O objetivo deste artigo é o de apresentar algumas posições filosóficas, que dialogam com diferentes áreas do conhecimento, e que nos auxiliam a dar um passo a mais na compreensão da relação entre razão e emoção. Em primeiro lugar, apresentamos a ideia dos marcadores somáticos, de Damasio, que elucida o papel dos afetos no desenvolvimento do pensamento racional. Em segundo lugar, observamos que indivíduos psicopatas apresentam uma capacidade reduzida em diferentes esferas da vida, com evidente diminuição na capacidade de ligar (...) sentimentos negativos a normas morais, o que leva a um comportamento moral inadequado e interfere na capacidade deliberativa. Por fim, apresentamos a teoria de Shaun Nichols acerca da Affective Resonance: normas que possuem respaldo afetivo (principalmente negativo) possuem vantagens de transmissão cultural, em detrimento de normas afetivamente neutras. Estes estudos comprovam a importância dos afetos para o pensamento racional e para a manutenção e propagação de normas e regras morais. A ideia principal aqui defendida é a de que há uma estreita relação entre razão e emoção. Ao elucidar esta relação, podemos aprofundar os estudos sobre a condição humana, em especial a razão e a moral. -/- The aim of this article is to present some of the philosophical positions that dialogue with different areas of knowledge and that help us take a step further in the understanding of the relationship between reason and emotion. First, we present Damasio's idea of somatic-markers, which elucidates the role of affections in the development of rational thought. Second, we observe that these exhibit a reduced capacity in different spheres of life, with a decreased ability to connect negative components to moralnorms, resulting in inappropriate moral behavior and interfering with deliberative capacities. Finally, we present Shaun Nichols' theory on Affective Resonance, the norms that comprise affective support (mainly negative) exhibit cultural transmission advantages to the detriment of affectively neutral norms. These studies prove the importance of affections inrational thinking and in the maintenance and propagation of moral norms and rules. The main idea defended herein is that a close relationship between reason and emotion takes place. By elucidating this relationship, we are able to deepen studies concerning the human condition, especially with regard to reason and morality. (shrink)

Few views have seen a more precipitous fall from grace than hedonism, which once occupied a central position in the history of ethics. Recently, there have been efforts to revive interest in the view, including well-motivated pleas for contemporary ethicists to at least take the view seriously. In this article, I argue for the seriousness of hedonism on metaethical grounds. Taking J.S. Mill's argument for hedonism as a test case, I show that historically, classic hedonism was grounded metaethically via a (...) commitment to two positions: empiricist epistemology and the view that pleasure occurs in sensation. Together, these two positions provided principled grounds for various iterations of classic hedonism. Moreover, these two positions are still serious options in both contemporary epistemology and the contemporary literature on the nature of pleasure. Insofar as a contemporary ethicist takes those two views seriously, they ought to take classic hedonism seriously as well. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAlthough philosophers have often insisted that specular perception is illusory or erroneous in nature, few have stressed the reliability and indispensability of mirrors as optical instrumen...

Background. Drawing on social identity theory and positive psychology, this study investigated women’s responses to the social environment of physics classrooms. It also investigated STEM identity and gender disparities on academic achievement and flourishing in an undergraduate introductory physics course for STEM majors. 160 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory physics course were administered a baseline survey with self-report measures on course belonging, physics identification, flourishing, and demographics at the beginning of the course and a post-survey at the end of (...) the academic term. Students also completed force concept inventories and physics course grades were obtained from the registrar. Results. Women reported less course belonging and less physics identification than men. Physics identification and grades evidenced a longitudinal bidirectional relationship for all students (regardless of gender) such that when controlling for baseline physics knowledge: (a) students with higher physics identification were more likely to earn higher grades; and (b) students with higher grades evidenced more physics identification at the end of the term. Men scored higher on the force concept inventory than women, although no gender disparities emerged for course grades. For women, higher physics (versus lower) identification was associated with more positive changes in flourishing over the course of the term. High-identifying men showed the opposite pattern: negative change in flourishing was more strongly associated with high identifiers than low identifiers. Conclusions. Overall, this study underlines gender disparities in physics both in terms of belonging and physics knowledge. It suggests that strong STEM identity may be associated with academic performance and flourishing in undergraduate physics courses at the end of the term, particularly for women. A number of avenues for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Most philosophical or scientific theories suppose that colour composition judgments refer to the way colours appear to us. The dominant view is therefore phenomenalist in the sense that colour composition is phenomenally given to perceivers. This paper argues that there is no evidence for a phenomenalist view of colour composition and that a conventionalist approach should be favoured.

