© British Society of Aesthetics 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] interpretations of Kant’s ethics have tended to foreground its more humane characteristics, stressing the prominence of emotion, habituation and virtue, distancing us from the harsh and mechanical Kant of legend.1 At the same time there has been increasing interest among aestheticians in the moral significance of the aesthetic and in the role it may (...) play in moral development. The Possibility of Culture, a study of the role Kant ascribed to aesthetic experience in fostering the development of moral character, is thus timely and welcome. Murray draws upon texts not traditionally considered in studies of Kant’s aesthetics, especially the Anthropology and the Doctrine of Virtue, while placing relatively little emphasis on the well-worked questions surrounding the justification of judgements of... (shrink)

Excerpt from Spinoza and Time The Arthur Davis Memorial Lecture was founded in 1917, under the auspices of the Jewish Historical Society of England, by his collaborators in the translation of "The Service of the Synagogue," with the object of fostering Hebraic thought and learning in honour of an unworldly scholar. The Lecture is to be given annually in the anniversary week of his death, and the lectureship is to be open to men or women of any race or creed, (...) who are to have absolute liberty in the treatment of their subject. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

The Scottish Enlightenment provided the fledgling United States of America and its emerging universities with a philosophical orientation. For a hundred years or more, Scottish philosophers were both taught and emulated by professors at Princeton, Harvard and Yale, as well as newly founded colleges stretching from Rhode Island to Texas. This volume in the Library of Scottish Philosophy demonstrates the remarkable extent of this philosophical influence. Selections from William Smith, John Witherspoon, Samuel Stanhope Smith, Archibald Alexander, Alexander Campbell, W.E. (...) Channing, James McCosh, and C.S. Peirce, together with the editor's introductory and explanatory material, provide the modern reader with unprecedented access to this period of intellectual formation. (shrink)

The September 11th Victims Compensation Fund can only hesitatingly find its place within a comprehensive study of reparation programs. While the origin of the Fund lies in the political exigencies surrounding a perceived threat to the security of the United States, it more accurately reflects the desire by the U.S. Congress to ensure the viability of its nation’s air carriers. Unlike traditional reparations which are closely related to a process of social reintegration of the victim, fostering civic trust and social (...) solidarity, the Fund was not established to bring justice to the victims of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Also, unlike traditional reparations, the Fund did not seek to serve as a mechanism of corrective or distributive justice as a result of an authoritarian domestic regime or internal conflict. It was initially created out of fear that recourse to the U.S. courts would threaten the precarious financial health of the airline industry. Implicitly, however, such pragmatism reflected a desire by lawmakers that the government be seen as doing all it could to ease the pain of those who suffered so greatly on September 11, 2001. Initial motivations for the program aside, there is no question that the compensation scheme has since taken on a life of its own. Ultimately, the Fund’s contribution to any reparations case-study lies in its cautionary tale about the creation of elaborate administrative schemes that try to individualize recoveries as the mechanisms through which to compensate victims. (shrink)

Human culture is uniquely complex compared to other species. This complexity stems from the accumulation of culture over time through high- and low-fidelity transmission and innovation. One possible reason for why humans retain and create culture, is our ability to modulate teaching strategies in order to foster learning and innovation. We argue that teaching is more diverse, flexible, and complex in humans than in other species. This particular characteristic of human teaching rather than teaching itself is one of the (...) reasons for human’s incredible capacity for cumulative culture. That is, humans unlike other species can signal to learners whether the information they are teaching can or cannot be modified. As a result teaching in humans can be used to support high or low fidelity transmission, innovation, and ultimately, cumulative culture. (shrink)

