The first important reaction in favor of generic criticism here was that of the Chicago neo-Aristotelians, whose feisty polemics against the "New" critics must have seemed, in the 1940s and 1950s, like voices crying in the wilderness. The popularity of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism—also ostensibly based upon Aristotle's example—won the concept of genre broader support. And today, if the books covering my desk are anything to go by, genre criticism has emerged in force. The flood has brought forth historical (...) studies of Renaissance genres, analyses of traditional genres like the picaresque or of new ones like "the fantastic," ambivalently generic essays in "thematics," efforts to systemize the genres of narrative fiction, and even attempt, through the philosophic analysis of dozens of generic systems, to go "beyond genre." Indeed, the late sixties spawned a journal entitled Genre entirely devoted to theoretical and practical criticism employing the concept. David H. Richter is the author of a forthcoming book: Fable's End: Completeness and Closure in Rhetorical Fiction, and an article on Jerzy Kosinski. He is assistant professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York. (shrink)

This book gathers together three dozen original essays, all by noted scholars in their fields, and designed to introduce the general reader to the latest ideas about the literary and cultural theory of the last half century, focusing on the ideas that are still alive today.

My primary aim in this paper is to show that the structure of experience must include a subject (or self). I argue that the subjectless (No-Self) views of our experience must be rejected, primarily because without the consciousness-unifying function of a subject they are unable to account for the unities of consciousness present in our experience. In addition, I contend that such views fail in another respect. They emphasize the streaming of experience, the ever-changing flow of conscious events, but have (...) difficulty identifying what must stand unmoving to provide the contrast needed for the experience of motion. (shrink)

This chapter develops and defends a formal epistemology of conjunctive explanation by determining the conditions under which multiple distinct explanations are better than one. The general approach is to identify an appropriate measure of explanatory goodness that can then be applied to conjunctive explanations. If a conjunctive explanation is to be preferred it needs to have greater explanatory virtue (e.g., power or scope) with respect to the evidence, but this explanatory gain is insufficient on its own. Given a conjunctive explanation’s (...) greater complexity, it also has a cost associated with it and so a balance needs to be struck between the gain and the cost. This is achieved by employing a Bayesian measure proposed by I. J. Good. This chapter explores some properties of this measure and its application to the epistemology of conjunctive explanation. In so doing, it addresses the general question of whether it is desirable to have more informative, less probable hypotheses when seeking good explanations. (shrink)

Modeled on the classic Tao Te Ching, this startling and revealing new interpretation of Carl Jung's life and psychology parallels Jung's natural world of the psyche and that of Taoist philosophy, exploring the integration of such opposites as shadow/persona, yin/yang, dark/light, and feminine/masculine. Photos & drawings.

Richard Dawkins has a dilemma when it comes to design arguments. On the one hand, he maintains that it was Darwin who killed off design and so implies that his rejection of design depends upon the findings of modern science. On the other hand, he follows Hume when he claims that appealing to a designer does not explain anything and so implies that rejection of design need not be based on the findings of modern science. These contrasting approaches lead to (...) the following dilemma: if he claims that Darwinism is necessary for rejecting design, he has no satisfactory response to design arguments based on the order in the laws of physics or the fine-tuning of the physical constants; alternatively, if Humean arguments are doing most of the work, this would undermine one of his main contentions, that atheism is justified by science and especially by evolution. In any case, his Humean arguments do not provide a more secure basis for his atheism because they are seriously flawed. A particular problem is that his argument for the improbability of theism rests on a highly questionable application of probability theory since, even if it were sound, it would only establish that the prior probability of God’s existence is low, a conclusion which is compatible with the posterior probability of God’s existence being high. (shrink)

This is the first sustained, whole-Bible treatment on the theme of meeting God face to face. Starting with Genesis and ending with Revelation, the author systematically covers the major events in salvation history, all of which reveal the beauty of encountering God's grace in abundance.

Pragmatism is a distinctive approach to clinical research ethics that can guide bioethicists and members of institutional review boards (IRBs) as they struggle to balance the competing values of promoting medical research and protecting human subjects participating in it. After defining our understanding of pragmatism in the setting of clinical research ethics, we show how a pragmatic approach can provide guidance not only for the day-to-day functioning of the IRB, but also for evaluation of policy standards, such as the one (...) that addresses acceptable risks for healthy children in clinical research trials. We also show how pragmatic considerations might influence the debate about the use of deception in clinical research. Finally, we show how a pragmatic approach, by regarding the promotion of human research and the protection of human subjects as equally important values, helps to break down the false dichotomy between science and ethics in clinical research. (shrink)

