This paper introduces the concept of moral residue to global health, and shows how its presence undermines crucial interventions and research, especially in the global south. Lingering feelings of anxiety, anger, blame or frustration often exist among local populations, where previous interventions or research have left traces of harm and/or exploitation. The existence of such feelings reflects the presence of moral residue, recognizing the moral experiences of epistemic injustices, which in turn undermines critical interventions and research through outright rejection or (...) passive non-compliance among affected populations. While such situations have been variously interpreted and relevant strategies developed to address the issues, little to no consideration is made on the implications of moral residue experiences in global health contexts and how to address them. This paper demonstrates the presence of moral residue in global health and proffers an African ethical approach, a harmony framework, for addressing moral residue issues, as part of a holistic approach towards tackling population health crises without compromising health gains for affected populations in the global south. (shrink)

Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad, says a Nigerian proverb. These words of wisdom re-echo in traditional approaches to mental health ethics in sub-Saharan Africa. Among many cultures in Nigeria, it is customary to subject persons with mental health illness, especially those who present with violent behavior, to physical restraint and beatings. The belief is that such subjugation could restore mental health in the early stages of madness. Physical restraint and beatings only form a part (...) of the healing process, as it also has communitarian cum spiritual aspects. The healing process is carried out by family members or community, who share in the life of the mentally ill person. Their... (shrink)

This volume includes translations of three separate Tibetan works composed by individuals who are now regarded as iconic figures of the Geluk school of Buddhism. The first work is Banisher of Ignorance: An Ornament of the Seven Treatises on Pramāṇa, by Khedrup Gelek Palsang (1385-1438), and the second is On Preclusion and Relationship, by Gyaltsab Darma Rinchen (1364-1432). The authors-popularly known as Khedrup Jé and Gyaltsab Jé-are represented as the foremost disciples of Tsongkhapa Losang Drakpa (1357-1419), and each succeeded him (...) as the Ganden throneholder. The third text, Mighty Pramāṇa Sun, a commentary on Candrakīrti's Clear Words (Prasannapadā), is by Jamyang Shepa (1648-1721), a later luminary in the Geluk school. These works concern themselves primarily with the Buddhist theory of knowledge-the means by which we are able to know things and how we can be certain of that knowledge. Encapsulating this theory is the notion of pramāṇa, a concept derived from India, the Buddhist understanding of which was shaped most significantly by the masters Dignāga (fifth to sixth century) and Dharmakīrti (seventh century). Based on their explanation, pramāṇa is often translated as "valid cognition," a literal reference to the kind of cognition that they proposed could be relied upon to supply indisputable knowledge. In recognition of the crucial role that reasoning is held to play in gaining certain knowledge, the Buddhist Pramāṇa tradition that the treatises of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti gave rise to is described as a logico-epistemological system. The works in this volume demonstrate how important a component scholastic rigor has been to Tibetan religion. They illustrate how those who follow the tradition have viewed the ordered, systematic approach as necessary not only for textual analysis, for those seeking to unravel the complexities of the Indian Buddhist scriptures and treatises, but also for practitioners aiming to progress along the spiritual path and achieve the higher Buddhist goals. (shrink)

According to the attentional resources account, mind wandering (or “task-unrelated thought”) is thought to compete with a focal task for attentional resources. Here, we tested two key predictions of this account: First, that mind wandering should not interfere with performance on a task that does not require attentional resources; second, that as task requirements become automatized, performance should improve and depth of mind wandering should increase. Here, we used a serial reaction time task with implicit- and explicit-learning groups to test (...) these predictions. Providing novel evidence for the attentional resource account’s first prediction, results indicated that depth of mind wandering was negatively associated with learning in the explicit, but not the implicit, group, indicating that mind wandering is associated with impaired explicit, but not implicit, learning. Corroborating the attention resource account’s second prediction, we also found that, overall, performance improved while at the same time depth of mind wandering increased. From an implicit learning perspective, these results are consistent with the claim that explicit learning is impaired under attentional load, but implicit learning is not. (shrink)

In recent years, the number of studies examining mind wandering has increased considerably, and research on the topic has spread widely across various domains of psychological research. Although the term “mind wandering” has been used to refer to various cognitive states, researchers typically operationalize mind wandering in terms of “task-unrelated thought” (TUT). Research on TUT has shed light on the various task features that require people’s attention, and on the consequences of task inattention. Important methodological and conceptual complications do persist, (...) however, in current investigations of TUT. As we argue, these complications may be dampening the development of a more nuanced scientific account of TUT. Here, we outline three of the more prominent methodological and conceptual complications in the literature on TUT, and we discuss potential directions for researchers to take as they move forward in their investigations of TUT. (shrink)

