This paper describes a study conducted in collaboration with a marketing agency and a nonprofit organization providing regional sexual health services, which included advice on, and testing f...

Figurative communication (the use of metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole and irony) provides economy of expression, clarity, persuasiveness, politeness, evaluation, and communication of emotions. However, it also increases the potential for misunderstanding in situations when people lack shared background knowledge. This book combines theoretical frameworks with empirical studies that measure the effectiveness of different approaches to the use of figurative language in advertisements, to show how to maximise the benefits of creative metaphor and metonymy in global advertising. It highlights how subtle differences (...) in colour, layout, and combinations of different kinds of figurative language affect the reception and appreciation of creative advertising, shedding new light on the nature of figurative communication itself. With a balance between theory, experiments and practical case studies, this book is accessible for academics in linguistics and communication studies, as well as advertising and marketing professionals. (shrink)

The conclusion of practical reasoning is commonly said to rest upon a diverse pair of representations—a “major” and a “minor” premise—the first of which concerns the end and the second, the means. Modern and contemporary philosophers writing on action and practical reasoning tend to portray the minor premise as a “means-end belief”—a belief about, as Michael Smith puts it, “the ways in which one thing leads to another,” or, as John McDowell puts it, “what can be relied on to bring (...) about what.” On this point there is little difference between followers of Davidson and followers of Anscombe, or between those who invoke Hume’s legacy and those who invoke Aristotle’s. But Aristotle himself held a very different position. According to him, the minor premise concerns particulars, a sphere controlled by perception. The perception of particulars—that is, of the really-existing people and things confronted in the field of action—plays no essential role in the modern account of rational agency. Because it does not, the modern account fails to explain how one could act for a reason, or how practical reasoning could deliver any conclusion. (shrink)

Anscombe holds that a proper account of intentional action must exhibit “a ‘form’ of description of events.” But what does that mean? To answer this question, I compare the method of Anscombe’s Intention with that of Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic—another classic work of analytic philosophy that consciously opposes itself to psychological explanations. On the one hand, positively, I aim to identify and elucidate the kind of account of intentional action that Anscombe attempts to provide. On the other hand, negatively, I (...) hope to dispel the canard that Anscombe’s opposition to the causal theory of action is a product of “behaviorism.”. (shrink)

In an effort to theorize educational logics that are oppositional to capitalism, this article explores what it means to study like a communist. I begin by drawing out the tight connection between learning and capitalism, demonstrating that education is not a subset but a motor of political-economic relations. Next, I turn to the concept of study, which is being developed as an educational alternative to learning. While studying represents an educational challenge to capitalism, I argue that there are political limitations (...) to studying for which we need to account. Specifically, studying is not in itself political, but only represents the possibility of politics. To make this claim and to address these limitations, I turn to Jodi Dean’s work on the communist Party. Dean posits the Party not as a master, director, or prophet, but as an infrastructure of affective intensity that maintains a gap in the order of things. I show that the Party is one way to organize and to defend study. Throughout the article, I illuminate the ways in which educational philosophers can contribute to political movement building by showing, developing, and refining the educational components of politics that many organizers and theorists neglect. (shrink)

Air is an immersive substance that envelopes us and binds us together, yet it has dominantly been taken for granted and left out of educational and other theorizations. This article develops a conceptualization of the pneumatic common in order to address this gap. The specific intervention staged is within recent educational literature on the common by Noah De Lissovoy, Tyson E. Lewis, and Alexander Means. This literature is surveyed and analyzed in relation to educational theory, curriculum, pedagogy, and policy. Claiming (...) that the air is a central feature of and paradigm for the common, I then concentrate on making the air conditions of the educational common explicit. I do this through a theoretical, historical, and sociological reading of air conditioning. While this explicitation is itself educational, I return to the educational common at the end of the article to ask how and what we can learn in, with, and from the air. (shrink)

It’s not uncommon for people to make reference to atmospheres, including in relationship with educational spaces. In this article, we investigate educational atmospheres by turning to Western and Chinese literature on the air and wind. We pursue this task in three phases. First, we examine the Western literature to see the possible strings of thought that would help us reinvigorate the element of air/atmosphere as a foundational component of an educational sphere. Second, we historicize the Chinese notion of wind as (...) a style of reasoning which structures ancient Chinese cosmology, tempo-spatiality, teaching, and governing into a grid of intelligibility. Third, we argue for a bracketing of a trap of philology and a signifier-signified representational logic through reconceptualizing the atmosphere as a thing that blurs the material-figural boundary and that pushes into a new genre of educational life. (shrink)

