A paper which succeeds in being erudite, yet lively, and which tells an amusing tale without digressing from its theme, deserves great admiration. Such is Professor George's discussion of Kant and liberalism. He first points out briefly that in fact Kant exercised small influence on liberal thought in the nineteenth century. The bulk of his paper is devoted to the question of whether Kant was a liberal at all and to justifying his unconventional negative answer. In the course of so (...) doing he presents the diverting tale of the ingenuous young aristocrat who solicits Kant's opinion as to whether one's wife should be inoculated against the pox. But the diversion is pertinent. Kant's two answers to the question reveal two different ways in which the Kantian moral theory, sententiously expressed in the so-called “categorical imperative”, might be incompatible with liberal opinion. (shrink)

Objective: There is a demonstrated link between the mental health and substance use comorbidities experienced by young adults, however the vast majority of psychological interventions are disorder specific. Novel psychological approaches that adequately acknowledge the psychosocial complexity and transdiagnostic needs of vulnerable young people are urgently needed. A modular skills-based program for emotion regulation and impulse control addresses this gap. The current one armed open trial was designed to evaluate the impact that 12 weeks exposure to ERIC alongside (...) usual care had on young people's ability to regulate emotions, as well as examine potential moderating mechanisms.Methods: Seventy nine young people were enrolled to the 12 week intervention period. Twenty one practitioners from youth and community health services delivered relevant ERIC modules adjunct to usual care. Linear mixed effects regression was used to examine change over time across the primary outcome of emotion dysregulation and secondary outcomes of depression, anxiety, stress, experiential avoidance and mindfulness. Moderation analyses were conducted to test whether the magnitude of change in emotion dysregulation moderated change over time in secondary outcomes.Results: Analyses revealed significant improvement in the primary outcome of emotion dysregulation with a moderate effect size, in addition to decreases in the secondary outcomes of depression, anxiety, stress and experiential avoidance. No improvements in mindfulness were reported. Moderation analyses revealed that the residualised change over time in emotion dysregulation moderated the change over time in symptoms of distress, depression, anxiety, stress, experiential avoidance, and mindfulness.Conclusion: Reductions in the severity of emotion dysregulation, depression, anxiety, stress and experiential avoidance are promising, and were evident despite the complexity of the participants and the diversity of the service setting. The improvements found in each outcome were only observed for those young people whose emotion regulation also improved, providing preliminary evidence for the role of emotion regulation as a key treatment target in this population. (shrink)

We perceive smells as perduring complex entities within a distal array that might be conceived of as smellscapes. However, the philosophical orthodoxy of Odor Theories has been to deny that smells are perceived as having a distal location. Recent challenges have been mounted to Odor Theories’ veracity in handling the timescale of olfactory perception, how it individuates odors as a distal entities, and their claim that olfactory perception is not spatial. The paper does not aim to dispute these criticisms. Rather, (...) what will be shown is that Molecular Structure Theory, a refinement of Odor Theory, can be further developed to handle these challenges. The theory is further refined by focusing on distal perception that requires considering the perceptual object as mereologically complex persisting odor against a background scene conceived of as a smellscape. What will be offered is an expansion of Molecular Structure Theory to account for distal smell perception within natural environments. (shrink)

In this particularly well written volume Graeme Hirst presents a theoretically motivated foundation for semantic interpretation (conceptual analysis) by computer, and shows how this framework facilitates the resolution of both lexical and syntactic ambiguities.

