Introduction -- Context -- Overview of themes -- Reading the text -- Reception and influence.

This book represents the first full-length study of the aesthetics of the appreciation of wine. It introduces and argues for the validity and significance of several new concepts: competency, project, and aesthetic practices. Using these concepts -- together with analyses borrowed from cognitive science, sensory science, Husserlian phenomenology and hermeneutics -- the case is made that wine can be a proper and indeed significant object of aesthetic attention. The implications of this are pursued in three ways: First, within the culture (...) of wine, with a sustained treatment of important concepts such as terroir; second, within philosophical aesthetics. The latter results in a position termed 'contextual aesthetics' that sees aesthetic acts as always situated within cultural practices, and given meaning thereby. The third implication is for the cultural and aesthetic value accorded to the various senses, and the kinds of underlying issues that might have led to, and might now lead away from, these values. (shrink)

In his article “Category Independent Aesthetic Experience: The Case of Wine” in this journal, David Sackris presents arguments against Kendall Walton’s view in the famous article “Categories of Art.”David Sackris, “Category Independent Aesthetic Experience: The Case of Wine,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, 47 (2013), pp. 111–120; Kendall Walton, “Categories of Art,” in Steven M. Cahn and Aaron Meskin (Eds) Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 521–537. [First published in The Philosophical Review, 79 (1970), pp. 334–367.] He claims, (...) with support in an argument about the immediate qualities of great wines, that for some kinds of aesthetic appreciation specific category knowledge is not necessary. We welcome the idea that wine appreciation is an aesthetic practice, and more importantly the view that the features of wine appreciation might shed light on, or even transform our understanding of aesthetic experience more generally. The article also draws welcom .. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Cognitive Background to the Aesthetic Problem Wine, Cognition and Philosophy The Phenomenology of “Projects” The Aesthetic Project Notes.

Kant's third Critique, the Critique of Judgement, is regarded as one of the most influential books in the history of aesthetics. This book is designed as a reader's guide for students trying to work their way, step-by-step, through Kant's text.

Nietzsche is not difficult to read, but he is famously difficult to understand. This is because of the bewildering array of words, phrases or metaphors that he uses. The Nietzsche Dictionary aims to help, by giving readers a road map to Nietzsche's language, and thus how his terminology and images relate together, forming an overall philosophical picture. The Dictionary also includes synopses of Nietzsche's key works, and short articles on the main philosophical and cultural influences leading up to, and resulting (...) from, Nietzsche. It is designed to be a resource that all readers of Nietzsche will find invaluable, from beginners to more advanced readers.In order to make the book easy to use and navigate, all entries are treated thematically and are of seven types:1. Influences on, or the contemporary context of, Nietzsche2. Major influences of Nietzsche3. Key concepts4. Key metaphors or images5. Alternative translations of the above6. Other words or phrases found in Nietzsche that are cross-referenced to a main entry7. Synopses of major works by Nietzsche. (shrink)

Emanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is one of the most widely read texts in the history of philosophy. Douglas Burnham and Harvey Young unravel this difficult text, passage by passage, making reading and appreciating this work achievable and enjoyable. Designed to be read alongside the original, this guide is essential for students and scholars at all levels.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is considered one of Nietzsche’s most important works, but for many readers it is often impenetrable. This guide provides readers with the tools they need to understand this key philosophical work. Douglas Burnham and Martin Jesinghausen offer a close reading, suggest alternative readings, break down difficult language, and show how the book fits within Nietzsche's larger philosophical project. No other guide deals as successfully with Zarathustra’s stylistic and conceptual challenges.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Wine as a Moving Target Wine as a Vague Object 2030 ‐ A Thought Experiment Wine as “Pure Experience” or as “Rich Object”? The Taster of the Future Conclusions Notes.

This chapter contains sections titled: Canary Wine and Beyond Wine, the Analogy with Art, and Expression Dewey Seeing As and Seeing In Critical Rhetoric The Institutional Theories Attention, Attitude and Appreciation Aesthetic Attributes and Experiences Aesthetic Experience: What Is It? Functionalist Theories The Necessity of Aesthetic Competency Aesthetic Emergence Aesthetic Competency Notes.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Competency Aesthetic Practices Inter‐Subjective Validity Project Conclusion Notes.

