In this essay, I argue for a new analysis of Porphyry’s argument for justice in On abstinence. I aim to show that (i) in addition to being an inner order of soul, justice is attributed to external actions and (ii) justice of actions consists in refraining from harming harmless living creatures, including animals and plants. The relevant harm, I argue, consists in taking the lives of living creatures and taking products from them by force or without care. I contend (...) that Porphyry extends moral concern for others to all living creatures, but not merely on the basis of animal suffering. Finally, I argue that that the hierarchy of godlikeness in On abstinence does not support the subordination of moral concern for animals and plants to higher virtues of purity and theory. (shrink)

In book 3 of On Abstinence from Animal Food, Porphyry is traditionally taken to argue that animals are rational and that it is, therefore, unjust to kill them for food. Since the vast majority of scholars endorse this interpretation, I call it ‘the consensus interpretation’. Yet, strangely enough, elsewhere in his corpus Porphyry claims that the non-human animals are irrational. Jonathan Barnes notices this discrepancy and suggests that an appeal to the distinction between specific and non-specific predication can resolve (...) the problem. This paper explains Barnes’ solution, but argues that it must ultimately be rejected. It concludes with a brief survey of other approaches to the problem, and with an outline of the proposed solution, in which the consensus interpretation of On Abstinence is rejected in favour of a dialectical reading of Book 3. Porphyry, this piece suggests, may not have believed that animals were rational after all. (shrink)

Clinical studies as well as hundreds of case reports have indicated that Yan Xin Life Science Technology has enabled human participants to live a normal life with little or no food intake for prolonged periods—a state referred to as bigu. Bigu is described in historical records as “taking in qi to avoid food,” and is regarded as a special technique to achieve a long and healthy life. In this study, experiments were designed to study whether cells in vitro can survive (...) without commonly acknowledged essential nutrients after receiving external qi treatments from Dr. Yan Xin, a chief physician and a renowned life scientist. Results reported here indicate that mouse hybridoma cells can survive in Dulbeco’s modified Eagles medium without serum or in phosphate-buffered saline buffer without other nutrient ingredients after qi treatment. These results are the first evidence that a cellular equivalent of the human bigu phenomenon or cellular bigu phenomenon may occur. (shrink)

Abstinence from meat has been a subject of much controversy and friction from the dawn of Christian history. Relatively widespread in the early Church, it was praised when it formed part of a temporary ascetic fasting regimen, but condemned if it amounted to a permanent rejection of animal flesh, as it would be associated with heretical ideas found in various dissident groups, gnostic sects, and pagan philosophical schools. Nevertheless, several patristic authors put forth a number of compelling arguments in (...) defense of a meatless diet, all of which would be revisited by future generations of Christian thinkers. Laying the emphasis upon the ethical incentives for abstaining from animal flesh, as well as upon enduring ambivalent attitudes toward vegetarian dietary practices, this article offers a brief overview of abstinence from meat throughout Christian history. (shrink)

My main aim in this paper is to show that influential antireductionist arguments such as Fodor's, Kitcher's, and Dupré's state stronger conclusions than they actually succeed in establishing. By putting to the fore the role of metaphysical presuppositions in these arguments, I argue that they are convincing only as 'temporally qualified argument', and not as 'generally valid ones'. I also challenge the validity of the strategy consisting in drawing metaphysical lessons from the failure of reductionist programmes. What most of these (...) antireductionist standpoints have in common is a pretension to methodological imports. I conclude by explaining why, in order to remain relevant for scientific practice, antireductionist arguments should stay clear of metaphysics, for the latter, I argue, does not mix well with a taste for methodological prescriptions. (shrink)

