An examination of the philosophy of Anne Conway (1631-1679) and the main aspects of her fascinating work, Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy.

This paper offers a discussion of Conway’s account of omnipresence, as found in her only published work, Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (1690). It is argued that Conway proposes a radical approach to understanding the nature of the divine presence in the world. After delineating different approaches to the question of omnipresence that can be found in the philosophical and theological tradition, it is argued that Conway offers a significant and original account that contrasts with the more (...) traditional notions of divine presence based on God’s location, knowledge, power, and creative activity. This account is informed by an exploration of Conway’s underlying Platonist commitments and her arguments regarding the need for a mediating principle, “Christ” or “Adam Kadmon,” between God and creation. Following this, it is argued that there is a notion of omnipresence to be found in Conway’s philosophy centred on a Platonist-inspired “participation-presence,” which offers a dynamic sense of the growing presence of God in the world. The paper then concludes with some more general reflections upon the manner in which Conway’s account of omnipresence fits into the wider intellectual climate of the time, including radical reimaginings of both the nature of God and his presence in the world. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper seeks to shed light on the often-overlooked account of divine and human freedom presented by Anne Conway in her Principles of the Most Ancient Modern Philosophy, partly through a...

This paper considers the largely unexplored relation between Schopenhauer’s metaphysical system of Will and the philosophical therapy offered by Stoicism. By focusing on three key texts from disparate points in Schopenhauer’s philosophical career, as well as considering live debates regarding the metaphorical nature of his thought and his soteriology, I argue that the general view of straightforward opposition between himself and the Stoics is not the correct one. Rather, there are deep parallels to be found between the therapeutic aspects of (...) The World as Will and Representation (WWR) and the ethical recommendations made by the ancient Stoics. I will argue, further, that Schopenhauer recognised these similarities between his thought and Stoic ethics, often defending what he sees as the true essence of Stoicism. I conclude with some thoughts regarding the adoption of Stoic ideals by Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, in relation to their reading of Schopenhauer’s work. (shrink)

This paper considers the conception of the Triune God, soteriology and eschatology in Anne Conway’s metaphysics. After outlining some of the key features of her thought, including her account of a timeless God who is nevertheless intimately present in creation, I will argue that her conception of the Trinity offers a distinctive role for Christ and the Holy Spirit to play in her philosophical system. I also propose an interpretation of Conway’s eschatology, in which time is understood as grounded in (...) a never-ending soteriological process of the overall movement of creatures towards perfection and a state of spirituality. (shrink)

Kant and Sartre are two of the most significant figures in modern philosophy, and yet there has, until very recently, been little comparative research undertaken on them. Despite dealing with many shared philosophical issues, they have traditionally been taken to be too opposed to each other to render any search for possible parallels between their works a useful enterprise. Indeed, Sartre is often taken to be one of Kant’s most vocal critics in the literature, and as rather indebted to other (...) major figures, such as Husserl and Heidegger. As a consequence, often, where comparative analysis has been done upon Kant and Sartre, the emphasis has been on their differences, rather than on their similarities. However, as recent research has begun to show, the story is not that straightforward and there is much to be explored with regard to parallels between Kant and Sartre. Baiasu has characterised Sartre’s relation to Kant as one of an “anxiety of influence” – Sartre desires to explicitly distance himself from Kant, but this obscures some deeper underlying parallels between them1. Such parallels can form a foundation for productive dialogue, more widely, between the schools of Kantian “Critical philosophy” and existentialism2. (shrink)

This book examines the metaphilosophy that underlies the work of Arthur Schopenhauer and discusses important questions concerning the proper nature and aims of philosophy. It sheds vital new light on a thinker whose ideas continue to both provoke and inspire.

This volume collects 12 essays by various contributors on the subject of the importance and influence of Schopenhauer’s doctoral dissertation for both Schopenhauer’s more well-known philosophy and the ongoing discussion of the subject of the principle of sufficient reason. The contributions deal with the historical context of Schopenhauer’s reflections, their relationship to idealism, the insights they hold for Schopenhauer’s views of consciousness and sensation, and how they illuminate Schopenhauer’s theory of action. This is the first full-length, English volume on Schopenhauer’s (...) Fourfold Root and its relevance for Schopenhauer’s philosophy. The thought-provoking essays collected in this volume will undoubtedly enrich the burgeoning field of Schopenhauer-studies. (shrink)

This paper seeks to illuminate Schopenhauer’s notion of the negation or denial of the will by investigating the figure of the saint within his philosophy. We argue that various discussions in Schop...

