As he neared 80 Russell was more financially secure than he had been for decades. But to remain so he needed to maintain his prodigious output as a writer, broadcaster and lecturer (see Papers 26, forthcoming). Meanwhile, the breakdown of his third marriage threatened to undermine his much-improved financial position. The monetary concerns addressed in both the text prepared by Russell and the related commentary hint at a lifetime’s scrupulous regard for his personal finances.

Résumé: Après la promulgation de la loi sur le mariage de la République populaire de Chine en 1950, les œuvres littéraires dérivées du besoin de publicité ont des implications politiques et une signification disciplinaire distinctes. Parce que le problème du divorce a la rationalité des “droits libres” et la sensibilité de l’agitation sociale, le récit du “divorce” à cette époque se situe dans une certaine mesure entre la politique et la réalité. D’une part, les œuvres littéraires doivent promouvoir (...) positivement le concept juridique de “liberté de divorce” et, d’autre part, elles doivent être soumises à un traitement narratif insensible. Les récits de divorce sont donc vagues et capricieux. Toutefois, la littérature a comblé dans une certaine mesure le fossé entre la loi et la réalité en réimaginant les problèmes réels causés par le divorce. (shrink)

Though it''s difficult to agree on the exact date of their union, logic and artificial intelligence (AI) were married by the late 1950s, and, at least during their honeymoon, were happily united. What connubial permutation do logic and AI find themselves in now? Are they still (happily) married? Are they divorced? Or are they only separated, both still keeping alive the promise of a future in which the old magic is rekindled? This paper is an attempt to answer these (...) questions via a review of six books. Encapsulated, our answer is that (i) logic and AI, despite tabloidish reports to the contrary, still enjoy matrimonial bliss, and (ii) only their future robotic offspring (as opposed to the children of connectionist AI) will mark real progress in the attempt to understand cognition. (shrink)

This book brings together the work of eleven leading international scholars to map the contribution of teaching Sisters, who provided schooling to hundreds of thousands of children, globally, from 1800 to 1950. The volume represents research that draws on several theoretical approaches and methodologies. It engages with feminist discourses, social history, oral history, visual culture, post-colonial studies and the concept of transnationalism, to provide new insights into the work of Sisters in education. Making a unique contribution to the field, chapters (...) offer an interrogation of historical sources as well as fresh interpretations of findings, challenging assumptions. Compelling narratives from the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Africa, Australia, South East Asia, France, the UK, Italy and Ireland contribute to what is a most important exploration of the contribution of the women religious by mapping and contextualizing their work. _Education, Identity and Women Religious, 1800–1950: Convents, classrooms and colleges_ will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of social history, women’s history, the history of education, Catholic education, gender studies and international education. (shrink)

Wedding vows seem to be promises. So they go: I promise to love, honour, and cherish .... But this poses a problem. Divorce is not widely seen as a serious moral wrong, but breaking a promise is. I first consider, and defend against preliminary objections, a ‘hard-line’ response: divorce is indeed prima facie impermissible promise-breaking. I next consider the ‘hardship’ response—the hardship of failed marriages overrides the prima facie duty to keep promises. However, this would release promisors in (...) far too many cases. I resolve the triad by considering the content of the vows. Vows concerning love are not promises at all. We cannot promise to do acts the performance of which is outside our control, and love involves states of mind outside our control. Vows concerning spousal roles are complicated by diverse social understandings of marriage and the centrality of emotion to the roles. (shrink)

An examination of some of the ethical issues that arise in making policy decisions about divorce child-custody disputes. It is argued in this paper that what needs to be resolved is the dilemma that occurs when the legislator is faced with a choice between using a discretionary standard that promotes the best interests of the child or a non-discretionary standard that settles disputes by an arbitrary assignment of custody. The dilemma is resolved through a normative analysis of various types (...) of dispute-settling processes and a canvas of standard that allow for the automatic but non-arbitrary settling of disputes between contending parents. (shrink)

