In this essay, I look at some extraordinary actors who never got their due—actors who had distinguished careers, but never won an Academy Award for acting. I review the work of: Joseph Cotten; Orson Welles; Edward G. Robinson; Cary Grant; James Mason; Richard Burton; Claude Rains; Alan Ladd: Robert Mitchum; and Fred MacMurray. In each case, I explore the actor’s best work, what made his acting outstanding, and offer possible explanations why he was not so honored.

This précis summarizes the main topics, arguments and conclusions of the book. Many interesting arguments and critiques have, of course, been omitted in order to make this summary appropriately brief.

The term ‘propaganda’ is normally taken in the pejorative sense of deceitful messaging. Propaganda is considered dubious if it is produced by a government agency, especially by a ministry of war or propaganda. In this article, I apply the theory of propaganda I sketched in a prior piece in these pages, under which propaganda is simply messaging intended to persuade others to do something or to support something. Under this theory, propaganda is reasonable if but only if it is evidence-based, (...) truthful, broadly logical, not coercive, targeted at mentally competent adults, and transparent—meaning that the audience should be aware that the message is intended to persuade them to do or support something. I then examine three WWII-era government propaganda films, one—A Defeated People (1946)—produced by the British military, and two—The Negro Soldier (1944) and Teamwork (1947)—produced by the American military. I explain first why I chose these particular films. I then analyze these films in some detail and show that while they were not perfectly rational, they all effectively conveyed the persuasive message that the respective militaries wanted to convey. And they did this by meeting all of the criteria for propaganda to be rational. (shrink)

Recent findings in experimental philosophy have revealed that people attribute intentionality, belief, desire, knowledge, and blame asymmetrically to side- effects depending on whether the agent who produces the side-effect violates or adheres to a norm. Although the original (and still common) test for this effect involved a chairman helping or harming the environment, hardly any of these findings have been applied to business ethics. We review what little exploration of the implications for business ethics has been done. Then, we present (...) new experimental results that expand the attribution asymmetry to virtue and vice. We also examine whether it matters to people that an effect was produced as a primary or side- effect, as well as how consumer habits might be affected by this phenomenon. These results lead to the conclusion that it appears to be in a businessperson’s self-interest to be virtuous. (shrink)

Experiential acquaintance is an alleged relation between ourselves and our experiences that has sometimes been hypothesised as necessary for knowledge of our experiences. This paper begins with a clarification of ‘acquaintance’ and an explanation of ‘experience’ that focuses attention on a famous, but flawed, argument by G. E. Moore. It goes on to critically examine several recent arguments concerning experiential acquaintance and to show how internalist foundationalism can respond to a famous Sellarsian dilemma without appeal to a relation of acquaintance (...) with our experiences. It concludes that we can dispense with experiential acquaintance. (shrink)

Very plausibly, nothing can be a genuine computing system unless it meets an input-sensitivity requirement. Otherwise all sorts of objects, such as rocks or pails of water, can count as performing computations, even such as might suffice for mentality—thus threatening computationalism about the mind with panpsychism. Maudlin in J Philos 86:407–432, ( 1989 ) and Bishop ( 2002a , b ) have argued, however, that such a requirement creates difficulties for computationalism about conscious experience, putting it in conflict with the (...) very intuitive thesis that conscious experience supervenes on physical activity. Klein in Synthese 165:141–153, ( 2008 ) proposes a way for computationalists about experience to avoid panpsychism while still respecting the supervenience of experience on activity. I argue that his attempt to save computational theories of experience from Maudlin’s and Bishop’s critique fails. (shrink)

With his 1998 book, In Nature’s Interests? Gary Varner proved to be one of our most original and trenchant of environmental ethicists. Here, in the first of a promised two volume set, he makes his mark on another field, animal ethics, leaving an even deeper imprint. Thoroughly grounded in the relevant philosophical and scientific literatures, Varner is as precise in analysis as he is wide-ranging in scope. His writing is clear and rigorous, and he explains philosophical nuances with extraordinary (...) economy of expression. Never one to add an unnecessary clause to a sentence, Varner nonetheless constructs a formidable edifice while always dealing fairly with the authors he criticizes. His explication of the properties and moral status of what he calls near-persons is a crucial addition to the discussion of personhood initiated by Parfit in Reasons and Persons and subsequently applied to animals by McMahan in The Ethics of Killing. The comparison to McMahan is intentional for, to my mind, Varner vies with him as the most important animal ethicist since Singer and Regan. (shrink)

