Creative activities in a classroom can often be mistaken for negligence of academic requirements. This is especially true for many African American students. Recognition of the mental processes used in the expression of creative behaviors should give teachers the opportunity to harness this creative energy to develop academic skills. This article draws upon a historical perspective of creativity and its relationship to this trait in African Americans. Although many of the behaviors listed are common in all ethnic groups those behaviors (...) listed as uniquely evident among African American students are derived from assumptions made from experiences by various scholars, research documents and historical data. Strategies for addressing and enhancing these creative behaviors are included. (shrink)
Three experiments with preschool- and young school-aged children (N = 75 and 53) explored the kinds of relations children detect in samples of instances (descriptive problem) and how they generalize those relations to new instances (inferential problem). Each experiment initially presented a perfect biconditional relation between two features (e.g., all and only frogs are blue). Additional examples undermined one of the component conditional relations (not all frogs are blue) but supported another (only frogs are blue). Preschool-aged children did not (...) distinguish between supported and undermined relations. Older children did show the distinction, at least when the test instances were clearly drawn from the same population as the training instances. Results suggest that younger children’s difficulties may stem from the demands of using imperfect correlations for predictions. Older children seemed sensitive to the inferential problem of using samples to make predictions about populations. (shrink)
Russell famously propounded scepticism about memory in The Analysis of Mind (1921). As he there acknowledged, one way to counter this sceptical position is to hold that memory involves direct acquaintance with past, and this is in fact a thesis Russell had advanced in The Problems of Philosophy (1911). Indeed he had there used the case of memory to develop a sophisticated fallibilist, non-sceptical, epistemology. By 1921, however, Russell had rejected the early conception of memory as incompatible with the neutral (...) monism he now affirmed. In its place he argued that memory involves a distinctive type of belief whose content is given by imagery. Russell's language here is off-putting but without much distortion his later position can be interpreted as an early formulation of a functionalist theory of mind based on a causal theory of mental representation. Thus interpreted it provides the basis for a different response to Russell's sceptical thesis. (shrink)
What is the meaning of life? In the post-modern, post-religious scientific world, this question is becoming a preoccupation. But it also has a long history: many major figures in philosophy had something to say on the subject. This book begins with an historical overview of philosophers from Plato to Hegel and Marx who have believed in some sort of meaning of life, either in some supposed "other" world or in the future of this world. Young goes on to look (...) at what happened when the traditional structures that provided life with meaning ceased to be believed. (shrink)
Ordinary people often make moral judgments that are consistent with philosophical principles and legal distinctions. For example, they judge killing as worse than letting die, and harm caused as a necessary means to a greater good as worse than harm caused as a side-effect (Cushman, Young, & Hauser, 2006). Are these patterns of judgment produced by mechanisms specific to the moral domain, or do they derive from other psychological domains? We show that the action/omission and means/side-effect distinctions affect nonmoral (...) representations and provide evidence that their role in moral judgment is mediated by these nonmoral psychological representations. Specifically, the action/omission distinction affects moral judgment primarily via causal attribution, while the means/side-effect distinction affects moral judgment via intentional attribution. We suggest that many of the specific patterns evident in our moral judgments in fact derive from nonmoral psychological mechanisms, and especially from the processes of causal and intentional attribution. (shrink)
Is the basis of criminality an act that causes harm, or an act undertaken with the belief that one will cause harm? The present study takes a cognitive neuroscience approach to investigating how information about an agent’s beliefs and an action’s conse- quences contribute to moral judgment. We build on prior devel- opmental evidence showing that these factors contribute differ- entially to the young child’s moral judgments coupled with neurobiological evidence suggesting a role for the right tem- poroparietal junction (...) (RTPJ) in belief attribution. Participants read vignettes in a 2 2 design: protagonists produced either a negative or neutral outcome based on the belief that they were causing the negative outcome (‘‘negative’’ belief) or the neutral outcome (‘‘neutral’’ belief). The RTPJ showed significant activation above baseline for all four conditions but was modulated by an interaction between belief and outcome. Specifically, the RTPJ response was highest for cases of attempted harm, where protag- onists were condemned for actions that they believed would cause harm to others, even though the harm did not occur. The results not only suggest a general role for belief attribution during moral judgment, but also add detail to our understanding of the inter- action between these processes at both the neural and behavioral levels. (shrink)