In June 2002, Arthur Andersen LLP became the first accounting firm in history to be criminally convicted. The repercussions were immense. From a position as one of the leading professional services firms in the world, with 85,000 staff in 84 countries and revenues in excess of $9 billion, Andersen effectively ceased to exist within a matter of months. Although Andersen’s conviction related specifically to a charge of obstructing justice, public attention focused on the audit relationship between Andersen and its major (...) client, Enron Corporation, particularly the actions (and inactions) that had allowed Enron to post spectacular year-on-year earnings and profit growth. As well as examining events leading up to the demise of Andersen, the case provides an opportunity to consider the broader controversy over accounting and corporate governance practices and, more generally, the pressures found within organisations that can foster unethical conduct. The case was prepared from public sources. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that all transparent objects are colorless. This thesis is important for at least three reasons. First, if transparent objects are colorless, there is no need to distinguish between colors which characterize three-dimensional bodies, like transparent colors, and colors which lie on the surface of objects. Second, traditional objections against color physicalism relying on transparent colors are rendered moot. Finally, an improved understanding of the relations between colors, light and transparency is provided.

Along with hallucinations and illusions, afterimages have shaped the philosophical debate about the nature of perception. Often referred to as optical or visual illusions, experiences of afterimages have been abundantly exploited by philosophers to argue against naïve realism. This paper offers an alternative account to this traditional view by providing a tentative account of the colors of the afterimages from an objectivist perspective. Contrary to the widespread approach to afterimages, this paper explores the possibility that the colors of afterimages are (...) not ontologically different from “ordinary” colors and that experiences of afterimages fail to provide a motivation for rejecting naïve realism. (shrink)

El tema de este artículo es la interpretación que hace Gadamer del concepto de phronesis de Aristóteles, tal como se presenta en el Libro VI de la Ética a Nicómaco. Gadamer defiende que este primado aristotélico del ser ético puede extenderse a la reflexión sobre la cuestión del ser, en especial, el ser de la vida histórica. Al igual que Heidegger, Gadamer concibe la ontología como una filosofía de la finitud orientada por la ética de Aristóteles, pero a diferencia de (...) Heidegger, y de una manera más consecuente, no vacía la discusión de su significado ético. Se trata igualmente de una retomada del problema hermenéutico de cómo es posible la comprensión, si esta ocurre a partir de una situación histórica concreta, así como de una extensión de este problema a la reflexión filosófica en su totalidad. Para exponer esta problemática, partiremos del fenómeno histórico de la rehabilitación de la filosofía práctica en Alemania y de cómo el neoaristotelismo de Gadamer forma parte de este movimiento. Luego investigaremos el origen y desarrollo de la actualización que hace Gadamer del concepto aristotélico de phronesis, cuya culminación puede observarse en Verdad y Metodo como conciencia de la Wirkungsgeschichte. (shrink)

In November 2003, the University of Fribourg hosted a symposium on the ontology of colors. The invited participants included Justin Broackes, Alex Byrne, David Chalmers, Larry Hardin, Joe Levine and Barry Maund. The points of view presented by the participants in their thought-provoking papers were highly divergent. The presentation of each paper was followed by a long and intense discussion. Despite the divergence of the views proposed, the discussion during the symposium was highly focused. Several specific issues came up repeatedly (...) in the debate and illuminated the puzzle about the nature of colors in a thought provoking way from different angles. We include these papers in our brief description in the present introduction to present to the reader all the different viewpoints that have nourished the debate throughout the symposium. We are glad to be able to include one further invited paper by Jonathan Cohen in the present volume. In an attempt to transfer some of the atmosphere of the meeting to the reader and in order to make this collection still more stimulating we invited each participant to contribute comments on the other papers. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION Yoga is very ancient, certainly much older than the archaeological record, which is the only reliable one we have at present. ...

