Social dilemmas occur when individuals make choices that are in their own best interest but not in the interest of society as a whole. Intrapersonal dilemmas occur when people make choices that are in the best interest of themselves at the moment of choice, but not in the best interest of themselves in the long run. A number of writers have observed that we can usefully model this self-defeating behavior by treating each individual as an aggregate of selves which have (...) competing interests, like the individual selves in a population. We undertake to synthesize and extend these contributions, applying the theory of intrapersonal dilemmas to addiction and procrastination, and discuss how the concept of multiple selves can explain why people attempt to control their behavior by imposing costs or constraints on themselves in the future, and how it can also help us develop new strategies of (personal) behavior control. (shrink)

Personal utilitarianism applies act-utilitarianism to the problem of individual choice. It is based on the view that the good life is achieved through maximizing the sum of individual measures of utility over a population. the population being the sequence of semi-autonomous selves from which the individual is composed. I begin by showing how our lives can usefully be partitioned into selves because the weights put on our various choice motives are constantly changing and, consequently, our preferences themselves concerning what we (...) should choose at any given time can also change from moment-to-moment. In particular, because we put disproportionate weight on our present needs relative to our future ones, we often become impatient and choose options that offer immediate gratification. I use concepts from game theory to describe multiple selves, and to discuss how strategic interactions between selves are possible, and then conclude by considering the practical problem of how to achieve the good life, or how can we get our selves to choose what is best for us in the long run. (shrink)

What makes a work of literature good or bad? How freely can the reader interpret it? Could a nursery rhyme like _Baa Baa Black Sheep_ be full of concealed loathing, resentment, and aggression? In this accessible, delightfully entertaining book, Terry Eagleton addresses these intriguing questions and a host of others. _How to Read Literature _is the book of choice for students new to the study of literature and for all other readers interested in deepening their understanding and enriching their (...) reading experience. In a series of brilliant analyses, Eagleton shows how to read with due attention to tone, rhythm, texture, syntax, allusion, ambiguity, and other formal aspects of literary works. He also examines broader questions of character, plot, narrative, the creative imagination, the meaning of fictionality, and the tension between what works of literature say and what they show. Unfailingly authoritative and cheerfully opinionated, the author provides useful commentaries on classicism, Romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism along with spellbinding insights into a huge range of authors, from Shakespeare and J. K. Rowling to Jane Austen and Samuel Beckett. (shrink)

_A literary master’s entertaining guide to reading with deeper insight, better understanding, and greater pleasure_ What makes a work of literature good or bad? How freely can the reader interpret it? Could a nursery rhyme like _Baa Baa Black Sheep_ be full of concealed loathing, resentment, and aggression? In this accessible, delightfully entertaining book, Terry Eagleton addresses these intriguing questions and a host of others. _How to Read Literature _is the book of choice for students new to the study (...) of literature and for all other readers interested in deepening their understanding and enriching their reading experience. In a series of brilliant analyses, Eagleton shows how to read with due attention to tone, rhythm, texture, syntax, allusion, ambiguity, and other formal aspects of literary works. He also examines broader questions of character, plot, narrative, the creative imagination, the meaning of fictionality, and the tension between what works of literature say and what they show. Unfailingly authoritative and cheerfully opinionated, the author provides useful commentaries on classicism, Romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism along with spellbinding insights into a huge range of authors, from Shakespeare and J. K. Rowling to Jane Austen and Samuel Beckett. (shrink)

In his Quadratura, Paul of Venice considers a sophism involving time and tense which appears to show that there is a valid inference which is also invalid. His argument runs as follows: consider this inference concerning some proposition A: A will signify only that everything true will be false, so A will be false. Call this inference B. Then B is valid because the opposite of its conclusion is incompatible with its premise. In accordance with the standard doctrine of ampliation, (...) Paul takes A to be equivalent to 'Everything that is or will be true will be false'. But he proceeds to argue that it is possible that B's premise ('A will signify only that everything true will be false') could be true and its conclusion false, so B is not only valid but also invalid. Thus A and B are the basis of an insoluble. In his Logica Parva, a self-confessedly elementary text aimed at students and not necessarily representing his own view, and in the Quadratura, Paul follows the solution found in the Logica Oxoniensis, which posits an implicit assertion of its own truth in insolubles like B. However, in the treatise on insolubles in his Logica Magna, Paul develops and endorses Swyneshed's solution, which stood out against this ''multiple-meanings'' approach in offering a solution that took insolubles at face value, meaning no more than is explicit in what they say. On this account, insolubles imply their own falsity, and that is why, in so falsifying themselves, they are false. We consider how both types of solution apply to B and how they complement each other. On both, B is valid. But on one (following Swyneshed), B has true premises and false conclusion, and contradictories can be false together; on the other (following the Logica Oxoniensis), the counterexample is rejected. (shrink)

