In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual WomanCatharine Savage BrosmanSimone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman, by Toril Moi; xii & 324 pp. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, $54.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.Eschewing linear patterns and other conventional ways of writing lives, feminist critic Toril Moi has undertaken instead to construct a “personal genealogy” of Beauvoir, using notions derived partly from Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu (Jacques (...) Lacan and Freud are cited likewise). This manner of understanding what the French existentialists called the human project seeks “to achieve a sense of emergence or production and to understand the complex play of different kinds of power involved in social phenomena” (p. 7). The human subject is viewed as a product of forces; individual choice—emphasized continually, and probably excessively, by existentialists—is secondary. All types of evidence, not only writing, are considered germane: social institutions and the subject herself are “text,” part of a “discursive network” (p. 5). The point is to illuminate Beauvoir’s “speaking position” (p. 9) and what it means, for herself and others, and concurrently to explain the rather low disregard in which she appears to be held in France presently.The chief social factor identified is, not surprisingly, what is called the patriarchal order, which Moi sees even today as powerful enough to threaten thinking women’s chances for fulfillment. “Displaying a pernicious imagery of ugly bluestockings and dried-up spinsters, patriarchal ideology seeks to enforce the split between body and mind with particular rigor in the case of intellectual women” (p. 256). Cited in this connection are novels by Germaine de Staël and George Eliot; but, although Eliot influenced the young Beauvoir, these nineteenth-century models pertain little to today’s situation in America and England, for instance (where Moi, a Norwegian, has resided). But Moi needs to believe that such strictures still operate, in order to argue for Beauvoir’s unique position as “a mythological figure, an imago that has made its presence felt in the thoughts and dreams of every intellectual woman in the Western world since the early 1950s” (p. 5)—a claim no less absurd for being unoriginal.The study investigates three “moments” or crucial questions. The first is Beauvoir’s discovery in 1929 (justified or not, and made chiefly perhaps through sexual desire) that she was intellectually inferior to Sartre, despite her stellar academic performance; this led to her positioning herself as second among equals. Moi explores this momentous choice in personal and sociological terms, examining the French academic establishment that formed her and asking what it meant to be a woman agrégée in philosophy, in love with a brilliant man.The second major topic is Beauvoir’s writing itself, as it springs from and refers to her self-image, especially in She Came to Stay and The Second Sex. The former provides telling evidence of what happens when an intelligent woman persuades herself that her lover considers her an equal, whereas actually the [End Page 417] authority remains his. Moi views this novel as more revealing, although oblique, because it is more affectively nuanced and apparently genuine, than direct accounts in Beauvoir’s memoirs of the triangle involving her, Olga Kosakiewicz, and Sartre. The Second Sex—said to be unrivaled in any field in this century, in terms of influence—is examined in light of Beauvoir’s tardy revelation in the 1940s (if one believes her) that being a woman meant something different from being a man. Beauvoir’s understanding of woman’s position is compared to Sartre’s (expressed in fiction and essays, and deduced from his behavior) and to Frantz Fanon’s concept of racial oppression.Lastly, Moi focuses on the bitter conclusion to Force of Circumstance, in which Beauvoir confesses, in her fifties, feeling cheated by life. The problematic quality of this admission can escape no one, in light of her repeated assertions elsewhere that her relationship with Sartre—central to her self-image—constituted an unreserved success, involving utter transparency and union of thought. Moi studies this in terms of other statements—some by Sartre—and Beauvoir’s true accomplishments, and shows how Beauvoir’s... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Shimmering Maya and Other EssaysPatrick HenryThe Shimmering Maya and Other Essays, by Catharine Savage Brosman; 149 pp. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994, $24.94.When the author was fifteen, she held the rank of “prospector” at Girl Scout Camp. Now, over forty years later, she is “digging down through the layers, sifting through the running stream of memory” (p. 14). Her art of prospecting (...) affords the reader a linear impression of a journey that begins with “The Shimmering Maya,” a recountal of a family move in August 1944 from Colorado to South Texas. “Desert Silvery Blue” describes life in Alpine, Texas, while “Leaving for Good” narrates her experience of displacement as she departs Alpine in 1951 to attend Rice Institute, known then as “the atheist school” (p. 37). From Alpine to Houston, she experiences the greening of America and the shock of Gulf Coast humidity, “a sensation of being hit in the face and smothered” (p. 42). At Rice, she finishes her degrees, travels to France, her intellectual home, and returns, in “Cherry Time”—“Yes, Virginia, there is a Virginia” (p. 52)—to describe her life in full bloom during this relatively short but intense period, spent in and around the state of Virginia, before her permanent move to New Orleans. Two essays conclude the volume even as they bend back toward its beginning. “Winter Light” narrates the life of her grandfather, Edward Hill, newspaperman, teacher, doctor, writer, and formidable learner whom she knew only in the winter of his life but whose light illuminated her being and “whose heir I feel, or wish, myself to be” (p. 130). “Turn My Face Out to the West” recounts a recent camping trip in New Mexico but, more profoundly, a return to the Western land of her youth. Like the Anasazi and Pueblo Indians, she too was born there and, reclaiming their heritage as partly hers, extols their solar-based science, courage, sense of community, independent spirit, and love and respect for the