China has undergone a media revolution that has transformed the domestic context for making foreign policy as well as domestic policy. The commercialization of the mass media has changed the way leaders and publics interact in the process of making foreign policy. As they compete with one another, the new media naturally try to appeal to the tastes of their potential audiences. Editors make choices about which stories to cover based on their judgments about which ones will resonate best with (...) audiences. In China today, that means a lot of stories about Japan, Taiwan, and the United States, the topics that are the objects of Chinese popular nationalism. The publicity given these topics makes them domestic political issues because they are potential focal points for elite dis-agreement and mass collective action, and thereby constrains the way China' leaders and diplomats deal with them. Even relatively minor events involving China' relations with Japan, Taiwan, or the United States become big news, and therefore relations with these three governments must be carefully handled by the politicians in the Communist Party Politburo Standing Committee. Because of the Internet, it is impossible for Party censors to screen out news from Japan, Taiwan or the United States that might upset the public. Common knowledge of such news forces officials to react to every slight, no matter how small. Foreign policy makers feel especially constrained by nationalist public opinion when it comes to its diplomacy with Japan. Media marketization and the Internet have helped make Japan China' most emotionally charged international relationship. (shrink)

Hurley here revives a classical idea about rationality in a modern framework, by developing analogies between the structure of personality and the structure of society in the context of contemporary work in philosophy of mind, ethics, decision theory and social choice theory. The book examines the rationality of decisions and actions, and illustrates the continuity of philosophy of mind on the one hand, and ethics and jurisprudence on the other. A major thesis of the book is that arguments drawn from (...) the philosophy of mind may be used to undermine widely-held subjectivist positions in ethics and politico-economic theory. The work is inspired by the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Davidson, but goes on to connect their arguments about interpretation with formal work in decision theory and social choice theory, and with the theory of adjudication. (shrink)

In this important book, Susan Hurley sheds new light on consciousness by examining its relationships to action from various angles. She assesses the role of agency in the unity of a conscious perspective, and argues that perception and action are more deeply interdependent than we usually assume. A standard view conceives perception as input from world to mind and action as output from mind to world, with the serious business of thought in between. Hurley criticizes this picture, and considers (...) how the interdependence of perceptual experience and agency at the personal level (of mental contents and norms) may emerge from the subpersonal level (of underlying causal processes and complex dynamic feedback systems). Her two-level view has wide implications, for topics that include self-consciousness, the modularity of mind, and the relations of mind to world. The self no longer lurks hidden somewhere between perceptual input and behavioral output, but reappears out in the open, embodied and embedded in its environment. Hurley traces these themes from Kantian and Wittgensteinian arguments through to intriguing recent work in neuropsychology and in dynamic systems approaches to the mind, providing a bridge from mainstream philosophy to work in other disciplines. Consciousness in Action is unique in the range of philosophical and scientific work it draws on, and in the deep criticism it offers of centuries-old habits of thought. (shrink)

From my Consciousness in Action, ch. 2; see Consciousness in Action for bibligraphy. This chapter revises material from "Kant on Spontaneity and the Myth of the Giving", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1993-94, pp. 137-164, and "Myth Upon Myth", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1996, vol. 96, pp. 253-260.

We all know about the vehicle/content distinction (see Dennett 1991a, Millikan 1991, 1993). We shouldn't confuse properties represented in content with properties of vehicles of content. In particular, we shouldn't confuse the personal and subpersonal levels. The contents of the mental states of subject/agents are at the personal level. Vehicles of content are causally explanatory subpersonal events or processes or states. We shouldn't suppose that the properties of vehicles must be projected into what they represent for subject/agents, or vice versa. (...) This would be to confuse the personal and subpersonal levels. (shrink)

I ARGUE THAT WE RECEIVE PLEASURE FROM TRAGEDIES BECAUSE WE ARE PLEASED TO FIND OURSELVES RESPONDING IN AN UNPLEASANT WAY TO HUMAN SUFFERING AND INJUSTICE. THE PLEASURE IS THUS A METARESPONSE, AND REFLECTS FEELINGS WHICH ARE AT THE BASIS OF MORALITY. THIS HELPS EXPLAIN WHY TRAGEDY IS SUPPOSED TO BE A HIGHER ART FORM THAN COMEDY, AND PROVIDES A NEW WAY OF SEEING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE MORALITY OF AN ARTWORK AND ITS VALUE.

