Starting from the peculiar tension between figure and writing in Walter Benjamin’s philosophical thought, my contribution aims to define the relevance of manuscripts, schemes, fragments and annotations for the definition of philosophical textuality. Analyzing Benjamin’s writings belonging to this genre, as well as the fragmentary observations belonging to Novalis’ Allgemeines Brouillon and Nietzsche’s Posthumous Fragments, the processual dimension of philosophical thinking will be emphasized. In this theoretical context the processual moment of textuality can be put in tension with the moment (...) defined by the work in its insular completeness. Finally, one wonders if the most appropriate form of philosophical thought in our era of digital production and transmission of knowledge does not really lie in the flow dynamics of textuality. In conclusion, it will remain to be clarified how the autographic moment of philosophy can be thought of in the digital age of knowledge. To this last extent, a good example would be eventually given by Walter Benjamin’s archive in Berlin that contains in fully digitalized form both edited texts and manuscripts. (shrink)

This paper continues Israel Scheffler's investigation of rituals as autographic/allographic. It concludes that the autographic/allographic distinction is more fruitfully applied to rituals as a gradual distinction, distinguishing rituals in terms of their autographic/allographic elements or aspects.

Within the holdings of The University of Manchesters John Rylands Library is a remarkable collection of 337 letters to and from Baptist ministers and laypersons written between 1741 and 1907. Nearly half can be found among the autograph collections of Thomas Raffles, Liverpool Congregationalist minister and educator, with another 103 letters belonging to the collections of the Methodist Archives. John Sutcliff, Baptist minister at Olney and an early leader within the Baptist Missionary Society, was the recipient of more than seventy (...) of these,letters. Among the correspondents are the leading Baptist and Congregationalist ministers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although largely unknown today, these letters provide important insights into British Baptist history between 1740 and 1900, establishing the John Rylands Library,as a valuable resource for Baptist historians. (shrink)

The autograph corpus of the Damascene scholar Ibn Ṭūlūn is dispersed throughout collections in North America, Europe, and West Asia. As an initial probe into these materials, I will describe, identify, and analyze two compendia in the Princeton University collection: Garrett MSS 196B and 1011H. They contain, among other things, a portion of al-Thaghr al-bassām, an autograph draft of his biographical dictionary of Damascene judges, which is later than the one edited and published in 1959, and a heretofore missing portion (...) of al-Qalāʿid al-jawhari- yya, his topography of al-Ṣāliḥiyya. I will also positively identify an anonymous, untitled manuscript in the Bodleian Library and show its relationship to the al-Thaghr al-bassām autograph. (shrink)

The great paleographer Ludwig Traube was the first to suggest that the actual handwriting of John Scottus Eriugena could be identified. In this new study, the first full examination of the problem of Eriugena's handwriting, the authors not only systematically review the evidence, but suggest a solution. Their identification of the autograph is based upon a detailed palaeographical and philological examination of the surviving examples of the scripts of the two Irishmen who wrote in the twelve ninth-century manuscripts associated directly (...) with Eriugena and his school. (shrink)

Voluntarism about beliefs is the view that persons can be free to choose their beliefs for non-epistemic (truth-related) reasons (cf. Williams 1973). One problem for belief voluntarism is that it can lead to Moore-paradoxality. The person might believe that -/- a.) there are also good epistemic reasons for her belief, or that b.) there are no epistemic reasons one way or the other, or that c.) there are good epistemic reasons against her belief. -/- If the person is aware of (...) the fact that she chose her belief for non-epistemic reasons, then she would believe one of the following three things (using "evidence" as a term for all kinds of epistemic reasons): -/- a.) I believe that p but not because of the good evidence in favour of it; b.) I believe that p but that has nothing to do with the evidence; c.) I believe that p but the evidence speaks against it. -/- We could add a fourth case in which the person suspends belief on the subject matter despite the evidence: -/- d.) The evidence supports "p" but I have no view on the matter. -/- All the different versions a-d are somehow Moore-paradoxical. They constitute different ways of mistrusting one's own belief (cf. Wittgenstein 1958, p.190). Given that one cannot, for conceptual reasons, mistrust one's beliefs, it follows that a person cannot be in one of the above predicaments described by a-d. Hence, voluntarism about beliefs is false, at least if we are dealing with cases in which the person is aware of the fact that she chose her belief for non-epistemic reasons. It won't help to focus on cases in which the person is not aware of that fact, either because she has forgotten the genesis of her belief or because the process of belief acquisition was unconscious. -/- Bas van Fraassen's conception of a stance (cf. van Fraassen 2002)-a mix of commitments, values, goals-gives us reason to rethink the possibility of voluntarism. Might we be free to choose our stances for non-epistemic reasons? I argue here that the answer is negative. First, it is not clear at all whether stances can be objects of choice, properly speaking. And: Can we make sense of the idea of a free choice here? Furthermore, I argue that similar problems of Moore-paradoxality would arise for voluntarism about stances. If one does not want to completely devalue the idea of a stance, one should avoid voluntarism. (shrink)

