This paper concerns the familiar topic of whether we can have genuinely emotional responses such as pity and fear to characters and situations we believe to be fictional1. As is well known, Kendall Walton responds in the negative (Walton (1978); (1990): 195-204 and Chapter 7; (1997)). That is, he is an ‘irrealist’ about emotional responses to fiction (the term is Gaut’s (2003): 15), arguing that such responses should be construed as quasiemotions (Walton (1990): 245), of which their possessor imagines that (...) they are genuine emotions. This is not to deny that an experience in response to a fiction may have a phenomenology very like a given emotion, but to insist that, nonetheless, such responses are not real instances of the emotions which they resemble (Walton (1997)). So, in his most famous example, Charles, who experiences fear-like emotion in relation to a film which depicts the approach of evil slime, does not, despite appearances, experience genuine fear towards the slime, but only quasi-fear (Walton (1990): 195-204)2. Walton’s view presupposes the following view about the nature of emotion3. (shrink)

This article, prompted by an extended essay published in theJournal of Medical Ethicsby Charles Foster, and the current controversy surrounding the case of Vincent Lambert, analyses the legal and ethical arguments in relation to the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment from patients with prolonged disorders of consciousness. The article analyses the legal framework through the prism of domestic law, case-law of the European Court of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and examines the challenge (...) to the ethical consensus made by Foster. It concludes that the right approach remains a version of the approach that has prevailed for the last 25 years since the decision inAiredale NHS Trust v Bland[1993] AC 789, refined to reflect that that there is now, and rightly, a much more limited place for judgments made about the ‘burden’ of treatment or the quality of life enjoyed by the person made on the basis of assumptions about that person as a category as opposed to investigation of that person as an individual human being. (shrink)

It is strange, indeed, to have devoted one's life to an obscure topic and to sense it suddenly as a focus of political passion. It is also a unique opportunity: when a country like France, so long a victim of protectionism, makes ready to give it a new impetus, when another, the United States, hopefully cured, envisages it as the stock issue of an electoral campaign, it is fitting to search for motivations which preserve world-wide restrictive practices no longer defensible (...) in theory. Thus, a comportment is discovered first found in international trade then invading the most variegated fields and explaining in large measure the rise of the day's great problems: unemployment, the financial crisis and the armament race. (shrink)

In this essay, I investigate the human act of spectatorship as found in the work of John Dewey and Paulo Freire. I will show that each is thoroughly anti-watching when it comes to educational practices. I then problematize their positions by looking at their spectatorial commitments in the realm of aesthetics. Both Dewey and Freire have a different opinion about spectatorship when it is a matter of watching art. I claim that this different in opinion derives from the practice of (...) ‘educational humanism’. By educational humanism, I mean the tendency to posit stock human traits that derive from pedagogical practices. Ultimately, I will take a stand against educational humanism, against the process of back-forming, from educational circumstances, the desirability, or the undesirability, of human traits. (shrink)

It is now more than twenty years since Knight (1987) first presented his paradigm-shifting theory of how and why the ‘human revolution’ occurred — and had to occur — in modern humans who, as climates dried under ice age conditions and African rainforests shrank, found themselves surrounded by vast prairies and savannahs, with rich herds of game animals roaming across them. The temptation for male hunters, far from any home base, to eat the best portions of meat at the kill (...) site — as do other social carnivores — called for strong measures from human females, who were paying the heavy metabolic and physical costs of bearing large-brained but helpless children. Even in the modern west, with well stocked supermarkets, a pregnant or lactating woman can lose ten percent of the dry weight of her brain, because developing babies demand dietary lipids for brain growth (Horrobin, 1998). Hence the idea of the menstrual sex strike, designed to force males to deliver their kills entirely into the hands of women for cooking and distribution—a practice common in foraging communities to this day. (shrink)

This a general account of the school of Mo-tzu, its social basis as a movement of craftsmen, its isolated place in the Chinese tradition, and the nature of its later contributions to logic, ethics, and science. It assesses the relation of Mohist thinking to the structure of the Chinese language, and grapples with the textual dynamics of later Mohist writings, particularly in regard to grammar and style, technical terminology, the use and significance of stock examples, and overall organization. Includes edited (...) and annotated Chinese text with an English translation and commentary, a glossary, and a photographic reproduction of the unemended text from the Taoist Patrology. (shrink)

