Although most of us know that human beings cannot and should not be replaced by computers, we have great difficulties saying why this is so. This paradox is largely the result of institutionalizing several fundamental misconceptions as to the nature of both trustworthy objective and moral knowledge. Unless we transcend this paradox, we run the increasing risks of becoming very good at counting without being able to say what is worth counting and why. The degree to which this is occurring (...) is the degree to which the computer revolution is already over — and the degree to which we human beings have lost. (shrink)

How do we explain organized complexity in human affairs? The most common model explain s human organization as the outcome of rational design; order in human affairs arises from the intentions, plans, and orders of those in charge. For organizational complexity on vast scales, this model is insufficient, misleading, and potentially disastrous. An alternative model, based upon self-organization within complex systems, is developed and applied to the tobacco industry.Leaked documents and public testimony point to widespread distortion of information within the (...) tobacco industry. The model developed herein describes such behaviors as emergent outcomes, not reducible to or sufficiently explained by individual fraud and deliberate deceit. Critics of the tobacco industry often fail to appreciate the role of self-organization in complex systems. They presume rational design. Consequently, they imply more intentional deceit, deliberate planning, and conspiracy than needed to explain the distortions that actually occurred. (shrink)

Michela Bella & Matteo Santarelli – What was the state of Pragmatism studies when you first encountered pragmatism? Larry A. Hickman – After completing my undergraduate degree in psychology I decided that I wanted to study philosophy. In order to prepare for graduate school, I spent a year taking philosophy courses at the University of Texas in Austin. The faculty included Charles Hartshorne, who was co-editor of the Peirce Collected Papers. There was also David L. Miller and George (...) Gentry, b... (shrink)

This article aims to address the widespread thesis according to which medieval scholastics would not handle the idea of fine art. Based on a suggestion by Anzulewicz, the author shows how Albert the Great did understand the peculiarity of fine arts and put them in close relationship with liberal arts. There are fine arts, such as music, which are sought after for their own sake and can, therefore, be considered as fully liberal. In contrast to them, there are other arts (...) called mechanical, whose purpose is utilitarian. In the third place, there are other arts which, although also possessing some utility, are chosen for their own sake and are therefore partly liberal; we should place fine arts such as architecture in that group. The more art participates in reason and the beauty of the soul, the more it will be fine and liberal. The product is called to be a metaphor for the honest good of virtue. The very contemplation of this beauty embodied by art evokes an aesthetic enjoyment. In this way, we can see that Albert, no less than Aquinas, speaks of the pleasure linked to the contemplation of beauty. (shrink)

Saving the World and Healing the Soul treats the heroic and redemptive trials of Jason Bourne, Bruce Wayne, Bella Swan, and Katniss Everdeen. The Bourne films, Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, the Twilight saga, and the Hunger Games series offer us stories to live into, to make connection between our personal loves and trials and a good order of the world.

This book is a series of essays by distinguished scholars concerned with the improvement of primary, secondary, and tertiary studies, most especially in arts but also in mathematics and science. It is concerned with past ideas about education in Australia, most particularly with the traditions that have yielded an education that has proven most beneficial to Australia in terms of comparison with other countries; and it advocates and emphasises how this tradition can be maintained and improved in specific ways. Essays (...) focus on primary and secondary education in music, and art, mathematics, history and the classics, on the improvement of memory and vocabulary, but more particularly on university education, discussing the purpose of education, learning in general, the use of the seminar, the necessity of freedom of debate, the inadequacies and contradictions of French and Anglo-post modernism, the teaching of history, of philosophy, and its branch aesthetics, mathematics, equality in education, teaching at university and funding of the whole enterprise. The authors are all well known in their disciplines and some are experts, internationally recognised in their fields. This book features essays by: David Daintree, Karl Schmude, Simon Haines, Kevin Donnelly, Matthew Lesh, Chris Berg & Bella d'Abrera, David Furse-Roberts, Greg Melleuish, Steven Schwartz, Blaise Joseph, James Franklin, Christopher Allen, Richard Gill, Jeremy Bell, Barry Spurr, David Brooks, Natalie Kennedy, Sarah Williams, Sarah Lawrence, Ivan Francis Head. (shrink)

Exploramos las tensiones entre narración y materia en la obra de David Lynch. Partiendo de algunas investigaciones recientes -especialmente los trabajos de Català Domènech y Pacôme Thiellement-, proponemos una aproximación al problema de la materia lyncheana que tome como metodología el análisis formal del discurso. Comenzaremos preguntándonos por el uso mismo de la materia que el director aplica en sus creaciones en relación con el aura benjaminiana. En segundo lugar, propondremos un recorrido cronológico que nos permita explorar cómo ha (...) sido la evolución en su manejo de los materiales a partir de tres posibles etapas: el aprendizaje de los códigos artísticos pretéritos -tanto en lo que toca a la herencia de las bellas artes como al reciente pasado cinematográfico-, la paulatina quiebra de los mismos mediante el recurso del video digital o la cita postmoderna, y finalmente, el replanteamiento de sus propias imágenes en un contexto postdigital. (shrink)

Much of the sustained attention on pandemic preparedness has focused on the ethical justification for plans for the “crisis” phase of a surge when, despite augmentation efforts, the demand for life...