The paper presents a historical-epistemological analysis of the notion of “spontaneous symmetry breaking”, which I believe today provides a template for conceiving the relationship between symmetry and asymmetry in physics as well as in other areas of the natural sciences. The central thesis of the paper is that spontaneous symmetry breaking represents an instance of “narrative knowing” in the sense developed by recent research in history and philosophy of science (Morgan and Wise (eds) SI narrative in science, Studies (...) in history and philosophy of science, 2017a). Spontaneous symmetry breaking is best understood as a hybrid narrative comprising formulas, verbal statements, images, and at times also other media. This flexible notion can be deployed in different variations, allowing to explain a broad range of non-symmetric phenomena or models as resulting from (not necessarily observable) processes of loss of symmetry. I will support this thesis by first analysing in detail the way in which spontaneous symmetry breaking, and in particular electroweak symmetry breakdown, are presented in today’s physics textbooks and reference works, and then by reconstructing the emergence of the hybrid construct from the late 1950s until the 1970s, when spontaneous symmetry breaking definitively established itself as a key physical notion. (shrink)

All people are vulnerable to having their self-concepts shaped by others. This article investigates that vulnerability using a theory of narrative self-constitution. According to narrative self-constitution, people depend on others to develop and maintain skills of self-narration and they are vulnerable to having the content of their self-narratives co-authored by others. This theoretical framework highlights how vulnerability to co-authoring is essential to developing a self-narrative and, thus, the possibility of autonomy. However, this vulnerability equally entails that co-authors (...) can undermine autonomy by contributing disvalued content to the agent’s self-narrative and undermining her authorial skills. I illustrate these processes with the first-hand reports of several women who survived sexual abuse as children. Their narratives of survival and healing reveal the challenges involved in developing the skills required to manage vulnerability to co-authoring and how others can help in this process. Finally, I discuss some of the implications of co-authoring for the healthcare professional and the therapeutic relationship. (shrink)

Divorce is not only a personal choice, but also a sign of the lack of confidence in the institution of marriage. The issue of divorce raises questions that are sociological, theological, experiential, philosophical and political. This article traces the arguments with particular reference to the situation in Taiwan where women have no right to initiate divorce. It surveys the biblical and theological arguments, locating issues of divorce in the area of gender justice within patriarchal systems. Marriage, (...) as well as divorce, is complex. To impose a monolithic definition of divorce is to fail to recognize the diversity of marital conflict and breakdown, generally to the advantage of a patriarchal society. This was as true of Hebrew society as it is of modern Taiwan, with its history of political struggle. The article concludes by challenging the Taiwanese churches to provide insights for people in their relationships with one another and with God. (shrink)

Based on the examination of a similar scene in three novels received in the 1950s on the subject of childhood on the margins of society, this article seeks to show the ideological clashes and represented in these novels. Behind their respective uses of narrative and specific discursive strategies, very different conceptions of rehabilation emerge. These are based on conflicting anthropologies of the child that need to be more clearly identified.

Our ability to tell stories about ourselves has captivated many theorists, and some have taken these developments for an opportunity to answer long-standing questions about the nature of personhood. In this essay I employ two skeptical arguments to show that this move was a mistake. The first argument rests on the observation that storytelling is revisionary. The second implies that our stories about ourselves are biased in regard to our existing self-image. These arguments undercut narrative theories of identity, but (...) they leave room for a theory of narrative self-knowledge. The theory accommodates the first skeptical argument because there are event descriptions with retrospective assertibility conditions, and it accommodates the second argument by denying us epistemic privilege in regard to our own past. The result is that we do know our past through storytelling, but that it is a contingent feature of some of our stories that they are about ourselves. (shrink)

This essay reexamines Holmes Rolston’s evocative notion of “storied residence” and evaluates it for its fitness for environmental virtue ethics. Environmental virtue ethics (or EVE) continues to garner attention among environmental philosophers, and recently Brian Treanor has argued for the indispensability of narrative approaches as part of that discourse. In this paper, I endorse this indispensability thesis generally, but I argue that narrative environmental virtue ethics must be supplemented either by “storied residence” or a similar environmentally, scientifically, culturally, (...) and historically rich concept of narrative. Rolston himself has criticized environmental virtue ethics for being too agent-centered. Fortunately, an adequate sense of storied-residence is precisely what is needed to avoid triggering the vicious anthropocentrism that concerns Rolston. More concretely, storied-residence makes place(s) central to environmental virtue ethics by giving expression to features of the more-than-human world that often become secondary considerations to agency in accounts of environmental virtue. (shrink)

