Menninghaus et al. distinguish art from fiction, but no current arguments or data suggest that the concept of art can be meaningfully circumscribed. This is a problem for aesthetic psychology. I sketch a solution by rejecting the distinction: Unlike most animal communication, in which signals are either true or false, art and fiction consist of signals without determinate truth values.

Callicott’s basic mistake in his much regretted paper ”Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair” is to think of the anthropocentric, zoocentric, and biocentric perspectives as mutually exclusive alternatives. An environmental ethics requires, instead, a polycentric perspective that accommodates and does justice to all three positions in question. I explain the polycentric perspective in terms of an analogy derived from the pioneering work of Canadian philosopher Rupert C. Lodge and distinguish it from both pragmatism and moral pluralism.

The concept of ‘psycho‐metaphysical explanation’ is explained in terms of the philosophy of the German idealist J. G. Fichte, who uses this mode of explanation to account for the fact that the dispute between Idealism and Realism is one which cannot be resolved by means of rational argument. This paper presents a similar account of the contemporary dispute between competing paradigms of persons, i.e. between materialist and non-reductivist theories. Some practical and frightening implications are illustrated by showing how this paradigmatic (...) dispute is at the basis of much contemporary debate concerning the purpose of post-secondary education. Since it is argued that the interrelated disputes in question are ones which cannot be resolved by straightforward rational argument the paper concludes by resorting to such non?rational literary devices as satire, irony and metaphor. (shrink)

That aristotle should have been inclined to think of women as defective men is, Perhaps, Overdetermined. But the psychological and sociological factors that contributed to his male chauvinism should not be allowed to obscure the role his metaphysics played in the way he conceived gender difference. Basic metaphysical constraints left aristotle with no entirely satisfactory way of understanding gender identity. Since we today are still so strongly influenced by aristotle's ways of thinking about essence and classification, His problem with gender (...) difference is also our problem. (shrink)

I critique the oppressive society in which Michael A. Fox’s Deep Vegetarianism was written and which Fox too attempts to criticize and change. Fox proves himself to be among a handful of Western philosophers open-minded enough to acknowledge and attempt to learn from North American indigenous values and world views. For this reason, he should be commended. In defending his thesis that a vegetarian life style is morally preferable, he draws upon indigenous thought, feminist philosophy, and antidomination theories, arguing that (...) speciesism, racism, and sexism can all be traced back to the same mind-set of oppression, domination and exploitation. Unfortunately, identifying the oppressive mind-set is not ipso facto escaping it. I show that Fox in his explication and use of indigenous thought actually perpetuates the very oppression and exploitation he argues against. (shrink)

In their History of Canadian philosophy, The Faces of Reason, Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott introduce the concept “philosophical federalism” to describe a tendency shared by many of the early Canadian idealists, a willingness to attempt to understand and accommodate philosophical positions opposed to their own. In this paper I wish to examine the relationship this concept bears to another one, which many still regard as merely an Utopian ideal, that of world federalism.