Inchoate crime consists of acts that are regarded as crimes despite the fact that they are only partial or incomplete in some respect. This includes acts that do not succeed in physically harming the victim or are only indirectly related to such a result. Examples include attempts (as in attempted murder that does not eventuate in the killing of anyone), conspiracy (in which case the crime has only been planned, not yet acted out) and incitement (where the inciter does (...) not himself commit the crime he is urging others to undertake). The present paper attempts to analyze these inchoate crimes from a libertarian perspective, based on the non-aggression principle. (shrink)

Psychiatry’s inchoate wish for a paradigm shift and the biopsychosocial model of mental illness’ critically examines the much discussed goal of a paradigm shift in psychiatric taxonomy. The chapter first highlights some illustrative calls for such a change and then sets these against the Kuhnian account of science from which the idea is taken, highlighting the connection to incommensurability. Relative to a distinction drawn from Winch, between putative sciences where the self-understanding of subjects plays no role and those where (...) it is fundamental, psychiatry falls into the latter kind. This suggests that the wish for a paradigm shift in psychiatry is either incoherent or a wish for a radical but unpredictable overhaul of a significant aspect of our self-understanding as subjects and agents. The biopsychosocial model of mental illness is thus a helpful reminder of the cost of a paradigm shift in psychiatry. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

In this paper, I challenge the traditional narrative that William James’s arguments against determinism were primarily motivated by his personal struggles with depression. I argue that James presents an alternative argument against determinism that is motivated by his commitment to sound scientific practice. James argues that determinism illegitimately extrapolates from observations of past events to predictions about future events without acknowledging the distinct metaphysical difference between them. This occupation with futurity suggests that James’s true target is better understood as logical (...) determinism rather than causal determinism. This has consequences for James’s proposed alternative, which I call his probabilistic underdeterminism, a conception of the universe that is built on chance, choice, and a local teleology. All of this forms part of a broader criticism of the scientific practices of his day based on their widespread failure to acknowledge the distorting effects of observation on that which is observed. (shrink)

Can we conceive of disorder in a positive sense? We organize our desks, we discipline our children, we govern our polities--all with the aim of reducing disorder, of temporarily reversing the entropy that inevitably asserts itself in our lives. Going all the way back to Hesiod, we see chaos as a cosmogonic state of utter confusion inevitably reigned in by laws of regularity, in a transition from fearful unpredictability to calm stability. In contrast to a similar early Chinese notion of (...) chaotic disorder (luan), early Daoists posit a type of chaos that is to be cultivated rather than feared. This chaos is a primal disorder, akin to Hesiod's, but rather than threatening disruption, it is replete with creative potential and through spontaneous action yields orderly processes that proceed from the concretion of things to their dissolution and back, in a complex web of relations. This processional activity, although taken in one sense as cosmogonic, in a more important sense is immanent at every moment of activity. This article identifies terms of chaos, such as dun dun 沌 沌, hundun 渾 沌, and xingming 涬 溟 in Laozi and Zhuangzi and examines the passages in which they occur. Analyzing these passages brings us to a better understanding of "chaos" in a Chinese sense and to a familiarity with related terms in its semantic field, such as xuan 玄 (dark, mysterious), miao 妙 (subtle/profound), wei 微 (minute/inchoate), xiao 小 (small/minute), and pu 樸 (uncarved block). We see that the Daoist ideal is to return to a chaotic inchoateness by melding with the cosmos and there finding a repository of creative potential. This notion of chaos as the inchoate is used a springboard into understanding the origins of Daoist spontaneity. (shrink)

Résumé Le Liber de natura et origine animae d’Albert le Grand semble avoir exercé une influence sur la Théologie platonicienne de l’immortalité des âmes de Marsile Ficin sur, au moins, deux points-clefs de la doctrine métaphysique et cosmologique exposée dans cet ouvrage : d’une part, l’inchoation des formes dans la matière, – formes actualisées par la puissance formatrice qui n’est autre que l’effet de l’influx du ciel et des éléments prenant sa source en Dieu et guidé par la raison de (...) l’intelligence divine –, d’autre part, la triplicité de la forme, dans son statut général (en Dieu, dans son « canal » : le ciel, dans la matière inférieure) et, encore plus, dans sa production effective qui la conduit à être soit plus proche de la matière, soit plus proche de l’agent, soit à mi-distance entre l’agent et la matière. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that we need a better understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of the current debates in international law surrounding hate speech and inchoate crimes. I construct a theoretical basis for speech acts as incitement to genocide, distinguishing these speech acts from speech as genocide and speech denying genocide by integrating international law with concepts drawn from speech act theory and moral philosophy. I use the case drawn on by many commentators in this area of international (...) criminal law, the trial of media executives for the roles they played in the Rwandan genocide through public speech acts by media entities insulting an ethnic group or advocating violence against an ethnic group. Each of these men were institutional leaders and were charged with using their positions within Rwandan society to distribute what I call genocidal hate speech, genocidal incitement speech, and genocidal participation speech. I argue for a distinction between these three types of speech, and a difference in individual criminal liability for the dissemination of each type of speech. I also argue that there should be a difference in individual criminal liability for speech acts within the context of an ongoing or recent genocide, and speech acts that can be separated from a site of mass violence. (shrink)

A person incurs inchoate criminal liability when he incites another person or other persons to commit a crime. The most salient characteristic of incitement, in comparison with the other forms of inchoate crime, is the existence of a communication that is made with a view to persuading the addressee to commit an offence. This article explores the question of why incitement should incur criminal liability, and the nature of such liability. It also identifies its distinctive features. The principal (...) focus here is on ambiguity in the putative words of incitement and on questions of gauging whether the words have had any effect on the actions of the addressee. It covers both the standard criminal offences and conduct which, arguably, should not be regulated by the criminal law, thereby raising issues of freedom of speech. Legal issues are set in the context of the common law generally, while drawing on English law in matters of detail. (shrink)

Defenses of pragmatic encroachment commonly rely on two thoughts: first, that the gap between one’s strength of epistemic position on p and perfect strength sometimes makes a difference to what one is justified in doing, and second, that the higher the stakes, the harder it is to know. It is often assumed that these ideas complement each other. This chapter shows that these ideas are far from complementary. Along the way, a variety of strategies for regimenting the somewhat inchoate (...) notion of stakes are indicated, and some troubling cases for pragmatic encroachment raised. (shrink)

