In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 30.1 (2006) 289-298 [Access article in PDF] Theory Is Dead— Like a Zombie Brian Boyd University of Auckland Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent, edited by Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral; ix & 725 pp. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. $72.50 cloth, $29.50 paper. Looking for an Argument: Critical Encounters with the New Approaches to the Criticism of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, by (...) Richard Levin; 309 pp. Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003. $49.50. Are we "after Theory"? And if so, then where are we? Seven years after Post-Theory (1996) came Reading After Theory (2002) and then After Theory (2003).1 Students inducted into the mysteries of Theory by an aging professoriate can no longer feel the zeal their teachers themselves have mostly long since lost. Theory's own leaders point out its failings.2 Like Queen Anne, Theory is surely dead. Or is it?In 1982 Jonathan Culler argued that post-structuralist literary theory should be called just Theory and that Theorists should play the "central role" in intellectual life (TE, pp. 26, 215). What now sounds hubristic seemed heady in the expansionist days of Theory's empire. But less than two decades later it could be pointed out in print that "everyone knows that if you want to locate the laughingstock on your local campus these days, your best bet is to stop by the English department" (TE, p. 315).So was theory dead by this point, five years after the start of the Bad Writing Contest and three years after the Sokal hoax? Not at all. The year of the "laughingstock" remark, David Scott Kastan's Shakespeare After [End Page 289] Theory (1999) claimed that we are "after theory" "not because theory's claims have been shown to be intellectually bankrupt but because its claims have been accepted as both useful and productive." A reviewer could demur: "As formulated the claim may be overstated—it sometimes seems that Shakespeare studies is insufficiently theorized."3But that was seven years ago. Surely things are different now, ten years after the Sokal hoax? Yes and no. After Reading After Theory and After Theory, a literature professor at the top of his field, Louis Menand, can (1) bemoan the sickness of the humanities and (2) deplore the culture of conformity in their Theorized students, and at the same time still (3) offer thanks that Theory "rescued" literature departments from "the literary" and (4) urge that despite their unhealthy state the Theorized humanities should resolve not "to retrench" but "to colonize."4So again, are we after Theory or not, and where are we, if we are? Are reports of the death of Theory exaggerated? Or is Theory dead in a special way, one of the Undead, a zombie or a vampire?There have been many blows driven through the heart of Theory in the last thirty years, but if Theory is at least dying now it is not because of blows from outside but only from its own terminal internal tedium. It has "always already" been immune to criticism because it refused to listen to critical arguments, treating them as so much unfriendly fire, proof of the enemy's perfidy, all the more reason to close ranks.I described Menand as at the top of his field because he belongs to the Harvard English Department, is a star essayist for the New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize winner, and was speaking to the 2004 MLA convention. There he wished some young Turks would stand up to challenge his generation, and tell them "You got it all wrong." But critics have been doing this cogently for decades. His generation has paid only enough heed to dismiss such criticism as proof that reactionary forces needed to be resolutely resisted.And the potential young Turks are simply too scared to speak up. Among all the many indictments of Theory collected in Theory's Empire, one of the most chilling indices of the betrayal of intellectual freedom and honesty in the Theorized humanities comes from a junior faculty... (shrink)

Three recent books?Richard Posner's Law and Literature, Stanley Fish's Doing What Comes Naturally, and James Boyd White's Justice as Translation? struggle over the relationship of law and literature. Fish and White defend the relevance of literature to law; Posner tries to kill the nascent law and literature movement by hugging it to death. Posner's literary criticism is belles?lettristic, concerned chiefly with how?great? a work is. Fish's is social, emphasizing the interpretative community. White attempts to make a new community, (...) in which we come to understand one another by an effort of translation. White's vision is attractive, though it surrenders Science to non?translation. As the sage said, even in science it is translation, and rhetoric, all the way down. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that selection history accounts of function can support a fully reductive naturalization of functional properties. I argue that this assumption is false. A problem with the alternative causal role account of function in this context is that it invokes the teleological notion of a goal in analysing real function. The selection history account, if it is to have reductive status, must not do the same. But attention to certain cases of selection history in biology, specifically those (...) involving meiotic drive, shows that selection historical explanations are available in the case of items without any plausible function. Making contributions to goals, here fitness, must be introduced as an additional constraint in the analysis, either explicitly, or implicitly by appeal to individual functions or the selection-of/selection-for distinction. (shrink)

