Mitchell S. Green presents a systematic philosophical study of self-expression - a pervasive phenomenon of the everyday life of humans and other species, which has received scant attention in its own right. He explores the ways in which self-expression reveals our states of thought, feeling, and experience, and he defends striking new theses concerning a wide range of fascinating topics: our ability to perceive emotion in others, artistic expression, empathy, expressive language, meaning, facial expression, and speech acts. He draws (...) on insights from evolutionary game theory, ethology, the philosophy of language, social psychology, pragmatics, aesthetics, and neuroscience to present a stimulating and accessible interdisciplinary work. (shrink)

What enables individually simple insects like ants to act with such precision and purpose as a group? How do trillions of individual neurons produce something as extraordinarily complex as consciousness? What is it that guides self-organizing structures like the immune system, the World Wide Web, the global economy, and the human genome? These are just a few of the fascinating and elusive questions that the science of complexity seeks to answer. In this remarkably accessible and companionable book, leading complex systems (...) scientist Melanie Mitchell provides an intimate, detailed tour of the sciences of complexity, a broad set of efforts that seek to explain how large-scale complex, organized, and adaptive behavior can emerge from simple interactions among myriad individuals. Comprehending such systems requires a wholly new approach, one that goes beyond traditional scientific reductionism and that re-maps long-standing disciplinary boundaries. Based on her work at the Santa Fe Institute and drawing on its interdisciplinary strategies, Mitchell brings clarity to the workings of complexity across a broad range of biological, technological, and social phenomena, seeking out the general principles or laws that apply to all of them. She explores as well the relationship between complexity and evolution, artificial intelligence, computation, genetics, information processing, and many other fields. Richly illustrated and vividly written, Complexity : A Guided Tour offers a comprehensive and eminently comprehensible overview of the ideas underlying complex systems science, the current research at the forefront of this field, and the prospects for the field's contribution to solving some of the most important scientific questions of our time. (shrink)

A leading classical utilitarian, John Stuart Mill is an unlikely contributor to the public reason tradition in political philosophy. To hold that social rules or political institutions are justified by their contribution to overall happiness is to deny that they are justified by their being the object of consensus or convergence among all those holding qualified moral or political viewpoints. In this chapter, I explore the surprising ways in which Mill nevertheless works to accommodate the problems and insights of the (...) public reason tradition, and the extent to which he makes arguments that can help those working within that tradition. Mill’s utilitarian theory incorporates the claim that the demands of social life require a publicly accepted set of normative expectations to govern judgments about when one has met one’s obligations and, relatedly, about the appropriateness of blame or punishment. (shrink)

My aim in this chapter is to place John Stuart Mill’s distinctive utilitarian political philosophy in the context of the debate about luck, responsibility, and equality. I hope it will reveal the extent to which his utilitarianism provides a helpful framework for synthesizing the competing claims of luck and relational egalitarianism. I attempt to show that when Mill’s distributive justice commitments are not decided by direct appeal to overall happiness, they are guided by three main public principles: an impartiality principle, (...) a sufficiency principle, and a merit principle. The question then becomes how luck and relational considerations figure into his articulation of these public principles. I argue that relational egalitarianism is more fundamental than considerations of luck and responsibility in Mill’s thought, but I also hope to show that any fleshed out picture of Mill’s reform proposals must recognize his condemnation of the role luck plays in determining the distribution of opportunities and outcomes. (shrink)

This article is part of a symposium on Bruce Cain's "Democracy More or Less: America’s Political Reform Quandary." It identifies the basic normative framework of Cain's skeptical "reform pluralism" as a form of democratic instrumentalism rather than political realism, and then argues that a more optimistic instrumentalist alternative is available. The instrumentalist can accept that more democracy need not entail better democracy. But the instrumentalist account of better democracy also gives us reason to believe that significant reform efforts remain worth (...) pursuing, for the simple reason that some of them have worked in the past. (shrink)

