Many medieval philosophers and logicians regarded modal logic as a model for epistemic, normative and optative concepts on the basis of their apparent similarities to modal concepts. These interpretations of modal logic led to critical studies of the applicability of modal principles to deontic concepts. Some philosophers presented apparent counterexamples to the deontic interpretation of the Consequence Principle, according to which the consequences of what is obligatory (or permitted) are also obligatory (permitted). These examples are variants of Lennart Åqvist's paradox (...) of the Good Samaritan. In this article it is argued that the examples involve a confusion between the compounded and the divided senses of deontic propositions, and are not genuine counterexamples to the Consequence Principle. If the concept of knowledge is analysed as epistemically satisfactory belief, the paradox of epistemic obligation can be solved in a similar way. (shrink)

The topic of my dissertation is the treatment of the fallacies of composition and division during the scholastic period , the compounded/divided sense distinction which grew out of that treatment, and the philosophical use to which the distinction was put. For instance, a recognition of these fallacies during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries helped theologians deal with certain problems having to do with foreknowledge and human freedom. In addition, a recognition of the distinction between the compounded and (...) divided senses of propositions allowed medieval logicians after the first quarter of the fourteenth century to get clearer about what might broadly be described as the logic of propositional attitudes. ;In Chapter 1, I briefly summarize and compare theories of composition and division from Peter Abelard to Paul of Pergula . And in Chapters 2 and 3, I examine the treatments of composition and division presented by Lambert of Auxerra , Roger Bacon , and William Ockham . In these treatments, composition and division are viewed in terms of ambiguity. ;By the second quarter of the fourteenth century, one sees the discussion of composition and division move from a concern with ambiguous expressions to a concern with arguments comprised of unambiguous sentences having either the compounded sense or the divided sense in virtue of the sentence's word-order. "Infinitely fast does Socrates run; therefore, Socrates runs infinitely fast" is, according to William Heytesbury , invalid: the premise has the divided sense, and is possibly true; the conclusion has the compounded sense, and is impossible. With Heytesbury there is an increasing emphasis on the compounded/divided sense distinction in connection with verbs signifying mental acts or acts of will: 'know,' 'believe,' 'desire,' 'understand,' etc. In Chapter 4 I explain why these shifts may have occurred in the medieval treatment of composition and division. And in Chapter 5, I consider the effect of Heytesbury's treatment of composition and division on logicians and commentators who come after him. I focus in particular on the work of four fifteenth- through sixteenth-century Italian logicians and their views on epistemic logic. (shrink)

Frege’s distinction between force and sense is a central pillar of modern thinking about meaning. This is the idea that a self-standing utterance of a sentence S can be divided into two components. One is the proposition P that S’s linguistic meaning and context associates with it. The other is S’s illocutionary force. The force/sense distinction is associated with another thesis, the embedding principle, that implies that the only content that embeds in compound sentences is propositional content. We argue (...) that both the Force/Sense distinction and the principle of embedding are seriously challenged by figurative language, and irony in particular. We conclude that theorists need to go back to the drawing board about the nature of illocutionary acts. (shrink)

