Boundary Images investigates the political, material, and visual work that images do to cross and blur the boundaries between the technological and biological and between humans, machines, and nature. Exploring the limits of the visual and beyond what can be seen, Boundary Images posits these boundaries as starting points for the production of new and radically different ways of knowing about the world.

The is a reading of Hegel's chapter on teleology in the Science of Logic. It argues that inadequacies in the intentional model of teleology that dominated both pre-Kantian and Kantian thought about teleology force us to recognize a much more Aristotelian conception of natural teleology that must be presupposed to make sense of the teleology of intentions.

A brief "book note" on James O'Shea's "Wilfrid Sellars".

The ten essays in this collection were written to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the lectures which became Wilfrid Sellars's Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, one of the crowning achievements of 20th-century analytic philosophy. Both appreciative and critical of Sellars's accomplishment, they engage with his treatment of crucial issues in metaphysics and epistemology. The topics include the standing of empiricism, Sellars's complex treatment of perception, his dissatisfaction with both foundationalist and coherentist epistemologies, his commitment to realism, and the status (...) of the normative. The volume shows how vibrant Sellarsian philosophy remains in the 21st century. (shrink)

This paper shows that the resources mobilized by recent arguments against individualism in the philosophy of mind also suffice to construct a good argument against a Humean-style skepticism about our knowledge of extra-mental reality. The argument constructed, however, will not suffice to lay to rest the attacks of a truly global skeptic who rejects the idea that we usually know what our occurrent mental states are.

In _Wild Blue Media_, Melody Jue destabilizes terrestrial-based ways of knowing and reorients our perception of the world by considering the ocean itself as a media environment—a place where the weight and opacity of seawater transforms how information is created, stored, transmitted, and perceived. By recentering media theory on and under the sea, Jue calls attention to the differences between perceptual environments and how we think within and through them as embodied observers. In doing so, she provides media studies (...) with alternatives to familiar theoretical frameworks, thereby challenging scholars to navigate unfamiliar oceanic conditions of orientation, materiality, and saturation. Jue not only examines media about the ocean—science fiction narratives, documentary films, ocean data visualizations, animal communication methods, and underwater art—but reexamines media _through_ the ocean, submerging media theory underwater to estrange it from terrestrial habits of perception while reframing our understanding of mediation, objectivity, and metaphor. (shrink)

To what extent do we pay attention to the text and images that cover our hospital walls and do we offer any critique either as professionals or service users? In the past we might have expected to see functional or helpful instructions about where to go (or not to go) and in more well‐endowed buildings, perhaps we would see some works of art, sculpture, stained glass even, with the intention to encourage, distract or even forewarn us. However, it is now (...) common in UK hospitals, for wall space to be used as a portal for a range of institutional political messages, that convey information about everything from its own values, behaviours to advertisements for products and services to requirements for rule following. Michel Foucault's ideas about Heterotopic space can help us to see that hospitals tend to fall (awkwardly) between being a public and personal health care space, and this is a possible explanation for the confused material culture and messages that are shared there. This paper draws on ethnographic methods to reflect on personal experience in order to offer a critique of the contemporary political discourse which has become 'literally' written onto our hospital walls. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars has been called "the most profound and systematic epistemological thinker of the twentieth century". He was in many respects ahead of his time, and many of his innovations have become widely acknowledged, for example, his attack on the "myth of the given", his functionalist treatment of intentional states, his proposal that psychological concepts are like theoretical concepts, and his suggestion that attributions of knowledge locate the knower "in the logical space of reasons". However, while many philosophers have begun (...) to acknowledge Sellars's inspiration in their work, their interpretation of his thought has not always been the most accurate. His writings are difficult. Individually, his essays are complex and sometimes rely on doctrines and arguments he put forward elsewhere. Each of his articles is deepened and strengthened by seeing it in its systematic context, but he never wrote a unified exposition of his system, which therefore has to be pieced together from numerous disparate sources. Willem deVries addresses these difficulties specifically and provides a careful reading and remarkable overview of Sellars's systematic philosophy that will become the standard point of reference for all philosophers seeking to understand Sellars's hugely significant body of work. (shrink)