Academic writing, even in prestigious journals, is frequently ugly and arduous. The writing in academic philosophy is no exception, especially given philosophers’ tendency to overlook prose and to focus exclusively on philosophical content. This paper argues that good prose matters for moral, prudential, and philosophical reasons. After glossing these reasons, the authors offer advice, born of experience, to academic writers who want to achieve clear, effective prose. Their advice includes how to improve sentence structure (e.g. eliminate undue repetition and forms (...) of “to be,” be careful with comma use, evaluate sentences by reading them aloud), global considerations (e.g. use technical notation cautiously, avoid prose in footnotes, read and report opponents’ views with charity), how to practice reiterating the same point in different words (e.g. play language games likes crossword puzzles, read non-academic prose, aim to communicate one’s point succinctly), and the suggestion to take prose seriously in the evaluation of student work. (shrink)

o (2000), 243). In particular, the idea is that binding interactions between the relevant expressions and natural lan- guage quantifiers are best explained by the hypothesis that those expressions harbor hidden but bindable variables. Recently, however, Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore have rejected such binding arguments for the presence of hid- den variables on the grounds that they overgeneralize — that, if sound, such arguments would establish the presence of hidden variables in all sorts of ex- pressions where it is (...) implausible that they exist (Cappelen and Lepore (2005), Cappelen and Lepore (2002)).1 In what follows we respond to Cappelen’s and Lepore’s attempted reductio by bringing out crucial disanalogies between cases where the binding argument is successful and cases where it is not. But we have a deeper purpose than merely to respond to Cappelen and Lepore: we think the attempted reductio goes wrong by not taking sufficiently seriously the nature of the binding relation that holds between quantifiers and arguments/variables, and that our criticism will serve to highlight the nature and importance of this relation. (shrink)

Spirituality is a universal human experience. Within the process of development, the role of spirituality as a developmental asset is understudied in general and especially within majority world contexts. In this article, we frame advances in spirituality research and practice with youth around three pillars: (a) theory, (b) measurement, and (c) research about and evaluations of positive youth development (PYD) programs in low- and middle-income countries. We place PYD programs as associated with dynamic, relational developmental systems (RDS)-based models of human (...) development, describe spirituality and the “Big Three” features of effective PYD programs as aligning to promote thriving, and discuss spirituality as a strength, as a key asset, in the lives of youth. We discuss advances in developmental methods and measures for describing, explaining, and promoting spirituality and PYD and offer a case study that responds to a United States Agency for International Development call for action and evaluations of spirituality within the context of a PYD program in the majority world. Considerations for future research about spirituality and youth development are discussed. (shrink)

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to aid legal decision making has become prominent. This paper investigates the use of AI in a critical issue in employment law, the determination of a worker’s status—employee vs. independent contractor—in two common law countries (the U.S. and Canada). This legal question has been a contentious labor issue insofar as independent contractors are not eligible for the same benefits as employees. It has become an important societal issue due to the ubiquity of the gig (...) economy and the recent disruptions in employment arrangements. To address this problem, we collected, annotated, and structured the data for all Canadian and Californian court cases related to this legal question between 2002 and 2021, resulting in 538 Canadian cases and 217 U.S. cases. In contrast to legal literature focusing on complex and correlated characteristics of the employment relationship, our statistical analyses of the data show very strong correlations between the worker’s status and a small subset of quantifiable characteristics of the employment relationship. In fact, despite the variety of situations in the case law, we show that simple, off-the-shelf AI models classify the cases with an out-of-sample accuracy of more than 90%. Interestingly, the analysis of misclassified cases reveals consistent misclassification patterns by most algorithms. Legal analyses of these cases led us to identify how equity is ensured by judges in ambiguous situations. Finally, our findings have practical implications for access to legal advice and justice. We deployed our AI model via the open-access platform, https://MyOpenCourt.org/, to help users answer employment legal questions. This platform has already assisted many Canadian users, and we hope it will help democratize access to legal advice to large crowds. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore locative grounding harmony, according to which the location of the grounds mirrors the location of the grounded. We proceed in three stages. First, we clarify the notion of locative harmony and describe different locative harmony principles. Second, we offer two arguments for the claim that grounding between physically located entities obeys principles of locative harmony. Third, we consider and respond to a range of cases that seem to show that grounding relations between physically located entities (...) do not obey such principles. We conclude that grounding between such entities obeys locative harmony. (shrink)

