves into the belief that such an approach guards them from subjectivity and prejudice. To be sure, philosophers since Kant have known that such naive empiricism is in fact fundamentally misleading, for even the most ardent Baconian has... (shrink)

Nearly every theory of perception just focuses on one sense at a time; but most of the time we perceive using multiple senses. Casey O'Callaghan offers a revisionist multisensory philosophy of perception: he explores how our senses work together and influence each other, leading to surprising perceptual illusions and novel forms of experience.

It is tempting to hold that perceptual experience amounts to a co-conscious collection of visual, auditory, tactual, gustatory, and olfactory episodes. If so, each aspect of perceptual experience on each occasion is associated with a specific modality. This paper, however, concerns a core variety of multimodal perceptual experience. It argues that there is perceptually apparent intermodal feature binding. I present the case for this claim, explain its consequences for theorizing about perceptual experience, and defend it against objections. I maintain that (...) just as one thing may perceptually appear at once to jointly bear several features associated with the same sense modality, one thing also may perceptually appear at once to jointly bear features associated with different sense modalities. For instance, just as something may visually appear at once to be both red and round, or to have a red part and a green part, something may multimodally perceptually appear at once to be both bright and loud, or to have a red part and a rough part. The main lesson, I argue, is that perceiving is not just co-consciously seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, and smelling at the same time. And perceptual phenomenal character is not on each occasion exhausted by that which is distinctive to or associated with a given modality, along with that which accrues thanks to simple co-consciousness. Not all ways of perceiving are modality specific. I defend this account against three main objections: that singular content theorists avoid my conclusions; that apparent infusion of perceptible features is required for perceptually apparent binding but does not occur intermodally; and that the diversity of objects across modalities makes perceptually apparent intermodal binding rare. (shrink)

... ISBN0199215928 ... -/- Abstract: Vision dominates philosophical thinking about perception, and theorizing about experience in cognitive science traditionally has focused on a visual model. This book presents a systematic treatment of sounds and auditory experience. It demonstrates how thinking about audition and appreciating the relationships among multiple sense modalities enriches our understanding of perception. It articulates the central questions that comprise the philosophy of sound, and proposes a novel theory of sounds and their perception. Against the widely accepted philosophical (...) view that sounds are among the secondary or sensible qualities, and against the scientific view that sounds are waves that propagate through a medium such as air or water, the book argues that sounds are events in which objects or interacting bodies disturb a surrounding medium. This does not imply that sounds propagate through a medium, such as air or water. Rather, sounds are events that take place in one's environment at or near their sources. This account captures the way in which sounds essentially are creatures of time and situates sounds in the world. Sounds are not ethereal, mysterious entities. It also provides a powerful account of echoes, interference, reverberation, Doppler effects, and perceptual constancies that surpasses the explanatory richness of alternative theories. Investigating sounds and audition demonstrates that considering other sense modalities teaches what we could not otherwise learn from thinking exclusively about the visual. This book concludes by arguing that a surprising class of cross-modal perceptual illusions demonstrates that the perceptual modalities cannot be completely understood in isolation, and that a visuocentric model for theorizing about perception — according to which perceptual modalities are discrete modes of experience and autonomous domains of philosophical and scientific inquiry — ought to be abandoned. -/- . (shrink)

