Let us look first at poetry. It is well known that by the fifteenth century, lyric poetry had undergone a radical transformation; the early lyric fluidity and formal variability had hardened into the nonlyric and even, some maintain, antilyric forms fixes which characterize the poetic formalism of late medieval France. Dispensing with the details of how and why this occurred, the essential point is that by the end of the Middle Ages, the poet in France and Burgundy saw himself as (...) an artisan of words, not as a singer.6 He refers to himself as a craftsman , and it is plain, sometimes painfully so, to anyone who reads the works that the rhétoriqueur is, indeed, an artisan of forms—or, if you will, an architecte de la parole, a specialist in verbal matter. He works words, sounds, metric and strophic forms into intricate patterns and arranges his elaborate designs in blocks of exact and harmonious symmetry. He is, in fact, from Machaut on, a virtuoso of the verbal equivalent of the architectural art of carrelage which adorned the princely château in which he worked and lived. No one familiar with the period will avoid noticing the strikingly similar types of patters in the poet’s works and in his surroundings.I have gathered elsewhere the visual documentation which bears out Zumthor’s suggestions quoted above with respect to the meticulously constructivist mentality of the Franco-Burgundian artisan. But the analogies I found are much more than perceptual. It is true that the elaborate designs on the walls, floors, ceilings, windows, woodwork, and so forth of the early Renaissance château are, indeed, composed of intricate blocks of material; but their function is not merely decorative , it is also narrative, with emblematic motifs and allegorical figures arrayed in linear patterns of “visual” discourse—the invariable “discours de la gloire” which silently proclaims the magnificence of the patron prince and proprietor of the château .7 6. A summary of internal and external factors in the transformation of lyric to Rhetoric is provided in my review of Die musikalische Erscheinungsform der Trouvèrepoesie by Hans-Herbert S. Räkel , in Romance Philology 34 : 250-58.7. This following collage of fragments from ML was constructed ôto serve as commentary on photographs of tile designs compared with verbal texts, in an earlier version of this paper , from which the examples in figs. 1-4 are taken.Culte de l’objet subtilement travaillé, au-delà de toute fonctionnalité primaire *** primat du labeur ardu, patient, du difficile, de l’inattendu *** les mots mêmes semblent travaillés d’un besoin de scientificité fictive, d’anoblissement par le savoir *** les … mots ne sont plus que les particules d’une parole dont la seule signification est globale *** matériau émancipé des contraintes de la phrase, transposé sur un plan où le signe devient le nom vide de ce signe *** goût du bricolage plutôt que de l’industrie; … du bariolage plus que du fondu et de la nuance; de l’équilibre numéral des parties plus que de la synthèse; du multiple plus que de l’un. Outil forgé martelé d’ “aornures” sans fonction utilitaire; enchâssements cubiques, coniques, pyramidaux, cruciformes du bâtiment … meubles marquetés, forrés de tiroirs minuscules et secrets [and so forth].For the iconography of these examples , see Emile Amé, Less Carrelages émaillés du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance , pp. 61-108. Jonathan Beck is associate professor of French at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Théâtre et propaganda aux débuts de la Réforme , a sequel to his edition and study, Le Concil de Basle: Le Origines du theater réformiste et partisan en France. (shrink)