S. L. Hurley's ambitious work brings these two areas of lively debate into overdue contact with each other.

Why does it matter whether and how individuals consciously control their behavior? It matters for many reasons. Here I focus on concerns about social influences of which agents are typically unaware on aggressive behavior.

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1995, given by Susan Hurley, an American philosopher.

This chapter contains sections titled: I. Knowing Oneself: The Cartesian Project Ii. Where Am I? Being in the World Iii. Who Am I? Existence Precedes Essence Iv. What Am I? Notes.

Lingering skepticism about climate change might be due in part to the way climate projections are perceived by members of the public. Variability between scientists’ estimates might give the impression that scientists disagree about the fact of climate change rather than about details concerning the extent or timing. Providing uncertainty estimates might clarify that the variability is due in part to quantifiable uncertainty inherent in the prediction process, thereby increasing people's trust in climate projections. This hypothesis was tested in two (...) experiments. Results suggest that including uncertainty estimates along with climate projections leads to an increase in participants’ trust in the information. Analyses explored the roles of time, place, demographic differences, and initial belief in climate change. Implications are discussed in terms of the potential benefit of adding uncertainty estimates to public climate projections. (shrink)

An ethnographic field study about the informed consent process in investigational drug trials for seriously ill persons with hepatitis C suggests that nurses and physicians referred to these trials as giving treatment, even though they involved placebos. Interview data and informed consent documents contained frequent references to the term `treatment trial' or `treatment'. Although these findings were unexpected and not the original focus of our study, we consider them in the light of an extensive literature on the `therapeutic misconception' that (...) has been described among physicians and patients with AIDS and other serious illnesses. We also suggest that certain organizational and professional characteristics of nursing and medicine reinforce this tendency to refer to the trials as treatment. Implications for further research are provided. (shrink)

Philosophy of neuroscience may seem an odd thing to do. What can a philosopher add to what neuroscience itself has to say, other than at some very abstract level, far removed from empirical details and the interests of scientists? At some point you take a deep breath, acknowledge the methodological questions, and just go ahead, spurred on by the sheer philosophical interest and excitement abroad in the neurosciences today. So it is very gratifying to a philosopher of neuroscience for such (...) a distinguished neuropsychologist as Marcel Kinsbourne to find added value in the result. (shrink)

Why is neural activity in a particular area expressed as experience of red rather than green, or as visual experience rather than auditory? Indeed, why does it have any conscious expression at all? These familiar questions indicate the explanatory gap between neural activity and ‘what it’s like’-- qualities of conscious experience. The comparative explanatory gaps, intermodal and intramodal, can be separated from the absolute explanatory gap and associated zombie issues--why does neural activity have any conscious expression at all?. Here I (...) focus on comparative gaps: why is neural activity in a given area expressed as this type of experience rather than that type of experience? (shrink)

Late Tokugawa society and the crisis of community -- Before the Kojikiden : the divine age narrative in Tokugawa Japan -- Motoori Norinaga : discovering Japan -- Ueda Akinari : history and community -- Fujitani Mitsue : the poetics off community -- Tachibana Moribe : cosmology and community -- National literature, intellectual history, and the new Kokugaku -- Conclusion : imagined Japan(s).