The Criminalization series arose from an interdisciplinary investigation into criminalization, focussing on the principles that might guide decisions about what kinds of conduct should be criminalized, and the forms that criminalization should take. Developing a normative theory of criminalization, the series tackles the key questions at the heart of the issue: what principles and goals should guide legislators in deciding what to criminalize? How should criminal wrongs be classified and differentiated? How should law enforcement officials apply the law's specifications of (...) offences? The sixth volume in the series offers a philosophical investigation of the relationship between moral wrongdoing and criminalization. Considering the justification of punishment, the nature of harm, the importance of autonomy, inchoate wrongdoing, the role of consent, and the role of the state, the book provides an account of the nature of moral wrongdoing, the sources of wrongdoing, why wrongdoing is the central target of the criminal law, and the ways in which criminalization of non-wrongful conduct might be permissible. (shrink)

Does Aquinas have a theory of social ontology? It is not easy to answer this question. On the one hand, Aquinas never discusses the ontology of those entities that we today consider significant for social ontology. On the other hand, though, there are places where Aquinas addresses the mereological question of the relation between aggregates and the individuals that compose them, and these places are significant for bringing to light what Aquinas had to say, if anything, about social ontology. In (...) the end, Aquinas grants social aggregates a place within Aristotelian ontology. My claim here is stronger, however. As a follower of Aristotle, Aquinas cannot avoid having a theory of social ontology, however inchoate this theory may be. In this paper, I show that his theory is metaphysical in character rather than cognitive or linguistic; nevertheless, it also considers the three primitives that, according to John Searle, are at the basis of any social construction, namely collective intentionality, assignment of function, and constitutive rules and procedures. I shall prove that Aquinas’s theory lies between reductionism and realism when it answers the question of the nature of social aggregates, and between naturalism and constructionism when it comes to explaining their origin. (shrink)

This paper develops the basis for a new account of radical moral imagination, understood as the transformation of moral understandings through creative response to the sensed inadequacy of one's moral concepts or morally significant appraisals of lived experience. Against Miranda Fricker, I argue that this kind of transition from moral perplexity to increased moral insight is not primarily a matter of the “top-down” use of concepts. Against Susan Babbitt, I argue that it is not primarily a matter of “bottom-up” intuitive (...) responsiveness to experience. Beyond courage and hope, radical moral imagination involves the articulation of inchoate experience, which allows individuals to make new kinds of moral moves and to lay claim to others' acknowledgment of the meaning of these moves. (shrink)

Many people object to genetically engineerehd (GE) food because they believe that it is unnatural or that its creation amounts to playing God. These objections are often referred to as intrinsic objections, and they have been widely criticized in the agricultural bioethics literature as being unsound, incompatible with modern science, religious, inchoate, and based on emotion instead of reason. Many of their critics also argue that even if these objections did have some merit as ethicalobjections, their quasi-religious nature means (...) that they are entirely irrelevant when interpreted aspolitical objections regarding what public policy ought to be. In this paper, we argue that this widespread view is false. Intrinsic objections have much more political import than has previously been recognized, and indeed the requirements of political liberalism and its associated idea of liberal neutrality, once properly understood, protect intrinsic objections from many of the most common objections. That is, policy-makers may not legitimately base public policy on grounds that are inconsistent with intrinsic objections, even when they believe those objections to be flawed in the ways mentioned above. This means that in the context of a political debate about GE food, the discussion should not center on the substantive merits of the intrinsic objections themselves but rather on the appropriate political norms for achieving democratically legitimate policy on issues that touch people’s deepest religious and moral beliefs. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Alice Ambrose is best known as Wittgenstein’s student during the 1930s. Her association with probably the most famous philosopher of the twentieth century contributes to her obscurity. Ambrose is referred to in historiography of this period as ‘follower’ or ‘disciple’ but never considered in her own right as a philosopher. The neglect of her place in the history of philosophy needs to be resisted. This paper explores some of Ambrose’s most interesting ideas from the early 1950s, when she developed (...) and expanded some of Wittgenstein’s inchoate suggestions and contributed to on-going debates about how to do philosophy and the role of language in the discipline. By combining an analysis of the 1950 paper “The Problem of Linguistic Inadequacy” and the 1952 paper “Linguistic Approaches to Philosophical Problems”, it will be seen that Ambrose rejects the idea that ordinary language can be improved and begins to develop the view that philosophical language adapts to usage. Thus, Ambrose does not blindly follow Wittgenstein but breaks with his idea that there is something inherently wrong with the way philosophers communicate. The paper also seeks to show how marginalized philosophers become obscured in the history of the subject through the example of Ambrose. (shrink)

Diverse and dynamic societies face a problem of social control. Institutions of social control, of which the police are a part, are a necessary part of just and legitimate governance. But in our non-ideal world they are also responsible for injustices of their own. This project raises questions of political philosophy as they apply to the professional police agency. It begins by constructing an inchoate, but mainstream view about just policing, legalism, according to which police power is justified by (...) the criminal code, and just policing is just the faithful enforcement of law. This view is undermined by the practical realities of policing, which involves widespread and unavoidable police discretion. It then develops an account of just and legitimate police discretion, including principles of proportionality, liberal neutrality, and democratic responsiveness. This sheds lights on controversial police tactics, order maintenance initiatives, and community policing strategies. This account also informs the just institutional arrangement of police powers, informing ongoing debates about police reform and abolition. (shrink)

Attention has become an important focal point of recent work in ethics and epistemology, yet philosophers continue to be noncommittal about what attention is. In this paper, I defend attention as selection for action in a weak form, namely that selection for action is sufficient for attention. I show that selection for action in this form is part of how we, the folk, experience it and how the cognitive scientist studies it. That is, selection for action pulls empirical and folk-psychology (...) together. Accordingly, philosophers who take seriously either source have reason to work with selection for action as their starting conception of attention. This conception provides a way to bridge empirical and philosophical concerns where attention is central. The theoretical advantages of selection for action have been obscured by the common opinion that it is easily refuted. I defend the position against many of the published objections and then deploy it to provide a foundation for the intuitive, but inchoate idea of attention being more or less, focusing on recent work in the ethics of attention. (shrink)

