Writings by a thinker—a psychiatrist, a philosopher, a cybernetician, and a poet—whose ideas about mind and brain were far ahead of his time. Warren S. McCulloch was an original thinker, in many respects far ahead of his time. McCulloch, who was a psychiatrist, a philosopher, a teacher, a mathematician, and a poet, termed his work “experimental epistemology.” He said, “There is one answer, only one, toward which I've groped for thirty years: to find out how brains work.” Embodiments (...) of Mind, first published more than fifty years ago, teems with intriguing concepts about the mind/brain that are highly relevant to recent developments in neuroscience and neural networks. It includes two classic papers coauthored with Walter Pitts, one of which applies Boolean algebra to neurons considered as gates, and the other of which shows the kind of nervous circuitry that could be used in perceiving universals. These first models are part of the basis of artificial intelligence. Chapters range from “What Is a Number, that a Man May Know It, and a Man, that He May Know a Number,” and “Why the Mind Is in the Head,” to “What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain” (with Jerome Lettvin, Humberto Maturana, and Walter Pitts), “Machines that Think and Want,” and “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity” (with Walter Pitts). Embodiments of Mind concludes with a selection of McCulloch's poems and sonnets. This reissued edition offers a new foreword and a biographical essay by McCulloch's one-time research assistant, the neuroscientist and computer scientist Michael Arbib. (shrink)

Myra Hird and Harlan Weaver have been invited by the editors of this special issue to enter into discussion with each other – to conduct a series of interchanges – because of the careful attention their research has paid to the ways in which transness as a lived reality is ontologized in humans, non-human animals, bacteria, and viruses. With this issue’s interchanges, we would like to further the conversation on critically approaching the consequences of merging transness with animality. In (...) the following series of four essay questions, we particularly invited each of these scholars to consider moments of classificatory tension in which taxonomies of human and non-human become inflected and redirected by the categories of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and geopolitical location. (shrink)

_The Life of the Mind _presents an original and striking conception of the mind and its place in nature. In a spirited and rigorous attack on most of the orthodox positions in contemporary philosophy of mind, McCulloch connects three of the orthodoxy's central themes - externalism, phenomenology and the relation between science and common-sense psychology - in a defence of a throughly anti-Cartesian conception of mental life. McCulloch argues that the life of the mind will never be understood (...) until we properly understand the subject's essential embodiment and immersion in the world, until we give up the idea that intentionality and phenomenology must be understood separately. The product of over twenty years' thinking on these issues, McCulloch's book is a bold and significant contribution to philosophy. (shrink)

One of the major values of animal ethical theory can be found in the light it sheds on practical ethical problems involving animals. McCulloch and Reiss’ paper does precisely this regarding the culling of badgers in England to limit the spread of tuberculosis. Perspicaciously realizing that societal ethics represents a combination of utilitarian and rights-based theorizing, the authors apply both of these perspectives to the issue, noting that both theoretical approaches generate a rejection of culling in the presence of (...) other viable alternatives. In addition, the authors suggest and defend the use of an Animal Welfare Impact Assessment tool to assess the impact of various management approaches on the animals, and demonstrate its congruence with both the ethical theories considered, and with societal moral attitudes. In this way, they show that their conclusion is directly compatible with the societal ethic, in my view a major prerequisite for effecting social change. (shrink)

The Brambell Report of 1965 recommended that animals should have the freedom to stand up, lie down, turn around, groom themselves and stretch their limbs. The Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC) developed these into the Five Freedoms, which are a framework for the analysis of animal welfare. The Five Freedoms are well known in farming, policy making and academic circles. They form the basis of much animal welfare legislation, codes of recommendations and farm animal welfare accreditation schemes, and are the (...) foundation of the Welfare Quality® assessment scheme. The Five Freedoms are also extensively employed for the education of veterinary and animal welfare science students. Hence they have proven to be of great practical utility. In this paper, the Five Freedoms framework is examined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for the analysis of animal welfare. Overall, the Five Freedoms are judged to be individually necessary and jointly sufficient as a framework for the analysis of animal welfare. FAWC has recently criticized the Five Freedoms for concentrating on negative aspects of welfare. However, it is shown here how the satisfaction of the Five Freedoms should lead to good welfare, from the animal’s point of view. The Five Freedoms are formulated as ideals of animal welfare. This has significant advantages that have likely contributed to their impact. However, the ideality of the Five Freedoms means that the framework is without power to determine what a satisfactory level of animal welfare is, in an ethical sense. (shrink)

In Sex, Gender and Science , Myra Hird outlines the social study of science and nature, specifically in relation to sex, sex differences, and sexuality. She examines how Western understandings of sex are based less upon understanding material sex differences than on a discourse that emphasizes sex dichotomy over sex diversity and argues for a feminist engagement with scientific debate that embraces the diversity and complexity of nature.