Every human being is born into a world of stories. Western society has tended to differentiate types of stories, distinguishing, for example, between history and fiction. Recently, the major intellectual task undertaken by many influential thinkers has been that of destroying these distinctions, and insisting on resemblances rather than differences. According to this train of thought, history is as much "imaginative literature" as is fictional writing. Argument in favor of this view is often begun by reducing the description of an (...) historian's data to "scattered events." But, being born into a world of stories, an historian actually works with events only in story-form. It is misleading to compare the concept "event," which belongs to the ontological mode, to "narrative," which belongs to the linguistic mode. "Event" is further ambiguous because "events" can be distinguished ontologically or evaluatively. Historians deal with "event-descriptions," not events, and these descriptions can be correct or incorrect. (shrink)

Philosophers and mathematicians have different ideas about the difference between pure and applied mathematics. This should not surprise us, since they have different aims and interests. For mathematicians, pure mathematics is the interesting stuff, even if it has lots of physics involved. This has the consequence that picturesque examples play a role in motivating and justifying mathematical results. Philosophers might find this upsetting, but we find a parallel to mathematician’s attitudes in ethics, which, I argue, is a much better model (...) for how philosophers should think about these issues. (shrink)

Memories of our personal past are the building blocks of our narrative identity. So, when we depend on objects and other people to remember and construct our personal past, our narrative identity is distributed across our embodied brains and an ecology of environmental resources. This paper uses a cognitive niche construction approach to conceptualise how we engineer our memory ecology and construct our distributed narrative identities. It does so by identifying three types of niche construction processes that (...) govern how we interact with our memory ecology, namely creating, editing, and using resources in our memory ecology. It also conceptualises how identity-relevant information in objects and (family) stories is transmitted vertically, i.e., across different generations of people. Identifying these processes allows us to better understand the cultural information trajectories that constitute our memory ecologies. Thus, what I’ll argue is that our memory ecology distributes our narrative identity and that engineering our memory ecology is a form of narrative niche construction. (shrink)

It is necessary to have available a variety of evidence-based resilience practices as we experience life’s stressors including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Evoking, experiencing, and reflecting on awe moments by developing and sharing an “awe narrative” are a type of mindfulness technique that can have the potential to help someone flourish, enhance their resilience, and have a positive impact on their overall wellbeing. This paper explores how constructing an awe narrative can assist the individual while also possibly having (...) a positive impact on others. (shrink)

One goal of this paper is to argue that autobiographical memories are extended and distributed across embodied brains and environmental resources. This is important because such distributed memories play a constitutive role in our narrative identity. So, some of the building blocks of our narrative identity are not brain-bound but extended and distributed. Recognising the distributed nature of memory and narrative identity, invites us to find treatments and strategies focusing on the environment in which dementia patients are (...) situated. A second goal of this paper is to suggest various of such strategies, including lifelogging technologies such as SenseCams, life story books, multimedia biographies, memory boxes, ambient intelligence systems, and virtual reality applications. Such technologies allow dementia patients to remember their personal past in a way that wouldn’t be possible by merely relying on their biological memory, in that way aiding in preserving their narrative identity and positively contributing to their sense of well-being. (shrink)

Is divorce reasonable, given that marital promises are often apparently unqualified? I explain a variety of ways in which one can take promises seriously and recognize the value of genuinely unqualified love in marriage while recognizing that it may be reasonable in particular cases to treat marital promises as non-binding.

Models of discourse and narration elaborated within the classical compositional framework have been characterized as bottom-up models, according to which discourse analysis proceeds incrementally, from phrase and sentence local meaning to discourse global meaning. In this paper we will argue against these models. Assuming as a case study the issue of discourse coherence, we suggest that the assessment of coherence is a top-down process, in which the construction of a situational interpretation at the global meaning level guides local meaning analysis. (...) In support of our hypothesis, we explore the role of executive functions (brain functions involved in planning and organization of goal-oriented behaviors) in coherence’s establishment, discussing the results of several studies on narrative abilities of patients with brain injuries. We suggest that, compared to other models of discourse processing focused on comprehension, our model is a viable candidate for an integrated account of discourse comprehension and production. (shrink)

In a magisterial book-length study, Professor E. Christian Brugger concludes that the canons of the Council of Trent, given the beliefs and intentions of its participants, provide “a dogmatic definition of the absolute indissolubility of marriage as a truth of divine revelation” (original italics). The present concern is whether Brugger’s arguments support this conclusion. Also subject to scrutiny are the relevance, plausibility, and consistency of the conciliar thinking on which his arguments are premised. It will be argued that Brugger’s conclusion (...) is unwarranted, leaving the question of divorce and remarriage an open one. (shrink)

