ABSTRACTEvaluative aesthetic discourse communicates that the speaker has had first-hand experience of what is talked about. If you call a book bewitching, it will be assumed that you have read the book. If you say that a building is beautiful, it will be assumed that you have had some visual experience with it. According to an influential view, this is because knowledge is a norm for assertion, and aesthetic knowledge requires first-hand experience. This (...) paper criticizes this view and argues for an alternative view, according to which aesthetic discourse expresses affective states of mind, analogously to how assertions express beliefs. It is because these affective states require first-hand experience that aesthetic discourse communicates that such acquaintance is at hand. The paper furthermore argues that the lack of an experience requirement for aesthetic belief ascriptions constitutes a problem for the kind of expressivist who claims that evaluative belief states are covert non-cognitive states. (shrink)

Imagination is the art of exploring beyond the depths of one’s body. Imagination allows one to peek into the void to realize the true existence of its self and feel the existence of eternity. The experience of imagination is a subjective experience of one’s own consciousness and it is this experience makes the experiencer worthy. Creation and creativity are the end aspects of imagination and unfold the hidden mysteries of the cosmos. This essay is a trip across (...) the cosmic energy that creates the self for experiencing its self - a first-hand experience through the virtuosity of imagination. (shrink)

Books on Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment usually fall into one of the following sorts: introductions, in-depth companions, scholarly work offering specific interpretations of certain aspects of the book. Where does Michel Chaouli's book fit within this taxonomy? Reading the preface and the first few dozen pages, one gets the impression that it falls under the third rubric, aiming to defend a specific interpretation of Kant's aesthetic theory: in making a judgment of taste, our imagination is productive; (...) it can make anything into an object of pleasure. According to Chaouli, the activity of making, as creative production, is also constitutive of aesthetic experience, and it demands... (shrink)

William James’s category of “first-hand religion” allows us to arrive at the religious from an internal and individual perspective, including in those activities and phenomena usually considered secular. B. B. King’s 1972 performance at Sing Sing Prison, documented by David Hoffman, brings both the prisoner audience and the performers to an “additional dimension” distinct from the hollowness of everyday (prison) life. In addition, the presence of this intense experience on the YouTube platform creates a fluid community of (...) second-order observers, bound not by any overarching belief but by observation of the experience itself. King’s performance is in the genre of blues music, which, in turn, has associations with African religious traditions. While the study of diverse religious traditions helps inform our understanding of the kinds of activities that might constitute the religious, this study takes individual experience as primary rather than as a manifestation of a particular tradition. (shrink)

Recent research offers good reason to think that various psychedelic drugs—including psilocybin, ayahuasca, ketamine, MDMA, and LSD—may have significant therapeutic potential in the treatment of various mental health conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, existential distress, and addiction. Although the use of psychoactive drugs, such as Diazepam or Ritalin, is well established, psychedelics arguably represent a therapeutic step change. As experiential therapies, their value would seem to lie in the subjective experiences they induce. As it is the only way for (...) trainee psychedelic therapists to fully understand their subjective effects, some have suggested that firsthand experience of psychedelics should form part of training programs. We question this notion. First, we consider whether the epistemic benefits offered by drug-induced psychedelic experience are as unique as is supposed. We then reflect on the value it might have in regard to the training of psychedelic therapists. We conclude that, absent stronger evidence of the contribution drug-induced experiences make to the training of psychedelic therapists, requiring trainees to take psychedelic drugs does not seem ethically legitimate. However, given the potential for epistemic benefit cannot be entirely ruled out, permitting trainees who wish to gain first-hand experience of psychedelics may be permissible. (shrink)

Here, we assess the usefulness of first-person methods for the study of embodiment during the rubber hand illusion (RHI). Participants observed a rubber hand being stroked synchronously and asynchronously with their concealed hand after which they made proprioceptive judgments about the location of their hand and completed a self-report questionnaire. A randomly selected cohort was further interviewed during the illusion and their transcripts analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Results showed that the IPA group experienced (...) a more intense embodied experience during the RHI, measured by proprioceptive distortion and self-report. IPA revealed four main themes of embodied experience: recalibration of the body schema; violation of the body schema; multisensory integration; and illusory experience over time. The report of agency was a significant predictor of proprioceptive distortion. This study shows how first-person methodologies can be empirically rigorous and how the introspective interview provides a rich, detailed account of embodied experience. (shrink)

Presents a self-contained introduction to logic suitable for majors and nonmajors, and can be covered entirely in a one-semester course. Natural deduction systems of sentential logic and of first-order logic, truth tables, and the basic ideas of model theory are presented without superfluous discussion.

