Tourism to sites of war, conflict, terror and violence is hugely popular. All manner of tours and visits are organised worldwide, every day, to both current and historic conflict sites. Some are once-in-a-lifetime events, such as tours of current conflict sites in the Middle East or to the battlegrounds of World War II, some are routine family visits, such as day trips to local castles. Some visits focus on war and battles themselves, others focus on sites that were the centres (...) of conflict in a broader sense, such as notorious prisons or torture chambers. What strikes us is the absence of sustained, critical attention to conflict tourism from philosophers. This paper narrows matters into a more manageable form. We focus on the idea of tourist visits to conflict heritage sites, some of which are adapted for mass, regular, safe tourism. In this chapter we have three aims: first, to raise awareness of the phenomena and show they merit sustained philosophical interest; second, to outline some relevant philosophical questions; third, to offer some initial responses to these questions. Our overall claim, voiced at various intervals, is that one can, at most, develop general, defeasible ideas both about the phenomena and about what one should do. (shrink)

Sleep enhances integration across multiple stimuli, abstraction of general rules, insight into hidden solutions and false memory formation. Newly learned information is better assimilated if compatible with an existing cognitive framework or schema. This article proposes a mechanism by which the reactivation of newly learned memories during sleep could actively underpin both schema formation and the addition of new knowledge to existing schemata. Under this model, the overlapping replay of related memories selectively strengthens shared elements. Repeated reactivation of memories in (...) different combinations progressively builds schematic representations of the relationships between stimuli. We argue that this selective strengthening forms the basis of cognitive abstraction, and explain how it facilitates insight and false memory formation. (shrink)

Lawyers defending extractive corporations in transnational human rights and environmental cases tend to reflect the dominant ‘resolute advocacy’ model of litigation, which directs lawyers to aggres...

Professor Deutscher studies Beauvoir's philosophy on "otherness" not just through her famous views on gender (in her celebrated 1949 work The...

Traditional accounts of the feminist history of philosophy have viewed reason as associated with masculinity and subsequent debates have been framed by this assumption. Yet recent debates in deconstruction have shown that gender has never been a stable matter. In the history of philosophy 'female' and 'woman' are full of ambiguity. What does deconstruction have to offer feminist criticism of the history of philosophy? _Yielding Gender_ explores this question by examining three crucial areas; the issue of gender as 'troubled'; deconstruction; (...) and feminist criticism of the history of philosophy. The first part of the book discusses the work of Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and contemporary French feminist philosophy including key figures such as Luce Irigiray. Particular attention is given to the possibilities offered by deconstruction for understanding the history of philosophy. The second part considers and then challenges feminist interpretations of some key figures in the history of philosophy. Penelope Deutscher sketches how Rousseau, St. Augustine and Simone de Beauvoir have described gender and argues that their readings of gender are in fact empowered by gender's own contradiction and instability rather than limited by it. (shrink)

Beauvoir argued that both femininity and old age were “the other.” So did she understand their relationship to be analogical? This chapter answers in the negative. Understanding the relationship between femininity and aging in non‐analogical terms, Beauvoir also offers an alternative means of understanding their intersectionality. This variant can be found in the oscillating motion which emerges, according to Beauvoir's accounts, between the constitutions and the deconstitutions of femininity and aging.

This book with an introduction by Witold Marciszewski, views the history of philosophy and logic from 1837 to 1939 from the perspective of the cradle of modern exact philosophy - Central Europe. In a series of case studies, it illuminates the developments in this region, most notably in Austria and Poland, examining thinkers such as Bolzano, Brentano, Meinong, Husserl, Twardowski, Lesniewski, and Tarski, as well as the logicians like Frege and Russell with whom they bore a close resemblance. The book (...) challenges established views about the history of philosophy and logic in Europe, and shows the vitality of the Central European tradition. (shrink)

