Determining the semantic role of sentence constituents is a key task in determining sentence meanings lying behind a veneer of variant syntactic expression. We present a model of natural language generation from semantics using the FrameNet semantic role and frame ontology. We train the model using the FrameNet corpus and apply it to the task of automatic semantic role and frame identification, producing results competitive with previous work (about 70% role labeling accuracy). Unlike previous models used for this task, our (...) model does not assume that the frame of a sentence is known, and is able to identify null- instantiated roles, which commonly occur in our corpus and whose identification is crucial to natural language interpretation. (shrink)

Under the influence of recurrent deleterious mutation and selection, asexual and sexual populations reach a deterministic equilibrium with individuals carrying 0,1,2,. . . harmful mutations. When a favourable mutation (aA) occurs in an asexual population it will usually occur in an individual who has one or more (k) deleterious mutations. Muller's ratchet then applies as A will thereafter never occur in an individual with less than k mutations. If the selective advantage of A is less than the selective disadvantage of (...) k harmful mutations then A will not spread. If it is greater it may spread carrying k deleterious mutations to fixation. Sexual populations are not affected in this way. A will spread through the population experiencing genomes with 0,1,2,. . . deleterious mutations in accordance with the deterministic equilibrium. (shrink)

In Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Adrian Desmond and James Moore contend that “Darwin would put his utmost into sexual selection because the subject intrigued him, no doubt, but also for a deeper reason: the theory vindicated his lifelong commitment to human brotherhood”. Without questioning Desmond and Moore’s evidence, I will raise some puzzles for their view. I will show that attention to the structure of Darwin’s arguments in the Descent of Man shows that they are far from straightforward. As Desmond and (...) Moore note, Darwin seems to have intended sexual selection in non-human animals to serve as evidence for sexual selection in humans. However, Darwin’s account of sexual selection in humans was different from the canonical cases that Darwin described at great length. If explaining the origin of human races was the main reason for introducing sexual selection, and if sexual selection was a key piece of Darwin’s anti-slavery arguments, then it is puzzling why Darwin would have spent so much time discussing cases that did not really support his argument for the origin of human races, and it is also puzzling that his argument for the origin of human races would be so poor. (shrink)

This article explores the significance of Hegel’s aesthetic lectures for Dewey’s approach to the arts. Although over the last two decades some brilliant studies have been published on the “permanent deposit” of Hegel in Dewey’s mature thought, the aesthetic dimension of Dewey’s engagement with Hegel’s heritage has not yet been investigated. This inquiry will be developed on a theoretical level as well as on the basis of a recent discovery: in Dewey’s Correspondence traces have been found of a lecture on (...) Hegel’s Aesthetics delivered in 1891 within a summer school run by a scholar close to the so-called St. Louis Hegelians. Dewey’s deep and long-standing acquaintance with Hegel’s Aesthetics supports the claim that in his mature book, Art as Experience, he originally appropriated some Hegelian insights. First, Dewey shared Hegel’s strong anti-dualistic and anti-autonomistic conception of the arts, resisting post-Kantian sirens that favored instead an interpretation of art as a separate realm from ordinary reality. Second, they basically converged on an idea of the arts as inherently social activities as well as crucial contributions to the shaping of cultures and civilizations, based on the proximity of the arts to the sensitive nature of man. Third, this article argues that an original re-consideration of Hegel’s thesis of the so-called “end of art” played a crucial role in the formulation of Dewey’s criticism of the arts and of the role of aesthetic experience in contemporary society. The author suggests that we read Dewey’s criticism of the removal of fine art “from the scope of the common or community life” in light of Hegel’s insight that the experience of the arts as something with which believers or citizens can immediately identify belongs to an irretrievable past. (shrink)

Many philosophers have become familiar with Leopold’s land ethic through the writings of J. Baird Callicott, who claims that Leopold bases his land ethic on a ‘protosociobiological’ argument that Darwin gives in the Descent of Man. On this view, which has become the canonical interpretation, Leopold’s land ethic is based on extending our moral sentiments to ecosystems. I argue that the evidence weighs in favor of an alternative interpretation of Leopold; his reference to Darwin does not refer to the Descent, (...) but rather to the Origin of Species, where Darwin discusses the interdependencies between organisms in the struggle for existence. (shrink)