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about animal rationality and mental processing in animals. This book discusses the theoretical issues and distinctions that bear on attributions of rationality to animals and draws some contrasts between rationality and certain other traits of animals to determine the relationships between them. It explores the relations between behaviour and the processes that explain behaviour, and the senses in which animal behaviour might be rational in virtue of features other than (...) classical reasoning processes on the human model. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beardsley for the Twenty-First CenturySusan L. Feagin (bio)When I was a graduate student in the early 1970s, Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art,1 published originally in 1968, was all the rage, eclipsing Beardsley's monumental Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism as the most important book in the field at the time. Goodman's book veered decidedly away from aesthetics and toward the philosophy of art; insofar as "the aesthetic" remained, (...) it was explained in cognitive terms. However, Beardsley's Aesthetics continued to provide a valuable resource for those of us who took questions about value and evaluation to be central to the philosophical enterprise, even if we chose to focus on the philosophy of art more or less independently of the aesthetic. Beardsley's functionalist account of aesthetic value is adaptable as a framework for understanding artistic value and evaluation, as is his opposition to (what also seemed to me to be) the too-easy ploy of attributing intrinsic value to our experiences of art. I ended up writing my dissertation on general criteria of criticism—with a chapter devoted to Beardsley's views—arguing that once one employs the notion of artworks having a function, general criteria are not needed to provide a logical connection between a work's good-making or bad-making qualities and its value as a work of art.Nevertheless, Beardsley's instrumentalist view that the value of an artwork resides in its capacity to provide an aesthetic experience contains a major structural problem—what I shall call "Beardsley's dilemma," which he continued to struggle with in his later work.2 The problem lies in the tension between the claim that the value of a work resides in its capacity to evoke an experience having a certain phenomenological quality, and the claim that the properties or qualities of the work are valuable not merely as a means for producing such an experience. [End Page 11]Fifty years on, philosophers of art continue to struggle with this dilemma in various guises. Though the nature of aesthetic experience is still a lively topic of debate, it is just as common to find the evocation of emotions and other affective responses—from Aristotelian pity and fear; to anger and pride and horror; to moods such as sadness and melancholy—touted as among the functions of art.3 In the first section of this essay, I describe why understanding Beardsley's dilemma is important if one takes having emotions and other affective responses to art as part of what is valuable about it. Emotions, after all, are typically alleged to be "in us," not in the object; simply jettisoning the concept of aesthetic experience or aesthetic emotion does not make the dilemma go away. In the second section I distinguish between Beardsley's instrumentalism and a noninstrumentalist version of functionalism as two different models for understanding art's value. Noninstrumentalist functionalism involves the idea that the value of a work lies in the activity of appreciating what is (aesthetically or artistically) valuable about it, rather than in an experience that occurs as a result of perceiving the work. Some exercises involving the evaluation of art and nonart objects—exercises that might usefully be undertaken by students using objects of their own choosing—illustrate how functionalism skirts Beardsley's dilemma and better explicates the nature and locus of the values concerned.I: From Aesthetic Experience to Garden-Variety EmotionsThe view that at least some artworks have as part of their function the production of emotions or other affective responses is a contemporary analogue of Beardsley's instrumentalist view that the function of artworks is to provide an aesthetic experience. The contemporary analogue, however, is not committed to the view that all artworks have, in some abstract sense, the same function but only insists, minimally, that it is at least part of the function of some works of art to produce some variety of emotions and other affective responses. That is, producing emotions may be conceived of as part of the function of a work, and a perceiver's having them as part of appreciating its value.Beardsley's dilemma arises when (at... (shrink)

Disneyland is work disguised as play; school disguised as vacation. While Walt Disney’s curriculum deploys across all of its products, it literally engulfs the approximately 50 million ‘guests’ who visit the Disney Parks each year. Drawing on Sarah Ahmed’s phenomenological reading of orientation in Queer phenomenology, this article investigates the ways in which Disney’s didacticism is made material through practices and procedures designed to orient the park’s visitors, to ensure that those visitors always know where they are and who they (...) are, as a means of educating ‘good’ citizens. The argument focuses not on Disneyland’s narrative curriculum but on its corporeal one: visitors are enticed to make affective investments, to construct or reconstruct their identities to comply with the Disney version of the ideal American worker and consumer, as the park attempts to reorient those who resist those roles. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to discuss an external whistleblowing event that occurred after all internal whistleblowing through the hierarchy of the organization had failed. It is argued that an organization that does not support those that whistle blow because of violation of professional standards is indicative of a failure of organizational ethics. Several ways to build an ethics infrastructure that could reduce the need to resort to external whistleblowing are discussed. A relational ethics approach is presented as a (...) way to eliminate the negative consequences of whistleblowing by fostering an interdependent moral community to address ethical concerns. (shrink)

This book shows the Emersonian arc in environmental ethics and nature writing extending into contemporary discussions of those topics. Dunston connects Emerson’s nature literacy and natural philosophy to contemporary forms of eco-feminism, living systems theory, Native American science, Asian philosophy, and environmental activism.

I argue that it is implausible to think that motives, As distinguished from intentions, Are relevant to literary criticism. The considerations leading to this conclusion offer some insights into the continuing debate over the relevance of artist's intentions to criticism. I also examine briefly why motives are not relevant to aesthetic judgments even though they are (plausibly) relevant to ethical ones. Some views of anscombe on intentions are discussed.