It must be admitted that there are some of us who “teach” Virginia Woolf and yet seem unable to learn from her. The secret of Virginia’s eminently readable prose style remains hidden from us. It is for this reason that I find it impossibly hard to read everything that Professor Marcus and some of her colleagues produce in such astounding abundance, and that, she may retort, is why she has found it impossible to read my biography of Virginia Woolf. In (...) a sense, she does not need to; she can imagine it and, thus, credit me with the statement that I considered my aunt “a minor British novelist, ranked somewhere below E. M. Forster as a writer of fiction” . Seeing that I made it clear from the outset of that biography that I would not attempt to assess the work of Virginia Woolf, seeing that I have been blamed for this abstention , and seeing that I have said absolutely nothing at any time that could possibly be construed in this sense, I think that we may well call this a master-stroke of the imagination.Also it is irrelevant. I accuse her of inaccuracy; she “replies” by asserting that I have bad taste. It seems a rather unconvincing form of defence. In fact, in her “reply,” which must be about as long as the article by which it was engendered, Professor Marcus can find so little in the way of evidence or argument with which to support those contentions which I have criticized that the reader must wade through page after page of completely otiose matter before coming to anything which seems to bear on the matter at hand. At last Professor Marcus tells us that she has written “two long essays in which I did at length and in detail exactly what he does here”; here, then, we come to her answer . The reader, who may be somewhat bewildered by so long a preface, may wish to be reminded what there is that needs to be answered. I maintain that Professor Marcus has neglected to notice that Margaret Llewelyn Davis was primarily Leonard Woolf’s friend rather than Virginia’s, that her relationship with Virginia was at times very uneasy, that Virginia was out of sympathy with politically minded women, and that Professor Marcus neglects to notice any of this because she fails to use the evidence of the diaries and the letters. When she does quote from a letter, she completely misunderstands it, just as she fails to understand Virginia’s use of the term “the woman’s republic” . Quentin Bell is the author of, among other works, Ruskin , Bloomsbury , Virginia Woolf: A Biography , and On Human Finery . His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry include “Art and the Elite” , “Bloomsbury and ‘the Vulgar Passions’” , and “A ‘Radiant’ Friendship”. (shrink)

This was to have been a confutation. My intention was to rebut and for the record’s sake to correct certain fashionable errors concerning the life of Virginia Woolf. What could be more proper, and what, it has to be said, more tedious? If the defence of truth had remained my only objet, I should have left these words unwritten, or at least should have addressed them to a very small audience. But the pursuit of truth sent me back to my (...) sources, and there I found a story, in many ways sad, but also funny and certainly instructive. It seemed worth extracting this record of a friendship from the great mass of evidence in which it is embedded. I hope that the reader will agree with me in finding it interesting in itself but, just as Prince’s Hal’s “plain tale” is made livelier by being contrasted with Falstaff’s “eleven buckram men,” so too the simple facts are made more striking by the intentions of Virginia’s recent interpreters. Let me therefore begin with a quotation from one of them.Volume I [of Virginia Woolf’s Letters] has a rarely preserved portrait of a female artist in the making, love and work intensely intertwined in her relations with women who encouraged her to write, read, and think, and gave her the nourishment of womanly love and literary criticism, which she was to seek and find in female friendship all her life. Bloomsbury fades into insignificance as an “influence” next to the radiance of Woolf’s relationships with Margaret Llewelyn Davies, head of the Cooperative Working Women’s Guild, Janet Case, her Greek teacher, violet Dickinson, Madge Vaughan, and her aunt Caroline Stephen, the Quaker whom she called “Nun.”1These words were written by Professor Jane Marcus, a person of great charm and ability, whose opinions are, I understand, accepted by a multitude of admirers. In those articles by her which I have read, she hardly disguises her contempt for me as a biographer. But, painful though it is to have incurred the disdain of so influential a personage, it much be allowed that, if the influence of Virginia Woolf’s husband, her sister, and her closest friends “fades into insignificance” when compared with that of Miss Caroline Stephen and Mrs. W. W. Vaughan, then indeed I have gone sadly astray. Quentin Bell is the author of, among other works, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Bloomsbury, Ruskin, and On Human Finery. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry include “Art and the Elite” and “Bloomsbury and ‘the Vulgar Passions’ ”. (shrink)

Stephen Davies presents a fascinating exploration of the idea that art, and our aesthetic sensibilities more generally, should be understood as an element in human evolution. He asks: Do animals have aesthetics? Do our aesthetic preferences have prehistoric roots? Is art universal? What is the biological role of aesthetic and artistic behaviour?

