What is moral philosophy? That is the question with which this important volume grapples. Its starting point is the famous critique made in 1958 by Elizabeth Anscombe, who argued that moral philosophy begins from a mistake: that it is fundamentally wrong about the sort of concept that the word 'moral' represents. Anscombe rejected moral philosophy as it was then (and mostly now still is) practised. She offered instead a blueprint for the task moral philosophers must embrace if they are to (...) speak intelligibly to society about good and bad, right and wrong, duty and obligation. The chapters in this book are inspired by Anscombe's classic text. One of the most powerful voices here, among many authoritative voices, is that of Philippa Foot – Anscombe's lifelong friend – who asserts that 'any account of practical reason evacuated of an understanding of what human beings need to flourish is inadequate and must be rejected.'. (shrink)

This book expounds and analyses notions of transcendence, creation and incarnation reflectively and personally, combining both philosophical and religious insights. Preferring tender-minded approaches to reductively materialistic ones, it shows some ways in which reductive approaches to human affairs can distort the appreication of our lives and activities. In the book's first half it examines a number of aspects of human life and experience in the thought of Darwin, Ruskin, and Scruton with a view to exploring the extent to which there (...) could be intimations of transcendence. The second half is then devoted to outlining an account of divine creation and incarnation, deriving initially, though not uncritically, from the thought of Simone Weil. The text concludes by examining the extent to which grace is needed to engage in religious practice and belief. Taking in art, literature, music and classical Greek writings, this is a multifaceted thesis on transcendence. It will, therefore, will be of keen interest to any scholar of Philosophy of Religion, Theology, Aesthetics and Metaphysics. (shrink)

There is a country where teachers have high status, and in which they have qualifications on a par with members of other respected profession. Parents and children have high aspirations and high expectations from education. Children are fully aware of the importance of hard and consistent work from each pupil. Schools open on 222 days in the year, and operate on the belief that all children can acquire the core elements of the core subjects. It is not expected that a (...) class will have a tail. Those in danger of becoming part of an incipient tail have to make up work in their breaks or after school. If the worst comes to the worst poor pupils have to repeat a year, while those who are exceptionally able will move up a year. In the primary schools, children are kept as one large group whatever their individual ability. The teacher teaches the whole group, largely from a text book, though interspersing exposition with focused questioning and discussion, so as to ensure the matter in hand has been properly assimilated by all. Lessons last 40 minutes each, with frequent breaks for letting off steam, after which it is down to work again. Pupils are frequently tested and the school Principal makes a couple of unannounced checks on homework books each term. Secondary schools are selective , allowing whole class teaching and whole class progression to predominate up to the end of schooling. The teacher indeed is in contact with the whole class for up to 80 per cent of the lesson time. While the school certainly does have non-academic aims, the focus is clearly on academic work. There is a conviction, shared by all involved, that the social and moral dimensions of the curriculum will tend to look after themselves and emerge as by-products of a properly conducted academic study. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the hermeneutic of reading text and hearing text.

The received wisdom is that people can mentally invoke a sarcastic tone of voice during silent reading although there is no direct evidence for this claim. We provide an empirical demonstration. In Study 1, participants silently read a set of ambiguous phrases as either being sarcastic or sincere, and chose from a set of adjectives those that best describe the tone of voice that was invoked. Sarcasm-discriminating and sincere-discriminating adjectives were identified. In Study 2, a different sample read a set (...) of phrases in a minimal discourse context. The critical phrase was preceded by one of three contexts: positive, negative, and an ambiguous context that could invoke either a sincere or sarcastic reading. Following each scenario participants were asked to rate a set of adjectives as to the extent the adjective was mentally heard during silent reading: the adjectives were a subset of those that were sarcasm-discriminating, sincere-discriminating or a set of adjectives irrelevant to tone of voice. As predicted, even when not instructed to think sarcastically, participants rated most highly those adjectives chosen as associated with a sarcastic tone of voice in the negative context and least in the positive context. Analogously, the opposite effect was observed for sincere-discriminating items: rated as most applicable to what is being heard internally for positive contexts and rated lowest in negative contexts. These basic findings were replicated when demand characteristics were minimized. (shrink)

