SummaryThe incidence of family breakdown and stress has been examined in an unselected group of 92 South Wales families, each containing a patient suffering from Huntington's chorea, and related to the onset and duration of the disease, age of the patient, and behavioural symptoms shown. The frequency of actual and attempted suicide is analysed and the effects of the disorder on the primary care agent for the patient discussed. Some of the effects on children and the needs of the families (...) for support and practical help are outlined. It is concluded that family support is an essential factor in any programme aimed at the long-term alleviation and prevention of Huntington's chorea. (shrink)

Presents general information about meteorology, weather, and climate and includes more than thirty activities to help study these topics, including making a ...

Stephen Davies presents a fascinating exploration of the idea that art, and our aesthetic sensibilities more generally, should be understood as an element in human evolution. He asks: Do animals have aesthetics? Do our aesthetic preferences have prehistoric roots? Is art universal? What is the biological role of aesthetic and artistic behaviour?

Classic text considersgeneral theory of computability, computable functions, operations on computable functions, Turing machines self-applied, unsolvable decision problems, applications of general theory, mathematical logic, Kleene hierarchy, computable functionals, classification of unsolvable decision problems and more.

La menzogna è irrinunciabile per vincere in politica? Davi ci spiega quali sono i meccanismi di persuasione a cui ricorrono taluni politici per farsi eleggere e quali le responsabilità di quegli elettori che scelgono comunque di votare chi sostiene anche ciò che non può essere vero. È indubbio che la comunicazione politica si rifaccia al simbolismo e al linguaggio delle favole; non necessariamente per occultare la realtà, ma più direttamente per esprimere con maggiore efficacia il suo messaggio. Alle celebri favole (...) di 'Biancaneve', 'Cenerentola', 'Il brutto anatroccolo' sono ricorsi infatti uomini politici del calibro di Berlusconi, Prodi, Nixon, Carter, Mitterrand e partiti quali la Democrazia Cristiana; l'hanno fatto per conquistare voti ma anche per attivare ampi meccanismi di consenso che attingessero direttamente dall'inconscio collettivo. Le conseguenze - ammonisce l'autore - possono essere molto serie, come nel caso dell'attuale politica americana che ha portato la manipolazione e l'inganno a essere riconosciuti come tratti identitari della presidenza di George W. Bush. (shrink)

Many philosophers and psychologists argue that out everyday ability to predict and explain the actions and mental states of others is grounded in out possession of a primitive 'folk' psychological theory. Recently however, this theory has come under challenge from the simulation alternative. This alternative view says that human beings are able to predict and explain each other's actions by using the resources of their own minds to simulate the psychological aetiology of the actions of the others. This book and (...) the companion volume Folk Psychology: The Theory of Mind Debate together offer a richly woven fabric of philosophical and psychological theory, which promises to yield real insights into the nature of our mental lives. (shrink)

This book examines the process philosophies of Whitehead and others against current discussions of astrobiology, extraterrestrial life, and their engagement by theological and religious systems.

This book unearths and outlines the semantic foundations of white fragility and their consequences for racial justice in the United States. It argues that by expanding our racial vocabulary in certain ways, we can make progress toward justice equally enjoyed by all.

Isaac Newton's Scientific Method examines Newton's argument for universal gravity and his application of it to resolve the problem of deciding between geocentric and heliocentric world systems by measuring masses of the sun and planets. William L. Harper suggests that Newton's inferences from phenomena realize an ideal of empirical success that is richer than prediction. Any theory that can achieve this rich sort of empirical success must not only be able to predict the phenomena it purports to explain, but (...) also have those phenomena accurately measure the parameters which explain them. Harper explores the ways in which Newton's method aims to turn theoretical questions into ones which can be answered empirically, by measurement from phenomena, and to establish that propositions inferred from phenomena are provisionally accepted as guides to further research. This methodology, guided by its rich ideal of empirical success, supports a conception of scientific progress that does not require construing it as progress toward Laplace's ideal limit of a final theory of everything, and is not threatened by the classic argument against convergent realism. Newton's method endorses the radical theoretical transformation from his theory to Einstein's. Harper argues that it is strikingly realized in the development and application of testing frameworks for relativistic theories of gravity, and very much at work in cosmology today. (shrink)

