Intellectual virtues are an integral part of adequate environmental virtue ethics; these virtues are distinct from moral virtues. Including intellectual virtues in environmental virtue ethics produces a more fine-grained account of the forces involved in environmental exploration, appreciation, and decision making than has been given to date. Intellectual virtues are character traits that regulate cognitive activity in support of the acquisition and application of knowledge. They are virtues because they further the human quest for knowledge and true belief; possessing these (...) traits improves us epistemically. Five intellectual virtues illustrate the nature and relevance of intellectual virtues to environmental ethics: thoroughness, temporal/structural sensitivity, flexibility, intellectual trust, and humility. While these virtues share many features of the moral virtues, there are differences between them that have practical implications and give sound reasons for considering these two types as distinct kinds. Intellectual virtues bear a structural relation to knowledge that moral virtues do not, and it is this epistemological stamp that sets them apart. Additionally, the two types of virtue can be possessed independently of one another. Ideally, intellectual virtues will combine with moral virtues such as respect, compassion, and humility to facilitate environmentally respectful behavior. The moral and intellectual virtues are thus importantly distinct and mutually reinforcing. Both should be present in a truly excellent human being, and both have a role to play in fully developed environmental virtue ethics. (shrink)

This paper argues that Heidegger's phenomenology of boredom in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (1983) could be a promising addition to the ‘toolbox’ of scientists investigating conscious experience. We describe Heidegger's methodological principles and show how he applies these in describing three forms of boredom. Each form is shown to have two structural moments – being held in limbo and being left empty – as well as a characteristic relation to passing the time. In our conclusion, we (...) suggest specific ways in which Heidegger's phenomenological description can be used in scientific investigations of boredom. (shrink)

Barbara Stafford is at the forefront of a growing movement that calls for the humanities to confront the brain’s material realities. In Echo Objects she argues that humanists should seize upon the exciting neuroscientific discoveries that are illuminating the underpinnings of cultural objects. In turn, she contends, brain scientists could enrich their investigations of mental activity by incorporating phenomenological considerations—particularly the intricate ways that images focus intentional behavior and allow us to feel thought. This, then, is a book for (...) both sides of the aisle, a stunningly broad exploration of how complex images—or patterns that compress space and time—make visible the invisible ordering of human consciousness. Stafford demonstrates, for example, how the compound formats of emblems, symbols, collage, and electronic media reveal the brain’s grappling to construct mental objects that are redoubled by prior associations. On the other hand, she compellingly shows that findings in evolutionary biology and the neurosciences are providing profound opportunities for understanding aesthetic conundrums as old and deep-seated as the human urge to imitate, the mapping of inner space, and the role of narrative and nonnarrative representation. As precise in her discussions of firing neurons as she is about the coordinating dynamics of image making, Stafford locates these major transdisciplinary issues at the intersection of art, science, philosophy, and technology. Ultimately, she makes an impassioned plea for a common purpose—for the acknowledgement that, at the most basic level, these separate projects belong to a single investigation. (shrink)

Using an observational sample of players of a simple online game, we are able to trace the development of skill in that game. Information on playing time, and player location, allows us to estimate time of day during which practice took place. We compare those whose breaks in practice probably contained a night's sleep and those whose breaks in practice probably did not contain a night's sleep. Our analysis confirms experimental evidence showing a benefit of spacing for skill learning, but (...) it fails to find any additional benefit of sleeping during a break from practice. We discuss reasons why the well-established phenomenon of sleep consolidation might not manifest in an observational study of skill development. We put the spacing effect into the context of the other known influences on skill learning: improvement with practice, and individual differences in initial performance. Analysis of performance data from games allows experimental results to be demonstrated outside of the lab and for experimental phenomenon to be put in the context of the performance of the whole task. (shrink)

Prawitz conjectured that proof-theoretic validity offers a semantics for intuitionistic logic. This conjecture has recently been proven false by Piecha and Schroeder-Heister. This article resolves one of the questions left open by this recent result by showing the extensional alignment of proof-theoretic validity and general inquisitive logic. General inquisitive logic is a generalisation of inquisitive semantics, a uniform semantics for questions and assertions. The paper further defines a notion of quasi-proof-theoretic validity by restricting proof-theoretic validity to allow double negation elimination (...) for atomic formulas and proves the extensional alignment of quasi-proof-theoretic validity and inquisitive logic. (shrink)

For many people "animal rights" suggests campaigns against factory farms, vivisection or other aspects of our woeful treatment of animals. Zoopolis moves beyond this familiar terrain, focusing not on what we must stop doing to animals, but on how we can establish positive and just relationships with different types of animals.