There is a vast literature that seeks to uncover features underlying moral judgment by eliciting reactions to hypothetical scenarios such as trolley problems. These thought experiments assume that participants accept the outcomes stipulated in the scenarios. Across seven studies, we demonstrate that intuition overrides stipulated outcomes even when participants are explicitly told that an action will result in a particular outcome. Participants instead substitute their own estimates of the probability of outcomes for stipulated outcomes, and these probability estimates in turn (...) influence moral judgments. Our findings demonstrate that intuitive likelihoods are one critical factor in moral judgment, one that is not suspended even in moral dilemmas that explicitly stipulate outcomes. Features thought to underlie moral reasoning, such as intention, may operate, in part, by affecting the intuitive likelihood of outcomes, and, problematically, moral differences between scenarios may be confounded with non-moral intuitive probabilities. (shrink)

This book introduces concepts in philosophy of mind and neurophilosophy. Inside, three scholars offer approaches to the problems of identity, consciousness, and the mind. In the process, they open new vistas for thought and raise fresh controversies to some of the oldest problems in philosophy. The first chapter focuses on the identity problem. The author employs an explanatory model he christened sense-phenomenalism to defend the thesis that personal identity is something or a phenomenon that pertains to the observable/perceptible aspect of (...) the human person. The next chapter explores the problem of consciousness. It deploys the new concept equiphenomenalism as a model to show that mental properties are not by-products but necessary products of consciousness. Herein, the notion of qualia is a fundamental and necessary product that must be experienced simultaneously with neural activities for consciousness to be possible. The last chapter addresses the mind/body problem. It adopts the new concept proto-phenomenalism as an alternative explanatory model. This model eliminates the idea of a mind. As such, it approaches the mind-body problem from a materialistic point of view with many implications such as, the meaning of our existence, the possibility of thought engineering as well as religious implications. (shrink)

As research on mind wandering has accelerated, the construct’s defining features have expanded and researchers have begun to examine different dimensions of mind wandering. Recently, Christoff and colleagues have argued for the importance of investigating a hitherto neglected variety of mind wandering: “unconstrained thought,” or, thought that is relatively unguided by executive-control processes. To date, with only a handful of studies investigating unconstrained thought, little is known about this intriguing type of mind wandering. Across two experiments, we examined, for the (...) first time, whether changes in task demand influence rates of constrained versus unconstrained thoughts. In both experiments, participants completed either an easy (0-back) or hard (2-back) task and responded to intermittently presented thought probes that gauged thought constraint throughout the task. In Experiment 1, we found that participants completing the easy task engaged in unconstrained thoughts more frequently than those completing the difficult task. In Experiment 2, we replicated this result and further demonstrated manipulations of unconstrained thought while also measuring task-relatedness (a common dimension of mind wandering). Finally, exploratory analyses showed associations between constrained thought and age, verbal intelligence, and an assessment of flow (‘deep effortless concentration’), thereby adding further evidence to indicate a dissociation between task-relatedness and constraint. We discuss the methodological and theoretical applications of our findings to the burgeoning field of research on unconstrained thought. (shrink)

A miracle is defined as a violation of or intercession in the laws of nature. Some recent reports of UFO phenomena are such that UFOs may satisfy that definition. In this paper, we ask how Hume’s famous argument in “Of Miracles” relates to UFOs. We argue that his critique fails and that some well corroborated UFO reports are such that they justify a belief in miracles (qua violations of laws of nature).

Philosophy of mind as a branch of philosophy has been growing. With a vast array of literature stemming from Plato to Descartes, down to Daniel Dennett and Paul and Patricia Churchland, there is no doubt that a lot has been said in that area regarding the mind-body problem, consciousness, the role of the human brain, etc. More so, with the advancement in neuroscience, newer and more interesting discussions linking neuroscience to philosophy of mind is inevitable. Equally as interesting, is the (...) philosophical work that is done in relation to the development of Artificial Intelligence in terms of robotics, artificial intelligence systems, technology-based human enhancements, etc. In all these, the African perspective has been largely underexplored and the salient perspectives of modern and contemporary African philosophers are rarely engaged. What we do in this chapter is to present an overview of the general concerns of this book. This concern is two-fold – the first part tackles issues related to consciousness, identity, and the mind-body problem, and the second part generally deals with issues related to Artificial intelligence and human enhancement. (shrink)

