Despite the frequent interpretation of any Early-Christian-era art that contains both Christian and pagan imagery as being solely Christian in meaning, this paper argues that the identification of these images as being Christian in nature, with the pagan imagery only present as borrowed ideas to support a Christian message, is problematic. By assessing some of the existing scholarship surrounding this topic, I attempt to problematize the assumptions made that lead to these widely-accepted interpretations.

This selection consists of extracts from writings of women concerned solely with the pursuit of abstract ideas, historically contextualized. The texts, for the most part, reflect issues widely debated in their contemporary societies. Extracts from lesser-known writers are also included, providing a diversity of arguments spanning four centuries and including some notable contemporary philosophers.

A leader in the modern commentary on ethics and philosophy, Mary Warnock casts a critical eye over her life and times.

As more and more sophisticated software is created to allow the mining of arguments from natural language texts, this paper sets out to examine the suitability of the well-established and readily available methods of corpus linguistics to the study of argumentation. After brief introductions to corpus linguistics and the concept of meta-argument, I describe three pilot-studies into the use of the terms Straw man, Ad hominem, and Slippery slope, made using the open access News on the Web corpus. The presence (...) of each of these phrases on internet news sites was investigated and assessed for correspondence to the norms of use by argumentation theorists. All three pilot-studies revealed interesting facts about the usage of the terms by non-specialists, and led to numerous examples of the types of arguments mentioned. This suggests such corpora may be of use in two different ways: firstly, the wider project of improving public debate and educating the populace in the skills of critical thinking can only be helped by a better understanding of the current state of knowledge of the technical terms and concepts of argumentation. Secondly, theorists could obtain a more accurate picture of how arguments are used, by whom, and to what reception, allowing claims on such matters to be evidence, rather than intuition, based. (shrink)

How is hope to be found amid the ethical and political dilemmas of modern life? Writer and philosopher Mary Zournazi brought her questions to some of the most thoughtful intellectuals at work today. She discusses "joyful revolt" with Julia Kristeva, the idea of "the rest of the world" with Gayatri Spivak, the "art of living" with Michel Serres, the "carnival of the senses" with Michael Taussig, the relation of hope to passion and to politics with Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto (...) Laclau. A dozen stimulating minds weigh in with their visions of a better social and political order. The result is a collaboration - of writing, of thinking, and of politics - that demonstrates more clearly than any single-authored project could how ideas encountering one another can produce the vision needed for social change. (shrink)

Michael Otsuka sets out to vindicate left-libertarianism, a political philosophy which combines stringent rights of control over one's own mind, body, and life with egalitarian rights of ownership of the world. Otsuka reclaims the ideas of John Locke from the libertarian Right, and shows how his Second Treatise of Government provides the theoretical foundations for a left-libertarianism which is both more libertarian and more egalitarian than the Kantian liberal theories of John Rawls and Thomas Nagel. Otsuka's libertarianism is founded on (...) a right of self-ownership. Here he is at one with 'right-wing' libertarians, such as Robert Nozick, in endorsing the highly anti-paternalistic and anti-moralistic implications of this right. But he parts company with these libertarians in so far as he argues that such a right is compatible with a fully egalitarian principle of equal opportunity for welfare. In embracing this principle, his own version of left-libertarianism is more strongly egalitarian than others which are currently well known. Otsuka argues that an account of legitimate political authority based upon the free consent of each is strengthened by the adoption of such an egalitarian principle. He defends a pluralistic, decentralized ideal of political society as a confederation of voluntary associations. Part I of Libertarianism without Inequality concerns the natural rights of property in oneself and the world. Part II considers the natural rights of punishment and self-defence that form the basis for the government's authority to legislate and punish. Part III explores the nature and limits of the powers of governments which are created by the consensual transfer of the natural rights of the governed. Libertarianism without Inequality is a book which everyone interested in political theory should read. (shrink)

All religion and much philosophy has been concerned with the contrast between the ephemeral and the eternal. Human beings have always sought ways to overcome time, and to prove that death is not the end. This book consists then in an exploration of certain closely related ideas: personal identity, time, history and our commitment to the future, and the role of imagination in life.

Fundamental principles : the nature of the dispute -- Types of euthanasia -- Psychiatric assisted suicide -- Neonates -- Incompetent adults -- Human life is sacred -- The slippery slope -- Medical views -- Four methods of easing death and their effect on doctors -- Looking further ahead.

