The Philosophy of Representation -- The Transition -- The Sign-Systems of 1908 -- Rhetorical Concerns -- Interpretation, Worldviews and the Object.

This paper examines the emotional processes in Machiavellian leadership. The leadership literature portrays Machiavellians as ‘dark’ individuals that engage in unethical actions, causing employee dissatisfaction, distress, emotional exhaustion and high turnover. However, research has seldom questioned the processes behind these unethical and negative outcomes. This study explores Machiavellian emotional processes at multiple levels—within-persons and relational levels (between-persons and interpersonal interactions in organisations). In this study, emotions and leadership are not explored in isolation but as social processes that occur in relationships (...) between leaders and employees in evolving organisational settings. This study draws on 20 participants from four large multi-national construction firms in Sri Lanka. Open-ended semi-structured interviews were conducted to explore the emotions of Machiavellians in organisations. The findings suggest that Machiavellianism influences leader and employee emotional processes. Furthermore, the emotional processes, influenced by Machiavellianism, appear to facilitate the development of leader and employee relationships and emotional experiences at within-persons and relational levels in organisations. (shrink)

This article explores the story of ‘the other Mersault’ whose narrative is published in the posthumous and arguably incomplete work A happy death. That this work is incomplete and that it appears to be a precursor to The outsider, has arguably limited scholarly analysis of its character and plot. However, the themes that are explored in A happy death are significant in their distinction to those themes that are experienced by the other, younger, Meursault. In A happy death the world (...) must be conquered by the will of a young man to find his happiness. He is not an outsider, and he is not content with his lot. Given an opportunity to address this latter concern, he acts upon his life in a search for happiness and in so doing engages in an ultimately frustrating, yet in some way enlightening, quest. In this article Mersault’s search for happiness is plotted in relation to his thinking about time, childhood, happiness and death. His journey is considered in relation to other stories of the search for some greater human condition. It is argued that his will to be happy reveals the absurdity of searching or not searching. This absurdity is considered in relation to the nature and purpose of school in the sense that such a relation to the search for knowledge might free school from its disciplinary tasks … and frees the learner, the child, the teacher, from the violence of having to want to know. (shrink)

This paper is about the contemporary debate concerning folk psychology – the debate between the proponents of the theory theory of folk psychology and the friends of the simulation alternative.¹ At the outset, we need to ask: What should we mean by this term ‘folk psychology’?

This article attempts to highlight the importance of including research sustainability as imperative when assessing human medical research in terms of ethical principles. Using a scoping review of recent literature, the complexity of research sustainability is highlighted with key themes and concepts surrounding this important topic being recognized and discussed. An overall paucity of guidance documents was identified and recommendations have been made to practically address this deficiency. An example of a research sustainability evaluation tool which is currently being piloted (...) has been provided for possible adaptation and use by Ethics Committees and Institutional Review Boards to bolster the concept and inclusion of sustainability during the research approval process. (shrink)

The infamous story of a young office clerk called Meursault has long entertained literary critics, scholars, musicians, artists and school teachers for the light and shadow that it reveals around and on the human condition. His character has been lauded as existential hero and rebuked as lacking agency. In this article, his story, in Camus’ The outsider, is explored as an educational challenge to a society to reflect on the territory it occupies, and the ways in which the sociopolitical machinery (...) deals with perceived anomalies. The article explores notions of normalcy and ordinariness in relation to Meursault’s thinking and experience in order to consider the idea of what lies outside, or beyond, thinking about education. The argument here is that Meursault’s failure to intervene in his own life challenges both the ways in which we are ordinarily educated and the ways in which we ordinarily resist our education. (shrink)

Many find it plausible that for a given beneficiary, Y, benefactor, R, and action, ϕ, Y’s being grateful to R for ϕ-ing implies Y’s being grateful that R ϕ-ed. According to some philosophers who hold this view, all instances of gratitude to, or “prepositional gratitude,” are also instances of gratitude that, or “propositional gratitude.” These philosophers believe there is a single unified concept of gratitude, a phenomenon that is essentially gratitude that, and whose manifestations sometimes have additional features that make (...) them instances of gratitude to as well. In this article, I show that view to be mistaken. I base my argument on two hypothetical cases, in each of which a beneficiary, Y, is grateful to a benefactor, R, for ϕ-ing, but not grateful that R ϕ-ed. Generalizing from those cases and other cases of gratitude, I argue that prepositional gratitude is the proper response to benevolence-motivated action and propositional gratitude consists in a beneficiary’s judging a state of affairs to be valuable for himself and welcoming that state of affairs. Because not every instance of a benefactor’s acting benevolently toward a beneficiary is something that beneficiary finds valuable for himself and welcomes, it is possible to be grateful to a benefactor for ϕ-ing but not grateful that she ϕ-ed. Prepositional gratitude and propositional gratitude can each occur without the other and are thus two distinct phenomena. I conclude by explaining the importance of accurately understanding the relationship between prepositional gratitude and propositional gratitude. (shrink)