In the third Critique Kant details an aesthetic operation of judgment that is surprising considering how judgment functioned in the first Critique. In this book, I defend an understanding of Kant’s theory of Geschmacksurteil as detailing an operation of the faculties that does not violate the cognitive structure laid out in the first Critique. My orientation is primarily epistemological, elaborating the determinations that govern the activity of pure aesthetic judging that specify it as a "bestimmte" type of judgment without transforming (...) it into "ein bestimmendes Urteil". I focus on identifying how the logical functions from the table of judgments operate in the pure aesthetic judgment of taste to reveal "the moments to which this power of judgment attends in its reflection". In the course of doing so, a picture emerges of how the world is not just cognizable in a Kantian framework but also charged with human feeling, acquiring the inexhaustible, inchoate meaningfulness that incites "much thinking". The universal communicability of aesthetic pleasure serves as the foundation that grounds robust intersubjective relations, enabling genuine connection to others through a shared a priori feeling. (shrink)

In discussions of standards of proof, a familiar perspective often emerges. According to what we call specificationism, standards of proof are legal rules that specify the quantum of evidence required to determine that a litigant’s claim has been proven. In so doing, they allocate the risk of error among litigants (and potential litigants), minimizing the risk of certain types of error. Specificationism is meant as a description of the way the rules actually function. We argue, however, that its claims are (...) either mistaken or at a minimum deeply misleading, especially when it comes to standard of proof rules (SPRs) that contain indeterminate formulas, as is typical. As against specificationism, we argue that SPRs are best understood as rules that confer competence to decide whether a given standard has been met—according to whatever vague or inchoate interpretation (if any) of the rule in question triers of fact implicitly or explicitly employ. We call this the competence-norm approach. (shrink)

Although The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most influential books of this century, its author, Thomas Kuhn, is notorious for disavowing most of the consequences wrought by his text. Insofar as these consequences have appeared "radical" or "antipositivist," this article argues that they are very misleading, and that Kuhn's complaints are therefore well placed. Indeed, Kuhn unwittingly succeeded where Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology tried and failed, namely, to alleviate the anxieties of alienated academics and defensive (...) policy-makers by teaching them that they could all profit from solving their own paradigmatic puzzles. The influence of tructure is traced from the philosophy of science into the social sciences and science policy. Special attention is paid to the import of the General Education in Science curriculum at Harvard, in which Kuhn taught for most of the period prior to writing tructure. Harvard President James Conant had designed this curriculum in order to keep "pure science" in the good favor of the American public, in whose eyes it suffered after the use of the atomic bomb. While Conant was keen to stress the distinctiveness of science from other social practices, Kuhn's model seemed to provide a blueprint for reconstituting any practice as a science. This enabled potentially antiscientific academics to become scientists themselves, thereby neutralizing any radical challenges to the ends of scientific inquiry. The article concludes by reconstructing some of the inchoate possibilities for radical critique that Kuhn's success preempted, and by making some suggestions for how they may be recovered in the present academic environment. (shrink)

The neologism ‘sexist’ has gained entry to an Oxford Dictionary, The Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English, third edition , where it is defined as ‘derisive of the female sex and expressive of masculine superiority’. Thus ‘sexpot’ and ‘sex kitten’, which are still defined in exclusively feminine terms in the fifth edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary , have finally met their lexicographical match. This point about current English usage has of course a serious, and general, application. For language reflects, (...) when it does not direct, prevailing social conceptions. Thus it is not accidental that there is no masculine counterpart to the word ‘feminism’. ‘Male chauvinism’, the nearest we have come to coining one, is more emotive than descriptive and so involves ambiguity; while ‘sexism’, even when it is given an exclusively masculine connotation, is still, formally, sexually neutral. ‘Feminism’, by contrast, unequivocally denotes the striving to raise women to an equality of rights and status with men. It has been suggested, it is true, that there were inchoate feminist movements or tendencies in the ancient Greek world, for example in the Classical Athens of Aristophanes and Plato . But feminism in the modern sense did not really emerge before the eighteenth century; and in Britain, for instance, it was only with the passage in 1975 of the Employment Protection, Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Acts that women raised themselves on to an all but equal footing with their male fellows — at any rate in the technical, juridical sense. (shrink)

Spacetime as we know and love it is lost in most approaches to quantum gravity. For many of these approaches, as inchoate and incomplete as they may be, one of the main challenges is to relate what they take to be the fundamental non-spatiotemporal structure of the world back to the classical spacetime of GR. The present essay investigates how spacetime is lost and how it may be regained in one major approach to quantum gravity, loop quantum gravity.

A global transformation of modes of religious authority has been taking place at an increasing pace in recent years. The social and political implications of the growing dominance of neo-scripturalist discourses on Islam have been particularly noticeable after 11 September 2001. This evolution of religiosity, which is mediated by mass media and new media technology, creates the conditions of existence of a post-Weberian and post-Durkheimian order. In this new social context, legitimacy (and legitimate violence) can be more easily disconnected from (...) the institutionalized framework of religious and political authority. Both in Muslim countries and in Western democracies, the attempt by Islamic activists to make the Shari’a relevant in contemporary settings creates new opportunities and challenges for legal pluralism. At the same time, the multiplication of Muslim voices claiming to be able to interpret the sacred texts, particularly in virtual communities, creates an increasingly inchoate ‘noise’ about Islamic orthodoxy. In the context of an exponential increase in the global possibilities for religious identification and expression, the growth of neo-scripturalist interpretations of Islam reflects a quest for parsimony and stability. (shrink)

In this study, Olberding proposes a new theoretical model for reading the _Analects_. Her thesis is that the moral sensibility of the text derives from an effort to conceptually capture and articulate the features seen in exemplars, exemplars that are identified and admired pre-theoretically and thus prior to any conceptual criteria for virtue. Put simply, Olberding proposes an "origins myth" in which Confucius, already and prior to his philosophizing knows _whom _he judges to be virtuous. The work we see him (...) and the _Analects'_ authors pursuing is their effort to explain in an organized, generalized, and abstract way _why _pre-theoretically identified exemplars are virtuous. Moral reasoning here begins with people and with inchoate experiences of admiration for them. The conceptual work of the text reflects the attempt to analyze such people and parse such experiences in order to distill abstract qualities that account for virtue and can guide emulation. (shrink)

This piece is a review essay on Victor Tadros’s The Ends of Harm. Tadros rejects retributive desert but believes punishment can be justified instrumentally without succumbing to the problems of thoroughgoing consequentialism and endorsing using people as means. He believes he can achieve these results through extension of the right of self-defense. I argue that Tadros fails in this endeavor: he has a defective account of the means principle; his rejection of desert leads to gross mismatches of punishment and culpability; (...) and he cannot account for punishment of inchoate crimes. (shrink)