When the noted political philosopher Iris Marion Young died in 2006, her death was mourned as the passing of "one of the most important political philosophers of the past quarter-century" (Cass Sunstein) and as an important and innovative thinker working at the conjunction of a number of important topics: global justice; democracy and difference; continental political theory; ethics and international affairs; and gender, race and public policy. In her long-awaited RESPONSIBILITY FOR JUSTICE, Young discusses our responsibilities to address (...) "structural" injustices in which we among many are implicated (but for which we not to blame), often by virtue of participating in a market, such as buying goods produced in sweatshops, or participating in booming housing markets that leave many homeless. Young argues that addressing these structural injustices requires a new model of responsibility, which she calls the "social connection" model. She develops this idea by clarifying the nature of structural injustice; developing the notion of political responsibility for injustice and how it differs from older ideas of blame and guilt; and finally how we can then use this model to describe our responsibilities to others no matter who we are and where we live. With a foreword by Martha C. Nussbaum, this last statement by a revered and highly influential thinker will be of great interest to political theorists and philosophers, ethicists, and feminist and political philosophers. -/- 'Iris Marion Young's death in 2006 was a tragic loss for the field of political theory, and this manuscript is evidence of how much she had yet to contribute. Like all her work, it addresses issues of enormous philosophical and political importance, and does so in a way that is original and insightful. It integrates a rich array of examples, concepts, theories and resources, from empirical social science to continental philosophy, and does so in a way that is seamless and effortless... it's an important manuscript and a fitting testament to Young's career."- Will Kymlicka, Philosophy, Queens University -/- '[The book] is both very distinctively the work of Iris Marion Young in its topic, style of argument and presentation, but it also makes a number of important contributions to contemporary political philosophy, through trying to work out a 'social connection' theory of responsibility. It is particularly impressive in the open way it draws on sources - equally at home discussing Derrida, Sartre and Levinas, as contemporary analytic philosophers such as G.A. Cohen, Alan Buchanan and Robert Goodin.' Jonathan Wolff, Philosophy, University College London. (shrink)
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was one of the greatest writers and German philosophers of the Nineteenth century. His work influenced figures as diverse as Wagner, Freud and Nietzsche. In this comprehensive introduction, Julian Young covers all the main aspects of Schopenhauer's philosophy. Beginning with an overview of Schopenhauer's life and work, he introduces the central aspects of his metaphysics fundamental to understanding his work as a whole: his philosophical idealism and debt to the philosophy of Kant; his attempt to answer (...) the question of what the world is; his account of science; and in particular his idea that 'will' is the essence of all things. Julian Young then introduces and assesses Schopenhauer's aesthetics, which occupies a central place in his philosophy. He carefully examines Schopenhauer's theories of the sublime, artistic genius and music, before assessing his ethics of compassion, his arguments for pessimism and his account of 'salvation'. In the final chapter, he considers Schopenhauer's legacy and his influence on the thought of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, making this an ideal starting point for those coming to Schopenhauer for the first time. (shrink)
CHAPTER 1 Neurotransmitter networks Elaine Perry and Allan Young i. Introduction This first chapter sets the scene for subsequent exploration of potential ...
[Robert Stalnaker] Saul Kripke made a convincing case that there are necessary truths that are knowable only a posteriori as well as contingent truths that are knowable a priori. A number of philosophers have used a two-dimensional model semantic apparatus to represent and clarify the phenomena that Kripke pointed to. According to this analysis, statements have truth-conditions in two different ways depending on whether one considers a possible world 'as actual' or 'as counterfactual' in determining the truth-value of the statement (...) relative to that possible world. There are no necessary a posteriori or contingent a priori propositions: rather, contingent a priori and necessary a posteriori statements are statements that are necessary when evaluated one way, and contingent when evaluated the other way. This paper distinguishes two ways that the two-dimensional framework can be interpreted, and argues that one of them gives the better account of what it means to 'consider a world as actual', but that it provides no support for any notion of purely conceptual a priori truth. /// [Thomas Baldwin] Two-dimensional possible world semantic theory suggests that Kripke's examples of the necessary a posteriori and contingent a priori should be handled by interpreting names as implicitly indexical. Like Stalnaker, I reject this account of names and accept that Kripke's examples have to be accommodated within a metasemantic theory. But whereas Stalnaker maintains that a metasemantic approach undermines the conception of a priori truth, I argue that it offers the opportunity to develop a conception of the a priori aspect of stipulations, conceived as linguistic performances. The resulting position accommodates Kripke's examples in a way which is both intrinsically plausible and fits with Kripke's actual discussion of them. (shrink)
Focusing on the idea- as opposed to a single conception- of purely "political" liberalism, Shaun Young examines the work of a number of prominent political ...
