In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art, Mind, and IntentionNoël CarrollArt and Intention: A Philosophical Study, by Paisley Livingston ; 266 pp. oxford: oxford University Press, 2005, $74.00, $35.00 paper.The relevance of intention to the philosophy of art was perhaps first made explicit by G.W.F. Hegel who, in his monumental The Philosophy of Fine Art, narrowed the domain of aesthetics to art on the grounds that the beauty that pertains to art is the product (...) of mind. Though Hegel does not single out intention as the aspect of mind that impresses him, his definition of fine art in terms of that which possesses an aim that imbues the pertinent art with content makes it probable that what he is talking about is intention. Since Hegel's day, but maybe most especially in the last three decades, philosophers of art have relied upon the notion of intention to attempt to solve many of the recurring problems of their field, including not only issues involving art status, but those involving authorship, interpretation, and fictional truth, among others. In Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study, Paisley Livingston has performed the very valuable service of corralling a substantial number of topics regarding the intersection of art and intention between the covers of one book.Although there are books devoted to exploring the relation of art and intention with respect to specific topics, most notably interpretation, there is, to my knowledge, no other book like Livingston's that surveys such a diversity of issues concerning the nexus of intention and the [End Page 394] philosophy of art. Thus, Art and Intention should be a welcome addition to the library of any aesthetician.Art and Intention comprises seven chapters. The first chapter, reasonably enough, involves a discussion of what it is to be an intention. For Livingston, who follows the action theorist Alfred Mele quite closely, an intention standardly consists of a propositional attitude in addition to a propositional content toward which said attitude is directed. The propositional attitude is executive in nature—that is, where x is the content, the intender is firmly settled upon or committed to perform x, or, at least, to try to perform x. The propositional content of an intention, in turn, is what Livingston calls a plan. An intention then is an executive attitude towards plans.I am a bit unhappy with this formulation, since I worry that it may be somewhat misleading. To my ear, the word plan insinuates the idea of a formulated method, whereas many intentional actions, including those of artists, are scarcely worked out beforehand but emerge instead in the heat of doing things. Livingston is aware of this and appears to require no more of plans in his sense than that they involve at least a rudimentary grasp of the means for carrying off the purposes at hand. This seems right to me, but it still strikes me as strained to call this sort of procedural knowledge a plan.When Jasper Johns denies that he plans to make a picture in a certain way, but rather only follows a thought that pulls in a certain direction, he does not mean to disagree with Livingston, though his choice of words seems at odds with Livingston's.1 For Johns's, like many others, plan means a precise formulation, whereas for the action theorist it is a technical term of art with broader signification. Nevertheless, since the word still retains its ordinary meaning, the possibility for confusion here is rife. So, perhaps another word can be found or, maybe, coined.Chapter 2 concerns intention and the creation of art. Livingston spends the first part of the chapter fending off counterexamples, like automatic writing, that might be adduced to challenge the claim that artworks require intentions. I am very sympathetic with his treatment of the examples he canvasses. However, I would be curious to hear what he would say about a case that I've heard described of a show at MOMA several decades back where images culled from surveillance cameras, operating automatically, were exhibited.2 These specific images were not produced intentionally by anyone. But aren't they art? Perhaps the curators will be assigned the... (shrink)

We argued in a recent issue of this journal that if abortion is restricted,1 then there are parallel obligations for parents to donate body parts to their children. The strength of this obligation to donate is proportional to the strength of the abortion restrictions. If abortion is never permissible, then a parent must always donate any organ if they are a match. If abortion is sometimes permissible and sometimes not, then organ donation is sometimes obligatory and sometimes not. Our argument (...) was based on the following ideas: (a) that a fetus has full moral status, (b) that parents have special obligations to their offspring, fetus or not, and (c) that this special obligation is to protect them. The result is the conclusion that abortion restrictivists cannot also consistently deny that organ donation should be compulsory. (shrink)