This is the second of two articles that are connected in a reading of The plague by Albert Camus. The other article is a determined narration of the events of a tragedy that befalls a city on the coast of Algeria. That article resists analysis beyond the decisions that are made regarding text to use, and of course interpretations to make. This article is juxtaposed to the first, with the intention of taking key themes of education and narration and considering (...) them within the context of another tragedy and another kind of narration. In this article the narratives of government education policy are considered in relation to the event of a tragic earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. The government narratives are then replaced by the narratives of Oran to consider alternative ways of thinking about tragedy and education and in particular to think about the ways in which the narrative relates to the tragedy and to any learning that might happen as a result of, and during, a tragedy. (shrink)

The plague narrates the stories of a group of men whose lives interconnect around the experience of exile during the event of a plague. This article selects and summarizes themes from each of their stories. The purpose of these selections is to present an interpretation of Camus’ narratives that can be juxtaposed to an analysis, overleaf, of the educational nature of narratives, and in particular of the event of the tragedy. This article then maps out the narrative of the town (...) and of seven men. It may be read alone as a reading of Camus’ novel with rich, yet unmapped, contributions to thinking about education, or it may be read concurrently with its analytical partner through which the meaning of Camus’ work is traced onto a contemporary tragedy and a city’s educational responses. (shrink)

I argue that there is nothing wrong with perfect voyeurism , covert watching or listening that is neither discovered nor publicized. After a brief discussion of privacy I present attempts from Stanley Benn, Daniel Nathan, and James Moor to show that the act is wrong. I argue that these authors fail to make their case. However, I maintain that, if detected or publicized, voyeurism can do grave harm and to that extent should be severely punished. I conclude with some thoughts (...) on the stubborn intuition that perfect voyeurism is wrong despite the absence of harm. (shrink)

This second volume continues the story told in the first by focusing on the writings of a selection of seminal thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in England, the German speaking world and in France, ending with the debate around the French Revolution of 1789.

A major recurrent feature of the intellectual landscape in cognitive science is the appearance of a collection of essays by Noam Chomsky. These collections serve both to inform the wider cognitive science community about the latest developments in the approach to the study of language that Chomsky has advocated for almost fifty years now,1 and to provide trenchant criticisms of what he takes to be mistaken philosophical objections to this approach. This new collection contains seven essays, the earliest of which (...) were first published about ten years ago. So the linguistic work that is summarised is within the principles and parameters approach and some of the essays (particularly the first and last) provide an outline of the main ideas of the emerging minimalist programme.2 But this is not primarily a book about the details of recent linguistic theory. Rather, in these essays Chomsky offers a wealth of critical commentary on some of the most influential arguments in the philosophy of mind and language that have appeared over the past two decades or so. Indeed, Chomsky discusses a vast range of philosophical topics and reaches some radical conclusions – that many influential philosophical discussions on language and mind are utterly misconceived and that, for example, the traditional mind-body problem cannot even be coherently stated. (shrink)

Free market environmentalists believe that the extension of private property rights and market transactions is sufficient to address environmental difficulties. But there is no invisible hand operating in markets that ensures that environmentally sound practices will be employed just because property rights are in private hands. Also, liability laws and the court systems cannot be relied upon to force polluters to internalize the social costs of pollution. Third, market prices do not provide an objective measure of environmental matters. Finally, there (...) is a right to a livable environment that justifies regulations protecting the public from unreasonable environmental risks. (shrink)

Philosophers have traditionally conceived of discovery in terms of internal cognitive acts. Close consideration of Rosalind Franklin's role in the discovery of the DNA double helix, however, reveals some problems with this traditional conception. This article argues that defining discovery in terms of mental operations entails problematic conclusions and excludes acts that should fall within the domain of discovery. It proposes that discovery be expanded to include external acts of making visible. Doing so allows for a reevaluation of Franklin's role (...) in the discovery of the structure of DNA. (shrink)