Hilary Putnam’s wide ranging thought turned on an axis: an idea of the shape of an object of rational thought, a reflection of a rational being’s unbounded capacity for unprejudiced self-criticism. The idea unfolds in a particular way the motto “The conceptual cannot take care of itself.” No stock of concepts can derive their content merely from structural relations between them, no matter how complex. What more there is to content, on this unfolding, lies in a concept’s unbounded openness to (...) world-dependence. This essay works through that idea in and through positioning Putnam in relation to two other great philosophers, Leibniz and Frege. (shrink)

This article examines the risk and return profiles of stock indices composed of companies meeting environmental, social and governance screening criteria [such as the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices ] and conventional composite indices of eight Asian countries from 2002 to 2014. The results indicate that there are no significant differences in the returns or risk-adjusted returns between the ESG indices and the composite indices within countries. The results do reveal that the market volatility of the ESG indices is higher than (...) the market volatility of the conventional indices. Market betas of DJSI and ESG equity indices are significantly lower than betas of the composite equity indices. The overall results indicate that the performance of ESG equity indices of many Asian countries is similar to the performance of conventional indices, suggesting that investors can pursue socially responsible investing objectives without a material difference in portfolio performance from conventional investing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 28.2 (2004) 324-341 [Access article in PDF] Charles Lamb: Professor of Indifference Tim Milnes University of Edinburgh Nothing puzzles me more than time and space, and yet nothing puzzles me less, for I never think about them.1 I The name of Charles Lamb—essayist, poet, and notorious punster—does not loom large in studies of the philosophy of the English Romantics. The reasons for this initially (...) unsurprising fact range from the personal and obvious to the cultural and curious. Tied for most of his adult life to a clerk's desk at the East India Company, and to the care of his mentally ill sister at home, Lamb was rarely permitted the leisure even to dally in the expansive visionary landscapes explored in the epic works of consciousness of his friends Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Robert Southey. And yet, as the 1810 quip to Manning recorded above suggests, his reluctance to engage with philosophy is not merely attributable to the straitened life of the journeyman scribe. Such a remark is quite typical of Lamb's conscious attempt, in the face of a culture increasingly driven by the dissemination of knowledge, to cultivate an imaginative space the reverse of the knowing or "philosophical." It is this attitude that makes him more, not less, interesting alike for the intellectual historian and the philosopher.Lamb's avowed carelessness about matters philosophical is as familiar to his readers as the persona of "Elia" adopted for the essays he wrote for the London Magazine in the early 1820s. It is also just as beguiling and intriguing. Lamb's resistance to philosophy and his epistemic insouciance both trade on the suggestion that the desirable mind is the [End Page 324] ironic mind, reflecting—or, perhaps, refracting—a transitional and forever "imperfect" subjectivity. Correspondingly, his essays frequently invoke figures of liminality, of being in two or more states at once: whether between dreams and consciousness in "Witches, and other Night Fears" (1821); past and present in "Distant Correspondents" (1822); truth and lies in "Imperfect Sympathies" (1821); or literal and figurative selves in the imponderable relationship between "Lamb" of "On Christ's Hospital" (1813) and "Elia" of "Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago" (1820).2 Moreover, this self-styled figure of the writer as always between alternate and often contrary conditions, beliefs and identities—what Lamb termed his "bi-parted nature"—has itself become a stock descriptor among Lamb's commentators.3 It is not difficult, for example, to detect its presence in Coleridge's portrayal of his friend as "one hovering between earth and heaven,"4 as well as De Quincey's depiction of a sleeping Lamb as "the image of repose midway between life and death, like the repose of a sculpture."5 More recently, it has shaped Jane Aaron's exploration of his proclaimed "double singleness"6 and Seamus Perry's characterisation of his "borderland," "serious-non-seriousness."7Understandably, critics of a certain bent have sought to link these features of Lamb's work, arguing that the centrifugal properties of his writing display an aversion to categorical "difference" that is directly related to his suspicion of the dualisms of systematic belief-systems. Gerald Monsman, for example, argues that insofar as Lamb's essays undermine "all transcendental reconciliations or definitive closures," they "appear to be sly critiques of the central dogmas of romanticism."8 However, to class Lamb's writing as radically decentred or self-deconstructing is to miss the profound nostalgia it evinces at critical moments for a neutral ground and a sense of belonging. Lamb's indifference to knowledge, and to philosophy as the pursuit of certain knowledge, is constantly challenged by his fear of imaginative dissolution. Correspondingly, Lamb/Elia's indifferent location between the real and the fictive never quite manages completely to repress the desire for truth. And yet, "indifference," quite apart from being a term that both fascinated and repelled Lamb himself, aptly characterises both his attitude to philosophy and knowledge on one hand, and the liminal properties of his prose on the other. Freud provides a... (shrink)