In preparation for examining the place of introspective evidence in scientific psychology, the chapter begins by clarifying what introspection has been supposed to show, and why some concluded that it couldn't deliver. This requires a brief excursus into the various uses to which introspection was supposed to have been put by philosophers and psychologists in the modern period, together with a summary of objections. It then reconstructs some actual uses of introspection (or related techniques, differently monikered) in the early days (...) of experimental psychology. It distinguishes broader and narrower conceptions of introspection and argues that recent critics have tended to misdescribe how introspection was supposed to work. Drawing upon the broader conception of introspection, it argues that introspective reports are ineliminable in perceptual psychology. It concludes with some examples of such ineliminable uses of introspective reports in both earlier and recent perceptual psychology. (shrink)

I argue for the moral relevance of a category of individuals I characterize as far-persons. Following Gary Varner, I distinguish near-persons, animals with a " robust autonoetic consciousness " but lacking an adult human's " biographical sense of self, " from the merely sentient, those animals living "entirely in the present." I note the possibility of a third class. Far-persons lack a biographical sense of self, possess a weak autonoetic consciousness, and are able to travel mentally through time a (...) distance that exceeds the capacities of the merely sentient. Far-persons are conscious of and exercise control over short-term cognitive states, states limited by their temporal duration. The animals in question, human and nonhuman, consciously choose among various strategies available to them to achieve their ends, making them subjects of what I call "lyrical experience:" brief and potentially intense pleasures and pains. But their ends expire minute-by-minute, not stretching beyond, I say metaphorically, the present hour. I conclude by discussing the moral status of far-persons. (shrink)

Psychology considered as a natural science began as Aristotelian "physics" or "natural philosophy" of the soul, conceived as an animating power that included vital, sensory, and rational functions. C. Wolff restricted the term " psychology " to sensory, cognitive, and volitional functions and placed the science under metaphysics, coordinate with cosmology. Near the middle of the eighteenth century, Krueger, Godart, and Bonnet proposed approaching the mind with the techniques of the new natural science. At nearly the same time, Scottish thinkers (...) placed psychology within moral philosophy, but distinguished its "physical" laws from properly moral laws. British and French visual theorists developed mathematically precise theories of size and distance perception; they created instruments to test these theories and to measure visual phenomena such as the duration of visual impressions. By the end of the century there was a flourishing discipline of empirical psychology in Germany, with a professorship, textbooks, and journals. The practitioners of empirical psychology at this time typically were dualists who included mental phenomena within nature. Accordingly, psychology as a natural scientific disciplines was not invented in the 18th and 19th centuries, but *remade* from the extant empirical psychology. (shrink)

The concept of expression in the arts is Janus-faced. On the one hand expression is an author-centered notion: many Romantic poets, painters, and musicians thought of themselves as pouring our or ex-pressing their own emotions in their artworks. And on the other hand, expression is an audience-centered notion, the communication of what is expressed by an author to members of an audience. Typically the word “expression” is used for the author-centered aspect of expression as a whole, and the word “expressiveness” (...) is used for the audience-centered aspect, and I shall keep to this usage. In this paper I shall argue that although expression is closely related to expressiveness, the two concepts are distinct and, in particular, expressiveness cannot be analyzed in terms of expression, as has been recently suggested by Stephen Davies and Jerrold Levinson. Nonetheless, the richest examples of expression in the arts involve both expression and expressiveness. (shrink)

According to ‘Excluders’, descriptive uncertainty – but not normative uncertainty – matters to what we ought to do. Recently, several authors have argued that those wishing to treat normative uncertainty differently from descriptive uncertainty face a dependence problem because one's descriptive uncertainty can depend on one's normative uncertainty. The aim of this paper is to determine whether the phenomenon of dependence poses a decisive problem for Excluders. I argue that existing arguments fail to show this, and that, while stronger ones (...) can be found, Excluders can escape them. (shrink)

It seems intuitively obvious that metameric matching of color samples entails a loss of information, for spectrophotometrically diverse materials appear the same. This intuition implicitly relies on a conception of the function of color vision and on a related conception of how color samples should be individuated. It assumes that the function of color vision is to distinguish among spectral energy distributions, and that color samples should be individuated by their physical properties. I challenge these assumptions by articulating a different (...) conception of the function of color vision, according to which color vision serves to partition object surfaces into discrimination classes. (shrink)

In this article, I set forth a theory of propaganda explaining what it is, how it relates to marketing, and the nature and types of ideology. I discuss the criteria by which we can judge the rationality or deceitfulness of propaganda. I defend the view that while propaganda can be perfectly rational, it rarely is, and I explain why that is the case. I finish by explaining why the question of the rationality or deceitfulness of propaganda is different from the (...) question of the morality of propaganda. I give two quick examples of how an ethicist might argue that deceptive propaganda might be ethical to use, and perfectly rational propaganda might be immoral to use. I conclude with the notion that the question of the ethics of marketing and propaganda is complex, and should be handled in a separate paper. (shrink)

