According to a common sense theory, facial expressions signal specific emotions to people of all ages and therefore provide children easy access to the emotions of those around them. The evidence, however, does not support that account. Instead, children’s understanding of facial expressions is poor and changes qualitatively and slowly over the course of development. Initially, children divide facial expressions into two simple categories (feels good, feels bad). These broad categories are then gradually differentiated until an adult system of discrete (...) categories is achieved, likely in the teen years. Children’s understanding of most specific emotions begins not with facial expressions, but with their understanding of the emotion’s antecedents and behavioral consequences. (shrink)

This data includes information on authorship gender in Leiter Ranked, Unranked, and Interdisciplinary Philosophy Journals between 1900 & 2010.

Baruch Spinoza began his studies learning Hebrew and the Talmud, only to be excommunicated at the age of twenty-four for supposed heresy. Throughout his life, Spinoza was simultaneously accused of being an atheist and a God-intoxicated man. Bertrand Russell said that, compared to others, Spinoza is ethically supreme, 'the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers'. This book is an exploration of (a) what Spinoza understood God to be, (b) how, for him, the infinite and eternal power of God (...) is expressed, and (c) how finite human beings can have a true idea of this greatest of all entities. Sherry Deveaux begins with an analytic discussion of these three questions, and an explication of three different views held by contemporary commentators on Spinoza. She then shows that the commonly held views about Spinoza are inconsistent with Spinoza's texts, especially his magnum opus, the Ethics. Next comes an analysis of topics in Spinoza that must be understood in order correctly to answer the three questions. For example, the notions of 'power' and 'true idea' are discussed, along with Spinoza's definition of the 'essence' of a thing, which is shown to be central to the discussion of Spinoza's God. Deveaux then claims that Spinoza defines God's essence as 'absolutely infinite and eternal power' and that, contrary to the commonly held view that God's essence is identical with the attributes (e.g., thought and extension), God's essence or "power" is expressed through the attributes. (shrink)

The first generation of children to grow up with electronic toys and games saw computers as our “nearest neighbors.” They spoke of computers as rational machines and of people as emotional machines, a fragile formulation destined to be challenged. By the mid-1990s, computational creatures, including robots, were presenting themselves as “relational artifacts,” beings with feelings and needs. One consequence of this development is a crisis in authenticity in many quarters. In an increasing number of situations, people behave as though they (...) no longer place value on living things and authentic emotion. This paper examines watershed moments in the history of human–machine interaction, focusing on the pertinence of relational artifacts to our collective perception of aliveness, life’s purposes, and the implications of relational artifacts for relationships. For now, the exploration of human–robot encounters leads us to questions about the morality of creating believable digital companions that are evocative but not authentic. (shrink)

Izard (2010) did not seek a descriptive definition of emotion—one that describes the concept as it is used by ordinary folk. Instead, he surveyed scientists’ prescriptive definitions—ones that prescribe how the concept should be used in theories of emotion. That survey showed a lack of agreement today and thus raised doubts about emotion as a useful scientific concept.

The numbering in the new edition of Wittgenstein's Remarks does not in general correspond to the part and section numbers of the 1956 edition. The following concordance is useful for making cross references between the two editions.

Embrace your authentic self and let your soul's light shine forth with guidance from 150 lessons meant to inspire, motivate, and teach. This empowering book helps you shed what is false and come to know, accept, and express your true self. With essays to uplift and engage you through personal stories, meditations, exercises, affirmations, and question prompts, Discover Your Authentic Self shows you how to live according to your passions and purpose. Explore a range of topics for self-discovery, including intuition, (...) spirit animals, recognizing personal abilities as related to archetypes, living your purpose, spirit essence and energy (chakras and auras), and more. With this remarkable book, you'll unlock your truth and set yourself free. (shrink)

