This book initiates a discussion among scholars in rhetoric and hermeneutics in many areas of the humanities. Twenty leading thinkers explore the ways these two powerful disciplines inform each other and influence a wide variety of intellectual fields. Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde organize pivotal topics in rhetoric and hermeneutics with originality and coherence, dividing their book into four sections: Locating the Disciplines; Inventions and Applications; Arguments and Narratives; and Civic Discourse and Critical Theory. For readers across the humanities, (...) the book demonstrates the usefulness of rhetorical and hermeneutic approaches in literary, philosophical, legal, religious, and political thinking. (shrink)

This chapter argues that from a particularly weak recombination principle and plausible assumptions about the nature of parthood and location, it follows that it is possible that the mereological structure of the material world and that of space-time fail to correspond to one another in very radical ways. The chapter suggests, moreover, that rejecting the possibility of such failures of correspondence leaves us with a choice of no less unappealing alternatives. It also discusses a few ways in which their possibility (...) is relevant to various important debates in metaphysics. (shrink)

I argue that from a very weak recombination principle and plausible assumptions about the nature of parthood and location it follows that it's possible that the mereological structure of the material world and that of spacetime fail to correspond to one another in very radical ways. I defend, moreover, that rejecting the possibility of such failures of correspondence leaves us with a choice of equally radical alternatives. I also discuss a few ways in which their possibility is relevant to various (...) debates in metaphysics. (shrink)

A team of leading philosophers presents original work on theories of parthood and location. Topics covered include how we ought to axiomatise our mereology; whether we can reduce mereological relations to identity or to locative relations; whether Mereological Essentialism is true; and what mereology and propositions can tell us about one another.

This article discusses two arguments in favor of perdurance. The first is Sider’s argument from vagueness, “one of the most powerful” in favor of perdurantism. I make the observation that endurantists have principled grounds to claim that the argument is unsound, at least if endurance is formulated in locative rather than mereological terms. Having made this observation, I use it to emphasize a somewhat neglected difference between endurantists and perdurantists with respect to their views on material objects. These views, in (...) the case of endurantists, lead to a further, less than conclusive but nevertheless interesting argument against endurantism—the anti-fundamentality argument—which I discuss and tentatively endorse. That argument posits that endurantists must take location to be a fundamental relation, and that this has as a consequence the metaphysical possibility of some rather unwelcome scenarios. Perdurantists may avoid this consequence by denying that location is fundamental, perhaps by embracing supersubstantivalism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSpatial cueing paradigms are popular tools to assess human attention to emotional stimuli, but different variants of these paradigms differ in what participants’ primary task is. In one variant, participants indicate the location of the target, whereas in the other they indicate the shape of the target. In the present paper we test the idea that although these two variants produce seemingly comparable cue validity effects on response times, they rest on different underlying processes. Across four studies using both variants (...) and manipulating the motivational relevance of cue content, diffusion model analyses revealed that cue validity effects in location tasks are primarily driven by response biases, whereas the same effect rests on delay due to attention to the cue in identification tasks. Based on this, we predict and empirically support that a symmetrical distribution of valid and invalid cues would reduce cue validity... (shrink)

Two conundrums puzzle COVID‐19 investigators: 1) morbidity and mortality is rare among infants and young children and 2) rates of morbidity and mortality exhibit large variances across nations, locales, and even within cities. It is found that the higher the rate of pneumococcal vaccination in a nation (or city) the lower the COVID‐19 morbidity and mortality. Vaccination rates with Bacillus Calmette–Guerin, poliovirus, and other vaccines do not correlate with COVID‐19 risks, nor do COVID‐19 case or death rates correlate with number (...) of people in the population with diabetes, obesity, or adults over 65. Infant protection may be due to maternal antibodies and antiviral proteins in milk such as lactoferrin that are known to protect against coronavirus infections. Subsequent protection might then be conferred (and correlate with) rates of Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib) (universal in infants) and pneumococcal vaccination, the latter varying widely by geography among infants, at‐risk adults, and the elderly. Also see the video abstract here https://youtu.be/GODBYRbPL00. (shrink)

How is the debate between endurantism and perdurantism affected by the transition from pre-relativistic spacetimes to relativistic ones? After suggesting that the endurance vs. perdurance distinction may run together a pair of cross-cutting distinctions, I discuss two recent attempts to show that the transition in question does serious damage to endurantism.

