That photography is a supremely realistic medium may be the commonsense view, but—as Edward Steichen reminds us—it is by no means universal. Dissenters note how unlike reality a photograph is and how unlikely we are to confuse the one with the other. They point to “distortions” engendered by the photographic process and to the control which the photographer exercises over the finished product, the opportunities he enjoys for interpretation and falsification. Many emphasize the expressive nature of the medium, observing that (...) photographs are inevitably colored by the photographer’s personal interests, attitudes, and prejudices.1 Whether any of these various considerations really does collide with photography’s claim of extraordinary realism depends, of course, on how that claim is to be understood.Those who find photographs especially realistic sometimes think of photography as a further advance in a direction which many picture makers have taken during the last several centuries, as a continuation or culmination of the post-Renaissance quest for realism.2 There is some truth in this. Such earlier advances toward realism include the development of perspective and modeling techniques, the portrayal of ordinary and incidental details, attention to the effects of light, and so on. From its very beginning, photography mastered perspective . Subtleties of shading, gradations of brightness nearly impossible to achieve with the brush, became commonplace. Photographs include as a matter of course the most mundane details of the scenes they portray—stray chickens, facial warts, clutters of dirty dishes. Photographic images easily can seem to be what painters striving for realism have always been after. 2. See André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray, vol. 1 , p. 12; all further references to this work, abbreviated “OPI,” will be included in the text. See also Rudolf Arnheim, “Melancholy Unshaped,” Toward a Psychology of Art: Collected Essays , p. 186. Kendall L. Walton is professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. He is currently completing a book on representation in the arts. (shrink)

Sports and competitive games of many kinds—from tag to chess to baseball—are often occasions for make-believe. To participate either as a competitor or as a spectator is frequently to engage in pretense. The activities of playing and watching games have this in common with appreciating works of fiction and participating in children’s make-believe activities, although the make-believe in sports, masked by real interests and concerns, is less obvious than it is in the other cases. What is most interesting about tag (...) and chess and baseball, however, are the ways in which the make-believe they involve differs from other varieties. (shrink)

Niche construction theory (NCT) can be applied to examine the influence of culturally constructed learning environments on the acquisition and retention of beliefs, values, role expectations, and skills. Thus, NCT provides a quantitative framework to account for cultural-historical contingency affecting development and cultural evolution. Learning in a culturally constructed environment is of central concern to many sociologists, cognitive scientists, and sociocultural anthropologists, albeit often from different perspectives. This article summarizes four pertinent theories from these fields—situated learning, activity theory, practice theory, (...) and distributed cognition. As a basis for interdisciplinary investigation, the article considers how these theories may be addressed using a cultural niche-construction framework, including the utility of an embedded model that explicitly accounts for effects of the constructed learning environment on within-individual learning dynamics in an evolutionary framework. (shrink)

This article investigates how Latin American women who migrate to the US frame their language experiences through narratives told in sociolinguistic interviews. As narratives reflect and shape social realities and relationships, narrative analysis can illuminate how individuals position themselves relative to language obstacles and ideologies, thus providing insights into processes that are central to the migration experiences of millions of individuals. We found that women related two types of stories: language conflict narratives, in which language was presented as part of (...) a broader ethnic or social conflict, and language difficulty narratives, which focused on individual, personal problems with language experienced by protagonists. Our analysis illustrates how interviewers’ questions, and the interviewees’ language conflict narratives in particular, confirm, reproduce, but also contest central language ideologies and dominant discourses about migration in the US. (shrink)

This paper aims to address how artificial gestation might affect equality of opportunity for the unborn and any resultant generation of “ectogenetic” babies. It will first explore the current legal obstacles preventing the development of ectogenesis, before looking at the benefits of allowing this technology to control fetal growth and development. This will open up a discussion of the treatment/enhancement divide regarding the use of reproductive technologies, a topic featured in various bioethical debates on the subject. Using current maternity practices (...) in Western society as a comparator, this paper will conclude that neither naturally nor artificially gestated fetuses have interests that can conflict with those of potential parents who might want to use this technology to control fetal development. Such control may include selective implantation of embryos of a desired gender, deliberate choice of genetic traits, or maintenance of an ideal incubation environment to avoid fetal damage. Objections on the basis of disability as well as concerns regarding eugenics will be addressed. The paper will conclude that none of these objections are compelling grounds to prevent the development and use of ectogenesis technologies for the purpose of achieving specific reproductive goals, particularly when compared to current practices in pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and selective abortion on the grounds of undesired traits. As such, when deciding whether to support ectogenesis research, the enduring interests of parents must be the primary consideration, with societal concerns regarding potential misuse the only valid secondary consideration. (shrink)

Representation—in visual arts and fiction—play an important part in our lives and culture. Walton presents a theory of representation which illuminates its many varieties and goes a long way toward explaining its importance. Walton’s theory also provides solutions to thorny philosophical problems concerning the existence of fictitious beings.