At the end of 2015‘s The Witch, isolated and beaten protagonist, Thomasin, ultimately rejects her puritanical upbringing to become a witch, accepting the invitation of the Devil (in the guise of the family’s goat Black Philip). This essay will discuss Thomasin’s sexual deliverance in terms of her turning away from the authoritarian ‘Law of the Father’ towards female liberation that comes in the form of the Witch. Thomasin transitions from girl to woman, but does not want to do so in (...) the restrictive Puritan fashion where patriarchy and oppression rules. She becomes a woman by embracing her sexuality in the figure of the witch and Black Philip as the figure of lust helping her become free. Western folklore posits the goat as a symbol of fertility, independence, and lust; Black Philip is a figure who represents a connection to wild desires. Therefore, Black Philip becomes not only a physical representation of the devil, but also a symbolic representation of Thomasin’s sexual desire. Drawing on theories of the monstrous-feminine (Creed, Kristeva, Arnold), the symbolism of folklore and Freud’s Electra complex, this work argues that, despite its message of feminine empowerment, The Witch cannot fully reject or escape patriarchal discourse. (shrink)

A central goal of typological research is to characterize linguistic features in terms of both their functional role and their fit to social and cognitive systems. One long-standing puzzle concerns why certain languages employ grammatical gender. In an information theoretic analysis of German noun classification, Dye, Milin, Futrell, and Ramscar enumerated a number of important processing advantages gender confers. Yet this raises a further puzzle: If gender systems are so beneficial to processing, what does this mean for languages that make (...) do without them? Here, we compare the communicative function of gender marking in German to that of prenominal adjectives in English, finding that despite their differences, both systems act to efficiently smooth information over discourse, making nouns more equally predictable in context. We examine why evolutionary pressures may favor one system over another and discuss the implications for compositional accounts of meaning and Gricean principles of communication. (shrink)

In this chapter, we will discuss three key ethical issues related to data collected in stakeholder-engaged research: (1) data ownership, (2) deciding how data are used, and (3) deciding what is published. We begin with the legal and regulatory policies of universities and sponsors around data ownership and data sharing. We then discuss the role of principal investigator(s) in a study and/or partnership leaders as data stewards for the development and implementation of partnership practices for data decision-making. We examine the (...) implications of funding and timing since many decisions related to data use and sharing often happen after the project has ended. Finally, we discuss the roles and responsibilities of different stakeholders (e.g., funder, researcher, and nonacademic partner) and offer lessons to be learned and resources for partnerships. (shrink)

A growing body of evidence suggests that emotional states under which individuals perform decision-making tasks modulate performance. Studies have mainly reported that negative emotions can differe...

A review of Lycan's Book "Consciousness".

In the following dialogue between TT - a foundationalist - and WdeV - a Sellarsian, we offer our differing assessments of the principle for observational knowledge proposed in Wilfrid Sellars's 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind'. Sellars writes: 'For a Konstatierung "This is green" to "express observational knowledge", not only must it be a symptom or sign of the presence of a green object in standard conditions, but the perceiver must know that tokens of "This is green" are symptoms of (...) the presence of green objects in conditions which are standard for visual perception.' In the ensuing dialogue, TT argues that it sets the bar too high when knowledge about perceptual conditions is required for ordinary observational knowledge - that young children, for example, are implausibly excluded as knowers given Sellars's principle. WdeV defends Sellars's metaknowledge requirement against these charges. Results from developmental psychology are surveyed for what they show about the actual capabilities of young children. The implications of these results for the success of Sellars's principle are debated. (shrink)

In recent years, alternative teacher preparation programmes are globally emerging to address teacher quality in ‘hard-to-staff’ schools. These programmes commonly attract graduates from prestigious...

Background:At a time when British nursing has been under scrutiny for an apparent lack of compassion in education and practice, this paper based offers a perspective on the notions of vocation and altruism in nursing.Objectives:To understand the vocational and altruistic motivations of nurses through the application of Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of ‘symbolic capital’, ‘field’ and ‘habitus’ through a long interview with nurse respondents.Research design:A reflexive qualitative study was undertaken using the long interview. A thematic analysis of the data, using a (...) qualitative data software package for analysis, was undertaken. The ideas of Pierre Bourdieu (Habitus, Capital and Field) were used to analyse and explain the content of community nurses' ‘talk’.Participants:Twelve Community Nurses working in a variety of local primary care settings volunteered to participate in the study. It was a self-selecting convenience sample of nurses responding to an invitation to be interviewed.Research context:A study in support of a doctoral thesis conducted within NHS primary care settings with registered nurses.Ethical considerations:The key considerations for this study were to be mindful of the possibility of emotional harm or distress being caused to the respondents during the retelling of their experiences. It was also essential to ensure that the locations or names of patients or staff (if discussed) were anonymised. Ethical approval was sought and granted by both the Local NHS Primary Care and the University Ethics committees before the study commenced.Findings:The nurse respondents had highly individual and at times contradictory views on their motivations to nurse including their views on vocation and altruism in nursing careers.Discussion:Bourdieu's ideas apply well to the nursing context and provided a useful theoretical framework to explore the social and cultural influences on nursing careers. Gender is important consideration in all aspects of nursing but class and educational experience is an important dimension in the stories nurses tell.Conclusion:The culturally determined experiences of these nurses in practice offer an authentic and realistic insight into the complex motives and predispositions of community nurses. This paper argues that nurse motivations whether vocational or altruistic, are better understood as culturally, rather than spiritually, driven. (shrink)