The authors use empirical research into the environmental practices of 31 manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to show that ‚business performance’ and ‚regulation’ considerations drive behaviour. They suggest that this is inevitable, given the market-based decision-making frames that permeate and dominate the industry in which manufacturing SMEs operate. Since the environment is a pillar of corporate social responsibility (CSR), the findings have important implications for CSR policy, which promotes voluntary actions predicated on a business case. It is argued that (...) this approach will not alter the behaviour of manufacturing SMEs significantly because CSR practice will be regarded as an optional and costly ‚extra’ affecting core business activity. Consequently, the use and development of existing regulatory structures, providing minimum standards for many activities covered by CSR, remains the most effective means through which the behaviour of manufacturing SMEs will be changed in the short to medium-term. Another feature of the paper is the distinction made between ‚business performance’ and the ‚business case’ argument. Business performance emphasises cost reductions and efficiency whereas the business case accentuates the benefits to shareholders of good practices as their firms become more attractive to stakeholders and society. Manufacturing SMEs␣try to improve business performance because of the pressures placed on them by market-dominated decision-making frames. These frames do not encourage manufacturing SMEs to undertake voluntary actions for the benefit of wider stakeholders and society. (shrink)

I develop an account of naturalness in physics which demonstrates that naturalness assumptions are not restricted to narrow cases in high-energy physics but are a ubiquitous part of how interlevel relations are derived in physics. After exploring how and to what extent we might justify such assumptions on methodological grounds or through appeal to speculative future physics, I consider the apparent failure of naturalness in cosmology and in the Standard Model. I argue that any such naturalness failure threatens to undermine (...) the entire structure of our understanding of intertheoretic reduction, and so risks a much larger crisis in physics than is sometimes suggested; I briefly review some currently-popular strategies that might avoid that crisis. (shrink)

Is it rational to be moral? How do rationality and morality fit together with being human? These questions are at the heart of David Schmidtz's exploration of the connections between rationality and morality. This inquiry leads into both metaethics and rational choice theory, as Schmidtz develops conceptions of what it is to be moral and what it is to be rational. He defends a fairly expansive conception of rational choice, considering how ends as well as means can be rationally (...) chosen and explaining the role of self-imposed constraints in a rational life plan. His moral theory is dualistic, ranging over social structure as well as personal conduct and building both individual and collective rationality into its rules of recognition for morals. To the "why be moral" question, Schmidtz responds that being moral is rational, but he does not assume we have reasons to be rational. Instead, Schmidtz argues that being moral is rational in a particular way and that beings like us in situations like ours have reasons to be rational in just that way. This approach allows him to identify decisive reasons to be moral; at the same time, it explains why immorality is as prevalent as it is. This book thus offers a set of interesting and realistic conclusions about how morality fits into the lives of humanly rational agents operating in an institutional context like our own. (shrink)

I develop an account of how mathematized theories in physics represent physical systems, in response to the frequent claim that any such account must presuppose a non-mathematized, and usually linguistic, description of the system represented. The account I develop contains a circularity, in that representation is a mathematical relation between the models of a theory and the system as represented by some other model --- but I argue that this circularity is not vicious, in any case refers in linguistic accounts (...) of meaning and representation, and is simply a consequence of the fact that we have no unmediated, representation-independent access to the world. (shrink)

Dan Korman and Dustin Locke argue that non-naturalists are rationally committed to withhold moral belief. A main principle in their argument, which they call EC*, can be read in either of two ways, which I call EC*-narrow and EC*-wide. I show that EC*-narrow is implausible. Then I show that, if Korman and Locke rely on EC*-wide to critique non-naturalism, then the critique fails. I explain how the availability of a view that I like to call moral occasionalism can be used (...) to respond on the non-naturalist’s behalf to the EC*-wide version of the argument. I also show how moral occasionalism is more useful for this purpose than an alternative third-factor account, namely David Enoch’s pre-established harmony view. (shrink)

The public forum has been connected to the functioning of democracy, expressive freedom, and the media's role in society. While the public forum's legal contours have been examined, the ethical foundation of the public forum has not. Relying on archival research, this article argues that ideas about the public forum can be traced to the pragmatism of Grenville Clark, who influenced ideas about the public forum through his work on the American Bar Association's Bill of Rights Committee.

