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

Intellectual character education has been primarily expressed in terms of educating for intellectual virtues (EFIV). This aim of teaching intellectual virtues has received some challenges, such as how it fails to articulate adequate action guidance through exemplarist pedagogy, and how it neglects the pervasiveness of intellectual vice among students. To respond to these challenges, this paper considers the aim of educating against intellectual vices (EAIV) – teaching students not to develop intellectual vices or weakening those that they have already developed (...) – which comes with the emergence of vice epistemology. More specifically, I look at how negative epistemic exemplars can be used as a classroom strategy for EAIV, and demonstrate how this could address the aforementioned weaknesses of EFIV. (shrink)

The articles in this volume focus upon Boethius's extant works: his De arithmetica and a fragmentary De musica, his translations and commentaries on logic, his five theological texts, and, of course, his Consolation of Philosophy.

Candidates for fundamental physical laws rarely, if ever, employ higher than second time derivatives. Easwaran sketches an enticing story that purports to explain away this puzzling fact and thereby provides indirect evidence for a particular set of metaphysical theses used in the explanation. I object to both the scope and coherence of Easwaran's account, before going on to defend an alternative, more metaphysically deflationary explanation: in interacting Lagrangian field theories, it is either impossible or very hard to incorporate higher than (...) second time derivatives without rendering the vacuum state unstable. The so-called Ostrogradski instability represents a powerful constraint on the construction of new field theories and supplies a novel, largely overlooked example of non-causal explanation in physics. (shrink)

We listen to a cacophony of voices instructing us how to think and feel about nature, including our own bodies. The news media, wildlife documentaries, science magazines, and environmental NGOs are among those clamouring for our attention. But are we empowered by all this knowledge or is our dependence on various epistemic communities allowing our thoughts, sentiments and activities to be unduly governed by others? Drawing on over 30 years on research into the 'social constitution of nature', Making Sense of (...) Nature shows that what we call 'nature' is made sense of for us in ways that make it central to social order, social change and social dissent. By utilising insights and extended examples from anthropology, cultural studies, human geography, philosophy, politics, sociology, science studies, this interdisciplinary text asks whether we can better make sense of nature for ourselves, and thus participate more meaningfully in momentous decisions about the future of life - human and non-human - on the planet. This book shows how 'nature' can be made sense of without presuming its naturalness. The challenge is not so much to rid ourselves of the idea of nature and its 'collateral concepts' (such as genes) but instead, we need to be more alert to how, why and with what effects ideas about 'nature' get fashioned and deployed in specific situations. (shrink)

Life and the living (on Aristotelian biohorror) -- Supernatural horror as the paradigm for life -- Aristotle's De anima and the problem of life -- The ontology of life -- The entelechy of the weird -- Superlative life -- Life with or without limits -- Life as time in Plotinus -- On the superlative -- Superlative life I: Pseudo-Dionysius -- Negative vs. affirmative theology -- Superlative negation -- Negation and preexistent life -- Excess, evil, and non-being -- Superlative life II: (...) Eriugena -- Negation in the periphyseon -- The quaestio de nihilo: on nothing -- The quaestio de nihilo: superlative nothing -- Dark intelligible abyss -- Apophasis -- The apophatic logic -- Negation in Frege and Ayer -- Negation vs. subtraction in Badiou -- Negation and contradiction in Priest -- The dialetheic vitalism of negative theology -- Ellipses: Suhraward and the luminous void -- Univocal creatures -- On spiritual creatures -- Life as form in Aristotle -- The concept of the creature -- Univocity I: Duns Scotus vs. Aquinas -- Univocity in Aquinas' Summa theologica -- Univocity in Duns Scotus' Opus oxoniense -- The common nature of the creature -- Univocity II: Duns Scotus vs. Henry of Ghent -- Univocity in Henry of Ghent -- Negative vs. privative indetermination -- Absolute indetermination -- Univocity III: Deleuze's scholasticism three variations -- Spinoza et le problème de l'expression -- Différence et répétition -- Cours de Vincennes -- Univocal creatures -- Ellipses: Dgen and uncreated univocity -- Dark pantheism -- Everything and nothing -- Life as spirit in Aquinas -- The concept of the divine nature -- Immanence I: Eriugena's periphyseon -- Natura and the unthought -- Universal life -- Four statements on pantheism -- Immanence II: Duns Scotus' reportatio Ia -- Univocal immanence -- Actual infinity -- The pathology of the triple primacy -- Immanence III: Nicholas of Cusa's De docta ignorantia -- The coincidence of opposites -- The folds of life -- Absolute vs. contracted pantheism -- Speculative pantheism (Deleuze's interlocutors) -- Pantheism and pure immanence -- The insubordination of immanence in Deleuze -- Scholia I: the isomorphism of univocity and immanence -- Scholia II: the vitalist logic of common notions -- Scholia III: the life of substance -- Dark pantheism -- Ellipses: Wang Yangming and idealist naturalism -- Logic and life (on Kantian teratology) -- The wandering line from Aristotle to Kant -- Critique of life -- Spectral life and speculative realism -- Ontotheology in Kant, atheology in Bataille -- The night land. (shrink)