This book offers a first glimpse into contemporary African Philosophical thought, which covers issues related to the mind-body relationships, the problem of consciousness, the ethics of artificial intelligence, the meaning of life and other topics. Taking inspiration from the conversational tradition in African philosophy, this book not only engages with and takes inspiration from traditional African thought, but also engages with philosophical views outside the philosophical tradition in a bid to present a holistic understanding of the problems that are central (...) to the book. The volume is relevant for professional African philosophers, philosophers of mind, philosophers of AI, undergraduate and postgraduate philosophy students, and African Studies scholars. (shrink)

Consider the utterances ‘our friendship is valuable’ and ‘I value our friendship’. On the face of it, these aren’t semantic equivalents: the former ascribes a property to our friendship, whereas the latter reports something about how I relate to our friendship. In this short paper, I first outline Samuel Scheffler’s account of valuing and of the difference between valuing and considering valuable. I then propose an amendment to his account of valuing, one which concerns how we interact with our (...) value-related emotions. Subsequently, I argue against Scheffler’s view of the distribution of valuing and considering valuable in the world. While I don’t deny that considering valuable without valuing is conceptually possible and indeed instantiated, I disagree that it’s typical within our evaluative lives. Next, I consider an obvious response to my empirical claim and sketch a dilemma which accompanies that response. Finally, I highlight two limits of my empirical claim. (shrink)

COVID-19 often manifests with different outcomes in different patients, highlighting the complexity of the host-pathogen interactions involved in manifestations of the disease at the molecular and cellular levels. In this paper, we propose a set of postulates and a framework for systematically understanding complex molecular host-pathogen interaction networks. Specifically, we first propose four host-pathogen interaction (HPI) postulates as the basis for understanding molecular and cellular host-pathogen interactions and their relations to disease outcomes. These four postulates cover the evolutionary dispositions involved (...) in HPIs, the dynamic nature of HPI outcomes, roles that HPI components may occupy leading to such outcomes, and HPI checkpoints that are critical for specific disease outcomes. Based on these postulates, an HPI Postulate and Ontology (HPIPO) framework is proposed to apply interoperable ontologies to systematically model and represent various granular details and knowledge within the scope of the HPI postulates, in a way that will support AI-ready data standardization, sharing, integration, and analysis. As a demonstration, the HPI postulates and the HPIPO framework were applied to study COVID-19 with the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO), leading to a novel approach to rational design of drug/vaccine cocktails aimed at interrupting processes occurring at critical host-coronavirus interaction checkpoints. Furthermore, the host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) relevant to COVID-19 were predicted and evaluated based on prior knowledge of curated PPIs and domain-domain interactions, and how such studies can be further explored with the HPI postulates and the HPIPO framework is discussed. (shrink)

Fragmentalism was originally introduced as a new A-theory of time. It was further refined and discussed, and different developments of the original insight have been proposed. In a celebrated paper, Jonathan Simon contends that fragmentalism delivers a new realist account of the quantum state—which he calls conservative realism—according to which: the quantum state is a complete description of a physical system, the quantum state is grounded in its terms, and the superposition terms are themselves grounded in local goings-on about (...) the system in question. We will argue that fragmentalism, at least along the lines proposed by Simon, does not offer a new, satisfactory realistic account of the quantum state. This raises the question about whether there are some other viable forms of quantum fragmentalism. (shrink)

It can be shown by means of a paradox that, given the Principle of Sufficient Reason, there is no conjunction of all contingent truths. The question is, or ought to be, how to interpret that result: _Quid sibi velit?_ A celebrated argument against PSR due to Peter van Inwagen and Jonathan Bennett in effect interprets the result to mean that PSR entails that there are no contingent truths. But reflection on parallels in philosophy of mathematics shows it can equally (...) be interpreted either as a proof that there are "too many" contingent truths to combine in a single conjunction or as a proof that the concept _contingent truth_ is indefinitely extensible and there is no such thing as "all contingent truths." Either interpretation would reconcile PSR with contingent truth, but the natural rationales of those interpretations are at odds. This essay argues that the second interpretation is a more satisfactory explanation of why, if PSR is true, there should be no conjunction of all contingent truths. This sheds new light on the nature of the explanatory demand embedded in PSR and uncovers a number of surprising implications for the commitments of rationalism. (shrink)