Overview of Wilfrid Sellars's philosophy.

Climate cuisine is about eating the future you want into being. In this article, I examine how seaweed recipes can be forms of climate fiction through the way that the reader is invited to participate in sustainable foodways. I examine several popularizations of seaweed aquaculture that imagine practices of eating and growing seaweeds. Their formal similarities center on participation: they include the direct address of the reader through the second person voice, and position themselves as instructional models. Bren Smith’s Eat (...) Like a Fish (Smith, Eat like a fish: My adventures as a fisherman turned restorative ocean farmer, Penguin, 2019) interpellates the reader as eater, invited to cultivate eating habits that, on a societal scale, would produce a more materially sustainable relation with the planet. The vignette “Ghost Bar,” which appears in Holly Jean Buck’s After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration (Buck, After geoengineering: Climate tragedy, repair, and restoration, Verso, 2019), sensorily emplaces the reader in a future seaweed farm as a window into the kinds of livelihoods and forms of work that could be part of mitigating global warming. I trace the similarities between Smith's recipes and Buck’s interpellation of a reader, both of which use the second-person mode addressing an unmarked “you,” inviting this “you” to imagine and actualize the future dish or future scenario they sketch. While these texts have their own limitations at the level of the social imagination, such popularizations of seaweed aquaculture model an important way of understanding the intimacies of climate fiction and recipes. Recipes not only popularize the sustainable eating of seaweeds, but actively constitute a form of climate fiction through their intention to actualize more seaweedy futures. (shrink)

An interpretation of Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit showing its continued relevance to contemporary issues in the philosophy of mind.

This is a careful explication of and commentary on Wilfrid Sellars's classic essay "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" [EPM]. It is appropriate for upper-level undergraduates and beyond. The full text of EPM is included in the volume.

This study investigates the procedural learning, retention, and reactivation of temporal sensorimotor sequences in children with and without developmental coordination disorder. Twenty typically-developing children and 12 children with DCD took part in this study. The children were required to tap on a keyboard, synchronizing with auditory or visual stimuli presented as an isochronous temporal sequence, and practice non-isochronous temporal sequences to memorize them. Immediate and delayed retention of the audio-motor and visuo-motor non-isochronous sequences were tested by removing auditory or visual (...) stimuli immediately after practice and after a delay of 2 h. A reactivation test involved reintroducing the auditory and visual stimuli after the delayed recall. Data were computed via circular analyses to obtain asynchrony, the stability of synchronization and errors. Firstly, an overall deficit in synchronization with both auditory and visual isochronous stimuli was observed in DCD children compared to TD children. During practice, further improvements were found for the audio-motor non-isochronous sequence compared to the visuo-motor non-isochronous sequence in both TD children and children with DCD. However, a drastic increase in errors occurred in children with DCD during immediate retention as soon as the auditory stimuli were removed. Reintroducing auditory stimuli decreased errors in the audio-motor sequence for children with DCD. Such changes were not seen for the visuo-motor non-isochronous sequence, which was equally learned, retained and reactivated in DCD and TD children. All these results suggest that TD children benefit from both auditory and visual stimuli to memorize the sequence, whereas children with DCD seem to present a deficit in integrating an audio-motor sequence in their memory. The immediate effect of reactivation suggests a specific dependency on auditory information in DCD. Contrary to the audio-motor sequence, the visuo-motor sequence was both learned and retained in children with DCD. This suggests that visual stimuli could be the best information for memorizing a temporal sequence in DCD. All these results are discussed in terms of a specific audio-motor coupling deficit in DCD. (shrink)

A dialogue between someone who finds Sellars's Rylean myth in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" quite implausible and another who defends it.

