The debate between realists and anti-realists about fictional entities is important partly because it connects with debates about the nature of reference. According to the descriptivist model held by Fregeans, a name has reference to an object due to the connection of that name with a description, which is met by the relevant object. According to the causal-communicative model held by Millians, a name refers in virtue of a chain of reference linking that name to a referent. In the case (...) of fictional entities, it is a matter of debate whether the entities in question exist or not. Traditionally, Millians have had trouble dealing with antirealism about fictional entities. I argue for a simple realist theory, ‘bare-bones artifactualism’, according to which fictional entities are simple abstract ‘counters’. Each of these simple abstract counters has only those intrinsic properties that other such simple abstract counters also have, except for one distinctive intrinsic property. This one distinctive intrinsic property is a number-bearing property that marks out the abstract counter’s identity, distinct from all other such abstract counters. The number-bearing property allows us to do with abstract counters what spatiotemporal situatedness allows us to do with concrete counters: it allows us to treat the abstract counters as individuals. In support of such artifactualism, I discuss the following considerations: its ontological simplicity; its parallels in our other practices; and its explanatory promise. (shrink)

I propose a construal of aesthetic value that gives us reason to emphasize some aesthetic practices over others. This construal rests on the existence of a central aesthetic value, namely apprehension-testing intricacy within an appropriate domain. I address three objections: the objection that asks how an aesthetic value based on intricacy can account for the value of minimalism; the objection that asks about the difference between intricacy within a medium and intricacy between media; and the objection that asks about the (...) danger of a regress. I then say that, although this central aesthetic value can in principle allow us to adjudicate between aesthetic practices, we have epistemic limits (about the potential of certain artistic domains to allow for apprehension-testing intricacy) that prevent adjudication in some cases. Even if there is a difference between the vastness of the potential-intricacy-fields somewhere down the line, it is too far for us to see. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine the role of materiality in human cognition. We address issues such as the ways in which brain functions may change in response to interactions with material forms, the attributes of material forms that may cause change in brain functions, and the spans of time required for brain functions to reorganize when interacting with material forms. We then contrast thinking through materiality with thinking about it. We discuss these in terms of their evolutionary significance and history (...) as attested by stone tools and writing, material forms whose interaction endowed our lineage with conceptual thought and meta-awareness of conceptual domains. (shrink)

This article examines the evolution of the vocabulary “feudal (fengjian)” in early twentieth-century China. Despite having served as a symbol of local autonomy and countervailing against imperial authority as emphasized in the Confucian tradition, the term had descended into an object of scorn, oppression, and retrogression in the latter half of the twentieth century until today. An alternative interpretation toward the modern misuse of fengjian may be found by focusing and comparing the two seemingly unrelated and radically different portrayals of (...) fengjian by: political thinker Zhang Taiyan’s federalist ideology; and Marxist historian Guo Moruo’s manipulation of Chinese classics. Under the historical context surrounding the turmoil of 1920s China, this article argues that much more than a mistranslation, the redefinition of fengjian was an intentional slander to, through the ambiguity surrounding its definition, destroy the Chinese tradition of liberty and local autonomy, further justifying a unified, highly centralized Chinese nation-state. (shrink)

The concept of ‘living metaphor’ receives a number of articulations within metaphor theory. A review of four key theories – Nietzsche, Ricoeur, Lakoff and Johnson, and Derrida – reveals a distinction between theories which identify a prior, speculative nature working on or with metaphor, and theories wherein metaphor is shown to be performatively always, already active in thought. The two cannot be left as alternatives because they exhibit opposing theses with regard to the ontology of metaphor, but neither can an (...) impartial philosophical appraisal of the most cogent or defensible theory be made, since the status and conduct of philosophy are part of the problem. Two responses to the predicament from within ‘living metaphor’ theory are considered: (1) Lakoff and Johnson’s ecological spirituality thesis which promises to make the contest redundant on the grounds that the origin of human concepts in our shared, embodied condition in the world removes all obstructions; (2) taking the lead from Nietzsche and Ricoeur, an approach based on the intersection of discourses, not as a resolution but as a gesture which allows the conflict to speak about ‘living metaphor’. (1) is shown to be unsuccessful, but (2) results in ‘living metaphor’ emerging as an attentiveness to questions of what does and does not belong, inspired by tensions between ‘is’ and ‘is not’, ‘from this perspective’ and ‘from that perspective’, and ‘is spoken about’ and ‘is spoken with’. (shrink)

