In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Pleasure of the PlayDeborah KnightThe Pleasure of the Play, by Bert O. States; 226 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994, $34.50, cloth, $12.95, paper.I am an Aristotelian about narrative structure. This is not always a fashionable position, and in some company I know just what to expect: a pop deconstructivist dressing down by those who assume that I must have simply missed the point of poststructuralism and (...) postmodernism. Surely, the nay-sayers claim, no one believes in beginnings, middles, and ends anymore—certainly not since Godard taught us that we don’t need to put them in that order. Isn’t it just obvious (they continue) that we must reject the ideology of wholeness and unity, and opt instead for fragmentation, or self-reflexivity, or other violations of Aristotelian form? And there is no mistaking that, in some quarters, notions like mimesis and catharsis haven’t received much good press lately.But there are still kindred Aristotelians, and Bert O. States is one. His The Pleasure of the Play takes the Poetics as its pivotal text and sets in motion around it a lively discussion of plays from, yes, Oedipus Rex to The Real Inspector Hound, stopping along the way to consider Shakespeare, Chekhov, Brecht, Handke (among others), before concluding with an essay on Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe, a play dedicated to Václav Havel. States adopts an open rather than a closed view of what the Poetics has to say about tragedy, expanding the discussion well beyond tragedy itself, out toward drama and, indeed, comedy. But he is clearly unwilling to go as far as another group of Aristotelians, notably Paul Ricoeur, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Jerome Bruner, who treat narrative as a mode of actual lived existence. States’s objective is to show the continued vitality of the Poetics, especially in terms of what it can tell us about drama in cultural contexts much removed from the one which offered Aristotle his range of primary textual material. [End Page 272]To be clear, then, States doesn’t claim to be doing either Poetics “scholarship” or exegesis. Indeed, this book is not what one might typically think of as a philosophical examination of the Poetics. Anyone looking for such a thing would do well to consult the excellent but unmistakably philosophical Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty. States is doing something else here. Like Aristotle, he is showing how dramatic structures work.The book is engaging. It features wonderfully turned phrases, examples that immediately illuminate a point, and nicely interwoven references to a range of theorists and philosophers who only rarely are found in each other’s company, for example: Richard Boyd, Martin Heidegger, Douglas Hofstadter, Wolfgang Iser, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Francis Sparshott, Tzvetan Todorov. Some of States’s more delightful examples might offend Aristotle purists. Hard cheese to them. Consider how States uses Roland Barthes’s analysis of the newspaper feature story, or fait divers, to illuminate the structure of the great dramatic plots. In States’s examples—GENERAL SACRIFICES DAUGHTER IN WEDDING CEREMONY (Iphigenia at Aulis) or WIFE FORCED INTO ADULTERY BY HUSBAND, MOTHER, PRIEST (Mandragola) or, to use Aristotle’s own example, MAN’S STATUE AVENGES HIS MURDER (pp. 67-68)—what each mock headline captures is the peculiar, often ironic, internal logic of drama. For States, this peculiar logic is characterized by events which are simultaneously improbable, unthinkable, unanticipatable, yet—given the unfolding course of actions—uncannily probable after all.Central to understanding this internal logic is the Aristotelian notion of peripety, the critical “divulging event” (p. 49) which turns out to be just the reverse of what one intended (as for example Oedipus killing his father and marrying his mother). Where Aristotle seems to treat peripety as a mere plot device, States considers it “a principle of plot development.” Thus, the status of peripety as a crucial dramatic plot device is “really a symptom” of its more basic function (p. 86). Peripety as a principle of plot development helps to show why it makes little sense to claim that what narratives imitate is “reality”—peripety is just what “open life” lacks (p... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Deborah Knight SELVES, INTERPRETERS, NARRATORS I Autobiography, understood in die standard sense of someone telling or more frequendy writing the story of her life, has been a periodic focus of philosophical attention. Partly this is because philosophers such as Augustine and Rousseau have written some of the classics of the genre. Recendy, interest in autobiography has been renewed among philosophers concerned widi narrative and especially those concerned (...) widi die relation between interpretation, narration, and die self. In particular, there has been considerable interest in questions of narrative voice and perspective,1 as well as in questions concerning whether die self is (merely) a literary or fictional construct. One philosopher who has had much to say about selves as autobiographers is Daniel C. Dennett. He argues that the self is just an autobiographical accretion forming on or around some agent who is able to speak, to differentiate itself from others, and to call itself "I."2 The self, according to Dennett, is just the hole surrounded by the autobiographical doughnut. It is a fiction, and like any otiier fiction, what any selfamounts to will depend on die way we tell the story. But as I will argue, Dennett's view oversimplifies die complex narrational role involved in telling tales about oneself and otiiers. It also oversimplifies die relationship between the accreters of autobiography and dieir interpreters. In particular, it fails to recognize that both autobiographical accreters and interpreters are involved in a narrational activity. Perhaps it should not surprise us to discover a philosopher-novelist whose work offers a helpful counterpoint to Dennett's views about story-based selves. Rebecca Goldstein's novel, TheLate-SummerPassion of a Woman ofMind,5 contains an important insight into die narrational Philosophy and Literature, © 1994, 18: 274-286 Deborah Knight275 function presupposed by bodi interpreters and self-interpreters. Goldstein, not unlike Dennett, argues that in a fundamental sense our lives are accounted for and made sense of in storied terms. This is not an original observation. What Goldstein recognizes that Dennett does not is the complex narrational interconnection between teller and interpreter. Further, she recognizes the hopelessness of the desire for some omniscient interpreter or impersonal narrator—some third-person interpretive perspective that can simply bracket the intentions of the agent as that agent understands them. Goldstein helps us to see part of what is at stake in all discussions of storied lives, as well as what is at stake in the idea diat die self or subject of action is produced through the stories tiiat we and otiiers tell. So let me contrast Dennett's views about narrated selves with Goldstein's views. My objective is to show the limitations of Dennett's position, and die suggestiveness of Goldstein's. II Dennett's views about the self can be thought of in terms of a pair of guiding intuitions: either (Dl) the self is soul-like, the ghost in the Cartesian machine, the originator a priori ofmeanings and actions, the incorrigible source of intentions, the consciousness that preexists and directs action; or (D2) the self is discursive, which is to say that it is a product formed in language dirough die telling and exchanging of tales about ourselves. If (Dl), then the self is prelinguistic and makes each of us God-like creators and guarantors of our meanings; or, if (D2), then the selfis the fragmentary, pieced-togetiier posit that orients us through an otherwise potentially unbalancing variety of environmental and psychological inputs and outputs. Dennett treats diese two views as the only possible positions in die debate, and since his brand of anti-Cartesianism, like RyIe's before him, requires that he refute (Dl), he is left only with (D2). By refuting (Dl) and keeping (D2), Dennett allows himself to conclude that, while agents' selves are spun through the tales they tell of themselves, there is no good reason to base one's interpretation of any agent on the version of the tale told by that agent. The only perspective from which agents can be interpreted is a diird-person perspective. There can be no significant question as to first-person authority, since on Dennett's view, die first-person subjective position has... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Case of the Disappearing EnigmaDeborah Knight and George McKnightAsked to give examples of detection narratives, one might first mention paradigms of the detective genre from either the classical or hard-boiled traditions. But the study of detection need not be restricted to the generic as familiarly construed. 1 Our interest in detection is transgeneric, which is why we speak in terms of “detection narratives” rather than the detective (...) genre. We are as interested in detection narratives that exploit the generic tendencies of suspense or comedy as we are in nongeneric narratives that feature an investigation of some mystery or crime. While what we have to say about detection, interpretation, and narrative explanation is generally applicable to both literary and non-literary detection narratives, our five main examples are all unapologetically taken from cinema. We have selected these five just because they are unlikely to strike anyone as an intuitively obvious group of films. They are The Thin Man (W. S. Van Dyke, 1934), a mystery/comedy; The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941), standardly cited as the earliest film noir and a paradigm of the cinematic hard-boiled detective genre; All The President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976), a political thriller based on Bernstein and Woodward’s nonfictional investigation of the Watergate break-in; Nicholas Roeg’s 1980 Bad Timing, a nongeneric film about sensual obsession; and Woody Allen’s 1993 comedy of manners, Manhattan Murder Mystery.Whether focusing on the investigation of a crime, the unraveling of a puzzle, or the solution of a mystery, detection narratives exhibit what Frank Kermode calls “a specialized ‘hermeneutic’ organization.” 2 As such, they call for a particular sort of investigation: namely, a hermeneutical one. Often we think about hermeneutical investigations as [End Page 123] interpretations and assume that the proper object of such interpretations is a text. Thinking primarily about literary texts, David Novitz argues that the function of such explanations is to “solve certain puzzles, answer certain questions, dispel confusions, or eliminate doubts about... the theme of a work or its plot, [or] about the actions, motives, or machinations of fictional characters....” 3Of course, interpretation is not restricted to literary texts, nor to answering specific questions about such matters as theme or plot or character motivation, nor does Novitz suggest it is. But when the object of interpretation is a text—literary, cinematic, legal, or other—it is arguable that interpretation is not restricted to those localized aspects of the text which we take to be puzzling. Novitz’s position is that interpretation only occurs when one confronts a specific puzzle or problem. What we understand directly is not, on this account, interpreted; interpretation is required only where we do not understand. The consideration of detection narratives suggests that understanding and interpretation are more closely related than Novitz seems to allow.In our attempts to make sense of the course of action of any detection narrative, there is always the question whether we have understood a given situation, event, action or statement correctly. It is always a question whether we have correctly distinguished between clues and red herrings. Detection narratives operate on the basis of a continual questioning—both for the detective and for the reader or viewer—as to whether we do, in fact, understand what is happening.This questioning attitude is keyed to the uncertainty as to whether we have correctly recognized what information is salient, which characters’ testimony is trustworthy. At various moments in any detection narrative, the detective (or reader/viewer) will have reason to question the reliability of their own assessment of what is going on. There is the risk of being mistaken, but also the risk of being deceived. So the appropriate attitude to detection narratives is an interpretive one, an attitude that asks questions about what is presented.Of course, particular questions cannot even be sensibly asked in the absence of a larger interpretive framework which gives the particular question its point. Not only the detective, but the reader or viewer, is well advised to contextualize any particular event or action as a (potential) part of what we call, adapting a notion of David Carr’s, an action of large... (shrink)