A collection of philosophical and aesthetic essays, influenced by Bernard Stiegler, which focuses on the techno-cultural artefact in order to critique, engage, or respond to, an aspect of digital culture.

Y a-t-il une psychanalyse chrétienne? Cette question a-t-elle un sens? Un croyant souffrant doit-il ou non s'assurer que son psychanalyste est lui-même croyant pour protéger sa foi? Autrement dit, comment l'analyse intègre-t-elle ou modifie-t-elle une donnée religieuse? Faire une analyse, c'est accepter de traverser le tragique de sa propre vie. En raison du dévoilement de la vérité que ce processus met en œuvre, le patient voit se dégager devant lui la perspective d'un désir dont la nouvelle mesure est infinie. Ce (...) désir avait été comblé par des objets qui, jusque-là, semblaient le satisfaire. Puis, le symptôme surgit, déstabilise, perturbe les petits arrangements que le patient s'était autorisés. Première ou dernière scène de son tragique? Dans le huis clos théâtral qu'est la séance analytique, le patient-acteur reprend et parle toute son histoire. Comme à son insu, il se voit contraint de redéfinir ce qui donne sens à sa vie : sens religieux? sens éthique? Bref, tout ce qui échappe à l'analyse et que, paradoxe imprévisible, elle évoque et convoque... Pourtant, un point restera toujours aveugle pour lui, à l'instar d'Œdipe qui, les yeux crevés, poursuit son chemin. C'est peut-être en ce même point - tragique-aveugle - que l'homme reconnaît sous une lumière nouvelle que son histoire personnelle rejoint la détresse commune et ordinaire de toute l'humanité. (shrink)

This book provides a much-needed, straightforward introduction to moral philosophy.

In this essay, I am concerned with the representation of groups in popular culture. My interest has to do with the politics of representing people. The couplet beauty/nonbeauty (or, more specifically, beauty/ugliness) frequently figures importantly in the representation of groups, including most notably, for my purposes, ethnic and racial minorities. This couplet can be politically significant because beauty is often associated in our culture with moral goodness. . . . Thus, beauty and non beauty can serve as a basis for (...) political rhetoric. . . . If one concept of human beauty (which is connected to ideas of goodness) sees beauty as the instantiation or near approximation of the concept human being, then the related idea of human ugliness (which is connected with ideas of moral degradation) is rooted in problematic exemplifications of the concept of the human. These "problematic exemplifications" can take many forms. The two that will preoccupy me in this essay are the imperfect exemplifications of the human found in the popular genres of horror and humor. (shrink)