Bovine tuberculosis is the most important animal health and welfare policy issue in Britain. Badgers are a wildlife reservoir of disease, although the eight-year Independent Scientific Group Randomised Badger Culling Trial concluded with a recommendation against culling. The report advised government that bovine TB could be controlled, and ultimately eradicated, by cattle-based measures alone. Despite the ISG recommendation against culling, the farming and veterinary industries continued to lobby government for a badger cull. The 2005–2010 Labour government followed the ISG advice (...) and decided against a cull. The 2010–2015 Coalition and the 2015-present Conservative governments have followed a badger culling policy. This paper investigates whether a virtuous government would cull badgers. It provides an overview of virtue theory in the context of government animal health and welfare policy. Bovine TB and badger control policy options are then analysed in the context of the virtues of justice, wisdom, integrity, loyalty, curiosity, trust, empathy, compassion and aesthetics. Justice is the first virtue of government, and badger culling is seriously problematic from a virtue perspective given that five badgers are culled per cow that avoids slaughter as a result. Analysis based on other virtues strongly suggests that government should not cull badgers. The paper concludes that a virtuous government would not cull badgers as part of policy to control bovine TB in cattle. (shrink)

Bipartism is the common view that the nature of an intentional state can be wholly explained in terms of (a) its horizontal relations with other such states (as well as peripheral inputs and outputs); and (b) its vertical relations with the world. Extrapolating from Nagel, I try to show that bipartism is fundamentally mistaken. Some intentional states are conscious states, and thus there is something it is like to be in them. This phenomenology is of a piece with such states’ (...) interpretability: to know what it is like to be X at least involves being able to interpret X’s conscious intentional states. But a bi‐partist account of an intentional state is not, by itself, interpretational. So bipartist accounts, at least of conscious intentional states, are incomplete: they fail to capture their phenomenology. (shrink)

Gregory McCulloch; III*—The Very Idea of the Phenomenological, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 93, Issue 1, 1 June 1993, Pages 39–58, https://do.

Feminist philosophical analyses have recently returned to psychoanalytic theory's insights into the origins of gender. Freud's exegesis on social development holds gender to be a matter of identification, as opposed to an ontological condition of being. This article considers Judith Butler's use of psychoanalytic theory to argue that homosexuality both precedes and conditions the formation of heterosexual gender identification. While convinced the processes of identification do involve loss and are grieved in some way, I am less convinced that the precedence (...) of either heterosexuality or homosexuality can be logically sustained. I suggest that Butler's political commitment to subvert the hetero-normative gender system leads to a conflation of identification with desire, two distinct processes involving different psychic mechanisms. I want to argue that all gender is melancholic, as any restriction of pleasures entails loss; but the closer to the dominant heteronormative system the greater that failure. (shrink)

_Using Sartre_ is an introduction to the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, but it is not an ordinary introduction. It both promotes Sartrean views and adopts a consistently analytical approach to him. Concentrating on the early philosophy, up to and including Sartre's masterwork _Being and Nothingness_, Gregory McCulloch clearly shows how much analytic philosophy misses when it neglects Sartre and the continental tradition in philosophy. In the classic spirit of analytic philosophy, this is a clear, simple and appealingly short exposition (...) of the early work of Sartre. Written specifically for beginners and non-specialists, this book is sure to spark new interest in Sartre and the existentialists, while making a significant contribution to the development of analytical philosophy of mind as well. (shrink)

Feminist analyses have made important contributions to the sociocultural experiences of pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding. This article draws upon recent theorizing within science studies to focus on the mattering of these processes. Specifically, the article expands upon Mauss's notion of the ‘gift’, which Diprose develops through the idea of ‘corporeal generosity’. I am interested in corporeal generosity insofar as it circumvents descriptions of relationships in terms of a closed economy in which resources are exchanged without excess or remainder. Corporeal generosity (...) refers to the often missed but nevertheless inescapable debt that a body owes to other bodies. At the same time, this embodied ‘gifting’ is both unpredictable and intrusive – there is as much possibility of threatening the integrity of bodies as there is of opening new possibilities. (shrink)