In this richly argued and provocative book, David Davies elaborates and defends a broad conceptual framework for thinking about the arts that reveals important continuities and discontinuities between traditional and modern art, and between different artistic disciplines. Elaborates and defends a broad conceptual framework for thinking about the arts. Offers a provocative view about the kinds of things that artworks are and how they are to be understood. Reveals important continuities and discontinuities between traditional and modern art. Highlights core (...) topics in aesthetics and art theory, including traditional theories about the nature of art, aesthetic appreciation, artistic intentions, performance, and artistic meaning. (shrink)

A good deal of moral criticism employed in everyday life associates, in a variety of ways and in varying degrees of complexity, selfish behaviour and attitudes with a deficiency in what Dr Leavis calls ‘ethical sensibility’. A primitive ethical sensibility is a species of ignorance; it is to be unperceptive, muddled, superficial, undiscriminating and slipshod in one's understanding and appreciation of the nature and quality of one's own and other people's experience. It might involve, for example, being afflicted with sentimentalism; (...) perceiving people through a distorting medium of stereotypes or impressionistically; being dominated by wishful thinking in the Freudian sense; holding beliefs on the basis of hearsay, authority, or because it suits one to hold them; being immersed in situations and relationships whose continued existence requires self-deception; having the sense of one's own worth be wholly dependent upon the opinions of others. A developed ethical sensibility, on the other hand, includes what Professor Peters and others believe to be among the defining characteristics of rationality—impartiality; a caring for clarity, evidence, relevance, consistency and sincerity; a willingness to question authorities, tradition and one's own motives; refusing to be tempted by the cosiness of easy certainties and the stock response. The content of such a sensibility will, of course, depend upon the context in which reason is employed, and attempts to describe the content must take the form of a detailed discussion of particular cases. (shrink)

This is not a random collection of essays, but a book on a single theme. Written by separate hands, mainly by literary critics at Cambridge, it was planned as a whole and executed with a common purpose: to produce the first literary study of the English moralists of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. The authors share two convictions: they believe that the study of literature demands an understanding of whatever moral philosophy is embodied in it; and (...) they believe that philosophical writings are capable of being tested by the techniques of literary criticism. In this book, such works as Bacon's Advancement of Learning, Hobbes's Leviathan, and Hume's Enquiries are viewed as whole works, not as repositories of philosophical propositions, nor as episodes in the history of English thought. (shrink)

Martin Davies; II*—Perceptual Content and Local Supervenience, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 92, Issue 1, 1 June 1992, Pages 21–46, https://do.

It is often thought that traditional recidivism prediction tools used in criminal sentencing, though biased in many ways, can straightforwardly avoid one particularly pernicious type of bias: direct racial discrimination. They can avoid this by excluding race from the list of variables employed to predict recidivism. A similar approach could be taken to the design of newer, machine learning-based (ML) tools for predicting recidivism: information about race could be withheld from the ML tool during its training phase, ensuring that the (...) resulting predictive model does not use race as an explicit predictor. However, if race is correlated with measured recidivism in the training data, the ML tool may ‘learn’ a perfect proxy for race. If such a proxy is found, the exclusion of race would do nothing to weaken the correlation between risk (mis)classifications and race. Is this a problem? We argue that, on some explanations of the wrongness of discrimination, it is. On these explanations, the use of an ML tool that perfectly proxies race would (likely) be more wrong than the use of a traditional tool that imperfectly proxies race. Indeed, on some views, use of a perfect proxy for race is plausibly as wrong as explicit racial profiling. We end by drawing out four implications of our arguments. (shrink)