My great-grandfather died before I was born. He never saw me. But I see him occasionally—when I look at photographs of him. They are not great photographs, by any means, but like most photographs they are transparent. We see things through them.Edwin Martin objects. His response consists largely of citing examples of things which, he thinks, are obviously not transparent, and declaring that he finds no relevant difference between them and photographs: once we slide down the slippery slope as far (...) as photographs there will be not stopping short of absurdity. The examples fail in their purpose, but they will help to clarify the reasons for the transparency of photographs. Several of them can be disposed of by noting that they jeopardize the transparency of photographs only if they jeopardize the very possibility of perception. The others appear to reflect a misconception of the issue before us and the nature of my claim.To perceive something is, in part, to have perceptual experiences caused by the object in question. This is scarcely controversial. It is also uncontroversial that additional restrictions are needed—not all causes of one’s visual experiences are objects of sight—although exactly what the required restrictions are is a notoriously tricky question. One important restriction is that the causation must be appropriately independent of human action , in a sense which I explained . This, I argued, is what distinguishes photographs from “handmade” pictures, which are not transparent. Seismographs and footprints are caused just as “mechanically” as ordinary photographs are. So are photographs that are so badly exposed or focused that they fail to present images of the objects before the camera. So, also, are the visual experiences of those who look at seismograms, footprints, and such badly focused or exposed photographs. Yet we obviously do not see the causes of these things through them, Martin claims. How is it, then, that we see through ordinary photographs? Kendall L. Walton is professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan and author of a book on representation in the arts . His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism,” appeared in the December 1984 issue. (shrink)

In fifteen essays-one new, two newly revised and expanded, three with new postscripts-Kendall L. Walton wrestles with philosophical issues concerning music, metaphor, empathy, existence, fiction, and expressiveness in the arts. These subjects are intertwined in striking and surprising ways. By exploring connections among them, appealing sometimes to notions of imagining oneself in shoes different from one's own, Walton creates a wide-ranging mosaic of innovative insights.

Kendal Mobley replies to Christopher Catherwood's article ‘Nationalism, ethnicity and tolerance: some historical, political and biblical perspectives’, published in Transformation, Vol 14, no. 1, January 1997, p. 10.

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 78, Issue 1, Page 79-84, Winter 2020.

