The notion that our society, its education system and its intellectual life, is characterised by a split between two cultures – the arts or humanities on one hand and the sciences on the other – has a long history. But it was C. P. Snow's Rede lecture of 1959 that brought it to prominence and began a public debate that is still raging in the media today. This fiftieth anniversary printing of The Two Cultures and its successor piece, A Second (...) Look features an introduction by Stefan Collini, charting the history and context of the debate, its implications and its afterlife. The importance of science and technology in policy run largely by non-scientists, the future for education and research, and the problem of fragmentation threatening hopes for a common culture are just some of the subjects discussed. (shrink)

This volume consists of the first of the John Dewey Lectures delivered under the auspices of Columbia University's Philosophy Department as well as other essays by the author. Intended to clarify the meaning of the philosophical doctrines propounded by Professor Quine in 'Word and Objects', the essays included herein both support and expand those doctrines.

Ernest Sosa's A Virtue Epistemology, Vol. I is arguably the single-most important monograph to be published in analytic epistemology in the last ten years. Sosa, the first in the field to employ the notion of intellectual virtue – in his ground-breaking ‘The Raft and the Pyramid’– is the leading proponent of reliabilist versions of virtue epistemology. In A Virtue Epistemology, he deftly defends an externalist account of animal knowledge as apt belief, argues for a distinction between animal and reflective knowledge, (...) contends that rational intuition is an intellectual virtue ; and offers responses to dream scepticism, the problem of the criterion and the value problem. Nearly all of these arguments are new, albeit consistent with Sosa's earlier work; that is, consistent with two notable exceptions. First, c ontra Sosa's ‘Replies’ in Ernest Sosa and His Critics, A Virtue Epistemology explicitly contends that safety is not required for animal knowledge. Second, unlike Sosa's Knowledge in Perspective, which arguably construes the intellectual virtues as merely instrumentally valuable, A Virtue Epistemology explicitly contends that the intellectual virtues are instrumentally and constitutively valuable. Best read in conjunction with the above monographs and Epistemic Justification, A Virtue Epistemology is mandatory reading for epistemologists and graduate students in the field. It will rightly set the standard for debates in analytic epistemology for years to come.I will summarize and raise objections to two key conclusions that are unique to A Virtue Epistemology: the ‘kaleidoscope-perceiver’ has animal knowledge but lacks reflective knowledge; unlike the k-perceiver, the ordinary perceiver has reflective knowledge. My objections …. (shrink)

I discussed the ways in which folk psychology is influenced by the need for small-scale cooperation between people. I argue that considerations about cooperation and mutual benefit can be found in the everyday concepts of belief, desire, and motivation. I describe what I call "solution thinking", where a person anticipates another person's actions by first determining the solution to the cooperative problem that the person faces and then reasoning backwards to a prediction of individual action.

Beyond Aesthetics brings together philosophical essays addressing art and related issues by one of the foremost philosophers of art at work today. Countering conventional aesthetic theories - those maintaining that authorial intention, art history, morality and emotional responses are irrelevant to the experience of art - Noël Carroll argues for a more pluralistic and commonsensical view in which all of these factors can play a legitimate role in our encounter with art works. Throughout, the book combines philosophical theorizing with illustrative (...) examples including works of high culture and the avant-garde, as well as works of popular culture, jokes, horror novels, and suspense films. (shrink)

Where does the mind begin and end? Most philosophers and cognitive scientists take the view that the mind is bounded by the skull or skin of the individual. Robert Wilson, in this provocative and challenging 2004 book, provides the foundations for the view that the mind extends beyond the boundary of the individual. The approach adopted offers a unique blend of traditional philosophical analysis, cognitive science, and the history of psychology and the human sciences. The companion volume, Genes and the (...) Agents of Life, explores the theme in the biological sciences. Written with verve and clarity, this ambitious book will appeal to a broad swathe of professionals and students in philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and the history of the behavioural and human sciences. You can download the table of contents here. (shrink)