Women's Power To Be Loud: The Authority of the Discourse and Authority of the Text in Mary Dorcey's Irish Lesbian Poetic Manifesto "Come Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear" The following article aims to examine Mary Dorcey's poem "Come Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear," included in the 1991 volume Moving into the Space Cleared by Our Mothers. Apart from being a well-known and critically acclaimed Irish poet and fiction writer, the author of the poem has been, from its (...) beginnings, actively involved in lesbian rights movement. Dorcey's poem "Come Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear" is to be construed from a perspective of lesbian and feminist discourse, as well as a cultural, sociological and political context in which it was created. While analyzing the poem, the emphasis is being paid to the intertwining of various ideological and subversive assumptions, their competing for importance and asserting authority over one another, in line with, and sometimes, against the grain of the textual framework. In other words, Dorcey's poem introduces a multilayered framework that draws heavily on various sources: the popular culture idiom, religious discourse, the text even employs, in some parts, crime and legal jargon, but, above all, it relies upon sensuous lesbian experience where desire and respect for the other woman opens the emancipating space allowing for redefining of one's personal and textual location. As a result of such a multifarious interaction, unrepresented and unacknowledged Irish women's standpoints may come to the surface and become articulated, disrupting their enforced muteness that the controlling heteronormative discourse has attempted to ensure. In Dorcey's poem, the operating metaphor of women's silence, conceived of, at first, as the need to conceal one's sexual identity in fear of social ostracism and contempt of the "neighbours," is further equated with the noiseless, solitary and violent death of the anonymous woman, the finding of whose body was reported on the news. In both cases, the unwanted Irish women's voices of either agony, during the unregistered by anybody misogynist bloodshed that took place inside the flat, or the forbidden sounds of lesbian sexual excitement, need to be censored and stifled, not to disrupt an idealized image of the well-established family and heteronormative patterns. In the light of the aforementioned parallel, empowered by the shared bodily and emotional closeness with her female lover, and already bitterly aware that silence in discourse is synonymous with textual, or even, actual death, the speaker in "Come Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear" comes to claim her own agency and makes her voice heard by others and taken into account. (shrink)

Job’s body is ‘portrayed’ in a text that can be nothing more than audible. Compared with the eyes of Job (mentioned 49 times explicitly), his ears (mentioned 13 times, i.e., four times less than his eyes, perhaps because his ears are less visible) play a much more subtle role, underlying even his final confession in 42:5-6, where it seems/sounds that his eyes gave him (only) his final in-‘sight’. That leaves the impression that his ears give him access to the (...) second-hand testimony of tradition but his eyes to his own, personal experience. The hypothesis of this study is that a psychoanalytical perspective can give additional meaning to this polarity and cooperation of the senses for both the main character and recipient of the book of Job in that Job’s (in)sight depends on the foundation of the aural experience, even the musical experience.Contribution: A psychoanalytical perspective adds to the breadth and depth of insight gained from studying the role of the sensory experience in the narrative about the psychic and spiritual development of the protagonist in the Book of Job. (shrink)

Hearing, Sound, and the Auditory in Ancient Greece represents the first comprehensive study of the role of sound and hearing in the ancient Greek world. While our modern western culture is almost an entirely visual one, hearing and sound were central to ancient Greeks. The fifteen chapters of this edited volume explore "hearing" as being philosophically significant across numerous texts and figures in ancient Greek philosophy. Through close analysis of the philosophy of such figures as Heraclitus, (...) Sophocles, Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle, Hearing, Sound, and Auditory in Ancient Greece presents new and unique research from philosophers and classicists that aims to redirect us to the ways in which sound, hearing, music, listening, voice, and even silence shaped and reflected the worldview of ancient Greece. (shrink)