Hermeneutics, the Bible and Literary Criticism. Edited by Ann Loades and Michael McLain.The Craft of Theology: From Symbol to System. By Avery Dulles.The Shape of Soreriology. By John McIntyre.Not the Cross But the Crucfied. By H.‐E. Mertens.Verbum Curo: An Encyclopedia on Jesus, the Christ. By Michael O'Carroll.The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of the Early Liturgy. By Paul Bradshaw.Worship: Initiation and the Churches. By Leonel L. Mitchell.The Eucharistic Mystery: Revitalizing the Tradition. (...) By David Power.Church of Churches: The Ecclesiology of Communion. By J.‐M. Tillard.God and History, Aspects of British Theology 1875‐1914. By Peter Hinchliff.Clear Heads and Holy Hearts: The Religious and Theological Ideal of John Henry Newman. By Terrence Merrigan.The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community. By Graham Gould.John Moschos, ‘The Spiritual Meadow’. Introduction, translation and notes by John Wortley.A Gentle Touch. By David Pailin.The Eye of the Storm: Spiritual Resources for rhe Pursuit of Justice. By Kenneth Leech.The Church and the Arts. Edited by Diana Wood.Anti‐Christian Polemic in Early Islam: Abu Isa al‐Warraq's ‘Against the Trinity’. Edited by David Thomas.Bernardus Magister: Papers Presented at the Nonacentenary Celebration of the Birth of St Bernard of Clairvaux. Edited by John R. Sommerfeldt.Church and City 1000‐1500: Essays in Honour of Christopher Brooke. Edited by David Abulafia, Michael Franklin and Miri Rubin.‘Piers Plowman’ and the Problem of Belief. By Britton J. Harwood.Ignutius of Luyola: The Psychology of a Saint. By W. W. Meissner.Jerome Naahl, S. J., 1507‐1580: Tracking the First Generation of Jesuits. By William V. Bangert, edited and completed by Thomas M. McCoog.From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra d'Otranto. By David Gentilcore.Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII. By Laurie Nussdorfer.Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Essays. Translated by M. A. Screech.Montaigne and Melancholy: The Wisdom of the ‘Essays’. By M. A. Screech.Religion and Philosophy. Edited by Martin Warner.What is Faith? Essays in the Philosophy of Religion. By Anthony Kenny.Truth and Hisroriciry. By Richard Campbell. (shrink)

This draft entry is a brief overview of John Stuart Mill's moral and political philosophy, with an emphasis on his views on religion, for the Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Religion (Wiley-Blackwell).

The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 63, Issue 253, Page 819-821, October 2013.

In Survivance des lucioles, Georges Didi-Huberman cites sections from a letter in which Pier Paolo Pasolini describes an encounter with a swarm of fireflies. The sight of the fireflies triggers reflections on various topics on the part of Pasolini. However, at the end of his life, Pasolini lamented the fact that fireflies had disappeared in modern society, serving as a metaphor for the fact that he had lost all hope in the consumerist society in which he was living. Pasolini’s reflections (...) on fireflies illustrate Georges Didi-Huberman’s theories on the current state and politics of images in contemporary society. In this article, several key features of the politics of images, according to Didi-Huberman, are clarified, in particular, the role of pathos and imagination. It is on the role of pathos and imagination that Didi-Huberman’s views will diverge from the theories of other prominent theorists of images, such as Jacques Rancière, Roland Barthes, W.J.T. Mitchell and Bruno Latour. By clarifying these diverging views, the theories of Didi-Huberman can be formulated more precisely. (shrink)

Heidegger's later thought is a thinking of things, so argues Andrew J. Mitchell in The Fourfold. Heidegger understands these things in terms of what he names "the fourfold"--a convergence of relationships bringing together the earth, the sky, divinities, and mortals--and Mitchell's book is the first detailed exegesis of this neglected aspect of Heidegger's later thought. As such it provides entré to the full landscape of Heidegger's postwar thinking, offering striking new interpretations of the atomic bomb, technology, plants, animals, (...) weather, time, language, the holy, mortality, dwelling, and more. What results is a conception of things as ecstatic, relational, singular, and, most provocatively, as intrinsically tied to their own technological commodification. A major new work that resonates beyond the confines of Heidegger scholarship, The Fourfold proposes nothing less than a new phenomenological thinking of relationality and mediation for understanding the things around us. (shrink)

Aldo Leopold once declared that there were two “spiritual dangers” in not owning a farm, with one being “the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace”. The dangers that Leopold was signaling were various, of course, but in that essay they primarily gathered around the problems caused by human distance from nature’s operations, the manners in which we can become divorced from the roots of life by a failure to (...) recognize the processes from which food and heat derive. However, Leopold did not repudiate the technologies involved in running a farm-house, and he clearly recognized that significant paradoxes are involved in the use of... (shrink)

What precisely, W. J. T. Mitchell asks, are pictures (and theories of pictures) doing now, in the late twentieth century, when the power of the visual is said to be greater than ever before, and the "pictorial turn" supplants the "linguistic turn" in the study of culture? This book by one of America's leading theorists of visual representation offers a rich account of the interplay between the visible and the readable across culture, from literature to visual art to the (...) mass media. (shrink)

Illocutionary force and semantic content are widely held to occupy utterly different categories in at least two ways: Any expression serving as an indicator of illocutionary force must be without semantic content, and no such expression can embed. A refined account of the force/content distinction is offered here that does the explanatory work that the standard distinction does, while, in accounting for the behavior of a range of parenthetical expressions, shows neither nor to be compulsory. The refined account also motivates (...) a development of the "scorekeeping model" of conversation, helps to isolate a distinction between illocutionary force and illocutionary commitment, and reveals one precise respect in which meaning is only explicable in terms of use. (shrink)