The works of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) ranged from the early _Thoughts on the Education of Daughters_ to _The Female Reader_, a selection of texts for girls, and included two novels. But her reputation is founded on _A Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ of 1792. This treatise is the first great document of feminism—and is now accepted as a core text in western tradition. It is not widely known that the germ of Wollstonecraft’s great work came out of an (...) earlier and much shorter vindication—A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), written in the context of the issues raised by the French Revolution. This edition, which follows the model of other Broadview Editions in including a range of materials that help the reader to see the work in the context of its era out of which it emerged, is arranged chronologically, opening with Wollstonecraft’s “other vindication.” It also includes a wide range of other documents in appendices, as well as a comprehensive and authoritative introduction, chronology, and full index. (shrink)

Nature and Mortality is a challenging look at some of the major public issues of our time through the eyes of one of our most influential and probing liberal humanists. It is a frank account on where we stand today on such controversial matters as human embryology, genetic engineering, euthanasia and abortion. Warnock's views may seem like a red rag to a bull to some, but her contribution to the debate is always stimulating. Enlivened by autobiographical anecdote and some delicious (...) side-swipes, Nature and Mortality is Mary Warnock at her most perceptive, wise and entertaining. (shrink)

This chapter first distinguishes between originality and creativity. True originality is rare, whether in art, science, or LEGO, because to be truly original means to have done something that no one has ever done before, and that no one could have anticipated. Most LEGO creations will not meet that condition, for with the exception of serious hobbyists who undertake massive builds, most players who make original creations are making creations that are commonplace. Painting or remolding or placing stickers on the (...) bricks counts against the spirit of LEGO creation. The chapter then discusses The LEGO Movie embodies the paradox that presents three conflicting models of creative LEGO play, illustrated by the Master Builders, Finn's father, and Emmet. The movie's creators were deliberately playing around with conflicting popular conceptions of creativity: creativity as madness, creativity as thinking outside the box, and creativity as vision. (shrink)

A new translation of one of the great koan collections--by the premier translator of the Chinese classics--that reveals it to be a literary and philosophical masterwork beyond its association with Chan/Zen. Zen is famous for its koans, those seemingly confounding statements, questions, or stories that masters use to gauge their students' practice. Here, the lauded modern master of Chinese poetry translation asks us to reimagine one of the greatest of the koan collections in a new way: as a classic of (...) Chinese philosophical literature in the tradition of the Tao Te Ching or the Chuang Tzu. He presents the No-Gate Gateway (variously also familiar to readers as the Mumonkan, Wu-men Kuan, Gateless Gate, or Gateless Barrier), in a "bare bones" version, without the usual additional commentary, not intended to be studied in the usual case-by-case method, but to be read as a complete work in itself, one that leads the reader carefully on a path to the discovery of the deep nature of reality--an unconventional way of reading it that can be truly revelatory. (shrink)

The unity of aesthetic and teleological judgment, the third and earlier Critiques, is based on Kant′s discovery of a “heuristic method” for applying judgments regarding sense phenomena to abstract thought, a “second attention” which enables an “idea of the whole”. Synthetic judgment, basis for cognition and human action, depends on efficacy of non-empirical insights: the transcendental standpoint, “regulative” ideas, consciousness of “ought” and the reality of freedom, universality of natural mechanism, the principle of “fortuitous” purposiveness. The activity of reflective judgment (...) in the encounter with the beautiful, sublime, living, and two paradigmatic types of explanation, inspired by Spinoza′s distinction of extensio and cogitatio, permit Kant to bridge the gap between freedom and necessity, theoretical knowledge and morality. (shrink)

Abstract Contemporary egalitarians often appeal to a distinction between inequalities issuing from choice as opposed to those stemming from brute luck. Inequalities of the second kind, they say, ought to be redressed, while those of the former may be allowed to stand. In this paper, I scrutinize the role played by the notion of brute luck in Ronald Dworkin's theory of equality. My intention is to show that Dworkin seeks to occupy what turns out to be an untenable middle position. (...) He is sandwiched unhappily between G. A. Cohen's radical brute luck egalitarianism, on the one side, and a non-egalitarian conception of justice that rejects entirely the appeal to brute luck, on the other. It follows from the untenable nature of Dworkin's position that egalitarians face a much starker choice than he realizes. They should either wholeheartedly embrace the brute luck story or else find another way of grounding their position. (shrink)

This paper examines the role that attention to emotions around climate change can play for third sector climate change engagement initiatives, an area to which the literature on such initiatives has paid little attention. It focuses on Carbon Conversations, a programme that explicitly acknowledges the role of difficult emotions and underlying values in people's engagement with climate change. While there are limitations to this approach, results show that it can help certain audiences engage more deeply with issues around climate change (...) and carbon reduction. Important lessons can be drawn for other initiatives that aim to engage the public on climate change. (shrink)

DCPS is a connectionist production system interpreter that uses distributed representations. As a connectionist model it consists of many simple, richly interconnected neuron‐like computing units that cooperate to solve problems in parallel. One motivation for constructing DCPS was to demonstrate that connectionist models are capable of representing and using explicit rules. A second motivation was to show how “coarse coding” or “distributed representations” can be used to construct a working memory that requires far fewer units than the number of different (...) facts that can potentially be stored. The simulation we present is intended as a detailed demonstration of the feasibility of certain ideas and should not be viewed as a full implementation of production systems. Our current model only has a few of the many interesting emergent properties that we eventually hope to demonstrate: It is damage‐resistant, it performs matching and variable binding by massively parallel constraint satisfaction, and the capacity of its working memory is dependent on the similarity of the items being stored. (shrink)