Being human while trying to scientifically study human nature confronts us with our most vexing problem. Efforts to explicate the human mind are thwarted by our cultural biases and entrenched infirmities; our first-person experiences as practical agents convince us that we have capacities beyond the reach of scientific explanation. What we need to move forward in our understanding of human agency, Paul Sheldon Davies argues, is a reform in the way we study ourselves and a long overdue break with (...) traditional humanist thinking. Davies locates a model for change in the rhetorical strategies employed by Charles Darwin in _On the Origin of Species_. Darwin worked hard to anticipate and diminish the anxieties and biases that his radically historical view of life was bound to provoke. Likewise, Davies draws from the history of science and contemporary psychology and neuroscience to build a framework for the study of human agency that identifies and diminishes outdated and limiting biases. The result is a heady, philosophically wide-ranging argument in favor of recognizing that humans are, like everything else, subjects of the natural world—an acknowledgement that may free us to see the world the way it actually is. (shrink)

What is critical thinking, especially in the context of higher education? How have research and scholarship on the matter developed over recent past decades? What is the current state of the art here? How might the potential of critical thinking be enhanced? What kinds of teaching are necessary in order to realize that potential? And just why is this topic important now? These are the key questions motivating this volume. We hesitate to use terms such as “comprehensive” or “complete” or (...) “definitive,” but we believe that, taken in the round, the chapters in this volume together offer a fair insight into the contemporary understandings of higher education worldwide. We also believe that this volume is much needed, and we shall try to justify that claim in this introduction. (shrink)

The honour of being the first to teach philosophy in Australia belongs to the Congregationalist minister Barzillai Quaife (1798–1873), in the 1850s, but teaching philosophy did not formally begin until the 1880s, with the establishment of universities (Grave 1984). -/- Two approaches have dominated Western philosophy in Australia: Idealism and materialism. Idealism was prevalent between the 1880s and the 1930s, but dissipated thereafter. It was particularly associated with the work of the first professional philosophers in Australia, such as Henry Laurie (...) (1837–1922), Francis Anderson (1858–1941), William Mitchell (1861–1962) (who rejected the label) and a second generation including W. R. Boyce Gibson (1869–1935). Idealism in Australia often reflected Kantian themes, together with the British, particularly Scottish, revival of interest in Hegel through the work of the ‘Absolute Idealists’ T. H. Green (1836–1882), F. H. Bradley (1846–1924) and Henry Jones (1852–1922), the latter of whom conducted a popular lecture tour of Australia (Boucher 1990). -/- A number of the early New Zealand philosophers, including Duncan MacGregor (1843–1906), William Salmond (1835–1917), and Francis W. Dunlop (1874–1932) were educated in the Idealist tradition and were influential in their communities, but produced relatively little. William Anderson (1889–1955), at Auckland, brother of John at Sydney, was the only New Zealand philosopher that seemed to retain Idealist views. -/- In Australia, materialism gained prominence through the work of John Anderson, who arrived in Australia in 1927, and continues to be influential. John Anderson had been a student of Henry Jones, who can be said to have influenced both strands of Australian philosophical thought. (shrink)

This article explores the development of a novel biomedical research organism, and its potential to remake the species and spaces of translational medicine. The humanized mouse is a complex experimental object in which mice, rendered immunodeficient through genetic alteration, are engrafted with human stem cells in the hope of reconstituting a human immune system for biomedical research and drug testing. These chimeric organisms have yet to garner the same commentary from social scientists as other human–animal hybrid forms. Yet, they are (...) rapidly being positioned as central to translational medicine in immunological research and pharmaceutical development. This article explores the complex relations between species and spaces they seek to enact. Humanizing mice simultaneously moves these animal forms towards the intimate geographies of corporeal equivalence with humans and the expansive geographies of translational research. These multiple trajectories are achieved by the way humanized mice function as both uncertain ‘epistemic things’ and as expansive ‘collaborative things’, articulating mouse genetics with other research, notably stem cell science. In the context of post-genomics, their indeterminacy is critical to their collaborative value; their expansive potential follows as much from their biological openness as from specific expectations. Yet, these new research organisms have both accumulative and disruptive capacities, for there are patterns of interference between these trajectories, remaking boundaries between experimental practices and clinical contexts. (shrink)

