The pandemic has been the most vivid agent of change that many of us have known. But it has not changed everything: plenty of the institutions, norms, and practices that sustain racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and cisheteropatriarchy have either weathered the storm of the crisis or been nourished by its effects. And yet enough has changed for us to see that the pandemic has profoundly recontextualised those structures and systems of violence, bringing us into a fresh negotiation with, for example, (...) the question of how we discuss and imagine freedom. Responding in part to this unexpected provocation, activist-scholars Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson forged a collaboration from the lockdown of 2020, corresponding by letter to create their forthcoming book, Rehearsals for Living, due to be published by Haymarket Books (US) and Knopf (Canada) in 2022. In this interview, we asked them to explain the epistolary form of the book and expand on the concept of “rehearsal”, before inviting them to reflect on a series of issues that animate our current crises: the politics of recognition; the notion of apocalypse; ways to disrupt linear temporalities; practises of reciprocity against proprietary logics; the gendered violence of state apparatuses; and worldbuilding as a method of resistance. In their expansive answers, Robyn and Leanne draw on their experiences as organisers and educators, commenting on anticolonial struggles, the Movement for Black Lives, and the rise of abolition discourse. Stressing the need to build a multiplicity of shared homespaces in the face of racial/colonial capitalism and organized abandonment, they challenge us to rethink the predicaments and possibilities of the present, enabling us to imagine futures liberated of extractivist, carceral governance – “planting more liberatory futures in the present”, as Robyn puts it. The task of sowing those seeds is a collective praxis of rewriting the narratives that constitute us, refusing to hear that nothing can change and insisting that everything must. (shrink)

A slew of recent political theorists—many taking their cue from the political writings of Bernard Williams—have recently contended that political normativity is its own kind of normativity, distinct from moral normativity. In this article, we first attempt to clarify what this claim amounts to and then reconstruct and interrogate five major arguments for it. We contend that all these arguments are unconvincing and fail to establish a sense in which political normativity is genuinely separate from morality.

The use of informational terms is widespread in molecular and developmental biology. The usage dates back to Weismann. In both protein synthesis and in later development, genes are symbols, in that there is no necessary connection between their form (sequence) and their effects. The sequence of a gene has been determined, by past natural selection, because of the effects it produces. In biology, the use of informational terms implies intentionality, in that both the form of the signal, and the response (...) to it, have evolved by selection. Where an engineer sees design, a biologist sees natural selection. (shrink)

This paper makes the case for a revision of contemporary forms of political realism in political theory. I argue that contemporary realists have gone awry in increasingly centring their approach around a metaethical claim: that political theory should be rooted in a political form of normativity that is distinct from moral normativity. Several critics of realism have argued that this claim is unconvincing. But I suggest that it is also a counterintuitive starting point for realism, and one unnecessary to avoid (...) the ‘applied morality’ approach to political theory that realists oppose. Instead, realism should be methodologically orientated around what I term ‘empirically constitutive political realities’ - enduring features of real political contexts that are systematically consequential in their normative implications. Realists can persuasively argue that such empirically constitutive political realities must be attended to in political theory-building, and not merely treated as a context in which independently formulated moral theories are simply applied. This framing of realism accords real politics a genuinely foundational theoretical role, but without requiring any contentious metaethical stance about a non-moral political normativity. I explain some methodological implications that follow for realism – in particular the need to prioritise empirically grounded theorisation of real political contexts over abstract and rather essentialist claims about ‘the political’. I also argue that such a framing of realism helps engender a more accurate, less divisive, and more pluralist conception of methodological debates within political theory. (shrink)

Concentrating on problems that commonly perplex general readers and beginning students, John Maynard Smith discusses fundamental issues in biology, with emphasis on evolution, development, and cognition. He provides a nontechnical account of molecular genetics, which is the foundation of modern biology, and explores such issues as heredity, animal behavior, the definition and origin of life, the brain and how we know things, artificial and natural intelligence, and genetics. The book is unique in presenting modern ideas in terms that can (...) be understood without an in-depth knowledge of biology. (shrink)

First ever philosophy treatise on photography, analytic in approach but sensitive to photo-history, not confined to aesthetics or art (illus.), Walker Evans photo on cover. Papercover printing, Dec. 2000.