The topic of this paper is the complex interaction between attention, fixation, and one species of change blindness. The two main interpretations of the target phenomenon are the ‘blindness’ interpretation and the ‘inaccessibility’ interpretation. These correspond to the sparse view (Dennett 1991; Tye, 2007) and the rich view (Dretske 2007; Block, 2007a, 2007b) of visual consciousness respectively. Here I focus on the debate between Fred Dretske and Michael Tye. Section 1 describes the target phenomenon and the dialectics it entails. Section (...) 2 explains how attention and fixation weigh in these debates, and argues that Dretske’s hyper-rich view fails precisely because he overlooks certain effects of attention and fixation. Section 3 explains why Tye’s view is also unsatisfying, mainly because he misconceives the degree of access. Section 4 then puts forward the positive model covariance, which has it that the degree of cognitive access tracks the degree of phenomenology, and contrasts it with Block’s view on the Sperling iconic memory paradigm. The paper ends with a discussion of levels of seeing, which involve crowding, indexing, and other visual phenomena. Change ‘blindness’ is a set of phenomena that was discovered about two decades ago, yet an entirely satisfying understanding is still lacking. To move forward, a more detailed understanding of attention and fixation is called for. (shrink)

Whitehead's 1922 theory of gravitation continues to attract the attention of philosophers, despite evidence presented in 1971 that it violates experiment. We demonstrate that the theory strongly fails five quite different experimental tests, and conclude that, notwithstanding its meritorious philosophical underpinnings, Whitehead's theory is truly dead.

economists. According to Rosenberg, Milton Friedman's positive methodology is being supplanted by Lakatos's methodology of scientific research programs (MSRP). At any rate, the Kuhnian wave of the seventies is being swallowed up by the Lakatosian program. (Redman 142) There have been a number of attempts to comprehend mainstream (bourgeois) economics as a Lakatosian research program, or as a set of competing research programs. (Latsis, ed. passim; de Marchi and Blaug, eds.)i In contrast, the extent to which the Marxian study of (...) capitalism can be interpreted from this perspective has hardly been explored.ii In the following sections some provisional steps in this direction will be taken. I shall first introduce a reading of Marx's Capital that emphasizes the systematic dialectic of economic categories unifying that work. I shall then ask whether we can arrive at a better understanding of Marx's systematic dialectic through considering how it contributes to a scientific research 1 program in Lakatos's sense of the term. Two other themes will arise along the way. Certain shortcomings in Lakatos's framework will be discussed. Also, a number of reasons for considering the Marxian research program superior to that of neoclassical economics will be mentioned. It should be stressed that the main topic of the present paper is the role of systematic dialectics in the Marxian research program. The other themes go far beyond the scope of single paper. Lakatos's work can be understood as a response to the dead-end of naive falsificationism. According to this simplistic methodology, theories are to be tested by deducing predictions from them and then determining whether the events predicted occur. If the predicted events do take place at some later time, this does not verify the validity of the theory. That would be to commit the fallacy of affirming the consequent; there may be many other theories that also lead to the prediction in question. In contrast, if the predicted events do not take place, that is sufficient to falsify the proposed theory.. (shrink)

The three volumes of Capital form an immensely complex work, including a variety of quite different sorts of texts. Marx’s systematic ordering of the essential determinations of capital, beginning in Volume I with relatively simple and abstract social forms and then proceeding step by step to ever more complex and concrete determinations provides a unifying thread. Many fundamental structures of the capitalist mode of production remained to be considered at the point where Marx left off in Volume III. At one (...) point, at least, Marx planned to conclude his project with volumes on the state, foreign trade, and the world market and crisis (Marx 1973, 227, 264). This paper is devoted to two questions. Why exactly did Marx place the category of the world market at the very culmination of his systematic ordering? And what are the essential features of the social form referred to by this category? Before addressing these issues some further methodological remarks are in order. (shrink)

Avicenna (d. 1037) and Tūsī (d. 1274) have different doctrines on the contradiction and conversion of the absolute proposition. Following Avicenna's presentation of the doctrine in Pointers and reminders, and comparing it with what is given in Tūsī's commentary, allow us to pinpoint a major reason why Avicenna and Tūsī have different treatments of the modal syllogistic. Further comparison shows that the syllogistic system Rescher described in his research on Arabic logic more nearly fits Tūsī than Avicenna. This in turn (...) has consequences for analysing Avicenna's logic, and for writing the history of a fascinating period of change and diversity in the discipline in the medieval Islamic world. (shrink)

A major and timely re-examination of key areas in the social and political thought of Hegel and Marx. The editors' extensive introduction surveys the development of the connection from the Young Hegelians through the main Marxist thinkers to contemporary debates. Leading scholars including Terrell Carver, Chris Arthur, and Gary Browning debate themes such as: the nature of the connection itself scientific method political economy the Hegelian basis to Marxs' "Doctoral Dissertation" human needs history and international relations.

