O'Brien & Opie's connectionist interpretation of and depends heavily on the notions of and that underlie the classic account. When the assumptions, shared by both accounts, are removed, the connectionist versus classic contrast appears to be between behavioral and linguistic accounts.

The representation of events, in primates at any rate, is a separate process from their emotional evaluation. The same holds for cognitive evaluation. Here too representation and evaluation are separate operations. Acknowledging the symmetry leads to the notion of free representation.

Byrne & Russon's account of program imitation in primates involves propositional attitudes (expectations and goals), which limits its falsifiability. Yet their account of priming shows exactly how imitation without attitudes would look. The challenge is to upgrade the notion of priming to give an account of low-level program imitation without invoking propositional attitudes.

Jackendoff's Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution (2002) achieves a major shift in the focus and methods of Generative Linguistics (GL). Yet some of the original restrictive features of GL, cognitivism and Cartesianism in particular, remain intact in the new work and take on a more extreme form with the addition of a phenomenalist ontology.

When Sartre arrives late to meet Pierre at a local establishment, he discovers not merely that Pierre is absent, but Pierre’s absence, where this depends, or so Sartre notoriously supposes, on a frustrated expectation that Pierre would be seen at that place. Many philosophers have railed against this view, taking it to entail a treatment of the ontology of absence that Richard Gale describes as ‘attitudinal’ – one whereby absences are thought to ontologically depend on psychological attitudes. In this paper, (...) I aim to make Sartre’s intuition respectable. What Sartre perceives is an absential location, only the boundaries of which are circumscribed by what Sartre is doing at that place: meeting Pierre. I explain how this Sartrean view, though not specifically attributable to Sartre, nonetheless honours some of the phenomenological data described, if a little opaquely, in Being and Nothingness. (shrink)

Finance is an area that, in practice, is plagued by accusations of unethical activity; the study of finance had adopted a largely nonbehavioral approach to business ethics research. We address this gap in by assessing whether individual ethical orientations predict the acceptability of questionable decisions about financial issues. Results show that individual ethical orientations are associated with different levels of acceptability of questionable decisions about financial issues, though the pattern of these differences varies across individual ethical orientations assessed. These results (...) represent evidence that ethical individual differences are associated with the acceptability of questionable finance decisions and are discussed in terms of methodological limitations and future directions in finance ethics research. (shrink)

Se analizan fragmentos de Diodoro Sículo donde se manifiestan algunos de los mecanismos de dominación de los amos sobre los esclavos. Observamos larepresentación que se hace desde el discurso dominante del ejercicio del control social y el ocultamiento de las prácticas violentas propias de la relación esclavista. Se trata de fragmentos en donde aparecen referidas situaciones concretas, ocurridas tanto en el ámbito doméstico como en los espacios productivos. La teoría de la dominación social de O. Patterson y los conceptos del (...) análisis del discurso son fundamentos sobre los que se elabora nuestra perspectiva metodológica. (shrink)

This paper briefly examines the concept of the ancient mode of production as expressed in Karl Marx’s Formations. It looks at how twentieth-century Marxist historiography picks up this concept in its characterisation of the Greco-Roman city-state. It explores the feasibility of the use of the concept in relation to the advancement of knowledge of the city-state, especially through the development of archaeology. It examines how social classes are structured and relations of exploitation are presented. And it analyses the need for (...) politics in the organisation of this socio-economic form in terms of how it is joined up with the social relations of production. (shrink)

This selection is an argument for the pharmacology of cannabinoids. It also provides a phenotypical account of the botany of cannabis.

In this collection of essays, Camillo “Mac” Bica, Ph.D., a former Marine Corps Officer, Vietnam Veteran, and philosopher, provides a cogent analysis of why a veteran may not want to be thanked for his “service” in war. Mac’s experiential and theoretical perspective is both gut wrenching and concise. “The Philosopher speaks from the mind,” Mac writes, “the warrior from where it hurts.” With simplicity, poignancy, and power, this book, together with future installments of the War Legacy Series, works to dispel (...) the mythology of nobility and heroism by providing a window into the reality of war and its devastating effects upon all who experience its horrors. (shrink)

'Philosophy in a world of women. I reflected, talking with Mary, Pip and Elizabeth, how much I love them.' Two brilliant young scholars uncover the major philosophical contributions of four women whose ideas could have changed the course of twentieth-century thought. Written with energy, expertise and panache, The Quartet is a page-turning blend of research and recovery, storytelling, and a call to arms. Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Elizabeth Anscombe were great friends and comrades in the intellectual trenches, (...) rethinking the possibilities of moral philosophy when the men 'left the room' and taking on the establishment, ultimately embodied by President Truman. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman bring these women out of the shadows and into vivid colour. (shrink)