LeSniewski?s systems of Ontology and Mereology, considered from a purely formal point of view, possessstriking algebraic parallels, ascan be seen in their respective relations to Boolean algebra. But there are alsoimportant divergences, above all that general Mereology is silent, where Ontology is not, on the existenceof ?atoms? (individuals). By employing plural terms, LeSniewski sought to accommodate talk of (distributive)classes, without according these an autonomous ontological status. His logic also ? like predicate logic? has no place for mass predication in its (...) raw state. It is argued that reference both to pluralities and tomasses is ineliminable, and that one must therefore separate the grammatical distinction singular/pluralfrom the ontological distinction individual/class/mass. A kind of language, modelled on kiniewski?s, issuggested which enables these distinctions to be held apart and at the same time, building on the work ofRichard Sharvy, allows us to express the most important relationships between individuals, classes andmasses. (shrink)

This paper argues that democracy is universalisable as a theory and practice that fails to be identical with itself. Firstly, the paradox that democracy's universality can be put into practice only in particular terms and contexts is discussed. Then four models of democratic universality are presented and assessed: (i) empirical or actual universality; (ii) hybrid universality; (iii) cosmopolitan universality; (iv) impossible universality.The final argument is that democracy can be universalised because of the impossibility of making the demos identical with political (...) authority, which is akin to the impossibility of being identical to ourselves. (shrink)

The relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is, yet until now there has been no full-length study of this concept. This book shows that mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology. Peter Simons surveys and criticizes previous theories, especially the standard extensional view, and proposes a more adequate account which encompasses both temporal and modal considerations in detail. This has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of such classical philosophical (...) concepts as identity, individual, class, substance and accident, matter, form, essence, dependence, and integral whole. It also enables the author to offer new solutions to long-standing problems surrounding these concepts, such as the Ship of Theseus Problem and the issue of mereological essentialism. The author shows by his use of formal techniques that classical philosophical problems are amenable to rigorous treatment, and the book represents a synthesis of issues and methods from the analytical tradition and from the older continental realist tradition of Brentano and the early Husserl. (shrink)

Massimiliano Simons provides the first systematic study of Serres' work in the context of late 20th-century French philosophy of science. By proposing new readings of Serres' philosophy, Simons creates a synthesis between his predecessors, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and Louis Althusser as well as contemporary Francophone philosophers of science such as Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers. Simons situates Serres' unique contribution through his notion of the quasi-object, a concept, he argues, organizes great parts of Serres' work into (...) a promising philosophy of science as well as a challenge to the narrower field of French epistemology, to which it has often been limited. Simons highlights how the concept encompasses Serres' commitment to positive relations between science and culture and his rejection of pleas to purify the scientific self from imaginative and cultural elements. It helps to situate Serres between the distinct traditions of Bachelard and Latour as well as progressing the innovative aspects of Serres' philosophy for current debates in the philosophy, history, and sociology of science. Showing how Serres' philosophy can serve as a normative approach to science and technology, Michel Serres and French Philosophy of Science takes in themes of materiality, religiosity, modernity and ecology to advance a timely alternative to philosophy of science for contemporary life. (shrink)

Capturing the lively modernist milieu of Kenneth Burke's early career in Greenwich Village, where Burke arrived in 1915 fresh from high school in Pittsburgh, this book discovers him as an intellectual apprentice conversing with "the moderns." Burke found himself in the midst of an avant-garde peopled by Malcolm Cowley, Marianne Moore, Jean Toomer, Katherine Anne Porter, William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate, Hart Crane, Alfred Stieglitz, and a host of other fascinating figures. Burke himself, who died in 1993 at the age (...) of 96, has been hailed as America's most brilliant and suggestive critic and the most significant theorist of rhetoric since Cicero. Many schools of thought have claimed him as their own, but Burke has defied classification and indeed has often been considered a solitary, eccentric genius immune to intellectual fashions. But Burke's formative work of the 1920s, when he first defined himself and his work in the context of the modernist conversation, has gone relatively unexamined. Here we see Burke living and working with the crowd of poets, painters, and dramatists affiliated with Others magazine, Stieglitz's "291" gallery, and Eugene O'Neill's Provincetown Players; the leftists associated with the magazines The Masses and Seven Arts; the Dadaists; and the modernist writers working on literary journals like The Dial, where Burke in his capacity as an associate editor saw T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" into print for the first time and provided other editorial services for Thomas Mann, e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, and many other writers of note. Burke also met the iconoclasts of the older generation represented by Theodore Dreiser and H. L. Mencken, the New Humanists, and the literary nationalists who founded Contact and The New Republic. Jack Selzer shows how Burke's own early poems, fiction, and essays emerged from and contributed to the modernist conversation in Greenwich Village. He draws on a wonderfully rich array of letters between Burke and his modernist friends and on the memoirs of his associates to create a vibrant portrait of the young Burke's transformation from aesthete to social critic. (shrink)