Meat abstinence, as is practiced in some religions, has a positive impact on reducing the damages that the process of meat production inflicts on the environment. The Ethiopian Orthodox Christians observe fasting by abstaining from meat for more than half a year, and this seems to do the environment and economy some good. Religion has been playing a regulatory role between ever-increasing meat demands and the country’s fast-growing meat and live animal exports. The article concludes that individuals' tendency to (...) drift from religious life practices, coupled with a growing middle class that can afford to buy meat regularly, and the country’s need to maximize foreign currency through meat and livestock exportation, is likely to see Ethiopia introduce intensive livestock production in the not too distant future, to meet domestic meat demands and increase livestock export earnings. (shrink)

This paper uses the controversy surrounding abstinence-only education to depict the current struggle between US government policy and science. The paper demonstrates the way in which this fight over science has become a communications battle and how the internet has become the vehicle through which ideology is able to masquerade as science. In addition, this paper identifies the damage to public health programs, and the ethical problems of providing selected information and misinformation to teenagers. Part of the resolution may (...) be for scientists to become better communicators to the public about scientific principles and findings. If scientists are interested in improving sexuality education, we need to rely on science but may find it more advantageous to reframe our arguments around themes that perhaps have greater cultural salience. (shrink)

In our previous article on the question whether heroin addicts are able to give informed consent voluntarily to research on heroin-assisted treatment, we criticized the ongoing bioethical discussion of a flawed conceptualization of heroin addicts' options. As a participant in this discussion, Edmund Henden defends the conceptualization as sufficient for determining whether heroin addicts are able to give informed consent to the research on heroin-assisted treatment voluntarily. This discussion on research on heroin-assisted treatment seems to go astray in several respects. (...) In his reply to our article Henden maintains some of the biases, such as the necessity of abstinence in recovery, that seem to prevail in addiction research on a more general level as well. These biases run the danger of having implausible ethical implications on stakeholders in addiction research and treatment. In our reply to him, we will further clarify and discuss the importance of describing the relevant issues in plausible terms that do justice to the realities of the cases of informed consent in research on heroin-assisted treatment and also raise a wider issue of the ethics of wording as well as of the narrow scope, or ‘tunnel vision’, in addiction research as currently conducted. (shrink)

Rather than proclaiming the "death of God," in the fashion of Nietzsche's madman, F. LeRon Shults proudly proclaims the "birth of God" in his incendiary, radically iconoclastic book Theology after the Birth of God. Shults argues, drawing on the multidisciplinary findings of the biocultural study of religion, that the commonplace belief in supernatural agents is the result of a variety of evolved cognitive and coalitional mechanisms that cause human beings to overdetect agency and that contribute to in-group cohesion—traits that would (...) have been selected because they aided the survival of early hominids living in hunter-gatherer societies, but that are maladaptive in our contemporary context. In his most recent book... (shrink)

The abstinence approach to sex education remains influential despite its demonstrated ineffectiveness. One bill forbids the “promotion” of “gateway sexual activity,” while requiring outright condemnation of “non-abstinence,” defined so loosely as to plausibly include handholding. Bioethics seldom (if ever) contributes to sex-ed debates, yet exploring the pivotal role of medical discourse reveals the need for bioethical intervention. Sex-ed debates revolve around a theory of human flourishing based on heteronormative temporality, a developmental teleology ensuring the transmission of various supposed (...) social goods through heterosexual marriage (Halberstam, 2005). Heteronormative temporality also constitutes a moralized discourse in which the values of health and presumed certainties of medicine serve to justify conservative religious dictates that otherwise would appear controversial as the basis for public policy. Overall, this analysis explores how moralized medical discourses compound existing injustices, while suggesting bioethics’ potential contributions to moral and political analysis of sex-ed policies. (shrink)

Heyman's model, paradoxically, predicts that whereas a maximizing approach to drug choice will prevent escalation of drug use it will never yield complete abstinence. We suggest an alternative model that overcomes this difficulty by focusing on changes in drug tolerance. A small modification allows maximization to predict either abstinence or moderation (e.g., social drinking).

