This book, based on Jaegwon Kim's 1996 Townsend Lectures, presents the philosopher's current views on a variety of issues in the metaphysics of the mind...

Previous work has shown that English native speakers interpret sentences as predicted by a noisy‐channel model: They integrate both the real‐world plausibility of the meaning—the prior—and the likelihood that the intended sentence may be corrupted into the perceived sentence. In this study, we test the noisy‐channel model in Mandarin Chinese, a language taxonomically different from English. We present native Mandarin speakers sentences in a written modality (Experiment 1) and an auditory modality (Experiment 2) in three pairs of syntactic alternations. The (...) critical materials are literally implausible but require differing numbers and types of edits in order to form more plausible sentences. Each sentence is followed by a comprehension question that allows us to infer whether the speakers interpreted the item literally, or made an inference toward a more likely meaning. Similar to previous research on related English constructions, Mandarin participants made the most inferences for implausible materials that could be inferred as plausible by deleting a single morpheme or inserting a single morpheme. Participants were less likely to infer a plausible meaning for materials that could be inferred as plausible by making an exchange across a preposition. And participants were least likely to infer a plausible meaning for materials that could be inferred as plausible by making an exchange across a main verb. Moreover, we found more inferences in written materials than spoken materials, possibly a result of a lack of word boundaries in written Chinese. Overall, the fact that the results were so similar to those found in related constructions in English suggests that the noisy‐channel proposal is robust. (shrink)

本书作者以马克思主义观点对文艺学中的美学、人道主义、方法论、文艺与上层建筑的关系及马克思主义美学、文艺学思想发展轨迹、分期原则、标准、方法、逻辑起点和理论构成等重大问题进行了探讨。.

Direction of fit theories usually claim that beliefs are such that they “aim at truth” or “ought to fit” the world and desires are such that they “aim at realization” or the world “ought to fit” them. This essay argues that no theory of direction of fit is correct. The two directions of fit are supposed to be determinations of one and the same determinable two-place relation, differing only in the ordering of favored terms. But there is no such determinable (...) because of ineliminable asymmetries between the way that beliefs “aim at truth” and the way that desires “aim at realization.” This essay traces the ills of direction of fit theory to a misunderstanding of Anscombe and proposes a cure that distinguishes theoretical and practical thought by appeal to a distinction between thought in the form of a state and thought in the form of an event. (shrink)

Among the various claims by early Chinese philosophers to hear someone’s de 德 or virtue through their music, the most astonishing statement may be found in the Yue Ji 樂記 : “Only Music cannot be faked”. While this classic Ru 儒 musical treatise on the development of human excellence in accordance with music is wide-ranging, the aim of this essay is narrow, in that it seeks to interpret this single sentence of the text by way of an explanation of the (...) reciprocal patterning between authentic emotions, character, and sound described by the Yue Ji. (shrink)

Is Anscombean practical knowledge independent of what the agent actually does on an occasion? Failure to understand Anscombe’s answer to this question is a major obstacle to appreciating the subtlety and plausibility of her view. I argue that Anscombe’s answer is negative, and turns on the nature of mistakes in performance, and reveals a distinctive implicit metaphysics of mind and knowledge, structured by related capacities and exercises of capacities. If my interpretation is correct, then practical knowledge shares features with knowledge-how (...) and knowledge-that, but deserves its own epistemic category. (shrink)

Responsible leadership is rare. It is not that most leaders are irresponsible, but responsibility in leadership is frequently defined so that an important connotation of responsible leadership is ignored. This article equates responsible leadership with virtuousness. Using this connotation implies that responsible leadership is based on three assumptions—eudaemonism, inherent value, and amplification. Secondarily, this connotation produces two important outcomes—a fixed point for coping with change, and benefits for constituencies who may never be affected otherwise. The meaning and advantages of responsible (...) leadership as virtuous leadership are discussed. (shrink)