The ‘new school system’ described in the Schools White Paper (DfE, 2010) presents religious organisations with two interesting opportunities. The first is an opportunity to play a significantly enhanced role in the management of faith‐based schools. The second is an opportunity to rethink quite radically the content of their curricula. In this article I advance a proposal for the consideration of religious organisations: that they take up the opportunity to develop innovative, religiously distinctive curricula whilst eschewing the activity of (...) confessional religious education. I show how non‐confessional, faith‐based curricula are possible and offer some suggestions about what they might include. (shrink)

It is widely recognized that Immanuel Kant was one of Karl Barth's most important intellectual influences, but how and to what extent this is the case remains an open question. In Presupposing God, Robert Hand demonstrates a deep consistency between Kant's and Barth's theological epistemologies, with this issue in mind. After arguing for a number of positive emphases in Kant's critical philosophy and religious epistemology in conversation with modern Kant scholarship, Presupposing God demonstrates how these emphases were obscured in (...) Kant's reception in the decades between Kant and Barth, and then explores the intellectual conditions under which Barth first encountered Kant. The argument proceeds to show how Barth wrestled with these varying interpretations and continued to utilize Kant with increased sophistication as his thought developed across the Romans commentaries, Anselm, and the Church Dogmatics. Presupposing God suggests that Kant can be an asset to theology, rather than the liability he is often taken to be, and that Barth is one of the better available examples of this in practice. (shrink)

Discussions of Karl Popper's falsificationist philosophy of science appear regularly in the recent literature on economic methodology. In this literature, there seem to be two fundamental points of agreement about Popper. First, most economists take Popper's falsificationist method of bold conjecture and severe test to be the correct characterization of scientific conduct in the physical sciences. Second, most economists admit that economic theory fails miserably when judged by these same falsificationist standards. As Latsis states, “the development of economic analysis (...) would look a dismal affair through falsificationist spectacles.”. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas has been Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne and the director of the Ecole Normale Israelite Orientale. Through such works as "Totality and Infinity" and "Otherwise than Being", he has exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century continental philosophy, providing inspiration for Derrida, Lyotard, Blanchot and Irigaray. "The Levinas Reader" collects, often for the first time in English, essays by Levinas encompassing every aspect of his thought: the early phenomenological studies written under the guidance and inspiration of Husserl (...) and Heidegger; the fully developed ethical critique of such totalizing philosophies; the pioneering texts on the moral dimension to aesthetics; the rich and subtle readings of the Talmud which are an exemplary model of an ethical, transcendental philosophy at work; the admirable meditations on current political issues. Sean Hand's introduction gives a complete overview of Levinas's work and situates each chapter within his general contribution to phenomenology, aesthetics, religion, politics and, above all, ethics. Each essay has been prefaced with a brief introduction presenting the basic issues and the necessary background, and suggesting ways to study the text further. (shrink)

This paper examines methodological issues raised by revealed preference theory in economics: particularly contemporary revealed preference theory. The paper has three goals. First, to make the case that revealed preference theory is a broad research program in choice theory—not a single theory—and understanding this diversity is essential to any methodological analysis of the program. Second, to explore some of the existing criticisms of revealed preference theory in a way that emphasizes how the effectiveness of the critique depends on the (...) particular version of revealed preference under consideration. Finally, three additional criticisms are presented that are aimed specifically at contemporary revealed preference theory. (shrink)

The relationship between economics and the philosophy of natural science has changed substantially during the last few years. What was once exclusively a one-way relationship from philosophy to economics now seems to be much closer to bilateral exchange. The purpose of this paper is to examine this new relationship. First, I document the change. Second, I examine the situation within contemporary philosophy of science in order to explain why economics might have its current appeal. Third, I consider some of (...) the issues that might jeopardize the success of this philosophical project. (shrink)

In this inaugural lecture, delivered at the University of Birmingham in January 2014, I sketch the outline of a theory of moral education. The theory is an attempt to resolve the tension between two thoughts widely entertained by teachers, policy-makers and the general public. The first thought is that morality must be learned: children must come to see what morality requires of them and acquire the motivation to submit to its authority. The second thought is that morality is controversial: (...) there is deep uncertainty about both the requirements of morality and the reasons to comply with them. I draw distinctions between two kinds of moral education and between two kinds of moral inquiry . I argue that some basic moral standards are robustly justified and that schools should promote subscription to these standards by means of both moral formation and directive moral inquiry. (shrink)

