Human-animal emotional relationships have a complicated interplay with public perceptions of the morality of animal use. Humans may build emotional relationships with companion species. These species are not usually intensively farmed in the United Kingdom, but they may be utilized during animal experimentation. From a relational ethical standpoint, the public may therefore perceive animal experimentation as being less acceptable than intensive farming. This study aimed to determine whether human-animal emotional relationships affect public attitudes regarding use of animals in intensive farming (...) and research. Responding to an online questionnaire, British citizens rated their agreement with 20 statements relating to their acceptance of intensive farming and animal experimentation, scientific research involving a given species, killing free-living animals, and consuming animals existing within companion and farming contexts. Positive correlations were found between public acceptance of intensive farming and animal experimentation, such that acceptance of animal experimentation corresponded with acceptance of intensive farming practices. This finding disproved our theory that the British public may perceive animal experimentation as less acceptable than intensive farming due to the use of companion species in scientific research. Public acceptance of animal experimentation also did not significantly differ between that involving companion or noncompanion species. However, respondents were more accepting of the consumption of a typical farmed animal raised for meat purposes than consuming an animal if it had been raised in a companion context or consuming a typical companion species raised in either a farmed or companion context. These findings illustrate that the human-animal relationship can influence public perceptions of the morality of animal use. (shrink)

While some may argue that universities are in a state of crisis, others claim that we are living in a post-university era; a time after universities. If there was a battle for the survival of the institution, it is over and done with. The buildings still stand. Students enrol and may attend lectures, though let’s be clear—most do not. But virtually nothing real remains. What some mistakenly take to be a university is, in actuality, an ‘uncanny’ spectral presence; ‘the nagging (...) presence of an absence … a “spectralized amnesiac modernity with its delusional totalizing systems”’. It is the remains and remnants of the university.[1]Overstatement? Perhaps. We think many if not most administrators, at all levels, will likely dissent. So too will many if not most teachers and students. Trying to determine whether this is correct, or to what extent, by consulting polls and reading opinion pieces in various education journals and professional papers is likely to be of little help. In any case, it is the hypothesis, along with closely related ones, and concerns about what can be done in the circumstances, that have generated this special issue.This special issue highlights and illustrates that most of the contested issues regarding educational theory and practice central to how universities and schools should be, and how they should be run, are first and foremost questions of value rather than fact. They are questions regarding what we want, but more importantly what we should want, from our universities and schools; about what they should be and what students, teachers and administrators should be doing to facilitate this.[1] See Cox and Levine and Boaks, Cox and Levine. (shrink)

From Edison’s invention of the phonograph through contemporary field recording and sound installation, artists have become attracted to those domains against which music has always defined itself: noise, silence, and environmental sound. Christoph Cox argues that these developments in the sonic arts are not only aesthetically but also philosophically significant, revealing sound to be a continuous material flow to which human expressions contribute but which precedes and exceeds those expressions. Cox shows how, over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first (...) centuries, philosophers and sonic artists have explored this “sonic flux.” Through the philosophical analysis of works by John Cage, Maryanne Amacher, Max Neuhaus, Christian Marclay, and many others, Sonic Flux contributes to the development of a materialist metaphysics and poses a challenge to the prevailing positions in cultural theory, proposing a realist and materialist aesthetics able to account not only for sonic art but for artistic production in general. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre is an undisputed giant of twentieth-century philosophy. His intellectual writings popularizing existentialism combined with his creative and artistic flair have made him a legend of French thought. His tumultuous personal life - so inextricably bound up with his philosophical thinking - is a fascinating tale of love and lust, drug abuse, high profile fallings-out and political and cultural rebellion. This substantial and meticulously researched biography is accessible, fast-paced, often amusing and at times deeply moving. Existentialism and Excess covers (...) all the main events of Sartre's remarkable seventy-five-year life from his early years as a precocious brat devouring his grandfather's library, through his time as a brilliant student in Paris, his wilderness years as a provincial teacher-writer experimenting with mescaline, his World War II adventures as a POW and member of the resistance, his post-war politicization, his immense amphetamine fueled feats of writing productivity, his harem of women, his many travels and his final decline into blindness and old age. Along the way there are countless intriguing anecdotes, some amusing, some tragic, some controversial: his loathing of crustaceans and his belief that he was being pursued by a giant lobster, his escape from a POW camp, the bombing of his apartment, his influence on the May 1968 uprising and his many love affairs. Cox deftly moves from these episodes to discussing his intellectual development, his famous feuds with Aron, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty, his encounters with other giant figures of his day: Roosevelt, Hemingway, Heidegger, John Huston, Mao, Castro, Che Guevara, Khrushchev and Tito, and, above all, his long, complex and creative relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. Existentialism and Excess also gives serious consideration to Sartre's ideas and many philosophical works, novels, stories, plays and biographies, revealing their intimate connection with his personal life. Cox has written an entertaining, thought-provoking and compulsive book, much like the man himself. (shrink)