In ‘from times to worlds and back again: a transcendentist theory of persistence’ (henceforth TTP) Alessandro Giordani outlines five competitor views regarding the manner in which objects occupy regions along a dimension. These are: (1) classical uni-location (2) bare uni-location (3) multi-location (4) counterpart presence and (5) transcendent presence. Each view comes in both a temporal and modal version and Giordani argues that one ought to prefer transcendentism (i.e. 5) along both dimensions. According to temporal transcendentism, necessarily, no object is (...) exactly located at any region along the temporal dimension. Instead, any object, O, is derivatively present at some region, R, along the temporal dimension in virtue of bearing certain relations to something (according to TTP an event) that occupies R along that dimension. According to modal transcendentism, no object is exactly located at any region along the modal dimension. Instead, any object, O, is derivatively present at some region, R, along the modal dimension in virtue of bearing certain relations to something (according to TTP an event) that occupies R along that dimension. I argue that such a view is under motivated, and, at any rate, may not in fact offer a distinct view. (shrink)

Even though the phenomenon of gentrification is ever-growing in contemporary urban contexts, especially in high income countries, it has been mostly overlooked by normative political theorists and philosophers. In this paper we examine the normative dimensions of gentrification through the lens of food. By drawing on Huber and Wolkenstein’s (Huber and Wolkenstein, Politics, Philosophy & Economics 17:378–397, 2018) work, we use food as an example to illustrate the multiple ways in which life plans can be located and to argue that (...) both existing residents and newcomers have an interest in occupancy rights. More specifically, while newcomers have an interest in moving freely to new neighbourhoods in order to purse their preferred life plans, they also have an interest in being able to continue to pursue those life plans once they have acquired them, and this requires occupancy rights and the implementation of measures aimed at regulating and slowing down gentrification. Moreover, when residents belong to already disadvantaged groups, more significant anti-gentrification measures can be implemented in order to prevent injustices from being compounded. (shrink)

In Our Knowledge of the Internal World, Robert Stalnaker describes two opposed perspectives on the relation between the internal and the external. According to one, the internal world is taken as given and the external world as problematic, and according to the other, the external world is taken as given and the internal world as problematic. Analytic philosophy moved from the former to the latter, from problems of world-construction to problems of self-locating beliefs. I argue in this paper that these (...) problems are equivalent: both arise because experience and objective, external facts jointly underdetermine their relation. Both can be seen as a problem of expressive completeness; of the internal language in the former case, and of the non-indexical language in the second. (shrink)

According to the “received view” the disagreement between endurantism and perdurantism is ontological and concerns the existence of temporal parts of continuants. In a recent paper, argues that the ontological conception of these theories does not address the crucial point: explaining the way things persist. According to Wasserman, perdurantism is not just the view that things have temporal parts; it is the view that things persist by having temporal parts. Moreover, in the last decade an alternative understanding of the dispute (...) between endurantism and perdurantism, the so called “locative turn”, has lead to an understanding of these two theories as concerning crucially locational rather than mereological notions. Our main aim in this paper is to bring together those two revisionary approaches to the received view, and show how they can enrich each other and open up further dimension of the debate. Finally in the last section we focus on some of the non-standard accounts of persistence and location that arise from this approach, such as “autonomism of persistence and location” and “reverse locational endurantism/perdurantism”. (shrink)

A critical survey of the fundamental philosophical issues in the logic and formal ontology of space, with special emphasis on the interplay between mereology (the theory of parthood relations), topology (broadly understood as a theory of qualitative spatial relations such as continuity and contiguity), and the theory of spatial location proper.

