Although primarily known as a portrait painter, Charles Willson Peale also possessed a profound interest in natural history. Indeed, Peale eventually founded the first natural history museum in the United States, and, during the end of the eighteenth century, he began to overlap his two great interests: art and nature. The event Peale chronicled in his 1804 painting The Exhumation of the Mastodon caused an extreme stir within the intellectual and religious circles of its time, and brought (...) about, at the very least, a serious questioning in the deeply held notion of the Great Chain of Being. Although now largely discredited, this religious conviction postulated two concepts that Peale’s Exhumation of the Mastodon seemingly contradicts. The first was the belief that no animals since creation had suffered the fate of extinction. The second was a lack of belief in geological time. Indeed, one Irish clergyman calculated the actual date of creation to 4004 BCE. In this paper, I explore Peale’s monumental painting, a work that is many things, a self-portrait and history painting among others. Indeed, in this painting, Peale was responding to science, religion, and their shifting positions within early-nineteenth-century America. When viewed together, Peale’s The Exhumation of the Mastodon is not merely a record of an event that occurred in New York during the early nineteenth century, and instead is a document of Peale and the interaction of science and religion in early-Federal America. (shrink)

Addressing the place of the Austrian poet, Georg Trakl, in the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, this article turns in particular to Trakl’s poem “A Winter Evening” in order to unfold a sense of language in dialogue with the poet. This engagement equally becomes the occasion for Gadamer to confront Heidegger, whose own reading of Trakl becomes both an inspiration and a challenge.

Benardete paradoxes involve infinite collections of Grim Reapers, assassins, demons, deafening peals, or even sentences. These paradoxes have recently been used in arguments for finitist metaphysical theses such as temporal finitism, causal finitism, and discrete views of time. Here we develop a new finite Benardete-like paradox. We then use this paradox to defend a companions in guilt argument that challenges recent applications of patchwork principles on behalf of the aforementioned finitist arguments. Finally, we develop another problem for those applications by (...) examining the notion of exact duplication. (shrink)

Ethics in business is the most urgent problem facing America today. Now two of the best-selling authors of our time, Kenneth Blanchard and Norman Vincent Peale, join forces to meet this crisis head-on in this vitally important new book. The Power of Ethical Management proves you don't have to cheat to win. It shows today's managers how to bring integrity back to the workplace. It gives hard-hitting, practical, ethical strategies that build profits, productivity, and long-term success. From a straightforward (...) three-step Ethics Check that helps you evaluate any action or decision, to the "Five P's" of ethical behavior that will clarify your purpose and your goals, The Power of Ethical Management gives you an immensely useful set of tools. These can be put to work right away to enhance the performance of your business and to enrich the quality of your life. The Power of Ethical Management is no theoretical treatise Peale and Blanchard speak from their own enormous and unique experience, They reveal the nuts and bolts, practical strategies for ethical decisions that will show you why integrity pays. "So Vince Lombardi was wrong. Winning is not the only thing as headlines and hearings from Wall Street to Washington confirm. Now comes a better game plan from the powerful one-two punch of Ken Blanchard and Norman Vincent Peale in a quickreading new book, The Power of Ethical Management. Peale and Blanchard may be the best thing that has happened to business ethics since Mike Wallace invented 60 Minutes. -- JOHN MACK CARTIER Editor-in-Chief Good Housekeeping. (shrink)

