I present a puzzle – the “puzzle of aesthetic testimony” – along with a solution to it that appeals to the impossibility of testimonial understanding. I'll criticize this solution by defending the possibility of testimonial understanding, including testimonial aesthetic understanding.

I argue that desire sometimes amounts to knowledge, in the same sense that belief sometimes amounts to knowledge. The argument rests on two assumptions: that goodness is the correctness condition for desire and that knowledge is apt mental representation. Desire that amounts to knowledge—or ‘conative knowledge’—is illustrated by cases in which someone knows the goodness of something despite not believing that it is good.

This article questions the aptness of ‘discourse analysis’ as a label for our field, and prefers the less reductionist concept of ‘Discourse Interpretation’. It does this through drawing on ideas from the field of philosophical hermeneutics – the theory and practice of interpreting texts. It operationalizes and adapts the construct of the Interpretive Arc from the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur in order to address issues that are central to discourse work, including that of how we warrant the validity of our (...) textual interpretations. The Interpretive Arc consists of six inter-linked phases, which the article presents and exemplifies through discussion of a single text – the story of Babel. Phase 1 of the arc defines readers as being in a state of Estrangement before the text because of the distancing created by its written or technological form. Phase 2 is that of Pre-view, the state of opinion or knowledge that readers bring to a text. At phase 3, a first reading forms readers’ Proto-understanding, their initial ‘guess’ at what the text means. Then processes of Analysis test and evidence the validity of alternative readings, limiting the interpretations which can plausibly be taken from a text. Three byways of interpretive analysis are challenged and discarded: the dominance of author intention, structuralist analysis and limitless polysemy. Analysis then leads into 5, the phase of informed Understanding of the matter or injunction of the text, of what is disclosed or unfolded before the text. The Interpretive Arc is completed in phase 6, Ownership. Here, through processes of critique of their own and the text’s ideologies and of fresh listening, readers are led to a new self formed by the matter of the text. There is a dialectic amongst Analysis, Understanding and Ownership, with each informing and modifying the other. The approach emphasizes interpretation as the heart of discourse work. The 3000-year-old narrative of Babel is a subject as well as an object here. It contributes to the matter of the article and its interpretation is interwoven with the theoretical substance. The story is shown to be an integrated narrative abounding in sophisticated linguistic techniques which show a delight in language. The traditional Christian and Western interpretation of Babel – as an affront to God which results in the curse of multilingualism – is challenged. A re-constructed interpretation informed by intertextual evidence reads the fault of Babel to be the people’s refusal to spread through the earth. Babel can be interpreted as a manifesto against the monolingual and monocultural impetus of empires ancient and contemporary. The multilingual outcome is a positive affirmation of sociocultural and linguistic diversity. (shrink)

(1992). Culture, regional image, and economic development in the United Kingdom. World Futures: Vol. 33, Culture and Development: European Experiences and Challenges A Special Research Report of the European Culture Impact Research Consortium (EUROCIRCON), pp. 105-120.

Chantal Mouffe har altid sat spørgsmålet om sociale bevægelser i relation til spørgsmålet om demokratisering. Hendes ideer om agonistisk og radikalt demokrati har fået gennemslag i den europæiske samfundsmæssige debat, men i den sammenhæng glemmer man måske, at hun først og fremmest er engageret i en radikalisering af det liberale demokrati. I hendes nuancerede debatstil kan de mange begreber, nogle af hvilke hun selv er ophavet til, godt få læseren til at fokusere på enkelte træer, som for eksempel netop agonistisk (...) og radikalt demokrati. Dermed kan selve skoven, det liberale demokrati og dets udvikling, forsvinde ud af fokus. Det gør det imidlertid ikke i dette interview, der fandt sted i hendes hjem i Hampstead, Nordlondon, primo 2012, omtrent samtidig med, at hendes seneste bog Agonistics blev afsluttet. (shrink)

Written by a social development practitioner, this paper applies a Goethean approach to the social sphere. The contention being that the Goethean method and understanding can be extended to working with social development processes; equally, that facilitation of social process is enhanced and deepened through a Goethean sensibility. The bulk of the paper, book ended by two obliquely apposite short stories, follows the process of a collaborative enquiry (facilitated by the author) during which participants reflected on a particular social phenomenon. (...) The paper is an illustration of the value of the Goethean approach not only to the (social) phenomenon itself but to the sensibility of participants and groups which undertake it. It also serves to extend the realm of Goethean application into a sphere which is in desperate need of such sensibility. (shrink)

