My topic is a certain view about mental images: namely, the ‘Multiple Use Thesis’. On this view, at least some mental image-types, individuated in terms of the sum total of their representational content, are potentially multifunctional: a given mental image-type, individuated as indicated, can serve in a variety of imaginative-event-types. As such, the presence of an image is insufficient to individuate the content of those imagination-events in which it may feature. This picture is argued for, or (more usually) just assumed (...) to be true, by Christopher Peacocke, Michael Martin, Paul Noordhof, Bernard Williams, Alan White, and Tyler Burge. It is also presupposed by more recent authors on imagination such as Amy Kind, Peter Kung and Neil Van Leeuwen. I reject various arguments for the Multiple Use Thesis, and conclude that instead we should endorse SINGLE: a single image-type, individuated in terms of the sum total of its intrinsic representational content, can serve in only one imagination event-type, whose content coincides exactly with its own, and is wholly determined by it. Plausibility aside, the interest of this thesis is also in its iconoclasm, as well as the challenge it poses for the diverse theories that rest on the truth of the Multiple Use Thesis. (shrink)

Shepard has supposed that the mind is stocked with innate knowledge of the world and that this knowledge figures prominently in the way we see the world. According to him, this internal knowledge is the legacy of a process of internalization; a process of natural selection over the evolutionary history of the species. Shepard has developed his proposal most fully in his analysis of the relation between kinematic geometry and the shape of the motion path in apparent motion displays. We (...) argue that Shepard has made a case for applying the principles of kinematic geometry to the perception of motion, but that he has not made the case for injecting these principles into the mind of the percipient. We offer a more modest interpretation of his important findings: that kinematic geometry may be a model of apparent motion. Inasmuch as our recommended interpretation does not lodge geometry in the mind of the percipient, the motivation of positing internalization, a process that moves kinematic geometry into the mind, is obviated. In our conclusion, we suggest that cognitive psychologists, in their embrace of internal mental universals and internalization may have been seduced by the siren call of metaphor. Key Words: apparent motion; imagery; internalization; inverse projection problem; kinematic geometry; measurement; metaphors of mind. (shrink)

Probabilistic support is not transitive. There are cases in which x probabilistically supports y , i.e., Pr( y | x ) > Pr( y ), y , in turn, probabilistically supports z , and yet it is not the case that x probabilistically supports z . Tomoji Shogenji, though, establishes a condition for transitivity in probabilistic support, that is, a condition such that, for any x , y , and z , if Pr( y | x ) > Pr( y (...) ), Pr( z | y ) > Pr( z ), and the condition in question is satisfied, then Pr( z | x ) > Pr( z ). I argue for a second and weaker condition for transitivity in probabilistic support. This condition, or the principle involving it, makes it easier (than does the condition Shogenji provides) to establish claims of probabilistic support, and has the potential to play an important role in at least some areas of philosophy. (shrink)

Andrew Cling presents a new version of the epistemic regress problem, and argues that intuitionist foundationalism, social contextualism, holistic coherentism, and infinitism fail to solve it. Cling’s discussion is quite instructive, and deserving of careful consideration. But, I argue, Cling’s discussion is not in all respects decisive. I argue that Cling’s dilemma argument against holistic coherentism fails.

It is standard practice, when distinguishing between the foundationalist and the coherentist, to construe the coherentist as an internalist. The coherentist, the construal goes, says that justification is solely a matter of coherence, and that coherence, in turn, is solely a matter of internal relations between beliefs. The coherentist, so construed, is an internalist (in the sense I have in mind) in that the coherentist, so construed, says that whether a belief is justified hinges solely on what the subject is (...) like mentally. I argue that this practice is fundamentally misguided, by arguing that the foundationalism / coherentism debate and the internalism / externalism debate are about two very different things, so that there is nothing, qua coherentist, precluding the coherentist from siding with the externalist. I then argue that this spells trouble for two of the three most pressing and widely known objections to coherentism: the Alternative-Systems Objection and the Isolation Objection. (shrink)

Coherentists on epistemic justification claim that all justification is inferential, and that beliefs, when justified, get their justification together (not in isolation) as members of a coherent belief system. Some recent work in formal epistemology shows that “individual credibility” is needed for “witness agreement” to increase the probability of truth and generate a high probability of truth. It can seem that, from this result in formal epistemology, it follows that coherentist justification is not truth-conducive, that it is not the case (...) that, under the requisite conditions, coherentist justification increases the probability of truth and generates a high probability of truth. I argue that this does not follow. (shrink)