It is often said nowadays that to understand pleasure we must understand it as affording us a reason for or an explanation of action. It is only from the standpoint of the agent that we can avoid being misled. Both Professor Nowell-Smith and Mr. Manser have argued along these lines; and Dr. Kenny has written that “pleasure is always a reason for action” and has elucidated what he means by a footnote: “I do not mean that a thing’s being pleasant (...) is always a sufficient reason for doing it; there may be strong reasons for abstaining. I mean merely that it is always silly to ask a man why he wants pleasure.” When I first saw this point made, I had the perhaps not uncommon philosophical experience of immediately finding it both lucid and convincing, but then, afterwards gradually becoming less and less clear about the source of my conviction. The reasons for my obfuscation are as follows. In one crucial sense anything can afford an agent with a reason for action. It depends upon what the agent wants and upon the projects in which he is engaged. Moreover, without having any strong reasons for abstaining from what will give me pleasure, I may not be at all moved by the prospect of pleasure. As I write this paper I can list a dozen activities or experiences which would afford me pleasure. I have no strong reason for abstaining; I do not particularly enjoy writing papers; I am not writing with a great sense of urgency; I have the time and the money to indulge myself. Yet I do not rush to open a Guinness or Mr. Alfred Grossman’s new novel. So that far from it being silly to ask me why I do not apparently want pleasure at the moment, it is a question that I find forced upon me. But if this question makes sense, there is at least a problem as to why “it is always silly to ask a man if he wants pleasure.” For one might expect the two questions to stand or fall together. This is the problem to which I address myself in this paper. But in order to do so I must first take up certain points from recent discussions which are in danger of preventing a solution. (shrink)

I present a novel anti-sceptical BIV argument by focusing on conditions on the production and use of the locative preposition ‘in’. I distinguish two uses of ‘in’—material and descriptive phenomenological—and I explain in what respect movement is central to the concept that our use of ‘in’ expresses. I go on to argue that a functionalist semantics of the intelligible use of ‘in’ demands a materialist philosophy of action in the spirit of G.E.M. Anscombe, but also why the structure of space (...) is not irrelevant either; appeal to the structure of space unsettles the causal-empirical assumptions that ground the picture of subjectivity and agency that the biv narrative assumes. Finally, I explain why a functionalist semantics demands a Naïve Realist metaphysics of perception, consistent with some of Putnam’s last writings on philosophy of perception. (shrink)

A vibrant portrait of four college friends-Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Mary Midgley-who formed a new philosophical tradition while Oxford's men were away at war.

1. Barry and Cullity (2022b) argue that when morally assessing a person’s climate actions,1 we should ask how these actions affect other people’s prospects.2 For the present purposes, we can unders...

We argue that the counterfactual representations of popular culture, like their religious cognates, are shaped by cognitive constraints that become visible when considered in aggregate. In particular, we argue that comic-book literature embodies core intuitions about sociality and its maintenance that are activated by the cognitive problem of living in large groups. This leads to four predictions: comic-book enforcers should be punitively prosocial, be quasi-omniscient, exhibit kin-signalling proxies and be minimally counterintuitive. We gauge these predictions against a large sample of (...) 19,877 characters that were derived from 72,611 comics using data scraping techniques. Our results corroborate the view that cognitive constraints exercise a selective effect on the transmission of popular culture. (shrink)

I ask whether figure-ground structure can be realized in touch, and, if so, how. Drawing on the taxonomy of touch sketched in Katz's 1925 The World of Touch, I argue that the form of touch that is relevant to such consideration is a species of immersed touch. I consider whether we can feel the space we are immersed in and, more specifically, the empty space against which the surfaces of objects, as I shall urge, “stand out.” Harnessing M. G. F. (...) Martin's account of bodily awareness and touch, I defend a positive thesis, pace Graham Nerlich on whose The Shape of Space I otherwise rely, both to defend the supposition that empty space can in principle be felt and to argue that touching empty space is not a mere species of absence perception. Along the way, I defuse a causal worry that might be thought to arise in the case of touching empty space. (shrink)

In what sense does empty space feature in visual experience? In the first part of this essay I sketch a view advanced by Soteriou and Richardson on which one's visual awareness of empty space is explained by appeal to ‘structural’ features of the phenomenology of visual experience, in particular the phenomenology of experiencing one's visual field as bounded. I suggest that although this ‘structuralist’ view is silent on whether empty space has a phenomenal appearance, the very appeal to structural features (...) seems a natural foil to some such thought. In the second part, I outline a view on which it can be granted that empty space does, after all, have a phenomenal appearance and, so, is not best cast as a species of absence perception as the structuralist avows, at least on a certain construal of ‘absence perception’. After O'Shaughnessy , I contend that although some privations have a phenomenal appearance, ‘absence perception’ should single out the putative perception of phenomena that lack phenomenal reality. I finally consider how the descriptive phenomenology that the structuralist points to, and which I urge should be embraced, can nonetheless be reconciled with the view I spell out. (shrink)