The lunar Three-Body problem is a famously intractable problem of Newtonian mechanics. The demand for accurate predictions of lunar motion led to practical approximate solutions of great complexity, constituted by trigonometric series with hundreds of terms. Such considerations meant there was demand for high speed machine computation from astronomers during the earliest stages of computer development. One early innovator in this regard was Wallace J. Eckert, a Columbia University professor of astronomer and IBM researcher. His work illustrates some interesting features (...) of the interaction between computers and astronomy. (shrink)

Let me begin with some of the background worries that motivate the paper. First, for years I have been working on the relation of the Timaeus to the Republic guided by this triple analogy: as the demiurge is to the cosmos, so the philosopher-ruler is to the polis, so reason is to the soul or individual. The key claim is Tim. 29e: the demiurge is good and so wants to make everything it makes like it itself is, i.e., good, as (...) good as possible. I take the demiurge to be reason idealized, so I infer reason wants to make everything it makes as good as possible. This sets the stage: how is reason related to the good? (shrink)

Recent social theory has departed from methodological individualism’s explanation of action according to the motives and dispositions of human individuals in favor of explanation in terms of broader agencies consisting of both human and nonhuman elements described as cyborgs, actor-networks, extended agencies, or distributed cognition. This paper proposes that moral responsibility for action also be vested in extended agencies. It advances a consequentialist view of responsibility that takes moral responsibility to be a species of causal responsibility, and it answers objections (...) that might be raised on the basis of intentions and deserts. (shrink)

To classify is to organize the particulars in a body of information according to some meaningful scheme. Difficulty recognizing metaphor, synonyms and homonyms, and levels of generalization renders those applications of artificial intelligence that are currently in widespread use at a loss to deal effectively with classification. Indexing conveys nothing about relationships; it pinpoints information on particular topics without reference to anything else. Keyword searching is a form of indexing, and here artificial intelligence excels. Growing reliance on automated means of (...) accessing information brings an increase in indexing and a corresponding decrease in classification. This brings about a shift from the modernist view of the world as permanently and hierarchically structured to the indeterminacy and contingency associated with postmodernism. (shrink)

The use of computers and the role of women in radio astronomy and X-ray crystallography research at the Cavendish Laboratory between 1949 and 1975 have been investigated. We recorded examples of when computers were used, what they were used for and who used them from hundreds of papers published during these years. The use of the EDSAC, EDSAC 2 and TITAN computers was found to increase considerably over this time-scale and they were used for a diverse range of applications. The (...) majority of references to computer operators and programmers referred to women, 57% for astronomy and 62% for crystallography, in contrast to a very small proportion, 4% and 13% respectively, of female authors of papers. (shrink)

Lloyd Gerson has a vision of what Platonism is. Those who see things differently may find his vision bewildering. In Platonism and Naturalism, to his credit, his vision is synoptic and impressively focused on critical passages and issues, especially in Plato's metaphysics and epistemology, though ethics also receives much attention. Leaving aside the introduction and chapter 1, chapters 2–6 are devoted to Plato and comprise two-thirds of the work. Chapters 7, "Aristotle the Platonist," 8, "Plotinus the Platonist," and 9, "Proclus (...) and Trouble in Paradise," along with brief concluding remarks, comprise the remainder. Naturally they take up only certain issues in the Platonism of these successors.... (shrink)

The nine responses to my focus article ‘Re-constructing Babel: Discourse analysis, hermeneutics and the Interpretive Arc’ are cross-disciplinary, as is the article itself. They come from discourse studies, cognitive science, Old Testament studies, hermeneutics, history and literature. I identify and address five main issues which I see these responses raising for discourse interpretation: the role of author intent and the original sociocultural context in interpretation; principles of translation, particularly in relation to the Babel story; issues of certainty and subjectivism in (...) interpretation, again including the Babel story; the role and limitations of cognitive approaches, and the potential of images like ‘unfolding the matter of the text’ to be realized in teaching hands-on discourse work; and finally a call to new listening in the encounter with hermeneutics, as a route to freshening the field I like to call Discourse Interpretation. (shrink)

This book presents a synopsis of Adler's Individual Psychology and then explores its application to the Christian virtues. There is an addendum of related spiritual and phenomenological essays.

Contemporary philosophy, to be useful to Orthodox Christian theology, must capture the “essence” of the divine and human activity in the world in the scientific sense of Edmund Husserl. Scholastic philosophy is no longer an academically privileged supporter of theology in the interpretation of the universe. In its place, this paper suggests that phenomenological philosophy becomes the unique and transcendent partner, as it were, in the interpretive dialogue. The methodological thinking of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger offers a way of (...) philosophical understanding that is more satisfactory than the traditional scholastic metaphysics in giving meaning to contemporary human experience. A phenomenological eco-theological approach captures the essences of a subject’s immediate and holistic perception of the environment. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , September 2008, Volume 8, Edition 2. (shrink)