It seems that an intuitive characterization of our emotional engagement with fiction contains a paradox, which has been labelled the ‘Paradox of Fiction’. Using insights into the nature of mental content gained from the disjunctive theory of perception I propose a novel solution to the Paradox, explained and motivated by reference to Kendall Walton’s influential account of fictionality. Using this insight I suggest that we can take the phenomenology of fictional engagement seriously in a way not allowed by Walton.

Port of Culture is a showcase of the images from a three year photographic project undertaken by photographer Pete Carr to capture the city of Liverpool in a different light. Award-winning photographer Carr is a specialist in HDR a technique that enables photographers to record a greater range of tonal detail than any camera could capture in a single photo, producing a 'painting-like' quality to the image. The end result is an incredible dynamic range of images capturing the many (...) moods of the city - from scenes of protests at the arrival of Condoleezza Rice, to local architecture old and new. Visually stunning, Port of Culture reveals the astonishing creativity of this young photographer while providing a wholly refreshing and entrancing take on a city evolving in front of our eyes. (shrink)

Humanitarian organisations often work alongside those responsible for serious wrongdoing. In these circumstances, accusations of moral complicity are sometimes levelled at decision makers. These accusations can carry a strong if unfocused moral charge and are frequently the source of significant moral unease. In this paper, we explore the meaning and usefulness of complicity and its relation to moral accountability. We also examine the impact of concerns about complicity on the motivation of humanitarian staff and the risk that complicity may lead (...) to a retreat into moral narcissism. Moral narcissism is the possibility that where humanitarian actors inadvertently become implicated in wrongdoing, they may focus more on their image as self-consciously good actors than on the interests of potential beneficiaries. Moral narcissism can be triggered where accusations of complicity are made and can slew decision making. We look at three interventions by Médecins Sans Frontières that gave rise to questions of complicity. We question its decision-guiding usefulness. Drawing on recent thought, we suggest that complicity can helpfully draw attention to the presence of moral conflict and to the way International Non-Governmental Organisations can be drawn into unintentional wrongdoing. We acknowledge the moral challenge that complicity presents to humanitarian staff but argue that complicity does not help INGOs make tough decisions in morally compromising situations as to whether they should continue with an intervention or pull out. (shrink)

The so-called subjectivity of conscious experience is central to much recent work in the philosophy of mind. Subjectivity is the alleged property of consciousness whereby one can know what it is like to have certain conscious states only if one has undergone such states oneself. I review neurophilosophical work on consciousness and concepts pertinent to this claim and argue that subjectivity eliminativism is at least as well supported, if not more supported, than subjectivity reductionism.

Numerous scholars have observed that the relationship between poverty and violent conflict is endogenous. As a result, the area of Peace Through Commerce argues as one of its central tenets that the institution of business may be able to contribute to sustainable peace by creating economic development where poverty is a critical issue. While this argument may be valid, it leaves the question open — what is the business case for engaging in poverty alleviation business strategies? Strategic Management scholars are (...) addressing this question, arguing the general proposition that poverty is not only experienced by the people, but also impacts businesses operating in environments where the phenomenon is pervasive. By addressing poverty, businesses can help themselves. Yet, organizational theory justifying this proposition is still emerging, consisting of only a few studies that generally suggest that these strategies can help firms develop competitive advantage through the lens of the resource-based view. This article extends the theoretical application of the resource-based view, suggesting that conditions of poverty directly suppress the value of organizational resources and capabilities that are or could be contributed by people affected by it. In addition, it characterizes poverty alleviation strategic capabilities as dynamic capabilities. Finally, it describes a framework of "base of the pyramid dynamic capabilities" that could guide both future discourse in the area and deductive-disconfirmatory research examining the efficacy of these strategies. (shrink)

