Here, for the first time, Christopher Kul-Want brings together twenty-five texts on art written by twenty philosophers. Covering the Enlightenment to postmodernism, these essays draw on Continental philosophy and aesthetics, the Marxist intellectual tradition, and psychoanalytic theory, and each is accompanied by an overview and interpretation. The volume features Martin Heidegger on Van Gogh's shoes and the meaning of the Greek temple; Georges Bataille on Salvador Dalí's _The Lugubrious Game_; Theodor W. Adorno on capitalism and collage; Walter Benjamin and Roland (...) Barthes on the uncanny nature of photography; Sigmund Freud on Leonardo Da Vinci and his interpreters; Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva on the paintings of Holbein; Freud's postmodern critic, Gilles Deleuze on the visceral paintings of Francis Bacon; and Giorgio Agamben on the twin traditions of the Duchampian ready-made and Pop Art. Kul-Want elucidates these texts with essays on aesthetics, from Hegel and Nietzsche to Badiou and Rancière, demonstrating how philosophy adopted a new orientation toward aesthetic experience and subjectivity in the wake of Kant's powerful legacy. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that current information and communication technology with the outcome of deep digitalization has been so profoundly integrated into everyday life that Schutz’s primary, universalistic description of the life-world which underplays the role of technology necessarily leaves a huge range of everyday experiences insufficiently discussed. Taking Schutz’s phenomenological observation as a starting point, I intend to examine the spatial, temporal, and social structures of the digitalized life-world and its meaning for the praxis of social sciences. Standing (...) by the world openness as human nature and technology as the very source of the dynamics of human-world-relation, I argue Schutz’s universalistic intended life-world analysis needs to be historicized ceaselessly to stay attuned to the most everyday reality. (shrink)

Details the role that giants have played in the history of humankind. _...style is breezy and accessible...a pleasant browse._ --BOOKLIST.

ABSTRACTRecent research suggests that impaired emotion regulation may play an important role in the development of youth psychopathology. However, little research has explored the effects of ER strategies on affect in early adolescents. In Study 1, we examined if early adolescents are able to use distraction and whether the effects of this strategy are similar to talking to one’s mother. In Study 2, we compared the effects of distraction, cognitive reappraisal, acceptance, and rumination. In both studies, participants received instructions on (...) how to regulate their emotions after a standardised negative mood induction. In general, the results indicated that distraction, but also cognitive reappraisal and acceptance, had promising short-term effects on positive and negative affect in early adolescents. These findings suggest that targeting adaptive ER skills, such as distraction, acceptance, and cognitive reappraisal, may be an important strategy to prevent or treat psychological pro... (shrink)

What makes philosophy on the continent of Europe so different and exciting? And why does it have such a reputation for being 'difficult'? Continental philosophy was initiated amid the revolutionary ferment of the 18th century, philosophers such as Kant and Hegel confronting the extremism of the time with theories that challenged the very formation of individual and social consciousness. Covering the great philosophers of the modern and postmodern eras – from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze right to up Agamben and (...) Žižek – and philosophical movements from German idealism to deconstruction and feminism – Christopher Kul-Want and Piero brilliantly elucidate some of the most thrilling and powerful ideas ever to have been discussed. (shrink)

Byrne & Russon suggest that the production of action by primates is hierarchically organised. We assess the evidence for hierarchical structure in the comprehension of action by primates. Focusing on work with human children we evaluate several possible indices of program-level comprehension.