This paper has aimed to remedy a neglect of multi-party disputes by addressing how those involved in a two-party argument may collaborate with others who are co-present. Collaboration is a complex phenomenon. In the first place, we have seen that disputes, although initially produced by two parties, do not consist simply of two sides. Rather, given one party's displayed position, stance, or claim, another party can produce opposition by simply aligning against that position or by aligning with a counterposition. This (...) means that parties can dispute a particular position for different reasons and by different means. It is therefore possible for several parties to serially oppose another's claim without achieving collaboration. A second complexity, then, is just that collaboration is a negotiated phenomenon. For example, while it is possible for an outside party to produce an uninvited alignment display that is sympathetic to an already-stated position in a two-party dispute, the party whose position it supports can agree or disagree with that display. Thus, outsiders' uninvited alignment displays that occur subsequent to those of the insiders or principals in a two-party dispute must be considered as collaboration offers, which can be accepted or rejected. But that is not the end of it, for an outside party can offer alignments that now align with a principal party's position and then, addressing a different aspect of the principal's talk, align against it. Finally, in addition to being offered, collaboration can also be solicited. A principal in a two-party dispute solicits collaboration by inviting an outsider to display an alignment favorable to inviter's own position or to participate in a joint activity that supports that stance. Such solicits can be accepted, rejected, or, again, handled in such a way as to exhibit neutrality. Argumentative collaboration, in short, is a specific, momentary, and delicate state of affairs that is also an organized, technical achievement.The fact that the subjects for this study were children has become submerged in the formal analysis of alignment structures and collaboration. Thus, following this research, two directions can be pursued. One would be to ask how children's arguments differ from those occurring among adults. A reasoned answer would be that matters of substance or content may distinguish disputes among youthful persons from those occurring among older ones, while the forms of disputing remain relatively invariant (Maynard, 1985a, 1985b). In other words, by studying multi-party disputes among first-grade children, we learn about the structure of collaboration as a generic phenomenon among at least practitioners of standard English no matter what their age. This claim can be sustained in part because the analysis presented here depends upon deriving a priori conventional relations between utterances, rather than statistical relations between variables (Coulter, 1983). We have not examined exogenous influences — which would include the age characteristics of participants — on disputes, but rather the endogenously-produced structure of argumentative discourse. Still, the claim that patterns of collaboration are generic to children and adults can be examined with further research on multi-party disputes among different age groups.Another, more radical, research orientation, would be to consider, in any social arena where the members are identified as children, how it is that such a ‘membership category’ (Sacks, 1972) is relevant. If that query is made, then research on ‘children's arguments’ would involve investigating formal practices for exhibiting the accountable category ‘children’ as much as it would mean describing the ways that disputing is done. Those who have studied children's arguments, in Pollner's (1979) terms, have treated ‘children’ as a social fact, a ‘thing,’ rather than as a socially organized meaning, or ‘ing.’To attend to the -ing of things involves a radical modification of the attitude of daily life, for it requires attending to the processes of constitution in lieu of the product thus constituted (Pollner, 1979: 253, fn. 11).In short, we have treated arguments as the important event without also seeing how it is that the category ‘children’ is constituted as a recognizable feature of and within the research setting. (shrink)

Inevitably, much of this reply will concern points on which I disagree with one or other of the commentators. I should start, therefore, by saying that I am delighted to find that their thinking is in many ways similar to my own, and that a serious attempt is under way to clarify the concept of information in biology.