Over fifteen years have passed since Cora Diamond and James Conant turned Wittgenstein scholarship upside down with the program of “resolute” reading, and ten years since this reading was crystallized in the major collection _The New Wittgenstein_. This approach remains at the center of the debate about Wittgenstein and his philosophy, and this book draws together the latest thinking of the world’s leading Tractatarian scholars and promising newcomers. Showcasing one piece alternately from each “camp”, _Beyond the Tractatus Wars_ pairs newly (...) commissioned pieces addressing differing views on how to understand early Wittgenstein, providing for the first time an arena in which the debate between “strong” resolutists, “mild” resolutists and “elucidatory” readers of the book can really take place. The collection includes famous “samizdat” essays by Warren Goldfarb and Roger White that are finally seeing the light of day. (shrink)

Climate change and the destruction of the earth is the most urgent issue of our time. We are hurtling towards the end of civilisation as we know it. With an unflinching honest approach, Rupert Read asks us to face up to the fate of the planet. This is a book for anyone who wants their philosophy to deal with reality and their climate concern to be more than a displacement activity. -/- As people come together to mourn the loss (...) of the planet, we have the opportunity to create a grounded, hopeful response. This meaningful hopefulness looks to the new communities created around climate activism. Together, our collective mourning enables us to become human in ways previously unknown. -/- Why Climate Breakdown Matters is a practical guide on how to be a radical, responsible climate activist. (shrink)

Whenever the membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a new-born are broken, imagine for a moment that something flies off, and that one can do it with an egg as easily as with a man, namely the hommelette, or the lamella. The lamella is something extra-flat, which moves like the amoeba. It is just a little more complicated. But it goes everywhere. And as it is something - I will tell you shortly (...) why - that is related to what the sexed being loses in sexuality, it is, like the amoeba in relation to sexed beings, immortal - because it survives any division, and scissiparous intervention. And it can turn around. Well! This is not very reassuring. But suppose it comes and envelopes your face while you are quietly asleep... I can't see how we would not join battle with a being capable of these properties. But it would not be a very convenient battle. This lamella, this organ, whose characteristic is not to exist, but which is nevertheless an organ - I can give you more details as to its zoological place - is the libido. It is the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to say, immortal life, irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life. It is precisely what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction. And it is of this that all the forms of the objet a that can be enumerated are the representatives, the equivalents. Every word has a weight here, in this deceivingly poetic description of the mythic creature called by Lacan "lamella". Lacan imagines lamella as a version of what Freud called "partial object": a weird organ which is magically autonomized, surviving without a body whose organ it should have been, like a hand that wonders around alone in early Surrealist films, or like the smile in Alice in Wonderland that persists alone, even when the Cheshire cat's body is no longer present: "'All right', said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone. 'Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin', thought Alice; 'but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!'" The lamella is an entity of pure surface, without the density of a substance, an infinitely plastic object that can not only incessantly change its form, but can even transpose itself from one to another medium: imagine a "something" that is first heard as a shrilling sound, and then pops up as a monstrously distorted body. A lamella is indivisible, indestructible, and immortal - more precisely, undead in the sense this term has in horror fiction: not the sublime spiritual immortality, but the obscene immortality of the "living dead" which, after every annihilation, re-composes themselves and clumsily goes on. As Lacan puts it in his terms, lamella does not exist, it insists: it is unreal, an entity of pure semblance, a multiplicity of appearances which seem to envelop a central void - its status is purely fantasmatic. This blind indestructible insistence of the libido is what Freud called "death drive," and one should bear in mind that "death drive" is, paradoxically, the Freudian name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis: for an uncanny excess of life, for an "undead" urge which persist beyond the cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption. This is why Freud equates death drive with the so-called "compulsion-to-repeat," an uncanny urge to repeat painful past experiences which seems to outgrow the natural limitations of the organism affected by it and to insist even beyond the organism's death - again, like the living dead in a horror film who just go on. This excess inscribes itself into the human body in the guise of a wound which makes the subject "undead," depriving him of the capacity to die : when this wound is healed, the hero can die in peace. (shrink)

Supposing that one is already familiar with special relativistic physics, what constitutes the best route via which to arrive at the architecture of the general theory of relativity? Although the later Einstein would stress the significance of mathematical and theoretical principles in answering this question, in this article we follow the lead of the earlier Einstein (circa 1916) and stress instead how one can go a long way to arriving at the general theory via inductive and empirical principles, without invoking (...) presumptions concerning the geometrical structure of the final theory. We focus on the construction of the kinematical structure and the terms describing the coupling of matter to gravity. General covariance, understood and employed as a straightforward extrapolation of empirical considerations, is central to our derivation, together with what we dub the `Methodological Equivalence Principle'. We argue that our approach has a number of virtues, both for one's understanding of the general theory of relativity, but also for pedagogy, since it stresses---to the greatest extent possible (a lesson which we inherit from Bell, [1976])---both the methodological precedence of dynamical considerations to interpretative issues and the theoretical continuity between general relativity and its precursors. We conclude by comparing our approach to other philosophical approaches to general relativity and discussing the significance of empirically motivated methodological principles in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