land.Brosman paints being, however, as well as becoming. Essays six through eleven focus more centrally than the others on her habitual self: her self-portrait as teacher, scholar, poet, traveler, and traditional woman. As a teacher of language, she offers “at once an end and a means” (p. 86) and, as literature teacher, not “entertainment chiefly but the pursuit of truth” (p. 88), undogmatically attempting to elicit self-awareness without imposing a single view. [End Page 136] A traditional woman who has never felt uncomfortable around men and doesn’t consider them her enemies, Brosman thinks Women’s Studies are “regressive” (p. 84), deplores language “barbarisms” such as “chairperson” and “herstory” (p. 75), and holds for a “nongendered intellectual patrimony of arts, letters, and science” (p. 84). While she admits that it’s a miracle that all marriages don’t simply fall apart, the differences between the sexes, she argues, constitute “the whole basis for attraction” (p. 70), and she prefers her cigar-smoking husband “to men who boast about their Hollandaise sauce” (p. 70). Not interested “in valorizing only the male principle” (p. 70), she seeks “vigor of mind” in all persons and considers herself a “feminist in the cupboard,” one who operates within the family but travels freely and enjoys a rich professional life. She links herself to her Aunt Margaret and other “closet feminists” (p. 100) in her family’s history who demonstrated self-reliance and a sense of their own value, and argues, against de Beauvoir’s thesis in The Second Sex, that female work for American women of the nineteenth century did indeed, like male work, go beyond biology “to remake the world through invention (production)” (p. 102).Brosman demands a metaphysical self-consciousness that recognizes unhappiness, anguish, and disorder but concomitantly posits the good life as the synthetic unity of the mind, body, and heart. This metaphysical consciousness is deeply rooted in the physical world—we are not only in the world but of it—and in a shared sense of place and a commitment to communal enterprises. Her thought is perhaps above all characterized throughout by a sense of “grace” and the “intimation of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Shimmering Maya and Other EssaysPatrick HenryThe Shimmering Maya and Other Essays, by Catharine Savage Brosman; 149 pp. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994, $24.94.When the author was fifteen, she held the rank of “prospector” at Girl Scout Camp. Now, over forty years later, she is “digging down through the layers, sifting through the running stream of memory” (p. 14). Her art of prospecting (...) affords the reader a linear impression of a journey that begins with “The Shimmering Maya,” a recountal of a family move in August 1944 from Colorado to South Texas. “Desert Silvery Blue” describes life in Alpine, Texas, while “Leaving for Good” narrates her experience of displacement as she departs Alpine in 1951 to attend Rice Institute, known then as “the atheist school” (p. 37). From Alpine to Houston, she experiences the greening of America and the shock of Gulf Coast humidity, “a sensation of being hit in the face and smothered” (p. 42). At Rice, she finishes her degrees, travels to France, her intellectual home, and returns, in “Cherry Time”—“Yes, Virginia, there is a Virginia” (p. 52)—to describe her life in full bloom during this relatively short but intense period, spent in and around the state of Virginia, before her permanent move to New Orleans. Two essays conclude the volume even as they bend back toward its beginning. “Winter Light” narrates the life of her grandfather, Edward Hill, newspaperman, teacher, doctor, writer, and formidable learner whom she knew only in the winter of his life but whose light illuminated her being and “whose heir I feel, or wish, myself to be” (p. 130). “Turn My Face Out to the West” recounts a recent camping trip in New Mexico but, more profoundly, a return to the Western land of her youth. Like the Anasazi and Pueblo Indians, she too was born there and, reclaiming their heritage as partly hers, extols their solar-based science, courage, sense of community, independent spirit, and love and respect for the land.Brosman paints being, however, as well as becoming. Essays six through eleven focus more centrally than the others on her habitual self: her self-portrait as teacher, scholar, poet, traveler, and traditional woman. As a teacher of language, she offers “at once an end and a means” (p. 86) and, as literature teacher, not “entertainment chiefly but the pursuit of truth” (p. 88), undogmatically attempting to elicit self-awareness without imposing a single view. [End Page 136] A traditional woman who has never felt uncomfortable around men and doesn’t consider them her enemies, Brosman thinks Women’s Studies are “regressive” (p. 84), deplores language “barbarisms” such as “chairperson” and “herstory” (p. 75), and holds for a “nongendered intellectual patrimony of arts, letters, and science” (p. 84). While she admits that it’s a miracle that all marriages don’t simply fall apart, the differences between the sexes, she argues, constitute “the whole basis for attraction” (p. 70), and she prefers her cigar-smoking husband “to men who boast about their Hollandaise sauce” (p. 70). Not interested “in valorizing only the male principle” (p. 70), she seeks “vigor of mind” in all persons and considers herself a “feminist in the cupboard,” one who operates within the family but travels freely and enjoys a rich professional life. She links herself to her Aunt Margaret and other “closet feminists” (p. 100) in her family’s history who demonstrated self-reliance and a sense of their own value, and argues, against de Beauvoir’s thesis in The Second Sex, that female work for American women of the nineteenth century did indeed, like male work, go beyond biology “to remake the world through invention (production)” (p. 102).Brosman demands a metaphysical self-consciousness that recognizes unhappiness, anguish, and disorder but concomitantly posits the good life as the synthetic unity of the mind, body, and heart. This metaphysical consciousness is deeply rooted in the physical world—we are not only in the world but of it—and in a shared sense of place and a commitment to communal enterprises. Her thought is perhaps above all characterized throughout by a sense of “grace” and the “intimation of... (shrink)

