I introduce an underdiscussed type of moral luck, which I call interpersonal moral luck. Interpersonal moral luck characteristically occurs when the actions of other moral agents, qua morally evaluable actions, affect an agent’s moral status in a way that is outside of that agent’s capacity to control. I suggest that interpersonal moral luck is common in collective contexts involving shared responsibility and has interesting distinctive features. I also suggest that many philosophers are already committed to its existence. I then argue (...) that agents who are susceptible to interpersonal moral luck are usually for this reason defeasibly entitled to make demands of those agents who are the source of that luck. This is the phenomenon of normative entanglement. I conclude by discussing some of the important ways in which normative entanglement can shape the norms that govern the actions of agents in collective contexts as well as explain some of our intuitions about what participants in these contexts owe one another. (shrink)

I argue that death can be (and sometimes is) bad for cattle because it destroys relationships that are valuable for cattle for their own sake. The argument relies on an analogy between valuable human relationships and relationships cattle form with conspecifics. I suggest that the reasons we have for thinking that certain rich and meaningful human relationships are valuable for their own sake should also lead us to think that certain cattle relationships are valuable for their own sake. And just (...) as death is bad for us when it destroys our valuable relationships, so death is bad for cattle when it destroys their valuable relationships. This argument is important because it pinpoints something that is bad about death for cattle that is overlooked by popular accounts of the badness of death for non-human animals that focus exclusively on the impact of death on lifetime well-being levels. Thus, the argument reveals an overlooked moral cost of some of our farming practices. (shrink)

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is now in its seventh year. The goals of this National Center for Biomedical Computing are to: create and maintain a repository of biomedical ontologies and terminologies; build tools and web services to enable the use of ontologies and terminologies in clinical and translational research; educate their trainees and the scientific community broadly about biomedical ontology and ontology-based technology and best practices; and collaborate with a variety of groups who develop and use ontologies and (...) terminologies in biomedicine. The centerpiece of the National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a web-based resource known as BioPortal. BioPortal makes available for research in computationally useful forms more than 270 of the world's biomedical ontologies and terminologies, and supports a wide range of web services that enable investigators to use the ontologies to annotate and retrieve data, to generate value sets and special-purpose lexicons, and to perform advanced analytics on a wide range of biomedical data. (shrink)

(Third edition with additions) -/- This is a collection of short stories centering around the protagonist character, Kingfisher, originally written in Vietnamese by myself. -/- The book aims to introduce international readers to snippets of Vietnamese culture through the ordinary yet humorous life of the bird village. -/- The first 15 of these short stories were published in the Khoảng Lặng (Quiet Moment) column of the Vietnamese magazine Kinh Tế và Dự Báo (Economy and Forecast Review) from 2017 (...) to 2019. -/- However, this is the first time that the collection of all the Kingfisher stories has been published in its entirety, covering stories that have not been published elsewhere, including new stories written in 2023. -/- The stories of Kingfisher are full of humor and satire while also deep in social commentary. I hope that the book brings readers joy and some food for thought, for beyond satire is genuine contemplation of the humanistic values in our lives. -/- Hanoi, October 21, 2023 -/- Quan-Hoang Vuong -/- (Incld. Artworks by Bui Quang Khiem and Dam Thi Thu Ha). (shrink)

In Plato’s Philebus, Socrates’ second account of ‘false’ pleasure (41d-42c) outlines a form of illusion: pleasures that appear greater than they are. I argue that these pleasures are perceptual misrepresentations. I then show that they are the grounds for a methodological critique of hedonism. Socrates identifies hedonism as a judgment about the value of pleasure based on a perceptual misrepresentation of size, witnessed paradigmatically in the ‘greatest pleasures’.

