In response to the discussion between William W. Morgan and Annette Kolodny in the Summer 1976 issue of Critical Inquiry I would like to address the issue of separating judgments based on feminism as an ideology from purely aesthetic judgments. Peripherally this included the issue of "prescriptive criticism," so labeled by Cheri Register in Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory.1 In the same book, as Kolodny points out,2 I called for criticism that exists in the "prophetic mode." Kolodny indicates reservations (...) about both concepts without fully exploring the issue. I would like to explain my statement here and to explore further the issue of feminism and aesthetics. When I called for criticism in the prophetic mode, I did not intend to promote an idea of the critic as ideological prophet. Rather, as I explain in the context from which the term is taken,3 I am speaking of the engaged scholar who is concerned to influence the future by her/his work today. S/he chooses her/his work with an eye to encourage political and social changes. Obviously, for a feminist this translates into a concern for a future in which women will be free from many of the restrictions that have held them down in the past. Much feminist criticism is thus corrective criticism designed to redress the imbalance in current literary curricula, and more generally to reintroduce "the feminine" into the public culture. · 1. Cheri Register, "American Feminist Literary Criticism: A Bibliographical Introduction ," Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory, ed. Josephine Donovan pp. 11-24.· 2. Annette Kolodny, "The Feminist as Literary Critic," Critical Inquiry 2 : 828.· 3. Josephine Donovan, "Critical Re-Vision," Feminist Literary Criticism, p. 81, n. 2. Josephine Donovan, currently working on a literary biography of Sarah Orne Jewett, has written "Feminist Style Criticism," "Sexual Politics in the Short Stories of Sylvia Plath," and has edited Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory. Although the occasion for this response was the exchange between Annette Kolodny and William W. Morgan , the questions raised by Ms. Donovan have some bearing on other topics discussed in Critical Inquiry—e.g., the nature of accepted canons in the arts . In addition the question of how we may interpret literary works from the past that contain currently unacceptable representations of women has implications as well for how we respond to "objectionable" representations of ethnic and religious groups and even of social classes. The editors expect to see these issues explored further in the future. (shrink)

We examine when and how police officers may avoid costly errors under stress by leveraging theoretical and empirical work on the biopsychosocial (BPS) model of challenge and threat. According to the BPS model, in motivated performance contexts (e.g., test taking, athletics), the evaluation of situational and task demands in relation to one’s perceived resources available to cope with those demands engenders distinct patterns of peripheral physiological responding. Individuals experience more challenge-like states in which blood circulates more efficiently in the periphery (...) when they evaluate their coping resources as meeting or exceeding the task demands. Conversely, individuals experience more threat-like states in which blood circulates less efficiently in the periphery when they view the situation or task demands as exceeding their coping resources. Patterns of response consistent with challenge and threat states have been shown to predict important performance and decision-making outcomes in stressful contexts, and repeated experiences of threat-like patterns of physiological activity are thought to have detrimental effects on long-term cardiovascular health. To date, however, research has not used the biopsychosocial model to understand police decision-making under stress. Here, we review relevant empirical work from the perspective of the BPS model concerning how minority status and power can shape challenge and threat responding and contribute to decision making under stress. We then detail a research agenda aimed at improving the translational value of research being conducted within the BPS model for understanding complex performance and decision making in the real world, including among law enforcement personnel. (shrink)

Reflection Principles are commonly thought to produce only strong axioms of infinity consistent with V = L. It would be desirable to have some notion of strong reflection to remedy this, and we have proposed Global Reflection Principles based on a somewhat Cantorian view of the universe. Such principles justify the kind of cardinals needed for, inter alia , Woodin’s Ω-Logic.

We argue for the conclusion that intrinsic desires, at least, and every other propositional attitude having the world-to-mind direction of fit exclusively, are never found within consciousness. All desire-like states found in consciousness are experiences or exercises of imaginative capacities pertaining either to the desire or the content of the desire, but never the desire itself.