Based on interviews with 104 women and men, this article argues that marriage constrains while divorce liberates men and women to develop relationships, but they do so in different ways with different consequences for each. The separated and divorced women were better than the men or themselves while married at building and maintaining old, and intimate, relationships. In this sense, separation and divorce proved generous; marriage, greedy. However, because of the structure of their lives and the opportunities available (...) to them, separated and divorced women were not so good at developing new and casual ties. It was the structure of the men's lives that provided access to “instant networks.” Developed to alleviate loneliness, these groups provided a place in the wider community that men did not seek while married. (shrink)

ArgumentA number of theorists have proposed simulation theories of empathy. A review of these theories shows that, despite the fact that one version of the simulation theory can avoid a number of problems associated with such approaches, there are further reasons to doubt whether simulation actually explains empathy. A high-level simulation account of empathy, distinguished from the simulation theory of mindreading, can avoid problems associated with low-level (neural) simulationist accounts; but it fails to adequately address two other problems: the diversity (...) problem and the starting problem. It is argued that a narrative approach to empathy obviates all these problems and offers a more parsimonious account. (shrink)

As an ethicist trained in narrative, I wondered what I could offer Dr. Darcy at this point, two weeks after the events he described. And what might I have offered those involved if they had called an ethics consult at the time? One of this physician's implicit questions was, “How might this have unfolded in a better way?”When difficult choices must be made, how can a narrative approach help? A narrativist focuses less on principles, rules, and law than (...) would a philosopher or a lawyer. This is not to say that we ignore the law or are unaware of bioethical principles. But where do we go from there? Narrative offers a mode of engagement that asks different kinds of questions than those that law or philosophy might ask about moral agency, context, and values. (shrink)

Recent findings in affective and cognitive neuroscience underscore the fact that traumatic memories are embodied and inextricably integrated with the affective dimensions of associated emotional responses. These findings can be used to clarify, and in some cases challenge, traditional claims about the unrepresentability of traumatic experience that have been central to trauma literary studies. The cognitive and affective dimensions experience and memory are closely integrated. Recollection is always an attenuated form of embodied reenactment. Further, situation models for narrative comprehension (...) show us that these same neurobiological processes that underwrite narrative understanding. This, in turn suggests that literary texts can be used as a resource for representing, reenacting, and understanding traumatic experience and might serve as external regulatory resources for reenacting, shaping, and thereby coping with traumatic memory. (shrink)

This paper responds to Dan Hutto’s paper, ‘Narrative Self-Shaping: a Modest Proposal’. Hutto there attacks the “strong” narrativism defended in my recent book, ‘Self, Value and Narrative’ and in recent work by Marya Schechtman. I rebut Hutto’s argument that non-narrative forms of evaluative self-shaping can plausibly be conceived, and defend the notion of implicit narrative against his criticisms. I conclude by briefly indicating some difficulties that arise for the “modest” form of narrativism that Hutto defends.

This paper asks three inter-related questions, proceeding chronologically through a divorcee’s experience: is it responsible and rational to make an unconditional marital vow in the first place? does divorce break that unconditional marital vow? And the main question: can the divorcee make a second unconditional marital vow in all moral seriousness? To the last question I answer yes. I argue that the divorce process is so disorienting – to use Amy Harbin’s term – as to transform the divorcee (...) and therefore partly release her from the original vow. Arguing this will require a specific understanding of personal identity and change. (shrink)

Many scholars have argued that history embodies a different form of explanation from natural science. This paper provides an analysis of narrative conceived as the form of explanation appropriate to history. In narratives, actions, beliefs, and pro-attitudes are joined to one another by means of conditional and volitional connections. Conditional connections exist when beliefs and pro-attitudes pick up themes contained in one another. Volitional connections exist when agents command themselves to do something having decided to do it because of (...) a pro-attitude they hold. The fear remains, however, that all narratives are constructed in part by the imagination of the writer, so if the human sciences deploy narratives, they lack proper epistemic legitimacy. The paper dispels this fear by arguing that we have proper epistemic grounds for postulating conditional and volitional connections because these connections are given to us by a folk psychology we accept as true. (shrink)