According to the self-defense view, the moral justification of punishment is derived from the moral justification of an earlier threat of punishment for an offense. According to the forfeiture view, criminals can justly be punished because they have forfeited certain rights in virtue of their crimes. The paper defends three theses about these two views. (1) The self-defense view is false because the right to threaten retaliation is not independent of the right to carry out that threat. (2) A more (...) plausible account of the right to threaten says instead that the right to retaliate is primary to the right to threaten, and that the former right in turn arises because aggressors forfeit the right not to suffer retaliation. (3) The ?fair warning thesis,? according to which just punishment must be preceded by a threat, is less plausible than first appearances suggest and is therefore no serious obstacle to the view of threats described above. (shrink)

Anthropocentrism has been proposed as the underlying cause of modern society's environmental impact. Concomitantly, hunter-gatherers’ orientation towards nature is connected with minimal environmental change or conservation, and seen as validating the idea that ‘what people do about their ecology depends upon what they think about themselves in relation to things around them’ (White 1967: 1205). Here it is argued that the notion that orientation towards nature is instrumental in environmental impact in any generalisable way has little empirical support and, most (...) importantly, is under-theorised and conceptually flawed. Employing a strong structurationist approach, it is shown that the tendency to abstract particular values from their social and environmental context must be resisted and that a deeper conception of the ‘inner lives’ of agents is required. Such an approach is more expansive and engages with a range of other motives as well as the unintended environmental consequences of actions. (shrink)

In this paper I criticize the standard argument for deontological egalitarianism, understood as the thesis that there is a moral claim to have an equal share of well-being or whatever other good counts. That argument is based on the idea that equals should be treated equally. I connect the debate over egalitarianism with that over comparative justice. A common theme is a general skepticism against comparative claims. I argue (i) that there can be no claim to equality based simply on (...) the fact of equal worth as that fact itself does not have any value for the supposed claim holder; and (ii) intuitions that suggest otherwise can be explained away without appealing to comparative claims. (shrink)

I develop Iris Murdoch's argument that “there is no Platonic ‘elsewhere,’ similar to the Christian ‘elsewhere.’ ” Thus: Iris Murdoch is against the Separation of the Forms not as a correction of Plato but in order to keep faith with him; Plato's Parmenides is not a source book of accurately targeted self-refutation but a catalogue of student errors; the testimony of Aristotle and Gilbert Ryle about Plato's motivations in the Theory of Forms is not an indubitable foundation from which to (...) denounce Iris Murdoch's treatment of Plato as inaccurate but a rival reading of dubious charity. If Iris Murdoch's version of the Theory of Forms strikes Newton Garver as an incoherent mix of influences from Wittgenstein and Plato, this is not because Iris Murdoch is herself confused, but because in important respects the orthodoxy has Plato wrong. (shrink)