“I quite rightly pass for an atheist,” Jacques Derrida announces in Circumfession. Grace Jantzen's suggestion that the poststructuralist critique of modernity can also be trained on atheism helps us make sense of this playfully cryptic statement: although Derrida sympathizes with the “idea” of atheism, he is wary of the modern brand of atheism, with its insistence on rationally arranging—straightening out—religion. In this paper, I will argue that poststructural feminism, with its focus on embodied epistemology, offers a way to re-explain Derrida's (...) “I rightly pass,” and also to carry it forward. Poststructural feminist atheism leads us through Derrida to an embodied disbelief drawing on three dimensions of poststructural feminism: feminist epistemology and material feminism, relationality, and affect theory. (shrink)

Lisa Sideris's Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World (2017) proposes that the call by some science advocates for a new moral framework based on scientific wonder is flawed. Sideris develops a typology of “wonder” with two separate affective axes: “true wonder” that is the prerogative of a sort of dwelling with the overwhelming mystery of life, and “curiosity” that presses to resolve puzzles and break through into a space of total clarity. The former, Sideris writes, is an ethical (...) resource that, by placing the human self against the backdrop of the unknowable cosmic expanse, prompts humility and genuine admiration for nature. The latter is the theater of “mere science.” This essay follows suit with Sideris's line of questioning, but also pushes back on the correlation of wonder with ethical attentiveness and proposes ways that science in its puzzle‐solving mode can be brought back into the ethical conversation. (shrink)

In recent decades, Russell’s “Neutral Monism” has reemerged as a topic of great scholarly interest among philosophers of mind, philosophers of science, and historians of early analytic philosophy. One of the most controversial points of scholarly dispute regarding Russell’s theory concerns how it best fits into standard classificatory schemes for understanding the relationship between mental phenomena and physical reality. The task of classifying Russell’s Neutral Monism is made all the more difficult by the fact that his conception of it evolves (...) in significant ways over the roughly four decades that he advocates it. In this paper, I contend that during this period, Russell holds (at least) three different, but related, ontological views, all of which he labels as “neutral monism”. This paper begins by considering key aspects of Russell’s early dualism which continue to play important roles in his Neutral Monism, especially his views about acquaintance, knowledge by description, structuralism about physics, and the construction of our physical knowledge. I argue that Russell revises, rather than abandons, his notion of knowledge by acquaintance in 1918 (when he gives up the act-object distinction) and contend that his resulting “neutral monism” remains a partial dualism until his 1921 The Analysis of Mind (hereafter AMi). Next, I explain how changes in physics leads Russell to re-conceptualize his Neutral Monism in The Analysis of Matter and An Outline of Philosophy, while challenging the relatively widespread view that his new position is a nonstandard version of physicalism. Finally, I argue that after 1940, Russell’s mature Neutral Monism—as presented in Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, My Philosophical Development, and elsewhere—is very plausibly interpreted as a version of “Russellian Physicalism”. (shrink)

Neutral monism is the view that both ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ are grounded in a more fundamental form of reality that is intrinsically neither mental nor material. It has often been treated as an odd fringe theory deserving of at most a footnote in the broader philosophical debates. Yet such attitudes do a grave disservice to its sophistications and significance for late nineteenth and early twentieth-century philosophy of mind and psychology. This paper sheds light on this neglected view by situating it (...) within broader historical monist debates about the mind and bringing attention to one of its central internal disputes regarding ‘mental chemistry’. By taking a closer look at how Ernst Mach, William James, and Bertrand Russell address the question of whether and how our mental episodes are composed of more basic elements, it highlights deep differences among their conceptions of the fundamental ‘neutral stuff’ and its relations to ‘mind’ and ‘matter’. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that a number of recent Russell interpreters, including Evans, Davidson, Campbell, and Proops, mistakenly attribute to Russell what I call ‘the received view of acquaintance’: the view that acquaintance safeguards us from misidentifying the objects of our acquaintance. I contend that Russell’s discussions of phenomenal continua cases show that he does not accept the received view of acquaintance. I also show that the possibility of misidentifying the objects of acquaintance should be unsurprising given underappreciated aspects (...) of Russell’s overall theory of knowledge and acquaintance. Finally, I consider the radical impact that Russell’s actual views on acquaintance have for our understanding of his well-known George IV case in ‘On Denoting’. In particular, I argue that Russell’s treatment of the George IV case is not a one-size-fits-all solution to Frege’s Puzzle and provides no support for the received view of acquaintance. (shrink)

This chapter provides an introduction to panpsychism, panprotopsychism, and neutral monism to an interdisciplinary audience.

