Infinite time register machines (ITRMs) are register machines which act on natural numbers and which are allowed to run for arbitrarily many ordinal steps. Successor steps are determined by standard register machine commands. At limit times register contents are defined by appropriate limit operations. In this paper, we examine the ITRMs introduced by the third and fourth author (Koepke and Miller in Logic and Theory of Algorithms LNCS, pp. 306–315, 2008), where a register content at a limit time is set (...) to the lim inf of previous register contents if that limit is finite; otherwise the register is reset to 0. The theory of these machines has several similarities to the infinite time Turing machines (ITTMs) of Hamkins and Lewis. The machines can decide all ${\Pi^1_1}$ sets, yet are strictly weaker than ITTMs. As in the ITTM situation, we introduce a notion of ITRM-clockable ordinals corresponding to the running times of computations. These form a transitive initial segment of the ordinals. Furthermore we prove a Lost Melody theorem: there is a real r such that there is a program P that halts on the empty input for all oracle contents and outputs 1 iff the oracle number is r, but no program can decide for every natural number n whether or not ${n \in r}$ with the empty oracle. In an earlier paper, the third author considered another type of machines where registers were not reset at infinite lim inf’s and he called them infinite time register machines. Because the resetting machines correspond much better to ITTMs we hold that in future the resetting register machines should be called ITRMs. (shrink)

Does thought have distinctive experiential features? Is there, in addition to sensory phenomenology, a kind of cognitive phenomenology--phenomenology of a cognitive or conceptual character? Leading philosophers of mind debate whether conscious thought has cognitive phenomenology and whether it is part of conscious perception and conscious emotion.

A sophisticated and original introduction to the philosophy of quantum mechanics from one of the world’s leading philosophers of physics In this book, Tim Maudlin, one of the world’s leading philosophers of physics, offers a sophisticated, original introduction to the philosophy of quantum mechanics. The briefest, clearest, and most refined account of his influential approach to the subject, the book will be invaluable to all students of philosophy and physics. Quantum mechanics holds a unique place in the history of physics. (...) It has produced the most accurate predictions of any scientific theory, but, more astonishing, there has never been any agreement about what the theory implies about physical reality. Maudlin argues that the very term “quantum theory” is a misnomer. A proper physical theory should clearly describe what is there and what it does—yet standard textbooks present quantum mechanics as a predictive recipe in search of a physical theory. In contrast, Maudlin explores three proper theories that recover the quantum predictions: the indeterministic wavefunction collapse theory of Ghirardi, Rimini, and Weber; the deterministic particle theory of deBroglie and Bohm; and the conceptually challenging Many Worlds theory of Everett. Each offers a radically different proposal for the nature of physical reality, but Maudlin shows that none of them are what they are generally taken to be. (shrink)

Dispositions are essential to our understanding of the world. Dispositions: A Debate is an extended dialogue between three distinguished philosophers - D.M. Armstrong, C.B. Martin and U.T. Place - on the many problems associated with dispositions, which reveals their own distinctive accounts of the nature of dispositions. These are then linked to other issues such as the nature of mind, matter, universals, existence, laws of nature and causation.

There are various senses in which a physical theory may be said to "unify" different forces, with the unification being deeper of more shallow in different cases. This paper discusses some of these distinctions.

In this paper we defend the doxastic conception of delusions against the metacognitive account developed by Greg Currie and collaborators. According to the metacognitive model, delusions are imaginings that are misidentified by their subjects as beliefs: the Capgras patient, for instance, does not believe that his wife has been replaced by a robot, instead, he merely imagines that she has, and mistakes this imagining for a belief. We argue that the metacognitive account is untenable, and that the traditional conception of (...) delusions as beliefs should be retained. (shrink)

Most countries promote mass immunisation programmes. The varying policy details raise a raft of philosophical issues. I have two broad aims in this paper. First, I hope to begin to remedy a rather curious philosophical neglect of immunisation. With this in mind, I take a broad approach to the topic hoping to introduce rather than settle a range of philosophical issues. My second aim has two aspects: I argue that the states should have pro-immunisation policies, and I advance a view (...) of the subsequent and more specific question as to which sorts of pro-immunisation policies they should prefer. I use the immunisation policies of the United States and New Zealand to frame my discussion of these substantive questions. Immunisation is effectively compulsory in the United States. New Zealand, by contrast, requires evidence not of immunisation but of immunisation status upon school enrolment: New Zealand's policy effectively makes immunisation choice compulsory. I argue that, as between the pro-immunisation policies of the United States and New Zealand, the latter should be preferred. Though the threshold question as to whether states should have pro-immunisation policies should be answered affirmatively, the move to compulsory immunisation cannot be justified. (shrink)