An analysis of Hegel's chapter on teleology in the Science of Logic. Hegel argues that the 'intentional model' of teleology assumed by Kant actually presupposes a natural or organic teleology more like along Aristotelian lines.

Lying and deceit are instruments of power, used by social actors in the pursuit of their practices as they seek to maintain social order. All social actors, nurses included, have deceit and dishonesty within their repertoire of practice. Much of this is benign, well intentioned and a function of being sociable and necessary in the pursuit of social order in the healthcare environment. Lying and deceit from a sociological point of view, is a reflection of the different modes of domination (...) that exist within a social space. French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu theorized about the way that symbolic power works within social space. The social structures and the agency of individual actors moving within it are interrelated and interdependent. Bourdieu's ideas will be used to theorize about real clinical experiences where acts of deceit can be identified and a case example will be presented. Nurses are actors in the social space of clinical care, and their world is complex, challenging, and often fraught with the contradictory demands and choices that reflect and influence their behaviours. An exploration of lying and deceit in nursing as an instrument in the modes of domination that persist enables us to challenge some of the assumptions that are made about the motives that cause or tempt nurses to lie as well as to understand the way on which they are sometimes lied to, according to the acts of domination that exist in the field. Lying or acting dishonestly is a powerful act that is intent on retaining stability and social order and could be seen to be a justification of lying and deceit. However, we need to pause and consider, in whose interests are we striving to create social order? Is it in the end about the comfort of patients or for the comfort of professionals? (shrink)

Robert B. Brandom’s From Empiricism to Expressivism ranges widely over fundamental issues in metaphysics, with occasional forays into epistemology as well. The centerpiece is what Brandom calls ‘the Kant-Sellars thesis about modality’. This is ‘[t]he claim that in being able to use ordinary empirical descriptive vocabulary, one already knows how to do everything that one needs to know how to do, in principle, to use alethic modal vocabulary – in particular subjunctive conditionals’. Despite claiming descent from Sellars, Brandom defends here (...) a version of modal realism and tries hard to limit Sellarsian nominalism, all in the service of elaborating Brandom’s own version of pragmatism. The range of issues Brandom addresses defies adequate consideration in a critical notice, so I confine myself here to a single issue: What is.. (shrink)

Advanced Cell Technology's Ethics Advisory Board has been called window dressing for a corporate marketing plan. But the scientists and managers have paid attention, and the lawyers have gone along.

this essay argues that John McDowell's argument that sensations are a useless 'fifth wheel' in Wilfrid Sellars' philosophy of experience fails.

Though Wilfrid Sellars portrayed himself as a latter-day Kantian, I argue here that he was at least as much a Hegelian. Several themes Sellars shares with Hegel are investigated: the sociality and normativity of the intentional, categorial change, the rejection of the given, and especially their denial of an unknowable thing-in-itself. They are also united by an emphasis on the unity of things—the belief that things do ‘‘hang together.’’ Hegel’s unity is idealist; Sellars’ is physicalist; the differences are substantial, but (...) so are the resonances. (shrink)

Though Wilfrid Sellars portrayed himself as a latter-day Kantian, I argue here that he was at least as much a Hegelian. Several themes Sellars shares with Hegel are investigated: the sociality and normativity of the intentional, categorial change, the rejection of the given, and especially their denial of an unknowable thing-in-itself. They are also united by an emphasis on the unity of things—the belief that things do “hang together.” Hegel’s unity is idealist; Sellars’ is physicalist; the differences are substantial, but (...) so are the resonances. (shrink)

Sellars claims completeness for both the “manifest” and the “scientific images” in a way that tempts one to assume that they are independent of each other, while, in fact, they must share at least one common element: the language of individual and community intentions. I argue that this significantly muddies the waters concerning his claim of ontological primacy for the scientific image, though not in favor of the ontological primacy of the manifest image. The lesson I draw is that we (...) need to reassess the aims of ontology. (shrink)

Robert Brandom makes several mistakes in his discussion of Sellars's "Two-Ply" account of observation. Brandom does not recognize the difference in "level" between observation reports concerning physical objects and 'looks'-statements. He also denies that 'looks'-statements are reports or even make claims. They then demonstrate a more correct reading of Sellars on 'looks'-statements.