It is a very great honor to address my friends and colleagues as president of the American Society for Aesthetics, an organization that plays a unique role in a field that is, at once, a major traditional branch of philosophy and also central to disciplines often regarded as remote from philosophy, as well as depending crucially on their contributions.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.4 (2002) 328-344 [Access article in PDF] Spaces of Invention:Dissension, Freedom, and Thought in Foucault Kendall R. Phillips Over the past two decades, invention has become an increasingly difficult concept to discuss. In an age when the free, rational actor has become not only de-centered but viewed as both impossible and undesirable by some social theorists, the traditional conception of invention, especially rhetorical invention, becomes (...) more tenuous. While some continue to promote a rational deliberative model of the human subject—Habermas is a prime example of this school of thought—the harsh and unrelenting critiques of poststructural and postmodern thinkers have cast these recovery efforts in a nostalgic and often negative light. Chief among these critics of the modern, humanist conception of human action is Michel Foucault. Within Foucault's perspective our utterances are governed by underlying rules of discourse formations, our actions are proscribed and authorized by relations of power, and our very conception of our self is circumscribed by technologies of subjectivity. Contained within these intertwined relations of knowledge, power, and subjectivity, the human subject takes on a very different meaning and even the concept of "human subject" is itself a product of these intertwined relations; a product that may, in time, disappear under new relations of discourse and governance.Despite the apparent centrality of a creative human subject to the study of rhetoric, Foucault has taken his place within the study of rhetoric. Of course, neither this incorporation of Foucault nor the observation of its peculiarity is particularly new. The incorporation of Foucault into rhetoric took its most dramatic turn in 1989 with Raymie McKerrow's "Critical Rhetoric" essay and the implications of this union of Foucault and rhetoric were forcefully raised by Barbara Biesecker in "Michel Foucault and the Question of Rhetoric" (1992). These two important essays made the relationship between Foucault and rhetoric most pressing: McKerrow by offering [End Page 328] a practical agenda for a Foucaultian rhetorical perspective and Biesecker by opening a space for reflection on this type of agenda. In the intervening decade, however, the incorporation of Foucault into rhetoric has outstripped the reflection on this incorporation and Foucault now sits as comfortably in the bibliographies of rhetorical scholars as Burke or McKeon or Perelman.The purpose of the present essay is to revisit this relationship between Foucault and rhetoric. I pursue this end not in order to critique McKerrow's project or to outstrip Biesecker's reflections, but in order to press the importance of their earlier arguments. The project of a Foucaultian rhetoric should be taken seriously, seriously enough to keep the peculiarity of this union in the forefront of our minds as we pursue it. My present effort furthers this end by seeking within Foucault a space for invention and, in so doing, asks the question: how might invention be rendered within a Foucaultian framework?My contention is that a space for invention exists within Foucault's studies of knowledge, power, and subjectivity and that this space can be demonstrated by considering the counterpoints to his tripartite understanding of the human condition. The limiting/enabling relations of knowledge/power/subjectivity are counterpointed by three terms that describe the conditions for invention: dissension, freedom, and thought. Before turning to the conditions for these spaces of invention and the unique shape of invention that emerges from them, I will briefly consider previous discussions of Foucault. Power, resistance, and invention Rhetoricians, to be clear, are not the first to be concerned with the apparent foreclosing of the possibility of invention within Foucault. Focusing mainly on dominating relations of power/knowledge/subjectivity, Foucault seems to leave little ground for the creation of new ways of acting, speaking, or being. However, what I call a concern for invention has generally not been expressed as such; rather, in rhetoric and in other fields, criticism of Foucault has been largely couched in terms of resistance. Edward Said (1986), for instance, contends that Foucault's work is "not finally as contestatory, or as oppositional as on the surface it seems to be" (152... (shrink)

The twelve essays by Kendall Walton in this volume address a broad range of issues concerning the arts. Walton introduces an innovative account of aesthetic value, and explores relations between aesthetic value and values of other kinds. His classic 'Categories of Art' is included, as is 'Transparent Pictures', his controversial account of what is special about photographs. A new essay investigates the fact that still pictures are still, although some of them depict motion. New postscripts have been added to (...) several of the reprinted essays. (shrink)

In his discussion of the rational soul as form of the body in Summa Theologiae I.76.1, St. Thomas Aquinas largely devotes his response to the consideration and elimination of a few competing accounts of the relationship between the human body and soul. After rejecting these alternatives, he concludes that his account, on which the soul is the substantial form of the body, must be correct. I argue that Aquinas’s argument, which seems to involve a hasty move to affirm his own (...) view, in fact reveals a specific and plausible set of desiderata based on Aristotle’s definition of the human being as a rational animal in the category of substance. Aquinas’s argument, therefore, provides the constraints on any viable account of human ontology. Moreover, given his metaphysical framework, only his hylomorphic account can satisfy the desiderata. These considerations allow us to understand and appreciate Aquinas’s argumentative strategy more fully. (shrink)

Reproductive biotechnologies can separate concepts of parenthood into genetic, gestational and social dimensions, often leading to a fragmentation of heteronormative kinship models and posing a challenge to historical methods of establishing legal and/or moral parenthood. Using fictional cases, this article will demonstrate that the issues surrounding the intersection of current and emerging reproductive biotechnologies with definitions of parenthood are already leading to confusion regarding social and legal family ties for offspring, which is only expected to increase as new technologies develop. (...) Rather than opposing these new technologies to reassert traditional concepts of the family, however, this article will explore the opportunities that these technologies represent for re‐imagining various culturally cherished values of family‐making in a way that is inclusive of diverse genders, sexualities and cultures. It will consider IVF, gametogenesis, mitochondrial donation, surrogacy, artificial gestation, CRISPR‐Cas9 gene editing, foster care and adoption as some of many possible pathways to parenthood, including for members of the LGBTIAUQ+ community. (shrink)