On the Move presents a rich history of one of the key concepts of modern life: mobility. Increasing mobility has been a constant throughout the modern era, evident in mass car ownership, plane travel, and the rise of the Internet. And typically, people have equated increasing mobility with increasing freedom. However, as Cresswell shows, while mobility has certainly increased in modern times, attempts to control and restrict mobility are just as characteristic of modernity. Through a series of fascinating historical episodes (...) Cresswell shows how mobility and its regulation have been central to the experience of modernity. (shrink)

Imagine living in the future in a world already damaged by humankind, a world where resources are insufficient to meet everyone's basic needs and where a chaotic climate makes life precarious. Then imagine looking back into the past, back to our own time and assessing the ethics of the early twenty-first century. "Ethics for a Broken World" imagines how the future might judge us and how living in a time of global environmental degradation might utterly reshape the politics and ethics (...) of the future. This book is presented as a series of history of philosophy lectures given in the future, studying the classic texts from a past age of affluence, our own time. The central ethical questions of our time are shown to look very different from the perspective of a ruined world. The aim of "Ethics for a Broken" World is to look at our present with the benefit of hindsight - to reimagine contemporary philosophy in an historical context - and to highlight the contingency of our own moral and political ideals. (shrink)

Critics have argued that comparative philosophy is inherently flawed or even impossible. What standards can we use to describe and evaluate different cultures' philosophies? How do we avoid projecting our own ways of thinking onto others? Can we overcome the vast divergences in history, language, and ways of organizing reality that we find in China, India, Africa, and the West? Doing Philosophy Comparatively is the first comprehensive introduction to the foundations, problems, and methods of comparative philosophy. It is divided into (...) three parts: . A wide-ranging examination of the basic concepts of comparative philosophy, including "philosophy," "comparison," "tradition," and "culture." . A discussion of the central problems that arise in extending philosophy across cultural boundaries: linguistic, justificatory, and evaluative incommensurability; projection and asymmetry; and the validity of cultural generalizations. . A critical look at the dominant contemporary approaches to comparative philosophy. This book offers a basic tool-kit for doing philosophy at the cross-cultural level. Drawing on many examples from the past and present of comparative philosophy, it engages readers in sustained reflection on how to think comparatively. (shrink)

The car has become ubiquitous in late modern society and has become the leading object in the ordinary social relations of mobility. Despite its centrality to the culture and material form of modern societies, the relationship between the car and human beings has remained largely unexplored by sociology. This article argues that cars are combined with their drivers into an assemblage, the ‘driver-car’, which has become a form of social being that brings about distinctive social actions in modern society – (...) driving, transporting, parking, consuming, polluting, killing, communicating and so on. To understand the nature of this assemblage a number of theoretical perspectives that describe the interaction and collaboration between human beings and complex objects are explored; the process of driving, ‘affordance’, actor-network theory, and the embodied relationship between driver and car. This theoretical account of the driver-car is intended as a preliminary to the empirical investigation of the place of the driver-car in modern societies. (shrink)

Nissen and Bullemer's serial reaction time task has proven to be a useful model task for exploring implicit sequence learning. Neuropsychological research indicates that SRT learning may depend on the integrity of the basal ganglia, but not on medial temporal and diencephalic structures that are crucial for explicit learning. Recent neuroimaging research demonstrates that motor cortical areas , prefrontal, and parietal cortex also may be involved. This paper reviews this neuropsychological and neuroimaging research, but finds it lacking specific links between (...) structure and function. In order to promote better functional hypotheses, the second part of the paper examines the function of these brain areas from a broader perspective. Neuroimaging and neuropsychological research with human subjects, as well as neurophysiological and lesion research with animals, suggests a number component operations that these brain mechanisms may contribute to learning in the SRT task. (shrink)

The Meno is one of the foundational dialogues of the Platonic tradition - it initiates a series of investigations into subjects which lie at the heart of philosophy: What is virtue? How is it acquired?This edition of Taylor's revision of Sydenham's translation adds three introductory essays by Tim Addley and an extract from Procclus' commentary on The Republic on Virtue.

