This paper argues that there is a relationship between the structure of live theater and the question of whether human beings have free will, and that the practice of live theater and the pursuit of philosophical certitude regarding free will are both constructive human experiences coalesced around roughly the same set of sensations.

[DOI: 10.1097/j.pain.0000000000000765] Amanda Williams and Kenneth Craig, in a recent article in the IASP official journal _Pain_ (DOI: 10.1097/j.pain.0000000000000613), have argued that it is time to revise the IASP's well-entrenched definition of 'pain'. They propose an alternative definition. We critically discuss their proposed revision and argue that it admits clear counterexamples as both sufficient and necessary conditions. We further discuss the wisdom of replacing 'unpleasant' in the IASP definition with 'distress' as Williams and Craig propose. [Craig and (...) Williams respond to our criticism in DOI: 10.1097/j.pain.0000000000000766]. (shrink)

This lively collection of interdisciplinary essays engages the theology of Craig Keen. Keen’s work responds to the violence of metaphysics through a still and considered focus on divesting oneself of power. Acutely aware of the problems of modern theology, Keen does not set out to solve every puzzle, but instead responds to difficult questions with hope and prayer. For Keen, theology is never to be the acquisition of knowledge, but the giving of love. He writes in such a way (...) as to create space for voices of difference and dissent. The essays included in this volume do not just interpret, explain, or critique Keen’s thought, but they seek to accompany him in attentiveness to difference and pain. As such, they engage with the same concerns as Keen: the violence of concepts, the suffering of individuals, the divestment of power, and the embodiment of prayer and doxology. (shrink)

A revision of papers originally presented at a public symposium on The legitimation of evil held by the Wright Institute. Bibliography: p. 361-374.

To be fully understood, contemporary forms of racism must be grasped as ethical ideologies rooted in an independent system of value classification. Racism does not merely result from an intrusion of strategic action on communicative action, as discourse ethicists might argue. In contemporary racism, the minority group is seen as perversely incapable of developing a capacity for the behavior that would constitute just moral reciprocity as decided in the contractual situation. Their standing as members of the moral community is thereby (...) qualilied To address racism discursively, the racist must be met with more than an abstract moral demand. Rather, racists must be confronted with the needs and capacities of the racial outsider, so that they might perceive her acts as virtuous and recognize the aptness of her use of value-concepts. (shrink)

Tips, techniques, and inspiration for creating perfect poses Effectively posing the human body is a challenge for nearlyevery photographer, from amateur to professional. Understanding howa model's pose, body language, and posture affect a photograph iscrucial to success. Author and professional fashion photographerCraig Stidham shows you how to guide a subject's personalitythrough body language, with hundreds of examples andsuggestions. Answers critical questions such as: how can a photographeravoid having the subject look awkward? How does one direct bothexperienced and inexperienced models? Shares (...) helpful posing tips and techniques for posing models innew modern and fashion-forward ways Suggests ways to make strategic edits in post-production to fixcommon posing mistakes Offers hundreds of examples of strong and stunning posing Dynamic Posing Guide teaches you the skills you need toidentify strong modern posing techniques as you strengthen yourphotographic skills. (shrink)

Steven Lehar allows too much to his direct realist opponent in using the word “subjective” of the sensory field per se. The latter retains its nonconceptual, nonmental nature even when explored by perceptual judgement. He also needs to stress the evolutionary value of perceptual differences between person and person, a move that enables one to undermine the direct realist's superstitious certainty about the singular object.

Was the first book to examine the exciting area of overlap between philosophy and quantum mechanics with chapters by leading experts from around the world.

Personification has received little philosophical attention, but Daniel Nolan has recently argued that it has important ramifications for the relationship between fictional representation and possibility. Nolan argues that personification involves the representation of metaphysically impossible identities, which is problematic for anyone who denies that fictions can have impossible content. We develop an account of personification which illuminates how personification enhances engagement with fiction, without need of impossible content. Rather than representing an identity, personification is something that is done with representations—a (...) matter of use rather than content—and involves only a comparison of possibilities. We illustrate our account using the personification of death in the film Meet Joe Black, and show that there are no grounds for taking it to be fictionally true that there is a metaphysically impossible identity between Death and death. (shrink)

The Collective Imagination explicates the media of social creativity and explains how the imagination has shaped historically significant social institutions. It focuses on the media of wit, paradox, and metaphor, and develops a distinctive and original interpretation of the imagination’s appositional quality. Murphy’s conception of the collective imagination is compared with that of Cornelius Castoriadis. The discussion suggests that Murphy’s claims are likely to be disputed, particularly because they diverge from the common equation of contemporary creativity with social progress. Murphy (...) draws attention to a kind of conservative disposition that is necessary for imagination to have substantial social efficacy. Murphy claims that the creativity of the collective imagination has to a large extent been eclipsed by fantasy and kitsch. The deleterious effects of fantasy’s denial of reality are explored in relation to four domains of collective creativity: art, society, economy and politics. It is argued that the ramifications of Murphy’s profound interpretation of the imagination may be developed in ways that differ from some of his conclusions. (shrink)