This article takes as its starting point a recurring complaint in the popular reception of horror movies: that the characters in them behave foolishly. I argue that such complaints fail to recognize that the horror genre exploits a fundamental tension in fiction, between the perspective on a fictional world offered to its audience and that available to its characters. This distinction is highlighted in horror, which often depicts characters with everyday expectations facing extraordinary threats. Horror characters are frequently taken by (...) surprise, and even the better prepared can be thwarted by the malevolence of the generic world. The extent of characters’ misfortunes can resemble deliberate persecution, self-consciously flaunting authorial manipulation. I draw on Todorov’s notion of “pan-determinism” and suggest that a more sinister variant operates in horror. Occasionally, a character’s experiences can help equip them to survive; I argue that this can be inflected politically in films where the malevolent horror world is placed alongside forms of real-life persecution and abuse. Critical attention to the world of horror, and how it is understood from both the outside and within, can clarify the connections between different theoretical understandings of the genre and bring out important but overlooked generic conventions. (shrink)

This article examines the concept of a ‘terror of history’ in the work of historian of religion Mircea Eliade, particularly in his 1948 book The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History. The article turns to Eliade’s journals to trace the genesis of this concept, showing that this book which became a foundational text in the history of religions was originally conceived as a work on the philosophy of history. Tracing the incoherences and contradictions of this ‘terror’ in the (...) context of his wartime diary entries, the continuity of Eliade’s thought from his time as an outspoken supporter of the Romanian Iron Guard in the 1930s to his publication of Cosmos and History in 1948 becomes clear. Eliade’s ‘terror,’ it is shown, is conditioned by his despair at the retreat and collapse of the European fascist powers, but is more fundamentally an expression of horror toward the dissolution and loss of identity that he associates with historicity and, indeed, with difference itself. As this article shows, Eliade’s solution was not an ‘eternal return’ but rather an eternal escape from history, a religious oblivion that would collapse all events into ‘archetypes’ and blot out the horror of history and difference. (shrink)

Volume 3, Issue 1, March 2019, Page 76-80.

This book is not another lecture about the greed, self-centeredness, and self-aggrandizement of managers who perpetrated and profited from the failures of their ...

In this follow-up to How to Pray, Pete Greig turns his attention to one of the most pressing and perplexing questions of our time: How to Hear God. Writing with characteristic humor and humanity, he draws deeply from the rich insights of a range of Christian traditions, adding his own hard-won discoveries.

In this highly accessible new introductory textbook, Pete Woodcock examines the fundamental questions of political theory. He takes students step-by-step through the most important answers given by history's most famous thinkers to the most essential questions in politics, on topics ranging from liberty and justice to gender and revolution.

In this paper, we discuss the thesis of selective representing — the idea that the contents of the mental representations had by organisms are highly constrained by the biological niches within which the organisms evolved. While such a thesis has been defended by several authors elsewhere, our primary concern here is to take up the issue of the compatibility of selective representing and realism. In this paper we hope to show three things. First, that the notion of selective representing is (...) fully consistent with the realist idea of a mind-independent world. Second, that not only are these two consistent, but that the latter provides the most powerful perspective from which to motivate and understand the differing perceptual and cog- nitive profiles themselves. And third, that the sense in which organism and environment may together constitute an integrated system of scientific interest poses no additional threat to the realist conception. (shrink)

I propose and defend the Allocentric-Egocentric Interface Theory of Con- sciousness. Mental processes form a hierarchy of mental representations with maxi- mally egocentric (self-centered) representations at the bottom and maximally allocentric (other-centered) representations at the top. Phenomenally conscious states are states that are relatively intermediate in this hierarchy. More speci.

Many so-called problems in contemporary philosophy of mind depend for their expression on a collection of inter-defined technical terms, a few of which are qualia, phenomenal property, and what-it’s-like-ness. I express my scepticism about Keith Frankish’s illusionism, the view that people are generally subject to a systematic illusion that any properties are phenomenal, and scout the relative merits of two alternatives to Frankish’s illusionism. The first is phenomenal meta-illusionism, the view that illusionists such as Frankish, in holding their view, are (...) themselves thereby under an illusion. The second is qualia quietism, the view that nothing worth saying is said by employing any of the aforementioned inter-defined technical terms. (shrink)

Introduction: What is philosophy of mind? -- The key terms -- The key thinkers -- The key texts.