Motivated by accounts of concept use in autistic spectrum disorder and a computational model of weak central coherence we examined comprehension and production vocabulary in typically‐developing children and those with ASD and Down syndrome. Controlling for frequency, familiarity, length and imageability, Colorado Meaningfulness played a hitherto unremarked role in the vocabularies of children with ASD. High Colorado Meaningful words were underrepresented in the comprehension vocabularies of 2‐ to 12‐year‐olds with ASD. The Colorado Meaningfulness of a word is a measure of (...) how many words can be associated with it. Situations in which high Colorado Meaningfulness words are encountered are typically highly variable, and words with High Colorado Meaningfulness often involve extensive use of context. Our data suggest that the number of contexts in which a particular word can appear has a role in determining vocabulary in ASD. This suggestion is consistent with the weak central coherence theory of autism. (shrink)

[About the book] Although this collection of articles is not formally a commentary on Elizabeth Anscombe's famous article of the same title, in which she criticised the moral philosophy prevalent in 1958, a number of the contributors do take Anscombe's work as a starting point. Taken together the collection could be seen as a demonstration of the extent to which moral philosophers have since attempted to answer Anscombe's challenge, and to develop an approach to their subject which, while psychologically plausible, (...) is neither based on divine law nor permissive of the impermissible. (shrink)

What does it mean to be a citizen in a multicultural society? And what role must patriotism play in defining our relationship with our country and fellow citizens? In The Virtuous Citizen Tim Soutphommasane answers these questions with a critical defence of liberal nationalism. Considering a range of contemporary political debates from Europe, North America and Australia, over issues including multiculturalism, national history, civic education and immigration, Soutphommasane argues that a love of country should be valued alongside tolerance, mutual respect (...) and public reasonableness as a civic virtue. A liberal form of patriotism, grounded in national identity, is, if anything, essential for political stability in a diverse society. This book is required reading not only for political theorists and philosophers but also for researchers and professionals in political science, sociology, history and public policy. (shrink)

Acetylation of histones is an essential element regulating chromatin structure and transcription. MYST (Moz, Ybf2/Sas3, Sas2, Tip60) proteins form the largest family of histone acetyltransferases and are present in all eukaryotes. Surprisingly, until recently this protein family was poorly studied. However, in the last few years there has been a substantial increase in interest in the MYST proteins and a number of key studies have shown that these chromatin modifiers are required for a diverse range of cellular processes, both in (...) health and disease. Translocations affecting MYST histone acetyltransferases can lead to leukemia and solid tumors. Some members of the MYST family are required for the development and self‐renewal of stem cell populations; other members are essential for the prevention of inappropriate heterochromatin spreading and for the maintenance of adequate levels of gene expression. In this review we discuss the function of MYST proteins in vivo. (shrink)

This volume brings together recent work by leading and up-and-coming philosophers on the topic of virtue epistemology. The prospects of virtue-theoretic analyses of knowledge depend crucially on our ability to give some independent account of what epistemic virtues are and what they are _for_. The contributions here ask how epistemic virtues matter apart from any narrow concern with defining knowledge; they show how epistemic virtues figure in accounts of various aspects of our lives, with a special emphasis on our practical (...) lives. In essence, the essays here put epistemic virtues to work. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson argued that ‘mature sensible experience (in general) presents itself as … an immediate consciousness of the existence of things outside us’ (1979: 97). He began his defence of this very natural idea by asking how someone might typically give a description of their current visual experience, and offered this example of such a description: ‘I see the red light of the setting sun filtering through the black and thickly clustered branches of the elms; I see the dappled deer (...) grazing in groups on the vivid green grass…’ (1979: 97). In other words, in describing experience, we tend to describe the objects of experience – the things which we experience – and the ways they are when we are experiencing them. Some go further. According to Heidegger. (shrink)