This paper reports on a weekend performance event at the Tate Modern that explored how the senses of sound and movement can be used to apprehend geometrical and topological shapes and mathematical concepts. The sound sculpture Knots and Donuts spatialized sound and sonified space. It attuned the ‘mind’s ear’ and the auditory imagination to conceive of a Borromean Knot and a torus within an immersive three-dimensional sound field. Through dance movement, the choreography of Ordinal 5 actualized the specific mathematical entity (...) as understood in category theory. Both parts of the programme are considered as a performance as research experiment with an audience. Its aim was to understand how the sensory experience of the embodied mind might provide a basis of rationality in which meaning is not restricted to text and image, that is, an embodied topology. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Husserl offers an important, although almost completely neglected so far, contribution to the reductionist/antireductionist debate about testimony. Through a phenomenological analysis, Husserl shows that testimony works through the constitution of an intentional intersubjective bond between the speaker and the hearer. In this paper I focus on the Logical Investigations, a 1914 manuscript now published as text 2 in Husserliana 20.2, and a 1931 manuscript now published as Appendix 12 in Husserliana 15. I argue (...) that, in those texts, Husserl highlights three essential phenomenological features of testimony: a) testimony is personal, meaning that it only takes place among persons, b) testimony is social, meaning that it requires the joint effort of multiple cognitive agents, c) testimony is community-building, meaning that it generates a long-lasting social bond among the parts involved. (shrink)

Bakhtin's dialogical philosophy of the everyday, double‐voiced prosaic and poetic discourse of asymmetrically interrelated, embodied selves, each answerable to others and the world, found liberating wisdom in modern novelizing texts, notably those of Rabelais and Dostoevsky, with the Chalcedonian Christ prototype as background. He suggests how language is used in Christian contexts by attending to different voices in confessional utterances that may include God's voice/an interlocutory infinite “third”—heard in and through others’ voices—without collapsing perspectival pluralism into relativism. Current work on (...) comparative theology, contrasted with old‐style comparative religion, echoes his insights. (shrink)

In one of his earliest essays, Stanley Cavell says that “... we must keep in mind how different their arguments sound, and admit that in philosophy it is the sound which makes all the difference”. This is so whether we discuss the antiphony between Wittgenstein and American Pragmatism, or from within Cavell's own writings. Timothy Gould has set himself to the task of showing how the sound of Cavell's texts—specifically in the form of his voice—is the constituting feature of a (...) philosophical method. This enterprise evolves into a protracted exercise of listening to Cavell's voice for the purpose of working out how that sound can disclose another way that philosophy can be conducted. Gould's text recounts what he has heard, and why the sound of Cavell’s voice makes a difference to philosophy. (shrink)

Study is recently re-invoked as an alternative educational formation to disrupt the learning trap and trope. This paper calibrates study and learning as two hermeneutic principles and correlates them with seeing, hearing, and observing as three onto-epistemic modes that respectively underpin Greco-Christian, Rabbinic, and ancient Chinese exegetical traditions. Linking study and learning with the hermeneutic issues of language, text, meaning, and reality, my calibration unfolds in four steps. First, I introduce an epistemic aporia encountered in interpreting some Chinese (...) educational “wind” texts, exposing our naturalized reasoning of learning along a representational enclosure. Second, turning to Susan Handelman’s writing, I trace this learning-as-representation enclosure as being conditioned upon the Greco-Christian exegetical mode of seeing, meanwhile correlating study back with the Rabbinic hearing hermeneutic. Third, I move on to explicate an onto-cosmological Yijing observing, proffering a study hermeneutic as a movement of observing, following, and attuning to wendao, literally put, “a crisscrossing pattern that turns with dao.” Finally, I re-observe and study the crisscrossing Chinese educational “wind” texts, evoking a Chinese “wind-teaching” sensibility so far rarely discerned through representational thinking and learning. (shrink)

