Aristotle wrote his Nicomachean Ethics as a rational guide to virtuous activity for those people who have been well brought up and are interested in improving themselves.1 For the rest of us, Aristotle suggests that beating is the only solution. In this essay, I shall first use Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, supplemented by Plato's Gorgias, to provide a defense of beating as a way to intrude concerns of character conversion upon the attention of people impervious to argument. Closer analysis, though, shows (...) that beating is not enough. The person beaten makes no choices in the beating and is presented with no alternative options for future actions. We... (shrink)

Drawing on the findings of neuroscience, this text proposes and defends the hypothesis that the various modalities of sensation share a generic form that the author, Austen Clark, calls feature-placing.

This is part of a complete set of Jane Austen's novels collating the editions published during the author's lifetime and previously unpublished manuscripts. The books are illustrated with 19th century plates and incorporate revisions by experts in the light of subsequent research.

Hume’s moral philosophy is a sentiment-based view. Moral judgment is a matter of the passions; certain traits of character count as virtues or vices because of the approval or disapproval they evoke in us, feelings that express concern we have about the social effects of these traits. A sentiment-based approach is attractive, since morality seems fundamentally to involve caring for other people. Sentiment-based views, however, face a real challenge. It is clear that our affections are often particular; we favor certain (...) persons over others. This poses a problem when it comes to determining the proper content of morality. The ties of sentiment would seem to be in tension with the aspirations of morality toward impartiality and universality. (shrink)

"First edition 1954. Reprinted 1958, with revisions 1963, 1965, with further revisions by B.C. Southam 1969...".

Encourages Christian teenage girls to explore and discover Truth.

In _Always More Than One_, the philosopher, visual artist, and dancer Erin Manning explores the concept of the "more than human" in the context of movement, perception, and experience. Working from Whitehead's process philosophy and Simondon's theory of individuation, she extends the concepts of movement and relation developed in her earlier work toward the notion of "choreographic thinking." Here, she uses choreographic thinking to explore a mode of perception prior to the settling of experience into established categories. Manning connects (...) this to the concept of "autistic perception," described by autistics as the awareness of a relational field prior to the so-called neurotypical tendency to "chunk" experience into predetermined subjects and objects. Autistics explain that, rather than immediately distinguishing objects—such as chairs and tables and humans—from one another on entering a given environment, they experience the environment as gradually taking form. Manning maintains that this mode of awareness underlies all perception. What we perceive is never first a subject or an object, but an ecology. From this vantage point, she proposes that we consider an ecological politics where movement and relation take precedence over predefined categories, such as the neurotypical and the neurodiverse, or the human and the nonhuman. What would it mean to embrace an ecological politics of collective individuation? (shrink)

This book offers a systematic account of the reduction of psychological models of behavior to underlying neural mechanisms. "Clark has approached an extremely difficult and important issue in a systematic masnner and has done much to clarify concepts that are all too often mismanaged and confused in the psychological literature." --American Scientist.

The papers by Macpherson, O'Callaghan, and Batty reveal some startling differences in the objects and properties represented by different modalities. They also reveal some tensions between different ways of understanding what it is for any one modality to represent objects and properties.

This article examines whether and how a particular research practice is overseen and supervised, and by whom. This investigation fills notable gaps in the literature on science, including a lack of emphasis on larger sociopolitical structures, a neglect of regulation, and indifference toward ethics. The author focuses on the oversight of a particular research practice; data editing; which embodies qualities that are intriguing to sociologists of science: invisibility, uncertainty, heterogeneity, and reliance on tacit knowledge. These characteristics pose unique challenges to (...) oversight efforts. An analysis of in-depth interviews with gatekeepers reveals that although the methodological and ethical implications of data editing strategies can be substantial, oversight of such practices falls outside the stages and domains of current gatekeeping activity. These findings serve as the basis for recommendations to ensure data integrity while maintaining the professional autonomy of researchers. (shrink)

