The SI13 NTU/ADM Symposium on Sound and Interactivity in Singapore provided a meeting point for local researchers, artists, scholars and students working creatively with sound and interactivity, as well as the foundation for an issue exploring sound and interactivity in the Southeast Asian country. The School of Art Design Media of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University hosted the Symposium on Sound and Interactivity from 14–16 November 2013. A total of 15 artworks and 14 papers were selected by a review committee for (...) presentation by 24 active participants during the three-day symposium. While all but four of the participants are residents of the island, they represent seventeen different countries, thus reflecting the cosmopolitan nature of Singapore in general and of sound artists and researchers in particular. Thanks to funding from Nanyang’s CLASS conference scheme, Roger T. Dean and Diemo Schwarz could be invited as Keynote Speakers; they also performed in the concert that opened the symposium, and contributed to the exhibition. It is a pleasure to collaborate with eContact! in presenting a broad collection of articles emanating from this event, and to use these as a basis for an overview of sound art and related activities in Singapore. Eleven texts from the SI13 Proceedings have been edited for this issue. Joining them are two texts originally written for the catalogue of the “Sound: Latitudes and Attitudes” exhibition held at Singapore’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. Finally, in the guise of a “community report” on sound art activities in Singapore, I have contributed a “constructed multilogue” created from interviews with three sound art colleagues. (shrink)

What is the relationship between the Irish modernist writings of James Joyce and the Scottish empirical philosophy of David Hume? Here I discuss Joyce’s conception of Hume as a philosopher and explore the presence of Hume’s work in Joyce’s final masterpiece, Finnegans Wake. How then did Joyce conceive of Hume’s thought, and to what extent did he engage with it? Well, in his lecture “Realism and Idealism in English Literature,” given at Trieste in 1912, Joyce denounces the interest in the (...) sanity of artistic and philosophical geniuses, before offering the following comments. (shrink)

This article defends a claim about the conditions under which agents possess normative reasons for action. According to this claim, an agent has a normative reason to φ only if it’s psychologically possible for that reason to motivate the agent to φ. The claim is called‘Williams’s explanatory constraint,’since it’s drawn from Bernard Williams’s work on the topic of practical reason. A two-premise‘master argument’ for Williams’s explanatory constraint is put forward. First, an agent has a normative reason to φ only if (...) that agent has the ability to φ for that reason. The second premise states that an agent has the ability to φ for a normative reason only if it’s psychologically possible for that reason to motivate the agent to φ. It is suggested that the ability to act for a normative reason involves the ability to act from a consequence-sensitive process of practical reasoning. Furthermore, normative reasons for action can motivate agents by being the objects of psychological states—particularly beliefs,desires, and intentions. In reply to the objection that normative reasons can never be objects of psychological states, I contend that all normative reasons are capable of being represented as the objects of psychological states. (shrink)