Brentano’s theory of continuity is based on his account of boundaries. The core idea of the theory is that boundaries and coincidences thereof belong to the essence of continua. Brentano is confident that he developed a full-fledged, boundary-based, theory of continuity1; and scholars often concur: whether or not they accept Brentano’s take on continua they consider it a clear contender. My impression, on the contrary, is that, although it is infused with invaluable insights, several aspects of Brentano’s account of continuity (...) remain inchoate. To be clear, the theory of boundaries on which it relies, as well as the account of ontological dependence that Brentano develops alongside his theory of boundaries, constitute splendid achievements. However, the passage from the theory of boundaries to the account of continuity is rather sketchy. This paper pinpoints some chief problems raised by this transition, and proposes some solutions to them which, if not always faithful to the letter of Brentano’s account of continua, are I believe faithful to its spirit. §1 presents Brentano’s critique of the mathematical account of the continuous. §2 introduces Brentano’s positive account of continua. §3 raises three worries about Brentano’s account of continuity. §4 proposes a Neo-Brentanian approach to continua that handles these worries. (shrink)

This paper introduces the medical factual matrix as a new and potentially valuable tool in medical ethical analysis. Using this tool it demonstrates the idea that a defined medical intervention can only be meaningfully declared futile in relation to a defined goal of treatment. It argues that a declaration of futility made solely in relation to a defined medical intervention is inchoate. It recasts the definition of goal futility as an intervention that cannot alter the probability of the existence (...) of the important outcome states that might flow from a defined intervention. The idea of value futility and the extent of physician obligations in futile situations are also addressed. It also examines the source of substantive conflicts which commonly arise within the doctor-patient relationship and the ensuing power relations that operate between doctor and patient when questions of futility arise. (shrink)

This collection brings together the best contemporary philosophical work in the area of intersection between philosophy of language and the law. Some of the contributors are philosophers of language who are interested in applying advances in philosophy of language to legal issues, and some of the participants are philosophers of law who are interested in applying insights and theories from philosophy of language to their work on the nature of law and legal interpretation. By making this body of recent work (...) available in a single volume, readers will gain both a general overview of the various interactions between language and law, and also detailed analyses of particular areas in which these interactions manifest. The contributions to this volume are grouped under three main general areas: The first area concerns a critical assessment, in light of recent advances in philosophy of language, of the foundational role of language in understanding the nature of law itself. The second main area concerns a number of ways in which an understanding of language can resolve some of the issues prevalent in legal interpretation, such as the various ways in which semantic content can differ from law's assertive content; the contribution of presuppositions and pragmatic implicatures in understanding what the law conveys; the role of vagueness in legal language, for example. The third general topic concerns the role of language in the context of particular legal doctrines and legal solutions to practical problems, such as the legal definitions of inchoate crimes, the legal definition of torture, or the contractual doctrines concerning default rules. Together, these three key issues cover a wide range of philosophical interests in law that can be elucidated by a better understanding of language and linguistic communication. (shrink)

The preceding symposium articles speculate on the psychosocial dynamics of discrimination as reverberating with grief, mourning, melancholia, and denial. They invite a psychoanalytic paradox on the fate of inchoate loss and its complex relation to oppression and depression: constellations of attachment to loss met with its social and psychical disavowal render inexpressible to the other the work of mourning and drive its myriad expressions. A different way of putting the dilemma is that grief calls upon symbolic equation and the (...) pain of symbolization. Deborah Britzman's coda reads the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein's consideration of depression as the origin of the human condition with Paulo Freire's call to educators for a radical humanization to release oppression. Between Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Klein's Love, Guilt, and Reparation, the coda traces a signifying loss that attests to the entwined roots of the self/other matrix with attention to the needed fluctuations within interiority and exteriority, loss and the depressive position, illness and health, and psychoanalysis with pedagogy. (shrink)

Ethical challenges that arise within healthcare delivery institutions are currently categorized as either clinical or organizational, based on the type of issue. Despite this common binary issue-based methodology, empirical study and increasing academic dialogue indicate that a clear line cannot easily be drawn between organizational and clinical ethics. Disagreement around end-of-life treatments, for example, often spawn value differences amongst parties at both organizational and clinical levels and requires a resolution to address both the case at hand and large-scale underlying system-level (...) confounders. I refer to issues that contain elements of both clinical and organizational issues as hybrids and propose a new taxonomy to characterize hybrid cases. I contend that salient contextual features of an ethical issue, such as where it is identified, who it impacts and where it is ideally resolved in relation to its scope of impact, should inform procedure. Implementation of a Hybrid taxonomy viewing ethical issues as existing on a continuum furthers that end. The primary goals are to 1) systematize thinking about ethical issues that arise within healthcare delivery institutions and 2) allow the content of the ethical challenge to drive the process, rather than continuing to rely on the traditional binary issue-based choice. Failure to capture the complexity of hybrid situations perpetuates incomplete information and ultimately an inchoate resolution that creates more questions than answers. (shrink)