This is the first comprehensive treatment of Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art to appear in English. Julian Young argues that Nietzsche's thought about art can only be understood in the context of his wider philosophy. In particular, he discusses the dramatic changes in Nietzschean aesthetics against the background of the celebrated themes of the death of God, eternal recurrence and the idea of the Ubermensch. Young then divides Nietzsche's career, and his philosophy of art, into four distinct phases, but (...) suggests that these phases describe a circle. An attempt at world-affirmation is made in the central phases, but Nietzsche is predominantly influenced at the beginning and end of his career by a Schopenhauerian pessimism. At the beginning and end art is important because it 'redeems' us from life. This is a clear and lucid account of Nietzsche's philosophy of art. It combines exegesis, interpretation and criticism in a judicious balance, and will be essential reading for all scholars of philosophy and German studies with an interest in Nietzsche or aesthetics. (shrink)
Changing the Wor(l)d draws on feminist publishing, postmodern theory and feminist autobiography to powerfully critique both liberal feminism and scholarship on the women's movement, arguing that both ignore feminism's unique contributions to social analysis and politics. These contributions recognize the power of discourse, the diversity of women's experiences, and the importance of changing the world through changing consciousness. Young critiques social movement theory and five key studies of the women's movement, arguing that gender oppression can be understood only in (...) relation to race, sexuality, class and ethnicity; and that feminist activism has always gone beyond the realm of public policy to emphasize improving women's circumstances through transforming discourse and consciousness. Young examines feminist discursive politics, critiques social science methodology, and proposes an alternative approach to understanding the women's movement. This approach explores feminist publishing and feminist autobiographical writing as examples of discursive activism with broadly subversive potential. (shrink)
Heidegger's later philosophy has often been regarded as a lapse into unintelligible mysticism. While not ignoring its deep and difficult complexities, Julian Young's book explains in simple and straightforward language just what it is all about. It examines Heidegger's identification of loss of 'the gods', the violence of technology, and humanity's 'homelessness' as symptoms of the destitution of modernity, and his notion that overcoming 'oblivion of Being' is the essence of a turning to a post-destitute, genuinely post-modern existence. (...) class='Hi'>Young argues that Heidegger's conception of such an overcoming is profoundly fruitful with respect to the ancient quest to discover the nature of the good life. His book will be an invaluable resource for both students and scholars of Heidegger's works. (shrink)
In the first edition of White Mythologies (1990) Robert Young challenged the status of history, asking whether in this postmodern era we should consider it a Western myth, with an uncertain status. Is it, he asked, possible to write history that avoids the trap of Eurocentrism? Investigating the history of History, from Hegel to Foucault, White Mythologies calls into question traditional accounts of a single 'World History' which leaves aside the 'Third World' as surplus to the narrative of the (...) West. Young goes on to consider questionings of the limits of Western knowledge in the work of Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha. For Young, these thinkers have been involved in a project to decolonize History and to deconstruct 'the West'. In exploring these issues, he shows us the relation of history to theory and of politics to knowledge. White Mythologies has proved to be one of the most important critical works in post-colonial theory of the last two decades. It has engendered much debate and inspired countless critical responses. Twelve years after publication, Robert Young returns to the issues raised in this book to offer fresh perspectives and to reflect upon developments in the post-colonial debate since White Mythologies was first published. (shrink)
The method of approximate reasoning using a fuzzy logic introduced by Baldwin (1978 a,b,c), is used to model human reasoning in the resolution of two well known paradoxes. It is shown how classical propositional logic fails to resolve the paradoxes, how multiple valued logic partially succeeds and that a satisfactory resolution is obtained with fuzzy logic. The problem of precise representation of vague concepts is considered in the light of the results obtained.