Galen Strawson and Saul Smilansky have offered a well-known argument that free will does not exist because the control involved is so robust that it would require influence over an infinite series of prior decisions. (Strawson 1986, 1994, 2002, Smilansky 2000, 2002) Unfortunately, while this metaphysical argument has attracted widespread attention, it has garnered few adherents. Thus, in order to improve the metaphysical argument against free will, I offer a new interpretation of the argument, its fundamental principle, and its relationship (...) to incompatibilism. I demonstrate that the central principle of the argument is just as defensible as the central principle of one of the major arguments for incompatibilism (namely, Robert Kane's argument from ‘ultimate responsibility' in Kane 1996). Therefore, the metaphysical argument against free will deserves much more respect than it currently receives. (shrink)

The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the world of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, two of the most important and influential thinkers in twentieth-century European philosophy. Meticulously researched and extensively cross-referenced, this unique book covers all their major sole-authored and collaborative works, ideas and influences and provides a firm grounding in the central themes of Deleuze and Guattari's groundbreaking thought. Students and experts alike will discover a wealth of useful information, analysis and criticism. A-Z (...) entries include clear definitions of all the key terms used in Deleuze and Guattari's writings and detailed synopses of their key works. The Dictionary also includes entries on their major philosophical influences and key contemporaries, from Aristotle to Foucault. It covers everything that is essential to a sound understanding of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy, offering clear and accessible explanations of often complex terminology. The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary is the ideal resource for anyone reading or studying these seminal thinkers or Modern European Philosophy more generally. (shrink)

Body-environment (b-en) -- Functional cycle (fucy) -- An object -- The body and time -- Evolution, novelty, and stability -- Behavior -- Culture, symbol, and language -- Thinking with the implicit.

Excerpt from La Logique de Hegel S'il n'en est pas de meme chez nous on peut du moins remar quer que le nom de Hegel, qui naguere encore semblait tout a fait oublie, se rencontre assez frequemment sous la plume de nos philosophes les plus autorises. M. Fouillee, en particulier, le cite a maintes reprises'dans ses deux derniers livres Le Mouvement posuiviste et Le Mouvement idealiste. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find (...) more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Akratic belief, or belief one believes one should not have, has often been thought to be impossible. I argue that the possibility of akratic belief should be accepted as a pre-theoretical datum. I distinguish intuitive, defensive, systematic, and diagnostic ways of arguing for this view, and offer an argument that combines them. After offering intuitive examples of akratic belief, I defend those examples against a common argument against the possibility of akratic belief, which I call the Nullification Argument. I then (...) offer an Argument from Belief Attribution, using a discussion of the marks by which we typically attribute belief to defend attributions of akratic belief. I conclude by offering a way to explain what is puzzling about akratic belief, while allowing that it is possible. (shrink)

Prescriptive rules guide human behavior across various domains of community life, including law, morality, and etiquette. What, specifically, are rules in the eyes of their subjects, i.e., those who are expected to abide by them? Over the last sixty years, theorists in the philosophy of law have offered a useful framework with which to consider this question. Some, following H. L. A. Hart, argue that a rule’s text at least sometimes suffices to determine whether the rule itself covers a case. (...) Others, in the spirit of Lon Fuller, believe that there is no way to understand a rule without invoking its purpose — the benevolent ends which it is meant to advance. In this paper we ask whether people associate rules with their textual formulation or their underlying purpose. We find that both text and purpose guide people’s reasoning about the scope of a rule. Overall, a rule’s text more strongly contributed to rule infraction decisions than did its purpose. The balance of these considerations, however, varied across experimental conditions: In conditions favoring a spontaneous judgment, rule interpretation was affected by moral purposes, whereas analytic conditions resulted in a greater adherence to textual interpretations. In sum, our findings suggest that the philosophical debate between textualism and purposivism partly reflects two broader approaches to normative reasoning that vary within and across individuals. Keywords: , the concept of law, rules, legal psychology, Hart, Fuller. (shrink)

Understanding Ethics introduces the frameworks of moral philosophy to analyse contemporary moral issues and perennial human dilemmas.While the early chapters ...