Discussions of science and values in risk management have largely focused on how values enter into arguments about risks, that is, issues of acceptable risk. Instead this volume concentrates on how values enter into collecting, interpreting, communicating, and evaluating the evidence of risks, that is, issues of the acceptability of evidence of risk. By focusing on acceptable evidence, this volume avoids two barriers to progress. One barrier assumes that evidence of risk is largely a matter of objective scientific data and (...) therefore uncontroversial. The other assumes that evidence of risk, being "just" a matter of values, is not amenable to reasoned critique. Denying both extremes, this volume argues for a more constructive conclusion: understanding the interrelations of scientific and value issues enables a critical scrutiny of risk assessments and better public deliberation about social choices. The contributors, distinguished philosophers, policy analysts, and natural and social scientists, analyze environmental and medical controversies, and assumptions underlying views about risk assessment and the scientific and statistical models used in risk management. (shrink)

We demonstrate the existence of altruism via kin selection in artificial life and explore its nuances. We do so in the Avida system through a setup that is based on the behavior of colicinogenic bacteria: Organisms can kill unrelated organisms in a given radius but must kill themselves to do so. Initially, we confirm!results found in the bacterial world: Digital organisms do sacrifice themselves for their kin—an extreme example of altruism— and do so more often in structured environments, where kin (...) are always nearby, than in well-mixed environments, where the location of kin is stochastically determined. Having shown that helping one’s kin is advantageous, we turn our attention to investigating the efficacy and implications of the strategies of kincheaters, those who receive help from kin but do not return it. Contrary to the expectations of current theory, we find that kin-cheaters outcompete kin-altruists. Our results cause us to question the stability of strategies that involve altruism between kin. Knowing that kin-altruism persists in biological systems, however, we search for, and find, conditions that allow!kin-based altruism to persist in evolving!systems despite the!presence of kin-cheaters. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionSherri Irvin, Guest Editor (bio)The idea for this special issue of the Journal of Aesthetic Education had its origins in the December 2007 event “The Art of Performance: Symposium in Honor of Jim Hamilton,” organized by Sandra Lapointe and Marcelo Sabatés and hosted by the Department of Philosophy at Kansas State University with the kind support of President Jon Wefald and the dean of the Faculty of Arts and (...) Sciences. The symposium was designed to celebrate the 2007 publication of Jim Hamilton’s The Art of Theater by Blackwell, as well as his many years of leading experimental theater programs for Kansas youth. Noël Carroll, David Davies, Aaron Meskin, and I were critics in an author-meets-critics session on The Art of Theater at the symposium, while Paul Thom was a critic for a session on the book at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics.The Art of Theater bears the stamp of Hamilton’s dual roles as a philosopher and an avid participant in contemporary theater practice. It is a philosophically sophisticated and richly informed treatment of the theoretical issues surrounding the practice of theater. It contributes greatly to filling what was a rather glaring hole in the philosophical literature: whereas music has received quite extensive treatment in recent decades, only a few philosophers have ventured into the complex territory of theater.Hamilton holds that theater is an independent form of art: theatrical performances are artworks in their own right, not subsidiary to or derivative of works in any other form (particularly literature). The process by which a theatrical performance is constructed, he suggests, involves such an extensive array of decisions by the performing company—including decisions about whether and how to make use of any preexisting text in the performance—that no text or literary work can be thought of as “the work” that is performed. Instead, the company’s activities generate the only work [End Page 1] at issue: namely, the performance itself. When a performance seems to bear a special relation to some repeatable entity, such as Hamlet, we should understand this as a relation the performance bears not to some literary text but to a tradition of other performances that have been collected under the Hamlet rubric. Accordingly, basic understanding of a theatrical performance does not require prior acquaintance with a text or literary work; spectators can have basic understanding of a performance as long as their responses demonstrate that they have followed what is happening as the performance itself unfolds. Spectators lacking extensive acquaintance with recent text-based theatrical practices, then, need not be stigmatized as lacking the resources to appreciate works of theater.In this issue Hamilton’s précis of the book is followed by the contributions of five critics who challenge the book’s central theses. The critics ask, Does Hamilton provide sufficient reason to reject the claim that at least some performances are of literary works, and can a satisfactory ontology of theater be developed if this claim is rejected? Even if theatrical performances are not of some text-based literary work, could they be of some other work, perhaps a work of theater that is generated through the performance practices of a company? Should spectators who follow what is happening moment-to-moment in a given performance, but fail to recognize that the performance parodies or satirizes some literary work, be said to have even basic understanding of what they have seen?Hamilton’s extensive replies to the critics will, I think, serve as a valuable supplement to the book, clarifying some of its central arguments and, in some instances, supplying new arguments for its theses. In particular, he points out that he did not intend for the book to provide a definitive argument for the thesis that theatrical performances are never performances of some other work; instead, he takes this thesis to emerge from a careful examination of theatrical practice. The aim of the book is to explore the implications of the thesis and to show how identification and appreciation of theatrical performances are possible if it is true. In this spirit, many of his claims should be given... (shrink)