The primary concern of our 2014 paper was not notation but the autographic/allographic distinction, not representations as such but works of art. As we see it, Zeimbekis's considerations do not ultimately undermine the position we advanced in 2014— but they do challenge an element of Goodman's own theory of notation that derives from his requirement of recoverability. That requirement can be abandoned without losing the explanatory power of the autographic/allographic distinction as we have refined it.

Van Fraassen has argued that many philosophical positions should be understood as stances rather than factual beliefs. In this paper I discuss the vexed question of whether and how such stances can be rationally justified. Until this question has been satisfactorily answered, the otherwise promising stance approach cannot be considered a viable metaphilosophical option. One can find hints, and the beginnings of an answer to this question, in van Fraassen’s (and others’) writings, but no general, fully clear and convincing (...) account has been offered. I aim to provide such an account. In the first section I introduce the concept of a stance. In the second section I argue that stances may be justified pragmatically, in terms of both their epistemic fruits, and their coherence with values. In the third section I further consider the relationship between stances and values, arguing that the value-ladenness of a stance does not render it immune to rational scrutiny. In the final section I look at van Fraassen’s version of epistemological voluntarism, which plays a central role in his conception of the basis on which a stance may be rationally adopted. I show that voluntarism provides a theoretical framework, and approach to epistemology, within which the forms of justification appropriate to stance choice I outline in sections 2 and 3 find a natural home. (shrink)

Locating stance -- Structures of stance in lived experience -- Stance and others, stance and lives -- The social life of stance and the politics of expressive culture.

The Stance of Plato addresses Plato's particular fusion of literature and philosophy. Albert Cook examines a number of Plato's major dialogues to ascertain further the bearing of "rhetoric" and the dramatized dialogue on the relationship between literature and philosophy. Using an engaging and occasionally poetic style, Cook studies the implications of Plato's literary form and the historical context of his ideas. The Stance of Plato helps bridge the gap between scholars interested in Plato's arguments and logic and those (...) interested in their literary aspects, suggesting that literature and philosophy may not be separable domains. The book will be an important work for classicists, philosophers, and scholars of literature. (shrink)

Nelson Goodman notoriously distinguished between autographic works, whose instances should be identified by taking history of production into account, and allographic works, whose instances can be identified independently of history of production. Scholars such as Jerrold Levinson, Flint Schier, and Gregory Currie have criticized Goodman’s autographic/allographic distinction arguing that all works are such that their instances should be identified by taking history of production into account. I will address this objection by exploiting David Davies’ distinction between e-instances and (...) p-instances of a work, thereby restating the autographic/allographic distinction. Then, I will show that this way of restating this distinction leads us to effective accounts of relevant related phenomena such as forgery, plagiarism, and digital technologies. Finally, I will show the theoretical advantages of my account of the autographic/allographic distinction in comparison with an alternative account recently proposed by Jason D’Cruz and P.D. Magnus. (shrink)