The older topos ›historia magistra vitae‹ – which was coined by Cicero, borrowing from a Hellenistic pattern – lasted almost unbroken into the eighteenth century, also thanks to its flexibility in accommodating the most different conclusions. As demonstrated by R. Koselleck, the common place was emptied of meaning just between the eighteenth and nineteenth century, at the same time and in connection with the invisible and sudden semantic process, through which in the German language area the naturalized foreign world Historie (...) and the plural ›die Geschichten‹ were displaced by the collective singular ›die Geschichte‹. This paper aims to frame Fichte’s position in the process of dissolution of the topos, described by Koselleck. For this purpose, the paper will be articulated in the following steps. Firstly, it reconstructs the most important and probable filters, through which Fichte has received Cicero’s topos. The second part will examine deeply the criticisms that Fichte moves to the different versions of the formula, during his whole speculative itinerary. Finally, the conclusive part considers how Fichte recovers and reworks the topos – since his first works – by transposing it in the completely different theoretical frame of his own philosophy of history and of his theory of the State.Die Wendung ›historia magistra vitae‹ – die in Anlehnung an hellenistische Vorbilder von Cicero geprägt wurde – währte fast ungebrochen bis in das achtzehnte Jahrhundert, wobei eine solche Dauerhaftigkeit auch und zunächst auf seiner Elastizität beruhte, die die unterschiedlichsten Schlüsse zuließ. Wie R. Koselleck gezeigt hat, wird die Formel lediglich zwischen dem achtzehnten und dem neunzehnten Jahrhundert – gleichzeitig und parallel mit dem unmerklichen und unbewussten Vorgang, der im deutschen Sprachgebiet die Pluralform von ›die Geschichte‹ zu einem Kollektivsingular verdichtet hat – sinnentleert. Der vorliegende Beitrag geht darauf aus, Fichtes eigentümliche Stellung in dieser Auflösung des alten Topos zu verdeutlichen. Dazu untersucht man zuerst die Quelle, die Fichtes Rezeption des Topos ermöglichen und vermitteln. Im zweiten Teil betrachtet man alle Stelle tiefgehend, wo Fichte im Lauf seiner ganzen philosophischen Untersuchung an den Topos kritisch aufweist. Am Schluss wird die radikale neue Auslegung illustriert, die Fichte auf Grund seiner Philosophie der Geschichte und seiner Auffassung der Staatslehre anbietet. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 478-480 [Access article in PDF] The German Aesthetic Tradition,by Kai Hammermeister; xv & 259 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; $60.00 cloth; $22.00 paper. In some ways, aesthetic theory has become a thing of the past. With the exception of a kind of fascination with works such as T. W. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, as a project, as a tradition, aesthetics has surrendered its once (...) monolithic and grandiose position as the philosophical contemplation of art and the notion of artistic beauty to more diminutive fields such as literary theory, poetics and cultural studies. In some ways, this is due to the very function of aesthetics: the philosophical investigation not simply of what is beautiful, but the formulation of prescriptive ideas about works of art and the judgement them according to these prescriptive ideas. This, in turn, has been looked upon with a certain degree of scorn with the rise of a more pluralistic art world and the bold denial that art needs the guidance of philosophy let alone have any prescriptive function or be able to be classified as "good" or "bad."But Kai Hammermeister's The German Aesthetic Tradition takes a very different view. A bold and difficult project, Hammermeister traces the complex and oftentimes abstruse contours of German aesthetic philosophy from its inception with Baumgarten in the eighteenth century through Adorno in the twentieth. In the process, he not only provides us with an excellent historical-philosophical account of the development of German aesthetic philosophy, he also implicitly argues for the relevance of aesthetics as a way not only of comprehending art, but of understanding the cohesive links between art, society, culture and philosophy.The German aesthetic tradition, as Hammermeister refers to it, was a prolonged intellectual argumentation with classical conceptions of art and beauty inherited from classical Greek thought during the eighteenth century. Classical aesthetics was dominated by two opposing conceptions of art and its function. For Plato, art mirrored the outside world (mimesis) and the judgement of good works of art was based on how well this mirroring of the objective world was carried out. Aristotle's idea was that art served a purgatory function (katharsis), cleansing the emotions of the individual through the identification of the observer with the work of art. All of the thinkers in the German tradition wrestle with this dual conception of art in some form privileging one over the other or, more often than not, combining them and extending their explanatory reach. But as in any tradition, they also struggle with the ideas and philosophies of previous thinkers within the tradition itself making Hammermeister's task more complex, one that he handles with adroitness and precision.The book's overarching argument and structure is triadic. Hammermeister sees the eighteenth century through German Idealism and Romanticism as [End Page 478] articulating a set of different paradigms for interpreting art. These are subsequently attacked in post-Hegelian philosophy and are then revived in different ways in the twentieth century as a reaction to Nietzsche's aestheticization of philosophy. Two paradigms emerge as central for the subsequent unfolding of the tradition. First, there is Immanuel Kant's conception of art as wholly separate from epistemology and from morality. For Kant, the work of art is centered in the experience of the subject and, in terms of form, exists outside its social context. This Hammermeister calls the "first strong paradigm of aesthetics" (p. 40). Next, there is the position of Friedrich Schiller who sees a connection between the work of art with culture, thought and morality. "[T]he culture of beauty demonstrates the freedom of man to turn himself into whatever being he envisions while remaining under the law of morality" (p. 57). For Schiller, there exists a kind of spillover effect of art into other domains of human thought and action—specifically in morality and politics—and this represents a crucial deviation from Kant's paradigm and another tendency within the tradition of German aesthetics, i.e., the aestheticization of other domains of human existence.Schelling and Hegel represent two other... (shrink)