A strength of liberal political institutions is their ability to accommodate pluralism, both allowing divergent comprehensive doctrines as well as constructing the common ground necessary for diverse people to live together. A pressing question is how far such pluralism extends. Which comprehensive doctrines are simply beyond the pale and need not be accommodated by a political consensus? Rawls attempted to keep the boundaries of reasonable disagreement quite broad by infamously denying that political liberalism need make reference to the concept of (...) truth, a claim that has been criticized by Joseph Raz, Joshua Cohen, and David Estlund. In this paper, we argue that these criticisms fail due to the fact that political liberalism can remain non-committal on the nature of truth, leaving the concept of truth in the domain of comprehensive doctrines while still avoiding the issues raised by Raz, Cohen, and Estlund. Further substantiating this point is the fact that Rawls would, and should, include parties in the overlapping consensus whose views on truth may be incoherent. Once it is seen that political liberalism allows such incoherence to reasonable parties, it is clear that the inclusion of truth and the requirement of coherence urged by Raz, Cohen, and Estlund requires more of reasonable people than is necessary for a political consensus. (shrink)

The sexual revolution that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s is one of the most profound social changes during the second half of the twentieth century in America. Before the revolution, there existed a norm proscribing premarital sex (PS norm); premarital sex was not accepted. After the sexual revolution, the PS norm no longer existed; premarital sex became accepted. In the literature on how premarital sex became accepted, little attention is given to the institutional change that transpired—the (...) collapse of a sexual norm. This study specifies one micro-mechanism of this social change. Specifically, adopting methodological individualism and the prisoner's dilemma game, I develop a theory that explains how a technological innovation for contraception triggered a change in individuals' perception of premarital sex, which led to their behavioral change. As a result, premarital sex became accepted, and the norm proscribing premarital sex collapsed. I use General Social Survey data to test the hypothesized micro-mechanism of the institutional change. The empirical analysis supports the hypothesis derived from the theory. Based on the above analyses, I discuss two alternative explanations and the issue of teenage pregnancy. (shrink)

In recent years, many studies have examined conservative Christian responses to shifting societal attitudes about sexuality. In this article we examine official discourse from the LDS Church found in General Conference talks and the official adult magazine of the Church, Ensign, to better understand how leaders of the religion have taught the members to abstain from the use of pornography. Using a grounded-theory approach, we noted a pattern to the lessons that included four elements: avoiding dangerous associations, taking personal responsibility, (...) maintaining inner purity, and seeking spiritual treatment. This study extends previous research by examining how Mormon leaders taught their followers to interpret and protect themselves from pornography. As such, our analysis demonstrates the elaboration of religious teachings that may facilitate the negative reactions to pornography researchers have observed in survey and outcome-based research on members of conservative religions. (shrink)

Socrates believes that living well is primarily an intellectual undertaking: we live well if we think correctly. To intellectualists, one might think, the body and activities related to it are of little interest. Yet Socrates has much to say about food, eating, and cookery. This paper examines Socrates’ criticism of ‘feeding on opson’ (opsophagia) in Xenophon’s Memorabilia and of opson cookery (opsopoiia) in Plato’s Gorgias. I argue that if we consider the specific cultural meaning of eating opson, we can see (...) that Socrates takes a nuanced stance on food and cookery: he recommends careful consumption and skillful production, not austerity or abstinence. This nuance in Socrates’ discussion of food changes our interpretation of Socrates’ criticism of rhetoric in the Gorgias: in comparing rhetoricians to opson chefs—not to pastry chefs, as many have assumed—Socrates evokes the dangers of indulging in speeches while acknowledging their necessity for Athenian public life. (shrink)