This paper compares and contrasts the concept of a stance with that of a paradigm qua disciplinary matrix, in an attempt to illuminate both notions. First, it considers to what extent it is appropriate to draw an analogy between stances and disciplinary matrices. It suggests that despite first appearances, a disciplinary matrix is not simply a stance writ large. Second, it examines how we might reinterpret disciplinary matrices in terms of stances, and shows how doing so can provide (...) us with a better insight into non-revolutionary science. Finally, it identifies two directions for future research: “Can the rationality of scientific revolutions be understood in terms of the dynamic between stances and paradigms?” and “Do stances help us to understand incommensurability between disciplinary matrices?”. (shrink)

The volume addresses a variety of issues on Stance and Inter/Subjectivity, and the expression of Identity in discourse. It focuses on the multifaceted nature of stance, and the use of resources of epistemicity, effectivity, and evaluation and metaphor, as well as other dimensions within the domain of stance, such as mirativity, emotion and attribution. In this way it provides a more in-depth and a wider perspective into the nature of stance. The contributions feature the use of (...) stance resources in several languages, and in various discourse domains and genres, such as oral discourse, political and newspaper discourse, and science popularization and medical research articles, as well as online fora on social issues, mental health and peer support platforms. (shrink)

This qualitative study investigated the personal and professional stances of 40 health and social care professionals confronted with assisted suicide of older persons living in nursing homes or supported by social welfare or home care and support services in French-speaking Switzerland. Requests of assisted suicide triggered questions with regard to the professional mission, the quality of accompaniment, values, and ethical principles. Four types of stances emerged from the analysis performed according to the principles of the grounded theory: favorable in principle, (...) professional compromise, personal compromise, and opposed in principle. Each stance results from the combination of several dimensions: personal or professional concordance or compatibility with assisted suicide; implication in, and impact of, the process; appreciation of the process; and satisfaction with the resources at disposal. The differentiated stances adopted by professionals depend largely on their way of interpreting their mission, deontology, and the relationship to the older person. (shrink)

Recent work on workplace narratives as a site for the discursive construction of professional identities has focused on speakers who can be considered experienced and knowledgeable experts in their fields. The present study, in contrast, explores two types of workplace narratives — reflective and relational narratives — produced by a group of professionals who are non-experts: in this case, novice language teachers. Specifically, the article illustrates how the moral stance that a novice constructs within a narrative may be formulated (...) in uncertain terms, may be destabilized by the primary narrator, or may be subject to revision by other participants. Finally, the study highlights the relationship between the narrative dimensions of moral stance and tellership, and suggests that participant structure, participants' role relationships, and institutional power asymmetry are especially relevant factors to consider in any further analyses of novices' workplace narratives. (shrink)

In our daily lives, we need to predict and understand others’ behavior in order to navigate through our social environment. Predictions concerning other humans’ behavior usually refer to their mental states, such as beliefs or intentions. Such a predictive strategy is called ‘adoption of the intentional stance.’ In this paper, we review literature related to the concept of intentional stance from the perspectives of philosophy, psychology, human development, culture, and human-robot interaction. We propose that adopting the intentional (...) class='Hi'>stance might be a pivotal factor in facilitating social attunement with artificial agents. The paper first reviews the theoretical considerations regarding the intentional stance and examines literature related to the development of the intentional stance across life span. Subsequently, we discuss cultural norms as grounded in the intentional stance, and finally, we focus on the issue of adopting the intentional stance toward artificial agents, such as humanoid robots. At the dawn of the artificial intelligence era, the question of how – and also when – we predict and explain robots’ behavior by referring to mental states is of high interest. The paper concludes with a discussion on ethical consequences of adopting the intentional stance toward robots, and sketches future directions in research on this topic. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 221 Seiten: 279-300.

About the Book: This Book besides giving Poetic Stance of The Holy Qur'an also discusses: Why couldn't the Creation take place without a Creator: There's a mathematical affirmation besides scientific and philosophical assertions.

The bifocal stance theory posits two stances – the ritual and the instrumental – each a learning strategy with different fidelity outcomes. These differences in turn have long-term consequences for cultural stability. Yet we suggest the key concept of “fidelity” is insufficiently explicated. Pointing to counterexamples and gaps in the theory, we suggest that explicating “fidelity” reveals the stances to be heuristic explanatory strategies: first-pass explanatory glosses of learning and its consequences, not descriptions of the inner machinery of agents.