We assemble here in this time and place to discuss the thesis that conscious attention can provide knowledge of reference of perceptual demonstratives. I shall focus my commentary on what this claim means, and on the main argument for it found in the first five chapters of Reference and Consciousness. The middle term of that argument is an account of what attention does: what its job or function is. There is much that is admirable in this account, and I am (...) confident that it will be the foundation, the launching-pad, for much future work on the subject. But in the end I will argue that Campbell's picture makes the mechanisms of attention too smart: smarter than they are, smarter than they could be. If we come to a more realistic appraisal of the skills and capacities of our subpersonal minions, the "knowledge of reference" which they yield will have to be taken down a notch or two. But first let us clarify what the argument is. (shrink)

What has a use in the future, unforeseeably, is radically useless now. What has an effect now is not necessarily useful if it falls through the gaps. In _For a Pragmatics of the Useless_ Erin Manning examines what falls outside the purview of already-known functions and established standards of value, not for want of potential but for carrying an excess of it. The figures are various: the infrathin, the artful, proprioceptive tactility, neurodiversity, black life. It is around the latter (...) two that a central refrain echoes: "All black life is neurodiverse life." This is not an equation, but an "approximation of proximity." Manning shows how neurotypicality and whiteness combine to form a normative baseline for existence. Blackness and neurodiversity "schizz" around the baseline, uselessly, pragmatically, figuring a more-than of life living. Manning, in dialogue with Félix Guattari and drawing on the black radical tradition's accounts of black life and the aesthetics of black sociality, proposes a "schizoanalysis" of the more-than, charting a panoply of techniques for other ways of living and learning. (shrink)

Este ensayo busca trazar una genealogía defectuosa de varias escenas de lectura en la obra de Jacques Lezra. Se enfoca en la lectura como práctica metodológica salvaje que conjuga —de manera inesperada, contraintuitiva, e indisciplinada— objetos, discursos, y modalidades conceptuales. Se analiza una selección de escenas de lectura de Materialismo salvaje y República salvaje para identificar en ellas un pensamiento estético-político que imagina corrientes subterráneas y deconstruye conceptos como soberanía, institución, y normatividad, enfatizando su carácter defectuoso.

Prelude -- What moves as a body returns as a movement of thought -- Introduction: Events of relation : concepts in the making -- Incipient action : the dance of the not-yet -- The elasticity of the almost -- A mover's guide to standing still -- Taking the next step -- Dancing the technogenetic body -- Perceptions in folding -- Grace taking form : Marey's movement machines -- Animation's dance -- From biopolitics to the biogram, or, how Leni Riefenstahl moves (...) through fascism -- Of force fields and rhythm contours -- Relationscapes : how contemporary Aboriginal art moves beyond the map -- Constituting facts : Dorothy Napangardi dances the dreaming -- Cornering a beginning -- Conclusion: Propositions for thought in motion. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging and probing book Erin Manning extends her previous inquiries into the politics of movement to the concept of the minor gesture. The minor gesture, although it may pass almost unperceived, transforms the field of relations. More than a chance variation, less than a volition, it requires rethinking common assumptions about human agency and political action. To embrace the minor gesture's power to fashion relations, its capacity to open new modes of experience and manners of expression, is (...) to challenge the ways in which the neurotypical image of the human devalues alternative ways of being moved by and moving through the world—in particular what Manning terms "autistic perception." Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis and Whitehead's speculative pragmatism, Manning's far-reaching analyses range from fashion to depression to the writings of autistics, in each case affirming the neurodiversity of the minor and the alternative politics it gestures toward. (shrink)