In this book, Rupert Read offers the first outline of a resolute reading, following the highly influential New Wittgenstein 'school', of the Philosophical Investigations. He argues that the key to understanding Wittgenstein's later philosophy is to understand its liberatory purport. Read contends that a resolute reading coincides in its fundaments with what, building on ideas in the later Gordon Baker, he calls a liberatory reading. Liberatory philosophy is philosophy that can liberate the user from compulsive patterns of thought, (...) freeing one for possibilities that were previously obscured. Such liberation is our prime goal in philosophy. This book consists in a sequential reading, along these lines, of what Read considers the most important and controversial passages in the Philosophical Investigations 1, 16, 43, 95 & 116 & 122, 130-3, 149-151, 186, 198-201, 217, and 284-6. Read claims that this liberatory conception is simultaneously an ethical conception. The PI should be considered a work of ethics in that its central concern becomes our relation with others. Wittgensteinian liberations challenge widespread assumptions about how we allegedly are independent of and separate from others. Wittgenstein's Liberatory Philosophy will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Wittgenstein, and to scholars of the political philosophy of liberation and the ethics of relation. (shrink)

That our ecological future appears grave can no longer come as any surprise. And yet we have so far failed, collectively and individually, to begin the kind of action necessary to shift our path away from catastrophic climate collapse. -/- In this stark and startling little book, Rupert Read helps us to understand the direness of our predicament while showing us a metaphor and a method — a way of thinking — by which we might transform it. From the (...) relatively uncontroversial starting point that we love our own children, we are introduced to a logic of care that iterates far into the future: in caring for our own children, we are committed to caring for the whole of human future; in caring for the whole of human future, we are committed to caring for the future of the natural world. Out of such thinking, hope emerges. -/- As Read demonstrates in this urgent call to action, accepting that we care for our own offspring commits us to a struggle on behalf of us all. (shrink)

Ecological Psychology and Enactivism both challenge representationist cognitive science, but the two approaches have only begun to engage in dialogue. Further conceptual clarification is required in which differences are as important as common ground. This paper enters the dialogue by focusing on important differences. After a brief account of the parallel histories of Ecological Psychology and Enactivism, we cover incompatibility between them regarding their theories of sensation and perception. First, we show how and why in ecological theory perception is, crucially, (...) not based on sensation. We elucidate this idea by examining the biological roots of work in the two fields, concentrating on Gibson and Varela and Maturana. We expound an ecological critique of any sensation-based approach to perception by detailing two topics: classic retinal image theories and perception in single-celled organisms. The second main point emphasizes the importance of the idea of organism-environment mutuality and its difference from structural coupling of sensations and motor behavior. We point out how ecological - phenomenological methods of inquiry grow out of mutualism and compare Gibson’s idea of visual kinesthesis to Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the lived body. Third, we conclude that Ecological Psychology and varieties of Enactivism are laying down different paths to pursue related goals. Thus, convergence of Ecological Psychology and Enactivism is not possible given their conflicting assumptions, but cross-fertilization is possible and desirable. (shrink)

Even though there is an ineluctable abyss between Analytic and Continental Philosophy, it is not hard to argue that in his later works Ludwig Wittgenstein draws a closer philosophical attitude to the latter in terms of that the notions developed by him, such as language-games, family resemblances, meaning-in-use or rule-following, apart from his earlier nomological approach to language, leave room for various understandings and uncertainty in language. In the present work, my primary task is to concentrate on the close relationship (...) between the Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblances and Gadamer’s idea of the fusion of horizons. But both philosophers, coincide in criticizing the authority of the Cartesian subject and private language and in allowing different understandings and uncertainty in language. Starting from this point of view, the linguistic turn, I will turn my remarks on the question how we learn color concepts since the structure of these concepts radically differs from the words that are able to subject to ostensive definitions. This last section will also offer a hermeneutical reading of Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblances. (shrink)

The increasingly pervasive practice of veiling among Muslim women has stimulated a great deal of scholarly investigation and debate. This study brings empirical evidence to bear on current debates about the meaning of the veil in Islam. This article first examines the conflicting meanings of the veil among Muslim religious elites and Islamic feminists. Although the dominant gender discourse among Muslim elites strongly favors this cultural practice, an antiveiling discourse promulgated by Islamic feminists has gained ground within recent years. This (...) study then examines how these discursive disputes affect gender identity negotiation among veiled and unveiled Muslim women living in Austin, Texas. Interviews with these women highlight how their gender identities reproduce and reformulate existing Muslim gender discourses. Special attention is paid to the subjective disparities and points of congruence between both groups of respondents. This study concludes by suggesting avenues for future research on the intersection of gender, religion, and cultural difference. (shrink)

Within feminist memory studies the economy has largely been overlooked, despite the fact that the economic analysis of culture and society has long featured in research on women and gender. This article addresses that gap, arguing that the global economy matters in understanding the gender of memory and memories of gender. It models the conceptual basis for the consideration of a feminist economic analysis of memory that can reveal the dimensions of mnemonic transformation, accumulation and exchange through gendered mnemonic labour, (...) gendered mnemonic value and gendered mnemonic capital. The article then applies the concepts of mnemonic labour and mnemonic capital in more detail through a case study of memory activism examining the work of the Parragirls and the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project in Sydney, Australia. The campaigns have worked to recognize the memory and history of the longest continuous site of female containment in Australia built to support the British invasion. The site in Parramatta, which dates from the 1820s, was a female factory for transported convicts, a female prison, an asylum for women and girls, an orphanage and then Parramatta Girls Home. The Burramattagal People of Darug Clan are the Traditional Owners of the land and the site is of practical and spiritual importance to indigenous women. This local struggle is representative of a global economic system of gendered institutionalized violence and forgetting, The analysis shows how the mnemonic labour of women survivors accumulates as mnemonic value that is then transformed into institutional mnemonic capital. Focusing on how mnemonic labour creates lasting mnemonic capital reveals the gendered dimensions of memory which are critical for ongoing memory work. (shrink)