From a modern point of view, compounds are contrasted with elements of which they are composed, and the two categories combine to give the category of substances. Mixtures, on the other hand, might be understood to contrast with pure substances (substances in isolation), so that mixtures are quantities of matter containing several substances (be they compounds or uncombined elements) whereas pure substances are understood to be quantities of matter exhausting the material contents of a region of space which contain only (...) one substance, and might be either a compound or an element. But heterogeneous quantities of matter (comprising several phases) might also be understood to be mixtures. Thus, it is common to speak of a mixture of ice, liquid water and water vapour in equilibrium at the triple point of water, although there is only a single substance present. The general concept of mixture as treated by Gibbs’ phase rule is a quantity of matter comprising either several substances or several phases, “or” being used in the inclusive sense. Gibbs’ phase rule is a relatively recent development in the history of the concept of chemical substance, dating from the latter half of the nineteenth century. The concepts and distinctions it presupposes have not always been apparent. I trace some of the important conceptual developments underlying the important distinctions at issue here from Aristotle, who didn’t distinguish either substance and phase, or what are now called compounds and solutions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:183, IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES: PUBLIC OR PRIVATE? In his 'Perceptions and Persons' William Davie aims "to determine what perceptions are for Hume." He challenges what I trust that he is right in labelling "The Standard View." His statement of this view is quoted from my Hume's Philosophy of Belief:... Impressions are defined as constituting with ideas the class of 'perceptions of the mind. ' While wine must be (logically) (...) public, the impression of wine like the idea of wine must be (logically) private. Whereas the presence of wine tautologically guarantees the presence of wine, the occurrence of an impression of wine is by no means a sufficient condition of the presence of wine — because an impression of wine, but not of course real wine, may be hallucinatory. Impressions belong to the category of experiences: wine2is cellared in that of physical things. My own purpose now is to defend, against attacks recently launched not only by Davie but also by Donald Livingston, this standard view. Davie contrasts it with "my own view, which is that perceptions are the things that we know, both private and public" (p. 130). He shows no signs of recognizing either how revolutionary his present suggestion is, or how revolutionary Hume himself would have been were any such suggested interpretation correct. For this particular "Standard View" is not one first introduced by me a couple of decades ago, and later misguiding even such usually sound scholars as Terence Penelhum. Instead it seems to have been accepted by almost if not absolutely all earlier writers discussing this part of Hume's philosophy. For instance: if Davie is right, then Thomas Reid must have devoted most of his professional life to the dismembering of a straw man. "Reid," as Livingston remarked in his Introduction to Hume: A Re- 184. evaluation, "took Hume's work to be a reduction to absurdity of a philosophical hypothesis which began in modern times with Descartes.... 'The hypothesis I mean is, that nothing is perceived but what is in the mind which perceives it....'" Again: if Davie is right, then Hume is here breaking from all his immediate predecessors in a revolutionary way, and in a direction which ought to have made the revolution welcome to Reid. Yet Hume himself gives no hint of this radical new beginning. Instead he goes out of his way to note a merely verbal innovation: by his introduction of a new use for the term 'impression' the word 'idea' is restored "to its original sense, from which Mr. Locke had perverted it, in making it stand for all our perceptions" (T2 fn.). The class of Lockean ideas, the class which Hume is thus studiously subdividing into the subclasses of Humean ideas and Humean impressions, contains, surely, nothing but what is logically private? Certainly no other interpretation of Locke's words would seem to be possible. He scarcely could have put the point more clearly or more emphatically than he does in the introductory first chapter of An Essay concerning Human Understanding. He says there that he is going to investigate "those Ideas, Notions, or whatever else you please to call them, which a Man observes, and is conscious to himself he has in his Mind...." Locke also apologizes for his frequent employment of "the Word Idea, " excusing it as necessary "to express whatever is meant by Phantasm, Notion, Species, or whatever it is, which the Mind can be 4 employ'd about in thinking...." Only and precisely in this understanding of the nature of ideas was it possible for Berkeley to open The Principles of Human Knowledge with a single sentence asserting everything which Reid was so correctly concerned to deny: 185, It is evident to any one who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses, or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind, or lastly ideas formed by help of memory and imagination, either compounding, dividing, or barely representing those originally perceived in the aforesaid ways. In face of all this, how is it possible to maintain that, for Hume, "perceptions are the things that we know... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:62. 'HUME ON SPACE AND GEOMETRY': ONE RESERVATION In so far as Rosemary Newman disagrees with any2 thing said in my 'Infinite Divisibility in Hume's Treatise ' - which seems, happily, not to be so very far - I hasten to report that I am now persuaded. Thus my suggested reason for refusing to allow that an impression of blackness could give rise to the idea of extension was (...) not, after all, 3 Hume's. And no doubt his conviction that whatever ^s capable of being divided in_ infinitum, must consist of an infinite number of parts (T26) was in part sustained by "the atomistic type of phenomenalism advanced in the first Part 4 of Book I of the Treatise". For to any objection that this nowadays so plainly unacceptable conviction had been accepted as obviously correct by such formidable predecessors as Berkeley and Hobbes, it could be replied that they too had their commitments to their own brands of atomism. In her further comments upon "Hume's phenomenalist atomism" Newman notices, as "a very curious claim", his statement that when - like the true philosopher he was! - he locked at a table:- My senses convey to me only the impressions of colour 'd points, dispos 'd in a certain manner (T34). So I was sorry that she seems to have missed the bold priority claim which, referring to the same passage, I made on Hume's behalf in that article: "Anyone familiar with the theories and the paintings of Seurat might also mischievously characterize the Hume of this Section as 'the Father of Pointillisme' "! But at the end of her paper, although I think only at the end, Newman begins to go very wrong indeed. She says: "Turning to the Enquiry there is little to indicate any shift in Hume's opinion of geometry as a body of synthetic but necessary knowledge." After remarking that Hume does not repeat "any of his earlier arguments" against infinite divisibility "nor those in support of a system of mathematical 63. points", she notices that, in the paragraph characterizing propositions stating only the relations of ideas, geometry "is classed as a science alongside arithmetic and algebra (E25) ".7 Next she quotes the end of that paragraph, and at once comments: "Flew thinks that in the Enquiry Hume is to be seen as 'restoring pure geometry to its place alongside Q the other two elements in the trinity',..." Newman does not, so far as I can see, offer any reason for dismissing this suggestion - apart, that is, from asserting that the paragraph from which she has just quoted "can be interpreted so as to remove any apparent inconsistency with the claim that the impossibility of conceiving the negation of a geometrical axiom has the same ground in the Enquiry as in the Treatise, namely, the invariant character of sensible space." She just tells us that "Where geometry is concerned I follow Atkinson's opinion in finding no reason to suppose that 9 Hume abandoned the Treatise stand." This I find, to say the least, surprising since the very sentence of Hume's Philosophy of Belief from which she quoted my contrary opinion does provide what I still consider to be a quite decisive reason. Since she does not discuss either my reason or the Hume passage to which I was referring, I can here do nothing else or better than repeat myself; adding only and by the way that Professor Atkinson's paper 'Hume on Mathematics' was published a year before that book:Besides restoring pure geometry to its place alongside the other two elements of the trinity, the Inquiry also sketches an account of applied mathematics. This is something the earlier book did not provide at all. 'Every part of mixed mathematics proceeds on the supposition that certain laws are established by nature in her operations, and abstract reasonings are employed, either to assist experience in the discovery of these laws or to determine their influence in particular instances... Thus it is a law of motion, discovered by experience, that the moment or force of any body in motion is in 64. the compound ratio or proportion of its solid contents and its velocity, and, consequently... (shrink)

The P?li Nik?yas describe a range of painful feelings that are experienced by human beings. The painful feelings are primarily divided into the categories of dukkha and domanassa. In its broader sense, dukkha covers a complete range of different types of painful or unpleasant feeling. But when it appears within a compound or together with domanassa successively within a passage, its meaning is primarily limited to physical pain while domanassa refers to mental pain. This article investigates the question of (...) whether or not the Arahant and the Buddha experience mental pain as well as physical pain. My analysis of doctrinal explanations demonstrates that the Arahant and the Buddha are subject to experience physical pain and physical disease but not mental pain. This article also clarifies why and to what degree the P?li tradition sees them as experiencing physical pain and disease. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

Rad se bavi koncepcijom slikanja francuskog filozofa Jeana-Luca Nancyja. Njena je osobitost da se ona gradi u odmaku od fenomenoloških i mimetičkih pojmova kao što su reprezentacija, predodžba, pojavljivanje, otkrivanje, ili davanje. Pa ipak je pojam slikanja za Nancyja u tijesnoj vezi s ontološkim pojmovima svijeta, smisla i stvaranja ex nihilo. No ta veza opet nije od vrste »deduktivna izvođenja« pojma slikanja iz pojmova svijeta, smisla i stvaranja ex nihilo, već se slikanje određuje preko koncepta fragmenta. U radu se naznačuju (...) linije dodirivanja i razdvajanja između ideje fragmenta i Nancyjevih eseja o slikanju.This paper discusses Jean-Luc Nancy’s conception of painting. According to Nancy, painting could not be properly understood relying on phenomenological notions such as representation, appearing, disclosure, or giving. Instead, Nancy relates painting with the ontological notions such as world, sense, and creation ex nihilo. Nevertheless, this relation is not a kind of “deductive inference” of the notion of painting from notions of world, sense and creation ex nihilo, but the notion of painting is defined through the concept of fragment. Therefore, the attempt of the paper is to draw dividing and connecting lines between the notion of fragment and Nancy’s essays on painting. (shrink)