Reproducing empirical results and repeating experimental processes is fundamental to science, but is of grave concern to scientists. Revisiting the same location is necessary for tracking biological processes, yet I argue that ‘location’ and ‘replication’ contain a basic ambiguity. The analysis of the practical meanings of ‘replication’ and ‘location’ will strip of incommensurability from its common conflation with empirical equivalence, underdetermination and indeterminacy of reference. In particular, I argue that three biodiversity re-surveys, conducted by the research institutions of Harvard, Berkeley, (...) and Hamaarag, all reveal incommensurability without indeterminacy in the smallest spatial scale, and indeterminacy without incommensurability in higher scales. (shrink)

In light of the fact that social dynamics and unexpected uses of technology can inspire innovation, this book proposes a research model of design for emergence, ...

Recently, Cody Gilmore has deployed an ingenious case involving backwards time travel to highlight an apparent conflict between the theory that objects persist by perduring, and the thesis that wholly coincident objects are impossible. However, careful attention to the concepts of location and parthood that Gilmore’s cases involve shows that the perdurantist faces no genuine objection from these cases, and that the perdurantist has a number of plausible and dialectically appropriate ways to avoid the supposed conflict.

In fields such as medicine, geography, and mechanics, spatial reasoning involves reasoning about entities that may coincide without overlapping. Some examples are: cavities and invading particles, passageways and valves, geographic regions and tropical storms. The purpose of this paper is to develop a formal theory of spatial relations for domains that include coincident entities. The core of the theory is a clear distinction between mereotopological relations, such as parthood and connection, and relative location relations, such as coincidence. To guide the (...) development of the formal theory, I construct mathematical models in which nontrivial relative location relations are defined. (shrink)

The Dutch historiography of the middle of the 19thcentury was a culture of honour. Disputes over the reputations of historical figures were manifold. This article focuses on one controversy specifically that took place in the 1840s. The subject of debate was the 16th-century nobleman Henry of Brederode, his deeds, his character and his morals. The controversy was not only about content, however. Many suppositions about doing history and being a historian that otherwise remain tacit, were made explicit in the controversy (...) – especially concerning archive-based history. First, the participating historians themselves were judged – somewhat like Brederode himself – on the virtuousness, including the epistemic virtuousness, of their behaviour. Second, it was discussed whether archival documents were fit for use in historiography. To some, the use of these personal letters was ethically unjustifiable. Third, the location from which historical knowledge originated, mainly the archive, came under scrutiny. The singularity of the archive made historians relying on archival material prone to attacks on their trustworthiness. (shrink)

Sustainable management of natural resources by farmers is under increasing public scrutiny. In Australia, the case of water unsustainably used and stored by agricultural businesses has gained attention with communities in catchments potentially deprived of water and placed at downstream risk. Yet, sustainable water management institutional policy mechanisms remain disjointed around the country. The study reported here applies a strategic response typology to a survey of 404 farmers in four different institutional environments in Australia to explore their responses to institutional (...) pressures. Findings demonstrate a convergence in typologies that relate to farmers organising each other and communities influencing and networking for the benefit of agricultural resource management thereby questioning the traditional continuum of resistance. Furthermore, the mid-range typology ‘avoidance’ emerges as a highly problematic typology for sustainable water management policymakers especially those in weaker institutional environments where there is a need to develop policy instruments that retain farmer water management decision-making power and encourage networks. The paper also extends the strategic response typology to enable understanding of how gender and location affect strategic responses to institutional pressures. Findings provide insight for policy design in times of increasing catastrophic flood and drought conditions exacerbated by poor water management practice. (shrink)

We develop a Bayesian framework for thinking about the way evidence about the here and now can bear on hypotheses about the qualitative character of the world as a whole, including hypotheses according to which the total population of the world is infinite. We show how this framework makes sense of the practice cosmologists have recently adopted in their reasoning about such hypotheses.

