This article examines discourse on immunity in general public engagements with pandemic influenza in light of critical theory on immuno-politics and bodily integrity. Interview and focus group discussions on influenza with members of the general public reveal that, despite endorsement of government advice on how to avoid infection, influenza is seen as, ultimately, unavoidable. In place of prevention, members of the general public speak of immunity as the means of coping with influenza infection. Such talk on corporeal life under microbial (...) threat is informed by self/not-self, network and ‘choice’ immunity, and therefore makes considerable allowance for cosmopolitan traffic with others, microbes, ‘dirt’ and immune-boosting consumer products. The immuno-political orientation of members of the general public, therefore, appears to trend towards a productive cosmopolitanism that contrasts with more orthodox bioscientific and governmental approaches to pandemic influenza. We reflect on the implications of the immuno-cosmopolitanism of everyday life for the advent of global public health emergency and for biopolitical rule in general. (shrink)

COVID-19 lockdown presented a novel opportunity to study the experiences of people attempting to maintain friendships in the context of worldwide, government-enforced physical distancing and lockdown. Here we report on an experiential, idiographic qualitative project with a purposive sample of Scottish students. Data was collected via one-to-one on-line interviews with nine student participants. Data was transcribed and analyzed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Analysis highlighted three group-level experiential themes and associated subthemes. Participants’ shared experiences of maintaining friendships were reflected in a (...) dynamic process by which ‘changes to communication’ were associated with experiences of ‘effort and balance’ across friendships. Participants reported becoming particularly aware of the psychological processes involved in maintaining friendships, in turn, this was associated with ‘reflection and growth.’ These experiential findings resonate well with several longstanding classic theories; however, they also speak to the particularities of the context in which the study was conducted. They suggest the need for a pandemic psychology that moves beyond the typical focus on the direct impacts of infectious disease to address the wider psychosocial impacts with equal vigor. (shrink)

Reverence is an ancient virtue that survives among us in half-forgotten patterns of civility and moments of inarticulate awe. Reverence gives meaning to much that we do, yet the word has almost passed out of our vocabulary.Reverence, says philosopher and classicist Paul Woodruff, begins in an understanding of human limitations. From this grows the capacity to be in awe of whatever we believe lies outside our control -- God, truth, justice, nature, even death. It is a quality of character (...) that is especially important in leadership and in teaching, although it figures in virtually every human relationship. It transcends religious boundaries and can be found outside religion altogether.Woodruff draws on thinking about this lost virtue in ancient Greek and Chinese traditions and applies lessons from these highly reverent cultures to today's world. The book covers reverence in a variety of contexts -- the arts, leadership, teaching, warfare, and the home -- and shows how essential a quality it is to a well-functioning society.First published by Oxford University Press in 2001, this new edition of Reverence is revised and expanded. It contains a foreword by Betty Sue Flowers, Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, a new preface, two new chapters -- one on the sacred and one on compassion -- and an epilogue focused on renewing reverence in our own lives. (shrink)

This paper argues for two interrelated claims. The first is that the most innovative contribution of Timothy Williamson, Herman Cappelen, and Max Deutsch in the debate about the epistemology of thought experiments is not the denial of intuition and the claim of the irrelevance of experimental philosophy but the claim of epistemological continuity and the rejection of philosophical exceptionalism. The second is that a better way of implementing the claim of epistemological continuity is not Deutsch and Cappelen’s argument view or (...) Williamson’s folk psychological view. This is so because while the argument view makes the basis of the relevant classificational judgement evidentially too demanding; the folk psychological view makes it too weak and error-prone to count as an adequate explanation. Drawing from a certain reading of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics that flowers in Miranda Fricker and John McDowell, I argue for the reason-responsiveness view. Like the extant views, the reason-responsiveness view vindicates the claim of epistemological continuity. But unlike the extant views, it does not share those problematic features. Further, I show that the reason-responsiveness view offers a way for champions of the claim of epistemological continuity to resist Avner Baz’s objection to the claim of epistemological continuity and his objection to the philosophical use of thought experiments while taking on board some attractive elements of his view. (shrink)

L'auteur veut montrer que la création ou créativité (poiêsis) fait partie de l'essence même du sujet : lequel peut se définir tout entier comme un générateur de création, un être créateur (zôon poiêtikon) qui, de par ses attributs ontologiques mêmes, recrée le monde avec lequel il est en contact et le peuple de ses propres productions. Mais, dans le même temps, il manifeste une tendance constante à s'oublier lui-même derrière ses créations et à doter celles-ci d'une réalité objective, hypostasiée : (...) d'où l'évocation métaphorique proposée du myosotis, cette fleur qu'on appelle couramment « ne m'oubliez pas ». The author wants to show that creation or creativeness (poiêsis) is part of the very intrinsic nature of the subject: which can be wholly defined as a generator of creation, a creative being (zôon poiêtikon) who by his very ontological attributes recreates the world he is in contact with, and fills it with his own productions. But, in the same time, he manifests a constant tendency to forget himself behind his creations and endow them with a substantial objective reality: hence the metaphorical evocation suggested by the myosotis, this flower commonly called « forget me not ». (shrink)