Human engagement with nonhuman animals in motion pictures is a complex process that anthropomorphism and identification misconstrue. A superior model comes from cognitive theories of how spectators engage characters, particularly Smith , who suggests modifications to account for the nuances of spectator engagement with nonhuman animal characters. The central components of this amended model include the person schema, the three types of cues that films use to activate the person schema, and what Smith calls the "Structure of Sympathy." Such a (...) model enables us to understand better the role that moving image representations of nonhuman animals play in human-animal relationships. (shrink)

Abstract In this paper I embrace what Brian Keeley calls in “Of Conspiracy Theories” the absurdist horn of the dilemma for philosophers who criticize such theories. I thus defend the view that there is indeed something deeply epistemically wrong with conspiracy theorizing. My complaint is that conspiracy theories apply intentional explanations to situations that give rise to special problems concerning the elimination of competing intentional explanations.

This article tackles problems concerning the reduction of phenomenal consciousness to brain processes that arise in consideration of specifically epistemological properties that have been attributed to conscious experiences. In particular, various defenders of dualism and epiphenomenalism have argued for their positions by assuming special epistemic access to phenomenal consciousness. Many physicalists have reacted to such arguments by denying the epistemological premises. My aim in this paper is to take a different approach in opposing dualism and argue that when we correctly (...) examine both the phenomenology and neural correlates of phenomenal consciousness we will see that granting the epistemological premises of special access are the best hope for a scientific study of consciousness. I argue that essential features of consciousness involve both their knowability by the subject of experience as well as their egocentricity, that is, their knowability by the subject as belonging to the subject. I articulate a neuroscientifically informed theory of phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

The goal of the present paper is to defend against a certain line of attack the view that conscious experience of color is no more fine-grained that the repertoire of non- demonstrative concepts that a perceiver is able to bring to bear in perception. The line of attack in question is an alleged empirical argument - the Diachronic Indistinguishability Argument - based on pairs of colors so similar that they can be discriminated when simultaneously presented but not when presented across (...) a memory delay. My aim here is to show that this argument fails. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:We develop the concept of stakeholder salience to account for stakeholders who should matter to the firm, even when managers do not perceive them as important. While managers are responsible for attributing salience to stakeholders, they can overlook or ignore stakeholder importance because of market frictions that affect managerial perceptions or induce opportunism. When this happens, corporate financial and social performance can suffer. Thus, we propose that the perceptions of organizational and societal stakeholders should also codetermine the salience of the (...) focal stakeholder to the firm. We also propose that stakeholder dialogue can reduce the impacts that market frictions can have on managerial perceptions of stakeholder interests that should matter to the firm. Finally, we discuss how the refined conceptualization of stakeholder salience might have better predictive validity, be more normative, and make instrumental and normative stakeholder theory more convergent. (shrink)

The majority of contemporary philosophers of mind are physicalists. The majority of physicalists, however, are non-reductive physicalists. As nonreductive physicalists, these philosophers hold that a system's mental properties are different from a system's physical properties, that is, they hold that the sum total of mental facts about some system is a different set of facts than the sum total of physical facts about the same system. As physicalists, however, these nonreductivists hold that mental facts are nonetheless determined by physical facts, (...) that is, they subscribe to the supervenience thesis, i.e., the thesis that no mental differences can obtain without physical differences obtaining. In this paper I take up the issue of how best to understand the notion of supervenience, especially in the light of recent advances in the neurosciences. (shrink)

I respond to the separate commentaries by Jacob Berger, Charlie Pelling, and David Pereplyotchik on my paper, “Color-Consciousness Conceptualism.” I resist Berger’s suggestion that mental colors ever enter consciousness without accompaniment by deployments of concepts of their extra-mental counterparts. I express concerns about Pelling’s proposal that a more uniform conceptualist treatment of phenomenal sorites can be gained by a simple appeal to the partial overlap of the extensions of some concepts. I question the relevance to perceptual consciousness of the arguments (...) for demonstrative concepts that Pereplyotchik attacks. (shrink)

This article addresses the perennial picture of the human as rational animal, the nexus of trends undermining the cultural legacy of classical humanism, and the so-called posthumanisms that embrace its dissolution. Against critical posthumanism, which aims to break with humanism entirely, and in contrast to transhumanism, which uncritically inherits certain features of humanism, I outline an alternative – rationalist inhumanism – which critically extracts the inhuman core of humanism by unbinding rationality from animality. I begin by re-examining the history of (...) humanism leading up to the posthuman nexus, in order to highlight the features that can be repurposed by inhumanism. I then weave these features into an outline of a genealogy of reason, encompassing its genesis in, co-evolution with, and eventual liberation from the animal that is Homo sapiens. (shrink)

s Gibson (1982) correctly points out, despite Quine’s brief flirtation with a “mitigated phenomenalism” (Gibson’s phrase) in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, Quine’s ontology of 1953 (“On Mental Entities”) and beyond left no room for non-physical sensory objects or qualities. Anyone familiar with the contemporary neo-dualist qualia-freak-fest might wonder why Quinean lessons were insufficiently transmitted to the current generation.

