This (1982) essay sets out the claim that psychoanalysis is a cogent extension of the intuitive common sense psychology by which we naturally understand human action. In this psychology explanation proceeds by relating actions to the logically and causally cohering desires and beliefs of agents. As Freud showed, this kind of explanation is systematically deepened and extended by the explanation of dreams, the symptoms of mental disorder, and other related phenomena via the Freudian concept of wish fulfilment, which was later (...) extended to the more inclusive post-Freudian concept of phantasy. In this extension everyday actions, such as Freud's writing up his patient Irma's case history on the day before his dream of Irma's injection, are seen to be rooted in the same unconscious motives as are represented as fulfilled in dreams and symptoms -- e.g., in this case, by unconscious stirrings of deep guilt on the topic of injection, of which Freud was unaware until he analysed the dream. As this illustrates, the understanding of wishfulfilments and other formations of phantasy enables us fill out our account of agents and their actions by adding a stock of previously unacknowledged desires and modes of expression of desire. These are seen to cohere with, and also to deepen, our previous understanding: after understanding Freud's dream, we also have a deeper and firmer (and so more cogent) understanding of his behaviour on the previous day. In this way Freud effected an extension of our everyday mode of understanding that was cogent, cumulative, and radical, as illustrated further by examination of Freud's case history of the patient described as the Rat Man. (shrink)

We cannot imagine two straight lines intersecting at two points even though they may do so. In this case our abilities to imagine depend upon our abilities to visualise.

James Hopkins; IX*—Wittgenstein and Physicalism, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 75, Issue 1, 1 June 1975, Pages 121–146, https://doi.org/10.109.

Gerard Manley Hopkins is best remembered for his celebratory 'nature sonnets'— 'Pied Beauty', 'God's Grandeur', and 'The Windhover'. Less than a year before his death, however, Hopkins drew on ideas associated with the ancient Greek thinker Heraclitus of Ephesus to express a darker view of nature. In 'That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection’ Hopkins offers a vision of nature and human existence marked by dissolution and destruction. But the poet rejects (...) that apocalyptic vision in favor of the Christian promise of salvation: ‘in a flash, at a trumpet crash/ I am all at once what Christ is…’ In articulating his dark vision of nature Hopkins followed Heraclitus’ fragment B 30: ‘this cosmos…a fire.’ However, Heraclitus’ cosmos ‘always was, is, and will be, an ever-living fire, kindled in measures and extinguished in measures.’ It was not, therefore, the one-way descent to destruction Hopkins described. (shrink)

If, as Richard Wollheim says, the Acquaintance Principle is ‘a well-entrenched principle in aesthetics,’ it would be surprising if there were not something true at which those who have asserted it have been aiming. I argue that the Acquaintance Principle cannot be true on any traditional epistemic interpretation, nor on any usability interpretation of the sort Robert Hopkins has recently suggested. I then argue for an interpretation of the principle that treats acquaintance as the end to which judgments of (...) aesthetic value are the means as opposed to the other way around. (shrink)

This article is the SECOND of several excerpts from my book The Nondual Mind: Vedānta, Kashmiri Pratyabhijñā Shaivism, and Spinoza (the full book is posted on this site). “I liked James H. Cumming’s The Nondual Mind a lot. It is beautifully written, thoughtful, and very clear.” (Prof. Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University) “James H. Cumming’s scholarly interpretation of Spinoza’s works, persuasively showing how 17th century European ideas that ushered in the Enlightenment (...) find a precursor in 10th century Kashmir, is a masterpiece of reason and philosophy that will leave the reader with profound thoughts on the meaning of history, God, and life itself. As a senior staff attorney in my chambers for many years at the California Supreme Court and a top scholar of ethics and philosophy of law, Mr. Cumming never ceased to amaze me with his outstanding research and intellect. This scholarly book is a must read for all who want to know why Spinoza continues to influence contemporary philosophy and how his work is still relevant in today’s challenging, interconnected world.” (Hon. Ming W. Chin, Associate Justice (Retired), Supreme Court of California, 1996–2020). (shrink)