As theories of performativity struggle to disentangle and reconfigure the relationships between act and identity, a heterowoman who relishes the performance of femininity is still aware that she can be read as reactionary. Her choice of sexual partners seems to undermine the efficacy of similar strategies constructed by femme lesbians. One queer option for a heterosexual woman is to ‘act’ like a gay man. As more than one cultural commentator has pointed out, it appears that only a male drag queen (...) can be a ‘lady’ these days. This particular woman does not want to change her biological sex to ‘be’ a gay man. She has learned how to be a ‘lady’ from the ‘feminized fags’ who may have learned from her mother. Their ironic distancing, camp connoiseurship, and parodic appropriation of the notion of a stable gender identity came as part of the package. As a result of this transaction, she acts as if she has balls under her dress. Such mimetic masquerades can be most easily recognized as resistant when performativity is ‘bound’ into a formalized performance. It is implicit that this artifice is not sustainable, nor is this desirable. ‘Doing’ queer means possessing the agency to defy and destabilize gendered behaviours, sexes, and sexualities through continuing and conscious decisions. This article explores the efficacy of heterosexual femme performances that attempt to challenge and subvert ideological normativities through their transactions with gay men. (shrink)

The human sciences, says Foucault, are those inquiries about 'man' as the two-faced one. The 'object and knower of knowledge, ' refers to 'man' whose heads look in and out rather than left and right at past and future. Although Foucault is primarily concerned with relations of abstract power rather than human interpersonal relations, the idea of the human sciences - the 'immature sciences' - do provide an intellectual position recast as a target to hit against. A legal system which (...) interprets and represents the value of freedom can do so only if it grows out of the free reciprocity of communicative exchange between free people. Here law functions as a link and as a pivot between possible and ideal, between physical and metaphysical. This volume of the papers presented at the Fifth Round Table on Law and Semiotics is, as is all of Legal semiotics, an investigatory tool: a discovery of legal meaning, and a means of discovery, i.e., a way of producing such evidence that may be further evaluated in judgments of Law's acts and transactions with other sign-systems in the whole sphere of social organization. (shrink)

The article deals with the question of phenomenological ethics, comparing Husserl’s and Fink’s ways of understanding the phenomenological reduction and thereby the pedagogical tasks of phenomenology, whose existential meaning lies in the “doctrine of freedom” (“Lehre von der Freiheit”), which is in turn closely linked with the problem of the beginning of philosophizing, since the phenomenological reduction presupposes itself. A comparison between Fink’s and Patocka’s views of freedom as transcendence (expressed by the concepts of hermitry and sacrifice), as well as (...) a phenomenological reading of Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values in relation to the educational theme of the Idealbildung, will let us see how Fink’s cosmological philosophy, having its hermeneutic keystone in the phenomenon of play, still has phenomenological features and pedagogical implications, being describable as a phenomenology of freedom, whose idea of freedom as “experiment” or as man’s “self-production” presents interesting analogies with Arendt’s view of action. (shrink)

The problem, of man falls into a category of problems of human knowledge that are both ‘eternal’ and ever new. Countless legends, myths, philosophical systems, religious doctrines, scientific conceptions and fantastic visions have been the fruit of man's ungovernable desire to know himself, to know his essence, his purpose in the world, his fate, his future. Not to mention the ingenious hypotheses and Utopian fantasms, scientific truths and galling mistakes, bold projects and cowardly superstitions handed on by human civilization in (...) its Indefatigable search for the ‘magic crystal’ which would at last reveal man's true nature. All periods have made their contribution In this everlasting quest and all have relied on the few parcels of truth gleaned by humanity at earlier stages of development. Our times, the most dramatic and revolutionary of all, are by no means an exception and can be distinguished from the rest only by the exceptional acuity and urgency of the problem. (shrink)

