Patterns of three variables of reproductive strategies in male New World primates are examined: (i) how males obtain access to potential mates; (ii) how males obtain actual mating opportunities; and (iii) how males affect infant survival and female reproductive success. Male opportunities to associate with females, whether by remaining in their natal groups, dispersing and forming new groups, or dispersing and taking over or joining established groups, are strongly influenced by local population densities and correlate with female reproductive rates and (...) the extent of female reproductive seasonality and synchrony. Differences in male mating success are affected by female accessibility, whether male-male and male-female relationships are hierarchical or egalitarian, and whether female reproduction is seasonally restricted. Patterns of male behavior toward infants, characterized as active assistance, overt interference, or benign tolerance, appear to co-vary with differences in the degree to which males can affect female reproductive rates.These qualitative analyses suggest that the reproductive strategies of male New World primates can be classified along a continuum ranging from conservative to daring depending on whether female reproductive rates are relatively slow or fast and whether reproduction is strongly or weakly linked to seasonal ecological variables. Males adopt the conservative strategy of staying in their natal groups, forfeiting exclusive mating opportunities, and treating infants with tolerance when female reproduction is constrained by ecological factors. Conversely, males adopt the more daring strategy of dispersing and competing when potential payoffs through their ability to affect female reproduction are high. (shrink)

Unified explanations seek to situate the traits of human beings in a causal framework that also explains the trait values found in nonhuman species. Disunified explanations claim that the traits of human beings are due to causal processes not at work in the rest of nature. This paper outlines a methodology for testing hypotheses of these two types. Implications are drawn concerning evolutionary psychology, adaptationism, and anti-adaptationism.

There is a long-standing debate about whether poetry can make a substantive contribution to philosophy with compelling arguments to show that poetry and philosophy involve distinct modes of thought and aims, albeit with similar concerns. This paper argues that reading lyric poetry can play a substantive role in philosophy by helping the philosopher understand how to forge connections with the perspectives of others. The paper takes the view that poetry is not directly philosophical but can play an important role in (...) developing the philosopher's awareness of how perspective shapes beliefs and thought processes. Following Robert Nozick, David Lewis, and Helen Beebee, it argues for the need to broaden our conception of the aims of philosophy beyond aiming for conclusive proof, at the least where philosophical inquiry is focused on questions of value. It then shows how poetry cultivates an intellectual virtue essential to philosophy aimed at uncovering equilibria and collective understanding. (shrink)

This study has two agendas: to interrogate popular notions of religion by reading it, out of Derrida and Certeau, as a signifier for a situated historical scene; and to show the existential philosophy of Beauvoir as a performance of that scene. In particular, it shows how the structure of relationships she presents in her ethics clearly reproduces the rhythms of the scene of religion. One of the implications of this reproduction is that existential philosophy can only emerge in the context (...) of religion, and is necessarily an iteration of religion. The other implication is that we might reassess how we code the category ‘religion’ in our public and private discourse, with all the disruption that such a different coding might entail. (shrink)

This paper is about a category of social conventions that, I will argue, have significant moral implications. The category consists in our conventions about what we notice and choose not to notice about persons, features of persons, and their circumstances. We normally do not think much about what we notice about others, and what they notice about us, but I will argue that we should. Noticing people is a way of engaging with them in social contexts. We can engage in (...) social noticing more or less respectfully, more or less benevolently. Moreover, our standard conventions about noticing often have disparate effects on different groups of people. To be noticed appropriately is to have one's moral and social standing affirmed; conversely, to be denied notice or to be noticed inappropriately is very often to be denigrated or objectified. My aim in this paper is to unpack these moral dimensions of conventions of noticing and discuss their implications for how people engage with each other in certain kinds of social exchanges involving persons with disabilities. In Part I, I explain what I mean by the conventions of noticing and how they operate in social interactions. I show that although we do not always attend to them, these conventions are thoroughly embedded in our everyday social life. In Part II, I argue that these conventions have important moral dimensions and as such, should be governed by moral principles and values. I employ a Kantian framework of duties of love and respect in order to show how moral concerns should shape the way we use conventions of noticing and respond to their use by others. In Part III, I draw out the implications of this picture for social interactions among strangers when one or more of the parties involved has an immediately visible disability. (shrink)

