The article views the development of the Tartu–Moscow semiotic school from the analysis of texts to the study of spatial entities (semiosphere being most well known of them). It comes to light that ‘culture’ and ‘space’ have been such notions in Tartu–Moscow School to which, for instance, the ‘semiosphere’ does not add much. There are studied possibilities to join Uexküll’s and Lotman’s basic concepts (as certain grounds of Estonian semiotics) with Tartu–Moscow School’s treatment of culture and space through the notion (...) of ‘semiotic subject’. Such an approach allows to see transdisciplinarity, which has come to issue only during the last decade, already in the first conceptions of Tartu–Moscow School where transdisciplinarity revealed itself in the symbiotic use of ‘culture’ and ‘space’. (shrink)

Summary John Stuart Mill's classic tale of disillusionment from a ‘narrow creed’, an overt as much as a covert theme of his Autobiography (London, 1873), has for many years served as a guide to the search for the causes and sources of his ‘enlargement-of-the-utilitarian-creed’ project. As a result, in analyses of Mill's mature views, Samuel Taylor Coleridge—and friends—commonly take centre stage in terms of influence, whereas John's father—James Mill—is reduced either to a supernumerary or a villain in the last act (...) of John's intellectual development. However, students of Mill's works should not take at face value the story presented in Autobiography. Mill's own emphasis on the role of his ‘new influences’ has led scholars to disregard the role of his ‘old influences’ in his attempt to create a broader theory of living—one which takes into account both the intellectual and the emotional capacities of individuals. A close look at key aspects of John Stuart Mill's ‘enlargement project’ suggests that James Mill may have played a more positive role than is usually acknowledged. A way into the intellectual affinity of the two Mills is the person they both kept returning to for guidance and inspiration throughout their lives: Plato. (shrink)

James Mill'sHistory of British India(1817) made a rather strange claim: first-hand experience of India was not vital in writing a history – potentially, it led to false ideas about its subject-matter: eyewitnesses are susceptible to bias. The historian was thus to perform his task as a judge: sifting through various testimonies to obtain a ‘more perfect’ conception of the whole than those who witnessed its various parts. Although strange, Mill's claim does not bewilder his readers: after all, Mill was a (...) ‘militant’ exponent of theorizing utilitarianism. I argue that such a reading of Mill's method is injudiciously restrictive. Not only did Mill draw on well-known methodological concerns in contemporary historiographical practice, not necessarily linked with Jeremy Bentham or the Scottish theoretical historiography, but he also seemed to adopt the vocabulary of forensic rhetoric, making his claim that his was a ‘judging’ history more literal than it has been supposed. (shrink)

It seems that eudaimonistic reconstructions of John Stuart Mill's conception of happiness have fallen prey to what they thought Mill should have done with regard to the role of pleasure in his notion of happiness. Insisting that utility and eudaimonia make conflicting claims, something which mirrors Mill's ‘conflicting loyalties’, they downgrade pleasure to just one of the ingredients of happiness. However, a closer look at Mill's intellectual development suggests otherwise. By focusing on Mill's radical background, this paper argues that pleasure (...) retains a central role in his conception of happiness – even from a eudaimonistic point of view. (shrink)

Contemporary sociosemiotics is a way to transcend borderlines between trends inside semiotics, and also other disciplines. Whereas semiotics has been considered as an interdisciplinary field of research par excellence, sociosemiotics can point directions at transdisciplinary research. The present article will try to conjoin the structural and the processual views on culture and society, binding them together with the notion of signification. The signification of space will illustrate the dynamic between both cultures and metacultures, and cultural mainstreams and subcultures. This paper (...) pays attention to the practice of sociocultural semiotisation of space and territorialisation by diverse examples and different sociocultural levels that imply semiotic cooperation between several members of groups that can be characterised as socii. We analyse territorialisation by graffiti, by furnishing spatial environment through artistic manners, by shaping the semiotic essence of cities through naming, renaming and translating street names, by pinning and structuring territories with monuments, by landmarking and mapping cultural space through individualisation of cities. We will see how principles of semiotisation of space are valid on different levels and how these principles form a transdisciplinary object of study as ‘semiotisation of space’, and how space can be regarded as a genuinely transdisciplinary research object. Individual, culture, and society are connected in such an object both as constituents and as a background of study. (shrink)

The rise and fall of the historian of British India -- A classical education -- History, philosophy, and history -- Induction and deduction -- Rational persuasion -- Good government.