The glowing light of cinema, which continues to claim supremacy as a collective site for evolving senses of time, has fundamentally changed since its inception, from exclusively projected light to primarily emitted light. Digital, rather than analog projectors, dominate in personal rather than public spheres. The physiological and behavioral effects of those technologies manipulate our biological clocks, creating an entanglement of time-sensing. Similarly, the art of cinema now relies far more upon energy-intensive materials and methods, from equipment to image manufacturing (...) and data flow. This essay takes the twelve-hour clock as a slanted optic to address those profound shifts, choosing a handful of moving-image artists to feature, including Deborah Stratman, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, and Mikael Kristersson, who are attempting to find alternative temporal modes of depicting the hyperobjectiveness of eternity, ecocrises, dystopias, and deep time on screen. (shrink)

this paper focuses on animal issues—specifically relating to the animal beings we eat—using the perspective of American pragmatism. This essay grows out of my earlier work that used American pragmatism, specifically the work of John Dewey, to argue that we can develop a productive process model of utopia. In this model, it becomes important for us to critically examine the goals we choose to pursue because what we choose to pursue in the present sets the limits and possibilities of what (...) we will be able to pursue in the future. Utopian visions are future-focused. We need goals, or ends-in-view, to help direct our present actions. If we give up on the idea of perfection often connected with utopian visions, such thinking can be an important way to realistically examine present action in light of future hopes and desires. Rather than seek perfection, the process model of utopia seeks to create and sustain people willing to take on responsibility and participate in directing their present toward a better, more desirable future. This is an ongoing task. (shrink)

Conventionalists about promising believe that it is wrong to break a promise because the promisor takes advantage of a useful social convention only to fail to do his part in maintaining it. Anti-conventionalists claim that the wrong of breaking a promise has nothing essentially to do with a social convention. Anti-conventionalists are right that the social convention is not necessary to explain the wrong of breaking most promises. But conventionalists are right that the convention plays an essential role in any (...) satisfactory account of promising. A new conventionalism can explain this by appealing to special features of social conventions. Two of these special features have important implications for any moral requirements they mediate, such as the requirement to keep one's promises and the moral requirements attached to social or occupational roles. First, these requirements will not depend on features of a situation that are inaccessible to typical participants in the convention. Second, these requirements often cannot be tailored to fit the overly unusual circumstances of participants. (shrink)

A collection of essays examining the writings of William James. Provides a reinterpretation of pragmatism to devise philosophical resources for pragmatist feminism that challenge sexism and male privilege"--Provided by publisher.

Cluster randomized controlled trials (cluster RCTs) randomize whole clusters of individuals in testing two or more competing interventions. Here we will present the ethical problems raised by cluster RCTs concerning their effect on inequality. We argue that some inequalities generated by cluster RCTs are larger in scope than those generated from individual RCTs. We also argue that any cluster RCT-generated inequalities, which divide groups rather than individuals, are more problematic in type than the inequalities created in individual RCTs. These concerns (...) should be taken into consideration when designing research at the cluster level, and those conducting the research should consider modified research design strategies in cases where they believe the risk of generating inequalities is large. (shrink)

Can psychology explain the qualitative content of experience? A persistent philosophical objection to that discipline is that it cannot. Qualitative states or 'qualia' are argued to have characteristics which cannot be explained in terms of their relationships to other psychological states, stimuli, and behavior. Since psychology is confined to descriptions of such relationships, it seems that psychology cannot explain qualia. A paradigm case of qualia is provided by simultaneous color contrast effects, in which a neutral grey patch is made to (...) look reddish by being enclosed in a green surround. If the qualia based objections are sound, psychology ought not to be able to explain simultaneous color contrast; but psychology at least seems to be able quite successfully to explain those effects. This paper analyzes the logic of psychological explanations of simultaneous color contrast effects, and the import of various qualia based objections to those explanations. I argue that the qualia objections do not demonstrate any explanatory inadequacy in existing psychological explanations of 'looks'. Psychology succeeds in explaining at least some qualia. In a more positive vein, I argue that once the structure of such explanations is sufficiently understood, a place can be found for qualia within the emerging scientific account of color perception. The resulting account can deal with many of the traditional perplexities over qualia. (shrink)