This essay argues that there are theoretical benefits to keeping distinct—more pervasively than the literature has done so far—the psychological states of imagining that p versus believing that in-the-story p, when it comes to cognition of fiction and other forms of narrative. Positing both in the minds of a story’s audience helps explain the full range of reactions characteristic of story consumption. This distinction also has interesting conceptual and explanatory dimensions that haven’t been carefully observed, and the two mental state (...) types make distinct contributions to generating emotional responses to stories. Finally, the differences between the mental states illuminate how a given story can be both shared with others and at the same time experienced as personal. (shrink)

Most people will agree that if my brain were made to have within it precisely the same pattern of activity that is in it now but through artificial means, as in its being fed all its stimulation through electrodes as it sits in a vat, an experience would result for me that would be subjectively indistinguishable from that I am now having. In ‘The Story of a Brain’ I ask whether the same subjective experience would be maintained in variations like (...) these: The hemispheres are in different vats but interacting with each other through radio transmission. Smaller chunks - and eventually the individual neurons - are interacting in this way. The hemispheres or the smaller chunks undergo internally the same pattern of activity but without interacting with each other. (shrink)

The shortest stories are zero words long. There is no maximum length.

From folk tales to movies, stories possess features which naturally suit them to contribute to the growth of virtue. In this article I show that the fictional exemplars help the learner to grasp the moral importance of internal states and resolves a tension between existing kinds of exemplars discussed by virtue ethicists. Stories also increase the information conveyed by virtue terms and aid the growth of prudence. Stories can provide virtuous exemplars, inform learners as to the nature (...) of the virtues and offer practice in developing situational judgement. As such they are a significant resource for virtue ethics and moral education. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that fiction is necessarily incomplete, but some recent work postulates the existence of universal fictions—stories according to which everything is true. Building such a story is supposedly straightforward: authors can either assert that everything is true in their story, define a complement function that does the assertoric work for them, or, most compellingly, write a story combining a contradiction with the principle of explosion. The case for universal fictions thus turns on the intuitive priority we (...) assign to the law of non-contradiction. My goal in this paper is to show that our critical and reflective literary practices set constraints on story-telling which preclude universal fictions. I will raise four stumbling blocks for universal fictionalists: the gap between saying and making true, our actual interpretive reactions to story-level contradictions, the criteria we accept for what counts as a story in our literary practices, and the undesirability of the universal fictionalist’s closure principles. (shrink)

Today’s technological-scientific prospect of posthumanity simultaneously evokes and defies historical understanding. On the one hand, it implies a historical claim of an epochal transformation concerning posthumanity as a new era. On the other, by postulating the birth of a novel, better-than-human subject for this new era, it eliminates the human subject of modern Western historical understanding. In this article, I attempt to understand posthumanity as measured against the story of humanity as the story of history itself. I examine the fate (...) of humanity as the central subject of history in three consecutive steps: first, by exploring how classical philosophies of history achieved the integrity of the greatest historical narrative of history itself through the very invention of humanity as its subject; second, by recounting how this central subject came under heavy criticism by postcolonial and gender studies in the last half-century, targeting the universalism of the story of humanity as the greatest historical narrative of history; and third, by conceptualizing the challenge of posthumanity against both the story of humanity and its criticism. Whereas criticism fragmented history but retained the possibility of smaller-scale narratives, posthumanity does not doubt the feasibility of the story of humanity. Instead, it necessarily invokes humanity, if only in order to be able to claim its supersession by a better-than-human subject. In that, it represents a fundamental challenge to the modern Western historical condition and the very possibility of historical narratives – small-scale or large-scale, fragmented or universal. (shrink)

PENULTIMATE DRAFT. At times, weird stories such as the Pizzagate spread surprisingly quickly and widely. In this paper I analyze the mental attitudes of those who seem to take those absurdities seriously: I argue that those stories are often imagined rather than genuinely believed. Then I make room for the claim that often these imaginings are used to support group ideologies. My main contribution is to explain how that support actually happens by showing that motivated cognition can employ (...) imagination as a seemingly rational tool to reinforce and protect beliefs. (shrink)

