In public discourse trauma is predominantly framed as an overwhelming event undergone by the individual. In this article I first provide a brief genealogy to trace the emergence of what is now the dominant temporal framework of psychological catastrophe. I supplement this evental nosology with a durational consideration of trauma by drawing on the works of Henri Bergson and his articulation of duration, memory, and lived experience. Durational trauma accommodates liminal and ongoing experiences of the catastrophic that are equally devastating (...) to the paradigmatic exemplars of PTSD. This alternate account entails different modalities of reparation and responsibility to the systemic traumatization of others. For this I draw on Levinas and his intersubjective ethics drawing out the relevancy his work has for this concept of durational trauma. Levinas’s emphasis on expiation avoids the reification of the trauma of the other as spectacle and draws into focus one’s own participation in the circulation and continuation of ongoing traumatic networks. This contributes to the emergent alchemy of reading Bergson and Levinas together, but likewise, to philosophy of trauma and the ethical responsibility and temporality of ongoing systemic harm. (shrink)

Accompanying the ‘moral panic’ about an obesity epidemic is a growth in female body dissatisfaction and dieting. This article maintains that feminist theology must play a vital role in returning the future to fat bodies at a time when the estimated spending on diet products in the US alone equals the projected costs of obesity. The theological nature of this task is essential given the way harmful theological systems and associations remerge within commercial dieting settings to help demonize food, appetite (...) and eating and reestablish ancient associations between women, food and sin. This article develops a feminist theology of food and fat by drawing on the lived experiences of women who diet. Engaging with my own ethnography, I argue that feminist theology must challenge the discourses of sin and salvation which resource the ‘secular’ commercial dieting industry, and instead construct theologies which are ‘good to taste’ and nourishing to our bodies. (shrink)

Many feminist theologians have creatively engaged in conversations surrounding the Trinity, presenting imaginative models and trinitarian formulations which serve to challenge traditional patriarchal imagery and affirm female personhood in all its diversity. Such feminist contributions are of undeniable value, however this article seeks to take a different approach to the Trinity. Moving beyond the question of how we might adequately speak the Trinity, it turns to address the question of how we might think the triune God. To the extent that (...) the two are related, both will be mentioned in this article, however the focus rests specifically on a dialogue with French feminist and literary theorist, Luce Irigaray, and the ways in which her two concepts of ‘self-love’ and ‘wonder’ might inform a trinitarian understanding of God. Essentially, it is argued that locating these concepts within a specifically trinitarian framework serves to support and affirm the subjectivity of women, establishing the Trinity in contradistinction to a phallocentric logic. (shrink)

In a powerful and original contribution to the history of ideas, Hannah Dawson explores the intense preoccupation with language in early-modern philosophy, and presents a groundbreaking analysis of John Locke's critique of words. By examining a broad sweep of pedagogical and philosophical material from antiquity to the late seventeenth century, Dr Dawson explains why language caused anxiety in writers such as Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Gassendi, Nicole, Pufendorf, Boyle, Malebranche and Locke. Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy demonstrates that (...) new developments in philosophy, in conjunction with weaknesses in linguistic theory, resulted in serious concerns about the capacity of words to refer to the world, the stability of meaning, and the duplicitous power of words themselves. Dr Dawson shows that language so fixated all manner of early-modern authors because it was seen as an obstacle to both knowledge and society. She thereby uncovers a novel story about the problem of language in philosophy, and in the process reshapes our understanding of early-modern epistemology, morality and politics. (shrink)

Francis Bacon, lawyer, statesman, and philosopher, remains one of the most effectual thinkers in European intellectual history. We can trace his influence from Kant in the 1700s to Darwin a century later. The Advancement of Learning , first published in 1605, contains an unprecedented and thorough systematization of the whole range of human knowledge. Bacon’s argument that the sciences should move away from divine philosophy and embrace empirical observation would forever change the way philosophers and natural scientists interpret (...) their world. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction.