Interpreting Figurative Meaning critically evaluates the recent empirical work from psycholinguistics and neuroscience examining the successes and difficulties associated with interpreting figurative language. There is now a huge, often contradictory literature on how people understand figures of speech. Gibbs and Colston argue that there may not be a single theory or model that adequately explains both the processes and products of figurative meaning experience. Experimental research may ultimately be unable to simply adjudicate between current models in psychology, linguistics and philosophy (...) of how figurative meaning is interpreted. Alternatively, the authors advance a broad theoretical framework, motivated by ideas from 'dynamical systems theory', that describes the multiple, interacting influences which shape people's experiences of figurative meaning in discourse. This book details past research and theory, offers a critical assessment of this work and sets the stage for a new vision of figurative experience in human life. (shrink)

This important book provides a theory about the nature of fiction, and about the relation between the author, the reader and the fictional text. The approach is philosophical: that is to say, the author offers an account of key concepts such as fictional truth, fictional characters, and fiction itself. The book argues that the concept of fiction can be explained partly in terms of communicative intentions, partly in terms of a condition which excludes relations of counterfactual dependence between the world (...) and the text. This communicative model is then applied to the following problems: how can something be 'true in the story' without being explicitly stated in the text? In what ways does interpreting a fictional story depend upon grasping its author's intentions? Is there always a unique best interpretation of a fictional text? What is the correct semantics for fictional names? What is the nature of our emotional response to a fictional work? In answering these questions the author explores the complex interaction between author, reader, and text. This interaction requires the reader to construct a 'fictional author' - a character in the story whose personality, beliefs and emotional states must be interpreted if the reader is to grasp the meaning of the work. (shrink)

Function theorists routinely speculate that a viable function theory will be equally applicable to biological traits and artifacts. However, artifact function has received only the most cursory scrutiny in its own right. Closer scrutiny reveals that only a pluralist theory comprising two distinct notions of function--proper function and system function--will serve as an adequate general theory. The first section describes these two notions of function. The second section shows why both notions are necessary, by showing that attempts to do away (...) with one of them fail. This demonstration draws on examples from the artifactual realm to motivate major points of the argument. The third section is an outline of artifact function. It confirms the conclusions of the second section, and also begins the task of describing some of the special features of artifact function needing accommodation within the general theory. (shrink)

What is computer art? Do the concepts we usually employ to talk about art, such as ‘meaning’, ‘form’ or ‘expression’ apply to computer art? _A Philosophy of Computer Art_ is the first book to explore these questions. Dominic Lopes argues that computer art challenges some of the basic tenets of traditional ways of thinking about and making art and that to understand computer art we need to place particular emphasis on terms such as ‘interactivity’ and ‘user’. Drawing on a wealth (...) of examples he also explains how the roles of the computer artist and computer art user distinguishes them from makers and spectators of traditional art forms and argues that computer art allows us to understand better the role of technology as an art medium. (shrink)

A variety of scientific disciplines have set as their task explaining mental activities, recognizing that in some way these activities depend upon our brain. But, until recently, the opportunities to conduct experiments directly on our brains were limited. As a result, research efforts were split between disciplines such as cognitive psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence that investigated behavior, while disciplines such as neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and genetics experimented on the brains of non-human animals. In recent decades these disciplines integrated, and with (...) the advent of techniques for imaging activity in human brains, the term cognitive neuroscience has been applied to the integrated investigations of mind and brain. This book is a philosophical examination of how these disciplines continue in the mission of explaining our mental capacities. (shrink)

_Philosophy of Art_ is a textbook for undergraduate students interested in the topic of philosophical aesthetics. It introduces the techniques of analytic philosophy as well as key topics such as the representational theory of art, formalism, neo-formalism, aesthetic theories of art, neo-Wittgensteinism, the Institutional Theory of Art. as well as historical approaches to the nature of art. Throughout, abstract philosophical theories are illustrated by examples of both traditional and contemporary art including frequent reference to the avant-garde in this way enriching (...) the readers understanding of art theory as well as the appreciation of art. Unique features of the textbook are: * chapter summaries * summaries of major theories of art and suggested analyses of the important categories used when talking and thinking of art * annotated suggested readings at the ends of chapters. Also available in this series: _Epistemology_ Pb: 0-415-13043-3: £12.99 _Ethics_ Pb: 0-415-15625-4: £11.99 _Metaphysics_ Pb: 0-415-14034-X: £12.99 _Philosophy of Mind_ Pb: 0-415-13060-3: £11.99 _Philosophy of Religion_ Pb: 0-415-13214-2: £12.99. (shrink)

This anthology brings together ten papers which have defined and advanced the debate between internalism and externalism in epistemology.