Many people profess to believe that acting morally, or as we ought to act, involves the self-conscious acceptance of some (quite specific) constraints or rules that place limits both on the pursuit of our own interests and on our pursuit of the general good. Though these people do not regard the furtherance of our own interests or the pursuit of the general good as ignoble ends, or ones that we are morally required to eschew, they believe that neither can be (...) regarded as providing us with morally sufficient reason to take action. Those who hold such a view believe that there are certain sorts of acts that are wrong in themselves, and thus morally unacceptable means to the pursuit of any ends, even ends that are morally admirable, or morally obligatory. (How strong the prohibition is against performing such acts is a matter that will be taken up later.) Philosophers call such ethical views ‘deontological’ (from the Greek deon , ‘duty’), and contrast them to views that are ‘teleological’ in structure (from telos , Greek for ‘goal’). Those who hold teleological views reject the view that there are special kinds of acts that are right or wrong in themselves. For teleologists, the rightness or wrongness of our acts is determined by a comparative assessment of their consequences. [...] The focus of this essay is on deontological theories. (shrink)

This philosophical treatise on the foundations of semantics is a systematic effort to clarify, deepen, and defend the classical doctrine that words are conventional signs of mental states, principally thoughts and ideas, and that meaning consists in their expression. This expression theory of meaning is developed by carrying out the Gricean program, explaining what it is for words to have meaning in terms of speaker meaning, and what it is for a speaker to mean something in terms of intention. But (...) Grice's own formulations are rejected and alternatives developed. The foundations of the expression theory are explored at length, and the author develops the theory of thought as a fundamental cognitive phenomenon distinct from belief and desire, argues for the thesis that thoughts have parts, and identifies ideas or concepts with parts of thoughts. This book will appeal to students and professionals interested in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

We make decisions every day. Yet we are sometimes perplexed by these decisions and the decisions of others. To complicate things further, we live in an age where there are more things to choose from than ever before – the Internet is transforming our choices and making us more accountable for them: what we choose is recorded, modelled and used to predict our future behaviour. So are we in a position to make better choices today than we were a decade (...) ago? Certainly there are some who believe so. Psychologists claim we are subject to hidden mental processes that lead us to one thing rather than another; economists offer predictions about what people will buy; and some philosophers claim that our choices echo our evolutionary past. Are these claims merited? Do they reflect the beginnings of a new science of choice? This book offers a critical overview of these and other claims, showing where they are justified and where they are exaggerated. It will be an essential reference for anyone interested in whether science can help us to understand both the ways people make choices in their everyday lives and how these may be changing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 11.1 (2004) 55-64 [Access article in PDF] Delusions and Discourse:Moving beyond the Constraints of the Modernist Paradigm David J. Harper This special issue provides a good opportunity to reflect on the range of views about delusions,1 and it is good to see all the authors taking the issue of how to approach this topic seriously. Here I wish to argue that the traditional psychiatric (...) view of delusions is problematic. In the first half of this article I will group my comments on the issues raised by the papers by Klee and Bayne and Pacherie together as I think that, for their differences, they share modernist philosophical assumptions. I will argue that the modernist paradigm runs into considerable problems in considering beliefs felt by some to be unusual and I will go on to argue that we need to move beyond this paradigm and embrace different approaches, of which the work by Georgaca is an exemplar. The Trouble with (traditional Views of) Delusions The traditional psychiatric view of delusion has come under increasing attack over recent years. As Georgaca has noted, a number of problems with the assumptions in definitions of delusion can be identified when they are viewed from a social constructionist perspective (Georgaca 2000, 2004; Harper 1992, 1996; Heise 1988). For convenience I will group these under four main headings. They Are Based on a Naively Realist View of the World The criterion of inaccuracy or falsity implies that deciding on the veracity of a belief is a relatively unproblematic matter. However, the reality of claims does not always seem so important in judgments about whether a belief is delusional or not. For example, there is little evidence that mental health professionals systematically investigate the basis for people's beliefs; rather, they decide whether a belief is plausible. Thus Maher has argued that the assessment of the plausibility of beliefs is "typically made by a clinician on the basis of "common sense," and not on the basis of a systematic evaluation of empirical data" (1992, 261). He notes that it is not "customary to present counterevidence to the patient; it is not even common to present vigorous counterargument" (1992, 261) and there appears to be some empirical evidence of this (McCabe et al. 2002). Here then, we begin to see [End Page 55] how psychiatry, while claiming to have the power to judge the truth of beliefs on the basis of its status as an empirical scientific discipline, can be seen to make judgments on the basis of common sense and taken-for-granted social and cultural assumptions.Some commentators have suggested that delusions should be identified less by whether they seem to accord with reality but more by whether a person gives evidence for their belief (Gillett 1995; Spitzer 1990). However, this seems to be based on an idealized view of how people manage their beliefs in everyday life. For example, I would question how many of us have evidence for many of the beliefs (e.g., political, ethical, religious, etc.) we hold dear; indeed it would be hard to think of what evidence we could have for some of them (e.g., religious and ethical beliefs). Some recent work has suggested that the diagnosis of delusion is made on the basis of how people with delusions talk and interact; for example, some have argued that they do not appear to appreciate the hearer's point of view (Palmer 2000). However, here and in previous work, Georgaca (2000, 2004) has shown that people with delusions are able to talk about and negotiate disagreements about their beliefs and that many disputes of fact cannot be settled in conversation. People Said to Have Delusions Are Seen to Vary in the Conviction With Which Those Beliefs Are Held There is evidence that people considered to be deluded vary in the conviction with which they hold beliefs (Garety 1985) and can also be persuaded to modify their beliefs if this is conducted in a sensitive and collaborative manner (e.g., Chadwick, Birchwood, and Trower 1996). This... (shrink)