Toward the end of his book Jokes, perhaps the best known philosophical treatment of the subject, Ted Cohen includes a notorious joke about a group of young Black men who are deterred from committing a gang rape by being thrown a basketball. This is a joke that perplexes Cohen and that he admits plays into stereotypes that presuppose the mindless obsession of Black youths with basketball as well as their unbridled sexuality. He agrees that the joke is morally bad and (...) that it would be a better world without it. But he denies that its evil compromises its alleged funniness. He writes: “Wish that there were no mean jokes. Try remaking the world so that such jokes will have no place, will not arise. But do not deny that they are funny. That denial is a pretense that will help nothing.” In this paper, I want to challenge the claim that the moral defectiveness of a joke, especially a racist joke, cannot ever compromise its capacity to be funny. (shrink)

This paper is a commentary comparing the evolutionary perspectives of Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct (2009) and Stephen Davies’s The Artful Species (2012). Their topics thus necessarily overlap, but their books have different purposes and a different feel. Davies’s book is an academic exercise. He has no real arguments or claims of his own. Dutton wishes to demonstrate that evolutionary psychology can provide a satisfying naturalistic explanation of aesthetic experience. Neither Davies nor Dutton fully succeeds in his ambition. Davies (...) extends his scepticism well beyond a sensible account of the state of current knowledge about human evolution, and Dutton fails to recognize underlying theoretical differences in his main sources of theoretical inspiration. The limitations in these two works do not define the boundaries of current knowledge in evolutionary aesthetics. The most advanced and adequate concept in the evolutionary humanities is the idea that humans evolved the capacity to create imaginative virtual worlds and use those worlds to guide human behaviour. Both books being considered in this essay approach the idea of imaginative virtual worlds and almost grasp it. Before taking up that topic, the paper shall discuss two subsidiary issues: Dutton’s effort to incorporate sexual selection, and Davies’s sceptical negations about all evolutionary knowledge. (shrink)

This paper addresses the debate surrounding epistocracy. While many discussions of epistocracy focus on its instrumental defenses, this paper aims to critically examine the non-instrumental jury argument offered by Jason Brennan. Brennan’s argument equates the rights of individuals in political decisions to their rights in jury decisions, asserting that just as individuals have a right to a competent jury, they likewise have a right to a competent electorate. We disagree. By juxtaposing the costs of enforcing such rights and the severity (...) of the harm prevented by their enforcement, this paper argues in favor of maintaining the right to a competent jury while denying the existence of a right to a competent electorate. The central claim is that while securing a competent jury is feasible and vital, attempting to secure a competent electorate poses significant challenges and may prevent less significant harm than perceived. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Pleasures of FictionDenis DuttonHuman Beings Expend staggering amounts of time and resources on creating and experiencing art and entertainment—music, dancing, and static visual arts. Of all of the arts, however, it is the category of fictional story-telling that across the globe today is the most intense focus of what amounts to a virtual human addiction. A recent government study in Britain showed that if you add together annual (...) attendances in plays and cinema with hours watching television drama, the average Briton spends roughly 6% of all waking life watching dramatic performances. And that figure does not even include books and magazines: further vast numbers of hours spent reading short stories, bodice-rippers, mysteries, and thrillers, as well as so-called serious fictions, old and new.The origins of this obsession with comic and dramatic fictions are lost in remote prehistory, as lost as the origins of language itself. But like language, we know the obsession with fiction is universal: stories told, read, and dramatically or poetically performed are independently invented in all known cultures, literate or not, having advanced technologies or not. Wherever printing arrives, it is used to reproduce fictions. Whenever television appears in the world, soap operas soon show up on the schedule. Both the forms that fiction takes and the ideas, types of characters, and kinds of conflict that make up its content can be shown to be strikingly similar across cultures. It has specialist practitioners—rhapsodes, novelists, playwrights, actors—and is governed both informally with stylistic conventions and sometimes formally—for example, by censorship laws. A love of fiction is as universal as governance, marriage, jokes, religion, and the incest taboo. [End Page 453]The question for any general aesthetics is: Why? Joseph Carroll is a literary theorist who has applied his probing mind over the last decade to the origins, nature, and functions of literary experience. His new collection of essays and reviews, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (Routledge, $85.00 boards, $23.95 paper) looks at literature and literary theory through the lens of evolutionary psychology. At the same time, Carroll's eye is that of an extremely perceptive literary critic. In fact, I would judge him to be one of the most acute and knowledgeable readers of fiction I've ever encountered. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that he is sometimes dubious, or even scathing, about evolutionary explanations of literature that have been offered up by writers whose grasp of psychology exceeds, in his opinion, their command of high literature. His complaints, however, are not to the fundamental notion that evolution by natural and sexual selection have made human beings into the story-loving animals they have become: his adjustments are intended to increase the accuracy and usefulness of Darwin's revolution. However critical he is of evolutionary psychologists, Carroll remains a Darwinian through and through.Carroll holds that the only way to attain a general theory of literature is through an account of human nature that builds from the ground up, from the most basic conditions for the evolution of the human species. A Darwinian literary theory first needs a Darwinian psychology. Once we have a basic Darwinian psychology in place, we can see that the narrative proclivities of human beings, far from being an incidental by-product of the evolved mind, are central to some of its most human functions. The structures of basic motives and dispositions are what would be appropriate for a species, as Carroll describes it, that "is highly social and mildly polygynous, that displays concealed ovulation, continuous female receptivity, and postmenopausal life expectancy corresponding to a uniquely extended period of childhood development, that has extraordinary aptitudes for technology, that has developed language and the capacity for peering into the minds of its conspecifics, and that displays a unique disposition for fabricating and consuming aesthetic and imaginative artifacts." Such a list alone, he contends, would make it impossible to imagine a blank-slate view of the mind, in which the mind evolves in a vacuum, goes onto produce culture, which then gives back to the mind all content and structure.Some of the mental processes that grow from... (shrink)