In struggling to free science from theological implications, Huxley let his own philosophical beliefs influence his interpretation of the data. However, he was certainly not unique in this respect. Like the creationists he despised, he made many important contributions to the issue of progression in the fossil record and its relationship to evolutionary theory. Certainly other factors were involved as well. Undoubtedly, just the sheer inertia of ideas played a role. He was committed to a theory of type and was (...) heavily influenced by von Baer, who argued that one could not rate the different types as being higher or lower than the others. By the mid-1850s his animosity toward Owen had become extreme and he tried to discredit the man whenever possible; yet, as I have pointed out, he also was more than willing to cite Owen's early work when it suited his needs.But I believe the crucial factor in Huxley's eventually accepting progression was that he finally disassociated it from the idea of divine plan. This happened gradually through the 1860s and 1870s, as more and more fossil finds provided support for Darwin's theory. In evaluating this new evidence that supported gradualism, Huxley also realized that progression was an intrinsic part of Darwin's theory:The hypothesis of evolution supposes that at any given period in the past we should meet with a state of things more or less similar to the present, but less similar in proportion as we go back in time... if we traced back the animal world and the vegetable world we should find preceding what now exist animals and plants not identical with them, but like them, only increasing their differences as we go back in time, and at the same time becoming simpler and simpler until finally we should arrive at that gelatinous mass which, so far as our present knowledge goes, is the common foundation of all life.In concluding his first lecture to the Americans, he told them: “The hypothesis of evolution supposes that in all this vast progression there would be no breach of continuity, no point at which we could say ‘This is a natural process,’ and ‘This is not a natural process.’”85 Finally for Huxley, progression was no longer linked to Divine Plan. (shrink)

Open Access: This article argues for an aesthetic approach to resisting oppression based on judgments of bodily unattractiveness. Philosophical theories have often suggested that appropriate aesthetic judgments should converge on sets of objects consensually found to be beautiful or ugly. The convergence of judgments about human bodies, however, is a significant source of injustice, because people judged to be unattractive pay substantial social and economic penalties in domains such as education, employment and criminal justice. The injustice is compounded by the (...) interaction between standards of attractiveness and gender, race, disability, and gender identity. -/- I argue that we should actively work to reduce our participation in standard aesthetic practices that involve attractiveness judgments. This does not mean refusing engagement with the embodiment of others; ignoring someone’s embodiment is often a way of dehumanizing them. Instead, I advocate a form of practice, aesthetic exploration, that involves seeking out positive experiences of the unique aesthetic affordances of all bodies, regardless of whether they are attractive in the standard sense. I argue that there are good ethical reasons to cultivate aesthetic exploration, and that it is psychologically plausible that doing so would help to alleviate the social injustice attending judgments of attractiveness. -/- This essay was the winner of the 30th Anniversary of the American Society for Aesthetics Feminist Caucus Committee Feminist Research Essay prize in 2020. (shrink)

The growing availability of computer power and statistical software has greatly increased the ease with which practitioners apply statistical methods, but this has not been accompanied by attention to checking the assumptions on which these methods are based. At the same time, disagreements about inferences based on statistical research frequently revolve around whether the assumptions are actually met in the studies available, e.g., in psychology, ecology, biology, risk assessment. Philosophical scrutiny can help disentangle 'practical' problems of model validation, and conversely, (...) a methodology of statistical model validation can shed light on a number of issues of interest to philosophers of science. (shrink)