The Protestant Work Ethic is a powerful force in Western culture with far reaching effects on our values and judgments. While research on PWE as a cultural value is abundant in diverse disciplines, little research has explored how this cultural value facilitates the use of heuristics when evaluating the morality of others. Using both PWE and illusory correlation as foundations, this paper explores whether people attribute positive moral characteristics to others merely based upon a description as hardworking. Three experiments suggest (...) merely being described as hardworking leads to perceptions of greater honesty, a more careful and detailed approach to one’s work, accompanied by a lesser likelihood of engaging in cheating behavior and a greater likelihood of accountability. These results have implications regarding the detection of deviant/fraudulent behavior. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Reading the Philosophy of Right The Terms of Ethical Life The Hard Work of Freedom Conclusion Notes References.

What makes necessary truths true? I argue that all truth supervenes on how things are, and that necessary truths are no exception. What makes them true are proofs. But if so, the notion of proof needs to be generalized to include verification-transcendent proofs, proofs whose correctness exceeds our ability to verify it. It is incumbent on me, therefore, to show that arguments, such as Dummett's, that verification- truth is not compatible with the theory of meaning, are mistaken. The answer is (...) that what we can conceive and construct far outstrips our actual abilities. I conclude by proposing a proof-theoretic account of modality, rejecting a claim of Armstrong's that modality can reside in non-modal truthmakers. (shrink)

In the main bulk of this chapter, I offer a Wittgensteinian take on infinity and deduce from this some Wittgensteinian criticisms of Chomsky on ‘creativity’, treating this as one among many examples of how metaphors, following the understanding of Lakoff and Johnson, following Wittgenstein, can delude one into metaphysics. As per my title, ‘metaphysics’ turns out to be, really, nothing other than metaphorics in disguise. Our aim in philosophy, then, is to turn latent metaphors into patent metaphors. When we do (...) this, the charm of metaphysics evaporates. Or again, its charm, if still felt, is properly contextualised: ‘metaphysics’ becomes at best a kind of accidental or un-self-aware poetry, rather than something like a super- or supra-science. (shrink)

Midway through How to Do Things With Words, J.L. Austin’s announces a “fresh start” in his efforts to characterize the ways in which speech is action, and introduces a new conceptual framework from the one he has been using up to that point. Against a common reading that portrays this move as simply abandoning the framework so far developed, Marina Sbisà contends that the text takes the argumentative form of a proof by contradiction, such that the initial framework plays an (...) instrumental role as part of a proof in favour of the subsequent one. Despite agreeing with Sbisà’s broad instrumentalist approach, we argue that her regimentation of Austin’s narrative into a proof by contradiction ultimately fails - both as a proof and as an interpretation of Austin. Instead, we suggest that a better way of interpreting the peculiar structure of How to Do Things With Words is as a pedagogical exercise whose point is to bring a concealed alternative into view in a manner that also explains its initial concealment, and that this approach provides richer resources for supporting Sbisà’s own conventionalist understanding of illocution than that afforded by reading the text as a proof by contradiction. (shrink)

The author argues that Fuller’s book, with the single exception of its correct reinterpretation of Kuhn as no apostle of postmodernism—such that his “fans” and “foes” alike are boxing with (or cheering on) only a shadow Kuhn—is worse than worthless. For, in a disreputable and outright propagandistic fashion, it consists in a series of serious distortions of and outright falsehoods about Kuhn and recent philosophy of science, distortions and falsehoods which may well mislead the unwary reader. Nickles’ s collection by (...) contrast is a competent, useful, and workmanlike performance, although the author argues that the editor’s focus on cognitive science uses of Kuhn (and of Wittgenstein) is unhelpful, in that these uses again distort the philosophy of Kuhn (as of Wittgenstein), who was on balance no apostle of cognitive science either. (shrink)

The death of Peter Winch in 1997 sparked a revived interest in his work with this book arguing his work suffered misrepresentation in both recent literature and in contemporary critiques of his writing. Debates in philosophy and sociology about foundational questions of social ontology and methodology often claim to have adequately incorporated and moved beyond Winch's concerns. Re-establishing a Winchian voice, the authors examine how such contentions involve a failure to understand central themes in Winch's writings and that the issues (...) which occupied him in his Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy and later papers remain central to social studies. The volume offers a careful reading of the text in alliance with Wittgensteinian insights and alongside a focus on the nature and results of social thought and inquiry. It draws parallels with other movements in the social studies, notably ethnomethodology, to demonstrate how Winch's central claim is both more significant and more difficult to transcend than sociologists and philosophers have hitherto imagined. (shrink)