In this target article we question the assumption that perception is divided into separate domains of vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. We review implications of this assumption for theories of perception and for our understanding of ambient energy arrays (e.g., the optic and acoustic arrays) that are available to perceptual systems. We analyze three hypotheses about relations between ambient arrays and physical reality: (1) that there is an ambiguous relation between ambient energy arrays and physical reality, (2) that (...) there is a unique relation between individual energy arrays and physical reality, and (3) that there is a redundant but unambiguous relation, within or across arrays, between energy arrays and physical reality. This is followed by a review of the physics of motion, focusing on the existence and status of referents for physical motion. Our review indicates that it is not possible, in principle, for there to be a unique relation between physical motion and the structure of individual energy arrays. We argue that physical motion relative to different referents is specified only in the global array, which consists of higher-order relations across different forms of energy. The existence of specificity in the global array is consistent with the idea of direct perception, and so poses a challenge to traditional, inference-based theories of perception and cognition. However, it also presents a challenge to much of the ecological approach to perception and action, which has accepted the assumption of separate senses. (shrink)

This collection of 17 articles offers an overview of the philosophical activities of a group of philosophers (who have been) working at the Groningen University. The meta-methodological assumption which unifies the research of this group, holds that there is a way to do philosophy which is a middle course between abstract normative philosophy of science and descriptive social studies of science. On the one hand it is argued with social studies of science that philosophy should take notice of what scientists (...) actually do. On the other hand, however, it is claimed that philosophy can and should aim to reveal cognitive patterns in the processes and products of scientific and common sense knowledge. Since it is thought that those patterns can function as guidelines in new research and/or in research in other disciplines, philosophy can nevertheless hold on to the normative aim which is characteristic of 'classical' philosophy of science. Compared to this common assumption, there is a diversity of subjects. Some papers deal with general problems of science, knowledge, cognition and argumentation, others with topics relating to foundational problems of particular sciences. Therefore this volume is of interest to philosophers of science, to philosophers of knowledge and argumentation in general, to philosophers of mind, as well as for scientists working in the physical and applied sciences, biology, psychology and economy who are interested in the foundations of their disciplines. After a foreword by Leszek Nowak and a general introduction by the editors, the book is divided into four parts, with special introductions. - I: Conceptual Analysis in Service of Various Research Programmes (Henk Zandvoort, Rein Vos, Rick Looijen, Gerben Stavenga, Renée Dalitz); - II: The Logic of the Evaluation of Arguments, Hypotheses, Default Rules, and Interesting Theorems (Erik Krabbe, Theo Kuipers, Alfons Keupink, Maarten Janssen/Yao-Hua Tan, Bert Hamminga); - III: Three Challenges to the Truth Approximation Programme (Sjoerd Zwart, Hinne Hettema/Theo Kuipers, Roberto Festa); - IV: Explicating Psychological Intuitions (Anne-Ruth Mackor, Jeanne Peijnenburg, Lex Guichard, Michel ter Hark). The Groningen research group was recently qualified, by an official international assessment committee, as one of the best philosophy research groups in the Netherlands. (shrink)

After a definition of ?common sense? it is argued that sociology and common sense both do and ought to interact with one another. Four positions on the sociology?common sense relation in the light of the interaction thesis are then critically discussed: sociology must break with common sense; sociology must be based on common sense; sociology and common sense are incomparable; and sociology and common sense are identical. The first two of these positions are further sub?divided in terms of whether (...) the arguments in their favour are or are not independent of one's conceptions of sociology and common sense. Each of these positions is illustrated by means of a case study of one author. The final section involves a consideration of ethnomethodology on the basis of the above typology: it is argued that ethnomethodology cannot find a site on the sociology?common sense question which is compatible with its basic commitments. (shrink)

The now growing literature on the content and sources of the phenomenology of first-person agency highlights the multi-faceted character of the phenomenology of agency and makes it clear that the experience of agency includes many other experiences as components. This paper examines the possible relations between these components of our experience of acting and the processes involved in action specification and action control. After a brief discussion of our awareness of our goals and means of action, it will focus on (...) the sense of agency for a given action, understood as the sense the agent has that he or she is the author of that action. I argue that the sense of agency can be analyzed as a compound of more basic experiences, including the experience of intentional causation, the sense of initiation and the sense of control. I further argue that the sense of control may itself be analysed into a number of more specific, partially dissociable experiences. (shrink)

The Matthean parable of the labourers in the vineyard is open to multiple interpretations. For some, the parable may speak of God's unlimited grace and generosity; for others the parable may speak of God's unfairness. The present study is set within the context of an emerging interest in the concept of grace as a topic for empirical enquiry. The study draws on the theoretical framework provided by the notion of ordinary theology and employs the sensing, intuition, feeling and thinking (SIFT) (...) approach to biblical hermeneutics, which is rooted in Jungian psychological type theory. Data were drawn from two one-day workshops with Church of England Readers (lay ministers). On each occasion the participants were divided into three separate groups according to their preferences for thinking or feeling (the two judging functions proposed by psychological type theory) and within these groups they were invited to explore the messages about grace in Matthew 20:1-15 (Jesus' parable of the labourers in the vineyard). The rich data gathered from these workshops generated insights into contemporary theologies of grace and also confirmed the hypothesis that a biblical interpretation of grace is shaped by the reader's psychological type preference for thinking or feeling. While feeling types tended to empathise, thinking types pondered motives and unfairness. CONTRIBUTION: Situated within the reader perspective approach to biblical hermeneutics, the SIFT method is concerned with identifying the influence of the psychological type of the reader in shaping the interpretation of sacred text. Employing this method, the present study contributes to three fields of scholarship: to the field of homiletics and hermeneutics, to the field of ordinary theology and to the emerging field concerned with the concept of grace as a topic for empirical enquiry. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between common-sense psychology (CSP) and scientific psychology (SP) — which we could call the mind-mind problem. CSP has come under much attack recently, most of which is thought to be unjust or misguided. This paper's first section examines the many differences between the aims, interests, explananda, explanantia, methodology, conceptual frameworks, and relationships to the neurosciences, that divide CSP and SP. Each of the two is valid within its own territory, and there is no competition between (...) them — primarily because CSP is not, and has no interest in being, a scientific theory. In the second section some implications are drawn. First, neither CSP nor SP has the mind-body problem in its familiar form. Second, CSP, for excellent reasons, is not equipped to handle irrational or non-rational behaviour; there are some grounds for believing that this can and should be the task of SP. Third, philosophical psychology, or armchair theories of action, perception, etc., are doomed to failure. And, fourth, the realm of the psychological is so heterogeneous that no single model for either CSP or SP is likely to succeed. (shrink)