Kant distinguishes between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ citizens and holds that only the former are civilly self-sufficient and possess rights of political participation. Such rights are important, since for Kant state institutions are a necessary condition for individual freedom. Thus, only active citizens are entitled to contribute to a necessary condition for the freedom of each. I argue that Kant attributes civil self-sufficiency to those who are not under the authority of any private individual for their survival. This reading is more (...) textually grounded than the dominant reading, which understands civil self-sufficiency in terms of economic relations alone. I further argue that Kant was interested in relations of authority because he was concerned to eliminate certain forms of corruption. This indicates that Kant’s contested distinction between active and passive citizens was a response to a key problem of any account of public lawgiving. (shrink)

This article discusses five attempts at justifying the provision of welfare on Kantian grounds. I argue that none of the five proposals is satisfactory. Each faces a serious challenge on textual or systematic grounds. The conclusion to draw from this is not that a Kantian cannot defend the provision of welfare. Rather, the conclusion to draw is that the task of defending the provision of welfare on Kantian grounds is a difficult one whose success we should not take for granted.

Denis Dutton claimed that, to grasp why it matters to the artistic value of a painting like The Disciples at Emmaus that it was painted by van Meegeren in the first half of the twentieth century rather than by Vermeer in the seventeenth century, we need to locate what van Meegeren did in a wider class of ‘artistic crimes’ involving ‘misrepresented artistic performances’. I begin by clarifying how the notions of ‘artistic performance’ and ‘misrepresentation’ are to be understood in the (...) context of Dutton’s paper. I survey a range of examples of misrepresented artistic performances in Dutton’s sense, and ask when they involve ‘artistic crimes’. I then seek a principled way of justifying what seem to be our clear intuitions—apparent in our artistic practice—as to which ‘misrepresented artistic performances’ are artistic crimes and which are not. (shrink)

This chapter critically examines the idea that some cinematic artworks “do philosophy”. It is argued that any interesting “film as philosophy” thesis must satisfy two conditions: (FP1) In any advance in philosophical understanding attributable to a cinematic artwork, the philosophical content through which such an advance is accomplished must be articulated in a manner that is distinctively cinematic, on a proper understanding of the latter; (FP2) The advance in philosophical understanding attributable to a cinematic artwork must occur in the course (...) of our experiential engagement with that work, rather than in some distinct philosophical activity to which that engagement provides an extractable input. These conditions, it is argued, are not satisfied by the kinds of examples of ‘film as philosophy’ – cinematic ‘thought experiments’ – most often cited by philosophers. While (FP2) might be satisfied given a particular model of learning from thought experiments, (FP1) remains problematic. A second more elusive possibility is that philosophical understanding is advanced through affective qualities of the experiences cinematically elicited in receivers of a narrative film. After examining how cinematic affect is generated and the kind of philosophical work that such affect might do, Robert Sinnerbrink’s notion of “cinematic thinking” is critically assessed and tested against some relevant examples. (shrink)

The De Malo represents some of Aquinas' most mature thinking on goodness, badness, and human agency. In it he examines the full range of questions associated with evil: its origin, its nature, its relation to good, and its compatability with the existence of an omnipotent, benevolent God. This edition offers Richard Regan's new, clear readable English translation, based on the Leonine Commission's authoritative edition of the Latin text. Brian Davies has provided an extensive introduction and notes..

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 78, Issue 1, Page 75-79, Winter 2020.

[I]f you could know a priori that you are in a given mental state, and your being in that state conceptually or logically implies the existence of external objects, then you could know a priori that the external world exists. Since you obviously _can.

Howard Robinson’s “revised causal argument” for the sense-datum theory of perception combines elements from two other arguments, the “original” causal argument and the argument from hallucination. Mark Johnston, however, has argued that, once the nature of the object of hallucinatory experience is properly addressed, the errors in hallucination-based arguments for conjunctivist views of perception like the sense-datum theory become apparent. I outline Robinson’s views and then consider the implications of Johnston’s challenge for the revised causal argument.