Michael Davis, a leading figure in the study of professional ethics, offers here both a compelling exploration of engineering ethics and a philosophical analysis of engineering as a profession. After putting engineering in historical perspective, Davis turns to the Challenger space shuttle disaster to consider the complex relationship between engineering ideals and contemporary engineering practice. Here, Davis examines how social organization and technical requirements define how engineers should (and presumably do) think. Later chapters test his analysis of (...) engineering judgement and autonomy empirically, engaging a range of social science research including a study of how engineers and managers work together in ten different companies. (shrink)

The pioneering work of Johann Winckelmann (1717-1768) identified a homoerotic appreciation of male beauty in classical Greek sculpture, a fascination that had endured in Western art since the Greeks. Yet after Winckelmann, the value (even the possibility) of art's queer beauty was often denied. Several theorists, notably the philosopher Immanuel Kant, broke sexual attraction and aesthetic appreciation into separate or dueling domains. In turn, sexual desire and aesthetic pleasure had to be profoundly rethought by later writers. Whitney Davis follows (...) how such innovative thinkers as John Addington Symonds, Michel Foucault, and Richard Wollheim rejoined these two domains, reclaiming earlier insights about the mutual implication of sexuality and aesthetics. Addressing texts by Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Sigmund Freud, among many others, Davis criticizes modern approaches, such as Kantian idealism, Darwinism, psychoanalysis, and analytic aesthetics, for either reducing aesthetics to a question of sexuality or for removing sexuality from the aesthetic field altogether. Despite these schematic reductions, sexuality always returns to aesthetics, and aesthetic considerations always recur in sexuality. Davis particularly emphasizes the way in which philosophies of art since the late eighteenth century have responded to nonstandard sexuality, especially homoeroticism, and how theories of nonstandard sexuality have drawn on aesthetics in significant ways. Many imaginative and penetrating critics have wrestled productively, though often inconclusively and "against themselves," with the aesthetic making of sexual life and new forms of art made from reconstituted sexualities. Through a critique that confronts history, philosophy, science, psychology, and dominant theories of art and sexuality, Davis challenges privileged types of sexual and aesthetic creation imagined in modern culture-and assumed today. (shrink)

An inquiry into the nature of the universe draws out the implications of the quantum theory and argues that our universe is only one among many possible universes and that other universes may exist.

Zygmunt Bauman tells us that liquid modernity is an age of both chances and dangers. It is a paradoxical age in which our attempts ‘to relate’ to each other are thwarted by the threat of ‘being related’, our hope for collective security and togetherness at odds with our desire for individual freedom and choice. As such, it is an age in which we prefer to roam freely in virtual networks, choosing when and how to connect with others. Facilitating this form (...) of liquid life is the growing consumption and usage of new communications technology. As the starting point for a new programme of research at the Bauman Institute, this article provides a critical evaluation of the role of new technology in liquid modernity with a particular focus upon its impact upon our perception of time. Presented here as two dialectical relationships, I argue that the professed capacity of new technology to ‘connect people’ and to ‘save time’ actually result in their opposites, namely: a curiously ‘hurried life’ in which we spend much of our waking lives interacting with digital screens rather than engaging in human face-to-face contact, and in which, for all of our frenetic productivity, we are perhaps becoming more and more ‘interpassive’, running the risk of losing basic social skills in the process. (shrink)

