Through a consideration of the views of R.G. Collingwood on historical knowledge and conceptual change, this paper addresses organisational issues such as history, culture and memory. It then subjects the idea of ‘learning histories’ to critical scrutiny. It concludes that, because of their potential to become framing mental models, they may be in danger of failing to achieve the purposes for which they are used.

Frank Balfour was regarded by his colleagues as one of the greatest biologists of his day and Charles Darwin’s successor, yet the young aristocrat died in a climbing accident before his thirty-first birthday. Reactions to his death reveal much about the image of science and scientists in late-Victorian Britain. In this paper I examine the development of the Cambridge school of animal morphology, headed by Balfour, and the interdependence of his research reputation and his charisma. Contemporaries praised his gentlemanly qualities, (...) making his aristocratic background a part of his scientific character. Yet his reputation for good judgement and his abilities as a leader were severely tested when it began to emerge that the accident that killed Balfour and his guide might have been prevented. Nonetheless, the image of Balfour that emerges from his obituaries is that of a noble hero and outstanding scientist, who lived on in the memories of all who knew him. (shrink)

This book examines the effects of the market mechanism on economies and societies. It argues that perfect competition has a tendency to promote adulteration of products and a general deterioration in quality. It also contends that it is very difficult for competitive firms to behave in socially desirable ways - being kind to the environment, contributing to worthy social programmes, handling redundancy humanely. The book goes on to propose ways in which these flaws might be remedied without subverting the market (...) mechanism. (shrink)

This article takes a genealogical approach to the problem of affective communication that we find coalescing around the phenomenon of ‘affective transfer’ identified in experiences such as voice-hearing, telepathy and hypnotic suggestion. These experiences breach the boundaries between the self and other, inside and outside, and material and immaterial, and make visible some of the central issues that are important in re-thinking affect, relationality and embodiment. The article will attempt to re-engage the problematic of subjectivity by asking what a turn (...) to affect entails within such technologies of listening and attention. This is particularly important when such turning or opening to affect engenders a conversation with traumatic memories, albeit a conversation that does not occur primarily in a verbal register. The key focus will be on the marginalized status of telepathic modalities of affective transfer throughout the histories of the development of the psychological sciences. The article uses this as a platform to consider the connections between what is occluded or excluded from the psychological sciences, and what is being silenced within work on affect taking form across the humanities. Taking us back to the practice of telepathy in the 19th century and the problem of hypnotic suggestion in the mid 20th century (the Macy Conferences), the article discloses how both function as carriers of what is being overlooked and silenced in the engagement by many affect scholars with the knowledge-practices of the psychological and neurosciences. (shrink)

Habit is an integral concept for body studies, a hybrid concept and one that has provided the bedrock across the humanities for considering the interrelationships between movement and stasis, being and becoming, and process and fixity. Habits are seen to provide relay points between what is taken to be inside and outside, disrupting any clear and distinct boundary between nature and culture, self and other, the psychological and social, and even mind and matter. Habit thus discloses a paradox. It takes (...) up a unique position in affect modulation, which encompasses both regulation (in the form of discipline) and also extends the body’s potential for engaging the new, change and creativity. In order to understand the basis of the ambivalent duality governing understandings of habit it is argued that a genealogical approach to this question is necessary. This will be located within the recent ‘turn to affect’ and histories of conation within the psychological sciences, particularly taking the writings of William McDougall as a focus. (shrink)

This paper is an intervention within feminist and queer debates that have re-posed so-called negative states of being as offering productive possibilities for political practice and social transformation. What is sometimes called the politics of negative affect or analyses of political feeling has sought to de-pathologise shame, melancholy, failure, depression, anxieties and other forms of ‘feeling bad’, to open up new ways of thinking about agency, change and transformation. Ann Cvetkovich's recent memoir explores depression as a public feeling and argues (...) that ‘feeling bad might, in fact, be the ground for transformation’. As she suggests, the question, ‘how do I feel’ could usefully be reframed as ‘how does capitalism feel’? This performative staging of political forms of psychosocial reflexivity opens up new strategies for survival, new visions of the future, and importantly de-medicalises feeling beyond an individual expression of psychopathology. The grounds for affective politics might be found within new feminist futures that are attentive to the relations between emotion, affect, feelings and politics. This paper will be situated within these debates and the challenge of thinking about the productive possibilities of negative states of being. However, rather than focus on depression, I will turn my attention to experiences such as psychosis and temporal dissociation, based on my long-standing research with the Hearing Voices Network. In the context of discussions of disability and capability I will discuss the value of concepts such as debility, and ‘living in prognosis’, and respond to the call to think through what such states might offer for feminist and queer practice. (shrink)