Stories express hypotheses, interpretations of the world that have a certain degree of probability. To demonstrate this thesis I have adopted the notion of hypothesis, in a sense very close to the Meinongian concept of assumption, and a ‘metric’ conception of the values of the truth or falsity of a proposition – as that has been proposed in several ways by Peirce, Vasil’ev and Meinong. To show the the cognitive value of literary texts, and therefore their truth value, I (...) take my move from chapter 9 of Aristotle’s Poetics, where he holds that poetry is imitative of reality, not in the sense of history – which relates what has happened – but rather, in so far as it expresses “the kinds of things that might happen, that is, that could happen because they are either probable or necessary.” The probable admits variations of degree. By means of an examination of the Meinongian concepts of assumption and objective (i.e. state of affairs), which also allow different modes of gradation, I introduce, with examples drawn from Dante’s Divine Comedy and The Description (Tradimento) by Machiavelli, a theory of degrees of truth that makes it possible to apply the concept of probability to literary as well as to historical texts. Finally, I connect the universal character of the literary text with the ontological notion of incomplete object and argue that a fictional object, as it is incomplete, is not an individual but a type. (shrink)

It is our contention that an ontological commitment to propositions faces a number of problems; so many, in fact, that an attitude of realism towards propositions—understood the usual “platonistic” way, as a kind of mind- and language-independent abstract entity—is ultimately untenable. The particular worries about propositions that marshal parallel problems that Paul Benacerraf has raised for mathematical platonists. At the same time, the utility of “proposition-talk”—indeed, the apparent linguistic commitment evident in our use of 'that'-clauses (in offering explanations and making (...) predictions)—is also in need of explanation. We account for this with a fictionalist analysis of our use of 'that'-clauses. Our account avoids certain problems that arise for the usual error-theoretic versions of fictionalism because we apply the notion of semantic pretense to develop an alternative, pretense-involving, non-error-theoretic, fictionalist account of proposition-talk. (shrink)

The epistemological consequences of paradox are paradoxical. They can be usefully generated by telling a series of once-upon-a-time stories that make various philosophical points, starting out innocent and ending up, well, paradoxical. This is an introduction to my Live Skepticism, defended in Skepticism Comes Alive.

The author interprets three stories from recently Neolithic cultures (Melanesian, African Bushman, and Inuit) and a fourth story from an oral tradition of Haitian women. All four are about women and perhaps, judging by their content, composed by women. The author trained with Edward Whitmont and developed his interpretation technique in decades of practice with dreams as a Jungian analyst. He adds a new tool, the use of repetition, in which the same point is made by a series of (...) different details. Repetition provides an internal test for the accuracy of an interpretation. The author updates Jung’s concept of archetypes to incorporate an understanding of Darwinian evolution (which Jung lacked), new knowledge of the function of genes, and new knowledge of the emergence of complexity in dynamic and adaptive systems. He compares his interpretations of the four stories with other scholars’ interpretations, in particular the extraordinary work of Michael Wessels on African Bushman legends. Though Wessels criticized Jung for imposing his ‘colonial’ theory of universal archetypes, both Jung and Wessels insisted that interpretation requires a dialogue between two agents in which both are subjects, neither being dominated or objectified. In the four stories, the author shows, symbolic consciousness began with women. The anthropologist Chris Knight proposed something similar in 1991 in his controversial book Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture. (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 study aims to determine the socio-demographic and debt profile of the public-school teachers in the Schools Division of Aklan, Philippines, their reasons on acquiring debt and perceived ways to avoid debts. This study utilized descriptive correlational research design utilizing a researcher-made instrument on socio-demographic profile, pattern of expenditures, debt profile covering the type of debts, total cost of debts, reasons for having debts and perceived ways to manage debts. The data gathered were tabulated and analyzed using the IBM Statistical (...) Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 26. The take-home pay of the teachers was only more than half of their gross income. Most of the spouses of the married teachers were employed but many of them have relatively lower income. Their monthly family income was higher than the reported average family income for 2022 and their expenditures are also relatively higher than the average family expenditures in provinces for 2022. Almost one-half of the income of the teachers was used to pay their debts – both thru automatic payroll deduction and thru personal transactions. The bigger the household size, the higher the expenditure because there were more needs and there were many people consuming commodities. The higher the family income, the bigger the expenditure since lifestyle often adjusts with income. Young; married teachers; those occupying higher position and longer tenure have higher cumulative debts. Increase in family expenditure could cause increase in the number of debts as linked to the Theory of Reasoned Action and Theory of Planned Behavior. High regard for education, health, and safety triggered teachers to have debts, which can only be avoided thru better money and lifestyle management and having additional source of income. (shrink)

