This article demonstrates the potential of using hierarchical Bayesian methods to relate models and data in the cognitive sciences. This is done using a worked example that considers an existing model of category representation, the Varying Abstraction Model (VAM), which attempts to infer the representations people use from their behavior in category learning tasks. The VAM allows for a wide variety of category representations to be inferred, but this article shows how a hierarchical Bayesian analysis can (...) provide a unifying explanation of the representational possibilities using 2 parameters. One parameter controls the emphasis on abstraction in category representations, and the other controls the emphasis on similarity. Using 30 previously published data sets, this work shows how inferences about these parameters, and about the category representations they generate, can be used to evaluate data in terms of the ongoing exemplar versus prototype and similarity versus rules debates in the literature. Using this concrete example, this article emphasizes the advantages of hierarchical Bayesian models in converting model selection problems to parameter estimation problems, and providing one way of specifying theoretically based priors for competing models. (shrink)

All accounts of language acquisition agree that, by around age 4, children’s knowledge of grammatical constructions is abstract, rather than tied solely to individual lexical items. The aim of the present research was to investigate, focusing on the passive, whether children’s and adults’ performance is additionally semantically constrained, varying according to the distance between the semantics of the verb and those of the construction. In a forced‐choice pointing study (Experiment 1), both 4‐ to 6‐year olds (N = 60) and (...) adults (N = 60) showed support for the prediction of this semantic construction prototype account of an interaction such that the observed disadvantage for passives as compared to actives (i.e., fewer correct points/longer reaction time) was greater for experiencer‐theme verbs than for agent‐patient and theme‐experiencer verbs (e.g., Bob was seen/hit/frightened by Wendy). Similarly, in a production/priming study (Experiment 2), both 4‐ to 6‐year olds (N = 60) and adults (N = 60) produced fewer passives for experiencer‐theme verbs than for agent‐patient/theme‐experiencer verbs. We conclude that these findings are difficult to explain under accounts based on the notion of A(rgument) movement or of a monostratal, semantics‐free, level of syntax, and instead necessitate some form of semantic construction prototype account. (shrink)

According to the Standard Model account of religion, religious concepts tend to conform to “minimally counterintuitive” schemas. Laypeople may, to varying degrees, verbally endorse the abstract doctrines taught by professional theologians. But, outside the Sunday school exam room, the implicit representations that tend to guide people’s everyday thinking, feeling, and behavior are about minimally counterintuitive entities. According to the Standard Model, these implicit representations are the essential thing to be explained by the cognitive science of religion. It (...) is argued here that this theoretical orientation of mainstream CSR misses a whole dimension of religiosity—the acceptance of certain religious authorities, that is, the acceptance of other people’s superior expertise. Average believers tend to accept the authority of religious experts who espouse highly counterintuitive ideas that they understand in a distorted form, if at all.... (shrink)

§1. Introduction. After the pioneering work of Mostowski [29] and Lindström [23] it was Jon Barwise's papers [2] and [3] that brought abstract model theory and generalized quantifiers to the attention of logicians in the early seventies. These papers were greeted with enthusiasm at the prospect that model theory could be developed by introducing a multitude of extensions of first order logic, and by proving abstract results about relationships holding between properties of these logics. Examples of such properties (...) areκ-compactness.Any set of sentences of cardinality ≤ κ, every finite subset of which has a model, has itself a model.Löwenheim-Skolem Theorem down toκ.If a sentence of the logic has a model, it has a model of cardinality at most κ.Interpolation Property.If ϕ and ψ are sentences such that ⊨ ϕ → Ψ, then there is θ such that ⊨ ϕ → θ, ⊨ θ → Ψ and the vocabulary of θ is the intersection of the vocabularies of ϕ and Ψ.Lindstrom's famous theorem characterized first order logic as the maximal ℵ0-compact logic with Downward Löwenheim-Skolem Theorem down to ℵ0. With his new concept of absolute logics Barwise was able to get similar characterizations of infinitary languagesLκω. But hopes were quickly frustrated by difficulties arising left and right, and other areas of model theory came into focus, mainly stability theory. No new characterizations of logics comparable to the early characterization of first order logic given by Lindström and of infinitary logic by Barwise emerged. What was first called soft model theory turned out to be as hard as hard model theory. (shrink)

Based on architectural projects which interpret literature as program we discuss design reasoning when no routine models of problem solving apply. We address three aspects of formulation: defining the design charge so that it can be retrospectively stated independent of the actual proposal; defining a language of formal operations; and defining the intrinsic aims of design that are only intimated through the proposal itself. The coherence of the project is a function of the way in which formal properties interact, and (...) the way in which they sustain analogical or metaphorical relationships to text: how the patterns of subdivision, connection, differentiation, positioning, movement or perception associated with built space relate to textual figures, concepts, structure, or narrative. The possibility of constructing architectural meaning in this way implies an underlying model of space as a morphic language which works primarily through the constitution of generic and significant relationships rather than the combination of previously objectified elements. The gradual articulation of the design charge is mediated by a process of diagramming. Diagrams express as spatial constructions the conditions and concepts abstracted from text; also, they act as notations of constructive operations which are themselves spatial. Diagrams can be abstractive or pictorial, dense or discrete. They document two aspects of an integral process of reasoning: First, an exploration of how concepts, whether directly, analogically or metaphorically transferred from text to shape, may relate to produce a more complex idea; second, how formal properties co-vary and how an emergent design proposal engages and activates a field of formal possibility. (shrink)

Achieving accurate skin tones is one of the most challenging tasks in digital photography. Master this challenge with professional photographer Lee Varis as he covers a range of skin: women and men, young and old, various tones, in-studio and outdoors, tattoos, and more. His step-by-step tutorials and before-and-after illustrations demonstrate various techniques for topics such as digital-specific lighting challenges and what can and cannot be done in post-process. A free CD-ROM accompanies the book and contains sample image files to use (...) while following the tutorials, plus equipment recommendations and technical reference materials that enhance and reinforce the instruction. Order your copy of this practical guide today and get a complete start-to-finish approach to integrating everything from posing models to shooting and retouching candid scenes. (shrink)

According to usage‐based approaches to language acquisition, linguistic knowledge is represented in the form of constructions—form‐meaning pairings—at multiple levels of abstraction and complexity. The emergence of syntactic knowledge is assumed to be a result of the gradual abstraction of lexically specific and item‐based linguistic knowledge. In this article, we explore how the gradual emergence of a network consisting of constructions at varying degrees of complexity can be modeled computationally. Linguistic knowledge is learned by observing natural language utterances (...) in an ambiguous context. To determine meanings of constructions starting from ambiguous contexts, we rely on the principle of cross‐situational learning. While this mechanism has been implemented in several computational models, these models typically focus on learning mappings between words and referents. In contrast, in our model, we show how cross‐situational learning can be applied consistently to learn correspondences between form and meaning beyond such simple correspondences. (shrink)

In this study, Consistency and Balance Model (CBM) is proposed and introduced. In the context of the model, the importance of consistency is emphasized in morality just like in Philosophy. Therefore, CBM gives the reason prominence in morality to ensure the consistency and according to CBM the emotion, the intuition and the conscience in addition to the reason, are also important. In order to see the principles determined by the reason in human behaviors, two kinds of classification are (...) developed for the virtues that is defined as the middle of excess and defect. The first of them is the triple classification of virtues that draws attention to the false existence of virtues and determines the opposite of virtues as forming dichotomy. The latter is the tetrad classification, which is based on the duality of two means that propose to consider the virtues together. The Contrast is considered as the central concept in the first classification and the integration is considered as the central concept in the second classification. Then it is offered that the virtues may be evaluated consistently in the social, global and theological contexts. However, the ideal morality with objective qualities and the real morality with subjective qualities are produced in order to reach the universal morality that is determined by the reason, then the consistency and the integration are proposed for them. Similarly, consistency and integration are proposed in the dualities of principle-virtue, abstract-concrete, intention-outcome, universality-locality, objectivity-subjectivity throughout the study. Finally, it is pointed out that the reasonableness of applying consistency in morality has exceptions.Summary: Philosophy is the logical, systematic and consistent thinking that focuses on specific questions and topics to reach the reality. When this basic tendency of philosophy is applied to morality, logical, systematic and consistent actions are expected to emerge. Accordingly, a new model called as Consistency and Balance Model (CBM) is proposed and introduced in this article. By this model, the importance of consistency is emphasized in morality just like in philosophy. Therefore, CBM gives the reason prominence in morality to ensure thought, expression and behavior consistency. According to CBM the human emotion, the divine intuition and the solid conscience in addition to reason are required to determine the virtues. CBM, which is a synthesis of the good intention and the reason, aims to constitute the sensible and good actions. According to CBM, which has a holistic structure, if a person can adopt the virtue as a principle and reflect the virtue in all of his behaviors during his whole life, he can be defined as consistently virtuous.CBM defines the good with the concepts of consistency and balance. According to CBM, the good is the mean of excess and defect. In this respect, CBM is based on Aristotle’s mean idea. However, CBM aims to develop it with new content. Two important questions arise during the identification of the evil: 1. Is it bad that nothing happens? 2. Is it bad that something is wrong? The point of defect represents the absence and the point of excess represents the fallacy in the entity. Both of them are bad in morality. The middle of them is the virtue. In order to see the principles determined by the reason in human behaviors, two kinds of classification are developed for the virtues which are defined as the middle of excess and defect. The first is the triple classification of virtues that draws attention to the false existence of virtues and determines the opposite of virtues as forming dichotomy. The triple classification, which forms a dichotomy as an empty pattern that can be applied to all virtues, is determined as over virtue-virtous-virtueless. According to CBM the opposite of the mean is always clearly the point of defect and implicitly the point of excess. Therefore, it is important to determine extremes of virtues. The point of defect can be briefly denoted as virtueless. The point of excess can be denoted as in fact virtueless, pretending as virtuous, masked virtue and over virtue. The latter is the tetrad classification, which is based on the duality of two means. In this classification, it is possible to produce new and better virtues by considering two virtues together. The Contrast is considered as the central concept in the first classification and the integration is considered as the central concept in the second classification.The principle is seen as a guarantee for the consistency in philosophy. CBM points out that a similar situation should be in ethics. According to Kant, the invisible internal principles of the actions are more important than the actions themselves to determine the moral value. The principle does not vary according to the individual and the condition, on the contrary, the individual is shaped by the principle and all individuals benefit equally from the outcome of the principle. Thus, the abuse of the rights of individuals with arbitrary treatments and double standards are prevented. In this democratic environment formed by the principle not only the owner of the power, but all right holders can get their rights. In this respect, the adherence to the principle is the guarantee of the rights and the freedom by establishing a balance between the rule and the freedom.Aristotle’s virtue and Kant’s principle are discussed in a holistic manner in this study. Thus, it is aimed that the principles in the human mind and the virtues in human actions are consistent in themselves and ultimately the union of the principles and the virtues can be ensured. Besides, the concepts of the ideal morality and the real morality are introduced in this article. The ideal morality takes place on the objective basis of the good and the truth, which is absolute, universally and unarguably accepted by everyone. The ideal morality with its objective qualities can be seen as the target that people know and want to achieve. The real morality is the morality that is shaped in the people or society in all its positive and negative aspects, which also includes the subjectivity of them as their own realities. The real morality with subjective qualities is the morality that occurs in life. CBM aims at the integrity and the consistency between the ideal morality and the real morality to reach the universal morality. In this article, the virtues are divided into two parts as material and spiritual. Then it is offered that the virtues may be evaluated consistently in the principal, individual, social, global and theological contexts. In this context, on the one hand it is aimed that the principal, individual, social, global and theological virtues are consistent within themselves and on the other hand they all are consistent within each other. In this classification the principal and theological morality have objective qualities and the individual and social morality have subjective qualities. CBM aims at an objectivity that incorporates subjectivity within the consistency and integrity of the principal, individual, social, global and theological morality. CBM aims to achieve the ultimate morality by integrating the starting point as the principal morality and the end point as the theological morality and to make them clear in the individual and social morality. As a result, CBM confirms the mean found by reason, by the revelation given by God. In other words, the morality that God has already there and always presents and the morality that the human mind finds here and now coincide. The consistency and integration are also proposed in the dualities of principle-virtue, abstract-concrete, intention-outcome, universality-locality, objectivity-subjectivity in the article. However, consistency, which is the central concept of the article, can form the basis for possible criticisms. But, it can be foreseen that the possible criticisms oriented to CBM would come from an extreme consistency perception that detaches the concept of consistency from reality without careful consideration. For this reason it should be kept in mind that it is wrong to expect excessive consistency in human behavior and to accept the ideal morality as absolute by neglecting the real morality. Finally, it is pointed out that the reasonableness of applying the consistency in morality has exceptions. (shrink)

New types of artificial intelligence products are gradually transferring to voice interaction modes with the demand for intelligent products expanding from communication to recognizing users' emotions and instantaneous feedback. At present, affective acoustic models are constructed through deep learning and abstracted into a mathematical model, making computers learn from data and equipping them with prediction abilities. Although this method can result in accurate predictions, it has a limitation in that it lacks explanatory capability; there is an urgent need for (...) an empirical study of the connection between acoustic features and psychology as the theoretical basis for the adjustment of model parameters. Accordingly, this study focuses on exploring the differences between seven major “acoustic features” and their physical characteristics during voice interaction with the recognition and expression of “gender” and “emotional states of the pleasure-arousal-dominance (PAD) model.” In this study, 31 females and 31 males aged between 21 and 60 were invited using the stratified random sampling method for the audio recording of different emotions. Subsequently, parameter values of acoustic features were extracted using Praat voice software. Finally, parameter values were analyzed using a Two-way ANOVA, mixed-design analysis in SPSS software. Results show that gender and emotional states of the PAD model vary among seven major acoustic features. Moreover, their difference values and rankings also vary. The research conclusions lay a theoretical foundation for AI emotional voice interaction and solve deep learning's current dilemma in emotional recognition and parameter optimization of the emotional synthesis model due to the lack of explanatory power. (shrink)