“Every practice is a mode of thought, already in the act. To dance: a thinking in movement. To paint: a thinking through color. To perceive in the everyday: a thinking of the world’s varied ways of affording itself.” —from _Thought in the Act _Combining philosophy and aesthetics, _Thought in the Act_ is a unique exploration of creative practice as a form of thinking. Challenging the common opposition between the conceptual and the aesthetic, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi “think through” (...) a wide range of creative practices in the process of their making, revealing how thinking and artfulness are intimately, creatively, and inseparably intertwined. They rediscover this intertwining at the heart of everyday perception and investigate its potential for new forms of activism at the crossroads of politics and art. Emerging from active collaborations, the book analyzes the experiential work of the architects and conceptual artists Arakawa and Gins, the improvisational choreographic techniques of William Forsythe, the recent painting practice of Bracha Ettinger, as well as autistic writers’ self-descriptions of their perceptual world and the experimental event making of the SenseLab collective. Drawing from the idiosyncratic vocabularies of each creative practice, and building on the vocabulary of process philosophy, the book reactivates rather than merely describes the artistic processes it examines. The result is a thinking-with and a writing-in-collaboration-with these processes and a demonstration of how philosophy co-composes with the act in the making. _Thought in the Act_ enacts a collaborative mode of thinking in the act at the intersection of art, philosophy, and politics. (shrink)

Drawing on work in psychophysics, psychometrics, and sensory neurophysiology, Clark analyzes the character and defends the integrity of psychophysical explanations of qualitative facts, arguing that the structure of such explanations is sound and potentially successful.

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 9, September 2022.

Faith in the power and righteousness of retribution has taken over the American criminal justice system. Approaching punishment and responsibility from a philosophical perspective, Limits of Blame takes issue with a criminal justice system that aligns legal criteria of guilt with moral criteria of blameworthiness. Many incarcerated people do not meet the criteria of blameworthiness, even when they are guilty of crimes. The author underscores the problems of exaggerating what criminal guilt indicates, particularly when it is tied to the illusion (...) that we know how long and in what ways criminals should suffer. Our practice of assigning blame has gone beyond a pragmatic need for protection and a moral need to repudiate harmful acts publicly. It represents a desire for retribution that normalizes excessive punishment. Kelly proposes that we abandon our culture of blame and aim at reducing serious crime rather than imposing retribution. Were we to refocus our perspective to fit the relevant moral circumstances and legal criteria, we could endorse a humane, appropriately limited, and more productive approach to criminal justice.--. (shrink)

The computations involved in statistical learning have long been debated. Here, we build on work suggesting that a basic memory process, chunking, may account for the processing of statistical regularities into larger units. Drawing on methods from the memory literature, we developed a novel paradigm to test statistical learning by leveraging a robust phenomenon observed in serial recall tasks: that short‐term memory is fundamentally shaped by long‐term distributional learning. In the statistically induced chunking recall (SICR) task, participants are exposed to (...) an artificial language, using a standard statistical learning exposure phase. Afterward, they recall strings of syllables that either follow the statistics of the artificial language or comprise the same syllables presented in a random order. We hypothesized that if individuals had chunked the artificial language into word‐like units, then the statistically structured items would be more accurately recalled relative to the random controls. Our results demonstrate that SICR effectively captures learning in both the auditory and visual modalities, with participants displaying significantly improved recall of the statistically structured items, and even recall specific trigram chunks from the input. SICR also exhibits greater test–retest reliability in the auditory modality and sensitivity to individual differences in both modalities than the standard two‐alternative forced‐choice task. These results thereby provide key empirical support to the chunking account of statistical learning and contribute a valuable new tool to the literature. (shrink)

Much has been made of the importance of training ethical, socially conscious engineers, but does US engineering education actually encourage neophytes to take seriously their professional responsibility to public welfare? Counter to such ideals of engagement, I argue that students’ interest in public welfare concerns may actually decline over the course of their engineering education. Using unique longitudinal survey data of students at four colleges, this article examines (a) how students’ public welfare beliefs change during their engineering education, (b) whether (...) engineering programs emphasize engagement, and (c) whether these program emphases are related to students’ public welfare beliefs. I track four specific public welfare considerations: the importance to students of professional/ethical responsibilities, understanding the consequences of technology, understanding how people use machines, and social consciousness. Suggesting a culture of disengagement, I find that the cultural emphases of students’ engineering programs are directly related to their public welfare commitments and students’ public welfare concerns decline significantly over the course of their engineering education. However, these findings also suggest that if engineering programs can dismantle the ideological pillars of disengagement in their local climates, they may foster more engaged engineers. (shrink)

