Sanford Goldberg investigates the role that others play in our attempts to acquire knowledge of the world.

What Is Aesthetic Pleasure? When is pleasure in an object properly denominated aesthetic? The characterization of aesthetic pleasure is something that ...

This is a long-awaited reissue of Jerrold Levinson's 1990 book which gathers together the writings that made him a leading figure in contemporary aesthetics. These highly influential essays are essential reading for debates on the definition of art, the ontology of art, emotional response to art, expression in art, and the nature of art forms.

Sanford C. Goldberg argues that a proper account of the communication of knowledge through speech has anti-individualistic implications for both epistemology and the philosophy of mind and language. In Part I he offers a novel argument for anti-individualism about mind and language, the view that the contents of one's thoughts and the meanings of one's words depend for their individuation on one's social and natural environment. In Part II he discusses the epistemic dimension of knowledge communication, arguing that the (...) epistemic characteristics of communication-based beliefs depend on features of the cognitive and linguistic acts of the subject's social peers. In acknowledging an ineliminable social dimension to mind, language, and the epistemic categories of knowledge, justification, and rationality, his book develops fundamental links between externalism in the philosophy of mind and language, on the one hand, and externalism is epistemology, on the other. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics brings the authority, liveliness, and multi-disciplinary scope of the Handbook series to a fascinating theme in philosophy and the arts. Jerrold Levinson has assembled a hugely impressive range of talent to contribute 48 brand-new essays, making this the most comprehensive guide available to the theory, application, history, and future of the field. This Handbook will be invaluable to academics and students across philosophy and all branches of the arts, both as the reference work of choice (...) and as a stimulus to new research and creativity. (shrink)

Does aural understanding depend upon reflective awareness of musical architecture or large-scale musical structure? Jerrold Levinson thinks not.

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 676-692, June 2022.

Contemplating Art is a compendium of writings from the last ten years by one of the leading figures in aesthetics, Jerrold Levinson. The twenty-four essays range over issues in general aesthetics and those relating to specific arts--in particular music, film, and literature. It will appeal not only to philosophers but also to musicologists, literary theorists, art critics, and reflective lovers of the arts.

Marina Sbisà has long advocated that we think of the illocutionary force of a speech act in terms of the act’s (predictable) systematic effects on the normative relationship between a speaker and her audience. Building on this idea, I argue that the hypothesis of distinctive speech act norms can be used to explain how participants in a conversation coordinate the normative expectations they have of one another in conversation. Such an explanation earns its keep by explaining how speakers render themselves (...) illocutionarily intelligible to their audiences—thereby enabling us to articulate the sense of mutuality that characterizes speech exchanges. One important upshot of my reflections is that we should reject both Austin’s thesis that the successful performance of an illocutionary act depends on audience uptake and Sbisà’s claim that Austin’s thesis is required if we are to make sense of the illocutionary dimension of speech in terms of an act’s systematic effects on participants’ normative expectations of one another. (shrink)

Written by an international team of leading scholars, this collection of thirteen new essays explores the implications of semantic externalism for self-knowledge and skepticism, bringing recent developments in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, and epistemology to bear on the issue. Structured in three parts, the collection looks at self-knowledge, content transparency, and then meta-semantics and the nature of mental content. The chapters examine a wide range of topics in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language, (...) including 2D semantics, transparency views of self-knowledge, and theories of linguistic understanding, as well as epistemological debates on contextualism, contrastivism, pragmatic encroachment, anti-luminosity arguments and testimony. The scope of the volume will appeal to graduate students and researchers in epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, cognitive science, psychology and linguistics. (shrink)

The scenario of the brain in a vat, first aired thirty-five years ago in Hilary Putnam's classic paper, has been deeply influential in philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, and metaphysics. This collection of new essays examines the scenario and its philosophical ramifications and applications, as well as the challenges which it has faced. The essays review historical applications of the brain-in-a-vat scenario and consider its impact on contemporary debates. They explore a diverse range of philosophical issues, from intentionality, external-world (...) scepticism, and the nature of truth, to the extended mind hypothesis, reference magnetism, and new versions of realism. The volume will be a rich and valuable resource for advanced students in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind and language, as well as anyone interested in the relations between language, thought and the world. (shrink)

Internalism and Externalism in Semantics and Epistemology presents eleven specially written essays exploring these debates in metaphysics and epistemology and ...