This letter explores the intricate historical and contemporary links between large language models (LLMs) and cognitive science through the lens of information theory, statistical language models, and socioanthropological linguistic theories. The emergence of LLMs highlights the enduring significance of information‐based and statistical learning theories in understanding human communication. These theories, initially proposed in the mid‐20th century, offered a visionary framework for integrating computational science, social sciences, and humanities, which nonetheless was not fully fulfilled at that time. The subsequent development of (...) sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, especially since the 1970s, provided critical perspectives and empirical methods that both challenged and enriched this framework. This letter proposes that two pivotal concepts derived from this development, metapragmatic function and indexicality, offer a fruitful theoretical perspective for integrating the semantic, textual, and pragmatic, contextual dimensions of communication, an amalgamation that contemporary LLMs have yet to fully achieve. The author believes that contemporary cognitive science is at a crucial crossroads, where fostering interdisciplinary dialogues among computational linguistics, social linguistics and linguistic anthropology, and cognitive and social psychology is in particular imperative. Such collaboration is vital to bridge the computational, cognitive, and sociocultural aspects of human communication and human−AI interaction, especially in the era of large language and multimodal models and human‐centric Artificial Intelligence (AI). (shrink)

T.M. Scanlon has recently offered an influential treatment of blame as a response to the impairment of a relationship. I argue, first, that Scanlon’s remarks about the nature of blame suggest several sharply diverging views, so different that they can reasonably be considered different theories: a judgment-centered theory, on which blame is the reaction the blamer judges appropriate; an appropriateness-centered theory, on which blame is any reaction that is actually appropriate; and a substantive list theory, on which blame is any (...) of a list of reactions, such as anger or loss of trust. Once distinguished, each theory faces a series of formidable challenges that neither Scanlon nor his commentators have addressed. I argue that the notion of directed attention, central in Scanlon’s earlier work, can be used to address these challenges, while preserving the spirit of Scanlon’s discussion of blame. (shrink)

According to spacetime state realism, the fundamental ontology of a quantum mechanical world consists of a state-valued field evolving in four-dimensional spacetime. One chief advantage it claims over rival wave-function realist views is its natural compatibility with relativistic quantum field theory. I argue that the original density operator formulation of SSR cannot be extended to QFTs where the local observables form type III von Neumann algebras. Instead, I propose a new formulation of SSR in terms of a presheaf of local (...) state spaces dual to the net of local observables studied by algebraic QFT. 1Introduction2Spacetime State Realism in Quantum Field Theory 2.1Equivalence thesis3Entanglement and the Type III Property 3.1No-Go Lemma 13.2No-Go Lemma 24State Space Axioms for Quantum Field Theory 4.1Revised equivalence thesis5Discussion. (shrink)

Childcare robots are being manufactured and developed with the long term aim of creating surrogate carers. While total childcare is not yet being promoted, there are indications that it is 'on the cards'. We examine recent research and developments in childcare robots and speculate on progress over the coming years by extrapolating from other ongoing robotics work. Our main aim is to raise ethical questions about the part or full-time replacement of primary carers. The questions are about human rights, privacy, (...) robot use of restraint, deception of children and accountability. But the most pressing ethical issues throughout the paper concern the consequences for the psychological and emotional wellbeing of children. We set these in the context of the child development literature on the pathology and causes of attachment disorders. We then consider the adequacy of current legislation and international ethical guidelines on the protection of children from the overuse of robot care. (shrink)

Noel Carroll, film scholar and philosopher, offers the first serious look at the aesthetics of horror. In this book he discusses the nature and narrative structures of the genre, dealing with horror as a "transmedia" phenomenon. A fan and serious student of the horror genre, Carroll brings to bear his comprehensive knowledge of obscure and forgotten works, as well as of the horror masterpieces. Working from a philosophical perspective, he tries to account for how people can find pleasure in having (...) their wits scared out of them. What, after all, are those "paradoxes of the heart" that make us want to be horrified? (shrink)

Standard approaches to ontological simplicity focus either on the number of things or types a theory posits or on the number of fundamental things or types a theory posits. In this paper, I suggest a ground-theoretic approach that focuses on the number of something else. After getting clear on what this approach amounts to, I motivate it, defend it, and complete it.