Internalism about normative reasons is the view that an agent’s normative reasons depend on her motivational constitution. On the assumption that there are reasons for emotion I argue that externalism about reasons for emotion entails that all rational agents have reasons to be morally motivated and internalism about reasons for emotion is implausible. If the arguments are sound we can conclude that all rational agents have reasons to be morally motivated. Resisting this conclusion requires either justifying internalism about reasons for (...) emotion in a way hitherto unarticulated or giving up on reasons for emotion altogether. (shrink)

A principal proposta desse trabalho é mostrar a relatividade do tempo. Inicialmente, o ponto de vista clássico é explorado: a) a entropia do universo crescendo como uma medida de tempo; b) o tempo como algo independente do observador. Depois de um experimento muito especial, a velocidade da luz - ideia introduzida por Einstein - como uma simples matemática, a relatividade do tempo é mostrada. Finalmente, o conceito de "continuo" tempo-espaço é apresentado.

During the 1870s animal morphologists and embryologists at Cambridge University came to dominate British zoology, quickly establishing an international reputation. Earlier accounts of the Cambridge school have portrayed this success as short-lived, and attributed the school's failure to a more general movement within the life sciences away from museum-based description, towards laboratory-based experiment. More recent work has shown that the shift in the life sciences to experimental work was locally contingent and highly varied, often drawing on and incorporating aspects of (...) museum work. Thus in order to understand the more general changes, studies of particular sites are needed. Here I examine the organisation of teaching at Cambridge, both in terms of the spaces in which it was taught and the ways in which teaching and examining were organised, to bring out the complexities of the 'revolt from morphology' and to show in more detail the institutional aspects that intertwined with intellectual change. Francis Maitland Balfour, as head of the Cambridge school, was able to make use of family connections and his own personal wealth to promote morphology. His successor lacked these resources, and one competition within the natural sciences at Cambridge intensified, morphology was unable to compete properly. (shrink)

Defenders of compatibilism occupy one of two camps: those who think that free will requires the ability to do otherwise, and those who deny this. Those compatibilists who think that free will requires the ability to do otherwise are interested in defending a reading of ‘can’ such that one can do otherwise even if determinism is true. By contrast, those compatibilists who think that free will does not require the ability to do otherwise tend to join incompatibilists in denying that (...) determinism is compatible with the ability to do otherwise. The primary goal of this paper is to fight for the first camp and against the second camp. The secondary goal is to draw greater attention to a relatively overlooked aspect of the debate about alternative possibilities: that giving up on alternative possibilities might mean giving up on much of morality. (shrink)

Defenders of compatibilism occupy one of two camps: those who think that free will requires the ability to do otherwise, and those who deny this. Those compatibilists who think that free will requires the ability to do otherwise are interested in defending a reading of ‘can’ such that one can do otherwise even if determinism is true. By contrast, those compatibilists who think that free will does not require the ability to do otherwise tend to join incompatibilists in denying that (...) determinism is compatible with the ability to do otherwise. The primary goal of this paper is to fight for the first camp and against the second camp. The secondary goal is to draw greater attention to a relatively overlooked aspect of the debate about alternative possibilities: that giving up on alternative possibilities might mean giving up on much of morality. (shrink)

Academics across the sciences and humanities are increasingly being encouraged to use social media as a post-publication strategy to enhance and extend the impact of their articles and books. As well as various measures of social media impact, the turn towards publication outlets which are open access and free to use is contributing to anxieties over where, what and how to publish. This is all the more pernicious given the increasing measures of academic value that govern the academy, and the (...) stresses, strains and hidden injuries that structure academic life. This article will debate these issues and their consequences for the humanities and social sciences by analysing the contours of a recent controversy in academic science publishing, which follows the after-lives of a highly cited journal article. This includes a discussion of the value and status of post-publication peer review, and the politics of open access publishing, of citation and the public communication of science within digital environments and archives. (shrink)

Psychiatric culture provides an important site for humanities scholars interested in the relationships between body, culture and identity. The problem raised in this article is how to ‘think’ the body as discursive, material and embodied without reinstating the notion that the discursive and material are two separate, preexisting entities that somehow ‘interact’. The focus of this article will be on the complex relational dynamics that exist between science and culture in the production of psychopathology. The discussion will centre on the (...) practices of a psychiatric user-movement, the Hearing Voices Network, that provide a radical challenge to the alignment of body, culture and identity in the production and understanding of psychopathology, and specifically the phenomenon of voice-hearing. The article will consider the importance of affectivity, relationality and embodiment in understanding the relationship between the performative injunctions of psychiatry, the transformative practices of the HVN and the production of subjectivity. (shrink)