John Stuart Mill considered his A System of Logic , first published in 1843, the methodological foundation and intellectual groundwork of his later works in ethical, social, and political theory. Yet no book has attempted in the past to engage with the most important aspects of Mill's Logic . This volume brings together leading scholars to elucidate the key themes of this influential work, looking at such topics as his philosophy of language and mathematics, his view on logic, induction and (...) deduction, free will, argumentation, ethology and psychology, as well as his account of normativity, kinds of pleasure, philosophical and political method and the "Art of Life.". (shrink)

The article analyses the position of sociosemiotics in the paradigm of contemporary semiotics. Principles of studying sociocultural phenomena are discussed so as they have been set for analysing the inner mechanisms of sign systems in the semiology of F. de Saussure on the one hand, and for studying sign systems and semiotic units as related to referential reality in the semiotics of C. S. Peirce on the other hand. Three main issues are touched upon to define the scope of sociosemiotics: (...) the general methodology of sociosemiotics. its particular methods, and possible objects of analysis. The relevance of the features of objects in different humanitarian disciplines (cultural unit, historical fact, social fact, institutional fact, social process, etc.) is surveyed to define the object of study in sociosemiotics. Also, the article comments on the description of social organisations via cultural processes and on relations between an individual and society as controllable by social action models. (shrink)

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 20, Issue 1, Page 204-207, January 2012.

This book explores various connections of John Stuart Mill's thought to ancient Greek philosophy primarily in relation to his conception of happiness. It argues that a better understanding of Mill's background in ancient Greek thought and his reading(s) of Plato's dialogues leads to innovative interpretations of his moral and political thought.

This chapter argues that two distinct, yet connected, contexts – Mill's “mental crisis” and his task as a “Logician” – led to the formation of two arguments on the value of art. On one hand, Mill argued that aesthetic cultivation was important as an end in itself. Excellence was to be pursued disinterestedly as part of a beautiful life. On the other, Mill argued aesthetic cultivation was important as a means to the utilitarian end – strengthening the social sympathies made (...) social happiness attainable. The first argument highlights what Mill thought was missing from the theory of his utilitarian predecessors, while the second brought Mill closer to this tradition, rather than moving him further away from it. (shrink)

Contemporary sociosemiotics is a way to transcend borderlines between trends inside semiotics, and also other disciplines. Whereas semiotics has been considered as an interdisciplinary field of research par excellence, sociosemiotics can point directions at transdisciplinary research. The present article will try toconjoin the structural and the processual views on culture and society, binding them together with the notion of signification. The signification of space willillustrate the dynamic between both cultures and metacultures, and cultural mainstreams and subcultures. This paper pays attention (...) to the practice of sociocultural semiotisation of space and territorialisation by diverse examples and different sociocultural levels that imply semiotic cooperation between several members of groups that can be characterised as socii. We analyse territorialisation by graffiti, by furnishing spatial environment through artistic manners, by shaping the semiotic essence of cities through naming, renaming and translating street names, by pinning and structuring territories with monuments, by landmarking and mapping cultural space through individualisation of cities. We will see how principles of semiotisation of space are valid on different levels (individual and social, formal and informal, democratic and hegemonic, cultural and subcultural) and how these principles form a transdisciplinary object of study as ‘semiotisation of space’, and how space can be regarded as a genuinely transdisciplinary research object. Individual, culture, and society are connected in such an object both as constituents and as a background of study. (shrink)

This book does three main things. First, it defends mathematical platonism against the main objections to that view (most notably, the epistemological objection and the multiple-reductions objection). Second, it defends anti-platonism (in particular, fictionalism) against the main objections to that view (most notably, the Quine-Putnam indispensability objection and the objection from objectivity). Third, it argues that there is no fact of the matter whether abstract mathematical objects exist and, hence, no fact of the matter whether platonism or anti-platonism (...) is true. (shrink)