This article is the SIXTH of several excerpts from my book The Nondual Mind: Vedānta, Kashmiri Pratyabhijñā Shaivism, and Spinoza (the full book is posted on this site). “I liked James H. Cumming’s The Nondual Mind a lot. It is beautifully written, thoughtful, and very clear.” (Prof. Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University) “James H. Cumming’s scholarly interpretation of Spinoza’s works, persuasively showing how 17th century European ideas that ushered in the Enlightenment (...) find a precursor in 10th century Kashmir, is a masterpiece of reason and philosophy that will leave the reader with profound thoughts on the meaning of history, God, and life itself. As a senior staff attorney in my chambers for many years at the California Supreme Court and a top scholar of ethics and philosophy of law, Mr. Cumming never ceased to amaze me with his outstanding research and intellect. This scholarly book is a must read for all who want to know why Spinoza continues to influence contemporary philosophy and how his work is still relevant in today’s challenging, interconnected world.” (Hon. Ming W. Chin, Associate Justice (Retired), Supreme Court of California, 1996–2020). (shrink)

This article is the FIFTH of several excerpts from my book The Nondual Mind: Vedānta, Kashmiri Pratyabhijñā Shaivism, and Spinoza (the full book is posted on this site). “I liked James H. Cumming’s The Nondual Mind a lot. It is beautifully written, thoughtful, and very clear.” (Prof. Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University) “James H. Cumming’s scholarly interpretation of Spinoza’s works, persuasively showing how 17th century European ideas that ushered in the Enlightenment (...) find a precursor in 10th century Kashmir, is a masterpiece of reason and philosophy that will leave the reader with profound thoughts on the meaning of history, God, and life itself. As a senior staff attorney in my chambers for many years at the California Supreme Court and a top scholar of ethics and philosophy of law, Mr. Cumming never ceased to amaze me with his outstanding research and intellect. This scholarly book is a must read for all who want to know why Spinoza continues to influence contemporary philosophy and how his work is still relevant in today’s challenging, interconnected world.” (Hon. Ming W. Chin, Associate Justice (Retired), Supreme Court of California, 1996–2020). (shrink)

This article is the FOURTH of several excerpts from my book The Nondual Mind: Vedānta, Kashmiri Pratyabhijñā Shaivism, and Spinoza (the full book is posted on this site). “I liked James H. Cumming’s The Nondual Mind a lot. It is beautifully written, thoughtful, and very clear.” (Prof. Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University) “James H. Cumming’s scholarly interpretation of Spinoza’s works, persuasively showing how 17th century European ideas that ushered in the Enlightenment (...) find a precursor in 10th century Kashmir, is a masterpiece of reason and philosophy that will leave the reader with profound thoughts on the meaning of history, God, and life itself. As a senior staff attorney in my chambers for many years at the California Supreme Court and a top scholar of ethics and philosophy of law, Mr. Cumming never ceased to amaze me with his outstanding research and intellect. This scholarly book is a must read for all who want to know why Spinoza continues to influence contemporary philosophy and how his work is still relevant in today’s challenging, interconnected world.” (Hon. Ming W. Chin, Associate Justice (Retired), Supreme Court of California, 1996–2020). (shrink)

This article is the FIRST of several excerpts from my book The Nondual Mind: Vedānta, Kashmiri Pratyabhijñā Shaivism, and Spinoza (the full book is posted on this site). “I liked James H. Cumming’s The Nondual Mind a lot. It is beautifully written, thoughtful, and very clear.” (Prof. Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University) “James H. Cumming’s scholarly interpretation of Spinoza’s works, persuasively showing how 17th century European ideas that ushered in the Enlightenment (...) find a precursor in 10th century Kashmir, is a masterpiece of reason and philosophy that will leave the reader with profound thoughts on the meaning of history, God, and life itself. As a senior staff attorney in my chambers for many years at the California Supreme Court and a top scholar of ethics and philosophy of law, Mr. Cumming never ceased to amaze me with his outstanding research and intellect. This scholarly book is a must read for all who want to know why Spinoza continues to influence contemporary philosophy and how his work is still relevant in today’s challenging, interconnected world.” (Hon. Ming W. Chin, Associate Justice (Retired), Supreme Court of California, 1996–2020). (shrink)

