Perhaps no myth is more misunderstood than the story of Narcissus, who is erroneously thought to be self-absorbed, egotistical, and vain. Adding to the confusion, a growth industry on narcissism has emerged in academic circles. case in point: Professor Daniel Ames of columbia business School devised a brief personality test with sixteen binary choices such as “I am going to be a great person” or “I hope I am going to be successful.”1 One student did so “well” that he boasted (...) of his perfect score—a clear manifestation of disturbing egotism!2 In his way, Freud set the stage for this modern obsession with the self. He theorized that narcissists love either what they are, what they were, what they’d like to be, or... (shrink)

Michael A. Petersa and Fazal Rizvib aBeijing Normal University, Beijing, PR China; bMelbourne University, Melbourne, Australia Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘no...

Human aesthetic practices show a sensitivity to the ways that the appearance of an artefact manifests skills and other qualities of the maker. We investigate a possible origin for this kind of sensibility, locating it in the need for co-ordination of skill-transmission in the Acheulean stone tool culture. We argue that our narrative supports the idea that Acheulean agents were aesthetic agents. In line with this we offer what may seem an absurd comparison: between the Acheulean and the Quattrocento. (...) In making it we display some hidden complexity in human aesthetic responses to an artefact. We conclude with a brief review of rival explanations—biological and/or cultural—of how this skills-based sensibility became a regular feature of human aesthetic practices. (shrink)

Circumscribed delusional beliefs can follow brain injury. We suggest that these involve anomalous perceptual experiences created by a deficit to the person's perceptual system, and misinterpretation of these experiences due to biased reasoning. We use the Capgras delusion (the claim that one or more of one's close relatives has been replaced by an exact replica or impostor) to illustrate this argument. Our account maintains that people voicing this delusion suffer an impairment that leads to faces being perceived as drained of (...) their normal affective significance, and an additional reasoning bias that leads them to put greater weight on forming beliefs that are observationally adequate rather than beliefs that are a conservative extension of their existing stock. We show how this position can integrate issues involved in the philosophy and psychology of belief, and examine the scope for mutually beneficial interaction. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are no people. If identity isn't what matters in survival, psychological connectedness isn't what matters either. Further, fissioning cases do not support the claim that connectedness is what matters. I consider Peter Unger's view that what matters is a continuous physical realization of a core psychology. I conclude that if identity isn't what matters in survival, nothing matters. This conclusion is deployed to argue that there are no people. Objections to Eliminativism are considered, especially that (...) morality cannot survive the loss of persons. (shrink)

1. Introduction For philosophers, the current phase of the debate with which this volume is concerned can be taken to have begun in 1986, when Jane Heal and Robert Gordon published their seminal papers (Heal, 1986; Gordon, 1986; though see also, for example, Stich, 1981; Dennett, 1981). They raised a dissenting voice against what was becoming a philosophical orthodoxy: that our everyday, or folk, understanding of the mind should be thought of as theoretical. In opposition to this picture, Gordon and (...) Heal argued that we are not theorists but simulators. For psychologists, the debate had begun somewhat earlier when Heider (1958) produced his work on lay psychology; and in more recent times the psychological debate had continued in developmental psychology and in work on animal cognition. (shrink)

This paper will argue that there are no people. Let me summarize the argument. In part II of what follows, I argue that if identity isn't what matters in survival, psychological connectedness isn't what matters either. Psychological connectedness, according to Derek Parfit, is the 'holding of particular direct psychological connections,' for example, when a belief, a desire, or some other psychological feature continues to be had ; psychological connectedness consists in two other relations—resemblance plus a cause that produces it. For (...) our purposes, to say of a relation that it is 'what matters in survival' is to say that it carries the burden of responsibility, remorse, and regret for past misdeeds; and that it is what makes rational the anticipation of, and the special hopes and fears we have about, our own future experiences. A consequence of II is that if identity isn't what matters in survival, either something other than psychological connectedness is what matters or nothing matters. (shrink)