In this essay, I want to explore one of the most ironic episodes in the history of propaganda, the attempt by various federal agencies to moderate American WWII anti-Japanese propaganda films. My texts will be four films, two produced by the military, and two by Hollywood: December 7th (1943), directed by Gregg Toland and revised by John Ford; Air Force (1943), directed Howard Hawks; Know Your Enemy: Japan (1945), directed by Frank Capra; and Betrayal for the East (1945), directed by (...) William Berke. As all of these films are readily available on YouTube, I will be brief in my description of them. Instead, I will focus on how they served to intensify racial hatred of Japanese in general and Japanese-Americans in particular, and how the federal government tried to control that propaganda—but was limited by its own policies regarding Japanese-Americans. (shrink)

The theory of knowledge in early twentieth-century Anglo American philosophy was oriented toward phenomenally described cognition. There was a healthy respect for the mind-body problem, which meant that phenomena in both the mental and physical domains were taken seriously. Bertrand Russell's developing position on sense-data and momentary particulars drew upon, and ultimately became like, the neutral monism of Ernst Mach and William James. Due to a more recent behaviorist and physicalist inspired "fear of the mental", this development has been down-played (...) in historical work on early analytic philosophy. Such neglect assumes that the "linguistic turn" is a proper and permanent effect of twentieth-century philosophy, an assumption that distorts early analytic historiography, and begs a substantive philosophical question about thought and cognition. (shrink)

On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) over what would quickly become known as SARS-CoV- 2 or COVID- 19. This emergency status was officially ended in the United States in May 2023 amidst much dissent and debate. Although emergency conditions resulting from COVID- 19 will likely wax and wane over the coming years, there is good reason to think that the incidence of severe global pandemics will increase over the next (...) century, as will declarations of emergency. The declaration of an emergency calls for urgent action, but it just as urgently demands careful reflection. Official “emergency” status licenses unparalleled executive intervention, completely reorganizing the lives of those who live under its decree. Such official recognition, however, is heavily dependent on the social context in and from which the emergency arises. Highlighting which circumstances rise to the level of an official emergency clarifies our reigning assumptions about what threshold of active harm—and in relation to which groups of people—demands immediate intervention. (shrink)

Christopher Johnson has put forward in this journal the view that ad hominem reasoning may be more generally reasonable than is allowed by writers such as myself, basing his view on virtue epistemology. I review his account, as well as the standard account, of ad hominem reasoning, and show how the standard account would handle the cases he sketches in defense of his own view. I then give four criticisms of his view generally: the problems of virtue conflict, vagueness, conflation (...) of speech acts, and self-defeating counsel. I then discuss four reasons why the standard account is superior: it better fits legal reality, the account of other fallacies, psychological science, and political reality. (shrink)

Gossip is rarely praised. There seems little virtuous that is about talking behind someone’s back. Whether there is anything virtuous about gossip, however, depends on the kind of gossip. Some gossip is idle, but some evaluative gossip promulgates and enforces norms. When properly motivated, such gossip effects positive change in society and counts as gossiping well. The virtue of gossiping well even includes some kinds of false gossip, namely the sort that exaggerates a pre-existing trait, thereby creating a caricature of (...) a person’s character in order to establish a moral exemplar (or anti-exemplar). (shrink)

This article seeks the origin, in the theories of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), Descartes, and Berkeley, of two-stage theories of spatial perception, which hold that visual perception involves both an immediate representation of the proximal stimulus in a two-dimensional ‘‘sensory core’’ and also a subsequent perception of the three dimensional world. The works of Ibn al-Haytham, Descartes, and Berkeley already frame the major theoretical options that guided visual theory into the twentieth century. The field of visual perception was the first area (...) of what we now call psychology to apply mathematics, through geometrical models as used by Euclid, Ptolemy, Ibn al-Haytham, and Descartes (among others). The article shows that Kepler’s discovery of the retinal image, which revolutionized visual anatomy and entailed fundamental changes in visual physiology, did not alter the basic structure of theories of spatial vision. These changes in visual physiology are advanced especially in Descartes' Dioptrics and his L'Homme. Berkeley develops a radically empirist theory vision, according to which visual perception of depth is learned through associative processes that rely on the sense of touch. But Descartes and Berkeley share the assertion that there is a two-dimensional sensory core that is in principle available to consciousness. They also share the observation that we don't usually perceived this core, but find depth and distance to be phenomenally immediate, a point they struggle to accommodate theoretically. If our interpretation is correct, it was not a change in the theory of the psychology of vision that engendered the idea of a sensory core, but rather the introduction of the theory into a new metaphysical context. (shrink)

This essay is my analysis of Eamonn Butler’s fine book, Public Choice: a Primer. I suggest that Butler’s book is especially useful for philosophers, most of whom are to this day unfamiliar with public choice theory. This body of economics studies the role that universal self-interest plays in politics. This is an unpleasant truth for many philosophers, who have the Hegelian view of government as the realm of disinterested charity. Butler reviews the history of public choice economics, discusses the various (...) schools of the theory, and the major areas of application. (shrink)

In his 'Of the Standard of Taste' David Hume seems to make the paradoxical claim that even though the sentiments an agent feels in response to an artwork are subjective and unique, and it cannot be said that such sentiments are either correct or incorrect, there is a standard upon which art can be judged, which is at least partly determined by these sentiments.