The condition of postmodernity has been associated with the depreciation of narratives. Here it is argued that stories play a primordial role in human self-creation, underpinning more abstract discourses such as mathematics, logic and science. This thesis is defended telling a story of the evolution of European culture from Ancient Greece to the present, including an account of the rise of the notion of culture and its relation to the development of history, thereby showing how stories function to (...) justify beliefs, situate people as agents within history and orient them to create the future. (shrink)

What is it to be an agent? One influential line of thought, endorsed by G. E. M. Anscombe and David Velleman, among others, holds that agency depends on practical rationality—the ability to act for reasons, rather than being merely moved by causes. Over the past 25 years, Velleman has argued compellingly for a distinctive view of agency and the practical rationality with which he associates it. On Velleman’s conception, being an agent consists in having the capacity to be motivated by (...) a drive to act for reasons. Your bodily movements qualify as genuine actions insofar as they are motivated in part by your desire to behave in a way that makes sense to yourself. However, there are at least two distinct ways of spelling out what this drive towards self-intelligibility consists in, both present in Velleman’s work. It might consist in a drive towards intelligibility in causal-psychological terms: roughly, a drive to maximize the rational coherence of your psychological states. Alternatively, it might consist in a drive towards narrative intelligibility: a drive to make your ongoing activity conform to a recognizable narrative structure, where that structure is understood emotionally. Velleman originally saw these options as basically equivalent, but later came to prioritize the drive towards causal-psychological intelligibility over that towards narrative intelligibility. I argue that this gets things the wrong way round—we should instead understand our capacities to render ourselves intelligible in causal-psychological terms as built upon a bedrock of emotionally suffused narrative understanding. In doing so, we resolve several problems for Velleman’s view, and pave the way for an embodied, embedded and affective account of practical rationality and agency. According to the picture that emerges, practical rationality is essential to agency, narrative understanding is essential to practical rationality, and the rhythms and structures patterning the ebb and flow of our emotional lives are essential to narrative understanding. (shrink)

I challenge the common picture of the “Standard Story” of Action as a neutral account of action within which debates in normative ethics can take place. I unpack three commitments that are implicit in the Standard Story, and demonstrate that these commitments together entail a teleological conception of reasons, upon which all reasons to act are reasons to bring about states of affairs. Such a conception of reasons, in turn, supports a consequentialist framework for the evaluation of action, upon which (...) the normative status of actions is properly determined through appeal to rankings of states of affairs as better and worse. This covert support for consequentialism from the theory of action, I argue, has had a distorting effect on debates in normative ethics. I then present challenges to each of these three commitments, a challenge to the first commitment by T.M. Scanlon, a challenge to the second by recent interpreters of Anscombe, and a new challenge to the third commitment that requires only minimal and prima facie plausible modifications to the Standard Story. The success of any one of the challenges, I demonstrate, is sufficient to block support from the theory of action for the teleological conception of reasons and the consequentialist evaluative framework. I close by demonstrating the pivotal role that such arguments grounded in the theory of action play in the current debate between evaluator-relative consequentialists and their critics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In a Buddhist treatise from around the fourth century CE there is a very remarkable story which serves as a thought experiment calling us to question the nature of self and the identity of persons. Lost in Sanskrit, the passage is fortunately preserved in a Chinese translation, the Dà zhìdù lùn. We here present the first reliable translation directly from the Classical Chinese, and discuss the philosophical significance of the story in its historical and literary context. We emphasise the (...) philosophical importance of embedding the story in two framing narratives, and demonstrate that the story taps a range of intuitions, and indeed fears, about the survival of the self which have also played a large role in the history of the topic in the West, and which continue to be of great contemporary concern. (shrink)