Cicero's On the Republic and On the Laws are his major works of political philosophy. They offer his fullest treatment of fundamental political questions: Why should educated people have any concern for politics? Is the best form of government simple, or is it a combination of elements from such simple forms as monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy? Can politics be free of injustice? The two works also help us to think about natural law, which many people have considered since ancient times (...) to provide a foundation of unchanging, universal principles of justice. On the Republic features a defense of politics against those who advocated abstinence from public affairs. It defends a mixed constitution, the actual arrangement of offices in the Roman Republic, against simple forms of government. The Republic also supplies material for students of Roman history—as does On the Laws. The Laws, moreover, presents the results of Cicero's reflections as to how the republic needed to change in order not only to survive but also to promote justice David Fott’s vigorous yet elegant English translation is faithful to the originals. It is the first to appear since publication of the latest critical edition of the Latin texts. This book contains an introduction that both places Cicero in his historical context and explicates the timeless philosophical issues that he treats. The volume also provides a chronology of Cicero’s life, outlines of the two works, and indexes of personal names and important terms. (shrink)

The issue of sexual relations between spouses is a major cause of broken homes in Nigeria and Christian couples are not an exception. People believe that a large percentage of broken homes have the root of their problem traced to sex. The preponderance of broken homes notwithstanding, most studies in this area have been from the socio-scientific and medical cum psychological point of view and many more have focused on teenagers and young people to the exclusion of married couples that (...) need healing in this regard. This article is aimed at bringing out biblical instruction concerning the issue of sex that could help to restore peace to many homes at the verge of breaking down. The focal passage is 1 Corinthians 7:1–5, which was Paul’s instructions to the Corinthian church when they faced a similar problem. This article is an exegetical analysis of the passage and is read rhetorically with the Nigerian situation in mind. It concludes that sex must be enjoyed within the ambits of marriage and within this ambit, the only reason for abstinence is mutual agreement for the purpose of prayer.Contribution: The article upholds gender equality in initiating and enjoying sex and rejects looking down on women who request sex. It also calls for the eradication of female genital mutilation, a tradition based on making women not enjoy sex. (shrink)

Throughout the 1980s, the American right wing attempted to control the field of social politics and social policy through a rhetoric of `family'. In response, the left, including much of the lesbian and gay movement, abandoned an early, theorized antipathy to family, attempting to recapture the political field with ideas like `alternative families' and `families we chose'. These moves do not sufficiently account for the hidden glue that binds bodies to politics, national or anti-national. The glue, or, as Benedict Anderson (...) calls it, `political love' is no longer an affect to be rejected but a `feeling' to be embraced. Examining the case of sexual abstinence in early right-wing AIDS discourse and in current websites, this article suggests that micro-politics of love are inextricable from macro-politics of nationalism. (shrink)

“Black box argument” is a metaphor for modular components of argumentative discussion that are, within a particular discussion, not open to expansion. In public policy debate such as the controversy over abstinence-only sex education, scientific conclusions enter the discourse as black boxes consisting of a result returned from an external and largely impenetrable process. In one way of looking at black box arguments, there is nothing fundamentally new for the argumentation theorist: A black box argument is very like any (...) other appeal to authority, and what might be said about any particular form of black box will turn out to be a particularized version of what might be said about evaluating arguments based on authority. But in another way of looking at black box arguments, they are a constantly evolving technology for coming to conclusions and making these conclusions broadly acceptable. Black boxes are to argumentation what material inventions are to engineering and related sciences. They are anchored in and constrained by fundamental natural processes, but they are also new things that require theoretical explication and practical assessment. (shrink)

In Book 3 of 'On Abstinence from Animal Food', Porphyry is traditionally taken to be arguing in favour of the belief that animals are rational. However, elsewhere in his corpus, he endorses the opposite view, declaring that man differs from other mortal animals because he is rational and they are irrational. Jonathan Barnes offers a way of understanding Porphyry’s logical theory which is intended to make it consistent with the traditional interpretation of 'On Abstinence'. He suggests that the (...) same predicate can be related to different subjects in different ways. Porphyry’s claim that man differs from other mortal animals with respect to the predicate ‘rational’, is best understood to mean that whereas ‘rational’ is specifically predicated of man, it is non-specifically predicated of animals. This explains how they differ from man with respect to this predicate, without failing to be rational. This paper argues that there are reasons for rejecting Barnes’ interpretation. Barnes must maintain, for example, that animals possess the apparently incompatible properties of being specifically irrational and non-specifically rational simultaneously. Since Barnes fails to resolve the conflict, Porphyry’s claims that animals are irrational in his logical works pose a significant problem for the traditional interpretation of 'On Abstinence'. (shrink)