I offer an explanation of how subjects are able to perceive the intrinsic spatial properties of objects, given that subjects always perceive from a particular location. The argument proceeds in two steps. First, I argue that a conception of space is necessary to perceive the intrinsic spatial properties of objects. This conception of space is spelled out by showing that perceiving intrinsic properties requires perceiving objects as the kind of things that are perceivable from other locations. Second, I show that (...) having such a conception of space presupposes that a subject represent her location in relation to perceived objects. More precisely the thesis is that a subject represents her location as the location from which she both perceives objects and would act in relation to objects were she to act. So I argue that perception depends on the capacity to know what it would be to act in relation to objects. (shrink)

One of the main contributions of A Feminist Theory of Refusal is its connection of everyday action and prefigurative practices with an explicit commitment to structural change. But how such change happens, and what kind of relations it implies between ‘the city’ (as the existing political community) and feminist heterotopias of refusal, remains unclear. Reading Honig’s work as a prefigurative theory, I argue that it links moments of doing-otherwise with moments of institutional politics, sparking questions about the conditions of a (...) successful return to the city. I then develop these conditions through a case study of the feminist activism of Women on Waves; and argue that feminist refusal can lead to political transformation if it durably connects practices inside and outside the city. (shrink)

Two views on the nature and location of pain are usually contrasted. According to the first, experientialism, pain is essentially an experience, and its bodily location is illusory. According to the second, perceptualism or representationalism, pain is a perceptual or representational state, and its location is to be traced to the part of the body in which pain is felt. Against this second view, the cases of phantom, referred and chronic pain have been marshalled: all these cases apparently show that (...) one can be in pain while not having anything wrong in her body. Pain bodily location, then, would be illusory. I this paper I shall defend the representational thesis by presenting an argument against experientialism while conceding that the appearance / reality distinction collapses. A crucial role in such identification is played by deictics. In reporting that we feel pain here, the deictic directly refers to the bodily part as coinciding with the part as represented. So, pain location is not illusory. The upshot is that the body location is part and parcel of the representational content of pain states, a representation built up from the body map. (shrink)

The accurate positioning of target is an important link in robot technology. Based on machine learning algorithm, this study firstly analyzed the location positioning principle of binocular vision of robot, then extracted features of the target using speeded-up robust features (SURF) method, positioned the location using Back Propagation Neural Networks (BPNN) method, and tested the method through experiments. The experimental results showed that the feature extraction of SURF method was fast, about 0.2 s, and was less affected by noise. It (...) was found from the positioning results that the output position of the BPNN method was basically consistent with the actual position, and errors in X, Y and Z directions were very small, which could meet the positioning needs of the robot. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of machine learning method and provide some theoretical support for its further promotion and application in practice. (shrink)

Mass surveillance involves the collection and storage of vast amounts of information, such as DNA samples from the general population, or location data from cell phones towers, aerial surveillance, and other sources, to then be used when a future crime occurs. For example, DNA from a crime scene could be checked against the database to identify a suspect; location data could identify suspects who were at the scene of a crime. Mass surveillance implicates important privacy interests, but it would surely (...) reduce crime and therefore has been defended by those who reject “privacy at all costs.” I also reject “privacy at all costs.” However, while agreeing that privacy is a value that must be balanced against competing values, I argue that requiring everyone to provide a sample of their DNA or keeping track of everyone’s movements would limit the autonomy of vast numbers of people who there is no reason to suspect will pose a threat, and though such policies would make society safer, that is not worth the cost to individual autonomy. After explaining why individuals can have a substantial interest in privacy even if they are not guilty of a crime, by linking that interest to the value of individual autonomy, and drawing on a political theory of liberal pluralism to restrict what counts as a legitimate public interest that might justify mass surveillance, I articulate a method of balancing these competing interests that is more feasible than a utilitarian approach. (shrink)