Up against capacity‐based approaches to animal ethics, Cora Diamond has put the idea of animals as our fellow creatures. The aim of this article is to explore the implications of this concept for our treatment of fish. Fish have traditionally been placed at the borders or even outside of the moral community, although there is growing evidence that they have perceptual and social capacities comparable to animals that are considered morally significant. Given that a fellow creature's approach is not primarily (...) concerned with capacities, fish may pose a challenge: Can fish be seen as our fellow creatures, and if so, on what grounds? In exploring these questions, we defend Diamond against Jeff McMahan's critique of her account and its implications that the fellow creature‐concept is reducible to either capacities or special relationships and leaves no room for argument‐based moral reform. We suggest that moral attention is key to grasping the moral significance of fish and discuss how scientific research can support such attention. In so doing, we demonstrate how Diamond's approach to animal ethics provides a viable alternative to the dominant animal ethics approaches. Finally, we indicate how this approach can be useful for discussions on industrial fish farming. (shrink)

A unique selection of the most significant interviews given by Hannah Arendt, including the last she gave before her death in 1975. Some are published here in English for the first time. Arendt was one of the most important thinkers of her time, famous for her idea of "the banality of evil" which continues to provoke debate. This collection provides new and startling insight into Arendt's thoughts about Watergate and the nature of American politics, about totalitarianism and history, and (...) her own experiences as an emigre. Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations is an extraordinary portrait of one of the twentieth century's boldest and most original thinkers. As well as Arendt's last interview with French journalist Roger Errera, the volume features an important interview from the early 60s with German journalist Gunter Gaus, in which the two discuss Arendt's childhood and her escape from Europe, and a conversation with acclaimed historian of the Nazi period, Joachim Fest, as well as other exchanges. These interviews show Arendt in vigorous intellectual form, taking up the issues of her day with energy and wit. She offers comments on the nature of American politics, on Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, on Israel; remembers her youth and her early experience of anti-Semitism, and then the swift rise of the Hitler; debates questions of state power and discusses her own processes of thinking and writing. Hers is an intelligence that never rests, that demands always of her interlocutors, and her readers, that they think critically. As she puts it in her last interview, just six months before her death at the age of 69, "there are no dangerous thoughts, for the simple reason that thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise.". (shrink)

ABSTRACT It used to be said that shame culture waned in early modernity, but there is a growing body of historiography on the vital role that recognition and the opinion of others continued to play. Honour mattered; for some it was the mark and the maker of your true self. While philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, Hume, Smith, and Rousseau disagreed in their evaluations of the phenomenon, they were united in thinking that the great engine of recognition whirred like furious (...) clockwork through human society. When one listens to voices from the margins of power, however, to formerly enslaved black women and men, and white women, one hears a different story – that the machine is broken. I argue that, albeit from incomparable positions, they articulate a theory of misrecognition in the face of systematic power. Sensitive to the entanglements of epistemology and naturalised inequality, they offer a politics of vision that deconstructs the punitive lenses of gender and race which render people invisible and misunderstood, and in so doing they try to write themselves into view. They offer an account of the mysterious intractability of hegemonic ways of seeing that poses a challenge to both the putatively laissez-faire economy of recognition of their enlightened contemporaries, and to the emancipatory teleology of modern recognition theorists. (shrink)

The fact that physical laws often admit certain kinds of space-time symmetries is often thought to be problematic for substantivalism --- the view that space-time is as real as the objects it contains. The most prominent alternative, relationism, avoids these problems but at the cost of giving abstract objects (rather than space-time points) a pivotal role in the fundamental metaphysics. This incurs related problems concerning the relation of the physical to the mathematical. In this paper I will present a version (...) of substantivalism that respects Leibnizian theses about space-time symmetries, and argue that it is superior to both relationism and the more orthodox form of substantivalism. (shrink)