Scientists typically use a variety of representations, including different kinds of figures, to present and defend hypotheses. In order to understand the justification of scientific hypotheses, it is essential to understand how visual representations contribute to scientific arguments. Since the logical understanding of arguments involves the truth or falsity of the representations involved, visual representations must have the capacity to bear truth in order to be genuine components of arguments. By drawing on Goodman's analysis of symbol systems, and on Tarski's (...) work on truth, I show that the figures used in science meet this criterion. (shrink)

An introduction to philosophy through film, _Thinking Through Film: Doing Philosophy, Watching Movies_ combines the exploration of fundamental philosophical issues with the experience of viewing films, and provides an engaging reading experience for undergraduate students, philosophy enthusiasts and film buffs alike. An in-depth yet accessible introduction to the philosophical issues raised by films, film spectatorship and film-making Provides 12 self-contained, close discussions of individual films from across genres Films discussed include Total Recall, Minority Report, La Promesse, Funny Games, Ikuru, The (...) Dark Knight, Memento, AI and more Explores concepts that span epistemology, metaphysics, fate, choice, robot love, time travel, personal identity, spectacle, ethics, luck, regret, consequentialism, deontology and the philosophy of film itself A uniquely flexible resource for courses in philosophy and film that encourages student reflection, as well as being an engaging read for the film enthusiast. (shrink)

According to Weyl, “‘inexhaustibility’ is essential to the infinite”. However, he distinguishes two kinds of inexhaustible, or merely potential, domains: those that are “extensionally determinate” and those that are not. This article clarifies Weyl's distinction and explains its enduring logical and philosophical significance. The distinction sheds lights on the contemporary debate about potentialism, which in turn affords a deeper understanding of Weyl.

Philosophers of perception have a notoriously difficult time trying to account for hallucinatory experiences. One surprisingly quite popular move, and one that cross-cuts the representationalism/relationalism divide, is to say that hallucinations involve an awareness of uninstantiated properties. In this paper, I provide a new argument against this view. Not only are its proponents forced to classify many hallucinations as veridical, such experiences turn out to be necessarily veridical. In addition, I show that representationalists who endorse the uninstantiated property view must (...) reject the common fundamental kind claim and adopt disjunctivism, and naïve realists/relationalists must radically modify their disjunctivism: The distinction between ‘veridical’ and ‘hallucinatory’ will no longer track a metaphysical distinction between the relevant experiences. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Music, Science, and the Interpretation of Existence Dionysus and Apollo The Music of Dionysus Music, Science, and the Interpretation of Existence (Reprise).

Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason remains one of the most opaque of Kant's published writings. Though this opacity belongs, partly, to the text itself, a key claim of this article is that this opacity stems also from the narrow lenses through which his readers view this text. Often read as part of Kant's moral philosophy or his universal history, the literature has thus far neglected a different vantage point on the Religion, one that does not refute the utility (...) of these lenses but complements them. This paper places the Religion alongside parts of Kant's corpus that it is less typically paired with, namely his natural history writings—in particular, his writings on the concept of race and the development of the human races. I argue that by doing so, we can shed much light on Kant's infamous claim that there is a radical evil in the human species. More precisely, we will come to appreciate that this evil is not, as it is usually understood, a static property or fixed characteristic of human beings. Instead, radical evil concerns a dynamic, changing defect in human nature that increasingly threatens our aspirations to collective moral perfection. (shrink)

Welches Verhältnis besteht zwischen „Bild" und menschlichem Denken? Welche Rolle spielt das Konzept der „Form" im menschlichen Wissen? Forscher aus Philosophie, Kulturwissenschaften, Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Ästhetik, Literatur, Anthropologie, Mathematik und Biologie untersuchen aus historischer und theoretischer Perspektive den Zusammenhang zwischen der Aktivität des Denkens und den Konzepten von Bild und Form.

The Fold is a book of practical philosophy that takes a radical new approach to aesthetics. Laura U. Marks calls this philosophy "enfolding-unfolding aesthetics," based in ideas derived from Gilles Deleuze and others (G.F.W. Leibniz, David Bohm, and Édouard Glissant) that the universe is folded in on itself. She proposes a theory of mediation as contact and connection across the folds and a set of embodied methods for detecting such cosmic connections. In drawing out this aesthetics, Marks considers the (...) embodied and sensuous dimensions of engaging with audiovisual works and works of art-dimensions that Marks suggests are composed of the very folds that compose everything and everyone: all living beings, from humans to particles, sandwiches to stars, technologies, thoughts and images, in the present, the past, and the future. Making use of art and film, with a focus on African diaspora and Arab cinema, Marks opens ways to strengthen connections to the cosmos and to better trace processes of becoming that are immanent within the fold. (shrink)

The book shows one individual's (the author) experience of the world, through contacts with government officials and scholars in the Middle East and Asia, Europe and Latin America during the post-Second World War years up to the later 1960s; and then that individual's reflections and study during the succeeding decades, up to and including the first decade of the 21st century, concerning the future of the world and the critical choices that confront the world both in inter-state relations and in (...) maintaining the security of the biosphere. (shrink)

This paper explores the grounds upon which moral judgment of a person's beliefs is properly made. The beliefs in question are non-moral beliefs and the objects of moral judgment are individual instances of believing. We argue that instances of believing may be morally wrong on any of three distinct grounds: (i) by constituting a moral hazard, (ii) by being the result of immoral inquiry, or (iii) by arising from vicious inner processes of belief formation. On this way of articulating the (...) basis of moral judgment of belief it becomes clear that rational and epistemic norms do not exhaust the kinds of normative judgment properly made of a person's state of believing. We argue that there are instances of believing that are both rational and true and yet morally wrong. (shrink)

The volume provides a thorough look into Marina Sbisà’s distinctive, Austinian-inspired approach to speech acts. By gathering original essays from a world-class lineup of philosophers of language, linguists, social epistemologists, action theorists, and communication scholars, the collection provides the first comprehensive critical treatment of Sbisa’s outstanding contribution to speech act theory.

What's wrong with high executive pay? Beyond envy, is some issue of justice or fairness at stake? And what can anyone do about it? (A lot, as it turns out.).

As Douglas Adams points out, if there is no final answer to question, 'What is the meaning of life?', '42' is as good or bad an answer as any other. Indeed, 42 quotes might be even better! Gary Cox guides us through 42 of the most misunderstood, misquoted, provocative and significant quotes in the history of philosophy providing a witty and compelling commentary along the way. This entertaining and illuminating collection of quotes doesn't merely list who said what and when. (...) Gary Cox claims that each quote is a philosophical thesis in itself. By exploring who a particular philosopher is and what he or she really meant when they said what they said, this book looks for the philosophy within the quote. Using the writings of everyone from Douglas Adams to A.J. Ayer and Thomas Aquinas to Karl Marx, Gary Cox takes us on a philosophical journey through history, culture and writing to bring us to a deeper understanding of why we think the way we do. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: -- List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsIntroductionImmanent authorship: From the Living Theatre to Cage and Goat IslandDisorganizing language, voicing minority: From Artaud to Carmelo Bene, Robert Wilson & Georges LavaudantImmanent imitations, animal affects: From Hijikata Tatsumi to Marcus CoatesPaying attention, participating in the whole: Allan Kaprow alongside Lygia ClarkEthical durations, opening to other times: Returning to Goat Island with WilsonIn-Conclusion: What 'good' is immanent theatre? Immanence as an ethico-aesthetic valueCodaBibliographyIndex.