In modal subordination, a modal sentence is interpreted relative to a hypothetical scenario introduced in an earlier sentence. In this paper, I argue that this phenomenon reflects the fact that the interpretation of modals is an ANAPHORIC process. Modal morphemes introduce sets of possible worlds, representing alternative hypothetical scenarios, as entities into the discourse model. Their interpretation depends on evoking sets of worlds recording described and reference scenarios, and relating such sets to one another using familiar notions of restricted, preferential (...) quantification. This proposal relies on an extended model of environments in dynamic semantics to keep track of associations between possible worlds and ordinary individuals; it assumes that modal meanings and other lexical meanings encapsulate quantification over possible worlds. These two innovations are required in order for modals to refer to sets of possible worlds directly as static objects in place of the inherently dynamic objects—quite different from the referents of pronouns and tenses—used in previous accounts. The simpler proposal that results offers better empirical coverage and suggests a new parallel between modal and temporal interpretation. (shrink)

: This paper reconstructs the evolution of Novalis’ thought concerning being, nature, and knowledge. In his earlier writings (above all the Fichte-Studies) he argues that unitary being underlies finite phenomena and that we can never know, but only strive towards knowledge of, being. In contrast, his later writings, principally the Allgemeine Brouillon, maintain that the unitary reality underlying finite things can be known, because it is an organic whole which develops and organises itself according to an intelligible pattern. Novalis equates (...) this whole with nature. However, because this organic whole exercises spontaneity in assuming particular forms of organisation, we can never know why it assumes just these particular forms; nature therefore remains partly unintelligible to us. I argue that Novalis’ intellectual shift towards the idea that the whole can be known is motivated by his concern to explain how the modern, “disenchanted,” view of nature could be overcome. I also argue that by recognising this shift, we can resolve the dispute between Frank and Beiser as to whether Novalis thinks that the absolute can be known. (shrink)

: I argue that Irigaray's recent work develops a theoretically cogent and politically radical form of realist essentialism. I suggest that she identifies sexual difference with a fundamental difference between the rhythms of percipient fluids constituting women's and men's bodies, supporting this with a philosophy of nature that she justifies phenomenologically and ethically. I explore the politics Irigaray derives from this philosophy, which affirms the sexes' rights to realize the possibilities of their rhythmically diverse bodies.

According to the theory theory of folk psychology, our engagement in the folk psychological practices of prediction, interpretation and explanation draws on a rich body of knowledge about psychological matters. According to the simulation theory, in apparent contrast, a fundamental role is played by our ability to identify with another person in imagination and to replicate or re-enact aspects of the other person’s mental life. But amongst theory theorists, and amongst simulation theorists, there are significant differences of approach.

This article discusses the paradox of exclusion/inclusion: U.S. health policy prohibits Latinos who fall under certain classifications from accessing health services and insurance yet permits them to be human subjects in health research. We aim to advance the discussion of health research ethics post the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in Latinos by (a) tracing the impacts of policy exclusion and the social context of anti-Latino sentiment on Latinos' low participation rates in health research and inequitable access to treatment modalities; (b) challenging (...) researchers to address social sources of vulnerabilities; and (c) offering recommendations on adapting a social justice ethical stance to address these challenges, which are part of the Tuskegee Study legacy. (shrink)

We present an algorithm for simultaneously constructing both the syntax and semantics of a sentence using a Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG). This approach captures naturally and elegantly the interaction between pragmatic and syntactic constraints on descriptions in a sentence, and the inferential interactions between multiple descriptions in a sentence. At the same time, it exploits linguistically motivated, declarative specifications of the discourse functions of syntactic constructions to make contextually appropriate syntactic choices.