Discussions of the interpretation of quantum theory are at present obstructed by (1) the increasing axiomania in physics and philosophy which replaces fundamental problems by problems of formulation within a certain preconceived calculus, and (2) the decreasing (since 1927) philosophical interest and sophistication both of professional physicists and of professional philosophers which results in the replacement of subtle positions by crude ones and of dialectical arguments by dogmatic ones. More especially, such discussions are obstructed by the ignorance of both opponents, (...) and also defenders of the Copenhagen point of view, as regards the arguments which once were used in its defence. The publication of Bunge's Quantum Theory and Reality and especially of Popper's contribution to it are taken as an occasion for the restatement of Bohr's position and for the refutation of some quite popular, but surprisingly naive and uninformed objections against it. Bohr's position is distinguished both from the position of Heisenberg and from the vulgarized versions which have become part of the so-called "Copenhagen Interpretation" and whose inarticulateness has been a boon for all those critics who prefer easy victories to a rational debate. Einstein's main counterargument is discussed, and Bohr's refutation restated. The philosophical background and earlier forms of Bohr's views are stated also. Considering that these views are more detailed, better adapted to the facts of the microdomain than any existing alternative it follows that fundamental discussion must first return to them. Their uniqueness is not asserted, however. Here the author still maintains that a hundred shabby flowers are preferable to a single blossom, however exquisite. But a hundred shabby flowers plus an exquisite blossom are more desirable still. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 125-128. What is the nature of sound? What is the nature of volume? William James, in attempting to address these simple questions wrote, “ The voluminousness of the feeling seems to bear very little relation to the size of the ocean that yields it . The ear and eye are comparatively minute organs, yet they give us feelings of great volume” (203-­4, itals. original). This subtle extensivity of sensation finds its peer in the subtle yet significant influence (...) of habituated action upon our lives. This expansive quality of habit­making is what Craig Dongoski's bodies of work enable us to appreciate. Nearly ten years ago Dongoski had a habit of turning on his audio recorder every day at three o'clock for three minutes. No matter what the setting, what the activity, Dongoski recorded the ambient sounds in his environment at that moment. As it happened, one day he was teaching a drawing class and he recorded the sounds of their pencils scratching across their respective surfaces. This was a critical moment for him. Later he would place a contact mic onto a drawing surface and record the sound of his signature. Signatures change over time, they respond to the conditions in which they are performed. Signatures speak volumes about the author, but a practice of attunement is required for the volume to be audible. To hear all that a signature can tell about its author, the listener must tune into the frequency at which this information is being broadcast. Dongoski's drawings and video works draw­out the peculiar artifact that habit makes of living: habits establish a tempo of living and it seems that one's habitus is the signature of habitual living. I sat down with Craig in an attempt to sound­out some of the depths of thought in his practice. What follows is selected from our conversation. Paul Boshears (PB): Clearly your work is dealing with time: from the painstaking action of rendering the drawing to the free­form approach of launching a microphone into a body of water and waiting to see what's recorded. Craig Dongoski (CD): Are we talking about the films or the drawings? PB: Well, it's a bit of both in my mind. I know the drawings on first glance seem to be these flows of lines without concern but I realize that there is this painstaking action involved. CD: I'm interested in time because I'm interested in forms outside of control, outside of politics, and outside of economics. I think that art, when it's alive, does go beyond those. I'm interested in duality and paradox—a stream of contradiction, I suppose. For instance, scale and size. There is a tendency to think that these are the same thing. But really you can have something small that has a lot of scale—look at Goya's drawings, Los Caprichos , they're very small but they have a lot of scale. Likewise things that are spontaneous don't necessarily mean that they take only two or three seconds to do. This latter distinction is what I'm most interested in. Having that appearance of spontaneity. The image has rhythm, you can latch onto it; but the reality is that it took many hours—and many months in some cases—to arrive at. And this is in keeping with geological time. I like to insert this series of thoughts into my work sometimes as an attempt to make some of this stuff comprehensible. There are all these distractions inundating us throughout our days now. Time gets tweaked by all these technologies that we interact with daily. There's more than just digital time or the mechanical time of your watch. There's biological time, that time in which you're growing. PB: I'm reminded of McLuhan here: he made his career by making that strong claim that the humans of today are not the same humans of three generations ago because technology has fundamentally changed us. Are we not the same human beings as a hundred years ago? CD: I mean, I don't think we're the same human beings that we were when he was around! It's my understanding that before painting a flower, monks would meditate for hours on that flower and then they would complete the painting of that flower in less than a minute. That's what I want to point out about our world today, we have all this information, but how much of it are we metabolizing? PB: Is there a message you're looking for? Or that you're trying to share? CD: These drawings set­up the circumstances for me to continue them forever. I'm only about six years into it, but with more time, things can unfold. You know? If you take this cup of coffee and vow to restrict your work to only this material and medium for seven years—you'll make interesting work. The problem is that most people can't hold on to things or they give up or they get distracted. They don't trust that anything is possible; anything is potential material. Staying with this cup of coffee example, we can get enveloped in the history of the recycling logo, or the process for harvesting coffee and so on. The same is true for my work as it has lead me into places like graphical music scores. I had, of course, known about John Cage's notations and I'd always been interested in sound itself, but this drawing practice made it feasible to explore the intersections in a meaningful way. I think that if you trust your instincts and your curiosities and your abilities, then the bus drives itself. Look at Roman Opalka, he's kind of the patron saint of time painting. The claim is that no one can count to a billion in a lifetime so he's set­out to paint to seven sevens (7,777,777). He began with white numbers on a black field but over the years he has gradually reduced the black field to ever­lightening grays. His plan is to paint these seven sevens on what ostensibly will be white on white. PB: It occurs to me that I've never thought of the actual, literal, meaning of “microphone” in relation to “microscope.” The mic has made everything loud, the world's not allowed to be quiet anymore. Maybe we should call them “macrophones” since telephone's already taken... CD: Well, a microscope is a lens. What got me interested in sound was that a microphone acts like a lens. There are wide angle lenses, or a lens that gets your eye up close to something far away, or at a tiny level. The same is true of the microphone. You can use a parabolic mic to hear what the coach is saying on a sports field or a mic that picks­up the sound from the entire cathedral. There's this whole gamut... I'm kind of playing with the words here. I'm into the minuteness of the sound, but I'm interested in the minuteness of the mark itself. PB: I guess it's a Deluezean, generative, statement, then? It's not a metaphor, it's an actual thing with which we can work. CD : That's right. PB: While doing some background work on you I found myself at interesting places on the internet. For example, Konstantin Raudive and a brief jog into Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP); perhaps this was just synchronicity. But, it's a happy coincidence nonetheless because the them of this issue of continent. is “the moraine” and one of the nuances of this term is “what remains.” Is there a metaphysical or epistemological problem that you're sorting­out here? CD: Think about fossils: fossils are the first recording device, you know? It's the first, natural, recording device. It's in this way that I think my works are fossilized time. Artifacts of that process. Van Gogh is a strong source for me in this regard: it's not what he's painting it's how. You're seeing his nervous system at work. The what is so incidental, the chairs, the flowers, etc. It's funny: when I first started doing this, before I started drawing voices, I was doing these things in cemeteries. I was doing automatic drawings. And when I took this experiment to its maximum I was taking hydrophones and burying them in abandoned graves. I was thinking about the mic rig as the south coordinate and I'd use a shortwave radio as the north coordinate. Usually it was just white noise, but on the east and west I'd station a writer and a drawer. So I'd have these things going on simultaneously and I'd be mixing them at the same time. PB: How'd it come out? CD: Well, just like you'd expect. It was a lot of white noise. But I think that Raudive was on to something. Burroughs used to say something similar when he'd talk about being in a foreign country where he didn't know the language and then he'd start to hear things. At the base, what I'm doing is pattern recognition. I do have a writing component to the drawings. I haven't exploited it in a while but... I use a vocoder, which was developed to encrypt spy signals during one of the World Wars. The mechanism takes two channels, one being the spy's signal combined with noise and then the other channel is a sine wave so that the intended recipient can pick out the words. So I did something like this with Beowulf. I tried combining the spoken word with other television and radio sources, but that didn't work because a book on tape is usually read in a very steady clip and the result was too garbled. So the second try, instead of drawing I was writing, trying to articulate the sounds that I could hear in this garbled transmission of Beowulf. You start to think you hear something, so you start to write what you think you're hearing. But what you're hearing is just being triggered by this articulating action. When the sound of the drawing lines up with the sound of the word you get something. But it's not ever what you're really hearing. You start writing and you're trying to keep up with what you think you're hearing and it is truly, in the most true sense of the phrase, automatic writing. You can contrive and go into a “spirit trance” or whatever, but... PB: It's uninteresting to you? CD: Well, it's unbelievable. It's just listening to sounds and following along. The magic is out there, there are no tricks or anything. You do this exercise with twenty people and you will get twenty totally different writings. But, you're creating the sound and you're creating the writing as an interpretation. That's the thing with EVP, it's homophonic translation. PB: Do you trust a straight line? I know you start with these meticulous lines at the beginning of the drawings but they do change over time. CD: I'm trying to show that there are these imperfections in structures and that over the reiterations of these structures these imperfections become amplified. But you can see them in tree formation as well. The rings alter their shape as the trees grow. PB: Is that your transmission then? You're not just receiving these sounds but you're broadcasting this message as well? CD: Things exist because of their opposites. These drawings are really about nothing. It's the first body of work I've had where people project so much of stuff onto the works. So there you go, things existing because of their opposites. It's kind of like with Mike Kelley: the work was about a critique of commodity culture and commodifying emotions. Using toys this was a critique of production. But then suddenly people were saying it was about abuse and the abuse that Mike Kelley had suffered. And it wasn't but he heard that and said, “I'll go with it,” and so he did. I think that's the nature of communication: I send this but you receive that instead and this makes me think about what I sent in a different way. (shrink)

