Do contemporary big-budget blockbuster films like Gravity move something in us that is fundamentally the same as what avant-garde and experimental films have done for more than a century? In a powerful challenge to mainstream film theory, Cinema's Bodily Illusions demonstrates that this is the case. Scott C. Richmond bridges genres and periods by focusing, most palpably, on cinema's power to evoke illusions: feeling like you're flying through space, experiencing 3D without glasses, or even hallucinating. He argues that cinema (...) is, first and foremost, a technology to modulate perception. He presents a theory of cinema as a proprioceptive technology: cinema becomes art by modulating viewers' embodied sense of space. It works primarily not at the level of the intellect but at the level of the body. Richmond develops his theory through examples of direct perceptual illusion in cinema: hallucinatory flicker phenomena in Tony Conrad's The Flicker, eerie depth effects in Marcel Duchamp's Anémic Cinéma, the illusion of bodily movement through onscreen space in Stanley Kubrick's 2001, Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi, and Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity. In doing so he combines insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception and James J. Gibson's ecological approach to perception. The result is his distinctive ecological phenomenology, which allows us to refocus on the cinema's perceptual, rather than representational, power. Arguing against modernist habits of mind in film theory and aesthetics, and the attendant proclamations of cinema's death or irrelevance, Richmond demonstrates that cinema's proprioceptive aesthetics make it an urgent site of contemporary inquiry. (shrink)

In an issue of Common Knowledge given over to experiments in scholarly form and to the discussion of them, this piece is one of three on the genre of microhistory. The other two argue the merits and demerits of the genre, while this piece seeks to exemplify both its virtues and its risks. To show how microhistory offers intense deliberation on a narrowly defined topic, yet also a kind of hastiness — an impatience with demands for broader scope — Colin (...) Richmond examines one limited facet of the relationship between two Americans resident in England at the turn of the last century: the novelist Henry James and the painter Edwin Austin Abbey. Detailed evidence is mustered to document James's love of fresh hens' eggs and of the undignified lengths he would go to obtain them through the agency of Abbey and his wife. This short piece is written as if a parable, and while its moral goes unstated, the reader's attention is drawn to the unsettled question of whether James exerted maximal effort for minimal results, or whether he knew something about the value of freshness undreamed of by those more patient and dignified in pursuing their desires. (shrink)

Each of the five volumes in the Stone Art Theory Institutes series—and the seminars on which they are based—brings together a range of scholars who are not always directly familiar with one another’s work. The outcome of each of these convergences is an extensive and “unpredictable conversation” on knotty and provocative issues about art. This fourth volume in the series, _Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic_, focuses on questions revolving around the concepts of the aesthetic, the anti-aesthetic, and the political. (...) The book is about the fact that now, almost thirty years after Hal Foster defined the anti-aesthetic, there is still no viable alternative to the dichotomy between aesthetics and anti- or non-aesthetic art. The impasse is made more difficult by the proliferation of identity politics, and it is made less negotiable by the hegemony of anti-aesthetics in academic discourse on art. The central question of this book is whether artists and academicians are free of this choice in practice, in pedagogy, and in theory. The contributors are Stéphanie Benzaquen, J. M. Bern­stein, Karen Busk-Jepsen, Luis Camnitzer, Diarmuid Costello, Joana Cunha Leal, Angela Dimitrakaki, Alexander Dumbadze, T. Brandon Evans, Geng Youzhuang, Boris Groys, Beáta Hock, Gordon Hughes, Michael Kelly, Grant Kester, Meredith Kooi, Cary Levine, Sunil Manghani, William Mazzarella, Justin McKeown, Andrew McNamara, Eve Meltzer, Nadja Millner-Larsen, Maria Filomena Molder, Carrie Noland, Gary Peters, Aaron Richmond, Lauren Ross, Toni Ross, Eva Schürmann, Gregory Sholette, Noah Simblist, Jon Simons, Robert Storr, Martin Sundberg, Timotheus Vermeulen, and Rebecca Zorach. (shrink)

John J. McDermott was born on 5 January 1932, in Richmond Hill, Queens, New York City, and died on 30 September 2018, in College Station, Texas.McDermott received his undergraduate education at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, graduating cum laude in philosophy in January 1953. His graduate study in philosophy was at Fordham University in the Bronx, from which he received his MA in June 1954 and his PhD "with great distinction" in January 1959. His dissertation—"Experience Is Pedagogical: The Genesis (...) and Essence of the American Nineteenth Century Notion of Experience"—was completed under the guidance of his doctoral advisor Robert Channon Pollock. In 1964–65, McDermott held a postdoctoral fellowship in American... (shrink)

This chapter presents an overview of the issues that arise when logic is used in helping to understand problems in intelligent reasoning and to guide the design of mechanized reasoning systems. It provides some historical and technical details concerning nonmonotonic logic and reasoning about action and change, a topic that is not only central in artificial intelligence but that is normally of considerable interest to philosophers. The remaining sections provide brief sketches of selected topics, with references to the primary literature.