We can explain our intuitions about corporate takeover cases by appeal to Peter French's picture of the corporation as a moral person. He argues that corporations are persons in much the same sense as you and I, and are entitled to the same rights as humans. On this analysis, takeovers are murders, attempted murders, attempts to enslave, etc. I want to explore the consequences of this view for corporate takeovers. I shall argue that, though French can explain why our moral (...) intuitions seem to arise in response to some concern about the corporations themselves, his analysis commits us to the wrong intuitions in some cases. I shall then offer an account of these intuitions which focuses on the character of corporations. (shrink)

In this article, “Narrative Closure,” a theory of the nature of narrative closure is developed. Narrative closure is identified as the phenomenological feeling of finality that is generated when all the questions saliently posed by the narrative are answered. The article also includes a discussion of the intelligibility of attributing questions to narratives as well as a discussion of the mechanisms that achieve this. The article concludes by addressing certain recent criticisms of the view of (...) class='Hi'>narrative expounded by this article. (shrink)

Providing a wide-ranging account of the narrative properties of photographs, Greg Battye focuses on the storytelling power of a single image, rather than the sequence. Drawing on ideas from painting, drawing, film, video, and multimedia, he applies contemporary research and theories drawn from cognitive science and psychology to the analysis of photographs. Using genuine forensic photographs of crime scenes and accidents, the book mines human drama and historical and sociological authenticity to argue for the centrality of the perception and (...) representation of time in photographic narrativity. (shrink)

Folk psychology refers to our everyday practice of making sense of actions, both our own and those of others, in terms of reasons. This volume, which is a special issue of the _Journal of Consciousness Studies_, brings together new work by scholars from a range of disciplines whose aim is to clarify, develop and challenge the claim that folk psychology may be importantly -- perhaps even constitutively -- related to narrative practices. This book is part of a wider project (...) by its editor, Daniel D. Hutto, Professor of Philosophical Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, exploring this central issue of consciousness studies. (shrink)

At this polarizing moment in American politics identifying with the experiences of others feels especially difficult, but it is vital for sharing a world in common. Scholars in a variety of disciplines have argued that narratives, and especially literary ones, can help us cultivate this capacity by soliciting sympathetic identification with particular characters. In doing so, narratives can help us to be more ethically and political responsive to other human beings. This is a limited view of the potential for narratives (...) to solicit sympathetic identification, and it prevents us from identifying and grappling with our resistances to identifying with others. In this article I propose a more expansive view – inspired by Elizabeth Costello, a character in JM Coetzee’s novel of the same name – that there are no bounds to our capacities for sympathetic identification. Through critical readings of Waiting for the Barbarians and Animal Farm I explore the possibility that we might identify with people who cause others to suffer, and perhaps even with animals too. Both sorts of identification engender fierce resistance. Identifying with those who cause suffering demands that we grapple with our own capacities for cruelty and violence. Identifying with animals demands that we confront what is animal in ourselves – the perilous instincts that, unmoderated, incline us to aggression. Acknowledging and working through – without rejecting or disavowing – our capacities for cruelty and our animal instincts is necessary for the practices of sympathetic identification upon which sharing a world depends. (shrink)

Whether non-human animals can have episodic memories remains the subject of extensive debate. A number of prominent memory researchers defend the view that animals do not have the same kind of episodic memory as humans do, whereas others argue that some animals have episodic-like memory—i.e., they can remember what, where and when an event happened. Defining what constitutes episodic memory has proven to be difficult. In this paper, I propose a dual systems account and provide evidence for a distinction between (...) event memory and episodic memory. Event memory is a perceptual system that evolved to support adaptive short-term goal processing, whereas episodic memory is based on narratives, which bind event memories into a retrievable whole that is temporally and causally organized around subject’s goals. I argue that carefully distinguishing event memory from episodic memory can help resolve the debate. (shrink)

Mary Walker (2012) argues that the narrative form that self-understanding must take is capable of providing a largely truthful picture of who we are, despite neuropsychological evidence suggesting the contrary. Walker describes three approaches to counter the conclusion of falsity in self narratives: that some truths are fully intelligible only within a narrative structure; that narratives contain non-factual content with a significance and meaning otherwise unavailable; thirdly, and importantly for our purposes, she offers a constraint ‘on what can (...) count as a correct or good self-narrative...to point to ways in which the process of self-narration should be connected to the facts’. In this commentary we elaborate and offer further support to Walker’s claim that ‘continual intersubjective checking’ provides a dynamic and corrective social mechanism for ensuring truth in self narratives. (shrink)