This article introduces definitions for direct, means-end, oblique (or indirect) and ulterior intent which can be used to test for intent in an algorithmic actor. These definitions of intent are informed by legal theory from common law jurisdictions. Certain crimes exist where the harm caused is dependent on the reason it was done so. Here the actus reus or performative element of the crime is dependent on the mental state or mens rea of the actor. The ability to prosecute these (...) crimes is dependent on the ability to identify and diagnose intentional states in the accused. A certain class of auto didactic algorithmic actor can be given broad objectives without being told how to meet them. Without a definition of intent, they cannot be told not to engage in certain law breaking behaviour nor can they ever be identified as having done it. This ambiguity is neither positive for the owner of the algorithm or for society. The problem exists over and above more familiar debates concerning the eligibility of algorithms for culpability judgements that mens rea is usually associated with. Aside from inchoate offences, many economic crimes with elements of fraud or deceit fall into this category of crime. Algorithms operate in areas where these crimes could be plausibly undertaken depending on whether the intent existed in the algorithm or not. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Coleridge’s Intellectual Intuition, the Vision of God, and the Walled Garden of “Kubla Khan”Douglas HedleyIn his seminal work of 1917 Das Heilige Rudolph Otto quotes a number of passages as instances of the “Numinose.” Alongside those quotations from more conventional mystics, Plotinus, and Augustine, Otto refers to Coleridge’s “savage place” in Kubla Khan. 1 It is also pertinent that, when trying to define Romanticism, C. S. Lewis appeals to (...) the longing for the “unnameable something” fired by “morning cobwebs in late summer” or the “opening lines of Kubla Khan.” 2 Perhaps it is a mere coincidence that two of the most penetrating and influential scholars of religion in the twentieth century should appeal to Coleridge and his poem “Kubla Khan.” I wish to suggest reasons why the link between the imagery of “Kubla Khan” and a mystical experience of transcendence is not merely fortuitous. Indeed the connection between Coleridge’s mature writing and the imagery of the poem shows that we have good reason for seeing him as consciously writing, both as a poet and as a philosopher, within a visionary mystical tradition. I propose that it is no accident that Coleridge’s most visionary poem draws upon the central Christian image of paradise: the walled garden.This is an attempt not to interpret “Kubla Khan” but rather to suggest Coleridge’s place in the history of ideas as a Christian poet and philosopher. He is best described as an essentially speculative and mystical philosopher-theologian. 3 [End Page 115] By “speculative” I mean a theology inspired by those Church Fathers who emphasize the “vision” of God as an intellectual contemplation (speculari) of the transcendent Absolute, the prius of all being. The scholastics, the medieval German mystics, the Cambridge Platonists, and some of the German Idealists have all been influenced by such a speculative impulse. 4 Hegel uses the term “speculative” for his Dialectic. 5A philosophical or “speculative” approach to theology has invoked hostility from Tertullian onwards. Coleridge’s philosophy of religion often excited the fear of the new pantheistic German theology. John Henry Newman castigated Coleridge’s speculation as more heathen than Christian. Yet the speculative movement in theology spawned both a radical and a conservative wing, and we have to judge Coleridge’s thought in the light of the more conservative branch of nineteenth-century Idealism. D. F. Strauss jettisoned the transcendent “yonder” of traditional theology in favor of his philosophical or “scientific” approach to Christianity. Coleridge, however, could not adhere to theology of immanence; he wished to present a theology of an adamantly transcendent character.The walled garden is an eminently appropriate image of transcendence and was used as such by the fifteenth-century Christian Platonist Nicholas of Cusa, who is one of the links between Patristic theology and German Idealism. I shall draw upon his book The Vision of God as a paradigm of the sort of speculative mysticism which informs Coleridge’s metaphysics and much of his poetry. 6 Reflection upon an exotic poetic image may help us to clarify one of Coleridge’s philosophical tenets; the walled garden can be seen to symbolize that transcendent numinous reality, which the soul inchoately and barely consciously seeks and strives for.Coleridge’s “Mysticism” and the Imagery of “Kubla Khan”Richard Holmes claims that the “Kubla Khan” provides evidence of a transition in Coleridge’s interests and presents this switch from “classical and religious mythology” to the “drama of self-knowledge... the growth of consciousness and civilisation” as a key to Coleridge’s poetry. Holmes writes: [End Page 116][H]is instinct that the modern Epic subject must now centre on “the mind of man,” through “travels, voyages and histories,” shows a shift of poetic focus characteristic of the new Romantic age. The Epic could no longer draw on classical or religious mythology for the framework of its action. It must become contemporary with the world of scientific, anthropological, and psychological exploration: it must centre in some way on the drama of self-knowledge, on the growth of consciousness and civilisation. 7Coleridge would not have seen a conflict between the drama of self-consciousness and classical and religious mythology. In “Kubla... (shrink)

This paper argues that the public can do more than legitimate government; it can provide public knowledge for sound public policy. Critics of democracy worry that the public has too little objectivity and impartiality to know what is best. These critics have a point: taken one by one, people have little knowledge of the whole. For this reason, citizens need to escape the cloisters of kith and kin and enter a world of unlike others. They need to be open to (...) other perspectives and concerns. They need to deliberate with others in public. In other words, an inchoate plurality of people needs to become public in order to develop a more comprehensive picture of the whole and to define ‘where the shoe pinches’. Democracy requires that the multitude deliberate publicly in order to create public knowledge by which sound public policy can be formed. Key Words: deliberation • democracy • John Dewey • Jürgen Habermas • legitimacy • particularity • perspectives • rational deliberative • proceduralism. (shrink)

Historical Cognitive Science I am lucky to strike three reviewers who extract so clearly my book's spirit as well as its substance. They all both accept and act on my central methodological assumption; that detailed historical research, and consideration of difficult contemporary questions about cognition and culture, can be mutually illuminating. It's gratifying to find many themes which recur in different contexts throughout _Philosophy and Memory_ _Traces_ so well articulated here. The reviews catch my desires to interweave discussion of cognitive (...) theories of memory with moral questions of psychological control and self-mastery, to evoke the virtues and the pleasures of strange, baroque beliefs about fickle 'animal spirits' coursing through the nerves and the brain, to demonstrate that mechanistic explanation (even in its blunt old Cartesian form) can acknowledge complexity, and to develop scientific conceptions of dynamic memory traces and representations which can survive uncharitable philosophical criticism. The book's insistent interdisciplinarity is just an inchoate quest to acknowledge the daunting variety of the phenomena: remembering is both natural and cultural, and is studied by narrative theorists as well as neurobiologists, by physicists as well as psychologists. By fusing the rangy detail of a history of early modern neurophysiology with the committed, even gullible fervor of a defence of 'new connectionist' cognitive science, I wanted to pull out the carpet from all those who are happy to let 'scientific' and 'cultural' approaches to the mind run along independently. Once this general project is given space, as it is by all three reviewers, we can get down to specifics. (shrink)

There is a confusion over and inchoate understanding of how the past is made understandable through postmodernist historical orientation. The purpose of the article is to outline the characteristic features of the postmodernist movement in social sciences, to explain its confrontation with history, to document its critique of the conventional practice of history, and to discuss its implications for history education. The postmodernist challenge to the foundations of the discipline of history is elucidated with an emphasis on its epistemological (...) underpinnings. Implications of postmodernism for the teaching and learning of history are discussed. (shrink)

Sue Campbell reinstates the personal as an important dimension in analytic philosophy of mind. She argues that the category of feelings has a unique role in psychological explanation: the expression of feelings is the attempt to communicate personal significance. To develop a model for affective meaning, the author moves attention away from the classic emotions to feelings that are more personal, inchoate, and idiosyncratic.