The Temporal Experience of Pleasure Scale (TEPS) is a self-report instrument assessing pleasure experience. The present study aimed to confirm the factor model of the Chinese version of TEPS and test measurement invariance of the scale across gender in Chinese university students. Participants were 2977 (51% female) undergraduates aged from 16 to 27 years (Mean age = 18.9 years). Results indicated that the revised four-factor structure of the TEPS had acceptable fit in the total sample and in gender groups. Furthermore, (...) configural, metric and partial scalar invariance across gender were established. Two of the items (item 4 and 8) demonstrated different intercepts and women scored higher than men on both items. With partial scalar invariance demonstrated, test of differences in latent means indicated that men had lower levels of pleasure when compared with women. To our knowledge, this study is the first attempt to test the measurement invariance of the TEPS across gender, which provides support for future research that involves examining hedonic capacity in Chinese men and women. (shrink)

Here, for the first time, Christopher Kul-Want brings together twenty-five texts on art written by twenty philosophers. Covering the Enlightenment to postmodernism, these essays draw on Continental philosophy and aesthetics, the Marxist intellectual tradition, and psychoanalytic theory, and each is accompanied by an overview and interpretation. The volume features Martin Heidegger on Van Gogh's shoes and the meaning of the Greek temple; Georges Bataille on Salvador Dal’'s The Lugubrious Game; Theodor W. Adorno on capitalism and collage; Walter Benjamin and Roland (...) Barthes on the uncanny nature of photography; Sigmund Freud on Leonardo Da Vinci and his interpreters; Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva on the paintings of Holbein; Freud's postmodern critic, Gilles Deleuze on the visceral paintings of Francis Bacon; and Giorgio Agamben on the twin traditions of the Duchampian ready-made and Pop Art. Kul-Want elucidates these texts with essays on aesthetics, from Hegel and Nietzsche to Badiou and Rancire, demonstrating how philosophy adopted a new orientation toward aesthetic experience and subjectivity in the wake of Kant's powerful legacy. (shrink)

Philosophers on Film from Bergson to Badiou is an anthology of writings on cinema and film by many of the major thinkers in continental philosophy. The book presents a selection of fundamental texts, each accompanied by an introduction and exposition by the editor, Christopher Kul-Want, that places the philosophers within a historical and intellectual framework of aesthetic and social thought. Encompassing a range of intellectual traditions--Marxism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, gender and affect theories--this critical reader features writings by Bergson, Benjamin, Adorno (...) and Horkheimer, Merleau-Ponty, Baudrillard, Irigaray, Lyotard, Deleuze, Kristeva, Agamben, Žižek, Nancy, Cavell, Rancière, Badiou, Stiegler, and Silverman. Many texts discuss cinema as a mass medium; others develop phenomenological analyses of film itself. They reflect upon the potential of film to challenge dominant forms of ideology. The anthology considers the ways in which cinema can disrupt the clichés of capitalist images and offer radical possibilities for creating new worlds of visceral experience outside the grasp of habitual forms of knowledge and subjectivity. Ranging from the early silent period of cinema through the classics of European and Hollywood cinema to the early twenty-first century, the films discussed offer a vivid sense of these philosophers' concepts and ideas, casting new light on the history of cinema. This reader is an essential and valuable resource for a wide range of courses in film and philosophy. (shrink)

Research into second language teacher identity has experienced a shift in recent years from a cognitive perspective to social constructionist orientation. The existing research in Chinese language literature in relation to Foreign Language teachers’ identity shift is principally in relation to the change of social, cultural, and institutional contexts. Built on the current literature, this research asks: “How might teachers’ self-images or self-conceptualizations be renegotiated when they are located within their own mainstream cultural and educational system, yet comprised of students (...) from various cultural backgrounds?” The data were collected from a group of CFL teachers in a South China university. The research found that students’ backgrounds largely impacted on, and led to, the teachers’ dichotomous relational identities, but did not dramatically change the teachers’ perception on what or how much subject knowledge to be possessed to make an ideal CFL teacher. This attribute of their identity was sustained even though the teaching content was modified at a practical level in response to groups’ differences. Further, the CFL teachers’ pedagogical identity remained stable with only minor modifications when teaching “ingroups” and “outgroups” of students. (shrink)