To address the question of the nature and function of conventions, this essay explores a possible systematic link between Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology and Foucault’s historical ontology. It argues that these analyses establish, contra to the cognitivist interpretation, dominant then and now, that conventions are properly understood not as “common knowledge” nor even as “jointly accepted beliefs” —that they are not, at least at their most fundamental layer, cognitive states at all—but are instead bodily dispositions that are forged by historically shifting (...) entwinements of practices of power and forms of knowledge. (shrink)

It is customary to consider late Imperial historiography as a barren waste of meagre and inaccurate chronicles and incompetent rhetorical epitomes, all overshadowed by the giant figure of Ammianus Marcellinus, the greatest literary genius, as E. Stein has called him , between Tacitus and Dante. In fact, however, the fifth century A.D. produced at least one writer who was, in the words of Niebuhr, ‘second to no historian even of the best ages in talent, good faith and wisdom; elegant and (...) very pure in style, he justly acquired praise and glory both among contemporaries and succeeding ages’. Niebuhr was referring to Priscus of Panium in Thrace, but Priscus was a member of a school of historical writing which had been founded earlier in the fifth century by Olympiodorus, an historian of scarcely less merit than Priscus and author of what J. B. Bury called ‘a highly important work’. Since even Schmid-Stahlin are not able to refer to a single essay or mono-graph on Olympiodorus, it may not be amiss to assemble the facts which are known about him and to try to discover, so far as the scanty materials permit, what sort of man he was and what sort of work he produced. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 28.1 (2004) 218-220 [Access article in PDF] The German Aesthetic Tradition, by Kai Hammermeister; xv & 259 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, $22 paper. In some ways, aesthetic theory has become a thing of the past. With the exception of a kind of fascination with works such as T. W. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, aesthetics, as a project or tradition, has surrendered its once monolithic and (...) grandiose position as the philosophical contemplation of art and the notion of artistic beauty to more diminutive fields such as literary theory, poetics, and cultural studies. In some ways, this is due to the very function of aesthetics: the philosophical investigation not simply of what is beautiful, but the formulation of prescriptive ideas about works of art and the judgment them according to these prescriptive ideas. This, in turn, has been looked upon with a certain degree of scorn with the rise of a more pluralistic art world, and the bold denial that art needs the guidance of philosophy let alone have any prescriptive function or be able to be classified as "good" or "bad."However, Kai Hammermeister's The German Aesthetic Tradition takes a very different view. A bold and difficult project, Hammermeister traces the complex and often abstruse contours of German aesthetic philosophy from its inception with Baumgarten in the eighteenth century through Adorno in the twentieth. In the process, he not only provides us with an excellent historical-philosophical account of the development of German aesthetic philosophy, he also implicitly argues for the relevance of aesthetics as a way not only of comprehending art, but of understanding the cohesive links between art, society, culture, and philosophy.The German aesthetic tradition, as Hammermeister refers to it, was a prolonged intellectual argumentation with classical conceptions of art and beauty inherited from classical Greek thought during the eighteenth century. Classical aesthetics was dominated by two opposing conceptions of art and its function. For Plato, art mirrored the outside world (mimesis) and the judgement of good works of art was based on how well this mirroring of the objective world was carried out. Aristotle's idea was that art served a purgatory function (katharsis), cleansing the emotions of the individual through the identification of the observer with the work of art. All of the thinkers in the German tradition [End Page 218] wrestle with this dual conception of art, in some form privileging one over the other—or, more often than not, combining them and extending their explanatory reach. But as in any tradition, they also struggle with the ideas and philosophies of previous thinkers within the tradition itself, making Hammermeister's task more complex. Yet it is one that he handles with adroitness and precision.The book's overarching argument and structure is triadic. Hammermeister sees the eighteenth century through German Idealism and Romanticism as articulating a set of different paradigms for interpreting art. These are subsequently attacked in post-Hegelian philosophy, and are then revived in different ways in the twentieth century as a reaction to Nietzsche's aestheticization of philosophy. Two paradigms emerge as central for the subsequent unfolding of the tradition. First, there is Immanuel Kant's conception of art as a wholly separate from epistemology and from morality. For Kant, the work of art is centered in the experience of the subject and, in terms of form, exists outside its social context. This Hammermeister calls the "first strong paradigm of aesthetics" (p. 40). Next, there is the position of Friedrich Schiller who sees a connection between the work of art and culture, thought, and morality. Schiller writes that, "the culture of beauty demonstrates the freedom of man to turn himself into whatever being he envisions while remaining under the law of morality" (p. 57). For Schiller, there exists a kind of spillover effect of art into other domains of human thought and action—specifically in morality and politics—and this represents a crucial deviation from Kant's paradigm, and another tendency within the tradition of German aesthetics; that is, the aestheticization of other domains of human existence.Schelling and Hegel represent two other... (shrink)