In men and women sexual arousal culminates in orgasm, with female orgasm solely from sexual intercourse often regarded as a unique feature of human sexuality. However, orgasm from sexual intercourse occurs more reliably in men than in women, likely reflecting the different types of physical stimulation men and women require for orgasm. In men, orgasms are under strong selective pressure as orgasms are coupled with ejaculation and thus contribute to male reproductive success. By contrast, women's orgasms in intercourse are highly (...) variable and are under little selective pressure as they are not a reproductive necessity. The proximal mechanisms producing variability in women's orgasms are little understood. In 1924 Marie Bonaparte proposed that a shorter distance between a woman's clitoris and her urethral meatus (CUMD) increased her likelihood of experiencing orgasm in intercourse. She based this on her published data that were never statistically analyzed. In 1940 Landis and colleagues published similar data suggesting the same relationship, but these data too were never fully analyzed. We analyzed raw data from these two studies and found that both demonstrate a strong inverse relationship between CUMD and orgasm during intercourse. Unresolved is whether this increased likelihood of orgasm with shorter CUMD reflects increased penile–clitoral contact during sexual intercourse or increased penile stimulation of internal aspects of the clitoris. CUMD likely reflects prenatal androgen exposure, with higher androgen levels producing larger distances. Thus these results suggest that women exposed to lower levels of prenatal androgens are more likely to experience orgasm during sexual intercourse. . (shrink)

An observation of Hume’s has received a lot of attention over the last decade and a half: Although we can standardly imagine the most implausible scenarios, we encounter resistance when imagining propositions at odds with established moral (or perhaps more generally evaluative) convictions. The literature is ripe with ‘solutions’ to this so-called ‘Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance’. Few, however, question the plausibility of the empirical assumption at the heart of the puzzle. In this paper, we explore empirically whether the difficulty we (...) witness in imagining certain propositions is indeed due to claim type (evaluative v. non-evaluative) or whether it is much rather driven by mundane features of content. Our findings suggest that claim type plays but a marginal role, and that there might hence not be much of a ‘puzzle’ to be solved. (shrink)

Ji Kang's 嵇康 argument against the presence of emotions in music in “Sound Has Neither Sorrow nor Joy” (sheng wu ai le lun 聲無哀樂論) relies centrally on his claim that harmonious sounds are “without image” (wu xiang 無象). In contrast, the Ru 儒 (Confucian) view of music is that it transmits images and emotions between musicians and listeners, which provides the basis for the musical cultivation of virtue (de 德). In this paper, I provide a reading of Ji Kang's argument (...) that elucidates key differences between music with and without images, and offer an analysis of these differences in terms of intransitive musical meaning. (shrink)

According to the Zhuangzi, listening to the music of nature draws the self into the silence required to experience things in their self-arising spontaneity. How does this happen? This essay answers by way of the Yue Ji (Record of Music), where it is said that great music embodies the timeliness of nature. Using both texts, I develop timeliness as the opportune moment, temporal natality, and nature’s memory. Listening to the timely music of nature is shown to be an act of (...) ecological perception that, by releasing time in favor of timeliness, reveals our aesthetic accordance with nature’s own becoming. (shrink)

According to the Zhuangzi, listening to the music of nature draws the self into the silence required to experience things in their self-arising spontaneity. How does this happen? This essay answers by way of the Yue Ji (Record of Music), where it is said that great music embodies the timeliness of nature. Using both texts, I develop timeliness as the opportune moment, temporal natality, and nature’s memory. Listening to the timely music of nature is shown to be an act of (...) ecological perception that, by releasing time in favor of timeliness, reveals our aesthetic accordance with nature’s own becoming. (shrink)

For the physicalist, the mind-body problem is the problem of finding a place for the mind in a world that is fundamentally physical. What does “fundamentally physical” mean? I think any physicalist will accept at least the following two claims. First, the world contains nothing but bits of matter and aggregates of bits of matter. There are no Cartesian souls, or Hegelian spirits, or neo-vitalist entelechies—as the emergentist C. Lloyd Morgan put it, no “alien influx” into the natural order. This (...) ontological thesis is sometimes called “ontological physicalism”. Second, we have the supervenience thesis: physical facts determine all the facts, and the physical properties of a thing determine all its properties. At this point, then, the world looks like this: all the things that exist are physical things—either basic bits of matter or wholly made up of bits of matter. These physical things have properties. What properties? First, there are basic physical properties, like mass, size, shape, electric charge, and so on—properties and magnitudes in terms of which laws of physics are formulated. But some properties of complex physical systems, like biological organisms, seem prima facie nonphysical—at least, they are not among the properties investigated in physics or the physical sciences. Prominent among them are mental properties—beliefs, desires, sensations, emotions, and the rest. The supervenience thesis says that such properties are fixed by the physical properties of the systems that have them; once the physical properties of a system are fixed, that fixes all of its properties. And yet property dualists, or nonreductive physicalists, maintain that although certain non-physical properties are determined by physical properties, they are irreducible to, and remain distinct from, physical properties. Although thoughts and pains are determined by the biology, and ultimately physicochemistry, of an organism, they are not biological/physical properties themselves, and there exists a special autonomous science of psychology, or cognitive science, that is responsible for investigating them. (shrink)