Evolutionary fitness threats and rewards are associated with subjectively unpleasant and pleasant sensations, respectively. Initially, these correlations appear explainable via adaptation by natural selection. But here I analyse the major metaphysical perspectives on consciousness – physicalism, dualism, and panpsychism – and conclude that none help to understand the adaptive-seeming correlations via adaptation. I also argue that a recently proposed explanation, the phenomenal powers view, has major problems that mean it cannot explain the adaptive-seeming correlations via adaptation either. So the mystery (...) – call it the evolutionary paradox of consciousness – remains. Some have used this mystery to argue for non-naturalistic (e.g. theistic) explanations. But I propose a naturalistic, non-adaptive explanation of the adaptive-seeming correlations: namely, ‘sensational associative learning’ during development. In this perspective, pairing of particular sensations with unconditioned stimuli – fitness rewards or threats – cause the sensations themselves to come to be interpreted as good or bad, respectively. Sensations, like colours, that are not reliably paired with either fitness rewards or threats remain largely unvalenced. Sensational associative learning also provides explanations for adaptive-seeming structural aspects of sensations, such as the observation that sounds of different pitch are experienced as ordinal in correspondence to their wavelengths while the same is not true of colours of different hue. The sensational associative learning perspective appears compatible with physicalism, panpsychism, and dualism (though not epiphenomenalism). (shrink)

El presente artículo es un estudio comparativo donde se argumenta la relación disonante entre las obras de Schmitt y Benjamin sobre la estética barroca. Se defiende que la diferencia entre ambos consiste en su concepción de lo político. Para Benjamin, son dos los aspectos fundamentales del Trauerspi..

El presente ensayo se organiza al modo de un guion cinematográfico donde el protagonista conceptual es el fantasma. Se realiza una exposición de su abordaje filosófico en los trabajos de Slavoj Žižek enfatizando su relación con el goce y la ideología. El punto de partida es la famosa intuición del filósofo esloveno según la cual existe una analogía entre la concepción de la autonomía en el idealismo alemán y la concepción freudiana de la pulsión de muerte. A partir de este (...) argumento, análogo a una intriga de film noir, se pasa revista a la relación entre psicoanálisis y filosofía, así como a los análisis culturales propuestos por Žižek. (shrink)

This paper explores the ways that Daniel C. Dennett’s bestselling 2006 book Breaking the Spell traffics in a set of distinctly American presumptions about the relationship between religion and science. In this Americanized atheism, religion is presumed to be a set of logically organized propositional beliefs–a misbegotten science in need of correction or elimination. I show that a convergent critique, drawing on both evolutionary theory and deconstruction, highlights the limitations of this approach. This convergence highlights the theme of accident in (...) both pluralist evolutionary biology and continental philosophy of religion. Thematizing accident opens up a new conversational space between a deconstructive approach to religion and postadaptationist evolutionary theory, with implications not only for a philosophical understanding of religion, but for new, postsecular atheisms. (shrink)

James Joyce’s Ulysses can be read through the prism of the New Materialist School of contemporary critical thought to shed light on ongoing questions in the humanities about the relationship between language and embodiment. Specifically, Ulysses resonates with three thematic concerns of New Materialisms: the nature of matter, the correspondence between human and animal, and the role of affect. Contra some calls for the humanities to retrench in a conservative posture that reaffirms the special status of human reason and “consciousness” (...) – corresponding to Catholic readings of Ulysses that find in Joyce a metaphysical philosopher of transcendence – New Materialisms take human continuity with animals and matter seriously. Joyce’s Ulysses, by developing robust accounts of the interactions between matter, language, and thinking bodies, offers a template for exploring this convergence, demonstrating that the human “ghost” must be understood as radically inextricable from its material body and the material formations of its world. (shrink)

