The essays in this 1996 volume explore the ways in which traditional philosophical problems about self-knowledge, self-identity, and value have migrated into literature since the Romantic and Idealist periods. How do so-called literary works take up these problems in a new way? What conception of the subject is involved in this literary practice? How are the lines of demarcation between philosophy and literature problematised? The contributors examine these issues with reference both to Romantic and Idealist writers and to some of (...) their literary and philosophical inheritors and revisers. Their essays offer a philosophical understanding of the roots and nature of contemporary literary and philosophical practice, and elaborate, powerful and influential, but rarely decisively articulated, conceptions of the human subject and of value. (shrink)

In this provocative new study, Richard Eldridge presents a highly original and compelling account of Wittgenstein's _Philosophical Investigations_, one of the most enduring yet enigmatic works of the twentieth century. He does so by reading the text as a dramatization of what is perhaps life's central motivating struggle—the inescapable human need to pursue an ideal of expressive freedom within the difficult terms set by culture. Eldridge sees Wittgenstein as a Romantic protagonist, engaged in an ongoing internal dialogue (...) over the nature of intentional consciousness, ranging over ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of mind. The picture of the human mind that emerges through this dialogue unsettles behaviorism, cognitivism, and all other scientifically oriented orthodoxies. Leading a human life becomes a creative act, akin to writing a poem, of continuously seeking to overcome both complacency and skepticism. Eldridge's careful reconstruction of the central motive of Wittgenstein's work will influence all subsequent scholarship on it. (shrink)

Developing work in the theories of action and explanation, Eldridge argues that moral and political philosophers require accounts of what is historically possible, while historians require rough philosophical understandings of ideals that merit reasonable endorsement. Both Immanuel Kant and Walter Benjamin recognize this fact. Each sees a special place for religious consciousness and critical practice in the articulation and revision of ideals that are to have cultural effect, but they differ sharply in the forms of religious-philosophical understanding, cultural criticism, (...) and political practice that they favor. Kant defends a liberal, reformist, Protestant stance, emphasizing the importance of liberty, individual rights, and democratic institutions. His fullest picture of movement toward a moral culture appears in Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, where he describes conjecturally the emergence of an ethical commonwealth.Benjamin defends a politics of improvisatory alertness and consciousness-raising that is suspicious of progress and liberal reform. He practices a form of modernist, materialist criticism that is strongly rooted in his encounters with Kant, Hölderlin, and Goethe. His fullest, finished picture of this critical practice appears in One-Way Street, where he traces the continuing force of unsatisfied desires.By drawing on both Kant and Benjamin, Eldridge hopes to avoid both moralism and waywardness. And in doing so, he seeks to make better sense of the commitment-forming, commitment-revising, anxious, reflective and sometimes grownup acculturated human subjects we are. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature contains 23 newly commissioned essays by major philosophers and literary scholars that investigate literature ...

As readers of this journal can attest to, although philosophers and economists are somewhat used to talking to and learning from each other, it tends to be the subset of philosophers working in decision theory, philosophy of science, and particular areas of ethics and political philosophy that contribute to our interdisciplinary field of research. The book that is the subject of this review symposium, Anna Mahtani’s The Objects of Credence (Oxford University Press, 2024), is a wonderful exemplar of what can (...) be learned when a different branch of philosophy is brought to bear on central questions in this field. Both philosophers and economists talk about and work with credences, or degrees of belief, all the time. These are usually modelled as probabilities, which are in turn usually thought of as attaching to propositions. But it has long been argued by philosophers of language that propositions cannot be the objects of credence. Mahtani’s book is an investigation into all that begins to unravel once we accept this insight. The results have profound implications both for rational choice modelling and for welfare economics. (shrink)

The issue of detention as a public health control measure has attracted attention recently. This is because the threat of strains of tuberculosis that are resistant to a wider range of drugs has been identified, and there is renewed concern that public health is threatened. This paper considers whether involuntary detention is justified where voluntary measures have failed or where a patient poses a danger, albeit uncertain, to the public. We discuss the need for strengthening evidence-based assessments of public health (...) risk and suggest that we should refect more profoundly on the philosophical foundations upon which our policies and practices are grounded. (shrink)