This paper formulates Schopenhauer’s account of the development of the individual, with emphasis on the drive towards discerning truth about the essence of the world, be it through philosophy, religion, or the natural sciences, and the concomitant search for consolation in the face of the pessimistic truths about human existence.In this regard, the paper analyses the often largely ignored passages‘On Man’s Need for Metaphysics’ and ‘On the Different Periods of Life’,in order to reflect upon how he views the cognitive and (...) therapeutic needs that all individuals feel throughout their lives, and how these can evolve through the different stages of life, from childhood, through maturity, to old age.Such an account can help fill out our understanding not only of various parts of Schopenhauer’s system, but also of the wider therapeutic aims of his philosophy. (shrink)

Volume 27, Issue 6, December 2019, Page 1239-1240.

This paper places Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason within the historical context of the pantheism controversy between Mendelssohn and Jacobi. I argue that reading Religion with this context in mind shines new light upon passages connected with the need for a moral archetype and prototype in the form of Christ, as well as various comments upon the relation between Christianity and Judaism. Within this new viewpoint, we can also see Religion as ultimately concerned with promoting Christianity, broadly (...) understood, as the most appropriate historical vehicle for the promulgation of rational religion, and thus as a cornerstone of the Enlightenment project. (shrink)

Review of 'Kant's Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason: A Commentary' - DiCenso.

Volume 27, Issue 6, December 2019, Page 1239-1240.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's rationale for supporting the development and approval of BiDil for heart failure specifically in black patients was based on under-powered, post hoc subgroup analyses of two relatively old trials , which were further complicated by substantial covariate imbalances between racial groups. Indeed, the only statistically significant difference observed between black and white patients was found without any adjustment for potential confounders in samples that were unlikely to have been adequately randomized. Meanwhile, because the accepted (...) baseline therapy for heart failure has substantially improved since these trials took place, their results cannot be combined with data from the more recent trial amongst black patients alone. There is therefore little scientific evidence to support the approval of BiDil only for use in black patients, and the FDA's rationale fails to consider the ethical consequences of recognizing racial categories as valid markers of innate biological difference, and permitting the development of group-specific therapies that are subject to commercial incentives rather than scientific evidence or therapeutic imperatives. This paper reviews the limitations in the scientific evidence used to support the approval of BiDil only for use in black patients; calls for further analysis of the V-HeFT I and II data which might clarify whether responses to H-I vary by race; and evaluates the consequences of commercial incentives to develop racialized medicines. We recommend that the FDA revise the procedures they use to examine applications for race-based therapies to ensure that these are based on robust scientific claims and do not undermine the aims of the 1992 Revitalization Act. (shrink)

Sociology is experiencing what can only be described as hyperdifferentiation of theories - there are now many approaches competing for attention in the intellectual arena. From this perspective, we should see a weeding out of theories to a small number, but this is not likely to occur because each of the many theoretical perspectives has a resource base of adherents. As a result, theories in sociology do not compete head on with each other as much as they coexist. This (...) seminal reference work was brought together with an eye to capturing the diversity of theoretical activity in sociology - specifically the forefront of theory. Contributors describe what they themselves are doing right now rather than what others have done in the past. The goal of this volume is to allow prominent theorists working in a variety of traditions - who wouldn't usually come together - to review their work. The chapters in this volume represent a mix of theoretical orientations and strategies, but these these theories are diverse and represent the prominent theoretical discussions in sociology today. Some areas included are: Section I: Theoretical Methodologies and Strategies Section II: The Cultural Turn in Sociological Theorizing Section III: Theorizing Interaction Processes Section IV: Theorizing from the Systemic and Macrolevel Section V: New Directions in Evolutionary Theorizing Section VI: Theorizing on Power, Conflict, and Change SectionVII: Theorizing from Assumptions of Rationality This handbook will be of interest to those wanting a broad spectrum and overview of late 20th - early 21st century sociological theory. (shrink)

Creating Future People offers readers a fast-paced primer on how new genetic technologies will enable parents to influence the traits of their children, including their intelligence, moral capacities, physical appearances, and immune systems. It deftly explains the science of gene editing and embryo selection, and raises the central moral questions with colorful language and a brisk style. Jonathan Anomaly takes seriously the diversity of preferences parents have, and the limits policymakers face in regulating what could soon be a global (...) market for reproductive technology. He argues that once embryo selection for complex traits happens it will change the moral landscape by altering the incentives available to parents. All of us will take an interest in the traits everyone else selects, and this will present coordination problems that previous writers on genetic enhancement have failed to consider. Anomaly navigates difficult ethical issues with vivid language and scientifically-informed speculation about how genetic engineering will transform humanity. Key Features: Offers clear explanations of scientific concepts Explores important moral questions without academic jargon Brings discoveries from different fields together to give us a sense of where humanity is headed. (shrink)