Many currently working on a Russellian notion of perceptual acquaintance and its role in perceptual experience (including Campbell 2002a, 2002b, and 2009 and Tye 2009) treat naïve realism and indirect realism as an exhaustive disjunction of possible views. In this paper, I propose a form of direct realism according to which one is directly aware of external objects and their features without perceiving a mind-dependent intermediary and without making any inference. Nevertheless, it also maintains that the qualitative character of perceptual (...) experience is a feature of our internal states of sentient awareness and so is to be distinguished from the features of objects in the perceptual scene. On this proposal, we are pre-reflectively aware of the qualitative character of our sensations simply in virtue of having them, and we are non-inferentially aware of external objects and their features by being attuned to what the occurrence of our sensations tells us about the rest of the world. Consequently, we are presented with, and thus acquainted with, both the external objects and the qualitative character of our sensory experiences, albeit in very different ways. Drawing on resources from Perry (2001) and Searle (in draft), I explain how perceptual experience has this “two-faced presentational character”. (shrink)

This paper examines the stability of the concept of rumor in the past century. It is suggested that not only do models of explanation change, but rumors themselves also change - not only in content, but perhaps in the way they are believed or disbelieved. Social scientific interest in rumors begins with the birth of modern psychology in the 19th century, shifts to social psychology and sociology in mid-20th century, prompted by governmental concern over subversion through rumor during the Second (...) World War, and is finally revived by folklorists in more recent decades. A central assumption emerged that ambiguous situations create a vacuum which rumor fills. By the late 1960s, despite a decline in social scientific interest in the topic, a handful of significant empirical and theoretical challenges emerge from scattered studies. The discipline of folklore begins to take more interest in contemporary rumor in the 1970s, and by the early 1990s the rubric of the rumor is almost entirely supplanted in English language scholarship by the ‘urban legend’. It is argued that particular attention can and should be paid, in contemporary analysis, to the general information environment, the politics of belief, and cultural shifts in ideas about truth and falsity. (shrink)

This paper will be a limited attempt to make sense of divine causation in Leibniz. I will not be able to discuss whether divine causation is immanent causation, nor explore the metaphysics of creation, emanation, and miracles in detail. Rather, I will focus on adjudicating the degree to which Leibniz’s famous denial of the interaction of substances bears on his views of divine causation. (edited).

Publication date: 15 October 2018 Source: Author: Donovan A. McFarlane This paper examines the constructs “Level of Educational Attainment” and “Intelligence Quotient” using a Case Study Approach based in current United States political conflicts and debates between U.S. Representative Maxine Waters and U.S. President Donald Trump. Specifically, the researcher examines U.S. President Donald Trump’s claim that U.S. Representative Maxine Waters, a democratic member of the U.S. Congress from the State of California, is a “low IQ individual”. The researcher examines IQ (...) indicators and focuses on the Level of Educational Attainment of Trump and Waters by accessing, analyzing, and interpreting the most current vital data on Level of Educational Attainment at the post-secondary level, specifically examining both parties’ LEA in relation to the population samples within their age groups. Additionally, the researcher briefly looks at the life circumstances of both Donald Trump and Maxine Waters to make an educated conclusion about both leaders’ levels of intelligence and IQs. (shrink)

Affect theory is a subfield that encourages us to think about how we interact with each other and the world along registers that are not reducible to language. This has suggested to some scholars that affect theory can also be used to better understand the experience of animals. This article explores a merger between affect theory, animal studies and the lifeworld tradition of phenomenology. The upshot of this is a way of seeing how animals, like humans, have rich religious worlds (...) that are shaped by pre-linguistic textures of affect. This perspective indicates that animals can be thrown into a state of trauma by being deprived of these lifeworlds. In light of this, the article considers the ethical implications of the modern factory farm system, particularly the practice of mass confinement. (shrink)