This paper supports the literature which argues that derivational robustness can have epistemic import in highly idealized economic models. The defense is based on a particular example from mathematical economic theory, the dynamic Walrasian general equilibrium model. It is argued that derivational robustness first increased and later decreased the credibility of the Walrasian model. The example demonstrates that derivational robustness correctly describes the practices of a particular group of influential economic theorists and provides support for the arguments of philosophers (...) who have offered a general epistemic justification of such practices. (shrink)

Discussions of Karl Popper's falsificationist philosophy of science appear regularly in the recent literature on economic methodology. In this literature, there seem to be two fundamental points of agreement about Popper. First, most economists take Popper's falsificationist method of bold conjecture and severe test to be the correct characterization of scientific conduct in the physical sciences. Second, most economists admit that economic theory fails miserably when judged by these same falsificationist standards. As Latsis states, “the development of economic analysis (...) would look a dismal affair through falsificationist spectacles.”. (shrink)

The structure of strategies for semantical games is studied by means of a new formalism developed for the purpose. Rigorous definitions of strategy, winning strategy, truth, and falsity are presented. Non-contradiction and bivalence are demonstrated for the truth-definition. The problem of the justification of deduction is examined from this perspective. The rules of a natural deduction system are justified: they are seen to guarantee existence of a winning strategy for the defender in the semantical game for the conclusion, given winning (...) strategies for that player in the games for the premises. Finally, it is shown how semantical games and the truth-definition can be given for languages lacking individual constants. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** AZ902009 00003. (shrink)

In this brief comment on Educational Goods, I raise two worries about the authors' proposed normative framework for educational decision-makers. The first concerns the omission of rationality, or responsiveness to reasons, from the list of educational goods; the second concerns the inclusion of parental interests in the list of independent values.

The ‘new school system’ described in the Schools White Paper (DfE, ) presents religious organisations with two interesting opportunities. The first is an opportunity to play a significantly enhanced role in the management of faith-based schools. The second is an opportunity to rethink quite radically the content of their curricula. In this article I advance a proposal for the consideration of religious organisations: that they take up the opportunity to develop innovative, religiously distinctive curricula whilst eschewing the activity of (...) confessional religious education. I show how non-confessional, faith-based curricula are possible and offer some suggestions about what they might include. (shrink)

_Education, Ethics and Experience_ is a collection of original philosophical essays celebrating the work of one of the most influential philosophers of education of the last 40 years. Richard Pring’s substantial body of work has addressed topics ranging from curriculum integration to the comprehensive ideal, vocational education to faith schools, professional development to the privatisation of education, moral seriousness to the nature of educational research. The twelve essays collected here explore and build on Pring’s treatment of topics that are central (...) to the field of philosophy of education and high on the agenda of education policy-makers. The essays are by no means uncritical: some authors disagree sharply with Pring; others see his arguments as useful but incomplete, in need of addition or amendment. But all acknowledge their intellectual debt to him and recognise him as a giant on whose shoulders they stand. This book will be a welcome and lively read for educational academics, researchers and students of Educational Studies and Philosophy. (shrink)

This fascinating monograph tackles a well-established problem in the philosophy of education. The problem is the threat posed to the logical possibility of non-confessional religious education by the claim that religion constitutes an autonomous language-game or form of knowledge. Defenders of this claim argue that religion cannot be understood from the outside: it is impossible to impart religious understanding unless one is also prepared to impart religious belief. Michael Hand argues for two central points: first, that non-confessional religious (...) education would indeed be impossible if it were true that religion constitutes a distinct form of knowledge; and, second, that religion does not in fact constitute a distinct form of knowledge. >. (shrink)

Assuming that the issue of same-sex marriage should be discussed in schools, how should the discussion be framed? Michael Hand first distinguishes this question from the related but distinct question of whether discussion on this topic should be steered. He then examines three possible frames for discussion of same-sex marriage: the perfectionist frame, the antiperfectionist frame, and the practical accommodation frame. He defends the perfectionist frame over the two alternatives: the purpose of state involvement in marriage is to (...) promote valuable forms of intimate relationship, so the case for enabling same-sex couples to marry turns on the ethical claim that same-sex and opposite-sex intimate relationships are similarly valuable. Interrogation of this ethical claim must be central to classroom discussion of same-sex marriage. (shrink)

Adding branching quantification to a first-order language increases the expressive power of the language,without adding to its ontology. The present paper is a defense of this claim against Quine (1970) and Patton (1991).