In this unusual and much-needed reappraisal of Freud's clinical technique, M. Guy Thompson challenges the conventional notion that psychoanalysis promotes relief from suffering and replaces it with a more radical assertion, that psychoanalysis seeks to mend our relationship with the real that has been fractured by our avoidance of the same. Thompson suggests that, while avoiding reality may help to relieve our experience of suffering, this short-term solution inevitably leads to a split in our existence. M. Guy (...) class='Hi'>Thompson forcefully disagrees with the recent trend that dismisses Freud as an historical figure who is out of step with the times. He argues, instead, for a return to the forgotten Freud, a man inherently philosophical and rooted in a Greek preoccupation with the nature of truth, ethics, the purpose of life and our relationship with reality. Thompson's argument is situated in a stunning re-reading of Freud's technical papers, including a new evaluation of his analyses of Dora and the Rat Man in the context of Heidegger's understanding of truth. In this remarkable examination of Freud's technical recommendations, M. Guy Thompson explains how psychoanalysis was originally designed to re-acquaint us with realities we had abandoned by encountering them in the contest of the analytic experience. This provocative examination of Freud's conception of psychoanalysis reveals a more personal Freud than we had previously supposed, one that is more humanistic and real. (shrink)

This paper argues that two distinct models of resistance are to be found in Foucault's work. The first, tactical reversal, is predicated on the idea that conflict is inherent to power relations, the strategical model of power, and thus that a specific configuration of power and knowledge can be thwarted by reversing the mechanisms whereby this relation is sustained. The second, the aesthetics of existence, is based in the governmental model of power and holds that it is possible to forge (...) autonomous forms of life in and through such techniques of governance. I argue that Foucault came to favor the latter of these two alternatives because the model of power underlying resistance as tactical reversal proved insufficient both historically and conceptually. It was thus on this basis that he was able to work out the governmental conception of power relations and thereby accord a fundamental role to the concept of resistance as autonomy or self-formation. The key to understanding how this project is not only practical, but is also our obligation lies in the genealogy of the critical attitude that Foucault was developing in his final years. (shrink)

New evidence from untranslated manuscripts challenges the accepted view that Kierkegaard's "gospel of suffering" was an orthodox view of man's existence.

I. SummaryRuth Boeker's Locke on Persons and Personal Identity is a profound treatment of Locke's views on the nature and identity of human persons. The book is divided roughly into two halves. The first half (Chapters 1–6 and 8) focuses on providing a philosophically sophisticated interpretation of Locke that engages with the most recent secondary literature. Chapter 3, for instance, includes an important contribution to scholarly debates about Locke's sortal-relative account of identity in the Essay II.xxvii.§7–8. Some (the coincidence theorists) (...) have argued that Locke's claim that there are different persistence conditions for a ‘man’ (human animal) and the ‘mass of matter’ that occupies the same spatio-temporal location as the man entails that there are two, coincident material objects. Others (the relative identity theorists) argue that Locke holds that there is ontologically one and only one material object at any spatio-temporal location—a single object that can be attributed different identity conditions when considered under different sortals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:398 Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Becky Thompson In the Slip Between Coasts Every morning the sea announces the day intimate crashing against the high stone wall we scan the waves for black dots floating becoming new moons and then arms waving rafts carrying the world Cartography in Greece after Zeina Hashem Beck’s “To Hamra” Here is the Oleander bush where a (...) family hid before their walk up the hill from Eftalou to Molyvos after eating eggs and croissants in my seaside room thirteen pairs of shoes lined up on the patio slate Here is seaweed beach where one raft landed in perched sea another behind carrying the elders and children Becky Thompson 399 stalled, taking in saltwater coast guard delayed in Petra sea ten, twenty, fifty minutes shouting and prayer finally a rescue exhaustion lining every pore They say memories fade, mine multiply, a cacophony tossing Here is the beach where the Syrian man strapping muscles and whimsical eyes gave me his salmon shirt with a finely made collar his friends ordered selfies called home saying yes began the climb to Mytilini defiant, alive There were moments of freedom jubilation in the air rest on the beach with dates and cool water children tossing stones into the sea lovers sitting close, feet in Europe cell phones that worked, telegraphing safety What does it mean to miss the intimacy of disaster? Now rescue teams mechanic pick-ups intercept rafts before shore whisk people away to Skala Sikamia then Moria no time to touch sand rest with the breeze Here is life jacket graveyard next to the dump perched between two hills above the seacoast 400 Becky Thompson a German couple toots up on a scooter taking photographs while eating nine-grain toast academics from the US talking postmodern flight a film crew from Barcelona picking through jackets amid ashes and twisted plastic crows memorize the wind as two garbage trucks trudge up the road bringing old fish and more jackets I wave at the sheepherder as I walk down the hill Save the people, bury the dead, photograph the remains, repeat Here is the hotel by the beach in Petra where children would run to the iron swing set let the arc carry them then jump off dance in the sprinklers the owner emerging mumbling generations handing us apricots and bottles of water Here is the computer store where the young Greek tells me he can’t copy my poems since he sees Arabic words menacing the page Here is my patience as I sit in his smoke ask him about his family and dancing Becky Thompson 401 eye his automatic weapon perched next to a wooden door Down the highway is a new bar next to Moria. Of course. Here is barbed wire that doubles as a fence a clothesline for diapers space to toss out rotten food Here is the highway lined with pickups and two-door sedans young Greek employment guarding people in tents Here is a baby carriage a young mother pushes that seconds as a grocery cart and shade for her five-year-old a step up from before when babies were in arms toddlers walking Here is the refugee people center where they built a strong swing set men lifting weights growing rings around their arms women stretching out in a new room eyeing the Lesvos sky Here are the streets of Mytilini looking like Beirut the Greeks who ran from Turkey the Turks who kicked out Afghans the Afghans who wish they were Syrian 402 Becky Thompson Syrians joined by Congolese— teachers, holy seers, and men selling hats. The sidewalk sparkles an atlas in transit.... (shrink)