Aesthetic theoriesmayclaim universality, but they are normally conditioned by the aesthetic issues and debates of their own times. Plato and Aristo- tle were motivated both to account for the Greek arts of their day and to connect aesthetics to their general metaphysics and theories of value. Closer to our time, asNo¨el Carroll observes, the theories of Clive Bell and R.G. Collingwood can be viewed as “defenses of emerging avant-garde practices— neoimpressionism, on the one hand, and the mod- ernist poetics (...) of Joyce, Stein, and Eliot on the other.”1 Susanne Langer can be read as provid- ing a justification for modern dance, while the ini- tial version of George Dickie’s institutional the- ory “requires something like the presupposition that Dada is a central form of artistic practice” in order to gain intuitive appeal. The. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Astrology, Computers, and the VolksgeistDenis DuttonCarroll Righter is not a name you will recognize, unless, perhaps, you’re old enough and you grew up reading the Los Angeles Times. Righter was the Times’s astrologer, and encountering his name recently brought back a couple of memories from the early 1950s. I remember finding it strange that a man (he was pictured alongside his column) was called Carroll, though he didn’t (...) spell it like the girl who lived across the street. But especially I recall the fun we had when my father would read the horoscopes out loud and we’d compare them with the day’s events. Ours was a tough family for an astrologer to please, with rather different things happening to too many Aquarians, and a robust skepticism about anything of the sort later to be called “New Age.”How could I know that while we laughed and debated, somewhere else out there in the urban sprawl, Righter’s prognostications were being subjected to subtle and portentous analysis by that kingpin of the Frankfurt School, Theodor W. Adorno? Mirabile dictu, Adorno was living in L.A. at the time, and we now have his examination of Righter in The Stars Down to Earth, and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, edited with an excellent introduction by Stephen Crook (Routledge, $16.95). The result seems, now in the fullness of time, of mixed value and relevance. Adorno has produced an admirably accessible rhetoric of astrology, what he terms “content analysis.” In this, he is finding out for himself about the so-called cold-reading techniques of psychic consultation, practices long known to magicians and astrologers and only really understood by psychologists since Bertram Forer’s work in the 1940s. But beyond that, Adorno uses astrology to support and exemplify his theory of authoritarian irrationalism. As you might expect, this is more questionable. [End Page 424]To be sure, there are many intriguing observations throughout this mostly readable essay. In a passage perhaps even more true today than when it was written, Adorno says that a “climate of semi-erudition is the fertile breeding ground for astrology.” He refers to people who have gone just beyond the naive acceptance of the authority of science, but who don’t know enough, or who have not sufficiently developed “the power of thinking,” that they can replace such acceptance with anything better: “The semi-erudite vaguely wants to understand and is also driven by the narcissistic wish to prove superior to the plain people but he is not in a position to carry through complicated and detached intellectual operations.” In other words, quantum mechanics is pretty tough, but astrology offers sophisticated understanding of all reality in a few easy steps. Besides, astronomy is about those remote stars and planets out there—rather cold and impersonal. In Adorno’s apt title phrase, astrology brings it all down to earth, because it’s about the single most important thing in the universe: me. In an analogy that isn’t too far-fetched, he says that to the semi-erudite individual “astrology, just as other irrational creeds like racism, provides a short-cut by bringing the complex to a handy formula and offering at the same time the pleasant gratification that he who feels excluded from educational privileges nevertheless belongs to the minority of those who are ‘in the know.’” Someone once remarked that Scientology boosts self-esteem largely by giving semi-educated, degreeless persons impressive certificates to hang on their walls, and Adorno is right that there’s a similar syndrome at work with most New Age esoterica, including astrology. (In literary theory, there are no certificates, of course—you just have to learn the jargon.)Much to his credit, Adorno independently identifies many of the features of cold reading described by Forer and later writers, such as the persistent tendency of the client to personalize the general message. Of Righter’s “Follow up that intuition of yours,” or “Display that keen mind of yours,” Adorno says, “People who have any affinity at all to occultism are usually prepared to react to the information they are craving in such a way... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BELSEY ON LANGUAGE AND REALISM by Noel Carroll Like much contemporary literary theory, Catherine Belsey's influential Critical Practice1 is antirealist, where "antirealism" refers both to the rejection of a putative literary style and to the espousal of an epistemological stance, the latter ostensibly grounded in a theory of language, adapted from Ferdinand Saussure. Moreover, these two antirealisms are connected in that stylistic antirealism is, in part, advanced as (...) a consequence of epistemological —or perhaps more aptly "linguistic"— antirealism. Belsey's theory is avowedly political, designed to challenge the operation of ideology in literature, particularly realist literature. That is, though Belsey discusses literature of several different periods and of different genres, her primary preoccupation is with something she calls expressive realism, a tendency perhaps best exemplified by the nineteenth-century novel and still pursued by our less experimental writers. Purportedly, expressive realism is underwritten by at least two tenets: (1) realism insofar as it presumes that literature can accurately represent reality, and (2) a variant of expressionism insofar as it presumes we have access to the thoughts and intentions of authors {CP, p. 7). In this note, I shall concentrate exclusively on the linguistic arguments— which Belsey calls "Post Saussurean" — that are mobilized to discredit the first presumption of literary realism, its claim to represent reality. For Belsey, a major problem with expressive realism is that this sort of literature presents itself or is taken as an accurate reflection of reality. Belsey sometimes makes this point by saying that such literature purports to be an accurate representation of reality. At other moments, that which such literature claims to reflect accurately is said to be experiences of reality. But these alternative claims are also segued by 124 Noel Carroll125 saying that what is reflected are experiences of reality which are recognized to be true. Given the text, the variant of the reflection theory that appears to occupy Belsey most is the notion that literature reflects reality — that is, holds a mirror up to nature, as Hamlet might have it. This raises Belsey's political hackles because she believes that a commitment to the plausibility of the goal of reflecting life accurately invests realist literature with the aura of a socially unmediated, transhistorical, "natural" account of human life rather than an ideologically constructed one. In order to forestall this supposedly political repercussion, Belsey, taking advantage of her expanded version of Saussurean linguistics, charges that realism misconstrues the relationship between literature and the world. Indeed, ana this is the crux of her postSaussurean argument, the error here can be traced to something deeper, viz., a misconstrual of the relation between language and the world, of which the pretensions of literary realism are merely but an instance. Stated baldly, Belsey aspires to debunk literature's claims to realism by denying language's claims to realism. This may seem rather like killing a fly by using a cannon. And, in any case, one would have thought that questions about the representational efficacy of language were logically independent of the issue of the ideological operation of literary realism. However, Belsey, like many contemporary literary theorists, mistakenly believes that one contests literary realism by propounding epistemological reservations about language. Belsey claims that her linguistic antirealism derives from Saussure's putative discovery that "far from providing a set of labels for entities which exist independently in the world, language precedes the existence of independent entities, making the world intelligible by differentiating between concepts" {CP, p. 38). That language always precedes the existence of that to which it refers is a truly astounding discovery. And we should wish to know how Saussure, according to Belsey's interpretation, came upon it. For Saussure, language is a system of signs. Signs are composed of two elements: a material element— a sound-image or graphic image— called a signifier, and a conceptual element, what in different jargons is referred to as a meaning, an intension, or a connotation, and which in Saussure's terminology is called a signified. At this point it pays to notice what is missing in this account, viz., what other theorists sometimes call the reference, extension, or denotation of a term, that is, the set of 126Philosophy and... (shrink)