Philosophical aesthetics emerges out of eighteenth-century discussions of taste that paid scant attention to the experience of tasting and ingesting food. Sarah Worth diagnoses this historical oversight and offers an unexpected remedy. She argues that we should start our analysis of aesthetic taste over again, this time beginning with the pleasures of the tongue and mouth, and work out from there to consider the kinds of experience, knowledge, and appreciation that belong to eating and savoring. As she argues, our ability (...) to make gustatory discriminations and to determine what tastes good and why is not as different from our aesthetic judgments as philosophers and other aesthetic theorists might have led us to believe. In this engaging and readable book, Worth persuasively argues that food and its many tastes deserve serious philosophical consideration.Worth explores a number of puzzles that arise when we try to make sense of the concept of taste. She disentangles the metaphorical sense of taste understood as a reasoned judgment expressing aesthetic preferences from the literal sense of taste which involves our sensory experiences when food is in our mouths. She discusses good and bad taste, food and pleasure, authentic and inauthentic food, “food porn”—those impossibly glamourized images of food that we find in advertising and magazines and cookbooks and social media—and the role of recipes in the practice of cooking. She places our everyday experiences of food in the context of wider relationships and activities including cultivation, harvesting, processing, shipping, and purchasing, as well as the preparation and cooking meals for family and friends. The book is punctuated by many of the usual philosophical suspects (Plato and Aristotle, Hume and Kant, Bullough and Sibley) as well as critical and feminist theorists, food sociologists, and a number of famous chefs including Fannie Farmer, Julie Child, and Nigella Lawson. If Worth endorses a particular metaphilosophy of food, it would be that of the Slow Food movement, which is the subject of Chapter Three. (shrink)