At least since Descartes, philosophers have been interested in the special knowledge or authority that we exhibit when we speak about our own thoughts, attitudes, and feelings. This book contends that even the best work in contemporary philosophy of mind fails to account for this sort of knowledge or authority because it does not pay the right sort of attention to the notion of expression. What's at stake is not only how to understand self-knowledge and first-person authority, but also what (...) it is that distinguishes conscious from unconscious psychological states, what the mental life of a nonlinguistic animal has in common with our sort of mental life, and how to think about Wittgenstein's legacy to the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

I revise J L Mackie's first account of casual direction by replacing his notion of "fixity" by a newly defined notion of "sufficing" that is designed to accommodate indeterminism. Keeping Mackie's distinction between casual order and casual direction, I then consider another revision that replaces "fixity" with "one-way conditionship". In response to the charge that all such accounts of casual priority beg the question by making an unjustified appeal to temporal priority, i maintain that one-way conditionship explains rather that assumes (...) objective temporal dependence as well as objective casual dependence. (shrink)

Explanatory models in psychiatry reflect what clinicians deem valuable in rendering people's behavior intelligible and thus help guide treatment choices for mental illnesses. This article outlines some key scientific and ethical principles of clinical explanation in twenty-first century psychiatry. Recent work in philosophy of science, clinical psychiatry, and psychiatric ethics are critically reviewed in order to elucidate conceptual underpinnings of contemporary explanatory models. Many explanatory models in psychiatry are reductionistic or eclectic. The former restrict options for diagnostic and therapeutic paradigm (...) choice, while the latter lack a well-defined theoretical basis. These two methodological approaches stand in a dialectical relation to one another insofar as clinicians often move from one approach to its antithesis, ultimately seeking a synthesis of the two approaches that satisfies clinical needs. Pragmatic considerations can help to transcend the reductionism/eclecticism dialectic. In the absence of a completed science of mental disorders, psychiatrists must tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty as they strive to integrate diverse explanatory concepts in a rigorous and evidence-based fashion. A pragmatic explanatory model in clinical psychiatry must focus on favorable treatment outcomes for patients by respecting the pluralistic, participatory, and provisional nature of psychiatric explanation. (shrink)

Freud is often assumed to have given an explanation of how human beings acquire a morality, especially as it is manifested in the phenomenon of moral conscience. Freud himself certainly lends credence to such an interpretation of his theory, as the following passage testifies.

Critics of the conventional theory of biological evolution have asserted that while natural processes might result in some limited diversity, nothing fundamentally new can arise from “random” evolution. In response, biologists like Richard Dawkins have demonstrated that a computer program can generate a specific short phrase via evolution-like iterations starting with random gibberish. While such demonstrations are intriguing, they are flawed in that they have a fixed, prespecified future target, whereas in real biological evolution there is no fixed future target, (...) but only a complicated “fitness landscape.” In this study, a significantly more sophisticated evolutionary scheme is employed to produce text segments reminiscent of a Charles Dickens novel. The aggregate size of these segments is larger than the computer program and the input Dickens text, even when comparing compressed data. (shrink)

Hume, in "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding", holds (1) that all causal reasoning is based on experience and (2) that causal reasoning is based on nothing but experience. (1) does not imply (2), and Hume's good reasons for (1) are not good reasons for (2). This essay accepts (1) and argues against (2). A priori reasoning plays a role in causal inference. Familiar examples from Hume and from classroom examples of sudden disappearances and radical changes do not show otherwise. A (...) priori causal reasoning is closely related to understanding causal mechanisms. One uncovers the intelligibility of a causal process by understanding its mechanism. (shrink)

In "Causes and "If P, Even If X, still Q," Philosophy 57 (July 1982), Ted Honderich cites my "The Direction of Causation and the Direction of Conditionship," journal of Philosophy 73 (April 22, 1976) as an example of an account of causal priority that lacks the proper character. After emending Honderich's description of the proper character, I argue that my attempt to account for one-way causation in terms of one-way causal conditionship does not totally lack it. Rather than emphasize the (...) singularity of an effect, as Honderich does, I emphasize the multiplicity of independent factors in a causal circumstance. (shrink)

McTaggart argues that the A series, which orders events with reference to past, present, and future, involves an inescapable contradiction. The significant difference between the earlier version of his argument (Mind, 1908) and the version in The Nature of Existence, Volume II, Chapter 33 (1927), has often gone unnoticed. His arguments are all invalid; the conclusion can be rejected without rejecting any premiss. It is therefore unnecessary to adopt any philosophical thesis about time (e.g., that some token-reflexive analysis of tensed (...) statements is adequate) to avoid McTaggart's final conclusion that time is unreal. (shrink)