From Detroit Red to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, the man best known as Malcolm X restlessly redefined himself throughout a controversial life. His transformations have appeared repeatedly in books, photographs, paintings, and films, while his murder set in motion a series of tugs-of-war among journalists, biographers, artists, and his ideological champions over the interpretation of his cultural meaning. This book marks the first systematic examination of the images generated by this iconic cultural figure--images readily found on everything from T-shirts and hip-hop (...) album covers to coffee mugs. Graeme Abernethy captures both the multiplicity and global import of a person who has been framed as both villain and hero, cast by mainstream media during his lifetime as "the most feared man in American history," and elevated at his death as a heroic emblem of African American identity. As Abernethy shows, the resulting iconography of Malcolm X has shifted as profoundly as the American racial landscape itself. Abernethy explores Malcolm's visual prominence in the eras of civil rights, Black Power, and hip-hop. He analyzes this enigmatic figure's representation across a variety of media from 1960s magazines to urban murals, tracking the evolution of Malcolm's iconography from his autobiography and its radical milieu through the appearance of Spike Lee's 1992 biopic and beyond. Its remarkable gallery of illustrations includes reproductions of iconic photographs by Richard Avedon, Eve Arnold, Gordon Parks, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and John Launois. Abernethy reveals that Malcolm X himself was keenly aware of the power of imagery to redefine identity and worked tirelessly to shape how he was represented to the public. His theoretical grasp of what he termed "the science of imagery" enabled him both to analyze the role of representation in ideological control as well as to exploit his own image in the interests of black empowerment. This provocative work marks a startling shift from the biographical focus that has dominated Malcolm X studies, providing an up-to-date--and comprehensively illustrated--account of Malcolm's cultural afterlife, and addressing his iconography in relation to images of other major African American figures, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Kanye West, and Barack Obama. Analyzing the competing interpretations behind so many images, Abernethy reveals what our lasting obsession with Malcolm X says about American culture over the last five decades. (shrink)

Speculative Realism (SR) has often been characterised as a heterogeneous group of thinkers, united almost exclusively in their commitment to the critique of what Quentin Meillassoux terms ‘correlationism’ or what Graham Harman calls the ‘philosophy of (human) access.’ The terms ‘correlationism’ and ‘philosophy of access’ are in turn often treated – at times even by Meillassoux and Harman themselves – as synonymous. In this paper, I seek to analyse these terms to evaluate their similarities, but also possible differences. I shall (...) argue that the difference between the two terms ought to be retained and emphasised, since it hints at important differences between the positions of Harman and Meillassoux. (shrink)

We are immersed within an odorous sea of chemical currents that we parse into individual odors with complex structures. Odors have been posited as determined by the structural relation between the molecules that compose the chemical compounds and their interactions with the receptor site. But, naturally occurring smells are parsed from gaseous odor plumes. To give a comprehensive account of the nature of odors the chemosciences must account for these large distributed entities as well. We offer a focused review of (...) what is known about the perception of odor plumes for olfactory navigation and tracking, which we then connect to what is known about the role odorants play as properties of the plume in determining odor identity with respect to odor quality. We end by motivating our central claim that more research needs to be conducted on the role that odorants play within the odor plume in determining odor identity. (shrink)

Arthur Schopenhauer was one of the greatest writers and German philosophers of the nineteenth century. His work influenced figures as diverse as Wagner, Freud and Nietzsche. Best known as a pessimist, he was one of the few philosophers read and admired by Wittgenstein. In this comprehensive introduction, Julian Young covers all the main aspects of Schopenhauer's philosophy. Beginning with an overview of Schopenhauer's life and work, he introduces the central aspects of his metaphysics fundamental to understanding his work as (...) a whole: his philosophical idealism and debt to the philosophy of Kant; his attempt to answer the question of what the world is; his account of science; and in particular his idea that 'will' is the essence of all things. Julian Young then introduces and assesses Schopenhauer's aesthetics, which occupy a central place in his philosophy. He carefully examines Schopenhauer's theories of the sublime, artistic genius and music, before assessing his ethics of compassion, his arguments for pessimism and his account of 'salvation'. In the final chapter, he considers Schopenhauer's legacy and his influence on the thought of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, making this an ideal starting point for those coming to Schopenhauer for the first time. (shrink)

The talk is called ‘The QUANTUM COMPLEXITY behind Quantum Reality’. It is divided into 3 parts: an outline of the essentials of quantum theory, a discussion of some glaring problems of interpretation, and my shocking philosophical conclusions.