This is a précis of my recent monograph John McDowell on Worldly Subjectivity: Oxford Kantianism Meets Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences. I first describe the key question the book is trying to answer via understanding McDowell’s thinking and the general outline of it. The key question is a Kantian how-possible question, and the outline includes the distinction between first and second nature, the contrast between Cogito and Homo sapience, and how a minded human animal can be a perceiver, knower, thinker, speaker, (...) agent, person, and conceptual cum self-conscious being in the world. I then focus on two key notions of the subtitles—phenomenology and cognitive sciences—and explain how they figure in the text. After that, a chapter-by-chapter summary is provided, albeit selectively. This introductory piece ends with a prediction that McDowell’s works will still be widely discussed in the reasonable distant future. (shrink)

The historical Molyneux’s question – roughly, whether congenital blind subjects can visually identify shapes in front of them right after being made to see – is having its renaissance in recent years (Ferretti and Glenney, 2021). While there have been many different formulations of it, and many attempted answers as well, no clear consensus has been reached. Moreover, although arguably both memory and imagination are involved in the process, their roles in the Molyneux’s task have not been adequately discussed. In (...) this paper, I focus on a specific version of Molyneux’s question, propose a specific hypothesis in relation to that version, and sketch the roles of structural correspondence, memory, and imagination in the relevant hypothesis. One key moral of this discussion is that while Molyneux’s question has primarily been regarded as a perceptual puzzle, other kinds of mental episodes such as memory and imagination have to be taken into account as well in order to have a more satisfying answer to versions of Molyneux’s question (Macpherson and Dorsch, 2018). (shrink)

Avicenna refers on a number of occasions in his Book of the Syllogism to “the eminent later scholar” . At least three recent studies have argued or assumed that this eminent later scholar is Alexander of Aphrodisias. It is argued in this article that Avicenna is in fact referring to Alfarabi. This has consequences for reconstructing the lost first part of Alfarabi's Great Commentary on the Prior Analytics , for highlighting certain aspects of Alfarabi's logical doctrines, and for understanding more (...) about the relation between Avicenna and Alfarabi in matters logical. (shrink)

T?s?, a thirteenth century logician writing in Arabic, uses two logical connectives to build up molecular propositions: ?if-then?, and ?either-or?. By referring to a dichotomous Tree, T?s? shows how to choose the proper disjunction relative to the terms in the disjuncts. He also discusses the disjunctive propositions which follow from a conditional proposition.

To desire is to want, but not necessarily to be disposed to do anything. That is to say, desiring does not necessarily involve having any disposition to act. To lend plausibility to this view I appeal to the example of whimsical desires that no action could help us to realise. What may lead us to view certain desires as whimsical is precisely the absence of any possibility of realizing them. While such desires might seem less than full-blooded, I argue that (...) we can have full-blooded desires concerning such matters because of our (non-whimsical) concern for others. That is to say, whimsical desires can have a borrowed seriousness. The article goes on to strengthen the separability of dispositions and desires by narrowing down the concept of triggering conditions for a disposition. If we allow the triggering conditions to be too broad then it will always make sense to say that someone with a desire simply must have a disposition because, all other things being equal, they would bring about what they desire if they were able to do so. (shrink)

In this article the questions of what counts as play and philosophy are considered in relation to the question of early education for young children. The child subject characterised by the themes of playfulness, emotion, and irrationality is compared to the playful philosopher emanating from the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michel Foucault. This analysis contributes to the exploration of themes of truth and difference, the search for challenges to styles of philosophy in education, and to the role (...) of the educator in knowing and producing a particular creative child subject. Relationships between child and adult, player and philosopher are explored in order to question what counts as style, play and philosophy for both the child who is required to contribute as a creative player, and for the educator who is required to facilitate the development of such a child. The contemporary valorisation of children as active and constructive philosophers is, then, critically examined in terms of what counts as a philosopher and/or a child, and who gets to ‘do’ creative and playful philosophy. This article draws upon the New Zealand curriculum framework for early childhood education, Te Whāriki, and the work of Paulo Ghiraldelli, in exploring the contributions of both child and adult to the experience of education and philosophy. (shrink)