When the French philosopher Sarah Kofman committed suicide in 1994 she left behind an impressive oeuvre in which both the autobiographical genre and the treatment of women play a central role. Her theoretical re ections on both topics situate themselves in the interstices between psychoanalysis, feminism and deconstruction and share a common concern: the respect of alterity in all its guises. Kofman's resistance to the authoritative claim of the retrospective closure underlying traditional autobiographies is closely related to her celebration of (...) an e ®criture parricide, a mode of writing which undoes the repression of multiplicity and otherness. Shortly before her death Kofman published an autobiographical account of her own childhood years after the deportation and death of her father in a concentration camp. This article addresses the striking discrepancies between the theoretical positions Kofman defends throughout her philosophical writings and the autobiographical turn of her own last words. (shrink)

Ein Vergleich zwischen zwei prominenten Deutungen der Begegnung von Odysseus mit den Sirenen in Homers Odyssee, dem erstem Exkurs in der Dialektik der Aufklärung und dem einleitenden Kapitel von Maurice Blanchots Livre à venir – einer offensichtlich mit Adornos Deutung korrespondierenden Lektüre der Sirenenepisode – ermöglicht einen Einblick in das Verhältnis zwischen der Hauptfigur der Kritischen Theorie und einem der wichtigsten Vorläufer der Dekonstruktion. Diese beiden idiosynkratischen Lesarten von Homers kanonischer Szene erfassen nicht nur den Kern von Adornos und Blanchots (...) Zugang zu Literatur und Kunst sondern offenbaren in verdichteter Form die Unterschiede, aber auch die Verwandtschaft von zwei der einflussreichsten Denkformen des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts am Schnittpunkt zwischen Philosophie und Literatur. (shrink)

Common everyday materials such as textiles, foodstuffs, soil or skin can have complex, mutable and varied appearances. Under typical viewing conditions, most observers can visually recognize materials effortlessly, and determine many of their properties without touching them. Visual material perception raises many fascinating questions for vision researchers, neuroscientists and philosophers, yet has received little attention compared to the perception of color or shape. Here we discuss some of the challenges that material perception raises and argue that further philosophical thought should (...) be directed to how we see materials. (shrink)

Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) weaves together rigor and relevance while it improves student achievement and engagement. The Philippine Department of Education implemented Indigenous People’s education to respond to the demands for culturally responsive teaching. Teacher education graduates are expected to articulate the rootedness of education in sociocultural contexts in creating a learning environment that recognizes respect, connectedness, choice, personal relevance, challenges, engagement, authenticity, and effectiveness. Practice teachers need relevant exposure and immersion to fully develop their competence in CRT. This scenario (...) necessitates attention to assessing the competence of 191 practice teachers in CRT, correlating their competence across dimensions, and verifying the role of gender and degree programs in competence development. This investigation provides evidence on the role of gender in competence development toward culturally responsive teaching. Such competence is vital in practice teachers, especially because they are exposed to learners with diverse backgrounds during their teaching internship. This evidence informs supervising instructors in molding practice teachers. (shrink)

The Gompertz distribution is commonly used in biology for modeling fatigue and mortality. This paper studies a class of models proposed by Adham and Walker, featuring a Gompertz type distribution where the dependence structure is modeled by a lognormal distribution, and develops a new multivariate formulation that facilitates several numerical and computational aspects. This paper also implements the FBST, the Full Bayesian Significance Test for pertinent sharp (precise) hypotheses on the lognormal covariance structure. The FBST’s e-value, ev(H), gives the epistemic (...) value of hypothesis, H, or the value of evidence in the observed in support of H. (shrink)