The view that narrative artworks can offer insights into our lives, in particular, into the nature of the emotions, has gained increasing popularity in recent years. However, talk of narrative often involves reference to a perspective or point of view, which indicates a more fundamental mechanism at work. In this article, I argue that our understanding of the emotions is incomplete without adequate attention to the perspectival structures in which they are embedded. Drawing on Bennett Helm’s theory of emotion, I (...) argue that the narrative view fails to take into account the influence of perspective on the emotions. In order to address this gap in our understanding of the emotions, I highlight a mode of engagement with literature that prioritizes the perspectival features of a work. Focusing on lyric poetry, I argue that non-narrative artworks are those best placed to highlight this fundamental aspect of our emotional experiences. (shrink)

Focusing on narratives with supernatural components, Karen J. Renner argues that the recent proliferation of stories about evil children demonstrates not a declining faith in the innocence of childhood but a desire to preserve its purity. From novels to music videos, photography to video games, the evil child haunts a range of texts and comes in a variety of forms, including changelings, ferals, and monstrous newborns. In this book, Renner illustrates how each subtype offers a different explanation for the (...) problem of the “evil” child and adapts to changing historical circumstances and ideologies. (shrink)

A timely interrogation of the concept of 'expertise' in cultural work, exploring the characteristics of aesthetic expertise in the digital age, and its relation to inequalities in the cultural sector.

Performance is increasingly important to the poet, which is evidenced by the growing numbers of videos and audio recordings online including YouTube, the National Poetry library, and Poetry Archive. As a result, there are greater opportunities to engage with poets reading their own work and consequently, there is a need to move away from thinking of poetry as primary something that takes shape on the page. Furthermore, by refocusing attention to poetry as an oral artform, in particular to poetry performance, (...) different ways of understanding the value of poetry come to the fore. The live poetry performance, I argue, offers an attempt to reclaim the personal individual expression of language in contemporary society and demands attention by the audience because of the role of voice and body in the performance. Through awareness of ‘uniqueness of voice,’ the performed poem becomes a site of collective meaning making with individual identity intact as a shared endeavour between performer and audience, and necessarily resists appropriation (in the sense that the words experienced cannot be divorced from the performer or the performance space to serve as a proxy for meaning elsewhere). This chapter therefore makes an argument for the need to engage with spoken word and performance poetry in the live performance space. (shrink)

The French studies scholar Patrick Coleman made the important observation that over the course of the eighteenth century, the social meanings of anger became increasingly democratized. The work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is an outstanding example of this change. In Man or Citizen, Karen Pagani expands, in original and fascinating ways, the study of anger in Rousseau’s autobiographical, literary, and philosophical works. Pagani is especially interested in how and to what degree anger—and various reconciliatory responses to anger, such as forgiveness—functions (...) as a defining aspect of one’s identity, both as a private individual and as a public citizen. Rousseau himself was, as Pagani puts it, “unabashed” in his own anger and indignation—toward society on one hand (corrupter of our naturally good and authentic selves) and, on the other, toward certain individuals who had somehow wronged him (his famous philosophical disputes with Voltaire and Diderot, for example). In Rousseau’s work, Pagani finds that the extent to which an individual processes, expresses, and eventually resolves or satisfies anger is very much of moral and political concern. She argues that for Rousseau, anger is not only inevitable but also indispensable, and that the incapacity to experience it renders one amoral, while the ability to experience it is a key element of good citizenship. (shrink)