The self-visitation paradox is one paradox of time travel. As Ted Sider puts it, “Suppose I travel back in time and stand in a room with my sitting 10-year-old self. I seem to be both sitting and standing, but how can that be?” (2001, 101). So as not to beg any questions, let us label what is sitting B and what is standing C. The worry is about how B can be C in light of the looming contradiction that this (...) one person would be sitting and standing. Sider’s own approach is perdurantist, and holds that B is not C. My concern, though, is with solutions offered by, or on behalf of, endurantists–more 1 specifically, with solutions holding that B is C. The endurantist answer I shall criticize is a relativizer position maintaining that the sitting and the standing need to be relativized to the personal time or proper time of the time traveler. This manner of solution has been offered by Paul Horwich (1975, 433-435 ; 1987, 114-115) and also by Simon Keller and Michael Nelson (2001, 344). I will show that such a view has a linguistically suspect element and that there are three further reasons why relativizing only in this way falls short of solving the paradox. This will be enough to squash the relativizer position because it will not be clear how additional relativization could help, and furthermore any additional relativization would only make the linguistic matter worse. I will also present some considerations in favor of a non-contradiction endurantist alternative; this view eliminates the need for any relativization by denying that sitting and standing are contradictory properties. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Astrology, Computers, and the VolksgeistDenis DuttonCarroll Righter is not a name you will recognize, unless, perhaps, you’re old enough and you grew up reading the Los Angeles Times. Righter was the Times’s astrologer, and encountering his name recently brought back a couple of memories from the early 1950s. I remember finding it strange that a man (he was pictured alongside his column) was called Carroll, though he didn’t (...) spell it like the girl who lived across the street. But especially I recall the fun we had when my father would read the horoscopes out loud and we’d compare them with the day’s events. Ours was a tough family for an astrologer to please, with rather different things happening to too many Aquarians, and a robust skepticism about anything of the sort later to be called “New Age.”How could I know that while we laughed and debated, somewhere else out there in the urban sprawl, Righter’s prognostications were being subjected to subtle and portentous analysis by that kingpin of the Frankfurt School, Theodor W. Adorno? Mirabile dictu, Adorno was living in L.A. at the time, and we now have his examination of Righter in The Stars Down to Earth, and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, edited with an excellent introduction by Stephen Crook (Routledge, $16.95). The result seems, now in the fullness of time, of mixed value and relevance. Adorno has produced an admirably accessible rhetoric of astrology, what he terms “content analysis.” In this, he is finding out for himself about the so-called cold-reading techniques of psychic consultation, practices long known to magicians and astrologers and only really understood by psychologists since Bertram Forer’s work in the 1940s. But beyond that, Adorno uses astrology to support and exemplify his theory of authoritarian irrationalism. As you might expect, this is more questionable. [End Page 424]To be sure, there are many intriguing observations throughout this mostly readable essay. In a passage perhaps even more true today than when it was written, Adorno says that a “climate of semi-erudition is the fertile breeding ground for astrology.” He refers to people who have gone just beyond the naive acceptance of the authority of science, but who don’t know enough, or who have not sufficiently developed “the power of thinking,” that they can replace such acceptance with anything better: “The semi-erudite vaguely wants to understand and is also driven by the narcissistic wish to prove superior to the plain people but he is not in a position to carry through complicated and detached intellectual operations.” In other words, quantum mechanics is pretty tough, but astrology offers sophisticated understanding of all reality in a few easy steps. Besides, astronomy is about those remote stars and planets out there—rather cold and impersonal. In Adorno’s apt title phrase, astrology brings it all down to earth, because it’s about the single most important thing in the universe: me. In an analogy that isn’t too far-fetched, he says that to the semi-erudite individual “astrology, just as other irrational creeds like racism, provides a short-cut by bringing the complex to a handy formula and offering at the same time the pleasant gratification that he who feels excluded from educational privileges nevertheless belongs to the minority of those who are ‘in the know.’” Someone once remarked that Scientology boosts self-esteem largely by giving semi-educated, degreeless persons impressive certificates to hang on their walls, and Adorno is right that there’s a similar syndrome at work with most New Age esoterica, including astrology. (In literary theory, there are no certificates, of course—you just have to learn the jargon.)Much to his credit, Adorno independently identifies many of the features of cold reading described by Forer and later writers, such as the persistent tendency of the client to personalize the general message. Of Righter’s “Follow up that intuition of yours,” or “Display that keen mind of yours,” Adorno says, “People who have any affinity at all to occultism are usually prepared to react to the information they are craving in such a way... (shrink)