Die Frequenzkurven, die die lebendige Substanz charakterisieren, können als eine statische Beschreibung oder als das Ergebnis einer Entwicklung betrachtet werden.Im ersten Falle akzeptiert man ohne weiteres die gegebenen Verteilungen und man versucht, ihnen durch mathematische Gleichungen, die keine unmittelbare Wirklich-keitsbedeutung haben, nahezukommen. Das kausale Denken wird hier ausgeschaltet oder man gibt sich wenigstens mit nur sehr groben Analogien zufrieden.Verschiedene Methoden über die Genese der Frequenzkurven werden besprochen; dabei wird gezeigt, dass die Mehrheit der Fälle auf Hypothesen beruht, die biologisch wenig (...) begründet sind. Eine Ausnahme davon macht die Theorie vonJ. C. Kapteyn, weil er den Vorgang des Wachstums in die Genese einbezieht. Seine Methode weiter ausbauend kann man sich vorstellen, dass die Genese einer Frequenzkurve in erblich homogenem Pflanzenmaterial durch Variation der Wachstumsgeschwindigkeit zustandekommt.Auf solche Weise kann man in einem Koordinatensystem mit Länge und Zeit als Koordinaten ein “Deviationsraster” konstruieren.In einem experimentell untersuchten Fall ergab die graphische Methode mit völlig ausreichender Genauigkeit die schon gefundene Frequenz.Les courbes de fréquence qui caractérisent la matière vivante, peuvent être considérées ou comme une description statique ou bien comme le produit d'un développement.Dans le premier cas on accepte les distributions obtenues et on essaie de s'en rapprocher par des équations mathématiques qui n'ont pas une réalité effective. On ne recherche plus la causalité ou alors on se contente le plus souvent d'analogies très grossières.Les auteurs traitent des diverses méthodes de la genèse des courbes de fréquence et démontrent que la plupart des cas reposent sur des hypothèses qui ont peu de fond biologique. La théorie deM. J. C. Kapteyn fait exception parcequ'il introduit le processus de croissance dans la genèse. En poursuivant plus loin dans sa méthode on peut se figurer que la genèse d'une courbe de fréquence de plantes homogènes par hérédité s'expliquerait par des variations de vitesse de croissance.De cette façon on peut construire une “grille de déviation” dans un système en prenant longueur et temps comme coordonnées.Dans un cas essayé expérimentalement ce graphique donnait avec une exactitude assez grande la distribution de fréquence déjà trouvée. (shrink)

Robert Beck propose d'étudier les mutations du dimanche au travers des siècles, ainsi que le processus de désacralisation que ce dernier a subi de 1700 à nos jours. Le « dimanche du seigneur » laisse peu à peu la place au « dimanche de fête », à mesure que la société se laïcise et s'industrialise. Les fissures de l'édifice dominical apparaissent avec le discours d'une partie des philosophes des Lumières qui, au nom de la morale et de l'économie, critiquent (...) le caractère oisif de cette... (shrink)

Ulrich Beck, Jean-Marc Ferry et Jürgen Habermas voient dans l’Union européenne la réalisation d’une démocratie postnationale, capable de se hisser au niveau des enjeux actuels. Les signes de cette réalisation ne se font toutefois pas jour dans des valeurs abstraites, mais dans l’expérience de l’européanisation, lors des commerces transfrontaliers. Après avoir présenté ce paradoxe dans les textes, nous suggérons que l’accent mis sur les expériences ordinaires tient à la place occupée par le droit dans la construction européenne. Le contrôle (...) des libertés de circulation par la Cour de justice de l’Union européenne, caractéristique du marché intérieur, est à l’origine d’une intégration plus large, qui a étendu les droits des opérateurs économiques et forgé le statut de citoyen européen. La jurisprudence de la CJUE a en effet permis d’élargir la portée des droits transnationaux, dans la continuité du droit cosmopolitique kantien, sans dissoudre les États membres dans une association supranationale. Une affiliation postnationale, alternative au modèle de la souveraineté étatique classique, semble ainsi se concrétiser dans l’Union européenne. Cependant, nous suggérons que le crédit accordé à la construction, par la jurisprudence de la CJUE, de la citoyenneté postnationale, risque d’occulter les effets problématiques d’une intégration judiciaire vouée à être essentiellement négative. (shrink)