Aristotle’s Poetics defends the value of tragic poetry, presumably to counter Plato’s critique in the Republic. Can this defense resonate with something larger and rather surprising, that Aristotle’s overall philosophy displays a tragic character? I define the tragic as pertaining to indigenous and inescapable limits on life, knowledge, control, achievement, and agency. I explore how such limits figure in Aristotle’s physics, metaphysics, and biological works. Accordingly I want to disturb the common account of Aristotle’s thought as a neat system of (...) ontological order and metaphysical closure—not to exclude such elements but to place them within a world-view that includes certain limits at the edges of being. (shrink)

In this review article of Dan Hutto's bok Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons, I argue that we can take a functional approach to FP that identifies it with the practice of explaining behaviour -- that is, we can understand folk psychology as having the purpose of explaining behaviour and promoting social cohesion by making others’ behaviour comprehensible, without thinking that this ability must be limited to those with linguistic abilities. One reason for thinking that language must (...) be implicated in FP explanations arises from the history of theorizing about the nature of scientific explanation. I will show that there are other models of explanation that are free from the metaphysical linguistic baggage of the traditional models, and argue that such models can be profitably used to make sense of an explanation-centred FP that need not involve the attribution of propositional attitudes or a functioning linguistic competence. Further, I will argue that there is evidence that pre-linguistic human children engage in explanatory practices, and that some of these explanations may be seen as narrative explanations in an important sense. (shrink)

The paper suggests that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s arguments against sympathy after the French Revolution, Walter Benjamin’s claims against empathy following the traumatic shock of Modernity and the First World War, and Hannah Arendt’s critical take on compassion. after the Holocaust are similar responses to singular historical crises. Reconsidering Arendt’s On Revolution (1963) and its evocation of Hermann Melville’s novella Billy Budd (1891), I show first that the novella bears the traces of an essay by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Appeal to (...) Law” (1809). Then, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s writings on trauma in Illuminations (1968, edited by Arendt), I discuss the political importance Arendt attaches to the proper way of telling a story, at a time when “the communicability of experience is decreasing” (Benjamin, Illuminations, 86). Through the analysis of Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” and Arendt’s “heartless” report on the Eichmann trial (1963), I equally show that, according to Arendt, testimonies must be narrated, or rather performed, in a dispassionate, dry, and compact manner so that they can be historically and politically relevant. (shrink)

Sex toys promote a new consumptive ethos whose significance may be adequately outlined by attending to the institutional implications of this product category’s consumption. By drawing on Foucault’s theory of sexuality and the technologies of the self that materialize with the aid of discursive formations about sexuality, as well as on relevant sociological and ethnographic insights, I undertake a qualitative content analysis on a corpus of 100 sex toys’ product reviews from popular magazines and web sites in order to identify (...) how the discourse about sex toys is articulated in terms of three dominant categories of sexual scripts (Simon and Gagnon 2007, Sexual scripts. In Richard Parker & Peter Aggleton (eds.), Culture, society, and sexuality: A reader, 29–38. London: Routledge), namely, cultural scenarios, interpersonal and intrapsychic scripts. By opening up the discussion to a broader cultural terrain, I outline how the consumption experience of sex toys, as articulated in the reviews’ discursive formations, facilitates the emergence of new consumer trends, particularly with reference to orgasm-on-the-go and no-touch-orgasm, while redefining existing ones. (shrink)

The history of the house in Shyampukur, Kolkata, India, where Sri Ramakrishna lived for sometime when he was ailing. And the history of the place till the present-day, when it is a branch centre of the Ramakrishna Math.