The epoch-making revolution that has been taking place in mathematics and physics during the past hundred years is gradually changing our whole conception of reality and of the function of science in regard to it. We have discovered that the “common sense” view of the world which has become ingrained in the feeling-thought habits of Western man, especially since the seventeenth century, contains elements of serious limitation and even an illusion both from the standpoint of immediately intuited experience and from (...) that of demonstrated scientific fact. Moreover, by a long drawn out tortuous process, lasting over many centuries and involving the constant creation and correction of an enormously complicated scientific structure, we have finally arrived at an understanding of what may be the root of our difficulty. It seems that certain peculiarities of the over-all grammatical structure of those languages that have conditioned the feeling-thought world of the West have tended to lead us astray. Their correction, however, has so far been possible only through the invention of new esoteric languages, such as the symbolism of mathematics and the new logic. By means of these “languages of science” modern mathematicians and physicists have at last succeeded in freeing themselves from the shackles of their everyday speech and “common sense” concepts, at least so far as their scientific work is concerned. (shrink)

The term natural is effective in the marketing of a wide variety of foods. This ambiguous term carries important meaning in Western culture. To challenge an uncritical understanding of natural with respect to food and to explore the ambiguity of the term, the development of Western ideas of nature is first discussed. Personification and hypostasization of nature are given special emphasis. Leo Marx’s idea of the pastoral design in literature is then used to explore the meaning of natural as applied (...) to food, emphasizing Marx’s distinction between a sentimental and a complex pastoral. The latter is applied to natural as a means of collapsing a dichotomy of man and nature to the idea of second nature. From this perspective an understanding of the industrialization of the food system and the importance of local and organic food are considered. The extent to which processed foods might properly be considered natural is raised and discussed for several common foods. Although marketing of natural foods might make us think that we consume nature, I suggest that what is consumed is more appropriately second nature. I suggest that in order to maintain a critical perspective about one’s relationship to the natural world, everyone should make an attempt to experience the complex pastoral with respect to at least something that is consumed as food. When nature is understood as second nature in the context of a complex pastoral, the question of whether a food or ingredient is to be considered natural is replaced by deliberative thought based on our best knowledge and judgment, and the result will be less constrained by ideology. (shrink)

Recent research has shown that, although still on a limited scale, the teaching of business ethics in UK higher education has been increasing in recent years. This paper reports on a postal questionnaire survey conducted to investigate the extent to which ethical issues are covered in the teaching of management accounting in higher education. The principal findings are that the majority of management accounting lecturers in the British Isles do not incorporate ethics. About a third of the respondents to the (...) survey do address ethical issues, although about half of those say they do so only implicitly. Various factors underlying the findings and prospects for the future are discussed. (shrink)

Recent discussions in the philosophy of biology have brought into question some fundamental assumptions regarding evolutionary processes, natural selection in particular. Some authors argue that natural selection is nothing but a population-level, statistical consequence of lower-level events (Matthen and Ariew [2002]; Walsh et al. [2002]). On this view, natural selection itself does not involve forces. Other authors reject this purely statistical, population-level account for an individual-level, causal account of natural selection (Bouchard and Rosenberg [2004]). I argue that each of these (...) positions is right in one way, but wrong in another; natural selection indeed takes place at the level of populations, but it is a causal process nonetheless. (shrink)