Object perception deploys a suite of perceptual capacities that constrains attention, guides reidentification, subserves recognition, and anchors demonstrative thought. Objects for perception—perceptual objects—are the targets of such capacities. Characterizing perceptual objects for multisensory perception faces two puzzles. First is the diversity of objects across sensory modalities. Second is the unity of multisensory perceptual objects. This paper resolves the puzzles. Objects for perception are structured mereologically complex individuals. Perceptual objects are items that bear perceptible features and have perceptible parts arranged to (...) form a unified whole. This circumscribes the targets of object perception where neutral talk concerning intentional objects and objects of perception cannot. Nonetheless, it is more permissive than identifying perceptual objects with material bodies, which excludes too much and leans too heavily on vision. The account thus is tailored to capture the role of objects in perception beyond vision: tactual, auditory, and olfactory objects are individuals with differing structures. Its flexibility also enables the account to accommodate shared objects for multisensory perception: multisensory perceptual objects are mereologically complex individuals with hybrid structure. For instance, one can bimodally perceive a common whole with parts accessible to one but not both modalities. Each sense provides a partial perspective on a complex whole that is perceptible through the coordinated use of multiple senses. Understanding perceptual objects as structured mereologically complex individuals thus provides a theoretically useful notion of an object for multisensory perception that resolves the puzzles of diversity and of unity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:358 BOOK REVIEWS ing and his arguments seem more tentative and relativistic than those offered in his previously published works (Truth and Other Enigmas, 1978; The Interpretation of Frege's Phuosophy, 1981, etc.). Yet he uses his mastery of powerful logical techniques in order to support the chosen positions. This fact might give great satisfaction to a logician, hut the metaphysician may he somewhat disappointed by the meager results attained, (...) though Dummett himself modestly restricts his goals to those of forming only " a base camp for an assault on the metaphysical peaks...". One may also wonder whether Dummett remained faithful to his methodological requirement of the priority of meaningtheory with regard to logic and metaphysics. Doesn't Dummett's acceptance of intuitionistic logic (with its rejection of the principle of bivalence) dictate his preference for a certain meaning-theory, and not the other way around? To distill and extract metaphysical beliefs and insights which are contained (perhaps tacitly) in the working of our language is undoubtedly a legitimate goal of any philosophical enterprise. But our ambitions go beyond this goal: we are reaching after reality itself, not just after our opinions about reality and their semantical elucidation. In this respect Dummett's programmatic conception of metaphysics may face serious difficulties in attempts to climb the ahovementioned metaphysical peaks. On the other hand, is any metaphysical program exempt from such difficulties? The hook is beautifully printed; Harvard University Press has done an excellent job! The Index, which combines names and subjects, is a hit too economical, omitting certain references (for example, important remarks on God's omniscience on pp. 75-76). AUGUSTIN RISKA Saint John's University New York, New York Ethical Practice in Clinical Medicine. By WILLIAM J. ELLOS. New York: Routledge, 1990. Pp. 190. Medical ethics is an integral part of the science and art of medicine. Rather than being a set of norms or regulations added from external sources, such as the legal norms regulating the medicare program, the norms and maxims of medical ethics are integral elements of medicine arising from the relationship between physician and patient. In one way or another, most philosophers of ethics and medicine would agree with the foregoing statements. But once the role of ethics in medicine has BOOK REVIEWS 359 been established, a serious difficulty arises: What method should he used to define and delineate ethical norms for particular cases? More to the point, how should one go about solving problems in medical ethics? Father William Ellos, S.J., is concerned with resolving the difficulty of method in medical ethics. He seeks to develop and explain a method in medical ethics that will be both clinical and pragmatic. Joining with other specialists in the field, he opts for a virtue-centered approach to solving issues in medical ethics, as opposed to a rulecentered duty-based approach. While not rejecting the ethical method featuring the principles of autonomy, beneficence, and justice derived from W. D. Ross (an approach favored by so many contemporary scholars in the field of medical ethics), he does maintain that these principles are greatly overworked as well as simplistic. He proposes virtue-centered reasoning as a better method of ethical endeavor, especially attuned to the complexity and problematics of clinical ethics. In developing the notion of virtue·centered ethics, Ellos considers the contributions of the past and present thinkers to this method of ethical decision making. Hence, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas, the Scottish Enlightenment Philosophers, and American Pragmatists are the main sources of his reflections upon virtue ethics. Ellos finds a culmination of virtue ethics in the present-day tendency of many consultants in medical ethics to classify themselves as casuists, indicating that they are eclectic and pragmatic in their efforts to solve clinical cases. In the course of the historical and analytical sections of this work, Ellos demonstrates not only a wide acquaintance with classical and contemporary authors but also an ability to discern continuity of thought among these well.known philosophers and theologians. Especially significant is his recognition of the too often neglected contemporary authors Collen Clements and Roger Sider, whose accurate indictment of the principle of autonomy as interpreted by present-day medical ethicists restores the... (shrink)