Les sociétés contemporaines entretiennent un rapport ambivalent au risque : elles sont promptes à s’alarmer pour des risques collectifs, tout en valorisant les prises de risque individuelles. Cet article s’attache à resituer les interprétations sociologiques de ces prises de risque délibérées, en particulier celles de Lyng et Le Breton, dans le cadre de la société du risque décrite par Beck et Giddens. Les prises de risque apparaissent alors comme la réaction à un environnement devenu très incertain et anxiogène. Ce (...) cadre interprétatif invite aussi à nuancer l’opposition entre prises de risque adultes et adolescentes. Si les premières se concrétisent plus souvent dans la pratique d’un sport extrême, tandis que les secondes s’avèrent plus transgressives, il est possible que ce contraste traduise surtout des moyens matériels différenciés. Les données quantitatives du Baromètre Santé 2000 permettent enfin de tester empiriquement quelques hypothèses relatives à ces interprétations.Risk has an ambivalent status in contemporary societies : great fears of collective risks coexist with an increasing taste for individual risk-taking. This article aims at reframing Lyng and Le Breton’s sociological interpretations of voluntary risk-taking in a broader scope, derived from the « risk society » described by Beck and Giddens. From this viewpoint, such behaviours are individual responses to an environment in which uncertainty is causing anxiety, and adolescent risky behaviours are not so different from those of adults. If adolescents are more prone to take risks in illegal ways, it can result from a restricted access to expensive extreme sports. Using quantitative data from the French survey Baromètre Santé 2000, the article ends with an empirical test of some hypotheses deriving from these interpretations. (shrink)

Le texte, redige par Kant dans les premiers mois de l'annee 1790, pour servir d'introduction a la Critique de la faculte de juger, a ensuite ete laisse de cote, mais uniquement en raison de son etendue hors de proportion avec le texte. Kant, qui confia ensuite l'introduction a son eleve J.S. Beck, en avait bien reconnu l'importance, et il l'evoque comme une contribution considerable permettant de comprendre plus completement le concept d'une finalite de la nature. Ce qu'ont parfaitement reconnu (...) egalement les editeurs ulterieurs, presentant l'essai sous cet intitule: Sur la philosophie en general et sur la Critique de la faculte de juger en particulier. Respectant ici l'organisation du volume arretee par le traducteur lors de la premiere edition, nous y avons adjoint les deux opuscules de 1796, D'un ton grand seigneur adopte naguere en philosophie et L'annonce de la proche conclusion d'un traite de paix perpetuelle en philosophie. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 121.3 (2000) 497-499 [Access article in PDF] Thomas Schmitz. Bildung und Macht: zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit. Munich: Beck, 1997. 270 pp. Paper, DM 98. (Zetemata, 97) This book, which originated as a Habilitationsschrift, offers an intelligent and energetic analysis of the Second Sophistic from a sociological perspective informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu. (...) This is not Bourdieu the Algerian sociologist of the 1960s, nor even Bourdieu the polemical critic of social anthropology of the 1970s, but the Bourdieu of the 1970s and 1980s who applied his theories of practice and symbolic capital to the analysis of language and education in such works as Homo Academicus (Paris 1984) and Ce que parler veut dire: l'économie des échanges linguistiques (Paris 1982).Schmitz is interested in the way the elites of Greek cities used education to legitimate their ruling position (chapter 2.2, "Bildung als Legitimation zur Herrschaft"). The social domination of an elite, where not based on brute force, may be presented by that elite, both to those they dominate and to themselves, as the "natural" result of certain forms of superiority. The hallmark of elite superiority in the Greek cities of the Empire was paideia. This situation may explain the general prevalence of rhetorical training among elite families, but not why some people from these families would become sophists. Schmitz demonstrates [End Page 497] correctly that performing as a sophist did not in itself procure social advancement (chapter 2.3). Instead he sees the ruling class as delegating the legitimation of its collective power to certain of its members, so that the sophists in effect performed publicly as pars pro toto (64-66). How exactly the invisible hand of class delegation made itself felt in individual life choices would require some psychological speculation, which Schmitz does not attempt here. Possibly sophists evolved from child prodigies whose early success in outperforming their peers instilled a lifelong appetite for victorious competition.Mastery of the arbitrary complexities of atticizing paideia set one apart from the underclass (chapter 3) but could also be used to set oneself apart from one's peers. Schmitz sees striving for distinction as a constant in imperial society (chapter 4) and makes good use of the posthumous vaunts of funerary inscriptions to show that for these aristocrats paideia was the medium of competition par excellence (chapter 5.1). He stresses the parallel between paideia and euergetism (65-66, 95-96, 100ff., 219-20), a form of competitive political communication that validated the ascendancy not only of the individual liturgist but also the class to which he belonged. He describes the cornucopia of opportunities for public competition that characterized imperial society (from children's encomium contests at the Pythian Games to learned symposia) but concludes that because it structured competitive impulses and enhanced participants' sense of belonging, paideia, like euergetistic competition, operated in imperial society as a centripetal as well as centrifugal force (chapter 4.5).Schmitz sees the opsimathes as a sort of bogeyman whose pedantry, laboriously acquired and gauchely displayed, educated aristocrats imagined to contrast with their own paideia, the product of an inborn superiority. Indeed in chapter 5 he uses Bourdieu to pinpoint one of the reasons that participants and educated observers put such stress on extemporaneous performance: "il leur suffit d'être ce qu'ils sont pour être ce qu'il faut être, c'est-à-dire naturellement distingués de ceux qui ne peuvent pas faire l'économie de la recherche de la distinction" (158). As Schmitz himself puts it, in an extemporaneous performance, an aristocratic sophist "zeigte er nicht, was er erlernt hatte und was er wusste, sondern was er war." Improvisation functioned as synecdoche for aristocratic supremacy.What sophists have to say about the size of the crowds they enthralled should be taken with a grain of salt. In chapter 6 Schmitz is perhaps a bit too credulous in this regard, but he rightly stresses the artful way in which... (shrink)