English summary: Antonio Pellizzari (1747-1845) completed his Italian translation of Francis Bacons De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum in hopes that it would prove useful for Italian youth. It would remain unpublished for two centuries, partly because Bacons work had been place on the Churchs Index of prohibited books. The present edition offers a reproduction of the original manuscript as well as a thorough historical analysis of the translator in his chronological and intellectual context. Italian description: La prima traduzione italiana del (...) De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (1623) di Francis Bacon e rimasta inedita per due secoli: il traduttore, il canonico trevigiano Antonio Pellizzari (1747-1845), aveva gia dato alle stampe la prima versione italiana del Novum organum (1788) e, ammiratore del filosofo inglese, si era deciso all' impresa di tradurre la piu vasta opera baconiana, con il titolo di Della dignita e degli aumenti delle scienze, convinto che quest' opera avrebbe giovato pur qualche poco la gioventu italiana. Il manoscritto della traduzione, completo di note ed indici, pronto per la stampa, rimase inedito per le lungaggini dovute alla necessaria richiesta dell'imprimatur al S. Uffizio: l' opera infatti era stata messa all' Indice dalla Sacra Congregazione (nel 1669) con la formula donec corrigatur; l' autorizzazione giunse, firmata dal Prefetto dell' Indice Angelo Maj, nel 1847, due anni dopo la morte del pur longevo Antonio Pellizzari. In questo volume si pubblica una trascrizione annotata del manoscritto 1408 del Della dignita e degli aumenti delle scienze conservato nella Biblioteca Comunale di Treviso, corredata, sulla base di carteggi inediti e di fondi manoscritti talora considerati perduti, di una ricostruzione storica della figura del traduttore, inserito nel piu ampio contesto della cultura veneta fra Settecento e Ottocento, segmento significativo per la storia della diffusione della filosofia moderna. (shrink)

This is the first critical edition since the nineteenth century of Bacon's principal philosophical work in English, The Twoo Bookes of Francis Bacon. Of the proficience and advancement of Learning, divine and humane - traditionally known as The Advancement of Learning.

There are better and worse ways to blame others. Likewise, there are better and worse ways to blame yourself. And though there is an ever-expanding literature on the norms that govern our blaming practices, relatively little attention has been paid to the norms that govern expressions of self-blame. In this essay, I argue that when we blame ourselves, we ought not do so privately. Rather, we should, ceteris paribus, express our self-blame to those we have wronged. I then explore how (...) this norm can contribute to our understanding of the ethics of self-blame as well as the nature of blameworthiness itself. (shrink)

We explore multi-scale relations in artificial intelligence (AI) use in order to identify difficulties with coordinating relations between users, machine learning (ML) processes, and “sociobuilt contexts”—specifically in terms of their applications to medical technologies and decisions. We begin by analyzing a recent COVID-19 machine learning case study in order to present the difficulty of traversing the detailed causal topography of “sociobuilt contexts.” We propose that the adequate representation of the interactions between social and built processes that occur on many scales (...) ought to drive interdisciplinary approaches for ML modification. Next, we describe ML algorithm development as a process that is partly dependent on methodological stabilization for reliability and partly on coordinating relations. In the coordination between user, ML process, and sociobuilt contexts, we propose that new methods can be explored that promote the inclusion of patients and communities for the purpose of cross-checking portions of the ML process. Finally, we suggest that the advantages of responsible innovation emerge through the iterative entanglement of ethical, methodological, and ontological considerations within the broader conceptual infrastructure of epistemic responsibility. (shrink)

Auf den ersten Blick haben Hannah Arendt und Michel Foucault kaum etwas gemein. Tatsächlich beziehen sie sich jedoch auf die identischen Topoi der Philosophiegeschichte - wenn ihre Auslegungen der Quellen auch denkbar verschieden sind. Als Grund hierfür bestimmt Hannah Holme die komplementären Perspektiven der beiden, die sie als Aneignungen des heideggerschen Sorgebegriffs deutet: die ethische Sorge um sich Foucaults und die politische Sorge um die Welt Arendts. Am Ende steht ein Plädoyer für eine Verbindung des machtkritischen Ethos der (...) Sorge um sich mit der Macht des politischen Handelns, das der Sorge um die Welt unterstellt ist. (shrink)

I defend the normativity of meaning against recent objections by arguing for a new interpretation of the ‘ought’ relevant to meaning. Both critics and defenders of the normativity thesis have understood statements about how an expression ought to be used as either prescriptive or semantic. I propose an alternative view of the ‘ought’ as conveying the primitively normative attitudes speakers must adopt towards their uses if they are to use the expression with understanding.