Very often, living beings seem able to change their functioning when external conditions vary. In order to study this property, we have devised abstract machines whose internal organisation changes whenever the external conditions vary. The internal organisations of these machines, are as simple as possible, functions of discrete variables. We call such machines self-modifying automata.These machines stabilise after any transient steps when they go indefinitely through a loop called p-cycle or limit cycle of length p. More often than not, the (...) p in the cycle is equal to one and the cycle reduces to a fixed point. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Extra Ear:Ear on the Arm BlenderStelarc Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Blender. Teknikunst—Meat Market, Melbourne 2005. Photograph: Stelarc. Collaborator Nina Sellars stands with the Blender during an installation photograph. Text credit: K. Conden and A. Douglas. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Blender (3D Model). Teknikunst—Meat Market, Melbourne 2005. Image: Adam Fiannaca. The installation itself stands at just over 1.6 meters high and is anthropomorphic (...) in scale and structure. Text credit: K. Conden and A. Douglas. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 3.Blender. Teknikunst—Meat Market, Melbourne 2005. Photograph: Stelarc. Every few minutes the Blender automatically circulates or "blends" its contents via a system of compressed air pumps and a pneumatic actuator. Text credit: K. Conden and A. Douglas.[End Page 117] Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 4.Ear Scaffold. Los Angeles, Melbourne 2006. Photographer: Nina Sellars. The preoperative scaffolding that was surgically placed below the skin's surface of performance artist Stelarc. Text credit: R. Ferro. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 5.Blender (Biomaterial). Teknikunst—Meat Market, Melbourne 2005. Photograph: Cameron Jones. Both artists, Stelarc and Nina Sellars, undertook liposuction operations specifically for the purpose of this new work and have succeeded in securing the sanitized isolation and, most importantly, the legal ownership of the remnants of the procedures. Text credit: K. Conden and A. Douglas. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 6.Hole Hooks Forceps. As a guest at Cornell University's conference "Digital Bodies" in 2001, Stelarc spoke of his desire to implant an ear that could pick up sound. His plans become a reality in the photograph taken during surgery. Text credit: R. Ferro. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 7.Extra Ear: Ear on the Arm. Los Angeles, Melbourne 2006. Photographer: Nina Sellars. Stelarc's future plans are to implant Bluetooth technology into the Ear on the Arm in a subsequent surgery so that the ear will pick up sound which will be transmitted via the Internet. Text credit: R. Ferro. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 8.Blender (Sterile Hood). Teknikunst—Meat Market, Melbourne 2005. Photograph: Stelarc. The biomaterials are now housed within the Blender's industrial casing, on exhibition at the Meat Market Gallery B in North Melbourne until August 18. Text credit: K. Conden and A. Douglas.[End Page 118]Stelarc- Biographical NotesStelarc is an Australian artist who has performed extensively in Japan, Europe, and the USA—including new music, dance festivals, and experimental theater. He has used medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, Virtual Reality systems, and the Internet to explore alternate, intimate, and involuntary interfaces with the body. He has performed with a THIRD HAND, a VIRTUAL ARM, a VIRTUAL BODY and a STOMACH SCULPTURE. He has acoustically and visually probed the body—having amplified brainwaves, blood-flow and muscle signals and filmed the inside of his lungs, stomach, and colon, approximately two meters of internal space. He has done twenty-five body SUSPENSIONS with insertions into the skin, in different positions and varying situations in private gallery spaces and in remote locations.For FRACTAL FLESH, as part of Telepolis in 1995, he developed a touch-screen interfaced Muscle Stimulation System, enabling remote access, actuation, and choreography of the body. Performances such as PING BODY and PARASITE (1996, 1997) probe notions of telematic scaling and the engineering of external, extended, and virtual nervous systems for the body using the Internet. In 1998 for Kampnagel, he completed EXOSKELETON—a pneumatically powered six-legged walking machine actuated by arm gestures. During 2000, he completed an EXTENDED ARM—a manipulator with eleven degrees-of-freedom that extends his arm to primate proportions and a MOTION PROSTHESIS—an intelligent, compliant servo-mechanism that enables the performance of precise, repetitive, and accelerated prompting or programming of the arms in real time. In 2002, with the collaboration of the Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems Group, COGs, University of Sussex, and TNTU, the HEXAPOD robot prototype was developed. The six-legged MUSCLE MACHINE was constructed with the assistance of The Nottingham Trent University Engineering team, using fluidic rubber muscle actuators. The PROSTHETIC... (shrink)

Complex‐trait genetics has advanced dramatically through methods to estimate the heritability tagged by SNPs, both genome‐wide and in genomic regions of interest such as those defined by functional annotations. The models underlying many of these analyses are inadequate, and consequently many SNP‐heritability results published to date are inaccurate. Here, we review the modelling issues, both for analyses based on individual genotype data and association test statistics, highlighting the role of a low‐dimensional model for the heritability of each SNP. We (...) use state‐of‐art models to present updated results about how heritability is distributed with respect to functional annotations in the human genome, and how it varies with allele frequency, which can reflect purifying selection. Our results give finer detail to the picture that has emerged in recent years of complex trait heritability widely dispersed across the genome. Confounding due to population structure remains a problem that summary statistic analyses cannot reliably overcome. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/WC2u03V65MQ. (shrink)

A common strategy for simplifying complex systems involves partitioning them into subsystems whose behaviors are roughly independent of one another at shorter timescales. Dynamic causal models clarify how doing so reveals a system’s nonequilibrium causal relationships. Here I use these models to elucidate the idealizations and abstractions involved in representing a system at a timescale. The models reveal that key features of causal representations—such as which variables are exogenous—may vary with the timescale at which a system is considered. This has (...) implications for debates regarding which systems can be represented causally. (shrink)

§1. Introduction. After the pioneering work of Mostowski [29] and Lindström [23] it was Jon Barwise's papers [2] and [3] that brought abstract model theory and generalized quantifiers to the attention of logicians in the early seventies. These papers were greeted with enthusiasm at the prospect that model theory could be developed by introducing a multitude of extensions of first order logic, and by proving abstract results about relationships holding between properties of these logics. Examples of such properties (...) areκ-compactness.Any set of sentences of cardinality ≤ κ, every finite subset of which has a model, has itself a model.Löwenheim-Skolem Theorem down toκ.If a sentence of the logic has a model, it has a model of cardinality at most κ.Interpolation Property.If ϕ and ψ are sentences such that ⊨ ϕ → Ψ, then there is θ such that ⊨ ϕ → θ, ⊨ θ → Ψ and the vocabulary of θ is the intersection of the vocabularies of ϕ and Ψ.Lindstrom's famous theorem characterized first order logic as the maximal ℵ0-compact logic with Downward Löwenheim-Skolem Theorem down to ℵ0. With his new concept of absolute logics Barwise was able to get similar characterizations of infinitary languagesLκω. But hopes were quickly frustrated by difficulties arising left and right, and other areas of model theory came into focus, mainly stability theory. No new characterizations of logics comparable to the early characterization of first order logic given by Lindström and of infinitary logic by Barwise emerged. What was first called soft model theory turned out to be as hard as hard model theory. (shrink)

We examine a variety of dialogue protocols, taking inspiration from two fields: natural language dialogue modelling and multiagent systems. In communicative interaction, one can identify different features that may increase the complexity of the dialogue structure. This motivates a hierarchy of abstract models for protocols that takes as a starting point protocols based on deterministic finite automata. From there, we proceed by looking at particular examples that justify either an enrichment or a restriction of the initial model.

Wilfried Sieg and John Byrnes. AnModel for Parallel Computation: Gandy's Thesis.

It is plausible to think that, in order to actively employ models in their inquiries, scientists should be aware of their existence. The question is especially puzzling for realists in the case of abstract models, since it is not obvious how this is possible. Interestingly, though, this question has drawn little attention in the relevant literature. Perhaps the most obvious choice for a realist is appealing to intuition. In this paper, I argue that if scientific models were abstract entities, one (...) could not be aware of them intuitively. I deploy my argumentation by building on Chudnoff’s elaboration on intuitive awareness. Furthermore, I shortly discuss some other options to which realists could turn in order to address the question of awareness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Narcissism, Empathy and Moral ResponsibilityRonald W. Pies, MD (bio)Professor Fatic’s timely and wide-ranging essay demonstrates how the topic of narcissism has undergone a resurgence of interest in recent decades. This may owe, in part, to the controversial claim that narcissism is on the rise in the United States, at least among American college students (Twenge & Foster, 2010). As I discuss presently, the term “narcissism” is open to many (...) interpretations, and differs somewhat from the specific designation, Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), as defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). As Fatic rightly notes,Narcissism as a personality structure may or may not be diagnosed as NPD, depending on various criteria, perhaps most importantly on whether the narcissistic person actually encounters functional and emotional difficulties and shows up for diagnosis and evaluation.As Professor Fatic’s essay clearly shows, narcissism (variously defined) has important “ethical ramifications.” Fatic is primarily interested in exploring the relationship between what he calls the narcissist’s “emotional incompetence” and that person’s degree of moral responsibility. To oversimplify Fatic’s complex set of interlinked arguments, Fatic concludes that “emotional incompetence does not in fact reduce the moral responsibility of a narcissist person, whether diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder or not.” Drawing on the moral theories of Philip Pettit and Michael Slote—in particular, Slote’s “sentimentalist ethics” with its emphasis on empathy (Slote, 2004)—Fatic argues that narcissism is both “a moral failure and a psychopathology.” Nevertheless, for Fatic, narcissists remain “fully morally responsible for their insensitivity and interpersonal emotional incompetence.” Why? Because they have the moral duty “to acquire the moral and emotional competence required for the making of moral choices.”Some Philosophical ConcernsAs I understand Fatic’s argument, he is asserting that the narcissist ought to be held responsible for a kind of self-education process that will ameliorate his or her emotional incompetence. Fatic writes,[W]e develop our morality through constant moral education and testing, which we receive both through socialization and through our own efforts later in life, as autonomous human beings. [End Page 173]We are thus responsible for what kind of moral actors we are and are becoming based on our way of life, and have a moral duty to improve our own moral senses and sensibilities by constantly working on the development of virtues.It seems to me that this line of reasoning assumes that all, or most, narcissists possess the capacity to seek and acquire this “moral education.” Perhaps so—but I am not sure Fatic has demonstrated this. It seems at least plausible that, in virtue of the adverse developmental and perhaps even neurological factors that may generate the narcissistic personality (Fan et al., 2011), some narcissists may lack the capacity to modify their psychopathology by means of “moral education.” This leads me to wonder whether Professor Fatic has adequately explored the very heterogeneous nature of narcissism. Indeed, Fatic’s thesis seems to point toward a kind of Platonic “essence” of narcissism, conveyed by his frequent allusion to “the narcissist”—one of whose defining or essential features is said to be a lack of empathy.But, as I will suggest presently, this is at best an oversimplification of narcissism as psychiatrists understand the term. Indeed, there are degrees and varieties of narcissism, differing in their capacity for empathy—which is itself a psychologically complex term. Recent research suggests that “narcissistic personality disorder symptomatology does not reflect a “narcissist” category but rather a continuum of narcissistic pathology” (Aslinger, Manuck, S. Pilkonis, Simms, & Wright, 2018).Furthermore, Professor Fatic’s thesis seems to view “moral responsibility” as a binary construct; i.e., either one possesses, or does not possess, full moral responsibility. But as I have argued elsewhere, moral responsibility may be viewed as lying along a continuum that reflects varying degrees of voluntariness for any given individual (Pies, 2007).Consequently, in my view, any valid assessment of the “the narcissist’s” moral responsibility must consider both the heterogeneity of narcissism and the non-binary (i.e., continuous) nature of moral responsibility.One way of conceptualizing this “two-track” model is... (shrink)

For years now, phase-amplitude cross frequency coupling (CFC) has been observed across multiple brain regions under different physiological and pathological conditions. It has been suggested that CFC serves as a mechanism that facilitates communication and information transfer between local and spatially separated neuronal populations. In non-invasive brain computer interfaces (BCI), CFC has not been thoroughly explored. In this work, we propose a CFC estimation method based on Linear Parameter Varying Autoregressive (LPV-AR) models and we assess its performance using both (...) synthetic data and electroencephalographic (EEG) data recorded during attempted arm/hand movements of spinal cord injured (SCI) participants. Our results corroborate the potentiality of CFC as a feature for movement attempt decoding and provide evidence of the superiority of our proposed CFC estimation approach compared to other commonly used techniques. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 8-21MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Klossowski's Reading of Nietzsche Impulses, Phantasms, Simulacra, StereotypesDaniel W. SmithIn his writings on Nietzsche, Pierre Klossowski makes use of various concepts—such as intensities, phantasms, simulacra and stereotypes, resemblance and dissemblance, gregariousness and singularity—that have no place in Nietzsche's own oeuvre. These concepts are Klossowski's own creations, his own contributions to thought. Although Klossowski consistently refused to characterize himself as a philosopher ("Je (...) suis une 'maniaque,'" he once said, "Un point, c'est tout!"),1 his work in its entirety was marked by an extraordinary conceptual creation. From this point of view, his Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle can be read as a work in philosophy—at least in the idiosyncratic sense given to this term by Gilles Deleuze, who defined philosophy as the creation or invention of concepts [Deleuze and Guattari 2]. No doubt, Klossowski remains an almost unclassifiable figure—philosopher, novelist, essayist, translator, artist—and attempting to analyze his work through the prism of philosophy may seem to be a reductive approach that belies the complexity of his exceptional oeuvre. Reading Klossowski as a conceptual innovator, however, at least has the advantage of allowing us to chart a consistent trajectory through his difficult and often labyrinthine text, without denying its other dimensions (affective, perceptive, literary, and so on). In what follows, then, I would like to examine three of Klossowski's most characteristic and important concepts—impulses and their intensities, phantasms, and simulacra and their stereotypes—as well as the precise interrelations he establishes among them. Taken together, these three concepts describe what Klossowski terms the tripartite economy of soul, which constitutes the implicit model through which he interprets Nietzsche's thought.1Impulses as Fluctuating IntensitiesKlossowski describes his books on both Nietzsche and Sade as "essays devoted not to ideologies but to the physiognomies of problematic thinkers who differ greatly from each other" ["Postface" 137, emphasis added]. This emphasis on the "physiognomy" of thinkers reflects Nietzsche's insistence on taking the body rather than the mind as a guide for philosophy since the body is a more accessible phenomenon, less surrounded by myth and superstition. "The body and physiology as the starting point," Nietzsche wrote. "Why?... The phenomenon of the body is the richer, clearer, more tangible [End Page 8] phenomenon.... Belief in the body is more fundamental than belief in the soul" [WP §§492, 489, 491]. Klossowski himself, however, when writing of the intensive status of the impulses, frequently makes use of the term "soul" (âme), owing in part, no doubt, to his interest in the theological literature of the mystics, such as Meister Eckhardt and Teresa of Avila. For the mystics, the depth of the soul is something irreducible and uncreated: it eludes the exercise of the created intellect, and can only be grasped negatively.2 Nonetheless, if one can find a similar apophaticism (or "negative theology") in Klossowski, it is related exclusively to the immanent and chaotic movements of the soul's intensive affects, and not to the transcendence of God. What is incommunicable in the soul (or body) are its "impulses"—their fluctuations of intensity, their rises and falls, their manic elations and depressive descents, which are in constant variation.Nietzsche himself had recourse to a highly varied vocabulary to describe what Klossowski summarizes in the term "impulse": "drive" (Triebe), "desire" (Begierden), "instinct" (Instinke), "power" (Mächte), "force" (Kräfte), "impulse" (Reize, Impulse), "passion" (Leidenschaften), "feeling" (Gefülen), "affect" (Affekte), "pathos" (Pathos), and so on.3 Klossowski frequently employs the musical term tonalité to describe these states of the soul's fluctuating intensities—their diverse tones, timbres, and changing amplitudes—which can take on various forms ("aggressiveness, tolerance, intimidation, anguish, the need for solitude, the forgetting of oneself" [NVC 6]). At bottom, what these impulses express are what Klossowski calls the "obstinate singularity" of the human soul, which is by nature noncommunicable; they constitute "the unexchangeable depth" (le fond inéchangeable) or "the unintelligible depth" (le fond unintelligible) of the soul. What makes every individual... (shrink)