According to the reading offered here, Descartes' use of the meditative mode of writing was not a mere rhetorical device to win an audience accustomed to the spiritual retreat. His choice of the literary form of the spiritual exercise was consonant with, if not determined by, his theory of the mind and of the basis of human knowledge. Since Descartes' conception of knowledge implied the priority of the intellect over the senses, and indeed the priority of an intellect operating independently (...) of the senses, and since, in Descartes' view, the untutored individual was likely to be nearly wholly immersed in the senses, a procedure was needed for freeing the intellect from sensory domination so that the truth might be seen. Hence, the cognitive exercises of the Meditations, modeled not on the sense- and imagination-based exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, but on the Augustinian procedure of turning away from the senses and imagination to perceive the unpicturable with the fleshless eye of the mind. In accordance with this reading, the function of Descartes' skeptical arguments is not to introduce skepticism so that it can be defeated but to aid the meditator in withdrawing the mind from the senses in order to attend to truths of the pure intellect. These truths then offer the basis for a new natural philosophy, including a new theory of the senses. (shrink)

Virtues are acquirable, so if intellectual humility is a virtue, it’s acquirable. But there is something deeply problematic—perhaps even paradoxical—about aiming to be intellectually humble. Drawing on Edward Slingerland’s analysis of the paradoxical virtue of wu-wei in Trying Not To Try (New York: Crown, 2014), we argue for an anti-individualistic conception of the trait, concluding that one’s intellectual humility depends upon the intellectual humility of others. Slingerland defines wu-wei as the “dynamic, effortless, and unselfconscious state of mind of a person (...) who is optimally active and effective” (Trying Not to Try, 7). Someone who embodies wu-wei inspires implicit trust, so it is beneficial to appear wu-wei. This has led to an arms race between faking wu-wei on the one hand and detecting fakery on the other. Likewise, there are many benefits to being (or seeming to be) intellectually humble. But someone who makes conscious, strategic efforts to appear intellectually humble is ipso facto not intellectually humble. Following Slingerland’s lead, we argue that there are several strategies one might pursue to acquire genuine intellectual humility, and all of these involve commitment to shared social or epistemic values, combined with receptivity to feedback from others, who must in turn have and manifest relevant intellectual virtues. In other words, other people and shared values are partial bearers of a given individual’s intellectual humility. If this is on the right track, then acquiring intellectual humility demands epistemic anti-individualism. (shrink)

The first two sections of the paper characterize the nineteenth century respect for the phenomenal by considering Helmholtz’s position and James’ and Russell’s move to neutral monism. The third section displays a moment’s sympathy with those who recoiled from the latter view -- but only a moment’s. The recoil overshot what was a reasonable response, and denied the reality of the phenomenal, largely in the name of the physical or the material. The final two sections of the paper develop a (...) third way, which retains a healthy respect for the mental and for the mind–body relation, does not attempt to equate objects with congeries of sensations, and does not attempt to deny the reality of the phenomenal. In fact, I will claim that on some conceptions (and not merely idealist-phenomenalist conceptions), the phenomenal is a fact of nature, and hence a part of the natural world. Some aspects of this third way are familiar in the various representational and critical realisms of the twentieth-century. But the realization -- or, more neutrally, the conception -- that the natural might include the phenomenal is less familiar. Yet this position has its predecessors too, not only among the physicists and psychologists of the nineteenth century, but among major physicists (as opposed to physicalist philosophers) and psychologists of the twentieth. [A re-edited version of this paper appears in Gary Hatfield, Perception and Cognition: Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology, Clarendon Press, 2009.]. (shrink)