Philosophical views of language have traditionally been focused on notions of truth. This is a reconstructive view in that we try to extract from an utterance in context what the sentence and speaker meaning are. This focus on meaning extraction from word sequences alone, however, is challenged by utterances which combine different types of figures. This paper argues that what appears to be a special case of ironic utterances—ironic metaphorical compounds—sheds light on the requirements for psychological plausibility of a theory (...) of communication and thus presents a different view of communication and language to that dominant in philosophy of language. In the view presented here, the hearer does not extract the speaker’s communicative intention from the sequence of words in the utterance, but from other channels, so as to constrain the inferential space for the sentence and speaker meaning. Specifically, we examine an example of ironic metaphor discussed by Stern. He argues that ironic content is logically dependent on metaphorical content, but makes no claims about how psychologically plausible this is in terms of the processing order. We argue that a straightforward translation of logical order into temporal order makes little sense. The primary sticking point is that without a prior understanding of the speaker’s communicative intentions, it is computationally more challenging to process the sub-component meanings. An alternative solution based on communicative channels leads us to a more psychologically plausible account of the structure of communicative acts and intentions. This provides support for the psychological realism of a richer theory of communicative intent. (shrink)

Recent discussions have fixated on the distinction between perception and cognition. How should recognition be understood in light of this distinction? The relevant sense of recognition involves a sensitivity to particulars from one's past. Recognizing the face of a familiar friend is one instance of this phenomenon, as is recognizing an object or place that one has viewed before. In this article, I argue that recognition is an interface capacity that straddles the border between perception and cognition.

There are two ways in which sense has been approached in contemporary philosophy. The dividing line is between those who interpret sense as abiding with models of recognition and those who determine sense and paradox as co-present. In The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze puts forth a paradoxical constitution of sense in order to render that which is new in being something untimely, the always new in being. In placing paradox at the center of the constitution of sense, Deleuze effectively (...) works to displace the two aspects of doxa, good sense and common sense. In relation to paradox, sense moves in two directions simultaneously; it is actualized in the present, and it is continuously reborn in the transcendental field .. (shrink)

Tomasello's account of the origins and nature of moral obligation rightly emphasises the key roles of social relations and a cooperative sense of “we.” However, we suggest that it overlooks the complexity of those social relations and the resulting prevalence of a divided “we” in moral social groups. We argue that the social identity dynamics that arise can lead to competing obligations in a single group, and this has implications for the evolution of obligation.

The study aimed to evaluate the intervention effects on spelling and meaning of compounds by Greek students via group board games in classroom settings. The sample consisted of 60 pupils, who were attending the first and second grade of two primary schools in Greece. Each grade-class was divided into an intervention ( N = 29 children) and a control group ( N = 31 children). Before intervention, groups were evaluated by standardized tests of reading words/pseudowords, spelling words, and vocabulary. (...) Students were also assessed on compound knowledge by a word analogy task, a meaning task and a spelling task. The experimental design of the intervention included a pre-test, a training program, and a post-test. The pre- and post-assessments consisted of the spelling and the meaning tasks entailing equally morphologically transparent and opaque compounds. The training program was based on word families ( N = 10 word families, 56 trained items, 5 sessions) and aimed to offer instruction of morphological decomposition and meaning of words. The findings showed that training was effective in enhancing the spelling and most notably the meaning of compounds. A closer inspection of intervention data in terms of morphological transparency, revealed that training group of first graders improved significantly both on transparent and opaque compounds, while the degree of gains was larger on opaque items for the second graders. These findings are consistent with the experimental literature and particularly optimistic for the literacy enhancement of typically developing children in regular classrooms. (shrink)

This article was originally presented as a paper, and since much of what it discusses turns on problems of position, location, self-representation and representativity, I have decided to leave it, as far as is possible, in its original form. Extensive use of the first person pronoun is frowned on in the contexts in which I am used to working, but I have deliberately retained it in this text to try and convey a sense of particularity, of myself speaking in a (...) specific context(s). The use of ‘we’ is a highly politicized act both in anthropology and in feminist contexts. Its use here is intended to convey a sense of audience, that is of myself speaking to others. But, and much more importantly, it also operates as a mark of interrogation, a fictive unity that reveals the lines of fragmentation at the very moment when it claims affinity.1. (shrink)

Donald T. Campbell argued that the organization of university departments shaped the boundaries among specialties. This article extends his argument in two ways. First, specialties are also shaped by other institutions, such as sponsors and learned societies. Second, the intersection among specialties is shaped by the complexity of the problems that research addresses. Specialization of research is a way to deal with the complexity of nature. One way of doing this is to erect specialties that focus on different aspects of (...) nature, and which do not overlap in subject matter. This view is the basis of Campbell’s “fish-scale” model of relations among specialties, and assumes that nature is descriptively complex in the sense of William C. Wimsatt . But specialties often overlap and are thus interactively complex as well. Here I argue that a kind of interactive complexity—collaborative complexity—arises when research on a problem must take the not-yet-established contents of multiple specialties into account. Such compound problems are exemplified by attempts to explain historical particulars, such as particular adaptations in single species, e.g., masculinization in Spotted Hyenas. (shrink)

