In March 2018, the Irish government confirmed that a referendum would be held on 25 May, allowing for the Irish public to vote on the legalisation of abortion. The same month, Together for Yes – the national civil society campaign advocating for a ‘Yes’ vote in the referendum – was launched. This article draws upon findings from 27 in-depth interviews conducted in December 2019 and January 2020 with Irish abortion activists, to explore the moral and emotional construction of abortion within (...) the ‘Yes’ campaign. This research suggests that the ‘Yes’ campaign, which secured 66% of the votes cast in the referendum, framed abortion as a negative affective object and constructed the moral permissibility of abortion along rather conservative lines. Data from the first year of abortion provision in the Republic of Ireland reveals that abortion seekers still face huge obstacles in accessing services in the State. The legislation introduced in January 2019 allows abortion on request only until 12 weeks, whilst issues remain in relation to the refusal of care. This article, therefore, concludes that by framing abortion in conservative terms, the pro-choice campaign has not yet succeeded in destigmatising abortion in Ireland – an issue now translated into limited legislation and inadequate provision of services. (shrink)

This article brings together the work of Catherine Malabou and films by Jacques Audiard, Céline Sciamma and Mia Hansen-Løve to probe what a Malabouian approach to cinema might be and how it could be brought into dialogue with specific works. Grounding itself in Malabou's thought around change, migration, metamorphosis and brain plasticity, it homes in on her discussion of cineplastics and the brain as image of the world and screen. It argues that, although the cineplastic is paradoxically not applied (...) to film by Malabou, it constitutes a more productive route into film analysis than her direct cinematic references. Turning to the filmmakers to apply a cineplastic approach, it explores how they enable us to reflect on the mobile encounter between plastic subjects and their world, as the world reaches into them and shapes them and they reflexively respond by shaping themselves and reaching out into the world, moulding their relation to it. Building on the careful line Malabou draws between plasticity and neoliberal flexibility, the article uses her thought to probe the films' politics, finding most interest in their reflexivity, their capacity to render visible the contingency of apparently fixed forms and the non-reconciliation of filmic subjects to their worlds. (shrink)

Brian O'Shaughnessy puts forward a bold and original theory of consciousness, one of the most fascinating but puzzling aspects of human existence. He analyses consciousness into purely psychological constituents, according pre-eminence to its epistemological power; the result is an integrated picture of the conscious mind in its natural physical setting. Consciousness and the World is a rich and exciting book, a major contribution to our understanding of the mind.

This volume provides the fundamentals needed to understand the various explanatory systems and methodologies used in the behavior sciences and to evaluate their findings, in particular the literature and findings on buyer behavior. In clear prose, the author discusses the key issues in modern philosophy, psychology, and sociology and their relevance for the student of marketing and buyer behavior. O'Shaughnessy exploits insights from many disciplines as to the many ways to derive understanding of behavioral phenomena, making it accessible not only (...) to academics and students of marketing, but to professionals as well. (shrink)

The phenomenon of action in which the mind moves the body has puzzled philosophers over the centuries. In this new edition of a classic work of analytical philosophy, Brian O'Shaughnessy investigates bodily action and attempts to resolve some of the main problems. His expanded and updated discussion examines the scope of the will and the conditions in which it makes contact with the body, and investigates the epistemology of the body. He sheds light upon the strangely intimate relation of awareness (...) in which we stand to our own bodies, doing so partly through appeal to the concept of the body-image. The result is a new and strengthened emphasis on the vitally important function of the bodily will as a transparently intelligible bridge between mind and body, and the proposal of a dual aspect theory of the will. (shrink)

The phenomenon of action in which the mind moves the body has puzzled philosophers over the centuries. In this new edition of a classic work of analytical philosophy, Brian O'Shaughnessy investigates bodily action and attempts to resolve some of the main problems. His expanded and updated discussion examines the scope of the will and the conditions in which it makes contact with the body, and investigates the epistemology of the body. He sheds light upon the strangely intimate relation of awareness (...) in which we stand to our own bodies, doing so partly through appeal to the concept of the body-image. The result is a new and strengthened emphasis on the vitally important function of the bodily will as a transparently intelligible bridge between mind and body, and the proposal of a dual aspect theory of the will. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose and defend a theory of concepts. According to Machery (2009), psychologists and philosophers mean different things by ‘concept’. Psychologists mean bodies of knowledge used to categorise and infer; philosophers mean constituent of propositional thought. Machery’s conclusion would drive a wedge between contributions by psychologists and philosophers on concepts. Theories about the former would have no clear role to play in, and cast no light on, the latter, and vice versa. We argue that, on the contrary, (...) ‘concept’ has a single core meaning: a container of stored knowledge pertaining to a single category. This single meaning satisfies both the theories of psychologists and philosophers. The divergence in use of the term ‘concept’ on which Machery focuses arises because words for containers are often used to refer to (a) what is contained by the container and (b) the label of a container. Our account explains what a concept is, and how one might be misled by Machery’s challenge. (shrink)

I have no comment to make on the aesthetic merits of these verses. I have put them at the head of my discussion because they happen to introduce a cluster of concepts connected with forgiveness: pride, love, hate, God, friendship, goodwill, eternity, offence, condemnation, resentment, blame. We may think that some, but not all, of these have essential connections with the concept in which we are interested. And we may, of course, think that the list is incomplete. Other obvious candidates (...) spring to mind: pity, for example, repentance, compassion, punishment and pardoning. (shrink)

Brian O'Shaughnessy; XII*—Processes, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 72, Issue 1, 1 June 1972, Pages 215–240, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristoteli.