The basic idea of his Origin of Species is that in nature there is a process similar to what goes on in the breeding of domestic plants and animals. If a breeder wants to produce a variety with certain characteristics, he/she keeps an eye out for individuals that have some approximation to those characteristics and breeds from them and not from individuals that do not have something like the desired characteristics. The other individuals may be destroyed, or they may just (...) be segregated; at any rate they are not allowed to breed with the selected stock. The breeder follows this policy also with the second generation of the offspring of the selected individuals of the first generation; those that after all do not have the desired characteristics are rejected, those that do are selected to produce the third generation, and so on. The whole process presupposes some degree of variability within the plant or animal being bred from. There have to be spontaneously produced individuals with something like the desired characteristics for the breeder to select. What can be accomplished by selection breeding depends of the range of variation that occurs spontaneously. (Hence the topic of Darwin's book of 1868, Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication.) See in the Readings book the picture of the different breeds of pigeons from the Illustrated London News, 1864; Darwin was a pigeon fancier. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 239. In 1998 the Securities and Exchange Commission authorized electronic exchanges. Not only did this give day traders access to buy and sell securities from their desktops, it also made it possible for high powered Wall Street traders to program algorithms to make trades at speeds on the order of milliseconds.(1) The advent of automatic algorithmic trading, now known as high-frequency trading, has vastly accelerated the already increasing speed and volume of trading. This project was an attempt (...) to capture in an ephemeral and environmental way the dizzying acceleration of networked markets. The change in the daily closing value of the Dow and daily trading volume were each set to control a sine wave oscillator between 20 and 800hz. The oscillators were combined to ‘sonify’ the data, creating a changing noise reflecting the daily change and trading volume of the market. The resulting sound is somewhat tedious until the trading volume begins increasing in the 60s and then becomes increasingly complex as high-frequency trading and market volatility set in during the 1990s and 2000s. NOTES 1. Charles Duhigg. “Stock Traders Find Speed Pays, in Milliseconds.” New York Times . July 23, 2009. (shrink)

Solar Resources takes stock of the resource - sunlight - on which any plan for solar heat conversion technologies must be based. It describes the evolution of theoretical models, algorithms, and equipment for measuring, analyzing, and predicting the quantity and composition of solar radiation, and it reviews and directs readers to insolation databases and other references that have been compiled since 1975. Following an overview of solar energy research by the editor, Raymond J. Bahm presents a comprehensive guide to available (...) insolation databases and other information resources in the United States. Charles M. Randall and Richard Bird discuss the theoretical models and algorithms used to characterize the transference of solar radiation through the earth's atmosphere. Their chapter also addresses the important question of the accuracy of the data sets produced by the various modeling methods and algorithms. The National Weather Service monitoring network and other major monitoring networks in the United States are discussed by Kirby Hanson and Thomas Stoffel. And Eugene Zerlaut covers the instrumentation used to measure total solar irradiance and spectral solar irradiance; he describes types of equipment, their manufacturers, procedures for calibration, and the accuracy of the data produced. Richard Bird and Carol Riordan explain the nature of spectral solar irradiance at the earth's surface, and John Jensenius describes the NWS Operational Solar Insolation Forecast System, which predicts the daily total global-horizontal insolation for two days. In the concluding chapter, Claude Robbins summarizes daylighting models and resources, and details methods for converting insolation date to illuminance data. Solar Resources is volume 2 in the series Solar Heat Technologies: Fundamentals and Applications, edited by Charles A. Bankston. (shrink)