One of postmodernism's toughest challenges to Christian thought is its wholesale rejection of metaphysics. This profound book meets the challenge squarely, offering a surer foundation for the idea of being and a new theological perspective of supreme relevance to today's world. In a brilliant turn of postmodern thought itself, Oliver Davies argues for a renewal of metaphysics based on a dynamic new understanding of ontology as narrative and performance. His repairing of the Western metaphysical tradition is grounded both in the (...) divine self-naming in Exodus -- which, for the rabbis, identified God's presence in the world with God's compassionate acts -- and in the compassionate resistance of Etty Hillesum and Edith Stein to the violence of the Holocaust. Building on a new metaphysics of compassion that is attentive to the deepest histories of the contemporary world, Davies offers a renewed systematic theology focused on divine speech and God's compassionate relation to human culture. (shrink)

This paper addresses a problem about epistemic warrant. The problem is posed by philosophical arguments for externalism about the contents of thoughts, and similarly by philosophical arguments for architecturalism about thinking, when these arguments are put together with a thesis of first person authority. In each case, first personal knowledge about our thoughts plus the kind of knowledge that is provided by a philosophical argument seem, together, to open an unacceptably ‘non-empirical’ route to knowledge of empirical facts. Furthermore, this unwelcome (...) prospect of transferring a ‘non-empirical’ warrant from premises about our own mental states and about philosophical theory to a conclusion about external environment or internal architecture seems to depend upon little more than the possibility of knowledge by inference. (The use of the scare-quoted term ‘non-empirical’ is explained a couple of paragraphs further on.). (shrink)

Article copyright 2002. We provide a battery of examples of delusions against which theoretical accounts can be tested. Then we identify neuropsychological anomalies that could produce the unusual experiences that may lead, in turn, to the delusions in our battery. However, we argue against Maher's view that delusions are false beliefs that arise as normal responses to anomalous experiences. We propose, instead, that a second factor is required to account for the transition from unusual experience to delusional belief. The second (...) factor in the etiology of delusions can be described superficially as a loss of the ability to reject a candidate for belief on the grounds of its implausibility and its inconsistency with everything else that the patient knows, but we point out some problems that confront any attempt to say more about the nature of this second factor. (shrink)

I critically examine Cappelen and Lepore’s definition of and tests for indexicality, and refine them to improve their adequacy. Indexicals cannot be defined as expressions with different referents in different contexts unless linguistic meaning and circumstances of evaluation are held constant. I show that despite Cappelen and Lepore’s claim that there are only a handful of indexical expressions, their “basic set” includes a number of large and open classes, and generates an infinity of indexical phrases. And while the tests can (...) be used effectively to combat contextualism concerning ‘knows’ and ‘actual,’ many expressions not in their basic set test positive for indexicality, including quantifier nouns, weather reports, and comparative adjectives. I rebut their claim that context-shifting arguments inevitably lead to radical contextualism, and that if there were any indexicals beyond their basic set, communication would be impossible. (shrink)

Zygmunt Bauman tells us that liquid modernity is an age of both chances and dangers. It is a paradoxical age in which our attempts ‘to relate’ to each other are thwarted by the threat of ‘being related’, our hope for collective security and togetherness at odds with our desire for individual freedom and choice. As such, it is an age in which we prefer to roam freely in virtual networks, choosing when and how to connect with others. Facilitating this form (...) of liquid life is the growing consumption and usage of new communications technology. As the starting point for a new programme of research at the Bauman Institute, this article provides a critical evaluation of the role of new technology in liquid modernity with a particular focus upon its impact upon our perception of time. Presented here as two dialectical relationships, I argue that the professed capacity of new technology to ‘connect people’ and to ‘save time’ actually result in their opposites, namely: a curiously ‘hurried life’ in which we spend much of our waking lives interacting with digital screens rather than engaging in human face-to-face contact, and in which, for all of our frenetic productivity, we are perhaps becoming more and more ‘interpassive’, running the risk of losing basic social skills in the process. (shrink)