Brian O'Shaughnessy; XI*—Seeing the Light, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 85, Issue 1, 1 June 1985, Pages 193–218, https://doi.org/10.1093/aris.

The phenomenon of action in which the mind moves the body has puzzled philosophers over the centuries. In this new edition of a classic work of analytical philosophy, Brian O'Shaughnessy investigates bodily action and attempts to resolve some of the main problems. His expanded and updated discussion examines the scope of the will and the conditions in which it makes contact with the body, and investigates the epistemology of the body. He sheds light upon the strangely intimate relation of awareness (...) in which we stand to our own bodies, doing so partly through appeal to the concept of the body-image. The result is a new and strengthened emphasis on the vitally important function of the bodily will as a transparently intelligible bridge between mind and body, and the proposal of a dual aspect theory of the will. (shrink)

Michael Abecassis 'Le Petit Theatre de Renoir: Martin O'Shaughnessy's _Jean Renoir_' _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 8 no. 8, March 2004.

The aim is to discover a principle governing the formation of the dream. Now dreaming has an analogy with consciousness in that it is a seeming-consciousness. Meanwhile consciousness exhibits a tripartite structure consisting of understanding oneself to be situated in a world endowed with given properties, the mental processes responsible for the state, and the concrete perceptual encounter of awareness with the world. The dream analogues of these three elements are investigated in the hope of discovering the source of the (...) kinship between dream and consciousness. The dream world proves to be a logically impossible world, limited by nothing more than sheer narratability. The internal world of the dreamer is notable for the limitlessness of the scope allotted to the imagination, together with the presence of two important phenomena encountered in waking consciousness: a measure of interiority, and the positing of a world. Finally, the dream further replicates consciousness in so far as we seem in dreaming concretely to experience our physical surrounds in the form of perceptual imagining. These properties play their part in enabling the dream to be a seeming-consciousness. At the same time they are such as to necessitate its not being consciousness. It is proposed that in the light of these properties, and those composing the state of consciousness, the dream simply is the imagining of consciousness. (shrink)

Additional arguments for sense‐data begin by defending the claim that perceptual sensations are psychological individuals, examples being phosphenes, after‐images, and the ‘ringings’ of ‘tinnitus’. Five arguments for sense‐data follow. First, that since corresponding to every veridical visual field is a possible non‐veridical visual field of sensations, the latter merely needs a different and regular outer cause to be deemed veridical. Second, since bodily sensation experience is extremely strong evidence for the existence of a matching sensation cause, the experience of ‘ringing’ (...) must be strong evidence that a ‘ringing’ sensation is its cause, and this holds in the veridical hearing of a ringing sound. Third, that it is inconceivable that one has a truly visual experience of a red visual field, and absolutely nothing red‐looking be there before one had noticed. Fourth, that the experience of sound might have had a different developmental history, in which first there was merely experience of auditory sensation, and then over millennia such experience gradually found itself caused by regular outer phenomena, thereby constituting the hearing of sound. And a fifth argument that resembles the first argument. (shrink)

The discussion that follows establishes a three-way conversation between two films, Laurent Cantet’s L’Emploi du temps (Time Out [2001]) and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Le Silence de Lorna (Lorna’s Silence [2008]) and one work of theory, Maurizio Lazzarato’s La Fabrique de l’homme endetté: essai sur la condition néo-libérale (The Making of Indebted Man: Essay on the Neoliberal Condition [2011]). The subject of the conversation will be neo-liberal governance and the role of debt within it. Part of Lazzarato’s argument regards the (...) central role debt has played since the start of the global financial crisis in 2008. But another part of his argument is that during the neo-liberal era, debt has been a, if not the .. (shrink)

Mental health, in one awake, guarantees that person knowledge of the central phenomenon-contents of his own mind, under an adequate classificatory heading. This is the primary thesis of the paper. That knowledge is not itself a phenomenon-content, and usually is achieved in no way. Rather, it stems from the natural accessibility of mental phenomenon-contents to wakeful consciousness. More precisely, when mental normality obtains, such knowledge necessarily obtains in wakeful consciousness. This thesis conjoins a version of Cartesianism with the concepts of (...) mental health and human nature. Demonstration of the thesis requires that we show that a particular human mental potential fails fully to be realized when such self-awareness is impaired. That potential is for consciousness of the world (w-Cs), wakefulness. W-Cs divides into consciousness of the outer world (ow-Cs), and consciousness of the inner world (iw-Cs), and we need to demonstrate an essential dependence of ow-Cs upon iw-Cs. Now w-Cs is the adoption of the correct occurrent epistemological posture to the world, and this involves free rational determination of occurrent cognitive attitudes via the internal systematized knowledge of the world, which requires adequate awareness of mental phenomenon-contents. Therefore ow-Cs needs iw-Cs. This is displayed in mental structural accounts of hypnotic, drunken, and psychotic disturbances of consciousness. (For we endorse a structural account of mental health.) We show how failures of self-consciousness entail disturbed modes of determination of cognitive attitudes by the knowledge-system, which is loss of contact with the personal yet true internal representation of the world, which is loss of contact with reality, which is a disturbance both of w-Cs and of consciousness itself. (shrink)