In his book SEXUAL DESIRE, Roger Scruton wrongly maintains that human sexual experience is essential intentional. His thesis depends on his highly revisionary definition of 'sexual desire', the artificial nature of which I expose and criticise. He admits that homosexual desire is capable of the same kind of intentionality as heterosexual desire, and is therefore not intrinsically obscene or perverted, but he advances reasons why homosexuality is morally different from heterosexuality and is therefore an object of disapproval. His arguments presuppose (...) 'an impassable moral divide' between the sexes, and are, on his own admission, not very cogent. Since he allows that homosexual desire is a natural and spontaneous phenomenon and also proposes that moral education should guide us towards a state in which our sexuality is entirely integrated within a life of personal affection and responsibility, consistency requires that he adopt a sexual ideology which does not discriminate against homosexuality. For homosexuals are unlikely to achieve the 'sexual integrity' which Scruton advocates (and which I endorse) if they are constantly encouraged to disparage their own sexual nature and if social institutions make no positive provision for them. (shrink)

Is a logicist bound to the claim that as a matter of analytic truth there is an actual infinity of objects? If Hume’s Principle is analytic then in the standard setting the answer appears to be yes. Hodes’s work pointed to a way out by offering a modal picture in which only a potential infinity was posited. However, this project was abandoned due to apparent failures of cross-world predication. We re-explore this idea and discover that in the setting of the (...) potential infinite one can interpret first-order Peano arithmetic, but not second-order Peano arithmetic. We conclude that in order for the logicist to weaken the metaphysically loaded claim of necessary actual infinities, they must also weaken the mathematics they recover. (shrink)

J Martin Stafford; A Rejoinder to Professor Edgley, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 15, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 171–174, https://doi.org/10.1111/.

J Martin Stafford; John Wilson, Prophet of the Sane Society, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 13, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 169–186, https://doi.org.

J Martin Stafford; Public Schools, Private Privilege and Common Sense, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 19, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 137–141, https.

Many theorists of the ‘political turn’ in animal rights theory emphasize the need for animals’ interests to be considered in political decision-making processes, but deny that this requires self-representation and participation by animals themselves. I argue that participation by domesticated animals in co-authoring our shared world is indeed required, and explore two ways to proceed: 1) by enabling animal voice within the existing geography of human-animal roles and relationships; and 2) by freeing animals into a revitalized public commons where citizens (...) encounter one another in spontaneous, unpredictable encounters in spaces that they can re-shape together. (shrink)

Tracing the impact of the 'memory wars' on science and culture, Relational Remembering offers a vigorous philosophical challenge to the contemporary skepticism about memory that is their legacy. Campbell's work provides a close conceptual analysis of the strategies used to challenge women's memories, particularly those meant to provoke a general social alarm about suggestibility. Sue Campbell argues that we cannot come to an adequate understanding of the nature and value of memory through a distorted view of rememberers. The harmful stereotypes (...) of women's passivity and instability that have repopulated discussions of abuse have led many theorists to regard the social dimensions of remembering only negatively, as a threat or contaminant to memory integrity. Such models of memory cannot help us grasp the nature of harms linked to oppression, as these models imply that changed group understandings of the past are incompatible with the integrity of personal memory. Campbell uses the false memory debates to defend a feminist reconceptualization of personal memory as relational, social, and subject to politics. Memory is analyzed as a complex of cognitive abilities and social/narrative activities where one's success or failure as a rememberer is both affected by one's social location and has profound ramifications for one's cultural status as a moral agent. (shrink)

Philosophy has often been represented by its detractors, and even sometimes by its practitioners, as a subject which, unlike the natural sciences, exhibits a degree of progress far from commensurate with its long history. Many of the questions entertained by the ancients are still very much alive: answers proffered are put forward very tentatively, seldom meet with universal acceptance, and frequently give rise to controversy even more prolific than that which they were intended to lay low.