The theory about human desire is one important component in early Confucian theory of humanity. It is worth our attention that Pre-Qin Confucians never put human desire at the absolute opposite position to the Heavenly Principle, as their successors do. Contrarily, they generally believe that the desire is the inseparable property of normal human nature, and making efforts to satisfy the human desire is reasonable. Only in terms of reducing the conflicts between human desire and the limited resources they advocate (...) a moderate abstinence. [key words] Pre-Qin Confucianism; the theory of human nature; human nature is good; human desire. (shrink)

On the Cave of the Nymphs, an allegorical exegesis of Homer’s description of the cave of the nymphs at Odyssey 13.102-112, a passage quoted in full at the beginning of the treatise after the briefest possible indication of the project on which Porphyry is embarking, has been generally given little attention in discussions of Neoplatonic philosophy, as it is deemed to be of little importance for establishing Porphyrian doctrine. However, the treatise contains significant philosophical thoughts on the relationship between the (...) soul and body, embodiment, demonology, and the concept of the salvation of the soul, which are compatible with his other works, especially _On Abstinence from Killing Animals_ and _Pathways to the Intelligible_. The concept of the salvation of the soul is found in Porphyry’s identification of the goddess Athena with _phronesis_, along with the olive tree, while Odysseus represents the soul descending into genesis, but will return back to his fatherland. In this context, this paper will explore the role and meaning of _phronesis_, namely the goddess Athena, in the process of the soul’s journey towards the intelligible realm and show the relevance of the Neoplatonic doctrine of virtues, particularly the cathartic virtues, in _Sententia_ 32 to Porphyry’s reading of Homer’s image of Odysseus under guidance of the goddess Athena. _Phronesis_ inspires the soul to incline towards the level of Intellect that is, away from damaging influences of the body to which the soul is enslaved and which confuses it with desires, passions, fears and illusory impressions, and prevents it from attaining the intelligible realm, whereas the body and its desires lead us to conflict and unjust behaviour in order to gain wealth, status, power, and pleasure. (shrink)

Sir—In their editorial, Hall, Carter & Morley [1] present an incorrect interpretation of my central argument. The point of my paper [2] is that there are solid reasons to suspect that the capacity of heroin addicts to consent to heroin therapy is compromised because of their addiction. As one medical commentator on my paper states, if active heroin addicts can give voluntary and competent consent to heroin therapy without any problems, then we need a new conceptualization of addiction: they are (...) not addicted, almost by definition [3]. Yet obviously there are problems and grey zones. The solution is to investigate the issue empirically in order to determine the extent of the problem. (As we have done for consent to research on depression and other mental illnesses.) Ultimately, the question can only be solved on a case by case basis, using standardized assessment tools adapted for this purpose. The MacArthur Competence Assessment Tool (MaCAT‐T) is the particular assessment tool I chose to discuss. [4] It is the most promising candidate available, and it has proved its merits in the areas of depression and schizophrenia. -/- At no point do I condemn heroin therapy and endorse an abstinence model of treatment, as the authors state. On the contrary, I note the success of heroin therapy and make suggestions about how to facilitate the consent process. Ironically, it may be Hall et al . who have oversimplified the issues. What we need here are empirical studies on the decisional capacity of heroin addicts to consent to heroin therapy. Only then will we be able to refute the naive view they have no ‘free will’, or say how much they have; but really my paper is not about ‘free will’ at all. This is a philosophical concept. The topic I chose to discuss is ‘decisional capacity’, also called ‘mental competence’. This is a clinical concept with complex legal and ethical associations that often vary across jurisdictions. My point was that although the Swiss Heroin Trials were approved in Europe, they probably would not be approved in Canada or the United States under existing regulations. Interested readers might want to consider the wide variety of reactions to my paper, published in the same issue [5]. Unfortunately, the editorial by Hall et al . does little to advance this debate. (shrink)

Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logics are used to model events with imprecise, incomplete, and uncertain information. Researchers have developed numerous methods and techniques to cope with fuzziness or uncertainty. This research intends to introduce the novel concepts of complex neutrosophic relations and its types based on the idea of complex neutrosophic sets. In addition, these concepts are supported by suitable examples. A CNR discusses the quality of a relationship using the degree of membership, the degree of abstinence, and the (...) degree of nonmembership. Each of these degrees is a complex number from the unit circle in a complex plane. The real part of complex-valued degrees represents the amplitude term, while the imaginary part represents the phase term. This property empowers CNRs to model multidimensional variables. Moreover, some interesting properties and useful results have also been proved. Furthermore, the practicality of the proposed concepts is verified by an application, which discusses the use of the proposed concepts in statistical decision-making. Additionally, a comparative analysis between the novel concepts of CNRs and the existing methods is carried out. (shrink)

Dorit Bar-On develops and defends a novel view of avowals and self-knowledge. Drawing on resources from the philosophy of language, the theory of action, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, she offers original and systematic answers to many long-standing questions concerning our ability to know our own minds. We are all very good at telling what states of mind we are in at a given moment. When it comes to our own present states of mind, what we say goes; an (...) avowal such as "I'm feeling so anxious" or "I'm thinking about my next trip to Paris," it is typically supposed, tells it like it is. But why is that? Why should what I say about my present mental states carry so much more weight than what others say about them? Why should avowals be more immune to criticism and correction than other claims we make? And if avowals are not based on any evidence or observation, how could they possibly express our knowledge of our own present mental states? Bar-On proposes a Neo-Expressivist view according to which an avowal is an act through which a person directly expresses, rather than merely reports, the very mental condition that the avowal ascribes. She argues that this expressivist idea, coupled with an adequate characterization of expression and a proper separation of the semantics of avowals from their pragmatics and epistemology, explains the special status we assign to avowals. As against many expressivists and their critics, she maintains that such an expressivist explanation is consistent with a non-deflationary view of self-knowledge and a robust realism about mental states. The view that emerges preserves many insights of the most prominent contributors to the subject, while offering a new perspective on our special relationship to our own minds. (shrink)

Shortly before the end of his life, Cornelius Castoriadis turned to radical political ecology, which he seemed to consider the only way to de-colonize the technicist, capitalist imaginary ( imaginaire), into which the totality of modern philosophy and praxis is, to use a Heideggerian concept, (heteronomously) being-thrown. Castoriadis’ critique of the capitalist imaginary, the imaginary of the unlimited extension of rational mastery, is in a state of eclectic affinity with the unsurpassed critique of the autonomous Technique by the French theologian (...) and sociologist Jacques Ellul. Ellul had highlighted the necessity of demythologizing the spirit of technicism since the 1940s, when he was working on the uncontrollability of modern technology, which in his work is depicted as the societal manifestation of the Ge-stell. The Weberian ideal type of formal rationality runs through the critique of both thinkers. For Ellul, technology, or technique, is intrinsically rational. However, when technique is in contact with social and cultural milieus which belong to a non-technical formation and organization, paradoxes and irrationalities are inevitable. In turn, Castoriadis emphasizes the irrationality and autonomy that characterize the modern sphere of techno-science, which leads, with mathematical precision, to the ecological, and also the anthropological, destruction of the Anthropos. Therein lies the central problem of modernity’s technology. Is there a way out? Castoriadis envisions the foundation of a true democracy, nowhere near theocratic, which, nonetheless, must learn to limit itself politically and technologically. Ellul, on the other hand, highlights the ethics of non-power, an essentially spiritual and idealistic attitude that Hans Jonas will adopt a few years later, talking about the heuristics of fear. (shrink)