Abstract: In chapter 15 of A Materialist Theory of the Mind, D.M.Armstrong offers an account of what he calls “the biological value of introspection”, namely, that “without information…about the current state of our minds, purposive trains mental activity would be impossible.” This paper examines and assesses Armstrong’s “Just-so story about introspective consciousness”—as W.G.Lycan later called it. One moral will be that appreciating this aspect of Armstrong’s view blurs the difference between his own perceptual model of introspection, and the anti-perceptual models (...) advanced by such critics as Sydney Shoemaker . (shrink)

This essay argues that current theories of action fail to explain agentive control because they have left out a psychological capacity central to control: attention. This makes it impossible to give a complete account of the mental antecedents that generate action. By investigating attention, and in particular the intention-attention nexus, we can characterize the functional role of intention in an illuminating way, explicate agentive control so that we have a uniform explanation of basic cases of causal deviance in action as (...) well as other defects of agency, explain cases of skilled agency and sharpen questions about the role of thought in agency. This provides for a different orientation in the theory of action. (shrink)

In this paper, I present an alternative account of action that improves upon what has come to be known as the standard story. The standard story depicts actions as events that are caused by and made intelligible through the appropriate combinations of the agent’s beliefs, desires, decisions, intentions and other motivational factors. I argue that the standard story is problematic because it depicts the relation between the agent and their bodily actions as causally mediated by their motivational factors. On the (...) alternative account that I present, whenever an agent performs a bodily action, they do so by exerting a distinctive kind of effort so as to initiate, sustain, and control their own bodily capacities, an essential feature of bodily action that is absent from the standard story. (shrink)

An exploration of the freedom foreknowledge problem using (New) Battlestar Galactica.

This paper considers the 20-year period that began with the US presence, interrogating the dynamics that helped ensure the failure of the US project – purportedly a democratic, rights-based state. It particularly examine how international actors and Afghan leaders ignored local culture and context to their ultimate detriment. The lack of attention paid to these elements helped create an opportunity for the Taliban to take power again with little opposition once the United States departed the country.

Ordinary readers and literary scholars take it for granted that stories mean something – not just that the words used to tell them mean something but that stories themselves have meaning. Using Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse as my main source of examples, I present an account of story-meaning involving the basic operations of generalisation, abstraction, universalisation and application. I also discuss questions about whose meaning story-meaning is – does it belong to the author, the reader or to (...) the story itself? – and about the motivation for using stories as vehicles of meaning. (shrink)

What happens to our minds when we listen to a story or read a book? How about when we watch a play or film? Any story, like a piece of music, plays out across our minds and in the process changes the nature of our notes and expands their range. Stories enable a metamorphosis of our minds through biological and sociocultural processes operating in concert.

Take a strip of paper with 'once upon a time there'‚ written on one side and 'was a story that began'‚ on the other. Twisting the paper and joining the ends produces John Barth’s story Frame-Tale, which prefixes 'once upon a time there was a story that began'‚ to itself. I argue that the ability to understand this sentence cannot be explained by tacit knowledge of a recursive theory of truth in English.

The essay discusses the meaning of 'A story of a bird named Bìm Bịp', Vietnamese traditional folklore. Through contradiction between a bandit and a monk, the meaning of lies, violence, and enlightenment is being told.

In questo contributo descriviamo un sistema di creatività computazionale in grado di generare automaticamente nuovi concetti utilizzando una logica descrittiva non monotòna che integra tre ingredienti principali: una logica descrittiva della tipicalità, una estensione probabilistica basata sulla semantica distribuita nota come DISPONTE, e una euristica di ispirazione cognitiva per la combinazione di più concetti. Una delle applicazioni principali del sistema riguarda il campo della creatività computazionale e, più specificatamente, il suo utilizzo come sistema di supporto alla creatività in ambito mediale. (...) In particolare, tale sistema è in grado di: generare nuove storie (a partire da una rappresentazione narrativa di storie pre-esistenti), generare nuovi personaggi (ad es. il nuovo “cattivo” di una serie tv o di un cartone animato) e, in generale, può essere utilizzato per proporre nuove soluzioni e format narrativi da esplorare nell’ambito dell’industria creativa. (shrink)