Two experiments employed experience sampling to examine the factors associated with a prospective and retrospective focus during mind wandering. Experiment One explored the contribution of working memory and indicated that participants generally prospect when the task does not require continuous monitoring. Experiment Two demonstrated that in the context of reading, interest in what was read suppressed both past and future-related task-unrelated-thought. Moreover, in disinterested individuals the temporal focus during mind wandering depended on the amount of experience with the topic matter—less (...) experienced individuals tended to prospect, while more experienced individuals tended to retrospect. Together these results suggest that during mind wandering participants’ are inclined to prospect as long as the task does not require their undivided attention and raise the intriguing possibility that autobiographical associations with the current task environment have the potential to cue the disinterested mind. (shrink)

Rawls’ primary legacy is not that he standardised a particular view of justice, but rather that he standardised a particular method of arguing about it: justification via reflective equilibrium. Yet this method, despite such standardisation, is often misunderstood in at least four ways. First, we miss its continuity across his various works. Second, we miss the way in which it unifies other justificatory ideas, such as the ‘original position’ and an ‘overlapping consensus’. Third, we miss its fundamentally empirical character, given (...) that it turns facts about the thoughts in our head into principles for the regulation of our political existence. Fourth, we miss some of the implications of that empiricism, including its tension with moral realism, relativism, and conservatism. (shrink)

Stephen Laurence and Eric Margolis have recently argued that certain kinds of regress arguments against the language of thought (LOT) hypothesis as an account of how we understand natural languages have been answered incorrectly or inadequately by supporters of LOT ('Regress arguments against the language of thought', Analysis, 57 (1), 60-6, J 97). They argue further that this does not undermine the LOT hypothesis, since the main sources of support for LOT are (or might be) independent of it providing an (...) account of how we understand natural language. In my paper I seek to refute both these claims, and reinstate the putative explanation of natural language understanding as a necessarily central part of the support for LOT. The main argument exploits the fact that Laurence and Margolis give too little weight to the ideas (a) that LOT might be innate (b) that for LOT supporters a semantic theory must apply to in-the-head tokens, not linguistic utterances. (shrink)

Students of perception have long known that perceptual constancy is an important aspect of our perceptual interaction with the world. Here is a simple example of the phenomenon concerning color perception: there is some ordinary sense in which an unpainted ceramic coffee cup made from a uniform material looks a uniform color when it is viewed under uneven illumination, even though the light reflected by the shaded regions to our eyes is quite different from the light reflected by the unshaded (...) regions to our eyes (see figure 1). Or consider this example concerning size perception: there is some ordinary sense in which two telephone poles look the same size when the first is viewed from 100 meters and when the second is viewed from 1 meter, even though the visual angle subtended by the two poles on our retinae is very different (see figure 2). Or consider this example concerning shape perception: there is some ordinary sense in which a penny looks round both when viewed head on and when viewed from an acute angle, even though the area projected by the penny onto our retinae under these two conditions is very different (see figure 3). Or, finally, consider this example concerning auditory volume perception (which I cannot depict graphically): there is some ordinary sense in which a speaker’s voice sounds the same volume when heard from across the room and when heard from a distance of 1 meter, even though the energy striking our ears under these two conditions is very different. (shrink)

The paper investigates an elliptical construction, Clarification Ellipsis, that occurs in dialogue. We suggest that this provides data that demonstrates that updates resulting from utterances cannot be defined in purely semantic terms, contrary to the prevailing assumptions of existing approaches to dynamic semantics. We offer a computationally oriented analysis of the resolution of ellipsis in certain cases of dialogue clarification. We show that this goes beyond standard techniques used in anaphora and ellipsis resolution and requires operations on highly structured, linguistically (...) heterogeneous representations. We characterize these operations and the representations on which they operate. We offer an analysis couched in a version of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar combined with a theory of information states (IS) in dialogue. We sketch an algorithm for the process of utterance integration in IS which leads to grounding or clarification. The account proposed here has direct applications to the theory of attitude reports, an issue which is explored briefly in the concluding remarks of the paper. (shrink)

This expands the proposal in 'Is consciousness only a property of individual cells?' to attempt to cover all relevant psychological, neuroscientific and philosophical issues. Some of the material is now dated (in 2011) but chiefly in the sense that tentative proposals have become firmer views for me. An example of this is the clarification of complementarities in "Are our spaces made of words?'.