Can an understanding be formed of how sensory experience might be presented or manipulated in visual art in order to promote a relational concept of the senses, in opposition to the customary, capitalist notion of sensation as a private possession, as a sensory impression that is mine? I ask the question in the light of recent visual art theory and practice which pursue relational, ecological ambitions. As Arnold Berleant, Nicolas Bourriaud, and Grant Kester see it, ecological ambition and artistic form (...) should correspond, but they fail to recognize sensation as a site where the ecological cause can be fought. Jacques Rancière argues for the political force of the senses, but his distribution of the sensible does not address the particularity of sensory experience. I identify the difference between these approaches within recent relational or ecological aesthetics and my position on sensibility, and indicate some of the problems involved in referring to the senses. I set out the concepts that are central to the cultivation of relational sensibility: style, autofiguration, and the mobility of sensory meaning, extrapolated from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Paul Cézanne. They amount to positioning the senses ontologically as movements along lines of conceptual-sensory connection and implication, based on the transfer of meanings created artistically through style and autofiguration. (shrink)

Using a model of cognition as extended and enactive, we examine the role of materiality in making minds as exemplified by lithics and writing, forms associated with conceptual thought and meta-awareness of conceptual domains. We address ways in which brain functions may change in response to interactions with material forms, the attributes of material forms that may cause such change, and the spans of time required for neurofunctional reorganization. We also offer three hypotheses for investigating co-influence and change in cognition (...) and material culture. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 785793. (shrink)

This essay introduces a special issue focused on 4E cognition (cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) in the Lower Palaeolithic. In it, we review the typological and representational cognitive approaches that have dominated the past fifty years of paleoanthropology. These have assumed that all representations and computations take place only inside the head, which implies that the archaeological record can only be an “external” product or the behavioral trace of “internal” representational and computational processes. In comparison, the 4E approach (...) helps us to overcome this dualist representational logic, allowing us to engage directly with the archaeological record as an integral part of the thinking process, and thus ground a more parsimonious cognitive archaeology. It also treats stone tools, the primary vestiges of hominin thinking, as active participants in mental life. The 4E approach offers a better grounding for understanding hominin technical expertise, a crucially important component of hominin cognitive evolution. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore two ways of understanding the moral and spiritual significance of stories, and in turn two ways of developing the notion of storied identity, and hence two ways of reading the Bible. I propose that these two approaches to the biblical text provide the basis for a fruitful interpretation of the Christian rite of the Eucharist, so that, to this extent, we can take the Eucharist to support these ways of drawing out the sense of the (...) text. Accordingly, we can speak of reading the Bible eucharistically. The aim of the paper is not to substantially explain central features of the Eucharist as it has been understood in mainstream Christian teaching but, more modestly, to consider how these two ways of approaching the biblical text may help to bring some aspects of the rite, as depicted in Christian thought, into rather clearer focus, including its social dimension, and the relationship, on the Christian understanding, between the divine presence in the Incarnation and in the Eucharist. (shrink)

The ”dark night of the soul’ is a common motif in Christian spiritual writing; and the locus classicus for this motif is the work of John of the Cross, a Spanish Carmelite friar of the sixteenth century. My aim in this paper is to use John’s account of the ”night’ to consider how the themes of mystery, humility and religious practice may be subsumed, and related to one another, within a Christian conception of God and of human life lived out (...) in relation to God. (shrink)

Carey leaves unaddressed an important evolutionary puzzle: In the absence of a numeral list, how could a concept of natural number ever have arisen in the first place? Here we suggest that the initial development of natural number must have bootstrapped on a material culture scaffold of some sort, and illustrate how this might have occurred using strings of beads.