In his Quadratura, Paul of Venice considers a sophism involving time and tense which appears to show that there is a valid inference which is also invalid. Consider this inference concerning some proposition A : A will signify only that everything true will be false, so A will be false. Call this inference B. A and B are the basis of an insoluble-that is, a Liar-like paradox. Like the sequence of statements in Yablo's paradox, B looks ahead to a moment (...) when A will be false, yet that moment may never come. In the Quadratura, Paul follows the solution to insolubles found in the collection of elementary treatises known as the Logica Oxoniensis, which posits an implicit assertion of its own truth in insolubles like B. However, in the treatise on insolubles in his Logica Magna, Paul develops and endorses a different solution that takes insolubles at face value. We consider how both types of solution apply to A and B : on both, B is valid. But on one, B has true premises and false conclusion, and contradictories can be false together; on the other (following the Logica Oxoniensis), the counterexample is rejected. (shrink)

In line with the Principle of Uniform Solution, Graham Priest has challenged advocates like myself of the “multiple-meanings” solution to the paradoxes of truth and knowledge, due to the medieval logician Thomas Bradwardine, to extend this account to a similar solution to the paradoxes of denotation, such as Berry’s, König’s and Richard’s. I here rise to this challenge by showing how to adapt Bradwardine’s principles of truth and signification for propositions to corresponding principles of denotation and signification for descriptive phrases, (...) applying them to give a “multiple-meanings” solution to the denotational paradoxes. (shrink)

Based on the reception of Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) philosophy in the English-speaking world, the paper highlights some tendencies in reading and commenting on classical philosophical works that have been the focus of attention for a long time. The author makes a suggestion that we can find persistent but nonetheless dynamic, patterns of commenting and interpreting. The first wave of Levinas studies was apologetic and laudatory. Its main task was to introduce new concepts, i.e. to paraphrase. The second wave was much (...) more appropriative and critical. In this period, the scholars tried to apply the philosophy of the Other to existing problems or they tried to resolve the paradoxes that were the products of apologetic readings. The today’s third wave recreates and readjusts interpretive strategies inherent to the first and second wave. To explain this dynamics of reading, the paper introduces a normative scheme that consists of three regulative principles – “faithfully”, “truthfully”, and “ethically”. Due to this tripartite opposition, in which “faithfully” refers to fidelity to an original, “truthfully” refers to the search for universal truth, and “ethically” refers to the inaccessibility for an ego to grab hold of a text of another person, commenting grows intensive. In addition, the opposition of “faithfully” and “truthfully” demonstrates some liberty in such, to some extent, involuntary practice as commenting. This reflexion helps identify the current phase of commenting on classical texts and the intentions of readers and commentators. What is more, it provides justifications for innovative readings of Levinas’ oeuvre as well as the texts of other great philosophers. (shrink)

James Klagge aims to shed light on Wittgenstein’s philosophy by situating it in its biographical–cultural context. While Klagge is not alone in pursuing this aim, his claim to originality lies in his thematic focus on Wittgenstein’s relationship to his time and culture as one of “alienation” (3), expressed by the metaphor of being “in exile” (61). A central concern of Klagge’s is how we, as modern readers living in a “civilized” culture not dissimilar to the one from which Wittgenstein felt (...) himself estranged, can hope to understand the philosophical writings of such a radically distant “other.” Klagge’s suggestion is that through acknowledging and engaging with just how different Wittgenstein was, we can .. (shrink)

The author argues that Fuller’s book, with the single exception of its correct reinterpretation of Kuhn as no apostle of postmodernism—such that his “fans” and “foes” alike are boxing with (or cheering on) only a shadow Kuhn—is worse than worthless. For, in a disreputable and outright propagandistic fashion, it consists in a series of serious distortions of and outright falsehoods about Kuhn and recent philosophy of science, distortions and falsehoods which may well mislead the unwary reader. Nickles’ s collection by (...) contrast is a competent, useful, and workmanlike performance, although the author argues that the editor’s focus on cognitive science uses of Kuhn (and of Wittgenstein) is unhelpful, in that these uses again distort the philosophy of Kuhn (as of Wittgenstein), who was on balance no apostle of cognitive science either. (shrink)

John Cleland’s 1740s pornographic novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure repeatedly depicts and eroticises the act of defloration. As such it is a revealing illustration of what Ivan Bloch termed the ‘defloration mania’ of the eighteenth century. This article maps narrative events on to contemporary medical depictions of first intercourse to show the ways that the theories and ideas presented in medical and pseudo-medical texts transferred into erotic fiction and demonstrates how in some instances the bloody defloration scenes can (...) be read as being sex during menstruation, an act which was culturally forbidden at this time. (shrink)