We analyse aspects of the Big Bang program in modern cosmology, with special focus on the strategies employed by its adherents both in defending the theory against anomalous data and in dismissing rival accounts. We illustrate this by critically examining four aspects of Big Bang cosmology: the interpretation of the cosmic red-shift, the explanation of the cosmic background radiation, the inflation hypothesis and the search for dark matter. We conclude that the Big Bang's dominance of contemporary cosmology is not justified (...) by the degree of experimental support it receives relative to rival theories. (shrink)

This is a clear and lucid account of Nietzsche's philosophy of art, combining exegesis, interpretation and criticism in a judicious balance. Julian Young argues that Nietzsche's thought about art can only be understood in the context of his wider philosophy. In particular, he discusses the dramatic changes in Nietzschean aesthetics against the background of the celebrated themes of the death of God, eternal recurrence, and the idea of the Übermensch. Young then divides Nietzsche's career and his philosophy of (...) art into four distinct phases, but suggests that these phases describe a circle. An attempt at world-affirmation is made in the central phases, but Nietzsche is predominantly influenced at the beginning and end of his career by a Schopenhauerian pessimism. At the beginning and end art is important because it 'redeems' us from life. (shrink)

Working memory limits are best defined in terms of the complexity of the relations that can be processed in parallel. Complexity is defined as the number of related dimensions or sources of variation. A unary relation has one argument and one source of variation; its argument can be instantiated in only one way at a time. A binary relation has two arguments, two sources of variation, and two instantiations, and so on. Dimensionality is related to the number of chunks, because (...) both attributes on dimensions and chunks are independent units of information of arbitrary size. Studies of working memory limits suggest that there is a soft limit corresponding to the parallel processing of one quaternary relation. More complex concepts are processed by or In segmentation, tasks are broken into components that do not exceed processing capacity and can be processed serially. In conceptual chunking, representations are to reduce their dimensionality and hence their processing load, but at the cost of making some relational information inaccessible. Neural net models of relational representations show that relations with more arguments have a higher computational cost that coincides with experimental findings on higher processing loads in humans. Relational complexity is related to processing load in reasoning and sentence comprehension and can distinguish between the capacities of higher species. The complexity of relations processed by children increases with age. Implications for neural net models and theories of cognition and cognitive development are discussed. (shrink)

The Discovery of Evolution explains what the theory of evolution is all about by providing a historical narrative of discovery. Some of the major puzzles that confront anyone studying living things are discussed and it details how these were solved from an evolutionary perspective. Beginning with the emergence of the early naturalists in the seventeenth century, the scientific discoveries that led up to and then flowed from Darwin and Wallace's theory of evolution by natural selection are then discussed, and finally (...) the modern evolutionary studies at the close of the twentieth century are detailed. This new edition of The Discovery of Evolution is fully updated and contains a new chapter on the evolutionary studies of the twentieth century. By approaching the topic of evolution in this way, it is made accessible to the non-specialist and no previous study of biology is required in order to read and understand this book. (shrink)