Human development takes place in a social context. Two pervasive sources of social information are faces and hands. Here, we provide the first report of the visual frequency of faces and hands in the everyday scenes available to infants. These scenes were collected by having infants wear head cameras during unconstrained everyday activities. Our corpus of 143 hours of infant-perspective scenes, collected from 34 infants aged 1 month to 2 years, was sampled for analysis at 1/5 Hz. The major (...) finding from this corpus is that the faces and hands of social partners are not equally available throughout the first two years of life. Instead, there is an earlier period of dense face input and a later period of dense hand input. At all ages, hands in these scenes were primarily in contact with objects and the spatio-temporal co-occurrence of hands and faces was greater than expected by chance. The orderliness of the shift from faces to hands suggests a principled transition in the contents of visual experiences and is discussed in terms of the role of developmental gates on the timing and statistics of visual experiences. (shrink)

University philosophy outreach programs are proliferating. On campuses across the world, students and staff are taking philosophy out to the wider community, and especially to children and young people in schools. Their mission is to engage the public in philosophical discussion and to make a notoriously abstract and arcane subject accessible, meaningful and useful. As yet, there is little published research on these programs. They give rise to two clusters of questions deserving of scholarly attention. First, there are questions (...) about the rationale for philosophy outreach. What is the purpose of taking philosophy into the community? What are the intended benefits of these programs, to the children and young people who participate in them, to the students and staff who lead them, to society at large, or to the discipline of philosophy itself? How do these aims inform the selection of philosophical topics, texts, tools and techniques? The second group of questions have to do with the success of philosophy outreach. What attempts have been made to evaluate these programs and their outcomes? Do they, in fact, yield the benefits intended by those who design and deliver them? Are there any drawbacks to participation, or benefits other than the intended ones? What challenges (financial, institutional, pedagogical, psychological) have been encountered by those engaged in philosophy outreach and how have they been overcome? These are the questions that animate this double special issue on university philosophy outreach programs. The tremendously positive response we received to our call for papers, from contributors in Europe, North America and Australasia, confirms our impression that these questions are ripe for scholarly attention. Here, in Issue 10(1) we present the first tranche of papers; the next tranche will follow later this year, in Issue 10(2). (shrink)

In the first part of our mini-series on moral education, Michael Hand considers whether schools should be involved in trying to make children moral.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 247-248 [Access article in PDF] Christ and Buddha: Weaving a Path for the New Millennium Thomas G. Hand, S.J.Mercy Center, Burlingame, CAThis dialogue conference/retreat was held at Mercy Center, Burlingame, CA, August 10-15, 1999. Well over the stated limit of 150 people joined a faculty of ten in presentations, discussions, sharing, meditation, and rituals. The conference was born primarily out of the personal and (...) social need for dialogue felt by Sandi Peters, who joined the program staff of Mercy Center after three years spent at Insight Meditation East, Barre, Massachusetts.Besides Peters as presider, the faculty members were: representing the Buddhist side--Nigel Edmonds (Mahayana and Christianity), Chris Phillips (Theravada), Ven. Thubten Chodron (Vajrayana), Rev. Heng Sure (Chinese Mahayana), and Patrick Thornton (Theravada and Christianity); representing the Christian side--Thomas G. Hand, S. J. (Catholic), Kevin Hunt, OCSO (Cistercian monk), Roshi Jinne Richardson (Zen and Christianity), and Rev. Shari Young (Episcopal and Zen).In a well-received keynote talk, Thomas Hand offered as the basis for the whole dialogue "The Primacy of Experience" in both traditions. The major themes were: (1st day) "The Challenges of Buddhist-Christian Dialogue," (2nd day) "The Language and Symbols of the Traditions," (4th day) "Weaving a Path for the New Millennium" as a joint venture of the two traditions together. On the third day, participants engaged in "Practice--East and West," including presentations geared toward practice both then and there and in the future.One marked difference between this conference and those that Mercy Center put on from 1985 to 1988 was the quality of the participants. In the earlier conferences, many were seekers and intellectual questioners. This year, besides such qualities, the participants were sincere practitioners. In fact, a great many were practicing in both traditions. They often classified themselves as Buddhist Christians or as Christian-root Buddhists. The greater depth of dialogue that has developed in less than fifteen years was clearly apparent. What is more, the sharing and insights of both Buddhist and Christian presenters seemed to have become increasingly relaxed, articulate, and vital. Their presentations were met with much deeper understanding and enthusiasm by all the participants. [End Page 247]Besides the presentations, participants deeply appreciated the chi kong and tai chi sessions, the daily meditation together, the day of practice, the tea ceremony, and the closing ritual. In a word, the conference was holistic dialogue.Those of dual practice were especially happy to find that they are not alone, that many are coming together to weave a new Path for the new millennium.Tapes are available. Contact Sandi Peters at (650) 340-7486.... (shrink)