Zeno's paradoxes of motion and the semantic paradoxes of the Liar have long been thought to have metaphorical affinities. There are, in fact, isomorphisms between variations of Zeno's paradoxes and variations of the Liar paradox in infinite-valued logic. Representing these paradoxes in dynamical systems theory reveals fractal images and provides other geometric ways of visualizing and conceptualizing the paradoxes.

Noël Carroll denies and Robert Stecker affirms that it is a necessary condition of aesthetic experience that it should be valued for its own sake. I make use of their controversy to argue for the psychological impossibility of discharging very common practices of art evaluation and analysis without undergoing an aesthetic experience valued for its own sake. By way of supporting my thesis and also making progress in Stecker and Carroll’s dispute about aesthetic experience, I analyse their methodological (...) assumptions and develop further our understanding of negative, indifferent and unexpected aesthetic experiences. The article provides a defence of Stecker’s position based on my contention regarding art evaluation and analysis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wittgenstein’s Reflection in Lewis Carroll’s Looking-GlassLeila S. MayAccording to one tradition in the theory of fiction, there is a kind of fantasy whose function is to invite the reader to "acknowledge the possibility of a different reality."1 In this essay I want to ask whether Lewis Carroll's Alice books fit into this category; that is, I want to explore the possibility that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and (...) Through the Looking-Glass are not the pure nonsense that many readers take them to be. In considering the Alice books as fantasy offering a view of a "different reality" I do not deny that there are in these stories some mimetic elements alongside the fantastic—representations of things going on somewhere, somehow, in Victorian society—in which case the "different reality" presented will not be so terribly different as to be unrecognizable. For example, the Mad Tea Party in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is not only an act of fantasy but also an act of mimesis. It certainly imitates the real tea parties often held throughout Victorian England—if caricature is a form of imitation—but it may also mime those mock tea parties held in English asylums whose goal was to model sane-like behavior to the inmates.2 An analogous question can be asked about Carroll's books in general: In addition to the component of fantasy, are they mimetic of Victorian culture itself, or merely of the Victorian conception of madness? Michel Foucault has argued that, while the very idea of la folie is an historical construct, the dialectical relationship between reason and unreason, with each pole parasitic on the other, is a structural constant. Carroll's Alice books produce images that are discharged in the confused nineteenth-century landscape where these two opposites meet. In that respect, his books are not so different from many of the more standard novels written in mid-century England. In this essay I [End Page 79] will explore features of this landscape, using a theoretical framework that has been synthesized from a number of related claims in the work of the linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In addition to my long-range aim of urging further study of Wittgenstein's work by literary critics, one of my specific goals is to show that the application of Wittgensteinian methods to the works of Lewis Carroll reveals something about the hidden logic of Carroll's stories, and conversely that this procedure tests some of Wittgenstein's intuitions concerning language. Yet another goal is to suggest that the structure of the discourse of domesticity as reflected in many mid-nineteenth-century novels is curiously similar to the structure of discourse in Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land—that the language-games played at these sites are at the same time functional and dysfunctional in much the same way. That may seem like a lot to attempt in a few pages,... but to paraphrase Humpty-Dumpty, when I ask words to do that much extra work, I pay them overtime.In 1965 the philosopher George Pitcher published an essay, "Wittgenstein, Nonsense, and Lewis Carroll," in which he sought to demonstrate "the remarkable extent and depth of affinity between these two great writers with respect to nonsense." In addition, he showed that "the very same confusions with which Wittgenstein charged philosophers were deliberately employed by Carroll for comic effect," and that many of the examples that Wittgenstein used to illustrate his points "resemble, in varying degrees, examples that are found in the works of Carroll."3 While I agree with Pitcher's observation that the examples of nonsense that Wittgenstein offers are very similar to a primary strain of nonsense that runs through the Alice books, in the first section I intend to go beyond that observation and to apply some of Wittgenstein's tools to Carroll's work and show that Wittgenstein's work can be used to reveal features of literary narrative that might otherwise be obscured, and in the second section, to apply these tools to the works of fiction this side of the Looking-Glass.IWittgenstein says that a language is a "language-game." He... (shrink)