Bernard Williams famously argued that eternal life is undesirable for a human because it would inevitably grow intolerably boring. I will argue against Williams and those who share his view. To make my case, I will provide an account of what staves off boredom in our current, earthly-mortal lives, and then I will draw on this account while advancing reasons for thinking that eternal life is desirable, given certain conditions. Though my response to Williams will partly overlap with some prior (...) responses to Williams, especially the one offered by J. M. Fischer, my response will also be distinctive in some important ways. For instance, it will be distinctive in that it will discuss the role that one’s part-whole-reality conception plays in fending off boredom, where by “one’s part-whole-reality conception” I mean “one’s conception of his or her place in the whole of reality.”. (shrink)

Abstract If asked about the Darwinian influence on William James, some might mention his pragmatic position that ideas are “mental modes of adaptation,” and that our stock of ideas evolves to meet our changing needs. However, while this is not obviously wrong, it fails to capture what James deems most important about Darwinian theory: the notion that there are independent cycles of causation in nature. Versions of this idea undergird everything from his campaign against empiricist psychologies to his (...) theories of mind and knowledge to his pluralistic worldview; and all of this together undergirds his attempts to challenge determinism and defend freewill. I begin this paper by arguing that James uses Darwinian thinking to bridge empiricism and rationalism, and that this merger undermines environmental determinism. I then discuss how Darwinism informs his concept of pluralism; how his concept challenges visions of a causally welded “block universe”; and how it also casts doubt on the project of reducing all reality to physical reality, and therewith the wisdom of dismissing consciousness as an inert by-product of physiology. I conclude by considering how Darwinism helps him justify the pragmatic grounds upon which he defends freewill. (shrink)

The concept of law is not a theorist's invention but one that people use every day. Thus one measure of the adequacy of a theory of law is its degree of fidelity to the concept as it is understood by those who use it. That means as far as possible. There are important truisms about the law that have an evaluative cast. The theorist has either to say what would make those evaluative truisms true or to defend her choice to (...) dismiss them as false of law or not of the essence of law. Thus the legal theorist must give an account of the truth grounds of the more central evaluative truisms about law. This account is a theory of legitimacy. It will contain framing judgments that state logical relations between descriptive judgments and directly evaluative judgments. Framing judgments are not directly evaluative, nor do they entail directly evaluative judgments, but they are nonetheless moral judgments. Therefore, an adequate theory of law must make (some) moral judgments. This means that an adequate theory of law has to take a stand on certain (but not all) contested issues in political philosophy. Legal theory is thus a branch of political philosophy. Moreover, one cannot be a moral-aim functionalist about legal institutions without compromising one's positivism about legal norms. (shrink)

Responds to the article by Brad Brown and Susan Perry in the August 1995 issue of `Business & Society' periodical on the measure of corporate social responsibility (CSP).

ABSTRACT: In this essay I provide one methodology that yields the level of analysis of an alleged knowledge-claim under investigation via its relations to varying gradations of scepticism. Each proposed knowledge-claim possesses a specified relationship with: (i) a globally sceptical argument; (ii) the least sceptical but successful argument that casts it into doubt; and (iii) the most sceptical yet unsuccessful argument, which is conceivably hypothesized to repudiate it but fails to do so. Yielding this specified set of relations, by means (...) of proceeding from global scepticism to (ii) and (iii), increases the chances of identifying the highest evaluative relevancy of the levels of analysis and observation of an alleged knowledge-claim. I argue that the failure to analyse and derive a difference between (i) and (ii) with respect to an alleged knowledge-claim signifies that the claim is grounded within the theoretical framework itself, that the claim lacks specification with regard to content that is analysable via that framework, and the claim is dubious insofar as alternative theoretic frameworks may present greater relevancy to levels of observation. KEYWORDS: knowledge, scepticism, perception, level of observation, magnification level, methodological scepticism. (shrink)