This article is the THIRD of several excerpts from my book The Nondual Mind: Vedānta, Kashmiri Pratyabhijñā Shaivism, and Spinoza (the full book is posted on this site). “I liked James H. Cumming’s The Nondual Mind a lot. It is beautifully written, thoughtful, and very clear.” (Prof. Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University) “James H. Cumming’s scholarly interpretation of Spinoza’s works, persuasively showing how 17th century European ideas that ushered in the Enlightenment (...) find a precursor in 10th century Kashmir, is a masterpiece of reason and philosophy that will leave the reader with profound thoughts on the meaning of history, God, and life itself. As a senior staff attorney in my chambers for many years at the California Supreme Court and a top scholar of ethics and philosophy of law, Mr. Cumming never ceased to amaze me with his outstanding research and intellect. This scholarly book is a must read for all who want to know why Spinoza continues to influence contemporary philosophy and how his work is still relevant in today’s challenging, interconnected world.” (Hon. Ming W. Chin, Associate Justice (Retired), Supreme Court of California, 1996–2020). (shrink)

This book compares Hindu nondual philosophy to that of Baruch Spinoza, demonstrating the similarity of Spinoza’s ideas to Kashmiri Pratyabhijñā Shaivism. The book is well researched, but it is written in an informal style suitable for both scholars and the educated general public. There is already some scholarly literature comparing Spinoza’s philosophy to Śaṅkara’s Vedānta, but none of it has focused, as this book does, on philosophy of mind, and none of it has included nondual Kashmiri Shaivism in the comparison. (...) Among other things, the important distinction between Śaṅkara’s Vedānta and nondual Kashmiri Shaivism is brought to the fore by looking at those two philosophies through the lens of Spinoza. “I liked James H. Cumming’s The Nondual Mind a lot. It is beautifully written, thoughtful, and very clear.” (Prof. Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University) “James H. Cumming’s scholarly interpretation of Spinoza’s works, persuasively showing how 17th century European ideas that ushered in the Enlightenment find a precursor in 10th century Kashmir, is a masterpiece of reason and philosophy that will leave the reader with profound thoughts on the meaning of history, God, and life itself. As a senior staff attorney in my chambers for many years at the California Supreme Court and a top scholar of ethics and philosophy of law, Mr. Cumming never ceased to amaze me with his outstanding research and intellect. This scholarly book is a must read for all who want to know why Spinoza continues to influence contemporary philosophy and how his work is still relevant in today’s challenging, interconnected world.” (Hon. Ming W. Chin, Associate Justice (Retired), Supreme Court of California, 1996–2020). (shrink)

This single pdf includes ALL SEVEN of my Dogma Revue articles, which together comprise the entirety of my book The Nondual Mind: Vedānta, Kashmiri Pratyabhijñā Shaivism, and Spinoza (the full book in manuscript form is also posted on this site). The book compares Hindu nondual philosophy to that of Baruch Spinoza, demonstrating the similarity of Spinoza’s ideas to Kashmiri Pratyabhijñā Shaivism. The book is well researched, but it is written in an informal style suitable for both scholars and the educated (...) general public. There is already some scholarly literature comparing Spinoza’s philosophy to Śaṅkara’s Vedānta, but none of it has focused, as this book does, on philosophy of mind, and none of it has included nondual Kashmiri Shaivism in the comparison. Among other things, the important distinction between Śaṅkara’s Vedānta and nondual Kashmiri Shaivism is brought to the fore by looking at those two philosophies through the lens of Spinoza. “I liked James H. Cumming’s The Nondual Mind a lot. It is beautifully written, thoughtful, and very clear.” (Prof. Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University) “James H. Cumming’s scholarly interpretation of Spinoza’s works, persuasively showing how 17th century European ideas that ushered in the Enlightenment find a precursor in 10th century Kashmir, is a masterpiece of reason and philosophy that will leave the reader with profound thoughts on the meaning of history, God, and life itself. As a senior staff attorney in my chambers for many years at the California Supreme Court and a top scholar of ethics and philosophy of law, Mr. Cumming never ceased to amaze me with his outstanding research and intellect. This scholarly book is a must read for all who want to know why Spinoza continues to influence contemporary philosophy and how his work is still relevant in today’s challenging, interconnected world.” (Hon. Ming W. Chin, Associate Justice (Retired), Supreme Court of California, 1996–2020). (shrink)

Many attempts to define depiction appeal to viewers' perceptual responses. Such accounts are liable to give a central role in determining depictive content to picture features responsible for the response, design. A different project is to give a compositional semantics for depictive content. Such attempts identify syntax: picture features systematically responsible for the content of the whole. Design and syntax are competitors. But syntax requires system, in how picture features contribute to content, that design does not. By examining John Kulvicki's (...) semantics for basic depictive content, I argue that the relevant systematicity is absent from the pictorial realm. (shrink)

This paper briefly addresses questions of confirmation and disconfirmation in psychoanalysis. It argues that psychoanalysis enjoys Bayesian support as an interpretive extension of commonsense psychology that provides the best explanation of a large range of empirical data. Suggestion provides no such explanation, and recent work in attachment, developmental psychology, and neuroscience accord with this view.