A neighbor who strikes it rich evokes both admiration and envy, and a similar mix of emotions must be aroused in many neighborhoods of cognitive science when the residents look at the results of research in color perception. It provides what is probably the most widely acknowledged success story of any domain of scientific psychology: the success, against all expectation, of the opponent process theory of color perception. Initially proposed by a Ewald Hering, a nineteenth century physiologist, it drew its (...) inspiration from the existence of opposing muscle groups. Hering thought that analogous opposing processes could explain some aspects of color perception, but the resulting theory was more complicated and less intuitive than that proposed by the great Hermann von Helmholtz. Helmholtz carried his day, but in the long run Hering turned out to be right. (shrink)

In his most recent book, Philip Pettit presents and defends a “republican” political philosophy that stems from a tradition that includes Cicero, Machiavelli, James Harrington, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Madison. The book provides an interpretation of what is distinctive about republicanism—namely, Pettit claims, its notion of freedom as nondomination. He sketches the history of this notion, and he argues that it entails a unique justification of certain political arrangements and the virtues of citizenship that would make those arrangements possible. Of (...) historical and philosophical interest, he stresses, is the fundamental contrast between freedom as nondomination and slavery. Joseph Priestly, for instance, invoked this contrast in defending the cause of the American Revolution, and in 1769 declared, incredibly, that if the parliament of Great Britain continued to tax the American colonies, “the colonists will be reduced to a state of as complete servitude, as any people of which there is an account in history”. Those opposed to American independence, among them Jeremy Bentham, relied instead on a Hobbesian notion of freedom as noninterference, using it to argue that the colonists were no more interfered with by the British government than were citizens of Britain. Drawing out this contrast, Pettit aims to establish that a republican view of freedom better supports the institutions of a constitutional democracy than does liberalism. His account of the distinguishing characteristics and strengths of republicanism is, however, only partially successful. Neither his case that a republican notion of freedom provides for a more solid defense of democratic institutions and constitutional protections than is available within liberalism, nor his argument that republicanism can better address “private” injustices, is convincing. (shrink)

The metaphor of the heart or mind as a mirror appears not only in the work of Zhuangzi and Xunzi but also in the work of Western philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Rorty. This essay shows how a properly contextualized comparison of the mirror metaphor in the work of these four philosophers highlights the different ways in which they use it, helping us to understand more clearly critical differences between their views. The significance of the mirror metaphor in the work (...) of each thinker is studied in detail. Distinctively Chinese and Western understandings of mirrors, hearts, and minds are explored, and the importance of studying different cultural and philosophical understandings of metaphors is defended. The essay ends by assessing Edward Slingerland's claim that shared metaphors point toward deeper similarities between different views, in light of the foregoing analysis. (shrink)

A standard view in philosophy of mind is that qualia and phenomenal character require consciousness. This paper argues that various experimental and clinical phenomena can be better explained if we reject this assumption. States found in early visual processing can possess qualitative character even though they are not in any sense conscious mental states. This non-standard interpretation bears the burden of explaining what must be added to states that have qualitative character in order to yield states of sensory awareness or (...) sensory experience. I argue that the study of selective attention reveals resources that can be useful in that project. Two traditional objects are briefly considered. (shrink)

Individuals tend to judge bad side effects as more intentional than good side effects (the Knobe or side- effect effect). Here, we assessed how widespread these findings are by testing eleven adult cohorts of eight highly contrasted cultures on their attributions of intentional action as well as ratings of blame and praise. We found limited generalizability of the original side-effect effect, and even a reversal of the effect in two rural, traditional cultures (Samoa and Vanuatu) where participants were more likely (...) to judge the good side effect as intentional. Three follow-up experiments indicate that this reversal of the side-effect effect is not due to semantics and may be linked to the perception of the status of the protagonist. These results highlight the importance of factoring cultural context in our understanding of moral cognition. (shrink)