Business and Society: Ethics and Stakeholder Management, 5th edition employs a stakeholder management framework, emphasizing business' social and ethical responsibilities to both external and internal stakeholder groups. A twin theme of business ethics to illustrate how ethical or moral considerations are included the public issues facing organizations and the decision making process of managers. The text is written from a managerial perspective that along with the twin themes of stakeholders and ethics, shows how to identify stakeholders, incorporate their concerns into (...) the organization's strategy and operations, and also integrate ethical wisdom into their decision making process. In addition, 35 case histories are included to help connect theory and practice through timely and interesting examples. (shrink)

Art in Three Dimensions is a collection of essays by one of the most eminent figures in philosophy of art.

This is a review of Marc Lange's _Natural Laws in Scientific Practice<D>.

To me the decisive reason in favor of our minds meeting in some common objects at least is that, unless I make that supposition, I have no motive for assuming that your mind exists at all.

Abstract:A synthesis of the two theoretical bases of business ethics—normative philosophy and descriptive social science—is called for. Examples from the literature are used to demonstrate that to ignore the descriptive aspects of moral behavior is to risk unreal philosophy, and that to ignore the normative aspects is to risk amoral social science. Business ethics is portrayed as a single unified field, in which fact-value distinctions are inappropriate.

Proceedings of a conference held in Sept. 2009 in London, England.

Many psychological scientists and behavioral neuroscientists affirm that “emotion” influences thinking, decision-making, actions, social relationships, well-being, and physical and mental health. Yet there is no consensus on a definition of the word “emotion,” and the present data suggest that it cannot be defined as a unitary concept. Theorists and researchers attribute quite different yet heuristic meanings to “emotion.” They show considerable agreement about emotion activation, functions, and regulation. The central goal of this article is to alert researchers, students, and other (...) consumers of “emotion” research to the multiple meanings or aspects that distinguished scientists attribute to ”emotion,” increase appreciation of its interesting and challenging complexity, and sharpen perspectives on “emotion” and the associated body of literature that is of critical significance to science and society. (shrink)

This article clarifies my current and seemingly ever-changing position on issues relating to emotions. The position derives from my differential emotions theory and it changes with new empirical findings and with insights from my own and others’ thinking and writing. The theory distinguishes between first-order emotions and emotion schemas. For example, it proposes that first-order negative emotions are attributable mainly to infants and young children in distress and to older individuals in emergency or highly challenging situations. Emotion schemas are defined (...) as emotion feelings interacting with cognition in motivating the decision making and actions of everyday life. (shrink)

Through a series of semistructured interviews with 12 nurses delivering direct patient care in acute, long-term and home care settings, information was sought regarding the ethical concerns of practicing nurses. Although these nurses frequently did not specifically identify the areas of expressed concern as ethical in nature, thematic analysis of the transcribed interviews uncovered four major ethical areas of concern common to these 12 nurses. These areas are: (1) Withholding of information and truth-telling; (2) Unequal access or inequalities in care; (...) (3) Differences between business and professional values; (4) Breaking and reporting broken rules. Several reasons are offered to explain the failure of nurses accurately to identify specific practice dilemmas as ethical in nature and the sequelae of these failures. Possibilities involving ongoing education and mentored experiences in practice areas are reported. (shrink)

The philosophy of Spinoza can hardly be said to have been in the fore-front of recent developments in the philosophy of mind. Notwithstanding, Stuart Hampshire has put himself on record as saying “that in the philosophy of mind he [Spinoza] is nearer to the truth at certain points than any other philosopher ever has been.” The purpose of this paper is to get even nearer the truth with Spinoza’s leading. The idea of the body is, however, a confused idea; so (...) confused, in fact, that Spinoza was never able to form an adequate idea of the idea. I wish to argue that Spinoza has even worse reasons than Descartes for taking the idea of the body to be the idea of something that “actually exists.” Lacking any appeal to the divine veracity, Spinoza’s contention that the body does exist constitutes a standing petitio for the whole of the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