Vitalism, from its early modern to its Enlightenment forms (from Glisson and Willis to La Caze and Barthez), is notoriously opposed to intervention into the living sphere. Experiment, quantification, measurement are all ‘vivisectionist’, morally suspect and worse, they alter and warp the ‘life’ of the subject. They are good for studying corpses, not living individuals. This much is well known, and it has disqualified vitalist medicine from having a place in standard histories of medicine, until recent, post-Foucauldian maneuvers have sought (...) to change the situation (but for unrelated, contextualist reasons). What is perhaps more suprising is that if we consider the emergence of medical ‘theory’ as a whole, from Harvey through to Locke and Sydenham, is the presence of a sustained anti-experimentalist line of argument, and this from the ‘empiricist’ (not Cartesian or Boerhaavian rationalist) side. It would seem then that ‘empiricks’, medical empiricists and other protagonists of an ‘embodied empiricism’ are not Boylean experimentalists who seek to map out Nature in its transparency, but deliberately archaic, Hippocratic observers of living bodies. (shrink)

Religion and Community: Adam Smith on the Virtues of Liberty CHARLES L. GRISWOLD, JR. The good temper and moderation of con- tending factions seems to be the most es- gential circumstance in the publick morals of a free people. Adam Smith' THE ARCHITECTS of what one might call "classical" or "Enlightenment" liberal- ism saw themselves as committed to refuting the claims to political sovereignty by organized religion. ~ The arguments against the legitimacy of a state- supported religion, and, in (...) the extreme case, of a religious monopoly, are so integral a part of the Enlightenment's effort to put politics on a stable and just foundation as to constitute one of the controlling themes of the period. Lib- eral politics requires toleration, or better, liberty of religious belief. And this in turn requires that religious institutions be privatized, as it were, and that just politics be secularized in that legitimate rule is to lie in the consent of the ruled rather than in the laws of God as interpreted by his ministers on earth. Differ- ' Wealth of Nations V.i.f.4o. My references to The Wealth of Nations are to the two-volume R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner edition . 2 The list of thinkers in the "classical liberal" tradition simply reads as the list of key Enlighten- ment figures: Bayle, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Hume, Smith, Voltaire, and Kant, to name a few. Consider the role that religious freedom plays in Kant's. (shrink)

Three problems are raised for Nicholas Georgalis’s recent work: (1) a problem with regard to the supposed noninferential knowledge of minimal content, (2) a problem with the “necessary condition” Georgalis stipulates for the legitimate application of a first-person methodology to a science of the mind, and (3) a problem with regard to denying phenomenal content to intentional acts.

Let us now consider the third class of statements, those completely nonrestrictive. For example, "Something exists." Since this is the pure contradictory of the wholly restrictive, "Nothing exists," which we have found reason to regard as impossible, and since the contradictory of an impossible statement is necessary, we should expect "Something exists" to be necessarily true, a statement valid a priori. And we see that it excludes nothing from existence, except bare "nothing" itself. But the existence of bare nothing is (...) no existence. Further, "Something exists" is in no conceivable circumstances falsifiable, since the falsifying experience would have to exist, and it would also have to be the experience of something existing--at least if, as I should maintain, experience is essentially a relative term, requiring that to which it is relative, or of which it is the experience. But though "Something exists" is unfalsifiable, it is verified every moment. Could the verifiable but in any conceivable world absolutely unfalsifiable be false? I hold that the necessarily true must be knowable as true and only as true, and that, conversely, whatever is in principle verifiable though not falsifiable is thereby shown to be necessarily true. (shrink)

This volume provides a vivid and engaging introduction to contemporary philosophy of religion.