Inspired both by our ordinary understanding of the world and by reflection on science, anti-Humeanism is a growing trend in metaphysics. Anti-Humeans reject the Lewisian doctrine of Humean supervenience that the world is “just one little thing and then another”, and argue instead that dispositions, powers, or capacities provide connection and activity in nature. But how exactly are we to understand the shared commitment of this anti-Humean movement? I argue that this kind of anti-Humeanism, at its (...) most general level, is to be understood neither as a view about ontology nor about fundamentality, but rather as a specific claim about what explains what. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to raise some serious worries about anti-representationalism: the recently popular view according to which there are no perceptual representations. Although anti-representationalism is more and more popular, I will argue that we have strong empirical reasons for mistrusting it. More specifically, I will argue that it is inconsistent with some important empirical findings about dorsal perception and about the multimodality of perception.

Many philosophers claim that the neurocomputational framework of predictive processing entails a globally inferentialist and representationalist view of cognition. Here, I contend that this is not correct. I argue that, given the theoretical commitments these philosophers endorse, no structure within predictive processing systems can be rightfully identified as a representational vehicle. To do so, I first examine some of the theoretical commitments these philosophers share, and show that these commitments provide a set of necessary conditions the satisfaction of which allows (...) us to identify representational vehicles. Having done so, I introduce a predictive processing system capable of active inference, in the form of a simple robotic “brain”. I examine it thoroughly, and show that, given the necessary conditions highlighted above, none of its components qualifies as a representational vehicle. I then consider and allay some worries my claim could raise. I consider whether the anti-representationalist verdict thus obtained could be generalized, and provide some reasons favoring a positive answer. I further consider whether my arguments here could be blocked by allowing the same representational vehicle to possess multiple contents, and whether my arguments entail some extreme form of revisionism, answering in the negative in both cases. A quick conclusion follows. (shrink)

Résumé Je défends une solution référentielle anti-réaliste au problème de l'identité intentionnelle. Je développe la solution réaliste référentielle de Nathan Salmon — selon laquelle les objets mythiques existent et que nous pouvons y faire référence en utilisant des noms d'objets mythiques — et je considère les objections de David Braun à son égard. Je soutiens que la solution de Salmon donne l'identité réelle des objets des pensées de plusieurs sujets, plutôt que leur identité intentionnelle. Je développe enfin une variante (...) référentielle anti-réaliste du point de vue de Salmon qui évite cette inquiétude — selon laquelle les objets mythiques n'existent pas et ne sont pas réels par ailleurs, bien que nous puissions néanmoins nous y référer. (shrink)

We offer an overview of what we take to be the main themes in Annalisa Coliva’s book, Moore and Wittgenstein: Scepticism, Certainty and Common Sense. In particular, we focus on the ‘framework reading’ that she offers of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty and its anti-sceptical implications. While broadly agreeing with the proposal that Coliva puts forward on this score, we do suggest one important supplementation to the view—viz., that this way of dealing with radical scepticism needs to be augmented with an (...) account of the meta-sceptical problem which this proposal generates, which we call epistemic vertigo. (shrink)

Strawson (1994) and Peacocke (1992) introduced thought experiments that show that it seems intuitive that there is, in some way, an experiential character to mental events of understanding. Some (e.g., Siewert 1998, 2011; Pitt 2004) try to explain these intuitions by saying that just as we have, say, headache experiences and visual experiences of blueness, so too we have experiences of understanding. Others (e.g., Prinz 2006, 2011; Tye 1996) propose that these intuitions can be explained without positing experiences of understanding. (...) Call this the debate between Realism and Anti-Realism about experiences of understanding. This paper aims to advance that debate in two ways. In the first half, I develop more precise characterizations of what Realists and Anti-Realists propose. In the second half, I distinguish the four most plausible versions of Anti-Realism and argue that Realism better explains the target intuition than any of them does. (shrink)