'I know what you're thinking' is a fascinating exploration into the neuroscientific evidence on 'mind reading'.

We present a unified empirical and philosophical account of moral consistency reasoning, a distinctive form of moral reasoning that exposes inconsistencies among moral judgments about concrete cases. Judgments opposed in belief or in emotion and motivation are inconsistent when the cases are similar in morally relevant respects. Moral consistency reasoning, we argue, regularly shapes moral thought and feeling by coordinating two systems described in dual process models of moral cognition. Our empirical explanation of moral change fills a gap in the (...) empirical literature, making psychologically plausible a defensible new model of justified moral change and a hybrid theory of moral judgment. (shrink)

1 Background for the Uninitiated RICHMOND CAMPBELL Paradoxes are intrinsically fascinating. They are also distinctively ...

Modern epistemology has run into several paradoxes in its efforts to explain how knowledge acquisition can be both socially based and still able to determine objective facts about the world. In this important book, Richmond Campbell attempts to dispel some of these paradoxes, to show how they are ultimately just "illusions of paradox," by developing ideas central to two of the most promising currents in epistemology: feminist epistemology and naturalized epistemology. Campbell's aim is to construct a coherent theory of (...) knowing that is feminist and "naturalized." Illusions of Paradox will be valuable for students and scholars of epistemology and women's studies. (shrink)

This book brings together two experienced educators from the fields of teacher education and arts education. The authors Richmond, a photographer, and Snowber, a dancer and poet, see aesthetic education as aiming to extend creativity, appreciation of the arts and nature, and the sensuous qualities of everyday life, to gain a more intimate understanding of the self and the world. They include poetic, narrative, philosophical, and artistic ways of writing to support a more embodied and holistic aesthetics. Landscapes of (...) Aesthetic Education has significance for educators, scholars, students, and artists, and for all who would like to explore the connections between the arts, aesthetics, and transformation. (shrink)

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a (...) compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on. (shrink)

The Gifford Lectures were established in 1885 at the universities of St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh to promote the discussion of 'Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term - in other words, the knowledge of God', and some of the world's most influential thinkers have delivered them. The 1901–2 lectures given in Edinburgh by American philosopher William James are considered by many to be the greatest in the series. The lectures were published in book form in (...) 1902 and have been reprinted many times. James, who was educated in the United States and Europe, and spent much of his career teaching philosophy at Harvard, was very influential in the development of modern psychology, and in these twenty lectures he explores the personal experience of religion. Some of the topics include religion and neurology, 'the sick soul', saintliness, and mysticism. (shrink)

In Kitcher’s ‘pragmatic naturalism’ moral evolution consists in pragmatically motivated moral changes in response to practical difficulties in social life. No moral truths or facts exist that could serve as an ‘external’ measure for moral progress. We propose a psychologically realistic conception of moral objectivity consistent with this pragmatic naturalism yet alive to the familiar sense that moral progress has an objective basis that transcends convention and consensus in moral opinion, even when these are products of serious, extended and collaborative (...) reflection. (shrink)

Hubert Dreyfus has argued that cases of absorbed bodily coping show that there is no room for self-awareness in flow experiences of experts. In this paper, I argue against Dreyfus’ maxim of vanishing self-awareness by suggesting that awareness of agency is present in expert bodily action. First, I discuss the phenomenon of absorbed bodily coping by discussing flow experiences involved in expert bodily action: merging into the flow; immersion in the flow; emergence out of flow. I argue against the claim (...) that flow experience does not involve an awareness of agency for each of these features, while conceding that fluent agency does not involve self-awareness in the thetic sense. I challenge the assumption that the awareness of fluent agency must be understood in terms of a thetic awareness of agency. Instead, I develop an Anscombean account of the awareness of fluent agency in terms of the phenomenal character of knowing one’s aims. I respond to the challenge that if an Anscombean account of the awareness of agency is to succeed, then agents must be able to answer Anscombean questions. I consider the objection that awareness of agency is not a form of self-awareness by outlining an account of self-awareness as self-synthesis that is distinct from self-perception and self-ascription, but which makes room for self-awareness in expert bodily action. (shrink)

Despite the emergence of new forms of feminist empiricism, there continues to be resistance to the idea that feminist political commitment can be integral to hypothesis testing in science when that process adheres strictly to empiricist norms and is grounded in a realist conception of objectivity. I explore the virtues of such feminist empiricism, arguing that the resistance is, in large part, due to the lingering effects of positivism.