It has generally been assumed since the 1950s that the African elephant known to classical antiquity, and thus the one used, inter alia, by Carthage and Ptolemaic Egypt, is the forest elephant, which is even smaller in stature than the Asian or Indian elephant. Yet a recent scientific study using DNA evidence has asserted that it was the larger bush or savannah elephant that was used in antiquity. This study adduces literary sources pertaining to habitat and representational evidence to explore (...) the issue of the most likely species of African elephant known to the ancient Mediterranean world. (shrink)

I begin by contending that an absolute prohibition to avoid resorting to shoot-to-kill, under any circumstances, does not adequately address the considerable negative consequences that could follow. In opening up the question for debate, I seek to alert us to the risks of moral corruption in both thought and practice, but I do not take these to be unassailable. Next, I pose a set of questions in order to interrogate unsafe assumptions and to disambiguate critical language in the shoot-to-kill scenario. (...) (1) How might shoot-to-kill be analogous to self-defence? (2) Should we not distinguish between reasons which could explain from those which do not justify why a suicide bomber acted as they did? (3) Must we avoid entertaining any charges of complicity on the suicide bombers’ behalf? (4) How, if at all, does racial profiling adulterate the grounds for police suspicion? (5) Does “reasonability” differ from “absolute necessity” as a precondition for enacting shoot-to-kill? And, (6), prompted by the injustice of the Jean Charles de Menezes case, can we assess the moral consequences of relocating the moment of decision from the firearms officer to their operational commander? After taking stock of the results of these enquiries, I conclude that resort to 'Kratos' rules of engagement unjustifiably raises the risk of shooting dead an innocent person, compared to the risk from harm that the general population may be reasonably expected to shoulder. (shrink)

Perhaps more than any other major historical phenomena, we tend to look through revolutions as much as we look at them, and ascribe to them meanings that have little to do with the intentions and e...

Since structural descriptions rather than ostensive ones are required by the logic of the cultural sciences, the Platonic eidos as a regulative idea continues to play a creative role in establishing the formal unity of historical concepts. Paul Natorp, Troeltsch’s neo-Kantian contemporary and early proponent of the logicist thesis in Germany, first construed mathematical logic as a Platonistic search for the unconditioned in the form of absolutely foundational concepts or categories of thought. The hidden Platonism expressed in Troeltsch’s formal logic (...) of history is rather close to Natorp’s reading of the Platonic ideas as functions of knowledge, as methods, unities, and pure postulates of thought whose cognitive role is to be comprehensive, heuristic, and revelatory. Moreover, such characteristic 19th-century Hegelian histories of philosophical concepts as those of Adolf Trendelenburg and Gustav Teichmüller, or F. C. Bauer’s dialectical historical methodology of congruence and manifestation in ecclesiastical historicity, were Platonically oriented in that development meant fulfillment as abstract pristination [[sic]] or as the progressively emergent pure logic of historical ideas. The same climate of thought is expressed in F. H. Bradley’s version of the Identity of Indiscernibles and a Platonic-Hegelian ascent of concepts is present even later in Nicolai Hartmann’s neo-idealist treatment of the realization of concepts as "living spirit" in the progressive movement of research itself. (shrink)

La première grande question qui se pose au lecteur de la Critique de la Raison Dialectique est certainement celle des rapports entre les problématiques sartrienne et marxiste. Dans sa conclusion à Questions de Méthode, Sartre la forrnule clairement en écrivant que l'existentialisme « ne remet rien en question, sauf un déterminisme mécaniste qui n'est précisément pas marxiste et qu'on a introduit du dehors dans cette philosophie totale. Il veut, lui aussi, situer l'homme dans sa classe et dans les conflits qui (...) l'opposent aux autres classes à partir du mode et des relations de production. Mais il veut tenter cette ‘situation’, à partir de l'existence, c'est-à-dire de la compréhension ». En termes plus généraux, l'existentialisme « veut dans le Savoir même et dans l'universalité des concepts réintroduire l'indépassable singularité de l'aventure humaine ». Nous sommes donc ici simultanément en présence d'une profession de foi dans le marxisme—car même la carence que Sartre reproche à celui-ci, l'élimination de l'homme, «tient à l'événement et non aux principes mêmes de la doctrine»—et d'une volonté d'introduire dans cette philosophie une méthode propre à l'idéologie de l'existence. (shrink)

" -- Dr. Daniel Gardner, Cornell University Medical College Charles Stevens, a prominent neurobiologist who originally trained as a biophysicist (with George Uhlenbeck and Mark Kac), wrote this book almost by accident.