The article engages with the protagonist of The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene by Michèle Roberts, first published in 1984 as The Wild Girl. Filipczak discusses scholarly publications that analyze the role of Mary Magdalene, and redeem her from the sexist bias which reduced her to a repentant whore despite the lack of evidence for this in the Gospels. The very same analyses demonstrate that the role of Mary Magdalene as Christ’s first apostle silenced by patriarchal tradition was unique. While (...) Roberts draws on the composite character of Mary Magdalene embedded in the traditional association between women, sexuality and sin, she also moves far beyond this, by reclaiming the female imaginary as an important part of human connection to the divine. At the same time, Roberts recovers the conjunction between sexuality and spirituality by framing the relationship of Christ and Mary Magdalene with The Song of Songs, which provides the abject saint from Catholic tradition with an entirely different legacy of autonomy and expression of female desire, be it sexual, maternal or spiritual. The intertext connected with The Song of Songs runs consistently through The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene. This, in turn, sensitizes the readers to the traces of the Song in the Gospels, which never quote from it, but they rely heavily on the association between Christ and the Bridegroom, while John 20 shows the encounter between the risen Christ and Mary Magdalene in the garden whose imagery is strongly suggestive of the nuptial meeting in The Song of Songs. (shrink)

In this controversial new book O'Hear takes a stand against the fashion for explaining human behavior in terms of evolution. He contends that while the theory of evolution is successful in explaining the development of the natural world in general, it is of limited value when applied to the human world. Because of our reflectiveness and our rationality we take on goals and ideals which cannot be justified in terms of survival-promotion or reproductive advantage. O'Hear examines the nature of human (...) self-consciousness, and argues that evolutionary theory cannot give a satisfactory account of such distinctive facets of human life as the quest for knowledge, moral sense, and the appreciation of beauty; in these we transcend our biological origins. It is our rationality that allows each of us to go beyond not only our biological but also our cultural inheritance: as the author says in the Preface, "we are prisoners neither of our genes nor of the ideas we encounter as we each make our personal and individual way through life.". (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

What do spelling errors look like in children with sign language knowledge but with variation in hearing background, and what strategies do these children rely on when they learn how to spell in written language? Earlier research suggests that the spelling of children with hearing loss is different, because of their lack of hearing, which requires them to rely on other strategies. In this study, we examine whether, and how, different variables such as hearing degree, sign (...) language knowledge and bilingualism may affect the spelling strategies of children with Swedish sign language, Svenskt teckenspråk, (STS) knowledge, and whether these variables can be mirrored in these children’s spelling. The spelling process of nineteen children with STS knowledge (mean age: 10.9) with different hearing degrees, born into deaf families, is described and compared with a group of fourteen hearing children without STS knowledge (mean age: 10.9). Keystroke logging was used to investigate the participants’ writing process. The spelling behavior of the children was further analyzed and categorized into different spelling error categories. The results indicate that many children showed exceptionally few spelling errors compared to earlier studies, and they demonstrated good typing skills. Also, deaf children showed a tendency to rely on a visual strategy during spelling, which may result in incorrect, but visually similar, words, i.e. a type of spelling errors not found in texts by hearing children with STS knowledge. The deaf children also showed direct transfer from STS in their spelling. A sounding strategy was found in the hard-of-hearing children with STS knowledge, together with hearing children of deaf adults (CODAs), rather than a visual strategy. Nevertheless, the children with STS knowledge demonstrated fewer spelling errors in general, that may also derive from their early exposure of STS, also enabling them to use the fingerspelling strategy. Overall, this study suggests that the ability to hear and to use sign language, together and respectively, play a significant role for the spelling patterns and spelling strategies used by the children with and without hearing loss. (shrink)