The aim is to provide a theory of consciousness, and of the relation of consciousness through perception with the World. Consciousness is not a mystery, being an internal state analysable into internal constituents. However, it is essentially directed to the World, and this necessitates some knowledge of the World. Certain epistemological powers are peculiar to it, but are they essential? It emerges that consciousness necessitates an accessible perceptual attentive capacity. This is demonstrated through appeal to the principle: the conscious are (...) ‘in touch with’ Reality, and are of necessity oriented towards the truth. Part of the proof turns upon the theory that perception is the sheer presence to awareness of extensionally given phenomenal objects. It contacts objects, not propositions. This is accomplished through the mediation of perceptual ‘proxies’ like side, surface, and ultimately also in seeing through light and visual sensations. However, even prior to this encounter, a ‘The Visual Given’ is presented to consciousness, a causal posit necessitated by the presence of mental causation in the aetiology of the visual experience. This is where the ‘journey’ of the Attention begins, and it ends in Physical Reality, in a complex mental perceptual‐cognitive phenomenon in which in humans the conceptual powers of the mind are engaged in constituting the physical object and its universal setting. Consciousness has from the start an appointment in the concrete with the World in its ultimate physical form, and the introduction sets out to explain how it is that it keeps that appointment. (shrink)

Are there some mental phenomena for which insight is necessarily inexistent? The Freudian ‘Id’, and Schopenhauerian ‘Will’, have been joined in latter days by certain cerebral phenomena, all of which have been claimed to be both necessarily inaccessible and mental. General principles of insight are sought whereby we may assess such claims. The main truth emerging is that all known mental phenomenal types are normally immediately insightable in states of proper waking consciousness, and that the only phenomenon that defies the (...) rule is constituted out of insightables. While many mental causal relations are naturally and even necessarily inaccessible, it seems unlikely that any mental phenomenal processes could be. As a test case, the formation of the visual experience is investigated, to discover whether it includes such a mental process. No evidence for such is encountered. All mental processes seem in principle to be accessible to their owner, whether immediately qua experience or inferentially through their constituting state. The conditional‐Cartesian thesis seems intact. (shrink)

In perception, objects come to the attention. Accordingly, one might come to believe that ‘The Attention’ names the capacity to harbour events of the specific idiosyncratic type, noticing. In fact it signifies an experiential mental space to which objects can come in perception and, which can contain experiences. After all, many mental phenomena other than perception require awareness if they are to so much as exist, e.g. emotion and thought, thanks to being experiences. That experiential space is of limited extent, (...) for at any moment the mind can experience so much and no more. Indeed, the space is no more than the existence of such a limit, and has no autonomous existence other than the fact of that limit, and it is a dangerous illusion to hypostatize the limit as a real space, leading one to misunderstand what it is to experience an experience. Then there is reason for supposing that the experiences of the moment constitute a system. This circle or centre of awareness is the Attention. And it is to this Attention that perceived existents come—as object. This happens when a noticing or perceiving occurs. (shrink)

Brian O'Shaughnessy; V—Material Objects and Perceptual Standpoint, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 65, Issue 1, 1 June 1965, Pages 77–98, https.

The definition of perception is defended by piecemeal assembling of the concept of perception. We begin with the assumption that some event is an intentionally directed experience; add that it is of a type that aspires to ‘success’‐status, as seem‐see and try‐act aspire to status see and act ; and add that the object actually exists, and that the ‘aspiration’ is successful. Now this complex property fits both action and perception. Then to define action we have the need of a (...) further and indefinable concept, that of will, whereas to define perception we have all the conceptual material we need, for we need no more than the concepts, experience, and object. Perception is unique in being the only experience that finds its identity under the concept of experience, for it is merely awareness or experience taking an extensional object. Then since consciousness and experience are universal to any account of mind, perception likewise must have a position of centrality in the mind. It is an a priori‐given a priori‐definable concept, built out of a priori‐given concepts.. (shrink)

Perception is here differentiated from perceptual imagining. To better understand the latter, the imagination was studied. Three different kinds of imaginative experience were characterized: propositional imagining, imaginative perception, and perceptual imagining. The origins of propositional imagining ensure that they cannot instantiate the cognitive prototype. Meanwhile, both the origins and constitutive character ensure the same in the case both of imaginative perception and of perceptual imagining. The general conclusion is, that imaginings are imaginings neither through having a required constitution nor through (...) origins, and not even through a combination of these factors. Rather, they are imaginings through satisfying the definition. Imagining is quasi a cognitive prototype, which represents Reality as endowed with a certain character, is of necessity not that prototype, and is merely quasi that prototype. (shrink)