The study of perception and the role of the senses have recently risen to prominence in philosophy and are now a major area of study and research. However, the philosophical history of the senses remains a relatively neglected subject. Moving beyond the current philosophical canon, this outstanding collection offers a wide-ranging and diverse philosophical exploration of the senses, from the classical period to the present day. Written by a team of international contributors, it is divided into (...) six parts: -/- Perception from Non-Western Perspectives Perception in the Ancient Period Perception in the Medieval Latin/Arabic Period Perception in the Early Modern Period Perception in the Post-Kantian Period Perception in the Contemporary Period. The volume challenges conventional philosophical study of perception by covering a wide range of significant, as well as hitherto overlooked, topics, such as perceptual judgment, temporal and motion illusions, mirror and picture perception, animal senses and cross-modal integration. By investigating the history of the senses in thinkers such as Plotinus, Auriol, Berkeley and Cavendish; and considering the history of the senses in diverse philosophical traditions, including Chinese, Indian, Byzantine, Greek and Latin it brings a fresh approach to studying the history of philosophy itself. -/- Including a thorough introduction as well as introductions to each section by the editors, The Senses and the History of Philosophy is essential reading for students and researchers in the history of philosophy, perception, philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, aesthetics and eastern and non-western philosophy. It will also be extremely useful for those in related disciplines such as psychology, religion, sociology, intellectual history and cognitive sciences. (shrink)

Various interpretations of Husserl have been presented in relation to the internalism-externalism debate. The debate concerns the question whether linguistic and mental content can be determined by features that are not only internal but also external to the subject. Besides different internalist and externalist interpretations of Husserl, there are interpretations that reject both internalism and externalism as frameworks for understanding Husserl. The main reason not to commit to either externalist or internalist interpretations seems to be that the internal-external divide, which (...) is pertinent to internalism and externalism, is purportedly inapplicable to the transcendental framework of Husserl’s phenomenology. Yet, it is not obvious how the concepts of internality and externality are understood when they are deemed inapplicable in this context, which reflects the ambiguity of the concepts in the internalism-externalism debate itself. The aim of this article is to clarify the internal-external divide and its rejection in these interpretations of Husserl. The reason why the internal-external divide has been deemed inapplicable to the transcendental framework of Husserl’s phenomenology is first located to a spatial sense in which the concepts of internality and externality are usually understood. It is then argued that the internal-external divide can be rendered applicable to the transcendental framework of Husserl’s phenomenology by reconfiguring internality and externality in relation to the subject’s point of view. In addition to Farkas’ proposal that conceives the internal-external divide in phenomenal terms, two phenomenological ways of understanding internality and externality are considered. The main problem in both Farkas’ proposal and the two phenomenological proposals is that they preclude some forms of externalism. This article solves the problem by using the two phenomenological proposals to modify Farkas’ proposal so that a broader range of externalism is enabled. (shrink)

From antiquity, Galenic physicians extensively discussed the active powers of simple and compound drugs. In their views, simple drugs, that is, single ingredients, acted according to their material qualities and the properties of their substance. As for compound drugs, their efficacy resulted from the mutual interaction of their ingredients and their modes of preparation. In the late Renaissance, Galenic physicians and naturalists, such as Leonhart Fuchs and Pietro Andrea Mattioli, attempted to explain these pharmacological properties or “faculties” at the intersection (...) of medicine, botany, and natural philosophy. This chapter examines the case of the Italian physician and botanist Andrea Cesalpino. His pharmacological treatise De medicamentorum facultatibus [On the Faculties of Drugs, 1593] was particularly significant for its reception of ancient and medieval texts on drug properties, materia medica, and the role of the senses in the knowledge of bodies. (shrink)

This book aims to contribute to our understanding of one of the most pressing issues of modern international law: the relationship between the international legal order on the one hand and the domestic legal orders of over 190 sovereign states on the other handThe traditional and dominant understanding of this relationship is that there exists a strict separation between the international legal order and domestic legal orders. Processes of legal globalisation and internationalisation have made this relationship much more complex. Legal (...) authority has shifted away from the state in both vertical and horizontal directions. Forced by the pressures of interdependence, states have allowed international bodies to oversee and sometimes even implement and enforce domestic legislation. At the same time, private persons are more and more drawn into an internationalized order. Increasing cross-border flows of services, goods and capital, mobility, and communication have further undermined any stable notion of what is national and what is international.This book offers several partly complementary and partly competing perspectives that allow us understand and make sense of the complex interaction between the international and domestic sphere. (shrink)

The idea of equality in political thought is often approached from a distributive perspective that entails a rethinking of institutional arrangements. In this paper I present an approach to conceived as a complement to the common institutional approach in liberal theory. The foundational claim is that blacks do not come into view for a wide range of people as worthy of full human recognition, that is, persons in possession of human vulnerabilities that require responses and in possession of warrants to (...) rights that demand respect. The central argument is that this problem of diminished social value can be addressed by imagination and that imagination is crucially important to bridge the experiential divide between white and black Americans. I deploy two ideas I claim are essential for leveraging imagination: attentiveness and skill. When we are attentive we provide the imagination range to sense the more difficult aspects of others’ lives under inequality; when we are skilled we deploy a finer sensibility in taking the proper ethical stance towards others’ experiential difficulties under a regime of racial inequality. To achieve this, I provide a schematic of three pairs of concepts that provide a foundation though not full accounting of the necessary skills in response to ethical challenges: narrative/receptivity, reasons/responsibility, affect/compassion. (shrink)

In a recent article Mr. D. A. West investigated the meaning of haurire, haustus, showing how the primary sense ‘to take by scooping, to draw’ is present in a number of passages which have been incorrectly interpreted in the light of extensions made only later of this usage. He noted in passing that ‘this sense may well survive in, the cognate of haurire’. In this article I hope to show that the recognition of this as the basic sense of and (...) its cognates and compounds helps to clear away a number of errors arising from the misunderstanding of the fact that the action of scooping, or drawing, is at the root of Gk., as of Lat. haurire. (shrink)

There appear to be at least two kinds of compound physical substances: compound pieces of matter, which have their parts essentially, and living organisms, which do not. Examples of the former are carbon atoms, salt molecules, and pieces of gold; and examples of the latter are protozoa, trees, and cats. Given that there are compound entities of these two kinds, and given that they can be created or destroyed by assembly or disassembly, questions naturally arise about the nature of the (...) causal relations which unite their parts. In answer to these questions, we first argue that the parts of a compound piece of matter are connected via a relation of dynamic equilibrium of attractive and repulsive forces. We then argue that the parts of an organic living thing are united in a different way: they are functionally connected in a broadly Aristotelian sense which is compatible with an ultimately non‐teleological, naturalistic biology. (shrink)