Intentional, ‘commonsense,’ or ‘folk’ psychology is, as Jerry Fodor has remarked, ubiquitous. Explanations of what we say and do in terms of our reasons for acting are the stock in trade of intentional psychology. But there is a question whether explanations in terms of reasons are properly explanatory. Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett, to name two, have defended intentional psychology and its reason‐explanations. Still, many philosophers – including Fodor, Davidson and Dennett – fail to pay due attention to the narrative (...) basis of such agent‐centered accounts of action. In this paper, I argue that psychological explanation is an agent‐centered, narrative‐based interpretive practice. To make my case, I present a poetics of psychological explanation: seven elements which collectively describe what makes psychological explanations work. Narrative form allows us to represent the temporal arc of agents’ actions – as well as the temporal arc of their reasoning about their actions, both prospective and retrospective. It allows us to negotiate between the canonical and the exceptional in human experience, and thus to account for actions that strike us as puzzling or unusual – whether the puzzle originates in our suboptimal understanding or the agent's suboptimal reasoning. And it allows us to juxtapose different perspectives on any action. Such juxtapositioning gives us a mechanism for coming to see how an action that strikes us as misguided might have been construed by the agent as reasonable given her understanding of her circumstances. After establishing the seven elements of the poetics, I address the objection that narrative‐based accounts of intentional action are not properly explanatory. (shrink)