This thesis argues that Dame Iris Murdoch’s writings portray a dialectical picture of morality that invites the reader to acknowledge the presence of evil and reflect upon the necessarily ‘opposing forces’ of good and evil. Murdoch’s engagement with both historical and contemporary discussions of evil is traced through close reading of both her published texts, including fiction and philosophy, and her unpublished and recently published texts and resources, including annotations, interviews and letters. These close readings are focused on the theological, (...) psychological and literary aspects of the contemporary problem of evil. The perspectives offered within this study all transcend the focus on goodness invited by Murdoch’s fiction and philosophy, thus challenging the biased perspective of scholars of the late-twentieth century who sought to elevate Murdoch’s good characters by drawing equations between her moral philosophy and her fiction. This study begins, first, by demonstrating how Murdoch’s writings engage with the problem of evil, with the theological attempt to reconcile goodness with the presence of evil and suffering in the world, by drawing on her allusions to the Book of Job and to the writings of Simone Weil and Dame Julian of Norwich, all of which assert the necessary presence of evil and suffering in the moral life. Second, I interrogate the inconsistencies between Murdoch’s fictional and philosophical pictures of evil to illustrate how her fictional and philosophical engagement with Saint Paul’s writings reveals that she adopted the same dialectical picture of morality for which she critiqued Jung in her moral philosophy. For her, Jung’s picture of morality merges aspects of dualism and monism, both of which, traditionally speaking, offer two countervailing ways in which to picture the moral life, where evil represents, respectively, either an independent moral force separate from the good or a failure to carry out the moral iii ideals of goodness. Third, I identify and develop a link between contemporary moral, psychological and sociological discourses on psychopathy and the evil characters, both male and female, within Murdoch’s novels: not only do her antagonists and demons, often called ‘enchanter’ figures by scholars, echo the psychopath’s moral psychology, but so too do her saintly figures. Such an ambiguous picture resonates with contemporary interpretations of psychopathy, such as those offered by Robert D. Hare, Kevin Dutton, or Simon Baron- Cohen, which highlight the complex role of compassion, empathy and emotion on the individual’s moral awareness, whether they are saintly or psychopathic. In the final chapter, I argue that Murdoch’s dialectical picture of morality is indebted to Blake, whose The Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell illustrates the necessity of the ‘contrary’ pairs of innocence and experience, reason and passion, and good and evil. While Murdoch may praise goodness, her complex engagement with evil reveals a dialectical task for the moral agent in which they have to appreciate the complexity of the moral life, with its inherently ambiguous mixtures of emotion and rationality, the saintly and the psychopathic, and goodness and evil. (shrink)

Martha Nussbaum’s _Justice for Animals_ calls upon humanity to secure for all sentient beings the central capabilities they need to flourish. This essay review critically examines the ethical and scientific foundations of Nussbaum’s position. On the ethical side, we explore the tension between a robust defence of animal rights and political liberalism, which requires tolerance of a range of reasonable views. On the scientific side, we reflect on how our uncertainty regarding the distribution of sentience in the natural world leaves (...) us uncertain about how many claimants of justice there are and about the relative strength of their claims. We bring out some further problems with Nussbaum’s views on animal killing and pest control. We also reflect on how animal welfare science might be done differently if guided by Nussbaum’s framework. (shrink)

This paper introduces the Special Issue on 'post-truth'. The contributions to this special issue try between them to strike a right balance. To establish how new ‘post-truthism’ really is – or isn’t. To seek a point of reflection on whatever is new in our current socio-political straits. And to consider seriously how philosophy can help. Whether by wondering about the extent to which reason, or truth, may rightly, if one follows Wittgenstein, be viewed in certain respects as a constraint upon (...) thought or opinion. Or indeed by wondering whether we still have a long way to go in approaching truth at all. (shrink)

_Framing the Dialogues: How to Read Openings and Closures in Plato_ focuses on the intricate and multifarious ways in which Plato frames his dialogues, with a view to exploring the complex association between framework and philosophical content.

It is known that, on average, people adapt their choice of memory strategy to the subjective utility of interaction. What is not known is whether an individual's choices are boundedly optimal. Two experiments are reported that test the hypothesis that an individual's decisions about the distribution of remembering between internal and external resources are boundedly optimal where optimality is defined relative to experience, cognitive constraints, and reward. The theory makes predictions that are tested against data, not fitted to it. The (...) experiments use a no-choice/choice utility learning paradigm where the no-choice phase is used to elicit a profile of each participant's performance across the strategy space and the choice phase is used to test predicted choices within this space. They show that the majority of individuals select strategies that are boundedly optimal. Further, individual differences in what people choose to do are successfully predicted by the analysis. Two issues are discussed: the performance of the minority of participants who did not find boundedly optimal adaptations, and the possibility that individuals anticipate what, with practice, will become a bounded optimal strategy, rather than what is boundedly optimal during training. (shrink)

Volume 55, Issue 2, April 2024, Page 198-199.