There has been much recent work in philosophy of science on idealization – the way inaccurate representations can be used to understand a target system. My dissertation concerns a particular sort of idealization that is familiar but often overlooked: rational reconstruction. Rational reconstructions are “cleaned-up” – more coherent and accurate – versions of an individual’s or a group’s attitudes. They are the kind of idealized model that facilitates a crucial aim of the interpretive sciences, the understanding of another’s point of (...) view. I provide an account of rational reconstruction and argue that such an account can help us make sense of many intellectual projects in the humanities and the interpretive social sciences. I then argue that this account can also be used to resolve a problem in democratic theory: how deliberative institutions can facilitate understanding and discursive engagement with “inchoate” points of view. A theory of rational reconstruction thus elucidates an important way that the humanities and interpretive social sciences can be politically significant. (shrink)

Gregor Samsa awakes to find himself transformed into a gigantic bug. The creature’s inchoate flailing leads Gregor’s sister to conclude that Gregor is no more, having been replaced by a brute beast lacking any vestige of human understanding. Sadly, real cases of brain injury and disease can lead to psychological metamorphoses so profound that we cannot easily think that the survivor is the person we knew. I argue that there can be cases in which statements like, “It’s just not (...) Gregor anymore,” are not merely figures of speech. With this in mind, I consider three possible results of saving a biological life: (1) ordinary cases where saving the life will save the person, with strong duties to save the life; (2) cases where the intervention needed to save the life will replace the person, with strong duties not to save the life; (3) cases in which it is indeterminate whether the person will be saved or replaced. How should we think about indeterminate cases? Impersonal ethical considerations miss the point, while standard person-affecting considerations are inapplicable. I suggest turning attention away from survival towards a richer focus on what I call “personal concern.” I show how considerations of personal concern, unlike those of self-interest, need not be tied to survival and how this allows personal concern to provide a basis for ethically substantive discussion of cases where saving a life might result in losing the patient. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE SCANDAL OF ORIGINS IN ROUSSEAU Jeremiah L. Alberg University of West Georgia To speak of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and scandal is not difficult. Immediately one thinks of his relationship with Mme de Warens, his lover and his beloved mama. Most of his works upset some group or another—other intellectuals (the Discourse on the Sciences andArts), the Genevan authorities (the "Dedication" the Discourse on Inequality), the Church (Emile)—the list could (...) go on and on. In this article I would like to turn away from our usual use ofthe word scandal and look more deeply at the connection between Rousseau's system and the theological or, more properly, the biblical notion of scandal. This notion is obscure. While no one would deny its importance in the New Testament, trying to develop a coherent "theory ofscandal" from the various usages in the New Testament has proven difficult.1 To give only one example of the problem, Christ crucified is proclaimed as a scandal (ICor 1.23) and yet the Christians who follow him are forbidden to cause scandal to others (ICor 8.9), especially the younger and weaker. 1 For a basic understanding ofthe biblical notion ofscandal the following titles are helpful' G. Stählin, Skandalen Untersuchungen zur Geschichte eines biblischen Begriffs, (Gütersloh. Bertelsmann, 1930), as well as his article "Skandalen, skandahzo" in Theologisches Wörterbuch des Neuen Testaments, ed Kittel and Friedrich, 7 339-58, J Calvin, ConcerningScandals (translation oíDe scandalis. 1550) (Grand Rapids Eerdmans, 1 978), H Bintz. Das Skandalen als Grundlagenproblem derDogmata. (Berlin de Gruyter. 1969), D McCracken, The Scandal ofthe Gospels Jesus, Story, and Offense, (NY Oxford UP, 1994); J Alison, The Joy ofBeing Wrong Original Sm Through Easter Eyes (NY Crossroad, 1998) 140-146; G. Bailie, Violence Unveiled Humanity at the Crossroads (NY Crossroad, 1995) 207-2 10; R Girard, Des choses cachées depuis lafoundation du monde, (éditions Grasset et Fasqelle, 1978) especially 573-592 2 Jeremiah L. Alberg The most successful attempt at bringing coherence to the various elements of scandal has been carried out in the various works of René Girard.2 His basic insight was to see in biblical scandal an inchoate theory of human desire. Girard calls this desire "mimetic" or desire that one receives from another. This type of desire leads to scandal. It is here that the connection with Rousseau becomes evident. The famous literary theorist T. Todorov states: "the 'mimetic desire' of Girard is only another name for the amour-propre ofRousseau" (Todorov 38). For his part Girard defines theskandalon (that which causes the scandal) in the following way: It is not an obstacle thatjust happens to be there and merely has to be got out ofthe way; it is the model exerting its special form of temptation, causing attraction to the extent that it is an obstacle and forming an obstacle to the extent that it can attract. (Girard 1987, 416) Rousseau's analysis of amour-propre as that which excites without satisfying, seduces without delivering, and promises without fulfilling, parallels Girard's analysis ofmimetic desire as the doomed-to-be-frustrated reaching for the scanáalon3 Thus, I am arguing that in his various works Rousseau is developing the conceptual possibilities of biblical scandal. While there would be many way's of showing this structural parallel between Rousseau's thought and biblical scandal, I will concentrate on a reading ofthe "Preface" to the Discours sur l'origine et lesfondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes (1755), in order to show that this work is structured by scandal. It is structured by a human desire that seeks what is unattainable and renders the object unattainable in the very seeking after it. More concretely, 1 shall argue that in the "Preface" Rousseau is able to reduce the question aboutthe origin ofinequality "to its genuine state" only 2 See the work cited above as well as his more recent / See Satan Fall Like Lightning ' Rousseau's definition of amour-propre makes its connection with offense (another translation of the biblical word for scandal) quite clear. Speaking of man in the primitive state he remarks. "For the same reason [that he is not capable ofmaking comparisons... (shrink)