Dans un texte désormais célèbre, Ferdinand de Saussure insiste sur l’arbitraire du signe dont il vante les qualités. Toutefois il s’avère que le symbole, signe non arbitraire, dans la mesure où il existe un rapport entre ce qui représente et ce qui est représenté, joue un rôle fondamental dans la plupart des activités humaines, qu’elles soient scientifiques, artistiques ou religieuses. C’est cette dimension symbolique, sa portée, son fonctionnement et sa signification dans des domaines aussi variés que la chimie, la théologie, (...) les mathématiques, le code de la route et bien d’autres qui est l’objet du livre La Pointure du symbole. -/- Jean-Yves Béziau, franco-suisse, est docteur en logique mathématique et docteur en philosophie. Il a poursuivi des recherches en France, au Brésil, en Suisse, aux États-Unis (UCLA et Stanford), en Pologne et développé la logique universelle. Éditeur-en-chef de la revue Logica Universalis et de la collection Studies in Universal Logic (Springer), il est actuellement professeur à l’Université Fédérale de Rio de Janeiro et membre de l’Académie brésilienne de Philosophie. SOMMAIRE -/- PRÉFACE L’arbitraire du signe face à la puissance du symbole Jean-Yves BÉZIAU La logique et la théorie de la notation (sémiotique) de Peirce (Traduit de l’anglais par Jean-Marie Chevalier) Irving H. ANELLIS Langage symbolique de Genèse 2-3 Lytta BASSET -/- Mécanique quantique : quelle réalité derrière les symboles ? Hans BECK -/- Quels langages et images pour représenter le corps humain ? Sarah CARVALLO Des jeux symboliques aux rituels collectifs. Quelques apports de la psychologie du développement à l’étude du symbolisme Fabrice CLÉMENT Les panneaux de signalisation (Traduit de l’anglais par Fabien Shang) Robert DEWAR Remarques sur l’émergence des activités symboliques Jean LASSÈGUE Les illustrations du "Songe de Poliphile" (1499). Notule sur les hiéroglyphes de Francesca Colonna Pierre-Alain MARIAUX Signes de vie Jeremy NARBY Visualising relations in society and economics. Otto Neuraths Isotype-method against the background of his economic thought Elisabeth NEMETH Algèbre et logique symboliques : arbitraire du signe et langage formel Marie-José DURAND – Amirouche MOKTEFI Les symboles mathématiques, signes du Ciel Jean-Claude PONT La mathématique : un langage mathématique ? Alain M. ROBERT. (shrink)