In this article I argue that the Early German Romantics understand the absolute, or being, to be an infinite whole encompassing all the things of the world and all their causal relations. The Romantics argue that we strive endlessly to know this whole but only acquire an expanding, increasingly systematic body of knowledge about finite things, a system of knowledge which can never be completed. We strive to know the whole, the Romantics claim, because we have an original feeling of (...) it that motivates our striving. I then examine two different Romantic accounts of this feeling. The first, given by Novalis, is that feeling gives us a kind of access to the absolute which logically precedes any conceptualisation. I argue that this account is problematic and that a second account, offered by Friedrich Schlegel, is preferable. On this account, we feel the absolute in that we intuit it aesthetically in certain natural phenomena. This form of intuition is partly cognitive and partly non-cognitive, and therefore it motivates us to strive to convert our intuition into full knowledge. (shrink)

Bringing together the work of Hannah Arendt, poststructuralist and hermeneutic theories of narrative, and feminist standpoint theory, this book examines the role of narrative in both ideological and critical political thinking. The book recasts feminist affirmations (and critiques) of "marginal experience" by situating experience and identity within a theory of narrative and it identifies the specific narrative strategies that impede, and those that facilitate, feminist and democratic struggles.

I argue that being wide awake is an epistemic virtue which enables me to recognize immediately that I'm wide awake. Also I argue that dreams are imaginings and that the wide awake mind can immediately discern the difference between imaginings and vivid sense experience. Descartes need only pinch himself.

The meanings of donkey sentences cannot be captured using a procedure which, like Montague’s, uses the existential quantifiers of classical logic to translate indefinites and the variables to translate pronouns. The treatment of these examples requires meanings which depend on the context in which sentences appear, and thus necessitates a logic which models this context to some extent. If context is represented as the information conveyed in discourse, and the meanings of pronouns are enriched to depend on this information, the (...) result is the E-Type approach (ETA) adapted by Heim (1990) from proposals in Evans (1980) and Cooper (1979). If the context is represented as a list of potential referents, and the meanings of indefinites are enriched to introduce new referents into this list, the result is a compositional formulation like Groenendijk and Stokhof’s (1990) of the discourse representation theory (DRT) of Kamp (1981) and Heim (1982). Either tack suffices to capture the way in which the referents of he and it systematically correspond to the alternative possibilities described by the antecedent. Disjunction offers a parallel way of introducing alternatives in the antecedent of a conditional, as shown in (2). (shrink)

_Two notions of autonomy are distinguished. The respective_ _denials that psychology is autonomous from neurobiology are neuron_ _doctrines, moderate and radical. According to the moderate neuron_ _doctrine, inter-disciplinary interaction need not aim at reduction. It is_ _proposed that it is more plausible that there is slippage from the_ _moderate to the radical neuron doctrine than that there is confusion_ _between the radical neuron doctrine and the trivial version._.

In this article I critically re-examine Julia Kristeva's view that becoming a speaking subject requires psychical matricide: violent separation from the maternal body. I propose an alternative, non-matricidal conception of subjectivity, in part by drawing out anti-matricidal strands in Kristeva's own thought, including her view that early mother–child relations are triangular. Whereas she understands this triangle in terms of a first imaginary father, I re-interpret this triangle using Donald Winnicott's idea of potential space and Jessica Benjamin's idea of an intersubjective (...) space of thirdness. I argue that this space provides a maternal third term: a relation of connection and difference between two, a relation that inherits the affective, mobile, generative qualities of the maternal body as the infant (according to Kristeva) imagines it. This connecting space allows both mothers and children to emerge as subjects in their own right. I then suggest that potential-maternal space expands into language, so that language intrinsically allows the possibility of a speaking position of connection with the mother. Entrance into language need not entail separation or matricide: the problem is not language as such but the particular way that speech and logos have been defined historically. (shrink)