Many believe that quantum mechanics makes the world hospitable to the tensed theory of time. Quantum mechanics is said to rescue the significance of the present moment, the mutability of the future and possibly even the whoosh of time’s flow. It allegedly does so in two different ways: by making a preferred foliation of spacetime into space and time scientifically respectable, and by wavefunction collapse injecting temporal ‘becoming’ into the world. The aim of this paper is to show that the (...) reasoning underlying these claims is wishful thinking. Against the first claim I develop what I call the “coordination problem” for tensers. The upshot of this problem is that if tensers escape the threat of relativity, they do so only by embracing conflict with the branch of physics they believed saved them, quantum mechanics. I then step back from the fray and examine some methodological issues, concluding that scientific methodology will always be “against” tenses as they are currently conceived. The Appendix deals with the confused tangle of issues linking wavefunction collapse to an open future. (shrink)

The subject of meteorology was central to Girolamo Cardano’s thought. It held together his encyclopedism by tying the celestial realm to the sublunary world and human action. Meteorology, for Cardano, links abstract knowledge to the practical and operative. While many of his Aristotelian predecessors understood weather prediction as distinct from meteorology as a natural philosophical field, Cardano’s profound interest in conjectural arts and probabilistic reasoning led him to tie causal explanations to methods of forecasting future conditions of the air and (...) their effects on humans, especially regarding health and disease. While it might be expected that Cardano would have emphasized astrological tools for weather forecasting, instead he went in a different direction, namely, embracing the ancient tradition of weather signs and revising Aristotelian theories of winds. At the end of his career, which he mostly spent writing commentaries on Hippocratic writings, he integrated his understanding of weather signs with Hippocratic rules of prognosis, revising traditional understandings of the causes of winds. (shrink)

The Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has traditionally been seen as the leading figure in the group of intellectuals known as the Bakhtin Circle. The writings of other members of the Circle are considered much less important than his work, while Bakhtin's achievement has been exaggerated in proportion to the downgrading of the thinkers with whom he associated in the 1920s. This volume, which includes new translations and studies of the work of the most important members of the (...) Circle, sets out to correct the distortions in the established representations of its activity. The original contributions to literary and linguistic theory made by Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev (but frequently credited to Bakhtin) are assessed, and the distinctiveness of their approaches is highlighted. (shrink)

Interesting as the experiments are, their relevance to the real-life situation is rendered questionable by the unthinking use of given singularities as target objects. The evolutionary process does not respect what one agent takes to be a singular referent. A “singling” from the continuum is rather a varying feature of the necessity to track what is rewarding in it.

Why does time seem to flow in one direction? Can we influence the past? Is only the present real? Does relativity conflict with our common understanding of time? How does time relate to free will? Could science do away with time? These questions and others about time are among the most puzzling problems in philosophy and science. In this exciting collection of original articles, eminent philosophers propose novel answers to these and other questions. Based on the latest research in philosophy (...) and physics, these essays will be enjoyable to anyone with a speculative turn of mind. (shrink)

Crowdsourcing has attracted increasing attention as a means to enlist online participants in organisational activities. In this paper, we examine crowdsourcing from the perspective of its ethical use in the support of open innovation taking a broader system view of its use. Crowdsourcing has the potential to improve access to knowledge, skills, and creativity in a cost-effective manner but raises a number of ethical dilemmas. The paper discusses the ethical issues related to knowledge exchange, economics, and relational aspects of crowdsourcing. (...) A guiding framework drawn from the ethics literature is proposed to guide the ethical use of crowdsourcing. A major problem is that crowdsourcing is viewed in a piecemeal fashion and separate from other organisational processes. The trend for organisations to be more digitally collaborative is explored in relation to the need for greater awareness of crowdsourcing implications. (shrink)

Certain arguments that phenomenal conscious states play no role, or play a role that could be different, depend upon the seeming plausibility of thought experiments such as the inverted spectrum or phenomenal zombie. These thought experiments are always run for perceptual states like colour vision. Run for affective states like emotions, they become absurd, because the prior intension of our concepts of emotional states are that the phenomenal experience is inseparable from their motivational aspects. Our growing scientific understanding of emotion (...) and motivation lends inductive evidence to this view. This points the way towards a positive hypothesis that affective consciousness is type-specific to its function. (shrink)

