Focusing on the question of how to be in the world, ontological religion often comes in forms that look very little like our standard expectations for religious institutions. Intuitive, experiential, and often taking a mystical bent, this direct kind of religious practice nevertheless needs guideposts for its participants. The literature of fly fishing serves as one such guidepost, offering a forum for a kind of spiritual public consciousness that can be drawn upon at will by those who seek it. This (...) article explores the parallels between fly fishing, its literature, and the kinds of spiritual statements that are regularly found among religious practitioners who are most concerned with questions about how to live. I am arguing here that fly fishing literature forms an implicit repository for a religious form of consciousness and a religious way of being in the world. (shrink)

We present a synthetic theory of skilled action which proposes that cognitive processes make an important contribution to almost all skilled action, contrary to influential views that many skills are performed largely automatically. Cognitive control is focused on strategic aspects of performance, and plays a greater role as difficulty increases. We offer an analysis of various forms of skill experience and show that the theory provides a better explanation for the full set of these experiences than automatic theories. We further (...) show that the theory can explain experimental evidence for skill automaticity, including evidence that secondary tasks do not interfere with expert performance, and evidence that experts have reduced memory for performance of sensorimotor skills. (shrink)

Abstract MacFarlane distinguishes “context sensitivity” from “indexicality,” and argues that “nonindexical contextualism” has significant advantages over the standard indexical form. MacFarlane’s substantive thesis is that the extension of an expression may depend on an epistemic standard variable even though its content does not. Focusing on ‘knows,’ I will argue against the possibility of extension dependence without content dependence when factors such as meaning, time, and world are held constant, and show that MacFarlane’s nonindexical contextualism provides no advantages over indexical contextualism. (...) The discussion will shed light on the definition of indexicals as well as the meaning of ‘knows,’ and highlight important constraints on the way meaning can be represented in semantics. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-14 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9831-1 Authors Wayne A. Davis, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116. (shrink)

Why games? How could anyone consider action games an experimental paradigm for Cognitive Science? In 1973, as one of three strategies he proposed for advancing Cognitive Science, Allen Newell exhorted us to “accept a single complex task and do all of it.” More specifically, he told us that rather than taking an “experimental psychology as usual approach,” we should “focus on a series of experimental and theoretical studies around a single complex task” so as to demonstrate that our theories of (...) human cognition were powerful enough to explain “a genuine slab of human behavior” with the studies fitting into a detailed theoretical picture. Action games represent the type of experimental paradigm that Newell was advocating and the current state of programming expertise and laboratory equipment, along with the emergence of Big Data and naturally occurring datasets, provide the technologies and data needed to realize his vision. Action games enable us to escape from our field's regrettable focus on novice performance to develop theories that account for the full range of expertise through a twin focus on expertise sampling and longitudinal studies of simple and complex tasks. (shrink)

Le but de Pierre Hadot en développant la notion de philosophie ancienne comme « exercice spirituel » était de fournir une solution de rechange à la religion. Dans cette perspective, Hadot rend le triomphe de la chrétienté et de la scolastique médiévale, exemplifié par Thomas d’Aquin, responsable de la « perte de la philosophie comme manière de vivre ». Le jugement qu’il porte sur Thomas d’Aquin s’applique également au néoplatonisme ancien. Or, de fait, pour les deux il n’y a rien (...) d’abstrait dans la théorie de la philosophie comme ascension vers Dieu : la philosophie est une manière de vivre qui nous transforme et nous tourne vers le divin. Comme son prédécesseur néoplatonicien, l’Université médiévale considérait la philosophie comme un « exercice spirituel » dans le cadre d’une spiritualité chrétienne qui préparait aussi les intellectuels à une félicité surnaturelle. (shrink)