“Austrian” philosophy of language is characterized, among other things, by the following two features: Problems of language are considered within the broader framework of an intentionality-based philosophy of mind—or, to put it more precisely, questions of meaning are considered as involving a quite articulated theory of intentions; several aspects of such an account are explicitly presented as inspired by or somehow already at work in the Medieval Scholastic tradition. In this study we follow the track indicated by these two features (...) and use some “Austrian” reflections on the articulation between meanings and intentions as a “heuristic filter”, as it were, to shed a new and different light on some Medieval debates in philosophy of language on the relationship between significare and intendere. It will be roughly divided into three parts. We begin by singling out some distinctive tenets of the “Austrian” strategy aimed at describing the relationship between meaning and intentions , and then turn to various Medieval texts from the 13th and 14th century dealing with the two related notions of significatio and intentio . The upshot of our investigation is to show how, for both “Austrian” and Medieval philosophers of language , a proper understanding of linguistic meaning—in the twofold sense of words or sentences having a lexical content and utterances having a determinate pragmatic function—presupposes an account of what one could call the “agentive intentionality”, i.e. the complex intentionality proper to practical goal-directed human behaviours. Some final remarks about outcomes, meaning, scope and perspectives opened by the method applied will conclude the study. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Repetition in Latin Poetry: Figures of AllusionMichael C. J. PutnamJeffrey Wills. Repetition in Latin Poetry: Figures of Allusion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. xvi 1 506 pp. Cloth, $90.Wills offers the first fully systematic codification of repetition in Latin poetry. The introduction deals with the various means, such as morphological or lexical markings, word order, position and the like, that can help the reader distinguish allusion in an act (...) of repetition, and there follow several detailed examples of practice built on theory. But the main body of the book consists of a “grammar” of repetition.The first major segment is devoted to gemination, the repetition of identical forms within the same sense unit. This in turn is divided between a cataloguing of simple gemination, either in nominal form or of verbs and adverbs, and of expanded gemination, where one of the elements repeated is qualified with further detail. Four chapters are devoted to the next rubric, polyptoton and its elaborations, the repetitions of different forms within a simple clause. Then follow detailed discussions of the same phenomena but located across units, entitled “parallelism” where, as in the case of gemination, the forms are the same; and “modification,” akin to polyptoton in that the forms are different. The book concludes with three more general chapters devoted to a detailed analysis of the positional patterns repetition most regularly takes, of compounds as part of repetition, and to prosody and semantic variations in repetition.Such a bald summary does scant justice not only to the sheer quantity of material Wills gathers—a monumental accomplishment in itself—but also to the learning, intelligence and critical sophistication that characterize the undertaking. At the start Wills lays claim only to illustrating the process whereby allusion is generated through repetition, but throughout the whole enterprise, whether in theoretical discussions or in the practical criticism that emanates from his compendia, the results are equally valuable, for the investigation of individual poems and authors as well as for a deeper understanding of the development of Latin modes of imaginative expression, often as analyzed against their Greek intellectual background. If I were to focus on one single accomplishment beyond the mere careful, discrete amassing of material, it would be the stress not only on diction, that is, on the iteration of words, but on such categories [End Page 295] as form, syntax, and word placement in the creation of allusion through repetition. But the main value of this rich work will be as much in the detailed analyses of countless specific instances as in the manifold possibilities for referencing, and cross-referencing, across the history of classical poetry that now become readily available to its scholars.A good example of Wills’s methodology is his initial illustration (26–28), tracing how Virgil adopts and adapts Catullus’ repetitions of perfide, at the opening of Ariadne’s lament (64.132–33) and later (174), through the central reaches of Aeneid 4, from 305 to 421. But there are a myriad others of which I may single out only a few brief samples: on the connection of Cat. 62.20–24 and Vir. Ecl. 8.47–50 where chiasmus and parallel stanzaic structure reinforce repetition’s allusiveness (p. 181); on the repetition of acies at Aen. 10.360 in what Wills calls “battle polyptoton” (194); on the assumed communality of clashing horses (Aen. 11.614–15) and wrestling humans (Ov. Met. 6.243) that allusion from one text to another brings (199); on the connection between Aen. 3.156 and 10.670–72 and the resulting linkage of Aeneas and Turnus at moments of loss (267); on Virgil’s melding of Homeric syntax with Lucretian diction in the impressive phrase gravis graviterque (Aen. 5.447) (239); on the resulting combination of form as well as diction as Propertius borrows from both Ecl. 7.44 and Ecl. 6.55–58 to describe the cattle of Hercules (4.9.16–19) (101–2).From time to time Wills seems swept along by the fact of repetition to the neglect of counterevidence which would be useful to the reader in weighing the value of an exemplum. A case in point is the... (shrink)

In recent years there has been widespread agreement among Bishop Butler's commentators and critics concerning the nature of his “official” position as a moral philosopher. His moral epistemology is a form of moral sensism, its cognitive aspect best described, after Sidgwick, as perceptual intuitionism. His normative theory is strongly deontologistic in character, and as a moral psychologist he is still celebrated as a devastating critic of psychological egoism and hedonism. Understandably enough, there has been a tendency to discount those remarkable (...) passages in Sermons XI and XII in which Butler seems to be defending an almost diametrically opposed position, compounded of a rationalistic epistemology, a hedonistic-utilitarian normative theory, and a form of psychological egoism. Thus G. D. Broad finds flatly inconsistent those passages in which Butler seems to make self-love coordinate with conscience in its moral authority. When Butler asserts that on calm reflection one is unable to justify any course of action contrary to one's own happiness, Broad maintains that in context this statement must be understood not as a presentation of Butler's own view, but as “a hypothetical concession to an imaginary opponent.” Butler, Broad thinks, is merely once again trying to convince people that reasonable self-love and the dictates of conscience do not conflict. Similarly, A. Duncan-Jones argues that the apparent inconsistency in the passage in question is removed once we understand that Butler is only refuting the egoists' contention that self-love and virtuous benevolence are necessarily opposed. (shrink)