In Moral Education in a Secular Society, Paul Hirst offers accounts of the content and justification of morality and the aims and methods of moral education. My own recent book, A Theory of Moral Education, does the same. Here I explore the similarities and differences between our theories. In the first part of the paper, I outline what Hirst calls the ‘sophisticated view of education’, which I wholeheartedly endorse, and highlight his attention to the noncognitive as well as the (...) cognitive aspects of morality. In the second part, I explain how Hirst’s transcendental justification of morality differs from my contractarian justification and trace the implications of this difference for our respective accounts of moral education. (shrink)

This study uses the American Association of University Women 1993 survey on sexual harassment in America's schools, a national sample of high school students, to examine gender differences in the behavioral, emotional, and educational consequences of sexual harassment. Previous research indicates that a high percentage of both boys and girls experience sexual harassment and that the negative consequences are greater for girls. The authors use a feminist theoretical framework to show that girls' and boys' qualitatively different experiences account for (...) part of this gender gap. Girls are far more likely to perceive harassment as harmful than boys and to experience a far greater frequency and severity of harassment. This article documents that girls are more likely to be targets of physical sexual harassment than boys and that physical harassment rather than derogatory or verbal and/or visual forms of harassment exacerbate the gender gap in educational outcomes. (shrink)

This paper applies the account developed by Susanna Siegel in The Rationality of Perception to aesthetic cases and explores the implications of such an account for aesthetic engagement as well as curatorial and exhibitionary practices. It argues that one’s prior outlook – expertise, beliefs, desires, fears, preferences, attitudes – can have both aesthetically good and bad influences on perceptual experiences, just as it can have both epistemically good and bad influences. Analysing these bad influences in cases of ‘hijacked’ aesthetic perception (...) will reveal that, unless we recognize that our perception of high-level and low-level aesthetically relevant properties is norm-governed, we will be at a loss to explain what goes wrong in these cases. Just as perception can be rational or irrational, so too can it be apt or inapt. (shrink)

This book delivers philosophy’s first sustained examination of handedness: being left-handed, right-handed, etc. It engages literature from phenomenology and continental philosophy, analytic philosophy, laterality studies, cognitive science and psychology, gender studies and feminist philosophy, sociology, political science, and more to provide a systematic accounting of the nature of handedness, its basis in lived experience, its effects on bodily performance, its role in varieties of inequality, and its part in oppression and liberation. As a radical asymmetry in the body, (...) handedness plays a key role in human flourishing. It informs both personal bodily movement and social life, from handshakes and high fives to high tech tools made for one hand or the other. Moreover, with left-handers making up just 10% of the population, handedness presents a significant inequality in lived experience. To live and live well, we must understand handedness. (shrink)

After years of progress in terms of gender and sexual rights, since 2012 Europe is facing a so-called gender backlash – opposition directed to issues related to reproductive policies and abortion, violence against women, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) rights and gay marriages, gender mainstreaming and sex education at schools as well as antidiscrimination policies. In this article, firstly, by taking the anti-gender developments as point of reference, I examine the emergence of anti-gender movement in Europe via (...) the use of what I call troll science. Troll science is based on (distorted) scientific arguments moulded into populist discourse, creating an alternative narrative on the conceptions of gender equality. Similar to troll accounts posting provocative, superfluous and even off-topic messages on social media to start arguments and quarrels aiming to distract, troll science, I argue, creates an alternative narrative opposing the scientific facts and discourses (i.e. climate change, evolution, vaccination and gender theory). Later, I discuss the emerging conservative troll-scientific discourses and the gendered public normative order of Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP; Justice and Development Party) government, under the New Turkey. I previously argued that New Turkey and the society under the party’s rule perpetuated by a new set of standards create an alternative narrative on the conceptions of gender equality through troll-science narratives. I concluded by showing how such ideological discourses help create emotional echo chambers – enabling its fast distribution and acceptance by the ideologically conservative groups. Contribution: This paper contributes to the Special Collection Gender Justice, Health and Human Development with the theory of troll-science it introduces to discuss the alternative and anti-gender scientific discourse that is dominating academia. (shrink)