The spiritual geography of Russian cosmism. General characteristics ; Recent definitions of cosmism -- Forerunners of Russian cosmism. Vasily Nazarovich Karazin (1773-1842) ; Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749-1802) ; Poets: Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov, (1711-1765) and Gavriila Romanovich Derzhavin (1743-1816) ; Prince Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky (1803-1869) ; Aleksander Vasilyevich Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817-1903) -- The Russian philosophical context. Philosophy as a passion ; The destiny of Russia ; Thought as a call for action ; The totalitarian cast of mind -- The religious and spiritual (...) context. The kingdom of god on earth ; Hesychasm: two great Russian saints ; The Third Rome ; Pre-Christian antecedents -- The Russian esoteric context. Early searches for "deep wisdom" ; Popular magic ; Higher magic in the time of Peter the Great ; Esotericism after Peter the Great ; Theosophy and anthroposophy -- Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1829-1903), the philosopher of the common task ; The one idea ; The unacknowledged prince ; The village teacher ; First disciple: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy ; The Moscow librarian ; Last years: Askhabad: the only portrait -- The "common task" ; Esoteric dimensions of the "common task" ; Fedorov's legacy: projectivism, delo, regulation -- The religious cosmists. Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov (1853-1900) ; Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (1871-1944) ; Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky (1882-1937) ; Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev (1874-1948) -- The scientific cosmists. Konstantin Edouardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) ; Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945) ; Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky (1897-1964) ; Vasily Feofilovich Kuprevich (1897-1969) -- Promethean theurgy. Life-creation ; Cultural immortalism ; God-building ; Re-aiming the arrows of Eros ; Technological utopianism ; Occultism -- Fedorov's twentieth century followers. Nikolai Pavlovich Peterson (1844-1919) and Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kozhevnikov (1852-1917) ; Svyatogor and the biocosmists ; New wine and the universal task ; Alexander Konstantinovich Gorsky (1886-1943) and Nikolai Alexandrovich Setnitsky (1888-1937) ; Valerian Nikolaevich Muravyov (1885-1932) ; Vasily Nikolaevich Chekrygin (1897-1922) -- Cosmism and its offshoots today. The N.F. Fedorov museum-library ; The Tsiolkovsky museum and Chizhevsky center ; ISRICA - Institute for Scientific Research in Cosmic Anthropoecology ; Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912-1992) and neo-eurasianism ; The hyperboreans ; Scientific immortalism: Igor Vishev, Danila Medvedev ; Conclusions about the Russian cosmists. (shrink)

Analytic philosophy has recently demonstrated a revived interest in metaphysical problems about possibility and necessity. Graeme Forbes here provides a careful description of the logical background of recent work in this area for those who may be unfamiliar with it, moving on to d discuss the distinction between modality de re and modality de dicto and the ontological commitments of possible worlds semantics. In addition, Forbes offers a unified theory of the essential properties of sets, organisms, artefacts, substances, and (...) events, based on the doctrine that identity facts must be intrinsically grounded, and analyzes and rejects apparent counterexamples to this doctrine. (shrink)

The phenomenon of the New Genetics raises complex social problems, particularly those of privacy. This book offers ethical and legal perspectives on the questions of a right to know and not to know genetic information from the standpoint of individuals, their relatives, employers, insurers and the state. Graeme Laurie provides a unique definition of privacy, including a concept of property rights in the person, and argues for stronger legal protection of privacy in the shadow of developments in human genetics. (...) He challenges the role and the limits of established principles in medical law and ethics, including respect for patient autonomy and confidentiality. This book will interest lawyers, philosophers and doctors concerned both with genetic information and issues of privacy; it will also interest genetic counsellors, researchers, and policy makers worldwide for its practical stance on dilemmas in modern genetic medicine. (shrink)

This book presents a comprehensive, accessible survey of Western philosophy of music from Pythagoras to the present. Its narrative traces themes and schools through history, in a sequence of five chapters that survey the ancient, medieval, early modern, modern and contemporary periods. Its wide-ranging coverage includes medieval Islamic thinkers, Continental and analytic thinkers, and neglected female thinkers such as Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). All aspects of the philosophy of music are discussed, including music and the cosmos, music's value, music's relation (...) to the other arts, the problem of opera, the origins of musical genius, music's emotional impact, the moral effects of music, the ontology of musical works, and the relevance of music's historical context. The volume will be valuable for students and scholars in philosophy and musicology, and all who are interested in the ways in which philosophers throughout history have thought about music. (shrink)

This is the first modern, annotated and scholarly edition of Jean-Baptiste Du Bos’ _Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting_, one of the seminal works of modern aesthetics in any language.

The programme of work -- Towards a theory of jokes -- The process of joke comprehension -- Text comprehension -- Processing and prediction -- Logic in jokes -- Incongruity and resolution -- Surprise -- The role of language -- Impropriety -- Superiority and aggression -- What's in a joke? -- Applying the framework -- The way forward.