Ethical questions surrounding withdrawal of life support can be complex. When life support therapies are the result of a suicide attempt, the potential ethical issues take on another dimension. Duties and principles that normally guide clinicians’ actions as caregivers may not apply as easily. We present a case of attempted suicide in which decisions surrounding withdrawal of life support provoked conflict between a patient’s family and the medical team caring for him. We highlight the major unresolved philosophical questions and contradictory (...) normative values about suicide that underlie this conflict. Finally, we show how these considerations were practically applied to this particular case. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss what triage is and how it might be applied to the preservation of endangered species. I compare the suggested application oftriage to endangered species with its application to wartime military practice, distribution of food aid, and human population control to show that the situation of endangered species is not analogous to these other suggested uses. I argue that, as far as species preservation is concemed, triage starts with the wrong norms and values: it is “human (...) chauvinistic,” giving primacy to economic, political, and sociocultural aspects that emphasize human interests without recognizing the connection between the survival of other species and the survival of humans. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.1 (2003) 53-55 [Access article in PDF] A Pragmatic Consideration of the Relation between Depression and Melancholia David H. Brendel THE MELANCHOLIA OF THE PAST and the major depression of the present are extraordinarily complex notions that represent different things to different people. With her compelling article "Is This Dame Melancholy? Equating Today's Depression and Past Melancholia," Jennifer Radden makes an important contribution to (...) the debate on whether these concepts are identical, overlapping, or distinct. Exploring both conditions from descriptive and causal points of view, Radden appropriately concludes that fully equating the two of them would constitute a "troubling oversimplification." Her line of reasoning runs as follows. Because past descriptions of melancholia and current descriptions of major depression are marked by dissimilarities (such as the genius and creativity associated with the former and the self-loathing and emphasis on loss associated with the latter), only an underlying causal base common to both conditions would justify our equating them. But the cause (or causes) of melancholia and depression remain mysterious. Thus, although Radden acknowledges that a causal explanation might yield substantial benefits ("research possibilities, further hypotheses, and even hope of prevention, or cure"), she suggests that we remain in a descriptive mode when comparing the two conditions and conclude that they are not one and the same.Radden's argument that past melancholia and contemporary depression are descriptively distinct is convincing and, I think, indisputable. But I would like to challenge and expand upon some of her ideas about considerations of causality and about the role of pragmatic reasoning in working out the relation between melancholia and depression. First of all, although Radden is correct that the cause of many (or perhaps most) depressive states is unknown, she underrates the extent of the empirical knowledge that we have acquired about the causation of depression and, in so doing, undervalues the relevance of causal reasoning to making the melancholia/depression distinction. Recent empirical research has revealed that major depressive episodes can result from brain lesions such as left-sided strokes or metabolic disorders such as hypothyroidism (Yudofsky and Hales 2002). Psychosocial research, moreover, has suggested that stressful life events also can be understood as causes of depression (Kendler, [End Page 53] Karkowski, and Prescott 1999). These findings provide some hope that the identification of causes of various clinical states is a real possibility. Identification of such causes, I believe, could empower us to make some plausible claims about the similarities or differences between past melancholia and current depression. A melancholic individual like van Gogh, for example, had a different illness than a contemporary stroke patient with major depression in a present-day hospital, not only on the basis of descriptive distinctions between their conditions, but also on the basis of the causes of their respective states. Although of course we cannot know the cause of van Gogh's melancholia, we can reasonably assume that it was not the result of a left-sided stroke due to the absence in his case of other clinical deficits that usually result from such a stroke (such as language and motor deficits). Plausible assertions about the causes of melancholic and depressive states would add to the robustness of any claims regarding the distinctness of the conditions.Conversely, careful consideration of the etiology of various clinical presentations might prompt us to hypothesize a shared pathophysiology and thereby lead us to believe that they are essentially identical conditions. It is difficult or impossible to discover a cause of melancholia in individuals who lived in past eras. But we might achieve our goal by comparing well-defined major depression to various forms of what Radden calls "masked depression," such as those seen in cross-cultural settings, where the subjective symptoms of sad mood are absent but numerous somatic signs of depression are observed. If it turned out that major depression and masked depression had the same cause, then differences in their clinical phenomenology would become merely surface differences that belie a shared etiological process. How might one discover the existence of such a process... (shrink)

For a stable visual world, the colours of objects should appear the same under different lights. This property of colour constancy has been assumed to be fundamental to vision, and many experimental attempts have been made to quantify it. I contend here, however, that the usual methods of measurement are either too coarse or concentrate not on colour constancy itself, but on other, complementary aspects of scene perception. Whether colour constancy exists other than in nominal terms remains unclear.

We present a set of algorithms for automated simplification of symbolic constants of the form ∑iαixi with αi rational and xi complex. The included algorithms, called SimplifySum2 and implemented in Mathematica, remove redundant terms, attempt to make terms and the full expression real, and remove terms using repeated application of the multipair PSLQ integer relation detection algorithm. Also included are facilities for making substitutions according to user-specified identities. We illustrate this toolset by giving some real-world examples of its usage, including (...) one, for instance, where the tool reduced a symbolic expression of approximately 100 000 characters in size enough to enable manual manipulation to one with just four simple terms.2Available from https://github.com/alexkaiser/SimplifySum. (shrink)

This new edition includes three new chapters, updating the book to take into account developments in the field over the past fifteen years.