The latter half of the twentieth century has been marked by debates in evolutionary biology over the relative significance of natural selection and random drift: the so-called “neutralist/selectionist” debates. Yet John Beatty has argued that it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish the concept of random drift from the concept of natural selection, a claim that has been accepted by many philosophers of biology. If this claim is correct, then the neutralist/selectionist debates seem at best futile, and at worst, (...) meaningless. I reexamine the issues that Beatty raises, and argue that random drift and natural selection, conceived as processes, can be distinguished from one another. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that grounding relations are asymmetric. Here I develop and argue for a theory of metaphysical structure that takes grounding to be nonsymmetric rather than asymmetric. Even without infinite descending chains of dependence, it might be that every entity is grounded in some other entity. Having first addressed an immediate objection to the position under discussion, I introduce two examples of symmetric grounding. I give three arguments for the view that grounding is nonsymmetric (I call this view (...) ‘metaphysical interdependence’). These arguments are: (i) that metaphysical interdependence is the only theory able to reconcile competing intuitions about grounding; (ii) that it is the only theory consistent with both ‘gunk’ and ‘junk’; and (iii) that offers a satisfactory solution to the problem concerning whether or not grounding is itself grounded. (shrink)

The first work to offer a comprehensive pragmatist anthropology focusing on sensibility, habits, and human experience as contingently yet irreversibly enlanguaged.

Biologists and philosophers have been extremely pessimistic about the possibility of demonstrating random drift in nature, particularly when it comes to distinguishing random drift from natural selection. However, examination of a historical case-Maxime Lamotte's study of natural populations of the land snail, Cepaea nemoralis in the 1950s - shows that while some pessimism is warranted, it has been overstated. Indeed, by describing a unique signature for drift and showing that this signature obtained in the populations under study, Lamotte was able (...) to make a good case for a significant role for drift. It may be difficult to disentangle the causes of drift and selection acting in a population, but it is not impossible. (shrink)

Biologists studying ecology and evolution use the term “population” in many different ways. Yet little philosophical analysis of the concept has been done, either by biologists or philosophers, in contrast to the voluminous literature on the concept of “species.” This is in spite of the fact that “population” is arguably a far more central concept in ecological and evolutionary studies than “species” is. The fact that such a central concept has been employed in so many different ways is potentially problematic (...) for the reason that inconsistent usages (especially when the usage has not been made explicit) might lead to false controversies in which disputants are simply talking past one another. However, the inconsistent usages are not the only, or even the most important reason to examine the concept. If any set of organisms is legitimately called a “population,” selection and drift processes become purely arbitrary, too. Moreover, key ecological variables, such as abundance and distribution, depend on a nonarbitrary way of identifying populations. I sketch the beginnings of a population concept, drawing inspiration from the Ghiselin-Hull individuality thesis, and show why some alternative approaches are nonstarters. (shrink)

One of Tocqueville’s best-known empirical claims in Democracy in America is that there is no national-level public administration in the United States. He asserts definitively and repeatedly that “administrative centralization does not exist” there. However, in scattered passages throughout the text, Tocqueville points to multiple federal agencies that contemporary historians and APD scholars characterize as instances of a growing national administrative system, such as the Post Office Department and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I reevaluate Tocqueville’s treatment of bureaucracy in (...) America in light of this evidence. I contend that Tocqueville, perhaps in spite of himself, reveals even the most paradigmatic examples of active, democratic self-government in Democracy in America—townships and other voluntary associations—to be embedded in and causally supported by a network of interrelated, centralized public administrative institutions. Crucially, Tocqueville never resolves the tension between his acknowledgment of the causal power of these institutions and his claims that they do not exist. This new picture of the empirical and normative complexity of Tocqueville’s treatment of bureaucratic institutions offers a rich set of conceptual resources for contesting, among other claims, the political construction of nostalgia for a lost age of do-it-yourself White settler democracy in a time before bureaucracy in America. (shrink)

Evolutionary theory (ET) is teeming with probabilities. Probabilities exist at all levels: the level of mutation, the level of microevolution, and the level of macroevolution. This uncontroversial claim raises a number of contentious issues. For example, is the evolutionary process (as opposed to the theory) indeterministic, or is it deterministic? Philosophers of biology have taken different sides on this issue. Millstein (1997) has argued that we are not currently able answer this question, and that even scientific realists ought to remain (...) agnostic concerning the determinism or indeterminism of evolutionary processes. If this argument is correct, it suggests that, whatever we take probabilities in ET to be, they must be consistent with either determinism or indeterminism. This raises some interesting philosophical questions: How should we understand the probabilities used in ET? In other words, what is meant by saying that a certain evolutionary change is more or less probable? Which interpretation of probability is the most appropriate for ET? I argue that the probabilities used in ET are objective in a realist sense, if not in an indeterministic sense. Furthermore, there are a number of interpretations of probability that are objective and would be consistent with ET under determinism or indeterminism. However, I argue that evolutionary probabilities are best understood as propensities of population-level kinds. (shrink)