The late Jerry Cohen struggled to reconcile his egalitarian political principles with his personal style of life. His efforts were inconclusive, but instructive. This comment locates the core of Cohen’s discomfort in an abstract principle that connects what we morally ought to be compelled to do and what we have a duty to do anyway. The connection the principle states is more general and much tighter than Cohen and others, e.g. Thomas Nagel, have seen. Our principles of justice always put (...) our personal integrity to the test, unless those principles are designed not to. But to craft principles with an view to avoiding that test is, as Cohen argued, itself to undermine both justice and our integrity. (shrink)

Naturalism is often considered to be antithetical to theology and genuine religion. However, in a series of recent books and articles, Willem Drees has proposed a scientifically informed naturalistic account of religion, which, he contends, is not only compatible with supernaturalistic religion and theology but provides a better account of both than either purely naturalistic or purely supernaturalistic accounts. While rejecting both epistemological and methodological naturalism, Drees maintains that ontological naturalism offers the best philosophical account of the natural world and (...) that, in addition, it provides the opening for a supernaturalistic understanding of religion and theology, one that best fits the condition of epistemic and moral distance from the transcendent characteristic of religious wonderers and wanderers. In this paper I examine Drees's claim and argue that it is seriously flawed. I show that Drees's naturalism is, in fact, both methodologically and epistemologically naturalistic. I also show that his attempts to limit naturalism to the sphere of the natural world by means of the phenomena of limit questions and underdetermination fail. Arguing for a more optimistic, but also, I contend, more empirically accurate account of human epistemic and moral capacities, I propose a full‐fledged scientifically based naturalistic account of theology. (shrink)

Experimenters claim some nonhuman mammals have metacognition. If correct, the results indicate some animal minds are more complex than ordinarily presumed. However, some philosophers argue for a deflationary reading of metacognition experiments, suggesting that the results can be explained in first-order terms. We agree with the deflationary interpretation of the data but we argue that the metacognition research forces the need to recognize a heretofore underappreciated feature in the theory of animal minds, which we call Unity. The disparate mental states (...) of an animal must be unified if deflationary accounts of metacognition are to hold and untoward implications avoided. Furthermore, once Unity is acknowledged, the deflationary interpretation of the experiments reveals an elevated moral standing for the nonhumans in question. (shrink)

We present a theoretical view of the cellular foundations for network-level processes involved in producing our conscious experience. Inputs to apical synapses in layer 1 of a large subset of neocortical cells are summed at an integration zone near the top of their apical trunk. These inputs come from diverse sources and provide a context within which the transmission of information abstracted from sensory input to their basal and perisomatic synapses can be amplified when relevant. We argue that apical amplification (...) enables conscious perceptual experience and makes it more flexible, and thus more adaptive, by being sensitive to context. Apical amplification provides a possible mechanism for recurrent processing theory that avoids strong loops. It makes the broadcasting hypothesized by global neuronal workspace theories feasible while preserving the distinct contributions of the individual cells receiving the broadcast. It also provides mechanisms that contribute to the holistic aspects of integrated information theory. As apical amplification is highly dependent on cholinergic, aminergic, and other neuromodulators, it relates the specific contents of conscious experience to global mental states and to fluctuations in arousal when awake. We conclude that apical dendrites provide a cellular mechanism for the context-sensitive selective amplification that is a cardinal prerequisite of conscious perception. (shrink)

What is W. V. O. Quine’s relationship to classical pragmatism? Although he resists the comparison to William James in particular, commentators have seen an affinity between his “web of belief” model of theory confirmation and James’s claim that our beliefs form a “stock” that faces new experience as a corporate body. I argue that the similarity is only superficial. James thinks our web of beliefs should be responsive not just to perceptual but also to emotional experiences in some (...) cases; Quine denies this. I motivate James’s controversial view by appealing to an episode in the history of medicine when a researcher self-experimented by swallowing a vial of bacteria that at the time had not been studied in much detail. The researcher’s commitment to his own as-yet untested hypothesis was based in part on emotional considerations. Finally, I argue that Quine’s insistence that emotions can never be relevant to adjusting our web of belief reflects a tacit holdover of one of logical positivism’s crucially anti-pragmatist commitments—that philosophy of science should focus exclusively on the context of justification, not the context of discovery. James’s emphasis on discovery as a (perhaps the) crucial locus for epistemological inquiry is characteristic of pragmatism in general. Since Quinean epistemology is always an epistemology of justification, he is not happily viewed as a member of the pragmatist tradition. (shrink)