Recently, dynamic text presentation, such as scrolling text, has been widely used. Texts are often presented at constant timing and speed in conventional dynamic text presentation. However, dynamic text presentation enables visually presented texts to indicate timing information, such as prosody, and the texts might influence the impression of reading. In this paper, we examined this possibility by focusing on the temporal features of digital text in which texts are represented sequentially and with varying speed, (...) duration, and timing. We call this “textual prosody.” We used three types of textual prosody: “Recorded,” “Shuffled,” and “Constant.” Recorded prosody is the reproduction of a reader’s reading with pauses and varying speed that simulates talking. Shuffled prosody randomly shuffles the time course of speed and pauses in the recorded type. Constant prosody has a constant presentation speed and provides no timing information. Experiment 1 examined the effect of textual prosody on people with normal hearing. Participants read dynamic text with textual prosody silently and rated their impressions of texts. The results showed that readers with normal hearing preferred recorded textual prosody and constant prosody at the optimum speed. Recorded prosody was also preferred at a low presentation speed. Experiment 2 examined the characteristics of textual prosody using an articulatory suppression paradigm. The results showed that some textual prosody was stored in the articulatory loop despite it being presented visually. In Experiment 3, we examined the effect of textual prosody with readers with hearing loss. The results demonstrated that readers with hearing loss had positive impressions at relatively low presentation speeds when the recorded prosody was presented. The results of this study indicate that the temporal structure is processed regardless of whether the input is visual or auditory. Moreover, these results suggest that textual prosody can enrich reading not only in people with normal hearing but also in those with hearing loss, regardless of acoustic experiences. (shrink)

Discussions of value play a central role in contemporary philosophy. This book considers the role of values in truth seeking, in morality, in aesthetics and also in the spiritual life. We have got beyond the simplistic view that values are simply expressions of feeling, but their precise ontological and epistemological status remains controversial. The essays in this book indicate in an accessible way the state of the discussion as it is at the end of the second millennium. The distinguished contributors (...) include Simon Blackburn, Jonathan Dancy, Paul Horwich, John Leslie, Timothy Sprigge, David Wiggins and others who have made significant contributions in this field. (shrink)