The COVID-19 outbreak spurred unplanned closures and transitions to online classes. Physical environments that once fostered social interaction and community were rendered inactive. We conducted interviews and administered surveys to examine undergraduate STEM students’ feelings of belonging and engagement while in physical isolation, and identified online teaching modes associated with these feelings. Surveys from a racially diverse group of 43 undergraduate students at a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) revealed that interactive synchronous instruction was positively associated with feelings of interest and (...) belonging, particularly for students of color, while noninteractive instruction reduced social belonging, but was related to more cognitive engagement. Small group and one-on-one interviews with 23 of these students suggest that students derived feelings of connectedness from their instructors, peers, and prior experiences and relied on their sense of competency to motivate themselves in the course and feel a sense of belonging. Two embedded cases of students in physics classrooms are compared to highlight the range of student feelings of connectedness and competency during the lockdown. Findings reaffirm that social interaction tends to support belonging and engagement, particularly for under-represented (Black or African American and Hispanic) racial groups in STEM. STEM instructors who aim to support feelings of belonging and engagement in virtual learning environments should consider increasing opportunities for student–student and student–teacher interactions, as well as taking a flexible approach that validates and integrates student voice into instruction. Future research is needed to further explore the themes of relatedness and competency that emerged as aspects of course belonging. (shrink)

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic initiated major disruptions to higher education systems. Physical spaces that previously supported interpersonal interaction and community were abruptly inactivated, and faculty largely took on the responsibility of accommodating classroom structures in rapidly changing situations. This study employed interviews to examine how undergraduate Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) instructors adapted instruction to accommodate the mandated transition to virtual learning and how these accommodations supported or hindered community and belonging during the onset of the pandemic. (...) Interviews with 25 STEM faculty at an undergraduate Hispanic Serving Institution revealed a wide range of accommodations they made to their courses and how they managed communication with students. Faculty strived to support student belonging with responses ranging from caring to crisis management, though some faculty expressed feelings of powerlessness when unable to accommodate certain challenges. The case of a responsive and flexible instructor is presented to highlight a productive response to a crisis. These retrospective findings point to strategies to support faculty teaching in virtual learning environments in the future; increasing opportunities for student–student and student–faculty interaction, supporting faculty in learning technologies that support these interactions and addressing faculty’s feelings of powerlessness. (shrink)

Résumé – Nous nous intéressons à l’enseignement et l’apprentissage de l’infini en classe de mathématiques en considérant les différences et les relations entre infini potentiel et infini actuel. Nous présentons les principaux éléments de notre étude philosophique, épistémologique et didactique, ainsi que trois situations visant à conduire un travail explicite avec les élèves sur ces questions en début de lycée. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------- Abstract – We are interested in the teaching and learning of infinite in mathematics class, taking into account the relations (...) between potential infinite and actual infinite. We report the main elements of our current philosophical, epistemological and didactical study; we also present three mathematical situations that we consider relevant for this purpose and to be explored with 10 and 11 grade students. (shrink)

The Mamasapano Incident of January 25, 2015, marked a tragic episode in Philippine history, stemming from an operation aimed at neutralizing the suspected international terrorist, Zulkifli bin Hir, also known as Marwan. This operation, conducted by the Philippine National Police – Special Armed Forces (PNP-SAF), led to clashes resulting in casualties from both the SAF and MILF/BIFF members, as well as civilians, and the displacement of local residents. While the incident garnered national attention and spurred investigations primarily focused on the (...) casualties and political ramifications, the plight of the displaced civilians received inadequate scrutiny. Motivated by the impact on families associated with MSU – Maguindanao, situated near the conflict zone, this research delves into the conditions faced by Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in the aftermath of the Mamasapano Incident. By exploring the experiences of these respondents, the study contributes to the broader understanding of IDPs and the detrimental effects of armed conflict on society. Moreover, it aims to identify opportunities for mitigating such conflicts. The research objectives encompass examining the evacuation experiences, soliciting suggestions for supporting affected communities during times of conflict, and understanding the challenges faced by IDPs and coping mechanisms. Through an exploratory approach, the study investigates firsthand accounts of evacuation and post-return experiences in Mamasapano, Mindanao, Philippines. Findings reveal that during evacuation, respondents received basic assistance such as food, water, medicine, and clothing from various agencies, yet essential facilities like proper sanitation were lacking. Challenges encountered include food scarcity, inadequate water supply, overcrowding, and health issues. Upon return, observations of increased security presence and dwindling assistance highlighted the enduring impact of the incident on social, economic, educational, and health aspects of the community. In summary, this research sheds light on the overlooked plight of IDPs affected by the Mamasapano Incident, emphasizing the urgent need for comprehensive support and interventions to address their multifaceted challenges and facilitate sustainable recovery. (shrink)