BackgroundStudies on different methods to supplement the traditional informed consent process have generated conflicting results. This study was designed to evaluate whether participants who received group counseling prior to administration of informed consent understood the key components of the study and the consent better than those who received individual counseling, based on the hypothesis that group counseling would foster discussion among potential participants and enhance their understanding of the informed consent.MethodsParents of children participating in a trial of nutritional supplementation (...) were randomized to receive either group counseling or individual counseling prior to administration of the informed consent. To assess the participant's comprehension, a structured questionnaire was administered approximately 48-72 hours afterwards by interviewers who were blinded to the allocation group of the respondents.ResultsA total of 128 parents were recruited and follow up was established with 118 (90.2%) for the study. All respondents were aware of their child's participation in a research study and the details of sample collection. However, their understanding of study purpose, randomization and withdrawal was poor. There was no difference in comprehension of key elements of the informed consent between the intervention and control arm.ConclusionsThe results suggest that the group counseling might not influence the overall comprehension of the informed consent process. Further research is required to devise better ways of improving participants' understanding of randomization in clinical trials.Trial RegistrationClinical Trial Registry - India (CTRI): CTRI/2009/091/000612. (shrink)

Given the ubiquitous nature of love, numerous theories have been proposed to explain its existence. One such theory refers to love as a commitment device, suggesting that romantic love evolved to foster commitment between partners and enhance their reproductive success. In the present study, we investigated this hypothesis using a large-scale sample of 86,310 individual responses collected across 90 countries. If romantic love is universally perceived as a force that fosters commitment between long-term partners, we expected that individuals likely (...) to suffer greater losses from the termination of their relationships—including people of lower socioeconomic status, those with many children, and women—would place a higher value on romantic love compared to people with higher status, those with fewer children, and men. These predictions were supported. Additionally, we observed that individuals from countries with a higher (vs. lower) Human Development Index placed a greater level of importance on romantic love, suggesting that modernization might influence how romantic love is evaluated. On average, participants worldwide were unwilling to commit to a long-term romantic relationship without love, highlighting romantic love’s universal importance. (shrink)

The Philosophy Outreach Project gets high school students across Indiana thinking. POP creates alternative spaces for learning in classrooms, clubs, online, and conference settings. By curating philosophical content and fostering philosophical discussion, POP provides high school students with tools and a platform to engage with each other and the world. POP is run by three teams of Ball State students with a variety of different interests and backgrounds. POP's team includes students studying philosophy, psychology, English, communications, criminal justice, and more. (...) This diversity of interests and knowledge allows for an impressive level of collaboration, which is ultimately what makes POP successful in promoting and facilitating pre-college philosophy. (shrink)

Thomas S. Kuhn Thomas Samuel Kuhn, although trained as a physicist at Harvard University, became an historian and philosopher of science through the support of Harvard’s president, James Conant. In 1962, Kuhn’s renowned The Structure of Scientific Revolutions helped to inaugurate a revolution—the 1960s historiographic revolution—by providing a new image of science. For … Continue reading Kuhn, Thomas S. →.

Liberalism and Distributive Justice discusses liberalism, capitalism, distributive justice, and John Rawls's difference principle. Chapters are organized in a narrative arc: from liberalism as the dominant political and economic system, to the laws governing interpersonal transactions in liberal society, to basic economic and political institutions that determine distributive justice.

Professor Scott in his paper on ‘Eurynome and Eurycleia’ was inclined to believe, although he did not press the point, that Eurynome and Actoris were one and the same servant, the name Actoris being a patronymic. This explanation was offered also by Hayman, who compares Actorion , but it has been ignored by Wilamowitz and by van Leeuwen-Mendes da Costa, who reject ψ 226 sqq. It is an ingenious attempt to solve a small Homeric problem, and would be convincing but (...) for two reasons, of which the first has to do with the poet's manner and the second with the circumstances of the recognition scene in ψ. (shrink)

The notion of semantic descent made familiar by Quine is extended to a movement from the first-floor level of language use to the level of objects that language typically describes; descent here is to a basement level. The idea of such a descent is combined with the idea of qualification to produce what is called the ‘Semantic Descent’ account of metaphor. According to this account, metaphor first requires semantic descent to a level of non-linguistic objects, and these objects then fulfill (...) the predicative function described as qualification. The account is presented in a relatively minimalist way, to show how it copes with the features of metaphor discussed in Chapter 1, as well as provide a clear view of the obvious objections that might be raised against it. The latter centrally includes the fear that the use of objects as qualifiers might be too indeterminate. This is countered with a discussion of a notion called ‘attunement’. (shrink)

Examines the role of experience within Adorno’s philosophy of language and epistemology.