As the most frequently used tool for measuring empathy, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) is often scored by researchers arbitrarily and casually. Many commonly used IRI scoring approaches and their corresponding measurement models are unverified, which may make the conclusions of subsequent variable relation studies controversial and even misleading. We make the first effort to summarize these measurement models and to evaluate rationality of the common scoring methods of the IRI by confirmatory factor analysis, focusing on model fitting, factor loading, (...) and model-based reliability simultaneously. The results show that most of these models do not fit well, indicating that the scoring approaches of the IRI corresponding to these models may be problematic. Relatively speaking, better scoring approaches of the IRI include summing empathic concern and perspective taking as the total score of the IRI and reporting the score of perspective taking as cognitive empathy. (shrink)

This article examines identity narratives of adult adoptees who have undergone dislocations which make impossible the construction of a seamless narrative of origin. Focusing on the dynamic between their experience of uprootedness and the modernist compulsion for a `fundamental ground' that is `beyond the reach of play', we argue that the pressure to fix identity operates to expose both the tenuousness of the concept of a center or ground and the problems with the postmodernist impulse to celebrate a vision of (...) identity as only play. Identity narratives of adoptees engage both cultural discourses of authenticity and the emotional resonance of these discourses as subjects reformulate the stories of their lives. These reformulations allow us to examine what it means to move beyond conventional understandings of identity as either mobile or fixed to a more complex view that encompasses interrupted movement and the dissonance of multiple forms of rootedness. (shrink)

Wants, preferences, and cares are physical things or events, not ideas or propositions, and therefore no chain of pure logic can conclude with a want, preference, or care. It follows that no pure-logic machine will ever want, prefer, or care. And its behavior will never be driven in the way that deliberate human behavior is driven, in other words, it will not be motivated or goal directed. Therefore, if we want to simulate human-style interactions with the world, we will (...) need to first understand the physical structure of goal-directed systems. I argue that all such systems share a common nested structure, consisting of a smaller entity that moves within and is driven by a larger field that contains it. In such systems, the smaller contained entity is directed by the field, but also moves to some degree independently of it, allowing the entity to deviate and return, to show the plasticity and persistence that is characteristic of goal direction. If all this is right, then human want-driven behavior probably involves a behavior-generating mechanism that is contained within a neural field of some kind. In principle, for goal directedness generally, the containment can be virtual, raising the possibility that want-driven behavior could be simulated in standard computational systems. But there are also reasons to believe that goal-direction works better when containment is also physical, suggesting that a new kind of hardware may be necessary. (shrink)

This paper replies to criticisms of the author's accounts of intending ("journal of philosophy", 1973), wanting ("philosophical studies", 1973), and common-sense explanations of intentional actions; and it extends the nomological theory of intentional action developed in those and other articles. the paper argues, negatively, that theoretical construct accounts of intentional concepts do not entail implausible views of self-knowledge, nor assimilate reasons to mechanical causes; and, positively, that both the way in which reasons render intelligible the actions they explain and the (...) apparently non-contingent relation certain reasons bear to the actions they explain can be accommodated by a sound nomological theory of intentional action. (shrink)

Patroni, Steve Review of: Wanting, by Richard Flanagan, Vintage Paperback by Random House, 2009.

Some features of the concept of a want, and of the explaining relation in which a want may stand to an action, have not received sufficient attention. In what follows we shall offer some suggestions and descriptions which may be one step toward remedy of this situationi. We shall be at pains to point out the extent to which the features we describe fit in with a conception of the explanations of actions conforming to the inferential (deductive or inductive) and (...) nomological patterns of scientific explanation, and also to point out where perhaps the fit is not so snug. (shrink)

Wanted est l’annonce de deux ouvrages théoriques en cours d’écriture, Blanchiment et Likilic.