The issue of detention as a tuberculosis control measure has resurfaced following the prolonged detention of a patient with an extensively drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis in a prison cell in Arizona, and the attempted detention in Italy and subsequent detention in Atlanta, Georgia of an American sufferer thought to have XDR-TB in May 2007. These cases have reignited the debate over the evidence that supports detention policy in the control of tuberculosis, and its associated legal and ethical ramifications. This paper (...) considers whether involuntary detention is justified where voluntary measures have failed or where a patient poses a danger, albeit uncertain, to the public, and discusses the need for strengthening evidencebased assessments of public health risk. (shrink)

We observe that approaches to intersubjectivity, involving mirror neurons and involving emulation and prediction, have eclipsed discussion of those same mechanisms for achieving coordination between the two hemispheres of the human brain. We explore some of the implications of the suggestion that the mutual modelling of the two situated hemispheres is a productive place to start in understanding the phylogenetic and ontogenetic development of cognition and of intersubjectivity.

In _The Company We Keep_, Wayne C. Booth argues for the relocation of ethics to the center of our engagement with literature. But the questions he asks are not confined to morality. Returning ethics to its root sense, Booth proposes that the ethical critic will be interested in any effect on the ethos, the total character or quality of tellers and listeners. Ethical criticism will risk talking about the quality of _this_ particular encounter with _this_ particular work. Yet it will (...) give up the old hope for definitive judgments of "good" work and "bad." Rather it will be a conversation about _many_ kinds of personal and social goods that fictions can serve or destroy. While not ignoring the consequences for conduct of engaging with powerful stories, it will attend to that more immediate topic, What happens to us _as we read_? Who am I, _during the hours of reading or listening_? What is the quality of the life I lead in the company of these would-be friends? Through a wide variety of periods and genres and scores of particular works, Booth pursues various metaphors for such engagements: "friendship with books," "the exchange of gifts," "the colonizing of worlds," "the constitution of commonwealths." He concludes with extended explorations of the ethical powers and potential dangers of works by Rabelais, D. H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, and Mark Twain. (shrink)

forall x: Calgary is a full-featured textbook on formal logic. It covers key notions of logic such as consequence and validity of arguments, the syntax of truth-functional propositional logic TFL and truth-table semantics, the syntax of first-order (predicate) logic FOL with identity (first-order interpretations), symbolizing English in TFL and FOL, and Fitch-style natural deduction proof systems for both TFL and FOL. It also deals with some advanced topics such as modal logic, soundness, and functional completeness. Exercises with solutions are available. (...) It is provided in PDF (for screen reading, printing, and a special version for dyslexics), HTML, and in LaTeX source code. (shrink)

An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art is a clear and compact survey of philosophical theories of the nature and value of art, including in its scope literature, painting, sculpture, music, dance, architecture, movies, conceptual art and performance art. This second edition incorporates significant new research on topics including pictorial depiction, musical expression, conceptual art, Hegel, and art and society. Drawing on classical and contemporary philosophy, literary theory and art criticism, Richard Eldridge explores the representational, formal and expressive (...) dimensions of art. He argues that the aesthetic and semantic density of the work, in inviting imaginative exploration, makes works of art cognitively, morally and socially important. This importance is further elaborated in discussions of artistic beauty, originality, imagination and criticism. His accessible study will be invaluable to students of philosophy of art and aesthetics. (shrink)

These challenging essays defend Romanticism against its critics. They argue that Romantic thought, interpreted as the pursuit of freedom in concrete contexts, remains a central and exemplary form of both artistic work and philosophical understanding. Marshalling a wide range of texts from literature, philosophy and criticism, Richard Eldridge traces the central themes and stylistic features of Romantic thinking in the work of Kant, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Hardy, Wittgenstein, Cavell and Updike. Through his analysis he shows that Romanticism is neither (...) emptily literary and escapist nor dogmatically optimistic and sentimental. This is the first serious philosophical defense of the ethical ideals of Romanticism and will appeal particularly to all professionals and students in philosophy, literature and aesthetics who are interested in what, philosophically, literature can show that philosophy cannot say. (shrink)

In Literature, Life, and Modernity Richard Eldridge focuses on the question of a reader's or a viewer's response to a literary or dramatic work in a specific historical epoch ("modernity"). That is, in contrast with many other philosophical approaches to literature, he avoids fixing attention on any putative doctrinal (moral or political or diagnostic) claims in a literary work. Thereby, and in many other admirable ways, he avoids the danger of treating literature as philosophy manqué, concedes the distinctness (...) of literary experience, and only then asks about the significance of this experience. (In this way his approach is reminiscent to some extent of Schiller's; not bad company to be keeping.) This all amounts to a philosophy of literature of sorts,[1] but avoids a forced "philosophy in literature" or "literature as philosophy" treatment. There are themes and ideas at stake of course, but for distinct historical reasons, Eldridge also thinks of what he generally calls "modern" literature as characterized precisely by the absence of any thematic resolution, and so by a kind of play of possibilities, unsettledness, even homelessness. But, he argues, this is a play of ambiguity that. (shrink)