Les études qui portent sur la stigmergie, ou qui l'exploitent pour le développement et la compréhension d'autres objets – comme la cognition sociale, les communs créatifs ou les systèmes adaptatifs complexes par exemple –, connaissent un essor extraordinaire depuis la fin des années 1990 ([11], [12], [22], [38]), essor frappé d'un caractère encore très exploratoire, puisqu'il n'en existe pas à ce jour de théorie unifiée, cohérente et consensuelle. Elle avait pourtant un sens très précis et un...

Identifies, analyzes and critiques the philosophy's conceptual structure and theoretical groundwork.

We show that if a countable structure M in a finite relational language is not cellular, then there is an age-preserving $N \supseteq M$ such that $2^{\aleph _0}$ many structures are bi-embeddable with N. The proof proceeds by a case division based on mutual algebraicity.

Property-based models of the ownership of body parts are common. They are inadequate. They fail to deal satisfactorily with many important problems, and even when they do work, they rely on ideas that have to be derived from deeper, usually unacknowledged principles. This article proposes that the parent principle is always human dignity, and that one will get more satisfactory answers if one interrogates the older, wiser parent instead of the younger, callow offspring. But human dignity has a credibility problem. (...) It is often seen as hopelessly amorphous or incurably theological. These accusations are often just. But a more thorough exegesis exculpates dignity and gives it its proper place at the fountainhead of bioethics. Dignity is objective human thriving. Thriving considerations can and should be applied to dead people as well as live ones. To use dignity properly, the unit of bioethical analysis needs to be the whole transaction rather than the doctor-patient relationship. The dignity interests of all the stakeholders are assessed in a sort of utilitarianism. Its use in relation to body part ownership is demonstrated. Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights endorses and mandates this approach. (shrink)

Explaining Mental Illness est un manuel de sociologie sur la santé mentale dont l’ambition est explicitée dès l’introduction: il s’agit d’articuler les recherches sur la santé mentale avec la sociologie générale. Le livre est coécrit par Baptiste Brossard et Amy Chandler, tous les deux spécialistes de l’automutilation et du suicide, ainsi que chercheurs à l’université de York (Royaume-Uni). L’originalité de l’ouvrage se reflète dans son titre, il s’agit d’expliquer (explaining) la santé menta...

In this noblest of Epistles Horace has been warning Quinctius to trust his own judgement about his happiness—is he sapiens bonusque? . The plaudits of the people are fickle and can be withdrawn overnight. Only a man who is flawed and in need of treatment is delighted by false honour or upset by untrue defamation: the philosophic man is impervious to both. Horace, prompted by the words ‘pone, meum est’, illustrates the idea of defamation by reference to a very ancient (...) and traditional form of Italian popular justice—flagitatio ordefamatory dunning.The three charges made in the Horatian passage—thieving, homosexuality, and unfilial behaviour—also appear in the classic Plautine catalogue of flagitatio at Pseud. 360 ff., where the pimp Ballio is abused: ‘fur’ , ‘impudice’ , ‘parricida’. (shrink)

Post-industrial landscapes present a challenge to traditional means of aesthetic evaluation. This article examines the work of four artists and their contributions to an aesthetic vocabulary that can support art practices that engage places and systems rather than objects. Art presumes a manipulation of materials and places, a significant point for landscape reclamation which also requires a re-making of a site. The land reclamation projects and proposals of Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, and Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison are guides (...) to an aesthetics that expands to include ethical relationships and responsibility for the well-being of the environment and others. (shrink)

In Johan Huizinga’s most prolific study of play, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture he states that for play to be considered authentic, genuine and real it must be fun, free, spont...