There are many people in the world who want to be Somebody. Let us describe someone as Somebody who comes to believe that, in one or more respects, he or she is a special or significant person and who succeeds, through whatever means, in acquiring some sort of reputation and some sort of fame. People want to become Somebody because they believe that unless they succeed in that respect they will turn out to be a mere mediocrity, or worse still, (...) to be thought of as a mere mediocrity. People want to leave some sort of mark in this world before they die. They do not want their passage through this world to be utterly ineffectual. This, I think, is the seed from which the ideal of being Somebody emerges. (shrink)

In this paper, I criticize Ethan Jerzak’s view that ‘want’ has only one sense, the mixed expected utility sense. First, I show that his appeals to ‘really’-locutions fail to explain away the counterintuitive predictions of his view. Second, I present a class of cases, which I call “principled indifference” cases, that pose difficulties for any expected utility lexical entry for ‘want’. I argue that in order to account for these cases, one needs to concede that ‘want’ has a sense, according (...) to which wanting is a matter of subjectively preferring p-alternatives to not-p-alternatives. Finally, I introduce some considerations for and against the view that ‘want’ also has another sense, which is roughly synonymous with ‘need’. (shrink)

This paper discusses ethics in the context of Aboriginal Studies. Taking the example of a late-nineteenth century missionary work, a collection of out-of-print Mi’kmaq stories, it examines the ethical implications of the potential re-publication of such a text. It is argued that the Baptist missionary Silas T. Rand, who translated and transcribed the narratives, did his work from a Eurocentric perspective. The biases of a colonial ideology built into his translations/interpretations which are often quoted as authoritative would be further perpetuated (...) if his work is republished without critical commentary. As Aboriginal oral traditions generally form the basis of Aboriginal cultures and contemporary Aboriginal literatures but have been demeaned for centuries thereby further colonizing the peoples, an edition of Rand’s work informed by a postcolonial ethics is crucial. The paper therefore concludes with the suggestion that the stories collected by the missionary should be repatriated in the respective Mi’kmaq communities in a way that the people can decide how to go about their publication (if they want them published at all). A non-Aboriginal scholar may facilitate the process but should follow the directions of the communities. (shrink)

The focus of this article is on how Finnish young women construct their transitions to adulthood and how they imagine their futures as women. Tensions in this process are analysed: many young women want to accelerate their shifts towards independent adult status. At the same time, some of them attempt to postpone the point of being locked into the lives of adult women. They look forward to acquiring the legal status of an adult citizen and to moving to homes of (...) their own. But they want to stay young, which means time for relationships, studying, work and travel, and definitely not children at an early age. Being an adult woman does not seem to be a very tempting position for some young women; being a girl is considered by them to open more possibilities. Those young women who are keener to embrace female adulthood are also discussed, focusing on ways in which they envisage their futures, and what contradictions they experience. These tensions are explored drawing from the research project ‘Tracing Transitions — Follow-Up Study of Post-16 Students’. In the study, 40 young women and 23 young men aged around 18 years were interviewed individually, in paris or in groups of three. The project is grounded on ethnographic research in which the same young people were followed when they started secondary school at the age of 13 years. (shrink)

You want to see the concert, but don’t want to take a long drive (even though the concert is far away). Such *strongly conflicting desire ascriptions* are, I show, wrongly predicted incompatible by standard semantics. I then object to possible solutions, and give my own, based on *some-things-considered desire*. Considering the fun of the concert, but ignoring the drive, you want to see the concert; considering the boredom of the drive, but ignoring the concert, you don’t want to take the (...) drive. (shrink)

What's the difference between needs and wants?

An expert on business ethics discusses the complex issues that arise from the increased responsibilities placed upon administrative assistants and other support staff, looking at one hundred real-world problems and their solutions.

Anthony Kenny says it is impossible to want what one already has and knows one has. We present a counter-example and then suggest that Kenny may have been misled by the fact that wanting expresses itself in goal-directed behavior. From the truism that one's behavior cannot be directed toward a goal that one knows one has already attained, Kenny may have been led to suppose that behavior directed toward an as yet unattained goal cannot express one's desire for what one (...) has and knows one has. (shrink)