We study the expansion of stable structures by adding predicates for arbitrary subsets. Generalizing work of Poizat-Bouscaren on the one hand and Baldwin-Benedikt-Casanovas-Ziegler on the other we provide a sufficient condition (Theorem 4.7) for such an expansion to be stable. This generalization weakens the original definitions in two ways: dealing with arbitrary subsets rather than just submodels and removing the 'small' or 'belles paires' hypothesis. We use this generalization to characterize in terms of pairs, the 'triviality' of the geometry (...) on a strongly minimal set (Theorem 2.5). Call a set A benign if any type over A in the expanded language is determined by its restriction to the base language. We characterize the notion of benign as a kind of local homogenity (Theorem 1.7). Answering a question of [8] we characterize the property that M has the finite cover property over A (Theorem 3.9). (shrink)
Reproduced from Robert J.C. Young, Torn Halves (Manchester Manchester University Press, 1996). Pages: 256. ISBN: 0-7190-477-3 (pbk); 0-7190-4776-5 (hbk). Price: 14.99 (pbk); 40.00 (hbk).
This book, the first comprehensive study in English of Heidegger's philosophy of art, starts in the mid-1930s with Heidegger's discussion of the Greek temple and his Hegelian declaration that a great artwork gathers together an entire culture in affirmative celebration of its foundational 'truth', and that, by this criterion, art in modernity is 'dead'. His subsequent work on Hölderlin, whom he later identified as the decisive influence on his mature philosophy, led him into a passionate engagement with the art of (...) Rilke, Ce;zanne, Klee and Zen Buddhism, liberating him not only from the overly restrictive conception of art of the mid-1930s but also from the disastrous politics of the period. Drawing on material hitherto unknown in the anglophone world, Young establishes a new account of Heidegger's philosophy of art and shows that his famous essay 'The Origin of the Work of Art' is its beginning, not its end. (shrink)
Written over a span of more than two decades, the essays by Iris Marion Young collected in this volume describe diverse aspects of women's lived body experience in modern Western societies. Drawing on the ideas of several twentieth century continental philosophers--including Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty--Young constructs rigorous analytic categories for interpreting embodied subjectivity. The essays combine theoretical description of experience with normative evaluation of the unjust constraints on their freedom and (...) opportunity that continue to burden many women. The lead essay rethinks the purpose of the category of "gender" for feminist theory, after important debates have questioned its usefulness. Other essays include reflection on the meaning of being at home and the need for privacy in old age residences as well as essays that analyze aspects of the experience of women and girls that have received little attention even in feminist theory--such as the sexuality of breasts, or menstruation as punctuation in a woman's life story. Young describes the phenomenology of moving in a pregnant body and the tactile pleasures of clothing. While academically rigorous, the essays are also written with engaging style, incorporating vivid imagery and autobiographical narrative. On Female Body Experience raises issues and takes positions that speak to scholars and students in philosophy, sociology, geography, medicine, nursing, and education. (shrink)
Exploring the relevance of biological discovery to philosophical topics such as perception, freedom, determinism, and ethical values, J.Z. Young's provocative book illuminates the significant links between these philosophical concepts and recent developments in biology and the neurosciences. In clear-cut language, Young describes the brain and its functions, examining questions concerning physical makeup versus "real" self, the awareness of our moral sense, and how human consciousness differs from that of other animals. He approaches perception not as a passive process (...) but as an active search for information, suggesting that human knowledge develops from a special process--essential to all organisms--of gathering information for survival. (shrink)
B. W. Young describes and analyses the intellectual culture of the eighteenth-century Church of England, in particular relation to those developments traditionally described as constituting the Enlightenment. It challenges conventional perceptions of an intellectually moribund institution by contextualising the polemical and scholarly debates in which churchmen engaged. In particular, it delineates the vigorous clerical culture in which much eighteenth-century thought evolved. The book traces the creation of a self-consciously enlightened tradition within Anglicanism, which drew on Erasmianism, seventeenth-century eirenicism and (...) the legacy of Locke. By emphasizing the variety of its intellectual life, the book challenges those notions of Enlightenment which advance predominantly political interpretations of this period. Thus, eighteenth-century critics of the Enlightenment, notably those who contributed to a burgeoning interest in mysticism, are equally integral to this study. (shrink)