This paper investigates three morphosyntactic alternations in Estonian – those between the exterior locative cases allative, adessive and ablative and the corresponding postpositionspeale‘onto’,peal‘on’ andpealt‘off’. Based on the Complexity Principle (e.g., Rohdenburg, Günter. 2002. Processing complexity and the variable use of prepositions in English. In Hubert Cuyckens & Günter Radden (eds.),Perspectives on prepositions, 79–100. Tübingen: Niemeyer), we expect cognitively more complex constructions to use more explicit (i.e., morphologically more substantial) marking by means of a postposition. Further, we expect variation to be (...) conditioned similarly in all three semantic categories. For each of the three alternations, a random sample of the two outcomes (case vs. postposition) from the Estonian National Corpus is used, resulting in 3,000 data points. Using properties of the Landmark phrase as independent variables in Bayesian mixed-effects logistic regression models, we predict the choice of postpositions over case-marked realisations. Of the patterns found, only the frequency-related one supports our complexity-related hypothesis. We conclude that the Complexity Principle, in its general form, has little explanatory power for the Estonian constructions at hand and, in particular, that the derived principle of ‘analytic support’ is not generally applicable. We show, however, that the grammatical knowledge of Estonian exterior locative cases and the corresponding postpositions is regulated by our three factors in a relatively uniform way. (shrink)

Dr. R. Michael Fisher shares thoughts on how we can all, in our own ways, more or less, make aware and educated choices to follow the philia of knowledge--that is, knowledge about fear and thy fearful self as part of the path of Fearlessness. He outlines the various forms of the spirit of Fearlessness: bravery, courageousness, fear-less, fearlessness and fearless. Errata: I should have said re: quote "Norman Vincent Peale" I should have said Philosophy is "love of wisdom" but (...) I wanted to say it more broadly and add the "love of knowledge" dimension; could have also said "love of truth". (shrink)

Until recently, the medical community assumed that placebos required either concealment in randomized controlled trials or deception in clinical practice to elicit placebo effects. Henry Beecher emphasized this orthodoxy, when he stated that placebo pills only work "as long as it is not detected as a placebo by the subject or the observer" and therefore, patients "believe it [is a drug] and consequently the expected results occurs". The time was ripe for such ideas: Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of (...) Positive Thinking was already in its fourth year on the bestseller list when Beecher published his landmark paper. As time went on, the use of placebo pills became trapped in an... (shrink)

The outbreak of COVID-19 has brought drastic changes to English teaching as it has shifted from the offline mode before the pandemic to the online mode during the pandemic. However, in the post-pandemic era, there are still many problems in the effective implementation of the process of English teaching, leading to the inability of achieving better results in the quality and efficiency of English teaching and effective cultivation of students’ practical application ability. In recent years, English speaking has attracted the (...) attention of experts and scholars. Therefore, this study constructs an interactive English-speaking practice scene based on a virtual character. A dual-modality emotion recognition method is proposed that mainly recognizes and analyzes facial expressions and physiological signals of students and the virtual character in each scene. Thereafter, the system adjusts the difficulty of the conversation according to the current state of students, toward making the conversation more conducive to the students’ understanding and gradually improving their English-speaking ability. The simulation compares nine facial expressions based on the eNTERFACE05 and CAS-PEAL datasets, which shows that the emotion recognition method proposed in this manuscript can effectively recognize students’ emotions in interactive English-speaking practice and reduce the recognition time to a great extent. The recognition accuracy of the nine facial expressions was close to 90% for the dual-modality emotion recognition method in the eNTERFACE05 dataset, and the recognition accuracy of the dual-modality emotion recognition method was significantly improved with an average improvement of approximately 5%. (shrink)

Th is paper explores the perception of urban landscapes through sound, using two case studies of cities where bells played a significant role in the city, where a particular dramatic event silenced these bells, and where the act of remaking broken or tuneless bells re-creates an engagement with the lived places of the past. At Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, newly cast bells recreate the melodious peal last heard before the French Revolution, and ChristChurch Cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand, bells (...) damaged by destructive earthquakes of 2011 will eventually ring out their familiar tones in an urban landscape that is physically almost unrecognisable. Both case studies demonstrate the ways that the inadvertent and the deliberate transformation of soundscapes continually interacts with ideas of place and meaning within the constantly changing city. (shrink)