I argue that intentional psychology does not stand in need of vindication by a lower-level implementation theory from cognitive science, in particular the representational theory of mind (RTM), as most famously Jerry Fodor has argued. The stance of the paper is novel in that I claim this holds even if one, in line with Fodor, views intentional psychology as an empirical theory, and its theoretical posits as as real as those of other sciences. I consider four metaphysical arguments for the (...) idea that intentional psychological states, such as beliefs, must be seen as requiring in-the-head mental representations for us to be able to understand their characteristic causal powers and argue that none of them validly generate their desired conclusions. I go on to argue that RTM, or some computational version thereof, is not motivated by appeal to the nature of cognitive science research either. I conclude that intentional psychology, though an empirical theory, is autonomous from details of lower level mechanism in a way that renders RTM unwarranted. (shrink)

The Consensus Statement of the Third International Congress on Concussion in Sport in November 2008 defined concussion as a “complex pathophysiologic process affecting the brain, induced by traumatic biochemical forces.” Definitions of concussion vary slightly between various professional organizations of neurosurgeons, neurologists, and orthopedic surgeons, but all share the common characteristics of trauma affecting the head or body resulting in transient neurologic deficits or symptoms. Underlying the symptoms of concussion is a complex pathophysiologic process at the cellular level. While (...) concussion is typically thought of as resulting from a direct impact to the head, a concussion can also be sustained as a result of an impact to the body causing the force of the impact to be transmitted to and absorbed by the brain. (shrink)

Many of us have experienced a peculiar feeling of freedom, of the world being open before us. This is the feeling that is captured by phrases like “the freedom of the open road” and “free spirits,” and, to quote Phillip Larkin, “free bloody birds” going “down the long slide / To happiness, endlessly.” This feeling is associated with the ideas that my life could go in many different directions and that there is a vast range of things that I could (...) become. It arises in concert with a wide range of human experiences, including experiences of artistic creation, play, fun, and resistance to authority. This freedom of openness and spontaneity, which I call spontaneous freedom, is central to our ordinary talk about freedom. Yet it is a phenomenon largely ignored in discussions of freedom in contemporary moral philosophy. This is because moral philosophers are primarily concerned to identify the sort of freedom that is a prerequisite for moral responsibility, and so focus on deliberate, voluntary action rooted in rational choice. When moral philosophers do discuss spontaneous freedom, it is often to disparage it as, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, the freedom of “the wanton” whose liberty is merely that of “anarchic impulsive behavior.” My dissertation develops a theory of spontaneous freedom and of the role it does and should play in our lives, including our moral and political lives. I argue that, to do full justice to the human aspiration for freedom, moral and political theory must recognize the value of spontaneity. Through a study of characters from stories and films by Virginia Woolf, Saki, Akira Kurosawa, and Aman Sethi, I develop a phenomenological account of the nature of spontaneous freedom. I argue that we experience spontaneous freedom when we experience our actions as arising out of ourselves but not fixed in advance either by the decisions of other agents or by our own preexisting commitments or plans. I further argue that spontaneous freedom is valuable because it allows for the distinctive pleasure of feeling that one’s life is unforetold and that one is among the sources of novelty in the world, a feeling that is central to artistic creativity. It also affords solace from the anxiety associated with the inevitability of death. As with many experiences, like falling in love or seeing an alpine lake, experiences of spontaneous freedom are most valuable when they are veridical. But even the subjective experience of spontaneous freedom, I suggest, activates our awareness of and openness to possibility. Achieving this awareness, at least on occasion, is valuable because it provides us with a sense of our own psychological potential and sharpens a skill that contributes to practical deliberation. My claim that spontaneous freedom is valuable conflicts with a popular account of the self. According to that account—endorsed by a number of moral philosophers but most famously associated with Christine Korsgaard—the ideal self is one that is well-ordered, actively constituted through rational deliberation. Such integrity theories of the self are attractive because they provide an account of agency according to which ideal moral agents invariably endorse their own actions and beliefs. Integrity theories view freedom as involving rational, deliberative control of one’s actions. But I argue that integrity theories forbid well-constituted moral agents to seek out experiences of spontaneous freedom: such agents must act in a manner that they antecedently and reflectively endorse, while spontaneous freedom requires acting in a manner not antecedently fixed by one’s own decisions. Insofar as spontaneous freedom is a kind of freedom that we do and should value, my account exerts pressure on this standard view of agency and the self. My account of spontaneous freedom also has important political implications. One version of liberal theory holds that the only sort of political freedom worth having is the freedom of each individual to effectively exercise choice compatibly with every other individual doing likewise. On this picture, I have all of the freedom that I could want if I am able to choose autonomously and act in accordance with my choices. But I argue that a community that secures this liberal variety of freedom does not yet provide its members with all the freedom for which people rightly yearn. When public and private institutions arrange our circumstances in ways that make the courses of our lives predictable, our own choices about how to act may be largely settled by the plans and decisions of other agents. This in turn makes it difficult for us to regard our futures as open in the way that is characteristic of experiences of spontaneous freedom. States should promote spontaneous freedom by providing the material and social preconditions for us to feel that our lives could head in radically different and unanticipated directions. (shrink)