The essay theorizes the responsibilities moral agents may be said to have in relation to global structural social processes that have unjust consequences. How ought moral agents, whether individual or institutional, conceptualize their responsibilities in relation to global injustice? I propose a model of responsibility from social connection as an interpretation of obligations of justice arising from structural social processes. I use the example of justice in transnational processes of production, distribution and marketing of clothing to illustrate operations of structural (...) social processes that extend widely across regions of the world. The social connection model of responsibility says that all agents who contribute by their actions to the structural processes that produce injustice have responsibilities to work to remedy these injustices. I distinguish this model from a more standard model of responsibility, which I call a liability model. I specify five features of the social connection model of responsibility that distinguish it from the liability model: it does not isolate perpetrators; it judges background conditions of action; it is more forward looking than backward looking; its responsibility is essentially shared; and it can be discharged only through collective action. The final section of the essay begins to articulate parameters of reasoning that agents can use for thinking about their own action in relation to structural injustice. a Footnotesa Thanks to David Alexander, Daniel Drezner, David Owen, and Ellen Frankel Paul for comments on an earlier version of this essay. Thanks to David Newstone for research assistance. (shrink)
Circumscribed delusional beliefs can follow brain injury. We suggest that these involve anomalous perceptual experiences created by a deficit to the person's perceptual system, and misinterpretation of these experiences due to biased reasoning. We use the Capgras delusion (the claim that one or more of one's close relatives has been replaced by an exact replica or impostor) to illustrate this argument. Our account maintains that people voicing this delusion suffer an impairment that leads to faces being perceived as drained of (...) their normal affective significance, and an additional reasoning bias that leads them to put greater weight on forming beliefs that are observationally adequate rather than beliefs that are a conservative extension of their existing stock. We show how this position can integrate issues involved in the philosophy and psychology of belief, and examine the scope for mutually beneficial interaction. (shrink)
The feeling of the sublime is, says Kant, the bitter-sweet combination of fear and utter security that one experiences in the face of, for instance, the night sky or the raging torrent. Fear of what? Fear of - this, I suggest, was Kant's seminal insight - death. But how can these feelings co-exist? Surely the one cancels the other out? Schopenhauer's great insight, I argue, was that the explanation of the sublime requires a division of the personality into two - (...) a threatened self and an unthreatened one. The feeling of "being safe whatever happens" comes from a primary identification with the individual-transcending self. The trouble, however, with Schopenhauer's account is that, based as it is on his version of idealism, it represents the entire world of nature as being absorbed into the content of the transcendent subject's consciousness. This makes the feeling of the sublime a kind of egoism, a contraction of the vastness of nature into the content of "my" consciousness. And this gets things precisely wrong, I suggest, since the feeling of the sublime is, in truth, an "oceanic" feeling, an expansion of the self into the vastness of being. What this shows, I conclude, is that to understand the sublime we actually need not idealism but a kind of realism; specifically, Heidegger's, as I call it, "magic" realism. (shrink)
: The essay theorizes the logic of masculinist protection as an apparently benign form of male domination. It then argues that authoritarian government is often justified through a logic of masculinist protection, and that this is the form of justification for the security regime that has emerged in the United States since September 11, 2001. I argue that those who live under a security regime live within an oppressive protection racket. The paper ends by cautioning feminists not ourselves to adopt (...) a stance of protector toward women in so-called less developed societies. (shrink)