Naïve realism (also called ‘relationalism’ or ‘object view’) is becoming increasingly popular, but the specific outline of its commitments remains often underspecified by proponents and misunderstood by critics. Naïve realism is associated with two claims, both concerning genuine, veridical perceptual experience (where this excludes hallucinations). Constitutive Claim (CC): The phenomenal character of perception is (partly) constituted by the mind-independent objects in one’s surrounding and their properties. Relational Claim (RC): Perception is a relation to mind-independent objects in the environment and their (...) properties. Some philosophers use the two claims interchangeably while talking about naïve realism, while others use only one or the other, although they do not explicitly discuss if the other claim is also a core commitment of naïve realism, or if naïve realism can be held without the other claim. This raises the question of how RC and CC relate to one another, together with the most pressing question of what each claim ultimately commits one to. After discussing the shortcomings of alternative interpretations, I argue that naïve realism should be understood as committed to, first and foremost, RC. This should be understood as a claim about the phenomenal character of perception, rather than about its nature, structure or essence (whatever that means). CC, on the other hand, should be understood as a corollary of RC. This doesn’t only offer a better characterisation of how naïve realists understand phenomenal character: it also helps us understand how we can simultaneously claim that the object of perception is a constitutive element of perception, while also allowing for it to play a causal role in determining perception. (shrink)

Ralph Waldo Emerson's theory of rhetoric has been the subject of ongoing inquiry that has moved Emerson further and further outside a line of Platonic thinkers in order to make his discussion of rhetoric applicable to contemporary discussions about civic discourse and the public sphere. Such accounts, however, subtly undermine the complexity of Emerson's attempts to reconcile transcendentalism with democracy. Understanding Emerson as involved in a project to not only democratize language and rhetorical theory but also Plato, the representative of (...) truth seeking and idealism, clarifies precisely how Emerson understands the power of rhetoric and philosophy to shape and enact democracy. Emerson was trying to find a place for Platonic idealism in the shaping of a young country, and in doing so, he reconfigured what might seem today to be irreconcilable dualities. For Emerson the split between the spiritual and the material world does not implicitly prioritize one domain over the other. Instead, Emerson negotiates the terrain between the worlds and suggests ultimately that language and action are means of straddling them and realizing real change in society. If ideals are in some way external in Emerson's metaphysics, they are no less accessible by every person who attends to his or her own experience in the world. Rhetoric, for Emerson, brings those poles together. (shrink)

It is time to bring the rich resources of these traditions into the contemporary debate about the nature of self. This volume is the first of its kind.

Recent research has shown that, although still on a limited scale, the teaching of business ethics in UK higher education has been increasing in recent years. This paper reports on a postal questionnaire survey conducted to investigate the extent to which ethical issues are covered in the teaching of management accounting in higher education. The principal findings are that the majority of management accounting lecturers in the British Isles do not incorporate ethics. About a third of the respondents to the (...) survey do address ethical issues, although about half of those say they do so only implicitly. Various factors underlying the findings and prospects for the future are discussed. (shrink)

Colour fascinates all of us, and scientists and philosophers have sought to understand the true nature of colour vision for many years. In recent times, investigations into colour vision have been one of the main success stories of cognitive science, for each discipline within the field - neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, computer science and artificial intelligence, and philosophy - has contributed significantly to our understanding of colour. Evan Thompson's book is a major contribution to this interdisciplinary project. Colour Vision provides (...) an accessible review of the current scientific and philosophical discussions of colour vision. Thompson steers a course between the subjective and objective positions on colour, arguing for a relational account. This account develops a novel `ecological' approach to colour vision in cognitive science and the philosophy of perception. It is vital reading for all cognitive scientists and philosophers whose interests touch upon this central area. (shrink)

In this important collection of essays Dennis Thompson argues for a more robust conception of responsibility in public life than prevails in contemporary democracies. He suggests that we should stop thinking so much about public ethics in terms of individual vices and start thinking about it more in terms of institutional vices. Combining theory and practice with many concrete examples and proposals for reform, these essays could be used in courses in applied ethics or political theory and will be (...) read by professionals and graduate students in schools of political science, public policy, law, public health, journalism and business. (shrink)