Bovine tuberculosis is a controversial animal health policy issue in England, which impacts farmers, the public, cattle and badgers. Badgers act as a wildlife reservoir of disease. Policy options for badger control include do nothing, badger culling, and badger vaccination. This paper argues for mandatory Animal Welfare Impact Assessment for all policy that significantly affects sentient animals. AWIA includes species description, and AWIA analysis stages. In this paper, AWIA is applied to impacts of bovine TB policy options on cattle and (...) badgers. Over 4 years, 85,000 badgers will be culled to prevent the slaughter of ~17,750 cattle over 9 years. Hence, about five badgers are culled for every cow which avoids slaughter. The AWIA analyses the impact of badger vaccination on cows and badgers based on a set of stated assumptions. The AWIA estimates badger vaccination to reduce the number of cows slaughtered by 11,600, i.e. a 12.5% reduction. Additional to the harm of killing, culling has greater welfare impacts on badgers compared to non-culling options. Actors in animal health and welfare policy were interviewed about the concept of AWIA. Policy actors supported the idea of AWIA to provide objective data to feed into policy making. The paper concludes with the proposal that AWIA is a necessary stage of just policy making where sentient animals are impacted by government policy. (shrink)

Cultural ethical dilemmas occur when ethical research practices, as prescribed by the research ethics codes of Western research institutions, conflict with the cultural and social norms of non-Western researchers and their participants. Thus, insider-researchers working with participants from similar cultural backgrounds may experience ethical dilemmas that result in disconcerting cultural estrangement from their communities. Using reflexive narratives, the author identifies moments of cultural ethical dilemmas that necessitate a choice between two competing sets of values. Working out of a Western university, (...) the narratives reflect on cultural ethical dilemmas relating to non-coercion, confidentiality, and beneficence, encountered during interviews in the researcher’s community. Analyzed through the lens of Confucian social and ethical behavior, the paper asks whether there is a need for East–west polarization, or whether research ethics codes based on Western worldviews can be reconciled with Confucian worldviews. The paper suggests the “Middle Way” approach to reconciling and integrating the diverse worldviews of ethics, through the use of an ethical reflexive process that engenders trust in the research process and resolves cultural ethical dilemmas. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:194 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY and properly, in a consideration of Bradley, although it is a little like citing Bradley in his own behalf. In all, Mr. Saxena's book is carefully researched and judicious, selecting Bradley's chief metaphysical themes for explication and defence. As one slight criticism: Bradley's doctrine of truth is treated as coherence, which it indeed was on the level of reality; but he dealt with truth quite (...) differently in immediate experience and on the level of appearance (elaborating those levels in his Essays on Truth and Reality), and hia metaphysics would appear richer if those theories of truth were discussed and applied to their appropriate realms. It~J~ Ross Scripps College Filosofia e SLoria nel Pensiero Crociano. By Adriano Bausola. (Milano: SocietA editrici Vitae Pensiero, 1965. Pp. 280. Paper. L. 4~500.) Etica e Politica nel Pensiero dl Benedetto Croce. (Milano: SocietA editrici Vitae Pensiero, 1966. Pp. 265. Paper. L 3,500.) Theee two volumes examine respectively Croce's doctrines of the theoretic and of the practical spheres of experience and thus treat of many of the main tenets of Croce's entire philosophy. For within these spheres, Adriano Bausola critically discusses important views which occur in the areas of logic, gnoseology, theory of history, as well as in ethics, economic and political doctrine. The scope of Bausola's treatment is in accord with Croce's own approach to philosophy, since strictly speaking, neither the theoretic nor the practical sphere can be correctly understood in abstraction from the other. Moreover, in his treatment of Croce's view, Bausola frequently discusses the criticisms of other contemporary Italian Crocean critics,as for example, of Gentile, Guido Calogero and Ugo Spirito, and this method of exposition has the advantages of making Croce's own position clear and of giving us some idea of very recent Italian philosophy. According to Bausola, the essential character of Croce's philosophy is shown in his rejection of every view which admits of transcendent experience or of abstract ideas. Thus, Filosofia e Storia critically traces this rejection as it occurs throughout the theoretic sphere of experience and attempts to make explicit the "positive" Crocean doctrine which accompanies his denial of the transcendent and of the abstract. Here Bausola concludes that despite Croce's claim to the contrary, there is more than one "logical" reason for Croce's refutation of the transcendent. Among these reasons are Croce's view of the identity of subject and object, his refutation of every mediate cognitive process, of every inference, and of every experience which issupposed to be neither theoretic nor practical. Chapter i ol Filosofia c Storia discusses the foundation of Croce's philosophy which Bausola maintains should be described as "spiritualism" (spiritualismo) rather than as "idealism" (idealismo), since for Croce, reality is fundamentally "spirit" and not "pure thought." Chapters 11 and 111 treat specifically of epistemic problems, such as, the nature of philosophic or pure concepts and the judgments to which they give rise, the nature of scientific or pseudoconcepts and the relations between philosophy and science. Chapters IV and v treat of Croce's view of the nature of "the real" and of the relations between the categories---their autonomy and their unity. Here Bausola attempts to show that Croce's transcendental deduction of the four forms of experience (aesthetic, logical, economic and ethical) has failed and that his demonstration shows merely that the distinction between these forms are empirical. Chapter IV then discusses Croce's view of philosophy as history. The next three chapters present a critical analysis of Croce's doctrine of error which forms one of his most interesting contributions to philosophy. Here Bausola's task is not to consist of an explication of the central Crocean view on error, but rather of an examination of its "concrete" development and its validity. At the outset of his discussion, Bausola asks: Does error ever result from non-practical as well as from practical acts? BOOK REVIEWS 195 Does error invariably result from conscious volition? And Bausola tries to show contrary to Croce% view that there are instances of error which do not involve conscious volition, but that Croce% denial of such instances follows... (shrink)