Most philosophers of emotion endorse a compound account of the emotions: emotions are wholes made of parts; or, as I prefer to put it, emotions are mental states that supervene on other (mental) states. The goal of this paper is to ascertain how the intentionality of these subvening members relates to the intentionality of the emotions. Towards this end, I proceed as follows. First, I discuss the problems with the account Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson offer of the intentionality of (...) the emotions; I argue their account is fundamentally misguided by virtue of being motivated by a misunderstanding of the nature of propositional attitudes. Second, I argue against Peter Goldie's claim that an affective component of an emotion contributes to its intentionality. Third, I offer my own compound account of emotions. I argue (1) emotions are mental states that supervene on other mental states, (2) the mental states that constitute the subvenience base of emotion can have nonconceptual and/or conceptual representational content, and (3) an emotion's intentionality supervenes on (but is often not identical to) the intentionality of only one of its subvening members, specifically, the evaluative representation. (shrink)

In his 2022 World Day of Peace Message, Pope Francis argues that education serves as an essential mechanism in building “lasting peace.” However, though an ethic of nonviolence has been gaining traction within Church teaching, education for nonviolence remains far from mainstream. This paper will argue that education has a vital role to play in the flourishing of a nonviolent Church. In doing so, it will question how an education for nonviolence might be approached, drawing on Dorothy Day as an (...) exemplar of both pedagogy and praxis. (shrink)

There is a difference between an object's being good simpliciter and an object's being good of its kind, and the vast majority of philosophers have supposed that it is the former variety of goodness that is relevant to ethics. I argue that one may be a meta-ethical realist while employing the notion of good of a kind to the exclusion of good simpliciter; I call such a view kindism. I distinguish between two varieties of kindism, explicate the details of one (...) of those varieties, and defend kindism against possible objections. (shrink)

In his 1911 paper, “On the Relations of Universals and Particulars,” Bertrand Russell supposes the question whether universals are spatial or non spatial turns on the question of the existence of particulars. If particulars could be shown to exist, then since, according to Russell, they obviously are spatial, the non-spatiality of universals would be established. On the other hand, the denial of the existence of particulars would entail the spatiality of universals.In this paper, I argue that Russell’s claim is plausible (...) only if particulars are construed either as quality instances or as ordinary objects. If, however, particulars are either substrata or collections of qualities, nothing follows in regard to the spatiality or the non-spatiality of universals. Since the alternative interpretations of particularity are, I contend, at least as attractive as Russell’s, his failure to consider them makes his position less interesting than it might otherwise have been. (shrink)

In his 1911 paper, “On the Relations of Universals and Particulars,” Bertrand Russell supposes the question whether universals are spatial or non spatial turns on the question of the existence of particulars. If particulars could be shown to exist, then since, according to Russell, they obviously are spatial, the non-spatiality of universals would be established. On the other hand, the denial of the existence of particulars would entail the spatiality of universals.In this paper, I argue that Russell’s claim is plausible (...) only if particulars are construed either as quality instances or as ordinary objects. If, however, particulars are either substrata or collections of qualities, nothing follows in regard to the spatiality or the non-spatiality of universals. Since the alternative interpretations of particularity are, I contend, at least as attractive as Russell’s, his failure to consider them makes his position less interesting than it might otherwise have been. (shrink)

The view that dominated the last century claims that ethical thought requires thinking of some things – e.g. pleasure, knowledge, virtue – as good “full stop,” or good simpliciter . Traditional Consequentialists, for instance, argue that moral evaluations of acts, motives, etc . are grounded in facts about the simple goodness of that which those things bring about. Similarly, some rational intuitionists think that claims about what one has reason to do are grounded in facts about what is good simpliciter (...) . Such a view gives rise to a set of semantic, metaphysical, and epistemological puzzles about the nature of good simpliciter . I argue that an Aristotelian approach to ethics reveals that ethical thought does not requires good simpliciter , that Aristotelian positions avoid charges of metaphysical and epistemological queerness, and that it gives a straightforward semantic analysis of key moral terms, e.g. morally good/bad and morally right/wrong. I then distinguish between two varieties of Aristotelianism. (shrink)

This edited book addresses four themes of contemporary importance in the experimental and applied analysis of behaviour: chronobiology (relationships between time and behaviour), the emergence of rational thinking, language, and behavioural medicine. The current empirical and theoretical status of each theme is considered in individual chapters, the authors of which are distinguished research scientists drawn from a wide range of scholarship and with a distinctive European dimension. This cultural and theoretical diversity emerges from the fact that each chapter is developed (...) from a paper originally presented by invitation at the Second European Meeting on the Experimental Analysis of Behaviour, which was held in Liège, Belgium in 1988. Within the four themes, individual topics address issues such as circadian rhythms in behaviour, temporal regulation in children and in animals, the emergence of equivalence relations in children and animals, the development of thinking in mentally retarded children, reasoning and associative learning in animals, rule'governed behaviour, theoretical issues relating language to the theory of mind, the relationship between behavioural and visceral functions, the relevance of behavioural approaches to the prevention of AIDS, and the development of self'detection skills for breast cancer. The book makes an important contribution to the literature of contemporary behaviour analysis by reviewing issues of current interest and importance from a broad theoretical base. (shrink)