Proprioception has been considered, within neuroscience, in the context of the control of movement. Here we discuss a possible second role for this 'sixth sense', pleasure in and of movement,homologous with the recently described affective touch. We speculate on its evolution and place in human society and suggest that pleasure in movement may depend not on feedback but also on harmony between intention and action. Examples come from expert movers, dancers and sportsmen, and from those without proprioception due to neurological (...) impairment. Finally we suggest that affective proprioception may help bind our sense of agency with our embodied selves at an emotional level. (shrink)

The way things are supposed to be : reputational theory and its demise -- Thriving the new way : with little or no reputation : the Goldman Sachs story -- The way things used to be : when reputation was critical to survival -- Individual reputation unhinged from the firm : hardly anybody goes down with the ship -- Proof in the pudding : Michael Milken, Junk Bonds, and the decline of Drexel and -- Nobody else -- The new, post-reputation (...) Wall Street : accounting firms -- The new, post-reputation Wall Street : law firms -- The new, post-reputation Wall Street : credit rating agencies -- The new, post-reputation Wall Street : stock exchanges -- The SEC and reputation -- The SEC : captured and quite happy about it -- Where we are and where we are headed : a conclusion of sorts -- Index. (shrink)

We offer a computational analysis of the resolution of ellipsis in certain cases of dialogue clarification. We show that this goes beyond standard techniques used in anaphora and ellipsis resolution and requires operations on highly structured, linguistically heterogeneous representations. We characterize these operations and the representations on which they operate. We offer an analysis couched in a version of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar combined with a theory of information states (IS).

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 255-268 [Access article in PDF] The Tree of Knowledge and Darwinian Literary Study Jonathan Gottscha I THE BRANCHES OF KNOWLEDGE are not strewn randomly on the ground; they are part of a coherent, interconnected tree. Physics is the most fundamental of all the sciences, so it is the trunk of the tree. The branch of chemistry emerges from physics, because the laws of (...) chemistry depend on the laws of physics: chemical reactions occur the way they do because of the physical properties of atoms. Biology's branch splits off from chemistry's: the molecules that comprise living things are bound by the rules of chemistry. Scientists, while grasping this fundamental interconnection of the broad boughs of the natural sciences, 1 have rarely craned their necks sufficiently to glimpse the upper reaches of the tree of knowledge: the green canopy of human culture that is the traditional jurisdiction of the social sciences and humanities. In fact, scholars from all disciplines have mostly proceeded as though the greenery above was the outgrowth of a neighboring tree from a fundamentally different species.Since the 1960s, however, a maverick band of Darwinian neck-craners have been demonstrating that the stuff of human culture, studied in the humanities and social sciences, is a contiguous part of the tree of knowledge: human culture and behavior grow out of human biology. 2 These scholars and scientists continue to define themselves by different names depending on subtleties in their particular approaches: Darwinian psychology, sociobiology, Darwinian anthropology, biosociology, human behavioral ecology, human ethology, and evolutionary psychology. 3 However, sacrificing some precision on the alter of clarity, I will refer to all of the above approaches with the umbrella term of human [End Page 255] behavioral biology, understood in its most expansive sense as the study of how millions of years of evolution shaped the human mind, and thus human behavior, and thus human culture. No matter how human behavioral biologists define their work, they all share the conviction that human behavior, psychology, and culture cannot be fully understood separate from human bio-evolutionary history.Darwinian excavation of the foundations of human nature has inspired a revolutionary movement in the social sciences that proceeds to this day. Like most revolutions, this one has seen its share of rolling heads and intellectual bloodshed. Starting with the "sociobiology debates" of the late 1970s through mid-80s and continuing through the "science wars" of the early-mid 1990s allegations and recriminations of the most serious sort have been almost casually poured into the air: racism, sexism, Social Darwinism, biological determinism, disciplinary colonialism, disciplinary xenophobia, and "biophobia." 4 However, despite entrenched, sometimes zealous opposition, evolutionary thinking has firmly established itself in the social sciences. Thumbing through leading social science journals, it is no longer a shock to encounter articles exploring traditional topics with shiny new Darwinian tools. This stands in stark contrast to the situation in the decades immediately following World War II, where applying biology to human behavior and culture was virtually taboo. In fact, the UNESCO statement of 1952 explicitly tabooed human behavioral biology as scientifically and politically incorrect. Moreover, this phenomenon is in marked contrast to the mainstream social science of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which was in the midst of a wicked backlash against the resurgence of biological inquiry into behavior represented in sociobiology.Currently, while human behavioral biology retains many social scientist critics, and while certain social science fields remain largely hostile or indifferent, invoking biology to explain social behavior is moving toward the mainstream. Almost thirty years after E. O. Wilson made, in Sociobiology (1975), his first call for a merger of disciplines under a new biological synthesis, biology-savvy social scientists and social-science-savvy biologists have provided startling new insights into a host of topics traditionally examined in isolation from biology: gender differences, criteria for mate choice, resource acquisition and allocation, aggression, cooperation, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, sexual politics, religious sensibilities, social hierarchy, moral codes, etc. 5Though one must be careful not to overstate the progress, we are [End Page 256] witnessing... (shrink)