During the seventeenth century the major cognitive faculties--sense, imagination, memory, and understanding or intellect--became the central focus of argument in metaphysics and epistemology to an extent not seen before. The theory of the intellect, long an important auxiliary to metaphysics, became the focus of metaphysical dispute, especially over the scope and powers of the intellect and the existence of a `pure' intellect. Rationalist metaphysicians such as Descartes, Spinoza, and Malebranche claimed that intellectual knowledge, gained independently of the senses, provides the (...) framework for constructing a new theory of nature. Other writers, including Hobbes and the early Gassendi, denied the existence of a distinct intellectual faculty, and so challenged the metaphysicians' abilities directly to perceive the essences of substances. The theory of the senses, which had long been a part of philosophical discussion, took on a new urgency, for adherents of the new corpuscularian philosophy needed to replace the dominant Aristotelian theory of real sensory qualities and sensible species. The revival of skepticism and a renewed interest in method also brought the faculties into prominence, for skeptical challenges typically were directed toward the faculties of sense and understanding, and the theory of method was conceived as providing instructions for the proper use of one's cognitive equipment. The theory of the faculties, then, is an important key to theories of knowledge in the seventeenth century. Indeed, rather than speaking of seventeenth century epistemology, it would be less anachronistic and more informative to speak of theories of cognition. The familiar (and over-stated) point that epistemology became fundamental to metaphysics during that century can then be restated as the point that the theory of faculties became central in metaphysical dispute. (shrink)

In this article, I explore how efficacious film can be in countering propaganda in film. To set up the discussion, I first sketch out a simple theory of propaganda, under which propaganda can be ranked from completely rational to very irrational, on six different dimensions. These are the degrees to which the propaganda is: evidence-based; truthful; broadly logical; transparent; properly targeted; and transparent. I then review in detail the main propaganda film, Gasland. This film was a highly successful documentary that (...) attacked the production of natural gas by hydrofracturing, called in America “fracking.” Gasland succeeded in organizing domestic opposition to fracking, actually blocking it in the Delaware River Basin system. The film was also influential abroad, leading to fracking bans in France, Bulgaria, and elsewhere in Europe. Next, I review in detail two counter-propaganda films—that is, in this case, two pro-fracking documentaries: Truthland and FrackNation. Truthland is a short documentary that aims at rebutting many of Gasland’s major claims. It was funded by the fracking industry and had limited distribution but it succeeded in refuting much of the longer and better-funded anti-fracking film. A much more successful film in terms of both general distribution and efficacy of rebuttal was the much longer pro-fracking documentary FrackNation. It critiques all of Gasland’s major points, in vivid detail. Since it was crowdfunded, it couldn’t be dismissed on the grounds that it was biased because of being industry-backed. I conclude by explaining why the pro-fracking documentaries did not result in a major change in public opinion. (shrink)

This chapter considers philosophical problems concerning non-human (and sometimes human) animals, including their metaphysical, physical, and moral status, their origin, what makes them alive, their functional organization, and the basis of their sensitive and cognitive capacities. I proceed by assuming what most of Descartes’s followers and interpreters have held: that Descartes proposed that animals lack sentience, feeling, and genuinely cognitive representations of things. (Some scholars interpret Descartes differently, denying that he excluded sentience, feeling, and representation from animals, and I consider (...) the evidence for these interpretations as well.) Given that Descartes denied any sort of soul to animals, his other philosophical commitments entailed that he must explain the vital and sensitive powers of non-human animals through purely material causes. Indeed, he welcomed this task, for he was engaged in the larger project of providing purely mechanistic explanations for all natural phenomena of the material world. Animal bodies form functional unities that are adapted to environmental circumstances. In his new physics, Descartes sought to discover or hypothesize material mechanisms that would explain the physiological and behavioral capacities of animals, including how they maintain themselves by seeking food and drink, reproduce themselves, and modify their behavior to fit current circumstances. Metaphysically, his new perspective raised the problem of accounting for the functional unity of the animal body considered as a purely material construction, devoid of an active, organizing power such as the sensitive soul. Descartes’s project becomes even more challenging if we ask whence come such mechanisms that are capable of performing the functions of living things. Officially, Descartes endorsed the accepted theological orthodoxy, that God designed and created the bodily mechanisms of humans and animals. However, in his natural philosophy he set himself the task of explaining the origin of animals as part of the natural development of the universe out of an original chaotic soup of material particles. Within this naturalistic perspective, he must explain how, through purely material processes, the functionally organized bodies of living things (plants and animals) could be produced from non-living matter. Without a designing creator, how do animal bodies arise that are capable of digesting food, growing, reproducing, and performing the behaviors needed to preserve life and health? (shrink)