The three major schools of Vedanta— a kara's Advaita, R m nuja's Viśi dvaita, and Madhva's Dvaita—all claim to be based on the Upanishads, but they have evolved very different views of Brahman, or the Supreme Reality, and the soul's relation to that Reality once it is liberated from rebirth, when mok a or eternal life commences. Advaita teaches that liberated souls merge into the seamless blissful Brahman, the only Reality, and finally escape their earth dreams of sin and suffering, (...) even to the point of forfeiting individuality. Both Viśi dvaita and Dvaita are resolutely realist systems and see essential differences between Brahman and souls that are never transcended, even in the world of the liberated, visualized in these systems as a glorious paradise where God (Vishnu) reigns in splendor over blissful souls devoted to Him everlastingly. But whereas Madhva sees innate differences in souls, each with a greater or lesser capacity for bliss, R m nuja sees a universal sameness in the quality and degree of bliss, even to the point of equating it with the bliss of God Himself. The author points out these and other contrasts between the three views of mok a , critiques each, then develops a view of the liberated state more satisfactory (in his view) than any of the three in a marriage of East and West. (shrink)

This small book is very large: it contains the living universe. It is a privilege to be asked to write this preface, and a delight to do so. That is because I recognize here a really important book, both in general and specifically. Before talking about the specific contents at all, I would like to explain why this is in general so.

Essays by the late feminist philosopher Sue Campbell explore the entanglement of epistemic and ethical values in our attempts to be faithful to our pasts. Her relational conception of memory is used to confront the challenges of sharing memory and reconstituting selves even in contexts fractured by moral and political differences.

Implicit bias training (IBT) is now frequently provided by employers, in order to raise awareness of the problems related to implicit biases, and of how to safeguard against discrimination that may result. However, as Atewologun et al (2018) have noted, there is very little systematicity in IBT, and there are many unknowns about what constitutes good IBT. One important issue concerns the tone of information provided regarding implicit bias. This paper engages this question, focusing in particular on the observation that (...) much bias training is delivered in exculpatory tone, emphasising that individuals are not to blame for possessing implicit biases. Normative guidance around IBT exhorts practitioners to adopt this strategy (Moss-Racusin et al 2014). However, existing evidence about the effects of moralized feedback about implicit bias is equivocal (Legault et al 2011; Czopp et al 2006). Through a series of studies, culminating in an experiment with a pre-registered analysis plan, we develop a paradigm for evaluating the impact of moralized feedback on participants’ implicit racial bias scores. We also conducted exploratory analyses of the impact on their moods, and behavioural intentions. Our results indicated that an exculpatory tone, rather than a blaming or neutral tone, did not make participants less resistant to changing their attitudes and behaviours. In fact, participants in the blame condition had significantly stronger explicit intentions to change future behaviour than those in the ‘no feedback’ condition (see experiment 3). These results indicate that considerations of efficacy do not support the need for implicit bias feedback to be exculpatory. We tease out the implications of these findings, and directions for future research. (shrink)

In an increasingly complex military operating environment, next generation wargaming platforms can reduce risk, decrease operating costs, and improve overall outcomes. Novel Artificial Intelligence enabled wargaming approaches, based on software platforms with multimodal interaction and visualization capacity, are essential to provide the decision-making flexibility and adaptability required to meet current and emerging realities of warfighting. We highlight three areas of development for future warfighter-machine interfaces: AI-directed decisional guidance, computationally informed decision-making, and realistic representations of decision spaces. Progress in these areas (...) will enable development of effective human-AI collaborative decision-making, to meet the increasing scale and complexity of today’s battlespace. (shrink)

There are now many important contributions to the scientific study of the brain-mind continuum. These results come both from research into non-ordinary states of consciousness and into the brain's intrinsic, largely unconscious mechanisms. The larger potential of such investigations consists precisely in making the parameters of our cognitive system apparent. But they also reveal the socio-cultural uses to which these parameters are currently, or in the foreseeable future, being applied. This article wrestles with that fact. Specifically, it examines the implications (...) for those of us interested in the dynamics of visual awareness and the structural and phenomenological aspects of noticing. Because some of the key characteristics of consciousness are so ingrained that we are usually blind to them, it is all the more important to understand how and why we pay attention to certain features of our environment. Subjective consciousness pertains to the realm of inner experience as well as focusing on the external world. What Daniel Dennett terms `intentionality' or directedness towards an object is a sign of our connectedness to the outside world. Beyond connection, I am interested in how complex works of art help us cognize, confer reality, or have knowledge of what lies before our eyes. I will argue that this calibration of the agent's experience and her perception of the world is under threat today. (shrink)