The prolific English poet John Lydgate has been known as the “monk of Bury” since the early fifteenth century. Both his popularity and perceptions of his literary merit have fluctuated wildly since his zenith as the famous laureate of Henry V, Henry VI and Duke Humphrey, but readers have been constant in their association of Lydgate with the Benedictine abbey from which the epithet derives. However, there has been remarkably little examination of the details of Lydgate's existence at Bury: the (...) critical emphasis has been on Lydgate's contact with Lancastrian society rather than on his quotidian life as a monk. “To trace in detail the connection between the Bury library and the characteristic configuration of Lydgate's thought and work, to see how his mind was formed and influenced by the books with which he was in such familiar contact” remains an unfulfilled desire. In particular, given the range of Lydgate's literary and intellectual allusions, it is surprising that there has been no full attempt to compare what we know of Bury's sizeable late medieval library, catalogued in the late fourteenth century by Henry Kirkstede, with Lydgate's poetic output. Likewise, few critics have attempted to trace connections between Lydgate's poetry and the intellectual and cultural atmosphere of a grand Benedictine abbey in the late medieval period. This article, a study of one manuscript from Bury that Lydgate certainly handled and that is typical of the type of book he would have encountered in great numbers in the monastic library, endeavours to reassert the importance to his poetry of the environment in which Lydgate spent most of his life. (shrink)

Within the rather large Wittgenstein-collection at the Austrian National Library are 14 letters to Ludwig Wittgenstein from his uncle Paul (1848-1928), written between 1914 and 1923. The last of these letters, written on 1st March 1923, contains a little surprise. On the backside of this letter, the logical remarks and draft graphics which are recorded are obviously penned by the hand of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The debate between scientific realists and anti-realists is now a classic debate in the Philosophy of Science. Van Fraassen (2002) has suggested that the positions that take part in the debate involve not only different doxastic attitudes regarding some propositions, but different epistemic stances, that is, different sets of commitments, values and epistemic strategies. The formulation of this debate in terms of epistemic stances and the voluntarist epistemology it motivates make it plausible to think of it as a deep disagreement. (...) This kind of disagreements cannot be settled by reason alone because they lack the conditions that are necessary for arguments to work. I argue, however, that the attempts to use arguments can have an epistemic value in these contexts, as they can help reveal intuitions. I adopt the view on intuitions put forward by Chudnoff (2014), according to which they are mental states capable of motivating epistemic action. I claim that, while the attempt to utter an argument cannot convince an opponent of changing her mind, it can make her perform some epistemic actions and, thus, bring out some of her intuitions. To show how arguments can work in this way, I take as a study case one of the main realist arguments: the No Miracles Argument. (shrink)

Inspired by Bas van Fraassen’s Stance Empiricism, Anjan Chakravartty has developed a pluralistic account of what he calls epistemic stances towards scientific ontology. In this paper, I examine whether Chakravartty’s stance pluralism can exclude epistemic stances that licence pseudo-scientific practices like those found in Scientology. I argue that it cannot. Chakravartty’s stance pluralism is therefore prone to a form of debilitating relativism. I consequently argue that we need (1) some ground or constraint in relation to which epistemic (...) stances can be ranked by degrees, and (2) some way to demarcate science from pseudo-science so that we know what epistemic stances are about. Regarding (1), I argue that empirical detectability can serve as the ground in relation to which epistemic stances are ranked by degrees. Regarding (2), I argue for ranking sciences on a continuum according to established institutional criteria, rather than attempting to draw a strict demarcation. (shrink)

Biologists have replaced the metaphor of “genetic transmission” with a detailed account of the molecular mechanisms underlying the phenomenon which Darwin referred to as “like produces like.” Cultural evolution theorists, in contrast, continue to appeal to “imitation” or “copying.” The notion of ritual and instrumental stances does not resolve this issue, and ignores the institutions in which people live.