Vision has been the primary focus of naturalistic philosophical research concerning perception and perceptual experience. Guided by visual experience and vision science, many philosophers have focused upon theoretical issues dealing with the perception of objects. Recently, however, hearing researchers have discussed auditory objects. I present the case for object perception in vision, and argue that an analog of object perception occurs in auditory perception. I propose a notion of an auditory object that is stronger than just that of an intentional (...) object of audition, but that does not identify auditory objects with the ordinary material objects we see. (shrink)

Cross-modal perceptual illusions occur when a stimulus to one modality impacts perceptual experience associated with another modality. Unlike synaesthesia, cross-modal illusions are intelligible as results of perceptual strategies for dealing with sensory stimulation to multiple modalities, rather than as mere quirks. I argue that understanding cross-modal illusions reveals an important flaw in a widespread conception of the senses, and of their role in perceptual experience, according to which understanding perception and perceptual experience is a matter of assembling independently viable stories (...) about vision, audition, olfaction, and the rest. (shrink)

My thesis is that perceptual awareness is richly multisensory. I argue for this conclusion on the grounds that certain forms of multisensory perceptual experience are incompatible with the claim that each aspect of a perceptual experience is associated with some specific sensory modality or another. First, I explicate what it is for some feature of a conscious perceptual episode to be modality specific. Then, I argue based on philosophical and experimental evidence that some novel intermodal features are perceptible only through (...) the coordinated use of multiple senses. I appeal to cases that involve consciously perceptible feature instances and feature types that could not be perceptually experienced through the use of individual sense modalities working on their own or simply in parallel and co-consciously. Finally, I offer an account of how to type perceptual experiences by modality that makes room for richly multisensory experiences. (shrink)

The earliest Analects yet discovered, this work provides us with a new perspective on the central canonical text that has defined Chinese culture--and clearly illuminates the spirit and values of Confucius.

I argue that sounds are best conceived not as pressure waves that travel through a medium, nor as physical properties of the objects ordinarily thought to be the sources of sounds, but rather as events of a certain kind. Sounds are particular events in which a surrounding medium is disturbed or set into wavelike motion by the activities of a body or interacting bodies. This Event View of sounds provides for a uni- ?ed perceptual account of several pervasive sound phenomena, (...) including transmission through barriers, constructive and destructive interference, and echoes. (shrink)

Philosophers and cognitive scientists of perception by custom have investigated individual sense modalities in relative isolation from each other. However, perceiving is, in a number of respects, multimodal. The traditional sense modalities should not be treated as explanatorily independent. Attention to the multimodal aspects of perception challenges common assumptions about the content and phenomenology of perception, and about the individuation and psychological nature of sense modalities. Multimodal perception thus presents a valuable opportunity for a case study in mature interdisciplinary cognitive (...) science. This chapter aims to raise these issues against the background of unimodal approaches in the study of perception. It presents some of the central empirical findings concerning multimodality, and it explains the philosophical implications of these findings. Foremost, it aims to encourage and open avenues for future research. (shrink)

Psychophysics and neuroscience demonstrate that different sensory systems interact and influence each other. Perceiving involves extensive cooperation and coordination among systems associated with sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. Nonetheless, it remains unclear in what respects conscious perceptual awareness is multisensory. This paper distinguishes six differing varieties of multisensory awareness, explicates their consequences, and thereby elucidates the multisensory nature of perception. It argues on these grounds that perceptual awareness need not be exhausted by that which is associated with each of (...) the respective sensory modalities along with whatever accrues thanks to simple co-consciousness. (shrink)

Beyond Vision brings together eight essays by Casey O'Callaghan which draw theoretical and philosophical lessons about perception, the nature of its objects, and sensory awareness. O'Callaghan focuses on auditory perception, perception of spoken language, and multisensory perception.