This paper aims to challenge the view that the sign present in many Frankfurt-style scenarios is insufficiently robust to constitute evidence for the possibility of an alternate decision, and therefore inadequate as a means of determining moral responsibility. I have amended Frankfurt’s original scenario, so as to allow Jones, as well as Black, the opportunity to monitor his (Jones’s) own inclination towards a particular decision (the sign). Different outcome possibilities are presented, to the effect that Jones’s awareness of his own (...) inclinations leads to the conclusion that the sign must be either (a) a prior determinate of the decision about to be made, (b) prior and indeterminate (therefore allowing for a contra-inclination decision to be made), or (c) constitutive of a decision that Jones has made but is not yet aware of. In effect, this means that, prior to the intervention of Black, Jones must have decided to do otherwise or could have so decided. Either way, although Frankfurt’s conclusion, that Jones could not have done other than he did, is upheld, the idea that he could not have decided otherwise must be rejected, and with it the view that the sign is nothing more than a flicker of freedom insufficient for assigning morally responsibility. (shrink)
Based on recent insight into the thalamocortical system and its role in perception and conscious experience, a unified pathophysiological framework for hallucinations in neurological and psychiatric conditions is proposed, which integrates previously unrelated neurobiological and psychological findings. Gamma-frequency rhythms of discharge activity from thalamic and cortical neurons are facilitated by cholinergic arousal and resonate in networks of thalamocortical circuits, thereby transiently forming assemblies of coherent gamma oscillations under constraints of afferent sensory input and prefrontal attentional mechanisms. If perception is based (...) on synchronisation of intrinsic gamma activity in the thalamocortical system, then sensory input to specific thalamic nuclei may merely play a constraining role. Hallucinations can be regarded as underconstrained perceptions that arise when the impact of sensory input on activation of thalamocortical circuits and synchronisation of thalamocortical gamma activity is reduced. In conditions that are accompanied by hallucinations, factors such as cortical hyperexcitability, cortical attentional mechanisms, hyperarousal, increased noise in specific thalamic nuclei, and random sensory input to specific thalamic nuclei may, to a varying degree, contribute to underconstrained activation of thalamocortical circuits. The reticular thalamic nucleus plays an important role in suppressing random activity of relay cells in specific thalamic nuclei, and its dysfunction may be implicated in the biological vulnerability to hallucinations in schizophrenia. Combined with general activation during cholinergic arousal, this leads to excessive disinhibition in specific thalamic nuclei, which may allow cortical attentional mechanisms to recruit thalamic relay cells into resonant assemblies of gamma oscillations, regardless of their actual sensory input, thereby producing an underconstrained perceptual experience. Key Words: Charles Bonnet syndrome; gamma oscillations; hallucinations; late paraphrenia; Lewy body dementia; perception; schizophrenia; thalamocortical system. (shrink)
To what extent do moral judgments depend on conscious reasoning from explicitly understood principles? We address this question by investigating one particular moral principle, the principle of the double effect. Using web-based technology, we collected a large data set on individuals' responses to a series of moral dilemmas, asking when harm to innocent others is permissible. Each moral dilemma presented a choice between action and inaction, both resulting in lives saved and lives lost. Results showed that: (1) patterns of moral (...) judgments were consistent with the principle of double effect and showed little variation across differences in gender, age, educational level, ethnicity, religion or national affiliation (within the limited range of our sample population) and (2) a majority of subjects failed to provide justifications that could account for their judgments. These results indicate that the principle of the double effect may be operative in our moral judgments but not open to conscious introspection. We discuss these results in light of current psychological theories of moral cognition, emphasizing the need to consider the unconscious appraisal system that mentally represents the causal and intentional properties of human action. (shrink)
In this paper I aim to present an explanation of object permanence that is derived from an ecological account of perceptually based action. In understanding why children below a certain age do not search for occluded objects, one must first understand the process by which these children perform certain intentional actions on non-occluded items; and to do this one must understand the role affordances play in eliciting retrieval behaviour. My affordance-based explanation is contrasted with Shinskey and Munakata's graded representation account; (...) and although I do not reject totally the role representations play in initiating intentional action I nevertheless maintain that only by incorporating direct perception into an account of object permanence can a fuller understanding of this phenomenon be achieved. (shrink)
It is often suggested that artists from one culture (outsiders) cannot successfully employ styles, stories, motifs and other artistic content developed in the context of another culture. I call this suggestion the aesthetic handicap thesis and argue against it. Cultural appropriation can result in works of high aesthetic value.