First and still only philosophy treatise on drawing, explaining the bases of meaning in all kinds of drawings, including technical and informational, design, child, and art drawings--depictive and nondepictive, East and West--engaging cognitive and developmental psychology, philosophy, art history and criticism. Ca 290 double-columned pp., 92 illus. Reviews include: Philosophy--David Hills, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 235-237. Aesthetics--Michael Podro, British Journal of Aesthetics 48, no. 3 (July 2008): 346-347. Art history--Svetlana Alpers, Phi Bet Kappa (...) Society Key Reporter (Summer 2006): 14 http://www.pbk.org/documents/tkrpdf/TKRSummer2006.pdf. General--Amy Ione, Leonardo On-line Reviews: http://www.leonardo.info/reviews/jan2007/draw_ione.html . (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

'Photo-credit: David Hume': a dialogue showing how application of Hume's three vivacity principles of resemblance, contiguity and causation--even his illustrations of them--not only immediately clarify the main sources of interest in photography, but locate photography in the broad and fascinating history of various functions that images serve us, thereby dispelling ongoing mystification about it. (In the dialogue, Veronica represents our contiguity and causal interests, Miranda [named for a Japanese camera company] our depictive ('resemblance') interests, while Clara serves as philosophical moderator.).

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 38.1 (2000) 1-26 [Access article in PDF] "What Will Surprise You Most": Self-Regulating Systems and Problems of Correct Use in Plato's Republic Patrick Maynard University of Western Ontario 1. Republic's Third Wave: "On Philosophers" The title of this paper is taken from a line in Book VI of Plato's Republic that appears to reject not only the accounts of moral justice and (...) other virtues argued in Book IV, but also an axiom of Plato's earlier dialogues: that the virtues are good and beneficial things. It reads: "What will surprise you most, when you hear it, is that each of the things we praised in that nature tends to corrupt the soul that has it and to drag it away from philosophy. I mean courage, moderation, and the other things we mentioned" (491b7-10). Although these other things specifically include justice, magnanimity, grace, love of truth, and a tendency to consider "the form [idea] of each thing that is" (486d10), for their part, commentators have never shown surprise at this passage; indeed they have tended either to neglect or minimize it.1 To recall the context of 491b7-10, it actually comes as a second surprise, hard on the heels of a remarkable admission by Socrates, in early Book VI. The admission came in response to Adeimantus' challenge to Socrates' attempt to show that 'Platonic' philosophers, in the famous Book V sense of those who believe in the [End Page 1] forms, will be just and virtuous people, capable of political leadership (484d8-487a5). Book VI's page 487 thus contains Adeimantus' blistering attack on Socratic method, and a counter-argument against the idea of philosopher-rulers, based on common opinions about philosophers—an argument that should give pause to those who say that Republic left elenctic method behind with Book I. It is Socrates who now faces a forceful elenchus: that is, an inconsistency between the philosopher-rulers position he has just argued and another view he himself accepts, for his reply to Adeimantus is that "they seem to speak the truth" (487d10, 489d5), and "what he says is true, that the best among the philosophers are useless to the majority" (489b2), but that "the greatest and more serious slander on philosophy... results from those who profess to follow the philosophic way of life," especially the "vicious" ones (489cd).Most commentators, teachers, readers, eager to join the account of forms at the end of Book V with that of the form of the good well into Book VI, bridge over this discussion of philosophers' reputations, perhaps noting such of its features as the true pilot, the tinker, the figure in the dust storm, etc., but with little attention to argument structure.2 However, low estimate of structure in Plato's writings is usually a mistake, especially with Republic, and some commentators do make space to shape this bit of text, before getting on to what really interests them. They usually bracket the whole philosophers' reputations discussion, including 491b, as an early part of the so-called "third and greatest wave" (472a, 473c) of objections and replies, regarding the feasibility of the earlier social proposals of Republic: specifically, the objection to the possibility of philosopher-rulers. Socrates' reply to the third wave is usually taken to conclude with the transition at 502c7-503d12, which begins: "now that this difficulty has been disposed of, we must deal with what remains"—that is, with how such rulers could come about, and how they would be educated, a transitional remark that makes the gateway to the scholars' great attractor of the form of the good, with its discussions of the sun, the divided line, the cave of shadows—and few readers ever look back. Thus one recent commentator who does discuss the early part of Book VI moves on to those topics as follows: "Now that the combination of traits required in a philosopher-king has been shown to be a natural possibility... (shrink)