Psychopathy fascinates. Modernist writers construct out of it an image of alienated individualism pursuing the moment, killing they know not why, exploiting in passing, troubled, if troubled at all, not by guilt, but by perplexity (Camus 1989; Gide 1995; Mailer 1957; Musil 1996). Psychiatrists and psychologists—even those who should know better—are drawn by it to take off into philosophical speculation about morality, evil, and the beast in man (Mullen 1992; Simon 1996). Philosophers succumb to the temptation of attempting to ground (...) speculation in the supposed facticity of psychopathy. -/- Psychopathy is a cultural construct with roots going back to the eighteenth century, but which only came to full flower over the last fifty years (Hare 1998; Lewis 1974). The currently fashionable constructions of psychopathy find wide acceptance among clinicians and academics. The problem is, however, whether the concept has connections that have been established to the behavior, psychopathology, or the structure and function of brain worthy of according even a modest level of scientific status. There is little point in basing an argument on some supposed scientific gold standard if what glitters is iron pyrites (fools' gold). -/- Neil Levy's opening paragraph contains the statement "Yet in other respects they seem quite irrational; so much so that the term moral insanity has sometimes been applied to them" (p. 129). This both asserts that there is a category "them," namely the psychopaths, and connects them to "moral insanity." Moral insanity entered the language of psychiatry when Pritchard chose to use the term to translate Pinel's category of mania sans deliré (Pritchard 1836). Pinel was attempting to conceptualize a range of disorders that bordered on insanity in the sense of severe disturbances of affect, judgment, and behavior, but that were not accompanied by hallucinations or delusions (Pinel 1798/1964). In today's terminology, the cases he described would probably fall into diagnostic groups, including major depression, bipolar disorder, epilepsy, and a range of personality disorders. A number of his more striking case histories involved antisocial and even murderous behavior, which probably reflected Pinel's role in assessing offenders for the criminal courts of Paris. Pritchard's use of the English word "moral" reflected an appeal first to its use at the time to designate something which was like or similar, but not identical (a usage the OED labels "vulgar"), and second moral in the sense of ethical, conforming to virtuous behavior. Anglophones seized on the latter meaning, although Pinel emphasized the former. Forty years later, Henry Maudsley, the most widely read psychiatrist of his generation, could assert that moral insanity was as real as Colour blindness, some people being Colour blind and some moral blind (Maudsley 1879). Moral insanity became connected variously to phrenology with its own bump over the underlying moral cortex, with the twisted genetics of degeneration, with atavistic theories of criminality, and with a range of disorders of brain from epilepsy to frontal lobe damage (Combed 1853; Ellis 1890; Pick 1989). Although it is anachronistic to use the terms "psychopathy" and "moral insanity" together, it is clear they occupied a similar social and psychiatric space, albeit in different era. This should caution against too ready acceptance of psychopathy which may turn out to be as empty and dangerous a conceptualization as moral insanity. Why dangerous? Dangerous to those labeled, because the morally insane and the moral imbeciles were placed in preventive detention in asylums and prisons, and even sterilized in some jurisdictions. Dangerous to society, because it gave a spurious scientific justification for viewing crime not as reflecting the social evils of deprivation, ignorance, and inequality but as the ravages of the born criminals. -/- Psychopaths are not, as Levy asserts, "(causally) responsible for … more than fifty percent of violent crime" (p. 129). A proportion of violent offenders, which varies widely between observers, are labeled psychopaths. This is often on the basis of Hare's psychopathy checklist, which is a subjective, albeit through training aspiring to be reproducible, and to some extent self-sustaining, evaluation system (Hare 1980, 2003). Part of the checklist gathers data on prior antisocial behavior; part constrains the examiner to subjectively estimate such matters as glibness and callousness, part requires judgments about whether the... (shrink)