The central problem of this dissertation arises from reflecting on Euthyphro’s often neglected final attempt to define piety and the discussion (elenchos) that follows. He claims that piety is knowledge of how to give to the gods what is pleasing in prayer and sacrifice. Socrates, without much argument, reduces Euthyphro’s answer to his earlier, already refuted one – that piety is what is dear to the gods – inviting the question of whether this is all the elenchos is meant to (...) accomplish. If it is not, we should expect to find its purpose in the brief discussion that falls between Euthyphro’s definition and the final reduction of this definition to its predecessor. At the center of this discussion Socrates compares Euthyphronic piety to commerce. This comparison has classically been interpreted as showing Euthyphro’s definition to imply that humans can benefit gods, and since Euthyphro has elsewhere rejected this idea, his definition is refuted by contradiction. But this strands the reduction withoutpurpose, and scrutiny of the text suggests this is not the correct way to interpret the inference structure of this intervening discussion. In this dissertation I argue for two main theses: (i) the disambiguation thesis, which claims that the comparison to commerce is not the philosophical point of the elenchos, and does not result in the refutation of Euthyphro’s definition. It is instead intended to elicit which of two possible models of piety Euthyphro means to describe, the language of his definition being equivocal in at least one important respect, namely whether or not a met need necessarily confers a benefit upon the recipient; (ii) the translation thesis, which claims that there are some important observations to be made about the Greek of Euthyphro’s definition, observations that will make the dis- ambiguation thesis more plausible, and which are obscured by traditional translations of the passage under discussion. These observations concern kecharismena, a word often translated as ‘pleasing’, but is better understood as denoting a broad set of social and religious norms, and for which there is no simple English equivalent. Together, these two theses allow us to see that the main philosophical lesson of the last elenchos is that Euthyphro’s account of piety as ritual is an application of his more famous third attempt to define piety voluntaristically, and that any philosophical concerns over the last definition are consequences of it being an extension of the third one. This is why Plato puts the two side-by-side to close the dialogue, and we are kept from seeing this clearly when we take the comparison to commerce to be accomplishing the main work of the elenchos, rather than as clarifying Euthyphro’s answer so that its conceptual similarities to the previous answer are plainly visible. I conclude the project by defending the venerable view that Socratic piety is service to the gods instantiated by rational inquiry, and show how this model of piety is the antithesis to, and moral remedy for, Euthyphronic piety. (shrink)

This chapter summarizes Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy, presents new biographical details about how and why Russell wrote it, and highlights its continued significance for contemporary philosophy. It also surveys Russell’s famous distinction between “knowledge by acquaintance” and “knowledge by description,” his developing views about our knowledge of physical reality, and his views about our knowledge of logic, mathematics, and other abstract objects.

This chapter examines Bertrand Russell's developing views--roughly from 1911 to 1918--on the nature of introspective knowledge and subjects' most basic knowledge of themselves as themselves. It argues that Russell's theory of introspection distinguishes between direct awareness of individual psychological objects and features, the presentation of psychological complexes involving those objects and features, and introspective judgments which aim to correspond with them. It also explores his transition from believing that subjects enjoy introspective self-acquaintance, to believing that they only know themselves by (...) self-description, and eventually to believing that self-knowledge is a logical construction. It concludes by sketching how Russell's views about introspection and self-knowledge change as a result of his adoption of neutral monism. Along the way, it sheds additional light on his acquaintance-based theory of knowledge, preference for logical constructions over inferred entities, and gradual progression towards neutral monism. (shrink)

Catherine Keller's Cloud of the Impossible knits together process theology and relational ontology with quantum mechanics. In quantum physics, she finds a new resource for undoing the architecture of classical metaphysics and its location of autonomous human subjects as the primary gears of ethical agency. Keller swarms theology with the quantum perspective, focusing in particular on the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, by which quantum particles are found to remain influential over each other long after they have been physically separated—what Albert (...) Einstein and his collaborators recklessly dismissed as “spooky action at a distance.” This spooky action, Keller suggests, reroutes process thought—classically concerned with flux—to a new concern with intransigence—particularly the intransigence of the ethical relationship. Attending to the ethical urgency of the Other, she leaves process theology in a position of susceptibility to the moral imperative posed by the marginalized, the victimized, and the oppressed. This essay argues that although the ontological work of Keller's book productively integrates quantum physics into process theology, the ethical dimension of relationality is left cold in the quantum field. This is because, contra the ethical framework of contemporary deconstruction, which, following Emmanuel Levinas, sees ethical relationships as emerging out of a dynamic of infinite distance, moral connection has nothing to do with the remote reaches of the quantum scale or the macro-scale limits of space—nothing to do with “infinity” at all. Ethics emerges out of a much messier landscape—the evolved dynamic of fleshy, finite, material bodies. Rather than seeing ethical labor as a matter of physics, my contention is that interdisciplinary undertakings like Cloud of the Impossible are ethical disciplinary practices, re-acquainting us with the non-sovereignty of the self in order to open up new habits of relating rather than spotlighting ethical imperatives. (shrink)