In English, in order to speak about Arthur’s attitudes, we use sentences like “Arthur believes that natural language is messy”. For sentences of this kind we have a standard theory, according to which the ‘that’-clause ‘that natural language is messy’ denotes a proposition. As Prior showed for the first time, the standard theory appears to be at odds with some linguistic data. Geach and Prior both assumed that linguistic data are to be taken as reliable guides to a correct semantic (...) account and I will start by raising some worries concerning their methodology. Because of these data, Prior and Geach suggested some non-standard accounts. I will then show that if we take linguistic data seriously, their non-standard accounts do not fare any better than the standard theory. My general conclusion will thus not only be that Prior’s and Geach’s methodology is disputable, but also that their conclusions do not seem to follow even if we grant the reliability of their methodology. (shrink)

Quotes re the situation of the 10,000 embedded male-biased names in language about our species making people believe the basis of mind is male.

Vivian Maier’s street photography shows us a sudden transfiguration of reality, by which persons, scenes and things become faerical (neologism that also receives one of the senses of the French féerie , a play where supernatural, or, in this case, also infranatural creatures appear). We propose that this transfiguration is an apparition – a faerical epiphany (always earthy and fleshy) that follows two ways, one sunny and luminous, the other obscure and subterranean. We will examine Maier’s body, reflected in her (...) self-portraits in order to propose that her sight (therefore her photography) is a daemonic one, an intermediary between our and other worlds. -/- La fotografía callejera de Vivian Maier nos hace ver una súbita transfiguración de la realidad por la cual las personas, las escenas y las cosas devienen féricas , neologismo que nos permitimos para recoger del inglés el universo de las faeries y traducir a la vez uno de los sentidos del francés féerie , pieza de teatro en la que aparecen seres sobrenaturales (o, en este caso, infranaturales). Esa transfiguración, proponemos, es en rigor una verdadera aparición: una epifanía feérica (siempre carnal) que se despliega en dos direcciones, solar y subterránea. Nos detendremos en el cuerpo de Maier, reflejado en sus autorretratos, para proponer, finalmente, que su mirada es un daimon, intermediaria entre éste y otros mundos. (shrink)

In 2005, Charles Mills published “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology” in Hypatia: a withering critique of much of contemporary political philosophy and ethics. For Mills such work in philosophy failed to attend to the realities of social life and politics, and in remaining silent on actual issues of domination and oppression served an ideological role in supporting the interests of white bourgeois men. Around the time that Charles Mills launched his broadside against ideal theory, trans theorists had been fighting their own (...) battle against the abstraction of theory from the realities of trans lives and oppression. Vivian Namaste (2000) and Jay Prosser (1998) argued that contemporary gender theory failed to justice to the actuality of trans life, retreating instead to understanding trans life through literary archetypes and idealized radical figures. In this chapter I’ll compare Mills’ critique of ideal theory with the transfeminist critique of 1990s gender theory, arguing that they share much in common. Centrally, both critiques share an underlying commitment to theory needing to be grounded in the actuality of oppression and power relations. This common thread, I suggest, must continue to guide transfeminist thought and action: contra Marquis Bey (2022) transfeminist thought and praxis must continue to be about trans lives, about the oppression of trans women, and about ways of actually achieving liberation from our current dire position. (shrink)

This paper connects recent findings from experimental epistemology to several major themes in classical Indian epistemology. First, current evidence supports a specific account of the ordinary knowledge concept in contemporary anglophone American culture. According to this account, known as abilism, knowledge is a true representation produced by cognitive ability. I present evidence that abilism closely approximates Nyāya epistemology’s theory of knowledge, especially that found in the Nyāya-sūtra. Second, Americans are more willing to attribute knowledge of positive facts than of negative (...) facts, especially when such facts are inferred and even when the positive and negative “facts” are logically equivalent. Similar suspicions about knowledge of negative facts seemingly occur in classical Indian epistemology, suggesting that the asymmetry might not be an American quirk but instead reflect a cross-culturally robust tendency in knowledge attributions. Each of these themes—abilism and the positive/negative asymmetry—presents an exciting opportunity for further research in experimental cross-cultural epistemology. (shrink)