Social change does not occur in the same form and direction in every social structure. In this context, every society experiences the modernization process with its own dynamics. These dynamics started with an intervention either from the top or from outside for the countries that want to be included in the modernization process. Due to the government's modernization initiatives, many differences have been made in the individual and social structure. Because, with the changes in the powers governing the state many (...) times in the short term, the society on the way to modernization has faced a new mentality and modernization steps accordingly. However, this difference has not always been in the way the state predicted and organized it. In this sense, the society sometimes accepted the foreseen change and continued it, and sometimes showed resistance to the change. The failure to legitimize the change successfully in the eyes of the people, however, the fact that it was put to work with various sanctions caused the new norms to not be internalized among the people. The modernization movements that could not be internalized by the society were tried to be applied superficially and formally. However, as a result of the development of information opportunities over time and the convergence of the levels in the state on both political and social planes, modernization has started to take its own motivation from internal processes. Thus, an eclectic culture has emerged between the east and the west, but with its own unique motifs. Individuals who grew up in this line have also applied the patterns of the society while living their own modernization experience. These patterns formed in society have changed the emotional and embarrassment thresholds of individuals. Thus, the sense of control, which started from the outside, descended to the core while human beings were civilized. Based on this background, the aim of our study is to read through clothes, within the scope of Elias' theory of civilization, how the change brought about by Turkish modernization has changed the emotional threshold of a single person in social and individual terms. Literature review was preferred for the progress of the study. The research is limited to dress as a subject. Temporally ıt was limited to the period from the II. Mahmud period to the early Republican period. Thus, the study made inferences about today by going back to the Turkish modernization adventure, which dates back 200 years. The study has been divided into three main parts. While these sections were being presented, the topics were often associated with the "religion" theme. (shrink)

Our main goal in this article is to discuss the structural and persistent problems experienced by women academics, especially with respect to the gendered divisions of academic tasks and unequal divisions of care obligations in the domestic sphere. The analysis is based on reflexive thematic analysis of the open-ended questions of an online questionnaire on the academic work environment, work satisfaction, stress, academic duties and allocation of tasks, and thoughts on gender equality. Academics from different countries voice their lived experiences, (...) frustrations as well as worries about their future. We aim to highlight how these issues are embedded in the structures of academic capitalism and argue against the tendency to individualise these issues in a bid to inspire an informed collective resistance. (shrink)

In this chapter, the author presents some Cartesian thought experiments by reproducing an excerpt from The Meditations on First Philosophy. The author asks us to imagine that the physical world around us is an elaborate illusion. He imagines that the world was merely a dream or, worse yet, a hoax orchestrated by an evil demon bent on deceiving us. The author asks us to suppose that we are dreaming, and that some particulars ‐ namely, the opening of the eyes, (...) the motion of the head, the forth‐putting of the hands ‐ are merely illusions; and even that we really possess neither an entire body nor hands such as we see. Nevertheless, he says that, it must be admitted at least that the objects which appear to us in sleep are, as it were, painted representations which could not have been formed unless in the likeness of realities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Baumgarten's Aesthetics: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives ed. by J. Colin McQuillanEmine Hande TunaJ. Colin McQuillan, editor. Baumgarten's Aesthetics: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. Pp. viii + 364. Hardcover, $130.00.Contemporary philosophers have often overlooked the originality and impact of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's views on aesthetics, and his contribution to the field is often reduced to his introduction of the term 'aesthetics' into the philosophical (...) lexicon. By illuminating the seminal character of Baumgarten's aesthetics and its enduring significance, J. Colin McQuillan's collection of twelve essays endeavors to rectify this neglect, particularly within the anglophone philosophical community. The collection aims to make recent scholarship on Baumgarten's aesthetics more accessible, with translated works from German scholars and their English counterparts presented in a single volume to entice anglophone readers. It stands as the first collection of essays devoted to Baumgarten's aesthetics to be published in English. Through the essays contained in this volume, readers are offered a comprehensive overview of Baumgarten's aesthetic theory and its progression as well as a deeper understanding of his substantial and influential contributions to the field.The collection begins with a comprehensive introduction by McQuillan, which provides insightful analysis of the reasons behind Baumgarten's neglected status and a concise biography of the philosopher. McQuillan lucidly summarizes Baumgarten's goals for his new science of aesthetics, the extent to which he was able to accomplish these goals, and what remained unfinished. McQuillan highlights Baumgarten's view that his aesthetics was not just a theoretical exercise, but rather had practical implications, such as the potential to enhance poetry, rhetoric, and other arts, and more generally all sensible cognition.The opening two essays of the collection offer dual perspectives on Baumgarten's aesthetics, one exploring the connection of his theories to the pursuit of establishing art as the presentation or representation of the absolute and the other presenting his aesthetics as modeled on the "art of invention" (ars inveniendi). Ursula Franke's essay contextualizes [End Page 711] Baumgarten's ideas within the historical framework and demonstrates his impact on the development of German idealist aesthetics, but it also serves as a valuable guide for further research on Baumgarten by providing an overview of contemporary research and avenues for engagement with his work. In the second essay, Stefanie Buchenau offers an insightful examination of the relationship between Baumgarten and Cicero, illuminating how the former crafted aesthetics as a new method of invention.The third and fourth essays of the collection have a narrower focus. In his analysis, Matthew McAndrew, following George Friedrich Meier, posits that Baumgarten, despite seemingly presenting two conflicting definitions of beauty—one attributing beauty to the object of cognition, and the other to the cognition itself—only held the former definition. Departing from previous interpretations that attempted to reconcile both definitions, McAndrew rejects the definition of beauty as the perfection of sensible cognition. Angelica Nuzzo argues that Baumgarten had a pluralistic understanding of truth and distinguished between aesthetic truth and logical truth. She examines Baumgarten's conception of aesthetic truth and contends that it is imperative to comprehend how poetry embodies and incorporates aesthetic truth. According to Nuzzo, Baumgarten believed that aesthetic truth is embodied.In the fifth essay, Simon Grote delves into the theological sources of Baumgarten's aesthetics. Grote claims that Baumgarten's definition of aesthetics was influenced by the definition of aisthēsis put forth by Halle Pietists. Indeed, he claims that seeing this connection between the Pietists and Baumgarten is vital to fully grasp the ethical dimensions of Baumgarten's early aesthetic theory. Like many Halle Pietists, Baumgarten was advancing a conception of moral education as involving the improvement of the human affects through the proper use of the sensible faculties. In the following essay, McQuillan examines the aspects of Baumgarten's aesthetics that set him apart from his rationalist predecessor Christian Wolff. Challenging the orthodox view that portrays Baumgarten as a Wolffian rationalist, McQuillan argues that Baumgarten limited the application of Wolff's mathematical method, circumscribed the scope of logic, and distinguished between sensible and intellectual perfection, separating what Wolff aimed to unite. In his contribution, Alessandro... (shrink)