Models of intertemporal choice draw on three evaluation rules, which we compare in the restricted domain of choices between smaller sooner and larger later monetary outcomes. The hyperbolic discounting model proposes an alternative-based rule, in which options are evaluated separately. The interval discounting model proposes a hybrid rule, in which the outcomes are evaluated separately, but the delays to those outcomes are evaluated in comparison with one another. The tradeoff model proposes an attribute-based rule, in which both outcomes and delays (...) are evaluated in comparison with one another: People consider both the intervals between the outcomes and the compensations received or paid over those intervals. We compare highly general parametric functional forms of these models by means of a Bayesian analysis, a method of analysis not previously used in intertemporal choice. We find that the hyperbolic discounting model is outperformed by the interval discounting model, which, in turn, is outperformed by the tradeoff model. Our cognitive modeling is among the first to offer quantitative evidence against the conventional view that people make intertemporal choices by discounting the value of future outcomes, and in favor of the view that they directly compare options along the time and outcome attributes. (shrink)

In a recent article, Halvorson and Manchak (Br J Philos Sci, Forthcoming) claim that there is no basis for the Hole Argument, because (in a certain sense) hole isometries are unique. This raises two important questions: (a) does their argument succeed?; (b) how does this formalist response to the Hole Argument relate to other recent responses to the Hole Argument in the same tradition—in particular, that of Weatherall (Br J Philos Sci 69(2):329–350, 2018)? In this article, _ad_ (a), we argue (...) that Halvorson and Manchak’s claim does not go through; _ad_ (b), we argue that although one _prima facie_ plausible reading would see Halvorson and Manchak as filling an important hole (no pun intended) in Weatherall’s argument, in fact this reading is implausible; there is no need to supplement Weatherall’s work with Halvorson and Manchak’s results. (shrink)

Within the Community Rule, 1QS 8:1-4 has at times been used as an intertext to support claims pertaining to the future expectations of both early Jesus movements and the historical Jesus himself. In particular, the passage has functioned as an intertext to support the notion that Jesus and some of his earliest movements foresaw the future restoration and liberation of greater Israel in toto, including outsiders. Without getting involved in this larger New Testament debate, the current article wishes to address (...) the appropriateness of using 1QS 8:1-4 as an intertext without taking its literary and sectarian contexts into consideration. Focusing throughout on the interrelationship between judgement and boundary demarcation, this article will unfold in a centripetal manner. Firstly, it will treat the commonalities among all the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls. Secondly, the discussion will direct its focus specifically to the Community Rule. Finally, we will look at 1QS 8:1-4 in particular. (shrink)

According to Kevin Mulligan, Derrida’s interpretation of Husserl in Speech and Phenomena gets the later wrong on almost every count, comprising an egregious example of a logic in the Parisian sense. In his reading Derrida seeks to undo the distinction, not just between the imagined word and the perceived word, but between imaginative and perceptual presentations in general. He also falls prey to the mentalist thesis that a subject is aware of the states he is in, a thesis not applicable (...) to speech. Derrida goes on to make a failed psychologistic attempt to display the role of death in our uses of signs, and claims that sign and meaning idealities command the totality of their actual and possible instantiations and therefore represent these, such that the resulting mixed species has the magical properties of being active and efficient. I argue that Derrida’s interpretation of Husserl is far more accurate than Mulligan allows, and that his work is only susceptible to the final objection. His text needs to be read again so as to get the greater part of it right. (shrink)

Most animals have mental states of one sort or another, but few species share our capacity for self-awareness. We are aware of our own mental states via introspection, and we are aware of the mental states of our fellow human beings on the basis of what they do and say. This chapter is not concerned with these traditional forms of mind-reading—forms whose origins predate the beginnings of recorded history—but with the prospects of a rather different and significantly more recent form (...) of ‘mind-reading’: the capacity to reliably ascribe mental states to a creature on the basis of information derived from information about their brain states. (shrink)

The metaphysical root of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus represents a departure from a pervasive philosophical assumption found originally in Plato's Meno. This departure is directly inspired by a critique of the Meno found in the works by Soren Kierkegaard written under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus. ;The central implication of Kierkegaard's influence for Tractatus interpretation is that thought---or thinking---referred to in the Tractatus of necessity extends beyond the limits of language. ;There are at present two competing interpretative readings of the Tractatus (...) in the literature. One reading---referred to as the "Standard" reading since it is propounded by almost all notable Wittgenstein scholars, e.g., Pears, Hacker, McGuinness, Anscombe, Rhees, Malcohn---has it that the "mystical" sections of the Tractatus must be, to some degree, taken seriously. The other reading---a "New" reading advocated most prominently by Winch, Diamond, and Conant---argues that the Standard reading is self-contradictory in that it maintains that the limits of language and those of thought are the same while it simultaneously maintains that there is a sort of Mystical residue left over even after the Tractatus has been "thrown away". The New reading sees Wittgenstein's point as being precisely that there is no such left-over residue and that we must accept this. ;Both readings are however incorrect in regard to Wittgenstein's view of limits in the Tractatus. While the New reading takes somewhat seriously the influence of Kierkegaard on the Tractatus, it asserts that a Kierkegaardian influence bolsters the New reading's view of the mystical as well as its view that language and thought share the same limits in the Tractatus. The opposite is in fact the case. Das Mystische corresponds to Kierkegaard's "absolutely unknown" that language---but not thought---runs up against as a limit. Wittgenstein himself alludes to this correspondence in conversation with members of the Vienna Circle in 1929. As such, if the influence of Kierkegaard is to be seen in its proper light, the problem is not with the Standard reading of Das Mystische, but rather with the view that the limits of thought and language in the Tractatus are the same. For Kierkegaard, unless thought extends beyond the limit of language there is no conceivable nexus for the subject or the divine. This is precisely his critique of Plato's Meno in Fragments. That this view is also the bedrock of the Tractatus' metaphysics is what the present thesis argues is the proper "Kierkegaardian reading" of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. (shrink)