The greatest intensity of “live” life is captured from as close as possible in order to be borne as far as possible away. Jacques Derrida. Echographies of Television . Rainer Ganahl has made a study of studying. As part of his extensive autobiographical art practice, he documents and presents many of the ambitious educational activities he undertakes. For example, he has been videotaping hundreds of hours of solitary study that show him struggling to learn Chinese, Arabic and a host of (...) other languages. The stacked boxes of tapes are then presented like minimalist monoliths, dense archives of effort. About fifteen years ago, Ganahl began photographing the lectures that he attends. At the time, he hadn’t seen anyone else doing it, so besides his spare selection of images of the speaker and the audience, much of the time the lectures would just pass into memory, undocumented, or recorded in writing alone. Since then, he has felt the transition to digital cause a significant shift in his process. At the same time, he has seen the habit become ubiquitous as others photograph, record, and videotape the lectures all around him. In keeping with the theme of this inaugural issue of continent. , can we propose each small grouping of photographs that result an isthmus stretching between two disparate bodies of mind? The first being the body of the lecture as spelled out in the title of each work – the experience of the event in all its constituent parts. The second is the body of the recipient, the listener, in this case an artist, who plays a minimal role just beyond the prescripted behavior of sitting and listening. He uses a gesture of documentation to draw a line between himself and the event, creating an artwork. Františka + Tim Gilman: As we mentioned before, the theme of the magazine for this issue is "isthmus." It seems like a very good way into your work, and it leads us to ask what connection you see between your photographs of the lecture and the lecture itself? Rainer Ganahl: The relationship is of course a concrete, pictorial one, or if you want a mimetic one but also an abstract one because the photographs carry the title of the lecture, the names of the lecturers, the site, the institution and the time of the lecture. Photos are fixed moments of time and can reproduce images displayed and reproduce visuals presented at a moment but they don’t come with time based recordings that video or sound takes are offering. What remains of a lecture is usually just the memory, some notes and all the announcements of it. In my case I end up with a visual product I declare as my artwork. It might not differ from any snapshot taken by any other student or member of the audience but I do this in a semi-systematic way with certain rules and procedures I have set up. While I am at a lecture I am mainly focusing on the lecture itself. Last night I went to one of Slavoj Žižek which demanded quite some concentration. I even was asking him a question at the end. I took photos as well but still didn’t lose track of the lecture. I didn’t walk around, I was not preoccupied by where I was sitting and what light I was having like some of the other photographing and filming people in the room who came and left, moved around and tried to capture him from this and that angle, from close and far. I just sat there and concentrated on the lecture and yet managed to take about 30 or so images of him, the public around me and of the film clips he presented. Once the lecture is over the story changes: it all becomes a question of the images, their selection, their visual qualities, their labeling and archiving. The function of the images also change: not only do they stand for an intellectual event in a row of lectures that become part of my intellectual history within many possible such histories but they also have to function as art, something not everybody else with images of lecturers demands of their images. This is my specific claim as an artist to impose them as artworks. And as with all artistic propositions the offer can be accepted or rejected. I basically spend my life trying to do exactly that: making what I declare as art, offering something to anybody interested in it as my art, an offer that is not and will never be accepted as such by all people. F+T: What are your criteria for selection, i.e. how do you choose which lectures to photograph, by lecturer, by topic, or do you photograph any and every lecture you can? RG: As everything in my life, I go by my interest which is the result of many factors. If I am aware of a lecturer, read his books or appreciate his works my interest of attending his much higher than if I am not aware of it. I usually don’t go to lecturers simply based on their subjects—something that can happen of course, if the subject, the title of the lecture is promising or at the heart of my interest. Sometimes I also wait for years to get a change to photograph certain people but I do that in a very low-level “keep your ears up” mentality and not in a systematic scanning of all channels and possibilities. I do not go into philosophy departments and photograph everybody teaching there. I go with the flow—and unfortunately a great deal of great talks I also miss because I hear too late of them. Often, I also stumble into them by traveling, by getting emails from friends and by simply being in the right spot at the right time. Somehow you could look at my lecture par cours as some kind of loose intellectual flâneurism . If you know of interesting lectures and events, please, let me know. F+T: Is your selection of images more of a production or post-production method? That is, do you take a lot of photos and select only a few images from each lecture, or do you take them very selectively? Do you have a particular methodology for the selection of images? RG: This all changed a bit with the arrival of digital photography. In the beginning I had to pay a lot of money for film developing. Hence, I was taking either one role - 36 images - or half a role - 13 images - depending on who talked and whether they projected images. With the unlimited capacity of digital imaging I easily end up between 30 and 150 images of one event still depending of whether images are presented or not. In the first years of that project when I wasn’t fully aware yet of what I was doing, I printed at least 2 images of any lecture and sometimes three or even four, a choice that was also constrained by costs. But again, since I have a web site and since images can easily be selected and presented on my web site without generating remarkable costs I have now more and more pain to reduce them to less than ten or eight images for an event. Now, before I have them printed which really is expensive, I can present them already as artwork on my web site without any immediate costs. Thus the economic factor is at the end of the chain which enables me to be more ‘generous’ and include more images. Over the last years I have been mostly selecting at least four photographs for a lecture unit but recently also as many as ten. But so far only one set above four images has been actually printed and sold. What might sound even more shocking is the likely fact that if a curator or a collector demands me to reduce the number of images due to costs, I might compromise at this current stage if the images have not been yet printed or published outside my own web site. This means that to a certain degree any selection that has only seen publication on my web site and not yet been produced runs the risk to change in numbers of images included. Needless to say, I am the last one that finally makes a decision and I do honor all given earlier decision if those were final. F+T: How do you feel the act of photographing the lecture affects your reception of the contents of the lecture? And your recollection afterwards, do you remember the lecture more having photographed it, or just having sat and listened? RG: As mentioned above, I get very little distraction from photographing since I can multitask well and do not obsess about the quality of the image: I photograph from where I am and listen with my ears and not my eyes. I am not sure whether the images serve as a mnemonic devise to the content of the lecture if there are no images involved but they at least remind me that the lecture existed, the title of the lecture and the name of the people and institutions involved. The titles of the hundreds of lectures I took during the past 15 years can also be read as an essay of theoretical life in that period. This will be come more and more visible as time passes by. These images age much better than I do. F+T: You mentioned at the outset of our discussions that you started this practice some time ago and have seen the practice of photographing lecturers become more commonplace. Why do you think that this shift has taken place? RG: The answer is very simple. Photographing is now free of any charge and hence omnipresent. You buy a phone or any other personal digital assistant and it has a camera integrated in it whether you want it or not. There is no need to develop images and there is no hassle to keep images, to distribute images, to organize images and save them. It is all virtual, not creating any costs and doesn’t require any efforts. You don’t spend twenty dollars for photo-developing anymore, you don’t need to walk anymore to your pharmacy or your photo shop to drop off and return to pick up and pay. You don’t need to go to the post office to send somebody a picture. You have a program like Photoshop already built into your camera. Photographing is now a thing for everybody—with functioning cameras made for two year olds. It is technically now nearly impossible to make bad images. The image quality is virtually guaranteed by cheap, high performing, mini-computers packed into miniscule cameras. With all these technological changes, we are undergoing now a cultural paradigm shift that includes permanent recording (not only still image taking) of everything. I wonder even whether babies are just born to be photographed—at least a process where the first photograph is right there. What is interesting now, is how the law is trying to catch up. I am experiencing and expecting more restrictions on photographing and recording—something already in place in many museums and in certain galleries—as the recording devices become more and more invisible and undetectable. It is an interesting cat and mouse play and will end up with some of us that are photographing the world around us in court. The world has become very transparent and everybody is contributing to it with social networking technologies—like twitter and Facebook—that are designed to monitor and communicate every step we make in our lives. F+T: Why did you start the practice? As a way to remember, or to capture the experience of the lecture and the environment there? RG: A couple of years earlier I started to photograph my own reading seminars as part of my art work with results that surprised me positively. I really liked these images of students and people discussing heavy non-fiction with me. The reading seminars justified this kind of pictorialism. Then in 1995 I had the chance to attend an entire seminar by Edward Said entitled “The Representation of Intellectuals at Columbia University,” which really gave me the idea to start this series. Why not also photograph these lectures I visit all the time since this really is a way of representing intellectuals? F+T: The constellation of images and the title seem like a kind of portrait, do you agree? If so, is it a portrait of the speaker, of yourself, or of the event? RG: Well, to follow up on the previous question the lectures are more than just portraits of lecturers since I include not only the speakers but also the audience, an audience that is not named or specifically highlighted as is the speaker. So if we stick with the metaphor of the portrait we would have to extend it also to the environment, the class room, the lecture hall, the arrangements of seats or benches, tables, lecture stands and other stuff typically seen on my images. Often the walls are decorated or even tagged with graffiti or posters and other stuff. There is a big difference between a small seminar room at the English Department of Columbia University, full with books and cabinets and a lecture room at a Paris or Frankfurt university that accommodates 50 to 150 people. We should, maybe, also distinguish between lectures that are one time events—mostly open to the public, free of charge or paid—and events that are weekly, closed to the public and held mostly in universities that can cost fortunes or be paid by the State as it is still predominantly the case in continental Europe. All this, of course, is not necessarily announced in the title of the lecture and is subject to information that isn’t visible on the images. To a certain degree we see also portraits of a general privilege when it comes to the public of certain institutions that are highly selective and extremely costly without forgetting that most of the lectures are dealing with theory, art, philosophy and other highbrow subjects. In general, I would say we see very little if we don’t know already what’s going on, who the lecturer, the institutions, the context are in which we subsequently can zoom into variants like sexual, racial, or age-related make-up without ignoring clothing fashions, hair styling, body mannerisms, gadgets and stuff. F+T: Do you see a relation between this body of work and your other work, for example your language studies? RG: Everything I do is “unfortunately” related. I say unfortunately because this makes my work not so easy to grasp. The relationship to the language studies is relatively clear since both are originally grounded in the domain of education and knowledge production. Nearly all my work comes across that nexus where knowledge and power are addressed. I was at one point wondering what the relationship was to some of my earlier indexical work where I was happy alone with footnotes from books painted on the walls: I came to understand that both are just different manifestations of knowledge and information. F+T: Do you foresee continuing the series indefinitely, or is there an end to it? RG: I think that I will continue this series indefinitely or to be more precise, as long as I go listen to lectures and want to learn something which brings me to your previous question: What do the reading seminars, language studies, historical research and lecture hopping have in common: I learn something. Further Reading Rainer Ganahl’s website William Kaizen. “ Vulgar Politics .” art&education . April 2009. Web. Smith, Roberta. “ Rainer Ganahl: ‘Language of Emigration & Pictures of Emigration .’” New York Times April 23 2010. Web. (shrink)