This article examines the 4th-century CE interpretation of the story of Rahab the Harlot by Severian of Gabala, in his homily, De paenitentia et compunctione (CPG 4186). In this article, a close and critical reading of Severian’s references to the story of Rahab in De paenitentia et compunctione (with some comparative reference to other works of Severian, and also of John Chrysostom and Pseudo-Chrysostom) is provided. It is asked, ‘how and why could a treacherous harlot, a prostitute, who was considered (...) to be the epitome of vice in early Christian moral deliberations, function as an exemplum for Severian?’ The article firstly asks how Severian deals with the problematic and paradoxical aspects of Rahab, namely, the fact that she was a prostitute and also a liar. Then, it illustrates how Severian transforms Rahab into a Christian heroine and how he deploys these qualities of the transformed Rahab in a potent anti-Judaistic rhetoric. This study is finally concluded with a somewhat broader delineation of the importance of Rahab in the development of a curious Christian cultural and moral trope, namely, the penitent prostitute. Such a study of Rahab is significant not only in that it expands our understanding of the history of women and gender dynamics in early Christianity, but it also elucidates the complex and strategic discursive moves employed by male Christian authors to deal with the seemingly ‘bad girls’ of scripture. Contribution: This article investigates the historical reception of the story of Rahab (Jos 2) in a little-known homily by Severian of Gabala. The focus is how Severian interprets the story and the paradoxical figure that is Rahab, with reference to its use as an anti-Judaistic trope, and its role in the shaping of the cultural phenomenon that is the penitent prostitute in early Christian thought. (shrink)

Michael Hannon has recently given “a new apraxia” argument against skepticism. Hannon’s case is that skepticism depends on a theory of knowledge that makes the concept “useless and uninteresting.” Three arguments rebutting Hannon’s metaphilosophical pragmatism are given that show that the concept of knowledge that makes skepticism plausible is both interesting and useful.

논자는 이 글에서 한국의 현행 고교 윤리(도덕) 및 철학 교과서에 나타난 반철학적·비철학적 교화의 흔적들을 적시하며 그것들을 극복하는 올바른 방향성의 윤곽을 시론적으로 제시해 보았다. 『고등학교 생활과 윤리』, 『고등학교 윤리와 사상』, 『고등학교 고전과 윤리』, 『고등학교 철학』 등 네 종의 검인정 교과서를 검토한 결과, 논자는 각각 ‘평면적·나열적 내용 구성’, ‘윤리의 도구적 합리화’, ‘동아시아 전통의 특권화’, ‘의사소통의 수직적 왜곡’으로 요약되는 네 가지 문제점이 그러한 교화의 흔적으로 교과서에 나타남을 발견할 수 있었다. 맨 먼저 논자는 ‘평면적·나열적 내용 구성’에 대해 향후 교과서의 내용 구성을 단순히 평면적이고 나열적인 (...) 방식에서 보다 더 입체적이고 문제 제기적인 방식으로 바꿔 나가야 한다고 주장했다. 둘째로 ‘윤리의 도구적 합리화’에 대해서는 교과서가 도덕적인 양심을 자양하는 밑거름이 되어야지 단순히 유불리에 따라서만 행동하는 타산성의 배양토가 되어선 안 된다고 주장했다. 셋째로 ‘동아시아 전통의 특권화’에 대해서는 동아시아 사상을 단순히 그것이 ‘우리 것’이란 이유로 윤리책에 싣기 전에 그중에서 윤리와 관련 있는, 그래서 윤리책에 실릴 만한 요소들을 가려내는 ‘윤리적 여과’가 선행되지 않으면 안 된다고 주장했다. 넷째로 ‘의사소통의 수직적 왜곡’에 대해서는 수업에서 행해지는 토론이 무리한 다수결로 결론을 급조하는 형식적 의결의 절차가 아니라 모두가 자신의 생각을 충분히 드러내고 타인의 생각을 충분히 경청하며 ‘함께하는 발견’에 도달하는 합리적 의사소통의 절차로 재정립되어야 한다고 주장했다. (shrink)