Hefty and serious—that is how this book feels when you pick it up. That was my subjective aesthetic experience anyway. Aesthetic judgment is, after all, one key to assessing our thoughts and perceptions. More on that soon, as you might expect.Hefty and serious also describes the questions with which the volume grapples: Is there, or can there be, a clear American Aesthetics, not merely aesthetics practiced by Americans? What would that look like? How would such a process affect the minds (...) and actions of Americans?The answers? It's complicated.The twenty essays in this volume trace the possibility of an American Aesthetics from foundational ideas of the past to the contemporary landscape. The goal is not only articulating an aesthetics that is distinctively American—aesthetics as a method for examining the arts and the artful—but also the possibility of aesthetics as a dynamic tool for pursuing a flourishing life within our hyper-capitalist, consumerist culture.Constant amongst the scholars gathered here is the assertion that aesthetics is not an abstract academic pursuit interesting only to the privileged and interested few but rather that aesthetics is the key element in the human pursuit of meaning and purpose in our lives. Aristotle would approve!Speaking of ancestors, the scholars here trace the work of grandparents such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Pierce, and William James, and parents such as the pragmatist John Dewey and the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. (Whitehead is from the UK but “American” in that he died in the US after a long career at Harvard and wrote his magnum opus, Process and Reality, in the US.) From these ancestors, the scholars gathered in this volume see a path forward: Art as conscious experience, as Dewey posited, and/or art as committed immersion in the process, as Whitehead claimed.Whitehead's process approach—process aesthetics—reminds us that each moment of our experience in this at once mundane and amazing world is an occasion of beauty and a telos—each moment is in the larger process of reality quite literally our last.William James attempted to map how we might free ourselves from the everyday and from everyday-ness: “We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib verbalities and verbosities and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up” (109). Yet, according to James, there is hope due to the fact that we human beings seek art and do art first and foremost because we enjoy it.Enjoyment was not the angle from which John Dewey approached the subject. According to Dewey our aesthetic reactions and interactions create the experience of art (and life) that re-accesses “an underlying harmony... that we vaguely remember” (112). For pragmatists, noticing a “thing” is entering a relationship with that thing, what David Strong terms in his essay, “correlational coexistence” (371).From these building blocks the scholars assembled propose ways to change US culture from one prone to ask, “What does it do?” into one in which it is increasingly possible to ask, “What does it mean?” This would be a fundamental shift in the dominant paradigms in US culture.How to get there? Randall E. Auxier offers a concise definition of “bad”—bad is something that is “lifeless and too much indebted to the actual.” My attempts at singing fall into that category, as do many American experiences conceived in the mode of what they do, not what they mean.That works of art escape or repel descriptions of their constitutive elements has proven to be a persistent philosophical conundrum through the centuries, as has the question of whether human feelings create an object or an object creates feelings, or both/and—Dewey's interaction of “organism and environment.” From whichever philosophical direction we approach this crux, aesthetic thinking can lead us to recognize and experience the inwardness of what we view as things—objects—and this examination can realign our personal axiology—our personal valuation of reality—the “ten thousand things” of ancient Chinese philosophy.Several authors cite Suzanne Langer's theory of symbol, broadening the scope of “art” well beyond Art with a capital A into the aesthetic and the ritualistic.The scholars gathered here are optimistic that aesthetic examination can create more of those rare moments (moments art can reliably create) in which our very being adjusts to the reality of existence, and we feel exhilarated and a part of the whole process of existence. We call this “nirvana” or “enlightenment.”That is another thing that feels hefty about this volume: the persistent optimism among the scholars that psychic wholeness and human flourishing are possible for more Americans. Robert S. Corrington terms this the “selving process,” roughly what Carl Jung termed “individuation.” This collection adds up to much more than the sum of its parts, as one idea inflected in a particular way by one author sparks off the same idea approached from a different perspective in another. This collection contains scholars on the cutting edge of process theology, pragmatism, aesthetics, and religion, many of whom are adept at crossing the traditional fences between academic fields. The US needs an American Aesthetics. As American poet William Carlos Williams wrote,It is difficultto get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lackof what is found there. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Avicenna's philosophical achievements: Aristotle and beyond Beyond philosophical articulation: glimpses of wisdom Imprints upon philosophical tradition Concluding remarks.

Social and regional inequality remained of secondary importance in the 2017 House of Representatives election, especially in comparison to national security and constitutional reform. Still, the election victory of the coalition between the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Kōmeitō was also due to its ability to shape the debate concerning Japan’s political-economic model of growth and inequality. Abenomics and regional revitalization were the dominating policies, which opposition parties criticized without having a real counter-model. A more detailed analysis shows, however, that (...) Abenomics has not yet fulfilled its promise of shared growth, and that the governing coalition’s discursive control over the political-economic agenda has significantly weakened. This creates opportunities for opposition parties in the future. (shrink)

Urbanization in Early and Medieval China: Gazetteers for the City of Suzhou. Translated and introduced by Olivia Milburn. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015. Pp. xx + 360. $50 ; $30.

This chapter contains sections titled: Religious Questions and Metaphysical Questions God of the Philosophers The Kind of Belief that Matters Philosophical Foundations What Metaphysical Reasoning Can Do Belief and Experience Notes.

This chapter contains sections titled: I II III IV.

This chapter provides a survey of Kierkegaard's views of systematic theology, doctrine, and dogmatics. It demonstrates that while Kierkegaard's view of theology is generally negative, for he regards it as a human enterprise created in order to avoid doing God's Word, his attitude to doctrine and dogmatics is nuanced and complex. Kierkegaard rejects doctrine insofar as it objectifies Christianity, but nevertheless generally accepts the classic doctrines of the Christian faith and sees no reason to reform them. This ambivalence toward doctrine (...) stems from his conviction that the task facing the believer is not to reflect on doctrine, but to appropriate and apply it existentially to his/her own individual existence. Similarly, although Kierkegaard rejects the efforts of contemporary dogmaticians, dogmatics itself is valid insofar as it reproduces the paradoxical character of Christianity and the decision between faith and offense with which Christian dogmas confront every human being. (shrink)

This Note argues that the fourth pseudo-hieroglyph from the left in Giorgio vasari’s Chatsworth Allegory of a Dream, previously regarded as a symbol of the sin of pride or else not interpreted, is, in fact, the depiction of a castle in the air (castello in aria). I show that the rare iconography of an upside-down castle was inspired by an illustration from an Italian translation of the dialogues of Lucian of Samosata and give a brief overview of the importance of (...) the motif of the castle in the air in sixteenth-century Italian culture. I also propose that Vasari’s drawing was a design for a ceiling panel intended for Giovanni Corner’s palace in venice and show its dependence on Francesco Primaticcio’s Allegory of the Nile for the palace of François Ier at Fontainebleau. (shrink)