Within French epistemology the question is central whether the present can be a reference point for the history of science or whether scientific practices should be understood within their own historical context. Both positions are linked with problems: either it results in a ‘whig history’ written from the perspective of the victors or it leads to the accusation of relativism and to resistance from the scientists themselves. Isabelle Stengers claims that this resistance by scientists must be considered as an essential (...) element in the historiography of the sciences. She is part of a more recent generation of French philosophers of science, who build on the work of the earlier generation but with significant differences. Stengers interprets the scientist’s work as ‘in the service of history’: everyone must be forced to recognize their work not as the product of personal construction but as a necessary discovery in the history of science. The work of the historian of science is in conflict with the aims of the scientists themselves, who want to be seen as the norm of the present by which one should read the history of science. This service of history is not some external ideological factor, but an internal part of the scientific practice itself. The construction of the difference between the discovery of a pre-given fact and the construction of a fiction is for Stengers the core of the scientific practices. This use of history will be illustrated by the case of synthetic biology, as described by Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent. Synthetic biologists are invoking specific past or future scenario’s, such as that of synthetic chemistry or computer engineering, to legitimatize their current research projects and ambitions. From this perspective, the problematic tension between the past and the present is so hard to cope with because it is not merely a struggle among historians and philosophers of science, but also among the scientists themselves. (shrink)

The starting point of this PhD project is a constructivist interpretation of scientific practices: science does not study independent and pre-given phenomena, but constructs them in an active way. Although this topic has already been argued for in general, this project wants to focus on recent emerging life sciences, such as systems biology, Artificial Life and synthetic biology. These disciplines bring forth an extreme form of this constructivist aspect: they actively and explicitly produce biological phenomena, such as synthetic cells that (...) do not exist outside of the laboratories. It is, however, unclear what this ‘construction’ of nature entails. There are multiple interpretations of how to understand these technical mediations and how this constructive element either shows the uniqueness of scientific practices or precisely shows how there is nothing special about scientific practices in relation to other practices. On the one hand this project wants to identify the different interpretations of constructivism in science: what does it in fact mean to claim that science constructs its object? Secondly, it wants to differentiate the notion of constructivism itself, by abandoning it as a general claim to more local, historical claims. This allows us to differentiate how a discipline, such as synthetic biology, is constructive in a unique sense, rather than being classified merely as one illustration of constructivism. This allows us to make room for the singularity of synthetic biology: in what specific way is synthetic biology a constructive practice? (shrink)

The metaphysics of relations is still in its infancy. We use the idea of truthmaking to gain purchase on this metaphysics. Assuming a modest supervenience conception of truthmaking, where true relational predications require multiply dependent truthmakers, these are indispensable relations. Though some such relations are required, none are needed for internal relatedness, nor for several other kinds of relational predication. Discerning the metaphysically basic kinds of relations is fraught with uncertainties, but must be tackled if progress is to be made.