Contemporary Philosophy in Focus offers a series of introductory volumes on many of the dominant philosophical thinkers of the current age. Stanley Cavell has been one of the most creative and independent of contemporary philosophical voices. At the core of his thought is the view that skepticism is not a theoretical position to be refuted by philosophical theory but is a reflection of the fundamental limits of human knowledge of the self, of others and of the external world that must (...) be accepted. This volume is the first attempt systematically and accessibly to describe and assess the full range of Cavell's work. There are new accounts of Cavell's contribution to the philosophy of mind and language, the theory of action, ethics, aesthetics, Romanticism, American philosophy, Shakespeare, and film and opera. Outside philosophy the appeal of this volume will be unusually broad. (shrink)

Philosophers debate the death of philosophy as much as they debate the death of God. Kant claimed responsibility for both philosophy's beginning and end, while Heidegger argued it concluded with Nietzsche. In the twentieth century, figures as diverse as John Austin and Richard Rorty have proclaimed philosophy's end, with some even calling for the advent of "postphilosophy." In an effort to make sense of these conflicting positions—which often say as much about the philosopher as his subject—Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel undertakes (...) the first systematic treatment of "the end of philosophy," while also recasting the history of western thought itself. Thomas-Fogiel begins with postphilosophical claims such as scientism, which she reveals to be self-refuting, for they subsume philosophy into the branches of the natural sciences. She discovers similar issues in Rorty's skepticism and strands of continental thought. Revisiting the work of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century philosophers, when the split between analytical and continental philosophy began, Thomas-Fogiel finds both traditions followed the same path—the road of reference—which ultimately led to self-contradiction. This phenomenon, whether valorized or condemned, has been understood as the death of philosophy. Tracing this pattern from Quine to Rorty, from Heidegger to Levinas and Habermas, Thomas-Fogiel reveals the self-contradiction at the core of their claims while also carving an alternative path through self-reference. Trained under the French philosopher Bernard Bourgeois, she remakes philosophy in exciting new ways for the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This paper presents an analysis of bluffing in labor negotiations from legal, economic, and ethical perspectives. It is argued that many forms of bluffing in labor negotiations are legal and economically advantageous, but that they typically constitute lying. Nevertheless it is argued that it is generally morally acceptable to bluff given a typical labor-management relationship where one's negotiating partner is familiar with and most likely employing bluffing tactics him/herself. We also consider whether it is an indictment of our present negotiating (...) practices and our economic system as a whole that, given the harsh realities of the marketplace, bluffing is usually morally acceptable. (shrink)

This chapter contrasts the broadly empirical, pluralist, and construction device–oriented approaches to film study of analytic philosophy of film with the broadly socially hermeneutic, artistically and politically avant-gardist stances of Continental film theory. Analytic philosophy of film has tended to focus on classic Hollywood films and continuity editing, in order to explore the achievements of these films as art, while Continental film theory frequently finds such films to be regressive and technically uninteresting. I explore in detail the work of such (...) analytically oriented film scholars as Cavell, Danto, Walton, Carroll, Wilson, Bordwell, Plantinga, and Wartenberg, among others, against the background of this broad divergence in styles of work. I conclude by suggesting possibilities of rapprochement between these two styles, possibilities that embrace both the insights of analytic philosophers concerning specific devices and effects of film construction and the insights of Continental theorists concerning human subject formation and human social, political, and artistic interests. (shrink)

This paper examines several issues regarding deception in advertising. Some generally accepted definitions are considered and found to be inadequate. An alternative definition is proposed for legal/regulatory purposes and is related to a suggested definition of the term deception as it is used in everyday language. Based upon these definitions, suggestions are offered for detecting and regulating deception in advertising. This paper additionally considers the grounds for the generally held but largely unquestioned assumption that deceptive advertising is unethical. It is (...) argued that deceptive advertising can be shown to be morally objectionable, on the weak assumption that it is prima facie wrong to harm others. Finally, the implications of this analysis with respect to current regulation of deceptive advertising by the FTC are considered. (shrink)