The aim of this book is to provide a unified solution to a wide range of philosophical problems raised by fiction. While some of these problems have been the focus of extensive philosophical debate, others have received insufficient attention. In particular, the epistemology of fiction has not yet attracted the philosophical scrutiny it warrants. There has been considerable discussion of what determines the contents of works of fiction, but there have been few attempts to explain how audiences identify their contents, (...) or to identify the norms governing the correct understanding and interpretation of works of fiction. -/- This book answers a wide range of both metaphysical and epistemological questions concerning fiction in a way that clarifies the relations between them. The metaphysical questions include: What distinguishes works of fiction from works of non-fiction?; What is the nature of fictive utterances?; What determines the contents of works of fiction?; What kinds of fictive content are there?; How broad in scope is fictive content?; and What kinds of things are fictional entities? The epistemological questions include: How do audiences identify the contents of authors’ fictive utterances?; How does understanding a work of fiction differ from interpreting it?; and What role does thinking and talking about fiction from an external perspective play in enabling communication through fiction? It develops the first single theory that provides answers to all these questions. (shrink)

Depiction is the form of representation distinctive of figurative paintings, drawings, and photographs. Accounts of depiction attempt to specify the relation something must bear to an object in order to depict it. Resemblance accounts hold that the notion of resemblance is necessary to the specification of this relation. Several difficulties with such analyses have led many philosophers to reject the possibility of an adequate resemblance account of depiction. This essay outlines these difficulties and argues that current resemblance accounts succumb to (...) them. It then develops an alternative resemblance account, drawing on Grice's account of nonnatural meaning and its role in determining sentence meaning to argue that something depicts an object if it bears intention-based resemblances to the object that jointly capture its overall appearance. In addition to solving the metaphysical problem of what it is for something to depict an object, this account also sheds significant light on the epistemological issue of how we are able to work out that something depicts an object. This essay argues that our ability to work out that something depicts an object results from both our more general ability to identify intentions from the products of communicative behavior and our knowledge of stylistic conventions. This account avoids the difficulties that face rival attempts to analyze depiction in terms of resemblance. It also clarifies and explains the features that distinguish depictive from nondepictive representation. (shrink)