Predicativity is a notable example of fruitful interaction between philosophy and mathematical logic. It originated at the beginning of the 20th century from methodological and philosophical reflections on a changing concept of set. A clarification of this notion has prompted the development of fundamental new technical instruments, from Russell's type theory to an important chapter in proof theory, which saw the decisive involvement of Kreisel, Feferman and Schütte. The technical outcomes of predica-tivity have since taken a life of their own, (...) but have also produced a deeper understanding of the notion of predicativity, therefore witnessing the " light logic throws on problems in the foundations of mathematics. " (Feferman 1998, p. vii) Predicativity has been at the center of a considerable part of Feferman's work: over the years he has explored alternative ways of explicating and analyzing this notion and has shown that predicative mathematics extends much further than expected within ordinary mathematics. The aim of this note is to outline the principal features of predicativity, from its original motivations at the start of the past century to its logical analysis in the 1950-60's. The hope is to convey why predicativity is a fascinating subject, which has attracted Feferman's attention over the years. (shrink)

Mimetic comprehension -- Mimetic comprehension of music -- Metaphor and related means of reasoning -- Pitch height -- Temporal motion and musical motion -- Perspectives on musical motion -- Music and the external senses -- Musical affect -- Applications -- Review and implications.

Laura Nader is a towering figure as anthropologist, teacher, and public intellectual. Her letters give a glimpse of academic life mostly unseen by academics and by the general public. The collection includes letters from academic colleagues, but it also contains correspondence from lawyers, politicians, citizens, people on death row, Peace Corps workers, members of the military, scientists, and more.

The Catholic Tradition requires the faithful to form and follow their conscience. This is the case even with the recognition that consciences can be malformed and one can make errors in practical judgments. Water Shaping Stone examines various aspects of this tradition regarding conscience by using, among other sources, twentieth-century magisterial documents, theologians' works, and Scripture. Kathryn Lilla Cox argues that while the Magisterium retains teaching authority, and a responsibility to help form consciences through its teaching, focusing only on the (...) Magisterium leads to incomplete formation. A more holistic vision of conscience formation means considering the formation of the moral agent to be a multifaceted process that draws on, for example, teaching, prayer, rituals, Scripture, practices, and virtues, along with relationships with the Triune God and communities of accountability. This vision of conscience formation retains the magisterial teaching authority while acknowledging discipleship as the theological basis for making and assessing practical judgments of conscience. (shrink)

Insights into the intelligence throughout the natural and technical environment, in the fabric of our devices and dwellings, in our clothes, and under our skin. Is there a way to understand the materials that surround us not as passive objects, but as other intelligences interacting with our own? In Parallel Minds, expert in materials science and nanotechnology Laura Tripaldi delivers not only detailed insights into the properties and emergent behaviors of matter as revealed by state-of-the-art chemistry, synthetic biology, and (...) nanotech, but also a rich philosophical reflection that crosses the frontier between nature and culture, where the most cutting-edge scientific syntheses resonate with ancient myth. The result is a technomaterial bestiary full of unexpected encounters with “strange minds”—from cobwebs to kevlar and carbon fibre, from centaurs to amoebas to arachnids, from polycephalic slime to resonating plasmons, from viruses to golems. Parallel Minds reveals the intelligence at large throughout the natural and technical environment, in the fabric of our devices and dwellings, in our clothes, and even under our skin. Full of lateral ideas and unexpected images, Tripaldi’s book imbues the study and synthesis of materials with a new urgency. For not only do the materials that surround us participate actively in the construction of the world in which we live, but harnessing their ability to interact intelligently with their environment could be the key to the future of our species. (shrink)