This book explores Iris Murdoch as a philosopher who, through her distinctive methodology, exploits the advantages of having a mind on the borders of literature and politics in her early career writings (pre-The Sovereignty of Good). By focusing on a single decade of Murdoch’s early career, Jamieson tracks connections between her views on the state of literature and politics in postwar Britain and her approach to the philosophy of mind and moral philosophy. Furthermore, this close study reveals that, far from (...) a stylistic quirk, Murdoch’s use of metaphors, analogies, and other literary devices is internal to her methodology. Finally, rather than asking what Murdoch’s views are, this work will ask “what is Murdoch trying to achieve with her writings and public lectures, and how does she go about this?” By answering the latter question, we will have a new strategy for interpreting her writings more generally. The book contributes to the growing body of scholarship focusing on Iris Murdoch’s philosophical writings, and on women in the history of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Within contemporary metaethics, it is widely held that there is a “presumption of realism” in moral thought and discourse. Anti-realist views, like error theory and expressivism, may have certain theoretical considerations speaking in their favor, but our pretheoretical stance with respect to morality clearly favors objectivist metaethical views. This article argues against this widely held view. It does so by drawing from recent discussions about so-called “subjective attitude verbs” in linguistics and philosophy of language. Unlike pretheoretically objective predicates (e.g., “is (...) made of wood”, “is 185 cm tall”), moral predicates embed felicitously under subjective attitude verbs like the English “find”. Moreover, it is argued that the widespread notion that moral discourse bears all the marks of fact-stating discourse is rooted in a blinkered focus on examples from English. Cross-linguistic considerations suggest that subjective attitude verbs are actually the default terms by which we ascribe moral views to people. Impressions to the contrary in English have to do with some unfortunate quirks of the term “think”. (shrink)

The science of mind wandering has rapidly expanded over the past 20 years. During this boom, mind wandering researchers have relied on self-report methods, where participants rate whether their minds were wandering. This is not an historical quirk. Rather, we argue that self-report is indispensable for researchers who study passive phenomena like mind wandering. We consider purportedly “objective” methods that measure mind wandering with eye tracking and machine learning. These measures are validated in terms of how well they predict self-reports, (...) which means that purportedly objective measures of mind wandering retain a subjective core. Mind wandering science cannot break from the cycle of self-report. Skeptics about self-report might conclude that mind wandering science has methodological foundations of sand. We take a rather more optimistic view. We present empirical and philosophical reasons to be confident in self-reports about mind wandering. Empirically, these self-reports are remarkably consistent in their contents and behavioral and neural correlates. Philosophically, self-reports are consistent with our best theories about the function of mind wandering. We argue that this triangulation gives us reason to trust both theory and method. (shrink)

A leitmotif of the interviews Werner Herzog gave throughout several decades is his portrayal of himself as an anti-intellectualist, an anti-theorist, and an anti-philosopher. The text resorts to an established philosopher, who may have actually welcomed Herzog’s anti-intellectualist and anti-theoretical posture: Ludwig Wittgenstein. They both attempt to do justice – the former cinematically, the latter philosophically – to what is sometimes called the “human condition,” its quirks and fancies included. And they are both concerned with the trouble we experience in (...) putting up with what there is, with what there may be at hand or before our eyes. Thus, the obstinacy of Herzog’s protagonists to achieve something come what may, and the dogmatism of Wittgenstein’s interlocutors to conceive of something in just one way, are two sides of the same coin. This coin is the unbounded attachment to a theory: one’s exclusive manner of acting upon, or looking at, the world around oneself. (shrink)

This essay meditates on the short film American Reflexxx and the violent laughter directed at a non-trans woman in public space when she was assumed to be trans. Drawing from work on the ideological and institutional dimensions of transphobia by Talia Bettcher and Viviane Namaste, alongside Sara Ahmed's writing on the cultural politics of disgust, I reverse engineer this specific instance of laughter into a meditation on the social meaning of transphobic laughter in public space. I then look at (...) racialized transphobic laughter directed against Tyra Hunter and Miriam Rivera to emphasize transmisogynist laughter as a denial of contact, intimacy, and care. Building on Kate Manne's work on misogyny, I conclude that a key aspect of transmisogyny is the use of transfeminine people as a source of dehumanized, disavowed, and disposable care and intimacy. Laughter and accompanying violence against trans women serves to reinforce this dynamic. (shrink)