The question of what constitutes a finished work is thrown open, reminding us that in certain of his completed autographs Beethoven continued the process that he normally reserved for the earlier stages of composition, setting out further choices, possibilities, and interchangeabilities, including radical alterations in goal as well as detail. In particular, the revision of movement endings was one of his long-standing preoccupations. In works of his middle period, Emil Platen observed, Beethoven continued to make essential alterations in the closing (...) sections of movements after the works had already taken concrete notational form; for example, in the scores of the String Quartets, op. 59, “out of a total of seven movement endings, six were altered after the fact, four in essential ways.”6 Indeed the relationship between sketches and compositional goals was always more problematical than traditional scholars were willing to allow. As Lewish Lockwood has shown, the closer one looks at the sketches the less one can continue to accept as an article of faith that “as a work progresses from first inklings to final realization it should pass through successive phases of growth and clarification of structure, and of complication of detail in relation to that structure, becoming progressively more definite en route to its goal.”7 To further thicken the issue, Janet Levy has pointed out that one “cannot assume that the goals of a completed work are necessarily the same as the goals of the sketches for it,” inasmuch as the composer’s intentions may well have changed during the course of composition and we may be left with sketches made in connection with goals no longer reflected in the final work.8 Composition is only partly a teleological process whereby the composer eventually finds a lapidary form for a predetermined idea. With Beethoven, not only is there no prospective inevitability, there may even be no inevitability after the fact. His sketches and autographs may well be series of rough maps to the multiplicity of universes he glimpsed, to a plurality of possibilities, a jammed crossroads of paths taken and not taken. 6. Emil Platen, “Beethovens Autographen als Ausgangspunkt morphologischer Untersuchungen,” in Bericht über den internationalen musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress: Bonn 1970, ed. Carl Dahlhaus et al. , p. 535. See also Lewis Lockwood, “Beethoven and the Problem of Closure: Some Examples from the Middle-Period Chamber Music,” in Beiträge zu Beethovens Kammermusik, p. 270.7. Lockwood, “On Beethoven’s Sketches and Autographs: Some Problems of Definition and Interpretation,” Acta Musicologica 42 : 34.8. Levy, Beethoven’s Compositional Choices, p. 3. Maynard Solomon’s books include Beethoven , Beethoven Essays , and, most recently, Beethoven’s Tagebuch . He has also written on Schubert, Ives, and Freud, and has edited a standard work on Marxist aesthetics. He is currently writing a life of Mozart and a study of the origins of music. In 1990 he was visiting professor of music at Columbia University. (shrink)

Despite the venerable place that "justice" occupies in social scientific theory and research, little effort has been made to see how members of society themselves define and use the concept when confronted with determining "what has happened" in some social arena, theorizing about why it happened, and deciding what should ensue. We take an ethnomethodological approach to justice, attempting to recover it as a feature of practical activity or a "phenomenon of order." Our analysis involves an actual videotaped jury deliberation. (...) In his classic study of decision making by juries, Garfinkel observed that jurors changed their reliance on commonsense reasoning very little, even though they were instructed to adhere to official and legal criteria for guilt. The vacillation between commonsense reasoning and using official criteria creates a tension; in our data this tension is manifested as the choice between adhering to law and procedural rules and providing "justice." By articulating this tension as a puzzle, several of the jurors prepare the way for using "justice," and then use this concept in formal ways which, along with other discursive patterns and strategies, constitute the deliberation as a structured, concerted activity. We show four stages in the use of the term justice as it is embedded in jurors' practical reasoning. (shrink)