The bifocal stance theory (BST) of cultural evolution has prompted a wide-ranging discussion with broadly three aims: to apply the theory to novel contexts; to extend the conceptual framework; to offer critical feedback on various aspects of the theory. We first discuss BST's relevance to the diverse range of topics which emerged from the commentaries, followed by a consideration of how our framework can be supplemented by and compared to other theories. Lastly, the criticisms that were raised by a (...) subset of commentaries allow us to clarify parts of our theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:73. More Hume autograph marginalia in a first edition of the "Treatise". Two sets of marginalia by Hume in copies of the first edition of A Treatise of Human Nature have been published. One is a copy in the British Library. This has 1 2 been described by Connon and Nidditch and was, no doubt, one, at least, of the copies which Hume kept for himself. The marginalia are (...) so extensive as to suggest that, at the time he made them, he may have been hoping for an opportunity to publish a second edition of the Treatise. The other copy with marginalia, a presentation copy to his kinsman, Henry Home, Lord Karnes, has been described by Wallace Nethery, Librarian of the Hóose Library of Phil3 osophy and by Nidditch. There is a third copy of the Treatise with marginalia in Hume's hand which was a pre4 sentation copy to Pope. The Pope copy is inscribed on the flyleaf of Volume I in Hume's handwriting, "To Alexander* Rope Esq at Twickenham". There are 18 corrections in Volume I and 5 in Volume II. They are as follows, the first word or phrase being the error, the second the correction. The first word is usually scratched out in the text and the correction inserted in the margin but sometimes insertions are simply made within the text. 1st EditionSelby-Bigge 1.12.252.8'the' Our' 1.35.2316.1'of 'or' 1.57.428.18'these* 'those' 1.58.829.6'part' 'parts' 1.111.2860.27'defection' 'dissection' 1.126.569.14'it' deleted 1.154.486.1'worn out' "worn it out' 1.240.7136.9'as' 'when' 1.256.21145.28'evidence' 'testimony' 74. ï. 273. 20155.24'instance' 'instances' 1.280.16159.33'gave it's' 'gave it its' Ï.286.25163.22-23'upon observation' 'upon the observation' 1.287.16164.2'cause' 'case' 1.288.5164.15'results* 'result' 1.293.10167.14'exists' 'exist' 1.343.17196.22'opening I' 'opening it I' 1.402.16231.6'presses' 'press' 1.453.1260.34'what the' 'what is the' 11.108.10 336.24 "affections wheel' 'affections to wheel' II. 120. 4 343.19 'cause' 'causes' 11.228.23404.15 'One' Our' 11.229.19 404.32 'and proceed' 'and practice proceed' 11.271.24428. 20 'considerably' 'sensibly' In addition, someone, perhaps Hume, has marked a printer's error where a letter has slipped. (Vol. I, p. 466. 3). It is not possible to find out the date upon which Hume gave this copy to Pope from the published correspondence of either party. Pope died in 1744 and Hume may have sent him a copy of the Treatise because of the former's literary renown and because the publishers had a large number of unsold copies on their hands. From the fact, among others, that the footnote on Volume II, p. 168 (Selby-Bigge, p. 371) is missing from both the Pope1 and the Karnes copies, it is clear that Volumes I and II were, as one might expect of presentations, in each case early issues or states. It is more than likely that Hume made other presents of the Treatise to friends and people he admired such as Francis Hutcheson and Bishop Butler, and these 75. would probably have included marginalia along the same lines as the Karnes and Pope copies. For what Hume substantially did in giving these copies was to perform an act of courtesy; i.e., to incorporate items from the errata tables into the text. The Pope copy is the least important and interesting of those noticed so far, for it contains only one correction which is not included in the errata tables - the second item listed above in Volume I - and not all of them. The percentage of the changes called for in the errata tables which are made by Hume in the text diminishes markedly as between Volumes I and II. Moreover, there are no marginalia in the third volume, 'Of Morals', and this is perhaps to be explained by Hume's becoming bored with this somewhat superfluous task, even if it was a politeness and the fact... (shrink)

