Inanimate air vents and grain silos, as well as parents and children, siblings, friends, neighbors, famous actors and athletes, unknown passersby, dogs, and livestock. All these rub shoulders - so to speak - in the pages of Couples, sought out by Shay's keen eye and coupled forever by his impertinent camera."--Jacket.

A collection drawn from five decades of the photographer's work celebrates animals with humans in natural and domestic settings, from the image of a man passing a peanut to a monkey to a pig drinking a can of beer, in a volume that also seeks to reveal the animal within human beings.

What is it to be a work of art? Renowned author and critic Arthur C. Danto addresses this fundamental, complex question. Part philosophical monograph and part memoiristic meditation, _What Art Is _challenges the popular interpretation that art is an indefinable concept, instead bringing to light the properties that constitute universal meaning. Danto argues that despite varied approaches, a work of art is always defined by two essential criteria: meaning and embodiment, as well as one additional criterion contributed by the (...) viewer: interpretation. Danto crafts his argument in an accessible manner that engages with both philosophy and art across genres and eras, beginning with Plato’s definition of art in _The Republic_, and continuing through the progress of art as a series of discoveries, including such innovations as perspective, chiaroscuro, and physiognomy. Danto concludes with a fascinating discussion of Andy Warhol’s famous shipping cartons, which are visually indistinguishable from the everyday objects they represent. Throughout, Danto considers the contributions of philosophers including Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, and artists from Michelangelo and Poussin to Duchamp and Warhol, in this far-reaching examination of the interconnectivity and universality of aesthetic production. (shrink)

I examine the phenomenon of implicit learning, the process by which knowledge about the rule-governed complexities of the stimulus environment is acquired independently of conscious attempts to do so. Our research with the two seemingly disparate experimental paradigms of synthetic grammar learning and probability learning, is reviewed and integrated with other approaches to the general problem of unconscious cognition. The conclusions reached are as follows: Implicit learning produces a tacit knowledge base that is abstract and representative of the structure of (...) the environment; such knowledge is optimally acquired independently of conscious efforts to learn; and it can be used implicitly to solve problems and make accurate decisions about novel stimulus circumstances. Various epistemological issues and related problems such as intuition, neuroclinical disorders of learning and memory, and the relationship of evolutionary processes to cognitive science are also discussed. (shrink)

This book was designed primarily as a textbook; though the author hopes that it will prove to be of interests to others beside logic students. Part I of this book covers the fundamentals of the subject the propositional calculus and the theory of quantification. Part II deals with the traditional formal logic and with the developments which have taken that as their starting-point. Part III deals with modal, three-valued, and extensional systems.

The realist programme has degenerated by now to the point where it is quite beyond salvage. A token of this degeneration is that there are altogether too many realisms. It is as though by splitting into a confusing array of types and kinds, realism has hoped that some one variety might yet escape extinct. I shall survey the debate, and some of these realisms, below. Here I would just point out the obvious; that in so far as the successes of (...) science mount while realism continues to decline we must conclude that scientific success lends no support to realism. Since it is unlikely to support anti-realism, we have some reason to suspect that the philosophical debate over realism does not concern issues that can be settled by developments in the sciences, no matter how successful science may be. Further, since that success grounds a culture of acceptance for science and its entities, we have reason to believe that the existence of those entities is also not actually the issue that concerns realism. Afortiori, it is not the issue that concerns anti-realism either; nor, I might add, is anti-realism the winner in the philosophical debate that realism has lost. (shrink)

_A lively meditation on the nature of art by one of America's most celebrated art critics_ What is it to be a work of art? Renowned author and critic Arthur C. Danto addresses this fundamental, complex question. Part philosophical monograph and part memoiristic meditation, _What Art Is _challenges the popular interpretation that art is an indefinable concept, instead bringing to light the properties that constitute universal meaning. Danto argues that despite varied approaches, a work of art is always defined (...) by two essential criteria: meaning and embodiment, as well as one additional criterion contributed by the viewer: interpretation. Danto crafts his argument in an accessible manner that engages with both philosophy and art across genres and eras, beginning with Plato’s definition of art in _The Republic_, and continuing through the progress of art as a series of discoveries, including such innovations as perspective, chiaroscuro, and physiognomy. Danto concludes with a fascinating discussion of Andy Warhol’s famous shipping cartons, which are visually indistinguishable from the everyday objects they represent. Throughout, Danto considers the contributions of philosophers including Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, and artists from Michelangelo and Poussin to Duchamp and Warhol, in this far-reaching examination of the interconnectivity and universality of aesthetic production. (shrink)