This experiment compared the effects of exposure to masked phobic stimuli at a very brief stimulus-onset asynchrony on spider-phobic and non-phobic individuals. Participants were identified through a widely used questionnaire and a Behavioral Avoidance Test with a live, caged tarantula to establish baseline levels of avoidance. One week later, they were individually administered one of two continuous series of masked images: spiders or flowers. Preliminary masking experiments showed that independent samples of participants from the same populations failed to recognize (...) these stimuli. Participants in the main experiment reported ratings of subjective distress immediately before and after the exposure manipulation. Then they engaged in the BAT once again. Very brief exposure to images of spiders reduced phobic participants’ avoidance of the tarantula. No effects were evidenced on subjective distress, or on non-phobic participants. Theoretical implications for the non-conscious basis of fear are discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Three Ovidian Tails PAUL BAROLSKY Kneeling at the edge of a pond in push-up position, a beautiful nude boy crowned with flowers gazes down at the water in which he beholds his reflection. In love, he is enthralled. Thus, the image of Narcissus rendered by the Florentine painter Alessandro Allori in a work that has been largely overlooked until recently. Datable to the second half of the (...) sixteenth century, it now hangs in the Turkish Embassy in Washington, DC. In the distant background of the picture we behold Echo, who extends an arm upward seemingly in a gesture of despair, since she is rejected by Narcissus. She stands before a mass of rock, her left leg beginning to turn to stone, the very stone into which she vanishes as only her voice remains when she echoes her beloved. The painting abounds in Alessandro Allori, Narcissus. Photograph © Patricia Rubin. arion 26.3 winter 2019 closely observed passages such as the little fish in the pond, one of which has captured a worm. There are other notable details such as the crab on a rock in the foreground, or the clusters of pendulous, ripe grapes, fruit of Bacchus, to whom androgynous Narcissus is likened in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Allori also employs poetic simile in his picture, since the fingers of the youth’s left hand rhyme with the finger-like roots that emerge from the water. These roots are magnified in turn by their reflected image on the water’s surface. 136 three ovidian tails Abraham Janssens, Nymph and Pan Among the Reeds. AKG / Museen Böttcherstra ße. The apex of the picture, we might say, is baby Cupid who, hovering above, aims his dart at Narcissus and thus arouses the boy’s desire. The shape of Cupid’s bow echoes that of Narcissus ’s prominent buttocks which are framed by the attractive, bright golden drapery fluttering prominently around the youth’s posterior. One might well say that Allori features the buttocks of Narcissus’s body most provocatively in a kind of butt which recalls that of Cupid in the famous Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time painted by the artist’s teacher, Bronzino. What Allori pictures is not exactly what Ovid writes. It is, however, how Allori imagines the Narcissus of Ovid’s tale. Allori is not alone among Ovidian artists in focusing on the backside of the human body. The posterior is especially prominent in another mythological picture, this one from the early seventeenth century, executed by a disciple of Rubens, Abraham Janssens. This work has found its way to Bremen, where it is now housed in the Ludwig Roselius Museum. It illustrates Pan’s pursuit of Syrinx, who is metamorphosed into reeds in a story told by Mercury in order to put Argus asleep. Ovid is Janssens’s point of departure. The artist depicts the moment when a muscular Pan with a ruddy, almost leathery face embraces Syrinx in her new form as a bunch of reeds. Janssens departs from Ovid with a most novel invention. He depicts a woman, seen from behind, who dominates the composition. With sharp contrasts of lights and darks, vestiges of Caravaggio, the painter emphasizes the female’s imposingly broad backside, which is framed by a billowing, bright, attention-grabbing red drapery that she seems to hold across the front of her body. Could it be that Janssens here alludes to the backside of Syrinx as Pan would have seen it when he chased her? It would seem that we are given not only a view of Pan embracing reeds, we are simultaneously given a Pan’s-eye view of Syrinx’s prominent and provocative backside before her metamorphosis. I wish to consider one final example of the derrière in Ovidian art, this one prominent in a picture painted well Paul Barolsky 137 over a hundred years after Janssens worked: Louis-JeanFran çois Lagrenée’s Abduction of Deianira by the Centaur Nessus, a work which is now in the Louvre. In Ovid’s story, Hercules arrives with his bride Deianira at the shore of the river Evenus where she is abducted by Nessus, who flees only to have Hercules shoot him with... (shrink)

Two claims are discussed. One is that works of art are a product of nature, no less than rocks and flowers. The other is that nature itself is an artifact, constructed by scientists and artisans, throughout centuries, from a partly yielding, partly resisting material of unknown properties. Since both claims are supported by convincing evidence, the world appears much more slippery than commonly assumed by rationalists. Intellectual generalizations around ?art,? ?nature? or ?science? are simplifying devices that can help us (...) order the abundance that surrounds us. They should be understood as such?opportunistic tools, not final statements on the objective reality of the world. (shrink)

Thought experiments play a prominent role in philosophical inquiry. And yet we lack a good understanding of how they work and how they are supposed to supply evidence or knowledge in inquiry. This dissertation offers a novel account of the epistemology of philosophical thought experiments, namely, the reason-responsiveness view. The view is inspired by a virtue ethical tradition that flowers in John McDowell (1994) and Miranda Fricker (2007). Drawing on this virtue ethical tradition, I argue that knowing in philosophical (...) thought experiments is achieved through the exercise of the virtue of sensibility, which has three distinct features. First, it is social in origin, acquired through our training in a human language and as ordinary members of a community. Second, it is recognitional in the sense that although our sensibility gives us the ability to classify situations, whether real or hypothetical and to resonate with rational considerations for or against a given classificational judgement (i.e., the judgements we form in thought experiments), it does not equip us with a reflective ability to fully articulate those reasons in an infallible way. And third, it allows us to project across various contexts, both in real and in hypothetical situations. And this ability to project, I argue further, does not come from the ability of people to grasp concepts or to have certain mental episodes or phenomenology or to grasp universals or to have mastery of the application conditions of rules or from belonging to some exclusive club or from enjoying a certain superior access to concepts or access to philosophically interesting phenomena not available to ordinary people. On the contrary, that we do comes down to “our sharing routes of interest and feeling, mode of response, senses of humour and of significance, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation—all the while of organism Wittgenstein calls “forms of life” (Cavell, 1969, p.52). The account is then used to shore up the claim of epistemological continuity, which asserts that the epistemology of thought experiments is an extension of social cognition or social epistemology (Cappelen, 2012; Deutsch, 2015; Williamson 2007), and to offer a claim of epistemological-continuity-style defence of philosophical thought experiments against two major objections in the literature, namely, the negative experimentalist challenge (see Machery, 2017) and the ordinary language challenge ( Baz, 2016, 2017). (shrink)