Confucian humility (qian xun 謙遜) is a deeply rooted virtue in East Asian traditions and widely practiced among modern East Asians. Despite its significance, our modern understanding of it remains imperfect, partly due to a prevailing misunderstanding of its true nature under the label of “modesty­bias.” This bias is often cited as a representative trait of East Asian collectivism in social or cultural psychology, leading to a narrow focus on attitudes and behaviors associated with it, with little attention to whether (...) it accurately reflects the historical roots of Confucian humility. This paper aims to highlight the notable differences between attitudes or behaviors related to modesty­bias and traditional Confucian humility, arguing that failing to make this distinction poses a significant obstacle to understanding Confucian humility as a virtue and its contemporary expression. Methodological suggestions are provided on how to conduct interdisciplinary research on Confucian humility, emphasizing the need to recognize and address the prejudice associated with modesty­bias. Such an interdisciplinary approach can also help discern modern attitudes or behaviors rooted in Confucian humility and shed new light on the continuing relevance of this traditional virtue in contemporary East Asian society. (shrink)

(From the Press's Website) -/- Winner of the 2004 Lakatos Prize, Thought in a Hostile World is an exploration of the evolution of cognition, especially human cognition, by one of today's foremost philosophers of biology and of mind. Features an exploration of the evolution of human cognition. Written by one of today’s foremost philosophers of mind and language. Presents a set of analytic tools for thinking about cognition and its evolution. Offers a critique of nativist, modular versions of evolutionary psychology, (...) rejecting the example of language as a model for thinking about human cognitive capacities. Applies to the areas of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and evolutionary psychology. -/- . (shrink)

This book is part of the growing field of practical approaches to philosophical questions relating to identity, agency and ethics, working across continental and analytical traditions. Kim Atkins explains and justifies the basis of the practical approach through an explication of the structures of human embodiment and an account of how those structures necessitate a narrative model of selfhood, understanding and ethics. She highlights how recent work on agency and autonomy implicitly draws upon conceptions of embodiment and intersubjectivity that underpin (...) the narrative view. (shrink)

Some people of colour feel shame in response to racist incidents. This phenomenon seems puzzling since, plausibly, they have nothing to feel shame about. This puzzle arises because we assume that targets of racism feel shame about their race. However, I propose that when an individual is racialised as non-White in a racist incident, shame is sometimes prompted, not by a negative self-assessment of her race, but by her inability to choose when her stigmatised race is made salient. I argue (...) that this can make sense of some shame responses to racism. My account also helps to highlight some of the emotional and cognitive costs of racism that have their root in shame as well as a new form of hermeneutical injustice and distinctive communicative harms, contributing to a fuller picture of what is objectionable about racism. (shrink)

In this article we defend the view that, on the All Affected Principle of voting rights, the weight of a person’s vote on a decision should be determined by and only by the degree to which that dec...

The essays collected in this volume address a range of issues that arise when the focus of philosophical reflection on identity is shifted from metaphysical to practical and evaluative concerns. They also explore the usefulness of the notion of narrative for articulating and responding to these issues. The chapters, written by an outstanding roster of international scholars, address a range of complex philosophical issues concerning the relationship between practical and metaphysical identity, the embodied dimensions of the first-personal perspective, the kind (...) of reflexive agency involved in the self-constitution of one’s practical identity, the relationship between practical identity and normativity, and the temporal dimensions of identity and selfhood. In addressing these issues, contributors engage with debates in the literatures on personal identity, phenomenology, moral psychology, action theory, normative ethical theory, and feminist philosophy. (shrink)

This paper discusses two perspectives, each of which recognises the importance of environmental resources in enhancing and amplifying our cognitive capacity. One is the Clark–Chalmers model, extended further by Clark and others. The other derives from niche construction models of evolution, models which emphasise the role of active agency in enhancing the adaptive fit between agent and world. In the human case, much niche construction is epistemic: making cognitive tools and assembling other informational resources that support and scaffold intelligent action. (...) I shall argue that extended mind cases are limiting cases of environmental scaffolding, and while the extended mind picture is not false, the niche construction model is a more helpful framework for understanding human action. (shrink)