Hearing and auditory perception are rapidly developing topics in the philosophy of perception. Recent work has focused on characterizing what we hear and on similarities and differences between audition and other modalities. Future work should address how theorizing about audition impacts theorizing about perception more generally. This entry concerns questions about the objects and contents of hearing. It includes discussion of the spatial content of audition, of the role of time and pitch in the individuation of auditory objects, and of (...) audition's role in the perception of speech. (shrink)

Paradigms in philosophy and cognitive science until recently have treated perception in typical human beings as relatively fixed and unchanging. Recent research instead supports the claim that perception can be altered over time by training, deliberate practice or mere exposure. If so, we do not all bring to a scene the same stock of perceptual capacities, and our differences are not just deficits or superpowers. This paper describes six questions an account of perceptual learning ought to address, which pose difficult (...) challenges to Kevin Connolly’s (2019) groundbreaking Offloading View of perceptual learning. In light of these questions, it sketches an alternative simple view according to which perceptual learning is acquiring a new or enhanced perceptual capacity in a particular way. The relevant capacity is a capacity perceptually to detect and differentiate a feature, where doing so constitutively if not wholly implicates perception. The relevant way is by means of an independently characterized learning process, rather than by adaptation, pure development, or mere accident. The perceptual change thus results from a smart process – one that is flexible, resilient, and responsive to feedback, rather than rigid, fragile and brute. Such a process can yield perceptual know-how. Thanks to perceptual learning, one comes to know how to perceive, in a sense that means being able to do so. Some specialists hone this to develop perceptual skills that are implicated in expert performance. (shrink)

Frequently, we learn of the locations of things and events in our environment by means of hearing. Hearing, I argue, is a locational mode of perceiving with a robustly spatial phenomenology. I defend three proposals. First, audition furnishes one with information about the locations of things and happenings in one’s environment because auditory experience itself has spatial content—auditory experience involves awareness of space. Second, we hear the locations of things and events by or in hearing the locations of their sounds. (...) Third, we auditorily experience sounds themselves as having relatively stable distal locations. I reject skepticism about spatial audition and auditory experience tracing to Strawson’s Individuals , and suggest that spatial auditory experience grounds a form of perceptual access to objects and events that is critical to negotiating one’s environment. (shrink)

Recent work on non-visual modalities aims to translate, extend, revise, or unify claims about perception beyond vision. This paper presents central lessons drawn from attention to hearing, sounds, and multimodality. It focuses on auditory awareness and its objects, and it advances more general lessons for perceptual theorizing that emerge from thinking about sounds and audition. The paper argues that sounds and audition no better support the privacy of perception’s objects than does vision; that perceptual objects are more diverse than an (...) exclusively visual perspective suggests; and that multimodality is rampant. In doing so, it presents an account according to which audition affords awareness as of not just sounds, but also environmental happenings beyond sounds. (shrink)

We can discern two opposing viewpoints regarding synesthesia. According to the first, it is an oddity, an outlier, or a disordered condition. According to the second, synesthesia is pervasive, driving creativity, metaphor, or language itself. Which is it? Ultimately, I favor the first perspective, according to which cross-sensory synesthesia is an outlying condition. But the second perspective is not wholly misguided. My discussion has three lessons. First, synesthesia is just one of a variety of effects in which one sense modality (...) causally impacts and reshapes experience associated with another. These effects are utterly common. However, due to their unfamiliarity, and to their conflict with a widespread conception of the role of the senses in perception and perceptual experience, until recently they have been surprising. Second, synesthesia nevertheless must be distinguished from other inter-modal effects that lead to misperception, such as crossmodal illusions. Third, synesthesia also may be distinguished from the potentially much broader class of synesthetic effects, which could be common across the population and within individuals. (shrink)

Sounds are audible, and sound sources are audible. What is the audible relation between audible sounds and audible sources? Common talk and philosophy suggest three candidates. The first is that sounds audibly are properties instantiated by their sources. I argue that sounds are audible individuals and thus are not audibly instantiated by audible sources. The second is that sounds audibly are effects of their sources. I argue that auditory experience presents no compelling evidence that sounds audibly are causally related to (...) audible sources. The third is that sounds audibly are related mereologically to their sources. I present and offer a defence of this third candidate. (shrink)

Listening to speech in a language you know differs phenomenologically from listening to speech in an unfamiliar language, a fact often exploited in debates about the phenomenology of thought and cognition. It is plausible that the difference is partly perceptual. Some contend that hearing familiar language involves auditory perceptual awareness of meanings or semantic properties of spoken utterances; but if this were so, there must be something distinctive it is like auditorily to perceptually experience specific meanings of spoken utterances. However, (...) an argument from homophony shows that auditory experiences do not resolve differences in meaning not marked by differences in sound. I propose an alternative explanation of the perceptual phenomenal difference in terms of perceptual awareness of language-specific but non-semantic features. (shrink)