In the 21st century what the future holds for young learners is unclear, what is clear is that they need to be confident, capable and resilient. As wider communication about education is increasing there is a developing understanding that children in settings across the globe learn in the same ways and have the same needs. This book considers international and multicultural learning environments from both theoretical and practical perspectives, written by specialists in early years education in the UK and in (...) international contexts. The theoretical perspectives are supported by eight case studies, from Uganda, Indonesia, Mexico, Qatar, Netherlands, Italy, the United Kingdom and Romania. (shrink)

The central problem of this dissertation arises from reflecting on Euthyphro’s often neglected final attempt to define piety and the discussion (elenchos) that follows. He claims that piety is knowledge of how to give to the gods what is pleasing in prayer and sacrifice. Socrates, without much argument, reduces Euthyphro’s answer to his earlier, already refuted one – that piety is what is dear to the gods – inviting the question of whether this is all the elenchos is meant to (...) accomplish. If it is not, we should expect to find its purpose in the brief discussion that falls between Euthyphro’s definition and the final reduction of this definition to its predecessor. At the center of this discussion Socrates compares Euthyphronic piety to commerce. This comparison has classically been interpreted as showing Euthyphro’s definition to imply that humans can benefit gods, and since Euthyphro has elsewhere rejected this idea, his definition is refuted by contradiction. But this strands the reduction withoutpurpose, and scrutiny of the text suggests this is not the correct way to interpret the inference structure of this intervening discussion. In this dissertation I argue for two main theses: (i) the disambiguation thesis, which claims that the comparison to commerce is not the philosophical point of the elenchos, and does not result in the refutation of Euthyphro’s definition. It is instead intended to elicit which of two possible models of piety Euthyphro means to describe, the language of his definition being equivocal in at least one important respect, namely whether or not a met need necessarily confers a benefit upon the recipient; (ii) the translation thesis, which claims that there are some important observations to be made about the Greek of Euthyphro’s definition, observations that will make the dis- ambiguation thesis more plausible, and which are obscured by traditional translations of the passage under discussion. These observations concern kecharismena, a word often translated as ‘pleasing’, but is better understood as denoting a broad set of social and religious norms, and for which there is no simple English equivalent. Together, these two theses allow us to see that the main philosophical lesson of the last elenchos is that Euthyphro’s account of piety as ritual is an application of his more famous third attempt to define piety voluntaristically, and that any philosophical concerns over the last definition are consequences of it being an extension of the third one. This is why Plato puts the two side-by-side to close the dialogue, and we are kept from seeing this clearly when we take the comparison to commerce to be accomplishing the main work of the elenchos, rather than as clarifying Euthyphro’s answer so that its conceptual similarities to the previous answer are plainly visible. I conclude the project by defending the venerable view that Socratic piety is service to the gods instantiated by rational inquiry, and show how this model of piety is the antithesis to, and moral remedy for, Euthyphronic piety. (shrink)

The History of Psychology course occupies an unusual but critical place in the psychology curriculum at most universities. As the field has become ever more specialized, with the various subdisciplines branching off, The History of Psychology is often the one course where the common roots of all of these areas are explored. Asking not only "What is psychology?" but also "What is science?" "Why is psychology a science?" and "How did it become one?" this book examines how the paradigm of (...) Psychology was built. Discussing key figures in history in the context of their time, it takes students on a carefully formulated, chronological journey through the build-up of psychology from ancient times to the present, and seeks to draw students into the way science is done, rather than merely presenting them with historical fact. Students will learn not only the "what," but the "why" of the history of psychology and will acquire the necessary background historical material to fully understand those concepts. Organized around a series of moments and cases--such as a shift from scholasticism to rationalism or empiricism, and a shift from idealism to materialism--the book seeks to portray psychology as an on-going, evolving process, rather than a theory.--page i. (shrink)

Abstract This paper defends an argument from interpretation against the possibility of massive error. The argument shares many important features with Donald Davidson's famous argument, but also key differences. I defend the argument against claims that it begs the question against scepticism and that it leaves the sceptic with an obvious means of escape.