Stewart Shapiro's aim in Vagueness in Context is to develop both a philosophical and a formal, model-theoretic account of the meaning, function, and logic of vague terms in an idealized version of a natural language like English. It is a commonplace that the extensions of vague terms vary with such contextual factors as the comparison class and paradigm cases. A person can be tall with respect to male accountants and not tall with respect to professional basketball players. The main (...) feature of Shapiro's account is that the extensions of vague terms also vary in the course of a conversation, even after the external contextual features, such as the comparison class, are fixed. A central thesis is that in some cases, a competent speaker of the language can go either way in the borderline area of a vague predicate without sinning against the meaning of the words and the non-linguistic facts. Shapiro calls this open texture, borrowing the term from Friedrich Waismann.The formal model theory has a similar structure to the supervaluationist approach, employing the notion of a sharpening of a base interpretation. In line with the philosophical account, however, the notion of super-truth does not play a central role in the development of validity. The ultimate goal of the technical aspects of the work is to delimit a plausible notion of logical consequence, and to explore what happens with the sorites paradox.Later chapters deal with what passes for higher-order vagueness - vagueness in the notions of 'determinacy' and 'borderline' - and with vague singular terms, or objects. In each case, the philosophical picture is developed by extending and modifying the original account. This is followed with modifications to the model theory and the central meta-theorems.As Shapiro sees it, vagueness is a linguistic phenomenon, due to the kinds of languages that humans speak. But vagueness is also due to the world we find ourselves in, as we try to communicate features of it to each other. Vagueness is also due to the kinds of beings we are. There is no need to blame the phenomenon on any one of those aspects. (shrink)