Someone who has more sympathy with traditional empiricism than with much of present-day philosophy may ask himself: 'How do my experiences give rise to my beliefs about an external world, and to what extent do they justify them?' He wants to refer, among other things, to unremarkable experiences, of a sort which he cannot help believing to be so extremely common that it would be ridiculous to call them common experiences. He mainly has in mind sense-experiences, and he thinks of (...) them in a particular way. His way of thinking of them, roughly speaking as something 'inner', is one on which recent logico-linguistic philosophy has thrown a good deal of light. The relevant special notion of an experience contrasts, among other things, with a certain more general biographical notion of an experience, which some dictionaries indicate by the definition, 'an event of which one is the subject'. This book explores the concept of experiences, focusing on the disjunctions between perception and illusion. (shrink)

Known as the “Mother of Tibetan Buddhism” and the “Mother of Knowledge,” Yeshe Tsogyal built upon indigenous Bön philosophy and Mahāyāna Buddhism to bring about a Buddhism that is identifiably Tibetan. I report on her life, her works and teaching. Then summarize her significance as a philosopher of Tibetan Buddhist metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. Lastly, I append portions of several writings attributed to her.

Recently, concerns have been raised about the phenomenon of 'overdiagnosis', the diagnosis of a condition that is not causing harm, and will not come to cause harm. Along with practical, ethical, and scientific questions, overdiagnosis raises questions about our concept of disease. In this paper, we analyse overdiagnosis as an epistemic problem and show how it challenges many existing accounts of disease. In particular, it raises questions about conceptual links drawn between disease and dysfunction, harm, and risk. We argue that (...) "disease" should be considered a vague concept with a nonclassical structure. On this view, overdiagnosed cases are 'borderline' cases of disease, falling in the zone between cases that are clearly disease, and cases that are clearly not disease. We then develop a précising definition of disease designed to provide practical help in preventing and limiting overdiagnosis. We argue that for this purpose, we can define disease as dysfunction that has a significant risk of causing severe harm to the patient. (shrink)

Neil Levy argues that while addicts who believe they are not addicts are self-deceived, addicts who believe they are addicts are just as self-deceived. Such persons accept a false belief that their addictive behaviour involves a loss of control. This paper examines two implications of Levy's discussion: that accurate self-knowledge may be particularly difficult for addicts; and that an addict's self-deceived belief that they cannot control themselves may aid their attempts at self-control. I argue that the self-deceived beliefs of addicts (...) in denial and of self-described addicts differ in kind. Unlike the self-deception of an addict in denial, that of the self-described addict allows them to acknowledge their behaviour. As such, it may aid an addict to develop more self-control. A paradoxical implication is that this self-deception may allow an addict more self-knowledge. (shrink)

Mary Anne Warren investigates a theoretical question that is at the centre of practical and professional ethics: what are the criteria for having moral status? That is: what does it take to be an entity towards which people have moral considerations? Warren argues that no single property will do as a sole criterion, and puts forward seven basic principles which establish moral status. She then applies these principles to three controversial moral issues: voluntary euthanasia, abortion, and the status of (...) non-human animals. (shrink)

Bathos - remarque -- Pt. 1. Le champ de bataille -- Pt. 2. Kant et ses juges -- Pt. 3. Traité de bathologie.

In this paper, we formulate a procedure for assessing reasoning as it is expressed in natural arguments. The procedure is a specification of one of the three aspects of argumentation assessment distinguished in the Comprehensive Assessment Procedure for Natural Argumentation that makes use of the argument categorisation framework of the Periodic Table of Arguments. The theoretical framework and practical application of both the CAPNA and the PTA are described, as well as the evaluation procedure that combines the two. The procedure (...) is illustrated through an evaluation of the reasoning of two example arguments from a recently published text. (shrink)

A visual imagery task is presented which is beyond the limits of normal human ability, and some of the factors contributing to its difficulty are isolated by comparing the difficulty of related tasks. It is argued that complex objects are assigned hierarchical structural descriptions by being parsed into parts, each of which has its own local system of significant directions. Two quite different schemas for a wire‐frame cube are used to illustrate this theory, and some striking perceptual differences to which (...) they give rise are described. The difficulty of certain mental imagery tasks is shown to depend on which of the alternative structural descriptions of an object is used, and this is interpreted as evidence that structural descriptions are an important component of mental images. Finally, it is argued that analog transformations like mental folding involve changing the values of continuous variables in a structural description. (shrink)

In this paper I describe the apparent differences between the views of Mizrahi and Seidel on the strength of arguments from expert opinion. I show that most of Seidel's objections rely on an understanding of the words 'expert' and 'opinion' different from those which Mizrahi employs. I also discuss certain inconsistencies found in both papers over the use of these key terms. The paper concludes by noting that Mizrahi is right to suggest that evidence shows expert predictions to be unreliable, (...) but Seidel is correct to observe that this finding should not be used to claim that expert opinion in general is not to be trusted. (shrink)