This paper considers clinical psychoanalysis together with developmental psychology (particularly attachment theory), evolution, and neuroscience in the context a Bayesian account of confirmation and disconfrimation. -/- In it I argue that these converging sources of support indicate that the combination of relatively low predictive power and broad explanatory scope that characterise the theories of both Freud and Darwin suggest that Freud's theory, like Darwin's, may strike deeply into natural phenomena. -/- The same argument, however, suggests that conclusive confirmation for Freudian (...) hypotheses, as in the case of Darwin's, will come from outside the original domain of explanation sketched out by Freud. As in Darwin's case conclusive confirmation came from understanding the physical mechanisms or reproduction, in Freud's case it will come from understanding the neural mechanisms that realise the phenomena described in psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Amie Thomasson’s work provides numerous ways to rethink and improve our approach to metaphysics. This chapter is my attempt to begin to sketch why I still think the easy approach leaves room for substantive metaphysical work, and why I do not think that metaphysics need rely on any ‘epistemically metaphysical’ knowledge. After distinguishing two possible forms of deflationism, I argue that the easy ontologist needs to accept (implicitly or explicitly) that there are worldly constraints on what sorts of entities could (...) exist, and could co-exist. I argue this leaves room for a substantive role for metaphysics if (following the work of E.J. Lowe) we take metaphysics to be concerned with the possible ways that reality could be. I explain how this conception does not need to appeal to any ‘epistemically metaphysical’ knowledge, and need only make use of conceptual and/or empirical means to arrive at views on what could exist (and co-exist). Thus, the answer I propose to the question posed in the title, at least in my view, is no-one. Or, at least, no-one should be afraid of conceptual analysis. Not even metaphysicians. (shrink)

We are immersed within an odorous sea of chemical currents that we parse into individual odors with complex structures. Odors have been posited as determined by the structural relation between the molecules that compose the chemical compounds and their interactions with the receptor site. But, naturally occurring smells are parsed from gaseous odor plumes. To give a comprehensive account of the nature of odors the chemosciences must account for these large distributed entities as well. We offer a focused review of (...) what is known about the perception of odor plumes for olfactory navigation and tracking, which we then connect to what is known about the role odorants play as properties of the plume in determining odor identity with respect to odor quality. We end by motivating our central claim that more research needs to be conducted on the role that odorants play within the odor plume in determining odor identity. (shrink)

Understanding the notion of innerness that we ascribe to mental items is central to understanding the problem of consciousness, and we can do so in evolutionary and physical terms.

Why are natural theories pre-well-ordered by consistency strength? In previous work, an approach to this question was proposed. This approach was inspired by Martin's Conjecture, one of the most prominent conjectures in recursion theory. Fixing a reasonable subsystem $T$ of arithmetic, the goal was to classify the recursive functions that are monotone with respect to the Lindenbaum algebra of $T$. According to an optimistic conjecture, roughly, every such function must be equivalent to an iterate $\mathsf{Con}_T^\alpha$ of the consistency operator ``in (...) the limit'' within the ultrafilter of sentences that are true in the standard model. In previous work the author established the first case of this optimistic conjecture; roughly, every recursive monotone function is either as weak as the identity operator in the limit or as strong as $\mathsf{Con}_T$ in the limit. Yet in this note we prove that this optimistic conjecture fails already at the next step; there are recursive monotone functions that are neither as weak as $\mathsf{Con}_T$ in the limit nor as strong as $\mathsf{Con}_T^2$ in the limit. In fact, for every $\alpha$, we produce a function that is cofinally equivalent to $\mathsf{Con}^\alpha_T$ yet cofinally equivalent to $\mathsf{Con}_T$. (shrink)