I examine three themes central to Denis Dutton’s philosophy of art. To understand the artworks of non-Western cultures, we must understand how to identify what artistic category these works in fact belong to. Though the perceived properties of a work of art do not seem to change when it is revealed to be a forgery, there is a reason why forgeries are “artistic crimes.” In both cases, a “work of art” is not simply the object produced (the painting, for example), (...) but rather the contextualized performance undertaken by the artist that brings about the finished product. (shrink)

This chapter examines the emergence of a distinctively analytic approach to film as art. I begin with an overview of Berys Gaut’s claim that the philosophy of film art is, roughly speaking, organized around three levels of analysis: the film medium; film narrative and aesthetics; and philosophical themes that emerge in films. Next I trace the emergence of an analytic philosophy of film as art in the work of Alexander Sesonske and Francis Sparshott. Sesonske and Sparshott each draw attention to (...) the central features of film aesthetics—notably to the ways in which film treats time and space. I conclude by discussing contemporary developments such as “film as philosophy.”. (shrink)

In Defense of ReadingWorthSarah E.rowman & littlefield. 2017. pp. 219. £24.95.

This dissertation inquires into the interpretation of agents' actions and utterances, and into the role of narrative theory in that interpretation. My thesis is that psychological explanation is an agent-centred, narrative-based interpretive practice. Agent-centred interpretation takes the form of narrative because such interpretations are governed by the need to discover or impose an intelligible explanatory pattern on events involving others like ourselves. I argue that narrative form is not a secondary way of construing action, but is what enables us to (...) recognize the intelligibility of agents' actions. Thus it is a main task of the dissertation to draw attention to the poetical nature of interpretation, and to the auto-poetical nature of self-interpreting agents. Interpretation is in essence intersubjective and communicative, and is doubly committed to intelligibility, since it must not only make sense of an agent's action, but also show how that action could have made sense to her. Conceiving of interpretation as an example of intersubjective communication allows me to present a poetics of psychological explanation. Not only does such a poetics outline the formal constraints on the interpretation of agents and their actions; it also allows me to show that the constraints in question are narrative constraints. (shrink)

The Well-Ordered Universe argues that Cavendish's natural philosophy, social and political philosophy, and medical theory share an underlying concern with order. This reveals interesting connections among Cavendish's natural philosophy and her views on gender, animals and the environment, and human health, and explains her commitment to monarchy and social hierarchy.

Under what conditions are people responsible for their choices and the outcomes of those choices? How could such conditions be fostered by liberal societies? Should what people are due as a matter of justice depend on what they are responsible for? For example, how far should healthcare provision depend on patients' past choices? What values would be realized and which hampered by making justice sensitive to responsibility? Would it give people what they deserve? Would it advance or hinder equality? The (...) explosion of philosophical interest in such questions has been fuelled by increased focus on individual responsibility in political debates. Political philosophers, especially egalitarians, have responded to such developments by attempting to map out the proper place for responsibility in theories of justice. This book both reflects on these recent developments in normative political theory and moves the debate forwards. (shrink)

Discrimination, understood as differential treatment of individuals on the basis of their respective group memberships, is widely considered to be morally wrong. This moral judgment is backed in many jurisdictions with the passage of equality of opportunity legislation, which aims to ensure that racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, sexual-orientation, disability and other groups are not subjected to discrimination. This chapter explores the conceptual underpinnings of discrimination and equality of opportunity using the tools of analytical moral and political philosophy.

The process of seeking the consent of a patient to a medical procedure is, arguably, one of the most important skills a doctor, or indeed any clinician, should learn. In fact, the very idea that doctors may institute diagnostic or treatment processes of any sort without a patient's consent is utterly counter-intuitive to the modern practice of medicine. It was not always thus, and even now it can be reliably assumed that consent is still not sought and gained appropriately in (...) every clinical encounter. To say that it should be sought and gained in this manner elevates the value of consent to a high level. It can be instructive to ask oneself why such a value might be held to be the case. The answer to this question lies in the philosophical underpinning of clinical consent, which sits within a notion of personal autonomy, and respect for autonomous decision making. (shrink)