When the fate of the Japanese people has been decided at the end of the war, the Japanese intellectuals cannot feign a naïve stance of innocence that would have mitigated pursed lips, silent pens and empty sheets of paper. And when some of them did take this recourse, or worse, tried to revise their earlier positions with regard to the Japanese’ involvement in the World War by tampering on their published works, Hajime Tanabe took the road less traveled and confronted (...) the issue of flawed scientific philosophical position head-on; his is a genuine attempt at self-criticism that would put to question every inveterate beliefs one has held at the expense of an openness to a reality that is neither pre-given nor statically perfect. This paper, then, will be a reflection on Tanabe’s suggestion on what we should or could do if rationality has become pathological, if thinking can no longer contain the irrational, and if at the demise of philosophy, nothing remains but the haunting gossamer of injustice’s debris crying for recognition, demanding for an apology. (shrink)

In a majority of situations the normal adult maintains posture or moves without consciously monitoring motor activity. Posture and movement are usually close to automatic; they tend to take care of themselves, outside of attentive regard. One's body, in such cases, effaces itself as one is geared into a particular intentional goal. This effacement is possible because of the normal functioning of a body schema. Body schema can be defined as a system of preconscious, subpersonal processes that play a dynamic (...) role in governing posture and movement (Head, 1920). There is an important and often overlooked conceptual difference between the subpersonal body schema and what is usually called body image . The latter is most often defined as a conscious idea or mental representation that one has of one's own body (for example, Adame, Radell, Johnson, and Cole, 1991; Gardner and Moncrieff, 1988; Schilder, 1935). Despite the conceptual difference many researchers use the terms interchangeably, leading to both a terminological and conceptual confusion. (shrink)

Putting into question its central presupposition of ‘inner freedom’, this paper deconstructs the ‘resistance through culture’ of the Păltiniş School of dissident thinkers in Romania under communism in the 1970s and 80s. The philosopher Constantin Noica, and his follower Gabriel Liiceanu, argue that resistance to authoritarian repression and dictatorial regimes is best achieved by preserving culture by schooling selected individuals in that culture rather than through direct political action or publicly speaking out. Adducing precisely which cultural values underpin the arguments (...) of these thinkers – values such as purity, exceptionalism, individualism and genius – I show that the culture propounded by them is essentially patriarchal and, further, that this culture is complicit with the very tyranny it seeks to resist: philosophically, ideologically and in practice. This is evidenced by the exclusion of women from the culture espoused. Additionally, by focussing on a fairly recent debate between Liiceanu and Nobel prize-winning author Herta Müller, herself an exile from communist Romania, I delineate two opposing philosophies of language which might best be described as “birth of the word is in the head” versus “birth of the word is on the page”, effectively re-staging a problem going back to early defences of liberty, for example in Spinoza and Mill, the relationship between freedom of thought and freedom of expression. Only by understanding selves as linguistic bodies whose language is socialised and shared through affective relations to others and to oneself do we arm ourselves with the resources to resist censorship, repression and tyranny. (shrink)

Hell is other people. This miserable-sounding soundbite, the moment of revelation in Jean- Paul Sartre’s shortest play, must be the most quoted line of twentieth-century philosophy. Not even Jacques Derrida’s claim that ‘there is nothing beyond the text’, fondly cherished in some regions of academia, has anything like the cultural reach of what is often taken to be the quintessential Sartrean slogan. And the analytic tradition hardly abounds in snappy lines: meaning just ain’t in the head, to be is (...) to be the value of a variable, and that’s about it. You’ll not sell many of those t-shirts. Part of the appeal of Sartre’s slogan lies, of course, in the fact that we are all regularly annoyed by each other. We think we can see better ways of doing what only other people have the power to do. Your schemes can clash with mine in ways that prevent me from achieving my goals and living my dreams. People can look down on me. (shrink)