Frank Mitjans is an architect who has worked in London since 1976. He was introduced to the significance of the figure of St. Thomas More by Andrés Vázquez de Prada, author of the biography, Sir Tomás Moro, Lord Canciller de Inglaterra. In 1977 Vázquez de Prada invited Mitjans to visit with him the Thomas More Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, which stimulated his interest in representations of More, his family and his friends. Since August 2002 he has given many (...) presentations and talks on the topography of More’s London to groups of students and other interested people in Britain, Ireland, and Sweden. Frank Mitjans, architecte qui travaille à Londres depuis 1976, fut initié au personnage de Saint Thomas More par Andrés Vázquez de Prada, auteur de la biographie Sir Tomás Moro, Lord Canciller de Inglaterra. En 1977 Vázquez de Prada l’invita à l’accompagner dans sa visite de l’exposition Thomas More à la National Portrait Gallery, évènement qui aiguisa son intérêt pour les représentations de More, de sa famille et de ses amis. Depuis août 2002 il a régulièrement fait des présentations et des exposés à des groupes d’étudiants et d’autres en Grande-Bretagne, Irlande et Suède au sujet de la topographie du Londres de Thomas More. The recent exhibitions of the works of Holbein in London and Basel, and scholarly publications such as Holbein and England, have rekindled interest in the Portrait of Thomas More and his Family, and in the late sixteenth-century versions of Holbein’s presumed lost original. The present paper analyses the differences between the sixteenth-century versions and Holbein’s 1527 composition sketch, and concludes that the sketch is a more reliable witness to Holbein’s lost painting than the later versions, as well as the only authentic witness to More’s intentions; though anything we learn from the drawing must be checked against what we know from More’s letters and writings and other biographical data. From the later versions, however, and in particular from the references to Seneca on them, we can learn about those who commissioned them and England’s peculiar historical circumstances. (shrink)

This book presents one of the first attempts at developing a precise, grammatically rooted, theory of conversation motivated by data from real conversations. The theory has descriptive reach from the micro-conversational - e.g. self-repair at the word level - to macro-level phenomena such as multi-party conversation and the characterization of distinct conversational genres. It draws on extensive corpus studies of the British National Corpus, on evidence from language acquisition, and on computer simulations of language evolution. The theory provides accounts of (...) the opening, middle game, and closing stages of conversation. it also offers a new perspective on traditional semantic concerns such as quanitifcation and anaphora. The Interactive Stance challenges orthodox views of grammar by aruging that, unless we wish to excluse from analysis a large body of frequently occurrring words and constructions, the right way to construe grammar is as a system that characterizes types of talk in interaction. (shrink)

By integrating Bernard Williams’s internalism about reasons with his later thought, this article casts fresh light on internalism and reveals what wider concerns it speaks to. To be consistent with Williams’s later work, I argue, internalism must align with his deference to the phenomenology of moral deliberation and with his critique of ‘moral self-indulgence’. Key to this alignment is the idea that deliberation can express the agent’s motivations without referring to them; and that internalism is not a normative claim, but (...) an example of sense-making from ‘the ethnographic stance’. This leaves a worry over whether moral conviction can coexist with an internalist understanding of reasons. Here too, however, Williams’s later thought provides an answer. Differentiating corrosive from corroborative sense-making, it elucidates how internalism, though not normative, can nonetheless affect our confidence in reason statements, thereby informing how we deliberate and how we address those whose motivations differ from our own. (shrink)

A great deal of research has now established that written texts embody interactions between writers and readers. A range of linguistic features have been identified as contributing to the writer's projection of a stance to the material referenced by the text, and, to a lesser extent, the strategies employed to presuppose the active role of an addressee. As yet, however, there is no overall typology of the resources writers employ to express their positions and connect with readers. Based on (...) an analysis of 240 published research articles from eight disciplines and insider informant interviews, I attempt to address this gap and consolidate much of my earlier work to offer a framework for analysing the linguistic resources of intersubjective positioning. Attending to both stance and engagement, the model provides a comprehensive and integrated way of examining the means by which interaction is achieved in academic argument and how the discoursal preferences of disciplinary communities construct both writers and readers. (shrink)