Religion, Race, Multiculturalism, and Everyday Life takes a spirited conceptualist look back into the history of our development. The book sets out to explore the ways in which a punditry of human equality continues to lock in unassailably assured logical postures, enabled by the historically intertwined roles played by power and the passage of time, towards the invention and sustenance of social truth. Religion, race, and multiculturalism have been written about many times, and from a variety of academic, discipline-specific perspectives. (...) Nonetheless, these social issues remain ever relevant to any sincere bid to understand the inegalitarian aspects of modern society. Religion, Race, Multiculturalism, and Everyday Life was primarily written with serious students of philosophy, sociology, the humanities, and history in mind. The author contends that we should never be too afraid to explore contentious or difficult philosophical and social questions. (shrink)

This project continues our interdisciplinary research into computational and cognitive aspects of narrative comprehension. Our ultimate goal is the development of a computational theory of how humans understand narrative texts. The theory will be informed by joint research from the viewpoints of linguistics, cognitive psychology, the study of language acquisition, literary theory, geography, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. The linguists, literary theorists, and geographers in our group are developing theories of narrative language and spatial understanding that are being tested by the (...) cognitive psychologists and language researchers in our group, and a computational model of a reader of narrative text is being developed by the AI researchers, based in part on these theories and results and in part on research on knowledge representation and reasoning. This proposal describes the knowledge-representation and natural-language-processing issues involved in the computational implementation of the theory; discusses a contrast between communicative and narrative uses of language and of the relation of the narrative text to the story world it describes; investigates linguistic, literary, and hermeneutic dimensions of our research; presents a computational investigation of subjective sentences and reference in narrative; studies children’s acquisition of the ability to take third-person perspective in their own storytelling; describes the psychological validation of various linguistic devices; and examines how readers develop an understanding of the geographical space of a story. This report is a longer version of a project description submitted to NSF. This document, produced in May 2007, is a L ATEX version of Technical Report 89-07 (Buffalo: SUNY Buffalo Department of Computer Science, August 1989), with slightly.. (shrink)

We suggest that the emerging field of the conservation humanities can play a valuable role in biodiversity protection in Papua New Guinea (PNG), where most land remains under collective customary clan ownership. As a first step to mobilising this scholarly field in PNG and to support capacity development for PNG humanities academics, we conducted a landscape review of PNG humanities teaching and research relating to biodiversity conservation and customary land rights. We conducted a systematic literature review, a PNG teaching programme (...) review, and a series of online workshops between the authors (10 PNG-based, 7 UK-based). We found a small but notable amount of PNG research and teaching focused on biodiversity conservation or customary land rights. This included explicit discussion of these topics in 8 of 156 PNG-authored humanities texts published 2010-2020 and related teaching content in the curricula of several different humanities-based programmes. We discuss current barriers to PNG academic development. The growth of fully fledged in-country conservation humanities will require a joint collaborative effort by PNG researchers, who are best placed to carry out such work, and researchers from abroad who can access resources to support the process. (shrink)

False belief tasks have enjoyed a monopoly in the research on children’s development of a theory of mind. They have been granted this status because they promise to deliver an unambiguous assessment of children’s understanding of the representational nature of mental states. Their poor cousins, true belief tasks, have been relegated to occasional service as control tasks. That this is their only role has been due to the universal assumption that correct answers on true belief tasks are inherently ambiguous regarding (...) the level of the child’s understanding of mental states. It has also been due to the universal assumption that nothing in the child’s developing theory of mind would lead to systematically incorrect answers on true belief tasks. We review new findings that 4- and 5-year-olds do err, systematically and profoundly, on the true belief versions of all the extant belief tasks. This reveals an intermediate level of understanding in the development of children’s theory of mind. Researchers have been unaware of this intermediate level because it produces correct answers in false belief tasks. A simple two-task battery—one true belief task and one false belief task—is sufficient to remove the ambiguity from each task. The new findings show that children do not acquire an understanding of beliefs, and hence a representational theory of mind, until after 6 years of age, or 2 years later than most developmental psychologists have concluded. This raises the question of how to interpret other new findings that infants are able to pass false belief tasks. We review these new infant studies, as well as recent studies on chimpanzees, in light of older children’s failure on true belief tasks, and end with some speculation about how all of these new findings might be reconciled. (shrink)