It is sometimes said that changes in academic philosophy in the twentieth century reflected a process in which a discipline that had been earlier closely tied to institutional religion became increasingly laicized and secularized.1 In line with this idea, the idealist philosophy that had flowered within British philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century can look like the last and ill-fated attempt of a Victorian religious sensibility to guard itself against a post-Darwinian God-less view of the world and ourselves.2 (...) Such a view generally represents, I believe, the attitudes of many contemporary philosophers to British philosophy prior to the transforming work of Russell and Moore of about one hundred years ago. Against the luxuriant and mystical metaphysics of the idealists, fuelled by religious longing, the “new philosophy”, it is thought, affirmed the brute materiality of the world and its independence from mind, be it divine or human. A similar development is commonly understood as carrying from Hegel through the “young Hegelians” to the mature Marx. Thus for Feuerbach, for example, Hegel’s idealist doctrine that “nature or reality is posited by the idea” was “merely the rational expression of the theological doctrine that nature is created by God”.3 Hegel’s philosophy had thus provided a “last place of refuge and ... rational support of theology”, and escaping from this condition (more prison than refuge) required rejecting idealism and confronting the fact that “the true relation of thinking and being is simply this. Being is subject and thinking a predicate but a predicate such as... (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the elements of time, memory and mystery in Veronica Mars. Both the plot and the visual style of Veronica Mars assign a huge importance to the past, suggesting that past events have a major impact on the present. The most straightforward way in which the past is accessible to us and has an impact on the present is through everyday memories. Much of the time when we voluntarily remember things, it's because something happening now has prompted (...) us to go looking for a memory designed to answer our question. The final episode of the first season ends with a touching sequence symbolizing the end of one particular detective story. Veronica dreams that she and Lilly are floating together in a pool, surrounded by flower petals, still in the soft focus of the past, but without the dark tints of foreboding and mystery. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 259 to the non-Latin reader; instead, it turns out to be a sort of catalogue of opinions on a wide variety of philosophical topics held by many of the thinkers active in the period: between St: Paul and. Marsilius of Padua. But a few facts and figures will, I think, show why' La filosofia medievale is more properly characterized as Liber Sententiarum than Antologia di testi...... (...) Of the book's 440 pages, 306 are occupied by actual text materials, the balance being. taken up with. bit-bibliographical prefatory remarks to each of the selections, an index, and the Table of Contents. Since selections from the works of thirty-five mediaeval authors are presented (!), an equable distribution of the 306 pages would leave something less than nine pages to be devoted to each writer. But as some of the selected figures, e.g., Augustine, Aquinas, and Ockham, have as many as 29 pages devoted to their writings, the others are given wholly inadequate representation. Now from this it can be easily seen that at best, i.e., where the full upper limit of space is assigned to the writings of any one of the mediaevals, his attack and stand on some chosen philosophical issue might be fairly represented. But when we look to the few men who are thus singled out for special consideration and note that their allotments of pages are spent on a great number of topics, drawn from many different works, the effect within the scope of a single "lengthy" selection mirrors perfectly the patchy and kaleidoscopic character of the entire collection. On the positive side, it must be noted at once that the translations are excellent: faithful and clear. The prefaces, albeit quite general, are accurate and informative; while the bibliographies, particularly those that deal with primary sources, are up-to-date and helpful. Further, it was most gratifying to find that this volume included selections culled from the writings of such oft-referred to, but never-anthologized figures as Peter Damian (289 pages), Gilbertus Porretanus (5~ pages), Vincent of Beauvais (4 pages), and Siger of Brabant (3 pages). An error occurs in the Table of Contents where Giustino, Atenagora, and Tertulliano, who should be listed under "L'apologetica cristiana," are cited under "Nuovo mestamento." To sum up: in a foredoomed attempt to be exhaustive of i momenti pith importanti del travaglio speculativo... dell'umanit~t per oltre 13 secoli, dall'avvento del Cristianesimo alle soglie della Rinascenza (Foreword), the eight collaborating editors of La filosofia medievale bit off much more than even their considerable talents could possibly have chewed--let alone properly digested. As a result, this book of readings, despite the excellences pointed out above, comes off a Book o] Sentences upon which (unlike Peter the Lombard's) only one Commentary can be written: inadequate. HERMAN SHAPIRO San lose State College Juan de Vald~s: la sua vitae il suo pensiero religioso. Con una completa bibliografia delle opere del Vald~s e degli scritti intorno a lui. Seconda edizione riveduta ed aggiornata. By Edmondo Clone. (Napoli: Fausto Fiorentino Editore, 1963. Pp. 225. = Collana di Studi e Testi di Letteratura, VII.) The Spaniard Juan de Vald~s (ca. 1495-1541) is one of the most significant personalities of Reformation times. He represents the flowering of Erasmian religious thought. Vald~s however keeps referring his readers to St Paul rather than to Erasmus. For Vald~s "the 260 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Christian business" is not knowledge but experience. He founds religious certainty on individual inspiration and emphasizes charity against external written law. A man inspired by God becomes autonomous and acquires a mind of his own--independent of external authorities. This valuable study (pp. 5-109) is followed by an extensive bibliography (pp. 113--209) in which it could be added that Vald~s' Al[abeto Cristiano was reprinted in 1948 by the Editorial "La Aurora" of Buenos Aires. In 1946 this publisher considered (in the Preface to his reprint of Vald~s' Dicilogo de Doctrina Cristiana, p. 12) republishing also Vald6s' Ciento y diez consideraciones divinas. PAUL T. FUrIRMAN~ Columbia Theological Seminary Descartes. Oeuvres philosophiques. Tome I (1618-1637.) Textes 6tablis, pr6sent6s et... (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce anaffective variant of the Simon paradigm. Three experiments are reported in which nouns and adjectives with a positive, negative, or neutral affective meaning were used as stimuli. Depending on the grammatical category of the presented word (i.e. noun or adjective), participants had to respond as fast as possible by saying a predetermined positive or negative word. In Experiments 1 and 2, the words POSITIVE and NEGATIVE were required as responses, in Experiment 3, FLOWER and CANCER (...) were used as response words. Despite the fact that participants were explicitly instructed to ignore the affective meaning of the presented words, reaction times were faster when the affective connotation of the presented word and the correct response was the same than when it differed. The results lendfurther support tothe hypothesis that stimulus valence can be processed automatically. We also argue that the affective Simon paradigm can be used as a flexible tool for the study of affective-processing and discuss how other variants of the Simon paradigm can be developed to stimulate research on other aspects of information-processing. (shrink)