The concept of ‘political energy’ is often treated as merely a rhetorical synonym for enthusiasm and active engagement. However, as Bruce Clarke’s Energy Forms argues there is an allegorical traffic of ideas between politics and science that reaches an apotheosis in the early-twentieth century interest in energy. In the field of the ‘energy-humanities’ inaugurated by Clarke, the work of George Sorel remains largely overlooked. Situating itself in this field, my paper investigates the interplay of science and politics in Sorel’s work. (...) I contend that Sorel, influenced by Vico’s ideogeneitic law anticipates Clarke’s allegorical framework. Paralleling Henri Bergson’s attempts to rethink the novelty of life in the post-thermodynamic framework of energy, I argue that models from science (Brownian motion and friction) underlie Sorel’s conceptions of political myth and class antagonism. While these remain inchoate in Sorel’s works, I conclude with the suggestion that these traces are completed in Ernst Jünger’s conception of ‘total mobilization’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Chaos, Fractals, and the Pedagogical Challenge of Jackson Pollock's "All-Over" PaintingsFrancis Halsall (bio)IntroductionThe "all-over" abstract canvases that Jackson Pollock produced between 1943 and 1951 present a pedagogical challenge in how to account for their apparently chaotic structure. One reason that they are difficult to teach about is that they have proved notoriously difficult for art historians to come to terms with. This is undoubtedly a consequence of their abstraction. (...) In the face of an apparent disintegration of the traditional pictorial distinction between figure and ground, multiplicities of (sometimes contradictory) readings present themselves. The question, posed to students, as to what they represent is an open one. To many, recalling the opinions of the baffled audience of the 1950s, they are nothing but an inchoate mess. In 1950 Time magazine referred to them as "chaos," prompting Pollock to wire a heated reply, "NO CHAOS DAMN IT."1Pollock's claim of "no chaos" can, however, be unpacked. This article looks at how a scientific analysis based on Chaos Theory and fractal patterns can be used to demonstrate to students that the paintings are indeed chaotic, but that this in turn provides evidence of an internal structure, an order within the chaos. This order is mimetically similar to other chaotic patterns and systems, from coastlines to economic systems. My overall position in this article is one of skepticism as to what such analysis ultimately has to offer in art historical, aesthetic, or pedagogical terms.The ProblemFor a student encountering Pollock's work for the first time, especially after a standard first-year survey of Western art, it can seem incomprehensible. [End Page 1] The challenge of Pollock's work is that none of the multiple interpretations that have been brought to bear on the paintings have any special claim to validity. Given the suggestive ambiguity and "chaos" of the images, there is little in the work itself that challenges the numerous, often contradictory, readings that have been posited. In fact, how art historians approach such images tells students something about the way art history itself works and how art historians are faced with particular choices in applying their discursive models. They must choose whether these accounts "fit" or satisfy the conditions of "rightness," to evoke Nelson Goodman's terms.2The numerous questions that have been asked of what the paintings actually represent are themselves demonstrative of the wide variety of techniques that modern art historians have at their disposal. Analyses have been based upon observations that are couched in the vocabularies of the political (often Marxist theory), feminism, psychoanalysis, iconography, formalism, and so forth.3 At the time of the paintings' creation even the CIA was in on the act; apparently realizing the ambiguity of the work left it open to political manipulation, they secretly funded the promotion of abstract expressionism as a weapon of the cold war.4 Simultaneously, members of Congress such as George Dondero were actually claiming the opposite—that Pollock was making paintings that were a "means of espionage" (sic) and that "If you know how to read them... [they] will disclose weak spots in U.S. fortifications, and such crucial constructions as Boulder Dam."5Ernst Gombrich's celebrated frustration with abstract art highlights the problems that those following traditional art historical methods had with such art at the time. Writing on Pollock's Number 12 (1952), Gombrich also seemed perplexed in the face of chaos. His response to the lack of explicit representational content or apparently accountable meaning was to claim:It is quite consistent that these [action] painters must counteract all semblance of familiar objects or even of patterns in space. But few of them appear to realise that they can drive into the desired identification only those who know how to apply the various traditional consistency tests and thereby discover the absence of any meaning except the highly ambiguous meaning of traces.6Indeed, if there is any consensus to be communicated to students about the work, it is that a single, specific meaning will always allude them.All of the above reactions to the work makes the claims of three physicists to have found the... (shrink)

It is common for normative legal theorists, economists and other policy analysts to conduct and communicate their work mainly in maximizing terms. They take the maximization of welfare, for example, or of wealth or utility, to be primary objectives of legislation and public policy. Few if any of these theorists seem to notice, however, that any time we speak explicitly of maximizing one thing, we speak implicitly of distributing other things and of equalizing yet other things. Fewer still seem to (...) recognize that we effectively define ourselves by reference to that which we distribute and equalize. For it is in virtue of that which we distribute and equalize that our policy formulations treat us as politically “counting” or “mattering” for purposes of social aggregation and maximization. To attend systematically to this form of inter-translatability, with a view in particular to that which maximization formulations latently prescribe that we distribute and equalize, might be called “putting distribution first.” It is explicitly to recognize the fact that all law and policy are implicitly as equalizing and citizen-defining as they are aggregative and maximizing, and to trace the many salient consequences that stem from this fact. It is likewise to recognize that all law and policy treat us as equals in some respects and as non-equals in other respects. Putting distribution first by attending explicitly to these “respects” yields greater transparency about how well or poorly our laws and policies manage to identify, count, and treat us as equals in the right respects. This Article works to lay out with care how to put distribution first in normative legal and policy analysis. The payoffs include both a workable method by which to test proposed maximization norms systematically for their normative propriety, and an attractive distributive ethic that can serve as a workable normative touchstone for legal and policy analysis. Indeed, the Article concludes, much — though not yet quite all — of our law can illuminatingly be interpreted as giving inchoate expression to just such an ethic. (shrink)