Do Quine and Carnap distort the social nature of inquiry by privileging individual epistemic subjects? This objection is at the heart of Donald Davidson’s claim that Quine fails to grasp the significance of the concept of truth. In Carnap’s case, the objection may be detected in Charles Morris’s call to ground scientific philosophy in semiotics, the science of signs, rather than syntax, the formal investigation of languages. Drawing out the challenge from Morris’s proposal requires examining a neglected influence on this (...) neglected philosopher: his advisor George Herbert Mead’s social theory of mind. I argue that Morris and Davidson can both be understood as demanding that scientific philosophers socialize their conception of objectivity. (shrink)

This chapter begins with a discussion of Indian theories of inference. It identifies the unique features of Indian logic not found in Western logic. Indian theories of inference are primarily theories of adequate evidence, but they may also be viewed as systems of nonmonotonic reasoning, which is being used in modern computer simulation of actual human reasoning processes. The chapter then discusses Nyāya logic, Buddhist logic, Jaina logic, and Navya–Nyāya logic.

Note on the text of the principles -- Context -- Biography -- Berkeley's philosophical background -- Overview of themes -- Teading the text -- The principles : introduction -- The principles : part one -- The objects and subject of knowledge : ideas and spirit -- Unperceived existence : a nicer strain of abstraction -- Problems for materialism -- A Cartesian dream argument -- The master argument -- From the inertness of ideas to the existence of God -- Philosophical objections (...) to immaterialism and replies -- Religious objections to immaterialism and replies -- Further advantages of immaterialism -- Great provinces of speculative science -- The attack on absolute space -- Mathematics -- Other minds -- The divine language of nature -- Reception and influence -- Guide to further reading. (shrink)

Like those famous nations divided by a single tongue, my paper (this volume) and Professor P.M. Churchland's deep and engaging reply offer different spins on a common heritage. The common heritage is, of course, a connectionist vision of the inner neural economy- a vision which depicts that economy in terms of supra-sentential state spaces, vector-to-vector transformations, and the kinds of skillful pattern-recognition routine we share with the bulk of terrestrial intelligent life-forms. That which divides us is, as ever, much harder (...) to isolate and name. Clearly, it has something to do with the role of moral talk and exchange, and something to do with the conception of morality itself (and, correlatively, with the conception of moral progress). Most of this Reply will be devoted to clarifying the nature of the disputed territory. First, though (as a prophylactic against misunderstanding) I shall rehearse some points of agreement concerning moral talk and progress. (shrink)

The theory I want to refute is sometime called Impersonal Ethical Egoism : the view that everyone ought to do what will benefit him the most in any given situation. It might be thought that this view can be distinguished from Personal Ethical Egoism : the view that I ought to do what will benefit me the most in any given situation. But to whom does “I” refer in PEE? To any person who states the view? And is the view (...) supposed to be true no matter who states it? If the answers to the last two questions are Yes, then PEE and IEE come to the same thing. To distinguish the views, we might take “I” to refer to a specific person, say, the person who just stated the view. Put unambiguously, without the personal pronoun, PEE then becomes: RC ought to do what will benefit RC the most in any given situation. IEE would then logically imply PEE, but not conversely. But the reason why PEE would not imply IEE is not that it would be a conflicting, or even an alternative and competing, form of ethical egoism; it is simply that PEE would be formulated much less generally than IEE. In fact, since PEE would concern only what one particular person ought to do, it would not be obvious that the view itself should be called a form of egoism. For if anyone else subscribed to the view, that would hardly make him an egoist; so there would seem to be nothing inherently egoistic about the view. But, in any case, what I aim to refute is a general theory about what anyone ought to do in a given situation, not a theory limited in scope to the actions of only one individual. (shrink)

We attempt a conclusive resolution of the debate over whether the principle of natural selection (PNS), especially conceived as the `principle' of the `survival of the fittest', is a tautology. This debate has been largely ignored for the past 15 years but not, we think, because it has actually been settled. We begin by describing the tautology objection, and situating the problem in the philosophical and biology literature. We then demonstrate the inadequacy of six prima facie plausible reasons for believing (...) that the tautology debate has been satisfactorily resolved (the PNS is strictly a methodological principle; scientific theories can contain tautologies; the scope of the PNS has been reduced; theories should be understood as models and not exceptionless laws; the widespread acceptance of the propensity interpretation of fitness; and the abandonment of operationalism and verificationism). We proceed to a detailed discussion of Brandon's law (D) describing the PNS, and show that law (D) seriously misrepresents the structure of evolution by natural selection. In the final sections, we provide and defend a novel reinterpretation of the structure of the principle (or, we prefer, model) of evolution by natural selection. (shrink)