The task of explaining language evolution is often presented by leading theorists in explicitly Gricean terms. After a critical evaluation, I present an alternative, non‐Gricean conceptualization of the task. I argue that, while it may be true that nonhuman animals, in contrast to language users, lack the ‘motive to share information’ understoodà laGrice, nonhuman animals nevertheless do express states of mind through complex nonlinguistic behavior. On a proper, non‐Gricean construal of expressive communication, this means that they show to their designated (...) audience (without intentionally telling)—and their designated audience recognizes (without rationally inferring)—both how things are in the world and how things are with them. Recognizing that our nonhuman predecessors were already proficient—though non‐Gricean—sharers of such information would free us to focus on the more tractable problem of explaining how linguistic expressive vehicles came to replace, augment, and transform the nonlinguistic expressive means to which nonhuman animals are consigned. (shrink)

This study examines how hunger narratives and performances contribute to a reconsideration of neglected or prohibited domains of thinking which only a full confrontation with the body's heterogeneity and plasticity can reveal. From literary motif or psychosomatic symptom to revolutionary gesture or existential malady, the double crux of hunger and disgust is a powerful force which can define the experience of embodiment. Kafka's fable of the "Hunger Artist" offers a matrix for the fast, while its surprising last-page revelation introduces disgust (...) as a correlative of abstinence, conscious or otherwise. Grounded in Kristeva's theory of abjection, the figure of the fraught body lurking at the heart of the negative grotesque gathers precision throughout this study, where it is employed in a widening series of contexts: suicide through overeating, starvation as self-performance or political resistance, the teratological versus the totalitarian, the anorexic harboring of death. In the process, writers and artists as diverse as Herman Melville, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Christina Rossetti, George Orwell, Knut Hamsun, J.M. Coetzee, Cindy Sherman, Pieter Breughel, Marina Abramovic, David Nebreda, Paul McCarthy, and others are brought into the discussion. By looking at the different acts of visceral, affective, and ideological resistance performed by the starving body, this book intensifies the relationship between hunger and disgust studies while offering insight into the modalities of the "dark grotesque" which inform the aesthetics and politics of hunger. It will be of value to anyone interested in the culture, politics, and subjectivity of embodiment, and scholars working within the fields of disgust studies, food studies, literary studies, cultural theory, and media studies. (shrink)

Researchers have converged on the idea that a pragmatic understanding of communication can shed important light on the evolution of language. Accordingly, animal communication scientists have been keen to adopt insights from pragmatics research. Some authors couple their appeal to pragmatic aspects of communication with the claim that there are fundamental asymmetries between signalers and receivers in non-human animals. For example, in the case of primate vocal calls, signalers are said to produce signals unintentionally and mindlessly, whereas receivers are thought (...) to engage in contextual interpretation to derive the significance of signals. We argue that claims about signaler-receiver asymmetries are often confused. This is partly because their authors conflate two conceptions of pragmatics, which generate different accounts of the explanatory target for accounts of the evolution of language. Here we distinguish these conceptions, in order to help specify more precisely the proper explanatory target for language evolution research. (shrink)

A standard way to explain the connection between ethical claims and motivation is to say that these claims express motivational attitudes. Unless this connection is taken to be merely a matter of contingent psychological regularity, it may seem that there are only two options for understanding it. We can either treat ethical claims as expressing propositions that one cannot believe without being at least somewhat motivated (subjectivism), or we can treat ethical claims as nonpropositional and as having their semantic content (...) constituted by the motivational attitudes they express (noncognitivism). In this paper, we argue that there is another option, which can be recognized once we see that there is no need to build the expression relation between ethical claims and motivational states of mind into the semantic content of ethical claims. (shrink)