Change is inevitable, and increasingly rapid and continuous in healthcare as organizations strive to adapt, improve and innovate. Organizational change challenges healthcare providers because it restructures how and when patient care delivery is provided, changing ways in which nurses must carry out their work. The aim of this doctoral study was to explore frontline nurses’ experiences of living with rapid and continuous organizational change. A critical hermeneutic approach was utilized. Participants described feeling voiceless, powerless and apolitical amidst rapid and continuous (...) organizational changes which fuelled apathy, cynicism and disengagement from the organization. However, critical analysis of the data showed that nurses actively engaged with power, voice and politics through resistant and transgressive behaviours in micro‐ethical moments of practice. There is a need to reconceptualize the concepts of voice, power and politics in nursing as there is dissonance between nurses’ beliefs about these concepts and what they are enacting in practice. Recognizing their enactment of power, voice and political agency at the micro‐level may empower nurses. Empowerment would mitigate the high levels of reports of powerlessness experienced in practice during organizational changes. (shrink)

This book is not a conventional introduction to the philosophy of mind, nor is it a contribution to the physicalist/ dualist debate. Instead The Representational Theory of Mind demonstrates that we can construct physicalist theories of important aspects of our mental life. Its aim is to explain and defend a physicalist theory of intelligence in two parts: the first six chapters consist of an exposition, elaboration and defence of human sentience (the functionalist theory of mind), and the second part considers (...) rivals and objections to this theory. Kim Sterelny aims to introduce people to this area of philosophy by exemplifying it, to show that philosophical and empirical investigations can be synthesized to the benefit of both. --From publisher's description. (shrink)

"No human now gathers for himself or herself the essential resources for life: food, shelter, clothing, and the like. Humans are obligate co-operator, and this has been true for tens of thousands of years; probably much longer. In this regard, humans are very unusual. Cooperation outside the family is rare: though it can be very profitable, it is also very risky, as cooperation makes an agent vulnerable to incompetence and cheating. This book presents a new picture of the emergence of (...) cooperation in our lineage, developing through four fairly distinct phases from a baseline that was probably fairly similar to living great apes, who cooperate, but in fairly minimal ways. As adults, they rarely depend on others when the outcome really matters. This book suggests that cooperation began to be more important for humans through an initial phase of cooperative foraging generating immediate returns from collective action in small mobile bands. This established in our lineage about 1.8 million years ago, perhaps earlier. Over the rest of the Pleistocene, cooperation became more extended in its social scale, with forms of cooperation between bands gradually establishing, and in spatial and temporal scale too, with various forms of reciprocation becoming important. The final phase was the emergence of cooperation in large scale, hierarchical societies in the Holocene, beginning about 12,000 years ago. This picture is nested in a reading of the archaeological and ethnographic record, and twinned to an account of the gradual elaboration of cultural learning in our lineage, making cooperation both more profitable and more stable"--. (shrink)

The last decade has seen an explosion of interest in the health and welfare of marginalized communities around the world. In one striking indicator, public and private development assistance for health programs increased from $8.65 billion in 1998 to $21.79 billion in 2007 [1]. There has been emergent academic interest as well, with growing ranks of undergraduate and graduate students and professionals adopting the field as their specialty. Despite the burgeoning interest, however, much about the field remains unclear. Reimagining Global (...) Health is an important contribution to this budding field for two reasons: it proposes a cohesive introductory text for a field in desperate need of one, and it seeks to “reimagine” some key concepts in global health in an effort to provide a bold new direction for the field. Its stated aim is to move global health from a mere “collection of problems” into an identifiable discipline .As a textbook, the work succeeds admirably. The book .. (shrink)

Recent scholars focus mainly on Paul’s use of ‘brothers (and sisters)’ or ‘brother (and sister)’ in Greco-Roman epistolary conventions and cultural backdrops. However, Jewish dimensions (particularly ethnic dimensions) of Paul’s sibling language still remain unexplored in current scholarship. Furthermore, scholars have not drawn much attention to how Jewish letter writers use sibling terms in their letters. This article offers a new interpretation on Paul’s sibling language in light of its Jewish usage. We should note that Jewish letter writers did not (...) address their Gentile letter recipients as ‘brother(s)’. However, Paul did call his recipients ‘brothers’. It is unlikely that Paul employed sibling language without being aware of its common Jewish usage. The author proposes that Paul’s sibling language is used in the context of an ethnic insider designation (shared ethnicity), and that ascribing the title of brother to believers including Gentiles signals the re-definition of the family of Abraham. (shrink)