This essay argues that film deserves a place within the medical humanities curriculum and demonstrates effective strategies for employing it within medical ethics and humanities classrooms. Part One of the article emphasizes how and why medical ethics teachers can utilize documentary and fictional films, such as “Thomas Szasz and the Myth of Mental Illness,” “The Deadly Deception,”Whose Life Is It Anyway? and “Voices From the Front” in their courses. Such films encourage students to move beyond abstract debates and confront the (...) human pain inherent in all ethical dilemmas. Part Two focuses on documentary and fiction film in the medical humanities classroom. In this section, the author details how to incorporates films, such asThe Doctor, The Waterdance andHospital, into the humanities classroom, juxtaposing them with various literary works, such asOther Women's Children, Borrowed Time, andCeremony. Part Three of the essay presents a detailed discussion ofThe Elephant Man andFrankenstein, illustrating how visual and literary texts compliment each other within the humanities classroom. Overall, the author demonstrates how films function as engaging and complex visual texts providing unique insights in the particularities of American health care and, as such, can become valuable components within medical ethics and humanities classrooms. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Slavoj Žižek’s Hegelian ReformationGiving a Hearing to The Parallax ViewAdrian Johnston (bio)Slavoj Žižek. THE PARALLAX VIEW. Cambridge: MIT P, 2006. [PV]Near the end of a two-hour presentation at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on November 10, 2006, Slavoj Žižek confesses that, in terms of the intellectual ambitions nearest to his heart, “my secret dream is to be Hegel’s Luther” [“Why Only an Atheist Can Believe”]. This confession (...) comes just months after the publication of his latest major work, The Parallax View, a book described as a new magnum opus. There are ample justifications within this text to license retroactively rereading it through the lens of Žižek’s subsequent public admission that he is now preoccupied with rescuing Hegel from the numerous misinterpretations to which this giant of German idealism (who casts such a long shadow over the Continental European philosophical tradition) has been repeatedly subjected over the past two hundred years. The Parallax View, at certain points explicitly and in other places implicitly, can be seen as centered on an effort to confront aggressively the various received versions of Hegel widely accepted as official and orthodox exegetical renditions. The motif of the “parallax gap,” elaborated in a plethora of guises throughout this 2006 tome, condenses and reflects the axiomatic theses of what could be called Žižek’s Hegelian reformation.The critical assessment of The Parallax View offered here seeks to go straight to its theoretical heart by highlighting a single line of argumentation running through the full span of this text’s different moments and phases. Žižek’s own Hegelian-style conceptions of truth (as fiercely partisan rather than calmly neutral) and universality (as immanently concrete rather than transcendently abstract) validate such an interpretive approach—“universal Truth is accessible only from a partial engaged subjective position” [PV 35]. Deliberately extracting particular conceptual constellations and forcing them to link up with each other according to the plan of a certain directed philosophical agenda promises to be much more revealing of the essential features of Žižekian thought than a comprehensive survey of this latest of his major works.The specific argumentative thread to be isolated here is the new extended engagement with the terrain covered by cognitive science and the neurosciences. Apart from the task of denouncing falsifying popular pictures of Hegel, one of Žižek’s other driving ambitions in this book is the desire to formulate a fundamental ontology appropriate to the theory of subjectivity mapped out over the course of his entire intellectual itinerary (a theory informed by Kant and post-Kantian German idealism combined with Lacanian psychoanalytic metapsychology). And, herein, the articulation of such an ontology appropriately gets entangled, via reflections on the nature of the brain, with the latest instantiations of the perennial philosophical problem of the relationship between mind and [End Page 3] body. Žižek grants that the central nervous system is, in at least several undeniable and important senses, the material, corporeal ground of the subject, the bodily being without which there cannot be the parlêtre (speaking being). But, in the spirit of Schelling and Hegel (especially their philosophies of “productive” nature), the fashions in which Žižek attempts to tie together systematically a materialist ontology with an account of more-than-material, transontological subjectivity illuminate a normally obscured and ignored set of implied consequences flowing from the gesture of dissolving hard-and-fast dualist distinctions between body and mind, nature and spirit.The past few decades of philosophical engagement with the neurosciences, an engagement almost completely monopolized by the Anglo-American Analytic philosophical tradition and neglected by the Continental European philosophical tradition to an equal degree, has emphasized (to put this in the vernacular of German idealism) the naturalization of spirit resulting from the collapse of any strict nature-spirit dichotomy. The materialisms promoted by those Analytic philosophers amenable to grounding the mental on the neuronal simply assume that the outcome of folding mind and matter into each other is a becoming-material of the mind, namely, a naturalization of the spirit (that is, the mind comes to resemble the brain conceived of as just another part... (shrink)

Pragmatist responses to radical skepticism do not receive much attention in contemporary analytic epistemology. This observation is my motivation for undertaking a search for a coherent pragmatist reply to radical doubt, one that can compete, in terms of clarity and sophistication, with the currently most popular approaches, such as contextualism and relevant alternatives theory. As my point of departure I take the texts of C. S. Peirce and William James. The Jamesian response is seen to consist in the application of (...) a wager argument to the skeptical issue in analogy with Pascal's wager. The Peircean strategy, on the other hand, is to attempt a direct rejection of one of the skeptic's main premises: that we do not know we are not deceived. I argue that while the Jamesian attempt is ultimately incoherent, Peirce's argument contains the core of a detailed and characteristically "pragmatic" rebuttal of skepticism, one that deserves to be taken seriously in the contemporary debate. (shrink)