In this article I rethink death and mortality on the basis of birth and natality, drawing on the work of the Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero. She understands birth to be the corporeal event whereby a unique person emerges from the mother’s body into the common world. On this basis Cavarero reconceives death as consisting in bodily dissolution and re-integration into cosmic life. This impersonal conception of death coheres badly with her view that birth is never exclusively material but always (...) has ontological significance as the appearance of someone new and singular in the world of relations with others. This view of birth calls for a relational conception of death, which I develop in this article. On this conception, death is always collective, affecting all those with whom the one who dies has maintained relations: As such, our different deaths shade into one another. Moreover, because each person is unique in virtue of consisting of a unique web of relations with others, death always happens to persons as webs of relations. Death is relational in this way as a corporeal, and specifically biological, phenomenon, to which we are subject as bodily beings and as interdependent living organisms. I explore this with reference to Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir of her mother’s death from cancer. Finally I argue that, on this relational conception, death is something to be feared. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce a system, Sentence Planning Using Description, which generates collocations within the paradigm of sentence planning. SPUD simultaneously constructs the semantics and syntax of a sentence using a Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG). This approach captures naturally and elegantly the interaction between pragmatic and syntactic constraints on descriptions in a sentence, and the inferential and lexical interactions between multiple descriptions in a sentence. At the same time, it exploits linguistically motivated, declarative speci- fications of the discourse (...) functions of syntactic constructions to make contextually appropriate syntactic choices. (shrink)

Until recently, there has been relatively little self-conscious reflection - from either environmental or continental philosophers - on the specific contributions which continental philosophy, insofar as it is a distinctive tradition, might make to environmental thought. This situation has begun to change with several recent publications, such as Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine's edited collection Ecophenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself, and Bruce V. Foltz and Robert Frodeman's collection Rethinking Nature: Essays in Environmental Philosophy. This special issue aims to (...) continue the discussion of how the continental tradition might advance or transform environmental thinking, both by reconsidering authors such as Kant, Schelling, Nietzsche and Heidegger, and by considering how themes and concepts from continental philosophy and social theory - including Merleau-Ponty's concept of flesh, Foucault's notion of discipline, and Bourdieu's social critique of taste - bear on environmental practice and theory. (shrink)

Although its roots go back at least to Spinoza, religious naturalism is once again becoming a self–conscious option in religious thinking. This article seeks to (1) provide a generic notion of religious naturalism, (2) sketch my own “minimalist” variety of religious naturalism, and (3) view the science–religion dialogue from both of these perspectives. This last will include reflection on the nature of scientific practices, the contributions of religious traditions to moral reflection, and Ursula Goodenough's “religiopoiesis.”.