According to ontological nihilism there are, fundamentally, no individuals. Both natural languages and standard predicate logic, however, appear to be committed to a picture of the world as containing individual objects. This leads to what I call the \emph{expressibility challenge} for ontological nihilism: what language can the ontological nihilist use to express her account of how matters fundamentally stand? One promising suggestion is for the nihilist to use a form of \emph{predicate functorese}, a language developed by Quine. This proposal faces (...) a difficult objection, according to which any theory in predicate functorese will be a notational variant of the corresponding theory stated in standard predicate logic. Jason Turner (2011) has provided the most detailed and convincing version of this objection. In the present paper, I argue that Turner's case for the notational variance thesis relies on a faulty metasemantic principle and, consequently, that an objection long thought devastating is in fact misguided. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide a descriptive definition of art that is able to accommodate the existence of bad art, while illuminating the value of good art. This, I argue, is something that existing definitions of art fail to do. I approach this task by providing an account according to which what makes something an artwork is the institutional process by which it is made. I argue that Searle’s account of institutions and institutional facts shows that the existence of all (...) institutions is due to their being perceived by their participants to perform some humanly valuable function. I then identify the functions to which the existence of art institutions is due. I then use these functions to provide a reductive institutional definition of art. Finally, in section seven, I examine the account’s consequences for the value of good art. (shrink)

According to anti-individualism, the basic building blocks of the world are not individuals. The anti-individualist argues that standard, individual-entailing claims–for instance, that Theia is a cat–are mistaken in presupposing that there are individuals, but that such claims correspond to statements in a feature-placing language devoid of these presuppositions. Instead, the world is entirely made up of non-individualistic features–structurally akin to familiar examples such as it's raining or it's snowing–that are arranged in particular ways. Since features do not carve out individual (...) differences, however, this seems to entail that there is a class of statements in an individualistic language–statements expressing mere differences in which object is which–the members of which all correspond to the same anti-individualist description. That is, anti-individualism seems to entail anti-haecceitism, according to which all differences in ways the world could be supervene on qualitative differences. In this paper, I argue that, on the contrary, the anti-individualist has the resources to accommodate non-qualitative differences among ways the world could be. Moreover, haecceitistic anti-individualism does justice to the motivations for rejecting individuals while nevertheless accommodating intuitions that certain kinds of scenarios are metaphysically distinct. (shrink)

The genre to which an artwork belongs affects how it is to be interpreted and evaluated. An account of genre and of the criteria for genre membership should explain these interpretative and evaluative effects. Contrary to conceptions of genres as categories distinguished by the features of the works that belong to them, I argue that these effects are to be explained by conceiving of genres as categories distinguished by certain of the purposes that the works belonging to them are intended (...) to serve. (shrink)

There is a variety of epistemic roles to which photographs are better suited than non-photographic pictures. Photographs provide more compelling evidence of the existence of the scenes they depict than non-photographic pictures. They are also better sources of information about features of those scenes that are easily overlooked. This chapter examines several different attempts to explain the distinctive epistemic value of photographs, and argues that none is adequate. It then proposes an alternative explanation of their epistemic value. The chapter argues (...) that photographs play the epistemic roles they do because they are typically rich sources of depictively encoded information about the scenes they depict, and reliable depictive representations of those scenes. It then explains why photographs differ from non-photographic pictures in both respects. (shrink)

Standard rigid designator accounts of a name’s meaning have trouble accommodating what I will call a descriptive name’s “shifty” character -- its tendency to shift its referent over time in response to a discovery that the conventional referent of that name does not satisfy the description with which that name was introduced. I offer a variant of Kripke’s historical semantic theory of how names function, a variant that can accommodate the character of descriptive names while maintaining rigidity for proper names. (...) A descriptive name’s shiftiness calls for a semantic account of names that makes their semantic values bipartite, containing both traditional semantic contents and what I call "modes of introduction." Both parts of a name's semantic value are derived from the way a name gets introduced into discourse -- from what I refer to as its "context of introduction." Making a name's semantic value bipartite in this way allows for a definite description to be a part of proper name's meaning without thereby sacrificing that name’s status as a rigid designator. On my view, a definite description is part of descriptive name’s mode of introduction. That is, it is part of what determines the content assigned to that name. As it turns out, making a definite description part of a descriptive name’s mode of introduction allows for that definite description to play the role of a mere reference-fixer regarding that name’s content, as Kripke would have it. However, my account allows a definite description to fix a descriptive name’s content actively over time, thereby explaining its inherent shiftiness. (shrink)