In this paper, we develop the notion of a natural convention, and illustrate its usefulness in a detailed examination of indirect requests in English. Our treatment of convention is grounded in Lewis’s seminal account; we do not here redefine convention, but rather explore the space of possibilities within Lewis’s definition, highlighting certain types of variation that Lewis de-emphasized. Applied to the case of indirect requests, which we view through a Searlean lens, the notion of natural convention allows us to give (...) a nuanced answer to the question: Are indirect requests conventional? In conclusion, we reflect on the consequences of our view for the understanding of the semantics/pragmatics divide. (shrink)

Grice observes that the primary discourse function of disjunction is the presentation of alternatives, each of which is relevant in the same way to a given topic. After a brief introduction , I offer in Chapter Two an account of Grice's observation and of further felicity conditions on disjunction, for example, the constraint against disjunctions in which one disjunct entails another. Using an enriched version of the Stalnakerian model of assertion, I define two constraints on information update--Relevant Informativity and Simplicity--and (...) show that these suffice to account for the observations. ;I then argue that the requirement to abide by Relevant Informativity and Simplicity provides a basis for an account of two further properties of disjunctive sentences: their presupposition projection properties and the possibility of anaphora between disjuncts. I argue that presuppositions project in disjunction except where projection would lead to infelicity of the kind characterized in Chapter Two. To state this account, a treatment of presupposition which allows projection to be sensitive to considerations of felicity is required. I show that the Stalnakerian view of presupposition, combined with Heim's notion of local accommodation, provides the necessary framework. ;Similarly, I argue that anaphora across disjunction is disallowed only when it leads to an infelicitous disjunction. In certain configurations, anaphora between disjuncts leads to entailment between disjuncts, which is ruled out independently. The account is given using a version of Neale's E-type analysis of unbound anaphora. I show that the analysis has further desirable consequences with respect to more complex examples of inter-disjunct anaphora. ;Throughout Chapters Three and Four, I contrast my own proposals with accounts given in the Dynamic Semantic literature, offering a critique of Dynamic Semantic approaches to the phenomena discussed. ;In Chapter Five, I examine anaphora between NPs contained inside a disjunction and a pronoun in a following sentence. I argue that these pronouns are also E-type, but show that these cases require a reformulation of the E-type analysis. I develop a new account in which the interpretation of E-type pronouns is derived compositionally from the content of the antecedent clause. (shrink)

The empirical phenomenon at the center of this paper is projection, which we define (uncontroversially) as follows: (1) Definition of projection An implication projects if and only if it survives as an utterance implication when the expression that triggers the implication occurs under the syntactic scope of an entailment-cancelling operator. Projection is observed, for example, with utterances containing aspectual verbs like stop, as shown in (2) and (3) with examples from English and Paraguayan Guaraní (Paraguay, Tupí-Guaraní).1 The Guaraní example in (...) (2) and its English translation have at least the following implications: (i) Carla has previously smoked, and (ii) Carla stopped smoking. The first but not the second of these implications is also conveyed by the question version of sentence (2), as in (3a), or when (2) is embedded under entailment-cancelling sentential operators, such as negation, as in (3b), the antecedent of a conditional, as in (3c), or an epistemic modal, as in (3d). Hence, by the definition in (14), the first but not the second implication of (2) projects. (shrink)

stanislaw lesniewski, Collected Works, Edited by Stanislaw J. Surma, Jan T. Srzednicki and D. I. Barnett, with an annotated bibliography by V. Frederick Rickey. Warsaw:PWN?Polish Scientific Publishers; and Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer. 2 vols., xvi + 794 pp. $274/£163/Dfl. 480.

The basic linguistic phenomenon of presupposition is commonplace and intuitive, little different from the relation described by the word presuppose in its everyday usage. In ordinary language, when we say that someone presupposes something, we mean that they assume it, or take it for granted. The term is used in the same way when we talk of a speaker presupposing something, although typically we are interested in those assumptions which are revealed by what the speaker says. To begin with the (...) most venerable case of presupposing, first discussed by Frege 1892, when a speaker makes an assertion, “there is always an obvious presupposition that the simple or compound proper names used have reference.” So a speaker who says. (shrink)