Consensus in the contemporary philosophical literature has it that conserved quantity theories of causation such as that of Dowe [2000]—according to which causation is to be analysed in terms of the exchange of conserved quantities (e.g., energy)—face damning problems when confronted with contemporary physics, where the notion of conservation becomes delicate. In particular, in general relativity it is often claimed that there simply are no conservation laws for (say) total-stress energy. If this claim is correct, it is difficult to see (...) how conserved quantity theories of causation could survive. In this article, we resist the above consensus and defend conserved quantity theories from this conclusion, at least when focusing on the apparent problems posed by general relativity. We argue that this approach to causation can continue to be defended in general relativity, once one appreciates (a) the availability of approximate symmetries in generic general relativistic spacetimes, and (b) the role of modelling and idealisation in that theory. Given these points, conserved quantity theories of causation must stand or fall on other grounds. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the hermeneutic of reading text and hearing text.

In the Michaelmas Term 1968 I gave a course of lectures on the Philosophical Investigations . Until then nobody had lectured at Cambridge specifically on that book, though it had been in print for fifteen years and must by that time have been lectured on in nearly every other philosophy department in the English-speaking world. One reason why we were so slow is suggested by a remark that John Wisdom made after hearing Max Black give a lecture on the Tractatus (...) in the early fifties. As we came out of the lecture room he said to me ‘That was a strange experience. I have a clear memory of all that from my early years in Cambridge. And yet in some ways it was like hearing a lecture on Spinoza.’. (shrink)

In the Michaelmas Term 1968 I gave a course of lectures on the Philosophical Investigations. Until then nobody had lectured at Cambridge specifically on that book, though it had been in print for fifteen years and must by that time have been lectured on in nearly every other philosophy department in the English-speaking world. One reason why we were so slow is suggested by a remark that John Wisdom made after hearing Max Black give a lecture on the Tractatus in (...) the early fifties. As we came out of the lecture room he said to me ‘That was a strange experience. I have a clear memory of all that from my early years in Cambridge. And yet in some ways it was like hearing a lecture on Spinoza.’. (shrink)

I wish here to outline a new methodology for the history of philosophy, which is inspired from the practice of scholarship on Wittgenstein; I will call it “selective interpretation.” It is a method by which an historical figure is read so as to make any philosopher sound like they completely agree with one’s own personal stand on philosophical issues. First, I seek to systematize a set of rules which will aid one in reading the text any damn way one (...) pleases. The next section lays out these rules, outlining the necessary tools to read any text exactly as you want it to read. In the rest of the paper, I plan to give a few specific examples of selective interpretation of the early Wittgenstein: reading the Tractatus so that it sounds like David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer, respectively. I hope that my analysis here will be therapeutic to Wittgenstein scholars. And I hope also to help other historians of philosophy come to understand this daring methodological proposal. (shrink)

i would like to begin by heaping some well-merited laud upon Robert Cummings Neville, henceforth to be referred to simply as Bob. His architectonics, in this book and almost all his others, are perhaps only rivaled by Kant and Whitehead, and the profundity of his thinking is only surpassed by the breadth of his learning. Specifically, I am convinced that his knowledge of non-Western thought is unsurpassed by his peers. I, however, will refer to but a fraction of what he (...) has to teach us about non-Western thought, as I must admit that this is generally above my pay grade.In a recent issue of American Journal of Theology & Philosophy, Bob has a small article... (shrink)

The topic of self-awareness has an impressive philosophical pedigree, and sustained discussion of the topic goes back at least to Descartes. More recently, selfawareness has become a lively issue in the cognitive sciences, thanks largely to the emerging body of work on “mindreading”, the process of attributing mental states to people (and other organisms). During the last 15 years, the processes underlying mindreading have been a major focus of attention in cognitive and developmental psychology. Most of this work has been (...) concerned with the processes underlying the attribution of mental states to other people. However, a number of psychologists and philosophers have also proposed accounts of the mechanisms underlying the attribution of mental states to oneself. This process of reading one’s own mind or becoming self- aware will be our primary concern in this paper. (shrink)

This paper examines Fichte's conception of the freedom of choice in Das System der Sittenlehre of 1798 as a solution to the dilemma posed by determinism and indeterminism. It show that Fichte does not simply affirm an indifferent power of voluntary choice, but demonstrates how such a power might co-exist with the measure of regularity and lawfulness we normally admit of human choices. Particular choices do not occur at random, but are based on general reasons. These reasons are in turn (...) based on the extent to which we have freely reflected on our original drive. Thus our choices can be comprehended and predicted from the point of reflection from which we choose. This does not lead to the denial of the freedom of choice, but only to rethinking it in terms of the freedom of reflection: Though we cannot choose other than what we choose from the point of reflection we occupy, we can choose other than what we choose by raising or lowering ourselves through reflection to a higher or lower point of reflection. (shrink)