In this book, Earl Mac Cormac presents an original and unified cognitive theory of metaphor using philosophical arguments which draw upon evidence from psychological experiments and theories. He notes that implications of this theory for meaning and truth with specific attention to metaphor as a speech act, the iconic meaning of metaphor, and the development of a four-valued system of truth. Numerous examples of metaphor from poetry and science are presented and analyzed to support Mac Cormac's theory. A Cognitive Theory (...) of Metaphortakes up three levels of explanation—metaphor as expressed in surface language, the semantics of metaphor, and metaphor as a cogitive process—and unifies these by interpreting metaphor as an evolutionary knowledge process in which metaphors mediate between minds and culture. Mac Cormac considers, and rejects, the radical theory that all use of language is metaphorical; however, this argument also recognizes that the theoryof metaphor may itself be metaphorical. The book first considers the computational metaphor often adopted by cognitive psychology as an example of metaphor requiring analysis. In contrast to three well-known philosophical theories of metaphor—the tension theory, the controversion theory, and the grammatical deviance theory—it develops a semantical anomaly theory of metaphor based on a quasi-mathematical hierarchy of words. In developing the theory, Mac Cormac makes much-needed connections between theories of metaphor and more orthodox analytic philosophy of meaning, including discussions of speech acts and the logic of fuzzy sets. This semantical theory of explanation is then shown to be compatible with contemporary psychological theories of memory. (shrink)

I offer a reading of Murdoch's conception of concrete universality as it appears in 'The Idea of Perfection', the first essay in the Sovereignty of Good. I show that it has British Idealist overtones that are inflected by Wittgenstein, a thought I try to illuminate by drawing an analogy with Wittgenstein's discussion of the metre stick in Paris in Philosophical Investigations §50. In the last part of the paper, I appeal to the work of Murdoch's erstwhile tutor Donald MacKinnon to (...) respond to an objection to my strategy, which I draw from Murdoch's later work, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. (shrink)

In this study we present a self-organizing connectionist model of early lexical development. We call this model DevLex-II, based on the earlier DevLex model. DevLex-II can simulate a variety of empirical patterns in children's acquisition of words. These include a clear vocabulary spurt, effects of word frequency and length on age of acquisition, and individual differences as a function of phonological short-term memory and associative capacity. Further results from lesioned models indicate developmental plasticity in the network's recovery from damage, in (...) a non-monotonic fashion. We attribute the network's abilities in accounting for lexical development to interactive dynamics in the learning process. In particular, variations displayed by the model in the rate and size of early vocabulary development are modulated by (a) input characteristics, such as word frequency and word length, (b) consolidation of lexical-semantic representation, meaning-form association, and phonological short-term memory, and (c) delayed processes due to interactions among timing, severity, and recoverability of lesion. Together, DevLex and DevLex-II provide an accurate computational account of early lexical development. (shrink)

This paper expands on the notion of "moral conversion" (advanced by Bernard Lonergan but underdeveloped in his work) by developing a typology that uses two "cross-hatching" criteria. First, it distinguishes between moral conversions that have to do with a person's relation to moral obligation, good and evil, and between moral conversions that have to do with how a person regards the question of happiness and the meaning of life. Secondly, it distinguishes between conversions regarding the _content_ (what is good/evil or (...) the meaning of life?), regarding _attitude_ (becoming committed to doing good or to the meaning-seeking process), and regarding _coherence_ (conforming one's actual life to what is understood to be right/wrong or meaning-giving). Combining both criteria leaves us with six types of moral conversion. Each type is then illustrated and supported with concrete real-life narratives. I conclude with an attempt at a definition of moral conversion that includes all types. The article is a summary of Chapter 5 of my dissertation (2008) "Narratives of Hope: A Philosophical Study of Moral Conversion.". (shrink)

In this study we present a self‐organizing connectionist model of early lexical development. We call this model DevLex‐II, based on the earlier DevLex model. DevLex‐II can simulate a variety of empirical patterns in children's acquisition of words. These include a clear vocabulary spurt, effects of word frequency and length on age of acquisition, and individual differences as a function of phonological short‐term memory and associative capacity. Further results from lesioned models indicate developmental plasticity in the network's recovery from damage, in (...) a non‐monotonic fashion. We attribute the network's abilities in accounting for lexical development to interactive dynamics in the learning process. In particular, variations displayed by the model in the rate and size of early vocabulary development are modulated by (a) input characteristics, such as word frequency and word length, (b) consolidation of lexical‐semantic representation, meaning‐form association, and phonological short‐term memory, and (c) delayed processes due to interactions among timing, severity, and recoverability of lesion. Together, DevLex and DevLex‐II provide an accurate computational account of early lexical development. (shrink)