Anthony Kronman’s 1980 article “Contract Law and Distributive Justice” has become something of a classic in the philosophy of private law. Kronman argued that any theory of contract which relied upon voluntariness was necessarily concerned with distributive justice, since voluntariness was itself a distributive notion. The argument targeted libertarian accounts of contract. Given the distributive nature of voluntariness, the claim went, libertarians could not give an adequate account of contract without violating their own injunction against appeal to the “fair division (...) of wealth among the members of society”(472). It is easy to see why Kronman’s article attracted so much attention. The idea that voluntariness isnotdistributive is central not just to libertarianism but to liberalism generally. Kronman’s critique, though targeting a not terribly common species of liberalism, threatens the genus itself. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to differentiate initiation from indoctrination, and to return a positive significance to the notion of initiation, as a pedagogy that contributes not only to the perpetuation of a particular form of life or community, but that provides the next generation with means to advance that knowledge beyond its existing boundaries. When we conflate the terms ‘initiation’ and ‘indoctrination’ or only mark a minor difference between the two, we lose meaning. The explanatory and predictive power (...) of our statements is weakened by this failure to take seriously the difference between these two terms. By ignoring the progressive potential in initiation, and condemning that pedagogy as uncritical, educational theorists fail to recognize the intermediate steps that need to be taken in educating a student to be a creative and responsive thinker within a cultural, i.e. symbolic, context. Within the pedagogy of initiation crucial methods for teaching students to engage existing representations of truth, rules of practice, and principles of meaning-making are employed. This article draws upon case studies and theorists in anthropology to offer a description of initiation that holds progressive potential, and explains the possible relevance of initiatory pedagogy for multicultural education. (shrink)