John Danford claims that Hume's philosophy must be understood within the framework of the 'problem of reason'. The problem of reason', according to this account, concerns the general relationship between philosophy and reason, on the one hand, and experience and 'common life' on the other. Danford maintains that the nature and development of Hume's thought, considered as a response to this problem, falls, essentially, into two parts. First, we must consider Hume's Treatise and his first Enquiry (ie., his 'epistemological works' (...) [61-cp.9]). The heart of Hume's Treatise, Danford suggests, lies with the epistemology of Book I and, in particular, with the discussions of causation and the external world. Hume's primary concern in these passages, it is argued, was to refute and discredit the rationalistic, 'scientific philosophies of Descartes and, especially, Hobbes (24-5, 40-5, 59, 74-5, 84-5, 190). These thinkers, Danford maintains, had driven a 'wedge' between philosophy and experienceor 'common life' (24-5). By emphasizing the limits and weakness of h u m a n understanding Hume exposes the vulnerability of Hobbes's and Descartes's scientific ambitions and, in this way, he seeks to return philosophy to the secure and appropriate foundations of 'common life and everyday experience.....Shortly after Hume published the Treatise there was, Danford claims, a 'shift' in his thinking on these matters (28). This shift is represented most clearly in his later works: the Essays, the History, and the Dialogues (10, 33, 7, 88, 108). Danford firmly rejects the suggestion that these works represent a turning away from philosophy. On the contrary, it is these later works, taken together, which constitute Hume's most mature philosophy. Indeed, they are, Danford says, the 'flower ofHume's philosophic career' (10). The mature philosophy of Hume, it is argued, must be interpreted as 'Political philosophy". It is political philosophy in the sense that it attempts to investigate human life in its full diversity and complexity and, on this basis, it seeks to provide us with some general guide as to how we should live (10, 7, 88-9, 183-6). From the 'teachings' of the History and the Essays Danford draws some lessons that are 'valid for all times' (112 and 114). The inspirational message concerns, roughly, the merits of capitalism (see, e.g., p. 131: The increase in personal liberty, then, was and is directly connected to the growth of commerce...' and p.137:'. the central lesson of British history [is] the superiority of liberal commercial society ...). (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to show how moral imagination can be cultivated through meditation. Moral imagination was conceived as a three-stage process of ethical development. The first stage is reproductive imagination, that involves attaining awareness of the contextual factors that affect perception of a moral problem. The second stage, productive imagination, consists of reframing the problem from different perspectives. The third stage, creative imagination, entails developing morally acceptable alternatives to solve the ethical problem. This article contends that moral (...) imagination can be cultivated through three kinds of meditation: non-discursive, semidiscursive, and discursive meditation. Part one shows how the seed of reproductive moral imagination is planted during sessions of nondiscursive meditation. Productive moral imagination, as will be shown in part two, is nurtured through semidiscursive meditation. Part three will demonstrate the flowering of creative moral imagination through discursive meditation. Reflection and small group discussion on each form of meditation will help to show business people how to cultivate moral imagination. (shrink)

Challenging recent work that contends that seventeenth-century English discourses privilege the notion of a self-enclosed, self-sufficient individual, The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature recovers a counter-tradition that imagines selves as more passively prompted than actively choosing. This tradition - which Scott Paul Gordon locates in seventeenth-century religious discourse, in early eighteenth-century moral philosophy, in mid eighteenth-century acting theory, and in the emergent novel - resists autonomy and defers agency from the individual to an external 'prompter'. Gordon (...) argues that the trope of passivity aims to guarantee a disinterested self in a culture that was increasingly convinced that every deliberate action involves calculating one's own interest. Gordon traces the origins of such ideas from their roots in the non-conformist religious tradition to their flowering in one of the central texts of eighteenth-century literature, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 259 to the non-Latin reader; instead, it turns out to be a sort of catalogue of opinions on a wide variety of philosophical topics held by many of the thinkers active in the period: between St: Paul and. Marsilius of Padua. But a few facts and figures will, I think, show why' La filosofia medievale is more properly characterized as Liber Sententiarum than Antologia di testi...... (...) Of the book's 440 pages, 306 are occupied by actual text materials, the balance being. taken up with. bit-bibliographical prefatory remarks to each of the selections, an index, and the Table of Contents. Since selections from the works of thirty-five mediaeval authors are presented (!), an equable distribution of the 306 pages would leave something less than nine pages to be devoted to each writer. But as some of the selected figures, e.g., Augustine, Aquinas, and Ockham, have as many as 29 pages devoted to their writings, the others are given wholly inadequate representation. Now from this it can be easily seen that at best, i.e., where the full upper limit of space is assigned to the writings of any one of the mediaevals, his attack and stand on some chosen philosophical issue might be fairly represented. But when we look to the few men who are thus singled out for special consideration and note that their allotments of pages are spent on a great number of topics, drawn from many different works, the effect within the scope of a single "lengthy" selection mirrors perfectly the patchy and kaleidoscopic character of the entire collection. On the positive side, it must be noted at once that the translations are excellent: faithful and clear. The prefaces, albeit quite general, are accurate and informative; while the bibliographies, particularly those that deal with primary sources, are up-to-date and helpful. Further, it was most gratifying to find that this volume included selections culled from the writings of such oft-referred to, but never-anthologized figures as Peter Damian (289 pages), Gilbertus Porretanus (5~ pages), Vincent of Beauvais (4 pages), and Siger of Brabant (3 pages). An error occurs in the Table of Contents where Giustino, Atenagora, and Tertulliano, who should be listed under "L'apologetica cristiana," are cited under "Nuovo mestamento." To sum up: in a foredoomed attempt to be exhaustive of i momenti pith importanti del travaglio speculativo... dell'umanit~t per oltre 13 secoli, dall'avvento del Cristianesimo alle soglie della Rinascenza (Foreword), the eight collaborating editors of La filosofia medievale bit off much more than even their considerable talents could possibly have chewed--let alone properly digested. As a result, this book of readings, despite the excellences pointed out above, comes off a Book o] Sentences upon which (unlike Peter the Lombard's) only one Commentary can be written: inadequate. HERMAN SHAPIRO San lose State College Juan de Vald~s: la sua vitae il suo pensiero religioso. Con una completa bibliografia delle opere del Vald~s e degli scritti intorno a lui. Seconda edizione riveduta ed aggiornata. By Edmondo Clone. (Napoli: Fausto Fiorentino Editore, 1963. Pp. 225. = Collana di Studi e Testi di Letteratura, VII.) The Spaniard Juan de Vald~s (ca. 1495-1541) is one of the most significant personalities of Reformation times. He represents the flowering of Erasmian religious thought. Vald~s however keeps referring his readers to St Paul rather than to Erasmus. For Vald~s "the 260 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Christian business" is not knowledge but experience. He founds religious certainty on individual inspiration and emphasizes charity against external written law. A man inspired by God becomes autonomous and acquires a mind of his own--independent of external authorities. This valuable study (pp. 5-109) is followed by an extensive bibliography (pp. 113--209) in which it could be added that Vald~s' Al[abeto Cristiano was reprinted in 1948 by the Editorial "La Aurora" of Buenos Aires. In 1946 this publisher considered (in the Preface to his reprint of Vald~s' Dicilogo de Doctrina Cristiana, p. 12) republishing also Vald6s' Ciento y diez consideraciones divinas. PAUL T. FUrIRMAN~ Columbia Theological Seminary Descartes. Oeuvres philosophiques. Tome I (1618-1637.) Textes 6tablis, pr6sent6s et... (shrink)