Exactly when Philosophy of Psychiatry started as a subfield of Philosophy is hard to say. There are several different estimates of how old psychiatry itself is, from one hundred to three hundred years, and of course there has been discussion and treatment of mental illness for at least a couple of thousand years. A host of issues which could count as belonging to the field have been discussed just within the last hundred years. For instance, a large literature on the (...) philosophy of psychoanalysis dates back to the beginning of the century, and in the last thirty years there has been discussion of amnesia and multiple personality in the philosophy of mind, bioethical debate about involuntary hospitalization and the ability of the mentally ill to give informed consent to drug trials, and recent continental philosophy has shown much interest in madness, civilization, capitalism and schizophrenia. However, I suggest that Philosophy of Psychiatry reached a sense of itself as a separate field only in the 1990s. In this time, it has gained its own association, journal, and a book series with a prestigious press. I refer to the American Association for Philosophy and Psychiatry, the associated journal, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology, and the MIT Press series, Philosophical Psychopathology: Disorders of Mind, edited by Owen Flanagan and George Graham. Jennifer Radden's Divided Minds and Successive Selves is the first book in that series. (shrink)

I argue that Schmidtet al, while correctly diagnosing the serious racial inequity in current ventilator rationing procedures, misidentify a corresponding racial inequity issue in alternative ‘unweighted lottery’ procedures. Unweighted lottery procedures do not ‘compound’ (in the relevant sense) prior structural injustices. However, Schmidtet aldo gesture towards a real problem with unweighted lotteries that previous advocates of lottery-based allocation procedures, myself included, have previously overlooked. On the basis that there are independent reasons to prefer lottery-based allocation of scarce lifesaving healthcare resources, (...) I develop this idea, arguing that unweighted lottery procedures fail to satisfy healthcare providers’ duty to prevent unjust population-level health outcomes, and thus that lotteries weighted in favour of Black individuals (and others who experience serious health injustice) are to be preferred. (shrink)

Throughout much of the first half of the twentieth century, the free-will debate was largely concerned with the question of what kind of freedom was required for moral responsibility and whether the kind of freedom required was compatible with the thesis of determinism. This issue was itself addressed primarily with reference to the question of how freedom is related to alternative possibilities and what the relevant analysis of “could have done otherwise” comes to. The discussion of these topics made little (...) advance on the basic strategies and positions already developed and defended on either side of the compatibilist/incompatibilist divide in the preceding two centuries. When P. F. Strawson’s published his seminal article “Freedom and Resentment” in 1962 the dynamics of this debate were fundamentally altered. This is true both in respect of Strawson’s general methodology, which demands a more empirically informed approach, and in terms of his core conceptual framework, which identifies a different set of considerations and issues at the heart of this debate. In particular, whereas the traditional or classical debate focused on the problem of (moral) freedom, Strawson directed his attention to the role of moral sentiments or “reactive attitudes” as the key to understanding and resolving the core problems lying at the heart of this debate. This essay is devoted to a critical assessment of Strawson’s project and an analysis of the current debate concerning its prospects. (shrink)

Due to new innovations and changes, every language needs new words simply because there is a need for new words to name new things. It is a common occurrence for a speaker to use some words in a way that has never been used before in order to communicate directly about certain facts or ideas. When new inventions and changes come into people’s lives, there is a need to name them and talk about them. If a new word is used (...) by many speakers of the language, it will probably survive, and the same word will one day become an everyday word and enter the vocabulary of a language. This paper looks at compounding as one of the most productive word formation process in English. The term compounding refers to a process in which two or more lexemes are combined into one new word. When a word is formed by merging two or more words, each of which can be used separately, it is called a compound word. The term “word formation” has no universally accepted use. Word formation is sometimes defined as a process associated with changing the form of a word, for example, affixation, which is, in fact, the subject of morphology. In a broader sense, word formation covers the processes of creating new lexical items. In English, word formation is of great importance because this phenomenon affects the English dictionary, which in addition to borrowing from various other languages is enriched in this way. The aim of this paper was to investigate the context based vs. non-context interpretation of English compounds by EFL students in legal discourse. The findings from the test run-questionnaire showed that students of English as a foreign language found it more difficult to apply compound words in context rather than choosing an appropriate definition for them, with or without a given context. Furthermore, students scored lower when 50% of the compounds were given in context. (shrink)

The relationship whereby one physical theory encompasses the domain of empirical validity of another is widely known as “reduction.” Elsewhere I have argued that one influential methodology for showing that one physical theory reduces to another, associated with the so-called “Bronstein cube” of theories, rests on an oversimplified and excessively vague characterization of the mathematical relationship between theories that typically underpins reduction. I offer what I claim is a more precise characterization of this relationship, which here is based on a (...) more basic notion of reduction between distinct models of a single physical system. Reduction between two such models, I claim, rests on a particular type of approximation relationship between group actions over the models’ state spaces, characterized by a particular function between the model state spaces and a particular subset of the more encompassing model’s state space. Within this approach, I show formally in what sense and under what conditions reduction is transitive, so that reduction of a model 1 to another model 2 and reduction of model 2 to a third model 3 entails direct reduction of model 1 to model 3. Building on this analysis, I consider cases in which reduction of a model 1 to a model 3 may be effected via distinct intermediate models 2a and 2b, and motivate a set of formal consistency requirements between distinct “reduction paths” having the same models as their “end points”. These constraints are explicitly shown to hold in the reduction of a model of non-relativistic classical mechanics to a model of relativistic quantum mechanics, which may be effected by a composite reduction that proceeds either via a model of non-relativistic quantum mechanics or a model of relativistic classical mechanics. I offer some brief speculations as to whether and how this sort of consistency requirement might serve to constrain the reductions relating other theories and models, including the relationship that the Standard Model and general relativity must bear to any viable unification of these frameworks. (shrink)

Liberal individualism, in its atomic sense, asserts that people are autonomous and self-contained individuals, whose rights are prior to and independent of any conception of the good. It champions individual rights and toleration for different conceptions of the good life, and essays to secure justice for all in equal measure.In prioritizing right over good, liberal individualism demands that the state have a stance of strict neutrality concerning any particular conception of the good. It privileges political analysis, in that no conception (...) of what is good must interfere with the fundamental rights, unconditionally guaranteed, of each individual. Consequently, it is essentially atomic ideal, and this atomism, whether metaphysical ormethodological, effects a separation of persons and institutions. This I call the “Great Divide”.In what follows, I argue that the liberal separation of persons from institutions is a disintegrative political and ethical ideal in personal, social, and ethical senses. (shrink)