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Contributors -- Series Editor's Foreword -- Preface: A 'Science' of Psychology: The Enduring Aspiration -- Introduction: Science, Scientism, and Psychology -- 1 Epistemology and the Boundaries Between Phenomena and Conventions -- 2 Hayek and Hempel on the Nature, Role, and Limitations of Science -- 3 On Scientism in Psychology: Some Observations of Historical Relevance -- 4 Why Science Needs Intuition -- 5 Scientism and Saturation: Evolutionary Psychology, Human Experience, and the (...) Phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion -- 6 Psychotherapy and Scientism -- 7 Science and Society: Effects, Reactions, and a Call for Reformation -- 8 Beyond Scientism: Reaches in Psychology Toward a Science of Consciousness -- Index. (shrink)

In this book, Della Rocca traces out the conceptual links between key concepts and principles of Spinoza's system bearing on representation and the mind-body problem. In the course of doing so, he presents and defends a number of new, interesting theses about Spinoza's thought on these matters. The arguments are presented with impressive clarity and in great detail. All in all, the book is a significant contribution to the literature on Spinoza's metaphysics and epistemology, and should be read by anyone (...) with a serious interest in its historical subject or in the two perennial philosophical problems on which it focuses. (shrink)

From the neurophysiological perspective, thinking in dreaming and the quality of dream thought have been considered hallucinatory, bizarre, illogical, improbable, or even impossible. This empirical phenomenological research concentrates on testing whether dream thought can be defined as rational in the sense of an intervening mental process between sensory perception and the creation of meaning, leading to a conclusion or to taking action. From 10 individual dream journals of male participants aged 22–59 years and female participants aged 25–49 years, we delimited (...) four dreams per journal and randomly selected five thought units from each dream for scoring. The units provided a base for testing a hypothesis that the thought processes of dream construction are rational. The results support the hypothesis and demonstrate that eight fundamental rational thought processes can be applied to the dreaming process. (shrink)

This paper argues that Donald Davidson’s infamous denial in “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs” that there is any such thing as a language, though it may not be fully supported by the arguments given for it in that paper, is nonetheless entailed by his semantic views generally, according to which the literal, linguistic meaning of a speaker’s words on an occasion is determined by how the speaker intended to be understood. In favor of this view, and thus against conventional languages, (...) the paper then argues that this understanding of linguistic meaning promises, in a way the conventional view of meaning does not, to make sense of linguistic normativity. (shrink)

Donald Davidson infamously claims that belief is in its nature veridical, and that skepticism is for this reason fundamentally incoherent. To those who take the issue of external world skepticism seriously, Davidson's arguments may seem to involve a conjuring trick. In particular, his invocation of an ‘omniscient interpreter’, whose intelligibility supposedly ensures that our beliefs must be largely true, has the air of incense and lantern-rubbing about it. Davidson's claim has received considerable critical response in the literature, almost all of (...) it negative. In my view, some commentators have indeed lit on a critical and controversial lemma in Davidson's argument, but this basic result has been obscured by being presented amidst an array of other criticisms that simply make no sense from a Davidsonian point of view. The aim of this paper is to clear away some of the confusion that stands in the way of a more productive evaluation of Davidson's important claim. (shrink)

Scientism: The New Orthodoxy is a comprehensive philosophical overview of the question of scientism, discussing the place of science in the humanities and religion. Clarifying and defining the key terms in play in discussions of scientism, this collection identifies the dimensions that differentiate science from scientism. Leading scholars appraise the means available to science, covering the impact of the neurosciences and the new challenges it presents for the law and the self. Illustrating the effect of scientism on the humanities, Scientism: (...) The New Orthodoxy addresses what science is. This provocative collection is an important contribution to the humanities in the 21st century. Contributors include: Peter Hacker, Bastian van Fraassen, Kenneth Schaffner, Roger Scruton, James K.A. Smith, Richard Swinburne, Lawrence Principe and Richard Williams. (shrink)

Introduction to an issue on moral and scientific realism in honor of Richard N. Boyd and Nicholas L. Sturgeon (Elizabeth S. Radcliffe, guest editor).