I defend an account of sexual orientation, understood as a reflexive disposition to be sexually attracted to people of a particular biological Sex or Sexes. An orientation is identified in terms of two aspects: the Sex of the subject who has the disposition, and whether that Sex is the same as, or different to, the Sex to which the subject is disposed to be attracted. I explore this account in some detail and defend it from several challenges. In doing so, (...) I provide a theoretical framework that justifies our continued reference to Sex-directed sexual orientation as an important means of classifying human subjects. (shrink)

A uniform theory of conditionals is one which compositionally captures the behavior of both indicative and subjunctive conditionals without positing ambiguities. This paper raises new problems for the closest thing to a uniform analysis in the literature (Stalnaker, Philosophia, 5, 269–286 (1975)) and develops a new theory which solves them. I also show that this new analysis provides an improved treatment of three phenomena (the import-export equivalence, reverse Sobel-sequences and disjunctive antecedents). While these results concern central issues in the study (...) of conditionals, broader themes in the philosophy of language and formal semantics are also engaged here. This new analysis exploits a dynamic conception of meaning where the meaning of a symbol is its potential to change an agent’s mental state (or the state of a conversation) rather than being the symbol’s content (e.g. the proposition it expresses). The analysis of conditionals is also built on the idea that the contrast between subjunctive and indicative conditionals parallels a contrast between revising and consistently extending some body of information. (shrink)

I objected that the defeasibility theory of knowledge prohibits you from knowing that you know that p if your knowledge that p is a posteriori. Rodrigo Borges claims that Peter Klein has already satisfactorily answered a version of my objection. He attempts to defend Klein’s reply and argues that my objection fails because a principle on which it is based is false.I will show that my objection is not a version of the old one that Klein attempts (unsuccessfully) to address, (...) that Borges’ defence of Klein’s reply fails and that his argument against my new objection leaves it untouched. (shrink)

The current COVID-19 pandemic and the previous SARS/MERS outbreaks of 2003 and 2012 have resulted in a series of major global public health crises. We argue that in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs and to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechenisms it is necessary to integrate the large and exponentially growing body of heterogeneous coronavirus data. Ontologies play an important role in standard-based knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. Accordingly, we initiated the (...) development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology in early 2020. -/- As an Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) library ontology, CIDO is open source and interoperable with other existing OBO ontologies. CIDO is aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology and Viral Infectious Disease Ontology. CIDO has imported terms from over 30 OBO ontologies. For example, CIDO imports all SARS-CoV-2 protein terms from the Protein Ontology, COVID-19-related phenotype terms from the Human Phenotype Ontology, and over 100 COVID-19 terms for vaccines (both authorized and in clinical trial) from the Vaccine Ontology. CIDO systematically represents variants of SARS-CoV-2 viruses and over 300 amino acid substitutions therein, along with over 300 diagnostic kits and methods. CIDO also describes hundreds of host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and the drugs that target proteins in these PPIs. CIDO has been used to model COVID-19 related phenomena in areas such as epidemiology. The scope of CIDO was evaluated by visual analysis supported by a summarization network method. CIDO has been used in various applications such as term standardization, inference, natural language processing (NLP) and clinical data integration. We have applied the amino acid variant knowledge present in CIDO to analyze differences between SARS-CoV-2 Delta and Omicron variants. CIDO's integrative host-coronavirus PPIs and drug-target knowledge has also been used to support drug repurposing for COVID-19 treatment. -/- CIDO represents entities and relations in the domain of coronavirus diseases with a special focus on COVID-19. It supports shared knowledge representation, data and metadata standardization and integration, and has been used in a range of applications. (shrink)

There are numerous (Bayesian) confirmation measures in the literature. Festa provides a formal characterization of a certain class of such measures. He calls the members of this class “incremental measures”. Festa then introduces six rather interesting properties called “Matthew properties” and puts forward two theses, hereafter “T1” and “T2”, concerning which of the various extant incremental measures have which of the various Matthew properties. Festa’s discussion is potentially helpful with the problem of measure sensitivity. I argue, that, while Festa’s discussion (...) is illuminating on the whole and worthy of careful study, T1 and T2 are strictly speaking incorrect (though on the right track) and should be rejected in favor of two similar but distinct theses. (shrink)