I. A. Richards ushered the spirit of Cambridge realism into semantics and literary criticism. When he arrived as an undergraduate in 1911, Cambridge was in the midst of its finest philosophical flowering since the Puritanism and Platonism of the seventeenth century. The revolution of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell against Hegelian idealism had already occurred; the Age of Principia was under way. There was a reassertion of native empiricism and a new interest in philosophical psychology, and the whole discussion (...) was marked increasingly by a preoccupation with language. Richards, too, would break with the past, with the history of criticism in the previous two generations, gather psychological ideas to establish an empirical semantics and aesthetics, and center his attention on language. Although Romantic and late-Victorian values inform his theories, Richards set down an original criticism on first principles, not on tradition. Many of his books' titles show this rationalist strains: The Foundations of Aesthetics , The Meaning of Meaning , Principles of Literary Criticism , Basic Rules of Reason , and The Philosophy of Rhetoric . The originality and influence of Richards' criticism can be shown by the number of terms he put into circulation, terms which became the currency of debate for almost half a century: close reading, tone, pseudostatement, stock response, tension, equilibrium, tenor and vehicle of metaphor, emotive and referential language.John Paul Russo is a professor and chairman of the English department at the University of Miami. He is the editor of I. A. Richards' Complementarities: Uncollected Essays and the author of Alexander Pope: Tradition and Identity and an annotated bibliography of Richards' works. He is currently completing a critical biography of Richards. "A Study in Influence: The Moore-Richards Paradigm," his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Summer 1979 issue. (shrink)

Paul Lafargue, the disciple and son-in-law of Karl Marx, helped to found the first French Marxist party in 1882. Over the next three decades, he served as the chief theoretician and propagandist for Marxism in France. During these years - which ended with the dramatic suicides of Lafargue and his wife - French socialism, and the Marxist party within it, became a significant political force. Leslie Derfler explores Lafargue's political strategies, specifically his break with party co-founder Jules Guesde in (...) the Boulanger and Dreyfus episodes and over the question of socialist syndicalist relations. Derfler shows Lafargue's importance as both political activist and theorist. He describes Lafargue's role in the formulation of such strategies as the promotion of a Second Workingmen's International, the pursuit of reform within the framework of the existent state but opposition to any socialist participation in nonsocialist governments, and the subordination of trade unionism to political action. He emphasizes Lafargue's pioneering efforts to apply Marxist methods of analysis to questions of anthropology, aesthetics, and literary criticism. (shrink)

When Sasaki Sokei-an founded his First Zen Institute of North America in 1930 he suggested that bringing Zen Buddhism to America was like "holding a lotus against a rock and waiting for it to set down roots." Today, Buddhism is part of the cultural and religious mainstream. Flowers on the Rock examines the dramatic growth of Buddhism in Canada and questions some of the underlying assumptions about how this tradition has changed in the West. Using historical, ethnographic, and biographical (...) approaches, contributors illuminate local expressions of Buddhism found throughout Canada and relate the growth of Buddhism in Canada to global networks. A global perspective allows the volume to overcome the stereotype that Asia and the West are in opposition to each other and recognizes the continuities between Buddhist movements in Asia and the West that are shaped by the same influences of modernity and globalization. Flowers on the Rock studies the fascinating and ingenious changes, inflections, and adaptations that Buddhists make when they set down roots in a local culture. It is essential reading for anyone interested in Buddhism, religious life in Canada, and the broader issues of multiculturalism and immigration. Contributors include Michihiro Ama, D. Mitra Barua, Paul Crowe, Melissa Anne-Marie Curley, Mavis Fenn, Kory Goldberg, Sarah F. Haynes, Jackie Larm, Paul McIvor, James Placzek, and Angela Sumegi. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 144-147 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Welcoming Flowers from Across the Cleansed Threshold of Hope: An Answer to the Pope's Criticism of Buddhism Welcoming Flowers from Across the Cleansed Threshold of Hope: An Answer to the Pope's Criticism of Buddhism. By Thinley Norbu. New York: Jewel Publishing House, 1997. 93 pp. Welcoming Flowers is a short and tightly written critique of (...) the Buddhism chapter of Pope John Paul II's 1994 best-seller, Crossing the Threshold of Hope. It is a strong, barbed, personal essay from a highly respected Buddhist teacher who expresses shock and dismay that the Pope's actual words about Buddhism that are read as absolute truth by millions of people around the world had "serious, gratuitous misrepresentations of Buddhist doctrine."The book is ostensibly a response to requests from Polish readers and a Polish publishing company to comment on "what the Pope clearly said about Buddhism." The author of Welcoming Flowers, Thinley Norbu, paints himself as a kind of efficient, spiritual cleaning maid who, with tongue in cheek despite his long admiration for the Catholic leader, has to tidy up after the Vicar of Rome: "It is as though the Pope suddenly vomited insolently and uncontrollably in a cathedral, so I hastily had to clean it up, as the Polish people asked me to do."The Pope's negative assessment of Buddhism inspired Thinley Norbu to match [End Page 144] his attack with even more exalted teachings of the Buddha: "I am grateful to the Pope for being like a hit-hitting drumstick that has given me the good opportunity to be like a drum myself, resonating with the sound of profound Dharma. I am grateful to the Pope for yelling with negative words in a valley, letting me return the answer of its transformation into the positive echo of Buddhist hymns."Thinley Norbu in fact uses the Pope's chapter to clarify some basic teachings of Vajrayana Buddhism and how it differs from Mahayana and Hinayana (note: Norbu's term, not this reviewer's) in a concise and instructive manner from the point of view of a practitioner. In this regard,Welcoming Flowers can be considered a kind of introductory, primary source ofTibetan (Nyingma)Vajrayana Buddhist doctrine for those who are unfamiliar with the various schools of Buddhism. The Pope's seriously outdated (reminiscent of Max Weber or early missionaries), limited, and unsympathetic understanding of one school of Buddhism is used by Thinley Norbu as a platform to expound his rich understanding of Buddhist traditions toWestern readers of comparative religion and specifically to Catholics. The book's twenty-nine footnotes can also function as a brief glossary of transliterated TibetanVajrayana Buddhist terms (but without use of diacritical marks for Sanskrit or Pali terms).Thinley Norbu is careful to mitigate his condemnation of the Pope's unwarranted ignorance of Buddhism by sharing the onus with the Pope's not-so-sapient preceptors. He generously suggests that the Pope may not bear all the blame for the chapter's shortcomings in the following paragraph: The misrepresentations of Buddhism in his book may have come from listening to advisors who were unfamiliar with Buddhism, from simply glancing at books at the Hinayana level, or by being shown books by misinformed authors. Perhaps he only looked at negative conceptions about Buddhism written by followers of other doctrines who had malicious intentions, or by idiots who wrote books for money without caring that they were full of mistakes. In any case, the Pope definitely heard about Buddhism from sources that did not know anything about it. It seems... as though he... scooped a few drops of water from an immeasurable ocean with a piece of grass and even misunderstood these few drops (p. 2). Norbu reprimands the Pope for not doing his required homework, a fault that can lead to serious disharmony among religions."Without studying and understanding other doctrines deeply, to say many things about them is not wise," Norbu continues; "it... (shrink)