The author uses social epistemology to develop the cognitive authority theory. The fundamental concept of cognitive authority is that people construct knowledge in two different ways: based on their first-hand experience or on what they have learned second-hand from others. What people learn first-hand depends on the stock of ideas they bring to the interpretation and understanding of their encounters with the world. People primarily depend on others for ideas as well as for information (...) outside the range of direct experience. Much of what they think of the world is what they have gained second-hand. All that people know of the world beyond the narrow range of their own lives is what others have told them. However, people do not count all hearsay as equally reliable; only those who are deemed to “know what they are talking about” become cognitive authorities. --. (shrink)

This book seeks to advance social economic analysis, economic methodology, and the history of economic thought in the context of twenty-first century scholarship and socio-economic concerns. Bringing together carefully selected chapters by leading scholars it examines the central contributions that John Davis has made to various areas of scholarship. In recent decades, criticisms of mainstream economics have rekindled interest in a number of areas of scholarly inquiry that were frequently ignored by mainstream economic theory and practice during the second (...) half of the twentieth century, including social economics, economic methodology and history of economic thought. This book contributes to a growing literature on the revival of these areas of scholarship and highlights the pivotal role that John Davis's work has played in the ongoing revival. Together, the international panel of contributors show how Davis's insights in complexity theory, identity, and stratification are key to understanding a reconfigured economic methodology. They also reveal that Davis' willingness to draw from multiple academic disciplines gives us a platform for interrogating mainstream economics and provides the basis for a humane yet scientific alternative. This unique volume will be essential reading for advanced students and researchers across social economics, history of economic thought, economic methodology, political economy and philosophy of social science. understanding a reconfigured economic methodology. They also reveal that Davis' willingness to draw from multiple academic disciplines gives us a platform for interrogating mainstream economics and provides the basis for a humane yet scientific alternative. This unique volume will be essential reading for advanced students and researchers across social economics, history of economic thought, economic methodology, political economy and philosophy of social science. (shrink)