Relational Ontologies uses the metaphor of a fishing net to represent the epistemological and ontological beliefs that we weave together for our children, to give meaning to their experiences and to help sustain them in their lives. The book describes the epistemological threads we use to help determine what we catch up in our net as the warp threads, and our ontological threads as the weft threads. It asks: what kind of fishing nets are we weaving for our children to (...) help them make sense of their experiences? What weft threads are we including and working to strengthen, and what threads are we removing or leaving out? It is important to carefully re/examine these most basic ways of catching up what sustains us in our ocean of infinite experiences, as the threads we weave for our children will determine what they catch up in their nets, until they are old enough to re/weave their own. Relational Ontologies reweaves America's epistemological and ontological fishing net on a larger scale, turning to indigenous cultures and diverse spiritual beliefs for assistance in reforming American schools. (shrink)

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 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. 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)

This three-part chapter explores a higher-order logic we call ‘Classicism’, which extends a minimal classical higher-order logic with further axioms which guarantee that provable coextensiveness is sufficient for identity. The first part presents several different ways of axiomatizing this theory and makes the case for its naturalness. The second part discusses two kinds of extensions of Classicism: some which take the view in the direction of coarseness of grain (whose endpoint is the maximally coarse-grained view that coextensiveness is sufficient for (...) identity), and some which take the view in the direction of fineness of grain (whose endpoint is the maximally fine-grained theory containing all distinctness claims compatible with Classicism). The third part introduces some techniques for constructing models of Classicism, and uses them to prove the consistency of many of the extensions of Classicism introduced in the second part. (shrink)

A number of philosophers, including Kant, Kripke, Boghossian, Gibbard and Brandom, can be read as endorsing the view that concepts are normative. I distinguish two versions of that view: a strong, non-naturalistic version which identifies concepts with norms or rules (Kant, Kripke), and a weaker version, compatible with naturalism, on which the normativity of concepts amounts only to their application’s being governed by norms or rules (Boghossian, Gibbard, Brandom). I consider a problem for the strong version: grasp of a rule (...) seems to require grasp of the concepts which constitute the content of that rule, so how can we explain concept acquisition without falling into regress? I offer a Kantian response, on which grasp of a rule does not require antecedent grasp of concepts, but still involves the recognition of normativity in one’s rule-governed behavior. I distinguish the normativity of concepts, so understood, from the normativity associated with truth or warrant. Keywords: concepts, normativity, rules, Kant, Kripke, Boghossian, Gibbard, Brandom. (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive textbook on higher order logic that is written specifically to introduce the subject matter to graduate students in philosophy. The book covers both the formal aspects of higher-order languages -- their model theory and proof theory, the theory of λ-abstraction and its generalizations -- and their philosophical applications, especially to the topics of modality and propositional granularity. The book has a strong focus on non-extensional higher-order logics, making it more appropriate for foundational metaphysics than other (...) introductions to the subject from computer science, mathematics, and linguistics. A Philosophical Introduction to Higher Order Logics assumes only that readers have a basic knowledge of first-order logic. With an emphasis on exercises, it can be used as a textbook though is also ideal for self-study. Author Andrew Bacon organizes the book's 18 chapters around four main parts: I. Typed Language II. Higher Order Languages III. General Higher-Order Languages IV. Higher-Order Model Theory In addition, two appendices cover the Curry-Howard isomorphism and its applications for modeling propositional structure. Each chapter includes exercises that move from easier to more difficult, strategically placed throughout the chapter, and concludes with an annotated suggested reading list providing graduate students with most valuable additional resources. Key Features Is the first comprehensive introduction to higher-order logic as a grounding for addressing problems in metaphysics Introduces the basic formal tools that are needed to theorize in, and model, higher order languages Offers an abundance of: - Simple exercises throughout the book, serving as comprehension checks on basic concepts and definitions - More difficult exercises designed to facilitate long-term learning Contains annotated sections on further reading, pointing the reader to related literature, learning resources, and historical context. (shrink)