In this chapter I argue that writers on metaphor have misunderstood Aristotle on metaphor. Aristotle is not an elitist about metaphor and does not consider metaphors to be merely ornamental. Rather, Aristotle believes that metaphors are ubiquitous and believes that people can express themselves in a clearer and more attractive way through the use of metaphors and that people learn and understand things better through metaphor. He also distinguishes between the use of metaphor and the coinage of metaphor, and believes (...) that the ability to coin marvelous new metaphors is a form of literary genius, and he provided an entirely natural origin of metaphor coinage. (shrink)

Some philosophers take Perky's experiments to show that perceiving can be mistaken for visualizing and so that the two sometimes match in phenomenology. On Segal’s alternative interpretation Perky’s subjects did not consciously perceive the stimuli at all. I argue that even setting this alternative aside, Perky's results do not prove what the philosophers think. She showed her subjects, not the objects they were asked to visualise, but pictures of them. What they mistook for visualizing was not perceptual consciousness of stimuli, (...) but pictorial consciousness. Once clear about the nature of the latter, we can see that Perky's results reveal nothing very surprising. (shrink)

A model of metaphysics associated with EJ Lowe and Tuomas Tahko sees metaphysics as involving a priori knowledge of possible essences, or at least modal facts, and delimiting the actual ‘ontological categories,’ the ultimate and essential divisions of what exists, based on the results of a posteriori scientific investigation. Their approach to metaphysics has been criticized by those who argue that such metaphysics is unsuitably a priori, disconnected with empirical research in natural science, and ends up failing to provide meaningful (...) constraints on metaphysical theorization. I present different epistemological and semantic worries about these accounts to motivate an alternative perspective on which metaphysics centers on form, rather than possibility. This scholastic perspective is shown to incorporate the skeptical insights as constitutive of its approach to existence, by way of the position that ‘being’ is not a genus. Rather, ‘being’ is a determinable. The scholastic approach can thus provide responses to the skeptics, since it denies that ontological categories – in the Lowe/Tahko sense – are what metaphysicians investigate and proposes a different view of ontological categories as classes of forms. (shrink)

It is a reasonable worry that God would not truly love us and want our salvation if He fixed a definite point after which He will no longer offer us the graces to repent of our sins. I propose that Thomas Aquinas succeeds in showing us that God would not be cruel or arbitrary in setting up a world where embodied agents end up after death in a state where they will inevitably fail to repent of their sins. Aquinas proposes (...) that being disembodied is to be in a state where a person cannot be mistaken about what they want, given that they know themselves perfectly. If the disembodied state were like this, it would not be surprising that being in that state makes repentance impossible, since a soul would become fully integrated around whatever one desired, without any conflicting desires that could prompt repentance. Thus, humans would persist in whatever desires they had at the moment of death and disembodiment. I conclude by arguing that, while this scenario stands in need of fuller theodicy, Aquinas’ scenario is helpful in defending a view that God is not cruel or arbitrary for creating a world in which post-mortem repentance is impossible. (shrink)

Is testimony a legitimate source of aesthetic belief? Can I, for instance, learn that a film is excellent on your say-so? Optimists say yes, pessimists no. But pessimism comes in two forms. One claims that testimony is not a legitimate source of aesthetic belief because it cannot yield aesthetic knowledge. The other accepts that testimony can be a source of aesthetic knowledge, yet insists that some further norm prohibits us from exploiting that resource. I argue that this second form of (...) pessimism has certain advantages over the first. I offer two candidates for the non-epistemic norm that, on this view, stands in the way of our taking aesthetic testimony. And I argue that this form of pessimism meets a challenge to pessimism in general – that of explaining why, if testimony cannot be a legitimate source of aesthetic belief, we can nonetheless rightly rely on the aesthetic recommendations of others. (shrink)

In How We Get Along, philosopher David Velleman compares our social interactions to the interactions among improvisational actors on stage. He argues that we play ourselves - not artificially but authentically, by doing what would make sense coming from us as we really are. And, like improvisational actors, we deal with one another in dual capacities: both as characters within the social drama and as players contributing to the shared performance. In this conception of social intercourse, Velleman finds rational grounds (...) for morality, though not a rational guarantee. He maps a middle course between skepticism and rationalism, arguing that practical reasoning is 'pro-moral' without requiring moral action. The result is what he calls a 'Kinda Kantian metaethics'. How We Get Along is the summation of Velleman's thinking to date, incorporating and unifying previous work on agency, the self, the emotions, narrative and Kantian moral theory. (shrink)

Psychoanalytic theory can be regarded as a cogent extension of commonsense psychology by interpretive means internal to it.