Grice’s Razor is a methodological principle that many philosophers and linguists have used to help justify pragmatic explanations of linguistic phenomena over semantic explanations. A number of authors in the debate over contextualism argue that an invariant semantics together with Grice’s (1975) conversational principles can account for the contextual variability of knowledge claims. I show here that the defense of Grice’s Razor found in these “Gricean invariantists,” and its use against epistemic contextualism, display all the problems pointed out earlier in (...) Davis (1998). The everyday variation in acceptable knowledge claims is better explained in terms of implicature than indexicality, but general conversational principles shed little light on whether ‘know’ is used hyperbolically, meiotically, or loosely in a context, although this issue is crucial in deciding what if anything ‘S knows p’ implicates. I present reasons favoring an account of the representative bank case in terms of loose use, making clear how they differ from Grice’s Razor. (shrink)

It is often thought that traditional recidivism prediction tools used in criminal sentencing, though biased in many ways, can straightforwardly avoid one particularly pernicious type of bias: direct racial discrimination. They can avoid this by excluding race from the list of variables employed to predict recidivism. A similar approach could be taken to the design of newer, machine learning-based (ML) tools for predicting recidivism: information about race could be withheld from the ML tool during its training phase, ensuring that the (...) resulting predictive model does not use race as an explicit predictor. However, if race is correlated with measured recidivism in the training data, the ML tool may ‘learn’ a perfect proxy for race. If such a proxy is found, the exclusion of race would do nothing to weaken the correlation between risk (mis)classifications and race. Is this a problem? We argue that, on some explanations of the wrongness of discrimination, it is. On these explanations, the use of an ML tool that perfectly proxies race would (likely) be more wrong than the use of a traditional tool that imperfectly proxies race. Indeed, on some views, use of a perfect proxy for race is plausibly as wrong as explicit racial profiling. We end by drawing out four implications of our arguments. (shrink)

Read this excellent collection of informative papers in the field to stimulate your ow the field and readers interested in the nature of the discipline of ...

An examination of the state of journalism and the need for change. For students and professionals on journalism fields.

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, widely recognized as one of the most important yet difficult philosophers of the 20th century. In this much-needed introduction, Davis unpacks the concepts at the centre of Levinas's thought - alterity, the Other, the Face, infinity - concepts which have previously presented readers with major problems of interpretation. Davis traces the development of Levinas's thought over six decades, describing the context in which (...) he worked, and the impact of his writings. He argues that Levinas's work remains tied to the ontological tradition with which he wants to break, and demonstrates how his later writing tries to overcome this dependency by its increasingly disruptive, sometimes opaque, textual practice. He discusses Levinas's theological writings and his relationship to Judaism, as well as the reception of his work by contemporary thinkers, arguing that the influence of his work has led to a growing interest in ethical issues among poststructuralist and postmodernist thinkers in recent years. Comprehensive and clearly written, this book will be essential reading for students and researchers in continental philosophy, French studies, literary theory and theology. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction: Questions of Meaning Theories of Meaning Language, Mind and Metaphysics: Questions of Priority Semantic Theories: Davidson's Programme Analysing the Concept of Meaning: Grice's Programme Pragmatics: Conversational Implicature and Relevance Theory.

In this paper, I shall defend externalism for the contents of perceptual experience. A perceptual experience has representational properties; it presents the world as being a certain way. A visual experience, for example, might present the world to a subject as containing a surface with a certain shape, lying at a certain distance, in a certain direction; perhaps a square with sides about 30 cm, lying about one metre in front of the subject, in a direction about 20 degrees to (...) the left of straight ahead. (shrink)

Representing Stephen Davies's best shorter writings, these essays outline developments within the philosophy of music over the last two decades, and summarize the state of play at the beginning of a new century. Including two new and previously unpublished pieces, they address both perennial questions and contemporary controversies, such as that over the 'authentic performance' movement, and the impact of modern technology on the presentation and reception of musical works. Rather than attempting to reduce musical works to a single type, (...) Davies recognizes a great variety of kinds, and a complementary range of possibilities for their rendition. (shrink)

Humanism offers students a clear and lucid introductory guide to the complexities of Humanism, one of the most contentious and divisive of artistic or literary concepts. Showing how the concept has evolved since the Renaissance period, Davies discusses humanism in the context of the rise of Fascism, the onset of World War II, the Holocaust, and their aftermath. Humanism provides basic definitions and concepts, a critique of the religion of humanity, and necessary background on religious, sexual and political themes of (...) modern life and thought, while enlightening the debate between humanism, modernism and antihumanism through the writings and works of such key figures as Pico Erasmus, Milton, Nietzsche, and Foucault. (shrink)