Is a Christian naturalism possible? It sounds like a contradiction in terms. However, depending on the meaning of the terms, it is not only possible but highly desirable. The purpose of this article is to sketch the possibility of a Christian naturalism, drawing on a number of twentieth- and twenty-first-century theologians. Naturalism is a contrast term, like “left” or “up,” which gets its meaning partly from opposition to another term, in this case “supernaturalism” or sometimes “supranaturalism.” It is a set (...) of beliefs which focuses on this world. (Of course, there is no other world, according to naturalism, but since Christians and others have often spoken of God, soul, and/or heaven as distinct from .. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Women's Place in the Hegelian State The Organic State and Individual Freedom Tensions in the Organic Model: For and Against Sex Equality Animal State, Vegetal State: Hegel versus Early German Romanticism Notes Abbreviations References.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mother-Daughter Relations and the Maternal in Irigaray and ChodorowAlison StoneGod the Father and Jesus the Son; Abraham and Isaac; Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus; Zeus and Dionysus; Hamlet and his father; Fyodor Karamazov and his three sons—representations of and fantasies about father-son relationships are central to Western culture and philosophy. Within philosophy, one thinks of Hegel’s conception of the dialectic in terms of the divine trinity, Nietzsche’s preoccupation with Christ (...) and Dionysus, or Kierkegaard’s meditations on Abraham’s near-murder of Isaac. In contrast, mother-daughter relationships have been shrouded in near-universal silence—much more so than representations of either mothers and sons (Oedipus and Jocasta; Mary and Jesus) or fathers and daughters (Agamemnon and Iphigenia; Lear and Cordelia). Female and feminist theorists, writers, and artists have done much to bring mother-daughter relationships into representation and to reimagine the maternal beyond its traditional subservience to father-son dynasties.Amongst continental feminists, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva have, of course, made major contributions to this task. Within Anglophone feminism, too, feminist psychoanalytic thinkers have sought to rectify Freud’s overemphasis on the paternal and on father-son relations. Nancy Chodorow’s important work in this area paints a portrait of contemporary mother-daughter relations which seems, at first sight, strikingly similar to Irigaray’s. Both thinkers suggest that mothers and their infant daughters experience a unique level of mutual identification. But under patriarchy—specifically, given exclusively female childrearing for Chodorow and given the absence of any symbolization of female subjectivity for Irigaray—daughters are forced to turn to the father [End Page 45] to achieve any psychical independence from their mothers. The independence that daughters thus attain coexists with ongoing psychical identification with their mothers, so that women oscillate endlessly between separation from and mergence with their mothers. If the dominant template for father-son relations involves violent rivalry followed by guilt-ridden father-worship as the cement of fraternal society, as Freud described in Totem and Taboo (Freud 2001), the template for mother-daughter relations involves hostile separation constantly undone by ongoing fusion. This difference in templates maps the social-symbolic difference between the paternal position of power/authority/law and the maternal position of powerlessness/silence/body.However, the manifest similarities between Irigaray’s and Chodorow’s pictures are embedded in deep theoretical differences. The details of their descriptions of mother-daughter relations differ, and they give different explanations for why these relations follow a logic of separation and fusion: female mothering for Chodorow, the paternal symbolic order for Irigaray. They make different proposals for how to change these relations: shared parenting for Chodorow versus symbolic transformation for Irigaray. They hold conflicting conceptions of the self and of language, reflecting their heterogeneous psychoanalytic backgrounds in Anglo-American object relations versus French Lacanianism and poststructuralism. These deep differences raise questions about whether Chodorow and Irigaray are discussing mother-daughter relations in the same sense at all.Bringing Irigaray and Chodorow together across their different intellectual contexts, this article compares and partially synthesizes their visions of the maternal and of mother-daughter relations. By integrating their perspectives, we can move beyond the “impasse” between Lacanian and object-relations feminisms that dominated psychoanalytic feminist debates in the 1980s and 1990s (Brennan 1991)—debates that have crucially shaped continental feminists’ orientation towards questions of sexual difference, language and representation, and the embodied psyche.The impasse in question has at least two strands. First, for object-relations feminists such as Chodorow, our pre-Oedipal relations with our mothers shape us so that we acquire “core” selves with a fairly stable gender. This approach elevates the mother in importance (compared to classical psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the father), but it loses sight of psychic and gender instability. This can make Chodorow’s views seem rather dated given the impact of Judith Butler’s work and her emphasis on the unstable, shifting nature of gender. Lacanian feminists such as Jacquelyn Rose (Rose 1986) reemphasize psychic instability, but they do so by stressing that the subject is split between paternal language and the pre-Oedipal maternal realm, which means that these theorists also... (shrink)

Even while progressive educators and feminist standpoint theorists defend the value of marginalized perspectives, many marginal-voice texts continue to be deprecated in academic contexts due to their seemingly "unprofessional," engaged, and creative styles. Thus, scholars who seek to defend a feminist and multicultural curriculum need a theory of knowledge that goes beyond current standpoint theory and accounts for the unorthodox format in which many maringal standpoints appear. In response to this challenge, this essay draws on feminist and postcolonial critics of (...) objectivity, including Dorothy Smith, Chandra Mohanty, Barrios de Chungara, and Arhundati Roy to theorize the epistemic value of texts that respond with passion and creativity to marginalized people's struggles. In conclusion, the author distinguishes ethically oriented engagement with such texts from mere "politicized teaching," and she suggests ways to teach such texts that cultivate their critical potential. (shrink)