BackgroundInnovations in technology have contributed to rapid changes in the way that modern biomedical research is carried out. Researchers are increasingly required to endorse adaptive and flexible approaches to accommodate these innovations and comply with ethical, legal and regulatory requirements. This paper explores how Dynamic Consent may provide solutions to address challenges encountered when researchers invite individuals to participate in research and follow them up over time in a continuously changing environment.MethodsAn interdisciplinary workshop jointly organised by the University of Oxford (...) and the COST Action CHIP ME gathered clinicians, researchers, ethicists, lawyers, research participants and patient representatives to discuss experiences of using Dynamic Consent, and how such use may facilitate the conduct of specific research tasks. The data collected during the workshop were analysed using a content analysis approach.ResultsDynamic Consent can provide practical, sustainable and future-proof solutions to challenges related to participant recruitment, the attainment of informed consent, participant retention and consent management, and may bring economic efficiencies.ConclusionsDynamic Consent offers opportunities for ongoing communication between researchers and research participants that can positively impact research. Dynamic Consent supports inter-sector, cross-border approaches and large scale data-sharing. Whilst it is relatively easy to set up and maintain, its implementation will require that researchers re-consider their relationship with research participants and adopt new procedures. (shrink)

Study on feminism and psychoanalysis and women's writings in Tamil.

Que reste-t-il du "sujet", en littérature, après le retrait du structuralisme? C'est la question que pose ce livre, qui, dans le compte tenu de l'héritage théorique des années 1960-1970, cherche à préciser le statut d'un sujet qui insiste dans les discours critiques contemporains (Compagnon, Clément, Macé) aussi bien que dans les tentatives littéraires récentes (Beck, Deguy, Michon). Trois études articulées, qui sont autant d'expériences de lecture, tentent ici de répondre à cette interrogation : la première, "L'exception du sujet", se (...) propose de relire les psychanalyses existentielles de Sartre ; la seconde, "Poétique et vérité", entre en dialogue avec la lecture d'A la recherche du temps perdu par Gérard Genette ; la troisième, "Prose de soi", s'essaie à décrire la singularité de l'autofiction rimbaldienne, telle qu'elle s'avive dans Une Saison en enfer, et notamment dans sa section prosimétrique, "Alchimie du verbe". Au terme du parcours, une hypothèse : c'est dans l'articulation critique entre la littérature et son commentaire que la forme restante du sujet trouve son lieu paradoxal. (shrink)

Should governments give special rights to ethnic and cultural minorities? Should rich countries open their borders to economic immigrants or transfer resources to poor countries? When framing and implementing economic and environmental policies, should current generations take into account the interests of future generations? If our political community committed a wrong against another group a hundred years ago, do we owe reparations to current members of that group? These are just some of the pressing questions which are fully explored in (...) this accessible new analysis of justice in the contemporary world. They force us to reconsider the extent of our obligations to our fellow citizens, future generations and foreigners. Justice in a Changing World introduces the moral debates around issues such as immigration, national self-determination, cultural rights and reparations, as well as resource transfers from one generation to the next and from rich to poor countries, through the lenses of liberalism, communitarianism and libertarianism. In so doing, it helps to unravel the complexity of key ethical dilemmas facing us today. The book will be a valuable resource for students of political theory, and will appeal to anyone wishing to reflect on their deepest values and commitments by putting them to the test of practical politics. (shrink)

Dysfunctional body- and shape-related attentional biases are involved in the aetiology and maintenance of eating disorders (ED). Various studies suggest that women, particularly those with ED diagnoses, focus on negatively evaluated parts of their own body, which leads to an increase in body dissatisfaction. The present study aims to empirically test the hypothesis that non-ED women show an attentional bias towards negative body parts, and that the focus on positive and negative parts of one’s own body can be modified by (...) attentional bias modification training based on a dot-probe task. Although several studies have measured body-related attentional biases by using pictures of participants’ own bodies, the approach of investigating attentional bias via a dot-probe task while presenting pictures of the participants’ own body parts and modifying the biased attention using such pictures is novel. Women (n = 60) rank-ordered ten parts of their own body regarding their attractiveness. To examine and modify the attentional focus, pictures of the self-defined positive and negative parts of one’s own body were presented by means of a dot-probe task. A paired-sample t-test revealed no difference between reaction times to negative compared to positive body parts, indicating no attentional bias towards negative parts of one’s own body. A two-way ANOVA revealed a main effect of time for pictures of positive and negative parts of one’s own body, with a decrease in reaction times from pre- to post-training. However, there was no significant interaction between time and training condition concerning reaction times to positive and negative body parts. Our findings replicate previous evidence of a balanced attentional pattern regarding one’s own body in women without ED diagnoses. However, the dot-probe task failed to modify the attentional focus. As the modifiability of state body image increases with more pronounced body dissatisfaction, the next step would be to test this approach in clinical samples of women with ED diagnoses. (shrink)

This book provides a fresh and bold look at how archaeologists and heritage managers may enhance their capacity to interpret and understand material culture and heritage values. Drawing on the founding principles of anthropology, Archaeologies of Listening demonstrates the value of cultural apprenticeship, an almost forgotten part of archaeological practice.