This paper explores the evolution of consciousness and subjectivity through a biological framework for understanding the universe. It posits that functional patterns in biological systems mirror cosmic mathematical principles, defining our objective reality. Similar to wave and Fibonacci patterns in different physical phenomena, biological patterns are intrinsic to all things and can be quantified using Dedre Gentner’s approach to analogy. For example, Earth’s ocean currents and the melting and freezing of Antarctica resemble the circulatory system and heart, while the production (...) of music from instruments is analogous to ribosomal protein synthesis. Shelves, tables, and chairs function like cytosol by holding objects in space, and a coffee cup mirrors red blood cell distribution. These analogies reveal a universal order rooted in biology’s functional patterns, essential for shaping the emergence and evolution of life. The paper traces the development of consciousness from its rudimentary cellular states to complex human cognition, highlighting the role of biologically-patterned environments in driving evolutionary changes. Organisms that recognized and organized according to these patterns evolved as “pattern recognition engines” crucial for survival—thus, Life (survival) being the primary measure of consciousness. Humans advanced this capacity, gaining cognitive freedom by insulating themselves from environmental constraints, but faced increased subjectivity complexity. Consciousness, while inherently subjective and necessary for cognitive development, evolves in humans to understand objective reality and its biological nature, so to understand and navigate complexities of subjectivity. Ultimately, the paper asserts consciousness is the ability to recognize and adhere to life-sustaining patterns and principles. Successful adherence deems them worthy of continued existence, while failure leads to demise. Parallels with historical concepts like Atman and Brahman in Hinduism suggest ancient recognition of the correspondence between human and universal patterns. This ancient understanding, coupled with modern scientific evidence, reveals the interconnectedness and intrinsic biological nature of reality. (shrink)

The paper argues that at present the Criminal law does not contain satisfactory rules for dealing with the circumstances in which a mistake can be taken to vitiate the victim's consent to an action or transaction. Rules on this issue vary both between different offences and within given offences in a way that is neither coherent nor predictable. As a matter of fact consent should be regarded as vitiated whenever the victim is under a misapprehension but for which (s)he would (...) not have given consent, but from a practical point of view it will not always be possible to allow this factual vitiation to have legal effect. To try to find a more satisfactory set of rules the paper offers a series of potential rules placed along a spectrum. Towards either end of the spectrum the rules have greater certainty and coherence, but produce less desirable results in terms of policy. Towards the centre of the spectrum the reverse is true. The paper therefore concludes that no single rule will be able to provide the answer to this area, and that an approach which recognises a series of circumstances in which consent will be regarded as legally vitiated should be retained instead. However, it is imperative that in future these categories be clearly, and predictably drawn and individually explicable and justifiable. As a starting point it is proposed that consent should be regarded as vitiated when the victim has made a non est factum mistake, has been mistaken about something which would render the action or transaction physically different from that expected, or where the victim believed that the defendant had a legal qualification which in fact (s)he lacked. (shrink)

Since it was inspired by Bernard and developed and named by Cannon, the conceptof homeostasis has been invoked by many as the central theoretical framework for physiology. Ithas also been the target of numerous criticisms that have elicited the introduction of a plethoraof alternative concepts. We argue that many of the criticisms actually target the more restrictiveaccount of homeostasis advanced by the cyberneticists. What was crucial to Bernard and Cannonwas a focus on the maintenance of the organism as the goal (...) of physiological regulation. We analysehow Bernard’s and Cannon’s broad conception of what was required to maintain the organismwas narrowed to negative feedback, characterized in terms of setpoints, by the cyberneticistsand demonstrate how many of the alternative concepts challenge the role of setpoints – treatingthem as variable in light of circumstances or in anticipation of future circumstances, or asdispensable altogether. To support our analysis, we draw on the experimental and theoreticalwork on thermoregulation, a phenomenon that has been considered as a paradigmatic example ofhomeostasis and has been a common focus of those advancing alternative concepts. To integratethe insights advanced by the original proponents of homeostasis and the theorists proposingreplacement notions we advance a framework in which regulation is viewed from the perspectiveof maintaining the organism. (shrink)