It is generally recognised that an adequate resemblance-based account of depiction must specify some standard of correctness which explains how a picture’s content differs from the content we would attribute to it purely on the basis of resemblance. For example, an adequate standard should explain why stick figure drawings do not depict emaciated beings with gargantuan heads. Most attempts to specify a standard of correctness appeal to the intentions of the picture’s maker. However, I argue that the most detailed such (...) attempt to date is incomplete. I argue that an adequate standard can be given only if one construes a picture’s content as being pictorially implicated, in a way analogous to that in which Grice explains an utterance’s meaning as being conversationally implicated. I propose a theory of pictorial implicature and use it as the basis for an intention-based standard of correctness. I show how this standard is able to explain both the ways in which the content of pictures differs from the content we would attribute to them solely on the basis of resemblance, and how we are able to apply an intention-based standard of correctness even though we lack any independent knowledge of the intentions of pictures’ makers. (shrink)

Like every great word, “representation/s “ is a stew. A scrambled menu, it serves up several meanings at once. For a representation can be an image—visual, verbal, or aural. Think of a picture of a hat. A representation can also be a narrative, a sequence of images and ideas. Think of the sentence, “Nancy Reagan wore a hat when she visited a detoxification clinic in Florida.” Or, a representation can be the product of ideology, that vast scheme for showing forth (...) the world and justifying its dealings. Think of the sentence, “Nancy Reagan, in her hat, is a proper woman.” In the past twenty years, feminist thinking about representation has broken apart. This fracture is both cause and symptom of the larger collapse of a feminist cultural consensus. Some of the rifts have been thematic. That is to be represented? Others have been theoretical. What is the nature of representation itself? I wish to map these rifts, especially those in the United States, and to wonder about the logic of a new cultural consensus.In the late 1960s, feminists began to share a cultural consensus about the representation of women and gender. Few who built up that consensus were village idiots. Even without being semioticians, everyone more or less knew that the marriages between the signifier and the signified in that odd couple, the sign, were ones of convenience. Everyone more or less knew that the marriages between the sign and the referent, that hubbub out there, or somewhere, were also ones of convenience. Some survived. Others were obsolete, cold, hostile, ending in separation or divorce. Everyone more or less knew that when I exclaimed, “Nancy Reagan wears a hat,” it was easier for a fellow citizen of my linguistic community to understand me than for a stranger to do so. Nevertheless, the consensus offered a rough, general theory of representation that extolled the possibility of a fit between “reality” and its “description” or “image.” Catharine R. Stimpson is professor of English and dean of the Graduate School at Rutgers University. She is presently at work on a book about Gertrude Stein. (shrink)

However, Stein's self-images are more than appropriations of a male identity and masculine interests. Several of them are irrelevant to categories of sex and gender. In part, Stein is an obsessive psychologist, a Euclid of behavior, searching for "bottom natures," the substratum of individuality. She also tries to diagram psychic genotypes, patterns into which all individuals might fit. Although she plays with femaleness/maleness as categories, she also investigates an opposition of impetuousness and passivity, fire and phlegm; a variety of regional (...) and national types; and the dualism of the "dependent independent," who tends to resist. In part, as she puzzles her way towards knowing and understanding, she presents herself as engaged in aural and oral acts, listening and hearing before speaking and telling. That sense of perception as physical also emerges in a passage in which she, as perceiver/describer, first incorporates and then linguistically discharges the world: "Mostly always when I am filled up with it I tell it, sometimes I have to tell it, sometimes I like to tell it, sometimes I keep on with telling it."1 · 1. The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress , p. 325. Catharine R. Stimpson, associate professor of English at Barnard College, is the editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and the author of J.R.R. Tolkien as well as other essays and fiction. See also: "Visual Rhetoric in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" by Paul K. Alkon in Vol. 1, No. 4; "Gertrude Stein, the Cone Sisters, and the Puzzle of Female Friendship" by Carolyn Burke in Vol. 8, No. 3. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a unified account of cinematic representation as primary depiction. On this account, cinematic representation is a distinctive form of depiction, unique in its capacity to depict temporal properties. I then explore the consequences of this account for the much-contested question of whether cinema is an independent representational art form. I show that it is, and that Scruton’s argument to the contrary relies on an erroneous conception of cinematic representation. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

