Sheehan deals with relatively recent authors—Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Beckett. He is critical of humanism, by which he seems to understand a kind of anthropocentric and limitative image of human beings, imposed on the public by narrative, among other things. As against this, he is setting the animal, the mechanical, and the transcendental, but the definition of the latter is, to say the least, bizarre—“the ability to evade compromise and contingency”. Reformulating narrativity is, according to Sheehan, the best (...) attempt or search by the moderns to define a new kind of human. His whole project is, to put it bluntly, rather confused. There are some intelligent and original commentaries on Schopenhauer, for instance but Sheehan soon falls back under the spell of Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and Terry Eagleton and seems to contribute rather few original comments to the discussion. In a word, this is a good example of how the interface philosophy/literature ought not to be visited. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to examine the liturgical spirituality of Virgil Michel through some of the literature he left behind. It is important to note that it would be difficult to derive Virgil Michel’s spirituality, solely from his own works, since the texts in general do not delve deeply into the background and context of his life. This is why secondary sources written about Virgil Michel were also consulted and played a role (...) in the research. Several of his major works were essential to the research, these include: an article entitled the “Significance of the Liturgical Movement” and two books entitled, The Liturgy of the Church and Christian Social Reconstruction. All of these sources provided important insights into Virgil’s liturgical spirituality, while the secondary sources helped make sense of material regarding Virgil’s life that were not directly accessible through his own literature. (shrink)

This book addresses central issues in the philosophy and metaphysics of science, namely the nature of scientific theories, their partial truth, and the necessity of scientific laws within a moderate realist and empiricist perspective. Accordingly, good arguments in favour of the existence of unobservable entities postulated by our best theories, such as electrons, must be inductively grounded on perceptual experience and not their explanatory power as most defenders of scientific realism claim. Similarly, belief in the reality of dispositions such as (...) causal powers which ground the natural necessity of scientific laws must be based on experience. Hence, this book offers a synthetic presentation of an original metaphysics of science, namely a metaphysics of properties, both categorical and dispositional, while at the same time opposing strong versions of necessitarism according to which laws are true in all possible worlds. The main theses and arguments are clearly presented in a non-technical way. Thus, on top of being of interest to the specialists of the topics discussed, it is also useful as a textbook in courses for third year and more advanced university students. (shrink)

This volume is a wonderful introduction to Foucault and a testimony to the deep humanity of the man himself.

"Next to Sartre's Search for a Method and in direct opposition to it, Foucault's work is the most noteworthy effort at a theory of history in the last 50 years." -- Library Journal.

Whether the prefrontal cortex is part of the neural substrates of consciousness is currently debated. Against prefrontal theories of consciousness, many have argued that neural activity in the prefrontal cortex does not correlate with consciousness but with subjective reports. We defend prefrontal theories of consciousness against this argument. We surmise that the requirement for reports is not a satisfying explanation of the difference in neural activity between conscious and unconscious trials, and that prefrontal theories of consciousness come out of this (...) debate unscathed. (shrink)

In his influential article ‘Essence and Modality’, Fine proposes a definition of necessity in terms of the primitive essentialist notion ‘true in virtue of the nature of’. Fine’s proposal is suggestive, but it admits of different interpretations, leaving it unsettled what the precise formulation of an Essentialist definition of necessity should be. In this paper, four different versions of the definition are discussed: a singular, a plural reading, and an existential variant of Fine’s original suggestion and an alternative version proposed (...) by Correia which is not based on Fine’s primitive essentialist notion. The first main point of the paper is that the singular reading is untenable. The second that given plausible background assumptions, the remaining three definitions are extensionally equivalent. The third is that, this equivalence notwithstanding, Essentialists should adopt Correia’s version of the definition, since both the existential variant, which has de facto been adopted as the standard version of the definition in the literature, and the plural reading suffer from problems connected to Fine’s primitive essentialist notion. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that fiction is necessarily incomplete, but some recent work postulates the existence of universal fictions—stories according to which everything is true. Building such a story is supposedly straightforward: authors can either assert that everything is true in their story, define a complement function that does the assertoric work for them, or, most compellingly, write a story combining a contradiction with the principle of explosion. The case for universal fictions thus turns on the intuitive priority we assign (...) to the law of non-contradiction. My goal in this paper is to show that our critical and reflective literary practices set constraints on story-telling which preclude universal fictions. I will raise four stumbling blocks for universal fictionalists: the gap between saying and making true, our actual interpretive reactions to story-level contradictions, the criteria we accept for what counts as a story in our literary practices, and the undesirability of the universal fictionalist’s closure principles. (shrink)

The premise that every work belongs to an art-kind has recently inspired a kind-centred approach to theories of art. Kind-centred analyses posit that we should abandon the project of giving a general theory of art and focus instead on giving theories of the arts. The main difficulty, however, is to explain what makes a given kind an art-kind in the first place. Kind-centred theorists have passed this buck on to appreciative practices, but this move proves unsatisfactory. I argue that the (...) root of this dissatisfaction stems not from the act of kicking the can down the road, but from not kicking it far enough. The missing ingredient, I argue, is a notion of convention which does the work of marking the difference between art and non-art for a given physical medium. (shrink)