Responding to Russell is a constant throughout Wittgenstein's philosophizing. This Element focuses on Wittgenstein's criticisms of Russell's theories of judgment in the summer of 1913. Wittgenstein's response to these criticisms is of first-rate importance for his early philosophical development, setting the path to the conceptions of proposition and of logic in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. This Element also touches on further aspects of Wittgenstein's responses to Russell: the rejection of Russell's and Frege's logicisms in the Tractatus, the critique of Russell's causal-behavioristic philosophy (...) of mind in Wittgenstein's 'middle' period, the Russellian origins of notions of privacy dialectically treated in Philosophical Investigations, and the discussion of 'surveyability' of mathematical proof in Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, which is, again, a response to Russellian logicism. (shrink)

Kant and Milton: fundamentals and foundations -- Kant's journey in the constellation of German Miltonism: toward the procedure of succession -- Kant's Miltonic transfer to exemplarity: the succession to Milton's "On his blindness" in the groundwork of the Metaphysics of morals -- Kantian tragic form and Kantian "storytelling" -- The Critique of practical reason and Samson agonistes -- Kant's Miltonic procedure of succession in a key moment of the Critique of judgment.

Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice is a wide-ranging and important book on a much-neglected topic: the injustice involved in cases in which distrust arises out of prejudice. Fricker has some important things to say about this sort of injustice: its nature, how it arises, what sustains it, and the unhappy outcomes associated with it for the victim and the society in which it takes place. In the course of developing this account, Fricker also develops an account of the epistemology of testimony. (...) Focusing my attention on that account, my central claims are two. First, at least some of Fricker's arguments against existing (inferentialist and non-inferentialist) views in the epistemology of testimony are less than fully persuasive, and the (non-inferentialist) view she ends up endorsing is not all that different from the views she criticizes. Second, her reasons for harboring doubts regarding the role of a principle of default entitlement within a non-inferentialist account are not persuasive. Neither of these claims affects the overall argument Fricker is trying to run. Rather, they suggest that Fricker may have picked more fights than she needed to in the epistemology of testimony. If so, we have reason to detach Fricker's important work on epistemic injustice from some of the details of the story she tells regarding the epistemology of testimony. (shrink)

I revise J L Mackie's first account of casual direction by replacing his notion of "fixity" by a newly defined notion of "sufficing" that is designed to accommodate indeterminism. Keeping Mackie's distinction between casual order and casual direction, I then consider another revision that replaces "fixity" with "one-way conditionship". In response to the charge that all such accounts of casual priority beg the question by making an unjustified appeal to temporal priority, i maintain that one-way conditionship explains rather that assumes (...) objective temporal dependence as well as objective casual dependence. (shrink)

This book is about the insights of psychology, mythology, literature, philosophy and Christianity.

Could space consist entirely of extended regions, without any regions shaped like points, lines, or surfaces? Peter Forrest and Frank Arntzenius have independently raised a paradox of size for space like this, drawing on a construction of Cantor’s. I present a new version of this argument and explore possible lines of response.

Most people have a sense of obligation to family members that is more powerful than the law in compelling compliance with its demands. When families dissolve, however, the power of such nonlegal norms often dissolves as well. The question then becomes what the law should require in their stead. This Article is part of a larger series of studies that have examined this question by asking what citizens believe the law should demand, using surveys of persons called to jury service (...) in Tucson, Arizona. Respondents are asked to imagine they are the judge charged with deciding a series of cases in which the facts are systematically varied so as to reveal the implicit principles that survey respondents employ in deciding them. Previously reported results in this project have examined studies of the amount of child support that people believe appropriate, and how they believe child custody disputes should be resolved. This study examines lay views about alimony. It finds considerable divergence between American law in practice and the views of American citizens as to what the law should be. Survey respondents were willing to award alimony considerably more often than the law now does. More clearly, in deciding whether to allow an alimony award, they care most of all about the claimant’s responsibility as primary caretaker of the couple’s minor children, to some extent about the partners’ marital status and their relational duration, and very little at all about the claimant’s history of having cared for the couple’s now-grown children. Moreover, the way these factors affect our respondents’ judgments about alimony are not very dependent on who they are. Our respondents did vary among themselves, of course, in the frequency with which they allowed alimony, but they varied relatively little in how factors such as marriage, relational duration, the presence of minor children or the history of care for now-grown children affected their judgments. The citizen consensus reflected by these patterns differs, however, from the prevailing legal rules, the views of many scholars, and the recommendations of the American Law Institute. This striking discrepancy is interesting although not always surprising. Our respondents’ willingness to award alimony to non-marital partners, for example, is consistent with the law of some other Western countries, even if not with American law, suggesting perhaps that it is American law, not our respondents, that is peculiar. Perhaps it is also understandable that our respondents seem more concerned with the welfare of the couple’s current minor children than with addressing perceived inequities in the current economic circumstances of the adult partners. In any event, the views of our respondents pose a challenge to policymakers. Given the dearth of theoretical justification for current American practice, its rejection by American citizens seems all the more telling. (shrink)