In this article, I examine whether the concept of testimony can be used in order to clarify the epistemological value of literary fiction. It seems that it cannot: a testimony can be wrong while it makes no sense to say that a literary fiction can be wrong. However, in the wake of a hermeneutic philosophy, the fictional story has often been qualified as a testimony of an experience, even in cases which are not merely autobiographical. I try to unravel this (...) paradoxical connection between literary fiction and testimony. Starting from an examination of Kafka’s short story “Metamorphosis”, I intend to articulate the distinction between literary fiction and testimony, on the one hand and on the other, to understand the importance of the perspective of the witness in literary fiction. The main argument for both statements is given by an analysis of the visibility in literary fiction. (shrink)

From the 1990s until just before his death, the legendary art critic and philosopher Arthur C. Danto carried out extended conversations about contemporary art with the prominent Italian critic Demetrio Paparoni. Their discussions ranged widely over a vast range of topics, from American pop art and minimalism to abstraction and appropriationism. Yet they continually returned to the concepts at the core of Danto’s thinking—posthistory and the end of aesthetics—provocative notions that to this day shape questions about the meaning and (...) future of contemporary art. Art and Posthistory presents these rich dialogues and correspondence, testifying to the ongoing importance of Danto’s ideas. It offers readers the opportunity to experience the intellectual excitement of Danto in person, speculating in a freewheeling yet erudite style. Danto and Paparoni discuss figures such as Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Franz Kline, Sean Scully, Clement Greenberg, Cindy Sherman, and Wang Guangyi, offering both insightful comments on individual works and sweeping observations about wider issues. On occasion, the artist Mimmo Paladino and the philosopher Mario Perniola join the conversation, enlivening the discussion and adding their own perspectives. The book also features an introductory essay by Paparoni that provides lucid analysis of Danto’s thinking, emphasizing where the two disagree as well as what they learned from each other. (shrink)

This innovative - and pessimistic - view has proved powerfully influential upon philosophy and art, directly affecting the work of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and ...

This book contains the definitive statement of Franz Brentano's views on meta physics. It is made up of essays which were dictated by Brentano during the last ten years of his life, between 1907 and 1917. These dictations were assembled and edited by Alfred Kastil and first published by the Felix Meiner Verlag in 1933 under the title Kategorienlehre. Kastil added copious notes to Brentano's text. These notes have been included, with some slight omissions, in the present edition; the (...) bibliographical references have been brought up to date. Brentano's approach to philosophy is unfamiliar to many contemporay readers. I shall discuss below certain fundamental points which such readers are likely to find the most difficult. I believe that once these points are properly understood, then what Brentano has to say will be seen to be of first importance to philosophy. THE PRIMACY OF THE INTENTIONAL To understand Brentano's theory of being, one must realize that he appeals to what he calls inner perception for his paradigmatic uses of the word "is". For inner perception, according to Brentano, is the source of our knowledge of the nature of being, just as it is the source of our knowledge of the nature of truth and of the nature of good and evil. And what can be said about the being of things that are not apprehended in inner perception can be understood only by analogy with what we are able to say about ourselves as thinking subjects. (shrink)

In The Sleepwalkers and The Act of Creation Arthur Koestler provided pioneering studies of scientific discovery and artistic inspiration, the twin pinnacles of human achievement. The Ghost in the Machine looks at the dark side of the coin: our terrible urge to self-destruction... Could the human species be a gigantic evolutionary mistake? To answer that startling question Koestler examines how experts on evolution and psychology all too often write about people with an 'antiquated slot-machine model based on the naively (...) mechanistic world-view of the nineteenth century. His brilliant polemic helped to instigate a major revolution in the life sciences, yet its 'glimpses of an alternative world-view' form only the background to an even more challenging analysis of the human predicament. Perhaps, he suggests, we are a species in which ancient and recent brain structures - or reason and emotion - are not fully co-ordinated. Such in-built deficiencies may explain the paranoia, violence and insanity that are central strands of human history. And however disturbing we find such issues, Koestler contends, it is only when we face our limitations head-on that we can hope to find a remedy. (shrink)

Tractatus 4.024 inspired the dominant semantics of our time: truth-conditional semantics. Such semantics is focused on possible worlds: the content of p is the set of worlds where p is true. It has become increasingly clear that such an account is, at best, defective: we need an ‘independent factor in meaning, constrained but not determined by truth-conditions’ (Yablo 2014, p. 2), because sentences can be differently true at the same possible worlds. I suggest a missing comment which, had it been (...) included in the Tractatus, would have helped semantics get this right from the start. This is my 4.0241: ‘Knowing what is the case if a sentence is true is knowing its ways of being true’: knowing a sentence’s truth possibilities and what we now call its topic, or subject matter. I show that the famous ‘fundamental thought’ that ‘the “logical constants” do not represent’ (4.0312) can be understood in terms of ways-based views of meaning. Such views also help with puzzling claims like 5.122: ‘If p follows from q, the sense of “p” is contained in the that of “q”’, which are compatible with a conception of entailment combining truth-preservation with the preservation of topicality, or of ways of being true. (shrink)

Covers the period from the beginning of Greek Philosophy to St. Augustine.

