[Graeme Forbes] In I, I summarize the semantics for the relational/notional distinction for intensional transitives developed in Forbes (2000b). In II-V I pursue issues about logical consequence which were either unsatisfactorily dealt with in that paper or, more often, not raised at all. I argue that weakening inferences, such as 'Perseus seeks a mortal gorgon, therefore Perseus seeks a gorgon', are valid, but that disjunction inferences, such as 'Perseus seeks a mortal gorgon, therefore Perseus seeks a mortal gorgon or (...) an immortal gorgon', are invalid. Since 'a gorgon' and 'a mortal gorgon or an immortal gorgon' are extensionally and intensionally the same quantifier, it is not completely trivial to arrange the semantics of intensional transitives so that this classification of the inferences is obtained. (This paper is an abridged version of Forbes (2001a); the latter will be incorporated into a forthcoming monograph, Attitude Problems.) /// [Jennifer Saul] This paper discusses the question of which verbs are intensional transitives. In particular, I ask which verbs Forbes should take to be intensional transitives. I argue that it is very difficult to arrive at a clear and plausible understanding of what an intensional transitive is-making it difficult to answer these questions. I end by briefly raising some questions about the usefulness of the category of intensional transitives. (shrink)

Andrew Feenberg’s distinction between formal and substantive bias in the design of technology is interrogated. The two dimensions of his definition—inten­tion and the enhancement of specific social interests—are examined and eight logical possibilities arising from his argument are identified. These possibilities are explored through discussion of examples and it is argued that Feenberg has both: a) not broken sufficiently with substantivist philosophies of technology so that he retains ambivalence on technology’s ‘biased essence,’ and b) illegitimately rejected the idea of a (...) technology that is biased in itself. The latter category is important to critical theory of technology and the paper offers a conceptualization of it that draws on Habermas’s discourse ethics. (shrink)

The phenomenon of the New Genetics raises complex social problems, particularly those of privacy. This book offers ethical and legal perspectives on the questions of a right to know and not to know genetic information from the standpoint of individuals, their relatives, employers, insurers and the state. Graeme Laurie provides a unique definition of privacy, including a concept of property rights in the person, and argues for stronger legal protection of privacy in the shadow of developments in human genetics. (...) He challenges the role and the limits of established principles in medical law and ethics, including respect for patient autonomy and confidentiality. This book will interest lawyers, philosophers and doctors concerned both with genetic information and issues of privacy; it will also interest genetic counsellors, researchers, and policy makers worldwide for its practical stance on dilemmas in modern genetic medicine. (shrink)

This article enquires into the curriculum advocated in the only ancient Greek treatise concerning education that has survived in its entirety, entitled On the Training of Children. The treatise was highly influential in Europe from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, and thus exhibits certain assumptions concerning the purpose of curriculum that lie behind the development of western education and may still be influential today. The inquiry is conducted in three stages: the intended recipients of the curriculum are identified; its (...) elements are enumerated and evaluated; and its aims are inferred from the text. I conclude that the curriculum was intended for wealthy, privileged boys, that philosophy (though not independent theorising) was the most valued subject of study and that the aim of the curriculum was to instil in the recipients aristocratic values and modes of behaviour. Finally, some topics are suggested for reflection, in response to these conclusions, upon existing curricula. (shrink)

In this particularly well written volume Graeme Hirst presents a theoretically motivated foundation for semantic interpretation (conceptual analysis) by computer, and shows how this framework facilitates the resolution of both lexical and syntactic ambiguities.