The body is a rich object for aesthetic inquiry. We aesthetically assess both our own bodies and those of others, and our felt bodily experiences have aesthetic qualities. The body features centrally in aesthetic experiences of visual art, theatre, dance and sports. It is also deeply intertwined with one's identity and sense of self. Artistic and media representations shape how we see and engage with bodies, with consequences both personal and political. This volume contains sixteen original essays by contributors in (...) philosophy, sociology, dance, disability theory, critical race studies, feminist theory, medicine, and law. They explore bodily beauty, sexual attractiveness, the role of images in power relations, the distinct aesthetics of disabled bodies, the construction of national identity, the creation of compassion through bodily presence, the role of bodily style in moral comportment, and the somatic aesthetics of racialized police violence. -/- Contents: Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, "Black Silhouettes on White Walls: Kara Walker’s Magic Lantern"; A. W. Eaton, "Taste in Bodies and Fat Oppression"; C. Winter Han, "From 'Little Brown Brothers' to 'Queer Asian Wives': Constructing the Asian Male Body"; Deborah L. Rhode, "Appearance as a Feminist Issue"; Shirley Anne Tate, "A Tale of Two Olympians—Beauty, 'Race,' Nation"; Glenn Parsons, "The Merrickites"; Stephen Davies, "And Everything Nice"; Tobin Siebers, "In/Visible: Disability on the Stage"; Jill Sigman, "Live, Body-Based Performance: An Account from the Field"; Barbara Gail Montero, "Aesthetic Effortlessness"; Peg Brand Weiser and Edward B. Weiser, "Misleading Aesthetic Norms of Beauty: Perceptual Sexism in Elite Women's Sports"; Yuriko Saito, "Body Aesthetics and the Cultivation of Moral Virtues"; George Yancy, "White Embodied Gazing, the Black Body as Disgust, and the Aesthetics of Un-Suturing"; Richard Shusterman, "Somaesthetics and the Fine Art of Eating"; Ann J. Cahill, "Sexual Desire, Inequality, and the Possibility of Transformation"; Sheila Lintott and Sherri Irvin, "Sex Objects and Sexy Subjects: A Feminist Reclamation of Sexiness" -/- . (shrink)

Nursing practice occurs in the context of conversations with healthcare users, other healthcare professionals, and healthcare institutions. This discussion paper draws on symbolic interactionism and Fairclough's method of critical discourse analysis to examine language that nurses use to describe the people in their care and their practice. We discuss how nurses’ use of language constructs meaning about healthcare users and their own work. Through language, nurses are articulating what they believe about healthcare users and nursing practice. We argue that the (...) language nurses use can contribute to viewing their practice as tasks on bodies that must be accomplished efficiently and objectively within the biomedical model, rather than relational and person‐centered. Moreover, the language nurses use can perpetuate a sense of powerlessness within healthcare systems yet paradoxically they are in a position of power over healthcare users. Nurses’ compliance with the efficiency and biomedical model results in a lack of emphasis on the full breadth of nursing work, which could be enacted in relational rather than power‐laden practices. We conclude by positing that careful use of language among nurses in all settings is essential, if we are to begin to articulate what nursing is to ourselves and to others. (shrink)

Jim Joyce argues for two amendments to probabilism. The first is the doctrine that credences are rational, or not, in virtue of their accuracy or “closeness to the truth” (1998). The second is a shift from a numerically precise model of belief to an imprecise model represented by a set of probability functions (2010). We argue that both amendments cannot be satisfied simultaneously. To do so, we employ a (slightly-generalized) impossibility theorem of Seidenfeld, Schervish, and Kadane (2012), who show that (...) there is no strictly proper scoring rule for imprecise probabilities. -/- The question then is what should give way. Joyce, who is well aware of this no-go result, thinks that a quantifiability constraint on epistemic accuracy should be relaxed to accommodate imprecision. We argue instead that another Joycean assumption — called strict immodesty— should be rejected, and we prove a representation theorem that characterizes all “mildly” immodest measures of inaccuracy. (shrink)