In turning to the language of freedom, I am not automatically freed from the dangers of reduction and self-privileging. "Freedom" as a term is at least as ambiguous as "power" . When I say that for me all questions about the politics of interpretation begin with the question of freedom, I can either be saying a mouthful or saying nothing at all, depending on whether I am willing to complicate my key term, "freedom," by relating it to the language of (...) power. The best way to do that is to get power in from the beginning, by making a distinction taken for granted by many earlier thinkers and too often ignored today: freedom from as contrasted with freedom to; freedom from external restraints and the power of others to inhibit our actions, and freedom to act effectively when restraints disappear.All the freedom from in the world will not free me to make an intellectual discovery or to point a picture unless I have somehow freed myself to perform certain tasks. Such freedoms are gained only by those who surrender to disciplines and codes invented by others, giving up certain freedoms from. Nobody forbids by interpreting the original text of Confucius' Analects or the Principia Mathematica, yet I am not free to do so, lacking the disciplines—having not been disciplined—to do so. The distinction can lead to troublesome complexities, but in its simple form here it cuts through some of the problems that arise in power language.Every critical revolution tends to speak more clearly about what it is against than about what it seeks. The historicists against impressionism, the New Critics against historicism, the new new critics against intentionalism and the authority of canons, the feminists against misogynous art and criticism–clearly one could write a history of modern criticism as a glorious casting off of errors. But it is rightly a commonplace among intellectual historians that all revolutionaries depend on their past far more than they know. Revolutionary critics are enslaved by a nasty law of nature: I can say only what I can say, and that will be largely what I have learned to say from the kings I would depose.Everyone who tries to forge any kind of ideological criticism must struggle with these complexities. Nobody ever knows just what powers have been rejected and what voices heard. But at the moment it seems clear that what follows here, both in its emerging clarities and remaining confusions, results from my somewhat surprised surrender to voices previously alien to me: the "Mikhail Bakhtin" who speaks to me, muffled by my ignorance of Russian, and the feminist criticism" that in its vigor and diversity and challenge to canonic views has—belatedly, belatedly—forced me to begin listening.Wayne C. Booth's most recent work, Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism, won the Laing Prize in 1982. He is working on a book about ethical and political criticism of narrative. A new edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction will appear in 1983. (shrink)

Since there have been many recent occurrences of alleged wrongdoing by business persons and other professionals, it seems additional ethics research is needed to obtain knowledge that will impact real-world behavior. An empirical study assessed business students' impressions of hypothetical wrongdoers and whistleblowers. To some extent, impressions of an unethical executive and a whistleblower were influenced by the same variables and in opposite directions. Female respondents judged the unethical executive less favorably and the whistleblower more favorably than did males. The (...) executive was rated less favorably and the whistleblower more favorably when the executive sought a small gain than when the goal was a large gain or prevention of a loss of either magnitude. Some manipulations, however, impacted impressions of one actor, but not the other. Perhaps ethics training can make students aware that issue framing and moral intensity components may bias decisions. (shrink)

Mad about it they still were, in 1926, when Hemingway's splendid spoofing appeared in The Sun Also Rises. But it was not everybody who had been responsible. It was mainly Anatole France, abetted by his almost unanimously enthusiastic critics. And of all his works, the one that must have seemed to fit the formula best was Thaïs, already a quarter of a century old when Jake Barnes learned of irony and pity. It is not a bad formula for the effect (...) of Thaïs, as formulas go. It is at least as useful—and at least as misleading—as "pity and fear" for tragedy. There is, however, a surprising difference. If I tell you the story of any classical tragedy, even in very brief form, you will know at once why someone might talk about that story using the terms "pity" and "fear." But if I tell you of the priest who lost his soul converting the prostitute, you will not be able to predict any determinate reaction—except perhaps that the story will have for everyone a slight bit of ironic wonder at the grand reversal. In other words, a teller will be able to turn such material almost any direction he chooses, making it into a tragedy, a comedy, a farce, a celebration of God's wonder and mystery—or a tale playing with pity and irony. Wayne C. Booth's most recent books are A Rhetoric of Irony and Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent. He is now completing a book on critical warfare and critical pluralism . A version of one chapter from that book, "M.H. Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic as Pluralist," will appear in the Spring issue of Critical Inquiry. Other contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Kenneth Burke's Way of Knowing" , "'Preserving the Exemplar': Or, How Not to Dig our Own Graves" , "Notes and Exchanges" , "Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation" , "Ten Literal ‘Theses’" , with Wright Morris: "The Writing of Organic Fiction: A Conversation" , and with Robert E. Streeter, W.J.T. Mitchell: "Sheldon Sacks 1930-1979". (shrink)