Erdelyi's dialectical repression theory attempts to reconcile what appear to be incompatible perspectives in the contentious area of memory for trauma. He partially succeeds and makes a strong case that repression is “an empirical fact,” but makes a weaker case that distortions and omissions are due to the same mechanism and that recovered memories are necessarily unreliable. Available data do not suggest that the return of the repressed is any less accurate than the return of the non-repressed.

Ex nihilo nihil fit: PHILOSOPHY'S "STARTING POINT" Periodically, philosophers have had the feeling that somehow the entire weight of the traditional ...

Naive mereology studies ordinary, common-sense beliefs about part and whole. Some of the speculations in this article on naive mereology do not bear directly on Peter van Inwagen's "Material Beings". The other topics, (1) and (2), both do. (1) Here is an example of Peter Unger's "Problem of the Many". How can a table be a collection of atoms when many collections of atoms have equally strong claims to be that table? Van Inwagen invokes fuzzy sets to solve this problem. (...) I claim that an alternative treatment of vagueness, supervaluations over many-value valuations, provides a better solution. (2) The Special Composition Question asks how parts compose a whole. One who rejects van Inwagen's answer in terms of constituting a life need not provide some alternative answer. Even if all answers to the Special Question fail, there are a multitude of less general composition questions that are not so difficult. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists are increasingly investigating the conditions under which multiple explanations are better in conjunction than they are individually. This book brings together leading scholars to provide an interdisciplinary and unified discussion of such "conjunctive explanations." The book starts with an introductory chapter expounding the notion of conjunctive explanation and motivating a multifaceted approach to its study. The remaining chapters are divided into three parts. Part I includes chapters on "The Nature of Conjunctive Explanations." Each chapter illustrates distinct ways (...) in which explanatory multiplicity is motivated by a careful study of the nature and concept of explanation. The second part ("Reasoning about Conjunctive Explanations") includes chapters on the epistemology and logic of conjunctive explanations. Here the contributors propose and evaluate various norms for reasoning correctly about and to conjunctive explanations. Part III concerns "The Psychology of Conjunctive Explanations," with contributions discussing conditions under which humans entertain and hold multiple explanations of single explananda simultaneously and the cognitive limitations and capacities for doing so. Conjunctive Explanations will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on explanation in philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophical logic, and cognitive psychology. (shrink)

A primary purpose of argument is to increase the degree of reasonable confidence that one has in the truth of the conclusion. A question begging argument fails this purpose because it violates what W. E. Johnson called an epistemic condition of inference. Although an argument of the sort characterized by Robert Hoffman in his response (Analysis 32.2, Dec 71) to Richard Robinson (Analysis 31.4, March 71) begs the question in all circumstances, we usually understand the charge that an argument is (...) question begging with reference to the beliefs of the person, or the sort of person, to whom the argument is directed. (shrink)

In the form of inference known as inference to the best explanation there are various ways to characterise what is meant by the best explanation. This paper considers a number of such characterisations including several based on confirmation measures and several based on coherence measures. The goal is to find a measure which adequately captures what is meant by 'best' and which also yields the truth with a high degree of probability. Computer simulations are used to show that the overlap (...) coherence measure achieves this goal, enabling the true explanation to be identified almost as often as an approach which simply selects the most probable explanation. Further advantages to this approach are also considered in the case where there is uncertainty in the prior probability distribution. (shrink)

We present a conceptual framework on the experience of time and provide a coherent basis on which to base further inquiries into qualitative approaches concerning time experience. We propose two Time-Layers and two Time-Formats forming four Time-Domains. Micro-Flow and Micro-Structure represent the implicit phenomenal basis, from which the explicit experiences of Macro-Flow and Macro-Structure emerge. Complementary to this theoretical proposal, we present empirical results from qualitative content analysis obtained from 25 healthy participants. The data essentially corroborate the theoretical proposal. With (...) respect to Flow, the phenomenally accessible time experience appeared as a continuous passage reaching from the past through the present into the future. With respect to Structure, the individual present was embedded in the individual biography, emerging from past experiences and comprising individual plans and goals. New or changing plans and goals were being integrated into the existing present, thus forming a new present. The future appeared as changeable within the present, by means from the past, and therefore as a space of potential opportunities. Exemplarily, we discuss these results in relation to previous empirical findings on deviant experiences of time in Autism Spectrum Disorder that is presumably characterized by a breakdown of Flow and concomitant compensatory repetition resulting in an overly structured time. Finally, we speculate about possible implications of these findings both for psychopathological and neuroscientific research. (shrink)