There has been a surprising absence of a general philosophical overview of progress as a method of articulating human meaning. This book attempts to fill this gap.

Ethnic groups are universal and unique to human societies. Such groups sometimes have norms of behavior that are adaptively linked to their social and ecological circumstances, and ethnic boundaries may function to protect that variation from erosion by interethnic interaction. However, such interaction is often frequent and voluntary, suggesting that individuals may be able to strategically reduce its costs, allowing adaptive cultural variation to persist in spite of interaction with out-groups with different norms. We examine five mechanisms influencing the dynamics (...) of ethnically distinct cultural norms, each focused on strategic individual-level choices in interethnic interaction: bargaining, interaction-frequency-biased norm adoption, assortment on norms, success-biased interethnic social learning, and childhood socialization. We use Bayesian item response models to analyze patterns of norm variation and interethnic interaction in an ethnically structured Amazonian population. We show that, among indigenous Matsigenka, interethnic education with colonial Mestizos is more strongly associated with Mestizo-typical norms than even extensive interethnic experience in commerce and wage labor is. Using ethnographic observations, we show that all five of the proposed mechanisms of norm adoption may contribute to this effect. However, of these mechanisms, we argue that changes in relative bargaining power are particularly important for ethnic minorities wishing to preserve distinctive norms while engaging in interethnic interaction in domains such as education. If this mechanism proves applicable in a range of other ethnographic contexts, it would constitute one cogent explanation for when and why ethnically structured cultural variation can either persist or erode given frequent, and often mutually beneficial, interethnic interaction. (shrink)

In the current paper, we present and discuss a series of experiments in which we investigated people’s willingness to ascribe intentions, as well as blame and praise, to groups. The experiments draw upon the so-called “Knobe Effect”. Knobe [2003. “Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language.” Analysis 63: 190–194] found that the positiveness or negativeness of side-effects of actions influences people’s assessment of whether those side-effects were brought about intentionally, and also that people are more willing to assign blame (...) for negative side-effects of actions than they are to assign praise for positive side-effect of actions. Building upon this research, we found evidence that the positiveness or negativeness of side-effects of group actions influences people’s willingness to attribute intentions to groups, and that people are more willing to assign blame to groups for negative side-effects of actions than they are to assign praise to groups for positive side-effects of... (shrink)

This book reconstructs key aspects of the early career of Descartes from 1618 to 1633; that is, up through the point of his composing his first system of natural philosophy, Le Monde, in 1629-33. It focuses upon the overlapping and intertwined development of Descartes’ projects in physico-mathematics, analytical mathematics, universal method, and, finally, systematic corpuscular-mechanical natural philosophy. The concern is not simply with the conceptual and technical aspects of these projects; but, with Descartes’ agendas within them and his construction and (...) presentation of his intellectual identity in relation to them. Descartes’ technical projects, agendas and senses of identity shifted over time, entangled and displayed great successes and deep failures, as he morphed from a mathematically competent, Jesuit trained graduate in neo-Scholastic Aristotelianism to aspiring prophet of a systematised corpuscular-mechanism, passing through stages of being a committed physico-mathematicus, advocate of a putative ‘universal mathematics’, and projector of a grand methodological dream. In all three dimensions—projects, agendas and identity concerns—the young Descartes struggled and contended, with himself and with real or virtual peers and competitors, hence the title ‘Descartes-Agonistes’. (shrink)

It is difficult to place jazz within a philosophy of music dominated by the concepts and practices of classical music. One key puzzle concerns the nature and role, if any, of musical works in jazz. I briefly describe the debate between those who deny that there are musical works in jazz (Kania) and those who affirm that there are such (Dodd and others). I argue that musical works are performed in jazz but that jazz performance of works is very different (...) from performance of classical music works. The first step toward resolving the puzzle is to embrace the descriptive concept of a musical work and reject inappropriate normative concepts of a musical work. In particular, I argue against the accounts of musical works by Kania and Goehr, each of which implies a no-works thesis for jazz performance. I contrast the norms governing work performance in classical music with the practices governing performances of works in jazz, which I call realization or staging. Finally, I propose a model of jazz appreciation that incorporates a role for jazz works and that differs from the appreciation of classical music. (shrink)

The question ‘Is it worth it?’, as originally applied to artworks by Tolstoy and here reintroduced by Sheila Lintott, opens a fruitful avenue for understanding land art. It is, however, a question...