This book's dedication reads “to the man I married.” The phrase is a nice incitement to reflect on the book's topic: is the man she married identical with her present husband? Does the dedication imply a subtle reproach? a note of resignation before the inevitable fact that the man I married cannot be the one I'm married to? By the end of her book, Radden concludes that we can't get away from “normative demands of individuality” that remain anchored to common (...) sense. The challenge she takes up is to articulate the intuitions evoked by a wide spectrum of questions about unity and disunity of the person, both diachronic and synchronic. The latter include the dramatic case of Multiple Personality Syndrome or MPD, but also milder cases of dissociation. Radical amnesia, personality changes including those brought about by religious conversions, and disintegration of personality consequent on senile dementia suggest disunity through time. In all cases, Radden opts for a Rawlsian reflective equilibrium, though she rightly notes that “drawing philosophical conclusions from empirical descriptions, on the one hand, and contributing philosophical distinctions and theories to an understanding of those facts, on the other, [are] fraught with methodological dangers.”. (shrink)

This essay is a review of The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism, the last book that Patricia Crone wrote before she died, as well as an overview of her career and a tribute to her as a great historian of Islam. In Crone's subaltern history of the Persian plateau, the “nativist prophets” are a series of Iranian divines, seers, and hooligans whose resentment against Arab domination was expressed in recourse to pre-Islamic Persian ideals and (...) beliefs. Islamic orthodoxy was undefined in the early eighth century, Crone shows, and the law had not yet entered every corner of daily life. There was, moreover, no clerical class at the time to correct heresiarchs on the fringes of the empire. Hence, according to the reviewer, one can easily imagine the situation as Crone does, with the truths of the new faith, in the eastern extremities of the caliphate, mixing with the Zoroastrian, Christian, and Manichaean truths already rooted there. Crone bleeds the categories of “Islamic” and “pre-Islamic” into each other, and thus her history is composed less of blocks of time and well-defined identities than of mutable compounds of belief and usage. The reviewer argues that Crone's sense of an unruly proliferation of popular beliefs is confirmed by the latest archaeology, and then he closes with an extended meditation on the relevance of this early Arab-Persian divide to the contemporary political situation of Islam and the Middle East. (shrink)

In this chapter, I discuss some lesser-known aspects of Husserl’s concept of the phenomenological reduction in relation to his use of the notion of reflection, and indicate how these topics connect to concerns in contemporary philosophy after the analytic-continental divide. Empathy, collective intentionality, non-representationalism, non-cognitivism, and the focus on the lived body as a source of sense-making and knowing-how are all domains in which Husserl’s conception of the reduction anticipates recent philosophical trends after the analytic-continental divide. They are also interconnected (...) parts of a unified conception of philosophy that arises from the phenomenological reduction when we reflect radically on experience in its full breadth as an embodied phenomenon that is both historical and communal. (shrink)

This new volume of philosophical papers by Bernard Williams is divided into three sections: the first Action, Freedom, Responsibility, the second Philosophy, Evolution and the Human Sciences; in which appears the essay which gives the collection its title; and the third Ethics, which contains essays closely related to his 1983 book Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Like the two earlier volumes of Williams's papers published by Cambridge University Press, Problems of the Self and Moral Luck, this volume will (...) be welcomed by all readers with a serious interest in philosophy. It is published alongside a volume of essays on Williams's work, World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams, edited by J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison, which provides a reappraisal of his work by other distinguished thinkers in the field. (shrink)

It is well known that Niels Bohr insisted on the necessity of classical concepts in the account of quantum phenomena. But there is little consensus concerning his reasons, and what he exactly meant by this. In this paper, I re-examine Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics, and argue that the necessity of the classical can be seen as part of his response to the measurement problem. More generally, I attempt to clarify Bohr’s view on the classical/quantum divide, arguing that the relation (...) between the two theories is that of mutual dependence. An important element in this clarification consists in distinguishing Bohr’s idea of the wave function as symbolic from both a purely epistemic and an ontological interpretation. Together with new evidence concerning Bohr’s conception of the wave function collapse, this sets his interpretation apart from both standard versions of the Copenhagen interpretation, and from some of the reconstructions of his view found in the literature. I conclude with a few remarks on how Bohr’s ideas make much sense also when modern developments in quantum gravity and early universe cosmology are taken into account. (shrink)

This article investigates how companies make sense of CSR. It is based on an explorative comparative case study of 18 companies in the Netherlands using background information, interviews and annual reports. Initially, the sensemaking process of CSR is guided and coordinated by change agents who are specifically appointed to explore the implementation of CSR in their company. These change agents initiate the CSR process within their own organisations. The meaning they develop stems from their personal and organisational values and frames (...) of reference. By attuning the vocabulary of CSR to the language of their colleagues, they aim to gain support for this undertaking in their organisation. This sensemaking procedure can be divided into pragmatic, external, procedural, policy‐oriented and value‐driven processes. The capability of an organisation to embed CSR is the result of trial and error, personal preferences and the use of language by the change agent that fits the (dynamic) situation at hand. Thus, each organisation needs a tailor‐made approach to implement CSR successfully. (shrink)

In Book 9 of Plato's Republic we find three proofs for the claim that the just person is happier than the unjust person. Curiously, Socrates does not seem to consider these arguments to be coequal when he announces the third and final proof as ‘the greatest and most decisive of the overthrows’. This remark raises a couple of related questions for the interpreter. Whatever precise sense we give to μέγιστον and κυριώτατον in this passage, Socrates is clearly appealing to an (...) argumentative standard of some kind, and claiming that his final argument alone meets this standard. But what precise standard is Socrates invoking here? And given that the first two arguments of Book 9 fall short of this standard, why does he not simply leap directly to the third, most decisive proof? (shrink)

Study of the controversy between Franz Brentano and his student Carl Stumpf on emotions and sense-feelings. The issue is whether the pleasure that provides an object such as a work of art is intentional, as it is the case in Brentano's theory in which it is closely related to the class of emotions (love and hate), or merely phenomenal as Stumpf wants it. The paper is divided into two parts : I first examine several aspects of the relationship between (...) Stumpf and Brentano and I evaluate in the second part whether Stumpf's deviations from several theses of Brentano's descriptive psychology, namely on emotions and sense-feelings, challenge his commitment to Brentano's program in philosophy. (shrink)