The "Kinsey Report" suggests the existence of such a mentality. Of 142 women with much homosexual experience, 70 percent reported no regrets. This consciousness has manifested itself in literature in two ways. First, in lesbian romanticism: fusions of life and death, happiness and woe, natural imagery and supernatural strivings, neoclassical paganism with a ritualistic cult of Sappho, and modern beliefs in evolutionary progress with a cult of the rebel. At its worst an inadvertent parody of fin de siecle decadence, at (...) its best lesbian romanticism ruthlessly rejects a stifling dominant culture and asserts the value of psychological autonomy, women, art, and a European civilization of the sensuous, sensual, and voluptuous. Woolf's Orlando is its most elegant and inventive text, but its symbol is probably the career of Natalie Barney, the cosmopolitan American who was the prototype of Valerie Seymour.23· 23. See Rubin, introduction to Vivien's A Woman Appeared to Me, and George Wickes, The Amazon of Letters: The Life and Loves of Natalie Barney .Catherine R. Stimpson, professor of English at Rutgers University, is the former editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. The author of both critical essays and fiction, she recently co-edited, with Ethel Spector Person, Women, Sex and Sexuality. (shrink)

An adequate account of the nature of genre and of the criteria for genre membership is essential to understanding the nature of the various categories into which comics can be classified. Because they fail adequately to distinguish genre categories from other ways of categorizing works, including categorizations according to medium or according to style, previous accounts of genre fail to illuminate the nature of comics categories. I argue that genres are sets of conventions that have developed as means of addressing (...) particular interpretative and/or evaluative concerns, and have a history of co‐instantiation within a community, such that a work’s belonging to some genre generates interpretative and evaluative expectations among the members of that community. Genres are distinct from styles in consisting of conventions, and are distinct from media both in consisting of conventions and in generating interpretative and evaluative expectations. (shrink)

I propose a number of criteria for the adequacy of an account of pictorial realism. Such an account must: explain the epistemic significance of realistic pictures; explain why accuracy and detail are salient to realism; be consistent with an accurate account of depiction; and explain the features of pictorial realism. I identify six features of pictorial realism. I then propose an account of realism as a measure of the information pictures provide about how their objects would look, were one to (...) see them. This account meets the criteria I have identified and is superior to alternative accounts of realism. (shrink)

This paper examines the logical and metaphysical consequences of denying Leibniz's Law, the principle that if t1= t2, then φ(t1) if and only if φ(t2). Recently, Caie, Goodman, and Lederman (2020) and Bacon and Russell (2019) have proposed sophisticated logical systems permitting violations of Leibniz's Law. We show that their systems conflict with widely held, attractive principles concerning the metaphysics of individuals. Only by adopting a highly revisionary picture, on which there is no finest-grained equivalence relation, can a well-motivated metaphysics (...) for rejecting Leibniz's Law be developed. We sketch one such picture—a metaphysics of stuff. Stuff ontologies can be initially motivated through ordinary language: stuff stands to mass nouns as objects stand to count nouns. The stuff ontology we propose takes stuff to be fundamental and views the world as composed of an infinite descending hierarchy of kinds and portions of stuff. We defend the coherence of this picture and offer a model theory demonstrating that it can be consistently formalized. (shrink)

Transcriptional repression and silencing have been strongly associated with hypoacetylation of histones. Accordingly, histone deacetylases, which remove acetyl groups from histones, have been shown to participate in mechanisms of transcriptional repression. Therefore, current models of the role of acetylation in transcriptional regulation focus on the acetylation status of histones and designate histone acetyltransferases, which add acetyl groups to histones, as transcriptional coactivators and histone deacetylases as corepressors. In recent years, an accumulation of studies have shown that these enzymes also target (...) non‐histone proteins and that histone deacetylases have clear roles as coactivators at a variety of genes, some of which are key regulators of cell growth and survival. This review summarizes the evidence for histone deacetylases as coactivators and provides models of coactivation mechanisms, some of which integrate roles of acetylated histones and non‐histone proteins in transcription. BioEssays 30:15–24, 2008. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This volume of specially written essays by leading philosophers offers to set the agenda for the philosophy of depiction.