Analytic philosophy has recently demonstrated a revived interest in metaphysical problems about possibility and necessity. Graeme Forbes here provides a careful description of the logical background of recent work in this area for those who may be unfamiliar with it, moving on to d discuss the distinction between modality de re and modality de dicto and the ontological commitments of possible worlds semantics. In addition, Forbes offers a unified theory of the essential properties of sets, organisms, artefacts, substances, and (...) events, based on the doctrine that identity facts must be intrinsically grounded, and analyzes and rejects apparent counterexamples to this doctrine. (shrink)

From Detroit Red to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, the man best known as Malcolm X restlessly redefined himself throughout a controversial life. His transformations have appeared repeatedly in books, photographs, paintings, and films, while his murder set in motion a series of tugs-of-war among journalists, biographers, artists, and his ideological champions over the interpretation of his cultural meaning. This book marks the first systematic examination of the images generated by this iconic cultural figure--images readily found on everything from T-shirts and hip-hop (...) album covers to coffee mugs. Graeme Abernethy captures both the multiplicity and global import of a person who has been framed as both villain and hero, cast by mainstream media during his lifetime as "the most feared man in American history," and elevated at his death as a heroic emblem of African American identity. As Abernethy shows, the resulting iconography of Malcolm X has shifted as profoundly as the American racial landscape itself. Abernethy explores Malcolm's visual prominence in the eras of civil rights, Black Power, and hip-hop. He analyzes this enigmatic figure's representation across a variety of media from 1960s magazines to urban murals, tracking the evolution of Malcolm's iconography from his autobiography and its radical milieu through the appearance of Spike Lee's 1992 biopic and beyond. Its remarkable gallery of illustrations includes reproductions of iconic photographs by Richard Avedon, Eve Arnold, Gordon Parks, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and John Launois. Abernethy reveals that Malcolm X himself was keenly aware of the power of imagery to redefine identity and worked tirelessly to shape how he was represented to the public. His theoretical grasp of what he termed "the science of imagery" enabled him both to analyze the role of representation in ideological control as well as to exploit his own image in the interests of black empowerment. This provocative work marks a startling shift from the biographical focus that has dominated Malcolm X studies, providing an up-to-date--and comprehensively illustrated--account of Malcolm's cultural afterlife, and addressing his iconography in relation to images of other major African American figures, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Kanye West, and Barack Obama. Analyzing the competing interpretations behind so many images, Abernethy reveals what our lasting obsession with Malcolm X says about American culture over the last five decades. (shrink)

Working memory limits are best defined in terms of the complexity of the relations that can be processed in parallel. Complexity is defined as the number of related dimensions or sources of variation. A unary relation has one argument and one source of variation; its argument can be instantiated in only one way at a time. A binary relation has two arguments, two sources of variation, and two instantiations, and so on. Dimensionality is related to the number of chunks, because (...) both attributes on dimensions and chunks are independent units of information of arbitrary size. Studies of working memory limits suggest that there is a soft limit corresponding to the parallel processing of one quaternary relation. More complex concepts are processed by or In segmentation, tasks are broken into components that do not exceed processing capacity and can be processed serially. In conceptual chunking, representations are to reduce their dimensionality and hence their processing load, but at the cost of making some relational information inaccessible. Neural net models of relational representations show that relations with more arguments have a higher computational cost that coincides with experimental findings on higher processing loads in humans. Relational complexity is related to processing load in reasoning and sentence comprehension and can distinguish between the capacities of higher species. The complexity of relations processed by children increases with age. Implications for neural net models and theories of cognition and cognitive development are discussed. (shrink)

This article examines nanotechnology within the context of the public interest. It notes that though nanotechnology research and development investment totalled US$9.6 billion in 2005, the public presently understands neither the implications nor how it might be best governed. The article maps a range of nanotechnology dialogue activities under way within the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, and Australia. It explores the various approaches to articulating public interest matters and notes a shift in the way in which these governments, (...) on the whole, appear to be attempting to manage nanotechnology “risks.” It argues that open and transparent policy deliberations and extensive public discourse will be pivotal to protecting the public interest, gaining public trust and acceptance of nanotechnologies. The article concludes that though governing emerging technologies in the public interest is not a new concept, nanotechnology does present additional challenges that must be addressed by the guardians of the public interest. (shrink)