Filmmaking is one of the most complexly layered forms of artistic production. It is a deeply interactive process, socially, culturally, and technologically. Yet the bulk of popular and academic discussion of filmmaking continues to attribute creative authorship of films to directors. Texts refer to “a Scorsese film,” not a film by “Scorsese et al.” We argue that this kind of attribution of sole creative responsibility to film directors is a misapprehension of filmmaking processes, based in part on dubious individualist assumptions (...) about creative minds. Such a misapprehension is effacing the public value that a more inclusive and accurate understanding of filmmaking offers. By “public value” we mean the potential to enhance social and cultural well-being, particularly in working lives and collaborative undertakings in the screen industries. Better understanding of the systemic and social nature of creativity in filmmaking can potentially help in democratising aesthetics, which we consider a clear public good. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe major credit rating agencies contributed substantially to the sub‐prime mortgage crisis by giving their highest rating to most of the collateralized debt obligations securities that were backed by these sub‐prime mortgages. Because the rating agencies are compensated by the issuers whose CDO bonds they rate, this relationship creates a prima facie conflict of interest, one that is compounded when the rating agency also consults for the issuers on designing the CDOs. While Congress and the Securities Exchange Commission investigate possible (...) wrongdoing, various reforms have been proposed. This article analyzes these conflicts of interest and the cognate corporate governance issues. It then categorizes and critiques several of the reform proposals—which range in severity from requiring more disclosure to the suspension of the rating agency's license. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are areas of political behavior for which the usual assumption of wealth maximizing homo economicus is to narrow to generate convincing explanation of behavior. In particular, it is argued that for many political decisions, people choose according to some set of moral preconceptions while for others, people have insufficient information to make economic choices even if they were inclined to do so. This implies that normative public choice can only be part of a political decision (...) process in which non-pecuniary concerns influence choices. Finally, constitutional economics insofar as it is conceptually conceived, must presume some set of moral and informational properties of the parties to the social contract. (shrink)

Like the determinist, the New Critic must proceed by assuming what he hopes to prove; he assumes the existence of "objective" relations between the words of the poem he is studying and then attempts to perceive such relations.1 The distinction between "objective"—that is, in some sense verifiable—and purely subjective or personal meaning must necessarily be a central one for this type of poetics. New Critics are constantly protesting that they are not "reading into" works, that the meanings they ascribe to (...) the words or images of a literary text are objectively there rather than subjectively imposed. Empson declares, speaking of a recurrent image in Donne's poetry, "the point is not so much what 'connotations' this 'image-term' might have to a self-indulgent reader as to what connotation it actually does have in its repeated uses by Donne"—there is clearly a semantic distinction to be made here, for Empson is using the same term, "connotation," to describe both what he does and what he does not mean.2 · 1. On this procedure in general, see Nelson Goodman's remark on "virtuous circles" in Fact, Fiction, and Forecast , pp. 67 ff.· 2. "Donne and the Rhetorical Tradition," Kenyon Review 11 : 580; reprinted in Paul Alpers, ed., Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism , pp. 63-77. Empson's quotation marks indicate that for the purposes of discussion he is adopting the terminology of Rosemond Tuve. Richard Strier, assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago, has written articles on religious poetry and is currently completing a book on Herbert and Vaughan. (shrink)

How do you find God in the ordinary moments of life? After a random surgery gave Karen Wingate better vision than she ever had before, she saw parts of creation, faces of friends, and life moments in ways she had never seen before. In her book, With Fresh Eyes, sixty readings chronicle her discoveries and shed light on your ability to look for God, see the finer details of His handiwork, and discover how He moves and works within the (...) lives of His children. Her insights will guide you toward the light of God's goodness and help you find a clarity of spiritual sight you've never experienced before. (shrink)

The preoccupation with "depth" and its relevance to cinema and media studies.

The Handbook of International Psychology Ethics discusses the most central, guiding principles of practice for mental health professionals around the world. For researchers, practicing mental health professionals, and students alike, the book provides a window into the values and belief systems of cultures worldwide. Chapters cover ethics codes from psychological associations and societies on five continents, translating each code into English and discussing vital questions around how the code is put into practice, what it means to association members and society (...) at large, as well as how the code was developed within its unique historical, political, and cultural context. (shrink)

This volume seeks to improve an understanding of and conversations about the nature, meaning and significance of higher education's public service within the scope of a democratic society. Contributors offer educators and students a praxis-oriented, hope-infused, contemplative approach to conceiving, developing and in some cases, returning to public service and public identity in the twenty-first century.