Four experiments investigated the effects of probability manipulations on the indicative four card selection task (Wason, 1966, 1968). All looked at the effects of high and low probability antecedents (p) and consequents (q) on participants' data selections when determining the truth or falsity of a conditional rule, if p then q . Experiments 1 and 2 also manipulated believability. In Experiment 1, 128 participants performed the task using rules with varied contents pretested for probability of occurrence. Probabilistic effects were observed (...) which were partly consistent with some probabilistic accounts but not with non-probabilistic approaches to selection task performance. No effects of believability were observed, a finding replicated in Experiment 2 which used 80 participants with standardised and familiar contents. Some effects in this experiment appeared inconsistent with existing probabilistic approaches. To avoid possible effects of content, Experiments 3 (48 participants) and 4 (20 participants) used abstract material. Both experiments revealed probabilistic effects. In the Discussion we examine the compatibility of these results with the various models of selection task performance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to C. Victor Fung and Leonard Tan, “‘Love of All Wisdoms’: Toward A Multiphilosophical Approach To Music Education”Lauren Kapalka RichermeFung and Tan’s arguments regarding the limits of our profession’s longstanding narrow focus on Eurocentric and American philosophical traditions are crucially important, and I think the majority of PMER readers will agree about the need to engage with philosophies written by those from diverse geographic locations and with other (...) forms of contrasting lived experiences. Additionally, this essay contains many thoughtful clarifications, including the importance of local and individualized needs, accruing philosophical wisdoms over time, and ongoing reflexivity. I found the conceptualization of boundaries “as a connecting agent rather than a separation device” particularly intriguing. Moreover, I applaud Fung and Tan for their work outside of this paper; their efforts to translate and extend various Asian philosophical ideas have certainly enriched the graduate philosophy classes that I teach.1 For me, the joy of any philosophical inquiry is the questions and imaginings it incites, and these authors have certainly given me a lot to contemplate. I begin this response with a couple of wonderments and then provide a possible extension of this valuable work. [End Page 185]One of my wonderments regards the relationship between culturally sustaining pedagogy and the proposed multiphilosophical approach. Fung and Tan write, “Ontological and axiological questions regarding the meaning of music in education and in the broader life are still unaddressed” and specifically ask “To what extent should musics of the students’ cultural tradition be customized and incorporated in the curriculum?” Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy or CSP, which is a primary contemporary outgrowth of the multicultural education movement, provides a clear response. Django Paris and H. Sami Alim write that Culturally Responsive Pedagogy:seeks to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of schooling for positive social transformation. CSP positions dynamic cultural dexterity as a necessary good, and sees the outcome of learning as additive rather than subtractive.... Culturally sustaining pedagogy exists wherever education sustains the lifeways of communities who have been and continue to be damaged and erased through schooling.2Given the similarities between this explanation and Fung and Tan’s description of a multiphilosophical approach, I wonder if they could say more about points of alignment and disagreement. Might their arguments serve as an extension of CSP?Another wonderment I have is: What does a multiphilosophical approach exclude? I’m intrigued by Fung and Tan’s rich metaphor of a Chinese medicine cabinet and find it applicable to an array of philosophies. Yet, equating students to “patients” and a music educator to a “doctor” who “writes a prescription for a patient” is incompatible with some philosophies. For example, such language implies a banking model of education that undermines Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire’s core tenets.3 Given that no metaphor or philosophical approach can address everything, I wonder if in addition to inclusions, a multiphilosophical approach necessarily relies on certain exclusions. I spend the remainder of this response positing three potential ways that exclusions might extend Fung and Tan’s ideas.First, inclusive approaches such as Fung and Tan’s multiphilosophy necessarily exclude philosophies resistant to openness and varying viewpoints. Philosophies that forward single prescribed educational ends or limited ways of being musical cannot function within a multiphilosphical approach and therefore must be excluded. Moreover, Fung and Tan’s references to democracy and use of Dewey suggest that a main purpose of a multiphilosophical approach is to propagate liberal pluralism. Such thinking aligns with Meira Levinson’s ideas about liberal education. She writes: “liberal citizenship does require certain habits and virtues, and pluralism is rightly restricted to individuals holding conceptions of [End Page 186] the good which are compatible with liberal citizenship.”4 Specifically, Levinson argues that these habits and virtues include respecting the democratic process, paying attention to public issues, and public involvement through voting and other forms of engagement. While I agree with Fung and Tan that “contemporary diverse needs are localized and always evolving,” those needs exist within larger socio-political-economic structures that inevitably rely on certain exclusions. The nature of those exclusions informs how “diverse needs” are understood and addressed... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Setting the Scientific Bar for the Genetics of BehaviorEric Turkheimer, PhD (bio) and Sarah Rodock Greer, BA (bio)We are grateful for the opportunity to respond to such a varied and challenging set of commentaries. They range from highly supportive to quite disputatious; we will repay the supportive ones ironically, by discussing them only briefly. That will allow us to expand a bit on the more difficult comments, and of (...) course the thoughtful reply from Dr. Dick.Knox, Allen, and DownesKnox, Allen, and Downes imagine a world in which effective polygenic scores for alcohol use exist and conclude that even then there would be no way to use them ethically. We agree, for the most part, but there are several distinctions to consider. The first is among physical, medical, psychiatric, and normal-range behavioral phenotypes. Effective polygenic scores exist for height, and to a somewhat lesser extent for medical conditions like coronary heart disease. Whether or not it is a good idea to deploy them in embryo selection or clinical medicine, that is already happening.We do not think an R2 of 0.35 polygenic scores for complex behavioral phenotypes will ever exist, for all the reasons we outlined in the original paper. If we allow ourselves to imagine it happening, however, there are two explanatory pathways to follow. The first is the raw R2, and let’s stipulate that with more enormous samples or exome sequencing or whatever, respectable values are eventually achieved. The second involves the causal validity underlying black-box prediction. Scientists are taking the first step down that path (although not in Spit for Science [S4S], see the reply below to Lee and Morris) by investigating direct and indirect effects between and within families and examining the portability of polygenic scores (PGS) across environments and ancestries. The most convincing causal evidence would involve the kind of mechanistic causal biology about which enthusiasts like to speculate, but there is little sign of that.We will grant another possibility. Suppose there was a PGS for alcohol at an R2 of 0.35 that worked between families and within them, in [End Page 455] North America, South Asia, Central America, and West Africa. Animal models confirmed that it is related to specific metabolic pathways involved in alcohol. It was related but not identical to other successful PGS that predict cannabis use and other addictions. Ancient DNA studies find that it is high in human remains that were preserved next to the casks of wine that they apparently loved. Pharmacologists use it to develop effective medications for withdrawal. This hypothetical PGS, mechanistically opaque though it might remain, would exist in what Cronbach and Meehl (1955) called a nomological network. It would have construct validity, similar to a good self-report questionnaire. Like PGS for coronary heart disease, people would want to have access to construct valid PGS, and there would probably be no way to prevent people from obtaining them. We repeat that we do not expect this to happen, and as we discuss in the response to Dick below, hypothetical discussions of future scientific outcomes usually turn out to be unscientific wishcasting. It is like insisting that cities need to develop traffic control systems for flying cars.SadlerSadler is probably correct that the exigencies of grant funding explain much of what we have observed in S4S. It is certainly a more charitable explanation than the alternatives. It is interesting to consider that one of several revolutions that have occurred in the years since S4S was conceived is in the realm of scientific design and reporting. Preregistration of research hypotheses might have prevented many of the more dubious outcomes of S4S. Yet those ideas have never been applied to grant proposals, as far as we know. Grant reviews reward grandiose promises. No one has ever received funding for announcing that they hope to make incremental progress at the margins of a difficult and perhaps intractable problem. There is no mechanism to check on whether the big promises in proposals were ever fulfilled. What does get checked is whether and where investigators have published, often without regard to what the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany ed. by Corey W. DyckJulia BorcherdingCorey W. Dyck, editor. Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. Hardback, $85.00.In more ways than one, this volume constitutes an important contribution to ongoing efforts to reconfigure and enrich our existing philosophical canon and to question the narratives that have led to its current shape. To start, while there is (...) a growing amount of research dedicated to recovering the contributions of women to early modern philosophy, much of this work focuses on the seventeenth century, and geographically centers on England, France, and Italy. By turning the spotlight on eighteenth-century Germany, this volume broadens the scope of these efforts in an important way. Further, with the historiography of this period still shaped by a long-standing dismissive treatment of post-Leibnizian German philosophy and by the long shadow cast by the success of Kant's Critical philosophy, which eclipsed many of the thinkers opposed to it, challenges to its traditional narratives seem especially important. The editor's earlier collection (coedited with Falk Wunderlich) on Kant and his German contemporaries already succeeded in mounting such a challenge by showing that German philosophy throughout the eighteenth century in fact presents us with an extraordinarily rich tableau of intellectual life (Kant and His German Contemporaries. Vol. 1: Logic, Mind, Epistemology, Science and Ethics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018]).The present volume stands as a further valuable contribution to relativizing the still dominant narrative of German philosophy as the story of a select few brilliant minds. It successfully dispenses not only with the idea that those minds were few, but also with the equally persistent one that they were exclusively male. Already in the nineteenth century, we find historians such as Karl Joël explicitly casting the new age of German philosophy inaugurated by Kant as its "masculine epoch"—an image undoubtedly furthered by its main protagonist, who cast philosophical acumen in decidedly male terms when he observed that "[a] woman who has a head full of Greek, like Madame Dacier, or one who engages in debate about the intricacies of mechanics, like the Marquise du Châtelet, might just as well have a beard; for that expresses in a more recognizable form the profundity for which she strives" (Karl Joël, Die Frauen in der Philosophie [Hamburg, 1896], 48; Immanuel Kant, Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen [Königsberg, 1764], translation in Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989], 146; both cited in Eileen O'Neill, "Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and Their Fate in History," in Philosophy in a Feminist [End Page 154] Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions, ed. Janet A. Kourany [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997], 17–62). Yet as the contributions to this volume forcefully illustrate, women in the period did—in spite of the numerous severe social, religious, and political obstacles they faced—in fact manage to gain access to its intellectual sphere, and actively shaped its philosophical landscape.While the papers collected here are of high quality throughout, they do vary in their approach. Many chapters, especially in the earlier parts of the volume, investigate female figures as philosophers in their own right, and carve out their self-standing contributions to prominent philosophical movements and debates. Focusing on Sophie of Hanover's correspondence with Leibniz, Christian Leduc's chapter begins by examining her metaphysical views and argues, against standing interpretations, that her main aim is to defend a version of the doctrine of physical influence as an account of mind-body interaction while rejecting metaphysical commitments regarding the nature of the soul in favor of a more agnostic, Lockean empiricist approach. In chapter 3, Stefanie Buchenau shows how women engaging with Wolffian Schulphilosophie began to view themselves as more than teachers and translators and started to claim the title of philosophers. Using the example of Johanna Charlotte Unzer, Buchenau convincingly argues that despite the "feminine," aesthetic garb of her thought, Unzer in fact offers a serious critique and revision of the Wolffian model of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Consciousness and Machines:A Commentary Drawing on Japanese PhilosophyS. D. Noam Cook (bio)Viewed from within the great unity of consciousness, thinking is a wave on the surface of a great intuition.Kitarō NishidaIntroductionRecent developments in AI have made the long-standing debate about what computers can and can't do a major public concern. What we understand the properties of such machines to be, and consequently how we design [End Page 305] and (...) deploy them, will increasingly shape how we live and how we understand ourselves. Thus, there is an urgent need for better understanding of these issues.Susan Schneider, in her book Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, offers an exceptionally careful and insightful examination of key issues entailed in how we understand AI and ourselves. One of her central concerns is how we might test for machine consciousness. Given the variations in design and function among current and projected AIs, Schneider sees no likely one-size-fits-all test. So, she offers a battery of different tests that she believes together will make such testing more reliable. This seems a wise approach, and reflects the conceptual and pragmatic care Schneider takes throughout the book.Similarly, it seems to me that the question of machine consciousness should also include various understandings of consciousness itself. What consciousness is taken to be has varied widely both historically and culturally. No commonly accepted single understanding has emerged, and may never emerge. Just as having a battery of tests might help us better assess possible machine consciousness, having different understandings of consciousness might give us a better understanding of what we are testing for. The two should work in tandem, each gauging and shaping the other.Like the development of computers themselves, the predominant thinking about AI has been shaped, in part, by key presuppositions of a scientific worldview, with its origins in Western thought and culture. Among these presuppositions are materialism, reductionism, and a primary focus on objective behavior. These are reflected in the common concern with observable behavior of physical aspects of the brain in efforts to understand human consciousness, which in turn has become a familiar model for work on machine consciousness. All this is important and valuable work. But, in the spirit of Schneider's cautions, it should not be taken as one-size-fits-all. Accordingly, I offer one view of consciousness from a different perspective.In what follows, I sketch out an understanding of consciousness that draws on Japanese philosophy, particularly that of the highly influential early twentieth-century Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida (1870–1945). I then explore how the tests for machine consciousness that Schneider proposes might be viewed from that perspective.Consciousness: A Perspective from Japanese PhilosophyConsciousness was a central concern for Nishida, whose philosophy is deeply informed by Japanese culture and by Zen theory and practice. As one might expect from such a philosopher, Nishida's exploration of consciousness is not concerned with properties of the brain, but with what we might discern through disciplined reflection on the experience of our own consciousness. Ultimately, he views consciousness as an organic whole [End Page 306] of systemically organized interrelationships of activities and sensations within our subjective experience. This may be understood by first considering 'nothingness'.For Nishida, nothingness does not suggest an ultimate and absolute vacuity, as is often understandably assumed. In Nishida's sense, it is a singular "place" that mirrors the multifaceted world of our common experience. In understanding this, I am told by native Japanese speakers that the English word 'nothingness' has an advantage over the Japanese equivalent, 'mu', in that 'nothingness' can usefully be broken down as 'nothing-ness'. This suggests that nothingness is a state of consciousness where what we commonly experience as distinct (self, other, world, blue, ache, joy, etc.) is indistinct, a state of unified experience. This is consciousness without our finding or discriminating in it the myriad "things" of common experience, but rather a "pure experience" of a singular whole. Nishida introduces his concept of "pure experience" as follows:To experience means to know facts just as they are, to know in accordance with facts by completely relinquishing one... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Less Familiar Plato: From Phaedo to Philebus by Kevin CorriganKristian SheeleyCORRIGAN, Kevin. A Less Familiar Plato: From Phaedo to Philebus. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023. xi + 306 pp. Cloth, $110.00Corrigan makes a substantial contribution to the body of Plato scholarship that offers rigorous and textually supported corrections to [End Page 711] superficial (yet all too common) readings of Plato’s dialogues. The book covers a range (...) of core Platonic topics such as embodiment and selfhood, participation in the divine, the critique of artworks in the Republic, the form of the good, love, friendship, desire, and the relationship between mythos and logos. Corrigan devotes his primary attention to the so-called middle dialogues and the Philebus, but to varying degrees he engages with many more Platonic dialogues as well as other philosophers in the Platonic tradition.Chapter 1 combats common interpretations of the Phaedo claiming that Plato wholly denigrates the body and idealizes the state of disembodiment that can only be fully reached in death. Corrigan’s opponents claim that Plato’s negative comments about the body encourage an unhealthy attitude toward the body and the emotions. Corrigan responds by thoroughly showing how the passages about body–soul separation, when read in view of the dialogue as a whole, instead reveal a “model of positive embodiment” that is “full of conscientious protest, good hopes, thoughts, arguments, refutations, and friendship.” Next, Corrigan turns his focus to passages from both Plato and Aristotle that shed light on classic perplexities surrounding the key concept of participation. He argues that “participation” is not the best option for translating methexis or its related terms, and he suggests “having of” or “sharing” as alternative translations. If they are correctly understood, Plato’s discussions of the forms and their relationship to particulars are not vulnerable to criticisms concerning infinite regress or self-predication issues according to Corrigan’s analysis. Chapters 3 and 4 confront Plato’s well-known criticisms of artworks in the Republic and beyond. Here Corrigan makes a highly intriguing point about the role of what he calls “the intelligible painter” in Republic 6 and 7, through which Socrates both sketches and exemplifies “positive philosophical art” as an alternative to the traditional art he criticizes in books 2, 3, and 10. The intelligible painter uses the good as his “perfect and sufficient model” to cultivate himself and others through education, just as Socrates fashions the images of the sun-good, the cave, and other images for the sake of benefitting his interlocutors.In chapter 5 Corrigan draws inspiration from Plotinus’s nuanced understanding of the famous statement in the Republic that the form of the good is “beyond being.” According to the view Corrigan works out, the form of the good is the ground of all intelligibility, and so its relationship to everything that is intelligible can be understood, but it is not in itself intelligible. Chapter 6 takes a close look at the Philebus in light of the Republic’s discussions of the forms and dialectic, the One and the indefinite Dyad of the “unwritten doctrines,” and the work of Speusippus and Xenocrates. Corrigan then shows in chapter 7 how Plato reveals the wide variety of ways in which myths can be used, ranging from the misleading tales of unwise poets to Plato’s own use of stories to aid philosophical logos. Finally, chapters 8 and 9 focus on Plato’s dialogues concerning love and friendship: Symposium, Phaedrus, Lysis, and First Alcibiades, which Corrigan regards as authentic. Corrigan’s main [End Page 712] objective is to show that these dialogues collectively provide a “guide for the perplexed” in matters of love that, contrary to modern criticisms of Plato, is both sensitive and relevant to real, complex, and concrete relationships between humans.As mentioned above, Corrigan sometimes uses terminology and conceptual resources from authors throughout the various ancient and medieval Platonic traditions, including Aristotle and his inheritors. Corrigan’s interpretive method often aims to show that the dialogues harmonize with one another as well as with Plato’s “unwritten teachings,” and he argues that some Neoplatonic interpretations of Plato are correct. This interpretive approach might be seen as... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Adapting: A Chinese Philosophy of Action by Mercedes ValmisaMieke Matthyssen (bio)Adapting: A Chinese Philosophy of Action. By Mercedes Valmisa. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 220, Hardcover $97.00, isbn 978-0-19-757296-2.When Mercedes Valmisa's Adapting. A Chinese Philosophy of Action (hereafter Adapting) was released, I instantly recognized it as a theme I would have loved to delve into myself. But I never did, while Valmisa stepped up to this (...) challenging task with remarkable depth. By examining a variety of master texts from several schools within the Classical Chinese philosophical corpus--including the Zhuangzi 莊子, Huainanzi 淮南子, Guanzi 管子, Shenzi 慎子, Lüshi Chunqiu 呂氏春秋, Sunzi Bingfa 孫子兵法, and Mozi 墨子, to name just a few--Adapting digs into the complexities of what Valmisa describes as "a philosophy of action" as articulated by ancient Chinese thinkers. She provides a comprehensive textual and historical overview of the evolution of action theories in Chinese philosophy, highlighting adaptability or adaptive agency as a cornerstone of these theories.To set the stage for her nuanced exploration, Valmisa introduces the overarching concept of adapting as it is primarily expressed through the character yin 因. She then expands on how adapting is deeply intertwined with traditional Chinese ideas of relatedness and interdependence. Contrary to Western action models that emphasize autonomy and control, along with static, individualistic, and intention-driven approaches, Valmisa portrays the Chinese model of adaptivity as inherently relational and context-dependent. This model situates human agency within an extensive web of relationships that includes not only other individuals but also objects, the environment, and the broader cosmos-- essentially, all things under heaven.This relationality is foundational, suggesting that individuals are continually shaped by and shaping their interactions with the world. Valmisa focuses on how humans constantly adapt to their fluctuating material and immaterial environments, including the lashes of fate (ming 命) and various visible or invisible opportunities. Taking the Guanzi-Xinshu shang 心術上 ("The Art of the Heart" I) as a source, she characterizes adapting as "abandoning oneself and taking entities as standard" (p. 5), describing this as an "open-ended strategy of action" that aligns with the contingencies of a given situation (time, place, context). In essence, the situation itself sets the parameters for evaluating the appropriateness and efficacy of a course of action. [End Page 1]Chapter 1 elaborates extensively on the notion of adapting, demonstrating through a selection of texts that adaptive agency is a form of action responsive to the specific demands of the moment emphasizing flexibility and situational responsiveness. This distinctively Chinese approach to adapting to changing circumstances rather than adhering to fixed guidelines or imposing one's will, contrasts sharply with the more prescriptive, moral, and forceful models typical of Western thought. Throughout the book, Valmisa lucidly introduces and defines key terms such as "adaptive agency," "agent-situation fit," and "co-action paradigm," often beginning with anecdotal discussions between masters and disciples from various schools. Drawing on these diverse texts, she effectively argues that although the core practices and forms of adapting in the Chinese context are traceable across different texts, their objectives, and thus success, vary by philosophical school. In texts inspired by Confucian thought, the focus is on adapting to achieve social or societal harmony, while Daoist texts emphasize achieving cosmic harmony. Summarizing this, Valmisa, referring to a story in the Zhuangzi, states: "There is no standardized model to decide on the actions that will bring success to our endeavors. One must learn to live in the all-embracing uncertainty and openness represented by the dao" (p. 17). And this dao can be Confucian, Daoist, or of any other classical school.Valmisa also introduces a critical distinction between constitutive standards and structural goals. Constitutive standards are dependent on content that is considered conducive to a good life, whereas structural goals are content-neutral, achievable through various means. From the perspective of adaptive agency, constitutive standards dissolve within the situation as agents determine the most suitable course of action to achieve structural goals. This innovative approach to differentiating goals from standards is profoundly intriguing and has significant implications. The question remains how to educate and cultivate adaptability rooted in structural goals. In line with the above framework, Valmisa... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 741 pointedly, what he is asking for is " the ' planned dissolution ' of the Latin Church into a considerable number of distinct, autonomous ' patriarchates ' " (p. 132). These suggestions, although not original, are intriguing. They deserve, however, more than three pages. What is needed is a detailed presentation of these changes, indicating their historical context, their advantages and disadvantages, and their practical implementation. (...) Despite the criticisms given above, there is much good material to be found in this crisply written book. I agree in general with Hill's judgment that Church authority should embody a collegial rather than a monarchical ecclesiology. He shows that the MC ecclesiology has a solid foundation in scripture and tradition and its cornerstone is the theology of the local Church. Furthermore, he is correct in insisting that the doctrines of collegiality and the priesthood of the faithful are urgent questions in contemporary ecclesiology and that they have broad ecumenical ramifications. He speaks convincingly of greater lay participation, local autonomy, consultation, and accountability. At the same time, his partisanship leads him to caricature the MP view. He will not persuade many MP supporters by criticizing their "highhanded authoritarianism and paternalism " (p. 53) and " ecclesiastical dishonesty " (p. 127) or by claiming that the Roman Curia " is neuro· tically obsessed with the matter of papal authority" (p. 114). Hill makes many valid and important points, but, on occasion, he weakens them by exaggeration. At times his partisan style overcomes his theo· logical substance. The Catholic University of America Washington, D.C. pATRICK GRANFIELD Many Paths: A Catholic Approach to Religious Pluralism. By EUGENE HILLMAN. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1989. Pp. 95. A Christian theology of religions raises fundamental epistemological and methodological questions. Hillman comes to the debate from what Lindbeck has called an " experiential expressivist " background, that is, there is a tacit assumption that reality is experienced and then expressed, that reality precedes language rather than being disclosed and shaped through language. When such an outlook is applied to the theology of religions, the outcome is often the " discovery " of a common experience underlying all religions, despite their different expressions. The latter can be seen to vary according to climate, history, temperament, and so on. Such expressions are loose symbols for a 742 BOOK REVIEWS greater reality, which takes on an increasingly vague shape with the demise of the signifier. History can offer very little resistance to such a model, and the conflicts, differences, intractabilities, and real problems of religious plurality are slowly silenced, almost numbed into a drowsy calm. That history refuses to play this role, while theologies of religion are often demanding it, is indicative of the difficulties with such a model. Hillman's first book on this topic (The Wider Ecumenism, 1968) showed him to be a follower of Rahner. He stressed the universality of grace and its mediation through the historical and particular; he thereby argued for a wider ecumenism with regard to the world religions, in a model analogous to intra-Christian ecumenism. In this book, Hillman advances the same position, but now infused with a strong dose of Wilfred Cantwell Smith. He does not confront the theological criticisms made against either of his mentors. The book is divided into four lucid chapters. The first considers the meaning and role of religion, and much of Hillman's discussion is helpful. However, as the chapter proceeds, one finds that the definition of religion is not controlled by the particularities and intractable dif. ferences presented by the subject matter but rather by an experiential essentialism. Hillman uses Smith's distinction between "faith" and " belief " to two ends, one descriptive, the other evaluative. However he, like Cantwell Smith, conflates description with evaluation. Furthermore, he is untroubled that the subject matter under inspection does not easily yield to such distinctions. Descriptively, " belief " or the " cumulative tradition " involves the " myriad historico-cultural par· ticularizations " that go to make up a religion such as liturgies, doc· trines, ethical systems, practices, histories, and so on {20). Faith is basically an experience of " the tr,anscendent, which is presumably the same for every person," and can be distinguished from the "cumulative tradition, which is different for each people, nation or... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Philosophic Foundations of Mimetic Theory and Cognitive Science(Including Artificial Intelligence)Jean-Pierre Dupuy (bio)In the mid 1970s I discovered at the same time cognitive science and mimetic theory. Being a philosopher with a scientific background, I immediately brought them together and tried to reconceptualize the latter in terms of the former. In a sense, I haven't stopped doing that in the last 45 years. That is why I feel fully (...) at home with the goals pursued by the organizers of this conference.I do not believe it is feasible or even desirable to operate the rapprochement between the two disciplines at a global level. The history of cognitive science is exceedingly involved, and the part played by artificial intelligence in it compared to the part played by the neurosciences has varied greatly over time.1 Only a piecemeal approach makes sense. I present here four short case studies that cover the whole period, from the beginnings in cybernetics to today's artificial intelligence (AI).In order to better situate these studies within a broader frame, I propose the diagram in Figure 1. To comment on it would require more time than available for my whole presentation. Let me just say the following. [End Page 1]It is essential to distinguish between two kinds of AI. The first to bear this name was launched by economist Herbert Simon and computer scientist Allan Newell at a Dartmouth conference in 1956. It was based on the premise that thinking is computing, with this computation bearing on sentences of a "language of thought" implementable in a digital computer. It turns out that this AI(1) was progressively substituted from the 1980s onward by an AI(2), which, to some extent, was a return to a fundamental result obtained by cybernetics in 1943. Neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch and mathematician Walter Pitts had constructed a mathematical model of a network of elementary calculators called "neurons" and explored its properties. The capacity to "think" was one of these. It was not situated at the elementary level, as was the case in AI(1), but it emerged at the collective level from the interactions between the neurons.This model was heavily criticized by the supporters of AI(1),2 and its first implementations, in the notorious "Perceptron" in particular (1957), were pitiful failures. However, the emergence of "second-order cybernetics" under the guidance of cybernetician Heinz von Foerster and the theory of complex, self-organizing systems that it helped develop, in cooperation and rivalry with similar efforts in the physical sciences, enabled the neural network model to come to a second life under different names: formal neurons, deep learning, big data, and the like. Together, they constitute AI(2).The following network of influences wouldn't have been possible without its stem, that is, the boxes containing the names of Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. The former revolutionized logic by showing that reasoning about arithmetic and arithmetic are one and the same, insofar as it is possible to code in a 1-to-1 fashion propositions about integers (for instance, "7 is a prime number") by means of integers. The latter demonstrated that some mechanisms can self-transcend inasmuch as they generate an ensemble of outputs that cannot be defined mechanistically. Later, John von Neumann, who is credited along with Alan Turing with having invented the digital computer, would use this logical possibility to define complexity: A mechanism is complex if it is capable of generating one more complex than itself. The gate was open for the theories of complex, self-organizing systems to thrive and, by way of consequence, for AI(2) to emerge.fascination with modelsHerbert Simon (1916–2001), winner of the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on what he called "bounded rationality," is generally considered to be one [End Page 2] Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.of the founders of artificial intelligence. Some cognitive scientists still rely on the computer program that he devised with Alan Newell to simulate the creative processes of human thought—a program aptly named "General Problem Solver." The title of one of his principal works, The Sciences of the... (shrink)