Higher-order logic augments first-order logic with devices that let us generalize into grammatical positions other than that of a singular term. Some recent metaphysicians have advocated for using these devices to raise and answer questions that bear on many traditional issues in philosophy. In contrast to these 'higher-order metaphysicians', traditional metaphysics has often focused on parallel, but importantly different, questions concerning special sorts of abstract objects: propositions, properties and relations. The answers to the higher-order and the property-theoretic questions may coincide (...) sometimes but will often come apart. I argue that when they do, the higher-order questions are closer to the metaphysical action and so it would be better for these debates to proceed in higher-order terms. (shrink)

This new translation is an extremely welcome addition to the continuing Cambridge Edition of Kant’s works. English-speaking readers of the third Critique have long been hampered by the lack of an adequate translation of this important and difficult work. James Creed Meredith’s much-reprinted translation has charm and elegance, but it is often too loose to be useful for scholarly purposes. Moreover it does not include the first version of Kant’s introduction, the so-called “First Introduction,” which is now recognized as indispensable (...) for an understanding of the work. Werner Pluhar’s more recent translation, which does include the First Introduction, is highly accurate when it confines itself to rendering Kant’s German. However, it is often more of a reconstruction than a translation, containing so many interpretative interpolations that it is often difficult to separate out Kant’s original text from the translator’s contributions. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews have provided a translation that compares to or exceeds Pluhar’s in its literal approach to the German, but that confines all interpretative material to footnotes and endnotes, so that the text itself, with all its unclarities and ambiguities, lies open to view. In addition, Guyer, as editor of the volume, has provided a great deal of valuable supplementary material. This includes an introduction with an outline of the work and details of the history of its composition and publication, and a wealth of endnotes offering clarifications of the text, background information, and, most strikingly, many references to related passages in Kant’s voluminous writings, particularly in connection with Kant’s earlier writings related to aesthetics. The edition also records differences among the first three editions of the work, and—of particular interest—erasures from and additions to Kant’s manuscript of the First Introduction. Although the introduction and endnotes reflect interpretative views that are sometimes disputable, this supplementary material makes the present edition into a valuable resource even for those able to read the text in German. (shrink)

Imagination comes with varying degrees of sensory accompaniment. Sometimes imagining is phenomenologically lean (cognitive imagining); at other times, imagining involves or requires sensory presentation such as mental imagery (sensory imagining). Philosophers debate whether contradictions can obtain in fiction and whether cognitive imagining is robust enough to explain our engagement with fiction. In this paper, I defend the Principle of Poetic License by arguing for the Permissive View of fictional truth: we can have fictions in which a contradiction is true, everything (...) is true, or nothing is true. I show that imagination-based worries about impossible, unlimited, and empty fictions can be shown to be about sensory imagination and that sensory imagination isn’t necessary for fictional truth. (shrink)

For pragmatists, the inability to stand outside of the contingencies of human practice does not impede social criticism. However, several pragmatists have argued that Richard Rorty’s position unnecessarily and undesirably circumscribes the scope of social criticism, allowing for nothing more than an appeal to current practices, with no way to challenge or revise them. This article argues against this understanding, showing that on Rorty’s account, social criticism is an interpretive activity in which critics draw on elements within current practices, focusing (...) attention on the ways in which a society’s practices fail to live up to its self-image. In so doing, Rorty’s position is shown to allow for everything that his fellow pragmatists think important, but take him to be denying. (shrink)