_Published in its entirety for the first time, a candid conversation with Susan Sontag at the height of her brilliant career_ “One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling, which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment... and I don’t believe it’s true.... I have the impression that thinking is a form of feeling and that feeling is a form of thinking.” Susan (...) Sontag, one of the most internationally renowned and controversial intellectuals of the latter half of the twentieth century, still provokes. In 1978 Jonathan Cott, a founding contributing editor of _Rolling Stone_ magazine, interviewed Sontag first in Paris and later in New York. Only a third of their twelve hours of discussion ever made it to print. Now, more than three decades later, Yale University Press is proud to publish the entire transcript of Sontag’s remarkable conversation, accompanied by Cott’s preface and recollections. Sontag’s musings and observations reveal the passionate engagement and breadth of her critical intelligence and curiosities at a moment when she was at the peak of her powers. Nearly a decade after her death, these hours of conversation offer a revelatory and indispensable look at the self-described "besotted aesthete" and "obsessed moralist." “I really believe in history, and that’s something people don’t believe in anymore. I know that what we do and think is a historical creation....We were given a vocabulary that came into existence at a particular moment. So when I go to a Patti Smith concert, I enjoy, participate, appreciate, and am tuned in better because I’ve read Nietzsche.” “There’s no incompatibility between observing the world and being tuned into this electronic, multimedia, multi-tracked, McLuhanite world and enjoying what can be enjoyed. I love rock and roll. Rock and roll changed my life....You know, to tell you the truth, I think rock and roll is the reason I got divorced. I think it was Bill Haley and the Comets and Chuck Berry that made me decide that I had to get a divorce and leave the academic world and start a new life.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 278-294 [Access article in PDF] Homer's Human Animal: Ritual Combat in the Iliad Jonathan Gottschall I Freud called Darwin's revelation of man's animality a blow to human narcissism on par with Copernicus's finding that Earth is not the center of the solar system. While Darwin hinted at our bestiality in the Origin of Species, in later publications he conveyed the disturbing and fantastic (...) news that our ancestors were, as he playfully wrote in private notebooks, "monkey men." 1 Adam and Eve were not lovingly molded from the clay; they were the rude grandchildren of a "hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World." 2 Darwin's news was greeted by his contemporaries with a range of responses, from hooting derision to holy indignation, to resigned acceptance. Yet his hypothesis has been amply verified by the work of geneticists, primatologists, biologists, archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, and others. Nowadays we are not too chagrined to hear that we share a common ancestor with the other apes; it is orthodox evolutionary theory.But perhaps we give Darwin rather too much credit for this discovery. Surely he deserves esteem for deciphering the mechanism of evolution in natural selection, for helping demonstrate our kinship with other primates, and for providing subsequent scientists a head start for their research. He also deserves the less technical distinctions of giving human self-regard a terrific bloody nose and of helping to sire the modern existential crisis. But while Darwin may be responsible for giving scientific credibility to the notion that humans do not stand aloof from the rest of the animal kingdom, he was far from the first to come to this realization. [End Page 278]The artists of every age and the builders of mythology have come, with wondrous unity of conception, to similar conclusions. In fact, the world's earliest known pictorial art conveys this message. The hundreds of paintings and etchings adorning the walls of the Chauvet Cave in France, though over thirty thousand years old, include depictions of human-animal compounds, including a figure that is half-human and half-bison. 3 This ancient suggestion that the human and animal realms overlap is likewise indicated in the common mythological figure of the human-animal hybrid. As Dorothy Dinnerstein says: "Myth images of half-human beasts like the mermaid and the Minotaur express an old, fundamental, very slowly clarifying communal insight: that our species' nature is internally inconsistent; that our continuities with, and our differences from, the earth's other animals are mysterious and profound." 4 So Darwin did not invent the concept of the human animal. Rather, he marshaled the evidence and developed the theoretical model that established scientific credence for an ancient belief.The Ancient Greeks were particularly fascinated by hybrids blending human and animal morphology. Their mythology abounds with queer, conflicted, compound creatures. And so does their literature. Their first and greatest poet, Homer, was characteristically Greek in his attention to half-human creatures. The sirens, the centaurs, the minotaur, the chimera, Scylla, "Ox-eyed" Hera, and "Owl-eyed" Athena are all present or alluded to in his work. All of these figures symbolically insinuate that beasts dwell under every human skin.But Homer's suggestions of human animality do not cease with these compound creatures. In the Iliad, he presses this theme with depictions of warriors who are, physically, fully human. Homer suggests, however, that their dispositions and behavior patterns are, often, fully brutish. For Homer, the human animal is the most incongruous crossbreed of all: he is queer, conflicted, inconsistent, godlike, and brute. It is the "in-betweenness" of the human animal that makes him tragic. His soul would gravitate toward the empyrean, but his body roots him steadfastly in the blood and filth of animal life. The father Zeus, perhaps recognizing this, says: "In truth there is nothing more wretched on earth than man, of all things that breathe and move." 5The Iliad suggests human animality in a variety of ways. First, we are aligned with... (shrink)