Arthur Collins's succinct, revisionist exposition of Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_ brings a new clarity to this notoriously difficult text. Until recently most readers, ascribing broadly Cartesian assumptions to Kant, have concluded that the _Critique_ advances an idealist philosophy, because Kant calls it "transcendental idealism" and because the work abounds in apparent confirmations of that interpretation. Collins maintains not only that this reading of Kant is false but also that it conceals Kant's real achievements. To counter it, he addresses (...) the themes and passages in the _Critique_ that seem to require an idealist thesis and shows how they may be better understood without ascribing any idealist philosophy to Kant. His account coheres with Kant's explicit "refutations" of idealism, it fits Kant's rejection of the imputation of idealism to him by early critics and readers, and it validates Kant's contention that the second edition of the _Critique_ changes the expression but not the doctrine of the first. (shrink)

This book discusses and aims to clarify the issue of describing conduct and character as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, or as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. The book states that one of the main factors that have made this issue obscure is the illusion of some anti-naturalists that purely logical considerations can settle it. It clearly defines the limitations of the discussions: it is not concerned with the ‘other things’ people use to define conduct and character. The book attempts to consider the issue (...) from the purely logician point of view and suggests to the naturalists and anti-naturalists how their positions may be freed from logical faults. The book also introduces the ‘logic of ethics’, which is not a special kind or branch of logic, but rather an application of it. (shrink)

The Cellular Basis of Consciousness theory places the first appearance of sentience at the emergence of life. It makes the radical, and previously unexplored, claim that prokaryotes, like bacteria, possess a primitive form of consciousness. The implications of the theory for the philosophy of mind, cell-biology, and cognitive neurosciences are explored.

We show the consistency, relative to a supercompact cardinal, of the least measurable cardinal being both strongly compact and fully Laver indestructible. We also show the consistency, relative to a supercompact cardinal, of the least strongly compact cardinal being somewhat supercompact yet not completely supercompact and having both its strong compactness and degree of supercompactness fully Laver indestructible.

This paper considers four lines of objection to the efficacy or worth of Grice's cancellability test for conversational implicatures – the coherence objection, the entailment objection, the sarcasm objection, and the ambiguity objection. I argue that the test survives these objections relatively unscathed; and hence conclude that the cancellability test is still a significant, useful, reliable indicator at the semantics/pragmatics interface.

Cannabis use in some individuals can meaningfully introduce de novo risk for the initiation of opioid use and development of opioid use disorder. These risks may be particularly high during adolescence when cannabis use may disrupt critical periods of neurodevelopment. Current research studying the combination of genetic and environmental factors involved in substance use disorders is poorly understood. More research is needed, particularly to identify which adolescents are most at risk and to develop effective interventions addressing contributing factors such as (...) trauma and psychiatric comorbidity. (shrink)

In the contemporary discussion of hidden variable interpretations of quantum mechanics, much attention has been paid to the “no hidden variable” proof contained in an important paper of Kochen and Specker. It is a little noticed fact that Bell published a proof of the same result the preceding year, in his well-known 1966 article, where it is modestly described as a corollary to Gleason's theorem. We want to bring out the great simplicity of Bell's formulation of this result and to (...) show how it can be extended in certain respects. (shrink)

Health, Disease, and Illness brings together a sterling list of classic and contemporary thinkers to examine the history, state, and future of ever-changing "concepts" in medicine.

This brief introduction to a special issue of Disputatio succinctly summarizes John Perry’s pluri-propositionalist reflexive framework and notes some potential applications to varieties of context-sensitivity.

Historian Arthur Herman traces the roots of declinism and shows how major thinkers, past and present, have contributed to its development as a coherent ideology of cultural pessimism. From Nazism to the Sixties counterculture, from Britain's Fabian socialists to America's multiculturalists, and from Dracula and Freud to Robert Bly and Madonna, this work examines the idea of decline in Western history and sets out to explain how the conviction of civilization's inevitable end has become a fixed part of the (...) modern Western imagination. Through a series of biographical portraits spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, the author traces the roots of declinism and aims to show how major thinkers of the past and present, including Nietzsche, DuBois, Sartre, and Foucault, have contributed to its development as a coherent ideology of cultural pessimism. (shrink)