When restrictive abortion policies are presented there are often two questions posed: will there be an exception to save the life of the ‘mother’ and will there be an exception in the case of rape or incest. This article will demonstrate that there are no distinctive elements to the first ‘exception’, that do not also apply to all abortions on demand. Through consideration of the potentially lethal impacts of pregnancy on physical and mental health, the case will be made that (...) all requested abortions fit the criteria of ‘medically necessary’. (shrink)

BackgroundParanoia is associated with a multitude of social cognitive deficits, observed in both clinical and subclinical populations. Empathy is significantly and broadly impaired in schizophrenia, yet its relationship with subclinical paranoia is poorly understood. Furthermore, deficits in emotion recognition – a very early component of empathic processing – are present in both clinical and subclinical paranoia. Deficits in emotion recognition may therefore underlie relationships between paranoia and empathic processing. The current investigation aims to add to the literature on social cognition (...) and paranoia by: (1) characterizing the relationship between paranoia and empathy, and (2) testing whether there is an indirect effect of emotion recognition on the relationship between empathy and paranoia.MethodsParanoia, empathy, and emotion recognition were assessed in a non-clinical sample of adults (n= 226) from the Nathan Kline Institute-Rockland (NKI-Rockland) dataset. Paranoia was measured using the Peters Delusions Inventory-21 (PDI-21). Empathy was measured using the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), a self-report instrument designed to assess empathy using four subscales: Personal Distress, Empathic Concern, Perspective Taking, and Fantasy. Emotion recognition was assessed using the Penn Emotion Recognition Test (ER-40). Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to estimate relationships between paranoia, the four measures of empathy and emotion recognition.ResultsParanoia was associated with the Fantasy subscale of the IRI, such that higher Fantasy was associated with more severe paranoia (p< 0.001). No other empathy subscales were associated with paranoia. Fantasy was also associated with the emotion recognition of fear, such that higher Fantasy was correlated with better recognition of fear (p= 0.008). Paranoia and emotion recognition were not significantly associated. The Empathic Concern subscale was negatively associated with emotion recognition, with higher empathic concern related to worse overall emotion recognition (p= 0.002). All indirect paths through emotion recognition were non-significant.DiscussionThese results suggest that imaginative perspective-taking contributes to paranoia in the general population. These data do not, however, point to robust global relationships between empathy and paranoia or to emotion recognition as an underlying mechanism. Deficits in empathy and emotion recognition observed in schizophrenia may be associated with the broader pathology of schizophrenia, and therefore not detectable with subclinical populations. (shrink)

At some time between 1907 and 1912, probably very much nearer the earlier date, Bradley produced the first draft of an article on Christian morality. He did this in response to criticism that his moral ideas were anti-Christian. This charge was based mainly on the content of two articles that he published during 1894 in the International Journal of Ethics , one called ‘Some Remarks on Punishment’ and the other ‘The Limits of Individual and National Self-Sacrifice’. In these Bradley had (...) maintained that the conventional ‘Christian’ belief in the sacredness of life undermined any sensible approach to punishment and any clear understanding of the moral importance of self-assertion . It encouraged a squeamishness about retribution and ‘social surgery’. It devalued proper human ends and interests, and the rights and duties founded on them. There was needed ‘a correction of our moral view, and a return to a non-Christian and perhaps a Hellenic ideal’, one that would recognize the unlimited right of the moral organism to dispose of its members and to use force internationally in defence of right. Bradley pulled no punches and had this to say about the self-styled ‘Christian’ party. (shrink)

Considerations of the impact of new technologies of archival information and the texture of public memory.

In Summa Theologiae I.76.1 Aquinas presents an argument for the hylomorphic union of body and soul that he attributes to Aristotle. Aquinas builds on Aristotle’s original argument, however, offering his own short but powerful line of reasoning in support of one of the main premises. This additional argument involves an appeal to the principle that nothing acts except insofar as it is in act. This principle has roots in the thought of Aristotle, but is not explicitly used by him. It (...) is, however, fundamental for Aquinas and pervasive throughout his work. In this paper I examine the principle and its implications for Aquinas’ version of the argument. Furthermore, I argue that the principle is foundational to Aquinas’ criticisms of Averroes’ account of the intellective soul and that its inclusion renders Aquinas’ version of the argument incompatible with Averroes’ view. (shrink)