An incisive examination of bioethics and American healthcare, and their profound affects on American culture over the last sixty years, from two eminent scholars. An eye-opening look at the inevitable moral choices that come along with tremendous medical progress, Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die is a primer for all Americans to talk more honestly about health care. Beginning in the 1950s when doctors still paid house calls but regularly withheld the truth from (...) their patients, Amy Gutmann and Jonathan D. Moreno explore an unprecedented revolution in health care and explain the problem with America’s wanting everything that medical science has to offer without debating its merits and its limits. The result: Americans today pay far more for health care while having among the lowest life expectancies and highest infant mortality of any affluent nation. Gutmann and Moreno—“incisive, influential, and pragmatic thinkers” (Arthur Caplan)—demonstrate that the stakes have never been higher for prolonging and improving life. From health care reform and death-with-dignity to child vaccinations and gene editing, they explain how bioethics came to dominate the national spotlight, leading and responding to a revolution in doctor-patient relations, a burgeoning world of organ transplants, and new reproductive technologies that benefit millions but create a host of legal and ethical challenges. With striking examples, the authors show how breakthroughs in cancer research, infectious disease, and drug development provide Americans with exciting new alternatives, yet often painful choices. They address head-on the most fundamental challenges in American health care: Why do we pay so much for health care while still lacking universal coverage? How can medical studies adequately protect individuals who volunteer for them? What’s fair when it comes to allocating organs for transplants in truly life-and-death situations? A lucid and provocative blend of history and public policy, this urgent work exposes the American paradox of wanting to have it all without paying the price. (shrink)

The extent of the approval with which Western culture views the attitude of hope can scarcely be exaggerated. Hope is seen as that which sustains us through wartime, death camps, slavery, natural disaster, extreme disease and disability—it is a light, a beacon, the last spark that fuels us when all else has failed. Hope is also seen as a moral and spiritual virtue—hoping for moral progress in this world, and salvation in the next, is at the heart of a meaningful (...) human life. A positive view of hope infuses Western theology since Aquinas; utopian political philosophy, positive psychology, the self-help culture, the clinical research community, a wide range of activist groups, and a great deal of political rhetoric all maintain the affirmation of hope. The only qualm commonly expressed about hope is that it is sometimes “false:” that is, based on lies or misconceptions. False hope is bad because, first, it is bad to be deceived and, second, it may suck up resources better spent elsewhere. False hope, though, is not genuine hope, and genuine hope is an essential human good. My book Wanting to Pull Clouds will argue that the popular view of hope is vastly and dangerously oversimplified. Much more insidious than false hope is hope that is “genuine” and not based on lies or misconceptions, but that nevertheless bears important conceptual and empirical connections to passivity, inattention, excuse-making and wishful thinking. To be clear, this is not an anti-hope project. Rather, it examines the mechanisms that make hope desirable and virtuous, when it is these things; it becomes clear in the course of this examination that these very.. (shrink)

An account of desire as a species of belief may owe its appeal to the details of its proposal as to precisely what sort of beliefs desires are to be identified with, and its downfall may be due to those details it does provide. For example, it may be proposed that the desire that α is in fact the belief that it ought to be that α, or is morally good or desirable that it should be the case that α. (...) Here the appeal might be that of forging a link between the holding of a moral belief and the acknowledgment that one has a reason for acting a certain way; and the shortcoming of the suggestion is its evident implausibility: even if the ‘necessity’ direction could be established, having a desire hardly seems sufficient for the holding of any such belief. Again: it might be proposed, perhaps simply to bring some order into the realm of propositional attitudes by reducing some to others, that the belief with which we should identify a’s desire that α is a’s belief that he will or would be happy if α. This proposed identification can be seen to be incorrect by consideration of examples such as the following, due to J. Gosling. An aging and ailing parent might forego numerous pleasures in order that his children should reap the benefits of his saving and have a good start in life – perhaps by receiving an expensive education – after his impending death. Oearly he may want that they should so benefit even if he does not believe in an after-death existence in which he might come to know of, and so take pleasure in, his children’s subsequent well-being. So his wanting that they should prosper cannot consist in his believing that he will be happy if/when they do, since he has no expectation of even being in existence in that eventuality. As Gosling puts it, there is a clear difference between thinking that something’s coming about will bring one pleasure, on the one hand, and viewing the prospect of its coming about with pleasure, on the other. (shrink)