For philosophical readers, a review of biology Nobel laureate Eric R. Kandel’s Age of Insight historical thesis, that today’s ‘neuroaesthetics’ is a continuation of Vienna’s great contributions to modernism from 1900 on, becomes a ‘critical study’, by closely examining Kandel’s valuable account of E.H. Gombrich’s psychology, then, broadly, his own case for the validity of ‘neuroaesthetics’. The article much credits Kandel for recognising and explaining—unlike most philosophers, with their epistemological and metaphysical perspectives—why Gombrich’s Art and Illusion is subtitled ‘Psychology’, since (...) it is about what its author termed throughout ‘convincing’ depiction. But, while holding that Kandel’s case for ‘neuroaesthetics’ is, at least in tone, superior to Ramachandran’s, the study broadens still further into a critical examination of it, with at first standard—since Aristotle—arguments against reductivism, as a materialism that neglects first formal then final causes or purposes. Original to the critique is an additional argument, that so-called ‘neuroaesthetics’ is not only inconsistent with the ‘reductionist’—not reductivist—principles of Kandel’s own science, as explained in his earlier account of them, In Search of Memory, but also contradicts a basic Darwinian principle underlying all modern biology, that genuine novelty can arise from rearrangement of older materials. The conclusion is that although neuroscience may make important contributions to aesthetics and appreciation, there is as yet no basis for holding that it could produce an aesthetics. (shrink)

Suggesting that much of social science is still wedded to the ‘dogma of the ghost in the machine,’ I discuss my ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach to the assembly of cognitive objects. It is important to reverse the usual social psychological metalanguage of mind causing behavior, and see how practices in interaction operate to display cognitive states of participants. Two examples are given: one in regard to the assembly of gestalts, including social actions in talk, and the other concerning the (...) production of responses as accountable phenomena in the survey interview. While advances are being made in brain imaging, the connections between the neurobiology of the mind and the practices embedded in human conduct are tenuous at best. For the social scientist, approaching cognition through practices puts ghosts and other ephemera in abeyance and allows for analysis of the detail exhibited in behavior when minds are purportedly at work. (shrink)

In Southeast Asian countries (SEA), road transport accounts for the main energy consumption and CO2 emission. Air pollution is a major concern in densely populated cities such as Bangkok, Manila, and Kuala Lumpur. The main objective of this paper is to give insights on trends of transport development, car ownership, and CO2 emissions in Southeast Asia. This study also attempts to review the successful transportation policies around the globe and to introduce the possible instruments that can help reduce air pollution (...) in Southeast Asian countries. Economic instruments to estimate the benefits of a cleaner environment due to new policies are introduced as well. The results of this research could help policy makers consider approaches that could internalize external costs of transportation and maximize the societal welfare. (shrink)

Two important methodological debates in political theory concern (i) the place of historical research and interpretation in normative inquiry; and (ii) the importance of comparing different cultural traditions of political thought. The first question animates a long-standing controversy over the relative importance of ‘history of political thought’ versus ‘philosophy’ in political theory, while the second has been central to the recent growth of ‘comparative political theory’. Despite both debates being concerned, in fundamental ways, with history and comparison, they have remained (...) surprisingly disconnected from broader debates in the humanities and social sciences about the use of comparative history and, in particular, of the prominent methodological approach in political science known as ‘comparative historical analysis’. This may reflect the fact that the debates over history of political thought and comparative political theory have fundamentally revolved around thought—history as the history of thought and comparison as the comparison of thought—whereas comparative historical analysis is more centrally focused on the study of political behaviour. In this paper I suggest that this neglect of comparative historical analysis in political theory represents a missed opportunity. Like other forms of social scientific inquiry, comparative historical analysis can yield important empirical knowledge for political theorists. But I wish to more ambitiously suggest that comparative historical analysis can also be adapted for conducting normative political theory itself. I summarise the key features of comparative historical analysis for political theorists, and explain how its use of historical cases can supplement both the use of imaginary thought experiments and the study of contemporary politics. I then delineate three specific ways in which comparative historical analysis might be used to support normative inquiry: deductive testing, inductive construction, and casuistic elaboration. All three, I argue, can help meet recent calls to bring the study of real political behaviour more centrally into political theory research. (shrink)