This article suggests a way to circumvent some of the problems that follow from the lack of consensus on a definition of emotion (Izard, 2010; Kleinginna & Kleinginna, 1981) and emotion regulation (Cole, Martin, & Dennis, 2004) by adopting a conceptual framework based on discrete emotions theory and focusing on specific emotions. Discrete emotions theories assume that neural, affective, and cognitive processes differ across specific emotions and that each emotion has particular motivational and regulatory functions. Thus, efforts at regulation should (...) target the specific dysregulated emotions. The positive effects of emotion regulation are more likely to be optimized when they result from or lead to emotion utilization—the constructive use of the energy of emotion arousal. Effective processes for regulation differ for basic emotions and emotion schemas. This article identifies neural systems that facilitate emotion experiences and emotion regulation processes. It considers the implications of the developmental change from basic emotions to emotion schemas, and also briefly discusses the effects of interventions on changes in emotion knowledge, emotion regulation, and social and emotional competence. (shrink)

Numbers. Natural numbers -- Integers -- Real numbers -- Irrational and transcendental numbers -- Funny numbers. Zero -- e : the unnatural natural number -- [Phi] : the golden ratio -- i : the imaginary number -- Writing numbers. Roman numerals -- Egyptian fractions -- Continued fractions -- Logic. Mr. Spock is not logical -- Proofs, truth, and trees : oh my! -- Programming with logic -- Temporal reasoning -- Sets. Cantor's diagonalization : infinity isn't just infinity -- Axiomatic set (...) theory : keep the good, dump the bad -- Models : using sets as the LEGOs of the math world -- Transfinite numbers : counting and ordering infinite sets -- Group theory : finding symmetries with sets -- Mechanical math. Finite state machines : simplicity goes far -- The turing machine -- Pathology and the heart of computing -- Calculus : no, not that calculus- [lambda] calculus -- Numbers, booleans, and recursion -- Types, types, types : modeling [lambda] calculus -- The halting problem. (shrink)

The essays in this book are intended to inform leaders, and the general public, about the challenges of ethical decision making, the application of the law of war, and the important role of spirituality. Aspects of Leadership will educate readers and generate important questions that leaders should ask themselves, encouraging them to reflect upon their pivotal roles in these three areas"--Back cover.

This book examines transaction cost economics, the influential theoretical perspective on organizations and industry that was the subject of Oliver Williamson's seminal book,Markets and Hierarchies. Written by leading economists, sociologists, and political scientists, the essays collected here reflect the fruitful intellectual exchange that is occurring across the major social science disciplines. They examine transaction cost economics' general conceptual orientation, its specific theoretical propositions, its applications to policy, and its use in systematic empirical research. The chapters include classic texts, broad review (...) essays, reflective commentaries, and several new contributions to a wide range of topics, including organizations, regulations and law, institutions, strategic management, game theory, entrepreneurship, innovation, finance, and technical information. The book begins with an overview of theory and research on transaction cost economics, highlighting the specific accomplishments of scholars working within the perspective and emphasizing the enormous influence that transaction cost reasoning exerts on the social sciences. The following section covers conceptual uses for the transaction cost framework and major theoretical or methodological elements within it, such as bounded rationality. While advancing some interesting theoretical propositions, these chapters are in fact more ambitious: each examines a specific field, area, or research program and attempts to fashion a new way of thinking about research questions. In the section on industrial applications, contributors study the application of transaction cost theory to a range of problems in utilities, telecommunications, laser printing, and early international trade. The book closes with four microanalytical chapters that delve into the structures and behaviors of specific aspects of firms and organizations: boards of directors, equity structures, employment models, human resource policies and practices, technology strategies, and innovation events. Firms, Markets, and Hierarchies collects excellent social science work on transaction cost economics, taking stock of its status, charting its future development, and fostering its renewal and evolution. (shrink)

I attempt a thorough delineation of hocking's multiangular argument, and historically trace its genis to sources in james and royce. i argue that royce's logic of triadic relations shows the james-hocking to be untenable, and that hocking's version of intersubjectivity must be taken as an expression of tacit or autobiographical knowledge.