This volume presents new essays on the propositional imagination by leading researchers. The propositional imagination---the mental capacity we exploit when we imagine that everyone is colour-blind or that Hamlet is a procrastinator---plays an essential role in philosophical theorizing, engaging with fiction, and indeed in everyday life. Yet only recently has there been a systematic attempt to give a cognitive account of the propositional imagination. These thirteen essays, specially written for the volume, capitalize on this recent work, extending the theoretical picture (...) of the imagination and exploring the philosophical implications of cognitive accounts of the imagination. The book also investigates broader philosophical issues surrounding the propositional imagination. The first section addresses the nature of the imagination, its role in emotion production, and its sophistication manifestation in childhood. The essays in the second section focus on the nature of pretence and how pretence is implicated in adult communication. The third section addresses the problem of 'imaginative resistance', the striking fact that when we encounter morally repugnant assertions in fiction, we seem to resist imagining them and accepting them as fictionally true. In the final section, contributors explore the relation between imagining, conceiving, and judgements of possibility and impossibility. The Architecture of the Imagination will be an essential resource for the growing number of philosophers and psychologists studying the nature of the imagination and on its role in philosophy, aesthetics, and everyday life. (shrink)

In The Abuse of Beauty, art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto explains how the notion of beauty as anathema to art arose and flourished and offers a new way of looking at art and beauty. He draws on the thought of artists, critics, and philosophers such as Rimbaud, Fry, Matisse, and Greenberg, to reposition beauty as one of many modes -- along with sexuality, sublimity, disgust, and horror -- through which the human sensibility expresses itself. 20 black-and-white illustrations are included.

"Prompted by modern critical discussions, the fourteen papers, lectures and articles assembled in this volume revolve around issues raised by twentieth-century art and theory."--Amazon.

Do children have a theory of mind? If they do, at what age is it acquired? What is the content of the theory, and how does it differ from that of adults? The Child's Theory of Mind integrates the diverse strands of this rapidly expanding field of study. It charts children's knowledge about a fundamental topic - the mind - and characterizes that developing knowledge as a coherent commonsense theory, strongly advancing the understanding of everyday theories as well as the (...) commonsense theory of mind. Wellman presents evidence that children as young as age three do possess a commonsense theory of mind - that they grasp the distinction between mental constructs and physical entities and that they have an understanding of the relationship between individuals' mental states and their overt actions. He delves in detail into questions about the nature of adults' commonsense theories of mind and about the nature of commonsense theories. Wellman then examines the content of the three-year-old's theory of mind, the nature of children's notions of mind before age three, the changes in the theory during subsequent development from ages three to six, and the young child's conception of mind in comparison with those of older children and adults. Henry M. Wellman is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Center for Human Growth and Development at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. (shrink)

An analysis of two heuristic strategies for the development of mechanistic models, illustrated with historical examples from the life sciences. In Discovering Complexity, William Bechtel and Robert Richardson examine two heuristics that guided the development of mechanistic models in the life sciences: decomposition and localization. Drawing on historical cases from disciplines including cell biology, cognitive neuroscience, and genetics, they identify a number of "choice points" that life scientists confront in developing mechanistic explanations and show how different choices result in divergent (...) explanatory models. Describing decomposition as the attempt to differentiate functional and structural components of a system and localization as the assignment of responsibility for specific functions to specific structures, Bechtel and Richardson examine the usefulness of these heuristics as well as their fallibility—the sometimes false assumption underlying them that nature is significantly decomposable and hierarchically organized. When Discovering Complexity was originally published in 1993, few philosophers of science perceived the centrality of seeking mechanisms to explain phenomena in biology, relying instead on the model of nomological explanation advanced by the logical positivists (a model Bechtel and Richardson found to be utterly inapplicable to the examples from the life sciences in their study). Since then, mechanism and mechanistic explanation have become widely discussed. In a substantive new introduction to this MIT Press edition of their book, Bechtel and Richardson examine both philosophical and scientific developments in research on mechanistic models since 1993. (shrink)

Noël Carroll; Art and Human Nature, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 62, Issue 2, 5 May 2004, Pages 95–107, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-59.

The work of the artist and the science of vision may seem distantly related as subjects.