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the recent debate about responsibility and distributive justice. It traces the recent philosophical focus on distributive justice to John Rawls and examines two arguments in his work which might be taken to contain the seeds of the focus on responsibility in later theories of distributive justice. It examines Ronald Dworkin's ‘equality of resources’, the ‘luck egalitarianism’ of Richard Arneson and G. A. Cohen, as well as the criticisms of their work put forward by (...) Elizabeth Anderson, Marc Fleurbaey, Susan Hurley, and Jonathan Wolff. Key concepts such as responsibility (individual and collective), luck (thin and thick; brute and option), control, desert, and equality of opportunity are delineated, and the implementation of responsibility-sensitive accounts of justice is considered. The chapters of this book are positioned in relation to the wider literature on responsibility and distributive justice, and a brief outline of the chapters is provided. (shrink)

This chapter identifies three contrasts between responsibility-sensitive justice and desert-sensitive justice. First, while responsibility may be appraised on prudential or moral grounds, it is argued that desert is necessarily moral. As moral appraisal is much more plausible, responsibility-sensitive justice is only attractive in one of its two formulations. Second, strict responsibility sensitivity does not compensate for all forms of bad brute luck, and forms of responsibility-sensitive justice like luck egalitarianism that provide such compensation do so by appealing to independent moral (...) concerns such as equality. Desert-sensitive justice can deliver the appropriate compensation without relying on external moral resources. Finally, while responsibility-sensitive justice harshly refuses to provide for those whose basic needs are unsatisfied due to their own negligent actions, this result can be averted by desert-sensitive justice as it can take into account responsibility-independent considerations. In sum, desert-sensitive justice appears to offer a tighter fit with considered judgments about justice. (shrink)

Laspro et al. (2024) present an insightful survey of ethical issues emerging in first-in-human whole eye transplants (WET). Their discussion is applicable to a broad range of first-in-human surgica...

In the social sciences and in everyday speech we often talk about groups as if they behaved in the same way as individuals, thinking and acting as a singular being. We say for example that "Google intends to develop an automated car", "the U.S. Government believes that Syria has used chemical weapons on its people", or that "the NRA wants to protect the rights of gun owners". We also often ascribe legal and moral responsibility to groups. But could groups literally (...) intend things? Is there such a thing as a collective mind? If so, should groups be held morally responsible? Such questions are of vital importance to our understanding of the social world. In this lively, engaging introduction Deborah Tollefsen offers a careful survey of contemporary philosophers? answers to these questions, and argues for the unorthodox view that certain groups should, indeed, be treated as agents and deserve to be held morally accountable. Tollefsen explores the nature of belief, action and intention, and shows the reader how a belief in group agency can be reconciled with our understanding of individual agency and accountability. _Groups as Agents_ will be a vital resource for scholars as well as for students of philosophy and the social sciences encountering the topic for the first time. (shrink)

Decades before the environmental movement emerged in the 1960s, Adorno condemned our destructive and self-destructive relationship to the natural world, warning of the catastrophe that may result if we continue to treat nature as an object that exists exclusively for our own benefit. "Adorno on Nature" presents the first detailed examination of the pivotal role of the idea of natural history in Adorno's work. A comparison of Adorno's concerns with those of key ecological theorists - social ecologist Murray Bookchin, ecofeminist (...) Carolyn Merchant, and deep ecologist Arne Naess - reveals how Adorno speaks directly to many of today's most pressing environmental issues. Ending with a discussion of the philosophical conundrum of unity in diversity, "Adorno on Nature" also explores how social solidarity can be promoted as a necessary means of confronting environmental problems. (shrink)

The seventeenth century was a period of extraordinary invention, discovery and revolutions in scientific, social and political orders. It was a time of expansive automation, biological discovery, rapid advances in medical knowledge, of animal trials and a questioning of the boundaries between species, human and non-human, between social classes, and of the assumed naturalness of political inequality. This book gives a tour through those objects, ordinary and extraordinary, which captivated the philosophical imagination of the single most important French philosopher of (...) this period, Rene Descartes. Deborah J. Brown and Calvin G. Normore document Descartes' attempt to make sense of the complex, composite objects of human and divine invention, consistent with the fundamental tenets of his metaphysical system. Their central argument is that, far from reducing all the categories of ordinary experience to the two basic categories of substance, mind and body, Descartes' philosophy recognises irreducible composites that resist reduction, and require their own distinctive modes of explanation. (shrink)