I examine the arguments Donald Davidson has offered through the years concerning the ontological bona fides of facts. In “Truth and Meaning”, Davidson uses the so-called “slingshot” argument to the effect that if true sentences refer, then they are all coreferential. Through a detailed examination of the assumptions underlying this argument, I show that, while it is effective as part of a reductio of bottom-up, reference based semantics, it has no tendency to establish the truth of its negative conclusion concerning (...) the existence of facts. Davidson also argues against facts by claiming they are of no help in the explication of truth. I claim that his repeated invocation of the slingshot in this context, as well as of arguments from other authors employing assumptions similar to the slingshot's, is inappropriate, especially in light of his own commitment to a top-down semantics — a committment inspired, ironically, by the reductio offered in “Truth and Meaning”. Davidson's other argument against truth as correspondence, namely that our grasp of facts is no better than our grasp of truths, is sound. But this argument does not show that there are no facts; it shows only that no theory of truth in terms of corre- pondence to facts can genuinely illuminate its explanandum. (shrink)

Kant distinguishes “natural ends” as exhibiting a part-whole reciprocal causal structure in virtue of which we can only conceive them as having been caused through a conception, as if by intelligent design. Here, I put pressure on Kant’s position by arguing that his view of what individuates and makes cognizable material bodies of any kind is inadequate and needs supplementation. Drawing on Spinoza, I further urge that the needed supplement is precisely the whole-part reciprocal causal structure that Kant takes to (...) be distinctive of natural ends alone. (shrink)

Donald Davidson argues that his interpretivist approach to meaning shows that accounting for the intentionality and objectivity of thought does not require an appeal, as John McDowell has urged it does, to a specifically rational relation between mind and world. Moreover, Davidson claims that the idea of such a relation is unintelligible. This paper takes issue with these claims. It shows, first, that interpretivism, contra Davidson's express view, does not depend essentially upon an appeal to a causal relation between events (...) in the world and speakers' beliefs. Second, it shows that interpretivism essentially, if implicitly, depends upon interpreters' appealing to facts taken in in perception, and that such facts are suited to provide a rational connection between mind and world. The paper then argues that none of Davidson's legitimate epistemological arguments tell against the idea that experience, in the form of the propositional contents of perception, can play a role in doxastic economy. Finally, it argues that granting experience such a role is consistent with Davidson's coherentist slogan that nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief. (shrink)

This paper is a result of remarks delivered at the 2014 conference of the Florida Philosophical Association during a book symposium on Elijah Chudnoff's Intuition.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Rationalism and the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction A priori Principles I: Davidson on Causation and the Mental Constitutive Principles and Classical Rationalism Classical Rationalism or Kantian Transcendentalism? The Refutation of (Transcendental) Idealism Rationalism Full‐Blown.

The topic of the present essay is the proper understanding of Donald Davidson’s version of the publicity requirement for the determinants of linguistic meaning. On the understanding I promote, the requirement is very strict indeed. My narrow aim is to show how such a strict conception of the publicity requirement can be maintained despite the evident need for interpreters to go beyond what is public on that conception in the process of constructing Davidsonian theories of meaning. Towards that aim, I (...) engage dialectically with treatments of Davidson’s principle of charity owing to Lepore and Ludwig and to Bar-On and Risjord, each of which, in different ways, recommend a more permissive approach to the publicity requirement than the one I recommended here. A broader aim is to shed some light on what would be required to take seriously the larger ambitions of Davidson’s semantic program. (shrink)

1. Marxism and totalitarian democracy, 1818-1850.--v. 2. Classical Marxism, 1850-1895.

A set of amino acid side chains that confer specificity for the coenzyme NADPH and the substrate glutathione in the flavoprotein disulphide oxidoreductase, glutathione reductase, has been identified. Systematic replacement of these amino acid residues in the coenzyme‐binding site switches the specificity of the enzyme from its natural strong preference for NADPH to a marked preference For NADH. The amino acids replaced all lie in a structural motif within the dinucleotide‐binding domain of the protein. Since this domain is a feature (...) common to most dehydrogenases (reductases) that use nicotinamide coenzymes, it may be that the coenzyme specificities of all such enzymes can be manipulated in this way. Similarly, amino acid residues involved in the selective recognition of trypanothione by trypanothione reductase, an enzyme related to glutathione reductase and exclusive to trypanosomatids, were identified. Suitable mutation of the corresponding residues in E. coli glutathione reductase switched its substrate specificity towards trypanothione. A better understanding of the substrate specificity of these enzymes could open up a route to the chemotherapy of trypanosomal infections. (shrink)