When M. H. Abrams published a defense, in 1972, of "theorizing about the arts,"1 some of his critics accused him, of falling into subjectivism. He had made his case so forcefully against "the confrontation model of aesthetic criticism," and so effectively argued against "simplified" and "invariable" models of the art work and of "the function of criticism," that some readers thought he had thrown overboard the very possibility of a rational criticism tested by objective criteria. In his recent reply to (...) these critics,2 Abrams concentrates almost entirely on whether his critical pluralism is finally a skeptical relativism. He does not even mention his great historical works, The Mirror and the Lamp and Natural Supernaturalism, and he has nothing to say about how his pluralistic theories would be applied to the writing of history. But then, surprising as it seems once we think about it, neither of the two histories has much about his method either. What is the true achievement of these aggressive raids into our past, and how does Abrams see them in relation to other possible histories of the same subjects? Knowing in advance that he has agreed to reply to my nudging, I should like both to propose that everyone has—with Abrams' own encouragement—understated the importance of what he has done and to ask: What kind of pluralist is he? · 1. "What's the Use of Theorizing about the Arts," In Search of Literary Theory, ed. Morton Bloomfield , pp. 3-54. · 2. "A Note on Wittgenstein and Literary Criticism," ELH 41 : 541-54. Wayne C. Booth's other contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Kenneth Burke's Way of Knowing" , "Irony and Pity Once Again: Thais Revisited" , >"Preserving the Exemplar: Or, How Not to Dig our Own Graves" , "Notes and Exchanges" , "Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation" ,"Ten Literal 'Theses" , with Wright Morris: "The Writing of Organic Fiction: A Conversation" , and with Robert E. Streeter, W.J.T. Mitchell: “Sheldon Sacks 1930-1979”. (shrink)

In this paper we give (1) a new interpretation to Nagel’s THE POSSIBILITY OF ALTRUISM and (2) use that interpretation to show that internalism and anti-realism are compatible, despite appearances to the contrary.

The author explains in 42 thorough chapters what the Bible says about ethical questions regarding marriage, government, abortion, and dozens of other issues in this highly practical, biblically based volume on Christian ethics.

This chapter considers the different forms of natural theology in the Patristic Period, first examining the Stoic Middle Platonism of Philo Judaeus and Josephus. In Philo – uniting Plato's and Moses' genesis, and thus connecting God, the cosmos, and the human in the opposite way to the one taken by Lucretius in his De Rerum Natura – we encounter most of the forms natural theology took in the period. We find not only that there is no operation of pure nature (...) abstracted from the divine activity but also that physics leads to theology, and that nature, the human, and community depend on gifts given beyond them from above. The philosophies of Boethius, John Scottus Eriugena, and Augustine are also discussed. (shrink)

As more wind energy projects are constructed and placed into operation, their potential downsides are becoming more apparent to a larger number of people. One of the most contentious issues is that of the potential loss of property values for those who happen to own homes close to these projects. This issue may be more parochial and therefore seemingly less important than larger global issues, such as energy independence, sustainability, or global warming. But for those most directly affected by these (...) projects, it can serve as a single proxy for all the other local concerns with wind turbines, such as noise, visual pollution, and health. Moreover, rural homeowners vote in high numbers, and in those locations where there is still local control of wind energy projects, the local politicians will eventually reflect those concerns. The wind energy industry counters these concerns by quoting from a series of industry and government studies that claim to show that proximity to wind turbines does not materially affect home prices. However, their efforts at allaying the concerns of the local homeowners have not been very successful. This article discusses some of the reasons why the industry has been unsuccessful at quelling these concerns, including an evaluation of the evidence from both sides of the wind energy debate as a homeowner might see it and ends with suggestions on how the industry might allay these concerns. (shrink)