Financial sustainability of protected areas is one of the main challenges of management. Financial self-sufficiency is an important element in improving conservation effort in these areas. This study seeks to review best practices in recreational fee systems in different countries and to find a relevant entry fee for a wildlife sanctuary in Malaysia. The revenue of the National Elephant Conservation Center (NECC) in Kuala Gandah, Malaysia, comes from several sources, including the national government, but all these budgetary sources are strained (...) by tighter public budgets and greater demands. The present study investigates the introduction of visitor entrance fees to supplement an otherwise inadequate budget for supporting the operational costs of the sanctuary. Factor analysis and a double-bounded contingent valuation method were combined to estimate tourists' willingness to pay (WTP) the proposed entrance fee. Factor analysis showed that respondents' motivation to support the NECC with user fees is conditioned by their direct experiences with elephants, their satisfaction with NECC's educational programs and services, and other experiences it gives to users. The WTP model considered respondents' four motivation factors with their sociodemographic characteristics. Since NECC visitors arrive from both within and outside the country, this study suggests to center managers a two-tier fee structure (residents vs. nonresidents of Malaysia), based upon mean WTP estimates. This study further suggests that revenue from such an entrance fee for NECC could support the Center's management and development costs. © 2015 Elsevier B. (shrink)

Recent advances in paleoarchaeology show why nothing in the Tate Modern, where a conference on "Agency & Automatism" took place, challenges the roots of 'the idea of the fine arts' (Kristeller) as high levels of craft, aesthetics, mimesis and mental expression, as exemplifying cultures: it is by them that we define our species. This paper identifies and deals with resistances, early and late, to photographic fine art as based on concerns about automatism reducing human agency--that is, mental expression--then offers the (...) fuller account of agency lacking in such discussions. But fine art is not the only value classification we use. (shrink)

This article explores the relation between ‘citing the evidence’, or implicating a particular diagnosis, and ‘asserting the condition’, or overtly predicating the diagnosis as an attribute of a person. Clinicians regularly postpone or delay asserting the condition, which is interactionally more confrontational and presumptive. They regularly do the postponement by citing the evidence prior to asserting the condition, using the evidence as kind of predecessor account for predicating the diagnosis as an attribute of the person. Citing the evidence as leading (...) to asserting the condition enhances the likelihood of recipients realizing some bad news or other kind of diagnostic upshot. This study has implications for the relation between interaction and authority in medical discourse. (shrink)

“Public” is here treated by its three extensions: most broadly, from the merely extrasomatic, where users of representations are initially distinguished from makers, through ‘published’ or for the general public, to the governmental, official—where the discussion begins, before turning in its second half to the more common, middle meaning. What is public in these ways, “spatial representation”, also has the different meanings of representation of space or representation by spatial means, and there are several kinds of space to be considered. (...) The styles of the two halves contrast, that of the first being an inductive mapping of neglected conceptual terrain of directive representations, that of the second linear: a continuous argument in answer to a question regarding descriptive spatial representation in the digital age. The common thread is the public as users of all such cognitive artifacts, and this use as interactive, with a range of implications for social collectivity. (shrink)

We introduce a new operator – belief fusion– which aggregates the beliefs of two agents, each informed by a subset of sources ranked by reliability. In the process we definepedigreed belief states, which enrich standard belief states with the source of each piece of information. We note that the fusion operator satisfies the invariants of idempotence, associativity, and commutativity. As a result, it can be iterated without difficulty. We also define belief diffusion; whereas fusion generally produces a belief state with (...) more information than is possessed by either of its two arguments, diffusion produces a state with less information. Fusion and diffusion are symmetric operators, and together define a distributive lattice. Finally, we show that AGM revision can be viewed as fusion between a novice and an expert. (shrink)