Inclusive single jet production in hadron collisions is considered. It is shown that the QCD parton model predicts a nonmonotonic dependence of the inclusive cross section on the fraction of the energy deposited in the jet registered, if it is normalized on the same cross section measured at another collision energy. Specifically, if the cross section is normalized by the one measured at a higher collision energy, it possesses a minimum which depends on jet rapidity. This prediction can be (...) tested at the Fermilab Tevatron, at the CERN LHC, and at the Very Large Hadron Collider under discussion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 11.1 (2004) 95-99 [Access article in PDF] Delusional Content and the Public Nature of Meaning:Reply to the Other Contributors Robert Klee The contribution by professors Bayne and Pacherie (2004) is an earnest attempt to defend a popular model of monothematic delusions against criticisms launched by John Campbell (2001). This model of monothematic delusions holds that such delusions are rational attempts by the sufferer (...) to explain to herself specific kinds of anomalous sensory/affective experiences. Bayne, Pacherie, Campbell, and for that matter Sass, Harper, and Georgaca, write as if semantic meaning accrued to words in a language term by term, as if meaning is "private" to the deluded person, and that she might therefore mean almost anything by her own idiosyncratic use of the public language she otherwise speaks. This is a notorious mistake. As Hilary Putnam famously put it in his classic 1975 paper "The meaning of 'meaning,'" "Cut the pie any way you like, 'meanings' just ain't in the head" (1975, 227). That is, meanings are not ethereal interior mental objects, private to the speaker—they are not private inner episodes that take place in some mental center stage of consciousness. The deluded person does not and cannot succeed in changing the meaning of a term in a public language like English merely by an individual act of imaginative will involving the making of a bizarre assertion—not even if she repeats it a thousand times. The public nature of meaning, if I can coin a phrase for it, is the central theme in the work of the later Wittgenstein. Even before Putnam, Wittgenstein had made the same point in his Philosophical Investigations via a famous footnote in which he writes, Can I say 'bububu' and mean "If it doesn't rain I shall go for a walk"?—it is only in a language that I can mean something by something. This shows clearly that the grammar of 'to mean' is not like that of the expression 'to imagine' and the like." (2001, 18e) Wittgenstein argues that the answer to the rhetorical question in the footnote is an emphatic No. To mean something by the use of words in a public language is not equivalent to an act of individual free imagination. The languages we each speak, including the unfortunately deluded among us, are public not private, and insofar as the notion of meaning has an understandable sense, the meaning of a term is fixed by its actual public use, across large time intervals, in many different contexts, by the many millions of speakers of the language in question. It is time that segments of the intellectual map beyond the borders [End Page 95] of philosophy got the news about this, for I think an appreciation of this point would forestall certain objections and argumentative moves that otherwise take up space in the psychological literature.Bayne and Pacherie (2004) describe Campbell's model of monothematic delusions as proposing that "delusions can be usefully regarded as Wittgensteinian framework propositions" (p. 7). I have discussed this notion in my main paper, although I do not use the terms framework propositions; I stick to Wittgenstein's own words. Wittgenstein called them, literally in the German, propositions that "stand fast for us" (feststehen). This description strikes me as less misleading than calling them framework propositions, for the latter expression suggests that they could in some sense be replaceable by a different framework of framework propositions, something that Wittgenstein in no way ever meant to suggest. Wittgenstein did not think of these propositions as individualized or privately owned—as beliefs that might vary considerably across the population of speakers of the language in which they are expressed. That is why he explicitly wrote that they stand fast for us. Note the plural pronoun. There is something irreducibly collective, something publicly owned, about the epistemology of these propositions. These propositions represent the accumulated certainties that precipitate out of what is commonly shared in human experience over long time intervals. Precisely because what stands fast for us is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Daoism, Practice, and Politics:From Nourishing Life to Ecological PraxisEric S. Nelson (bio)I. Daoism's Multiple ModelsManhua Li, Yumi Suzuki, and Lisa Indraccola have offered evocative insights, questions, and alternatives in their contributions concerning the arguments of Daoism and Environmental Philosophy: Nourishing Life (Nelson 2021). The present brief response and sketch of the book will not address every point in their essays, but I will strive to reply, directly and indirectly, (...) to their primary concerns.First, it should be noted that I take a pluralistic conception of 'Daoisms' as my point of departure. This is necessary since Daoist studies have been hampered by overly ahistorical and one-sided definitions that prioritize one philosophical or religious moment (such as skepticism or mysticism) in historically complex and varied transmissions that encompass a multiplicity of texts and perspectives. Due to the fact of the plurality of incompatible kinds of Daoism in Chinese antiquity and in subsequent history, my text considers a range of early Daoist and Daoist-related perspectives in the context of their potential consequences for environmental philosophy, ethics, and politics. Consequently, my approach is primarily philosophical without limiting any text to being exclusively philosophical, religious, or rigidly committed to one perspective, which would be untrue to the sources themselves.Second, examining distinctive tendencies (modifying Graham 1989 and Liu 1994) in the Daodejing 道德經, the Zhuangzi 莊子, and related texts enables us to articulate distinctive and conflicting ecological, ethical, and political paradigms. In place of constructing a mythologizing ideological construction of 'Chinese culture' and Daoism as intrinsically 'Green', a familiar essentializing tendency that has provoked skepticism regarding the very possibility of Daoist environmental philosophy, my book provides a different 'critical Daoist' strategy. This alternative entails that Daoist exemplars can be deployed as therapeutic models in the present, while at [End Page 792] the same time confronting their ideological codifications and uses. Early Daoist sources have roamed on long intercultural journeys. The Daodejing and the Zhuangzi have provided elements for European thinking about civilization, technology, and nature from Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger (Nelson 2017) to Peter Sloterdijk's 'Euro-Taoism' (Sloterdijk 1989) to contemporary progressive Green movements (Joshi 2022) and even ecofascism (Lubarda 2020). Similarly, in the current Chinese context, Green Daoism has both critical and authoritarian ideological functions in visions of 'ecological civilization' (shengtai wenming 生態文明) (Schönfeld and Chen 2019) and fears of a 'green leviathan'. Accordingly, it is not accidental that my anarchistic and participatory democratic interpretation of one key thread, which I call 'ziranist' and clarify below, in early Daoist and Wei-Jin mysterious-learning (xuanxue 玄學) discourses, has led to the most intense discussions and controversies about this book. These include the contributions by Li, Suzuki, and Indraccola that propose questions and alternative possibilities concerning agency and responsiveness, authority and self-determination, freedom and fate, and adaptation and intervention, as well as purposive techniques and anti-purposive uselessness.Third, this hermeneutical strategy points toward the tertiary aspect of our preliminary definition of Daoism. It does not primarily name a philosophical theory or a religious worldview. It concerns shifting, overlapping, and diverging ensembles of discourse and practice. This is not the vague ahistorical idea of 'a way of life' but rather refers to how philosophy is enacted through a specific configuration of—to adopt early Greek expressions—logos as dis-course (e.g., argumentation, hermeneutics, logic, rhetoric), ethos (e.g., comportment, orientation, a way of dwelling), and praxis (practices of the self, with others, and with things and nature). Thus, the Laozi 老子 and Zhuangzi collections can be analyzed textually and conceptually as having multiple threads (drawing on a variety of authors and sources) that form constellations in the received texts with better and worse historical, practical, and conceptual readings. My interpretive strategy in this discussion, which does not exclude other approaches, is that these texts express forms of practical instead of merely speculative philosophy. They are suggestive of an ethos of relational freedom, irreducible to rules and techniques, which dismantles hypostatized experiential and linguistic fixations, including moralistic fixations, in order to freely encounter the myriad things and enact and practice the dao in one's own singular way.'Critical Daoism', therefore, serves as a pluralistic, diagnostic, and practical designation... (shrink)