A friend, correspondent and intellectual successor to David Ricardo, John Ramsay McCulloch forged his reputation in the emerging field of political economy by publishing deeply researched articles in Scottish periodicals and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. From 1828 he spent nearly a decade as professor of political economy at the newly founded University of London, thereafter becoming comptroller of the Stationery Office. Perhaps the first professional economist, McCulloch had become internationally renowned by the middle of the century, recognised for sharing (...) his ideas through lucid lecturing and writing. The present reference work, first published in 1832 and later revised, expanded and updated multiple times, made McCulloch considerable sums of money. His critical and analytical treatment of the data he had largely compiled himself made this much more than a mere book of facts. Several other works written or edited by McCulloch are also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection. (shrink)

Waste is a major global environmental issue that assembles socio-cultural and bio-geological processes in complex indeterminate relationships. Drawing on three case studies, this article explores the shifting environmental politics concerned with waste’s material, economic, political, and cultural ‘management’. The Canadian case studies – determining a new waste management technology in a mid-sized city in central Ontario, an open dump in a remote Nunavut community, and an abandoned gold mine in the Northwest Territories – suggest waste occasions particular material and political (...) mobilizations. Landfill leachate, colonialism, disinterested publics, freezing arsenic, global corporate investments, country food, land claims, neoliberal governance, permafrost, ravens, and a host of other socio-material forces both empower and thwart ‘management’ politics. Through these case studies, this article explores Isabelle Stengers’s assertion that participating citizenship is an ‘Empty Great Idea’, and a provocation to consider the contexts in which waste may generate acquiescent or objecting publics. (shrink)

Sociology of Science: A Critical Canadian Introduction provides an overview of how sociology approaches science and, to a lesser extent, technology. It examines how science developed as a set of theories about both what we know and how we know. The book provides a succinct critical examination of the current state of science studies with a particular emphasis on research conducted by Canadian scholars. Hird illustrates that science studies offers useful perspectives on current and ongoing sociological debates, such as the (...) strengths and limitations of social constructionism, as well as popular public debates, such as the ethics of stem-cell research. Using examples from throughout history and with a focus on the Canadian context, the book provides students with an examination of influential science studies concepts, theories, and debates and situates these theories and debates within contemporary field of sociology. (shrink)

Nigel Clark’s ‘ex-orbitant globality’ concerns the incalculability of other-than-human forces we typically fail to acknowledge, yet which haunt all considerations of environmental change. This article considers Gaia theory as a useful heuristic to register the ubiquity of bacteria to environmental activity and regulation. Bacteria are Gaia theory’s fundamental actants, and through symbiosis and symbiogenesis, connect life and matter in biophysical and biosocial entanglements. Emphasizing symbiosis might invoke the expectation of a re-inscription of the human insofar as the ubiquitous inter-connectivity of (...) life ultimately connects everything to the human. I want to argue toward the opposite conclusion: that bacterial liveliness suggests a profound indifference to human life. As such, symbiosis does not efface difference, nor its vigorous refusal to be absorbed within human formulations of world-remaking, including environmental change. Bacterial indifference’s radical asymmetry suggests the need for non-human centred theories of globality. (shrink)

This introduction to modern work in analytic philosophy uses the example of the proper name to give a clear explanation of the logical theories of Gottlob Frege, and explain the application of his ideas to ordinary language. McCulloch then shows how meaning is rooted in the philosophy of mind and the question of intentionality, and looks at the ways in which thought can be "about" individual material objects.

