Opera dilettantes will forever argue over the relative importance of words and music in the creation and performance of their beloved art form. For philosophers brave enough to enter the fray, the issue raises a number of interesting ontological and phenomenological questions. In what does the work of opera primarily exist? What is distinctive of opera as a mode of dramatic presentation?

_An assessment and reevaluation of nihilism’s ascendency over metaphysics._.

To characterize human emotions, researchers have increasingly utilized Automatic Facial Expression Analysis (AFEA), which automates the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) and translates the facial muscular positioning into the basic universal emotions. There is broad interest in the application of FACS for assessing consumer expressions as an indication of emotions to consumer product-stimuli. However, the translation of FACS to characterization of emotions is elusive in the literature. The aim of this systematic review is to give an overview of how FACS (...) has been used to investigate human emotional behavior to consumer product-based stimuli. The search was limited to studies published in English after 1978, conducted on humans, using FACS or its action units to investigate affect, where emotional response is elicited by consumer product-based stimuli evoking at least one of the five senses. The search resulted in an initial total of 1,935 records, of which 55 studies were extracted and categorized based on the outcomes of interest including (i) method of FACS implementation; (ii) purpose of study; (iii) consumer product-based stimuli used; and (iv) measures of affect validation. Most studies implemented FACS manually (73%) to develop products and/or software (20%) and used consumer product-based stimuli that had known and/or defined capacity to evoke a particular affective response, such as films and/or movie clips (20%); minimal attention was paid to consumer products with low levels of emotional competence or with unknown affective impact. The vast majority of studies (53%) did not validate FACS-determined affect and, of the validation measures that were used, most tended to be discontinuous in nature and only captured affect as it holistically related to an experience. This review illuminated some inconsistencies in how FACS is carried out as well as how emotional response is inferred from facial muscle activation. This may prompt researchers to consider measuring the total consumer experience by employing a variety of methodologies in addition to FACS and its emotion-based interpretation guide. Such strategies may better conceptualize consumers' experience with products of low, unknown, and/or undefined capacity to evoke an affective response such as product prototypes, line extensions, etc. (shrink)

© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Scots Philosophical Association and the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] richness and originality of Thomas Aquinas’ theory of self-knowledge has been underappreciated no less by his admirers than his critics. The former consider it secondary to his teaching on cognition in general, and the latter dismiss it as scholastic triviality. Cory wishes to restore Aquinas’ theory of self-knowledge to its rightful (...) place, and to do so she must provide both its historical context and the theoretical implications it has for Aquinas’ anthropology and epistemology.Cory's basic premise is that Aquinas needed to maintain both that the intellect can know itself only by cognizing something else and that it has no explicit awareness of anything outside itself without implicit awareness of itself. To elaborate this ‘fundamental duality’ of conscious thought,... (shrink)

Grabowski, a self-described Platonic realist, argues against the "standard interpretation" of Plato's Forms as abstract universals in favor of the view that they are concrete particulars. He explains that the mistaken standard interpretation arises from a deeply ingrained habit of reading Plato's texts through the hermeneutical lens of the universals. Universals undoubtedly play a major role in the history of philosophy, though they were not Plato's primary concern in elaborating a theory of the Forms. "It is not that the problem (...) of universals gives rise to the Forms, but that the Forms give rise to the problem of universals" .According to Grabowski, if it can be shown that Plato never expunged the "model of acquaintance" from his theory of knowledge, then, strange as it seems, we can reasonably believe that Plato posited, or should have posited, the Forms as concrete particulars similar to those that exist in the sensible world, albeit bereft of any of the latter's "ontological deficiencies" .Grabowski begins the task by constructing an argument for the "standard interpretation," only to show that this interpretation proves unpersuasive, if for no other reason than the paucity of evidence supporting it in Plato's texts. In chapter 2, Grabowski summarizes. (shrink)

This study examines the manner in which Machiavelli undertakes to elaborate and to justify the notorious "realism" of his political science, which consists in a deliberate and rigorous critique of justice or moral goodness. Despite its overt appeal to the common good and republican devotion, the Discourses on Livy, I argue, supplies a pathway to the foundation of this realism: the work is addressed to "the young" who combine rare intelligence with moral and civic concern, and it is guided by (...) Machiavelli's concern to persuade such readers of the reasonableness of his amoral account of human affairs and the order of the world. Through his discourses on Livy's Romans Machiavelli undertakes to enlighten the young about the meaning of genuine virtu and the distance that allegedly separates it from the justice they currently embrace. ;An examination of Machiavelli's discussions of acquisitive necessity, domestic rule and foreign affairs in Books I and II reveals that the core of this enlightenment is a confrontation with what he understands to be the essentially pious foundation of the moral life: Machiavellian realism is a secular, and secularizing, enterprise. Machiavelli teaches those exceptional youth who are suited to become "princes" that the prosperous management of human affairs requires that the rulers of peoples abandon pious scruple and instead determine appropriate courses of action in accordance with necessities knowable through prudence or natural reason alone. However, by ascending in places to theoretical discussions about the "things of the world" , Machiavelli indicates his awareness that the adequacy of his political critique of piety ultimately depends upon his ability to demonstrate to the full satisfaction of reason the existence and sovereignty of Nature, understood as an order of impersonal necessity. Machiavelli's moral-political realism is thus shown to entail and to point towards a theoretical realism that confronts the claim that the world is ordered providentially under a just and omnipotent sovereign. (shrink)