Contemporary health care often lacks generosity of spirit, even when treatment is most efficient. Too many patients are left unhappy with how they are treated, and too many medical professionals feel estranged from the calling that drew them to medicine. Arthur W. Frank tells the stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who are restoring generosity to medicine--generosity toward others and to themselves. The Renewal of Generosity evokes medicine as the face-to-face encounter that comes before and after diagnostics, pharmaceuticals, (...) and surgeries. Frank calls upon the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin to reflect on stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who transform demoralized medicine into caring relationships. He presents their stories as a source of consolation for both ill and professional alike and as an impetus to changing medical systems. Frank shows how generosity is being renewed through dialogue that is more than the exchange of information. Dialogue is an ethic and an ideal for people on both sides of the medical encounter who want to offer more to those they meet and who want their own lives enriched in the process. The Renewal of Generosity views illness and medical work with grace and compassion, making an invaluable contribution to expanding our vision of suffering and healing. (shrink)

Introduction and translation of “The Four Phases of Philosophy” by Franz Brentano.

The lectures have afforded me an opportunity of developing more fully than in my earlier books the principles of philosophic thought associated with the modern advances of physical science. It is often said that there is no "philosophy of ...

In At the Will of the Body , Arthur Frank told the story of his own illnesses, heart attack and cancer. That book ended by describing the existence of a "remission society," whose members all live with some form of illness or disability. The Wounded Storyteller is their collective portrait. Ill people are more than victims of disease or patients of medicine they are wounded storytellers. People tell stories to make sense of their suffering when they turn their diseases (...) into stories, they find healing. Drawing on the work of authors such as Oliver Sacks, Anatole Broyard, Norman Cousins, and Audre Lorde, as well as from people he met during the years he spent among different illness groups, Frank recounts a stirring collection of illness stories, ranging from the well-known--Gilda Radner's battle with ovarian cancer--to the private testimonials of people with cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, and disabilties. Their stories are more than accounts of personal suffering: they abound with moral choices and point to a social ethic. Frank identifies three basic narratives of illness in restitution, chaos, and quest. Restitution narratives anticipate getting well again and give prominence to the technology of cure. In chaos narratives, illness seems to stretch on forever, with no respite or redeeming insights. Quest narratives are about finding that insight as illness is transformed into a means for the ill person to become someone new. (shrink)

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1962, given by Arthur N. Prior (1914-1969).

I present a formal theory of the logic and aboutness of imagination. Aboutness is understood as the relation between meaningful items and what they concern, as per Yablo and Fine’s works on the notion. Imagination is understood as per Chalmers’ positive conceivability: the intentional state of a subject who conceives that p by imagining a situation—a configuration of objects and properties—verifying p. So far aboutness theory has been developed mainly for linguistic representation, but it is natural to extend it to (...) intentional states. The proposed framework combines a modal semantics with a mereology of contents: imagination operators are understood as variably strict quantifiers over worlds with a content-preservation constraint. (shrink)

We give a review and critique of jury theorems from a social-epistemology perspective, covering Condorcet’s (1785) classic theorem and several later refinements and departures. We assess the plausibility of the conclusions and premises featuring in jury theorems and evaluate the potential of such theorems to serve as formal arguments for the ‘wisdom of crowds’. In particular, we argue (i) that there is a fundamental tension between voters’ independence and voters’ competence, hence between the two premises of most jury theorems; (ii) (...) that the (asymptotic) conclusion that ‘huge groups are infallible’, reached by many jury theorems, is an artifact of unjustified premises; and (iii) that the (nonasymptotic) conclusion that ‘larger groups are more reliable’, also reached by many jury theorems, is not an artifact and should be regarded as the more adequate formal rendition of the ‘wisdom of crowds’. (shrink)

In this acclaimed work, first published in 1986, world-renowned scholar Arthur C. Danto explored the inextricably linked but often misunderstood relationship between art and philosophy. In light of the book's impact--especially the essay "The End of Art," which dramatically announced that art ended in the 1960s--this enhanced edition includes a foreword by Jonathan Gilmore that discusses how scholarship has changed in response to it. Complete with a new bibliography of work on and influenced by Danto's ideas, _The Philosophical Disenfranchisement (...) of Art_ continues to be of interest to anyone who thinks seriously about art, as well as to philosophers, aestheticians, and art historians. (shrink)

Arthur I. Miller is a historian of science whose approach has been strongly influenced by current work in cognitive science, and in this book he shows how the two fields might be fruitfully linked to yield new insights into the creative process.

I am grateful to Donald Ainslie, Lisa Austin, Michael Blake, Abraham Drassinower, David Dyzenhaus, George Fletcher, Robert Gibbs, Louis-Philippe Hodgson, Sari Kisilevsky, Dennis Klimchuk, Christopher Morris, Scott Shapiro, Horacio Spector, Sergio Tenenbaum, Malcolm Thorburn, Ernest Weinrib, Karen Weisman, and the Editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs for comments, and audiences in the UCLA Philosophy Department and Columbia Law School for their questions.

Fusing philosophy and theology, the book assigns both Judaism and Christianity distinct but equally important roles in the spiritual structure of the world and ...

Unification was originally introduced in automated deduction and term rewriting, but has recently also found applications in other fields. In this article, we give a survey of the results on unification obtained in two closely related, yet different, application areas of unification: description logics and modal logics.

Schopenhauer argues, in uniquely powerful prose, that self-consciousness gives the illusion of freedom and that human actions are determined, but that we rightly feel guilt because our actions issue from our essential individual character. He locates moral value in the virtues of loving kindness and voluntary justice that spring from the fundamental incentive of compassion. Morality's basis is ultimately metaphysical, resting on an intuitive identification of the self with all other striving and suffering beings. The Introduction by leading Schopenhauer scholar (...) Christopher Janaway gives a clear summary of the argument of the essays in the context of Schopenhauer's life and works and the history of ethics in the modern period. --from publisher description. (shrink)