This article first refines the question of Kant's relation to Hume's skepticism, and then considers the evidence for Kant's attitude toward Hume in three contexts: the A Critique, the Prolegomena, and the B Critique. My thesis is that in the A Critique Kant viewed skepticism positively, as a necessary reaction to dogmatism and a spur toward critique. In his initial statement of the critical philosophy Kant treated Hume as an ally in curbing dogmatism, but one who stopped short of what (...) was really needed: a full critique of reason, to establish the boundaries of metaphysical cognition. Kant found fault with Hume's analyses of cognition and experience, and specifically his failure to see the crucial importance of synthetic a priori cognition in metaphysics. In particular, he held that Hume's empiricist account of cognition could neither explain the synthetic a priori cognition actually found in mathematics and natural science, nor provide a principled account of the limits on what can be known--and what can be thought--through the pure concepts of the understanding. According to Kant, Hume therefore failed in his attempt to determine the limits of metaphysics, whereas Kant succeeded because his transcendental philosophy provided a thorough account of cognition, its structure and limits. In the Prolegomena and the B Critique Kant distinguished his position more sharply from Hume's. He also adopted a more negative attitude toward "skeptical idealism" than before; but he attributed such skepticism to Descartes, not Hume. Prior to the B Critique Kant did not see Hume as attacking natural science or ordinary cognition. In none of the three works was Kant's main aim to "answer the skeptic." His primary aim was what he said it was: to firmly establish the boundary of metaphysics, by discovering the elements of human cognition and fixing its proper domain. His purported discoveries about the limits of metaphysical cognition meant that the traditional objects of metaphysical knowledge, God, the soul, and the world as it is in itself, are unknowable, hence that traditional metaphysics itself is impossible. Besides settling the possibility or impossibility of metaphysics, his findings would also prevent the illegitimate extension of principles of sensibility to God and the noumenal self, an extension that would threaten the metaphysics of morals by incorrectly denying the thinkability of noumenal freedom, and that might otherwise lead to "materialism, fatalism, atheism, and freethinking unbelief" (B xxxiv). (shrink)

In the past 60 years or so, the philosophical subject of artistic expression has generally been handled as an inquiry into the artistic expression of emotion. In my view this has led to a distortion of the relevant territory, to the artistic expression of feeling’s too often being overlooked. I explicate the emotion-feeling distinction in modern terms, and urge that the expression of feeling is too central to be waived off as outside the proper philosophical subject of artistic expression. Restricting (...) the discussion to the art of painting, I sketch a partial psychological model for the exrtistic expression of feelipression of feeling. Although the feeling-emotion contrast is seldom made clear in their writings, I stress that many, or even most of the eminent pre-1960’s voices in aesthetics and art criticism—Croce, Dewey, Langer, Bosanquet, Berenson and others—would more or less agree that feeling is no less important for expression than emotion, and indeed can be interpreted as anticipating many points that I set forth. (shrink)

This article focuses on the positive reasons for adopting epiphenomenalism. Some objections that have been answered in more detail in my other work receive some response here, but the main point is to see why epiphenomenalism is an attractive view for those with a generally naturalistic outlook. It distinguishes qualitative events from propositional states and explains why their treatment must be different. The view that our words must 'express our thoughts' is critically examined.

Robert Nozick (1993) has offered an evolutionary account of self-evident beliefs that comes into conflict with a "mild realist" (Dennett, 1991a) view of beliefs. This chapter summarizes both views, and explains the conflict. Emergence is examined. Mild realism is found to embrace "emergence" in an acceptable sense, and to eschew it in its problematic sense. Nozick's cases of self-evident beliefs are examined and difficulties in his account are explained. An alternative approach is developed that avoids the difficulties in Nozick's account (...) and is compatible with mild realism. Implications of mild realism for concepts are drawn. (shrink)

Review and response to Gimbel’s Isn’t That Clever.

Should people include beef in their diet? This chapter argues that the answer is “no” by reviewing what is known and not known about the presence in cattle of three psychological traits: pain, desire, and self-consciousness. On the basis of behavioral and neuroanatomical evidence, the chapter argues that cattle are sentient beings who have things they want to do in the proximal future, but they are not self-conscious. The piece rebuts three important objections: that cattle have injury information but not (...) pain; that cattle have goal-directed behavior but not desire; and that the absence of evidence for bovine self-consciousness should not be taken as evidence that cattle lack self-consciousness. In sum, what is known about cattle cognition shifts the moral burden of proof on to the beef eaters. (shrink)

After sketching some aspects of truthmaker doctrines and "truthmaker projects", and canvassing some prima facie objections to the latter, I turn to an issue which might seem to involve confusion about the nature of character of truthmakers if such there be, viz for statements of identity and (specially) distinctness. The real issue here is versions of the Identity of Indiscernibles. I discuss ways of discriminating versions, which are almost certainly true but trivial, which almost certainly substantive but false, and explore (...) an interesting intermediate possibility which might if developed yield a plausibly true yet not-entirely-trivial version of the doctrine: it is equivalent to what I call "the Denial of Bare Distinctness". (shrink)