I argue that Kant’s aesthetic theory yields a fruitful theory of art criticism and that this theory presents an alternative both to the existing theories of his time and to contemporary theories. In this regard, my dissertation offers an examination of a neglected area in Kant scholarship since it is standardly assumed that a theory of criticism flies in the face of some of Kant’s most central aesthetic tenets, such as his rejection of aesthetic testimony and general objective principles of (...) taste. If art criticism is an enterprise of providing evaluations of artworks supported by reasons, then it is hard to see what the Kantian art critic can do for us. If I cannot defer to the critic’s judgment that she loved Blade Runner and there are no feasible general principles linking the depiction of futuristic cityscapes, or the accompaniment of a haunting minimalist soundtrack to the goodness of a film, then it does not seem to matter whether the critic communicates to me her evaluation of Blade Runner or supports her evaluation with descriptions of Blade Runner scenes. Nevertheless, the assumption that these Kantian tenets preclude the possibility of art criticism is mistaken and it is my aim to show how this can be. The project has two phases. In the first phase I develop a new interpretation of Kant’s theory of artistic beauty. In the second phase I make use of this interpretation to put forward a Kantian account of art criticism. Central to my interpretation is the notion that judgments of perfection, e.g., Blade Runner is an excellent neo-noir science fiction film, inform our aesthetic evaluations and receive support from descriptions of non-aesthetic properties of the film. It is precisely this underappreciated role of judgments of perception that I exploit in making room for Kantian art criticism. (shrink)

What is the future of Philosophy of education? Or as many of scholars and thinkers in this final ‘future-focused’ collective piece from the philosophy of education in a new key Series put it, what are the futures—plural and multiple—of the intersections of ‘philosophy’ and ‘education?’ What is ‘Philosophy’; and what is ‘Education’, and what role may ‘enquiry’ play? Is the future of education and philosophy embracing—or at least taking seriously—and thinking with Indigenous ethicoontoepistemologies? And, perhaps most importantly, what is that (...) ‘Future’? These debates have been located in the work of diverse scholars: from the West, from Global South, from indigenous thinkers. In this collective piece, we purposefully juxtapose diverse takes on the future of these intersections. We have given up the urge to organise, place together, separate with subheadings or connect the paragraphs that follow. Instead, we let these philosophers of education and thinkers who use philosophical texts and ideas to sit together in one long read as potentially ‘strange and unusual bedfellows’. This text urges us to understand how these scholars and thinkers perceive our educational philosophical futures, and how the work and thinking they have done on thinking about what the future of that new key in philosophy of education may look like is embedded in a much deeper and richer literature, and personal experience. (shrink)

A rich intellectual encounter, revolving around the hands of the experimenter and those of the artist, highlighting the relation between the sciences and the arts. This book is the first to explore in detail the encounter between Albert Flocon and Gaston Bachelard in postwar Paris. Bachelard was a philosopher and historian of science who was also involved in literary studies and poetics. Flocon was a student of the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, who specialized in copper engraving. Both deeply ingrained (...) in the surrealist avant-garde movements, each acted at the frontiers of their respective métiers in exploring uncharted territory. Bachelard experienced the sciences of his time as constantly undergoing radical changes, and he wanted to create a historical epistemology that would live up to this experience. He saw the elementary gesture of the copper engraver—the hand of the engraver—as meeting the challenge of resistant and resilient matter in an exemplary fashion. Flocon was fascinated by Bachelard’s unconventional approach to the sciences and his poetics. Together, their relationship interrogated and celebrated the interplay of hand and matter as it occurs in poetic writing, in the art of engraving, and in scientific experimentation. In the form of a double biography, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger succeeds in writing a lucid intellectual history and at the same time presents a fascinating illustrated reading of Flocon’s copper engravings. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger is Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany. Kate Sturge is a translator and editor based in Berlin, Germany, and Visiting Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at Aston University, United Kingdom. (shrink)

The experience of embodiment may be studied using the rubber hand illusion. Little is known about the cognitive mechanism that elicits the feeling of embodiment. In previous models of the rubber hand illusion, bodily signals are processed sequentially. Such models cannot explain some more recent findings. Carruthers (2013) proposed a multidimensional model of embodiment, in which the processing of embodiment is understood in terms of conceptual hand space. Visual features of hands are represented along several dimensions. (...) The rubber hand illusion is then explained as the erroneous matching of the online representation of the artificial hand to the stored prototype in a space defined by those dimensions. We conducted the first experimental tests to investigate the multidimensional conceptual space account. First, participants performed a series of odd-one-out judgments for triads of hand images (including their own hand) and we then employed multidimensional scaling analyses. We found that a multidimensional model of perceived hand similarity could be fitted to our data. Second, we tested if a multisensory bodily signal manipulation (the rubber hand illusion) influences the position of the viewed artificial hand in hand space. We employed synchronous and asynchronous stroking and found that in the synchronous condition, which elicits the rubber hand illusion, compared to the asynchronous condition, which does not, the artificial hand was closer to the center of hand space; that is, to a prototype hand. We discuss these findings in the context of the Carruthers (2013) conceptual space model as well as other rubber hand illusion models. (shrink)