The Wisdom of the Early Buddhists. Geoffrey Parrinder. Sheldon Press, London. 86pp. £1.50.

This article aims to explore how epistemic status is negotiated during talk about the life memories of one speaker. Direct questions which foreground ‘remembering’ can lead to troubled sequences of talk. However, interlocutors sometimes frame their first parts as ‘co-rememberings’, and the sequential positioning of these can be crucial to the outcome of the talk. We draw on almost 10 hours of video data from dementia settings, where memory is a talked-about matter. Our focus is on 30 sequences which are (...) initiated with a question or other first part taking a K-stance, selecting one person as next speaker, and topically relating to the recipient’s past life. We show how type 2 knowables can be used alongside markers of tentativeness, to jointly construct the recipient’s epistemic primacy. (shrink)

What is death and why does it matter to us? How should the knowledge of our finitude affect the living of our lives and what are the virtues suitable to mortal beings? Does death destroy the meaningfulness of lives, or would lives that never ended be eternally and absurdly tedious? Should we reconcile ourselves to the fact of our forthcoming death, or refuse to "go gently into that good night"? Can death really be an evil if, after death, we no (...) longer exist as subjects of goods or evils? How should we respond to the deaths of others and do we have any duties towards the dead? These, and many other, questions are addressed in Geoffrey Scarre's book, which draws upon a wide variety of philosophical and literary sources to offer an up-to-date and highly readable study of some major ethical and metaphysical riddles concerning death and dying. (shrink)

The life of the Buddha. Patricia M. Herbert. The British Library, London 1993. 95 pp. £12.95.

What assumptions are built into the claim that experience has “phenomenal properties,” and could these assumptions turn out to be false? I consider the issue specifically for the similarity relations between experiences: for example, experiences of different shades of red are more similar to each other than an experience of red and an experience of green. It is commonly thought that we have a special kind of epistemic access to experience that is more secure than our access to the external (...) environment. In the first part of the paper, I argue than one way of elucidating this claim is especially plausible—that systematic error, of the kind subjects make about the external environment in traditional “skeptical” scenarios, is not conceivable for introspection of experience, including for our knowledge of similarity relations. I argue that focusing on similarity relations gives us a more interesting version of the argument than for other forms of experiential introspection. Then in the second part of the paper I describe an example, inspired by a similar case due to Sydney Shoemaker, in which a subject, despite being fully rational and attentive, apparently is systematically mistaken about the character of their experience in a surprising way. I argue that the example calls into question whether there are properties of experience satisfying the epistemic access constraint, and therefore whether experience has “phenomenal properties” in the intuitive sense. (shrink)

Dissent is a word we come across frequently these days. We read it in the newspapers, use it in discussions with friends and colleagues—perhaps even engage in the activity ourselves. And yet for all of its popularity, few of us, if pressed, would be able to pin down exactly what dissent is. It is this question I wish to explore in this paper. In particular my aim will be to provide a conceptual analysis of the idea of dissent such that (...) we may more cleanly distinguish it from other related forms of disagreement. I use a recent book written on the topic by Ronald Collins and David Skover as an argumentative foil. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 218 Seiten: 21-64.

In a critical scene deeply troubled by questions of justice and responsibility, and beset by political and moral scandals, no issue in recent years has been more urgent or more unsettled than the question of ethics. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, whose previous book, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism, was one of the first to announce the critical renewal of ethics, attempts in this new book to explain why ethical questions resist settlement. He urges a new account of ethics (...) not as a stable set of principles, values, or prescriptions, but as a variable factor of "imperativity" immanent in language, analysis, narrative, and creation. (shrink)

A volume of essays by leading photography writers and critics, published to benefit Amnesty International, cites such examples as the work of Susan Sontag to question whether photography of disturbing images stirs empathy or voyeurism in its viewers, outlining how to look at photographs to become contextually informed. Original.

In responding to an essay by Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer about photographs taken in the streets of Chernivitsi in the 1940s, and thus in the midst of the Holocaust, this paper seeks to link their concerns to a broader consideration of photography as a modern phenomenon. In the process, the paper provides a brief history of street photography, a genre virtually ignored in standard histories of the photographic medium. The author suggests that Hirsch and Spitzer’s paper bravely reminds us (...) that our fascination with photographs is based not on truth, but on a combination of desire and faith . Their account of street photography in Czernowitz thereby amounts to an interpretation of photographs as dynamic modes of apprehension rather than as static objects from the past that veridically represent it. It is precisely this aspect of photographs that makes them such unusually complicated, ambiguous, and incongruous historical objects. (shrink)

"The four essays in this volume constitute Derrida's most explicit and sustained reflection on the art work as pictorial artifact, a reflection partly by way of philosophical aesthetics, partly by way of a commentary on art works and art scholarship. The illustrations are excellent, and the translators, who clearly see their work as both a rendering and a transformation, add yet another dimension to this richly layered composition. Indispensable to collections emphasizing art criticism and aesthetics."—Alexander Gelley, _Library Journal_.

Presidential addresses offer an opportunity to reflect on the history of our subject and where the history of science stands in our own day. Such reflections are particularly appropriate with the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the British Society for the History of Science which is marked in 1997. Some may consider that looking back over our past is either an unacceptable luxury or an occasion for the kind of celebration that can all too easily degenerate into hagiography and (...) an excuse to rake over the past in a thoroughly uncritical manner. This address – and I trust the events of 1997 – will try to avoid such excesses and instead contribute to the historiography of our subject. (shrink)

Buddhist Scriptures: A Bibliography. Compiled by Edward Conze, edited and revised by Lewis Lancaster. Garland Publishing, Inc., New York 1982. xvi + 161pp. $25.00.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Discusses the work of G.I. Gurdjieff and his establishment of the Institute for the Harmonious Development of man, and examines the contributions of Gurdjieff's two major disciples, P.D. Ouspensky and A.R. Orage.