Over the course of the last four decades, William Leon McBride has distinguished himself as one of the most esteemed and accomplished philosophers of his generation. This volume—which celebrates the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday—includes contributions from colleagues, friends, and formers students and pays tribute to McBride’s considerable achievements as a teacher, mentor, and scholar.

ABSTRACTRegret over missed opportunities leads adults to take more risks. Given recent evidence that the ability to experience regret impacts decisions made by 6-year-olds, and pronounced interest in the antecedents to risk taking in adolescence, we investigated the age at which a relationship between missed opportunities and risky decision-making emerges, and whether that relationship changes at different points in development. Six- and 8-year-olds, adolescents and adults completed a sequential risky decision-making task on which information about missed opportunities was available. Children (...) also completed a task designed to measure their ability to report regret when explicitly prompted to do so. The relationship between missed opportunities and risky decision-making did not emerge until 8 years, at which age it was associated with the ability to explicitly report regret, and was stronger in adults than in adolescents. These novel results highlight the potential importance of the ability to experience r... (shrink)

Erratum to: Health Care Anal DOI 10.1007/s10728-013-0244-5In the original version of this paper, unfortunately, there happened to be a mistake in the paragraph “Several studies have compared health…better results or lower costs [7].” under the section “Health Care is NOT a Right?”The incorrect sentence is: For example, hip and knee replacements are not performed on Canadian and UK citizens after 77 .The correct sentence is: For example, hip and knee replacements in Canada and the UK are prioritized by age such (...) that older citizens are on a long waiting list. (shrink)

Recently, the debate on human enhancement has shifted from familiar topics like cognitive enhancement and mood enhancement to a new and – to no one's surprise – controversial subject, namely moral enhancement. Some proponents from the transhumanist camp allude to the ‘urgent need’ of improving the moral conduct of humankind in the face of ever growing technological progress and the substantial dangers entailed in this enterprise. Other thinkers express more sceptical views about this proposal. As the debate has revealed so (...) far, there is no shared opinion among philosophers about the meaning, prospects, and ethical evaluation of moral enhancement. In this article I will address several conceptual and practical problems of this issue, in order to encourage discussion about the prospects of moral enhancement in the future. My assumption is that for the short term, there is little chance of arriving at an agreement on the proper understanding of morality and the appropriateness of one single ethical theory; apart from this, there are further philosophical puzzles loosely referred to in the debate which add to theoretical confusion; and even if these conceptual problems could be solved, there are still practical problems to be smoothed out if moral enhancement is ever to gain relevance apart from merely theoretical interest. My tentative conclusion, therefore, will be that moral enhancement is not very likely to be made sense of – let alone realized – in the medium-term future. (shrink)

The “Arab Spring” was a surprising event not just because predicting revolutions is a difficult task, but because current theories of revolution are ill equipped to explain revolutionary waves where interactive causal mechanisms at different levels of analysis and interactions between the units of analysis predominate. To account for such dynamics, a multidimensional social science of revolution is required. Accordingly, a meta-framework for revolutionary theory that combines multiple levels of analysis, multiple units of analysis, and their interactions is offered. A (...) structured example of theory building is then given by detailing how the development of world cultural models and practices challenge existing political structures, affect mobilization processes, and make diffusion more likely. A structured example of study design using qualitative comparative analysis of 16 Middle Eastern and North African countries provides support for the interaction of subnational conditions for mobilization, state-centered causes, and transnational factors, including a country’s linkage to world society, as one explanation of the Revolutions of 2011. (shrink)