In his classic paper On Computable Numbers Turing analyzed what can be done by a human computor in a routine, “mechanical” way. He argued that mechanical op-erations obey locality conditions and are carried out on configurations satisfying boundedness conditions. Processes meeting these restrictive conditions can be shown to be computable by a Turing machine. Turing viewed memory limitations of computors as the ultimate reason for the restrictive conditions. In contrast, Gandy analyzed in his paper Church’s Thesis and Principles for Mechanisms (...) what can be done by “discrete deterministic mechanical devices” and appealed to physical considerations to motivate restrictive principles. These devices include, crucially, ones that carry out parallel processes, e.g., cellular automata. Following Turing’s methodological ways and guided by Conway’s “Game of Life” as a paradigm, Gandy formulated four restrictive principles and proved that devices satisfying them are computationally equivalent to Turing machines. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Learning from Art:Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian as a Critique of Divine DeterminismDennis Sansom (bio)Art's Critique of PhilosophyWe usually think the critic's role belongs to philosophy. That is, to understand art's essential characteristics and why and how we appreciate art, we need a philosophical explanation. Though our tastes for art are unique and personal, we typically think that to understand art we must first explain it. For example, Plato thought (...) he could explain art as an emotional inspiration for people, at best, or, at worse, a distortion of intelligible truths; therefore, according to Plato, art should be dismissed or censored in a society seeking social justice derived from the idea of justice. Aristotle understood art to be the imitation of nature; as an imitation, it needs clarification according to the purposes of nature, and philosophy clarifies these purposes. In either case, art needs to be critiqued by philosophy. It is customary to hear philosophical critics lecture on art rather than artists lecture on philosophy.But can art critique philosophy? Is it possible for art to provide a scrutiny of philosophy that perhaps a particular philosophy cannot give itself? I think art can provide this critique by using a feature that some philosophers have thought to be art's limitation to clear reasoning—the imagination. Though philosophers like John Dewey recognize the importance and influence of imagination on our moral and aesthetical orientation to the world of experience, typically Thomas Hobbes's view of imagination prevails in the empiricist-leaning philosophers (for instance, David Hume and Bertrand Russell): the imagination is about image recollection and hence necessary for connecting our ideas to empirical experiences. But for this latter approach, the imagination does not inform us about the world; rather it only bridges experience to abstract ideas. What is important, then, is proper understanding. For this approach, the main question is, Can we explain the world based upon our clearest account of the role of understanding? [End Page 1] Whether this account relies upon a psychological model of the brain's workings, a scientific model of successful theory formation, or a logical model reflective of truth relation possibilities, we need philosophy to clarify how we gain knowledge, even in art.Yet, this approach shortchanges analysis. Psychology, empirical science, and logic are not the only ways to analyze an idea. If a philosophy pretends to explain our experience of the world, then the philosophy opens itself to this question: Is the idea worth holding to be true according to our experiences of the world? A philosophical claim may be logically consistent, based upon generalizations of experience, and be coherent with acceptable views of God, the self, or morality, but if we envision the claim lived out within our experience of the world, would we want to accept it? Is it the kind of life we would want? It takes imagination to answer these questions, and the artist through her or his unique technique and representation can test the existential worth of an idea.Hobbes's description of the imagination represents only one way to explain it. Imagination is more than an act of memory and recollection. It is also reconstruction. John Dewey's definition highlights this role: "An imaginative experience is what happens when varied materials of sense quality, emotion, and meaning come together in a union that marks a new birth in the world."1 Imagination is always an interpretation of what the world could look like. It not only mirrors but heightens experience to focus on a certain viewpoint about the possible meaning of life. By doing this, the imagination enables us to explore whether certain ideas are worth keeping. That is, if we could picture living this way, would we want to live it?Because imagination occupies a central role in artistic creativity, art provides a useful means of analyzing philosophical claims about the world. Though a philosopher may be able to present an idea that is logically consistent, clear in its categories of quantity, quality, being, modality, and so on, explicit in all its assumptions, and even "clear and distinct," when the idea is imagined in life situations, it can lose its... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:_Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2602\REVIEWS.262 : 2007-01-24 01:12 eviews THE DENOTING CENTURY, 1 19 90 05 5– –2 20 00 05 5 Michael Scanlan Philosophy / Oregon State U. Corvallis, or 97331, usa mscanlan@oregonstate.edu Guido Imaguire and Bernard Linsky, eds. On Denoting: 1905–2005. Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 2005. Pp. 451. 98.00. isbn 3-88405-091-5. his anniversary collection of papers connected with Russell’s 1905 publiTcation of “On Denoting” reflects both the almost (...) mythic status that paper has achieved in analytic philosophy and the quite variegated nature of the significance that philosophers have seen in it. The papers in this collection break down roughly into two sorts. There are those which take a historical approach and attempt to explicate various aspects of the content of the OD article. The other sort might be labelled “application” papers in which Russell’s analysis in OD is seen as a tool or a model for subsequent philosophical work, in the spirit of Ramsey’s much quoted “paradigm of philosophy” remark. The volume opens with a reprint of the OD text with pagination indicated for the original Mind printing, for the text in Collected Papers 4 and for the widely referenced Logic and Knowledge Russell collection edited by R. C. Marsh. The Mind and Papers texts use the American convention of single quotation marks within double quotation marks. The Marsh edition (and the text given here) uses the inverse British convention. Readers need to be aware that paper authors here, and elsewhere, vary in which text they cite. The end of the volume has a comprehensive 21-page bibliography of the secondary literature. In between there are thirteen papers. I will be rather brief with the “application” papers, since I believe that Russell readers will tend to favour the more historically oriented papers. Some of the application papers wander quite far afield from Russell’s treatment of definite descriptions. For instance the paper by Thomas Mormann on “Description, Construction and Representation from Russell and Carnap to Stone” takes off from Russell’s assertion that his theory of descriptions was an early version of his subsequent interest in substituting “constructions” for “inferred entities” such as space-time points. The paper is almost exclusively a (worthwhile and mathematically astute) analysis of Russell’s efforts along these lines in Our russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 26 (winter 2006–07): 167–90 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036-01631 _Russell_ journal (home office): E:CPBRRUSSJOURTYPE2602\REVIEWS.262 : 2007-01-24 01:12 168 Reviews Knowledge of the External World and The Analysis of Matter. The author argues that Russell’s constructions did not actually achieve the effects he wanted, but that (curiously) they can be properly developed within the later framework of topological spaces developed by Marshall Stone in 1937. The paper by Guido Imaguire, “Theory of Descriptions and Inferential Semantics”, explicitly eschews an “exegetical” approach and allies itself with a “systematical approach, in which one analyses possible new features and extensions of the proposed theory” (p. 397). The extension considered here is to “inferential semantics”, especially that of Robert Brandom. The spirit of this approach is to take the semantics of a language to be determined by the set of allowed inferences within that language. Imaguire takes as an essential lesson of Russell’s theory of descriptions that definite descriptions and proper names cannot be treated as singular terms of a language in the same manner. He goes on to argue for a criterion for distinguishing proper names from definite descriptions based on inferences allowed between sentences containing them, and he takes this distinction to argue for a modification of Brandom’s treatment of singular terms in his inferential semantics. Elena Tatievskaya’s paper on “Russell’s Theory of Descriptions and Wittgenstein on Internal Properties of Propositions” is another paper that is mainly about something other than Russell and his theory of descriptions. It is a very detailed study of Wittgenstein’s attempt to make good on his claim that the logical symbols of propositional logic notation, such as v and ~, do not correspond to “logical” components of propositions (Tractatus... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Everyday Poetics: Logic, Love, and Ethics by Brett BourbonKatie PelkeyEveryday Poetics: Logic, Love, and Ethics by Brett Bourbon; 200 pp. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.In Everyday Poetics: Logic, Love, and Ethics, Brett Bourbon probes the nature of poetry and its centrality in our everyday lives, working from the ordinary-language philosophical framework associated with Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, W. V. O. Quine, and Stanley Cavell. Bourbon's ideas contribute new (...) dimensions to the elusive concept of poetry and pivots the reader's attention inward: how can we recognize poetry in our day-to-day and why should we? At sentence level, his claims are clear and compelling to readers across disciplines with varying knowledge of philosophy and poetry. This book is thus addressed to "poets, literary scholars, philosophers, and students of religion, and anyone who cares about the ethics of everyday life, about the surprises that punctuate and give our lives form" (p. ix).Poems themselves are such "events of form," Bourbon emphasizes, which live among us and need not be constituted by words. Wordless poems can be uncovered and embraced through the development of a "poetic vulnerability" to ordinary experiences that are not necessarily wedded to one's aesthetic reaction. Bourbon designates the alphabet as one such example of what he calls a "primal everyday poem"; the alphabet is wordless and consists of a patterned order whose mere form does not encompass its meaning. The ordinary expression "I love you" also falls under this classification; the phrase is a performative poem whose intricate connotation is simplified by common language, yet is not the equivalent of its mere words. Bourbon asserts that, like the phrase "I love you," poems of the everyday cannot be reduced to mere language, conditions, or creative modes.Of the ineffable nature of poetry, Bourbon claims, "Poetry, like death, is that which we can only know by analogy—by examples—but it has a scope beyond all our examples" (p. 108). In terms of examples, he draws from poignant personal experiences to reinforce his arguments and provide insight into his keen sensibility. In chapter 1 ("Poems of the Everyday"), Bourbon recounts his own dismissal as a young boy of poetry's worthiness until one day while watching an old film, he in fact was struck by the phrase "I love you." This ordinary phrase allowed him to reconsider the parameters of what constitutes poetry and acknowledge the dichotomy of the phrase's formal power constituted by trivial symbols.Chapter 4 ("Epithalamion") is also rooted in personal experience. Bourbon opens with the flat assertion, "I have never liked weddings" (p. 43), but he notes a difference between a "marriage of forms" and "marriage of intimacy and stability": his distaste is for the former. He believes that a successful marriage can become a poem of the everyday—an event of power and "linguistic surrogacy"—where the event itself fosters more meaning than the words alone [End Page 475] can carry. Marriage can be a poem of discovery that arises from the action of learning what it means to love. But in the objects of the wedding and all its trite, heart-shaped symbols, Bourbon remarks, no poems are to be found.Bourbon dedicates chapter 5 ("Is a Poem the Same as Its Words?") to his claim that what a poem is cannot be bound by its words entirely or by meaning alone. If one finds each line of a poem intelligible, that does not indicate that the poem's meaning is consequentially understood. Conversely, a reader may not know a poem's meaning with complete certainty; what is said may not illuminate what is meant. In Bourbon's explanation of the sentence as a model for how particular words construct a poem, he says that one must determine how such a sentence-poem would be meaningful through our own reading. He claims that a poem is more than its words and cannot be simplified into sets of sentences or phrases. "A poem, if it is a sentence, is always more than that sentence; otherwise, a poem would not be a poem but a sentence" (p. 67).Bourbon's latest publication challenges traditional, long... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Divine Action and Emergence: An Alternative to Panentheism by Mariuscz Tabaczek, O.P.Edmund LazzariDivine Action and Emergence: An Alternative to Panentheism by Mariuscz Tabaczek O.P., (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), xviii + 346 pp.One of the most challenging scientific phenomena for metaphysical explanation is the emergence of higher-order properties out of lower-level constituents of a system. This relatively recent scientific observation raises serious questions for (...) metaphysically reductionist materialism and has inspired a great deal of recent philosophical and theological activity, [End Page 1430] varying greatly in their level of understanding of the scientific phenomenon itself.At the same time, contemporary theological discourse about divine action and the sciences has turned more and more toward panentheism as a way to involve God in the scientific workings of the world without disrupting its operations.Fr. Tabaczek addresses both of these major developments in this volume. For those who do not have the stamina or the interest to dive into his exhaustive analytic treatment of emergence in his previous 2019 volume, Emergence: Towards a New Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science, Fr. Tabaczek provides a detailed summary of his findings in the first two chapters of this volume. Rather than repeat the first volume's detailed consideration of different emergent phenomena, Fr. Tabaczek simply identifies different levels of emergent phenomena in inorganic chemistry, molecular biology, fluid systems, macro-organisms, and evolutionary systems before providing a substantial overview of contemporary philosophical perspectives on emergence.Even in this short overview, however, the reader will find mention and references to the fundamental historical figures in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Anglophone thought on emergence, often omitted by contemporary literature, such as George Henry Lewis, Samuel Alexander, and C. D. Broad. The rest of the chapter consists in a concise classification and description of contemporary views of emergence, explaining and illuminating issues with downward causation-based accounts, whole-part constraints-based accounts, and supervenience-based accounts before moving on to spend a significant amount of time on Terrence Deacon's dynamical depth account of emergence. While full-length treatments of each account are provided in Emergence, the reader will find herself with more than enough philosophical engagement to understand the different models of emergence and Fr. Tabaczek's explanations of their shortcomings. While also much shorter than in Emergence, Fr. Tabaczek's overview of Deacon's account provides the necessary foundations for his Aristotelian synthesis of hylomorphism and emergence in the second chapter.The second chapter once more provides a review of Emergence, providing a comparison between classical Aristotelian metaphysics and "neo-Aristotelian" metaphysics of disposition. In both the classical- and neo-Aristotelian sections, Fr. Tabaczek shows his competence in chemistry by consistently applying Aristotelian notions of hylomorphic constitution, efficient causality, and final causality to chemical and cellular phenomena. While he criticizes neo-Aristotelianism for its lack of commitment to substantial form, he finds that its dispositionalism grounding act and potency [End Page 1431] provides it with a significant advantage over other models when accounting for emergent phenomena. While not fully endorsing it, Fr. Tabaczek's Aristotelian synthesis answers many of the philosophical questions Deacon addresses in his model.The third and fourth chapters of Divine Action and Emergence introduce a much-needed account of the panentheistic turn in recent theology and science literature. Fr. Tabaczek is especially astute to introduce the history of these accounts after the rigorous and sustained questions of the analytic-philosophical analysis of emergent phenomena. After giving a historical overview of the major figures in panentheism—from German idealism through Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne to contemporary theology–science dialogue, Fr. Tabaczek turns his analytic rigor towards dispelling ambiguities in panentheistic claims about God–world relations. Building on the work of Michael Brierley, Fr. Tabaczek argues that the meaning of "en" in panentheism is not a univocal term in the different writings of panentheistic writers, but rather share a Wittgensteinian family resemblance. This disambiguation of the claims of different panentheistic writers throughout history and in theology–science dialogue precedes an overview of the main avenues taken by those writers using emergence in theology–science dialogue before the critical evaluation... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.2 (2002) 96-119 [Access article in PDF] Re-Marking Slave Bodies: Rhetoric as Production and Reception Steven Mailloux There is much talk nowadays about the double nature of rhetoric: rhetoric as a practical guide for composing and rhetoric as a theoretical stance for interpreting. The two uses can be viewed as complementary, as flip sides of the same holistic approach to rhetorical studies. But they can also (...) appear in conflict: production models of writing and speaking versus reception models of reading and listening; models for inventing rhetoric versus models for analyzing it. Indeed, though the two models can be mutually supportive, they have often developed in tension within the evolution of academic disciplines over the last 125 years. Different emphases on one or the other model have resulted in different departmentalized disciplines and varied divisions within those departments, as we are all so well aware. One might even claim that advocating one or the other model has contributed significantly to the fragmentation of rhetoric as an interdiscipline during the last century and to the distribution of its parts into various academic units. In many English departments, for example, the continuing divisions between literature and composition faculty arise from contrasting professional interests in reception models focused on interpreting literary works versus production models focused on composing student texts. A similar reception/production antagonism appears in the history of speech departments separating from English departments. In 1915, when seventeen teachers of public address broke off from the National Council of Teachers of English, the production (oratory or debate) model they favored was at odds with the reception (philological or hermeneutic) model of most literature faculty. 1I don't mean to suggest that different choices between models of production and reception fully account for the academic fragmentation of rhetorical study. Nevertheless, practical antitheses do constitute disciplinary [End Page 96] identities. Antitheses between production and reception—between writing/speaking, on the one hand, and reading/listening, on the other—have variously combined with other distinctions between written texts versus oral performances as objects of study and between scientific research versus humanistic scholarship as intellectual traditions, and these assorted configurations of interpretive practices and institutional formations did help shape disciplinary identities throughout the past century. We are now faced with a situation in which rhetoric is distributed across several departments and programs, not in an integrated interdiscipline but as disciplinary fragments, where rhetorical critics in literary and cultural studies, for example, don't read deeply either in the work of rhetoric/ composition faculty in their own departments or the rhetorical scholarship produced in other departments such as communications or classics.Historically, I believe, the separation of written rhetoric (literature and composition) from oral rhetoric (public address and debate) within the academic humanities, this separation of English and speech departments, has been just as debilitating for rhetorical study as the literature/composition split within English departments alone. One might speculate about how these divisions encouraged the eventual exclusion of oratory from British and U. S. literary canons. More important, these divisions have resulted in a fragmented disciplinary approach to everything having to do with tropes, arguments, and narratives in culture, including most recently the study of local and global communication networks, old and new literacies, and past and present media revolutions.In the present essay I suggest an alternative to this disciplinary fragmentation of rhetoric. This alternative, call it rhetorical hermeneutics, learns from the more holistic approach to language arts found at the elementary and secondary levels of our U. S. educational system, where writing, speaking, reading, and listening (and sometimes viewing) are practices often taught in relation to one another. 