Received opinion holds that it would be more efficient, hence more economical, to compress and thus dissolve the holdings of the Warburg Institute Library into an overarching university library system. This essay argues two points: first, that we should not be automatically persuaded by the popular and largely unexamined goal of efficiency; and second, that the Library indeed requires its own space but that that space must now be reconceived. In line with Aby Warburg's belief that the past should engage (...) the present by expanding and refreshing it, the Warburg Institute Library's rare and singular collections are less about the books and more about the uniqueness of the content and what it does. This essay proposes that what makes the Library vital to today's networked epistemology is the insights that its volumes provide to the varieties of human ordering, organization, formatting, and categorization—visibly exhibited in the spatial arrangement of its holdings. As its users have long felt, the Warburg is more than a library: it is a complex physical space demonstrating the formal evolution or framing of human thought. The Warburg should thus be reconceived as a “house museum” along these lines. (shrink)

Prawitz conjectured that the proof-theoretically valid logic is intuitionistic logic. Recent work on proof-theoretic validity has disproven this. In fact, it has been shown that proof-theoretic validity is not even closed under substitution. In this paper, we make a minor modification to the definition of proof-theoretic validity found in Prawitz’s 1973paper ‘Towards a foundation of a general proof theory’ and refined by Schroeder-Heister in ‘Validity concepts in proof-theoretic semantics’ (2006). We will call the new notion generalized proof-theoretic validity and show (...) that the logic of generalized proof-theoretic validity is intuitionistic logic. (shrink)

Sue Campbell reinstates the personal as an important dimension in analytic philosophy of mind. She argues that the category of feelings has a unique role in psychological explanation: the expression of feelings is the attempt to communicate personal significance. To develop a model for affective meaning, the author moves attention away from the classic emotions to feelings that are more personal, inchoate, and idiosyncratic.

The interplay of philosophical ambitions and technical reality have given birth to rich and interesting approaches to explain the oft-claimed special character of mathematical and logical knowledge. Two projects stand out both for their audacity and their innovativeness. These are logicism and proof-theoretic semantics. This dissertation contains three chapters exploring the limits of these two projects. In both cases I find the formal results offer a mixed blessing to the philosophical projects. Chapter 1. Is a logicist bound to the claim (...) that as a matter of analytic truth there is an actual infinity of objects? If Hume’s Principle is analytic then in the standard setting the answer appears to be yes. Hodes’s work pointed to a way out by offering a modal picture in which only a potential infinity was posited. However, this project was abandoned due to apparent failures of cross-world predication. I re-explore this idea and discover that in the setting of the potential infinite one can interpret first-order Peano arithmetic, but not second-order Peano arithmetic. I conclude that in order for the logicist to weaken the metaphysically loaded claim of necessary actual infinities, they must also weaken the mathematics they recover. Chapter 2. There have been several recent results bringing into focus the super-intuitionistic nature of most notions of proof-theoretic validity. But there has been very little work evaluating the consequences of these results. In this chapter, I explore the question of whether these results undermine the claim that proof-theoretic validity shows us which inferences follow from the meaning of the connectives when defined by their introduction rules. It is argued that the super-intuitionistic inferences are valid due to the correspondence between the treatment of the atomic formulas and more complex formulas. And so the goals of proof-theoretic validity are not undermined. Chapter 3. Prawitz (1971) conjectured that proof-theoretic validity offers a semantics for intuitionistic logic. This conjecture has recently been proven false by Piecha and Schroeder-Heister (2019). This chapter resolves one of the questions left open by this recent result by showing the extensional alignment of proof-theoretic validity and general inquisitive logic. General inquisitive logic is a generalisation of inquisitive semantics, a uniform semantics for questions and assertions. The chapter further defines a notion of quasi-proof-theoretic validity by restricting proof-theoretic validity to allow double negation elimination for atomic formulas and proves the extensional alignment of quasi-proof-theoretic validity and inquisitive logic.Abstract prepared by Will Stafford extracted partially from the dissertation. (shrink)

J Martin Stafford; Marxism, Neutrality and Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 15, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 161–166, https://doi.org/10.111.