The ArgumentTheorists of science and culture, seeking to explicate the implications of chaos theory, quantum mechanics, or special and general relativity, have drawn parallels to the constellation of intellectual and social phenomena collected in the concept of postmodernism. The notion thereby invoked of a postmodern physics is suggestive and worth exploring. But it remains ungrounded so long as the argument moves in the realm of parallels. Moreover, these discussions prove to be tacitly constrained by a preexisting genre of physicists' own (...) literary production, a genre whose argumentative structures have been taken over implicitly into the subsequent exchanges. Attending critically in this way to the intellectual interests of the discussants — asking who it is that wants to constitute a postmodern physics — should open up more productive ways of framing the debate. (shrink)

Should we treat other people according to what they want (their own values), or according to what we take their best interests to be? If they have given us no mandate to decide for them, their values should prevail. This applies not only to allowing but also to assisting them to get what they want. Taking this seriously in medical practice involves a lot of communication between doctor and patient, and a lot of research to establish a typology of patients (...) in respect of their wants. The results would seriously affect doctor-patient relationships and the organisation of general practice and hospital care. It is with this, rather than dramatic 'moral problems', that medical ethics should be chiefly concerned. (shrink)

Richard Holton provides a unified account of intention, choice, weakness of will, strength of will, temptation, addiction, and freedom of the will. Drawing on recent psychological research, he argues that, rather than being the pinnacle of rationality, the central components of the will are there to compensate for our inability to make or maintain sound judgments. Choice is understood as the capacity to form intentions even in the absence of judgments of what action is best. Weakness of will is understood (...) as the failure to maintain an intention, or more specifically, a resolution, in the face of temptation--where temptation typically involves a shift in judgment as to what is best, or in the case of addiction, a disconnection between what is judged best and what is desired. Strength of will is the corresponding ability to maintain a resolution, an ability that requires the employment of a particular faculty or skill. Finally, the experience of freedom of the will is traced to the experiences of forming intentions, and of maintaining resolutions, both of which require effortful activity from the agent. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOne of the central claims of democratic theory is that the institutional features of democracy systematically cause government to respond to the people's needs. In fact, however, democracy might logically be expected to be especially responsive only to the people's desires, not their needs. Responses to people's objective needs can be substantially different from responses to their subjective desires. Democratic institutions therefore cannot guarantee responsiveness to basic human needs. Democracy, should, at least in principle, thus be confined to the sphere (...) of wants rather than needs. (shrink)

Disagreements about morally appropriate mitigation policies arise in part from implicit disagreements about the nature and moral significance of needs. One key question is what, if anything, distinguishes “needs” from “mere wants.” One approach, prominent in economics and implemented in existing integrated assessment models of climate change, rejects a hard distinction between needs and wants. An alternative approach, prominent in the philosophical literature on needs, identifies needs with the requirements for autonomous agency, which is the capacity to set (...) and pursue one’s own goals. A second key question is in what sense, if any, the satisfaction of needs should take precedence over the satisfaction of wants. Those who reject the distinction between wants and needs can say only that some desires should be weighted more heavily than others. Those who endorse the distinction can say that, given certain ethical assumptions, it is wrong to frustrate one person’s needs in order to satisfy others’ mere wants. Thus, rejecting the distinction between wants and needs tends to justify less aggressive mitigation policies, in which satisfying the so-called “wants” of present generations compensates for frustrating the so-called “needs” of future generations. Endorsing the distinction between wants and needs, along with certain ethical assumptions, tends to justify more aggressive mitigation policies. Both positions are intellectually defensible; understanding them helps illuminate disagreements over mitigation policy. (shrink)

Different brain mechanisms seem to mediate wanting and liking for the same reward. This may have implications for the modular nature of mental processes, and for understanding addictions, compulsions, free will and other aspects of desire. A few wanting and liking phenomena are presented here, together with discussion of some of these implications.