SummaryIn this paper, two different theoretical problems of induction are delineated. The first problem is addressed; the second problem is deferred to the sequel to this paper. The first problem of induction is taken to be the seemingly unformalizable nature of traditional inductive arguments. It is shown that the problem does not arise out of some particularly dubious argument form , but rather from the presupposition that inductive “logic” is, like deductive logic, assertoric. Rather , inductive logic is dialectical in (...) nature.RésuméDans cet article, deux problèmes théoriques de l'induction sont formulés. Le premier est traité, le second le sera dans une suite à cet article. Le premier problème de l'induction est ici la nature apparemment non formalisable des arguments inductifs traditionnels. L'auteur montre que le problème ne provient pas d'une forme d'argumentation particulièrement douteuse , mais au contraire de la présupposition que la «logique» inductive est, comme la logique déductive, assertorique. Il soutient au contraire qu'elle est par nature dialectique.ZusammenfassungIn der vorliegenden Arbeit werden zwei theoretische Probleme der Induktion formuliert, wovon das zweite in einem anderen Artikel behandelt werden soll. Das erste Problem betrifft die scheinbar nicht formalisierbare Natur der üblichen induktiven Argumente. Der Verfasser zeigt dass das Problem nicht von einer besonders zweifelhaften Argumentationsform herrührt , sondern von der Voraussetzung, dass die induktive «Logik» — wie die deduktive Logik — assertorisch sei. Es wird dagegen gezeigt, dass die induktive Logik dialektischer Natur ist. (shrink)

The term “environmental justice” carries with it a sort of ambiguity. On the one hand, it refers to a movement of social activism in which those involved fight and argue for fairer, more equitable distribution of environmental goods and equal treatment of environmental duties. This movement is related to, and ideally informed by, the second use of the term, which refers to the academic discipline associated with legal regulations and theories of justice and ethics with regard to sustainability, the environment, (...) and ecology. It is this latter, more academic—though vast and interdisciplinary—use of the term that is the subject of this essay. However, activists who pay careful attention to the arguments offered with regard to the political, legal, social, and philosophical treatments of these issues are potentially in a stronger position with regard to their own social movement. In that way, the two uses of the term may progress hand in hand. More broadly, however, the foundational claim about which both grassroots activists and legal, ethical, and policy advocates can agree is that environmental burdens—climate change, pollution, and their associated health risks—are borne disproportionately by the poorest and most vulnerable populations, and tend to have the greatest impact on racial and ethnic minorities, no matter where they are in the world. This is what makes the empirical questions about the environment a normative question about justice. (shrink)

Two stories have dominated the historiography of early modern philosophy: one in which a seventeenth century Age of Reason spawned the Enlightenment, and another in which a skeptical crisis cast a shadow over subsequent philosophy, resulting in ever narrower "limits to knowledge." I combine certain elements common to both into a third narrative, one that begins by taking seriously seventeenth-century conceptions of the topics and methods central to the rise of a "new" philosophy. In this revisionist story, differing approaches to (...) the central subject matter of early modern metaphysics--knowledge of substances through their essences and causal powers--arise as a result of disagreements about the powers of the human cognitive faculties. Methodological writings are seen as attempts to direct readers in the proper use of their cognitive faculties. The early modern rejection of the Aristotelian theory of cognition ranks equally in importance with rejection of Aristotelian doctrines about nature. Skepticism is more often than not a tool to be used in teaching the reader the proper use of the cognitive faculties, or indeed in convincing the reader of the existence or inexistence of certain cognitive faculties or powers. Instead of early modern "epistemology" or "theory of knowledge," one speaks, with seventeenth century writers, of theories of the cognitive faculties and their implications for the possibility of human knowledge. The early modern rejection of Aristotelian logic can then be seen as reflecting a negative assessment about the fit between syllogistic reasoning and logic as an art of reasoning or thinking which refines the use of the cognitive faculties. -/- Central to this new historiography is the story of the relation between the intellect and senses as cognitive faculties or powers. The development of philosophy from Descartes to Kant can be portrayed as a series of claims about the power of the intellect to know the essences of things, with resulting consequences for ontology and the foundations of natural philosophy. I illustrate this revised narrative by comparing three conceptions of the intellect in three philosophical settings, provided by several late scholastic Aristotelians, Descartes, and Locke. I have two aims: first, to exhibit the central role played by the conception of intellect or understanding in these authors, and, second, to locate their discussions of the cognitive faculties in relation to recent understandings of psychology, epistemology, logic, mind, and their relations. Early modern writings do not easily fit into the modern categories of epistemology and psychology; more generally, the early modern concern with the workings of mind does not coincide with recent conceptions of naturalism. These findings can help us to see problems with our current categories. (shrink)

Some experiments in perceptual psychology measure perceivers’ phenomenal experiences of objects versus their cognitive assessments of object properties. Analyzing such experiments, this article responds to Pizlo’s claim that much work on shape constancy before 1985 confused problems of shape ambiguity with problems of shape constancy. Pizlo fails to grasp the logic of experimental designs directed toward phenomenal aspects of shape constancy. In the domain of size perception, Granrud’s studies of size constancy in children and adults distinguish phenomenal from cognitive factors.