According to André Rouillé the search for photography's ontology is both fruitless and pointless. Six decades after André Bazin's seminal essay, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, there is a concerted attempt to remove photography from the ‘reliquary’ of death in which Bazin had locked it. Preferring ‘genesis’ to ‘result’, Bazin had suggested that photography benefited from an ‘essential objectivity’ and that it was close to being a ‘natural phenomenon’: for the first time in history, representation of the external world (...) emerges, mechanically, without human intervention. For Rouillé however, this is a ‘poverty of ontology’, a theory of the ‘index’ based on Peirce erroneously attached to a semiotics of the photographic image. So what happens to the photograph's temporal dimension, crucial to Bazin's definition, if we reject the image as record of the ‘that-has-been’? Can we still use Bazin's ontology in the twenty-first century? (shrink)

By considering S/Z as an early example of the romanesque in Roland Barthes's oeuvre, this article considers the generic and thematic anticipation of La Préparation du roman in Barthes's seminars of the late 1960s. It suggests that his seminar notes on Balzac's Sarrasine written in 1968 and 1969 are a form of proto-essayism, albeit given as seminars in the institutional context of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. This essayism is traced through the notion of perte de soi (...) evident in two aspects of the seminar notes: firstly, in the ‘drugged reading’ that Barthes proposes, and then through his ambivalence to the literary character. Working ‘retroactively’, the article concludes that La Préparation du roman can help us to explain S/Z and its genesis, that is proactively, by applying this perte de soi to the act of one about to write a novel. (shrink)

The evidence for rationalisation, which motivates the target article, is exaggerated. Experimental evidence shows that rationalisation effects are small rather than gross and, I argue, largely silent on the pervasiveness and persistence of the phenomenon. At least some examples taken to show rationalisation also have an interpretation compatible with deliberate, knowing reason-responsiveness on the part of participants.

Many of us, and I am no exception, have been led to assume, almost un-consciously, that Śankara is India's greatest philosopher and that the non-dualist philosophy he consolidated, Advaita Vedānta, is the supreme spiritual philosophy of India, if not of the whole world. Dualist opponents like Madhva, on the other hand, have usually been appreciated very little, if at all. Several of my colleagues think of Madhva as a reactionary, if brilliant, theist whose philosophy best serves as a foil to (...) Śankara's. Madhva, it almost seems, is studied not for his own philosophical virtues but as a means the better to appreciate Śankara's. I believe that we must weigh more carefully the dualist position, particularly its trenchant critique of non-dualism. We may discover in the process that Śankara, whatever else he was – brilliant stylist, mystic par excellence , deft polemicist – was not the originator or consolidator of anything like an internally consistent metaphysics. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill (1806 1873) was one of Britain's greatest philosophers and radical politicians, whose views had a profound influence on thinking on liberty, social policy and gender relations. William Stafford's accessible study outlines Mill's reputation from his lifetime to the present, together with a discussion of the major areas of his moral and political thought.

This article argues that rapid eye movement (REM) dreaming is elaborative encoding for episodic memories. Elaborative encoding in REM can, at least partially, be understood through ancient art of memory (AAOM) principles: visualization, bizarre association, organization, narration, embodiment, and location. These principles render recent memories more distinctive through novel and meaningful association with emotionally salient, remote memories. The AAOM optimizes memory performance, suggesting that its principles may predict aspects of how episodic memory is configured in the brain. Integration and segregation (...) are fundamental organizing principles in the cerebral cortex. Episodic memory networks interconnect profusely within the cortex, creating omnidirectional “landmark” junctions. Memories may be integrated at junctions but segregated along connecting network paths that meet at junctions. Episodic junctions may be instantiated during non–rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep after hippocampal associational function during REM dreams. Hippocampal association involves relating, binding, and integrating episodic memories into a mnemonic compositional whole. This often bizarre, composite image has not been present to the senses; it is not “real” because it hyperassociates several memories. During REM sleep, on the phenomenological level, this composite image is experienced as a dream scene. A dream scene may be instantiated as omnidirectional neocortical junction and retained by the hippocampus as an index. On episodic memory retrieval, an external stimulus (or an internal representation) is matched by the hippocampus against its indices. One or more indices then reference the relevant neocortical junctions from which episodic memories can be retrieved. Episodic junctions reach a processing (rather than conscious) level during normal wake to enable retrieval. If this hypothesis is correct, the stuff of dreams is the stuff of memory. (shrink)