Expressivism, broadly construed, is the view that the function of utterances in a given area of discourse is to give expression to our sentiments or other (non-cognitive) mental states or attitudes, rather than report or describe some range of facts. This view naturally seems an attractive option wherever it is suspected that there may not be a domain of facts for the given discourse to be describing. Familiarly, to avoid commitment to ethical facts, the ethical expressivist suggests that ethical utterances (...) (e.g., “Gratuitous torture is wrong”, “What John did was morally good”) do not serve to ascribe ethical properties to objects, actions, persons, or states of affairs. Instead, they simply function to give voice to certain of our sentiments (or ‘pro/con’ attitudes). Along similar lines, philosophers have entertained versions of expressivism about the aesthetic, the modal, the mental, what is funny, even about theoretical science and knowledge ascriptions. (shrink)

When people avow their present feelings, sensations, thoughts, etc., they enjoy what may be called “first-person privilege.” If I now said: “I have a headache,” or “I’m thinking about Venice,” I would be taken at my word: I would normally not be challenged. According to one prominent approach, this privilege is due to a special epistemic access we have to our own present states of mind. On an alternative, deflationary approach the privilege merely reflects a socio-linguistic convention governing avowals. We (...) reject both approaches. On our proposed account, a full explanation of the privilege must recognize avowals as expressive performances, which can be taken to reveal directly the subject’s present mental condition. We are able to improve on special access accounts and deflationary accounts, as well as familiar expressive accounts, by explaining both the asymmetries and the continuities between avowals and other pronouncements, and by locating a genuine though non-epistemic source for first-person privilege. (shrink)

When people avow their present feelings, sensations, thoughts, etc., they enjoy what may be called “first‐person privilege.” If I now said: “I have a headache,” or “I'm thinking about Venice,” I would be taken at my word: I would normally not be challenged. According to one prominent approach, this privilege is due to a special epistemic access we have to our own present states of mind. On an alternative, deflationary approach the privilege merely reflects a socio‐linguistic convention governing avowals. We (...) reject both approaches. On our proposed account, a full explanation of the privilege must recognize avowals as expressive performances, which can be taken to reveal directly the subject's present mental condition. We are able to improve on special access accounts and deflationary accounts, as well as familiar expressive accounts, by explaining both the asymmetries and the continuities between avowals and other pronouncements, and by locating a genuine though non‐epistemic source for first‐person privilege. (shrink)

... A. Zvie BAR-ON The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Shmuel Hugo Bergman, one of the most prominent Jewish philosophers of the 20th century, ...

Building on nearly eighty years of scientific work, The Handbook of Emotional Intelligence is the first definitive resource that brings together a stellar panel of academics, researchers, and practitioners, in the field. Sweeping in scope, the text presents information on the most important conceptual models, reviews and evaluates the most valid and reliable methods for assessing emotional intelligence, and offers specific guidelines for applying the principles of Emotional Intelligence in a variety of settings.

According to ethical neo-expressivism, all declarative sentences, including those used to make ethical claims, have propositions as their semantic contents, and acts of making an ethical claim are properly said to express mental states, which (if motivational internalism is correct) are intimately connected to motivation. This raises two important questions: (i) The traditional reason for denying that ethical sentences express propositions is that these were thought to determine ways the world could be, so unless we provide an analysis of ethical (...) terms in terms of natural properties, are we not committed to the Moorean conclusion that ethical sentences describe sui generis “nonnatural” ways the world could be? (ii) If we reject the claim that motivational attitudes constitute any part of the semantics of ethical sentences, are we not committed to denying the intuition behind motivational internalism after all? This chapter argues for negative answers to both of these questions. (shrink)

Davidson’s well-known language skepticism—the claim that there is no such a thing as a language—has recognizably Gricean underpinnings, some of which also underlie his continuity skepticism—the claim that there can be no philosophically illuminating account of the emergence of language and thought. My first aim in this paper is to highlight aspects of the complicated relationship between central Davidsonian and Gricean ideas concerning language. After a brief review of Davidson’s two skeptical claims and their Gricean underpinnings, I provide my own (...) take on how Davidson’s continuity skepticism can be resisted consistently with his rejection of the Gricean priority claim, yet without giving up some of Grice’s own insights regarding the origins of meaning. (shrink)