During the 1630s Descartes recognized that he could not expect all legitimate claims in natural science to meet the standard of absolute certainty. The realization resulted from a change in his physics, which itself arose not through methodological reflections, but through developments in his substantive metaphysical doctrines. Descartes discovered the metaphysical foundations of his physics in 1629-30; as a consequence, the style of explanation employed in his physical writings changed. His early methodological conceptions, as preserved in the Rules and sketched (...) in Part Two of the Discourse, pertained primarily to his early work in optics. By the early 1630s, Descartes was concerned with new methodological problems pertaining to the postulation of micro-mechanisms. Recognition of the need to employ a method of hypothesis led him to lower the standard of certainty required of particular explanations in his mature physics. (shrink)

This essay is my review of Bob Bowden’s excellent documentary The Cartel. It is a powerful indictment of public schools and public school teachers’ unions. In a crucial part of the film, we see minority parents at a charter school lottery. Charter schools, like voucher private schools, give parents school choice—although charter schools are public schools technically, but run fairly independently. They are so popular, and the school districts allow so few of them, that parents must apply by lottery for (...) the few slots. The looks of grief on the faces of the parents who lose the lottery—and hence must keep their children in failing public schools—is telling. It is ironic that the nation most admired by American progressives—Sweden—completely voucharized its entire K-12 school system thirty years ago. (shrink)

Part 1 of this paper discusses some uses of arguments from radical moral disagreement—in particular, as directed against absolutist cognitivism—and surveys some semantic issues thus made salient. It may be argued that parties to such a disagreement cannot be using the relevant moral claims with exactly the same absolutist cognitive content. That challenges the absolutist element of absolutist cognitivism, which, combined with the intractable nature of radical moral disagreement, in turn challenges the viability of a purely cognitivist account of moral (...) judgments. Such a conclusion could be staved off if it could be held that a sufficient condition for commonality of cognitive content in moral judgments could consist, despite the presence of radical moral disagreement, in the parties’acceptance of a common set of fundamental moral principles. Part 1 begins, and Part 2 further develops, a destructive critique of that idea, leading thereby to a skeptical appraisal of the important role sometimes assigned, in metaethical theorizing, to moral rules. Inter alia the paper is intended to suggest the possibility of overlap between relativist and particularist agendas. (shrink)

The chapter begins with an initial survey of ups and downs of contextualist history of philosophy during the twentieth century in Britain and America, which finds that historically serious history of philosophy has been on the rise. It then considers ways in which the study of past philosophy has been used and is used in philosophy, and makes a case for the philosophical value and necessity of a contextually oriented approach. It examines some uses of past texts and of history (...) that reveal limits to noncontextual history, including Strawson's Kant, Rorty's grand diagnosis of the Western tradition, and Friedman on Kant's philosophy of mathematics. It then considers ways in which the history of philosophy may become philosophically deeper by becoming more historical, and instances in which history of philosophy of various stripes has or may deliver a philosophical payoff. Along the way, it urges historians of philosophy to attend not only to individual philosophers and their problems and projects, but also to the larger shape of the history of philosophy and its narrative themes. (shrink)

Descartes was both metaphysician and natural philosopher. He used his metaphysics to ground portions of his physics. However, as should be a commonplace but is not, he did not think he could spin all of his physics out of his metaphysics a priori, and in fact he both emphasized the need for appeals to experience in his methodological remarks on philosophizing about nature and constantly appealed to experience in describing his own philosophy of nature. During the 1630s, he offered empirical (...) support for the basic principles of his natural philosophy, while also promising to provide a metaphysical justification. He offered the metaphysical justification in the Meditations and Principles. and claimed absolute certainty for it. At the same time, he recognized that the particular postulated mechanisms of his natural philosophy did not reach that standard of certainty. These mechanisms were supported by empirical testing or confirming of causes through observed effects. (shrink)

Crump et al.’s contribution to assessing whether decapods feel pain raises an important question: Is pain distributed unevenly across the order? The case for pain appears stronger in Pleocyemata than in Dendrobranchiata. Some studies report pain avoidance behaviors in Dendrobranchiata (Penaeidae) shrimp, but further studies are needed to determine whether the chemicals used are acting as analgesics to relieve pain, or as soporifics to reduce overall alertness. If the latter, the most farmed shrimp species may not require the same level (...) of protection as crabs, crayfish, and lobsters. (shrink)