Though the following problem is not explicitly raised by her, it seems sufficiently similar to an issue of pertinence to Akins's "Black and White and Color" (this volume) to merit the moniker, Akins's Problem : Can there be a visual experience devoid of both color phenomenology and black-and-white phenomenology? The point of the present paper is to draw from Akins's paper the materials needed to sketch a case for a positive answer to Akins's Problem. I am unsure about how much (...) of what follows Akins will want to endorse, but I hope this helps move us forward in our collective pursuit of a theory of visual consciousness. (shrink)

This article discusses the phase of education that precedes the undergraduate phase, drawing on Aristotle to outline a solution to the 'spoon-feeding-and-teaching-to-the-test' culture. It also says something about how philosophy, when included in this earlier phase of education, can address these problems.

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Control consciousness is the awareness or experience of seeming to be in control of one’s actions. One view, which I will be arguing against in the present paper, is that control consciousness is a form of sensory consciousness. In such a view, control consciousness is exhausted by sensory elements such as tactile and proprioceptive information. An opposing view, which I will be arguing for, is that sensory elements cannot be the whole story and must be supplemented by direct contributions of (...) nonsensory, motor elements. More specifically, I will be arguing for the view that the neural basis of control consciousness is constituted by states of recurrent activation in relatively intermediate levels of the motor hierarchy. (shrink)

Realism about consciousness conjoins a claim that consciousness exists with a claim that the existence is independent in some interesting sense. Consciousness realism so conceived may thus be opposed by a variety of anti-realisms, distinguished from each other by denying the first, the second, or both of the realist’s defining claims. I argue that Dennett’s view of consciousness is best read as an anti-realism that affirms the existence of consciousness while denying an important independence claim.

John Mullarkey. Bergson and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 206 pp. ISBN 0 7486 0957 1 (paperback), US$20; Keith Ansell Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual : Bergson and the Time of Life (London: Routledge, 2002), 246 pp. ISBN 0 415 23727 0 (cloth), US$90, 0 415 23728 9 (paperback), US$27.95; Leonard Lawlor, The Challenge of Bergson: Phenomenology, Ontology, Ethics (New York: Continuum, 2003), 153 pp. ISBN 0 8264 6802 0 (cloth), US$73.50, 0 8264 6803 9 (paperback), (...) US$24.95; John Mullarkey, ed., The New Bergson [Angelaki Humanities] (New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), 235 pp. ISBN 0 7190 5380 3 (cloth), US$69.95; 0 7190 5553 9 (paperback), US$29.95; John Mullarkey and Keith Ansell Pearson, eds., Bergson: Key Writings [Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers], trans. Melissa McMahon (New York: Continuum, 2002), 402 pp. ISBN 0 8264 5728 2 (cloth), US$99.95, 0 8264 5729 0 (paperback), US$33.95. (shrink)

I argue for the superiority of non-gappy physicalism over gappy physicalism. While physicalists are united in denying an ontological gap between the phenomenal and the physical, the gappy affirm and the non-gappy deny a relevant epistemological gap. Central to my arguments will be contemplation of Swamp Mary, a being physically intrinsically similar to post-release Mary (a physically omniscient being who has experienced red) but has not herself (the Swamp being) experienced red. Swamp Mary has phenomenal knowledge of a phenomenal character (...) not instantiated by any of her past or current mental states. I issue a challenge to gappy physicalists to account for how it is that Swamp Mary can satisfy the psychosemantic requirements on phenomenal knowledge while non-Swamp pre-release Mary cannot. I argue that gappy physicalists cannot meet this psychosemantic challenge. (shrink)