Nietzsche writes that the 'real task' of The Birth of Tragedy is to 'solve the puzzle of Wagner's relation to Greek tragedy'. The 'puzzle', I suggest, is the intermingling in his art and writings of earlier socialist optimism with later Schopenhauerian pessimism. According to the former the function of the 'rebirth of Greek tragedy' in the 'collective artwork' is to 'collect', and so create, community. According to the second the function of the artwork is to intimate a realm 'beyond' this (...) world of pain and death. The audacity of The Birth is that it attempts to show that Wagner can have his cake and eat it: the 'Dionysian', musical, element provides a 'metaphysical comfort', while the 'Apollonian', verbal, element draws a 'veil of oblivion' over the metaphysical, thereby allowing the artwork to solidify community. Contrary to the standard Anglophone view, this perspective on The Birth shows that Nietzsche's intimate association with Wagner during the period of its creation lies at the heart of its philosophical content. (shrink)
Phenomenally, we can distinguish between ownership of thought (introspective awareness) and authorship of thought (an awareness of the activity of thinking), a distinction prompted by the phenomenon of thought insertion. Does this require the independence of ownership and authorship at the structural level? By employing a Kantian approach to the question of ownership of thought, I argue that a thought being my thought is necessarily the outcome of the interdependence of these two component parts (ownership and authorship). In addition, whilst (...) still employing a Kantian approach, I speculate over possible mechanisms underlying the phenomenon of thought insertion. (shrink)
In recent times, explanations of the Capgras delusion have tended to emphasise the cognitive dysfunction that is believed to occur at the second stage of two-stage models. This is generally viewed as a response to the inadequacies of the one-stage account. Whilst accepting that some form of cognitive disruption is a necessary part of the aetiology of the Capgras delusion, I nevertheless argue that the emphasis placed on this second-stage is to the detriment of the important role played by the (...) phenomenology underlying the disorder, both in terms of the formation and maintenance of the delusional belief. This paper therefore proposes an interactionist two-stage model in which the phenomenal experience of the Capgras patient is examined, emphasised, and its relation to top-down processing discussed. (shrink)
It is argued that the Tractatus Project of Logical Atomism, in which the world is conceived of as the totality of independent atomic facts, can usefully be understood by conceiving of each fact as a bit in logical space. Wittgenstein himself thinks in terms of logical space. His elementary propositions, which express atomic facts, are interpreted as tuples of co-ordinates which specify the location of a bit in logical space. He says that signs for elementary propositions are arrangements of names. (...) Here, the names are understood as numerical symbols specifying coordinates. It is argued that, using this approach, the so-called colour-exclusion problem, which was Wittgensteins reason for abandoning the Tractatus, is in fact soluble. However, if logical space is a continuum then some coordinates will need to be expressed by numerical symbols that are infinite in size. How is this to be understood in Tractatus terms? It is shown that, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein did recognise the possibility of infinite propositions and sentences expressing them. At first sight his approach to infinite sentences, and the approach of the present paper, seem to differ, but it is argued that the difference is superficial. Finally, we address the question of whether Logical Atomism is viable and this raises issues concerning its relationship to natural science. (shrink)
This study provides a comparative analysis of students' self-reported beliefs and behaviors related to six analogous pairs of conventional and digital forms of academic cheating. Results from an online survey of undergraduates at two universities (N = 1,305) suggest that students use conventional means more often than digital means to copy homework, collaborate when it is not permitted, and copy from others during an exam. However, engagement in digital plagiarism (cutting and pasting from the Internet) has surpassed conventional plagiarism. Students (...) also reported using digital "cheat sheets" (i.e., notes stored in a digital device) to cheat on tests more often than conventional "cheat sheets." Overall, 32% of students reported no cheating of any kind, 18.2% reported using only conventional methods, 4.2% reported using only digital methods, and 45.6% reported using both conventional and digital methods to cheat. "Digital only" cheaters were less likely than "conventional only" cheaters to report assignment cheating, but the former was more likely than the latter to report engagement in plagiarism. Students who cheated both conventionally and digitally were significantly different from the other three groups in terms of their self-reported engagement in all three types of cheating behavior. Students in this "both" group also had the lowest sense of moral responsibility to refrain from cheating and the greatest tendency to neutralize that responsibility. The scientific and educational implications of these findings are discussed in this study. (shrink)
McTaggart's famous argument that the A-series is contradictory is vitiated by an unsatisfactory conceptualization of tenses which can be corrected by making explicit their relational structure. This leads into a much sharper formulation of his apparent contradiction, and defusing this apparent contradiction requires a careful distinction between tensed and tenseless descriptions of thoughts. As a result the ‘unreality’ of tense turns out to rest on the fact that tensed descriptions of temporal facts do not capture their identity. This ‘metaphysical’ priority (...) of tenseless over tensed descriptions of time is, however, counterbalanced by an ‘epistemological’ priority of tensed thoughts over tenseless thoughts: a conception of tense which requires a form of self-consciousness turns out to be an essential ingredient of rational thought. (shrink)
This article reports the findings from a study that investigates the relationship between ethical climates and police whistle-blowing on five forms of misconduct in the State of Georgia. The results indicate that a friendship or team climate generally explains willingness to blow the whistle, but not the actual frequency of blowing the whistle. Instead, supervisory status, a control variable investigated in previous studies, is the most consistent predictor of both willingness to blow the whistle and frequency of blowing the whistle. (...) Contrary to popular belief, the results also generally indicate that police are more inclined than civilian employees to blow the whistle in Georgia - in other words, they are less inclined to maintain a code of silence. (shrink)
Several prominent philosophers of music, including Lydia Goehr and Peter Kivy, maintain that the experience of music changed drastically in about 1800. According to the great divide hypothesis, prior to 1800 audiences often scarcely attended to music. At other times, music was appreciated as part of social, civic, or religious ceremonies. After the great divide, audiences began to appreciate music as an exclusive object of aesthetic experience. The great divide hypothesis is false. The musicological record reveals that prior to the (...) great divide music was often the exclusive object of aesthetic experience. (shrink)
This paper questions the view that knowledge must be articulable or at least experiential. It asserts that what distinguishes habitual yet intentional action from a mechanistic response is its grounding in a suitable claim to knowledge. However, it denies that a necessary condition for knowing how to perform an action is the ability of the subject to either articulate the particulars of that act, or experience it as appropriate.