A two-systems model of moral judgment proposed by Joshua Greene holds that deontological moral judgments (those based on simple rules concerning action) are often primary and intuitive, and these intuitive judgments must be overridden by reflection in order to yield utilitarian (consequence-based) responses. For example, one dilemma asks whether it is right to push a man onto a track in order to stop a trolley that is heading for five others. Those who favor pushing, the utilitarian response, usually take longer (...) to respond than those who oppose pushing. Greene's model assumes an asymmetry between the processes leading to different responses. We consider an alternative model based on the assumption of symmetric conflict between two response tendencies. By this model, moral dilemmas differ in the "difficulty" of giving a utilitarian response and subjects differ in the "ability" (tendency) to give such responses. (We could just as easily define ability in terms of deontological responses, as the model treats the responses symmetrically.) We thus make an analogy between moral dilemmas and tests of cognitive ability, and we apply the Rasch model, developed for the latter, to estimate the ability-difficulty difference for each dilemma for each subject. We apply this approach to five data sets collected for other purposes by three of the co-authors. Response time (RT), including yes and no responses, is longest when difficulty and ability match, because the subject is indifferent between the two responses, which also have the same RT at this point. When we consider yes/no responses, RT is longest when the model predicts that the response is improbable. Subjects with low ability take longer on the "easier" dilemmas, and vice versa. (shrink)

Philosophers have often sought criteria for a general distinction between appearance and reality. In chapter VII of Sense and Sensibilia, J. L. Austin claims to show that this enterprise is radically misconceived; and, characteristically, he bases his argument on the niceties of the use of ‘real’ in English. I shall try to show (1) that Austin’s account of how ‘real’ is used is muddled and inaccurate; and (2) that the uses of ‘real’ which Austin explores are irrelevant to the traditional (...) enquiry into the distinction between appearance and reality. Of these, (2) matters more, but most of my paper will treat of (1). The uses of ‘real’ which interested Austin may have some philosophical importance, so we might as well get them right. Also, although there are general grounds for denying that those uses are relevant to traditional epistemology, a tighter and more Austinian argument for the same conclusion can be based upon a correct account of the uses of ‘real’ in question. I should concede that I may have stated my thesis a little too strongly: for all I know, some philosophers may have pursued the traditional enquiry in such a miserably inadequate way that Austin’s points about the use of ‘real’ are, when suitably emended, effective against them. The fact that Austin did not publish Sense and Sensibilia suggests that he was not satisfied with its contents. Nevertheless, his views about the use of ‘real’ have been published and may be believed: personal considerations cannot be allowed to disarm criticism. I shall describe four ways of using ‘real’ in expressions of the form ‘a real F’ where ‘F’ stands for a general noun. Note the indefinite article: Austin writes as though nothing turns on the choice between ‘a real . . .’ and ‘the real . . .’, but this is not so. I shall argue that these four ways of using ‘real’ are distinct, though a single use of ‘real’ may partake of more than one of them. I believe but cannot prove that my four headings cover practically all idiomatic uses of the form ‘a real F’ other than the metaphorical, slipshod or pretentious.. (shrink)

No one disputes that certain cognitive tasks involve the use of images. On the other hand, there has been substantial disagreement over whether the representations in which imaginal tasks are carried out are imaginal or propositional. The empirical literature on the topic which has accrued over the last twenty years suggests that there is a functional equivalence between mental imagery and perception: when peopIe imagine a scene or event, the mental processes that occur are functionally similar in important senses to (...) what happens when they visually perceive an analogous scene or event. What is in dispute is not this principle of equivalence, but rather what conclusions should be drawn from it about the representational medium used in imagery.The problem to be explained is what internal cognitive events transpire when people answer questions like “What color is a bee’s head?” Most people report that they imagine a picture of the insect and then look at the head in the image to determine its color. Although there is no more reason to accept these introspective reports as a good account of cognitive processes than in any other cognitive phenomena, there are many empirical results which lend credence to the idea that there are mental images of some kind.Some theorists have taken the empirical results as evidence that there exists a special, non-symbolic representational medium for imagery. Others have insisted that the imagery data can be explained best in terms of the more general, symbolic representations which are usually taken to underly higher level cognitive tasks. In this paper I shall evaluate the arguments for both imaginal and propositional representations in the hope of assessing the status of the imagery debate. I shall conclude that imaginal theories represent the most reasonable account of imagery. (shrink)