This study began with a fascination for the enigma of American artist Andy Warhol (1928-1987). I began to collect his words. I had been intrigued by German philosopher, literary critic, and essayist Walter Benjamin’s (1892-1940) philosophical snapshots and with the notion of an aura that could be pealed from objects by photography. And I was taken by French philosopher, professor of law, and theologian Jacques Ellul’s (1912-1994) claim that religion, philosophy, and aesthetics were mere ornaments that had gone the way (...) of the ruffled sunshade on McCormick’s first reaper. Benjamin’s epistemological understanding of aura, the capacity of the object to look back and to direct the viewer in search for origins, fleshed out Ellul’s claim. The symbol had lost its symbolic dimension in the technical process where words became images and images became concepts; clichés were the nature of this productivity, which became more than tired expressions. The cliché is the machine in its new suit. This insight informed my reading of Warhol and Benjamin with Ellul. And, of course, my reading of Ellul has influenced my reading of Warhol and Benjamin. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically assess the thesis that the discovery of mirror neuron systems provides empirical support for the simulation theory of social cognition. This thesis can be analyzed into two claims: that MNSs are involved in understanding others’ intentions or emotions; and that the way in which they do so supports a simulationist viewpoint. I will be giving qualified support to both claims. Starting with, I will present theoretical and empirical points in support of the view that MNSs (...) play a substantial role and are perhaps neces¬sary although not sufficient for understanding at least some intentions or emo¬tions. Turning to, I will argue that the work on MNSs best supports a fairly weak version of ST, according to which social cognition involves simulation simply because conceptual thought in gen¬eral has a simulationist component. In elucidating this idea, I appeal to Law¬rence Barsalou’s embodied theory of concepts. Crucially, the term “simula¬tion” here refers not to simulations of a target agent’s experience, nor even spe¬cifically to one’s own experience in a similar counterfactual situation, but to simulations of experience in general - activating sensory, motor, proprioceptive, affective, and introspective representations that match representations one would have when perceiving, carrying out actions, experiencing emotions, etc. I then sketch an expanded simulationist framework for understanding the contribution of MNSs to social cognition. The ap¬peal to empirical work on MNSs in support of ST is therefore a two-edged sword; making this appeal persuasive requires us to modify our understanding of simulation to make it line up with the empirical work. (shrink)

This overview of the "sister arts" of the nineteenth century by younger scholars in art history, literature, and American studies presents a startling array of perspectives on the fundamental role played by images in culture and society. Drawing on the latest thinking about vision and visuality as well as on recent developments in literary theory and cultural studies, the contributors situate paintings, sculpture, monument art, and literary images within a variety of cultural contexts. The volume offers fresh and sometimes extended (...) discussions of single works as well as reevaluations of artistic and literary conventions and analyses of the economic, social, and technological forces that gave them shape and were influenced by them in turn. A wide range of figures are significantly reassessed, including the painters Charles Willson Peale, Washington Allston, Thomas Cole, George Caleb Bingham, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Mary Cassatt, and such writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and William Dean Howells. One overarching theme to emerge is the development of an American national subjectivity as it interacted with the transformation of a culture dominated by religious values to one increasingly influenced by commercial imperatives. The essays probe the ways in which artists and writers responded to the changing conditions of the cultural milieu as it was mediated by such factors as class and gender, modes of perception and representation, and conflicting ideals and realities. (shrink)

A magisterial exploration of poetry’s place in the fine arts by one of the twentieth century's leading poets In this book, eminent poet Anthony Hecht explores the art of poetry and its relationship to the other fine arts. While the problems he treats entail both philosophic and theoretical discussion, he never allows abstract speculation to overshadow his delight in the written texts that he introduces, or in the specific examples of painting and music to which he refers. After discussing literature’s (...) links with painting and music, Hecht investigates the theme of paradise and wilderness, especially in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He then turns to the question of public and private art, exploring the ways in which all the arts participate in balances between private and public modes of discourse, and between an exclusive or elitist role and the openly political. Beginning with a discussion of architecture as an illustration of a more general theme of discord and balance, the penultimate lecture probes the inner contradictions of works of art and our reactions to them, while the final piece concerns art and morality. (shrink)