Can indistinguishable objects differ aesthetically? Manifestationism answers ‘no’ on the grounds that (i) aesthetically significant features of an object must show up in our experience of it; and (ii) a feature—aesthetic or not—figures in our experience only if we can discriminate its presence. Goodman’s response to Manifestationism has been much discussed, but little understood. I explain and reject it. I then explore an alternative. Doubles can differ aesthetically provided, first, it is possible to experience them differently; and, second, those experiences (...) reflect differences in the objects’ themselves. A range of objections to this position is considered, but all are found wanting. (shrink)

What kind of mental state is episodic memory? I defend the claim that it is, in key part, imagining the past, where the imagining in question is experiential imagining. To remember a past episode is to experientially imagine how things were, in a way controlled by one’s past experience of that episode. Call this the Inclusion View. I motive this view by appeal both to patterns of compatibilities and incompatibilities between various states, and to phenomenology. The bulk of the paper (...) defends the account against four objections. Imagining and remembering seem to differ in whether they are active or passive, in the forms of singular content they involve, in their relations to observation and in their relations to belief. I argue that these differences can be accommodated, and some even explained, once we flesh out what else is involved in episodic memory, in addition to imagining the past. (shrink)

I argue that authentic photography is not able to develop to the full as a communicative representational art. Photography is authentic when it is true to its self-image as the imprinting of images. For an image to be imprinted is for its content to be linked to the scene in which it originates by a chain of sufficient, mind-independent causes. Communicative representational art (in any medium: photography, painting, literature, music, etc.) is art that exploits the resources of representation to achieve (...) artistically interesting communication of thought. The central resources of representation are content, vehicle properties, and the interplay between these two. Whereas painting and other representational arts are able to exploit all three to communicate thought, authentic photography can exploit interplay only to a very limited degree. However, the exploitation of interplay is the culmination of communicative representational art: the natural endpoint in its development. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that Shelley's "A Defense of Poetry" is best understood as a defense of poetic language, which is in turn best understood as a defense of metaphorical language. According to Shelley, the metaphors of the poets reveal (extra-linguistic) reality, and have a truth value – they are true insofar as they capture reality. The literal language of "mere reasoners" of science and philosophy, by contrast, only reveals relations between ideas already known, and their statements are true (...) in virtue of the meanings of the words. Shelley's essays has been misunderstood because writers on metaphor such as David Cooper and Richard Rorty have assumed that metaphors are neither true nor false, and that defenders of metaphorical language such as Shelley are defending non-truth-apt language. Even those writers on metaphor who believe that metaphors are truth-apt, such as Raymond Gibbs, fail to understand that Shelley should be included in their number. (shrink)

Some (Podro, Lopes) think that sometimes our experience of pictures is ‘inflected’. What we see in these pictures involves, somehow, an awareness of features of their design. I clarify the idea of inflection, arguing that the thought must be that what is seen in the picture is something with properties which themselves need characterising by reference to that picture’s design, conceived as such. I argue that there is at least one case of inflection, so understood. Proponents of inflection have claimed (...) great significance for the phenomenon. But what might that significance be? Inter alia, I consider Lopes’s proposal that inflection solves a central problem in pictorial aesthetics, the ‘puzzle of mimesis’. I argue that the puzzle, and the proposed solution, both turn on aspects of Lopes’s conception of seeing-in. Other accounts of seeing-in can make no sense of either. I further argue that the phenomenon of inflection itself puts pressure on the sort of account Lopes offers. Thus it is hard to offer a view which both holds that inflection occurs and is able to make clear sense of why it matters. (shrink)

In this chapter I argue that Richard Rorty and others are wrong to contrast the Romantic poets with Plato and other philosophers in virtue of a lack of concern for the truth. Percy Bysshe Shelley, in particular, believed that the metaphors in poetry revealed the fundamental truth about the world.