Title: "A Rose for Emily" ("Een roos voor Emily") Author: William Faulkner Translators: Martijn Boven and Maarten Jansen Original language: English Target language: Dutch -/- William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily", presented her in a Dutch translation, was first published in 1930, in the April issue of Forum magazine. By 1930, Faulkner had already authored four novels; however, "A Rose for Emily" marked his debut in the short story genre. While not as experimental as his novels The Sound (...) and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, it nonetheless incorporates certain characteristic Faulknerian elements, such as an unconventional narrative perspective and a non-linear chronology. Consistent with the majority of Faulkner's oeuvre, this narrative is situated in the fictional Southern setting to which Faulkner gave the name Yoknapatawpha County. -/- [In Dutch: Wiliam Faulkners 'Een roos voor Emily’ (‘A Rose for Emily’) werd voor het eerst gepubliceerd in 1930, in het aprilnummer van het tijdschrift Forum. Faulkner had in 1930 al vier romans op zijn naam staan, maar ‘Een roos voor Emily’ was het eerste korte verhaal dat hij publiceerde. Het is niet zo experimenteel als zijn romans The Sound and the Fury (Het geraas en gebral) en Absalom, Absalom! Desondanks bevat het toch enkele karakteristieke Faulkneriaanse elementen, zoals een ongebruikelijk vertel perspectief en een gefragmenteerde chronologie. Net als het merendeel van Faulkners oeuvre speelt ook dit verhaal zich af in het fictionele Zuiden waar Faulkner de naam Yoknapatawpha County aan gaf."]. (shrink)

The sense of form that provides the modern poet with a unique experience of the literary object has been crucial to various attempts to compare poetry to other cultural activities. In maintaining similar conceptions of the relationship between poetry and painting, Arthur Rimbaud and W. C. Williams establish a common basis for interpreting their creative work. And yet their poetry is more crucially concerned with the sudden emergence of visible "worlds" containing verbal objects that integrate a new kind of literary (...) text. This paper discusses the emergence of "aesthetic worlds" in the work of both poets and then examines how a common concern with Baroque form unites them in the phenomenological task of overcoming Cartesian dualism. (shrink)

Kit Fine’s logic of essence and his reduction of modality crucially rely on a principle called the ‘monotonicity of essence’. This principle says that for all pluralities, xx and yy, if some xx belong to some yy, then if it is essential to xx that p, it is also essential to yy that p. I argue that on the constitutive notion of essence, this principle is false. In particular, I show that this principle is false because it says that some (...) propositions are essential to yy even though those propositions are only about some of its members. I then consider modifications to the principle appealing to consequential essence and argue that such a modification is inconsistent with a central. (shrink)

Cette note devait introduire à un public anglophone la traduction de la « Lettre de Louis Althusser datée du 18 mars 1966 et adressée au Comité central du PCF », elle est ici enrichie dans une version livrée au public français. Elle apporte le contexte historique et théorique nécessaire à la compréhension des interventions « anti-humanistes » de Louis Althusser qui questionne les choix politiques opérés par le PCF au cours des années 1960. Nulle part ailleurs, dans les écrits publiés (...) d’Althusser, nous ne voyons aussi clairement les enjeux politiques imbriqués dans son projet philosophique, ni comment ce projet évolua progressivement d’une entreprise « théoriciste » à la recherche d’une philosophie en lien plus étroit avec la pratique. Cette lettre nous paraît de la plus haute importance pour les spécialistes de l’œuvre d’Althusser, les historiens de la pensée marxiste, mais aussi plus largement à tous ceux qui s’intéressent à l’importance que peut revêtir le travail d’Althusser dans les débats actuels dans le champ de la philosophie marxiste. (shrink)

Gerald Gaus argued in his 1996 book Justificatory Liberalism that proponents of public reason liberalism should attempt to ground their position in a specific epistemology. Critics of public reason liberalism such as David Enoch have also argued that public reason liberals need to elucidate their epistemic claims. Surprisingly, few public reason liberals have taken up Gaus and Enoch on their challenge. This paper will interact with the epistemological position undergirding the public justification principle, access internalism, arguing that it fails. In (...) its place, I put forward and defend proper functionalism as the better grounding epistemology, and then defend the new theory from possible objections. The result will be a synthesis of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s version of liberalism and an externalist version of convergence public reason liberalism. (shrink)