Against the ideology of conflict in which uncompromising violence is the winning attribute in the contest for political supremacy and superiority, Plato seeks to balance the oppositions of masculinity and femininity evenly in the single soul, to rethink manliness and allow it to be a disposition developed out of gentleness as well as spiritedness, and allowing men to draw on feminine characteristics to construct a new ideal of human nature. Socrates, we have seen, argues that guardian natures must be both (...) gentle and spirited, and that a harmonious tension between these traits is conducive to the good of the soul and the city. There is no equivalent re-evaluation of womanliness however, no interest in re-evaluating the female role in the generation of children, and no interest in re-assessing the ontological dependencies of form and matter and their relation to reproduction and identity. Plato complicates and allows variations within the logic of gender relations which privilege the male as ideal, but these moves could not remove that structural inequality. Meanwhile, real women continue to be born withsexed bodies on whichgendered meanings are already inscribed (in a variety of different ways as deformed, inchoate, and lacking specificity), providing the ground and matter on which a creative principle gets to work and produces children, ideas and meanings.Ultimately, reason is master of the self in service of which spirit and gentleness are employed, and the inclusion of feminine gentleness into that service is no threat to the dominance of patriarchal hierarchy; both conceptually and empirically, woman and women remain source and resource for the patriarchal order. Reforming gender roles and abolishing the patrilinear genealogy is Plato's well-intentioned aim, but his failure to achieve this is inevitable, I have argued, as long as a specific identity for woman remains untheorised and a maternal genealogy unrecognized. Unless the ideal human being is re-conceptualised, giving a specific identity and value to the different morphologies of male and female humans, ignoring gender will never allow women an equivalentvalue: for, if women may be queens, this necessarily makes men their kings in the ideal republic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Living Zen, Loving GodRobert P. KennedyLiving Zen, Loving God. By Ruben L. F. Habito. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2004. 136 + xxvi pp.In his treatise On Christian Doctrine, Augustine states that non-Christian "seekers of wisdom" may have "said things which are indeed true and are well accommodated to our faith," and even goes on to assert that "some truths concerning the one God are discovered among them." Augustine urges (...) that taking the "gold and silver" of genuine moral and spiritual wisdom from non-Christian sources "should not be feared... but rather [that these treasures ought to be] taken... and converted to our use" (II, xl, 60). As the title of his book implies, Habito believes that "living Zen," and particularly practicing the discipline of zazen, or contemplative sitting, is, for Christians at least, equivalent to the practice of loving God. He addresses himself to Christians—specifically, Roman Catholics—who are seeking to deepen their spirituality, and the book's over-arching purpose is to show that the practice of Zen meditation is both helpful in this quest and conformable with Christian faith. At various points throughout his book, Habito emphasizes that following the path of Zen, if done properly, will in fact strengthen Christians' commitment to their beliefs and, especially, the Gospel's call of loving one's neighbor.Living Zen, Loving God is divided into ten short chapters. In the first chapter, Habito gives a personal account of his experience with Zen. This opening allows him to demonstrate his authority to speak about Zen Buddhism, to introduce the fundamental experience that he is inviting his readers to share, and to illustrate how, in his own case, the practice of zazen shed new light on his Christian faith. As a former Jesuit priest and practicing Catholic, Habito may dispense with any discussion of his qualifications to speak as a Christian. His claim to speak for the Zen experience is less obvious, and so he relates the validation of his kensho (initial enlightenment) by two Japanese Buddhist masters. This, along with the testimonials in the forewords by John Keenan and Fr. Hugo Enomiya Lassalle, SJ, is an assurance that his presentation of Zen is reliable, despite the cultural gulf between his background and that of his Zen teachers.What Habito discovered in his initial enlightenment was nothing less than a transformative encounter with reality, an awareness that is irreducible to conceptual knowledge. Kensho is the experience of nothingness that cannot be expressed but only patiently awaited in silence (p. 5). This experience carried with it a new awareness of the Christian doctrine of creation and a renewed commitment to social involvement on behalf of those who suffer.The nature of Zen is explored more fully in the second chapter, "Emptiness and Fullness." The experience of nothingness involves a self-emptying, a "peeling off " of layers of the false self to find the "depths" in oneself (pp. 13–14). This work of self-realization proceeds by the use of a koan, an enigmatic statement [End Page 193] or story that brings the disciple to an intellectual impasse. The goal of zazen may be indicated inchoately by understanding that the purpose of the koan is precisely to stop thinking and thus to experience oneself as one is and not according to the labels or concepts one habitually uses. Self-realization, the kensho experience, then opens the capacity to relate to others and the world directly, without the falsification of translating experience into thought: "One who is fully emptied in Zen finds himself or herself in everything, literally, and is able to identify fully with everything, to be all things, and thus to act in total freedom, according to what the particular situation demands. Such a one is no longer separated by the illusory barrier between himself and the 'other.' One sees one's True Self in the 'other,' and the 'other' in one's True Self" (p. 22).The next three chapters develop the themes in this summary through readings of classic Buddhist texts. In chapter 3, on the Heart Sutra, Habito stresses that Buddhist meditation, when practiced genuinely, is not solipsistic, an escape into oneself from concern for... (shrink)

Alain Badiou’s Seminar: The One – Descartes, Plato, Kant (1983-1984) inaugurates "The Seminar, " the collection of transcribed and edited seminars that Badiou chose for publication from the sessions he held over his career. To its place opening "The Seminar" other, perhaps more important functions should be added, however. The Seminar: The One serves, with the companion seminar on the Infinite (1984-1985), as a bridge between Badiou’s Theory of the Subject (1982) and the work for which he is best known, (...) Being and Event ( L'Être et l'Événement, 1988; English translation, 2005). 1 (His play Incident at Antioch, whose first drafts are written during the years that Badiou holds the seminars on The One and The Infinite, builds another, rather different, bridge.) At once quite technical and rather chatty, The One – Descartes, Plato, Kant offers a genealogy for two decisive steps in Badiou’s thought: his description and his axiomatization of the operation “counts-as-one.” It also – rather against the grain of these two steps; inchoately, controversially – offers a tentative engagement with the dangerous mode of parody. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes holds that there is an intimate connection between linguistic meaning and thought. This chapter provides a general overview of Hobbes's views on language, and argues that Hobbes holds an inchoate, but recognizable, version of an inferential role or functional role semantics. On Hobbes's theory of language use and linguistic meaning, the meaning of an expression is the functional role of that expression in cognition. The chapter describes Hobbes's account of use of names in cognition – names are (...) marks, applied to objects, for the sake of recalling thoughts of those objects. According to Hobbes, a propositional attitude is a relation between a language‐using animal and a sentence. Sentences are signs of thought because they express propositional judgments. The chapter presents Hobbes's account of linguistic understanding. It argues that the understanding of linguistic expressions characteristic of mature, fully language‐competent humans is determined by the ability of language‐competent humans to deploy names in reasoning. (shrink)

I want to begin with four quotations, fairly typical of their type, and germane to our topic because they encapsulate what many artists and art lovers feel about art and music. These feelings are often inchoate, to be sure, and in the cold light of analytical day they may look extravagant and exaggerated. But they do capture something of the experience people often have of art and beauty, and for that reason alone must be given some phenomenological plausibility at (...) least. (shrink)