Kupperman (1995) advances an anti-essentialist view of emotions in which he suggests that there can be emotion without feeling or affect, emotion without corresponding motivation, and emotion without an intentional relation to an object such that the emotion is about that object in some way. In this reply to Kupperman's essay, I suggest a number of problems with his rejection of the essentialist position. I argue that in his discussion of feelings Kupperman is crucially not clear about the distinction between (...) the ascription of emotions by others versus the experience of emotions by an individual. Furthermore, I also question his analysis of the role of linguistic empiricism in philosophy and psychology. With respect to Kupperman's analysis of intentionality, I argue that he confuses the ability to readily identify intentional objects with the issue of their actual existence. Finally, I suggest that Kupperman confuses the concepts of action and motivation in his discussion of motivation. (shrink)

This review focuses on the theory of emotion outlined in Chapter 3 of Rolls's The brain and emotion. It is proposed that Rolls's emphasis on a relatively simple neurobiologically derived emotion scheme does not allow him to present a comprehensive account of emotion. Consequently, high-level cognitive processes, such as appraisal, end up being retained in the theory despite Rolls's skepticism about their utility. An argument is put forward that the concept of appraisal in the emotion literature is more than semantic (...) convention and actually allows us to talk about multiple functional-level routes to the generation of emotion – a characteristic of the latest generation of theories in the cognition-emotion literature. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: -- Introduction - the Small Screen and Morality - Morality on Television - Sociology and the Moral OrderTelevisuality: Style and the Small ScreenThe Phenomenology of Television - Society and the Small Screen - Mediating Morality- Television and the Imaginary - Conclusion.

Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Volume 90, Issue 2, Page 407-410, June 2012.

Professional roles are often thought to bring role-specific permissions and obligation, which may allow or require role-occupants to do things they would not be permitted or required to do outside their roles, and which as individuals they would rather not do. This feature of professional roles appears to bring them into conflict both with 'ordinary' or non-role morality, and with personal integrity which is often thought to demand some form of personal endorsement of one's conduct. How are we to reconcile (...) the demands of roles with ordinary morality and with personal integrity? This collection draws together a set of papers which explore these questions as they bear upon a number of different professional roles, including those of the lawyer, the judge and the politician, and from a variety of perspectives, including contemporary analytic moral theory, jurisprudence, psychoanalytic theory, virtue ethics, and contextualism, and, more broadly, from philosophy and legal academia and practice. (shrink)

There is a widespread perception that even when lawyers are acting squarely within their roles, being good lawyers, they display the vices of dishonesty and deviousness. At the heart of the perception is the so called standard conception of the lawyer's role according to which lawyers owe special duties to their clients which render permissible, or even mandatory, acts that would otherwise count as morally impermissible. Many have concluded that the standard conception should be set aside. This book suggests that (...) the moral implications of the standard conception are often mischaracterised. Critics suggest that the conception requires lawyers to secure any advantage the law can be made to give. But Dare offers a moral argument for the conception, according to which it justifies a more limited and moderate sphere of professional conduct than is normally supposed, allowing lawyers to preserve their integrity while giving proper weight to the role-differentiated permissions and obligations of their roles. (shrink)

Atticus Finch, the lawyer-hero of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, played by Gregory Peck in the classic 1962 film version, has been adopted as an exemplar by advocates of a virtue ethics approach to legal ethics. When Atticus condones a departure from the rules of law in order to spare Boo Radley a trial, these theorists argue, he displays practical wisdom, or phronesis, and shows that the good lawyer gives priority to judgement and character over rules and principles. Yet (...) Atticus can be understood in a quite different way as a tragic figure who, when faced with the possibility of a tragedy in Boo's case, abandons the commitment to law which earlier was a central part of his character. From this perspective, Atticus' lesson for legal ethics is not about the priority of judgement and character, but instead about the value of the rules and principles he abandons. (shrink)

Taking its title from the discussion of a ‘new Meno’ to be found in Difference and Repetition, through an examination of the link between learning and thinking set out across Deleuze's work this paper charts the important sense in which philosophical thought is characterised by an apprenticeship. The claim is that just as certain aesthetic and biological processes involve inscrutable and non-resembling elements that cannot be known in advance, the experience of learning is one oriented by unforseen encounters. With a (...) view to a peculiarly heuristic use of dictionaries in the case of language learning, the paper shows how the logic of this experience is one whereby the putative meaning of things does not enjoy a priority over the immanence of their expression. (shrink)

In this paper, we try to confront Robert Audis moral epistemology, namely his intuitionism, based on the concept of a self-evident moral proposition, with two main problems: disagreement and dogmatism within moral discourse. Although Audi can meet those classical objections in his theory, we think that some problems remain. We proceed – after an introduction – in five sections in order to pursue this end. After a short introductory section, we first reconstruct the classical intuitionist moral epistemology. We then discuss (...) the dogmatism and the disagreement objection and, in doing so, introduce Audi’s own version of a moral epistemology. After having proposed that the disagreement objection concerns an explanatory problem, we discuss a second version, namely disagreement as a problem of rationality. In the fourth section we present a third version, disagreement as a problem of moral discourse, understood as an intersubjective enterprise. In the fifth section we propose a solution to disagreement situations of this kind. (shrink)

This article replies to criticism of my article, “Is Religious Belief a Kind of Belief?” by Sebastian Gäb, Eva Schmidt and Michael Scott.