The world is in crisis. We, the people of the world, are all connected. We rely on each other to make ethical decisions and to solve thorny civic problems, together. Ethics and civics have always mattered, but perhaps now more than ever, we are starting to realize how much they matter. Teaching ethics and civics is essential to our future. This book argues that games can encourage the practice of ethics and civics. They help us to connect, deliberate, and reflect. (...) They help us to flourish. They help us to reimagine our world. Games are communities and public spheres. Like all communities, they may support care, understanding, and problem solving. And, they may also incite hate, disinformation, and toxicity. Games reveal humanity's compassion as well as its cruelty. Games reveal our complexity. We the Gamers provides research-based perspectives related to why and how we should play, make, and use games in ethics, civics, character, and social studies education. This book systematically evaluates how to use games in classrooms, remote learning environments, and other educational settings, with consideration to different audiences and standards. This book also provides tips and guidelines, as well as timely resources, examples, and case studies. It includes examples of all different types of games-virtual reality, mobile, card games, and computer games, big budget commercial games, indie games, and more. (shrink)

It is widely acknowledged that the gradual emergence of the modern nation-state is associated with intensified interest in the government of childhood. Grounded in the Foucauldian literature on governmentality and drawing on a broad range of disciplines, this book examines the government of childhood in the West from the early modern period to the present. The book deals with three key time periods, examining shifts in the conceptualization and regulation of childhood and child-rearing between the late sixteenth and late eighteenth (...) century; between the late eighteenth century and the mid/late twentieth century and the period from the late twentieth century to the present day. Building on the work of Chris Jenks, The Government of Childhood deploys the images of the Dionysian and Apollonian images of childhood as symbolic targets of power/knowledge and presents a third model - the Athenian child - as a symbolic target of modes of exercising power over the young that is grounded in children's capacity for agency. (shrink)

-/- Carefully considering the difference in the philosophical potential of page poetry and performance poetry, Karen Simecek argues that it is only by considering them side by side that the unique cognitive value of each can be realised. -/- Focusing on spoken word poetry reveals the importance of voice and embodied words to the differing epistemic rewards of engaging with contemporary works of poetry in both private reading and live performance. This concept of embodied voice progresses a new line (...) of thinking in the cognitivism debate and unlocks the philosophical value of engaging with poetry. Simecek's discussion of performed poetry also advances discussions of affect and experience in contemporary analytic aesthetics which raise new insights and connections within the field. -/- The moral significance of the differing effects of poetry finds comprehensive articulation through a rich philosophical analysis of the thoughts and affects which arise in particular contexts. Simecek concludes that when page poetry is treated as paradigmatic, this enables reflection in the singular, whereas taking poetry in live performance as paradigmatic enables reflection on what is shared and shareable with others. (shrink)

A joyful exploration of what it means to be made in God's image.

Over 700,000 copies of the original hardcover and paperback editions of this stunningly popular book have been sold. Karen Armstrong's superbly readable exploration of how the three dominant monotheistic religions of the world—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have shaped and altered the conception of God is a tour de force. One of Britain's foremost commentators on religious affairs, Armstrong traces the history of how men and women have perceived and experienced God, from the time of Abraham to the present. From classical (...) philosophy and medieval mysticism to the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the modern age of skepticism, Armstrong performs the near miracle of distilling the intellectual history of monotheism into one compelling volume. (shrink)