Philosophy, scientific psychology, and common sense all distinguish perception from cognition. While there is little agreement about how the perception–cognition boundary ought to be drawn, one prominent idea is that perceptual states are dependent on a stimulus, or stimulus-dependent, in a way that cognitive states are not. This paper seeks to develop this idea in a way that can accommodate two apparent counterexamples: hallucinations, which are prima facie perceptual yet stimulus-independent; and demonstrative thoughts, which are prima facie cognitive yet stimulus-dependent. (...) The payoff is not only a specific proposal for marking the perception–cognition boundary, but also a deeper understanding of the natures of hallucination and demonstrative thought. (shrink)

In the 1980s, a number of philosophers argued that perception is analog. In the ensuing years, these arguments were forcefully criticized, leaving the thesis in doubt. This paper draws on Weber’s Law, a well-entrenched finding from psychophysics, to advance a new argument that perception is analog. This new argument is an adaptation of an argument that cognitive scientists have leveraged in support of the contention that primitive numerical representations are analog. But the argument here is extended to the representation of (...) non-numerical magnitudes, such as luminance and distance, and shown to apply to perception and not just cognition. The relevant sense of ‘analog’ is also clarified, and two powerful objections are addressed. Finally, the question whether perception’s analog vehicles are located in conscious experience is explored and related to a well-known controversy within psychophysics. (shrink)

In this article, I critically reassess Iris Marion Young's late works, which centre on the distinction between liability and social connection responsibility. I concur with Young's diagnosis that structural injustices call for a new conception of responsibility, but I reject several core assumptions that underpin her distinction between two models and argue for a different way of conceptualising responsibility to address structural injustices. I show that Young's categorical separation of guilt and responsibility is not supported by the writings of Hannah (...) Arendt, which Young draws on, and that it is also untenable on independent systematic grounds. Furthermore, I argue that several of Young's other criteria fail to clearly demarcate two distinct phenomena. I therefore propose to transcend Young's distinction between two models in favour of a related, but conceptually different distinction between two forms of responsibility: interactional and structural. Embracing this terminology facilitates the conceptualisation of the general features of responsibility that are shared by both forms, including their retrospective and prospective time-direction and their applicability to individual, joint and group agency. The distinction between interactional and structural responsibility also yields a more compelling general account of the role of background structures, and of blame within ascriptions of political responsibility. (shrink)

Until quite recently, mind-body dualism has been regarded with deep suspicion by both philosophers and scientists. This has largely been due to the widespread identification of dualism in general with one particular version of it: the interactionist substance dualism of Réné Descartes. This traditional form of dualism has, ever since its first formulation in the seventeenth century, attracted numerous philosophical objections and is now almost universally rejected in scientific circles as empirically inadequate. During the last few years, however, renewed attention (...) has begun to be paid to the dualistic point of view, as a result of increasing discontent with the prevailing materialism and reductionism of contemporary scientific and philosophical thought. Awareness has grown that dualism need not be restricted to its traditional form and that other varieties of dualism are not subject to the difficulties commonly raised against Descartes' own version of it. -/- Interest in these alternative versions of dualism is growing fast today, because it seems that they are capable of capturing deep-seated philosophical intuitions, while also being fully consistent with the methodological assumptions and empirical findings of modern scientific work on the human mind and brain. The object of this book is to provide philosophers, scientists, their students, and the wider general public with an up-to-date overview of current developments in dualistic conceptions of the mind in contemporary philosophy and science. (shrink)

Perceptions are externally-directed—they present us with a mind-independent reality, and thus contribute to our abilities to think about this reality, and to know what is objectively the case. But perceptions are also internally-dependent—their phenomenologies depend on the neuro-computational properties of the subject. A good theory of perception must account for both these facts. But naive realism has been criticized for failing to accommodate internal-dependence. This paper evaluates and responds to this criticism. It first argues that a certain version of naive (...) realism, often called “selectionism”, does indeed struggle with internal-dependence. It then develops an alternate version of naive realism which does not. This alternate version, inspired by an idea of Martin’s, accommodates the internal-dependence of perceptions by recognizing the role that the subject’s neuro-computational properties play in shaping perceptual phenomenology. At the same time, it retains the distinctive naive realist account of the external-directedness of perceptions. (shrink)