This chapter contains sections titled: Aesthetic preservationism Aesthetic value The biophilia hypothesis What is an aesthetic response to nature? Perceiving nature as nature Positive aesthetics Mixed and influenced environments Conclusion.

The most comprehensive collection of essays on Descartes' scientific writings ever published, this volume offers a detailed reassessment of Descartes' scientific work and its bearing on his philosophy. The 35 essays, written by some of the world's leading scholars, cover topics as diverse as optics, cosmology and medicine, and will be of vital interest to all historians of philosophy or science.

Natural environments differ from artworks in two ways: (a) they are surroundings filled with objects, processes, and the observer, (b) they are natural, not intentionally created to be appreciated. I show that this serious problem for accounts of aesthetic appreciation of nature has led many thinkers in environmental aesthetics (e.g., Carlson and Rolston) to claim that appreciators should be actively engaged with a natural environment. But how? One suggestion has been that appreciators play the role of creative performers in the (...) arts. I explore this analogy, distinguishing three different kinds of performance. I argue that none is a good fit as a model of nature appreciation but that the analogy sheds considerable light on environmental art, especially the site-specific artworks of Andy Goldsworthy. (shrink)

I define "perfect realism" as a style of replicative sculpture: exact replicas of inanimate objects or humans. Differentiating perfect realism from "photo" or "super" realism, and from representation, I criticize various defenses of this type of art. I argue that to understand perfect realism we need a theory of replication, which I sketch. Part of the account involves X (a replica) causing the perceptual experience that it is a Y when it is not. Hence perfect realism turns on the generic (...) identities of things; it involves a metaphysical exploration of the way we constitute everyday reality. (shrink)

Investigamos a lógica de Leonhard Euler com ênfase no papel dos “diagramas de Euler”. Concluímos que os referidos diagramas constituem um instrumento intuitivo, embora não sistemático, para determinar validade na silogística tradicional, isto é, a silogística munida de implicações conversacionais. Nisto, contrastam-se com os diagramas de Venn que constituem um instrumento sistemático, porém menos intuitivo, para determinar validade numa silogística mais voltada para os fundamentos da matemática moderna.: We investigate the logic of Leonhard Euler, giving emphasis to the role of (...) “Euler diagrams”. We conclude that these diagrams are an intuitive, non-systematic instrument for determining validity in the traditional syllogistic, that is, the syllogistic furnished with conversational implications. In this regard, they contrast with Venn diagrams which are a systematic, less intuitive instrument for determining validity in a syllogistic more appropriate for the foundation of modern mathematics. Keywords: History of Logic. Leonhard Euler. Euler Diagrams. Venn Diagrams. (shrink)

The last twenty years or so have seen a surge of interest in the philosophy of music. However there is comparatively little philosophical literature devoted specifically to songs, singing and vocal music in general. This new collection of essays on the philosophical aspects of song and singing includes articles on the relationship between words and music in songs, the ontology of songs and recordings, meaning in songs, the metaphysics of vocal music in opera and the movies, and the ethical challenges (...) raised in song performance. The essays discuss a large range of examples, including rock, lieder, jazz songs, blues, doo wop, and rap. New essays by leading philosophers of art, including Peter Kivy (on "realistic song" in film), Jerrold Levinson (on jazz singing), Lee B. Brown (on the "minstrel hypothesis" in popular music), and Ted Gracyk (on linguistic pragmatics and song meaning). Papers that offer ground-breaking theories of the appreciation of rock recordings, the ethical implications of popular songs, the ontology of ephemeral artworks, the ontological status of cover versions, and of how a genre of popular music can both express and be a function of its social context papers that challenge existing accounts of much-debated topics, including operatic metaphysics and of the ontology of recorded music. Interdisciplinary essays that cut across aesthetics, philosophy of music, cultural music studies and musicology. Essays that are clearly written and engaging. (shrink)

[John Hawthorne] We examine some well-known disjunctivist projects in the philosophy of perception, mainly in a critical vein. Our discussion is divided into four parts. Following some introductory remarks, we examine in part two the link between object-dependent contents and disjunctivism. In part three, we explore the disjunctivist's use of discriminability facts as a basis for understanding experience. In part four, we examine an interesting argument for disjunctivism that has been offered by Michael Martin. /// [Scott Sturgeon] The (...) paper aims to do five things: sketch the backbone of disjunctivism about visual experience, explore the view of our title, defend a version of that view from two objections, press two more objections of my own, and sketch a more radical variety of disjunctivism which avoids much of the bother. (shrink)