Missouri, the "Show Me State," has become the epicenter of several important national public policy debates, including abortion rights, the right to choose and refuse medical treatment, and, most recently, early stem cell research. In this environment, the Center for Practical Bioethics (formerly, Midwest Bioethics Center) emerged and grew. The Center's role in these "cultural wars" is not to advocate for a particular position but to provide well researched and objective information, perspective, and advocacy for the ethical justification of policy (...) positions; and to serve as a neutral convener and provider of a public forum for discussion. In this article, the Center's work on early stem cell research is a case study through which to argue that not only the Center, but also the field of bioethics has a critical role in the politics of public health policy. (shrink)

Ten years after the publication of the special issue of Social Epistemology on feminist epistemology, this paper explores recent feminist interest in the inhuman. Feminist science studies, cultural studies, philosophy and environmental studies all build on the important work feminist epistemology has done to bring to the fore questions of feminist empiricism, situated knowledges and knowing as an intersubjective activity. Current research in feminist theory is expanding this epistemological horizon to consider the possibility of an inhuman epistemology. This paper explores (...) these developments through the subject of waste. Waste, as both an epistemological and material phenomenon, invites timely questions about possibilities for acknowledging an inhuman epistemology. These questions appear to be particularly urgent from an environmental perspective. (shrink)

The death of Frantz Fanon at the age of thirty-six robbed the African revolution of its leading intellectual and moral force. His death also cut short one of the most extraordinary intellectual careers in contemporary political thought. Fanon was a political psychologist whose approach to revolutionary theory was grounded in his psychiatric practice. During his years in Algeria he published clinical studies on the behaviour of violent patients, the role of culture in the development of illness and the function of (...) the psychiatric hospital as a social milieu. These papers illuminate Fanon's political theory, expose weaknesses in his concept of political consciousness and liberation, and contain a 'secret history' explaining the tide of revolutionary movements in the Third World. (shrink)

This book is a discussion of Heidegger's, Sartre's and Marcel's rejection of Cartesian epistemology, the scepticism to which it leads and its objectivist conception of human existence. It compares this rejection with Wittgenstein's rejection of these conceptions of man, his relation to the knowledge of what belongs to the world in which he lives. It concentrates on the existentialist critiques of consciousness as a substance and of the self as such a substance, of each person's body as something external to (...) which he is causally related, and of others as at best indirectly accessible to us. It discusses Sartre's positive views on these questions and the way he falls into a form of solipsism himself. It then considers Sartre's rejection of determinism and his conception of freedom as our capacity for choice. In a concluding chapter the book sketches a non-objectivist account of the self, its development, its 'bad faith', its capacity to emerge from it, and its knowledge of itself, free from the objections considered earlier. It then considers some new objections directed at its own account. Contents: Man in the World; Man's Way of Being: Existential Dualism; The Personal Dimension: Emotions and Value Judgements; Sartre and our Identity as Individuals; Mind and Body: Rejection of Cartesian Dualism; Sartre on the Self and the Other: Rejection of Cartesian Solipsism; Human Separateness and the Possibility of Communion: Marcel's Rejection of Sartrean Solipsism; Sartre: Freedom as Something to which Man is Condemned; Self, Self-Knowledge and Self-Change: A Non-Objectivist View and its Defense. (shrink)

Conceptual atomists argue that most of our concepts are primitive. I take up three arguments that have been thought to support atomism and show that they are inconclusive. The evidence that allegedly backs atomism is equally compatible with a localist position on which concepts are structured representations with complex semantic content. I lay out such a localist position and argue that the appropriate position for a non-atomist to adopt is a pluralist view of conceptual structure. I show several ways in (...) which conceptual pluralism provides an advantage in satisfying the empirical and philosophical demands on a theory of conceptual structure and content. (shrink)