Ist der Unterschied zwischen wissenschaftlichen Gesetzen und Theorien ein qualitativer oder lediglich von quantitativer Art? Der Autor versucht zu zeigen, daß Gesetze und Theorien fundamental verschieden sind und daß die Kenntnis ihrer verschiedenen Natur notwendig für ein richtiges Wissenschaftsverständnis ist. Aus seiner Sicht sind Theorien geistige Konstruktionen mit dem Ziel, kausale Erklärungen von empirischen Gesetzen zu geben, während diese Gesetze auf der Grundlage von Messungen entdeckt werden und die Tatsachen der Wissenschaft konstituieren. Erkenntnistheoretisch sind daher Theorien und Gesetze auf verschiedenen (...) Ebenen anzusiedeln: während Gesetze Wissen liefern, liefern Theorien Verstehen. Der Kern der Theorien besteht aus Modellen, die idealisierte Abstraktionen aus Zustandsarten darstellen. Theoretische Modelle konstituieren Ontologien, die kausale Mechanismen aufzeigen. Solche Ontologien betreffen den Bedeutungsaspekt des Gegenstandsbereichs, auf den die Theorie angewendet wird, während empirische Gesetze den Ausdrucksaspekt des gleichen Gegenstandsbereichs betreffen. Theorien erklären Gesetze, indem sie zeigen, wie der Ausdrucksaspekt lediglich der natürliche Ausdruck der Auswirkungen der Kausalmechanismen in Bedeutungsaspekt sind. (shrink)

In a lot of domains in metaphysics the tacit assumption has been that whichever metaphysical principles turn out to be true, these will be necessarily true. Let us call necessitarianism about some domain the thesis that the right metaphysics of that domain is necessary. Necessitarianism has flourished. In the philosophy of maths we find it held that if mathematical objects exist, then they do of necessity. Mathematical Platonists affirm the necessary existence of mathematical objects (see for instance Hale and (...) class='Hi'>Wright 1992 and 1994; Wright 1983 and 1988; Schiffer 1996; Resnik 1997; Shapiro 1997 and Zalta 1988) while mathematical nominalists, usually in the form of fictionalists, hold that necessarily such objects fail to exist (see for instance Balaguer 1996 and 1998; Rosen 2001 and Yablo 2005). In metaphysics more generally, until recently it was more or less assumed that whatever the right account of composition—the account of under what conditions some xs compose a y—that account will be necessarily true (for a discussion of theories of composition see Simons 1987 and van Inwagen 1987 and 1990; the modal status of the composition relation is explicitly addressed in Schaffer 2007; Parsons 2006 and Cameron 2007). Similarly, it has generally been assumed that whatever the right account is of the nature of properties, whether they be universals, tropes, or whether nominalism is true, that account will be necessarily true (though see Rosen 2006 for a recent suggestion to the contrary). In considering theories of persistence it has been widely held that whether objects endure or perdure through time is a matter of necessity (Sider 2001; though see Lewis 1999 p227 who defends contingent perdurantism). And with respect to theories of time it is frequently held that whichever of the A- or B-theory is true is necessarily true. A-theorists often argue that there is time in a world only if the A-theory is true at that world (see for instance McTaggart 1903; Markosian 2004; Bigelow 1996; Craig 2001) while B-theorists often argue that the A-theory is internally inconsistent (Smart 1987; Mellor 1998; Savitt 2000 and Le Poidevin 1991). Once again, we find a few recent contingentist dissenters. Bourne (2006) suggests that it is a contingent feature of time that it is tensed, and thus that the A-theory is contingently true. Worlds in which there exist only B-theoretic properties are worlds with time, it is just that time in those worlds time is radically different to the way it is actually. Other defenders of the B-theory, though not expressly contingentists, do offer arguments against versions of the A-theory that try to show that such A-theories theories are inconsistent with the actual laws of nature (see for instance Saunders 2002 and Callender 2000); these arguments, at least, leave room for the possibility that the A-theories in question are contingently false (at least on the assumption that the laws of nature are themselves contingent, an assumption that not everyone accepts). Despite some notable exceptions, necessitarianism has flourished in many, if not most, domains in metaphysics. One such exception is Lewis’ famous defence of Humean supervenience as a contingent claim about our world. Lewis does not argue that necessarily, the supervenience base for all matters of fact in a world is nothing but a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact. Rather, he thinks that we have reason to think that our world is one in which Humean supervenience holds (see Lewis 1986 p9-10 and 1994). Another exception to the necessitarian orthodoxy is to be found in the lively debate about the modal status of the laws of nature. Here, if anything, contingentism has been the dominating force, with it generally being held that there are possible worlds in which different laws of nature hold (this view is defended by, among others, Lewis 1986 and 2010; Schaffer 2005 and Sidelle 2002). Necessitarian dissenters hold that the laws of nature are necessary, frequently because they think it is necessary that fundamental properties have the causal or nomic profiles they do (see for instance Shoemaker 1980 and 1988; Swoyer 1982; Bird 1995; Ellis and Lierse 1994). Nevertheless, when it comes to thinking about the nature of the laws themselves, the necessitarian presumption is back on firm footing. Though there is disagreement about whether the laws are generalisations that feature in the most virtuous true axiomatisation of all the particular matters of fact (often known as the Humean view of laws and defended by Ramsey 1978; Lewis 1986 and Beebee 2000) or whether laws are relations of necessity that hold between universals (a view defended by Armstrong 1983; Dretske 1977; Tooley 1977 and Carroll 1990) no one has seriously suggested that it might be a contingent matter which of these is the right account of laws. The necessitarian orthodoxy is not surprising since metaphysics is largely an a priori process. While a priori reasoning may be used to determine whether a proposition is necessary or contingent, it is not well placed (in the absence of a posteriori evidence) to determine whether a contingent proposition is actually true or false. Since metaphysicians aim to tell us which principles are true in which worlds, on the face of it the discovery that metaphysical principles are contingent seems to make part of the task of metaphysics epistemically intractable. In what follows I consider two reasons one might end up embracing contingentism and whether this would lead one into epistemic difficulty. The following section considers a route to contingent metaphysical truths that proceeds via a combination of conceptual necessities and empirical discoveries. Section 3 considers whether there might be synthetic contingent metaphysical truths, and the final section raises the question of whether if there were such truths we would be well placed to come to know them. (shrink)