Discussion of uses of biomedical data often proceeds on the assumption that the data are generated and shared solely or largely within the health sector. However, this assumption must be challenged because increasingly large amounts of health and well-being data are being gathered and deployed in cross-sectoral contexts such as social media and through the internet of things and wearable devices. Cross-sectoral sharing of data thus refers to the generation, use and linkage of biomedical data beyond the health sector. This (...) paper considers the challenges that arise from this phenomenon. If we are to benefit fully, it is important to consider which ethical values are at stake and to reflect on ways to resolve emerging ethical issues across ecosystems where values, laws and cultures might be quite distinct. In considering such issues, this paper applies the deliberative balancing approach of the Ethics Framework for Big Data in Health and Research to the domain of cross-sectoral big data. Please refer to that article for more information on how this framework is to be used, including a full explanation of the key values involved and the balancing approach used in the case study at the end. (shrink)

This erudite book is aimed more directly at specialists in theories of right and law, than at Leibniz scholars. Acknowledging a debt of inspiration to the remarkable historical work of André de Muralt, the author introduces in variable detail the legal philosophy of Suarez, Grotius, Pufendorf, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Kant, with substantial forays into Augustine, Aquinas, Scotus and Ockham. Leibniz fits into this study less as its raison d’être than as a piece in the puzzle, one local system of (...) thought amid the galaxy of the modern school of natural right. (shrink)

This manuscript is a close reading of a significant article by Heidegger entitled "On the Essence of Truth'. The first part is a reading of the 1930 lecture which forms the basis of the article eventually published in 1943. It is followed by a second part in which Nicholson compares closely the original lecture with its subsequent versions eliciting the subsequent changes and detours of his thoughts on "truth" over this period. The result is a very thorough examination of Heidegger's (...) thoughts on the concept of "truth". (shrink)

This article will explore the musicianship of Bishop Charles Henry Davis, osb, coadjutor to Australia's first Catholic Archbishop, John Bede Polding, osb. It will focus on his musical contribution to the early Australian Catholic Church-his ability to improvise, compose, conduct and perform during his short time as bishop at St Mary's, Sydney.

The programme of work -- Towards a theory of jokes -- The process of joke comprehension -- Text comprehension -- Processing and prediction -- Logic in jokes -- Incongruity and resolution -- Surprise -- The role of language -- Impropriety -- Superiority and aggression -- What's in a joke? -- Applying the framework -- The way forward.

"Graeme Nicholson addresses the fundamental topic of ontology, perhaps the fundamental topic posed to philosophy and the human mind: what is being?, i.e., what is it to exist or to be? He initially shows that we humans must be understood to be "existers" and "disclosers"--terms that render Heidegger's concept Dasein. Heidegger's philosophy provides the basic viewpoint, but Professor Nicholson offers an interpretation of Heidegger that seeks to set deconstructionist and pragmatist readings to one side. Since, according to Heidegger, being (...) is fundamentally a union of presence and absence, this study shows that metaphysical theories have always offered positive illustrations or interpretations of being." "Illustrations of Being then goes on to scrutinize the four most fundamental determinations of being that Western thought has adumbrated: being as substance, especially in Greek ontology; being as reality, especially in the period from Descartes to Kant, and therefore in nineteenth- and twentieth-century science; the logic of being, in which Nicholson undertakes an ontological critique of mathematical logic; and being as the transformation of form--the key idea that runs from Christian patristics, through Hegel and Marx, to modern dialectics." "Graeme Nicholson's new study is marked by its receptiveness to metaphysics in the traditional sense, and contains a critique of the deconstructionist effort to pass beyond metaphysics. It will be of interest to professional philosophers and to theologians, as well as to graduate students and to members of the general public interested in philosophical arguments about the nature of being."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man is framed as a response to the “end of ideology” thesis of political equilibrium and a criticism of mainstream theoretical construction in advanced industrial countries. Such formulations obscured new forms of self-alienation in totally administered society, and replaced any conceived potential subjectivity with objective laws that govern social relations. One-Dimensional Man is also framed as a response to the “crisis of Marxism” by underscoring the importance of popular ideology in shaping subjective action, which at present, precludes (...) proletarian revolution. (shrink)