This paper has been explicitly composed for oral presentation: written by ear to be (read as) heard. It stages an experiment/experience ( expérience ) with sound—and in the written text with the “sight” of sound—in order to solicit and engage the becoming sens (e) of sound in the space between resonance and response-ability it seeks to explicate and explore. The presentation begins with the sound of the first few bars of a popular song (whose identity I am withholding in (...) this submission in order to preserve the integrity of the expérience upon which its success depends), which is eventually heard in its entirety and which constitutes the point of departure, reference, and return—of resonance and response-ability—for the composition as a whole. (shrink)

The principle that emergent writing is supported by talk, and that an appropriate pedagogy for writing should include planned opportunities for talk is well researched and well understood. However, the process by which talk becomes text is less clear. The term 'oral rehearsal' is now commonplace in English classrooms and curriculum policy documents, yet as a concept it is not well theorised. Indeed, there is relatively little reference to the concept of oral rehearsal in the international literature, and what (...) references do exist propose differing interpretations of the concept. At its most liberal, the term is used loosely as a synonym for talk; more precise definitions frame oral rehearsal, for example, as a strategy for reducing cognitive load during writing; for post-hoc reviewing of text; for helping writers to 'hear' their own writing; or for practising sentences aloud as a preliminary to writing them down. Drawing on a systematic review of the literature and video data from an empirical study, the paper will offer a theoretical conceptualisation of oral rehearsal, drawing on existing understanding of writing processes and will illustrate the ways in which young writers use oral rehearsal before and during writing. (shrink)

In this article, we will consider how far we might be said to be active in forming our beliefs; in particular, we will ask to what extent we can be said to be free in believing what we want to believe. It is clear that we ought to believe only what is really so, at least in so far as it lies in our power to determine this, but reflection shows that, regrettably, we do not confine our beliefs to what (...) we have evidence for, nor do we always believe in accordance with the evidence we do have. So it is natural to conclude that non-intellectual factors may be at work here; such, at least, was the view of Descartes, who attributed error to the influence of our will in leading us to assent to judgments which go beyond the evidence presented by our infallible intellect. This view has some initial plausibility when we think of cases in which emotional considerations lead people to take up and genuinely believe things they have no evidence for, but it is not a view which has received much support from modern philosophers. So, in Part 1 we will look at criticisms levelled against Descartes' view by J. L. Evans, and in Part 2 we will see how far Descartes can be defended. Our conclusions here will lead us to give in Part 3 a general account of the influence of the will in beliefs. We will suggest that we are always responsible for our explicit beliefs, even though it is not true that we can simply believe what we like. Thus we will reject the idea that a man can consciously know something, and at the same time, by will power, believe the opposite. Belief is not then totally free, but we will argue that people do sometimes form beliefs which go against what they should and could believe, and that this can in a way be put down to the influence of the will. Finally we will consider some of the ways in which it is possible to influence our beliefs by willed acts over a long period of time, though this is not the way that we clami that the will might be said to play a part in every judgment that we make. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Popper's attitude to traditions is fundamentally rationalistic. He analyses traditions, along with other institutions and practices, in terms of their efficiency in promoting goals which can be specified independently of the traditions themselves. Hayek, by contrast, looks at traditions in terms of their contributions to the survival of the culture in which they are embedded, something whose evaluation may be opaque even to people within the culture. Both these approaches are flawed compared to Oakeshott's insistence that traditions are not (...) goal‐oriented, and that goals cannot be specified independently of agents’forms of life. Oakeshott's views constitute a via media between Popperian rationalism and Hayekian anti‐rationalism. (shrink)

Even today, apologists for modernist and post-modernist architecture frequently appeal to what, following Sir Karl Popper, I will call historicist arguments. Such arguments have a particular poignancy when they are used to justify the replacement of some familiar part of an ancient city with some intentionally untraditional structure; as, for example, when a familiar nineteenth century block of offices in a prime city site is swept away to make room for something supposedly more fitting to the ‘new millennium’, a ‘twentieth (...) century contribution to monumental architecture’, a building ‘of substantial importance to the present age’. Similarly, those architects or consumers of architecture who fail to conform to whatever stylistic demands the age is held to demand are marginalized in many supposedly serious discussions of architecture, and made to feel out of place and out of time. (shrink)