This is the first book to combine an introduction to Philosophy as a degree subject with the practical study and assessment skills that the student is likely to need. It begins by helping a student to make an informed choice about which philosophy course to apply for and goes on to introduce the subject via key problems and philosophers. It expertly guides the reader towards philosophical thinking as an activity and offers practical advice for developing techniques specific to the study (...) of philosophy.Features* Gives brief biographies of major philosophers * Provides clear definitions of key terms and guidance on further reading* Includes sample essays and examination questions* Covers time-management and self-motivation skills* Offers tips on making use of contact time with tutors. (shrink)

This article begins with the hypothesis that much modern political thought can be understood according to a distinction between transcendent and immanent accounts of judgement. These two positions are analysed as to their correspondingly entailed accounts of the origin, legitimacy and nature of political community. Using Heidegger and a Heideggerian reading of Kant on the nature of judgement, it is then shown that both accounts of judgement are in fact metaphysically derivative (the ‘dirty’ of the title) and in precisely the (...) same way. This observation then inaugurates the project of providing a fundamental ontological account of judgement. However, it is discovered that such an account carries no political implications: politics emerges in and as its ‘fall’ into this or that metaphysically derivative interpretation. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Notes.

An extended philosophical analysis of the concept of judgement, important in many areas of contemporary philosophy, including epistemology, the philosophy of value and aesthetics.Kant's philosophy understands judgement in different ways in the cognition of nature, the appreciation of natural beauty, and in the determination of moral action. This book aims to explore these three 'philosophies' of judgement, producing in the process a new and creative reading of Kant's work. The result is a unique book-length study of judgement in general. At (...) the core of this reading is an interpretation of how Kant understands reflection, presentation and activity. Novel aspects include accounts of the transcendental object, the implications of considering cognition as an activity, the structure of sensible givenness, Kant on the sublime, and the moral argument.The book draws upon ideas from within the Continental philosophy tradition, particularly from Nietzsche, Heidegger and Deleuze. To Nietzsche there is devoted a whole chapter on the subject of sensation and physics, which aims to expand upon and illuminate parallel discussions in the reading of Kant. Readers will find much of interest in this wide-ranging text, including treatments of key features in Kant's epistemology, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, philosophy of religion as well as his practical philosophy.Features* The first book to consider Kant's account of judgement in general.* A unique interpretation of Kant, employing philosophers in the Continental tradition - e.g Nietzsche, Heidegger and Deleuze.* Contains a sustained study of Nietzsche on the subject of sensation and physics. (shrink)

This chapter considers the relationship between philosophy and literature both as forms of writing and thinking, but also (which is a more original contribution) as historically specific instititutions of enquiry. The argument is that part of the historical and cultural situatedness of philosophy is as a written form of cultural production, but one located within institutions (Universities above all) that already have a different 'department' specialising in understanding written forms of cultural production. This suggests that there might be an overlooked (...) reciprocal influence. In particular, what new challenges for its own thinking can philosophy discover in the contemporary practices of literary analysis? A case study is detailed concerning recent forms of ecological criticism. (shrink)

Beyond Good and Evil is a comprehensive statement of Nietzsche's mature philosophy and is an ideal entry point into Nietzsche's work as a whole. This work explains the key concepts, the range of Nietzsche's concerns, and highlights Nietzsche's writing strategies that are the key to understanding his work and processes of thought.

This chapter contains sections titled: Taste and Discernment Delicacy of Taste and the Supertasters Practices and Comparisons Who Are the True Judges of Wine? Experts and Projects Experts and Evaluation Ideal and Izeal experts ‐ And You The Canon and Ideal Critics: The Special Relationship Levinson's Problems The Canon and Wine Wine Canons and Ideal Wine Critics Taste, the Competencies and Trust Iconic or Iconoclastic Critics Conclusion Notes.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Hermeneutics of the Wineworld Wine and Its Effect on the Subject Experience and Its Effect upon Wine Wine, Food and the Wineworld(s) Terroir Notes.

In this paper we investigate how knowledge and experience influence aesthetic perception. We begin with a discussion of recent evidence from perceptual research in wine tasting that turn out to have significant implications for aesthetic perception. We argue that these results suggest not only that knowledge and experience (what we call “competencies”) are central to determining what is tasted and how, but that this happens because such competencies are an important part of the type of “project” that is undertaken with (...) respect to the object. Our analyses suggest that there must be a distinct aesthetic project for wine tasting, and that this project must include specific competencies. We believe this conclusion holds also for aesthetic experience more generally. (shrink)

How did the universe begin? What is truth? How can we live good live? The Little Book of Philosophy answers these questions and more. Packed with simple explanations, witty illustrations, and step-by-step diagrams that untangle complex theories, you'll find plenty of food for thought in this book, whether you're a novice, a student, or an armchair philosopher"--Page 4 of cover.