This paper concerns the familiar topic of whether we can have genuinely emotional responses such as pity and fear to characters and situations we believe to be fictional1. As is well known, Kendall Walton responds in the negative (Walton (1978); (1990): 195-204 and Chapter 7; (1997)). That is, he is an ‘irrealist’ about emotional responses to fiction (the term is Gaut’s (2003): 15), arguing that such responses should be construed as quasiemotions (Walton (1990): 245), of which their possessor imagines that (...) they are genuine emotions. This is not to deny that an experience in response to a fiction may have a phenomenology very like a given emotion, but to insist that, nonetheless, such responses are not real instances of the emotions which they resemble (Walton (1997)). So, in his most famous example, Charles, who experiences fear-like emotion in relation to a film which depicts the approach of evil slime, does not, despite appearances, experience genuine fear towards the slime, but only quasi-fear (Walton (1990): 195-204)2. Walton’s view presupposes the following view about the nature of emotion3. (shrink)

This study’s objective was to understand Colombian adolescents’ experiences and preferences regarding access to sexual and reproductive health services (SRHS), either alone or accompanied. A mixed-method approach was used, involving a survey of 812 participants aged eleven to twenty-four years old and forty-five semi-structured interviews with participants aged fourteen to twenty-three. Previous research shows that adolescents prefer privacy when accessing SRHS and often do not want their parents involved. Such findings align with the longstanding tendency to frame the ethical principle (...) of autonomy as based on independence in decision-making. However, the present study shows that such a conceptualization and application of autonomy does not adequately explain Colombian adolescent participants’ preferences regarding access to SRHS. Participants shared a variety of preferences to access SRHS, with the majority of participants attaching great importance to having their parents involved, to varying degrees. What emerges is a more complex and non-homogenous conceptualization of autonomy that is not inherently grounded in independence from parental involvement in access to care. We thus argue that when developing policies involving adolescents, policymakers and health professionals should adopt a nuanced “relational autonomy” approach to better respect the myriad of preferences that Colombian (and other) adolescents may have regarding their access to SRHS. (shrink)

In celebration of Newton da Costa’s place in the history of paraconsistency, this paper considers the use and abuse of deliberate self-contradiction. Beginning with Parmenides, developed by Plato, and continued by Cicero, an ancient philosophical tradition used deliberately paraconsistent discourses to reveal the truth. In modern times, decisionism has used deliberate self-contradiction against Judeo-Christian revelation. • DOI:10.5007/1808-1711.2010v14n1p1.

While every health care system stakeholder would seem to be concerned with obtaining the greatest value from a given technology, there is often a disconnect in the perception of value between a technology’s promoters and those responsible for the ultimate decision as to whether or not to pay for it. Adopting an empirical ethics approach, this paper examines how five Canadian medical device manufacturers, via their websites, frame the corporate “value proposition” of their innovation and seek to respond to what (...) they consider the key expectations of their customers. Our analysis shows that the manufacturers’ framing strategies combine claims that relate to valuable socio-technical goals and features such as prevention, efficiency, sense of security, real-time feedback, ease of use and flexibility, all elements that likely resonate with a large spectrum of health care system stakeholders. The websites do not describe, however, how the innovations may impact health care delivery and tend to obfuscate the decisional trade-offs these innovations represent from a health care system perspective. Such framing strategies, we argue, tend to bolster physicians’ and patients’ expectations and provide a large set of stakeholders with powerful rhetorical tools that may influence the health policy arena. Because these strategies are difficult to counter given the paucity of evidence and its limited use in policymaking, establishing sound collective health care priorities will require solid critiques of how certain kinds of medical devices may provide a better (i.e., more valuable) response to health care needs when compared to others. (shrink)

Developments that suggest the universe is full of life make the Fermi paradox increasingly pressing, but our search for an extraterrestrial technological civilization (“ETC”) is handicapped by our ignorance of its probable nature and behavior. This paper offers a way around this problem by drawing on information theoretical concepts, including game theory and Bayesian probability. It argues that, whatever its ultimate goals, an ETC would have the same instrumental goals as other intelligent agents. Generically, these are self-preservation and the acquisition (...) of resources. For an advanced ETC, these generic goals imply the objectives of removing existential threats and acquiring strategic and non-strategic information. Since the most problematic existential threats for any ETC would be from other civilizations and planets hosting such civilizations would also be copious sources of information, these objectives would lead it to gather information from these locations and to protect itself against them. This dual-goals hypothesis resolves the Fermi paradox, redirects the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and makes testable predictions regarding ETC’s behavior on Earth if it is here. (shrink)