This article examines the conflict between people's associative duties and their wider obligations of global justice. After clarifying the nature of associative duties, it defends the view that such duties may be civic in nature: obtaining between citizens, not just friends and families. Samuel Scheffler's 'distributive objection' to civic associative duties is then presented in the context of global distributive injustice. Three solutions to the objection are considered. One is that the distributive objection is more a philosophical puzzle than (...) a practical problem because of the means by which global justice would be achieved. This is only partially correct. The second reply is that associative duties are additional to citizens' more cosmopolitan duties. This reply loses its purchase if global justice is conceived of in comparative terms. The third reply claims that associative duties are justified by genuine values and do not disappear even when over-ridden by more weighty moral concerns. While in practice, our duties to engineer global justice are likely to over-ride our associative duties in the near future, in ideal circumstances the two kinds of duties can co-exist. (shrink)

This new edition of Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge has been designed especially for the student reader. It also includes the four letters between George Berkeley and Samuel Johnson, written in 1729-30. The text is supplemented by a comprehensive introduction, an analysis of the text, a glossary, detailed notes, and a full bibliography with guidance on further reading. Published alongside Berkeley's other masterpiece, the Three Dialogues this new edition aims to give the reader a thorough introduction to the central (...) ideas of one of the world's greatest philosophers. (shrink)

‘No trace anywhere of life’, Samuel Beckett says, ‘pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine’.1 Imagination oscillates in Beckett’s dense text be...

In this article I argue that the 1729 Dissertation on Liberty and Neces­sity should be attributed to Anthony Collins. This was the prevailing view until the publication of James O’Higgins’s 1970 biography of Collins. Since then, most have followed Collins’s modern-day biographer in denying that Collins penned the Dissertation. After reviewing O’Higgins’s six reasons for rejecting Collins as the author, I respond to the substantive issues in what follows. Part I is a historical positioning of the Clarke-Collins liberty-necessity debate where (...) I discuss the debate’s context, Collins’s methods and disposition, and timeline issues pertinent to ascribing authorship of the Dissertation to Collins. Part II is a demonstration of the fittingness of the Dissertation as Collins’s response to the earlier debate regarding liberty and necessity he had with Samuel Clarke. (shrink)

According to Stewart Candlish, Russell and Moore had misunderstood F. H. Bradley’s monism. According to Jonathan Schaffer, they had misunderstood monism more generally. A key thread of the creation narrative of analytic philosophy, according to which Russell and Moore successfully undermined monism to give rise to a new movement is, therefore, in doubt. In this paper, I defend the standard narrative against those who seek to revise it.

Until comparatively recently, say the middle of the last century, spinal cord injury was fatal as pressure sores and other infections took their toll. Those with severe brain injuries, unable to move or even communicate, fared even worse; without movement or feeding such patients were nursed until nature took its course. Over the last few decades medical and nursing advances have enabled some of these vegetative patients to survive for considerable time, provoking, at times, ethical and legal dilemmas. Though they (...) survived, without overt behaviour or clear communication their carers were frequently unsure how much residual function remained. Now real progress is occurring in this area thanks to the application of neuro-scientific methods by some outstanding groups of workers. Subjects with severe brain injury may begin in complete, unresponsive coma but then ‘lighten’ to one of three categories. In vegetative state (VS), patients are apparently awake but without evidence of voluntary behaviour and have no apparent awareness of self or environment, whilst in minimally conscious state (MCS) patients have some behaviour beyond the reflex but are not able to communicate effectively. These conditions usually result from widespread brain damage at either or both cortical and subcortical levels due to injury or anoxia, though they can also be seen in end stage neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s. In locked in syndrome (LIS), patients ‘awake’ from coma, usually due to stroke, aware of their surroundings and their situation but unable to speak or move, beyond eye lid control and eye movement. For many, LIS will be recognised from Bauby’s extraordinary account in ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,’ though, incidentally, it was presaged in Samuel Beckett’s novella ‘The Unnameable.’ LIS reflects a profound disconnection between brain and body, except for the upper cranial nerves involved in eyelid movement. The overriding question is how much awareness these patients have.. (shrink)

