In his book The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich claims the index is an ontological condition of cinema. Manovich asserts digital cinema can never be indexical and therefore has fundamentally altered the very nature of cinema, reducing it to a form of animation. This paper offers a refutation of Manovich’s redefinition of cinema, showing that digital cinema can be indexical, but indexicality is not an ontological condition of cinema.

This paper is an inquiry into the largely unexamined analysis of arguments by analogy. By exposing the degree of philosophical complexity, which ultimately renders evaluation of ABA subjective, we shall see that the most appropriate doxastic attitude to adopt, with respect to the conclusions drawn from these arguments, is often suspension of judgment. A critical examination of Copi’s criteria for evaluating ABA shows that while these criteria work well for simple arguments, they fail when considering more philosophically profound ABA. This (...) paper supports these claims by using Cleanthes’ teleological argument for the existence of God from Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion as a case study. (shrink)

In his paper How to Be a Moral Realist Boyd attempts to show how cases of ethical indeterminacy can be accounted for from an ethical realist’s standpoint. Boyd describes cases of extensional vagueness in the life-sciences which arise from knowable and definite underlying structures and draws an analogy to ethics to argue his case. This paper argues that an equally compelling analogy can be drawn between another type of scientific indeterminacy – that in quantum mechanics – and the related ethical (...) cases. Because quantum mechanical uncertainty is a real and not merely epistemic limitation on physical description, it cannot be explained by reference to an underlying real structure. Thus this new analogy, where it seems valid, provides an argument for ethical antirealism in describing indeterminate ethical situations. (shrink)