Adorno's philosophical writings on music are notably focused on the new, invested in positioning the challenging avant‐garde works of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern as the modernist mainstream. Nevertheless, Adorno's relationship with this “Second Viennese School” of composers was characterized by ongoing complexities, contradictions, and dissonances. His conflicted position is theorized here on multiple levels, considering not only Adorno's mature philosophy of the New Music, but his own musical‐creative output, and his relationships with the members of the Second Viennese School; a (...) group he was intimately connected to and distinct from at once. As his composition teacher, Berg was particularly influential in shaping Adorno's compositional activity and stance as simultaneously a champion and critic of Schoenberg. Adorno attempted to apply Schoenberg's twelve‐tone technique within his own compositions, recognizing its promise, yet from early on he had growing critical and compositional reservations concerning the method's restrictions. Though Adorno's writings from the 1930s defend Schoenberg and the twelve‐tone technique, by the end of the following decade, his Philosophy of New Music (2006 [1949]) expounds his critique of the method for its eschewal of the freedom of Expressionism. The impact of the Philosophy of New Music in the wake of the Second World War was both greater than and different from what Adorno could have expected. His message that the twelve‐tone method came at the cost of expressivity was largely missed by the subsequent generation of avant‐garde composers, the “Darmstadt School,” who understood the book as philosophical and theoretical basis for their extended exploration of music's serial systematization. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to determine if reading achievement of students from high-poverty US schools differs as a function of participation in summer tutoring versus access to books. Data fro...

Advances in machine learning hold promise for corpus analysis: they have the potential to allow for more efficient and less biased analyses of text. This would be a boon for qualitative research, such as the survey research conducted by Academic Philosophy Data and Analysis. In this paper we examine the utility of automated machine learning for select survey questions, with a focus on LDA and VADER. We thus compare human and machine coding on the question of whether underrepresented philosophers are (...) more likely to respond negatively to questions concerning diversity and inclusivity in academic philosophy. Our study has mixed results, revealing instances where automated machine learning can be used to fruitfully support and interrogate more traditional hand-coding techniques, but also instances where we were unable to glean much insight. (Contact authors for draft.). (shrink)

SummaryThe importation of Spencerism and Social Darwinism into Japan in the early Meiji era (from 1868 to the early 1880s) occurred against a background of rapid economic and industrial change which provoked widespread political unrest. This accelerated modernization was forced by Western demands for trade liberalization and the threat of Western imperialism. In this context, selected elements of Western scientific naturalism and liberalism could provide a prestigious ratification of élite agendas for the management of change, provided they could be made (...) culturally recognizable. It is suggested that traditional and Western knowledge claims were combined by key Meiji intellectuals in such a way that the product, Meiji Social Darwinism, supplied both the prestige of Western scientific positivism and the familiarity conferred by traditional resources. The clear differentiation between the constituents which made up Meiji Social Darwinism enables us to identify the distinct cultural functions performed by each of these sets of resources. In this study, these cultural functions emerge as elements in an élite class strategy. (shrink)

This book explores our corporeal connections to the past by considering what three theoretical approaches-somaesthetics, posthumanism, and the uncanny-may reveal about both premodern and postmodern terms of embodiment. It takes as its point of departure a selection of fifteenth-century northern European Books of Hours-evocative objects designed at once to to inscribe social status, to strengthen religious commitment, to entertain, to stimulate emotions, and to encourage discomfiting self-scrutiny. Studying their kaleidoscopically strange, moving, humorous, disturbing, imaginative pages not only enables a window (...) into relationships among bodies, images, and things in the past, but also in our own internet era, where surprisingly popular memes drawn from such manuscripts constitute a part of our own visual culture. In negotiating theoretical, post-theoretical, and historical concerns, this book aims to contribute to an emerging and much-needed intersectional social history of art. It will be of interest to scholars working in art history, medieval studies, Renaissance/early modern studies, gender studies, the history of the book, posthumanism, aesthetics, and the body. (shrink)