Episodic memory is sometimes described as mental time travel. This suggests three ideas: that episodic memory offers us access to the past that is quasi-experiential, that it is a source of knowledge of the past, and that it is, at root, passive. I offer an account of episodic memory that rejects all three ideas. The account claims that remembering is a matter of representing the past to oneself, in a way suitably responsive to how one experienced the remembered episode to (...) be. I argue that episodic memory is active, in the way this view suggests. I clarify the idea that it is, as the view also implies, not a source of knowledge but an expression of knowledge the subject already has. And I suggest the view need not limit memories to states that are in any way experience-like. This position offers a way to articulate the relations between episodic memory and related phenomena: factual memory, generic memory, remembering-how and anticipation. And it allows us to explain how we know which aspects of our episodic memory states to take seriously and which (such as the shift to an observer perspective on the remembered events) to treat as merely incidental. (shrink)

An account of depiction should explain its key features. I identify six: that depiction is from a point of view; that it represents its objects as having a visual appearance; that it depictive content is always reasonably detailed; that misrepresentation is possible, but only within limits; and that the ability to interpret depictions co-varies, given general competence with pictures, with knowledge of what the depicted objects look like. All this suggests that picturing works by capturing appearances, but how more precisely (...) does it operate? I show how to use the notion of experienced resemblance in outline shape to analyse depiction in such a way as to answer this question, and to explain the six key features above. (shrink)

This project has been supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council (project number CS170100008); the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science; and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. ACOLA collaborates with the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences and the New Zealand Royal Society Te Apārangi to deliver the interdisciplinary Horizon Scanning reports to government. The aims of the project which produced this report are: 1. Examine the transformative role that artificial intelligence may play in (...) different sectors of the economy, including the opportunities, risks and challenges that advancement presents. 2. Examine the ethical, legal and social considerations and frameworks required to enable and support broad development and uptake of artificial intelligence. 3. Assess the future education, skills and infrastructure requirements to manage workforce transition and support thriving and internationally competitive artificial intelligence industries. (shrink)

What is it for a film to be realistic? Of the many answers that have been proposed, I review five: that it is accurate and precise; that is has relatively few prominent formal features; that it is illusionistic; that it is transparent; and that, while plainly a moving picture, it looks to be a photographic recording, not of the actors and sets in fact filmed, but of the events narrated. The number and variety of these options raise a deeper question: (...) what is realism, if these are all to count as species of it? In answer, I articulate a sort of picture we have of realism, not just in film but in representations in general. I then ask how far each of the candidate realisms fares, when compared with that image. (shrink)

In this thesis, I examine how "truth" is never adequately defined yet still used as a foundation for meaning and purpose. The elephant which is ignored is the paradoxical nature of truth and how it relates to the infinite, which is something we have not yet come to understand well enough. I propose that it is still possible if we are open-minded enough to accept the unexpected.

Naïve realism, often overlooked among philosophical theories of perception, has in recent years attracted a surge of interest. Broadly speaking, the central commitment of naïve realism is that mind-independent objects are essential to the fundamental analysis of perceptual experience. Since the claims of naïve realism concern the essential metaphysical structure of conscious perception, its truth or falsity is of central importance to a wide range of topics, including the explanation of semantic reference and representational content, the nature of phenomenal consciousness, (...) and the basis of perceptual justification and knowledge. One of the greatest difficulties surrounding discussions of naïve realism, however, has been lack of clarity concerning exactly what affirming or denying it entails. In particular, it is sometimes unclear how naïve realism is related to the claim that perceptual experience is in some sense direct or unmediated, and also to what extent the view is compatible with another widely discussed thesis in the philosophy of perception, the claim that perceptual experiences are states with representational content. In this essay, I discuss how recent work on these issues helps to clarify both the central commitments of naïve realism, as well as its relation to representationalist theories of perception. Along the way, I will attempt to shed light on the different ways in which each approach tries to address the various theoretical challenges facing a philosophical theory of perception, and also to assess the prospects for views that attempts to combine features of each approach. (shrink)

An Aristotelian Philosophy of Mathematics breaks the impasse between Platonist and nominalist views of mathematics. Neither a study of abstract objects nor a mere language or logic, mathematics is a science of real aspects of the world as much as biology is. For the first time, a philosophy of mathematics puts applied mathematics at the centre. Quantitative aspects of the world such as ratios of heights, and structural ones such as symmetry and continuity, are parts of the physical world and (...) are objects of mathematics. Though some mathematical structures such as infinities may be too big to be realized in fact, all of them are capable of being realized. Informed by the author's background in both philosophy and mathematics, but keeping to simple examples, the book shows how infant perception of patterns is extended by visualization and proof to the vast edifice of modern pure and applied mathematical knowledge. (shrink)