This paper is inspired by Anthony Weston’s “What if Teaching Went Wild?” , in which he proposes a radical approach to environmental education, suggesting among other things a stress on “otherness.” Comparing Weston’s proposal to Richard Paul’s concept of the “strong sense” critical thinker, and to Trudy Govier’s rationale for her pedagogy of argument, I suggest that “going wild” in stand-alone critical thinking courses could provide a positive, unsettling push, helping students to reconnect through the otherness of alternative argumentation.

This paper is inspired by Anthony Weston’s “What if Teaching Went Wild?” (2004), in which he proposes a radical approach to environmental education, suggesting among other things a stress on “otherness.” Comparing Weston’s proposal to Richard Paul’s (1992) concept of the “strong sense” critical thinker, and to Trudy Govier’s (2010) rationale for her pedagogy of argument, I suggest that “going wild” in stand-alone critical thinking courses could provide a positive, unsettling push, helping students to reconnect through the otherness of (...) alternative argumentation. (shrink)

His book Some Japanese flowers of 1896. an original copy of which is in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, features handcolored collotypes of flowers native to Japan, including the lotus, several varieties of chrysanthemum and lily ...

Using the example of a small oak savanna located in Iowa, I begin by presenting some of the problems that confront us in attempting to describe nature. Finding ourselves in a paradox in an attempt to model nature, I then suggest that modeling nature through the use of the concept of “emplacement” offers us the best way forward. To better define “emplacement,” the argument then turns to an exposition of Paul Ricoeur’s idea of “emplotment.” I conclude by detailing how (...) one might use “emplacement” to construct a model of a specific place of nature. (shrink)

The artist understands his work as intimately connected with the life and symbolism of plants. Art, thus, demands an attunement to life’s elemental operations, the thrust “into dimensions far removed from the conscious process.” The first part of the present essay aims at recovering what is implied in the imagery of trees, delving into ancient archives of dormant collective memories and immemorial imaginal stratifications. The second and third parts, deploying the re-energized figure of the tree, explore the theme of the (...) relation between art and life, indeed, what Klee calls the “art of life.” By reference to Klee’s 1924 Jena lecture and the artist’s diaries, the discussion addresses the intersecting themes of artistic formation, mindful self-formation, the vital importance of worldly roots, and the transcendent fragrance of flowers and fruits. (shrink)

Descartes is widely portrayed as the arch proponent of “the epistemological transparency of thought” (or simply, “Transparency”). The most promising version of this view—Transparency-through-Introspection—says that introspecting (i.e., inwardly attending to) a thought guarantees certain knowledge of that thought. But Descartes rejects this view and provides numerous counterexamples to it. I argue that, instead, Descartes’s theory of self-knowledge is just an application of his general theory of knowledge. According to his general theory, certain knowledge is acquired only through clear and distinct (...) intellection. Thus, in his view, certain knowledge of one’s thoughts is acquired only through clear and distinct intellection of one’s thoughts. Introspection is a form of intellection and it can be clear and distinct. Ordinarily, however, introspection isn’t clear and distinct but is instead confused with dubitable perceptions of bodies. To make introspection clear and distinct, we need to “sharply separate” it from all perceptions of bodies by doubting all perceptions of bodies. Without such radical doubt, introspection remains confused and we lack certain knowledge not just of the specific features of our thoughts, but even of the minimal claim that a thought exists. Far from being the high priest of Transparency, Descartes is radically opposed to it. (shrink)

The options in a decision problem generally have outcomes with common features. Putting aside the common features simplifies deliberations, but the simplification requires a philosophical justification that this book provides.

The first book-length study of a leading tenth-century Ismaili theoretician Abu Ya'qub al-Sijistani.

The centrality of death rituals has in anthropologically informed studies of Buddhism been little documented. The current volume brings together a range of perspectives on Buddhist death rituals including ethnographic, textual, historical and theoretically informed accounts, and presents the diversity of the Buddhist funeral cultures of mainland Southeast Asia and China. It arises out of the University of Bristol's Centre for Buddhist Studies research project Buddhist Death Rituals in Southeast Asia and China, funded by the United Kingdom's Arts and Humanities (...) Research Council. This project involved extensive new research in Thailand, Laos and China. Other items from that project included several public exhibitions, extensive stills photographs, and several video films. The project-team produced two 30 minutes films on the ghost festival in Laos and China, one on urban funerals in Chiang Mai (Thailand) and several shorter clips dealing with funeral cultures in Laos, Thailand and China. Most of this material (and an extensive bibliography on the topic) is available free of charge from the project website located at the webpage of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies (Centre for Buddhist Studies) at the University of Bristol. (shrink)

This article contends that the evolution toward interdisciplinary collaboration that we are witnessing in the sciences must also occur in the humanities to ensure their very survival. That is, humanists must be open to working with scientists and social scientists interested in similar research questions and vice versa. Digital humanities is a positive first step. Complexity science should be the next step. Even though much of the ground-breaking work in complexity science has been done in the natural sciences and mathematics, (...) it can, if critically adapted, provide the needed metaphor for a broad integration of disciplines, humanistic and otherwise. Given its almost a-disciplinary nature, a complexity approach to the research problems in the humanities necessarily breaks down silos. Moreover, it can restore and reframe the seamless intellectual fabric sought by researchers before the atomization of the various disciplines in the nineteenthcentury academy. (shrink)