2 Here production and reception models form parts of the same integrated framework for understanding and participating in the cultural conversations of diverse public spheres. In the following sections, I address these issues of model selection first by considering the objection that rhetorical hermeneutics is exclusively a method of reading and not a heuristic for writing. Then I move to an example of rhetorical hermeneutics in practice: a reception study of rhetorical productions... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Political Philosophy of Fénelon by Ryan Patrick HanleyJohn J. Conley SJRyan Patrick Hanley. The Political Philosophy of Fénelon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xvi + 306. Hardback, $41.95.In his monograph, Ryan Patrick Hanley offers a revisionist interpretation of the political philosophy of François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, archbishop of Cambrai. A series of Enlightenment commentators (Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hume, Jefferson) and their progeny have hailed Fénelon (...) as a political subversive who boldly attacked the injustices of the reign of Louis XIV and who prepared the arrival of an egalitarian society with socialist and pacifist traits. Hanley, however, argues that Fénelon actually defended a more moderate and realistic model of political society than his Enlightenment exegetes have suggested. Like earlier commentators, Hanley attempts to prove his argument primarily through an analysis of Telemachus, the pedagogical novel Fénelon had composed for Louis, duc de Bourgogne, the "petit Dauphin" and grandson of Louis XIV, when Fénelon served as his tutor.Three strong chapters demonstrate Hanley's thesis concerning Fénelon's moderate politics and philosophy. Hanley argues that Fénelon's philosophy of education rests on a distinction between true and false glory. True glory resides in virtue and a humble recognition of divine glory, while false glory is the self-centered glorification of the human agent, which easily deteriorates into vanity. Rather than simply condemn self-interest, in his treatment of the education of the prince Fénelon argues that self-interest must be gradually transformed into a broader interest for the good of one's subjects and a deeper recognition of the glory of God. Earning the praise of his Enlightenment acolytes and later feminist commentators, Fénelon defends a solid education for women, but he clearly wants this education to prepare women for their domestic role as wives and mothers; his celebrated treatise and letters on the education of women are not an exercise in gender equality.The economic theory of Fénelon has often been interpreted as a type of utopian socialism. This is largely based on the central place taken by Bétique in the Telemachus. In this mythical land, the happy citizens practice a communist economics; private property is foreign to them. All their basic needs are provided for through communal cooperation. Luxury is also foreign to them; precious metals like gold and silver are used in practical construction as if they were pieces of iron. But Hanley argues that the prosocialist exegetes ignore the varied economies presented in the passages concerning Egypt, Crete, and Tyre. Bétique does not stand alone as an economic ideal. When Fénelon details how the economy of contemporary France should be reformed, it is far from simple socialism. The state has a strong initial role in the state's economic reform, but it works in tandem with private initiatives that will gradually become the stronger partner. "Fénelon differs from later socialists in insisting that the use of state power is not an end in itself, but necessary only to establish the conditions whereby a free economic system can emerge and flourish—at which point direct intervention of the state into economic affairs will diminish, and a free (though hardly unbridled) pursuit of self-interest will be encouraged" (81).Hanley also attacks the common argument that Fénelon is a pacifist who excoriates all recourse to war. Fénelon does indeed condemn war in the most graphic terms. As Archbishop of Cambrai in northern France, he had witnessed the brutal carnage and attendant famines that had decimated the population in repeated wars in this border area. But his nuanced critique of war rests on a distinction between false and true courage. False courage is found in the warrior who initiates war for the sake of his own false glory. True courage lies in those who defend the innocent out of a proper sense of duty; this courage contrasts with cowardice disguised as pacificism. Hanley argues that the confederation of nations that Fénelon envisions as a mechanism to mediate conflict and reduce the recourse to war is less a species of international government than... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Institute of MedicineRuth Ellen Bulger (bio)IN 1863 the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) was established by federal charter to advise the government on scientific matters. Almost 100 years later, in 1971, the Academy created the Institute of Medicine within the NAS to focus on health-related problems and issues. Today the IOM has a program budget of about $13 million, which includes both private and government funds, and is (...) regarded as a leading center for health policy research.After briefly explaining the structure and general goals of IOM, this article describes several new or anticipated projects as well as some recently completed reports that have a strong ethical component.The IOMThe IOM's distinguished membership is made up of health care professionals of all sorts, scientists working in health-related disciplines, and lawyers, economists, and others knowledgeable in and involved with policies and activities associated with health issues. It is organized around eight working groups or divisions: Health Sciences Policy; Health Care Services; Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, including AIDS activities; International Health; Biobehavioral Sciences and Mental Disorders; the Food and Nutrition Board; the Medical Follow-up Agency; and the Health Policy Fellowship Programs. Each of these divisions is assisted by an oversight board that provides advice on its activities.It is important to know at the outset that IOM has decided that each of the divisions will include consideration of human values and ethical issues in their activities. Therefore, no separate locus was established within the IOM to deal with these matters. I am director of the Division of Health Sciences Policy, which is the only division that has made ethics a priority in its work, and it is the focus of this article.We have addressed questions of ethics, human values, social values, decision making, and priority setting in many of the division's reports. In fact, most of our reports at least raise ethical questions. In addition, a portion of the interest from endowment funds given to IOM by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute has been devoted to work in this area. [End Page 73]The division's advisory board, headed by Claude Bennett, chairman of the Department of Medicine, University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, has decided on two major priorities for the division: (1) foster an environment conducive to productive research, and (2) anticipate the impact of scientific—especially biomedical—advances on society, monitoring and considering the social and ethical factors that accompany basic scientific and technological progress. These two priorities are interdependent because the fostering of a good environment for research presupposes that the results of this research will produce beneficial effects for the society that supports the research.Upcoming StudiesSociety has been unable to establish a mechanism for discussing in a meaningful way—and possibly resolving—a number of pressing national issues with social, ethical, legal, and scientific ramifications. The President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research considered several such issues and produced important reports about them. However, the commission was funded only until 1983. The Congressional Biomedical Ethics Advisory Committee was authorized in 1985 to address these contentious issues, but it was caught in the crossfire of congressional abortion politics and subsequently died. A new model is needed to attempt to develop national consensus on these complex, contentious issues.The Board on Health Sciences Policy has wrestled with this idea. Recently, it approved a proposal to establish a study committee charged with developing effective alternative methodologies for anticipating and addressing the social, legal, and ethical issues that may accompany rapid advances in biomedical science and technology. This multidisciplinary committee will be given a series of tasks: (1) to explore past experiences with some of these varying methodologies (i.e., town meetings, consensus conferences, forums, commissions, etc.); (2) to develop an agenda of issues likely to arise in the future; (3) to define and test a variety of alternative methodological approaches to these questions; (4) to evaluate strengths, weaknesses, and impact of the various approaches; and (5) to make recommendations on the process and structure by which this fact-finding, analytical, and decision-making function could be... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Spinoza's Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics by Claire CarlisleSanja SärmanCARLISLE, Claire. Spinoza's Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2021. 288 pp. Cloth, $29.95; paper, $22.95Spinoza has variously been read as presenting a fully naturalized theology (Steven Nadler), as a secretive Marrano philosopher of immanence cleverly hiding his true allegiances in plain sight (Yirmiyahu Yovel, see also Leo Strauss) and as (...) a God-intoxicated man (Novalis). Rarely have the assessments of a man's religion been so varied and conflicted. In an exemplarily searching spirit, Claire Carlisle explores the issue while keeping the question of what religion is an open one. The book comprises nine chapters—essayistic in form but scholarly in content—devoted to examining the issue from different angles.The leitmotif of Spinoza's religiosity is, for Carlisle, being-in-God, a term of art that denotes at once a metaphysical reality and a spiritual project. We are inevitably in God: This is an ontological as well as a conceptual dependence-relation. Being-in-God is participatory dependence on God's own being. In illuminating the relation between God and non-God, Carlisle draws on the rich Catholic tradition. For example, being in-God means being in another (God) without ever being the other of God, to whom all being belongs. This asymmetrical take on the otherness-relation clearly echoes Nicholaus of Cusa's thoughts about God as non-aliud, and Carlisle cites him, not as an ancestor of Spinozism but as a cotraveler along a certain pathway for understanding God.Although being-in-God is an indisputable reality, it is also a spiritual challenge. Since we are by necessity in-God, the spiritual task will paradoxically consist in becoming what we already are, and thereby gaining freedom-in-necessity.In my view, Carlisle's reading reaps rich fruit from its assumption that ontology and normativity are not, indeed cannot be, sequestrated within Spinoza's thought. Moreover, its study of the affectivity—the qualia, even—of being-in-God presents us with a welcome counterweight to descriptions of Spinoza's system from without. Differently put, for Carlisle, the question "What is it like?" can sensibly be asked about being-in-God. Inspired by Spinoza's earliest work, Carlisle sketches a philosophical diagnosis of the devout person who is compelled ("necessitated") by the work she has to do and therefore enjoys an enviable singularity of purpose: Following Latour and Foucault, Carlisle sees a distinctively spiritual quality in certain modes of attention. Attending to oneself and others as they are in-God instills calm; in other words, on Carlisle's reading, the affective aspect of being-in-God is characterized by being at rest with oneself and others (quies is Latin for "rest"). Her careful reading of the Latin text exposes a network of acquiescentia (and cognate terms) in Spinoza's work, somewhat obfuscated through Curley's English translation, which variously renders the word as "esteem" and "satisfaction": What the text gains in stylistic points, it may lose in spiritual significance. In the Ethics, acquiescentia in se ipso is a kind of self-esteem or self-confidence that becomes religiously poignant when mediated through the insight that one is in God: [End Page 347] Through the realization of being in-God, one's calm yet affective appreciation of oneself becomes indistinguishable both from one's love of God and from God's love of oneself. This is an interesting phenomenal perspective on Spinoza's doctrine of the third kind of knowledge.At times, one could perhaps wish for a more systematic discussion of core concepts, such as that of infinity. For example, Carlisle cites Spinoza's idea that we cannot bridge the infinite distance which separates us from God but does not explicitly discuss how this infinite distance is to be reconciled with ontological intimacy; while we sense the proper response, it is not demonstrated.In the end, Carlisle's work successfully shows that we cannot understand Spinoza's religiosity if we model it after our late-modern concept of religion—a construct that, as the historian Peter Harrison has argued, was... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Prayer in Greek ReligionFrances Hickson–HahnSimon Pulleyn. Prayer in Greek Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. xvi + 245 pp. Cloth, $75.The study of prayer in ancient Greece faces rather daunting obstacles. Only four brief texts remain which scholars agree may represent authentic examples of cultic prayer: the twoword prayer of Eleusinian initiates, the Athenian [End Page 632] prayer to Zeus for rain, a prayer to Demeter for the barley (...) sheaf, and the dithyramb of Elis, for a grand total of forty words. In addition, there are three fifth–century hymns from Epidaurus, a form not universally agreed to be prayer. In the area of epigraphic evidence, the largest body of prayer–like addresses derives from curse tablets which mostly postdate the classical period and which arguably belong not to the study of religion but to that of magic. Votive inscriptions, while plentiful, are rarely in prayer form. Thus, of necessity, the scholar is largely dependent on literary evidence, most of which is poetic.Thus it is a challenging task which Simon Pulleyn took on in this revised version of his doctoral thesis: to describe and interpret the mentality of all types of prayer in archaic and classical Greece in a relatively slight volume (216 pages plus appendices, etc.). The resulting monograph, "the first book–length study of Greek prayer to appear in English" (jacket), will prove a useful introduction to the body of evidence and major lines of research on Greek prayer. His work will be especially welcome to those not competent in the ancient languages, for Pulleyn translates all of the prayers proffered as examples, as well as modern foreign–language quotations. He also includes a brief glossary of fifteen Greek words especially important in the study of prayers. While he quotes an abundance of illustrative prayers, both literary and epigraphic, and devotes considerable space to lexicographic discussions, nevertheless he produces a quite readable text.Rejecting the broader definition of prayer as any address or appeal to supernatural powers, used by Aubriot–Sevin (Prière et conceptions religieuses en Grèce ancienne, Lyon, 1992), Pulleyn defines Greek prayers as "articulate requests directed toward the gods" and proposes a four–part classification of (1) prayers based on ξενία (2) curses (), (3) entreaties (λιταί), and (4) supplications ().While there is considerable ancient evidence to support the association of prayer with petition, such a narrow description leaves in limbo other types of address to the gods, such as thanksgivings and greetings, which are too important to be left out of this or any comprehensive study of prayer. And so Pulleyn is forced to devote much space to the discussion of material which he does not technically consider prayer. In fact, he himself varies between the technical use of the term "prayer" and the more common modern definition, a practice which naturally leads to some confusion. On occasion, he resorts to the term "prayer–like" to describe nonpetitionary addresses to gods.Perhaps the reason for this emphasis on petition is the author's main thesis that is the primary characteristic of the relationship between the ancient Greeks and their gods, and thus of prayer as well. Pulleyn explains thus: "it refers to a whole nexus of related ideas that we would call reciprocity. When one gives something to a god, one is giving in the sense that the offering is pleasing; but equally one is storing up for oneself a feeling of gratitude on the part of the god, which is also The whole two–way relationship can be called one of " (4). [End Page 633]This thesis, which is prominent in the first half of the book, is most fully developed in the second chapter, where Pulleyn examines prayers of the type, known particularly from the Homeric epics. He is especially concerned with the da quia dedi(t) model, which presents an argument for fulfillment of the accompanying request based on sacrifices previously offered. Numerically, in Homer and elsewhere, this is not a common prayer type. Although it would seem to violate the typical pattern of sacrifice offered in conjunction with prayer requests, Pulleyn argues convincingly for interpretation of this prayer type within the context of reciprocity. The connection with... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:CONRAD'S REPLY TO KIERKEGAARD by Jerry S. Clegg Varied answers to a fixed question have often guided interpretations of Conrad's novella, Heart ofDarkness. Who, that question has been, was Conrad's model for the enigmatic colonial official he calls Kurtz? Hannah Arendt has speculated that it was Carl Peters, an early explorer of east Africa.1 Norman Sherry has picked Arthur Hodister, a Belgian officer, as his candidate.2 Ian Watt (...) has likewise suggested historical figures: Henry M. Stanley and King Leopold of Belgium.3 Since all these men had a reputation for cruelty, those thinking that Conrad had them in mind when describing Kurtz have stressed the political message of his story; for them it is basically an indictment of colonialism. Stephen Reid has argued for a mythic model. Kurtz, he holds, was meant to be seen as one of the man-gods of Frazer's Golden Bough—a primitive king who is obliged to maintain his political position by engaging in certain bestial rites.4 Kenneth Bruffee has recendy cast Kurtz as Conrad's version of Byron's Childe Harold, arguing that the eventualjudgment on him by the character Marlow represents the effort of a squire-narrator to free himself from the pernicious influence of his knight-hero.5 For Bruffee Heart of Darkness is the prototype of a genre oftwentieth-century literature thatrejects the values ofaristocratic romance in favor of democratic norms. There may be truth in all these associations of Kurtz with known colonizers, mythical kings, and fictional knights, but they share a pair of deficiencies. They do not clarify the argument of Heart ofDarkness and so do not dojustice to its copious philosophical content. They also 280 Jerrys. Clegg281 fail to note those features ofKurtz that identify his model most precisely. The prototype of Conrad's famous character is biblical. He is a modern version of Abraham, and the work most intimately related to Heart of Darkness is Kierkegaard's panegyric on Abraham: Fear and Trembling. Conrad's story is, in fact, an addendum to Fear and Trembling written from the point of view of a poet-narrator—Marlow—who has accepted some, but not all, of the tenets of Kierkegaard's own poet-narrator, Johannes de Silentio. It is Marlow's quarrel with de Silentio that explains the structure of Heart ofDarkness, that constitutes its deepest message, and that tells the reader who the model for Kurtz was. An appreciation of that quarrel also helps clarify other matters. It makes plain, for example, the symbolism of light and dark that Conrad uses as an accompaniment to his argument.6 Heart of Darkness is, unarguably, a meditation on several subjects. It is about the Belgian Congo under the administration of King Leopold. It is also about European colonialism in general. It may be about other matters as well. Its primary subject, however, is the relationship of the religious to the ethical and the aesthetic. Since for Conrad the ethical and the aesthetic were allied, this subject may be best cast as the relationship ofreligion to art. It is introduced at the very start ofthe novella. Conrad's primary narrator there offers a theme for his seafaring friend, Marlow, to meditate on aloud: the great English knights-errant of the sea who, like "jewels flashing in the night of time," have born the torch of civilization into the mystery of an unknown earth.7 As this theme is announced, what was a mournful gloom that had hung over London becomes a lurid glare under the stars, and Marlow begins to talk of these, and still other, kinds of light and their relationship to the dark. The primary narrator has already identified what the dark stands for: time. Marlow does not challenge that equation. He only asks who, and with the aid of what kind of light, effectively combats "the night of time." During his meditation he considers four answers to his question, three of which are of primary importance. Certain "redeeming facts," illustrated by the restraint shown by hungry cannibals, quietly dazzle with reassurance, and so what mightbe called the person ofethical conduct— when stripped bare of pretense and the opaque "cloak of time... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.3 (2005) 44-57 [Access article in PDF] Literary Biography: The Cinderella of Literary Studies Michael Benton There are no prizes for guessing who are the two ugly sisters: Criticism, the elder one, dominated literary studies for the first half of the twentieth century; theory, her younger sister, flounced to the fore in the second half. Meanwhile, 'Cinders,' who had been doing the chores for (...) centuries, has been magically transformed in recent times, decked out in new clothes by Richard Holmes, Claire Tomalin, Juliet Barker, Peter Ackroyd et al., and, as the millennium approached, celebrated and admired on all sides. At the start of the new century, literary biography remains in vogue. The bibliography that carries it forward is rolling, and there is no sign of it turning into a pumpkin. Why is Cinderella so popular?One obvious if superficial answer might be that literary biography is where literary people go who find the contemporary preoccupation with theory to be personally undernourishing and critically unenlightening; they would rather stay with the literary works themselves and with the lives, the minds, and the times that produced them. Yet it is not only literary biography that is thriving; life writing in general is the fastest-growing area of mainstream publishing, evidence for which can be seen in Waterstone's flagship store in London's Piccadilly, which devotes its prime ground-floor site to thousands of biographies. This commercial high profile is responding to an evident, if unfocused, need to look at other lives and understand them. Individual reasons for the popularity of biography range from prurient interest and hero worship to a, perhaps unrecognized, search for coherence and purpose in an age that is often disinclined either to accept institutional values or to respect traditional authority. The motives for this search usually include the desire for recognizable success, to which end the invention of a convincing identity is essential. Biographies offer models of how others live, face challenges, and cope with change; they are prime sites for studying ourselves. Curiously, this justification for biography as providing [End Page 44] a model for living was felt most strongly when this literary genre first emerged in the eighteenth century. The difference today is that the model has changed: Biography as a moral exemplum based upon Christian principles has been replaced in today's celebrity culture by the demand for models of success provided by public personalities. Nonetheless, whatever the range of satisfactions readers seek in biography, life writing offers, in one form or another, detailed pictures of widely different ways of living and amid these, perhaps, some clues to how an individual sense of identity might be shaped.Literary biographies (i.e., biographies of writers, not biographies with a particular literary quality) are a significant and, in some respects, a unique subgenre since they purport to offer access to the creative imagination. They have a long and distinguished history from Johnson and Boswell to the present day; they are sometimes written by other novelists (Elizabeth Gaskell on Charlotte Bronte, Peter Ackroyd on Dickens); and autobiographical writing may take the form of poetry (Wordsworth) or fiction (Joyce).1 Furthermore recent writing in this field has increasingly introduced elements of metabiography in books by Adam Sisman2 and Lucasta Miller.3 It is evident, therefore, that literary biography offers a rich and varied area of study that raises issues about the relationships among biography, history, fiction, and poetry that are fundamental to aesthetic education.Yet despite this promise, it has become a truism to declare that biography has failed to establish any theoretical foundations upon which to build. Backscheider quotes Ira Nadel's remark on the absence of "a sustained theoretical discussion of biography incorporating some of the more probing and original speculations about language, structure, and discourse that have dominated post-structuralist thought."4 She goes on to lament the poverty of criticism; the absence of a cultivated readership; the failure to engage even with the practical questions of selection, organization, or presentation; and indicates that readers of biography are too easily... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:LABYRINTHINE STRATEGIES OF SACRIFICE: THE CRETANS BY EURIPIDES Giuseppe Fornari The application of René Girard's mimetic hypothesis demands drastic re-interpretation of the history of our culture. The denunciation of sacrificial violence performed first by the Hebrew Bible and then by the Gospels figures as an objective watershed in the evaluation ofcivilizations and historical periods. This new methodological and theoretical situation brings Girard's ideas into conflict with current trends toward (...) relativism. The victim is the reality at the root ofhistory, an extra-historical element that disrupts the circle of interpretation and confronts us as an absolute value demanding our commitment one way or another. The epistemological problems thus become one and the same with a frankly religious need. In an elegant and paradoxical way Girard's thought gives new, vital emphasis to the Christocentric interpretation of human history typical of patristic and medieval thought. In this light, comparison ofour Christian Western civilization with its Classical predecessor becomes crucial. For the Middle Ages Antiquity was not separate from Christianity but itsfigura (préfiguration), in a positive or negative way. Modern culture, however, starting from humanism and the Renaissance, discovered the historical dimension of Classical civilization with ever-increasing admiration until, finally, Neoclassicism set it as the great alternative to modern civilization. This tendency became openly anti-Christian first with the French revolution and then with thinkers like Nietzsche and Heidegger. The very identity of Western culture is determined by its varying attitudes toward Classical Antiquity and Christianity, to such an extent that the different periods in history could be subdivided accordingly. The comparison is like asking ourselves 164Giuseppe Fornari what we would be without Christianity, or who we are and what Christianity is. The radical nature of these questions and the overall development of our culture therefore confirm Girard's radical, metahistorical model. Classical civilization is the inevitable touchstone for this trans-historical question of identity. The comparison is fascinating and complex, and it cannot be dismissed simply by juxtaposing victimary awareness and blindness. Girard himself in Violence and the Sacred notes the profound investigation of mimetic violence in Greek tragedy and pre-Socratic philosophy.1 Further research of my own into these aspects of Greek civilization confirms and widens the analysis, revealing a surprisingly varied and dramatic picture.2 The most interesting discovery may be that the Greeks had already faced this question of meta-historical identity in relation to the victim. I have chosen Euripides' lost tragedy,the Cretans, to illustrate this: its highly original subject within the corpus of Greek tragedy and its symbolic richness fully justify its choice. The few remaining fragments, which are almost entirely reproduced here, provide enough material for analyses that are necessarily more limited but more complete in themselves and thus more suitable for a single essay. Besides, they possess high literary quality and do not deserve to remain the sole preserve of specialists. The tragedy of the labyrinth Euripides probably wrote the Cretans before 430 B.C. The premisses of the plot are supplied by traditional mythical material. To demonstrate to his brothers that he has a divine right to the kingdom of Crete, Minos asks Poseidon to send a white bull from the sea for sacrifice. The god satisfies his request and Minos's power is confirmed, but he decided the bull is too beautiful to sacrifice. The wrath of the god is not slow to strike the king's family. Minos's wife, Pasiphae, falls in love with the bull and copulates with it. From this bestial union comes the Minotaur, the being, half-man half-bull, which is shut up in the labyrinth. Minos's nonperformance of the sacrifice therefore causes a grave crisis on the island, 1It could be said that the exciting comparison with Classical civilization is one of the inspiring forces of Violence and the Sacred. An analogous direction, as regards Virgil and sacrifice, is followed by Bandera in The Sacred Game (13IfI). See also note 1 1. 2G. Fornari, The Esoteric Knowledge of the Greeks: From Orphism to Tragedy, A SacrificialReading (forthcoming). Labyrinthine Strategies ofSacrifice165 jeopardizing the boundaries between man and animal. The monstrousness ofthe Minotaur represents the breaking-down ofthose differences that... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:John Henry Newman's Theology of History: Historical Consciousness, Theological "Imaginaries", and the Development of Tradition by Christopher CimorelliReinhard HütterJohn Henry Newman's Theology of History: Historical Consciousness, Theological "Imaginaries", and the Development of Tradition by Christopher Cimorelli (Leuven: Peeters, 2017), xii + 356.There is no end of books on John Henry Newman, and this is a good thing, because Newman's importance is not waning, but—arguably—increasing. Christopher Cimorelli's study, the (...) adapted version of a doctoral dissertation completed at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, under the directorship of the noted Newman scholar Terrence Merrigan, appeared in print in 2017. This book is of ongoing relevance, for at least three reasons. (1) No other work since then has replaced or improved upon Cimorelli's close reading and exacting interpretation of Newman's first [End Page 1339] monograph, The Arians of the Fourth Century. (2) There exists no other study on Newman's theology of history in correlation to his development of doctrine of similar depth. (3) Cimorelli has recently become director of the National Institute for Newman Studies (NINS) in Pittsburgh. It is to be expected that the programmatic thrust of this work will inform to some degree the research agenda and the overall theological approach taken at the NINS under his leadership.Cimorelli's book does two things in one: it fills an urgent need in Newman studies, and based on Newman's thought about history, it makes an important—albeit not unproblematic—contribution to the ongoing discussion regarding the development of doctrine by advancing a new theory of the development of tradition. This makes the book fall into two parts of unequal length, the second shorter constructive part being conjoined to the first longer interpretive part, an investigation of Newman's view of history as a whole, ecclesiastical history, the nature of historical research, and its significance for theology.In the first chapter, Cimorelli treats lucidly and briefly the religious and socio-political context within which the Oxford Movement arose and in which Newman's self-perception as a historian developed. The central topic of the chapter is a succinct analysis of the religious epistemology of the Oxford Movement, based on the connection between ethos and religious knowledge taken to be embodied in the life and teaching of the early Church, the normative instantiation of orthodoxy and moral temper, and thus a model for the intended reform of the Church of England. Cimorelli argues persuasively that "the Tractarian ethos was... a way of life, a way of seeing the fallen world, and it directly involved the exercise of the human will in the maintenance of the moral disposition from which one views and judges the world" (37). This religious epistemology informed Newman's Parochial and Plain Sermons and became increasingly articulated in an explicit way in his Oxford University Sermons.In the second chapter, Cimorelli reconstructs Newman's self-perception as an ecclesial historian and the theological and theoretical method Newman develops, in which historical inquiry has a particular nature that is characterized by the dynamic confluence of three constitutive elements: evidence, antecedent probabilities, and antecedent considerations. The judgments the historian has inevitably to make regarding the method and the resources of a particular historical inquiry are irreducibly personal, because the antecedent considerations that guide these judgments will vary from historian to historian. Because historical evidence is imperfect, such considerations are valid and indeed indispensable. Cimorelli's analysis is [End Page 1340] perceptive and valuable; regrettably, too few contemporary Church historians reflect on these epistemological and hermeneutical matters pertaining to historiography in general and Church history in particular with sufficient depth and rigor. The central insights of Newman's view are still pertinent. His hermeneutical considerations are truly critical because they do justice to the specific nature of historical investigation. Compared to Newman's hermeneutics, the use by many ecclesial historians of the historical-critical method comes across as theologically quite uncritical and unreflective. To put it differently: Cimorelli's able analysis makes Newman a strikingly relevant interlocutor in a contemporary discussion about the nature of an ecclesiastical history and a history of doctrine and dogma that is fully... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Political Theology of Climate Change by Michael S. Northcott, and: Restored to Earth: Christianity, Environmental Ethics, and Ecological Restoration by Gretel Van WierenKevin J. O’BrienA Political Theology of Climate Change Michael S. Northcott grand rapids, mi: eerdmans, 2013. 335 pp. $30.00Restored to Earth: Christianity, Environmental Ethics, and Ecological Restoration Gretel Van Wieren washington, dc: georgetown university press, 2013. 208 pp. $29.95These two excellent books, A Political Theology (...) of Climate Change by Michael S. Northcott and Restored to Earth by Gretel Van Wieren, offer distinct directions for Christian environmental ethics: Northcott develops a rigorous analysis of climate change as a failure of enlightenment rationality and politics, while Van Wieren argues that those who care about the earth can connect with it through the practice of ecological restoration. Northcott theologically defines a complex global problem; Van Wieren theologically engages a community-based solution. Each book advances Christian environmental ethics in important ways; considered together, they have much to teach about the content and methods of the field.Northcott’s A Political Theology of Climate Change argues that climate change is a “cosmopolitical crisis” and that Christians should embrace a more ecological and theological politics in response. Theologians and ethicists have long argued that environmental degradation has cosmological roots: The belief that human beings are separate from nature makes global-scale degradation and pollution acceptable. Northcott adds a nuanced political analysis, noting that modern politics is based on a denial “that the weather is political, or that politics influences the climate” (46). Enlightenment thinkers who laid the groundwork for contemporary political structures insisted that storms and floods were not divine responses to human behavior, so modern nation-states are premised on an ideological separation from nature. Climate change reveals the failure of such thinking, so the facts of climate change pose an inherently political challenge.Thus, failures to act on climate change are political failures. Mainstream politics cannot consider that economic growth is unsustainable because it is premised on ignorance about nature. Nations cannot collaborate to solve the problem because they have no common moral agreement “about the ends and goals of human life” (245). Any response to climate change that simply extends [End Page 198] the enlightenment project—by ascribing “rights” to the natural world, or by trusting existing secular political structures—is doomed to failure. Instead, climate change calls for a different cosmology and a different politics.Northcott argues that both can be found in the Christian tradition. Natural law thinking respects the relationship between human beings and external moral standards “set into the structure of the cosmos,” demanding careful accounting for the atmospheric consequences of human action (246). Virtue ethics teaches the ideal of politics as a “community of friendship and love,” nurturing practices of participation in the good life, lived with less consumption and less destructive energy (200).Northcott hopes that small-scale communities inspired by Christian cosmology and Christian politics will transition away from destructive practices and thereby demonstrate a new way of life to the world. His book concludes by reasserting that because climate change is a political problem, it is fundamentally a theological problem, calling human communities to “re-create the historic and customary connections between nature and culture, land and life, love for neighbour and nature which are central to the Jewish and Christian messianism of empire-challenging love” (316).In contrast to Northcott’s focus on political and philosophical failures, Gretel Van Wieren’s Restored to Earth seeks a “more positive, solution-oriented” approach to Christian ethics (viii). The book is about reconnecting humans with the natural world through ecological restoration, “the science and art of repairing ecosystems that have been damaged by human activities” (2), and it argues that restoration models moral life by creating physical, intellectual, emotional, communal, and spiritual connections with the natural world.Van Wieren begins with an interdisciplinary definition of ecological restoration and argues that views on the practice depend upon varied definitions of nature. She then moves to a nuanced account of restoration ecology as a spiritual practice (chapter 3) of community formation (chapter 4). Evocatively recounting a controlled prairie burn in Illinois on Maundy Thursday, Van Wieren... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 66.4 (2005) 527-539 [Access article in PDF] Salvatore Camporeale's Contribution to Theology and the History of the Church Mariangela Regoliosi University of Florence Salvatore Camporeale's research, as rich and varied as it was, revolved around several primary axes and was inspired by several fundamental concerns.1 One of the objectives that certainly oriented his cultural effort was a serious, critical, and passionate desire to (...) reform the church, to recuperate its radical and founding truths, to go beyond all superstructure and pseudo-truth. I believe that, for this very reason, Camporeale engaged with Valla (to whom he devoted most of his scholarly work): because the latter had, with extraordinary lucidity, raised issues and proposed solutions in perfect keeping with his own essential needs.Naturally, arriving at such a perception of the innovativevalue and ideological depth of Valla's thoughtinvolved far more than this. We are indebted to Camporeale for having developed the lesson of his mentor, Eugenio Garin: that is, the view that—against the interpretive limitations widely heldby other scholars and other schools—Lorenzo Valla was not onlythe excellentphilological emender of Livy's text, nor simply the "grammarian" restorer of the Latin language, but that such tangible gifts and capacities were sustained by more general philosophical motives and by an organic project of cultural refounding, that would challenge established categoriesin all fields, from language to history to theology.Camporeale was thus able to identify—beginning with his distinguished book published in 1972, Lorenzo Valla. Umanesimo e teologia—the foundations and ultimate scope of Valla's philosophy of language and, consequently, the unifying elements in his apparently heterogeneous works, which range from historiography to historical criticism, from ethics to linguistics, from [End Page 527] logic to rhetoric, from the philological study of classical works to that of the NewTestament. And he was able to see that, also for Valla, the critical revision of the ecclesiastical tradition, and of the "models" of theological discourse, had been a Leitmotiv or, better yet, an arrival point.It is within this specific, though not limited sphere of inquiry that I intend to situate my study, a personal, brief recollection of the friend we lost. Therefore, I will focus on two particular contributions, one from 1977, Lorenzo Valla tra Medioevo e Rinascimento. "Encomion s. Thomae". 1457, the other from 1988, Lorenzo Valla e il "De falso credita donatione". Retorica, libertà ed ecclesiologia nel '400. As their titles openly declare, they investigate two of Valla's works diverging not only in time but in content as well ("De falso credita donatione" dates from 1440, the "Encomion sancti Thomae" from 1457); the one is intended to denounce the so-called "Donation of Constantine" as a forgery, the other to commemorate Saint Thomas on the day of his liturgical anniversary. And yet, Camporeale correctly identifies a peculiar and intrinsic unity in these works, namely the effort to rediscover an authentic Christianity: an authentic "form" of the church on the one hand, and an authentic "form" of Christian theology on the other.I will start with, and devote special attention to, the Encomion sancti Thomae. Camporeale correctly recognized this short text as Valla's "spiritual testament," not only, or not so much because it is his last piece of writing (he died a few months after the Encomion), but because, in a few dense but clear pages, it sums up Valla's entire logico-linguistic program and, consequently, his stance on the expressive potentialities of human language, up to the highest levels of the expressible, those of metaphysics and of theology. The way Camporeale develops his considerations on the "panegyric" is admirable, as he supports it with the experienced philosophical and theological competence (in the history of theology, and especially Thomistic theology) that he, as a Dominican, mastered so well. (In passing, it is worth noting that such competence alone could allow for a thorough assessment of the historical significance of Valla's discourse, too frequently trivialized or misunderstood by readers lacking the necessary tools). The following... (shrink)