This paper traces the ethnocentric structure of U.S.-published anthologies in global ethics and related fields and it examines the ethical and philosophical implications of such ethnocentrism. The author argues that the ethnocentric structure of prominent work in global ethics not only impairs the field's ability to prepare students for global citizenship but contributes to the ideological processes that maintain global inequities. In conclusion, the author makes a case that fuller engagement with global-South and indigenous writers on global issues can encourage (...) U.S. students and scholars to examine more closely the ideologies that order our lives and to risk the kind of selfexamination that is necessary in order to build effective relationships with diverse global communities. (shrink)

French materialist feminists such as Christine Delphy and Monique Wittig maintain that the social fact of women’s exploitation by men within the family pre-exists and produces gender differences as well as the perception that men and women belong to different biological sexes. They take this position to be ‘materialist’ because it puts social facts prior to ideas and beliefs and so puts the ‘material’ prior to the ‘ideal’. However, I shall claim, drawing on arguments of Sebastiano Timpanaro’s, that this is (...) an incomplete form of materialism because it neglects the shaping of social facts by their interaction with biological facts, notably the biological difference between the sexes. Wittig, though, denies that there is any ‘fact’ of biological sexual difference. Wittig claims that we only believe in and perceive two biological sexes due to the influence of gender expectations. I will try to show that Wittig’s arguments for this claim undermine themselves and actually presuppose that there are two biological sexes. I will conclude that, given that there are two biological sexes, a fully materialist form of feminism must take account of sex difference in theorising gender inequalities. (shrink)

In response to Mader's and Deutscher's questions, the author defends her approach to reading Irigaray and Butler, which entails extending the ideas of these thinkers into areas of thought with which they do not engage directly themselves. This involves relating Irigaray's ideas to the tradition of the philosophy of nature and interpreting Butler as offering, in spite of her focus on the genealogy of claims about sex, also a theory of sex itself, a theory of sex as an effect entirely (...) of gender. This approach to reading differs from Irigaray's own reading method of expanding and transforming philosophies in light of their constitutive exclusions. An example of this, explored here, is Irigaray's expansion and transformation of Merleau-Ponty's late ontology of flesh in light of its constitutive exclusion, the "maternal sojourn." This article also asks whether rhythmic sexual difference, which the author has attempted to differentiate from biological sex difference, ultimately remains tied to biological sex difference. This commentary suggests that it does but that reference to biological sex difference need not be politically problematic. Finally, the author asks whether the metaphysics of potentials and tendencies that she attributes to Irigaray impedes social change by inevitably reinstalling the actual as the horizon of possibility. Irigaray's strategy of reading texts and cultures for their constitutive exclusions offers a solution to this problem. (shrink)

The contemporary crisis in AmericanEducation that has resulted in Bush sponsoredfederal legislation for accountability andstandardized testing is the setting for anessay introducing the work of Frenchphilosopher, Julia Kristeva. The comparison isbetween an ``educated subject'' that might wellcome to be constituted in schooling at presentand a ``subject-in-process.'' In a strikinglydifferent vision of human potential, the latterindividual, with open-ended, non-perfectdevelopment, entails the possibility ofpersonal, societal and educational change.Kristeva's theory, based greatly in areinterpretation of Freud, and incorporatingthe semiotic, abjection and love, and revolt (...) iscentral. (shrink)

The aim of this book is to demonstrate that American Indians have a world-view that is consistent, intelligible, and legitimate. It is a deft and self-aware exemplification of the task of cross-cultural comparison. The overall strategy in the argument is to employ a modified version of Nelson Goodman’s notion of world-making and then construct a simplified model of the American Indian worldview. Norton-Smith accomplishes this difficult task and in the process modifies Goodman in a realist direction, making a strong case (...) that the Native view deserves intellectual respect. The writing is accessible and shows a deft and helpful interplay between abstract language and concrete illustrative .. (shrink)