       As is appropriate for an introductory text, Douglas Burnham’s book opens with a chapter providing general background information on Kant, a systematic overview of the whole Critical philosophy, a sketch of the basic issues dealt with in the third Critique, and an explanation of the overall structure of Kant’s book. Here and throughout Burnham’s book each section ends with a helpful summary, with diagrams and other convenient “lists†being supplied along the way (...) for added clarity. For the most part, these summaries are reliable. The author’s interpretations, however, occasionally suffer from some rather unfortunate mistakes. For example, when contrasting the categories with the principles (p.14), Burnham cites the principle of non-contradiction as the primary example; yet Kant’s expressed reason for mentioning this “principle†in A150- 3/B189-93 is to contrast it with the principles that function as applications of the categories. Likewise, while Burnham’s catalogue of the four “parts of sensibility†(pp.13-14), composed by grouping imagination (reproductive and productive) together with sensation and pure intuition, makes for an intriguing interpretation, especially as applied to the third Critique, he does not inform his (unknowing) student reader that the position he presents is far from being expressed so unambiguously in Kant’s text.        The main content of Burnham’s book is divided into five chapters that follow a more or less predictable – though sometimes rather idiosyncratic – order. Chapter 1 explains three of the four “moments†of beauty, but does so in a manner that wholly neglects Kant’s own understanding of their architectonic unity. Burnham discusses the second moment (universality) first, the first moment (disinterestedness) second, and the fourth moment (necessity) third! Moreover, he then devotes the entirety of Chapter 2 to a discussion of the third moment (purposiveness).. (shrink)

Blame is multifarious. It can be passionate or dispassionate. It can be expressed or kept private. We blame both the living and the dead. And we blame ourselves as well as others. What’s more, we blame ourselves, not only for our moral failings, but also for our non-moral failings: for our aesthetic bad taste, gustatory self-indulgence, or poor athletic performance. And we blame ourselves both for things over which we exerted agential control (e.g., our voluntary acts) and for things over (...) which we lacked such control (e.g., our desires, beliefs, and intentions). I argue that, despite this manifest diversity in our blaming practices, it’s possible to provide comprehensive account of blame. Indeed, I propose a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that aims to specify blame’s extension in terms of its constitution as opposed to its function. And I argue that this proposal has a number of advantages beyond accounting for blame in all its disparate forms. For one, it can account for the fact that one’s having had control over whether one was to φ is a necessary condition for one’s being fittingly blamed for having φ-ed. For another, it can account for why, unlike fitting shame, fitting blame is always deserved, which in turn explains why there is something morally problematic about ridding oneself of one’s fitting self-blame (e.g., one’s fitting guilt). (shrink)

The idea of basic action is a fixed point in the contemporary investigation of the nature of action. And while there are arguments aimed at putting the idea in place, it is meant to be closer to a gift of common sense than to a hard-won achievement of philosophical reflection. It first appears at the stage of innocuous description and before the announcement of philosophical positions. And yet, as any decent magician knows, the real work so often gets done in (...) the set-up. I argue that the seemingly innocent idea of basic action is, in fact, bound up with a wide-spread conception of the nature of bodily or physical action (section 3). Its legitimacy is vital to the intelligibility of the causal theory of action, according to which physical action consists of a mere event and a condition of mind joined (in the right way) by the bond of causality. Left unchecked, means-end reason threatens to permeate physical action, and thus threatens the sovereignty of the sphere of material events at the center of the causal theory: such events, including the movements of one’s body when one intentionally moves it, are thought to be constitutively independent of the subject’s rational capacities. Basic action is a necessary countermeasure, a sort of metaphysical containment wall needed to preserve the separate jurisdictions of the mind of the acting subject and what merely happens. I argue that so long as action theory proceeds under the assumption that there must be basic action, it must regard our relation to the progress of our own deeds as not different in principle from Marx’s understanding of the relation of the non-worker (Nichtarbeiter) to the material processes that realize his own ideas, namely the work done on the factory floor. Each is alienated from the progress, or getting done, of his deeds. In each the process of doing something intentionally turns out to be a case of delegating tasks to another power. How the process comes to completion is not willed, and at best watched: the causal work is not the agent’s work, his knowledge not self-knowledge (section 5). We should find this unacceptable. And if this is right, it should be a pressing question whether there must be basic action. I argue that we have no good reason to think so: basic action is not forced on us by argument (sections 2 and 4). It is open to us to consider an alternative, one on which action is not, in the fundamental case, barren of means- end structure, but instead permeated by it: we register as a force in nature not at the limit of the means-end order but precisely in its constitution. [from article introduction]. (shrink)