The core issue of our target article concerns how relational complexity should be assessed. We propose that assessments must be based on actual cognitive processes used in performing each step of a task. Complexity comparisons are important for the orderly interpretation of research findings. The links between relational complexity theory and several other formulations, as well as its implications for neural functioning, connectionist models, the roles of knowledge, and individual and developmental differences, are considered.

This book uses rare pathologies to inform questions on topics such as consciousness and rationality. Rather than trying to answer these by inventing far-fetched scenario or 'thought experiments', it is better to utilize a rich but under-used clinical resource.

The term 'essentialism' in its popular usage is usually qualified in some way, as in 'biological essentialism', 'gender essentialism' and 'social essentialism'. The essentialist theses were defended on the grounds that denying them leads, under plausible assumptions, to pairs of worlds containing objects which are intrinsic and spatio‐temporal duplicates and yet which are numerically distinct. This chapter outlines some technical difficulties in getting the definitions of 'essential property' and 'individual essence' exactly right. It explains the idea of a metaphysically essential (...) property in terms of Aristotle's 'essential/accidental' contrast. A popular idea is to invoke the notion, which has its roots in Aristotle's theory of essence and accident, of a substance sortal. A different way of developing a sortal‐based account of essential kinds is suggested by David Wiggins, who argues that it is only ultimate sortals that represent essential properties, where an ultimate sortal is the most general sortal corresponding to a given principle of individuation. (shrink)

Over recent decades there has been a growing interest in the question of whether computer programs are capable of genuinely creative activity. Although this notion can be explored as a purely philosophical debate, an alternative perspective is to consider what aspects of the behaviour of a program might be noted or measured in order to arrive at an empirically supported judgement that creativity has occurred. We sketch out, in general abstract terms, what goes on when a potentially creative program is (...) constructed and run, and list some of the relationships (for example, between input and output) which might contribute to a decision about creativity. Specifically, we list a number of criteria which might indicate interesting properties of a program’s behaviour, from the perspective of possible creativity. We go on to review some ways in which these criteria have been applied to actual implementations, and some possible improvements to this way of assessing creativity. (shrink)

Technology is an increasingly important dimension of social life. This title discusses the impact of technology and science on our lives, exploring how power is demonstrated and reinforced by technological innovation.

Twentieth-century developments in quantum physics, together with an emerging science of consciousness, have created the need for a new cosmology, or model of the universe. The theory of process contained in THE REFLEXIVE UNIVERSE places consciousness within the context of contemporary science. One of the central themes of this extraordinary work is that each successive organization of matter, from fundamental particles in physics to living organisms, expresses a particular stage in the evolution of mind. Starting with the photon, the basic (...) unit of light, and moving through atomic physics, molecular chemistry, the morphology of plants and animals and finally to levels of human evolution, Young develops his theory in vivid step-by-step detail. Consciousness, in his point of view, is not isolated from the material universe. It exists in a continuum, one in which physical and nonphysical realms can be linked and the teachings of mythology and religion can be integrated. To order: FAX: 415-883-9280; e-mail: [email protected]; or write: Anodos Foundation, c/o Publishers Services, P.O. Box 2510, Novato, CA 94948. Visa and MasterCard only. Trade STOP orders 40% plus postage. (shrink)

In Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), an apparent tension arises between his pursuit of a self-proclaimed “new theory of everything,” or general ontology, and his assertion that any ontology must be able to account for distinctions among various regions of being. This paper delves into this tension between universality and specificity, particularly concerning the question of animal ontology, and examines the potential for constructing an object-oriented animal ontology. By juxtaposing Harman’s perspectives with those of Matthew Calarco and other scholars, I (...) aim to demonstrate the feasibility of developing an animal ontology using the framework of OOO. (shrink)