Vision has dominated philosophical thinking about perceptual experience and the nature of its objects. Color has long been the focus of debates about the metaphysics of sensible qualities, and philosophers have struggled to articulate the conditions on the visual experience of mind-independent objects. With few notable exceptions, "visuocentrism" has shaped our understanding of the nature and functions of perception, and of our conception of its objects. The predominant line of thought from the early modern era to the present is that, (...) in the philosophically interesting respects, as things are with vision, so they are with hearing, touch, olfaction, and the rest. A closely related line of thought has been particularly strong in the case of the secondary qualities. (shrink)

This paper presents an account of the senses and what differentiates them that is compatible with richly multisensory perception and consciousness. According to this proposal, senses are ways of perceiving. Each sense is a subfaculty that comprises a collection of perceptual capacities. What each sense shares and what differentiates one sense from another is the manner in which those capacities are exercised. Each way of perceiving involves a distinct type of information gathering, individuated by the information it functions to extract (...) and the medium from which it does so. This approach distinguishes the project of characterizing and differentiating senses from that of attributing experiences to sensory modalities. Perceptual experiences are episodes in which perceptual capacities are exer- cised. Conscious perceptual episodes may be ascribed to distinct sensory modalities, according to the manners in which perceptual capacities are deployed on an occasion. According to this account, senses are not exclusive. First, their capacities may overlap. Second, perceptual episodes, including conscious experiences, may belong to multiple senses. Indeed, some episodes require the joint use of several senses. In this account, subjects have only limited first-person knowledge of the senses they employ. (shrink)

Echo experiences are illusory experiences of ordinary primary sounds. Just as there is no new object that we see at the surface of a mirror, there is no new sound that we hear at a reflecting surface. The sound that we hear as an echo just is the original primary sound, though its perception involves illusions of place, time, and qualities. The case of echoes need not force us to adopt a conception according to which sounds are persisting object-like particulars (...) that travel through space. (shrink)

This paper presents forms of multimodal perceptual experience that undermine the claim that each aspect of perceptual experience is modality specific. In particular, it argues against the thesis that all phenomenal character is modality specific (even making an allowance for co-conscious unity). It concludes that a multimodal perceptual episode may have phenomenal features beyond those that are associated with the specific modalities.

Roger T. Ames's A Sourcebook in Classical Confucian Philosophy is a companion volume to his Conceptual Lexicon for Classical Confucian Philosophy. It includes texts in the original classical Chinese along with their translations, allowing experts and novices alike to make whatever comparisons they choose. In applying a method of comparative cultural hermeneutics, Ames has tried to let the tradition speak on its own terms. The goal is to encourage readers to move between the translated text and commentary, the philosophical (...) introduction that attempts to sensitize them to the interpretative context, and the companion Lexicon of key philosophical terms, with the expectation that in the fullness of time they will be able to appropriate the original Chinese terminologies themselves. Armed with their own increasingly robust insight into these philosophical terms, readers will be able to carry this nuanced understanding over into their critical reading of other available translations. Ultimately, for students who would understand Chinese philosophy, tian 天 must be understood as tian 天, and dao 道 must be dao 道. (shrink)

Despite its admirable bottom-up methodology, Roy Sorensen's Seeing Dark Things (OUP, 2008) raises difficult theoretical questions concerning the metaphysics and perception of absences. Metaphysical difficulties include how to individuate, count, locate, and classify absences, and what determines their features. Perceptual difficulties include how to distinguish experiences of absences and presences, especially when nonveridical, and what subjects contribute to perceptual experience according to Sorensen's causal theory. In addition to articulating these difficulties, this paper also presents and explores, on Sorensen's terms, an (...) alternative account of silence. (shrink)

Perceptual malleability and diversity can stem from perceptual learning, expertise, genetics, disease, or accident. Perceptual malleability and diversity force us to reject the claim that perceptual capacities, perceptual experience, and perceptual content are universal across subjects and times. And it casts doubt on the presumption of a universal human perceptual nature. However, it does not directly challenge perceptual objectivity, understood as the claim that one can perceive a world of things and features that are independent from oneself and one's experiences (...) and that could be perceived by other subjects. (shrink)