ABSTRACT After Hong Kong’s return to Chinese Sovereignty in 1997, the terms ‘mainlander’ and ‘Hongkonger’ have been widely used by English-language media in Hong Kong to differentiate between people from the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong. This study examines representations of Chinese mainlanders and Hongkongers in a 17.4-million-token corpus containing 30,279 articles published between 1998 and 2019 by the South China Morning Post, a leading English-language newspaper in Hong Kong. By comparing the collocational behaviour of the noun lemmas mainlander and (...) Hongkonger, the study identifies the topoi, or stereotypical characterizations, associated with the two groups. The analysis demonstrates the way in which the ‘othering’ of or sometimes discrimination against mainland migrants/visitors has served as part of the process through which the distinctive ‘Hongkongers’ identity’ is pronounced after the 1997-handover in Hong Kong’s English language newspaper of record. (shrink)

Does the seller of a house have to tell the buyer that the water is turned off twelve hours a day? Does the buyer of a great quantity of tobacco have to inform the seller that the military blockade of the local port, which had depressed tobacco sales and lowered prices, is about to end? Courts say yes in the first case, no in the second. How can we understand the difference in judgments? And what does it say about whether (...) the psychiatrist should disclose to his patient's girlfriend that the patient wants to kill her? Kim Lane Scheppele answers the question, Which secrets are legal secrets and what makes them so? She challenges the economic theory of law, which argues that judges decide cases in ways that maximize efficiency, and she shows that judges use equality as an important principle in their decisions. In the course of thinking about secrets, Scheppele also explores broader questions about judicial reasoning--how judges find meaning in legal texts and how they infuse every fact summary with the values of their legal culture. Finally, the specific insights about secrecy are shown to be consistent with a general moral theory of law that indicates what the content of law should be if the law is to be legitimate, a theory that sees legal justification as the opportunity to attract consent. This is more than a book about secrets. It is also a book about the limits of an economic view of law. Ultimately, it is a work in constructive legal theory, one that draws on moral philosophy, sociology, economics, and political theory to develop a new view of legal interpretation and legal morality. (shrink)

At the International Legal Ethics Conference IV held at Stanford Law School between 15 and 17 July 2010, one of the two opening plenary sessions consisted of a panel who debated the proposition that legal ethics should be mandatory in legal education. The panel included leading legal ethics academics from jurisdictions around the world—both those where legal ethics is a compulsory part of the law degree and those where it is not. It comprised Professors Andrew Boon, Brent Cotter, Christine Parker, (...) Stephen L Pepper and Richard Wu, and was organised and chaired by Professor Kim Economides. This is an edited version of the panel's discussion. It provides a useful summary of the state of legal ethics teaching in the jurisdictions represented as well as a marshalling of the arguments for and against legal ethics as a required course in the university law degree. (shrink)

Although informed consent is important in clinical research, questions persist regarding when it is necessary, what it requires, and how it should be obtained. The standard view in research ethics is that the function of informed consent is to respect individual autonomy. However, consent processes are multidimensional and serve other ethical functions as well. These functions deserve particular attention when barriers to consent exist. We argue that consent serves seven ethically important and conceptually distinct functions. The first four functions pertain (...) principally to individual participants: (1) providing transparency; (2) allowing control and authorization; (3) promoting concordance with participants' values; and (4) protecting and promoting welfare interests. Three other functions are systemic or policy focused: (5) promoting trust; (6) satisfying regulatory requirements; and (7) promoting integrity in research. Reframing consent around these functions can guide approaches to consent that are context sensitive and that maximize achievable goals. (shrink)

Most contemporary theories of action maintain that there are basic actions. A basic action is something that one does intentionally without doing anything else intentionally as means to that end. Most contemporary theories of action also maintain that there are non-basic actions that are mistakes in performance, where a mistake in performance is a case of mucking up what one meant to do, without the failure being the result of prevention or abnormal interference. But most contemporary theories of action deny (...) that there are basic mistakes in performance: stretches of activity that would be basic actions were they to succeed, but are in fact mistakes in performance. I argue that we have reason to think that there are basic mistakes in performance, and if there are, then we must give up a key commitment common to much contemporary action theory. The commitment is that every particular imperfect expression of the will is grounded in some particular perfect expression of the will. Giving up this commitment has important metaphysical consequences for how we think of the will as a power of agency, and implies that causal deviance perhaps isn’t the main problem that causal theorists of action ought to worry about. (shrink)