Pragmatism is the distinctive contribution of American thought to philosophy. It is a movement that attracted much attention in the early part of the twentieth-century, went into decline, and reemerged in the last part of the century. Part of the difficulty in defining pragmatism is that misconceptions of what pragmatism means have abounded since its beginning, and continue in today’s “neopragmatism.”.

Volume 11 of Eugen Fink’s ‘Collected Works’ brings together Fink's contributions on ancient philosophy since the 1940s: three main texts—the lecture on the ‘Basic Questions of Ancient Philosophy’ (winter semester 1947/48), the seminar on the ‘Principle of Contradiction’ (winter semester 1959/60) and the seminar on Heraclitus (winter semester 1966/67), which he held together with Heidegger—, two smaller works entitled ‘Time and the Concept of Time in Aristotle’ and ‘Asebeia and Techne in the 10th Book of the Nomoi’ (1963 and 1969), (...) and drafts in the context of several seminars on Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle. The volume shows the important role played by Fink’s analysis of the ancient philosophers for the development of his phenomenological cosmology in the tension between Husserl and Heidegger: In the early thinkers, Fink finds traces of an original philosophy that has the world as a whole as its centre and guiding principle. (shrink)

Among the most well-known accounts of events is Jaegwon Kim’s exemplification theory, which identifies each event with a property exemplification. Two of the most influential rival event theorists have urged rejecting exemplificationism on the basis of the charge that it ultimately conflates events with facts [Lombard : Events: A Metaphysical Study. Routledge & Kegan Paul; Bennett :Events and their Names. Hackett Publishing Company]. In response, I offer a detailed examination of Lombard and Bennett’s arguments that exemplificationism undermines the event/fact distinction. (...) I then develop and defend a modified version of Kim’s account that overcomes this objection, and so constitutes a more plausible exemplification theory of events. (shrink)

Begrüssung und Einführung, von H. Gehrig.--Bewusstseinsanalytik und Weltproblem, von E. Fink.--Die Zeitanalyse in der Phänomenologie und in der klassischen Tradition, von L. Landgrebe.--Einige Reflexionen über den geschichtlichen Ort der Phänomenologie, von M. Müller.--Der gegenwärtige Stand der Arbeiten am Nachlass Edmund Husserls, von H. L. Van Breda.--Über das Zeitverständnis in der Phänomenologie und im Denken der Seinsfrage, von M. Heidegger.--Personalia.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Higher courts sometimes assess the constitutionality of law by working through a concrete case, other times by reasoning about the underlying question in a more abstract way. Prior research has found that the degree of concreteness or abstraction with which an issue is formulated can influence people's prescriptive views: For instance, people often endorse punishment for concrete misdeeds that they would oppose if the circumstances were described abstractly. We sought to understand whether the so-called ‘abstract/concrete paradox’ also jeopardizes the consistency (...) of judicial reasoning. In a series of experiments, both lay and professional judges sometimes reached opposite conclusions when reasoning about concrete cases versus the underlying issues formulated in abstract terms. This effect emerged whether participants reasoned with broad principles, such as human dignity, or narrow rules, and was largest among individuals high in trait empathy. Finally, to understand whether people reflectively endorse the discrepancy between abstract and concrete resolutions, we examined their reactions when evaluating both, either simultaneously or sequentially. These approaches revealed no single pattern across lay and expert populations, or exploratory and confirmatory studies. Taken together, our studies suggest that empathic concern plays a greater role in guiding the judicial resolution of concrete cases than in illuminating judges' professed standards—which may result in concrete decisions in violation of their own abstract principles. (shrink)

A major obstacle facing interpreters of quantum field theory is a proliferation of different theoretical frameworks. This article surveys three of the main available options—Lagrangian, Wightman, and algebraic QFT—and examines how they are related. Although each framework emphasizes different aspects of QFT, leading to distinct strengths and weaknesses, there is less tension between them than commonly assumed. Given the limitations of our current knowledge and the need for creative new ideas, I urge philosophers to explore puzzles, tools, and techniques from (...) all three approaches. (shrink)