Modern philosophers writing on action and practical reasoning rarely discuss perception. This is remarkable, not only because acting on the particular objects in one’s environment obviously requires a perceptual awareness of them, but also because perception is central to the account of action and practical reasoning offered by Aristotle, from whom many contemporary philosophers take their inspiration. The pivotal role that Aristotle assigned to perception is now uniformly given to belief, an act of mind or propositional attitude that might concern (...) particulars, but that might equally well concern general laws of nature, probabilities, or rules of logic. This paper aims to recover and demystify the idea of a practical perception. On the one hand, it argues that in order to mediate between a general end and an action performed in pursuit of that end, the minor premise of practical reasoning must concern particulars and must therefore be perceptual. On the other hand, it argues that this same minor premise must be practical, in the sense that it must represent the particular objects about which the agent is reasoning as constituting a field of obstacles and opportunities, or of things to be avoided and pursued. (shrink)

This paper largely engages with Brian Ellis’s description of categorical dimensions as put forward in his paper in this volume. The New Essentialism advocated by Ellis posits the ontologically-robust existence of both dispositional and categorical properties. I have argued that the distinction that Ellis draws between the two is unpersuasive, and that the causal role of categorical dimensions—what they do—is inseparable from what they are. This observation is reinforced by the fact that absolute physical quantities permit re-interpretations of measurement that (...) remove a clear differentiation between categoricity and dispositionality. Distinguishing between ‘pure power’ and ‘dispositionality’, I further argue that: i) there are no ontologically-robust categorical properties, although their apparent existence is explicable as higher-order and supervenient; ii) that the fundamental ingredients of the world may be accounted for in terms of pure-power that is neither categorical nor dispositional; and iii) that the categorical-dispositional distinction arises only at the higher-order level of objects, and does not in any case constitute ontologically-robust partitioning of reality. -/- . (shrink)

The Vietnamese philosopher Tran Duc Thao exerted an important influence over the development of 20th century French philosophy. In articles that stretched across the 1940s, Thao sought to employ the concrete insights of Marxism and dialectical materialism in order to correct and critique the dominant philosophical programs of phenomenology and existentialism. Thao’s pervasive concern was the determination of a basis for truthful action. In two essays – one taken from the beginning of his professional career, the other from near its (...) end – this concern is clearly displayed. A member of the General Delegation of Indochina advocating for an end to French colonial rule, Thao’s philosophical work is always undergirded by his political engagement. At the same time, his philosophical work seeks to demonstrate that his political activity is truthful, not merely partisan. (shrink)

Of the critical eyes that have focused upon Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, perhaps none is as insightful as Edward Said. Said repeatedly turned to Conrad’s tale as a privileged point of access to the tensions of colonialism. What is most remarkable about Said’s reading is the hesitancy and uncertainty that surrounds it – qualities that mirror Marlow’s troubles about his own story. Said’s reading is concerned with the form of the story, with its position as a cultural artifact, a tribute (...) to the society that it represents before that’s culture’s other, that it nonetheless is placed into intimate contact with. Taking Heart of Darkness as a cultural work, while at the same time paying particular attention to the rhetorical richness of the form of the story itself (the narrative displacement, the precise description of the situation of the Nellie, the description of Marlow, the patterned interruption of his voice, etc.), allows one to glimpse the limiting function of colonial culture. At the same time, as such a limit, it provides a place of encounter for counter-narratives, a place where the difference between a colonial society and its other might be revealed through the structural affinities and dissimilarities between their narratives. Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North is such a counter-narrative, and employs its structural parallels to Conrad’s novella to refashion the cultural limit between the colonizer and colonized. The center of Salih’s novel is the complicated relation between the narrator and Mustafa Sa’eed, both of whom have returned to Sudan following sojourns in England. While there is an obvious (but shallow) parallel here to Marlow and the narrator of Heart of Darkness, the echo is reinforced by the structural parallels of the narrative. The centrality of the Nile in Salih’s story – a river that serves both as a marker of native identity and as a place of civic, colonial projects – echoes both the Thames and Congo; the relations between the narrator, his past, and Sa’eed and his past, reflect and complicate the relations between Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, Marlow’s memory, and, finally, Kurtz. Most telling of Salih’s deliberate engagement with Conrad is the final, brief scene in which the narrator enters the river that (presumably) took Sa’eed’s life and there confronts the question of the maintenance of native identity in the wake of a migration to the heart of colonial power. Here Salih plays on the same structural ambiguities that Conrad only implicitly invokes, and that Said thematizes in his analysis. Like Conrad, he deliberately chooses not to offer a solution. For to offer a solution would be bind a society with a set limit. What we find in Salih’s novel is both the acceptance of culture as a form of political life, and also the rejection of culture as a justification of oppression. As Said notes, Conrad cannot find a way out of his society; he can only invent Marlow as a protest. Salih echoes this protest, but where Conrad’s tale ends in the sterility of darkness, Salih’s, precisely through the distinction of its rhetorical form from Conrad’s (one that also echoes), concludes with an urgent cry for other voices to take up the task of valorizing the multiplicity of cultures that illuminate the globe. (shrink)

In “Non-Rigid Forms” I characterized possibilities as indefinite forms, in contrast to the definite forms (eternal objects) of actualities. This did not do justice to the atemporality of eternal objects. Indefinite forms ought to be construed as dense clusters of eternal objects. By progressive definition God specifies relevant possibilities to the occasion, which determines one to become actual.