In the ninth century BCE, the peoples of four distinct regions of the civilized world created the religious and philosophical traditions that have continued to nourish humanity to the present day: Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Later generations further developed these initial insights, but we have never grown beyond them. Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for example, were all secondary flowerings of the original Israelite vision. Now, in (...) The Great Transformation , Karen Armstrong reveals how the sages of this pivotal “Axial Age” can speak clearly and helpfully to the violence and desperation that we experience in our own times. Armstrong traces the development of the Axial Age chronologically, examining the contributions of such figures as the Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the mystics of the Upanishads, Mencius, and Euripides. All of the Axial Age faiths began in principled and visceral recoil from the unprecedented violence of their time. Despite some differences of emphasis, there was a remarkable consensus in their call for an abandonment of selfishness and a spirituality of compassion. With regard to dealing with fear, despair, hatred, rage, and violence, the Axial sages gave their people and give us, Armstrong says, two important pieces of advice: first there must be personal responsibility and self-criticism, and it must be followed by practical, effective action. In her introduction and concluding chapter, Armstrong urges us to consider how these spiritualities challenge the way we are religious today. In our various institutions, we sometimes seem to be attempting to create exactly the kind of religion that Axial sages and prophets had hoped to eliminate. We often equate faith with doctrinal conformity, but the traditions of the Axial Age were not about dogma. All insisted on the primacy of compassion even in the midst of suffering. In each Axial Age case, a disciplined revulsion from violence and hatred proved to be the major catalyst of spiritual change. (shrink)

I offer a novel solution to the problem of counterfactual skepticism: the worry that all contingent counterfactuals without explicit probabilities in the consequent are false. I argue that a specific kind of contextualist semantics and pragmatics for would- and might-counterfactuals can block both central routes to counterfactual skepticism. One, it can explain the clash between would- and might-counterfactuals as in: If you had dropped that vase, it would have broken. and If you had dropped that vase, it might have safely (...) quantum tunneled to China. Two, it can explain why counterfactuals like can be true despite the fact that quantum tunneling worlds are among the most similar worlds. I further argue that this brand of contextualism accounts for the data better than other existing solutions to the problem. (shrink)

Both definite descriptions and pronouns are often anaphoric; that is, part of their interpretation in context depends on prior linguistic material in the discourse. For example: A student walked in. The student sat down. A student walked in. She sat down. One popular view of anaphoric pronouns, the d-type view, is that pronouns like ‘she’ go proxy for definite descriptions like ‘the student who walked in’, which are in turn treated in a classical Russellian or Fregean fashion. I argue for (...) a novel version of the d-type view in which anaphoric definites are restricted existential quantifiers that presuppose discourse uniqueness, which is uniqueness of discourse referent in the context, rather than uniqueness of object in the world. In other words, the anaphoric definites ‘the student’ and ‘she’ in and presuppose that there is a single object under discussion that is a student who walked in. I further argue that, by contrast, non-anaphoric definites are restricted existential quantifiers that presuppose worldly uniqueness, that is, that there is a unique object in the world that satisfies the descriptive information. The semantics for anaphoric and non-anaphoric definites accounts for the differences in truth conditions in discourses involving the two different types of definites, improving on existing accounts. It is further supported by crosslinguistic data. The semantics is formally implemented in a static system employing quantifier domain restriction in the style of Stanley and Szabo :219–261, 2000) and extended to account for bridging definites and donkey sentences. (shrink)

The classic Lewis-Stalnaker semantics for counterfactuals captures that Sobel sequences are consistent sequences, for example: a.If Sophie had gone to the parade, she would have seen Pedro dance. b.But if Sophie had gone to the parade and been stuck behind someone tall, she would not have seen Pedro dance. But reverse a sequence like this one and it no longer sounds so good, which is surprising on the classic semantics. This observation motivated Kai von Fintel and Thony Gillies to propose (...) dynamic semantic accounts of counterfactual conditionals. Subsequently, Sarah Moss defended the classic semantics against the charge that it need be abandoned in the face of these order effects, arguing that the infelicity of the reverse sequences is pragmatic. I argue that both accounts are ultimately untenable, but each account has strengths. Seeing what works and what doesn't in each account points the way to the right positive view. With this in mind, I defend a contextualist account of counterfactuals that takes conversational relevance to play a central role. (shrink)