In this essay I suggest that Heidegger’s Being and Time provides a ground for ethics in the notion of Dasein’s ‘Being-guilty.’ Being-guilty is not a ground for ethics in the sense of a demonstration of the moral ‘ought’ or a refutation of moral skepticism. Rather, Being-guilty serves as a foundation for ethical life in a way uniquely suited to a phenomenological form of ethics, a way that clarifies, from a phenomenological point of view, why the traditional approach to ethics is (...) misguided. The traditional attempt to ground ethics through demonstration or refutation depends upon a misunderstanding of obligation as an imposition that is distinct from, and inflicted upon, the subject in a way that is in need of justification. Heidegger’s conception of Being-guilty, on the contrary, identifies the basis of moral obligation in a form of primary selfobligation that is constitutive of human nature, rather than an imposition upon it. Although primordial guilt or self-obligation does not justify ethical obligation, it does ‘ground’ ethics. For it is the primary source and support of our ethical activity in two distinct senses. First, it serves as the condition for the possibility of our indebtedness to others—it enables us to be morally obligated. It enables moral obligation towards others by determining Dasein as ontologically indebted to care for its own being—a being which is, in turn, ontologically determined as care for others. Second, Being-guilty provides a criterion for distinguishing what we call ethical and unethical behavior. Ethical behavior is distinguished according to the appropriateness of one’s care for the other according to proper recognition of the nature of the Other’s Being as Dasein. (shrink)

The Harvard Graduate School of Education convocation speech, praised as "powerful" by Hillary Rodham Clinton in Teen Vogue and "inspired" by Justin Timberlake, that has offered inspiration to millions around the world In Lift Off, Donovan Livingston offers a groundbreaking rallying call about education, race, and the true nature of equality. In emotionally charged spoken-word poetry, Livingston shares a message of hope and hard truths, declaring that education can become an equalizer only if we first acknowledge the inequality and racial (...) divides holding back America's future. Livingston is dedicated to helping young people reach their celestial potential, and in his galvanizing commencement address, now adapted for the first time to the page, he calls on us to raise our voices on behalf of all children, as their brighter futures can light up our own. Together, we can lift off! Praise for Donovan Livingston "Donovan Livingston gave a powerful speech at the Harvard Graduate School of Education's convocation. In a spoken-word poem, he shared his struggles in life and urged his fellow graduates to fight inequality and inspire students. Donovan's message hit home. [He is] part of a rising generation that's. standing up to some of the biggest challenges in the world today."--Hillary Rodham Clinton, Teen Vogue "These are the words, and Donovan Livingston's voice and spirit are the music, but in any form, this rare graduation speech tells us that learning is full of bias yet can lead us to the stars."--Gloria Steinem "Donovan Livingston's Lift Offis our youth's gift to us. In this joyous young man's voice is the promise of tomorrow."--James McBride. (shrink)

In _Wild Experiment_, Donovan O. Schaefer challenges the conventional wisdom that feeling and thinking are separate. Drawing on science studies, philosophy, affect theory, secularism studies, psychology, and contemporary literary criticism, Schaefer reconceptualizes rationality as defined by affective processes at every level. He introduces the model of “cogency theory” to reconsider the relationship between evolutionary biology and secularism, examining mid-nineteenth-century Darwinian controversies, the 1925 Scopes Trial, and the New Atheist movement of the 2000s. Along the way, Schaefer reappraises a range of (...) related issues, from secular architecture at Oxford to American eugenics to contemporary climate denialism. These case studies locate the intersection of thinking and feeling in the way scientific rationality balances excited discovery with anxious scrutiny, in the fascination of conspiracy theories, and in how racist feelings assume the mantle of rational objectivity. The fact that cognition is felt, Schaefer demonstrates, is both why science succeeds and why it fails. He concludes that science, secularism, atheism, and reason itself are not separate from feeling but comprehensively defined by it. (shrink)