Deep brain stimulation is an experimental procedure for treatment-resistant depression. Some results show promise, but blinded trials had limited success. Ethical questions center on vulnerability: especially on whether depressed patients can weigh the risks and benefits effectively, whether depression causes “desperation,” and whether media portrayals create unrealistic hopes. We interviewed 24 psychiatric inpatients with treatment-resistant depression, qualitatively analyzing their comments. Most had minimal interest in deep brain stimulators. Some might consider them if their depression worsened, if alternatives were exhausted, or (...) if the evidence were stronger. Fears focused on the surgery, adverse effects, and the novelty of the device. Patients felt the depression interfered with their ability to weigh the risks and benefits. Patients seemed highly attuned to the risks, and were skeptical that the treatment would be effective. We conclude that ethical concerns about vulnerability remain, yet patients with treatment-resistant depression were thoughtful and cautious about trying a novel therapy. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the influential view that depiction, like language, depends on arbitrary conventions. I argue that this view, however it is elaborated, is false. Any adequate account of depiction must be consistent with the distinctive features of depiction. One such feature is depictive generativity. I argue that, to be consistent with depictive generativity, conventionalism must hold that depiction depends on conventions for the depiction of basic properties of a picture’s object. I then argue that two considerations jointly (...) preclude depiction from being governed by such conventions. Firstly, conventions must be salient to those who employ them. Secondly, those parts of pictures that depict basic properties of objects are not salient to the makers and interpreters of pictures. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Desiderata for an Account of Genre Existing Accounts of Genre An Account of Genre Conclusion Notes References.

In this paper, I discuss the account of depiction proposed by Robert Hopkins in his book Picture, Image and Experience. I first briefly summarise Hopkins’s account, according to which we experience depictions as resembling their objects in respect of outline shape. I then ask whether Hopkins’s account can perform the explanatory tasks required of an adequate account of depiction. I argue that there are at least two reasons for which Hopkins’s account of depiction is inadequate. Firstly, the notion of outline (...) shape, as Hopkins presents it, is inconsistent. Moreover, I argue that, while a consistent construal of outline shape is possible, Hopkins’s account becomes indistinguishable from previous accounts of depiction under any such construal. Second, I argue that, however it is construed, the notion of outline shape is unable to explain one of the central features which Hopkins himself insists any successful account of depiction must explain. (shrink)

Many forms of printmaking involve drawing or painting onto a plate to produce a matrix and then producing prints from that matrix by mechanical processes. One might be skeptical about the artistic significance of such prints, on the basis that only the process of drawing or painting the matrix enables printmakers to exercise intentional control over the features of the resultant prints. This might lead one to think that such forms of printmaking lack artistic significance independent of drawing and painting. (...) I examine whether or not such skepticism is warranted and argue that it is not. Nevertheless, I identify limitations on the independent artistic significance of another form of printmaking, namely that which involves producing prints from multiple matrices. (shrink)

Classic analysis of the subject and the development of personal probability; one of the greatest controversies in modern statistcal thought.

Critical realism, a philosophical framework originally developed by Roy Bhaskar in the 1970s, represents a relatively new approach to research generally and to nursing research in particular. This article explores the ontological and epistemological tenets of critical realism and examines the application of critical realist principles to nursing research and practice through a review of the literature. It is evident that few published nursing research studies have, as of yet, utilized critical realism as their paradigm of choice. Both the strengths (...) and limitations of the presentation and use of critical realism in these studies are discussed in this article. Given the varying degrees of success of the authors in explicating critical realism as a philosophical framework, the value of critical realism to the research study, and the ways in which usage of the critical realist framework influenced development of the study and interpretation of findings, it is evident that the quality of future publications espousing the use of critical realism must continue to be strengthened significantly. (shrink)

Dominic McIver Lopes’ Four Arts of Photography and Diarmuid Costello’s On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry examine the state of the art in analytic philosophy of photography and present a new approach to the study of the medium. As opposed to the orthodox and prevalent view, which emphasizes its epistemic capacities, the new theory reconsiders the nature of photography, and redirects focus towards the aesthetic potential of the medium. This symposium comprises two papers that critically examine central questions addressed in the (...) two books, with responses by the two authors in defence of their respective positions. (shrink)

Through an historical investigation of the concept of the zero from Gauthiot to Deleuze, this paper examines a peculiar object, the signifying nothing. Saussure founds his science of linguistics on the claim that the opposition between something and nothing provides the minimal condition for the existence of language. What is this nothing and how can it be recognized? What can account for the zero—as structuralist linguists call a marked nothing—in language? The essay first considers linguists’ responses to these problems, before (...) turning to later redeployments of the zero as the index for the fundamental questions raised by the structuralist project as such. (shrink)