We spent a wonderful morning in the van Gogh gallery in Amsterdam. Of course we knew all the paintings, we had seen them all in reproduction, and the building was more like a bank vault than a setting for art. But what art! At first sight how small and uniform the paintings were in reality: yet every blade of grass, every flower in a field, every olive tree, every vibration in the sky, every patch of colour, every brush stroke, testified (...) to life and to a life vibrating beneath the surface form. In a true sense, an artist inspired, an artist breaking convention, artistic and social, but nevertheless an artist transforming life with a vision of the enhancement of life, a vision inviting each one of us to look again at the natural forms around us, to feel the spirit or the gods dwelling in them, a vision of enchantment and of humanity in a disenchanted world. Art—painting—can, then, be a source of spiritual nourishment as Kant and Schiller and Ruskin in their different ways thought it should be. (shrink)

This volume celebrates the centenary of the birth of Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch. These four remarkable women were philosophical colleagues in Oxford in the 1940s, and their careers intertwined and overlapped henceforth. The papers in this book are all by prominent philosophers who spoke at the Royal Institute of Philosophy's annual lecture series from 2018-9. Together they cover the philosophical careers of Anscombe, Foot, Midgley and Murdoch, focusing on their thinking on morality, human nature and (...) action and the place of humanity in the animal and natural world, all areas to which they made notable and distinctive contributions. Connexions are drawn to the thought of Wittgenstein, Aquinas and Aristotle. This book demonstrates the way these four philosophers individually and collectively changed the direction of philosophy in the English speaking world in the mid-twentieth-century and how they continue to influence it one hundred years after their birth. (shrink)

Anthony O'Hear; VI*—Guilt and Shame as Moral Concepts, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 77, Issue 1, 1 June 1977, Pages 73–86, https://doi.org/10.

This book is a balanced and up-to-date introduction to the philosophy of science. It covers all the main topics in the area, as well as introducing the student to the moral and social reality of science. The author's style is free from jargon, and although he makes use of scientific examples, these should be intelligible to those without much scientific background. At the same time the questions he raises are not merely abstract, so the book will be of interest and (...) concern to scientists as well as philosophers.The author discusses the growth of knowledge of science, the status of scientific theories and their relationship to observational data, the extent to which scientific theories rest on unprovable paradigms, and the nature of scientific explanations. In later chapters he considers probability, scientific reductionism, the relationship between science and technology, and the relationship between scientific and other values. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Popper's attitude to traditions is fundamentally rationalistic. He analyses traditions, along with other institutions and practices, in terms of their efficiency in promoting goals which can be specified independently of the traditions themselves. Hayek, by contrast, looks at traditions in terms of their contributions to the survival of the culture in which they are embedded, something whose evaluation may be opaque even to people within the culture. Both these approaches are flawed compared to Oakeshott's insistence that traditions are not (...) goal‐oriented, and that goals cannot be specified independently of agents’forms of life. Oakeshott's views constitute a via media between Popperian rationalism and Hayekian anti‐rationalism. (shrink)

Anthony O'Hear; Academic Freedom and the University, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 22, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 13–21, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.

In this book Anthony O’Hear examines the reasons that are given for religious faith. His approach is firmly within the classical tradition of natural theology, but an underlying theme is the differences between the personal Creator of the Bible or the Koran and a God conceived of as the indeterminate ground of everything determinate. Drawing on several religious traditions and on the resources of contemporary philosophy, specific chapters analyse the nature of religious faith and of religious experience. They examine connections (...) between religion and morality, and religion and human knowledge – the cosmological, teleological and ontological arguments, process thought, and the problem that evil presents for religion. The final chapter returns to the inherently dogmatic nature of religious faith and concludes that rational people should look beyond religion for the fulfilment of their spiritual needs. (shrink)