According to Margaret Cavendish the entire natural world is essentially rational such that everything thinks in some way or another. In this paper, I examine why Cavendish would believe that the natural world is ubiquitously rational, arguing against the usual account, which holds that she does so in order to account for the orderly production of very complex phenomena (e.g. living beings) given the limits of the mechanical philosophy. Rather, I argue, she attributes ubiquitous rationality to the natural world in (...) order to ground a theory of the ubiquitous freedom of nature, which in turn accounts for both the world's orderly and disorderly behavior. (shrink)

I suspect the answer to the question in the title of this paper is no. But the scope of my paper will be considerably more limited: I will be concerned with whether certain types of considerations that are commonly cited in favor of dynamic semantics do in fact push us towards a dynamic semantics. Ultimately, I will argue that the evidence points to a dynamics of discourse that is best treated pragmatically, rather than as part of the semantics.

One of the central questions of discourse dynamics is when an anaphoric pronoun is licensed. This paper addresses this question as it pertains to the complex data involving anaphora and negation. It is commonly held that negation blocks anaphoric potential, for example, we cannot say “Bill doesn’t have a car. It is black”. However, there are many exceptions to this generalization. This paper examines a variety of types of discourses in which anaphora on indefinites under the scope of negation is (...) felicitous. These cases are not just of intrinsic interest, but I argue present serious problems for the dynamic semantic framework, which builds the licensing facts into the semantics. I argue in favor of adopting a dynamic pragmatics, a theory that explains context change through general Gricean principles, and combining it with a static, d-type theory of anaphora, in which pronouns go proxy for definite descriptions. (shrink)

Context-sensitivity raises a metasemantic question: what determines the value of a context-sensitive expression in context? Taking gradable adjectives as a case study, this paper argues against various forms of intentionalist metasemantics, i.e. that speaker intentions determine values for context-sensitive expressions in context, including the coordination account recently defended by King :219–237, 2014a; in: Burgess, Sherman Metasemantics: New essays on the foundations of meaning, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 97–118, 2014b). The paper argues that all intentionalist accounts face the speaker authority (...) problem, that speaker intentions are just the wrong sorts of things to determine the standards for gradable adjectives in context. The problem comes to light when we look at cases in which speakers have idiosyncratic, false beliefs that cause their proper communicative intentions to come apart from the non-intentional features of context like the question under discussion, facts about the world, practical goals, and prior linguistic discourse. (shrink)

Empirically-informed philosophy of mind (EIPM) has become a dominant research style in the twenty-first century. EIPM relies on empirical results in various ways. However, the extant literature lacks an empirical description of how EIPM philosophers rely on empirical results. Moreover, though EIPM is essentially a form of cross-disciplinary research, it has not been analyzed as cross-disciplinary research so far. We aim to fill the above two gaps in the literature by producing quantitative and qualitative descriptions of EIPM as a kind (...) of cross-disciplinary research. Our descriptions aim to enable metaphilosophers to evaluate EIPM methodologically and epistemically. Our analyses use co-citation and categorization analyses informed by the literature on interdisciplinarity. We present five sets of descriptions and identify the three most common types of cross-disciplinary interactions in EIPM. The resulting descriptions enable us to locate two metaphilosophical challenges for EIPM philosophers. One concerns how they should incorporate empirical results in different disciplinary contexts, and the other concerns which theoretical virtue(s) they should aim for when tinkering with scientific theories. (shrink)

Discourse dynamics, pragmatics, and indefinites Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-30 DOI 10.1007/s11098-012-9882-y Authors Karen S. Lewis, Department of Philosophy, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116.

We hypothesised that belief in conspiracy theories would be predicted by the general tendency to attribute agency and intentionality where it is unlikely to exist. We further hypothesised that this tendency would explain the relationship between education level and belief in conspiracy theories, where lower levels of education have been found to be associated with higher conspiracy belief. In Study 1 participants were more likely to agree with a range of conspiracy theories if they also tended to attribute intentionality and (...) agency to inanimate objects. As predicted, this relationship accounted for the link between education level and belief in conspiracy theories. We replicated this finding in Study 2, whilst taking into account beliefs in paranormal phenomena. These results suggest that education may undermine the reasoning processes and assumptions that are reflected in conspiracy belief. (shrink)