This paper argues that psychoanalysis enables us to see mental disorder as rooted in emotional conflicts, particularly concerning aggression, to which our species has a natural liability. These can be traced in development, and seem rooted in both parent-offspring conflict and in-group cooperation for out-group conflict. In light of this we may hope that work in psychoanalysis and neuroscience will converge in indicating the most likely paths to a better neurobiological understanding of mental disorder.

Integrated Information Theory (IIT) identifies consciousness with having a maximum amount of integrated information. But a thing’s having the maximum amount of anything cannot be intrinsic to it, for that depends on how that thing compares to certain other things. IIT’s consciousness, then, is not intrinsic. A mereological argument elaborates this consequence: IIT implies that one physical system can be conscious while a physical duplicate of it is not conscious. Thus, by a common and reasonable conception of intrinsicality, IIT’s consciousness (...) is not intrinsic. It is then argued that to avoid the implication that consciousness is not intrinsic, IIT must abandon its Exclusion Postulate, which prohibits overlapping conscious systems. Indeed, theories of consciousness that attribute consciousness to physical systems, should embrace the view that some conscious systems overlap. A discussion of the admittedly counterintuitive nature of this solution, along with some medical and neuroscientific realities that would seem to support it, is included. (shrink)

Most agree that, in some special scenarios, prudence can speak against feeling a fitting emotion. Some go further, arguing that the tension between fittingness and prudence afflicts some emotions in a fairly general way. This paper goes even further: it argues that, when it comes to anxiety, the tension between fittingness and prudence is nearly inescapable. On any plausible theory, an enormous array of possible outcomes are both bad and epistemically uncertain in the right way to ground fitting anxiety. What’s (...) more, the fittingness of an emotion is a demanding, not a permissive, normative status. So the norms of fitting emotion demand a great deal of anxiety. For almost any realistic agent, it would be deeply imprudent to feel anxiety in a way that meets the demands set by norms of fitting emotion. (shrink)

What is artistic style? In the literature one answer to this question has proved influential: the view that artistic style is the expression of personality. In what follows we elaborate upon and evaluatively compare the two most plausible versions of this view with a new proposal—that style is the expression of the artist’s ideals for her art. We proceed by comparing the views’ answers to certain questions we think a theory of individual artistic style should address: Are there limits on (...) what range of features can figure in a style? Can flaws be stylistic? Are there limits on the range of art forms across which a given style can be exhibited? To what extent is a style a kind of unity, and why? What makes style an artistic achievement? Why do we care about style? By considering the different views' answers to these questions we argue that our proposal is a workable theory of individual style and suggest that it fares better on the whole than both versions of the influential and widely accepted view. (shrink)

Th e present article reports a series of experiments designed to extend the empirical investigation of folk metaethical intuitions by examining how different kinds of ethical disagreement can impact attributions of objectivity to ethical claims.

This paper summarises the main claims I have made in a series of publications on depiction. Having described six features of depiction that any account should explain, I sketch an account that does this. The account understands depiction in terms of the experience to which it gives rise, and construes that experience as one of resemblance. The property in respect of which resemblance is experienced was identified by Thomas Reid, in his account of ‘visible figure’. I defend the account against (...) certain criticisms, and compare it to some of its main rivals, in particular the views offered by Goodman, Wollheim and Dominic Lopes. (shrink)

Freud's account of dreams has a cogent interpretive basis.

What are the legitimate sources of aesthetic belief? Which methods for forming aesthetic belief are acceptable? Although the question is rarely framed explicitly, it is a familiar idea that there is something distinctive about aesthetic matters in this respect. Crudely, the thought is that the legitimate routes to belief are rather more limited in the aesthetic case than elsewhere. If so, this might tell us something about the sorts of facts that aesthetic beliefs describe, about the nature of our aesthetic (...) judgements, or about the responses that ground them. Getting the epistemology right here may help with the metaphysics, the semantics or the philosophical psychology. Investigating the legitimate sources of aesthetic belief may thus teach us something important about the aesthetic realm. (shrink)