Re-Reading: Judith Jarvis Thompson, 'A Defense of Abortion'.

In his Letter on the Blind, Denis Diderot describes, based on mathematical physics, a method for evaluating hypotheses in situations where certainty cannot be reached. This article's thesis is that the author of the Letter extends this method to metaphysical questions of finalism and idealism. Diderot presents each pair of antagonistic positions (finalism-antifinalism and idealism-realism) in such a way that readers are invited to carefully weigh the arguments and to choose the one that appears to be the best, or most (...) probable, position. (shrink)

Neoliberal Techniques of Social Suffering: Political Resistance and Critical Theory from Latin America and Spain is the result of the critical and political commitment of various Latin American and Spanish philosophers who share a critical approach to the global “stealth revolution” in recent decades, where neoliberalism has forced the well-being and reproduction of life to adapt to a system devastating for both humans and non-humans. The authors voice the shared concern of contemporary Spanish and Latin American societies to build new (...) conceptions of the public and the common through mobilizing affects usually disavowed in political theory. If, in Ancient Greece, the idea of strengthening the most vulnerable and weakest was deplored as the art of sophists, this collection edited by Laura Quintana and Nuria Sánchez Madrid explores the other side of our social world to revive grassroots strategies of resistance and emancipation, which are able to bring about new distributions of power, welfare, and discursive legitimation and to extend our goal of creating a radically democratic world. (shrink)

While various definitions of moral distress have been proposed, some agreement exists that it results from illegitimate constraints in clinical practice affecting healthcare professionals’ moral agency. If we are to reduce moral distress, instruments measuring it should provide relevant information about such illegitimate constraints. Unfortunately, existing instruments fail to do so. We discuss here several shortcomings of major instruments in use: their inability to determine whether reports of moral distress involve an accurate assessment of the requisite clinical and logistical facts (...) in play, whether the distress in question is aptly characterized as moral, and whether the moral distress reported is an appropriate target of elimination. Such failures seriously limit the ability of empirical work on moral distress to foster appropriate change. (shrink)

This paper offers a novel solution to the Wrong Kind of Reason problem that afflicts Fitting-Attitude analyses of value. I argue that we can distinguish reasons of the right kind from reasons of the wrong kind by being clear about what our reasons are for. In Wrong Kind of Reason cases, our reason to have a certain affective attitude is a reason for an action, and it is this category-mistake that is the source of the problem.

The so-called bottoming-out problem is considered one of the most serious problems in Stuart Glennan's mechanistic theory of causality. It is usually argued that such a problem cannot be overcome with the acknowledgement of the non-causal character of fundamental phenomena. According to such a widespread view, in the mechanistic account causation must go all the way down to the bottom level; a solution to the bottoming-out problem, therefore, requires an appeal to an ancillary account of causation that covers fundamental phenomena. (...) In this paper I reconsider the arguments that led to this conclusion and criticize them. I argue that the no-causality-at-the-fundamental-level solution is in harmony with the causal anti-fundamentalism that characterizes the mechanistic theory. Moreover, contrarily to the dualistic solution put forward by Glennan, the no-causality-at-the-fundamental-level is not an ad-hoc solution.Finally, I provide the sketch for an account of the existence of an order in nature at the fundamental level that is consistent with the singularist and ontologically parsimonious spirit of the mechanistic account. (shrink)

SummaryComparison of some longitudinal data on infant weight in two samples of Australian Aborigines indicates changes in infant growth between 1966 and 1976 which suggest that at the time when the child comes off the breast, weight gain slows. This faltering of weight gain is often followed by a partial catch-up, but the resultant weight for age at 1 year corresponds with a lower British centile than the child was at just before weaning.