In Natural Justice Binmore offers a game-theoretic map to the landscape of human morality. Following a long tradition of such accounts, Binmore’s argument concerns the forces of biological and cultural evolution that have shaped our judgments about the appropriate distribution of resources. In this sense, Binmore focuses on the morality of outcomes. This is a valuable perspective to which we add a friendly amendment from our own research: moral judgments appear to depend on process just as much as outcome. What (...) matters is not just that the butler is dead, but who killed him, how, and for what reason. Thus, a complete understanding of ‘natural justice’ will entail an account not only of evolutionary pressures, but also of the psychological mechanisms upon which they act. (shrink)
The aim of this paper is to challenge the claim that the neural activity commonly referred to as 'readiness potential' constitutes evidence for the unconscious initiation of action. Although I accept that such neural activity seriously challenges the commonly held view that one's sense of volition is causally efficacious, I nevertheless contend that much of our everyday engagement with the world is consciously initiated. Thus, a distinction is made between awareness and what the awareness is of: the latter constituting the (...) conscious decision to act in accordance with one's goal, or what I have termed intentional project. Initiation of an action in accordance with one's intentional project grounds the action in meaning, something that would be lacking in an exclusively unconscious decision to act. (shrink)
Some members of the Vienna Circle argued for a coherence theory of truth. Their coherentism is immune to standard objections. Most versions of coherentism are unable to show why a sentence cannot be true even though it fails to cohere with a system of beliefs. That is, it seems that truth may transcend what we can be warranted in believing. If so, truth cannot consist in coherence with a system of beliefs. The Vienna Circle's coherentists held, first, that sentences are (...) warranted by coherence with a system of beliefs. Next they drew upon their verification theory of meaning, a consequence of which is that truth cannot transcend what can be warranted. The coherence theory of knowledge and verificationism together entail that truth cannot transcend what can be warranted by coherence with a system of beliefs. The Vienna Circle's argument for coherentism is strong and anticipates contemporary anti-realism. (shrink)
There are important ethical issues that must be carefully thought through when undertaking research with children. This paper explores how the context of such issues changes with the individual circumstances of the children involved, particularly when they are marginalised or excluded by wider society. By reflecting on experiences of research with Kampala street children, this paper highlights how participation throughout the research process can both raise and resolve ethical dilemmas. This is illustrated by reflecting on two examples, namely discussing sensitive (...) topics and the dissemination of socio-spatial research findings. In conclusion, the paper demonstrates the importance of ethical sensitivity to the changing situations that arise when conducting research with street children and the importance of incorporating and involving them in both the research process and ethical dilemmas. (shrink)
Much has been made in recent years concerning the ecological significance of the global boreal forest. In Canada, a highly coordinated political campaign is under way to halt the industrial pressures - mining, forestry, energy development - that threaten to undermine the ecological contributions made by the Canadian boreal forest. In this short commentary, however, it is argued that the current politicization of the boreal forest cannot be thought of solely as an innocent act of environmental protection, but must also (...) be thought of in terms of the colonial context from which its geography first emerged. Doing so raises problems for a conventional environmental subjectivity based on a sharp distinction between nature and culture. The author seeks to address this tension by advocating an environmental ethics that is based on a responsibility for the other. (shrink)