This paper considers the relevance of the Duhem-Quine thesis in economics. In the introductory discussion which follows, the meaning of the thesis and a brief history of its development are detailed. The purpose of the paper is to discuss the effects of the thesis in four specific and diverse theories in economics, and to illustrate the dependence of testing the theories on a set of auxiliary hypotheses. A general taxonomy of auxiliary hypotheses is provided to demonstrate the confounding of auxiliary (...) hypotheses with the testing of economic theory. (shrink)

Clive Bell was not an ethicist. He was an aesthetician, known for his very strong formalist views, according to which art has nothing to do with ethics and politics. At least that is the textbook description of his general stance. ‘Art and war’ is a relatively unknown piece by him that has been ignored within art history partly because the relation between art on the one hand and ethics and politics on the other is much more complex here.

Clive Walter Ingram Pearson was an Australian Existentialist and Religious Studies philosopher who spent his entire profesional career in the University of Auckland Philosophy Department. He was an idiosyncratic teacher and thinker who had a major influence on several contemporary ANZAC philosophers, as well as many hundreds of his students. This article is a tribute to him.

This perceptive and engaging work proposes a new approach to philosophical theology. Rather than beginning with the metaphysics or epistemology of religion, Wynn proposes to begin with the nature of spiritual goods and the ways in which they are pursued, understood, and handed on within spiritual traditions. Wynn advances his discussion while relying heavily on Aquinas’s Thomistic notion of infused virtue. The result is a fresh take on the “hybrid” nature of spiritual goods, which order human beings to both God (...) and the world. There are certainly some serious objections to the positions offered in this book, but the proposals are consistently insightful and interesting. In this review, I will focus on two key spiritual goods discussed by Wynn: (i) spiritual progress and (ii) faith. (shrink)

Some recent theories of emotion propose that emotions are perceptions of value laden situations and thus provide us with epistemic access to values. In this paper I take up Mark Wynn’s application of this theory to religious experience and try to argue that his McDowell-inspired account of intentional emotions leads to limitations for the justificatory force of religious experiences and to difficult questions about the metaphysical status of the object of religious experiences: if emotions and religious experiences are largely similar, (...) then, just as emotions, religious experiences cannot justify beliefs about the existence of objects, but merely beliefs about certain qualities they might have. Also, if emotions and religious experiences are largely similar, then, just as the objects of emotions, the object of religious experience turns out to be essentially mind-dependent. (shrink)

For many people, the phenomenon of divine hiddenness is so total that it is far from clear to them that God exists at all. Reasonably enough, they therefore do not believe that God exists. Yet it is possible, whilst lacking belief in God’s reality, nonetheless to see it as a possibility that is both realistic and attractive; and in this situation, one will likely want to be open to the considerable benefits that would be available if God were real. In (...) this paper I argue that certain kinds of desire for God can aid this non-believing openness. It is possible to desire God even in a state of non-belief, since desire does not require belief that its object exists. I argue that if we desire God in some particular capacity, and with some sense of what would constitute satisfaction, then through the desire we have knowledge -- incomplete yet vivid in its personal significance -- about the attributes God would need in order to satisfy us; thus, if God is real and does have those attributes, one knows something about God through desiring him. Because desire does not require belief, neither does the knowledge in question. Expanding on recent work by Vadas and Wynn, I sketch the epistemology of desire needed to support this argument. I then apply this epistemology to desire for God. An important question is how one might cultivate the requisite kinds desire for God; and one way, I argue, is through engaging with certain kinds of sacred music. I illustrate desire’s religiously epistemic power in this context, before replying to two objections. (shrink)

Introduction to the special issue in Pragmatics & Cognition focused on creativity, cognition, and material culture. With contributions from Maurice Bloch, Chris Gosden, Tim Ingold, John Kirsh, Carl Knappett & Sander van der Leeuw, Lambros Malafouris, Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau, Kevin Warwick, and Tom Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge.