The Growing-Block view of time has some problems with the past. It is committed to the existence of the past, but needs to say something about the difference between the past and present. I argue that we should resist Correia and Rosenkranz’ response to Braddon-Mitchell’s argument that the Growing-Block leads to scepticism about whether we are present. I consider an approach, similar to Peter Forrest, and show it is not so counter-intuitive as Braddon-Mitchell suggests and further show that it requires (...) no ‘semantic and metaphysical gymnastics’, as Chris Heathwood has suggested. In doing these things I make the problem of the past on the Growing-Block view a problem in its history, not its present. (shrink)

The right not to know is a contested matter. This can be because the inversion of the normal framing of entitlement to information about one's own health is thought to be illogical and inconsistent with self-authorship and/or because the very idea of claiming a right not to know information is an inappropriate appeal to the discourse of rights that places impossible responsibilities on others. Notwithstanding, there has been a sustained increase in this kind of appeal in recent years fueled in (...) large part by the rise and rise of the importance of personal autonomy in health care ethics, and by domestic and international health law. The right not to know has been acknowledged in at least two important international legal instruments. For example, the UNESCO Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights, Article 5c provides: “The right of every individual to decide whether or not to be informed of the results of genetic examination and the resulting consequences should be respected.”. (shrink)

This article argues for the importance of conceptual clarity in the debate about the so-called right not to know. This is vital both at the theoretical and the practical level. It is suggested that, unlike many formulations and attempts to give effect to this right, what is at stake is not merely an aspect of personal autonomy and therefore cannot and should not be reduced only to a question of individual choice. Rather, it is argued that the core interests that (...) can be protected by the right not to know are better conceived of as privacy interests rather than autonomy interests. This not only helps us to understand what is in play but also informs regulatory, professional, and legal responses to handling information and taking decisions about whether or not to disclose information to persons about themselves. The practical implications of this conceptualization are explored in the context of feedback policies in health-related research. (shrink)

Ascriptions of mental states to oneself and others give rise to many interesting logical and semantic problems. Attitude Problems presents an original account of mental state ascriptions that are made using intensional transitive verbs such as 'want', 'seek', 'imagine', and 'worship'. Forbes offers a theory of how such verbs work that draws on ideas from natural language semantics, philosophy of language, and aesthetics.

What is a physical object according to the theory of quantum mechanics? The first answer to be considered is that given by Bohr in terms of the concept of complementarity. This interpretation is illustrated by way of an example, the two slit experiment, which highlights some of the associated problems of ontology. One such problem is the so-called problem of measurement or observation. Various interpretations of measurement in Quantum Theory, including those of Heisenberg, von Neumann, Everett and Bohr, are compared (...) and contrasted. A second problem concerns whether or not QT can be considered complete and therefore satisfactory as a basis for physics. Various attempts to complete QT by means of the addition of ‘hidden variables’ to the quantum mechanical state function are considered and their aims and achievements assessed. Finally, we investigate some of the characteristic ontological problems for the orthodox interpretation of Relativistic Quantum Theory. -/- . (shrink)

This book has been written for eighteen year olds (or anyone who will listen) as an honest attempt to face their justified questionings and to offer them a metaphysical framework with which to confront the twenty-first century. It is vitally important that certain modes of thought are uprooted and new modes put in their place if mankind and planet Earth are not soon to suffer an historic global catastrophe. Apart from the continuing world-wide proliferation of conventional, chemical, biological and nuclear (...) weaponry, the temperature of the planet has risen more rapidly in the last twenty-five years than it has since the year 900AD, which confirms global warming by some cause or other. These and the many intensifying human conflicts and natural disasters demand that some fundamental changes to our thinking are made as soon as possible. These 120 pages begin with an original examination of the quantum-theoretical understanding of reason (logic) and reality (existence) and find both to be at odds with common sense. A theory of everything is a reduction to a single grand idea! A quantum theory of everything is a mathematical theory of a consciousness realizing this grand idea! That is what this book tries to comprehend by means of five indisputable propositions. (shrink)