What happens to our minds when we listen to a story or read a book? How about when we watch a play or film? Any story, like a piece of music, plays out across our minds and in the process changes the nature of our notes and expands their range. Stories – whether told orally, read in a book, scrolled through or watched upon screen or stage – enable a metamorphosis of our minds through biological and sociocultural processes operating (...) in concert. (shrink)

A key dispute in environmental aesthetics concerns the role of scientific knowledge in our aesthetic appreciation of the natural environment. In this article, I will explore this debate by focusing on the aesthetic experience of forests. I intend to question reductive forms of the scientific approach and support the role of imagination and stories in nature appreciation.

We now have a paradoxical situation where the place and status of stories is in decline within the humanities, while scientists are increasingly recognizing their importance. Here the attitude towards narratives of these scientists is defended. It is argued that stories play a primordial role in human self-creation, underpinning more abstract discourses such as mathematics, logic and science. To uphold the consistency of this claim, this thesis is defended by telling a story of the evolution of European culture (...) from Ancient Greece to the present, including an account of the rise of the notion of culture and its relation to the development of history, thereby showing how stories function to justify beliefs, situate people as agents within history and orient them to create the future. (shrink)

A popular “Reductionist” account of personal identity unifies person stages into persons in virtue of their psychological continuity with one another. One objection to psychological continuity accounts is that there is more to our personal identity than just mere psychological continuity: there is also an active process of self-interpretation and self-creation. This criticism can be used to motivate a rival account of personal identity that appeals to the notion of a narrative. To the extent that they comment upon the issue, (...) proponents of narrative accounts typically reject Reductionist metaphysics that (ontologically) reduce persons to aggregates of person stages. In contrast to this trend, we seek to develop a narrative account of personal identity from within Reductionist metaphysics: we think person stages are unified into persons in virtue of their narrative continuity with one another. We argue that this Reductionist version of the narrative account avoids some serious problems facing non-Reductionist versions of the narrative account. (shrink)

This paper explores a middle way between realism and eliminativism about grounding. Grounding-talk is intelligible and useful, but it fails to pick out grounding relations that exist or obtain in reality. Instead, grounding-talk allows us to convey facts about what metaphysically explains what, and about the worldly dependence relations that give rise to those explanations.

It is only the story... that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence. The story is our escort. Without we are blind. -Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah.

Evidentiality refers to the linguistic marking of the nature/directness of source of evidence of an asserted event. Some languages (e.g., Turkish) mark source obligatorily in their grammar, while other languages (e.g., English) provide only lexical options for conveying source. The present study examined whether or under what conditions firsthand source information is relied on more than nonfirsthand sources in establishing discourse coherence. Turkish- and English-speaking participants read a series of somewhat incongruous two-sentence narratives and were to come up with a (...) way of completing each narrative so that it would form a coherent story. Each narrative contrasted two source types (firsthand vs. hearsay, firsthand vs. inference, or inference vs. hearsay) and two information types (general vs. particular information) each presented first or second. Analysis of story completions showed greater overall reliance on firsthand information when it was presented second and referred to a particular event. When the firsthand source occurred first and the particular event occurred second, the latter was favored, especially by Turkish participants. Taken together, the findings suggest that evidentiality interacts with information type in establishing discourse coherence and that both firsthand and particular information are relied on more when presented later rather than earlier in discourse. (shrink)

This essay aims to tell the story of the “altered nuclear transfer-oocyte assisted reprogramming,” or ANT-OAR, proposal—from its conception by Professor William Hurlbut of the President’s Council on Bioethics—to its adoption and promotion by a group of conservative, mostly Catholic philosophers, theologians and scientists—to its eventual demise in Congress. It also will give some reflections on how ANT-OAR promotes a genetically deterministic view of the human organism and can lead down a slippery slope into a future in which human cloning (...) and human genetic engineering are more acceptable. For these reasons, it will be argued, ANT-OAR should be opposed by all who are against human genetic modification regardless of their political orientation. (shrink)