This paper takes the Status Loss Theory (introduced and explained in the first "How Humor Works" paper), and applies it to 40 real-world examples, including memes, radio and TV shows, movie and comic book tropes, song parodies, humor sayings, stand-up comedy cliches, known psychological quirks of humor, and more, to demonstrate the theory's potential to function as the first clear, complete, logical, and simple basis for defining, studying, and understanding humor in all of its forms.

This review places this translation and commentary on Book A of Prior Analytics in historical, logical, and philosophical perspective. In particular, it details the author’s positions on current controversies. The author of this translation and commentary is a prolific and respected scholar, a leading figure in a large and still rapidly growing area of scholarship: Prior Analytics studies PAS. PAS treats many aspects of Aristotle’s Prior Analytics: historical context, previous writings that influenced it, preservation and transmission of its manuscripts, editions (...) of its manuscripts, interpretations, commentaries, translations, and its influence on subsequent logic, philosophy, and mathematics. All this attention is warranted because Prior Analytics marks the origin of logic: the field that, among other things, asks of a given proposition whether it follows from a given set of propositions; and, if it follows, how we determine that it follows; and, if it does not follow, how we determine that it does not follow. This translation and commentary is not suitable for use in an undergraduate course. It has too many quirks that the teacher would want to warn against. A copy editor should have dealt with these things and with other matters such as incorrect punctuation and improper end-of-line divisions. The prose is heavily laden with glaring clichés. The one-page preface contains “longer than I care to remember”, “more than I can possibly list here”, “first and foremost”, and “last and by no means least”—a sentence later is devoted to thanking the “incredibly meticulous and helpful copy-editor”. A few pages later the translator reveals the need “to find a path between the Scylla … and the Charybdis …”. Moreover, the index is far from meeting the needs of undergraduate students. The attention to scholarly detail is not what one hoped for from Oxford University Press. At 26b10-15, this translation reads “let swan and white be chosen as white things” for what Smith correctly translates “let swan and snow be selected from among those white things”. At 41b16, “angles AB and CD” should read “angles AC and BD”. Despite this book’s flaws, it will be found useful if not indispensable for those currently engaged in Prior Analytics studies. The alternatives suggested to Robin Smith’s translation choices are often worth consideration. It is to be emphasized, however, that this book is unsuitable for those entering Prior Analytics studies. (shrink)

ROUDAUT (François) & STOFFEL (Jean-François), Avant-propos (pp. 371-372). BLAY (Michel), Soleil de Copernic et soleil de Galilée (pp. 373-389). MEHL (Édouard), Le Soleil au cinquième concile du Latran (1512-1516) : Copernic et la réforme du calendrier julien (pp. 391-408). STOFFEL (Jean-François), «Qui choisirait de poser ce flambeau dans un lieu autre ou meilleur que celui d’où il peut illuminer le tout simultanément ?»: examen de la pertinence d’un argument copernicien de convenance (pp. 409-458). ROUDAUT (François), Le Soleil chez quelques lexicographes (...) et vulgarisateurs (pp. 459-485). CÉARD (Jean), Le Soleil selon les physiciens de la Renaissance (pp. 487-498). MÉNAGER (Daniel), Le soleil dans les fêtes de cour sous les derniers Valois (pp. 499-510). SEIDENGART (Jean), La parenté du Soleil et des étoiles fixes dans la cosmologie de Giordano Bruno (pp. 511-529). ŠPELDA (Daniel), Les soleils et leurs observateurs au XVIIe siècle (pp. 531-577). MELLINGHOFF-BOURGERIE (Viviane), Connivences héliologiques entre théologie et astronomie chez François de Sales et Bérulle: le cas du barnabite Redento Baranzano (pp. 579-610). NEJESCHLEBA (Tomáš), De la métaphysique de la lumière à l’héliocentrisme: la vision du Soleil selon Valérien Magni (pp. 611-627). Les auteurs (pp. 629-630). (shrink)