This thousand-page book contains one third of the text of Samuel Pepys's diary, along with maps, a chronology, a glossary of archaic words, and an unusually helpful index, The diary, written in commercial short-hand, spans the 1660s, a decade in which power passed from the Roundheads to Charles II, London was ravaged by plague and then by fire, the English repeatedly fought the Dutch, and Pepys grew to be one of the most important civil servants in the land ("the (...) father of the English Navy", according to some). The diary, which I know only in this abridged version, has given me more sheer pleasure than any other book I have ever read. Writing for himself alone, Pepys had no sense of posterity looking over his shoulder with judgments about public, historic importance. He selected things for inclusion in the diary purely on the basis of how they struck him. This grand subjectivity would be fatal in a dull or passive or insensitive writer, but in Pepys it makes the work fresh and vibrant, constantly surprising, unlike anything else in literature. Even when describing an "important" scene, he is still his natural self and gives touches of his own behaviour, like this at the King's coronation: But so great a noise, that I could make but little of the Musique; and endeed, it was lost to everybody. But I had so great a list to pissse, that I went out a little while before the King had done all his ceremonies.... Not just his behavior, but also his reactions. (shrink)

Lewis et al. (2011) attempted to restore the reputation of Samuel George Morton, a 19th century physician who reported on the skull sizes of different folk-races. Whereas Gould (1978) claimed that Morton's conclusions were invalid because they reflected unconscious bias, Lewis et al. alleged that Morton's findings were, in fact, supported, and Gould's analysis biased. We take strong exception to Lewis et al.’s thesis that Morton was “right.” We maintain that Gould was right to reject Morton's analysis as inappropriate (...) and misleading, but wrong to believe that a more appropriate analysis was available. Lewis et al. fail to recognize that there is, given the dataset available, no appropriate way to answer any of the plausibly interesting questions about the “populations” in question (which in many cases are not populations in any biologically meaningful sense). We challenge the premise shared by both Gould and Lewis et al. that Morton's confused data can be used to draw any meaningful conclusions. This, we argue, reveals the importance of properly focusing on the questions asked, rather than more narrowly on the data gathered. (shrink)

In 1962, Harvard professor of anesthesiology Henry Beecher wrote to Senator Estes Kefauver about certain additions to the federal Food and Drug Act then being considered. According to The Antibiotic Era, the Maryland congressman Samuel Friedel had introduced language that would require informed consent in clinical research. Beecher joined a number of other distinguished medical scientists warning that such a requirement would “cripple” American medical research. A year before, Beecher had protested the U.S. Army's inclusion of the Nuremberg Code (...) in its contracts. Beecher's commitment to a medical ethics of virtue rather than one of oversight suggests that he was a far more interesting person than the cardboard cutout so often vaguely referenced in bioethics as an icon of the rights of human subjects. His thinking about research ethics was rooted in his post‐World War II laboratory work with LSD. (shrink)

A co-authored collaboration between a theatre practitioner and a clinical psychiatrist, this paper will examine Rough for Theatre II and Beckett’s demonstration of the way records are used to understand the human subject. Using Beckett’s play to explore interdisciplinary issues of embodiment and diagnosis, the authors will present a dialogue that makes use of the ‘best sources’ in precisely the same manner as the play’s protagonists. One of those sources will be Beckett himself, as Heron will locate the play in (...) its theatrical context through reflections upon his own practice as well as recent studies such as Beckett, Technology and the Body and Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama ; another source will be the philosopher Wilhelm Windleband, whose 1901 History of Philosophy was read and noted upon by Beckett in the 1930s, as Broome will introduce a philosophical and psychiatric context to the exchange. Windelband is now a neglected figure in philosophy; but as one of the key figures of Neo-Kantianism in the late 19th century, his work was an important impetus to that of Rickert, Weber and Heidegger. Specifically, Windelband gives us the distinction between idiographic and nomothetic understanding of individuals, an approach that is of relevance to the psychiatric encounter. This academic dialogue will consider tensions between subjectivity and objectivity in clinical and performance practice, while examining Beckett’s analysis of the use of case notes and relating them back to Windelband’s ideas on the understanding of others. The dialogue took place in 2011 at the University of Warwick, and has since been edited by the authors. (shrink)

Since it gained currency at the end of the second world war, the term “existentialism” has mostly been associated with a cultural movement that grew out of the wartime intellectual atmosphere of the Left Bank in Paris and spread through fiction and art as much as philosophy. The theoretical and other writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon in the 1940s and 1950s are usually taken as central to this movement, as are the sculptures of (...) Alberto Giacometti, the paintings of Jean Dubuffet, and the plays of Samuel Beckett from this time. Existentialism is frequently viewed, therefore, as an aesthetic movement rooted in certain philosophical thoughts and supplanting surrealism at the centre of European artistic fashion. This is the existentialism of black clothes and jazz clubs, coffee and cigarettes. (shrink)