Thomas Aquinas accepts the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, so he believes that divinity somehow contains distinction within itself. He thinks that there are three who are God, and he also thinks that, if we ask, ‘three what?’, the answer is, ‘three persons’. However, also in line with Christian orthodoxy, Aquinas is a monotheist: he believes that there is but one, powerful, knowledgeable God. This chapter investigates why Aquinas takes the resolutely monotheistic position that he adopts everywhere, before turning in (...) Ch. 10 to his treatment of the Trinity. The three main sections of the chapter are: God is one; God has power; and God's knowledge. (shrink)

For Thomas Aquinas, the heart of Christian teaching is the doctrine of the Trinity, and this is the first specifically Christian topic that he turns to in Summa Theologiae. Historically speaking, Aquinas is one of the most important writers on the doctrine of the Trinity, and it is these writings that are addressed in this chapter. Aquinas takes for granted the substance of early texts on the Trinity such as the Creed of Asthanius, so his position is thoroughly orthodox. Consequently, (...) his own treatment of the Trinity deals with three main topics, each of which is discussed separately: the relevance of philosophy to the doctrine; the divine processions, and hence the relations, involved in the Trinity; and the persons of the Trinity taken individually. (shrink)

Psychiatry widely assumes an internalist biomedical model of mental illness. I argue that many of psychiatry’s diagnostic categories involve an implicit commitment to constitutive externalism about mental illness. Some of these categories are socially externalist in nature.

St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 12251274) is widely viewed as one of the greatest Christian thinkers of all time.

It has been over a decade and half since Christof Koch and the late Francis Crick first advocated the now popular NCC project, in which one tries to find the neural correlate of consciousness for perceptual processes. Here we critically take stock of what have actually been learned from these studies. Many authors have questioned whether looking for the neural correlates would eventually lead to an explanatory theory of consciousness, while the proponents of NCC research maintain that focusing on correlates (...) is a strategically sensible first step, given the complexity of the problem. My point here is not to argue whether studying the NCC is useful, but rather, to question whether we are really studying the NCC at all. I argue that in hoping to sidestep the difficult conceptual issues, we have sometimes also missed the phenomenon of perceptual consciousness itself. (shrink)

Weaving together her most influential writings of the 1990s, Bronwyn Davies offers a unique engagement with poststructuralism that defies the boundaries between theory and embodied practice. Whereas poststructuralists are often accused of excessive abstraction, Davies' sophisticated and nuanced discussions of subjectivity, agency, epistemology, feminism, and power are embedded in vital depictions of lived experience and empirical research. A renowned scholar of education and gender formation, Davies shows the importance of poststructural perspectives for her own research in classrooms, (...) on playgrounds, with literary texts, and her own life history. Lucid prose—accessible for students and refreshing for researchers and theorists alike—makes postructural concepts usable as conceptual frameworks for interpreting and analyzing the social world. (shrink)

This book provides an accessible yet sophisticated introduction to the significant philosophical issues concerning the performing arts.

What is an object? How do we look at them? Why do they matter? This collection presents a lively, timely discussion of natural and artifactual objects, considering the relationship between them from a range of philosophical perspectives, including the philosophy of biology, the metaphysics of space and the philosophy of perception. Beginning from the starting point that natural objects are bona fide, endowed with some natural border between themselves and everything else, while artifactual objects depend on the observation of tacit (...) conventions and may include the ordinary objects of everyday life, this volume explores, contextualises and interrogates objects. Contributors discuss a variety of objects including physical, scientific and mental ones, as well as things that appear to question the limits of object-hood, including holes, Quinean 'posits' and language. The very first collection to address this growing topic within analytic philosophy, Natural and Artifactual Objects in Contemporary Metaphysics represents a highly original work, showcasing some of the most important and influential philosophers working in Europe today. (shrink)

In this work of historical theology, Rachel Davies considers the relationship between aesthetics and anthropology in Bonaventure's thought, and shows how bodily diminishment can become a sign and source of the self's renewal. Drawing from texts like the Collations on the Six Days, and the Major Life of Francis, Davies reconfigures traditional accounts of the fallen body's rebellion against the soul and emphasizes instead the soul's original abandonment of the body. Her interpretation draws attention to the crucial but (...) undervalued role that Bonaventure assigns to the body in the self's coming-to-be, and shows how contemplation involves the soul's tender recovery of the body it once rejected. Though contemplation makes body-soul integrity possible again, Davies argues that the body never fully recovers from its primordial alienation. Instead, Bonaventure suggests that individuals can experience brokenness and healing at the same time, and that suffering bodies can become paschal spaces, graced and open to beatific wholeness. (shrink)

Midwest Studies In Philosophy, EarlyView.