Recent investigations on how people derive meaning from language have focused on task‐dependent shifts between two cognitive systems. The symbolic (amodal) system represents meaning as the statistical relationships between words. The embodied (modal) system represents meaning through neurocognitive simulation of perceptual or sensorimotor systems associated with a word's referent. A primary finding of literature in this field is that the embodied system is only dominant when a task necessitates it, but in certain paradigms, this has only been demonstrated using nouns (...) and adjectives. The purpose of this paper is to study whether similar effects hold with verbs. Experiment 1 evaluated a novel task in which participants rated a selection of verbs on their implied vertical movement. Ratings correlated well with distributional semantic models, establishing convergent validity, though some variance was unexplained by language statistics alone. Experiment 2 replicated previous noun‐based location‐cue congruency experimental paradigms with verbs and showed that the ratings obtained in Experiment 1 predicted reaction times more strongly than language statistics. Experiment 3 modified the location‐cue paradigm by adding movement to create an animated, temporally decoupled, movement‐verb judgment task designed to examine the relative influence of symbolic and embodied processing for verbs. Results were generally consistent with linguistic shortcut hypotheses of symbolic‐embodied integrated language processing; location‐cue congruence elicited processing facilitation in some conditions, and perceptual information accounted for reaction times and accuracy better than language statistics alone. These studies demonstrate novel ways in which embodied and linguistic information can be examined while using verbs as stimuli. (shrink)

The principle of universal instantiation plays a pivotal role both in the derivation of intensional paradoxes such as Prior’s paradox and Kaplan’s paradox and the debate between necessitism and contingentism. We outline a distinctively free logical approach to the intensional paradoxes and note how the free logical outlook allows one to distinguish two different, though allied themes in higher-order necessitism. We examine the costs of this solution and compare it with the more familiar ramificationist approaches to higher-order logic. Our assessment (...) of both approaches is largely pessimistic, and we remain reluctantly inclined to take Prior’s and Kaplan’s derivations at face value. (shrink)

In December 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) filed a petition for a common law writ of habeas corpus in the New York State Supreme Court on behalf of Tommy, a chimpanzee living alone in a cage in a shed in rural New York (Barlow, 2017). Under animal welfare laws, Tommy’s owners, the Laverys, were doing nothing illegal by keeping him in those conditions. Nonetheless, the NhRP argued that given the cognitive, social, and emotional capacities of chimpanzees, Tommy’s confinement constituted (...) a profound wrong that demanded remedy by the courts. Soon thereafter, the NhRP filed habeas corpus petitions on behalf of Kiko, another chimpanzee housed alone in Niagara Falls, and Hercules and Leo, two chimpanzees held in research facilities at Stony Brook University. Thus began the legal struggle to move these chimpanzees from captivity to a sanctuary, an effort that has led the NhRP to argue in multiple courts before multiple judges. The central point of contention has been whether Tommy, Kiko, Hercules, and Leo have legal rights. To date, no judge has been willing to issue a writ of habeas corpus on their behalf. Such a ruling would mean that these chimpanzees have rights that confinement might violate. Instead, the judges have argued that chimpanzees cannot be bearers of legal rights because they are not, and cannot be persons. In this book we argue that chimpanzees are persons because they are autonomous. (shrink)

‘There is no place in the phenomenology of fully absorbed coping’, writes Hubert Dreyfus, ‘for mindfulness. In flow, as Sartre sees, there are only attractive and repulsive forces drawing appropriate activity out of an active body’1. Among the many ways in which history animates dynamical systems at a range of distinctive timescales, the phenomena of embodied human habit, skilful movement, and absorbed coping are among the most pervasive and mundane, and the most philosophically puzzling. In this essay we examine both (...) habitual and skilled movement, sketching the outlines of a multidimensional framework within which the many differences across distinctive cases and domains might be fruitfully understood. Both the range of movement phenomena which can plausibly be seen as instances of habit or skill, and the space of possible theories of such phenomena are richer and more disparate than philosophy easily encompasses. We seek to bring phenomenology into contact with relevant movements in psychological theories of skilful action, in the belief that phenomenological philosophy and cognitive science can be allies rather than antagonists. (shrink)