Newman sought a via media—a middle ground—between “evidentialists,” who considered reason supreme and so disparaged faith, and “existentialists,” who wanted to create a fortress of faith impenetrable to reason. Examining the way people actually think, Newman identified three types of inference that lead people to make decisions. This inferential process, which is operative in the decisions of every day life, serves as a paradigm for understanding how the human mind—particularly the illative sense—operates in religious matters; accordingly, Newman presents faith as (...) a personal and reasonable inference. (shrink)

Freud had read Bergson’s 1900 book Laughter when he composed his own book on jokes, and, even prior to his development of the concept of the super-ego, Freud had criticized Bergson for not following up his insights into the linkage between comedy and childhood experiences. Freud thus chides Bergson for failing to pursue a line of inquiry that would confirm the ultimately tragic underpinnings of comedy. Wise to this clever and even mischievous little suggestion, Bergson’s book can be read as (...) an account of comedy that might avoid the perennial temptation of yoking it to tragedy. Bergson approaches the problem of comedy in its concreteness, in its liveliness, and follows the various paths of its unfolding. What results is an analysis that shares some similarities with Freud’s investigations but that also eliminates the theoretical prejudices that guide Freud’s reflections. The comic spirit is, first of all, “undefinable.” A strange way to begin an essay on the subject except that, for Bergson, this designation is not a strictly negative one: “we shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition. We regard it, above all, as a living thing. However trivial it may be, we shall treat it with the respect due to life. We shall confine ourselves to watching it grow and expand.” In a deliberate departure from the sort of circumscription that characterizes the style of Aristotle’s Poetics – as well as its progeny – Bergson’s strategy is an indefinite one appropriate to the particular complexity of the subject. The text of the investigation will then share its subject’s style – it will dramatize rather than describe the comic – in order to give an account that is suited to the nature of the comic: it will be neither a joke nor a tragedy. Bergson’s book is of an essential different kind than Freud’s: its focus is upon the motivation or forces that bring laughter and the comic situation into existence. Freud’s analysis ultimately moves in a circle, discovering the tragic principles of its investigation in its conclusion, because it fails to begin with the question closer to the vital complex of which humour and the comic are a part: what advantage does comedy procure for life? (shrink)

In her review of my book, Weili Zhao sheds a new light on what it means to study like a communist, particularly by focusing on the concept of the encounter and the dao movement. In this response, I build on her insights by proposing that the binary and the planar be heterogeneously blocked together. Rather than critical pedagogy, critical education, liberal education, and postmodern education, we need to see pedagogy and politics as hanging together in a confrontational negotiation.

_ Source: _Volume 9, Issue 2, pp 220 - 239 Art has been crucial for Western philosophy roughly since Kant – that is, for what is becoming known as “correlationist” philosophy – because it has so often had assigned to it a singular ontological status. The artwork, in this view, is material being that has been transfigured and shot through with subjectivity. The work of art, what art does and how it works have all been understood as mediating between the (...) otherwise irreconcilable opposites of historical spirit and the mute material world, between communicative thought and the unresponsiveness otherness of nature. I revisit this aesthetic tradition from the perspective of the Anthropocene, the proposed name of the new geological epoch of the present, distinguished by the fact that collective human action has now acquired the scale of a world-shaping natural force. The Anthropocene is at once a geological epoch and a historical period. What forms of narrative might possibly relate these two temporal orders together? What other aesthetic categories might help us think through the conceptual impasse of the Anthropocene present? How might aesthetic experience illuminate the history of Anthropocene? What natural histories might artworks tell today? My speculative endpoint: the Anthropocene globe is the universal artwork of the contemporary moment. (shrink)

Following the medical practice of evaluating a person’s “state” of health in terms of prior history, present diagnosis and future prognosis, this essay comments briefly on four areas or—to use medical parlance— “branches” of Newman studies: Autobiographical: Newman as he portrayed himself; Interpretive: Newman as others have depicted him; Motivational: Newman’s life and work as inspiring others; Transcultural: Newman’s life and work as crossing cultures. By way of conclusion, I will share a dream about a digital reading of Newman’s Apologia (...) in the future. (shrink)

Following the medical practice of evaluating a person’s “state” of health in terms of prior history, present diagnosis and future prognosis, this essay comments briefly on four areas or—to use medical parlance— “branches” of Newman studies: Autobiographical: Newman as he portrayed himself; Interpretive: Newman as others have depicted him; Motivational: Newman’s life and work as inspiring others; Transcultural: Newman’s life and work as crossing cultures. By way of conclusion, I will share a dream about a digital reading of Newman’s Apologia (...) in the future. (shrink)