A review of Clive C. Nwonka & Anamik Saha (eds.), Black Film British Cinema II, London, Goldsmisths Press, 2021, by Frédéric Lefrançois.

I argue for the Wittgensteinian thesis that mathematical statements are expressions of norms, rather than descriptions of the world. An expression of a norm is a statement like a promise or a New Year's resolution, which says that someone is committed or entitled to a certain line of action. A expression of a norm is not a mere description of a regularity of human behavior, nor is it merely a descriptive statement which happens to entail a norms. The view can (...) be thought of as a sort of logicism for the logical expressivist---a person who believes that the purpose of logical language is to make explicit commitments and entitlements that are implicit in ordinary practice. The thesis that mathematical statements are expression of norms is a kind of logicism, not because it says that mathematics can be reduced to logic, but because it says that mathematical statements play the same role as logical statements. ;I contrast my position with two sets of views, an empiricist view, which says that mathematical knowledge is acquired and justified through experience, and a cluster of nativist and apriorist views, which say that mathematical knowledge is either hardwired into the human brain, or justified a priori, or both. To develop the empiricist view, I look at the work of Kitcher and Mill, arguing that although their ideas can withstand the criticisms brought against empiricism by Frege and others, they cannot reply to a version of the critique brought by Wittgenstein in the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. To develop the nativist and apriorist views, I look at the work of contemporary developmental psychologists, like Gelman and Gallistel and Karen Wynn, as well as the work of philosophers who advocate the existence of a mathematical intuition, such as Kant, Husserl, and Parsons. After clarifying the definitions of "innate" and "a priori," I argue that the mechanisms proposed by the nativists cannot bring knowledge, and the existence of the mechanisms proposed by the apriorists is not supported by the arguments they give. (shrink)

A review of Clive Scott's Translating the Perception of the Text: Literary Translation and Phenomenology (Oxford: Legenda, 2012).

To support my Phd theses and results of my grant research in 1999, I asked 1) prominent chemist Antonín Holý, author of substances to treat hepatitis and HIV, about the indivisibility of the art and science (published in Slovak Narodna Obroda and Czech blisty,cz), 2) the distinguished economist William Baumol about the alternative activities (published in Slovak Nove Slovo, Czech Respekt and blisty.cz), 3) Nobel Laureate Clive Granger about the significance of the economics (published in 2004 in Czech weekly (...) Tyden). The interviews were exhibited in Holland Park, W8 6LU, The Ice House between 18. Oct - 3. Nov. 2013. (shrink)

The subject of the thesis is the relationship between aesthetic and God. It aims to discuss whether the sense of beauty is proof of the existence of God and to determine the plausibility of aesthetic proof. As a matter of fact that reality and the perception of beauty point to two-way consciousness. In this context, it will be inevitable to mention God's relation with consciousness in the emergence of beauty. In the first part, the concepts of aesthetics will be analyzed, (...) and their philosophical discussions will be investigated. In the second part, the source of beauty will be questioned, and beauty will be grounded way of a priori and a posteriori with God. Afterward, aesthetic proofs will be presented and an evaluation will be made in the context of naturalistic claims and objections. Among the traditional arguments in the philosophy of religion, aesthetic proof offers a value-oriented approach rather than a mechanical view. It appreciates beauty from an inclusive perspective and has an existential aspect. The study concentrates on the nature of beauty and aesthetics, philosophical discussions, and the rational value of aesthetic proof and concludes that it is rational to suppose that the existence of God can be ontologically and epistemologically explanatory for aesthetic properties. (shrink)