This third book in a series of successful introductory textbooks by Craig Bartholomew and Michael Goheen builds on their previous projects, The Drama of Scripture and Living at the Crossroads, to offer a comprehensive narrative of philosophical thought from a distinctly Christian perspective. After exploring the interaction among Scripture, worldview, theology, and philosophy, the authors tell the story of philosophy from ancient Greece through postmodern times, positioning the philosophers in their historical contexts and providing Christian critique along the way. (...) The authors emphasize the Reformed philosophical tradition without neglecting other historical trajectories and show how philosophical thought relates to contemporary life. (shrink)

From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to The Motorcycle Diaries, to be a biker is to be on the road to the meaning of life. What would the existentialists have to say about facing death on a bike? Can your motorcycle be as much a work of art as a Michelangelo painting? And why is it that bikers are so often political rebels? Philosopher and biker Craig Bourne shows for the first time the thoughtful side of the (...) biker, and takes us on a fun trip through the philosophy of motorcycles. (shrink)

Advocates of the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics have long claimed that other interpretations needlessly invoke "new physics" to solve the measurement problem. Call the argument fashioned that gives voice to this claim the Redundancy Argument, or ’Redundancy’ for short. Originating right in Everett’s doctoral thesis, Redundancy has recently enjoyed much attention, having been advanced and developed by a number of commentators, as well as criticized by a few others.[1] Although versions of this argument can target collapse theories of quantum (...) mechanics, it is usually conceived with no-collapse "hidden variable" interpretations in mind, e.g., modal and Bohmian interpretations. In particular, the argument is an attack against theories committed to both realism about the quantum state and realism about entities – what Bell 1987 calls "beables" – that supplement this state. Particles, fields, value states, and more have been suggested as possible ontology to supplement the quantum state. Redundancy is the argument that this supplementation is methodologically otiose, the superfluous pomp that Newton scorned. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Four philosophical concerns about higher-order logic in general and the specific demands placed on it by the neo-logicist project are distinguished. The paper critically reviews recent responses to these concerns by, respectively, the late Bob Hale, Richard Kimberly Heck, and myself. It is argued that these score some successes. The main aim of the paper, however, is to argue that the most serious objection to the applications of higher-order logic required by the neo-logicist project has not been properly understood. (...) The paper concludes by outlining a strategy, prefigured in recent work of Øystein Linnebo, for meeting this objection. (shrink)

The ‘New Hume’ interpretation, which sees Hume as a realist about ‘thick’ Causal powers, has been largely motivated by his evident commitment to causal language and causal science. In this, however, it is fundamentally misguided, failing to recognise how Hume exploits his anti-realist conclusions about (upper-case) Causation precisely to support (lower-case) causal science. When critically examined, none of the standard New Humean arguments — familiar from the work of Wright, Craig, Strawson, Buckle, Kail, and others — retains any (...) significant force against the plain evidence of Hume's; texts. But the most devastating objection comes from Hume's own applications of his analysis of causation, to the questions of ‘the immateriality of the soul’ and ‘liberty and necessity’. These show that the New Hume interpretation has misunderstood the entire purpose of his ‘Chief Argument’, and presented him as advocating some of the very positions he is arguing most strongly against. (shrink)