Argumentation, which can be abstractly defined as the interaction of different arguments for and against some conclusion, is an important skill to learn for everyday life, law, science, politics and business. The best way to learn it is to try it out on real instances of arguments found in everyday conversational exchanges and legal argumentation. The introductory chapter of this book gives a clear general idea of what the methods of argumentation are and how they work as tools that can (...) be used to analyze arguments. Each subsequent chapter then applies these methods to a leading problem of argumentation. Today the field of computing has embraced argumentation as a paradigm for research in artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems. Another purpose of this book is to present and refine tools and techniques from computing as components of the methods that can be handily used by scholars in other fields. (shrink)

This chapter examines the views of seventeenth-century British philosophers on the notion of logic and demonstrative knowledge, particularly Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke, offering an overview of traditional Aristotelianism in relation to logic and describing Bacon's approach to demonstration and logic. It also analyzes the contribution of the Cambridge Platonists and evaluates the influence of Cartesianism. The chapter concludes that theorizing about logic and demonstrative knowledge followed an arc familiar from other branches of philosophy such as metaphysics or (...) the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Alexander X. Douglas situates Spinoza's philosophy in its immediate historical context, and argues that much of his work was conceived with the aim of rebutting the claims of his contemporaries. In contrast to them, Spinoza argued that philosophy reveals the true nature of God, and reinterpreted the concept of God in profound and radical ways.

A brief exploration of the nature of, and motivations for, contemporary forms of metaethical quietism. Also outlines some of the prominent objections to such positions and discusses some of the limitations of these objections from the quietist's perspective.

The dominant position of science in our culture has ended. In our postmodern world, belief that science will provide the answer to our problems and that progress is inevitable has been shaken, if not toppled. Optimism has been replaced by realism, creating a milieu for the development of intelligent Christian belief. Participating in the Trinity Institute's conference on ÒThe Church in a Postmodern Age, these six prominent scholars explore the breakdown of the basic tenets of the Enlightenment, the sorry state (...) of biblical literacy in our culture, Christian faith in a pluralistic world, the relevance of the Bible today, and the role of the church in our age. Contributors include Robert N. Bellah, Diogenes Allen, George A. Lindbeck, James B. Miller, Sandra M. Schneiders, and Rowan D. Williams. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to display an alternative to the familiar decompositional approach in action theory, one that resists the demand for an explanation of action in non-agential terms, while not simply treating the notion of intentional agency as an unexplained primitive. On this Anscombean alternative, action is not a worldly event with certain psychological causes, but a distinctive form of material process, one that is not simply caused by an exercise of reason but is itself a productive (...) exercise of reason. I argue that to comprehend the proposed alternative requires an account of the temporality of events in general. An event does not simply have a position in time, but is itself temporally structured. With the inner temporality of events in view, the Anscombean conception of action as a specifically self-conscious form of temporal unity is made available for critical reflection. (shrink)

Agents often face a choice of what to do. And it seems that, in most of these choice situations, the relevant reasons do not require performing some particular act, but instead permit performing any of numerous act alternatives. This is known as the basic belief. Below, I argue that the best explanation for the basic belief is not that the relevant reasons are incommensurable (Raz) or that their justifying strength exceeds the requiring strength of opposing reasons (Gert), but that they (...) are imperfect reasons—reasons that do not support performing any particular act, but instead support choosing any of the numerous alternatives that would each achieve the same worthy end. In the process, I develop and defend a novel theory of objective rationality, arguing that it is superior to its two most notable rivals. (shrink)

This book provides an argumentation model for means-end reasoning, a distinctive type of reasoning used for problem-solving gand decision-making. Means-end reasoning is modeled as goal-directed argumentation from an agent's goals and known circumstances, and from an action selected as a means, to a decision to carry out the action. Goal-based reasoning for argumentation provides an argumentation model for this kind of reasoning, showing how it is employed in settings of intelligent deliberation where agents try to collectively arrive at a conclusion (...) on what they should do to move forward in a set of circumstances. The book explains how this argumentation model can help build more realistic computational systems of deliberation and decision-making and shows how such systems can be applied to solve problems posed by goal-based reasoning in numerous fields, from social psychology and sociology, to law, political science, anthropology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems, and robotics." -- Back cover. (shrink)