We present a theoretical framework bearing on the evolution of written communication. We analyze writing as a special kind of graphic code. Like languages, graphic codes consist of stable, conventional mappings between symbols and meanings, but (unlike spoken or signed languages) their symbols consist of enduring images. This gives them the unique capacity to transmit information in one go across time and space. Yet this capacity usually remains quite unexploited, because most graphic codes are insufficiently informative. They may only be (...) used for mnemonic purposes or as props for oral communication in real-time encounters. Writing systems, unlike other graphic codes, work by encoding a natural language. This allows them to support asynchronous communication in a more powerful and versatile way than any other graphic code. Yet, writing systems will not automatically unlock the capacity to communicate asynchronously. We argue that this capacity is a rarity in non-literate societies, and not so frequent even in literate ones. Asynchronous communication is intrinsically inefficient because asynchrony constrains the amount of information that the interlocutors share and limits possibilities for repair. This would explain why synchronous, face-to-face communication always fosters the development of sophisticated codes (natural languages), but similar codes for asynchronous communication evolve with more difficulties. It also implies that writing cannot have evolved, at first, for supporting asynchronous communication. (shrink)

This articles gives an overview of the main themes and arguments of _Self-Expression_ (OUP,2007; paper, 2011), and responds to some recent publications in which that book is discussed. In the process of these responses, the article provides refinements and elaborations on some of the book's central claims.

A close study of Hesiod's understanding of the birth of Chaos as the beginning of the cosmos, in which I (1) show why this beginning is better interpreted as the differentiation of earth from Tartaros than as the splitting of earth from sky, (2) explicate the differentiation on three levels that structures the cosmos, and (3) reflect on the semantic and ethical implications that may have led Hesiod to this vision of the cosmos.

In philosophy textbooks for undergraduates the cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict is often cited as a proponent of moral relativism, and her writings are not infrequently excerpted to illustrate the view that the individual’s moral values are culturally determined. Because Benedict established that significant differences can exist in the underlying cultural patterns of different societies, her work is commonly construed as providing evidence for the arbitrary and non-rational basis of morals. The author of the present essay argues that this popular reading (...) of Benedict is mistaken. He draws a distinction between two different forms of moral relativism—the objective and the subjective—and then contends that Benedict is widely viewed as a subjective relativist when in fact her relativism was of the objective variety. He shows that her position actually has much in common with the pragmatic meliorism of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead. (shrink)

Most of us care about certain people and things, and some of these concerns become personal commitments, involving our values, our relationships, our work and our religious or political stances. But what is commitement, and why should it matter? Is social commitment - for example, to the family - being eroded by individualism or ironic detachment? And how should we deal with the potential tension between devotion to a life-stance, and the doubts prompted by pursuit of rational integrity? In this (...) work, Piers Benn delves into the relationship between commitment and meaningful life, and asks whether commitment must be based on truth to provide such meaning. He also explores obstacles to commitment such as boredom, sloth and indifference. Drawing on his own experience of dithering and procrastination, he suggests that a sceptical, cautious attitude to important matters can be both a virtue and a real obstacle to human fulfillment. (shrink)

This article approaches social media from the theory of the religio-political practice of acclamation revived by Agamben and following twentieth-century social and political thought and theology (of Weber, Peterson, Schmitt, Kantorowicz). It supplements that theory by more recent political-theoretical, historical and sociological investigations and regards acclamation as a ‘social institution’ following Mauss. Acclamation is a practice that forms publics, whether as the direct presence of the ‘people’, mass-mediated ‘public opinion’, or a ‘public mood’ decipherable through countless social media postings. The (...) article surveys issues of differential geographies of access, weighting of posts, value-creation, orality and gesture, algorithmic governmentality, and Big Data and knowledge production. It argues that social media constitute a public from a mass of individualized, private postings. It concludes that they make possible forms of political calculability and action, yet are continuous with ritual and liturgical elements of political life. This study contributes to an analytics of publicity. (shrink)

This book offers a thorough investigation into the development of the cognitive processes that underpin judgements about mental states (often termed 'theory of ...

This review essay of Victor Tadros’s new book, “The Ends of Harm: The Moral Foundations of Criminal Law,” responds to Tadros’s energetic and sophisticated attacks on retributivist justifications for criminal punishment. I argue, in a nutshell, that those attacks fail. In defending retributivism, however, I also sketch original views on two questions that retributivism must address but that many or most retributivists have skated past. First, what do wrongdoers deserve – to suffer? to be punished? something else? Second, what does (...) it mean for them to deserve it? That is, what is the normative force or significance of valid desert claims, either with respect to retributivist desert in particular or with respect to all forms of desert? Because the answers that this essay offers are preliminary, the essay also serves as a partial blueprint for further work by criminal law theorists with retributivist sympathies. (shrink)

This chapter provides both a general overview of the book and summaries of the subsequent chapters. Questions raised include: Is debate over the norms of practical rationality a theoretical matter? How do practical considerations enter into the theoretical domain? What is the relation between reasoning and rationality? Between reasons and rationality? Between rationality and consistency? Is it irrational to have false beliefs and bizarre preferences? Is it irrational to be immoral? Are we rational? Are the “standard” norms of rationality gender-biased?